In my postal-mail days, there were major variables (offer, price, creative, list, etc.) and minor ones (font, colour, graphics, etc.). All affected response rates. The rule of thumb was to first test all the major variables, as they accounted for the greatest response increases. Then, test minor variables to squeeze out even more orders.

In the e-mail world, the postal-mail model must be updated, especially in light of recent stats. First, from an EmailLabs study:

• Subject lines of fewer than 50 characters performed better than subject lines of over 50 characters:
• Open rates were 12.5 percent higher.
• CTRs were 75 percent higher.
• E-mail messages with over 25 links fared better than those with fewer than 25 links. “The more links there are,” says EmailLabs Loren McDonald, “the greater the chance that one or more will resonate with the recipient and motivate them to click through.”

Though the following Advertising.com stats are based on the Web, not specifically e-mail, they offer clues about what variables to consider testing:

• A call to action (CTA) accounted for an 85 percent lift in revenue compared to no CTA (that’s a no-brainer, of course).
• Colour accounted for lifts of up to 50 percent.
• Disclaimers located at the bottom of a Web page accounted for a 14 percent lift.

Let’s create a comprehensive list of variables to test:

• Offer (e.g., 30-day free trial vs. free shipping)
• Price (e.g., $79.95 vs. four payments of $19.95)
• Copy
• Graphics (e.g., photo vs. drawing)
• CTA
• List
• Format (text vs. HTML)
• Copy length (long vs. short)
• Appeals to consumer (e.g., look beautiful, improve health, etc.)
• Colour
• Subject lines
• Number of links
• Disclaimer positioning

There may be other logical variables to test that are specific to your product or service.

The Right Way to Test

Testing numerous variables in postal-mail days was difficult because we had to create numerous variations of the mail piece and have enough names to test each one. With e-mail, things are a lot simpler.

The key to producing statistically significant test results is to isolate and test each variable independently. To do this, track your testing program on a spreadsheet. Say you want to test 10 variables. You want to use the same list for all tests, so your first test would look like this:

You would create two messages, one in text and one in HTML, holding all other variables constant. Once you determine which works best, you move on to the next variable, so the next test would look like this:

And so on. Because you can create an e-mail message, send it, and read results within a day or so, you can easily test 10 variables in a couple weeks. Be sure to keep track of how each variable increases or decreases response. Because e-mail is so much easier to test and you can read results faster than postal mail, now’s the time to set up a formal testing program.

By Paul Soltoff

I’ve got a confession. Though I love good design, my real passion is great copy.

Copy is where the rubber meets the road. It engages readers, entices them to click a link and buy. A picture is worth a thousand words, but you still need some copy there, at least for an explicit call to action. I’ve seen fabulous copy in a not-so-great design succeed; I can’t say the same for not-so-great copy in a fabulous design.

Is your copy as great as it could be? Here are three real-life copy makeovers, with practical tips for making your copy more engaging, enticing, and successful.

Sell the Sizzle
One benefit of working with packaged goods companies is they usually have an abundance of copy. Product boxes are covered with it, and it’s written specifically about the products. Many companies use this copy on Web sites or in e-mail and other promotions. Sometimes this works well. Other times, it’s just not a good e-mail marketing fit. Let me give you an example.

The following product description isn’t bad at all. There’s nothing “wrong” with it. In fact, if I described it to you, you’d think it’d be great for e-mail. It’s concise and clear, utilizes bullet points, and has some personality to it:

• Combine clear red parts to create an ultimate XXX weapon!
  
• Ultimate XXX weapons can be used with other XXX figures!
  
• Comic book included!
  

XXX chip inside!
This is a very accurate description of the product, but I thought we could do better. After further research into the item, I wrote this for the e-mail promotion:

YYY knows only two speeds — fast and faster. She’s one of the female XXXs introduced in the XXX movie, but don’t be fooled — she’s a skilled sharpshooter who changes into a super-fast sport bike in vehicle mode.

The biggest change I made to this copy was move from bullets to a story. I pulled in some subtler product details and added intrigue. It’s still completely accurate, but it’s more engaging. Since this copy was written specifically for adults (primarily moms), I minimized the weapons aspect of the toy; although we mention she’s a sharpshooter, we don’t focus on it.

Keep It Simple
Copy’s often used to change the reader’s perception of something. Such was the case with another client. Testing showed Web site visitors thought of the company only for one service, rather than the suite of products it offers. Although we had product lists in drop-down menus, and some promotional offers on the home page, the message wasn’t getting through.

We decided to test a tag line after the company name. We came up with a number of ideas. Some used terms like “Online Presence” and “Complete Web Resource,” things that meant something to all of us. One was much simpler. It spelled it out directly, without fanfare: “Domain Registration, Web Hosting, Website Development and More.”

