Social proof an email marketing fail?

There’s a really interesting piece on the Thesis blog about a split test on a newsletter subscription form.

It’s worth checking out the full post and the comments, but in essence the test was around three variations of a simple email subscription form:

Far left is control, the middle version tests without the ‘social proof’ copy and the right hand version has a variation on the headline.

Now I am a big fan of persuasion architecture, so I was rooting for one of the variants that includes the social proof message of ‘join 14,572 others…’.

I am however hopeless at predicting the results of split tests, so it isn’t a big surprise that I was completely wrong – the winning variant was the middle form.

I suspect it won simply because it was the simplest. I’ve seen other tests that suggest that even the simplest piece of information on a form – ‘you don’t have to set a password now, you can do it later in the process’ – can depress response rates. And perhaps this isn’t the strongest version of social proof. Thousands of other suckers have already signed up for this list isn’t really too aspirational a message…

This is where Facebook Connect can really come into play. A message like ‘Our subscribers include your friends Jane and Phil’ would I think stand a chance of beating control here. I still think that playing around with persuasion architecture is a strong route, even if it failed in this instance.