Aweber Tutorial - Split testing with Aweber to triple my conversions

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I'm going to talk about using split testing as a way to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and specifically to get more people to sign up for your newsletter. So this is the page that I showcase all the favorite tools that I use to grow my business. And what I use for my newsletter is a service called AWeber. Just find it here. And so my list is over 50,000 people, kind of growing every day. Um, and I'm going to log into my AWeber backend and show you how I'm using a number of different tests to try to get the most out of my email list. So for any of you who are trying to get people to sign up for your email list, split testing is a fantastic way to do it and be able to get the most out of the people who are visiting your site. So this is the AWeber backend, and these are the different web forms you can create. So the test that I recently set up is around the lightbox. And a lightbox is one of those hover things that pop up over your page when somebody logs on to your site. So a quick example, if I load one up just so you can see what it looks like, is this. So you basically give away a free offer, so it's a free ebook that has a value on it. People can enter their name and email. You can, you know, show some other things here as well, and then they sign up and they get the email. So this kind of hovers over the page and they can either fill it in or close it. So I recently set this up. I am not committed to the lightbox idea. I just wanted to test it out. A few friends of mine had some good success with it. So like any marketing, you test it out and see if it works for you or not. And so I set up 8 different tests, and I can do it because I get significant traffic to my site. So for you, you might want to just test one thing at a time and, you know, make sure you have something works before moving on. You don't want to run too many tests because then it's hard to determine which one is actually going to generate a good result for you or not. So for me, in this example, the different things that I tested— I'll load that one back up here— I haven't tested the offer. And so that's something that you can test as well. You know, what is the offer? And you know, what's the best one to give people that they're going to have the best response with? I do a lot of stuff around Famous Entrepreneurs, so that's how I started off. What I'm testing that I'll show you some data on, one is Is it better to have people leave their name and email, or do I want to give them the option to log in via Facebook? Now, AWeber allows you to integrate Facebook into your forms. So if somebody has logged in through Facebook, you can see that they can quickly log in and sign up through their Facebook account. I want to test adding media in here, so it shows that, hey, this is a reputable site, it's been featured in lots of different media before. And I want to test if there's a customer testimony or not. So in this testimonial, one of my newsletter readers, it's a success story, you know, "You have no idea how much your stories have saved my life. I want to say thanks." And so I wanted to test having Facebook or having your name and email, having the media in or not, and having the testimonial in or not. So all in all, it creates 8 different scenarios that I can highlight here so you can see the difference. Now a lot of them have gotten some good impressions, so we're looking at you know, 25,000 to 30,000 impressions each. So we're getting some, you know, decent volume on that to be able to make some numbers from. And you can see they've had a big difference. Uh, one example is our best one performs at 1.5%. So 1.5% of people who saw it converted to become a newsletter subscriber, and the worst one converted at 0.5%. So there's not that much different. I spent a lot of time making that ebook and crafting the message That's where most of the work was. The only difference is those few elements like Facebook or not, you know, do I put a picture, a couple pictures in the testimonials or media or not. And just by making a few tweaks, I can go from 0.5% to 1.5%, and I can triple the amount of people who subscribe to my newsletter. So you're taking all that work and you're just getting more and more out of it. So this is the value of testing, because there isn't that big a difference between my 3 scenarios. So the one that had the best result seemed to be this one here where we had no Facebook and just plain vanilla. So people don't seem to like the media and they don't like the customer testimonials. That could be just how I laid it out, but, uh, you know, from these examples, it's just going to show me I want to keep it simple. And the next thing I might want to do is test the offer so I can test different offers against each other, see which one works better. Now, the one thing that did stand out The first 4 here, it says number 1 and FB, which means Facebook. So when you're creating your different reports, you can call them whatever you want. So I called them, you know, FB for the ones that had the Facebook login, and 2, no FB, for the ones that didn't have the Facebook login. So these 4 were all Facebook, and these ones did not give the option to sign up from Facebook. It just asked your name and email. And what's really surprising for me was the ones that had the Facebook option converted much more poorly than the ones that did not have the Facebook. So if you look at Facebook, it was 0.7, 0.6, 0.6, 0.5% conversion, and no Facebook was 1.5, 1.3, 1.3, 1.0. So across the board, having the option for people to sign up through Facebook really lowers the number of people who will sign up for your newsletter, which is, you know, I didn't know that, so it was a good test to make sure. And now I'm gonna delete all 4 of these campaigns and focus on a no Facebook option and trying to get these going better. So this was a new project for me and I didn't know what to expect. With any new project, I'm usually expecting pretty low numbers and then you test, test, test, test, test until you can boost the response rate. So what I'm probably going to do is obviously delete these first 4 with Facebook and then try to optimize these a little bit better. So, you know, 1.5% is my best now. How do I change the offer and maybe make the design a little bit better, play around with the colors to try to get that to 2% or 2.5% or 3%? And again, that's just the value of testing. Most of the hard work was in creating that report, but just by making a few simple tweaks, you can triple the number of people who respond to your offer. So I hope that helps. That's, you know, pretty easy to do within AWeber. You may need a little bit of technical backend to understand how to make it randomly choose one of these 8 options or one of 2 options, whatever it is for your website. I just wanted to illustrate the importance of testing and being able to triple your results is something that I think most entrepreneurs would want to do for their site. So thank you for watching another video. If you guys liked it, please leave a comment below. I'd love to hear what you guys are doing. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. And I always appreciate those thumbs-ups if you want to give them on the videos. So thank you and stay tuned for the next episode.