What if I told you about several “secrets” for increasing your sales every week, including several specific ones that you can apply right now – to landing pages and sales pages? Would that help you in your business?
Testing and optimization is the most reliable way to increase your opt-in rates, sales conversion rates and lead-generation success online.
How do I know this for certain? Because I spend a lot of time and effort tuning and optimizing landing pages and sales pages to increase conversion rates to build my lists and close more sales on all of my websites.
As John Reese (a famous Internet marketer) once said, it’s a great way to “give yourself a pay raise every day!”
So, enough already – what are these secrets anyway?
1. Selfish Promises – Picking the best headline and offer for your page that appeals to your visitors’ selfish interests
2. Image Amplifiers – Picking the best image for your page that “amplifies” your results
3. World-class Optimization Tools – Using the best testing/optimization tools to quickly optimize your pages without wasting traffic or time
Let’s examine each one of these more closely.
Selfish Promises
In order for someone to opt-in to your list or purchase something from you, you have to promise something that buyers actually want. I say “buyers” because you can build a large, fairly useless list of freebie-seekers who will likely never buy anything from you if you aren’t careful.
- Offer – your “offer” is what you are promising to give people in exchange for their name and email address (or their money!) This offer must give your visitors something they want, and must promise to satisfy some selfish need they have. Last year, I wrote a post on money magnet offers that may be helpful.
- Headline - your headline must succinctly make a promise to meet your visitors selfish desires and motivate them to read and act on your offer; i.e., to spend a few more seconds on your page and read your copy, then take the “action” you are asking them to take (e.g., to opt-in)
You must make an offer that’s compelling, or you can’t possibly optimize the page any further, since people won’t read beyond the headline. Assuming you understand your buyer and what they want and are making an offer that promises to satisfy your prospective buyer’s wants and emotional desires, then the next step is communicating that offer in a compelling way.
Your headline makes this compelling promise and triggers the visitor to take a closer look.
It has been said that a compelling headline can increase conversions by up to 17 times. I believe it. And a poorly-written headline that doesn’t catch your visitors attention in the first few seconds they arrive at your page will send your conversion rate plummeting – at or nearly to zero.
So if headlines are so super-critical, why don’t we spend more time developing and testing them? Two words. Time and work. It takes time and effort to come up with great headlines. Believe me, it’s worth the time and effort…
A while back, I posted about writing headline hooks – check out that post for more information on headlines. Also, keep in mind that different headlines appeal to different “buyer segments”, or groups of like-minded buyers, so experiment with changing your headline from time to time if you see sales falling off (or create a separate page for each buyer persona, better yet).
Image Amplifiers
Second to the headline, your “hero image” on the page typically has the next biggest impact. By hero, I mean whatever image accompanies your headline, reinforcing it in some way.
Over the years, I have found two ways to increase conversions significantly by using the right choice of images. I call these “Image Amplifiers” because the images amplify your offer in some way, providing “visual momentum” to your page, triggering your prospect into taking the action you are recommending.
Why and how do images work? Images “go directly in” – into the primitive brain of the viewer; that is, they by-pass the usual higher-level thinking and decision-making that takes place when reading copy. Instead, images go straight in through the visual cortex, directly stimulating our primitive decision-making systems in ways that simple copy cannot.
The “secret” is to choose images that cause your viewer to see the outcome you are promising them and/or that direct them visually to take the action you want your visitor to take.
Here are two actual examples of images I have used in my own online businesses that amplify results.
Image Amplifier 1 – The “Outcome Image”
This type of image clearly depicts the results or outcome the viewer wants to achieve. In this example, I was promoting a Texas Hold’em poker training e-book. The headline promised to increase a player’s winnings at poker tournaments (and it really does deliver on that promise).
My sales page had been converting consistently at around two percent (2%) for many months when I originally released that product back in 2005. I wasn’t using an image with the headline originally.
I next tried a number of different images, but they didn’t help much or at all. Finally, I found what I’m calling an “outcome image” – one that clearly depicts the outcome and results a poker player wants (and that my product delivers).
Adding this image boosted my sales conversion by 300% – yes, you read that correctly. It tripled sales conversions from 2% to 6% instantly!
I call this the “chip rake” image. It shows a hand raking in a big pot of chips – a visual depiction of the end result and outcome every poker player wants to experience as often as humanly possible.
This image visually communicates the value-proposition and promise made directly to buyers of that e-book – they will be raking in more big pots, and placing in the money and winning more poker tournaments if they buy this product (or opt-in on the landing page, then buy it from the sales page as the 2nd step in this case). Tens of thousands of satisfied customers from every corner of the Earth have bought and used this e-book to win more poker tournaments since 2004.
And adding that one image to my sales page has probably bought me the equivalent of two BMW’s since then, so it was definitely worth my time to do some experimenting and find out for sure what worked!
Image Amplifier 2 – The “Eyes Image”
It is commonly known that images of attractive females on landing pages often increases conversion rates. However, here’s something I only recently discovered (courtesy of Shelley Ellis, an expert on Google AdWords). In this example, we have a landing page that was converting lower than I wanted at 11.76% (after I first developed it).
