Would you send a million letters costing tens of thousands

　　Would you send a million letters costing tens of thousands to print and mail, in a direct marketing campaign, without testing Backlit Banner Suppliers the letter content first? It's what many website owners do when they don't test and measure their own website copy and content then spend thousands on web marketing campaigns to drive traffic to their websites. In a direct mail campaign the mailer knows based on test mail outs what to expect and therefore what his return on investment will be. They basically write, re-write and re-write again until they have the content that gets the desired response. Many moons ago I used to work full time writing for direct mailing companies and the mailers would ask for 3 or 4 different versions of the same message and this was the reason. They tested each one with a short mail out (about 1000 per mailshot) and gauged response to find the best percentage. So the direct mail marketer has a solid figure to work on. He knows if he spends figure 'a' on direct mailing he will get figure 'b' response. Why can't the same apply to website marketing?

We think it can. We tested this theory for 8 months and for the last 4 months have consistently been hitting the same percentage level (roughly give or take 0.5%) of conversion. By defining your website goal and objective, experimenting with copy, content, persuasion, design, colour and architecture it is possible to predict what the response of your website conversion will be. In other words you can confidently predict how many people will do what you want them to do every month. Month after month. Easy? no, it takes a lot of work but it certainly is possible. In a number of tests conducted on a website designed with web services for sale through a period of 8 months from January 2003 till August 2003, it was proved beyond doubt that a consistent level of conversion of new visitors can be achieved.

Conversion Chronicles is the result of these tests. It was found that: 1) Headlines can improve the click through of a page by up to 35%! Over two months on one page we tested the headline and looked to see how many more visitors moved onto another page. The first month with the headline "Just On Site, Improve the way you do business online" only 15% of readers went onto do another action and stayed on the page (reading presumably) more than 3 minutes. With the headline "Do you know if your website is a success or a failure?" 50% completed another action and stayed on our website for more than 3 minutes. A terrific improvement when you consider it was only one line of text we changed. Ok, we think the content was pretty good anyway but the first headline was poor and so readers just immediately left rather than read.