Test everything. We’ve all heard it. No one does it.
Why?
Because it’s a lazy way to run your business, that’s why. If you’re wondering how I could possibly describe all of that work (make no mistake, testing is work) as lazy, here’s the reason:
Making a point to test “everything” is basically an abdication of one of your greatest responsibilities as a business owner:
That responsibility is to be a good steward of your business assets (two of those are your time and focus). That means that you invest those assets in places that can provide the greatest return.
Testing “everything” is not one of those places.
Testing some things can lead to huge increases in results. Testing “everything” is a waste of time. That’s because “everything” doesn’t matter. Only certain things matter. The right things matter.
Testing the right things can move you forward. Testing the wrong things will have you running in circles. You’ll make all your decisions based on numbers, but those numbers will be largely irrelevant to helping you reach success.
So what do you test?
To get the answer, look at it from the perspective of your visitor. We’ll walk through the major decisions he has to make as he visits your page.
Keep in mind that the goal is to create a system for testing that’s practical and easy. If it’s not easy you’re not going to do it.
So let’s focus in on just a few of the things that have a big impact on your sales:
Decision #1
The first decision your visitor has to make when he shows up at your site is whether or not to stay there.
If we’re talking about a typical sales page, your headline plays a huge role in this decision. I’m not talking about the color of your headline. I think testing like that is ridiculous unless you’re already generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. I’m sure there are exceptions but do you really want to take your chances on being the exception?
The important part is what your headline communicates and how it does that—the appeal. If your appeal is on target, he’ll start to read. If not, bye, bye.
Experts say that 80% of the success of your ad depends on the headline. I have no idea if that’s true and no one else does either. The bottom line is that a bad headline can send your visitor running, so it’s pretty much common sense that you’ll want to be testing that on a regular basis.
If you don’t have a headline, then what you’re testing is the appeal of the page. What is your big idea? What is the positioning you’ve created for your product/service?
Decision #2
So your visitor has read your headline and decided to stick around. The next question that’s going through his head is something like, “Should I spend even more time on this page or should I go back to Facebook®?”
That’s really what this next part comes down to. Is your visitor attracted enough to your presentation to even stick around long enough to get the details?
Remember the last time you went to a web page that was selling something and, for some reason, you just didn’t feel it was worth digging enough to even figure out exactly what the offer was?
Maybe the sales video put you to sleep…
Maybe the copy was so cheesy that it gave you a bad taste in your mouth…
Maybe the promises that were being made were simply too over the top to be believable…
Maybe you simply didn’t trust something about the company…
The device that keeps the visitor on the page after those first initial seconds really varies with each specific situation.
If you have a long form sales letter, it’s probably your lead–the first few paragraphs or so where your reader either says, “This sounds good,” or “Not for me…”
If you’re selling with video, then it’s the first part of the video where he’s either thinking, “Tell me more…” or “Snooze…”
If you’re using short copy, it’s probably your bullets.
Ask yourself, after the headline, what part of my page has the power to draw people in or repel them?
That’s what you’re testing.
Rotate in a new video…
Write a new lead…
Charge up your bullets…
This might not seem like a very important part of the process. It’s a little bit fuzzy and difficult to talk about in general terms. But there’s nothing worse for your business than having spent good money attracting a qualified prospect only to lose him because he got bored.
So figure out where this “Decision #2” happens on your page and start testing alternative ways to keep your prospect glued to the presentation.
Decision #3
Should I buy this? That’s what every visitor is asking at some level.
In addition to all the ninja marketing tricks we know about how to get your visitor to say, “Yes,” a large part of that decision really comes down to one thing:
Is your offer awesome?
Not enough focus is put on the OFFER. That’s really the most important part of the whole puzzle here.
Marketing experts talk so much about getting great copy when it’s a whole lot easier to just focus on creating an offer that blows your customer away. You offer so much value they can’t resist.
Test your offer. That means adding/removing stuff, changing the price, payment terms, etc. Be creative and keep rotating in the changes.
How to Do It
The easiest split testing software out there right now is Visual Site Optimizer(aff). You can setup a simple A/B split test in just a few minutes.
Testing your offer gets a bit more complicated… but not really.
Once you get your winning headline, setup a new A/B split test between your two pages with different offers. Done.
