Before diving in to today’s content, I thought I’d share TWO things:

1. Our brand new copywriting manual…

“101 Hard-Hitting Conversion Hacks That Pro-Copywriters Would Rather You Did NOT Know About”

You can download that by CLICKING HERE, or by using one of the other links in the blog post below.

2. A personal update, it’s been a while since I did that.

If you want to skip the small talk, scroll on down…

Right now, as I write this blog post, I’m sitting in a chalet in the French Alps (right on the border of Switzerland), in a small ski town called Morzine. Here’s my view…

This is one of my favorite places on Earth.

My wife and I did a ski season here in 2010, then came back for a month in 2015, and are here for another month now (this time we’re here in the Summer)!

I’ve said it before… but for me THIS is what’s so amazing about running an online business.

Having the freedom to live life on your terms.

To choose where you live, choose when you work, and have no limitations on how much you can grow your business…

Just being here inspires me.

Anyway, enough small talk, let’s get in what matters today, hacking better results through split testing!

How To Hack Your Way To A Better ROI Through Split Testing

When most people think about split testing, they tend to think about increasing a conversion rate, or increasing a click through rate. While these things are part of what you ought to be doing, they shouldn’t necessarily be the main focus.

What we focus on is OCV, Optimizing Customer Value (sometimes also referred to as CVO, Customer Value Optimization).

If you’re trying to make money from your online business, then OCV is a CRITICAL component, and split testing is brilliant way, one of the best ways, to systematically optimize customer value.

How Joe Increased Net Profit By 58%

Consider the following example:

“Joe sells iPhone cases on his website. He gets 100 visitors each day, and makes an average of $100/day. His average customer ‘front end’ value is therefore $1 (front end refers to the immediate sale, it doesn’t take repeat sales into consideration). Over the course of a year, Joe makes $36,500 in sales.

But Joe has some expenses…

He pays $5,000 per year in advertising, and $10,000 in product costs (actually buying the physical products that he’s selling). His net profit is $21,500.

Keep in mind his average customer value is $1, that’s the important metric he’s working on here…

Joe is determined to earn more from his site, so he starts optimizing. He decides he will charge $0.50 more for shipping on each order, changes a couple of headlines, adds some well thought out product descriptions, speeds up his website load time, and optimizes for mobile devices.

After a couple of weeks, Joe is still getting 100 visitors each day, but is now making $140 per day. His costumer value is now $1.40, and over the course of a year, he now makes $51,100 in revenue.

His costs have stayed fairly similar. He still has $5,000 in ad spend, and his product costs have now increased slightly to $12,000, because he’s selling more units. His net profit is now $34,100.

Previously, he was netting $21,500 for the exact same amount of traffic. By implementing a few smart tweaks, and focusing on OCV, he’s increased his NET profit by a whopping 58% (he’s earning an EXTRA $12,600 profit each year)!”

This little story is something we’ve seen play out over and over again with online businesses. People who focus on OCV always tend to do much better than people who just cruise along accepting whatever metrics they get.

It makes no difference what your online business model is, if you want to make money, then OCV is a vital metric that needs your attention.

So how can you affordably work on your OCV on a part-time basis?

The answer is to leverage tools.

We use a combination of two main tools:

• VWO.com (Visual Website Optimizer)
• BlackBirdSuite.com

Disclaimer: We have no affiliation with VWO whatsoever. We simply love using it and have used it for many years. BlackBird however, is owned by us. We think it’s a great tool, superior and more complete than any others on the market. Hopefully you agree!

Let’s talk about VWO first. VWO is a tool we’ve used for years for OCV projects. It works with any platform, EXCEPT Amazon.com.

If you’re selling on Amazon.com, then you’ll need something like BlackBird, we’ll get in to that soon. First though, let’s take a closer look at what VWO can do, and how it does it.

Have you downloaded 101 copywriting hacks yet? If not… Click the link below!

A/B Testing

A/B testing is the process of creating variations of your website landing page, sending traffic to each different variation, and seeing which one results in the best customer value. This is a great starting point for anyone looking to dive in to split testing for the first time.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is when you test multiple changes to a webpage all at once. This type of testing is almost impossible to do manually, as there are so many permutations and combinations you could show someone. VWO makes it easy 🙂

Split-URL Testing

This is similar to A/B testing, only that you’re sending visitors to two different URLs, and seeing which one performs best. Unlike Split-URL testing, A/B split testing can be done on one single URL, by dynamically making changes to the way the pages are displayed. Without a tool like VWO, split-URL testing is the easiest way to get started.

