How a Dead Advertising Exec Helped Us Beat Our Control- 7-Times Over!
Yes, yes, I realize it’s after Halloween. The zombies are back in the closet, and all of the Officer Naughty’s have hung up their short skirts for the season. But there is still one man that haunts from the grave, and he’s the reason we just beat our control by 7 times!
As marketers know, we need to continually test our marketing pieces for ultimate effectiveness and conversion. We want to bring in as much money from a single advertisement, web page or radio ad as possible. In order to do this, we need to run a split-test, sending half of the traffic to one page, and the other half to a variation — then monitor and see which page wins.
Last week, a client of ours came to us with a landing page that he needed some work done on. Life got in the way, and he didn’t have time to create a split-test for us to use, so I asked if I could create one myself. He agreed, and I thought about what we could change.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from the top marketing gurus is that “Rich people have big libraries; poor people have big TV’s”. This was the perfect time to turn back to some of the old texts I have in my library and see what the past experts have said about this.
The landing page I was given and asked to beat was a video squeeze page. We’ve worked with these before, and they do a great job at converting. I even remember Bill Glazer say that delaying the purchase button on the video salespage for the Info Summit had the most conversions.
I decided to do an A/B split-test, testing the original design against my own. The first thing that stuck out to me was the fact that the video for the landing page was black, and there was white text moving on the screen. I turned back to a passage in a book I had read 18 months before from the late, great David Ogilvy, in his prolific book “Ogilvy on Advertising”. There was a footnote about how he was given a piece of advertising for a non-profit that was set inverted — black background with white text. He simply had the image turned back to the normal white background with black texts and … get this … saw DOUBLE the response. Double!
I simply inverted the video of our client and setup Google’s Website Optimizer to do a fair split test. To our amazement, Ogilvy was wrong. We didn’t get double response, we got 7-times more!
We only had to send about 3,000 visitors to realize how big of a deal this was. The purchase button appears after a set amount of time, and the test showed that on the control, the page we were given, the customer was averaging 1:06 minutes on the page.
Just changing the colors enticed people to stick around for 7 times longer, giving us more of an opportunity to present the full offer and payment options. That’s effectively saying that for the control, 1 in 15 watched the video to the end [where the purchase button magically appeared and asked them give us all of their monies]. The variation I made computed to near 1 in 2 visitors seeing the purchase button. Conversions mirrored what these numbers showed. It was a massive success.
Talking about my library, it’s incredible how many people I know who lack a library on their field of work. When I met the Independent Business Advisor for the Glazer-Kennedy Insiders Circle here in Brighton, MI, I was floored with his extensive library of old classics, with authors like Claude Hopkins and Gary Halbert. Derek had 2 walls of books, with the shelves dipping low to accommodate the fat 3-ring binders, literally bursting with million-dollar information. If you ask him, I bet he’d agree that his success is directly related to the information he’s read and put into action.
I remember hearing about Eben Pagan packing stacks of books to take with him on trips, just so he could cite the great marketers who have already figured out the puzzle. Why do it yourself?
Our job as marketers is to increase conversion and reduce costs. The biggest shortcut is to take the ideas others have used and apply them to your own business. If you haven’t already, get a copy of these basic bibles in direct response marketing:
- “Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy
- “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins
- “The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales” by Dan Kennedy
And read them EVERY YEAR. Sure, there are changes to what order button is converting better, or the legalities of testimonials, but one thing that never changes is the basics of good marketing.
Also, keep an eye out when you stop at bookstores on trips. Take a minute and see if there are any gems hiding in the dust, stuff by Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, or any other marketer who has made it big.
Finally, take massive action and you will see massive return.
— Casey “David Ogilvy Is My Middle Name” Stanton