Simple? Yes. Also, very clear. The testers preferred this last one to the other tag lines. Those terms we all understood didn’t mean anything (at least, not enough) to the target audience. The copy’s rough and must be massaged before it’s final, but it confirms that sometimes, simpler is better. If you get too clever with copy, you risk going over readers’ heads and having them miss the point.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Sometimes, the facts aren’t enough. You can undersell yourself with facts. For one client, I developed content for an online resource center for small businesses. I identified, and they linked to, some very good third-party resources. Here’s how one item I found was presented:

XXX has dozens of free sample/example human resource policies for Human Resources, available for download and customization.
Not bad. Very accurate. But the linked content was really great. Much better than the introduction made it sound. So I wrote this:

Got HR policies? If not, you may want to check out this site, offering sample wording for hundreds of issues, including flextime, purchasing and sub-contractors. It’s great for adding new provisions to your existing policies.

By making the tone more conversational, adding an explicit reason to click the link, referencing the breadth of topics, and adding examples, we made the intro more engaging. We increased the likelihood someone will explore further (which is what we want).

Why More Great Copy Isn’t Out There
Lack of a detailed, well thought-out creative brief. I’ve discussed creative briefs before; they provide copywriters with all the information they need, and sometimes much more. When I’m the copywriter, I like to immerse myself in the subject. And when I’m working with copywriters, I like to give them enough information so they can do the same. That’s what a good creative brief does. It lays the groundwork for the copywriter to start in the right direction.

Lack of time
Things happen so fast in the online world. You can’t fault clients for wanting copy in hours or overnight. The best copy takes time. Great copy is part art, part science. You don’t start writing by writing; you start by reading, brainstorming, researching, and getting into your topic area. Even once there’s a first draft, it can often be improved by sleeping on it and returning to it the next morning. This isn’t just my experience; many great copywriters I’ve worked with say the same.

Speaking of which, the best copywriters are booked in advance. They aren’t sitting around waiting for work. I used to book copywriters months in advance when I was a product manager. Sometimes, I didn’t know exactly what they’d be working on, but I knew I or someone else in my organization would have a project for them. You don’t necessarily have to book that far ahead, but good writers will hesitate to agree to do a rush project on short notice. They want to do their best work, and lack of time is an obstacle. Often, they’ll just decline. After all, they probably already have plenty of projects lined up.

Lack of focus on what’s in it for the reader. Readers want to know what’s in it for them. It doesn’t matter whether you want them to buy, try, or just click — if you can’t spell out in a compelling way what’s in it for them, they probably won’t do it.

Copy can make or break e-mail marketing. Don’t settle for so-so copy. Put in extra effort and make it great.

By Jeanne Jennings

How do I increase web site sales figures? The CEO roared at the web developer. The web developer looked at his boss a little confused and mumbled something about it not being his core competence with him being a programmer and all. So next the CEO went to his marketing department and bellowed.

How do I increase our web site sales conversion rates? A few mouths opened as if to speak but nothing came out until finally exasperated the CEO tearing at his hair in frustration turned to a guy painting the wall and said, Can you answer this question? How do I increase my web site sales figures?

The painter smiled knowingly, winked and dipped his brush into his paint tin, before evenly applying more paint to the wall in calm considered strokes. Then without looking away from his work he continued, When you asked me to paint this wall, you knew why you wanted it painted. Yes, I told you what it was going to cost you and I told you why it was going to cost you what it’s costing you. But you knew what the problem was, you knew you had a crack appearing in the paint. What I would do is calm down, take a few deep breaths and ask yourself the same questions. First you need to know exactly what it is that isn’t working, find the cracks in your wall.

The CEO laughed, slapped his head and went back to his office to consider this gem of wisdom. This article explains what the CEO should�ve done before asking impossible questions of his staff and what I’ve learned from our own failures and successes.

You Need To Know, Not Guess.
It’s easy to bawl at people when things don’t work out and you don�t sell what you expected to sell through your web site. It’s easy to blame the programmer who talks about missing include files and something called .pee h pee or .asp not working properly, as if a venomous snake could help you.

What will help is finding out what the problem is so you can learn how to put it right. When it comes to web site sales, we’ve learned that it could be any number of a great many things that you�re doing wrong. So first you need to diagnose the problem.

1) Get Web Analytics
Start measuring the website traffic. This is the only sure-fire way you can learn about how people do or don’t do what you want them to do. Now people keep telling me that web analytics is a science all to itself. I find it easy now because I know what to look for given a particular problem. I used to get things wrong all the time, but practice makes perfect. Getting things wrong is a pain in the rear, especially if it costs money, but I put it down to research and development. Simply put if you make a mistake put it back to the way it was before the mistake. Now I just watch out for trends which I think are good and trends which I think are bad.

