The Internet and e-commerce have many advantages over “brick” businesses. However, they suffer from an obvious problem that until recently has been very difficult to overcome.
Websites, e-commerce, and mail order are unique in that, as sales platforms, there is no face-to-face contact between seller and buyer!
This is a big problem because building credibility and trust relationships with your customers, which is the absolute foundation of all transactions, is very difficult if your business is completely internet based.
Imagine the scenario.
Our entrepreneurial hero, let’s call him Splitter, has secured or manufactured a product that will make him a millionaire.
Splitter went to a web designer and together they created the best website since a certain B. Gates was a kid.
Splitter hosts your website on a super fast server so your customers don’t have to wait more than a nanosecond before pages load and offer your product.
He has his administrative team (his wife and their dog) ready to fulfill all the requests that will come in.
He has not forgotten to set up an easy payment gateway in PayPal and checks everything again and again.
Let the good times pass!
Start a marketing strategy to promote the new e-commerce site. Write and submit articles with your URL to directories. You get stuck on social media and gradually start racking up a steady, albeit small, stream of site traffic. Excellent!
Days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and then before you know it, your anniversary is over. He checks his PayPal account and there is the big zip sum. Zero. No. Ouch!
What happened?
I’m guessing Splitter didn’t convert many of the prospects who visited your site into paying customers!
They came from the links you incorporated into your articles, from social media, from classified ads, and from search engines. They came to him well, but he didn’t build credibility or trust.
That’s the high level reason why they left without buying from him.
Understand this deeply. Understand him until he hurts.
If you can’t build a credible and trustworthy relationship with your customer, you will NEVER become one of the big dogs of successful internet marketing!
Let me ask you a question.
The high-level reason why Splitter failed to convert prospects into customers was lack of credibility and trust. But, did you identify the root of the problem that our entrepreneur could not face and overcome? Yes? Good. Nope? Ok, let me spell it.
In internet marketing there are three key elements.
1. The Product
2. The Offer – The price and associated bonuses.
3. The creativity: the website’s copy, fonts, formatting, images, and the positioning of these elements on the page.
Our entrepreneur has a product. Now suppose that the product is good. I know we should never assume, but if we don’t make some assumptions, this article will never end.
Being a good student of what internet gurus have told him in their endless emails, Splitter secured exclusive rights to a compatible bonus product as his “free” giveaway. His own product plus the bonus puts him ahead of others selling similar products. He has the USP of it.
The web designer you hired did an excellent job of giving the site a professional look and feel. There are navigation menus on the site, as well as “relevant” images that load quickly. And, although he’s not a copywriter, he did a decent job with the web copy.
This is where the problems started. During the year of trading, Splitter did its best to drive traffic to its site and, it must be said, with some success.
However, you didn’t test your site to make sure prospects were interested in what they found when they got there. Why did you fall into this common trap?
Splitter is an aspiring salesman. He has good ideas, but the idea of working hard doesn’t excite him. That is why he chose to open an online store instead of renting a place in the city to sell his product in a “brick” point of sale. He thought it would be easy. Activate the site, make the offer and bingo, millionaire!
He made the same assumption made by 99% of entrepreneurs. They assume they have the right offer and creativity to convert prospects into customers.
How do you know this? Well, have you heard these kinds of answers?
“I did English at school, I can write good copy.”
“I’ve studied a great copy of a library book, I know what works.”
“This product is so good that it moves on its own.”
The simple answer is this. On the Internet, you don’t get to know your prospects and customers. You have very little chance of asking them what they like or dislike about your website. You don’t always know if your offer is over or under the price.
Any and all conclusions you come to about your offering and your creativity, without any proof, are pure guesswork. Guesswork, like rolling the dice, is often a recipe for failure.
Please read that many, many times. And then read it one more time.
If there’s one thing that guarantees you’ll look at your PayPal account and find little there, it’s a failure to try, try, and then try some more.
This is the secret that separates the big boys from the minnows of the internet marketing world. The greats are always testing.
This is why Splitter, an aspiring salesman, had a bad year.
split test
The concept of split testing is quite simple. It means that you take your original creativity, also known as control, and test it with alternatives.
Why would you want to do this?
Because it’s the only way to identify what “wows” your prospects and makes them part with their money to buy your product or service.
When you or Splitter’s web designer creates original copy, if you don’t test it for all variables, you can only guess if it’s the best copy to convert your traffic and leads into customers.
You have no way of knowing if the attention-grabbing headline is drawing readers into the body of the copy. He doesn’t know if his introductory paragraph is turning off “potential customers” and wasting all the time, effort, and money he’s spent getting them there in the first place.
What about that image you painstakingly developed and placed in the top right corner of the table? Is your product offering doing you a favor? Well, if you don’t try, I can guarantee you won’t know for sure. You will be guessing. It could be that removing that image or placing it somewhere else might help your “convert more sales” proposition. But you won’t know without trying.
By testing alternate creatives with your original, over time you’ll get “insights” that tell you clearly what prospects like and don’t like about your website. You stop guessing and start focusing on what they want.
Your credibility increases and your trust with prospects improves as you communicate more comprehensively through your web copy and creative. As your credibility and building trust improves, so does your “sales conversion” rate.