Small Change Big Impact Part 2

In the previous post (part 1), we talk about using the principle of consistency technique that helped a restaurant reduce their cancellation of table reservations by 30%.

This was achieved just by adding 2 “small words” to the call script used by the phone receptionist.

Today, we are going to explore another “Small Change Big Impact” scenario.

I got this from a newsletter issue from John Forde’s Copywriting Roundtable. I thought it’s pretty relevant to today’s theme.

And I think you will like this. It goes like this:

In Italy, and for many countries for that matter (including Singapore where I am based), you get penalized with points if you commit a traffic offence.

Once you accumulated points to a certain level, your driving license get suspended.

Now Italy is well well-known for bad driving on the road. And while this measure probably work to a certain degree, the authorities decided to do a small tweak to the system.

They Flipped It Around!

That means you start of with points on your record. With every violation, you get points taken off. If you hit zero, you are IN LUCK! Say goodbye to your license!

Small Change Big Impact Part 1

Do you know that you can have significant increase in revenue just by making seemingly “small changes” to your business?

Most people tend to think that if you want big results…you need big change! You need to spend big money! But that’s not entirely true!

If you know how to make the RIGHT change, you can still achieve great results even if it may just be a small tweak.

Let me tell you a story illustrating this concept.

I read about this story in one of Robert Cialdini’s presentation about how to be more persuasive.

Robert Cialdini is a world-renowned authority in the study of influence. He is also the best-selling author of “The Psychology of Influence”.

And it goes like this.

There is a restaurant that takes advanced booking by phone. But there was a problem. There were many customers calling in to cancel at the last minute.

The thing is that the receptionist was trained to say “Thank you for calling our restaurant. Please call if you want to cancel your reservation” to all the customers making their booking.

Complex Testing And Tracking Made Simple

When it comes to pay per click marketing, the way to generate more profits is none other than to test and track consistently over time.

Yes, it sounds like work, however, this is the key to maximize your returns. Besides, it does not take much time and it is quite easy to set up.

Search Network Tracking

For search network, you must track based on individual keywords (and keyword match types) so that you know exactly which keywords are making you money and which keyword are not. When you know that, you can adjust your individual bid prices according to your ROI.

Content Network Tracking

For content network, you can only track based on adgroups and only broad match keywords are needed. Same thing, you adjust the bid prices of your adgroups according to your profits. For those adgroups which are doing well, considering duplicating the whole adgroup then use image ads.

CTR vs Conversions

Click through rates (CTR) is a good indicator of how good your ad is at grabbing attention. When you take a closer look, higher CTR does not mean that your conversion rates is good. Sometimes, you will write ads with high CTR and low conversions, this will lose you money!

Powerful Marketing ToolKit From Marketing Experiments

I’ve always been an advocate of testing and experimenting in marketing.

Often we don’t know what works. Or we think we know what works…but actually don’t.

I’ve done plenty of split tastings before on sales pages, landing pages and email campaigns, and the results have sometimes differ from what I thought was correct.

From there, it just underlines further to me the importance of testings in marketing and conversions. It’s NOT about what we think. But what the buyers think!

Now…when it comes to testing and optimizing, very few can match up to the folks at Marketing Experiments.

I’m a big fan of their marketing content.

Just recently, they came out with a big list of marketing tools, chockfull of guides, PDFs reports and worksheets.

They are FREE and extremely useful. If you are a marketer or a student of marketing, download them.

I’ve put them together here for your easy reference and download.

Free Tools from MarketingExperiments

1. Value Proposition Worksheet
One of our most downloaded resources, this worksheet will help you evaluate and present your value proposition more effectively.

How To Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click Through Rate By 7.8% and 8.4% Respectively

I’ve been fiddling around with email optimization in the past week.

Thinking to myself…how can I improve my open and click-through rate to my list?

Yes I’m always thinking of improving these email metrics.

Because any small increase in conversion can mean a significant increase in profitability.

This is especially true if you use email marketing as a sales channel.

Anyway…I thought I do a split test. Or more specifically split broadcast in this case.

I will spare you all the details and dive straight into the methods I used to improve my open and click through rates (the results you see in my post title is based on just 2 tests).

Improving Open Rate:

Personalize your email subject headline with your subscriber’s name. That’s it.

I found that a name-personalized email headline generally outperforms one that doesn’t.

You will need a good email marketing solution for this. I’m using Aweber and it performs brilliantly for me.

Improving Click Through Rate:

Keep the email as short and focused as possible.

And have the same link repeated twice.

Split Testing – 2 Opt-In Forms or 1?

Split testing is essentially an A/B test. We put 2 version out, A and B.

We set one variable to be tested (e.g. headlines in a sales copy) and keep all other factors for both versions constant.

And we send it out to test with fair exposure to both, and measure the ensuring actions that return.

So Why The Heck Do We Have To Test?

Marketing is about testing. It’s about bettering the previous version and keeping the improvement process going. Again and again.

Take a look at this equation:

Sales = Conversion x Traffic

Now, traffic takes time to build. But, you can easily improve your conversion by tweaking a headline, an offer or a bonus!

For example, you will have 5 sales if you get 1% conversion out of 500 visitors. To get 10 sales, you will need 1000 visitors, assuming your conversion stays at 1%

BUT, if you increase your conversion by just 1 more % with the same 500 visitors, you would already have gotten 10 sales. Is 1 more % difficult to achieve?

IT CAN BE DONE!