You may or may not be surprised by this, but even top marketers don’t get their best conversions right out of the blocks when they launch a new product.
The best improvements come after making a product offer public and with optimization of your selling system.
Small improvements over time can make a massive difference in your profit.
Of course, testing and optimizing sales letters and other ‘offer’ pages is important, but it is also important to be able to improve each step in your selling process.
Your sales system (the system that moves prospects along the buying pathway) is, far and away, the most important component of your online selling efforts. It is the series of web pages that put money in your pocket! So, it only makes sense to constantly look for ways to improve your results.
In order to effectively improve your results you need to know three things
1) What are your major goals?
2) What is the action that you want your prospects to take at each step of your selling process? and
3) How well is your system working now to help you attain your goals and to get your prospects to take the actions you want them to take?
Let’s take them one at a time:
1) What are your major goals?
In online selling, there really are just two categories of goals: “opt-ins” and “sales”. If your sales process is a list building campaign, then the major goal of your system is an “opt-in.” If your sales process is focused on selling a product, then the major goal is a “sale.” Or, of course you can have both an opt-in and a sales goal for a selling system.
This is a pretty fundamental element, but if you are not clear about your major goal, then you have no chance of being able to improve your results.
2) What is the action that you want your prospects to take at each step of your selling process?
Each step in your selling process should have one, very specific action you want your prospect to take, and that action should be very clear to both you and your prospect. I call these “mini goals” MDAs (Most Desired Action).
For an list-building campaign, for instance, the process might look like this:
Page 1: Free Offer -> Page 2: Thank You Page -> Page 3: Email Confirmation Page + Tell-A-Friend Form
For Page 1: the MDA is to opt-in to receive a free offer.
For Page 2: the MDA is for the prospect to confirm their email address
For Page 3: The MDA is to recommend the offer to a few friends
3) How well is the system working now?
Now that you know what you want to accomplish — both overall with your major goals and with each MDA along the way — now it is time to measure your results.
Integrate a tracking and analytics tool into your sales system so that you can see what is happening at every step.
This takes a bit of work, but it is absolutely critical that you can measure the effectiveness of your system so that you can start so see where prospects are dropping out of the process (or “funnel”) and test different approaches to see what can be improved.
Using the free analytics tool that comes with your hosting will give you the basic information you need. You can also try Google Analytics.
In either case, you will need to get good at extracting the most relevant statistics so that you can maximize your profits.
I am in the process of beta testing and refining a tracking and analytics tool that is designed specifically for these kinds of applications. If you want to be one of the first to know when the tool becomes publicly available, please follow click on my name at the top of this post.
This post was submitted by Doug Hudiburg.
