GreyBox Technologies Tested CTA Changes To Boost Conversions

The goal of this campaign was to increase click-throughs on Pcmbtoday.com’s website to drive purchases.

The Pcmbtoday.com site sold textbooks and other learning materials to students in India preparing for various Olympiads and entrance examinations. A popular site, traffic was around 100,000 visitors per month.
This is what looked like:

Despite the high traffic, conversions were relatively low. Visitors to the site were not clicking on the “Add this to my cart” button, which was the precursor to final purchase.

The website targeted students from large urban centers as well as smaller towns. But in India, online purchases were still at a nascent stage and largely limited to the larger cities where internet penetration was higher and access to smartphones, computers, and connectivity was much better.

The GreyBox team hypothesized that many potential customers (some of whom first-time online buyers) may not be familiar with the original call-to-action (CTA) text, which said: “Add this to my cart”. They felt that changing the CTA text to a more direct and easy-to-understand “Buy now” would increase clickthrough rates from the product pages.

A variation with the CTA text changed to “Buy now” was created and using the VWO platform, A/B tested against the original page. This is what variation looked like:

The hypothesis was proved because the variation page beat the original, pushing 8.41% more visitors down the conversion funnel. The confidence level associated with the test results was 98%. Considering the traffic received by Pcmbtoday.com and the fact that 42% of “add to cart” translated into final purchases, the change was significant in terms of its expected impact on sales.

Especially for an online business, understanding customer needs well is vital- but unless the website “speaks the language of the target audience”, traffic and engagement will not translate to sales. In a country like India, where English is spoken widely but with varying levels of fluency, simple CTA text that is likely to be easily understood by the target audience is vital to pushing them to the next stage of the sales funnel.