Welcome to The Growth Booth, episode number 75, where today I'm talking about different things that you should split-test in your business, and I'm going to give you some ideas about different tools that you can use to do it.

Now, first and foremost, I want you to understand that split-testing can be something which completely changes your results online, because you can take something which performs at a mediocre level and turn it into a conversion machine just through making slight improvements over time. By making iterative improvements and layering them on top of one another, you improve 1% one day, 1% the next day, 1% the next day, and before you know it, you're doing double the number of conversions that you were initially. 

Split testing is something that you can really only do if you've got traffic, so that could be free traffic, it could be paid traffic, it doesn't matter, but you need some kind of a traffic so that you can generate enough data to be able to do the split testing. Tools like Visual Website Optimizer, which you can see at vwo.com, the Google Analytics tool, which has got a split testing feature built into it. And that one, by the way, is completely free, can give you all the data that you could possibly need and help you make conclusions based on statistics, based on real data, rather than going with a gut feeling approach to marketing. Also, when you get into using paid ads, the likes of Facebook will tell you exactly which of your ads are performing better and help you optimize that accordingly. 

So in this podcast episode though, I want to give you a range of ideas about different things that you can consider split testing. You could use these as your cheat sheet if you like to where you can get the most bang for your buck. You would have heard me talk about the 80-20 rule in the past, and I believe that if you focus on the things that I'm going to share with you today, you'll be applying the 80-20 rule to your marketing, specifically related to split testing.

The first suggestion that I've got for you here is to split test your headlines and your copy in general. When I'm talking about the copy, I'm talking about the words on the page. So if you consider an ecommerce product page, for example, you're likely going to have a headline with the name of the product, and then below that you're going to have a description. E-commerce pages tend to have a small amount of text compared to say, a sales letter for an information product or a software product or something like that.

In any case though, whatever you are selling, the headline is the number one thing in terms of text on the page that is going to impact the performance of the page in my experience, because it's the first thing that people see and it's either going to resonate with the visitor or not. Your job is to come up with a headline that's going to resonate with the visitor and lead towards a favorable result, which would be a sale or an advancement towards a sale.

So different headlines can have hugely different impacts, and just trying different variations is a simple thing that you can do. If you are just getting started with the split testing, then I would suggest making changes to one element of the headline at a time, or you can do multivariate testing where you can change up multiple things and then the software, be it Visual Website Optimizer or the Google split testing tool, will be able to tell you which of the different variations are working best. But for someone who might be just getting started, I would suggest just testing one change at a time.

Now, the next thing that I would recommend you consider split testing is the Call to Action button. So a Call to Action button is where you are telling someone to do something like ‘Buy Now’, ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Sign up’ or ‘Get Started’. There are different things that you can test with the Call to Action button. One is the button color, another is the text on the button. Is it better to say ‘Buy now’ or ‘Add to cart’? I don't know. Do a test and find out.

What about placement? Is it better to have the call to action near the top of the page or further down the page? It's different, obviously, for every type of page, but this is the kind of thing that you can play around with. So the placement, and then the design, is it better to have a Call to action that is a text link or something that looks more like a button to press? And again, these are things that you can test. So that's the second thing there. 

The third thing that you can split test is price points. Now, this is something that I've done a huge amount of, especially with ecommerce where we've tested pricing of products on Amazon, on our own ecommerce stores. It is amazing how much more money you can make when you know what the optimum price is. Let me give you an example. You could raise your sale price of a product and do less sales, but because you're getting more profit per sale, it may still mean that you come out in a better financial position. Sometimes, I've seen that raising the price actually results in more conversions, and I'm not sure exactly why this is, but my theory, one of my theories anyway, is that it's to do with a higher price has got a higher perceived value. 

The other thing you'll find when you're split testing prices is there are sort of psychological barriers if you like. An example of this might be going from a product that costs $99 to $101. You've just gone through a psychological barrier there. That can sometimes cause conversion rates to drop a lot versus, for example, going from $91 to $99. I think going from $91 for a product to $99 is probably not going to do anything to the conversion rate, but it will give you 10% more revenue on every single product. I think split testing different price points is really important because it can tell you what the combination is of number of sales, profit per sale that is optimal for your business. Sometimes it's okay to accept fewer sales if you're earning so much more for each sale that you get. 

