What Kind of A/B Tests Should You Run to Improve Your Sales | Ep. #671

In episode #671, Eric and Neil discuss which A/B you should run to improve your sales. Tune in to hear what will help you up your conversions.

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

  • [00:27] Today’s Topic: What Kind of A/B Tests Should You Run to Improve Your Sales
  • [00:40] Add pop-ups to your site!
  • [00:42] You can use tools like Opt-in Monster, Sumo, and HelloBar to do this.
  • [00:52] From there, you just try to drive people to a conversion.
  • [01:08] Headlines and copy affect conversions more than most things.
  • [01:20] Get on the phone with your customers and ask what got them on board.
  • [01:35] You’ll find people will say a lot of the same things.
  • [01:39] Take what worked and incorporate it into your headlines and copy.
  • [01:53] You need to make sure your copy is cohesive throughout your site.
  • [02:00] Urgency is key. Have deadlines.
  • [02:09] Use Deadline Funnel to create a countdown.
  • [02:17] When something seems limited, it makes it more appealing.
  • [02:30] The final email you send out before the deal expires is usually what gets the most conversions.
  • [02:45] Having all your form fields on one page can be overwhelming. Break your checkout process into a couple or a few parts.
  • [03:07] Conversions will go up by at least 9%.
  • [03:22] Test your pricing every now and again.
  • [03:25] BugSnag changed their pricing several times during their first year in business.
  • [03:47] When doing customer development, ask them what prices are deal breakers.
  • [04:03] Play around with button color, text size, and images. These things don’t necessarily affect conversion as much as people say, but it counts as content.
  • [04:25] When people aren’t buying, Neil surveys them to see what didn’t work.
  • [04:35] Do a remarketing campaign addressing these negatives (maybe using video).
  • [04:54] Also run a test using the video.
  • [05:04] Try short-form vs. long-form copy and see what performs better.
  • [05:30] Optimize your ads.
  • [05:40] On Facebook, add video and a lot of text content.
  • [05:56] The conversion rate goes through the roof.
  • [06:07] Test out freemium, free trials, etc.
  • [06:37] That’s it for today!
  • [06:41] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!

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The post What Kind of A/B Tests Should You Run to Improve Your Sales | Ep. #671 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.

Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today, we're gonna talk about the kinds of A/B tests that you should run to improve your sales. So, the easiest one to start things off with, Neil, I have talked about this in the past is adding popups to your site. You can add accident tent popups, you can have take over popups, you can use tools like Opt-in monster, Sumo, HelloBar, too, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah, you can use ... all of them end up working.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and then basically from there, you're just trying to drive people to a conversion. It could be trying to get people on a phone call, or giving them an offer first and then offering them a phone call but being creative with your offer and then having some kind of way of throwing an offer in front of them, like an accident tent thing is gonna help.

Neil Patel: Yeah, the next A/B test you can end up running is related to your copy. You'll find that headlines and copy affect conversions more than most things. So look at your site, talk to some of your customers, get on the phone and ask them, "Why did you sign up for your product?" And they'll ramble but ask them, in one sentence or in a few words, please tell me why you signed up for our product. And of course, you wanna say it in a nicer way.
As you do that, with 20, 30, 40 people, you'll find that you'll see a lot of commonalities and what resonates with people and by taking that message in, putting it with your headlines and copy, you'll see that your conversion rates will go up and make sure you're consistent with that copy so you just can put on your homepage, it needs to be your homepage or your pricing pages, your checkout pages, your product pages, you need to have a copy that's all cohesive, flows well together throughout your whole funnel versus just one page of your site.

Eric Siu: The other thing I'll add is adding in urgency. When you have a deadline, for example people are more motivated to take an action. So you can use a tool like deadline funnel for example to put a countdown timer or you can have a real actual urgent deadline to get people to do something because here's the thing, you know, when you do sales, when you used to do sales for the course that you were selling, what percent came through the final email?

Neil Patel: I would say 30 plus percent just from the final email.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and some people go up to 50% or so because it's the final email before the deal actually expires. So having urgency, people respond to these things well especially when a sale's going on, whatever, it's human psychology, add that in there, that should help.

Neil Patel: Yeah, the other thing when you're trying to run A/B test is take your checkout pages. A lot of people thing, "Oh, but putting all the form fields on one page, it's more usable." No, it's overwhelming for people and they're just gonna bounce off. By breaking down your form fields into two steps so that you click like name and email first and then the rest on the checkout, you'll find that your conversions will roughly go up either by nine, 10, or 11%, it's usually always somewhere around there.
And the reason that also helps is because people are like, "I'd already put in my name and email, might as well finish the rest." In addition to that, you now have their email address so you can send them emails to try to get them to finish their purchase as well.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and you wanna be testing your pricing as well every now and then. I remember, I was talking go the BugSnag CEO and they changed their pricing four, five, six times in the first year or so because ultimately, pricing is you're just kind of pulling numbers from the sky, you're looking at other SAS companies but it's not really the industry ... it's not necessarily [inaudible 00:03:41] to the company that you're running right now. So, again, to Neil's point, talk to your customers and then when you're doing customer development, ask them, "Hey, what price is too expensive, what is too cheap where you question the quality of it?" But constantly test your pricing, maybe not too frequently but that's the biggest lever you can pull or one of the biggest levers you can pull to help your business grow.

Neil Patel: Yeah. And when you're doing A/B testing, you can try things like button colors, you know, text size, images. And what you'll find is a lot of these things don't impact conversions as much as people are saying or all these articles online are saying. But it is content. So one strategy that I have for you guys and it's worked really well, like sometimes I've seen 40 plus percent [lift 00:04:24] from this, when people aren't buying and they're exiting, I try to survey them and figure out what else would you like to see on this page or why didn't you make a purchase? And over time you'll get enough responses. You take the ones that are the most common and you create a video that answers all of these objections, you do a remarketing campaign where you show them a video on Facebook, on YouTube and what you'll find is that simple little tweak will generate you more sales. In addition to that, run a A/B test with that video also on the pages that people are going to so you're not only answering objections but you're also selling them at the same time and it's a great way to generate more sales.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and try short form versus long form copy too. People think, "Oh, people don't have the attention nowadays," but guess what. Sometimes, when you look at Facebook ads, the long form copy actually performs better than the short form copy. Seen it myself, and you can also do this for your landing pages too. People think, "Oh, that's so internet markety. You know, the long form landing pages don't work." Sometimes you need to have that, especially the higher dollar offer you have, the more trust you need to build. Try testing long form versus short form.

Neil Patel: And the last A/B test I have from my end is, optimize your ads. A lot of guys are doing paid advertising, so run A/B test on your paid ads where you educate more. So for example, on Facebook, try adding a video and a lot of paragraphs of text, explaining your product or service and the benefits and why people should use it. Yes, your clicks will cost more when people come to your website and we ran A/B test and what we found is when we do that, although the clicks cost more, the conversion rate goes through the roof. So in general, we're getting more sales for how much we're selling.

Eric Siu: Yeah, final one I have from my side is, this one's a little more resource intensive but testing out Freemium versus free trial, money back guarantees or even combing some of these things. Freemium can be a really good way of customer acquisition but just keep in mind, if you open up Freemium, you're opening up a lot more resources in terms of the kind of development resource that you need to take up on your site. You can have a lot of free users and only a small portion are actually gonna be paying but in some cases, it might actually work out for you. So your mileage may vary, again, it's resource-intensive. You gotta be careful with it but sometimes, I've seen it work out. Anything else?

Neil Patel: That's it from my end.

Eric Siu: All right. So that's it for today, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get free marketing tools to grow your business and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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