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A simple technique that boosted my conversion rate by 296.73%

By Michael | April 20, 2009

One of my secrets to success is that I’m a fairly serious tester of my marketing. During my years as a massage therapy center owner, I started out with doing simple A/B split tests.

At first, it was just testing different headlines on the same marketing piece. Many times, there was little or no difference but when I did find a new version that converted better, it was often a 25% or more improvement in conversion rates.

In fact, one headline change on a postcard mailer improved the response rate from approximately 1% to a solid 5% — an awesome 5000% improvement!

When I started online in 2004, it didn’t take me long to figure out that you could do even more elaborate testing.

Eventually I discovered multi-variate (sometimes called multi-variable) testing which would allow you to test more than one element on a web page at once.

That led to a series of blood boiling adventures with different testing tools to find one that I liked and actually worked as advertised.

Eventually I got so annoyed with it that I hired a programmer to build my own multi-variate testing tool called Easy Multi Tracking. http://www.easymultitracking.com

Fast forward to the present day. I’ve decided to share one of my recent testing results done on a squeeze page of mine. I’m not going to reveal the location of the squeeze page because I don’t want a bunch of non-targeted prospects hitting the site and causing the current testing I’m doing to become skewed.

For those of you who might be familiar with the term, a squeeze page is a web page where site visitors can either choose to give you their name & email address to progress further into the site or just leave the site instead.

It’s an effective way to build an email list of targeted prospects.

So one of my squeeze pages started out around 10% opt-in rate which is pretty bad but then I started running some tests on it. I tested things like different headlines, graphic signatures, headline colors and so on. Within 6 months, the opt-in rate was up to approximately 55% which is a significant improvement.

One of my tests on that squeeze page involved graphic callouts. I tested using a graphic callout by the opt-in box versus no graphic callout.

Here’s an example of using the graphic callout by the opt-in box:

Callout Test

My gut feeling was that the graphic callout would produce a higher conversion rate simply because it drew more attention to the opt-in box.

Of course, relying on your gut feeling is a poor predictor so that’s why I rely on doing multi-variate testing instead.

I set up a test on the squeeze page where Callout #1A was the control (the opt-in box with a graphic callout) and Callout #1B was the same opt-in box without any graphic callout.

Well, the results were mind-blowing. I didn’t believe them at first, so I re-ran the test a second time. Rather than tell you what they were… I’m going to show you.

Callout Test Results

The graphic callout smoked the non-graphic call-out by a cool 296.73%!

Now when it comes to graphic design, I’m terrible at it. I’ve hardly ever used the graphic design software that came with Dreamweaver MX2004 and it’s considered one of the better ones out there (Fireworks). So I frequently rely on hiring graphic designers or using ‘out of the box’ graphics, especially for things like testimonial boxes or bullet point graphics.

That’s why I absolutely love the response-boosting graphics that Mike Capuzzi offers and I frequently recommend to other copywriters & marketers to use them.

Adding a hand-drawn graphic is an easy response booster and adds a “personal” touch to the copy, almost as if you wrote the words in after the sales letter was finished.

The good news is, every hand-drawn graphic has been tested by Mike or his customers and proven to boost response rates in both offline and online marketing pieces.

There’s no guesswork involved. Simply choose the hand-drawn graphics you need and insert them into your offline or online marketing piece.

If you’re like me, you might do some tweaking to change the size of the graphics or where it’s positioned on the piece but that takes about 30 seconds to do.

The graphic callout I created and used for the test are part of Mike’s product and they produced almost a 300% increase in response rate for my squeeze page. Each time I’ve used them in my copy for my products or my clients, I’ve seen an increase in response rate too.

You can get the full scoop on Mike Capuzzi’s product here:

http://michaelhumphreys.com/recommends/OnlineDoodles

Until next time,

Michael

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