Robb Fahrion

How Flying V Group A/B Tested Their Way to a 60% Conversion Rate on Ebook Downloads

At Flying V Group, conversions are everything. Both to us, and to our clients.

Whether it's our PPC marketing campaigns that convert traffic into qualified leads or bottom-of-funnel content marketing strategy—the key metric for success is always how effectively prospects turn intent into real action.

Of course, it's easy to know when a landing page or call-to-action is working. You can see the spike in conversions and the leads coming in.

But the question always lingers: Could this campaign be working better?

This is where A/B testing has been a game-changer for us. Not only in honing the offers on our own website, but also doing it in a scalable way for our clients.

So in this post, we run through how we used A/B testing to:

  • Trade in our ebook landing page for one that hit 60% conversion rates
  • Use the same principle to build an exit intent popup on a client site that one in three users interacted with 
  • Streamline our approach to "conversion accountability"—making it significantly easier to have conversations with clients about what they need to do to improve their CTAs

Let's get started 👇

What is A/B testing?

Just so we're all on the same page, A/B testing (or "split testing") is simply testing out different offers or calls-to-action to find what works best for your audience. It usually works by using a tool to divide traffic numbers across one or multiple variants, with you then able to see conversion rates on each one.

Background: Our ebook strategy

To set the scene, we have a popular post on our blog covering 41 marketing questions to ask yourself that's getting consistent traffic:

Blog post headline screenshot: 41 Questions Marketing Consultants Should Ask Potential Clients

We then also have these questions formatted into an ebook, which people can save and reference in the future. Our goal is to get anyone viewing the blog post to take up the content upgrade ebook offer.

To start, there's a simple scroll-point website popup we use to offer this to people:

Screenshot of popup being used

This works well and captures leads for us. 

However, there are also sections pushing the ebook that are strategically placed at various places in the blog post text:

In post landing page links

These link off to a landing page further explaining and promoting the ebook. And this is where things get interesting from an A/B testing standpoint...

The A/B test that brought 60% conversions

The original headline and value prop of our landing page essentially mimicked what's in the above popup, saying:

"Want this blog post in an ebook for future reference?"

But, in hindsight, this raised two problems:

  1. The reader had now clicked through to a different page of the website, so referencing "this blog post" on the landing page caused a slight disconnect and potential confusion
  2. It had little to say about the kind of value the ebook offered to user, or why they'd want to download it

The result? A 1.5% conversion rate 😕 Pretty unspectacular for a landing page that users voluntarily visited: people actually clicked to get there and just hopped off because of the CTA. 

Trying out a new angle

Despite the landing page fail, we did have some downloads of the ebook already. And the feedback from these people was great.

So, we came up with an alternative, social-proof based focus for the page that talked about the value this ebook gave to real users and tried it out with ConvertFlow's A/B testing:

New landing page version 1

The results were night and day.

For this particular CTA, we saw over a 60% conversion rate 🤯

Landing oage version 1 results

This means way more than half the people that clicked into the ebook landing page actually registered. Whereas previously, almost all of them were bouncing away without converting.

Yes, this is an atypical result. But A/B testing like this with ConvertFlow helped us see precisely the kind of change better copy can bring.

Taking the test further

Going from a 1.5% conversion rate to an over 60% conversion rate is pretty epic. But we weren't satisfied there.

We decided to test out the copy on the page even further.

If the social proof brought about such a significant change the first time, why not double down on this tactic? So we tried swapping the sub-text paragraphs around to bring the social proof element towards the top:

New landing page version 2

A small change, right?

But it's had an impact, taking the rates up to just under 64% for just that variant:

Landing page version 2 results

Ok, it's not as dramatic an uptick as the first time around. But it still shows the value in testing until you find the exact offer, value prop, and copy that hits the spot for your audience.

PRO TIP:

With ConvertFlow, you can easily create multiple new variants of your landing pages and calls-to-action to tweak and split test against each other. You can even control the percentage of traffic sent to each one.

Just duplicate your original "A version" of a CTA, make your edits in the builder, and assign a traffic percentage:

Split testing in ConvertFlow screenshot

Learn more about A/B testing CTAs in ConvertFlow

What we learned

What did this tell us? People want to see results and success stories upfront.

At the earliest stages of the customer journey, social proofing—seeing how our solution delivered the goods for similar businesses—is critical. This is something with concrete implications for your content strategy and something ConvertFlow helped us to see: tell your users how you helped people like them succeed, and they'll be more likely to try out your solution.

Transferring this into our client work

After the success of our ebook signup page, we decided to integrate ConvertFlow and the same A/B testing philosophy as part of our CTA creation process for clients.

For example:

When working with EnviroCool (a technology vendor focused on commercial truck engine cooling), we tried out multiple exit intent popups to identify what spoke most to EnviroCool's audience. We tested out various offers, but found that providing a special offer discount yielded the best conversion results.

Here's what it looked like initially:

EnviroCool popup v1

But we thought we could do better.

So, we decided to add a little bit of urgency to the offer by tweaking the text at the top:

EnviroCool popup v2

Traffic to this particular page is comparatively low because of the very specific B2B niche EnviroCool is in. However, with this second CTA, we were able to increase on-page conversions to a remarkable 33%.

The key here was offering tangible value to a targeted, high-intent audience.

PRO TIP:

Want to run a discount popup of your own? Here's the template Flying V Group started with to create the example above:

See all popup templates

Talking to clients about conversions

As an agency, it's great that we can create and test these kinds of calls-to-action at scale for clients.

But being able to attribute success with direct conversion numbers? That's invaluable.

ConvertFlow offers these hard numbers: the precise volume of traffic to a CTA or page, and the number of people who actually take action.

So, this helped us out immensely when it came to talking to clients about CTAs. We were able to have more productive, data-driven conversations to point out precisely the kind of CTA formats and content we needed to budget for and focus on.

For example:

Another client of ours was running a new crowdfunding product launch and wanted to get people onto a waitlist.

So, we A/B tested slide-in site message popups with a small sample number. By utilizing the variant testing in ConvertFlow, we were able to identify the champion CTA to use for scale. After the first week, 82 email submissions were received to sign up for the product launch—which had a purchase price of $350.

And those numbers continued to grow at a 7.5% conversion rate:

Kickstarter stats

Clear stats like this are great for getting laser-focused with measuring our success. Instead of looking at generalized numbers, we now pull up ConvertFlow figures for specific CTAs, compare them to benchmark figures, and help clients understand exactly how they add value.

Final thoughts

Our biggest takeaway here is how crucial A/B testing can be for narrowing down your paths to success.

You're going to write great CTAs, as well as terrible ones. But the best way to figure out what works is to roll out some variants and test out what works best.

We've been using ConvertFlow to do this for the past five months. Iteration and improvement are essential, and ConvertFlow is a great way to speed up that iteration step.

About the author
Robb Fahrion
Co-Founder, Flying V Group
home icontwitter iconlinkedin icon
Robb is a Co-Founder and Partner of Flying V Group, who's passionate about helping businesses grow using the power of the internet. Robb graduated from Chapman University in Orange, CA and currently resides in Costa Mesa, CA. He enjoys writing about digital marketing, helping his clients turn their dreams into reality, and is a HUGE Mike Trout fan.