Splash pages are a great way to encourage visitors to your website to join your email list — before they can be distracted by all the various bells and whistles available on your homepage, you present them with a singular, specific ask.  The trick is, what ask to use?

Through previous testing, we’ve found that an effective splash page for the BarackObama.com site is an image of President Obama standing in front of an American flag, with an email and zip submission form below.  The only text on the page is a few words to the left of the form fields and the text on the submit button.  On our initial version of the page, we used the text “Stand with the President” to the left of the form fields and “Get Started” for the button.  But we were interested in seeing whether a different ask was more inspiring to visitors to our website and produced a higher conversion rate (submissions/visit).

We ran an A/B/C/D test between the initial version of the page and three variations:

• “Stand with the President” to the left and “Get Started” on the button (control)
• “Fired Up?” to the left and “Ready to Go” on the button
• “Fired Up?” to the left and “Let’s Go!” on the button
• “Join Me” to the left and “Get Involved” on the button

After a week of testing, we had our answer — visitors were indeed fired up about the “Fired Up?” ask:

• “Fired Up?” / “Ready to Go” increased conversion rate by 6.7%.
• “Fired Up?” / “Let’s Go!” increased conversion rate by 10.9% (statistically significant with 95% confidence).
• “Join Me” / “Get Involved” actually decreased conversion rate by 13.9%.

Overall, there was a 29.0% conversion rate gap between the winner (“Fired Up?” / “Let’s Go!”) and the loser (“Join Me” / “Get Involved”) of the test, which was a statistically significant difference with over 99% confidence.

You can see the final version of the best-performing splash page here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ofasplashflag/