We know you have them. Right above your submit button on your form, you have a little blurb stating “By submitting this form you agree to the terms and conditions”. Some come with a checkbox and others do not.
Either way, the majority of sites have them but the big question is do they help or hurt your conversions?
How you word the language around your terms and conditions could actually be holding back people from submitting it to become a lead or a sale.
In this particular case study we are going to look at how shrinking the text and cleaning it up actually helped one company.
Now before we discuss exactly what was tested you must know that we made several changes to the form to run this test, looking for a bigger impact. Not a TRUE A/B test as several elements changed but there is something to learn from this.
As you can see from the original version the terms and conditions stood out quite a bit and took up plenty of real estate. We have previously tested the headline call to action as well adding the “100% Free For Life” language that showed a nice 25% increase.
On the test variation as mentioned, we changed several elements. The first change is adding the “No Credit Card Required”. Which we knew from previous tests that the visitors responded better to the emphasis on free.
The second change is the button call to action and size. The bigger the button, typically the better.
The third and major change was the streamlining of the language around the terms and conditions. We made the text smaller and removed some words that weren’t really needed.
So what were the results from this little experiment?
The new layout and elements increased conversions by 13% with a significance of 99%. This means that for every 10,000 visitors instead of 2539 new members for this company they will now show roughly 2869, an increase in 330. All from some small changes.
Since this wasn’t a true A/B test, trying to put focus on one element and since we were looking for a bigger impact, we are now going to go back and test the individual elements to see what the visitors respond to the most, to learn more about what makes them tick, and set up future test hypotheses.
So the question again… do your terms and conditions help or hurt your leads and sales conversions?
The answer is that it looks as if they have a bigger impact than you may think. The next time you are testing you may want to take a look at the elements around your form.
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