The fourth thing that I think is worth considering when it comes to split testing is website design and layout. So this includes where to put the navigational menus. For example, the color schemes that you're using. Different colors generate different reactions from people. There have been a lot of studies about this. Fonts that are used, the different imagery and the overall layout. These are things that can all impact the performance of your website.

You can also try using a horizontal navigational bar versus a vertical sidebar. You can use the likes of heat maps to actually see where people are going. These are incredibly insightful actually, when you see these, and not just heat maps, but tools that record the activity of someone coming to your website and you can see where they go and what they do. I can't remember the name of the software that I've used for that in the past, but I'll look it up and I'll add it to the show notes, which you'll be able to get over at thegrowthbooth.com and navigate to episode number 75. Website design and layout is another option there. 

The fifth item that is great for split testing are product images and videos. Thinking about product images for a second, if you sell on Amazon or have sold on Amazon in the past, you'll know that the product image is one of the things that has the largest impact on people coming to your listing and then eventually buying your product. If you compare an Amazon listing that has got amateur photos with an Amazon listing that's got professional photos, the difference is enormous in conversion rate, not just the conversion rate from your page, but from the search results. 

If someone is searching for sunglasses case, as an example, a sunglasses case in Amazon, they're going to get a whole list of results come up. People tend to look first at the images that come up for the sunglasses cases when they're making their analysis in a few split seconds, and then they look at the title and the brand and so on and so forth. So if your image passes the first check, the first millisecond check that your brain goes through, or that the prospect's brain goes through, the next thing they'll do is to look at the title around that. If you've got a terrible image though, you won't pass the first check that your brain does and you'll never have a chance of getting that visitor.

Split testing product images and the visuals that you use for things like Amazon is a great idea. I think even aside from split testing them, just making sure that you've created the best practice whereby every image is as good as it can be. So having a nice crisp clear image with a white background that is maximized for the space that you've got available, so not having a big white edge around the image is a good idea. 

Another thing that you can test, and this is maybe more applicable to running ads, is a lifestyle image versus a product image. So if I'm selling some headphones, I can just have a picture of the headphones on their own with a white background, or I can have a picture of the headphones on someone's head. Which of those two things are going to perform better? Or maybe a short animated video is going to do better, or maybe a longer explanatory video is going to do better. These are the types of things you can split test especially, and it's especially easy to do this if you're running paid ads because oftentimes you'll have the image or the video in the ad.

Now the 6th thing that you can test is email marketing. Email marketing is very interesting in that with split testing you can split test things like the subject line, you can split test the From name, you can split test having personalization. So for example, it could say “Hi Aidan,” or it could simply say “Hi there”, or in the subject line it could have “Aidan, a special message for you,” or it could just have “A special message for you”. 

Content layout as well. Although in my experience with email marketing, I think applying the 80-20 rule, the thing that is going to give you the most bang for your buck is split testing the subject line. You might want to split test a blind subject line versus one that's explicit. A blind one would be something like “You'll never believe the amazing tool that I just discovered…”. That might be a blind subject line, and a more explicit subject line might be something like “Chat GPT: the most amazing AI tool ever”. One is blind and one is explicit. In that case, I think that a blind subject line might go better, but you really have to test these things because if you've got an audience that is very interested in the product that you're talking about, then being explicit can work very, very well. 

The 7th item that I've got here for you is landing pages. Landing pages really encompasses a whole bunch of different things. It's going to have headlines, it's going to have images, it's going to have different forms on it potentially, testimonials, overall layout, longer form versus shorter form, a video-based landing page versus a long traditional sales letter. I think it's a bit more challenging if you try to test all of these things at once, but with landing pages you can just sort of knock them off one at a time. 

A landing page could be just a squeeze page, which is just a small block of text normally, and an opt-in form. That's much, much simpler to run split tests on because there's not much there. It's more challenging when you've got a long sales letter, but even then you can still have good wins by doing some split testing. 

With regards to advertisements, I think these are one of the easiest things to split test because most of the big advertising channels and platforms that we use, like Google for example, like Facebook, have got the ability, or they give you the ability to run different ads so you can split test easily. You can have one ad saying one thing and another ad saying another thing, and then you can see which one gets the best results. 

