Which Bait Do Your Customers Respond To Best?
Split-testing is the logical way to test which motivations appeal to your customers best.
By identifying several factors that motivate your customers to buy – and testing these motivations against each other simultaneously (at the same time, with the same quality traffic) – you can measure how much of a difference these factors make to your sale.
(It’s the same as trying out different bait on two fishing rods when you go fishing, to see which bait catches more fish.)
In 2017, one particular client did exactly this.
The Six Magic Words That Increased Sales by 47.76%
Selling a large volume of musical instruments online via their ecommerce store, my client already offered several very attractive “sweeteners” that helped to increase sales. These included:
Free Express Shipping;
Financing Terms Available;
A 3-Year Warranty;
And 100 day no-questions-asked 100% money back guarantee.
But (as you’ll read in later chapters), making the most valuable marketing messages more prominent, visible and obvious can lead to a significant increase in sales.
So we decided to test each one of these appeals in one of the most prominent areas on their website – inside the “Add To Cart” button.
In the case of this particular client, mentioning any one of these four motivations for buying inside the “Add To Cart” button led to an increase in sales.
But one of these appeals was more relevant and effective at making sales than the others.
In this test, mentioning finance terms – “Buy Now, Pay Later, ZipPay Available” – led to a 47.76% increase in sales.
Interestingly, this effect wasn’t just seen among people taking up the financing offer. People who purchased without financing were also significantly more likely to purchase when shown this version of the button.
Perhaps “money worries” are a key concern of customers for this particular site – and the potential to access financing draws more customers magnetically towards the checkout. But when it comes time to register and apply for financing, many of these customers decide to simply pay via their existing credit card instead.
Whatever the case, mentioning access to finance seems to strike a chord with this ecommerce store’s musician clients.
Warning: Your Results WILL Vary
The recent series of blog posts have been focussed on the topic of relevance – and finding the motivations that appeal best to YOUR customers.
What worked for this client’s musical instrument ecommerce website may not work for you – even if you’re in a similar market with similar customers.
Your customers will have slightly different motivations. So, although you can use this particular test as inspiration for your own marketing and sales optimisation split tests, I encourage you to avoid simply copying and expecting to see a similar increase in your sales.
The risk of doing this is that you may not see an increase in sales. (In fact, you may see a decrease in sales – because your customers are different, your website is different, and your products are different. And if you’re not testing while you make changes to your marketing, you may not even notice if these changes do damage your sales by 5%, 10%, or even 20%!)
The key is to find the specific tweaks that work best for you.
If you want help with finding the motivations that could increase your sales by 5-10%, book in for a free 30-minute power session here.