When you ask readers to take an action, the text used can have a considerable impact on conversion rates.

Whether it's your home page or an offer page, there comes a point when you ask the reader to take an action.

That action may be to subscribe, register, buy or simply to move forward to another page.

When you write the text for that call-to-action, our testing suggests that even quite minor changes can have a very significant impact on conversion rates.

Here is an example from one of our recent research tests.

In this simple test for a large online publisher, we made a slight change in a single sentence near the order button. It had the following impact on conversion rates:

Page B improved overall conversion from 1.58 percent to 1.77 percent, an increase of 12 percent.

What was the simple change that resulted in this 12 percent gain?

Page A had this copy:

• 7 Days Free or continue at $24.95 for eight weeks at a savings of 50 percent.

Page B included these simple changes:

• 7 Days Risk Free then continue at just $24.95 for 8 weeks (50 percent savings).

As you can see, the changes we made were very minor. But for this particular publisher, a 12 percent increase in conversions on that page translated into a large increase in revenues.

For us, the most important lesson learned here was that one should never assume that you have done all you can to optimize any page on your site. There are still likely to be small changes you can make to the text that will lift your conversion rates a little higher. This is particularly true of the wording of your call to action.

You'll find the full set of test results in our The Power of Small Changes Brief.

The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.