William Charlwood

If you are doing any sort of testing then you need to make sure you have enough data to make rational decisions. I recently ran a split test using my autoresponder. What I did was send out two different emails to a relatively small list (around 400) and measured the response rates.

It was a classic A/B Split Test in other words although the sample size was quite small.

Here’s Version A of my email

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

PS Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

And here is Version B

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

.

Spot the difference!

Actually the only difference was the use of “PS” in version A.

Initially I was intrigued to see that Version A was significantly more successful in terms of click through rates. At one point there was a 91% likelihood that its relative out-performance would be repeatable. In other words, statistically it looked as though a similar exercise done again would show that Version A generated a higher click through rate 91% of the time.But as data dribbled in, the relative response rates got closer and closer. At the moment Version A has generated a click through rate of 23.5% and Version B a click through rate of 22.7%. These click through rates are quite high for emails and often one problem you face is getting people to read them in the first place.

The figures themselves are too close to separate and suggest that the results of this particular split test are neutral which is a shame! I rather enjoyed having made what looked like an interesting discovery, namely that using PS as opposed to not using PS made a difference.

But I was wrong to leap to this conclusion too early.

Just for completeness, the subject line of both emails was the same:

A Quick Suggestion

There’s a key statistic you need to know if you are going to read Harvey Segal’s little ebook called The Ultimate Supertip. It’s what proportion of your buyers are likely to buy the upgrade.

If you know this, you’ll know which version is right for you.

So here’s some current data. It’s not hugely reliable from a purist’s perspective because the sample size is a bit low but I’ve just looked at the last few sales. The results are as follows:

13 sales since 13th July of which 11 were for the upgrade version and just 2 for the normal version. So the higher priced version which pays a bigger commission is outselling the lower priced version.

The book is free to download and you don’t need to provide your name or your email address to check it out.

The Ultimate Supertip

An OTO or one time offer is a method of increasing sales by offering customers a special deal that is only made available to them once. For example, you could make a one time offer of a massive discount on an ebook to new subscribers to a newsletter.

An important feature of a one time offer is that its limited availability is made absolutely clear to the customer. If it isn’t made clear it won’t work.

The psychology behind OTOs is that you know that you will never get such a good deal presented to you again and if the value of the deal exceeds the price the conversion rate can be very high.

Many internet marketers use one time offers, especially as up sells, but in a lot of cases that statement that the offer is “one time and one time only” is actually false. Simply reloading the page having deleted cookies can often bring an expired one time offer back again.

Having said that One Time Offers often provide customers with excellent value deals and it usually pays to examine such offers in detail.

From the marketer’s perspective a One Time Offer made to a list very early on can help recover the cost of list building more quickly and so makes sense from a cash flow perspective.