Honest Marketing Techniques - Increasing Your Conversions - Part 2
Honest Marketing Techniques are time proven techniques you can use to generate online income.
In this series of articles you will find the information to decide which methods are right for you.
This information may also help you sort the good advertisements from the bad if you decide to purchase someone's program or membership.
This article will conclude a discussion about increasing the conversions of your opt-in or sales pages by talking about testing and feedback.
In part 1, we addressed your knowing your customer base and offers.
Now we proceed to testing and feedback.
Each of these four elements is key in increasing your conversion rates.
Testing Testing, or more specifically, split testing, involves the analytic testing of a variety of features of the various collateral items that make up marketing materials.
This includes such things as newsletter messages, opt-in pages, advertising copy and other related materials.
Split testing, in its simplest form is testing one or more variations of an existing item of collateral, to see what is more effective.
What would it mean to you, if you could increase your sales by 3% or more, or increase the opt-in rate of your squeeze page by 5% or more? Yep, it could lead to significantly increased revenues, and I'm willing to bet that this would be a "good thing" for most of you reading this article.
You would be amazed at just how much money is lost because so few people take the time and effort to perform split testing.
Going back to your basic high school science classes, you probably realize that you need a control (your existing messages, squeeze page or advertising copy).
Of course, you need some metrics to know what your conversion rates already are if you are to be truly effective.
Next, you need to vary various features of your copy.
You can test such things as headlines, images, introductions, length of copy, font size, and so on.
You can easily get overwhelmed if you try to test everything.
The important thing is to make a change, and provide a mechanism for tracking that change.
I typically will try three or four different techniques at a time (one per page).
For example, if I'm trying to determine what works best for an opt-in page, I'll set up several opt-in pages with different elements I'd like to test and give each opt-in page a different page name, then try to send roughly equal traffic to each page.
By looking at my web site statistics, I can see how many people landed on each page, and how many of those opted into my newsletter.
Thus, I am able to see which opt-in page features are most effective.
Over time, I can combine successful features to develop a killer opt-in page.
Tracking This just won't work without effective tracking mechanisms.
You really need to have decent site statistics to be able to be effective with split testing (or any other sorts of testing, for that matter.
) You need to track all the conversions, numbers and metrics you can for your sites.
Without knowing what you are doing, you really cannot tell what changes were positive, and which were negative.
Minor tweaks can have major impacts on conversions, but without decent statistics, you cannot even begin to figure out where you are, or what helps and what is a waste of time.
If you are not split testing you are losing money.
Though a very lucky person may arrive at a decently performing set of collateral, it is extremely rare.
Every item you present on your web site or send to a prospect can have an effect on your bottom line.
This also applies to emails sent out to prospects, not just canned content of your web site.
Feedback Another major area where you can greatly improve your business is through feedback.
Getting feedback from your customers can be one of the most important parts of your business, but is often the most overlooked process for improving your sales.
Do you really want to know what your customers like? ASK THEM.
Perhaps you can create a simple survey to ask them a few questions.
Deliver this via email or after purchase, and offer an incentive for real feedback.
This might be a discount on a future purchase, or a bonus download for completing a short survey, or something of that sort.
Another place to get feedback is the current proliferation of the pop-up on closing a web page.
Instead of trying to offer a cheaper price of other opt-in page, if the prospect didn't buy, BE DIFFERENT and ask them WHY.
If they answer, then give them an offer with an additional discount or bonus to see how many you can capture as customers.
The valuable feedback you receive from after purchase or even exit polling helps you refine your offer to make it even more effective.
It also helps you identify roadblocks that lose sales, and make modifications that can radically improve your profits.
Beyond immediate sales improvements, you also show that you listen to your customers too, and developing a reputation for listening to your customers can increase your profits down the road.
In this series of articles you will find the information to decide which methods are right for you.
This information may also help you sort the good advertisements from the bad if you decide to purchase someone's program or membership.
This article will conclude a discussion about increasing the conversions of your opt-in or sales pages by talking about testing and feedback.
In part 1, we addressed your knowing your customer base and offers.
Now we proceed to testing and feedback.
Each of these four elements is key in increasing your conversion rates.
Testing Testing, or more specifically, split testing, involves the analytic testing of a variety of features of the various collateral items that make up marketing materials.
This includes such things as newsletter messages, opt-in pages, advertising copy and other related materials.
Split testing, in its simplest form is testing one or more variations of an existing item of collateral, to see what is more effective.
What would it mean to you, if you could increase your sales by 3% or more, or increase the opt-in rate of your squeeze page by 5% or more? Yep, it could lead to significantly increased revenues, and I'm willing to bet that this would be a "good thing" for most of you reading this article.
You would be amazed at just how much money is lost because so few people take the time and effort to perform split testing.
Going back to your basic high school science classes, you probably realize that you need a control (your existing messages, squeeze page or advertising copy).
Of course, you need some metrics to know what your conversion rates already are if you are to be truly effective.
Next, you need to vary various features of your copy.
You can test such things as headlines, images, introductions, length of copy, font size, and so on.
You can easily get overwhelmed if you try to test everything.
The important thing is to make a change, and provide a mechanism for tracking that change.
I typically will try three or four different techniques at a time (one per page).
For example, if I'm trying to determine what works best for an opt-in page, I'll set up several opt-in pages with different elements I'd like to test and give each opt-in page a different page name, then try to send roughly equal traffic to each page.
By looking at my web site statistics, I can see how many people landed on each page, and how many of those opted into my newsletter.
Thus, I am able to see which opt-in page features are most effective.
Over time, I can combine successful features to develop a killer opt-in page.
Tracking This just won't work without effective tracking mechanisms.
You really need to have decent site statistics to be able to be effective with split testing (or any other sorts of testing, for that matter.
) You need to track all the conversions, numbers and metrics you can for your sites.
Without knowing what you are doing, you really cannot tell what changes were positive, and which were negative.
Minor tweaks can have major impacts on conversions, but without decent statistics, you cannot even begin to figure out where you are, or what helps and what is a waste of time.
If you are not split testing you are losing money.
Though a very lucky person may arrive at a decently performing set of collateral, it is extremely rare.
Every item you present on your web site or send to a prospect can have an effect on your bottom line.
This also applies to emails sent out to prospects, not just canned content of your web site.
Feedback Another major area where you can greatly improve your business is through feedback.
Getting feedback from your customers can be one of the most important parts of your business, but is often the most overlooked process for improving your sales.
Do you really want to know what your customers like? ASK THEM.
Perhaps you can create a simple survey to ask them a few questions.
Deliver this via email or after purchase, and offer an incentive for real feedback.
This might be a discount on a future purchase, or a bonus download for completing a short survey, or something of that sort.
Another place to get feedback is the current proliferation of the pop-up on closing a web page.
Instead of trying to offer a cheaper price of other opt-in page, if the prospect didn't buy, BE DIFFERENT and ask them WHY.
If they answer, then give them an offer with an additional discount or bonus to see how many you can capture as customers.
The valuable feedback you receive from after purchase or even exit polling helps you refine your offer to make it even more effective.
It also helps you identify roadblocks that lose sales, and make modifications that can radically improve your profits.
Beyond immediate sales improvements, you also show that you listen to your customers too, and developing a reputation for listening to your customers can increase your profits down the road.
Source...