I’m sure there are fancy ways you can do this all at once, but I don’t really care. The point is to make this simple, because it is simple.
If you got to this point in the article, you might think all this sounds like common sense. That’s because it is. Well, it makes perfect sense, but it’s far from common.
If you are one of the few who actually test on a regular basis, to you I say “congrats.” But there’s no prize because this journey has no end. Just know you’re better off than the guy who isn’t testing.
If you aren’t testing at all yet, then get started. Just don’t test everything. That’s a recipe for failure and burnout.
Testing has a place in your sales system, but you have to keep it in perspective. So the next time somebody tells you to, “Test everything…” Just give a polite smile and go on your way. Because you know better.
Photo Credit: Seattle Municipal Archives
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{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Good advice Lester. I’ve never officially tested anything other than different AdWord text ad versions.
“Testing the right things can move your ‘TESTING GRAMMAR’ forward.”
Very simple comment: Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m sick and tired of hearing every guru (and wanna-be guru) talk about testing. Maybe for those that enjoy that sort of thing… go for it. Some of us are here to help customers and to make money. Yes, if I’m making some monstrous mistake, I’m happy to fix it… but test everything? Puh-leeze….
I test a lot of things… but that’s what I do. I like to share my results, so other people know what to test, and why they should test it.
Lest,
A good article, thank you.
I think you are onto something really important that I have not given enough thought.
I will be spending the weekend doing just this.
Henk
Thanks guys… the name is Jason Leister
Finally, someone talks sense about testing… so glad to know I’m not the only one who believes testing everything is a bunch of hooey.
Thanks
thanks jason…love your stuff, always right on track, i agree, don’t over complicate things, just test what you need to.
Thanks for the great advice. first work on two-three things and if they work out then expand the new things (only personal opinion)
Disagree to a large extent.
What if you don’t test copy, headlines, calls to action?
Yes, testing every infinitesimal thing is silly (80/20 rule) but on sales pages and funnel pages I’d be testing stuff until your conversion increases start dropping off, that’s when you know you’ve done enough work.
How else will you know if you’re bleeding customers? (This is a rhetorical question).
My business is at the point where I need to start multivariate test copy and headlines to get better conversions and stop funnel abandonment.
By all means, at the start, spend time on product creation etc, but at some point you’ll need to address leakage.
Tim,
Thanks for your comment! I really appreciate everyone who speaks up.
But I don’t really get what you disagree with.
Testing? Not testing? Not testing enough?
At any rate, I think three things are important:
1. Test something on a consistent basis. But make sure you test things that you feel have the potential to create a big shift in results. Headlines, offers, etc.
Dan Kennedy says little hinges swing big doors, but have you ever seen what big hinges are capable of? I’m saying focus on big hinges because there are only so many hours in the day.
2. Don’t invest an inordinate amount of time chasing small improvements. You have better things to do as a business owner.
3. Keep your eye on your business as a whole instead of allowing any one part to become too important (like testing). At the end of the day, profit matters. The system for creating that profit matters. So is multivariate testing going to create a substantial increase in profits for you?
Maybe you simply need higher quality traffic? Or maybe you need to add more value to your offer?
You’ll have a gut feeling about the right direction for you since it’s your business.
Good luck.
Fantastic.
Great reminders . . .
and i didn’t have to click through to a website to then
sit through a video to then register for something to then receive the info.
I read very few emails – i delete 99% of them -
but i will try to remember to read the next diythemes
letter
Thanks Jason for nudging me on to the next step. I’m new to this so just testing my headline impact on bounce rate. Been on the project for many months and its bearing fruit. Installing Thesis was a good move. Wish me luck! Richard
I agree Thesis is a great move
Good luck!
Thanks Lester. Enjoyed reading this – made a lot of sense. Seems a lot of advice these days about the “OFFER”.
David,
Thank you for the comment. Yes, in my experience, having the right offer (which includes a product someone actually wants
makes EVERYTHING so much easier.
You begin your article by saying not to test everything, and the rest of the article you talk about how to test everything!!!???
Wyndham,
Testing the headline content, copy lead and offer hardly constitutes everything. But thank you for your comment.
I think this is amazingly bad advice, Jason.
