John Sternal

Very interesting article thank you.

It’s not clear if you used any tools to assist in measuring your tests aside from monitoring your sales.

Google’s Website Optimizer is an excellent tool that enables you to implement and measure A/B and Multivariant testing, which is essentially what you are doing by testing variations in your copy/design/layout etc. Difference is you can test two or more versions of a page and how that converts to sales (or any other goal) simultaneously.

This could help really reduce your test cycle time (as you could run X homepage variations at the same time rather than in serial).

There is a team of guys who call themselves Conversion Rate Squirrel who have a wealth of information on the subject, including Google’s Website Optimiser and numerous other tools and insights.

I recommend anyone interested in learning more in this area to look them both up.

No affiliation to either

With a more complex product like software, I think at least a 30-day “Satisfaction Guarantee” is a must. It gives buyers more confidence to take your product for a spin.

It definitely gives me something to keep in mind as I bring my mISV product to market (or buy one). Find a way to give users the warm and fuzzies about making a purchase. Help them be confident they’re making the right choice.

It would’ve been interesting to see how something like “Satisfaction Guaranteed” would have done. Saying you guarantee something is powerful, you just have to be willing to back it up. Good stuff.

1. For this site it was simple – I made changes and tracked them in a spreadsheet. For other sites I own I have a more complex process that I’ll post about in the future.

2. I no longer own the site (something I will be posting about in the future). But “Low Price Guarantee” implies that we are guaranteeing the lowest price. There were a few sentences of description after these three words that explained it in more detail.

Just to share – we already have a FB Fan Page which I think performs better than Groups which nobody checks… and also invested some money into FB Ads which performed miserably! So now we’ll be embarking on Google Ads and see how it does. Will also be trying out your idea of prweb

Thank you

1) Do you maintain a process of keeping track of your “marketing” tweaks? Are you able to refer back to past changes to develop new one’s?

2) Have you considered upping the ante with “LowEST Price Guarantee”?

I absolutely honored the guarantee. In 5 months, 1 person found a cheaper price and I refunded the difference.

1. This one was a simple testing scenario. Since I had enough traffic, I simply made one change at a time and watched my conversion rate. I didn’t need to use any special tools, although I do on some of my other sites (I’ll talk about them in the future).

2. Traffic was from organic search (primarily Google). But it could just as easily have been from AdWords, social media, etc… What mattered is that before this change I was converting a very small amount of visitors to buyers, and afterwards the conversion rate was much higher.

3. There was no traffic increase; it was purely a conversion increase. In other words, with the same amount of traffic I started making 10x the sales.

Did you actually implement that? Did anyone call you out if you didn’t have the lowest price?

1.) What testing methodologies or tools did you use to track whether your changes where effective or not?

2.) What was your primary means of driving traffic to the site (Google Adwords, Blogging, Social Media), etc?

3.) When your sales skyrocketed ten fold, did your traffic skyrocket as well or did you make ten-fold sales from the same amount of traffic?

Thank you

This is a excellent article. Congratulations for transitioning from Software Consultant to Marketer, Copyrighter aka Internet Marketing Guru

You’re right, I rushed that sentence. It should have been:

“At that point the rubber really meets the road and you find out if your design is performant, scalable, and maintainable.”

I’ve updated the post to reflect this. Thanks for the careful read.

As usual, this was a thoughtful and well-written post. But one paragraph sounded very odd:

“Today you might design an application that hits production in 6 months. At that point you find out if your design works. With enough visitors, your internet marketing test cycle can be as short as a few days.”

As a software tester, my job is to make sure we find out whether the design (and everything else in the system) works long before it goes to production. If you aren’t finding out whether your design works until after going to production, there are some big problems in development process.

By the way, it was fun meeting you at K&C’s last month. Hope all is well with you.

I performed additional marketing for the site including Adwords and a magazine ad (which failed miserably). But I found the conversion rate for beach towel related search terms to be fairly low, the competition for the terms on Adwords was fairly high, and with beach towel margins being what they are, the Adwords campaign about broke even, which made it more of a hassle than it was worth.

For your site (http://www.elevyn.com/), I think you’d at best have marginal success with AdWords (but you should test!).

A better approach would be to create a few videos (about your site’s mission, a separate video telling each vendor’s story, etc…) and post them to YouTube, Facebook, and other viral video sites.

Also, go with the social network route and start a Facebook group to get people involved. Since yours is a social cause you’re not going to pull in customers using typical advertising methods. You want to facilitate word of mouth (aka viral) recommendations as much as possible.

To that end, consider adding a “tell a friend about us” form at the end of the registration (or purchase) process, and to each product. People like to show other people they are into social causes.

Also, think about doing a promotion for a holiday (e.g. Valentine’s day), and sending out a press release through prweb.com. If you tell a good story in the release and I think you could get picked up by some online news sites.

Those are off the top of my head, and perhaps you are already exploring a few of them. You’ll never know until you test each one.

The site looks great, btw.