# Letting visitors pick 1 of 3 free guides: no change in conversions

- Outcome: Flat / inconclusive
- Page type: Lead form (Lead-gen)
- Elements: Incentive, Choice
- Date shared: 2013
- Test run by: [MarketingSherpa](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/marketingsherpa/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://marketingexperiments.com/a-b-testing/incentive-testing
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/marketingsherpa-act-on-incentive-choice/

Letting visitors choose one of three free Quick Guide topics, instead of offering a single guide, made no statistical difference to form conversions. MarketingSherpa ran the test with Act-On around Lead Gen Summit 2013, and it was published on MarketingExperiments. Most visitors in both versions picked the default lead generation guide anyway.

## Result

**no change in conversions**

- Form conversions showed no statistical difference between the single guide and the choice of three. Treat this as flat.
- The default Lead Generation guide was the most popular pick in both versions.
- Exact conversion rates and sample sizes were not shared.

## Control

A landing page reached from a promo email offered one free Lead Generation Quick Guide in exchange for four required form fields.

## Variant

The same page let visitors pick one of three Quick Guide topics, shown as tabs. The form still had four required fields.

## Why it likely came out this way (our reading)

- The audience came from a lead-gen focused email and event, so the default topic already matched what most of them wanted.
- The tabs may have been easy to miss, so many visitors never noticed they had a choice.
- The team also wondered whether the tabs added friction, which could cancel out any gain from extra choice.

## Caveats

No conversion rates, sample sizes or confidence levels were shared. The test is from 2013 and drew on MarketingSherpa and Act-On email lists.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we let visitors choose which free resource they get, then more of them will fill in the form because they can pick the one most relevant to them.
- Primary metric: Form conversion rate
- Guardrail: Share of visitors who change the default choice
- Guardrail: Lead quality by chosen topic
- Who should test it: Lead-gen businesses and B2B SaaS teams with a broad audience and several content offers. If your traffic comes from a campaign about one topic, a choice probably won't help.

---

Credit: MarketingSherpa ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/marketingsherpa-act-on-incentive-choice/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.