If you want to grow your mailing list as fast as possible, you are going to need to learn how to split test your optin offers. Thankfully, with Aweber, its really easy to do!
A Split Testing Case Study
As my regular readers will know, I have a large number of niche websites in the digital camera niche. One of the reasons that I have so many sites in one niche (called “grouping”) is that I wanted to be able to build a mailing list to generate additional passive income, however, I didn’t want to have to create a mailing list for each and every site.
By having a group of similar sites, it really wasn’t very hard to design my mailing list to be usable for all the sites. By doing this, I was also able to use a single optin form (more on that in a sec) for all the sites.
Being able to have a single optin form, just one list, and one set of auto-responders saved me a TON of time when it came to getting everything all set up and working.
Split Testing for Faster Growth
After I had my list growing for a while, I wanted to see if I could make it grow faster. To do that, I started split testing two different types of forms (back in Feb).
As you can see, in both situations, there was a marked difference in the S/D (ratio of optins per number of displays).
For example, on the lightbox, the better performing form got an additional 9 subscribers. On the sidebar form, which was displayed over twice as many times as the lightbox form (the lightbox is a fade in form that only shows once per visitor, whereas the sidebar form is shown continuously throughout their visit), the extra performance got me an additional 63 subscribers!
Using Aweber for Split Testing
As you can see from the image below, setting up split testing with Aweber is pretty darn easy. All you need is to have created two forms, then click the big green button and the wizard will walk you through the rest.
Once you have the split test setup, all you need to do is to past the code into a text box on the widgets area within the WP admin panel and you are done. The only additional thing that I’d suggest you do is to mark a task in your calendar to check the split test results at some point in the future.
Improving Your Split Testing Results
For me, I let the test run for a few months and then went back and changed the forms that were performing poorly. You might want to change the graphics on the form, the colors, text, the size, etc…but only change one thing at a time or you won’t know which change was helping you!
-Trent
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Who’s Trent?
Having sold his last business for over a million bucks in 2008 by the age of 38, Trent has since immersed himself in the study of internet marketing by going out and doing. Continue reading...
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