How Split Testing Will Boost Your Conversion Rates And Profits
Imagine you had two different ads created for you. How do you know which one is likely to produce the better response? The only way is split testing them and comparing the results. Imagine you had two different sales letters created for you. How do you know which one is likely to produce the better response? The only way is split testing them and comparing the results. In 1886, retail businessman John Wanamaker famously quipped, „I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” But the truth is much worse. In fact, most advertising is wasted, because most advertising is not based on what’s been proven to work. So to go back to my earlier question: how do you know which ad will perform better? To answer that question, you must first have a history of test results. That is, you must have a pretty good idea as to what types of elements in an ad produce the best response, based on real-world tests.
- Not what you think or I think what will do best.
- Not your mother or next-door neighbor.
- Not even the million dollar ad agencies.
In fact, nobody would really know what to focus on, UNLESS they had access to these proven test results. And in order to get these test results, there would have to be some way to specifically measure the results of any given ad. We would need to know which types of elements performed well and which did not. Then we could analyze the ads and determine the common techniques used among the successful ones. Well, fortunately much of this work has been already done for you. There are over a hundred years of history on advertising test results in which you can base your assumptions. So if you knew which kinds of ads performed better, then you might be able to take an educated guess as to which of the two ads would perform better than the other. Of course, that kind of information is just a “starting point.” You still need to split test your own ads. That means you’ll be using 2 or more versions of your ad, sales letter or whatever and compare their conversion rate. The one that’s better is the winner. Once you have your winner, you immediately start testing him against another ad. In the ‘split testing’ articles on this internet business blog I’m going to show you how to test your own sales letter the right way, so you can cut the dogs loose and go with the winners every time. No matter how successful your sales letter is, I can’t stress the importance enough of testing it to improve it even further. Sometimes the tiniest tweak can be responsible for boosting a sales letter’s conversion rate considerably. But how will you ever find out which tweaks those are unless you split test them?
- Sometimes it’s fairly obvious what you could do to improve their response.
- Other times what we may think will work better can actually make things worse. In the end it doesn’t matter what you or I or other copywriters think.
It only matters what your prospects think, and they weigh in on how much they like your headline or offer by purchasing and becoming a customer.
The equivalent of printing money on demand.
Remember, the name of the game is to always try to beat your control (your former winner and best-performing sales letter). Once you have a proven sales letter, it truly is money in the bank. When you know your average response rate, you can predict what getting more of the same kinds of prospects to your website will do to your bottom line. When you get right down to it, who wouldn’t want their average conversion rate to be as high as possible? I don’t know of anyone who wants a lower conversion rate, but I do know plenty of people who don’t test. Whether they realize it or not, they are settling for less than they’re capable of achieving. With a good marketing funnel in place, you ideally want to match each message you portray to your market’s desires. That means everything from the initial pay per click (PPC) ad, article, ezine ad, or whatever method you use to funnel traffic to your site—all the way on down the line. Everything.
- Your opt-in/name squeeze page
- Your email autoresponder sequence
- Your audio and video podcasts
- Your teleseminars
- And certainly your sales page
You see, the real purpose of testing is to develop the most profitable marketing funnel. So you test all elements of your funnel, not just the entry point. It’s easy to see that each tiny increase in one part of the funnel will MULTIPLY with all other improvements of the other parts of your marketing funnel. That’s ‘compounded’ split testing profit.