Squeeze Page Split Testing Ninja Trick

We’re currently in our house in Thailand, is hot, the food is great and people just love our small kids. Every now and then one of them is kidnapped when we’re out eating. Usually by a waitress wanting to show the kitchen our little wonder.

My girlfriend hates it and tries to keep an eye on the abductor while I assume the classic male approach and hope that they might forget to come back with my offspring (well – not really but if you have kids you’ve probably had this fantasy as well ).

But as I wrote in my last post I launching my private membership site where I help people work less and live more while we’re here.

And my site has a so called “squeeze page”. A page where I promise to give you something for free in return for your email address. You will get a series of free training videos, but eventually you will of course also receive “an offer you can’t refuse” to join my membership site.

So it’s important to me that as many people sign up on the squeeze page as possible.

If there is one universal truth about what words sell online (whether that is video, audio, pictures or text) it is that no one really knows in the specific case.

There are some best practices and you can have an idea that some combination of words will perform better, but without testing the assumption, no one can really know for sure.

So that is why we need to do split testing. We need to prove (or disprove) our thesis.

If you want to make it big with selling stuff online the big secret is continuous testing. Just look at Amazon – even though they’re a huge success, they are still split testing all the time (that is why you often see small changes in the layout and design of their site).

But I’m getting a head of myself I believe the title was squeeze page split testing ninja tricks, not how to optimize an e-commerce site (although the technique is the same).

I know that there are several good split testing tools, but I still just use Google’s offering. It’s inside Google Analytics and well integrated with everything eles in Google Analytics.

This blog post won’t be a walkthrough in using Experiments as it’s called in Google Analytics – you should be able to find that every where, instead I’m gonna show you a super secret ninja trick that can help you split test your squeeze page, actually I don’t really care what tool you are using, you can use these tricks in any split testing framework.

A Good Ninja Needs a Katana – and traffic

One the biggest problems I face with split testing is that you need traffic before you can do it. When you’re creating a new site guess what, you most likely won’t have much traffic.

But let’s face it before I start spreading the message about my squeeze page in a big style I would like to have some idea if it converts or not. For instance I won’t start recruiting a ton of affiliates for the backend product as long as I don’t know if the traffic they send me will actually convert.

This means we have a chicken or egg situation! We want traffic to our squeeze page but we won’t advertise the page until we know that it converts, and to test whether or not it converts – we need hmm… traffic through an a/b test.

So here’s the first Ninja trick. If you head over and sign up for List Joe, you will get 1000 free “credits” when signing up (1 credit = send 1 email to 1 person). Now the draw back of this is that you allow other List Joe users to spam you as well.

My first advice is therefore not to use your primary email address or create something like a filter in Gmail in order to keep the List Joe emails out of your inbox.

Now you can either send an email to 1000 subscribers right after signup, or you can wait while you collect more credits (you can either buy or spend time on clicking on other people mails to get additional credits).

I must warn you though…

You don’t get many clicks from other List Joe users. Apparently everyone just wants to send their shit, not read the emails from other users

So don’t expect to get many customers this way. But this is also why it’s perfect for split testing squeeze pages as your goal with this is not to sell products but optimize your squeeze page.

The traffic you are getting are most likely people who are used to be looking at squeeze pages and know all the psychological selling tricks in the book, so if you can convert any of them then you have a great squeeze page.

AND you get the added bonus of being able to split test your squeeze page without having to waste valuable visitors from say your newsletter list before you know that you actually got a fantastic squeeze page.

Don’t follow Sensei – grasshopper must follow own road

Now you might take my advice on this, I will at least continue to use this method for testing my squeeze pages (at least until they get enough traffic of their own).

But I also want to show you some numbers and share a little (ok big) mistake I did.

A minute ago I wrote that you didn’t get many clicks from List Joe, well let me show you the numbers for my first campaign I sent out.

As you can see I only got a 4.4% click through rate. Not exactly something to light the fireworks over. But I was just so excited to try this out that I just went in and sent the damn thing right after signup.

Problem was that it was Saturday… And as you probably know, the time that you send the email has a great influence on how many opens/clicks you get. And Saturday is probably one of the worst days to send email on.

Heck even my normal newsletter broadcasts are using functionality to send the email on just the right time based on the subscriber’s timezone. So I should know better.

So your numbers will most likely be higher if you try to send out Tuesday mornings instead of Saturday like my first broadcast.

One last lesson young grasshopper

Remember that you can split test your emails as well. You can send 1000 emails with one subject line and 1000 with another subject line.

This way you know what subject lines will work when you send the same email to your newsletter (or higher valued subscribers).

Let me know if you have any other cool split testing ninja tricks I should know about in the comments .