If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know that we’re doing a challenge with our friends over at KISSmetrics. Today marks the official start date of this challenge as the phone numbers have gone live on each of our contestant’s sites.

This experiment will run for the next 6 weeks.  At that point, we are going to analyze all the data we collected during this time period and evaluate it against our hypothesis of:

“People feel more comfortable with brands that they can put a face behind.  Even though you might purchase a product exclusively online, having a phone number on your site and the ability to talk to a real person (who cares) in turn makes you feel more comfortable taking out your wallet (or recommending someone else to) for this brand.”

The only requirement for this challenge was that the contestants had to put their phone number on their site somewhere above the fold.  As you can see in the screenshots below, each company took a very different approach to showcasing their number, one with a more obvious call to action than the other.

The Site Slinger

Goal: Increase the amount of site visitors who place an order on their orders page.

The Flowr

Goal: Increase the number of visitors who sign up and actively use the app in the first two weeks.

What number placement do you think will be more effective? Tell us in the comments below!