For most credit union websites, the header serves an important purpose. It gives visitors immediate access to navigation, search, contact information and, very often, the member login.
But that raises an important question: what about prospective members?
Existing members usually know exactly what they need to do. They visit the website, find “Log In” and move into online banking. Someone considering membership has a different goal. They need a clear path to learn more and begin the membership process.
For this experiment, the credit union wanted to increase membership, particularly among people who would use the credit union as their primary financial institution. The team tested whether giving prospective members a more visible “Join Now” option in the website header would increase engagement with the membership application.
The change was relatively small. The result was not.
Adding the Join Now CTA increased the measured conversion rate from 1.43% to 2.19% — a 53% lift with 100% statistical confidence.
The question
The credit union came into the experiment with a straightforward goal: more members. More specifically, it wanted more members who would use the institution as their primary financial institution, including their primary checking account.
The existing conversion funnel showed one potential opportunity. Before the experiment, the homepage-to-“Become a member” conversion rate was 1.1%, and the team identified homepage navigation as an area that could potentially be improved.
There was another useful signal from the client. The client had previously reviewed its own Clarity data and noticed that many visitors interacted with the “Log In” button. While the team did not independently review that data with the client during the experiment-planning call, the observation suggested that visitors were already paying attention to that area of the header.
For existing members, the next step was easy to find: “Log In” had prominent placement in the header. Prospective members, however, did not have an equally prominent invitation to join. According to the experiment hypothesis, visitors interested in membership could have to scroll or navigate through multiple sections before encountering the “Join Now” CTA.
Other elements of the homepage also served existing members or promoted individual products. For example, the hero highlighted “Thrive Checking,” while the Pre-Approved Offers section directed existing members to log in to Online Banking. Those elements were not findings from the experiment itself, but they help illustrate the different paths available to current and prospective members.
That made the header a logical place to test a clearer membership path. If visitors were already looking there to access Online Banking, would putting “Join Now” alongside “Log In” make the application easier to find and encourage more prospective members to take the next step?
That became the question behind the test: Would making the membership option more visible in the header increase engagement with the application?
The hypothesis
The hypothesis behind this A/B test was straightforward.
The team proposed placing a Join Now CTA directly in the website header to increase the visibility of the application option for prospective members.
Instead of requiring a visitor to scroll or navigate through the site to find the membership path, the header would surface that option immediately upon arrival.
The experiment documentation described the reasoning this way: putting Join Now at the top of the page would provide immediate visibility, eliminate extra navigation and increase the likelihood of engagement.
There was also precedent for testing the idea.
The team had previously conducted a successful experiment for Heartland Credit Union involving a Join Now CTA in the website header. That earlier experiment helped inform the hypothesis for Test #98.
Importantly, the reasoning wasn’t simply that headers are inherently better places for CTAs. It was more specific to this situation.
The credit union wanted more members. The membership application was not as immediately visible as it could be. And the client had observed that visitors were already interacting with another important CTA in the header.
Taken together, those signals made the header a reasonable place to test a more prominent membership path.
The hypothesis was that this improved visibility would increase product page click-through rate without requiring any changes to the body content of the page.
What changed
The test made one primary change to the page: a blue “Join now” button was inserted in the header, positioned between the contact icon and the existing red “Log In” button. A second, minor change also appeared in Variant B: a “Show Notifications” link was added to the utility row. The experiment documentation identifies the Join Now CTA as the primary intervention and the change tied to the experiment hypothesis.
In Variant A, the header contained navigation menus (Personal, Business, Lending, Online, About), a row of utility links (Make a Payment, Rates, Promotions, Careers, Contact us), a search icon, a contact icon, and the red “Log In” button. There was no membership invitation in the header.
In Variant B, a blue “Join now” button was added between the contact icon and “Log In.” The button linked directly to the membership application. A “Show Notifications” link also appeared in the utility row.
The broader homepage content and layout remained unchanged: the hero section, the loan solutions card, the rates display, the credit improvement section, the pre-approved offers section, the savings section, and the footer.
The contrasting button treatments also created visual differentiation between the two actions. The blue “Join now” button stood out against the neutral header colors, while “Log In” stayed red.
The results
Variant B won by a wide margin.
The primary metric was product page click-through rate (Product Page CTR): whether a visitor clicked through to any product page. The new “Join now” button provided a direct path toward the membership application, making it the primary new driver of that metric in Variant B.
The test ran 18 days, from May 1 to May 18, 2025, across nearly 49,000 visitors. Variant B increased Product Page CTR by 53%, with the test reporting 100% statistical confidence. The experiment documentation also describes the result as 53% more applications started. That refers to visitors starting the membership process, not a 53% increase in completed memberships or new members.
Verdict: Win.
Why it matters
A few things stand out about this result.