Recent Examples

Below is an example showing three different landing pages in one of our online marketing lead generation funnels.

Clearly variations 2 and 3 are performing MUCH better than the original design… in fact, almost 20 percentage points higher (55.95% conversion rate compared to 36.5%).

The difference here is actually much more than a 20% increase… the original conversion rate of 36.5% has increased by 53%! Since the amount we pay for traffic stays constant, it means we get MANY more leads for the same cost.

And here you can see the metrics, as taken from inside VWO.com:

NOTE: The ‘Control’ in the image above is referred to as ‘Variation 1’ in the previous image. Variation 3 and 4 above is referred to as Variation 2 and 3 in the previous image.

What About Split Testing On Shopify?

Here’s an example of one of our Shopify campaigns where we’ve used VWO to increase earnings per visitors from $0.88 to $1.16 over a 20-day period (an increase of 32%).

From the above chart, you can see the following:

The ‘Control’ generated $676.83 from 768 visitors, a value of $0.88 per visitor.

‘Variation 1’ has earned $909.89 from 779 visitors, a value of $1.16 per visitor.

Remember… this is over a period of 20 days, where we’ve received 1,547 visitors, that’s 77 visitors per day.

If you keep the traffic coming in at the same rate, here’s how it looks over a period of a year:

Original (Control): $0.88 x 77 visitors x 365 days = $24,732
New Page (Variation 1): $1.16 x 77 visitors x 365 days = $32,602

That’s a VERY healthy gain for 10 minutes work 🙂

How to use VWO?

VWO have plenty of information on their website showing exactly how to use the tool and set up tests, they also have a very responsive live support team who can help you at each step of the way.

What About Amazon?

VWO does not integrate with Amazon, so you can’t use it to split test Amazon listings. That’s where BlackBird comes in 🙂

If you’re unfamiliar with BlackBird, you can find out more information here: http://www.blackbirdsuite.com

In a nutshell, BlackBird is designed for people who sell their own products on Amazon, and it provides them with:

• In depth Amazon white-label training
• Product Research software
• Customer Relationship Management software (to automate the sending of emails)
• Advanced product tracking (and the ability to spy on competitors)
• On-Page performance analysis (and critiques)
• Negative alerts
• Strategic “Grab a Guru” support
• Split testing
• Financial Management (coming this month!)
• And a lot more!

The key module we’re discussing today, is the Split Testing module.

Here’s a video that shows how easy it is to set up split tests on Amazon products from within BlackBird:

As you can see, BlackBird makes it EASY to split test product pages and increase profitability.

Split testing is something that every single Amazon seller should be doing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve launched your first product today, or if you’ve been selling on Amazon for years, you always need to be split testing, and it’s never too early to start.

To learn more about BlackBird, go here: http://www.blackbirdsuite.com

Things To Keep In Mind…

Split testing is about find statistically significant winners.

The very first thing you need to figure out though, is what should your objective be…

Are you aiming to get subscriptions? If so, can you go one step further and measure revenue generated from those subscribers?

Are you trying to boost your Amazon sales? If so, perhaps you should re-think your priorities… sometimes it makes financial sense to make FEWER sales at a higher margin, so what you should really be aiming to achieve is a higher net profit.

What if you’re selling physical products on your own website? Then focus on average value per visitor.

Measurement is key, but ONLY when you’re measuring the right thing.

Statistical significance is also critically important. If you flip a coin three times, it might land on heads all three times, this doesn’t mean it’ll always land on heads though, it’s not a statistically significant test.

Tools like VWO and BlackBird do all the heavy lifting for you. They use the Chi Squared formula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-squared_test) to figure out when something is statistically significant… believe me, unless you’re a Math Mastermind, this is NOT a formula you want to get in to!

Leave A Comment!

We’d love to hear your thoughts about all this, and if you’ve got any experience split testing, please let us know how it went for you (and share any tips for other readers).

Until next time, thanks for visiting.

Aidan Booth