A/B/C split test: The power of a smile

An A/B split test I did in April this year showed that for my Collectorz.com landing pages, photos of real people worked better than cartoons. So the completely new site design I created in June features large header images showing either me or my wife standing in front of our movie and book collections, like this:

But a comment by Gleb Koshuiko on this blog (“Try to smile on the photo”) and one by a fan of our Collectorz.com Facebook page (“that is one angry dude”) made me think:
What would happen if the landing page had a smiling Alwin instead?
Or, let’s take this one step further, would it help if the person in the picture smiled and pointed to the main call-to-action, the free trial box?

So that is the test I just completed: Serious vs Smiling vs Pointing.

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