Win Report: How a dynamic tagline increased conversions by 15% for a worldwide media brand

Published: April 2024

Win Reports help you to grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each article highlights a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next four minutes, we’ll show you how a creative tagline test boosted subscription revenue by 15% for a world-leading media publisher.

Magazinesdirect.com is owned by Future Publishing, the global platform that’s home to some of the World’s favorite media brands. The site handles subscriptions and gifts for publications including Total Film, Country Life, and The Week.

As the client acknowledges, the current (aging) website has much room for improvement. A new site is in development, but the team is keen to ground that work in research, testing, and winning insights. (This strategic approach helps circumvent the typical problems associated with large web projects.)

For this phase of the project, we are focused on transferable wins that will enhance the work in progress.

Research: What’s the value of trust?

During our research, we asked visitors to share their initial impressions of magazinesdirect.com. One slide from our research deck highlighted a significant area of concern: Trust.

Though the issues were small, they created a gap between the high-quality magazines (that the visitors were seeking) and the site that promised to deliver them. One user said:

“It doesn’t give you the sense it is selling a Classic [Rock] magazine, like how it was in print. There’s no essence of classic rock on this page.”

Bottom line. The visitors we surveyed didn’t trust the website and—critically—often had little idea that it was the official publisher of the magazines they wanted to purchase.

How could we test the value of this missing connection?

To create the maximum value in the shortest time, we targeted an important but underutilized element of the site—its tagline.

The original pages (or control)

Magazinesdirect.com has specific pages for each magazine, and users often land on these pages first. Here’s the landing page for Ideal Home magazine.

The Control: A desktop view of the Ideal Home Magazine page.

The tagline sits beneath the site logo (top left) and reads “A Future Publishing Company.” Here it is in close-up:

The variation (and 69 others)

For our variation, we built a unique dynamic tagline for every magazine landing page. Each of the 70 subscription magazines was namechecked in their tagline, following this format:

“The official publisher of [Magazine Name]”

Here’s an example from Ideal Home magazine page (with a close-up below):

The Variation: Including “Official Publisher” in the tagline adds authority and trust.

And a few others:

A close-up of the Classic Rock tagline—‘The official publisher of Classic Rock’.

A close-up of the Country Life tagline—‘The official publisher of Country Life’.

A close-up of the Total Film tagline—‘The official publisher of Total Film’.

Although the tagline was the only thing we changed, it sits prominently in the top left of the page where users naturally look. As we say in our A/B Testing 101 article:

“Visitors will view the tagline under your logo almost as much as the headline itself. Therefore, make sure it clearly expresses distinct ‘positioning’; that is, it should describe what you do and how you fit into the marketplace.”

Result: Conversions increased by 15%

Adding a tagline that emphasized magazinesdirect.com’s status as the official publisher of each magazine increased authority and trust. During the test, we observed a 15% increase in conversion rate and a 28% increase in revenue.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of magazinesdirect.com’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to magazinesdirect.com for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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