Buildium A/B Tested Testimonial Messaging To Increase Its Conversions

We ran 2 separate A/B tests to see how we could improve the messaging on both the home page and pricing page. The aim of these tests was to market the product to a wider range of property managers.

The aim of these tests was to increase conversions by more effectively advertising the number of units that Buildium supports.

The test on the home page was to see whether we could increase conversions by displaying testimonials from small, medium, and large property managers, communicating that our software works great, no matter how many units you manage.

The control on our website had a heading: “Proof, meet pudding. We can help you too”, with the subhead that read: “We have over 8000 happy customers across the world.” This was followed by testimonials from our customers with no mention of the customer’s unit size. This failed to bring out the fact that we’re serving customers ranging from small, medium to large property managers.

This is what the control looked like:

In an attempt to boost free trial sign-ups, we decided to test a new presentation of our testimonials that more clearly articulated the scalability of our product. Each testimonial displayed the company’s unit count for context, and the testimonial copy itself spoke to the specific benefits that Buildium provides to a company of that size. We also introduced a new headline (Whatever your size, Buildium is the perfect fit) to echo this messaging.

Although we understand that the most statistically significant tests only change 1 element on the page; however, for the sake of this test, we chose to introduce these 3 changes that all work together to form the new experience. We tested 3 variations of this new experience against the control, each with a different subhead.

Here’s how the winning variation read:

For the home page, the winning variation was the one that specifically mentioned our ability to handle small, medium, and large companies. The new headline, testimonial copy, and the addition of the unit count had a positive effect on conversions, as all of the new variations converted at a higher rate than the control.

I believe that subhead of the variation above was the most successful because it set the expectation that the three testimonials below would be from companies of these three sizes. And since we followed this by mentioning the units of the property owners, we were successful in getting across the message that Buildium serves more than just small businesses.

Our new marketing site has a trial form embedded directly at the bottom of the homepage, which means that we needed to track for two separate conversion goals: submitting the form, or clicking the CTA to go to free-trial.

Below you will find the results for each goal, with the sum of the two used to calculate the total success of the variation.

Based on the VWO results, all of the variations had conversion rates higher than the control. This leads me to believe that regardless of the subhead, the addition of the new headline, testimonials, and unit count all created an experience that more effectively communicated the scalability of our product, attracting a wider range of customers.

Note: In our industry, small property management companies generally manage up to 100 units, medium ones manage 100 to 600 units, and large ones manage more than 600 units. Our largest customer uses our software to manage over 7,000 units. There are also “extra-large” companies who might manage tens of thousands of units, but we do not market to these companies as they would be better suited with an enterprise solution.