A/B Testing Got Obama $60 Million. You Can Do It Too

John Davier
John Davier

Last updated on

February 8, 2023

Everyone knows A/B testing is super helpful to eliminate guess work and increase conversions, little by little. Recently I read a case study by Dan Siroker (CEO of Optimizely) on how President Obama raised $60 million dollar by running a simple experiment. Dan was director of analytics on the 2008 Obama campaign when they decided to take full advantage of A/B testing to raise more money.

They experimented with 2 parts of their sign up form:

  1. Media
  2. Call-to-Action Button.

They tried 4 buttons and 6 different media (3 images and 3videos).

Button Variations

Join Us Button Obama Campaign

Learn More Obama Campaign

Sign Up Obama Campaign

Sign Up Now Obama Campaign

Media Variations

different media variations used during the experiment

Results

They measured success by sign up rate. Number of sign ups divided by number of impressions. There were a total of310,382 visitor to the page so each variation was seen by approximately 13,000 people.

Winner

The winning variation had a sign-up rate of 11.6%as compared to the original page which had 8.26%. That’s a 40.6% improvement right there. It resulted in additional 2,880,000 email addresses on their email list which translated into an additional $60 million in donations.

Isn't that amazing? This was the winning variation.

Obama Campaign Media Variation

How to A/B Test Your Forms

You must be thinking that's great but how can I do it for my business? Well, we have great news! We just launched brand new A/B testing framework on Mailmunch.

It's as simple as this...

MailMunch A/B Testing

We highly encourage you to run some simple experiments like:

  1. Test Headlines
  2. Test Media
  3. Test Button Text
  4. Test Colors and Designs

Just log in to your Mailmunch account, go to the Forms section for your site and click A/B Tests button on top. Happy Testing!

Do you have any A/B testing ideas? Did anything work for you really well? Leave a comment below to share it with us!

Author Bio

John Davier

Content marketing guru at Mailmunch. I’m passionate about writing content that resonates with people. Live simply, give generously, stay happy.

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