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Monday, April 7, 2008 -----===(*)===----- Hi, folks... Yet again, no Ramblings this time. Straight into the breach. "Interesting Results" ============ A lot of you picked up a copy of "The 10% Conversion Rate." More of you, obviously, did not. It would be very unusual to see a majority of any group this size buy any single product. There are some very interesting things to note about the people who didn't order it yet. Specifically, how they went about NOT ordering. .... First, I should mention... the sales letter is converting at above 10%, which isn't surprising. What might be surprising is that it's doing so despite the fact that I pulled two very important parts of the process from the letter. I'll get into what they are in a later issue. I'll tell you why I did it right now. An effective sales process consists of steps. Very few of those steps are necessary, in the sense that sales stop completely without them. Most are additive. Each one, when properly implemented, increases sales. If one of those is missing, you'll still sell. You'll just sell less. That's important to understand, if for no other reason than to know that you don't have to revamp your entire sales system all at once to begin to see improvements. A lot of people are hesitant to start making changes to their business out of concern that they won't have the time to do them all. Good news: You don't have to do them all. One little thing at a time can add to your sales. And that just fuels the desire to add further changes and test more things. Nothing breeds like success. .... One of the reasons so many people don't work on improving their sales process is that they don't understand how to do it. That's what I'm going to cover today, by way of an example you're directly involved in. The process you've been looking at for the past few emails. You're going to have the benefit of seeing it through my eyes and your own. Nothing beats that for learning at the gut level. .... Onward. The first thing you need to do is measure the results of each step (which is easily done with common tracking systems) and look at what you can do to improve the numbers. For instance, (rounding very slightly, for ease of example):
The first stat seems fine, until you look at the next one. What happened here is that a lot of people hit the letter and scrolled immediately to the order page link to find out the price. Some of those people went back and read the letter once they knew it wasn't out of their price range. Others saw the budget-busting sticker price of $27 and bailed. Okay. I'm half kidding on that last one. But only half. .... Based on the number who returned to read the description, and the number who left the site, it seems to be about an even split. That means that 30% of the people who hit the sales page didn't think the potential for significant improvements in their conversion rates was worth $27. Or they didn't think anything this inexpensive could deliver. Or they didn't have $27 to spend. Or maybe they just hate PayPal. The last two are easily ignored. They're going to be a tiny minority of the people in this market, and there's not much you can do if they just don't have the money. The first one is ridiculous. No-one really believes that it's not worth $27 to improve their conversion rates the way this book suggests is possible. Which means it's more likely that they don't believe a product at this price can deliver. Or perhaps they didn't quite grasp that getting such increases are what the book explains. Ah. THAT is believable. That can be helped by testing different headlines, to ensure that the maximum number of people get a clear understanding of the basic proposition of the offer before they scroll to find the price. The "deliver at this price" question can be settled by testing an increase in the price. (That will probably happen after this series is over anyway. Subscriber discounts are never permanent.) Testing. Always testing. Or should I say counting? .... Know your numbers. The numbers tell you what the real people reading your copy are doing. And that gives you hints at what they're thinking, which tells you where to make adjustments. This stuff is way easier than you'd think, listening to the testing gurus rattle on about sample size and confidence intervals. Those things are important, but not important enough to let it scare you off testing altogether. Here's testing in a nutshell:
Easy, yes? .... For the 40% of people who clicked the payment link and didn't complete the order, there are two main possibilities: They didn't have a PayPal account and thought they couldn't pay without it, or.... They just weren't sure they were doing the right thing. Maybe they weren't comfortable with the security, or they weren't convinced it was worth the money. A fair chunk of those people will have been among the ones who scrolled immediately to find the price and almost ordered. The changes suggested earlier will help with their concerns. Some of it will be because they skimmed, rather than reading the letter thoroughly. The fix for that is more engaging copy. (That's a huge topic for another time.) For some, it will be specific concerns or questions that weren't addressed properly. (That's covered pretty thoroughly in the book.) For some, it might be your personal credibility. Unless you're the author of the product, you handle that mostly through accessibility - easy contact information - and a strong guarantee. You test one thing at a time, and keep at it until you get a mix that produces better results. Again, nothing complicated or difficult here. One step at a time. .... For the folks who might not be aware that they can order without having a PayPal account, your job is really easy. You put a link near the order button, along with some text that says something like: Secure Payments handled through PayPal. [Don't have a PayPal account? Click here.] If they click on the "Don't have a PayPal account?" link, they go to a page that explains that they can order using a credit card, just like everywhere else, by looking for the following text, and clicking on the word "Continue": Don't have a PayPal account? Use your credit card or bank account (where available). Continue I'll be adding that after this series is done. (Until then, you folks are the only ones seeing that letter, and you already know about it now, right? ;) Don't neglect little things like that. In one campaign that I ran, adding a page like I just described tripled my conversion rate. It has never reduced it. Obviously I can't guarantee what will happen with your tests, but the potential in it is certainly worth the tiny effort, yah? .... There are other parts of the process that can be measured. How many of the emails I sent got delivered? What percentage of those people clicked through to the page? How many successfully downloaded the product? If there had been a back end offer, how many looked at it? How many ordered? Etc. A one anda two anda tree... .... One thing that a lot of people assume will hurt your conversion rate is that extra page between the sales letter and the payment step. We're constantly being told that things have to be as simple as possible, with as few steps as possible. Listening to that advice could be a very expensive mistake. In this market, it's VERY common for people to skip immediately to the price. Having the price on the order page, along with a summary of the offer, very likely resulted in some folks ordering who wouldn't have bothered reading the whole letter. You have to test this stuff, folks. For those of you new to the idea, testing just means, "Try it and see if it works." .... In the next issue, I'm going to get into something that will probably irritate some of the old guard copywriters and salespeople. Until they finish reading it, anyway. Basically, the traditional AIDA formula is obsolete. Depend on it too much and you're going to be throwing money away. A lot of it. I'll explain the new formula. (The pros already know it, intuitively, but don't seem to have put a name to it.) I call it A.D.D. It's exactly what you think. And a whole lot more. In the issue after that, we'll get into the specific systems that form the framework for your process. I'm not going to kid you. You can use all of this without buying "The 10% Conversion Rate." Do it right, and it could help your sales significantly. Put it together with the stuff Paul Hancox covers in the book, and you're likely to see much bigger improvements. Yes, "could" and "likely." You know the drill. I can't guarantee you specific results. No-one can. I can guarantee you that if you get the book, use the ideas, and don't see results, it won't cost you anything but the time to test them out. Get the details here: http://www.talkbiz.com/10percent/ Or, just head over here and get the book: http://www.talkbiz.com/10percent/order.html And don't miss the next issue. Seriously. See you then - same Bat-time, same Bat-channel! Paul Basically, Ben Prater poked me about how much easier it would be for people to read the newsletter on the web, and to tell their friends about it. So, instead of assuming anything, I'm testing it. Gotta test, right? This issue is, except for the HTML, exactly as I sent it to my subscribers. It's part of a series on selling more stuff. If you don't get the newsletter already, and would like to, you can use the form below. Once the series is done, everyone who's subscribed at that time will get the complete set of articles, in PDF format. I think you'll find them interesting. Maybe even profitable.
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