When Shelley saw this landing page, she said “I can tell you how to increase your landing page’s conversions. Needless to say, I was all ears…
Since your opt-in box is below the image, find an image with the female looking down, toward the opt-in box“. I was intrigued, so I decided to give it a try…
Here’s the original landing page image:
So what’s wrong with this image? She is looking straight at us. This has the effect of STOPPING us in our tracks, as this person is staring back at us. It causes our eyes to meet hers, instead of directing our attention where we actually want it to go.
Here’s the replacement image that increased conversions by 82%:
In this image, the eyes are looking down. This causes the viewers eyes to look down, too (where the opt-in registration box is located, underneath the image).
Here’s this Image Amplifier within the context of the landing page
Obviously, I’m very pleased with 82% more registrations on this landing page – by simply changing the image on this page! Since these are trial sign-ups, more registrations on this page leads directly to more sales.
In fact, this image has worked so well for us that I have used it on several other pages, with excellent results, including this one:
Landing page selling opt-in with this same Image Amplifier
This report landing page has proven itself, converting 25.64% of Google Content Network clicks and 33.33% of Google Search clicks into opt-ins for targeted keywords related to product launches.
So, both of these image amplifier methods work great and are proven winners – based not upon opinion, but proven fact – facts established through actual experimenting, measurement and testing.
Finally, these Image Amplifiers also work in Google display ads and banner ads! Yes, the time you invest figuring out which of these magic silver bullet images work can be leveraged all over the place. Note, for example, the banner ad on the left side of this blog (also shown below).
It contains this very same Image Amplifier! And this banner ad gets noticed and it gets clicked on (without any fancy, annoying animation smoke and mirrors).
If you only do one thing I’m teaching here… Please test and validate just one major Image Amplifier and put it to use in your business. You’ll be glad you did – I guarantee it.
World-class Optimization Tools
Testing and optimization of web pages is nothing new – it’s been going on for many years in various forms. The most common form is called “A/B Split-Testing”, where you test two different pages (or more) and choose a winner based upon which one results in more visitors taking the desired action.
A more advanced testing method is “Multi-Variate Testing”, which enables you to test multiple combinations of different elements on the same Web page in a single test. Google Web Optimizer supports both forms of these tests (and it’s free).
However, like most things in life, you get what you pay for… The Google Web Optimizer A/B testing works fine; however, it’s multi-variate tester leaves a lot to be desired. In addition to being complex to set up and tedious to maintain, I have actually had it produce erroneous results on my pages (during a launch! – not good…) Worse yet, it wastes a lot of your precious traffic, ad budget and time on under-performing combinations (that’s bad, Ok?)
Fortunately, I ran across a professional-grade multi-variate optimization product that I really like. It’s called Hi-Conversion. And just like it says on their website, it’s “fast, smart and easy to use” (well, it used to say that!)
First, to set up a test on your page, you simply enter the page URL, then it brings up the page and you visually choose the elements you want to test, replacing images, text or any thing else you want. Second, their patent-pending optimization algorithms reach the proper conclusions about which combinations are prevailing much sooner, avoiding wasting your traffic on under-performing combinations.
Give Yourself That Pay Raise on a Regular Basis
So, I hope these landing page optimization tips (they’re not really “secrets”, at least not anymore!) help you boost your opt-in and sale conversion rates on your Web pages.
If you will invest a little bit of time each week to optimize your website pages (including your home page, landing pages, sales pages, shopping cart pages, and checkout pages), you will can give yourself a pay raise every week. It takes more discipline than most of us have, but it’s well worth the time and effort to squeeze more out of every click you get to your site.
{ 11 comments }
Hi Rick,
Great and detailed article. Love the looking down image and poker example (tweeted the latter). I see you fan of another optimizing tool, so now I love to have your feedback on ours http://www.reedge.com if you have time.
Send me an email or just sign up on the site. Love have your view on it.
Dennis
300% more conversion rate by using one poker image http://ow.ly/2nfWP
Replace istock image of 'professional woman' but use image 'real woman &coffee mock' and get 82% higher conversion rate http://ow.ly/2ng10
RT @dennisvdheijden: Replace istock image of 'professional woman' but use image 'real woman &coffee mock' and get 82% higher conversion rate http://ow.ly/2ng10
RP's Poker Update How To Give Yourself a Pay Raise Every Week | Product Launch and … http://bit.ly/9PoKct #gambling #poker
RP's Poker Update How To Give Yourself a Pay Raise Every Week | Product Launch and … http://bit.ly/9PoKct… http://goo.gl/fb/e4UFp
3 Secrets to Increased Conversion Rates on Your Landing Pages and Sales Pages http://bit.ly/9bmnty #optimization #marketing
RT @rickbraddy: 3 Secrets to Increased Conversion Rates on Your Landing Pages and Sales Pages http://bit.ly/9bmnty #optimization #marketing
RT @rickbraddy How To Give Yourself a Pay Raise Every Week http://bit.ly/9jWirP
Reading about image amplifiers and how the right image tripled sales conversions http://bit.ly/aPkfrR
How To Give Yourself a Pay Raise Every Week http://bit.ly/9jWirP
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