"Here's
A Really Simple Explanation
Of How Accelerated Split Testing
Can
Make You More Sales."
(OR "How To Find
All The Needles
In Your Haystack In One Shot.")
If
you want more sales
from your
landing page, you will have make some changes to
your landing page.
For instance, maybe you would sell more copies of your product
if you used a different headline.
Or if you used a video. Or if
you put the testimonials at the
top of the page instead of at the bottom. Or if you led with a picture
of someone using your product. Or if you used one of those cool peel
away ads. Or if you used a drop
cap. Or if you had more order
links. Or if you broke your sales page into multiple
parts. Or if you had information running down
the side of the page in addition to the main text.
Or if you framed the price in a
different way. Or . . .
Those are all interesting ideas. And some of them
might work. But here's the thing . . . even if you
generate a whole bunch of testing
ideas, you
probably won't know which ideas will make a positive
difference, and
which ones won't.
In fact, most
of your ideas will NOT
be good ideas. That is, they won't lead to any kind of
significant improvement. (This is true even for very good professional
marketers and copywriters).
Charles Holland,
author
of "Breakthrough Business
Results With MVT", argues that out of every
100
ideas people have for
improving business processes, only about 6
of them will be test-worthy
and turn out to make a significant positive difference.
(Here's the breakdown:
Of 100
ideas, you will probably test only about 25, because the
others are too expensive, time-consuming or impractical to test. Of the
25 you test, about 13 won't make any real difference, 6 will HURT, and 6
will lead to significant improvement.)
Now here's the thing. Those 6
ideas might double or triple your conversion rate!
But since you don't know which ideas are good, and
which aren't, that makes the task before you a lot like . . .
 .
. . looking for needles in a haystack.
The needles are the few
good ideas that will
increase your conversion rate 20%, 50%, 100% or more. The strands of
straw are all the other ideas that will either hurt your conversion
rate, won't be tested, or won't make much difference.
And when all the ideas
are stacked up together,
you can't tell which ideas are the 6 good ideas, and which are the 94
useless ones.
That's why split
testing each idea . . . one at a
time . . . is kind of like . . .
. . . looking for
needles in a haystack, one
needle-shaped thingy at a time.
But
using the
Split Test Accelerator software and methods is kind of like putting
that haystack of
ideas on a magnetized hay sifter
,
and . . .
 .
. . giving it a good shake.
And . . .
voilà!
You
find what you were
looking for often 10 times faster than
you would with ordinary split testing.
In this case, you were
looking for those few
changes to your sales page that will deliver a powerful boost to your
conversion rate.
Now which would you
rather do? Take a week (or a month) and
test just one straw-shaped thingy, hoping it's a needle, and then
discover that it's a worthless piece of straw? (This often happens 3,
4, or 5 times in a row with traditional A/B split testing.)
Or would you
rather shake the heck out of
the entire haystack, and quickly get good results almost
every single
time?
"When You Shake The
Whole Haystack,
You Can Get Breakthrough Results
And Create Large Increases In
Your Profits."
I have used the Split
Test Accelerator on my own landing
pages and those of friends. And here are some of the results:
- 75% improvement
in sales
from a landing page for a low carb diet book.
- 200%+
improvement in click
throughs for a Google Adwords ad (I used a spreadsheet for this test)
- 40% improvement
for a low
carb newsletter opt-in page.
- 100%
improvement in sales
for a site selling pinewood derby cars.
- an additional
70% improvement on the same pinewood derby car site.
- 60% improvement on a Stop Snoring ebook
site.
- 47% improvement on my
opt-in form for the
Split Test Accelerator.
- 97% improvement
in free
signups for a membership site.
I wish I had more tests
to share, and I'm working
on it. I'll be honest. I've spent too much time
developing the software, and
struggling to earn my Ph.D. while raising two beautiful kids to use my
own software as much as I wanted to. (That has changed since I finished
my degree. I am doing more testing now, and am starting to
offer consulting
services as well.)
There
are others who have done more accelerated split testing than I have
(including many of my customers).
For example, Richard
Mouser used STA with some help from David Bullock, and turned around
his business. You can read his story in the March, 2007 issue
of "Black Enterprise" magazine.
There are also case studies worth reading at
www.taguchinow.com, and results-squared.com. For instance, at
Taguchinow.com you can read about how Dell Computer used accelerated
split testing on an email ad to get the following results:
- Click Through Rate increase: 5.2 times
- 7.1
times more sales per mail
- Annual sales before optimization: $8,900,000
- Annual sales after
optimization: $63,100,000
Accelerated split testing works. Some of
the
consulting gurus claim to routinely double and
triple conversion rates.
But
I think you'd have to agree that even the "do it yourself" results I
got aren't bad,
especially when you consider that profits almost always go up more than
the increase in conversion rate.
Here's
what's kind of neat:
I Got Pretty Good
Results Using
Inferior Brainstorming And Test Design
Methods.
When I designed my
first tests I was pretty much a marketing neophyte (or "noobie"). I was at best an
amateur copywriter and marketer. So I had a lot of weak headlines and
bad material in my tests.
Even today it's probably good that you're buying software
from me, and not copywriting services :-)
I also had to come up
with my own brainstorming method, and honestly many of my
ideas and tests were weak and timid.
But
it still worked!
Some of my early
customers were left to develop
their own methods, too, and they got relatively small improvements with
their first
tests. (And I didn't know how to advise them any better back then).
They still
got 10% to 20% improvements, which isn't bad. But those aren't the kind
of results that are possible with this method. (I should add that some
customers did very well, right out of the blocks, too).
But things are different now. I'm not
going
to just give you the software and leave you to
develop your own methods
Because .
. .
I Am Now In A Position To Deliver
Great
Software, AND Powerful
Brainstorming And Test Design Methods.
Here's why:
- In March, 2005
I drove my green 1994
Pontiac Bonneville 857 miles from Seattle to San Francisco to attend a
seminar put on by Dr.
Jim Kowalick and Mario
Fantoni, and I
learned many of their methods.
For what
it's worth, it was a
beautiful trip. You're almost always in the shadow of some
majestic snow-capped volcano -- From Mount Rainier to Mount St. Helens
to Mount Hood to Mount Shasta. Shasta Lake is wonderful.
Then you get to drive along the fringe of Napa Valley.
And the seminar site at Half Moon Bay was absolutely
gorgeous. And the weather couldn't have been better.
Yes, it was a sacrifice, but it allowed me to learn my craft
better, so I made the sacrifice :-)
- More
recently, I
discovered Qualpro
-- a
consulting company that uses multi-variate testing to improve business
processes. And I have studied their methods intently.
- Finally,
I took what I believe
to be the easiest and best
parts of both approaches, modified them in some cases to fit the
specific constraints of online landing pages, mixed them with
strategies that came from my own testing experience, and put them into
a little eBook that will be included with your software.
I call the
eBook, "How To Use
Accelerated Split Testing
To Get More Sales, Opt-ins, And Other Actions From Your Visitors".
(It's a mouthful, but it tells you exactly what's in the book!)
And the book comes free with the software. (I'll tell you more about both on the next page).
Now
that you know a little about how accelerated split testing works, I
want to get into a little more detail, and tell you about the tool that
makes it all happen.
And I want to assure
you that . . .
"The
Split Test
Accelerator Is Simple
. . . And
Complex . . .
Whichever Appeals To
You Most."
I could list a hundred functions that
STA
performs, and tell you about
each one. I know them all, because I wrote the
code. But
that might overwhelm you . . .
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