Increasing Your Lead Volume With Font Changes

How Numara Achieved a 133% Improvement in Conversion Rate

One of our customers, Numara Software is a $100M global IT software company. Their website was pretty large and was deployed in 12 different languages across the world. Like most companies, they were using the default Arial font at 10 pixels. This is the most common font and font size used by most websites because it is generally viewed to be easy to read and a web standard font.

We ran a sitewide A/B test on just the font size. The test was simply to compare the impact of a 10 pixel font to a 13 pixel font. The result of the test was impressive. This simple test improved the bounce rate by 10%, the site exit rate by 19%, pages per visit by 24%, and an impressive 133% improvement in form conversion rate. Read more about this case study at our website.

Testing Your Fonts

There are a number of things you can test with your fonts to impact visitor engagement and conversion. The key to fonts is making sure they are easy to read by your audience. Each website has a different audience, so there isn’t a foolproof combination to fonts, but here are some guidelines and things you can use for your fonts.

1. Font Size. For every website we’ve done testing on, increasing the font size of basic body text improves overall visitor engagement. What you have to determine is what is the best size for your audience. Depending on the font style, it may need to be bigger or smaller. Also, your headlines and subheadlines on pages should always be bigger than your main body copy. This helps visitors understand what the section of text is about and makes it easier to read.
2. Font Style. The days when we were limited to a small handful of web fonts is gone. Google has done a great job of making thousands of fonts freely available to use on your website. Need some help finding some of the better fonts?
3. Font Matching. Try to use complementary fonts, but not the same fonts, for your headlines and body text. We’ve found it to make the site more interesting. Its not critical but it helps. Here are some ideas fonts that match well.
4. Font Colors. You obviously don’t want to go crazy with font colors. First and foremost, make sure your fonts have enough contrast with their background so that they can easily be read. I try and make the headlines match the primary brand colors if possible or at least compliment them. Every bit of branding that can be done helps the customer better identify with your company.
5. Font Spacing. This isn’t a critical item to focus on, but you can adjust the spacing between lines and between characters. This can improve the overall readability of your site. If you have a blog, this can be an important issue if you have a lot of readers regularly engaging. Reducing their eyestrain can indirectly help your audience and thus they tend to read more and hang out longer.