It’s Saturday and I’m just sitting down to do a total re-write of the VisiOlo sales page and sales offer because the current one just is not doing it’s job.

Through testing, I know that the majority of visitors who see the page are not getting to the part of the sales letter that actually talks about features and benefits — they are not scrolling past the very top of the sales letter. I know this because I’m testing a future feature of VisiOlo that very simply measures how deep visitors go into my sales page.

This new testing feature still needs some work before it delivers rock solid measurements, so I’m not going to give you hard numbers, but I have seen enough data to reinforce my intuitive feel that the message and structure of the copy is just not right.

I’m not really that surprised. In fact, in my experience, it takes several months of active selling and focused effort to ‘tune’ a sales message and offer. 

First, you have ‘gross tuning’ in which you decide what the key messages are and how to structure the delivery of those messages.  Sometimes, gross tuning is completed before you start selling the product. But, more often than not, it has to take place in the real world in real sales conditions.  This principle, by the way, is as true for products that are sold face-to-face with a sales force as it is for info products sold online.

Then, you have ‘fine tuning’ which is more about testing headlines, layout, color combinations, small changes in price, etc. This tends to be an ongoing process where improvements are small, but over time, result in steadily increasing conversions.

The VisiOlo sales message is definitely in the gross tuning phase, which means there are people visiting the sales page for whom VisiOlo could be a transformational tool, but they are not even aware of it because what they need to know is buried too deep in the sales letter, or not there at all.  This is not good for me, nor is it good for for my potential customers, so I’m starting over with a blank piece of paper.

I’ve learned several things over the last thirty days that will influence the next version of the sales message, but one thing is for sure. The current introductiory price of $9.99 has got to go.

So, if you are considering a VisiOlo membership, now is the time, before I update the offer and increase the price.

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Conversion Tweak Video by Ryan Deiss

This is a great video and a simple item to split test. Of course, your results may vary, but that’s why you use VisiOlo to track your testing results, right?

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Small changes in your conversion rate can really add up to big results.

I know you’ve heard this before, and perhaps you’ve already experienced this effect by using VisiOlo.

But let me lay it out for you because no matter how many times I run these numbers, they always blow me away.

Did you know that if you just improve three ‘conversion points’ in your sales system, you can increase your sales revenue by 52% *without* driving more visitors to your site and without adding more products?

It’s true!  And you only need a 15% conversion improvement in these three places to get these astounding results.

I made a short video to show you what I mean and posted it below.

You will be amazed at how small changes can mean big profits.

It’s kinda hard to see the numbers in the video, sorry about that. Next time, I’ll use Camtasia with auto-zoom. BUT you can see for yourself because I’ve provided my spreadsheet for download. Just click here to download the file and play with the numbers yourself.

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I just finished reading  the new Extreme Optimization report from Matt Gallant and it is packed with both excellent testing methodology and case studies.  If you are in doubt about the power of split testing, then this is a report you must read.  If you are a testing geek like me, you’ve probably already left this blog and started reading

In his report, Matt explains how even a newbie can beat the pants off a pro copywriter, just by using testing as a ’secret weapon.’

Here’s a shocking fact that most copywriters never talk about (even most of the “big names”): They are GUESSING 95% of the time. Now, in their defence they are making
educated guesses. They’ve studied other copywriters and they’ve put their chops to the test and created many winners. However, it doesn’t mean that a newbie can’t get into a market and clean their clocks. Especially, if the newbie learns the art and science of Radical Testing Results (Which you’ll be begin to learn starting with this report).

It’s not only copywriters who guess 95% of the time, if you expand the sample to include ‘marketers’ in general, the numbers are more like 99.9%  And here’s good news for you, MOST of those people will continue guessing and you can put yourself way ahead of the pack by implemeting a habit of continually measuring, testing, and improving.

One of the big “take aways” from Matts report for me is a simple formula I can use to rapidly accellerate my tests, even for offers that don’t have a lot of traffic to begin with.  Instead of waiting a long time to get statistically significant numbers, Matt suggests moving fast and looking for breakthrough results.  But, you still don’t want to guess, so it’s important to have some sort of rule of thumb to use when picking a winner in split tests.

Matt’s rule of thumb comes in the form of this formula that he calls his “big breakthrough formula:”

The Winner – Square root of the winner > the losing element

It works like this — In any split test, there will be a winner and a loser.  You know you have a reliable winner when it passes the big breakthrough formula test.

The big breakthrough formula is simple… You substract square root of the winner from the winner and it should be a bigger number the loser.

It sounds more complicated than it is…(most every simple calculator has a square root button)

Let’s say you’re doing an A/B test and element A has 20 sales and B has 12 sales. First, calculate the square root of 20 – which is 4.47.  Now, simply plug-in the rest of the numbers:

20 (winner) – 4.47 (square root of 20) = 15.53

The next question is: Is 15.53 a bigger number than 11 (the losing element)?  I hope you answered yes.

It may seem like a small thing, but I’ve struggled with this very issue many times. When doing a split test, how do you pick a winner?  What Matt’s formula does it it provides a simple way of ‘handicapping’ the winner of a split test to that you know it’s not just a winner, but a real winner — a breakthrough winner.

If you don’t get a winner that passes the test, then you have two choices 1) extend the test to see if the gap between the winner and loser expands or 2) pick a new test.  For me, if the test was close, I’d let it run for a while longer. If the difference is only slight, I’d create a new test — aiming for a quick breakthrough result.

Extreme Optimization Graph

Matt shows several informative graphs in his report and I just want to point out one thing, the vertical axis on all graphs is Visitor Value — one of the most important metrics you can measure in your sales systems. If you are a VisiOlo user, you already know that this metric is extremely valuable because you can see it, at-a-glance, right in your dashboard

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I’ve been testing and re-testing the VisiOlo free and paid account signup process and until I learned a little trick with Gmail, I found it frustrating.  In our registration process (and with most registration processes) email is a key field which means we can’t allow duplicate emails in the system.

Because of this contstraint, I quickly found myself running out of email addresses while I was testing. I would have to log in to my admin panel, delete old test accounts, and then resume testing. Plus, I had to check multile email accounts to see the results of my tests.

Then, while listening to the Marketing Over Coffee podcast Christopher Penn came to my rescue (you’ll find the tip  at 15:50 in the podcast).   Chris was talking about using a Gmail address tag for seeding email lista, but my main interest was in using the feature he mentioned as a solution to my testing needs.

In Gmail, you can use the “+” sign and insert whatever tag you want between the + and the @ sign — Gmail will ignore everything between the + and the @ and will still consider the address valid, but you can use the tag in any way you want.

Here’s an example of how it works:  say your address is me@gmail.com and you want to do multiple tests on a subscription form (like I did). Now you can just add a tag such as me+test1@gmail.com.  Your form validation will consider this a new address, but Gmail will still deliver the email as normal.

This can also be used for ‘tagging’ your email address in lists (as Chris Penn suggested). Say you want to subscribe to a number of lists on a certain topic (like Hiking for instance) and have them automatically filtered with Gmail labels.  Just use me+hiking@gmail.com to subscribe. Then you can set up a filter in Gmail that labels all messages that have “me+hiking” in the address with your “hiking” label.

There are lots of uses for this little Gmail hack, but for me, it’s a big help when it comes to testing.

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