
Throughout these secrets, you’ve been learning about a whole lot of ways to start converting more of your existing traffic.
But here’s the thing…
How do you know if the changes you’re making are actually working?
Answer: you don’t.
If you’re not tracking these changes, then you’re really just guessing. And that means you could be wasting your time and throwing your money away.
The good news is that it’s easy to start tracking and testing your changes to see what’s working for you. Generally, you’ll do this by doing a/b split-testing. This means you get a split-testing tool (like splittestmonkey.com or any other number of tools). You then create two sales pages, email campaigns or other events that are identical except the ONE thing you’re testing. After approximately 30-50 conversions, you then see which of your factors produces the best conversion rates.
For example, let’s suppose you’re testing headlines on a sales letter. You create two identical sales letters, with the ONLY difference being the headline. You hold all other variables constant, such as traffic sources.
You then let your split-testing tool randomly send traffic to your two sales letters. After 30 to 50 sales, you check your results to see if one headline produced significantly higher conversion rates than the other headline. If so, this winning headline becomes your control, and you now test your control against other headlines to see if you can get even higher conversions.
TIP: Want fast results? Then use paid methods of advertising, such as Google AdWords or Facebook ads. With enough quick traffic, you can wrap up your testing and have your answers in a matter of a couple days (rather than weeks or longer).
So, you see how it works. While it may sound complicated if you’ve never done it, no worries… a good split-testing tool does all the calculations and heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is create your two identical pages, emails or other factor you’re testing, and the tool will take care of everything else.
Which brings us to the question… what should you be testing? The answer is that you can test just about everything. The key, however, is to focus on the factors that are likely to have the biggest impact on your conversion rates.
TIP: Just be sure you’re testing just one factor at a time. That way, if there are any differences between conversion rates, you know it’s due to the one change you’re testing (and not some other variable).
What are these influential factors? Let’s break them down across sales letters, ads and email campaigns…
Category #1: Sales Letters/Lead Pages
Again, you can test most anything on a sales page. However, these are the factors you’ll want to focus on:
- Headline: This is one of the most important factors, because if it doesn’t do its job (attract attention), then the rest of your sales letter is worthless. As such, invest a good chunk of your testing time and resources into testing your headlines.
- Opener: This is the next thing your prospect will read after they read your headline, so you’ll want to test different openers (e.g., a story, a startling statistic, a question, etc.).
- Benefit list: This is the part of your sales letter that will point out what the product will do for the customer, so test your main benefits (and the length of your list) to see which produces the best conversions.
- Overall offer: This includes your price, any bonuses you offer, and how you position the offer. This is another factor that tends to have an outsized influence on your conversion rates.
- Call to action: You can test both the words you use, the payment button you use, the number of calls to action in your letter, and where you place your calls to action.
- Postscript: People who skim your sales letter will often read the headline and then drop their eyes right down to the end of the letter. That’s why you want to make sure to test your postscript.
- Long form versus short form: Here you’ll test between a long-form sales letter versus a short-form sales letter. Your long-form sales letter may be a dozen pages, which includes opening with a story, sharing a long list of benefits, offering dozens of testimonials and so on. Your short-form sales letter may consist primarily of a headline, product introduction and benefits, guarantee, call to action, order button and postscript.
- Video sales letter vs text: Here you may test whether you get a better conversion rate with a video sales letter, a text sales letter, or a combination of the two.
- Web design: Your overall web design is what helps form your prospect’s first impression, so test designs to see which ones boost your conversions.
Category #2: Ads
Here we’re talking about short ads such as pay per click ads or Facebook ads. Since they’re short, there are really only a few factors to test. These include:
- Headline: Again, the headline is going to have the biggest impact on your ad, so focus your resources here.
- Body: Depending on the length of your ad, your body copy may only be one or two lines long. That makes this content important, so test it to boost conversions.
- Call to action: This is generally the last line of your ad, and it has a big impact on whether people click or not.
Category #3: Email Campaigns
Every email has a few important factors to test…
- Subject line: Just like the headline of a sales letter, your email subject line is going to have a big impact on conversion rates. You can test the strength of your subject line by looking at your email open rates.
- Your offer: You can rotate different offers at different price points to see which ones convert the best for you.
- Your call to action: Test your calls to action – such as creating one with more urgency – to see which ones produce the best results.
- When you send the email: You’ll want to do some testing to see what days and times of the day work best to get plenty of clicks and conversions.
Now let’s wrap things up…
Your Turn
Your assignment for this secret is to make a plan to test and track your sales letter, ads and emails. To make your plan, answer these questions:
- What tool will you use to run your tests?
- What factors will you test on your sales letters?
- What factors will you test on your emails?
- What factors will you test with your ads?
Conclusion
And that wraps up the secrets for the Optimized Traffic Profitscourse! Work your way through each of the secrets, paying careful attention to complete the assignments at the conclusion of each secret.
Soon, you’ll have your sales process optimized so you can get the maximum number of orders while helping the maximum number of customers solve their problems, reach their goals, or enjoy their interests. Everybody wins!
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