By Jimmy Ellis
Director of Optimization Research,
Marketing Experiments
- Build a new headline for a high traffic landing page.
- Build a new ad in a high volume PPC campaign ad group.
- Take one larger keyword group in a PPC campaign and split it into multiple, more specific ad groups
- Sign up for Google Analytics (it’s free). If you already have it, take a look at your top exit points and figure out why customers are leaving on those pages. (http://analytics.google.com)
- Add a new testimonial to a high volume landing page. If you don’t have any, send a personal email to some of your repeat customers and ask them about their purchasing experience or about the product/service they purchased.
- Build a new button for your site (a call to action such as “buy now,” “buy,” “add to cart,” ). In many of our tests, “add to cart” out- performs “buy now” and similar buttons.
- Add an incentive to subscribe to your email list (discount, special report, gift, etc). If you already have one, test a new incentive to try and improve your results.
- Run a website speed test on your site (maybe your home page). You can do it free right here: (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/). Take a look at the results and try to reduce the size of your site by cleaning up your html, your css, or optimizing your images for optimal load times.
- Drop or increase your prices. If you have never price tested, then you have never maximized the revenue of your current sales. Pick a high volume product or service, mark it up or down 10%, and watch those numbers. We prefer a/b split tests but if you don’t have a way to do it, a sequential test will usually give you enough information to tell if it’s having an impact on your revenue.
- Place an order on your own site. When is the last time you did that? I can almost guarantee you won’t love it. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, “How could that have been easier?“ Then have your designer test changes based on your input.
Thanx for your great tips. Your tips are going to help every new internet marketer.
Hey Jimmy,
I love that you remind ecommerce owners to just use their own site. I’ve seen that bring about more improvements than anything else I could imagine. Good suggestions.
btw- this article got linked to in sproutwire (thats a good thing.) you are invited to come check out the private beta, just click the url on my name.
Great job. Really these tips are very beneficiary for the internet marketer and i also refer your great tips to my friends.
Good Luck
Some good tips there…I was particularly interested in how “Add to cart” buttons perform well. Do you think this is because “Add to cart” may be semantically linked to commercial Ecommerce applications rather than Paypal? I know this post is old, but I think it’s worthy of retweeting, so I’ll do that now.
In many respects “the most popular” terms for calls to action work best because it’s what people are familiar with. Your comment about being semantically linked definitely has an impact on what customers usually see. In terms of our research, we believe the majority of the response is because the button creates less “anxiety” with the customer. It is not asking you to make a commitment like “buy” or “buy now” which makes you feel like you have to make your final decision on that page, where “add to cart” is you just selecting that product for now and you can choose to buy it or not later. The effect this has in many instances is that you have a significantly higher click thru on product pages which gets customers deeper in the process and more of them will actually finish. The lesson here is not really “add to cart” is any better than any other button, it’s what is the best button or call to action we can use to reduce anxiety and emphasize value for the specific products and services you are selling. Those usually work the best 🙂