The Impact of Seeing Your Name in Headlines
In this test - we found that embedding a user’s name within a headline boosted the number of people reading our sales copy by a whopping 46%.
Here’s the experiment.
First, users from Google Ads were directed to our landing page. The landing page allowed these visitors to sign up for 7 Free Tactics from our book.
Here’s what that page would look like for a fictional visitor named James. James would need to provide his firstname and email to subscribe
Now on the next page we ran a split test. Half our subscribers would see a regular headline.
What if there were a Way You Could Convert 15%, 25% – even 50% or More – of Your Website Visitors into Customers, How Much More Money Would You Earn as a Result?
The other half – would see the same headline, but with their firstname neatly embedded into the beginning. (we’d know their name based on what they provided upon signing up). In this case, James would see:
James What if there were a Way You Could Convert 15%, 25% – even 50% or More – of Your Website Visitors into Customers, How Much More Money Would You Earn as a Result?
Everything else about the pages remained the same.
Here’s the page without the name included:
And here’s the page with the name included – as you can see, the change is subtle.
At the bottom of the page was a link to allow the visitor to click on to learn about the pricing and bonuses available for our ecommerce course. Our goal was to see how many people clicked on this link.
The results were:
Click rate of people who saw the ordinary headline: 33.33%
Click rate of people who saw their name within headline: 48.70%
Long term results of course may not be as dramatic. But based on the math the statistical significance of this test is over 95%. This means we can be 95% sure that embedding a firstname within a headline will boost your response.
The question remains – who does one do this?
It can be done with simple PHP coding or you can purchase software that does this. We’ll be reviewing and testing one such software application next week and will share our findings.
Have you had similar success with this technique? Share your experience by commenting on this post.
Shouldn’t the text be “What if there WAS a way” instead of “What if there were a way” …?
Good point – here;s the funny thing …if you read the post just before this…”How Bad grammar Boosted Our Conversion Rates” you’ll see that grammar is not that important.
Very interesting find. Do you know if there was a significant variance between those two tests and actual booked sales? For example, you had higher CTR for the second test, but after that page, was the % of people who actually bought the book different?
Thanks
Well, the good old advices from Carnegie’s books still work!
I’ve certainly experienced success with this method. Back in the days of the google arbitrage days this would have been extremely helpful. There are additional conguent tools found in http://useit.com that offer similar outcomes. We are hoping to integrate this method into our website at http://worldwidebookdrive.org
[...] Anyway, if you think I just wrote this because I had nothing relevant to say, then you’re only partly right. I actually wanted to lead you to two articles about some research on headlines and wording in ad copy: The Impact of Seeing Your Name in Headlines and Google AdWords Tip: A ‘Guaranteed’ Way to Boost Your ROI – via SEOmoz. [...]
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