i. Think like a marketer in everything business-related

ii. Measure everything –you need to know the metrics of your business

Today, I’m going into deeper discussion on the second point, measurements.

We are starting measure a lot more, and it is really powerful.

Every industry does this –it’s called benchmarking. We are now finally in a position to start doing that internally, and that is going to dramatically accelerate our success.

If I asked you right now, “What is your shopping cart abandonment rate,” would you be able to answer? In 30 seconds?

If not, that is really bad because this is how you make your money.

The beauty of benchmarking is this: when you have several different websites, on all of them people start out on step one of the buying process. But, you have to know how many people who get to the check out actually make it to the ‘Thank You’ page.

Why? Because it’s crazy not to! This is a very important statistic you need to know, so you want to know if your checkout is world class.

What is your shopping cart abandonment rate?

10%? 20%? Or 50%? Do 10% or 50% of people on that particular website complete the checkout? If you have 4 websites, can you tell in 30seconds which is doing better than the rest?

Even if you have that data available ‘somewhere’, that doesn’t really count because it must be easily accessible. If it takes 10minutes and is a painful, painstaking process, people won’t check on those figures.

Is it worth getting something that takes 3minutes down to 10seconds? YES.

Because if not, you never check the data because there is resistance. You won’t know for a long time if your checkout is broken on Internet Explorer 6.0, for example.

If you had this data at hand, you could check all the time and instantly see if there was a problem, if your sales suddenly dropped to 10% from an average of 50%. You could see that you have a problem on a particular website, and then you could go in and fix it. It’s easy to do. That is what I mean by world class benchmarking.

If you knew all this important information instantly, you could also add industry averages to your equations. Or maybe you would just know that the industry shopping cart abandonment rate is 50%, and you would then analyze and instantly know how your business is doing.

The fact is, any time that it’s hard to get data, you get lazy. But, if you don’t do this, your checkout can be broken for three months and you wouldn’t know it. Doing it manually is just not good enough.

If it’s not easy and effortless, people just don’t do it. And if people don’t do it, you don’t know if you’re world class.

Lesson consumption.

Without a little more effort, you can probably track this way better than you are doing right now. You want to be able to know if you are world class in email deliverability and/or in email copywriting.

• Look at the percentage of people you email.
• You want to be able to instantly see which website is doing well, and which isn’t.
• When you know those figures, that is cool. ‘Not cool’ is not having any idea at all.

On which of your sites is Lesson 1 working better, A or B?

And what does ‘good’ even mean in relation to all these?

When you have these answers, you can immediately improve your business. You want to be able to see all these facts and make the comparisons. Only such analytics can quickly tell you if your checkout really is working or if you need to improve your emails for any one of your websites.

Benchmarking is a very powerful tool to have at your fingertips, especially when you launch new businesses. When you can just go straight in and see these graphs, it can be crazy powerful stuff.

Another thing that could potentially be tested with foresight is your auto-responder. Perhaps you have always had the hypothesis that email deliverability is better on one provider than another –and maybe you’ve never checked it because of lack of proper data.

When you make all of your money via email, imagine if emails from A get read 25% more times than emails from B. Which would you want to use? By making the right choice after testing and measuring, your whole business would grow in revenue and profit overnight.

That is the power of collecting these numbers.

World-class benchmarking and world-class measuring will sky-rocket your innovation because when you have this data in front of you, the moment you compare and see a drastic difference you will take action.

Incremental improvement is the single fastest way to drive revenue.

Study the Toyota way.

How did they become a world-class car manufacturer? Toyota does this: continuous improvement.

With Kaizen and all the other systems they have put in place, this is what they do:

• They benchmark.
• They measure.
• They improve.
• They fix.

Now, online measurement is really hard –-a lot of the time, you don’t get Google analytics and your E-commerce figures to sync. The good thing is though, it doesn’t matter when you benchmark because the same floor applies to all of them.

This kind of benchmarking will help you to very rapidly move ahead.

Other core questions

How long does it take people to buy from your websites, after they have signed up? Is it one day? 3 days? 8, 21, 30? What are the figures by website?

You may not know the answer today but imagine knowing that people from Website A buy after 4 days, from Website B buy after 21 days, etc. Again, measuring shows you the power and effectiveness of which site is better at getting customers to buy.

Benchmarking like a world-class business will really take you to the next level and can be game changing for your business when you have to right data on which to take action. How are you measuring?

Here are some of the Ideas We’ll be breaking Testing and Sharing Results Of

Facebook Advertising

How effective are CTRs on Facebook? Do clicks convert to leads or sales? We’ll be testing this out on 3 different products. A dating product, a personal development product and on driving applicants to a job site.

Placed Ads After Signup

Can a web 2.0 site with a registration form increase its revenue by placing ads on the post signup page? Several ad companies are claiming this. We’ll be testing out this idea on a signup form with 100 new users a day. Here’s a screen shot of what the user would see after signing up. It’s a chance to opt-in to offers by Disney, Yahoo and other major advertisers that will be paying per lead.

Getting Traffic through Facebook Groups

Here’s the idea. You’re trying to get traffic to your site on baseball bats. You create a group call "Baseball Bat Recommendations". You invite tons of people to share their recommendations on this site. Of course, you add a bunch of your own recommendations and subtle links back to your site. You then find a way to make this group appear as a recommendation to thousands of Facebook users who add Baseball as their Interest in their profile. How much traffic can you get?