You're not always looking at which ad is getting the most clicks, but it's better to be looking at which ad is getting more results. You might have a more explicit ad which says more about what you're trying to sell or trying to achieve, and it might get less clicks, but it may have better or higher results overall. I could have an ad saying “Buy the number one podcasting microphone which is…” such and such, and it might get a lower click through rate than something which is more vague, but it may end up getting a higher number of sales because it is pre-qualifying people who would otherwise maybe not be interested in the microphone.

The 9th thing that I've got for you here is the checkout process. Different elements on the checkout process can make a huge difference. Sometimes, for example, having the security badges can make a huge difference. “Your order is protected by…” so on and so forth. Sometimes having different payment options is a big deal. “You could pay with PayPal, you could pay with credit card,” so on and so forth. These are things that you will want to consider when optimizing your checkout process. 

Sometimes it's better to capture the shipping details and all of that information prior to asking for the credit card details, and sometimes it's better to collect all the information in the same place, and that's what we would normally call a single-page checkout versus a multi-step checkout. In most cases I've seen, at least if it's a multi-step checkout, it's valuable to have a progress indicator there. The one that I like the most is a visual bar, typically at the top where it says “You're 1/3 of the way through the process” or “You're 30 seconds away from finishing the checkout”, something like that. 

Another big thing you can test with the checkout process is the shipping. Are you offering free shipping or are you charging for shipping? You could say that this is a bit like testing the pricing and that would be true. However, it's subtly different in that this is something that you can do specifically in a lot of cases on the checkout page. 

I think a couple of things to look for specifically here when you're testing this are the abandonment rates, because if you see a lot of people get to check out but then they leave, that could be indicating that you've got some kind of an issue there. Like maybe people are abandoning the cart because your order form is just too overwhelming, or maybe they get to the order form and they realize “Oh my god, there's actually quite a price here for shipping. This is not what I was expecting,” and they leave. By analyzing and capturing data and testing you can optimize this and make sure that you don't run into these types of issues. 

The 10th thing that I wanted to raise in this episode here today is about mobile optimization. This is more important than ever because more and more people are using mobile devices to visit web pages. You want to test the layout and potentially run through different layout options and test them against one another to see if one of them works better than the other. This includes things like navigational menus, overall responsiveness, even load times. Load times is a big one because if you've got one mobile layout that takes half a second longer to load than another one, then chances are that's going to be reflected in the performance of your page.

You can test different types of menus as well. You can have, potentially on a mobile device, a one column layout or a two column layout. Which is going to be better? Well that's something that you want to test. And again, this can all be done using the Google website optimizer split testing tool or the likes of Visual Website Optimizer. 

Now just to wrap up here, I've seen many instances where a project has been failing miserably but completely turned around and turned into a homerun project just by iterative split testing. What I mean by that is I mean an ongoing continuation of split testing different elements and just getting little by little better and better and better over time. This is almost like a brute force method of optimization and improvement because little by little, you're cracking the code. Little by little, you're trying different combinations and figuring out what works. 

You can start with something which is a framework which is proven, if you like, and that's a good starting point, but it may still not be something that's profitable or optimized entirely because every single project is different. Every single project has got different things that work better for it. It's just vitally important that you're monitoring your statistics and you're starting to capture different metrics which tell a story of what's happening on your web page and how your web page is performing. Because once you've got the data, only then can you start improving. I would absolutely recommend that you are making sure that you're tracking the performance of your project. 

Whether it's an Amazon product listing or a product on an ecommerce website or maybe it's an affiliate marketing website, if you're monitoring and capturing data of the visitors that come, then you're going to be giving yourself information which you can then use to dramatically improve your results.  And I would not be surprised if you can double or triple the conversions. A conversion could be a sale or an email opt-in or whatever it might be for you. Double or triple your conversions or your results just by working through an iterative split testing campaign and little by little improving each of the different elements on your website.

That's a wrap for this episode. You can find out more by going to episode number 75 Over at thegrowthbooth.com. Remember to follow along on social media as well and make sure you tune in for the next episode. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.