The change was minimal, the impact was not. The primary intervention was adding a “Join Now” button to the header, without requiring a broader redesign of the homepage. The variation increased product page click-through rate by 53%, showing that a relatively small change in CTA visibility can have a meaningful impact.
The result also highlights the potential value of the header as conversion real estate. Credit union web design often puts significant emphasis on body content such as hero sections, product cards and rates tables, while the header primarily serves a navigational role. This test suggests that the header may also be a valuable place to surface an important conversion action.
The existing page also provided context for the result. The control page’s hero promoted a specific checking product, while the Pre-Approved Offers section directed existing members to log in to see their offers. Meanwhile, prospective members did not have an equally prominent “Join Now” option in the header. While the test did not isolate these page elements as causes of the result, they help illustrate why increasing the visibility of the membership path was worth testing.
The “Log In” / “Join now” pairing does something useful. It creates a clear distinction between two different visitor needs. Existing members have a prominent path to Online Banking, while prospective members have a similarly visible path toward membership. The contrasting button treatments also help visually distinguish the two actions.
The client’s “Log In” engagement data adds context. The client noted that many visitors were already interacting with the “Log In” button, suggesting that visitors were paying attention to that area of the header. Adding “Join Now” in that same high-attention area gave the team a hypothesis worth testing, and the experiment’s results were consistent with that hypothesis.
Why did the variation perform better?
The experiment gives us a strong result, but it is worth separating what the test demonstrated from what we can reasonably infer about why it happened.
What we know is that the variation with the Join Now CTA significantly outperformed the control. The most straightforward explanation — and the one consistent with the original hypothesis — is increased visibility.
Before the experiment, prospective members often had to navigate or scroll before encountering the Join Now option. In the variation, that action appeared directly in the header, reducing the amount of searching required to identify the next step.
The client’s previous observation about Log In engagement also supported the decision to test that placement. Visitors appeared to already be paying attention to that area of the site, making it a logical location to give prospective members a more visible route into the membership journey.
The experiment itself does not tell us exactly what individual visitors were thinking, so we cannot say with certainty that reduced navigation or the relationship between Log In and Join Now caused the entire lift.
But the results are consistent with the original hypothesis: making the membership application option more visible corresponded with significantly more visitors starting that process.
One header, two different audiences
There is also a broader design lesson worth considering.
Credit union websites have to serve existing and prospective members at the same time, and those audiences don’t necessarily need the same next step.
Existing members may arrive with transactional goals: log in to online banking, find a branch, check a rate or locate account information. Prospective members may be comparing products, researching the institution or deciding whether to become a member.
A prominent Log In button makes sense for current members. But if Log In receives prominent treatment while the membership path is less visible, prospective members may have to do more work to find their own next step.
This experiment suggests that giving the membership path greater prominence can make a measurable difference. It does not establish a universal rule that every credit union should place Join Now next to Log In, nor does it mean every institution would experience a 53% lift.
What it does show is that, for this institution, a variation centered on making Join Now more prominent significantly increased engagement with the membership application.
A result worth testing again
This wasn’t the first time the team had tested this idea.
The hypothesis for this experiment was informed by an earlier successful test for Heartland Credit Union that also placed a “Join Now” CTA in the website header. That previous result gave the team a reason to believe that making the membership option more visible could improve engagement, and it helped shape the approach tested here.
Seeing a positive result again is notable. It suggests this may be a pattern worth continuing to test: when the path to membership is less prominent than actions intended for existing members, increasing the visibility of that path may improve engagement.
At the same time, website audiences, navigation structures and existing CTA placement vary from institution to institution. The takeaway isn’t that adding a Join Now button guarantees a particular result. It’s that a tactic that had worked before produced another positive result when tested in a different setting, giving us more reason to continue investigating the approach.
What this means for your site
If your credit union website design includes a prominent “Log In” button in the header but makes the membership path harder to find, it may be worth testing a similarly visible CTA for prospective members.
A “Join Now” or “Open an Account” button can give prospective members a clear next step alongside the existing “Log In” option. The two actions serve different visitor needs: one provides existing members access to Online Banking, while the other gives prospective members a direct path toward starting a relationship.
This experiment was run on a credit union website, and the result was clear: making the membership CTA more visible in the header corresponded with a 53% increase in the measured conversion rate. That does not mean the same treatment will produce the same result for every institution. Instead, it provides a strong reason to test whether making an important conversion action easier to find can improve engagement on your own site.
If you already have a “Join” CTA elsewhere on the page, that does not necessarily mean a header CTA would be redundant. Different placements give visitors opportunities to encounter the same important next step at different points in their experience. Whether adding another placement improves performance is something that can—and should—be tested.
The takeaway is straightforward: make the membership path easy to find. For institutions evaluating bank or credit union website design, the header may be an important place to test it.