The 10 Day Autoresponder

Armand Morin talks about the power of the aggressive 10 day autoresponder and how it has a 15% sales rate. For every 100 people that sign up, 15 people buy something – not bad! Does it really work that well or do you end up alienating leads by sending them constant and aggressive promos? We’ll test out Armand’s ideas.

Co-Authorship Deals

You’re a newbie producing a new online program on speed reading. Nobody knows your name yet. Is there a sure-fire technique you can use to boost the appeal of your product by getting established speed reading experts to endorse your product? What can you give them in return? We’ll be testing a few new ideas for negotiating such joint venture deals.

Personalized Email Autoresponders

Bill Harris from Centerpointe uses a radical new way called Personalized Autoresponders to connect with his list, send out personalized emails and close sales. We’ll test this idea out. Can personalized emails really boost sales substantially enough to justify the cost in time and money needed to implement them?

"Why Didn’t You Buy" Emails

David D’Angelo of DoubleYourDating.com uses a brilliant technique where list subscribers who read his promo pieces online are tracked and get a polite email asking if they have any further questions 24 hrs after they view the product page and do not buy. A few days later, they get another email reminding them of the offer. How can you monitor this behavior on your list and will these emails boost sales? We’ll be sharing our ideas soon.

These are some of the upcoming tests.

Last year, Mike and I were only able to test a new concept or idea every 2 weeks or so. This year we’ve hired a bunch of talented "web scientist", built a testing methodology, developed a new ecommerce platform called Prodigy and as a result  we’re looking to test 2 new ideas PER WEEK.

We’re also going to share these results with you.

Why are we doing this? More in the next post.

Technorati Tags: facebook, internet marketing, leads, armand morin, tests

How do you establish credibility? Let your potential customers know that you already have a lot of satisfied customers! This is what we did in the ClickMuse test below. We simply changed the introductory sentence. Everything else was the same. See the highlighted text in the images below.

The result? A 45% improvement in our signup rate! The winning landing page

The losing landing page

The winner vs. the loser stats

Imagine if your signups increased by 45%, how much more money would you have made?

We achieved this result with almost no effort! We did not even change the main headlines. We just focused on optizing the first main sentence of our copy.

Would we have ever guessed that the outcome could be this dramatic? Of course not. That is why we love to do our A/B testing with ClickMuse because it makes it super fast and easy to rapidly test two versions of any page at the same time.

I cannot tell you how many times I have stared at my own websites and wondered whether I should go with version A or B or how many days I have spent trying to come up with the “perfect landing page.” Then I discovered a better, faster, simpler way. Instead of agonizing over what headline to choose or whether to go with version A or B of a page, why not just quickly split test them?

What is split testing?

Split testing is an extremely powerful online marketing method that allows you to test two versions of a web page at the same time. This is why it is also frequently called A/B testing. Whenever you are split testing a page, you have two versions:

Version A: is the control group. This is your existing web page

Version B: is the new test

Your goal in split testing is to always try to come up with a new test to beat your control group. As soon as you have created a new version to test, ClickMuse will start to serve the two versions of your page in real-time and show you which page is performing better according to your defined goals (such as sign-ups and sales).

The art of split testing

To dramatically boost the performance of your site with split testing, just keep two principles in mind.

1) Test everything

2) Never stop testing

When you are first getting started with split testing, there are a couple of obvious targets that you can immediately get started with. The obvious targets are site elements that are most likely going to have the biggest impact on your site’s conversion rate. We have highlighted the top 6 targets for split testing in the image below.

Top split testing elements:

1) The top header: The top header of a website is the first element that loads on the page and the first thing that your visitors will see. Our tests have shown that simply varying the color or information that is presented as part of the top header can have a huge change in the response rate.

2) Main title: As we already covered in the first lesson, the main headline is the single most important part of your site and you should always try to come up with a better headline than the one you are currently using.

3) Sub title: Often ignored is the subtitle. However, we have had tests weree varying the subtitle alone increased our sign-up rate by over 135%!

4) Body text: It is copy not images that sell, so testing different copy ideas is absolutely critical to maximize the potential of your website. Pay special attention to the text that shows up right after your headlines since this is the text that shows up above the fold. We have learned that often listing the main benefits as bullet points can lead to superior results instead of leading in with an opening paragraph.

5) The hero shot: Every site will have at least 1-2 images on your main landing page. Often, as in the example above, the hero shot is used to call attention to the most wanted response (such as the sign-up form). Hero shots can have a major impact on your site’s performance and are one site element definitely worth testing.

6) The sign-up form: If your most wanted response is to capture leads (i.e. email addresses) then you have to test different sign-up forms since that will have an immediate impact on your sign-up rate. Split testing different forms, colors, text, and positioning of your form will lead to significant improvements over time.

There are two ways to run split tests:

1) Split testing one element at a time: The easiest way to split test is to pick one element such as the headline or the sign-up form and to run and A/B test to test two different versions. As soon as you have collected enough data, you will know which versions is performing better and then you can either run another split test of the same element or move on to testing something else. This testing approach is very straight forward and effective.

2) Split testing multiple elements: Instead of testing one element at a time, you might also want to test multiple variables at the same time or test a completely new design of your site. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows you to rapidly test major changes to a website and to test multiple variables at the same time. The disadvantage is that at the end of the day you will know whether version A is better than version B but you will not be able to pin-point it to one exact data point.

At the end of the day, your goal is to continuously keep testing and to continuously run two versions so that you keep making your site better and better. I hope that the above has given you some good ideas of what main elements to start testing on your site today.