First, the only way to know what matters is to test – you can assume you know what your visitors want, but the only way to know you’re *meeting* that criterion is to test everything, whether “common sense”, your “intuition” or the Tooth Fairy tell you otherwise or not.
Let me share with you some off-the-top-of-my-head results of tests, both online and offline, that have nothing to do with headlines, the offer or the copy:
1. A direct mailing in which white envelopes outpulled green envelopes by 100%.
2. A similar mailing where a live stamp as opposed to a frank increased response by 60%.
3. An email blast where simple html outpulled plain text by 35%.
4. An email blast where having [sender's name] in the subject line outpulled the same subject line without the name by 35%, again (the email contents was identical). On a different list the results were reversed (almost to the decimal point).
5. An online sales page where the ONLY difference was in how we emphasised certain phrases: underline or bold. Underline outpulled bold by 2:1.
6. An offline ad in a national newspaper where a dashed line around the offer coupon and a larger headline outpulled the original by 30%+.
7. An offline ad where one was in sans-serif and the other in serif… and the serif one outpulled the sans-serif by 100%.
8. The long-copy squeeze page that broke all the “rules” and outpulled a traditional short-copy one with the form above the fold by 12.5%.
I could go on and on like this, but the message is clear: you don’t KNOW what’s going to be important and have the big effect until you actually test, test, and then test some more.
And as for suggesting it’s a “waste of time” is ludicrous. How long does it take to test, say, two different fonts on a web page using Google’s Website Optimizer?
Maybe 10 minutes to set it up?
And then it runs itself.
Sorry, Jason, but your advice is bad and readers would do well to ignore it.
Warmly,
Jon
Hey Jon,
Thanks for your comments. It’s clear you’re passionate about testing.
Many people aren’t. Which is why they don’t do it. My goal isn’t to suggest how to be perfect, it’s to move people one step forward.
Of course setting up tests in GWO is easy peasy, so that clearly isn’t the obstacle holding people back.
Something else is.
Not sure if all the results you cite are yours or not. If they are, that’s great. Testing clearly made a difference for you.
Although citing percentage improvements doesn’t really tell me anything, since a 100% improvement could mean $400 of additional revenue just as easily as it could mean an additional $4 million of revenue.
At the end of the day, do what works for your business. But for the vast majority of people selling online, the idea of “testing everything” is simply overwhelming.
I’m not talking to copywriters here. I’m talking to business owners. They have a lot more on their plate than simply testing stuff all day.
At any rate, I value your comments!
I’m not passionate about testing per se. I’m passionate about accurate thinking, and making my clients money.
With one exception the list I gave, #7, those results were either from work I did with my own list, or work I did with clients. The numbers we’re talking about are statistically significant. I would hardly be so disingenuous as to post the results of a 100-piece mailing, Jason.
In the case of emails, the list was about 5,000 strong; in the direct mail examples we’re looking at anything from tens of thousands to over a million posted pieces, and ROI measured in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
So they’re not inconsequential numbers.
I’m a business owner, too. So are all my clients. And my point remains: you don’t know what’s important until you test it. And that means testing as many things as you can.
As an aside: one great thing to test is (practically) getting rid of the sales letter entirely. Nurture your list properly with regular and informative emails and a 360 word sales letter which is nothing more than a call to action can convert at 16.6% (and yes, to statistically significant numbers).
Warmly,
Jon
Great article Jason.
I’m currently testing three variants with a fancy front end, portfolio, and portfolio with copy. Surprisingly the fancy front end is in last place even though it has all the information of the portfolio and copy – not at all what I expected.
My next step is to test variants of the copy, which this article addresses perfectly.
However I have a question. If I have many sales pages selling similar products – do I need to test each one or is it fair to assume they’d get similar results using the same sales copy formula?
You need to test each one, Pat.
You NEVER know what matters until you do. A good example is video and audio which “everyone knows” works better than plain copy.
Except when it doesn’t.
On MY website, it does; on my wife’s blog when we tested audio and video response bombed.
I repeat: you have to test, and you won’t know what’s important until you’ve tested as many things as you can.
Warmly,
Jon
Pat,
You come to your own conclusions about what works by doing your own work.
Don’t cut corners by assuming anything. Always go the extra mile to verify or disprove the “hunches” you have.
You owe it to yourself to do that.
Very helpful advice. I will be back for more to check out your comments.