A/B Testing Life-Sparring - Fighting Mediocrity, One Round at a Time

For the past four and a half years, the tagline below my blog’s logo read “Sparring for Life, Career and Happiness.”

From the moment where I came up with the term Life-Sparring, I loved it. It is catchy; I could register the domains, and even more critical, it accurately expressed what the idea of the blog was all about: bringing the concept of Sparring from martial arts into the broader context of Life.

Life-Sparring.com with the old tagline, before May 30, 2020

My relationship with the subtitle has been more ambivalent. It was the best slogan I had been able to come up with when I was designing the website. However, it was not only missing an Oxford comma, but it also was not very inspiring and even slightly incoherent. After all, Happiness and Career are subsets of Life, so the whole slogan did not make too much sense if you ponder about it for a while.

The Search for a New Tagline

Do not ask me while it took me almost five years to address this issue. But with me putting more effort into the blog since the Spring of this year, the tagline bothered me increasingly. I meditated a bit about it and came up with the idea of a new slogan, “Fighting Mediocrity, One Round at a Time.”

Now this tagline is not entirely new; it is taken from the intro to the blog. I always described Life-Sparring as “documenting my fight against (my own) mediocrity.”

Life-Sparring.com ever had and still has two major missions: holding me accountable in my pursuit to get the best out of me, and possibly being occasionally of value for a few other people out there too.

Now, while I was reasonably sure that the new tagline was stronger and more inspiring to my potential audience than the old one, I didn’t want to just change it based on my gutfeel. Instead, I opted for what a consumer goods company would likely do when changing the slogan of their detergent: a proper A/B Test.

A/B Testing Life-Sparring

To test which of the potential headline would perform better, I set up a Facebook Leads Ads campaign, using the same picture, but varying the ad text. I spontaneously threw a third slogan into the mix, just when I was about to launch the campaign. So technically, the A/B Test became an A/B/C test.

The ad was designed as a call to action to sign up for the Life-Sparring Newsletter (something I recommend you do too). After clicking on the ad banner, there was a short form to leave email-address, the full name, and the answer to the following mandatory question: “What would you change about yourself if you could?”.

Now, including this question surely lowered the conversion rate significantly. But at the same time, it weeds out a lot of people, for whom the blog would likely not have been interesting. I was not aiming at maximizing the number of leads generated by the campaign. The focus was on testing, which of the taglines was the best suited to motivate potential readers for whom the blog provides value.

The answer to the additional question also gives me a chance to write a personalized welcome message, addressing the problems and aspirations of the individual and probably referencing past Life-Sparring articles relevant to the topic.

As it should be for a proper A/B Test, all ads ran in the same time frame, with the same budget and on the same demographic.

The Verdict – Fighting Mediocrity is a Thing (for men aged 20 to 55)

As expected, the conversion rate was not particularly high for any of the three ads. But that was not extremely surprising. Would you subscribe to a newsletter just because you see a nice-looking advertisement on Facebook asking you to do so?

Comparing the results for all three ads, “Fighting Your Mediocrity, One Round at a Time.” outperformed the two other options across all metrics. It generated more post engagements (clicks and likes), in absolute numbers as well as in percent of the reach, it motivated more leads (completed forms with name, email, and the answer to the question), and it had a significantly higher completion rate of the form.

With the budget of HK$ 300 (approx. US$ 38), I gained a few subscribers to the Life-Sparring newsletter (did I mention that you really should describe to it too?) and validated the new tagline.

Welcome to Life-Sparring.com - Fighting Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!

As you can see, in a further step of streamlining, I dropped the pronoun. Life-Sparring.com is still as much addressed to you as it is to me.

Let us continue to spar together and keep Fighting (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time.

What do you think about the different tag lines? Which one do you like better, and why? What would you have done differently about the A/B Test? And how would you design a campaign that generates high-quality leads? Let me know!