How do you know which words are the right words to use to convert your customers and increase their lifetime value? Through testing! You test your headlines, your subheads, your body copy, your guarantees, your offers, your prices, your order forms, your background color, your font style and every other element that contributes to the entire online selling process.
Writing one sales letter and running with it-even if you think it is the most brilliant sales letter in the world-is unwise. Because that leaves you with no way of knowing what might convert better.
The only way to know that what you are doing is working is to test, test, test. You find out by trying different options and tracking what gets the best response. And here's the thing: testing is simple. Most people are just too lazy to do it!
The most simple type of test to conduct is an A/B split test where only one element is tested at a time, like price. For example, let's say you are currently selling a product for $39. And you want to know how raising your price would affect your conversion rates. So you run an A/B test.
You keep your control page active at yourwebpage.com then set up a new url, perhaps something like yourwebpage.com/test. On this new page, you duplicate everything on your control page and change only one thing: the price. Instead of $39, you charge $49.
Now you set up your traffic generation sources to direct half your traffic to your control page and half your traffic to the test page for a period of two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, you compare the results: your control had a 1% conversion rate, but your test page had a 1.5% conversion rate. That's a 50% improvement! Your customers are actually willing to spend more money on your product than you thought.
But you would have missed out on all that money if you had never conducted the test. Now you know, though, so your $49 price point becomes your control, and you test again. This time you change the headline to see which one is more effective.
And you keep testing different elements to figure out how to optimize your sales page. Or your squeeze page. You can test different headlines and "bribes" to determine which brings in the highest number of subscribers.
Running a sequential test is also an option. With a sequential test, you keep the same url and track the results for a certain time period. Then you change the element, like the price, and track the results for the same length of time.
The results of a sequential test may not be as accurate, especially if a holiday or other special event occurred during either test period, but a sequential test is certainly better than not testing at all.
"Test it and see!"
The beauty of working online is that we can easily and effectively test and track the results of any marketing that we do. That means we can quickly figure out what's working and what's not, which saves us (and can make us) a lot of energy and money in the end.
For example, if you want to know which headlines are compelling enough that people keep reading your sales page, you can test that. If you want to know if a price point is too high or too low, you can test that. If you want to know which free offer you're making is bringing in more leads, you can test that too. How? By doing what we call a split test. Here's a super-simple way for you to use a split test in your own business.
1. Create your sales page for your product...
...finalize it, and save it as something like www.mywebsite.com/salespage1.htm.
2. Save a second version (and exact duplicate) of your sales page, but give it a different URL.
For example, if your first sales page is www.mywebsite.com/salespage1.htm, then save your second sales page as www.mywebsite.com/salespage2.htm.
3. Change one thing on Sales Page 2.
In order for you to get the best results, make sure that you only change ONE thing on Sales Page 2. Change your headline, your price, your bonus package, add or delete a photo, etc.
4. Set up your split test.
The easiest way to do this is via your shopping cart's 'ad tracker' feature. With the ad tracker feature, you simply enter both URLs and the shopping cart will give you a tracking link (which the shopping cart uses to track the results of your split test for you). The tracking link is what you'll send out in your promotional emails to your email list. Then when your readers clink on that link, the shopping cart will automatically alternate which sales page it shows. So visitor 1 will see Sales Page 1 and visitor 2 will see Sales Page 2, visitor 3 will see Sales Page 1, visitor 4 will see Sales Page 2, etc. (By the way, if the same visitor comes back, they will always see the same sales page that they were shown originally.)
5. Measure your results.
In the shopping cart's ad tracker feature, you'll be able to see how many sales were made from each page, as well as the percentage difference in sales. This information can quickly show you which page is 'pulling' more sales for you.
Now you know what the difference is (because you only made ONE change) and you can use that information for your future sales pages. And of course, you'll end the split test and leave the best performing sales page in place.
Here's an example of what I mean. For one of my products, I wanted to test the price point for the initial launch. I created the sales page for it, saved a duplicate of it with a different URL, changed the price point on the duplicate page, created an ad tracker campaign in my shopping cart, which created the tracking link, and then sent my list a solo mailing with the tracking link. Within a week, I had made 20 sales at the lower price point and two at the higher price point. That told me that my list was willing to buy my product at the lower price point, but not so much at the higher price point (only a $10 difference). If I had only offered it at the higher price point, I would have thought the offer had failed, when it fact it was just that the price point was too high. Make sense?
Testing your marketing efforts is the best way to make sure you're always improving your results. This is just one way you can do so. If your fear of numbers keeps you from tracking your results like this, have your virtual assistant or volunteer do this for you. It's really that important for the overall success of your business.
Alicia Forest has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Marketing and Internet Marketing. Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & Coach?, founder of , and creator of 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System?, teaches profes. Alicia Forest's top article generates over 14800 views. to your Favourites.