Anne Holland – Importance of Testing on your site
StomperNet is hosting several “preview” webinars to showcase the speakers coming to the Live9 event, March 25-29, in Atlanta. The preview calls, as well as the event itself, are NOT a sales pitch for the event or the speaker. Well ok, technically they are; hopefully you will be intrigued enough by what the person provides to attend the event. Regardless, the information is valuable. If you couldn’t make the call here are my notes.
Anne’s message is all about testing to see what works. You know what they say in elections – you never know how people are going to vote. So don’t try to guess with your business dollars either.
Anne Holland, founder of marketingsherpa.com, was the featured speaker last night. MarketingSherpa is a research firm specializing in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing (and what does not).They test and they track and they test and they track and then you can buy their reports on what works and what didn’t.
Anne founded MarketingSherpa and built it into one of the premier research institutions on the planet. I bought a few of their reports and was a member of the site for a while. At the time it was a bit over my head and I guess I see why now. Anne told us that her background was in corporate America, so when she started MarketingSherpa, she provided services to corporate America. ( and my business wasn’t “corporate America”.) After she “retired”, she’s been doing a number of really interesting projects and has become a StomperNet faculty member.
She has two sites (services ?) now: whichtestwon.com and subscriptionsiteinsider.com.
whichtestwon.com was what she talked about last night.
In her experience, most sites are designed by:
- owner’s gut feel of what will sell,
- using a pre-formatted template,
- copying what a competitor is doing,
- following “best practices”.
But they are NOT TESTING. They don’t know for sure what their market will respond to.
Can you guess which test won?
- Which Test Won?
Look at this test on their site: whichtestwon.com. (at the time of this writing, the test was for imvu.com.) This is a membership site for a company that sells to the virtual reality market. See if you can guess whether page A or page B won the test. BTW, the “winner” of the test was the design that brought in the most money. That was the yardstick: which design resulted in the most sales.
Did you go look? Page B won. This is a membership site. Notice the difference in the membership login in page A and page B. Apparently prospects weren’t yet ready to see the login page and the member login was suppressing opt-ins. As they were using multi-variant testing, they were able to determine that made the difference rather than the difference in the hero shot picture. Are you using space on your page for member login? Could this be suppressing opt-ins?
Which of your pages should you test first?
Which page on your site should you put your resources into testing? One that is already your highest converting page or one that doesn’t do so well. Most would try to bring their underperformers up to speed. Anne says to ask yourself on which page would a 10% increase in sales bring in more actual dollars? Optimize the page that is already doing well first.
This is a mistake sales managers often make in the “off-line” world. Managers will spend time trying to bring the under-performers up to speed when they would generate more overall sales by increasing the sales of their top performers.
Testimonials and Customer Reviews
We know that reviews help boost sales but many owners of e-commerce sites are reluctant to put reviews up in case they get a bad one. Anne says research shows most customers leave positive reviews. It’s much safer to ask for reviews than people thought it was. What happens is that if you get a negative review you get 3 positive reviews from folks saying “hey I don’t know what that guy is talking about”. People who write reviews tend to be evangelical about the product. She mentioned one e-commerce site that includes a postcard inside their packages to solicit online reviews. They also give a 10% off coupon inthe package as a “thank you” for leaving a review.
Your Sales Funnel
Her next topic was your sales funnel. For most sites you have your entry or landing page, your shopping cart or lead conversion form and then your thank you page.
The receipt / thank you page is the first thing you should be optimizing. The people MOST likely to buy are those who have just bought from you. How about saying on the thank you page “here are 2 more things you might be interested in”. It sounded like Anne was not a big fan of the cross sell. Why confuse or slow down your customer right before they buy? After they have entered their credit card information, THEN present an upsell.
On your shopping cart do you have a telephone number? Restate your guarantee on the shopping cart. If your shopping cart doesn’t let you make modifications, but does let you upload a logo, can you create a specialized logo with the guarantee and/or phone number on it?
Video
Anne talked briefly about why video sells. How popular it is now. I flinch every time I hear this as video turns me off. I can read much faster than you can talk and I leave a page if I don’t see the answer written down. But apparently I am in the minority.
I’ve been watching Andy Jenkins new video training (it’s a freebie) and learning quite a bit. I know I need to get on board with the video.
How about having a product of the week that you showcase in a video. Hold it up, talk about it. You don’t even have to be in the video if you don’t want to. Tell why is it popular… On the page have a picture of the product with the video under it and text as well for those like me who don’t have the patience for the video.
Brad Fallon told us about a test he ran that tested whether the words “add to cart” or “buy now” converted better. At first “add to cart” ran away with it but then “buy now” did. They eventually figured out that “buy now” won during the week and “add to cart” won on the weekends. Maybe during the week when people were at work they preferred to BUY NOW but on the weekends when they were more relaxed they were happy to keep adding to cart.
TEST people you have to TEST.
PS if you want to know more about StomperNet Live9 you can find out more here: www.stompernetlive.com
So what did you think? Is this information useful? Did you agree with it? Let me know!
OUCH! Are you doing this?
