You Are NOT Your Customer (Easy Split Testing For Beginners)

One of the most dangerous assumptions any business owner can make is to think you know your customers inside out.  What they want, where they come from, how they will react in any given situation.  This is why split-testing is an essential tool in any business owner’s marketing repertoire.

Sure, you can have a good idea of who your “Ideal Customer” is, and you should have that down to the nth detail.  Their age, sex, social and financial demographic, what they do for a job, what they do for fun, where they hang out with their friends, what they read, what they watch, what are their hobbies.

But never assume that you KNOW them and more particularly their reactions.  Especially when it comes to your marketing.

And NEVER assume that what would attract and repel you in someone else’s marketing, is what would work for your Ideal Customer.

In The Words Of Dr House “The Patient Always Lies”

I’ll give you an example;  when my company The Money Gym was at the height of its traffic generating glory, I used to ask our Ideal Clients what words or phrases they would have used to search for us on Google.

The answers were always something sensible and grown up, like Investing, Property Investment, Financial Freedom, Security, Cashflow Control.

But when you looked at the Google Analytics, they told a different story.  Our top traffic generating keywords were “Make More Money”, “Become A Millionaire” and “Get Out Of Debt” with “Credit Crunch” being a good performer in the days when the banks stopped lending.

“Hmmmmm, interesting!” as my old mate Brett McFall would say, finger on chin.

Guess It Then Prove It

As I’m starting a fairly new business, with The Business Success Factory, I have no idea who my ideal client is going to be, or how they are going to find me or what will hit their hot buttons when they arrive at the site.

What are they looking for, in the first place, online?  What words are they typing into Google, late at night, glass of wine in hand?

Well, over time my Google analytics will tell me, but in the meantime, it’s my job to make sure that the site, and particularly the blog, appeals as much as possible to what I think my ideal future client needs right now.  So that, when they come looking, I can be found.

Offer A Variety Of Things In A Variety Of Ways

And how will they react when they get here?  I don’t know yet, so I have two free giveaways, one being a free Report and the other being the Free Website Marketing MOT’s.

Neither were converting particularly thrillingly to subscribers to my mailing list, hwoever, it was around the average at 3.5% (whereas my more established site at NicolaCairncross.com converts New Unique Visitors to subscribers at 12%)

The other day I added a PopUpDomination lightbox to TBSF.com and used it to feature the Free “Online Business Success Secrets” Report, setting the lightbox to come up after 10 seconds when they visitor would have had a good chance to see and take action on the Free Website Marketing MOT videos.

Would You Like To Triple The Hot Leads For Your Business?

Interestingly, my conversions have TRIPLED and not just on the Free Report, but the MOT signups have increased too.

In offline marketing terms, I have just tripled the number of hot leads that are putting up their hand and saying “Yes! I’m interested in your business, here is my permission to market to me again and again”.

Making A Profit On Your Marketing

I have a great new marketing product that I’m just about to launch, and it’s what’s known as an “evergreen” product which means that it can sit on my site, with links in, and sell, on an ongoing basis.

Because it is an automated digitally delivered product, with customer support being delivered via webinar, in groups, I can sell as many as I like of this product.

All this is great but it’s not actually the point, as it’s really a marketing product.

It’s designed for potential future customers of my top level internet marketing services to be able to buy a low cost item, after they have subscribed to my free report, and watched my free Website Marketing MOT’s, to enable them to test out the theory of whether I really am as expert as they hope I am.

Read that last line again, it’s pretty cool.

They WANT You To Be The Answer!

Because of course, your potential future customer (PFC for short) actually WANTS you to be the answer to their prayers, to be able to solve their problem or pain, but you would be amazed how many companies make it really, really hard for the PFC to establish that.

(Actually, no, calling people PFC’s sounds disrespectful, so I’m not going to do it, even if it would save my RSI LOL)

Now, if you have watched my “7 Steps To A Website That Works” video, you will know what I mean when I talk about product funnels and marketing funnels, and how they work together, and if you haven’t, you can watch it here for free >>>

I outline in that video how anyone, no matter what their business, can create a marketing/product funnel to gently encourage potential future customers from FREE to FEE.

As part of the Sales Funnel for TBSF.com, I have created a marketing product called Spartan Marketing, and the first part of that is a home study course, for busy business people to learn how to bring together the best of the traditional marketing techniques with the best of the new online marketing / direct response marketing techniques.

I ran this home study course live with several of my existing clients, to get the recordings and test out the content and now it’s ready to go live as a home-study course comprising  10 online video masterclasses, with downloadable powerpoint, MP3′s and weekly live Q&A telephone support.

I’ve created a blinder of a squeeze and sales page combo for it, even if I do say so myself.  Of course the Superstar Copywriter in my Mastermind Group says I’ve got it all wrong, but I do like to create the first pages myself and soft-launch to my own list, which gives you a control to test the said Superstar Copywriters against.

What am I talking about there? Split testing that’s what.

Don’t Guess, Split Test!

