4 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong and Don’t Even Realize, Part 2
In part 1, we looked at how many people make mistakes when doing e-mail marketing.
We went from understanding e-mail marketing to creating a good “offer” to entice people to join your list, to how to present that offer so it converts well, to the importance of building a relationship and caring for your list, and why you should always be following up with your list.
If you’ve done just some of what we talked about there, you should have already seen an improvement in your conversions.
This time we’re going to take a brief look at something all highly successful online businesses do. Something that separates the winners from the losers.
Something that most people know they should do, fewer do but don’t do consistently, fewer still do but not properly and others, the most successful, do and do well…
Testing.
Yes, one of the best things you can do to continually improve your open rates, click through rates, sign up conversion rates and your sales conversion rates is testing.
If you want to do better than you are, no matter how good or bad you are doing, you need to be looking at your numbers and testing everything to make them better.
In my free copywriting course, I devote 2 full lessons just on testing and even then I just show you how to do things properly using basic A/B testing and multivariate testing; there are lots of advanced techniques that I can’t get into.
The point is that in a single blog post I’m not going to be helping you become an expert; all I can hope for is to get you started doing testing or help you do it better.
What Testing is, in a nutshell, is taking one or more parts of some marketing material, it can be an e-mail, a text ad, a sales letter, a banner ad, a Squidoo Lens, a squeeze page, an AdWords ad, even just a graphic image, and making a change to it to see how it impacts your conversion rate.
Do It and Do It Rights
A/B Testing
This is the basis for most of the testing that is being done today. It is also the easiest to do.
A/B Testing is taking one thing, it MUST be ONE thing, and changing it in ONE way.
This could be the subject line in an e-mail or the headline on a sales page.
It could be the font used in a squeeze page.
It could be the use of a graphics header or not.
It could be the background color of your Web page.
It could be the position of something on a page.
It could even be just adding or removing one word.
Anything can be tested and over time many, if not, most things should be tested.
Just remember that you need to change only one thing and change it in only one way.
That means maybe you change a headline.. Just do that, don’t change the font also or the color of the font or the position of the headline or ANYTHING else.
It’s like a sports tournament… Test, keep the winner (throw out the loser), make another change and test again.
Multivariate Testing
This is just testing more than one thing at a time.
It is more complex to do this properly and is better for higher traffic sites or larger lists because otherwise it can take a long time to get accurate results.
I’m not going to go into it here but it is something to consider if you have the traffic, it can provide quicker results and get you to higher conversions faster.
One Other Option
One other option that has appeal and is used by the experts at Marketing Experiments is to make lots of changes to the page and then try it.
If it converts better start using it and then do some A/B or Multivariate Testing on the new page; or even do massive changes again.
Sounds Like a Lot of Work!
That’s what I’ve heard people say.
Personally, I don’t get it. If I could improve my conversions by 25%, note that probably means I am earning 25% more money, wouldn’t I be willing to do some work. Even if it was 15-20% more work I’d end up ahead.
BUT, with the tools available, even the free tools, it isn’t much work at all.
Understand It
There is a saying in the business world “You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure”, well it’s the same thing here “You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure.”
So first we need to be measuring things and by using the free Google Analytics you can easily measure all kinds of different things.
So, if you don’t have a Google Analytics account go get one and use it to start measuring at least your different conversion rates.
Make it Better
After you have been using Google Analytics for a while to get some numbers so you know where you stand now then you can start using Google’s free Website Optimizer tool to do you Testing.
It is a tool to help you do A/B and Multivariate Testing and it tracks your results and shows you different sets of information so you know what things improve results and what things harm them.
Conclusion
That’s it, short but so important. DO NOT neglect this.
Start tracking and the start Testing and you’ll quickly see improvements.
The free Google tools are really quite good. There are other tools but for many people, maybe even most people, the combination of Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer will be all they need to have continuous improvement
In the next post we’ll look at something that is dear to me and that can make a huge difference in how successful you are, copywriting.
Talk soon,
David
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
Have you ever thought about uploading one of your tests to A/B Tests ( http://www.abtests.com/ ) ? We’d love to see some of these if you have any you’d like to share with the testing community.
I didn’t even know about it, I’ll definitely check it out.
Thanks!
David
@David – Glad to have pointed you in the direction of our site. Hope to see you share/upload a test in the near future. btw, you can also follow us on twitter @abtests.