3 tools to improve your conversions

During my 16+ years online, I’ve been lax in tracking and testing conversions, I admit. But it’s SO important to know your conversion on your opt-in and sales pages as well as your emails. And especially to test variations to see which one works best.

Why? When you have knowledge, you can make changes that improve your conversion. And believe me, all of the highly successful marketers test. Why not you?

So let’s talk about tracking and testing for conversion.

Imagine…

Testing 2 versions of an opt-in page for your free offer and discovering that one of them gives you more subscribers!

Testing 2 versions of a sales page and finding out that one results in more sales!

Testing emails — the subject or the content — and finding that one gets more opens and more clicks!

What would that knowledge mean to you?

There’s a tool for that…

I’ve tested some tools over the years but found them either too complicated or expensive. I think I’ve finally found a set of 4 tools that will give me the information I need to improve my conversions, so I want to share them with you and how I’m using them.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you so much information you might be overwhelmed, but here are some of the possibilities:

• Where your visitors come from and how they find you
• Which pages/posts get the most traffic
• What search terms people use to find your website
• The conversion of an opt-in or sales page — to get this, you set Goals

Once I get results about conversion of two pages I’m testing:

1. I delete the losing page
2. I duplicate the winning page using the same URL as the losing page
3. I make another change
4. I test those pages

In this way, I can continually improve my conversion rate! And I can use that link anywhere, not just in autoresponders. I can put it on my e-store page, in promotions, etc.

Isn’t that cool?

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a program that creates opt-in boxes on your website. It can do exit pop-ups, sliders (they come in from the side), bars at the top, in-post boxes, bottom of post boxes, and more. You should definitely have this type of program because people often don’t notice that opt-in box in your sidebar.

Thrive Leads does A/B testing. You create a form, create a variation, and tell it to A/B test them. You can set it to choose the winner automatically. Again, this is an iterative process–you do it over and over until you see significant results.

I love it!

Email A/B testing

I used to use AWeber for my emails to subscribers to this website. It offers A/B testing, letting me send one email to one segment and a variant to another segment. We’re going to start using this a lot more.

The feature wasn’t as good as I’d like, but then again, I’ve never heard of one that is. Here’s what I really want:

1. I create 2 subject lines
2. I specify all the people I want it to go to, let’s say 3,000 people
3. I specify it the number of people I want the split test to go to, let’s say 1,000 people
4. I give it a wait time, let’s say 3 hours
5. It randomly splits the first 1,000 emails and then automatically sends the rest of the people the winner after 3 hours

I’ve found two email programs that do this: BirdSend and MailerLite. I use BirdSend now and use the A/B testing every single day. Woo-hoo!

Are you testing? If not, why not? If you are, which tools are you using? Leave a comment and please use the Share buttons below to share this post because others will also find it valuable.