by Neil Stafford
Posted on November 18, 2009
There's one area that many entrepreneurs slip upon and that's about knowing how effective their ads are.
It's essential that you analyse your ads from front to back so you could answer that question immediately anyone asked it. You need to analyse your ads for each element in this list:
** What they say and how they say it
** The headline and sub head
** The pre head
** If your Unique Selling Point is really clearly presented
** What action you want the prospect, visitor or customer to take
So, you have done all that and that's great. But it is even more important that you move to the next stage and start to monitor two things: first how much the ads cost you to run, and second the exact conversion rate into hard cash in terms of sales.
It's all about control:
Thinking your ads are effective doesn't cut it. You need to have exact figures because that gives you a control you can work with. What do I mean by that? Well in this context, a control is your basic offer, headline, and copy that has brought you some sort of return.
Having that information means you can now start to cut your cost per sale by testing different variations of each element. Now that doesn't mean changing everything all at once, in fact it's vital you don't because then you are not going to know which particular item is working, or failing.
Best place to start? I always jump in and change just the headline. Just doing that and comparing it to the original headline gave us 16 times more results on one of our landing pages than the original headline did.
How often do you change your headlines? Check what you are currently using and then run a test with a new one, I will bet you can come up with an even better headline when you sit down and think about it.
That headline is the first thing a visitor sees so it has to have impact because it's what you are going to be judged by. It doesn't matter how experienced you are at marketing, it is easy to underestimate the poewr of having a hard hitting, attention grabbing headline.
You have got around 6 seconds to interest any visitor to your website before they decide to stay - or go. That's why a killer headline is essential, and I suggest you also experiment with a pre head and a sub head.
For examples of what I am talking about, visit a few sites and look at their sales page and shopping cart and you will generally see how a mixture of attention grabbing headlines, sub heads and pre heads.
In our own business we definitely want to draw attention to specifics in the copy, so we have added in other text elements like bullets, lists, bold and italic and recently we have incorporated video as well.
Don't stop there: Once you start using your control pages, there is so much you can test. Every single element of your sales page can be analysed, and your copy has six distinct area's that you can test:
- The Headline
- Your Story or Pitch
- The Proposition
- The Offer
- The Guarantee
- The Call To Action
As I have said before, for me the best place to start is with your headline. It's the simplest to do and can produce quick and substantial results. Having got that killer headline then you can begin writing alternative messages that you can include in the other five components of your sales copy.
So what do you have to do in order to get that 60 percent increase I talked about in the headline? Simple maths shows you that by repositioning each of the six components could each give you a 10% boost to your sales, and multiply that by the six elements and you could soon see a 60% increase in your success rate.
Actually, you could do even better than that because I have experienced increases of up to 16 times, not percentages but times improvement, by adjusting and monitoring all the copy elements in a sales page.
Once you compound all of the improvements that you have carried out to that page then you could very quickly see a very different profit picture on your business.
It's essential that you analyse your ads from front to back so you could answer that question immediately anyone asked it. You need to analyse your ads for each element in this list:
** What they say and how they say it
** The headline and sub head
** The pre head
** If your Unique Selling Point is really clearly presented
** What action you want the prospect, visitor or customer to take
So, you have done all that and that's great. But it is even more important that you move to the next stage and start to monitor two things: first how much the ads cost you to run, and second the exact conversion rate into hard cash in terms of sales.
It's all about control:
Thinking your ads are effective doesn't cut it. You need to have exact figures because that gives you a control you can work with. What do I mean by that? Well in this context, a control is your basic offer, headline, and copy that has brought you some sort of return.
Having that information means you can now start to cut your cost per sale by testing different variations of each element. Now that doesn't mean changing everything all at once, in fact it's vital you don't because then you are not going to know which particular item is working, or failing.
Best place to start? I always jump in and change just the headline. Just doing that and comparing it to the original headline gave us 16 times more results on one of our landing pages than the original headline did.
How often do you change your headlines? Check what you are currently using and then run a test with a new one, I will bet you can come up with an even better headline when you sit down and think about it.
That headline is the first thing a visitor sees so it has to have impact because it's what you are going to be judged by. It doesn't matter how experienced you are at marketing, it is easy to underestimate the poewr of having a hard hitting, attention grabbing headline.
You have got around 6 seconds to interest any visitor to your website before they decide to stay - or go. That's why a killer headline is essential, and I suggest you also experiment with a pre head and a sub head.
For examples of what I am talking about, visit a few sites and look at their sales page and shopping cart and you will generally see how a mixture of attention grabbing headlines, sub heads and pre heads.
In our own business we definitely want to draw attention to specifics in the copy, so we have added in other text elements like bullets, lists, bold and italic and recently we have incorporated video as well.
Don't stop there: Once you start using your control pages, there is so much you can test. Every single element of your sales page can be analysed, and your copy has six distinct area's that you can test:
- The Headline
- Your Story or Pitch
- The Proposition
- The Offer
- The Guarantee
- The Call To Action
As I have said before, for me the best place to start is with your headline. It's the simplest to do and can produce quick and substantial results. Having got that killer headline then you can begin writing alternative messages that you can include in the other five components of your sales copy.
So what do you have to do in order to get that 60 percent increase I talked about in the headline? Simple maths shows you that by repositioning each of the six components could each give you a 10% boost to your sales, and multiply that by the six elements and you could soon see a 60% increase in your success rate.
Actually, you could do even better than that because I have experienced increases of up to 16 times, not percentages but times improvement, by adjusting and monitoring all the copy elements in a sales page.
Once you compound all of the improvements that you have carried out to that page then you could very quickly see a very different profit picture on your business.
Neil Stafford is Editor and Publisher of the Internet Marketing Review the UK's longest running PRINTED Internet Marketing Newsletter. 'Test drive' the Newsletter for FREE - Visit this special web page for more information: http://www.InternetMarketingReview.com/sya
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Best4buys.com writes: Nice article
8:01:11 Sat Nov 21 2009 CST
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