When you start out with your brand new, shiny sales funnel, it is quite common to try to find out what is the Best 
Headline / Best Colour / Best Image, etc for a given page. I must admit, that was something I asked many times. Did many searches to try to find the one answer to that question. Asked quite a few people too!
The interesting thing with marketing, and particularly with your subscribers, is that they will tell you. Do I mean, I must call them all up, and say, “Hey, Bob, what headline should I use?” Of course not. If they had the answer, they would probably be doing what you’re trying to do.
If you’re trying to put together an awesome headline, one that has you salivating at the thought of that juicy sizzling steak or being sucked in by the weird hack that made an ex-goat herder a millionaire, but you can’t guess how – then you’re not alone. There are things that you can add to a headline to make it work better. Ultimately, though, your visitors will tell you what they like.
The way that your visitors tell you what they like is by subscribing to your opt-in page when they like the headline. It means that you said something that caught their interest, and they in some way identified with whatever it was that you were trying to say. And you see this by adding tracking to your pages. I use this tracking software personally.
One thing that I should point out – my best opt-in rate ever was from the ugliest squeeze page you have ever seen. I mean, oranges, blues, yellows. Kind of like vomit with a headline in the middle. My point is not to change the ugliest designs, just that you can never tell what will work until the results show you.
Coming back to my initial premise for this post. If I am very good at selling fishing rods to my subscribers, I might have developed a headline that works well for my subscribers. You might also be a keen fisherman, but you have a slightly different style to me, and my headline might not work as well with your subscribers.
And if instead, I am trying to convince people to take up an affiliate marketing coaching course, then I don’t talk to the fishing rod headline guy! Unless of course your affiliate marketing subscribers are all fishermen, and your list is something like Affiliate Marketing for fishermen. In that case, the fishing rod guys’ headline might net you a few big fish!
Whilst there are many things that you can try that can help a headline, and if you stole a headline from a successful affiliate marketer, it would probably work well. It would only be a starting point for you to test, to find out if your subscribers like it or not.
There are then two approaches to testing – if you want to try completely unrelated variations – called multivariate testing, or A/B testing. Multivariate is what you might try to for example work out which marketing angle to use: appeal to someone who is lazy or appeal to someone who has no money. The messages are likely to be completely different.
Once you have an angle that appears to work better, you can then use an A/B test to fine-tune that baseline version.
So you might try two slightly different worded headlines, or two different button colours, or one with a pop up one without. This allows you to gradually work through all the scenarios of testing and land on something, hopefully, that gets the results that you want. You are likely to continually test your pages looking for improvements. Unless of course, you are getting 100% opt-in, which over any campaign involving a decent amount of traffic is almost impossible.
When you first start with your sales funnel, your opt-in page might get you a 20% opt-in rate. At first, if you think about it, you think, “What a waste, that’s 80% of people that I didn’t get”. But what happened is that you have not found the message, with the right formatting that people are interested in. That is valuable to know – next time, you try to get more of that 80%.
At first, my pages had a 20-30% opt-in rate. But over time, I picked up ideas from the sales page, other opt-in pages or sales pages, and tried those. Over time it improved. Once it gets to 50% or more that might be where you can concentrate on more subtle tweaks. Tweaks such as colours, bold fonts, underlines and so on.
So don’t be disheartened when you don’t get the results that you thought you would. As you test, you get to know your subscribers more, and can better align your messages to their ears. This is when the fun really starts to happen.
I’m writing this guest post, as I proceed through my step-by-step training created by my mentor, John Thornhill. Loving the content so far, you can see what it is about here.
And if you want to follow my progress, or get more ideas on internet marketing, please go here.
If you like this post, please drop a comment below.
This is a guest post from Martin Platt, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
