Success in business requires a willingness to measure your performance.
So the most important message we can convey is that you must test everything!
Your preferences and likes and dislikes do not matter.
The market place dictates what they like and what they will respond to.
If something isn’t pulling in the results you want, create other versions and test them against each other so you can come up with a winner!
You should test headlines, graphics, sales offers, price, and different opt-in methods. There is nothing that can’t be improved. The only way to determine whether the new or old version pulls better results is to TEST.
How do you go about testing? It’s simple. Create 2 pages with the same content. Try one header in blue font, and one in red font, or one with your price as $19.95 and another at $29.95.
Then drive traffic to each page, and after about 100 actions on each page (or 200 total actions), you can determine which pulled the best results.
There are many different software programs, such as Split Testing Pro which help you run tests. You will often hear these tests referred to as split tests or A/B splits.
Google AdWords allows you to split test ads in your PPC campaigns.
Some true examples of split tests:
A sales letter site with a header graphic and one without were split tested. The one without the graphic header resulted in a 35% sales increase!
Without spending any extra money, by simply improving one thing on the site, that person was able to increase SALES by 35%. That is pretty powerful.
A shadowed back ground on a sales letter produced a 33% increase in sales over a sales letter with no shadowed background.
I share these examples so you can see the power of testing and understand that minor improvements can have large impacts on your bottom line.
So, the process to go about testing?
Read up yourself or hire a consultant to learn the basics.
Purchase your testing/tracking software (there are software programs that will deliver one page to half your visitors and the other page to the other half – you simply login, look at the winner, pull the loser and start on your next test)
Start testing.
The top areas to start testing are:
Price Headlines Sub-heads Photo vs. no photo Testimonial vs. no testimonial Get creative.
Two important keys to testing:
Limit one thing per test so you can get an accurate response (or look into multi-variate testing)
Never stop testing!
This is a brief overview to help understand the basic concepts. To learn more, consider hiring a professional to either run tests for you, or teach you how.
About the Author:
Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of www.EcomBuffet.com. Jennifer’s vision and concepts are behind all in-house marketing campaigns. Additionally, over the past 8 years Jennifer’s expertise in online marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer@ecombuffet.com.
How to Scientifically Increase Your Conversion Rate - To learn more about this author, visit Jennifer Horowitz's Website.
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