The prologue

I’ve never had a webpage as a nemesis before.

Seems like an odd choice for an arch-rival, I know. It’s no Voldemort, Vader or megalomaniac super-villain-masked-by-super-rich-businessman-persona. But if your goal was to increase signups on carwow you’d understand.

I’ve tried many changes. New copy, different images. Nothing. The needle didn’t shift. That’s the problem with guessing.

The setup

The page in question is the signup page on carwow. It’s the final step before we create the visitor an account. They’ve gone through multiple steps configuring the exact car they’re interested in buying, now we just need their email address.

It’s at this point about half of them decide to drop out.

So you can understand why this page is important to me.

The big dig

Why do they drop out? It’s easy to guess, but our assumptions weren’t getting us anywhere. So we asked them.

We ran an exit survey (only appearing as they went to leave the page), posing a single question:

The answers were illuminating; confirming some assumptions and revealing some insights we’d never considered.

An example, about 5% of respondents had an issue with the Terms & Conditions that are linked from the page. Turns out they didn’t render properly on some browsers. Nothing to test here, just fix it!

The most important insights however, were concerning the sharing of their email address. You’re probably thinking ‘No sh*t, Sherlock, this is practically a given for every commercial website’. This is true — a certain percentage just aren’t going to be happy to readily hand over their email address for fear of getting spam.

However, the beauty is in the nuance of the answers. When you can see / hear the voice of the customer you can get to the nitty gritty of the problem. There, in amongst the ‘I hate spam’ and ‘I don’t want to be bombarded with junk email’ comments, was this gem:

I don’t want dealers pestering me

I almost skipped over it. We already tell them we don’t share their details.

Hang on. What is it we actually say on the page?

‘We will never share your details with anyone’

With anyone.

The spidey-sense

It’s one of my favourite things about optimising websites. That little tickle you get in your brain moments before dots begin to connect.

The realisation

The assumption we’d been operating under was that the term ‘anyone’ reassuringly covered all the bases. For us that would mean dealers, but also any third parties that wanted to buy our list for marketing purposes.

(by the way, we never sell or give access to our email list)

Maybe that assumption was wrong. Maybe being broad was the wrong approach. Maybe we needed to be specific.

The test

It’s was one of the simplest AB tests I’ve ever set up. The control ran with this line under the email input field:

We will never share your details with anyone

And the variant ran with this:

We won’t share it with dealers

The winner? The variant — with an increase of about 7% in signups over the control.

A small victory but significant with the volumes of signups we’re dealing with and remarkable from a simple copy change.

Next time on…

There is a lot more we need to do. As mentioned, there will always be some people who don’t want to share their email. But I’m confident there are a significant number who would if we just understand and address their concerns.

So if I could leave you with two pieces of advice…

Don’t assume. ASK your customers what is stopping them from doing something Don’t overlook the seemingly small stuff — it might be very important to others

Batman never took down the Joker in a single comic. It took Harry 7 books to finally defeat He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. We can’t stop now, we have more work to do.

Interested in making an Impact? Join the carwow-team!

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