It’s one of the most powerful tools known to internet marketers yet one that is woefully under utilised, and is almost totally unheard of in the “real world” of business unless the business owner is familiar with direct mail.

Essentially you run a test version of everything against a control version, (A/B split testing) and you then take the best performing one, and try and beat that.  This leads to incremental improvements, which in turn have a compounding effect on your profits.

One of my favourite boffins Dr Karl Blanks explains it brilliantly on his website Conversion-Rate-Experts.com , in the snappily entitled section “Why Increasing Your Conversion Rate Is Better Than Sex!”

If we doubled your website’s conversion rate, it means your cost-per-acquisition would halve. This tool shows you how much extra you’d earn. (By the way, when using the tool, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is how much it costs to get each new customer).

But when your conversion rate does increase, we recommend you don’t just sit back and enjoy the profits, (tempting as that might be). Instead, we recommend you take advantage of the fact you can now afford to pay twice as much per visitor. This means…

i. You can pay about twice as much per click on AdWords, which can bring a disproportionate number of additional visitors.

ii. You can start advertising in media that had previously been too expensive for you. For example:

• Full page magazine ads
• Newspaper ads
• Direct mail
• Radio ads
• TV infomercials

iii. Your affiliates can earn twice as much as before – so the super-affiliates leave your competitors and join you.

– so, in summary, your business grows much more than you might expect.

When you have finished THIS article, go read Karl’s site from top to bottom.  Some neat squirrels over there too LOL.

But I Hate Those Long Sales Pages!

Ah now we are getting to the whole point of the article.

On the sales page for the Spartan Marketing Masterclass, there’s an autoplay video with a white background and a voiceover by me and there’s also a long form sales page, created with the ever marvellous OptimizePress theme for WordPress.

Why did I bother with a long-form sales page if I’ve got a perfectly good video?

Because while I’m highly visual, I’m also very impatient and I would NEVER sit and listen to a video.  I can’t listen to anything for any length of time without losing attention.  And if I can’t then other’s can’t.

But because I am highly visual, I like to read, and I can skim read with the best of them.

Why do I bother with a long-form sales letter when my potential future customers are British?

Because my previous split testing has proved time and time again, that when selling a British Product to a British customer base, the American style sales letter outsells the most restrained design with the same copy (words on the page), or the more restrained design with more restrained copy.

In short, you have to answer all the questions objections of your potential future customer and emotion sells.  And all of that can only be done in a long-form sales letter.  Or a video.

What’s In A Subject Line?

Now my task is to get my subscribers to my mailing list to the the new sales page to watch the sales video or read the letter.  How do I do that?

By email, of course.  A short, snappy email, just intriguing enough to get them to click the link, is what’s needed here.

And this time, I decided to split test the subject line, while keeping the body of the email the same.  aWeber gives you the facility to split test up to 4 email subject lines (or bits of content) as long as one of your lists has more than 100 active subscribers in it.

I tested 4 x subject lines to one list, then tested the two best performing subject lines (in terms of “open” statistics) to another list and annoyingly the results were quite different!

With the list generated from the index page of my own site, the “Pssst! Don’t tell anyone….” subject line got a 15% open rate while the “Quick Heads Up” subject line got an 8.5% open rate.

With  a different list – of people who had downloaded a free chapter of The Money Gym book – the “Quick heads up” subject line got an open rate of 8% so about the same.

But the subject line “Pssst! Don’t tell anyone….” got only a 1.8% open rate (performing worse on this test than the other two I had tested, which got 3.6% and 3.7% respectively.

Very confusing.

Ideally now, I would mail the two best performers from the first test, to ALL the lists in my aWeber account but it won’t let you do that, you can only split test to one list at a time.

Now we know which two subject lines perform best out of the four though, in terms of getting the most eyeballs to the email, I can now use both with the same email body, and send to my entire list over both aWeber and TotalBusinessCart and insert an different adtracker link into both, which will track actual actions – or purchases.

(I’m thinking there must be an easier way to do this, but I can’t think of one right now and I’m too impatient!)

By the way, my two mailouts of earlier, to 220 people, resulted in 32 opens and about 7-8 clicks, with one purchase of $79.50, so that makes a click > sale conversion of  14% and a click value of $11.

If those conversion percentages hold up I’ll be a happy bunny.

I’ll update you in a little while on my full results.

I think the takeaway of this story, if you haven’t got it yet due to my meanderings, is that you don’t have to guess, or get it right first time.

You can just start with one version of something, and use it as the control, in the experiment, then split test new versions against the control.

You can see how this overcomes perfectionism and analysis paralysis.  And because everyone’s customers and clients are different, and will respond to different marketing messages and methods differently, as exemplified by the reaction to the two subject lines from my two sub-lists, you really don’t have to guess.

And you must NEVER assume that you are your customer, because I’d have deleted both of those cheesy subject lines unless they came from someone that I really “knew, liked & trusted”.

But that’s the topic of a whole other blog post.

What do you think about this split-testing business?  Can you think how it could be used in your business?  I’d love to help you out with some suggestions if you can’t think how to use it – just enter your comments in the box there!