Using A/B Design Testing To Determine The Effectiveness Of Your Law Firm Website
Is your law firm website performing as well as it could? You may have heard a lot of talk about A/B split testing and wondered what it meant and whether it could help your website bring in more clients. A/B testing randomly shows visitors a version “A” of a page and a version “B” and provides information on any changes in behavior based upon the version the visitor viewed. Several questions arise when you consider A/B testing. They include: What kind of things should you test for? How long does it take? I am going to give you a few examples of tests that have come across my desk, and the results of each. When you are finished reading, you may have some ideas on how you can increase the conversions on your law website from visitors to clients.
The A/B test is only a way to measure the conversion of your current design. Just because your website tests well does not mean you can’t make it even better as you grow. Testing also takes plenty of time to properly complete. First you must have a conversion in mind. This can be looked at as a goal for your test. Maybe you would like for the users to reach a certain page, or complete a contact form. It is good to have at least 90 conversions to solidify your results. You can test between two totally different site designs and decide which one best suits your potential clients. Or you can test between two different variables on the same design.
Typography
Typography can be a huge factor in determining the mood of a website. You might use a BOLD font to show danger or maybe a tall, light weight font to give a modern feel. Even in email we have learned that when someone types in ALL CAPS, it seems as if they are shouting their message. The difference in your call to action can be night and day with a change as simple as color or stroke point. Consider having your designer mock up 2 different variations, one calling more attention with a bold, but legible font and the other using a softer, more inviting font and see which one converts higher. This type of choice may be specific to the viewer you are trying to reach. If you are a divorce attorney, it may be better to give the user a feeling of relief with cool colors and inviting text. Think of your user and how you can reach them with the mood of your site.
Contact Forms
Most law web sites have quick contact forms located on the front page and the sidebars of their sites. You may want to test the location of the form in conjunction with the phone number or a call to action. Finding out if the user is more likely to fill out the form, depending on the location and the wording, can increase your conversions three fold. One example that comes to mind is a test Consultwebs.com performed between the layout of the form fields and text. We took a traditional form with the fields in a vertical format with the indicator text above the field. Then we tested this against a form that was built with a “fill in the blank” format. The “mad lib” style form converted 3 times more visitors than the standard form. But that is not all we can test! We can now play with the wording and find out if we can convert even more visitors by changing how the client reads and fills out their information. Once you have exhausted your tests, and you have the most visitors you can possibly convert, then maybe it is time to test against a new design.
Walkout Videos
The last test I am going to mention is one that involves a walk out video. A walk out video is one in which the background is transparent and the subjects appears to be walking out over the website. You would think that most of the time people would have a negative reaction to videos that automatically start when the website loads. Maybe the person is at work, searching for an attorney and your voice booms from their speakers the minute they hit your site. Or they may be looking for something specific and your forced message causes them to pause their search and look for the stop button on your video before they can continue. All of these things may be a deterrent for some visiting your site. On the other hand, these videos make you real, and help the user connect to you as a person. They typically consist of a warm greeting and offer useful information upon arrival to the site. In our last test we discovered that having a walkout video on a certain personal injury site helped convert more users than not having it. Currently this test is still in progress, but it has been trending this way for awhile now. This may not work the same way for your practice, but seeing the results caused me to make sure that video was playing for his users.
Testing is never finished, and it is definitely not the only tool you should utilize in your Web marketing campaign. Testing many different websites, over a long period of time, gives us the opportunity to fine tune your law firm website with knowledge gained from past experience. We are constantly testing to figure out what the trend may be today and how it can be leveraged to help our lawyer clients.