For instance, one trend I look for are pages where people enter your site and leave those pages without doing anything. This is called a bounce rate. If you have lots of bounces you have a problem. Once for example, I released an article which was re-printed in a very popular newsletter. I got about 6000 free visitors from a very on target newsletter, so with our good monthly conversion rate you would expect I would get lots of subscriptions to my site.

Wrong! My analytics program told me that I was getting a 90% bounce rate, which in all honesty infuriated me. So I went to the article in question and compared it to another article which had a low bounce rate of about 38%. The one with the better bounce rate had four related links within the article content (often referred to as embedded links). Had I simply put embedded links in the other article I might have reduced bounce by 50% or more which would then transpose to 3000 more people getting deeper into my site.

Had 3000 more people got deeper into my site (and further into the persuasive process), I know that more of them would have subscribed than before. It’s just a statistical fact that when people read more than one page they subscribe with greater frequency. I checked, only 9% of my visitors subscribed immediately last month from arriving at our site, the other 91% took more than 2 pages before giving me their email address. In fact since we added embedded links to all our pages we have reduced overall bounce considerably and subscriptions have improved as a whole.

The same thing happens with sales. Reduce bounce to your landing pages by comparing the ones that sell well to the ones that don’t. It’s a method that’s more scientific than guessing and it will improve sales if you gradually improve bounce rates site wide. If you don’t have any good bounce rates on sales pages, test something, which brings me nicely onto the next way to know what the problems are.

2) Test things
You can’t test anything until you have got web analytics. So if you haven’t already done so, do not pass go, do not collect $200 just go and get a good web analytics system. There are plenty to choose from. IRIS Metrics, HitBox, WebTrends are three we�d recommend but there are now plenty of others on the market that allow you to follow what people are doing on your site.

Once you have a system then you can learn to test. For instance if you haven’t got any sales pages that are selling then you have an easy time of it. Any improvement is good. So take the worst page (the one with the highest bounce rate) and change maybe the headline to imply a unique customer benefit. Measure this. If bounce improves keep it. If it gets worse change it again until it gets better.

Some variables you might want to test:

• Headlines. (We improved bounce by 36% on one page with a better headline).
• Scan Proofing (Bold benefits so that the reader gets the point without having to read  33% improvement in bounce).
• Bullet point benefits versus long copy. On one site last year we actually improved sales from nearly zero conversion to 2.4% sales conversion on a landing page by changing long copy to bulleted psychological benefits.
• Testimonials and other social evidence. Add these to pages where you can, we increased conversion of one lead generation system to 1.5% overall from nothing simply by adding client testimonials to a page with the registration form on it.
• Calls to action. It sounds stupid but if you don’t have a way to capture the sale or the lead then really please don’t expect to be inundated with phone calls. It doesn’t work like that. Put calls to action in different places and test which method works best.
• Graphics. Test how to use them. All communication should lead to change and graphics are no exception, use them to persuade, inform, brand or intrude. Don’t use them for the sake of using them.

3) Target your market
If you�re going to optimize for search engines make sure you get the target market right by selecting the right keywords to optimize for. Basically you want the highest levels of traffic you can attain which also converts highly. PPC traffic, or other traffic you have to pay for should be negatively targeted with factors like price and location for big ticket items. You don’t want to pay thousands for people only mildly interested, you want to pay hundreds for the few who have their wallets open.

Think about the market you have, what makes them tick? What is it about the product that they want? What about the extras and bonus benefits you can offer? Are you telling them everything? Remember above all else that different people have different wants and needs. One of our customers sells amongst other things nebulizers (an asthmatic product). A young mother with children might be closed to the sale by being told the fact that the nebulizer fits in her purse so it’s convenient for her, whereas a guy whose old nebulizer just broke might need a new one shipped pretty quickly so shipping time is more important to him. What you have to do is tell your audience all of these needs are catered for so that you have optimum chance of a sale. Tell your audience the whole story.

The good thing about search marketing is that it’s all possible to measure, so you can see where exactly people have arrived from. It makes it easy for you to concentrate your best time and effort on what works and forget about what doesn�t and it�s a cheaper form of marketing than say sticking an ad in the news paper.

Summary
Had the CEO looked through his web analytics package (or paid someone else to do it) he might have found that his bounce rates were very high on his product pages. He might have seen that the traffic directed to his offers were largely from the wrong kind of target audience. He might have realized that his content and copy was poorly organized and that his information architecture needed improvement. He might have figured out that by changing the size of a graphic on a page he could better influence the outcome of a call to action.

Improving web site sales happens with lots of testing, time and patience, but eventually it comes. It’s about learning how to sell to your online target audience by testing and optimizing pages through observation. Once you have learned the basics of doing this it becomes easy to continue your testing so that you continuously improve. Forever and ever!

By Steve Jackson