Conventional Sales Wisdom, not.
Listen to any “guru” on how to sell on the internet, and they will tell you to make it easy for your customer to make a purchase. This usually means making sure the “buy” button is prominent on the page. The conventional wisdom is the buy button should be “above the fold” (in an area at the to of the page where you don’t need to scroll to see it).
I was looking at one of my main sales pages (for a weight loss product) the other day, and noticed that the button was just under the fold. People needed to scroll just a little bit down to see it. So, believing the CV on the topic, I moved it up just a little. Everything else on the page was the same, I just moved the button up a few inches, and moved another graphic down.
It’s good I keep accurate conversion stats.
I ran the new page for two weeks and found sales conversions wend down almost 20%! I actually didn’t believe it, so I kept the page up another 10 days, and yup, still down.
So I moved the button down, where it was in the first place and bingo, conversion went back up. Go figure.
The Bottom Line
Don’t always believe what you hear from the gurus, and don’t always believe conventional wisdom. Test, test, test. If you are not testing your sales pages you don’t know how you are doing.
Tags: Sales & Conversions, testing