Can Web Copy Writers Learn From Direct Mail Techniques

Would you send a million letters costing tens of thousands
to print and mail, in a direct marketing campaign, without
testing the letter content first? It's what many website
owners do when they don't test and measure their own
website copy and content then spend thousands on web
marketing campaigns to drive traffic to their websites.

In a direct mail campaign the mailer knows based on test
mail outs what to expect and therefore what his return on
investment will be. They basically write, re-write and re-
write again until they have the content that gets the
desired response. Many moons ago I used to work full time
writing for direct mailing companies and the mailers would
ask for 3 or 4 different versions of the same message and
this was the reason. They tested each one with a short
mail out (about 1000 per mailshot) and gauged response to
find the best percentage.

So the direct mail marketer has a solid figure to work on.
He knows if he spends figure 'a' on direct mailing he will
get figure 'b' response. Why can't the same apply to
website marketing?

We think it can. We tested this theory for 8 months and
for the last 4 months have consistently been hitting the
same percentage level (roughly give or take 0.5%) of
conversion.

By defining your website goal and objective, experimenting
with copy, content, persuasion, design, colour and
architecture it is possible to predict what the response
of your website conversion will be. In other words you can
confidently predict how many people will do what you want
them to do every month. Month after month. Easy? no, it
takes a lot of work but it certainly is possible.

In a number of tests conducted on a website designed with
web services for sale through a period of 8 months from
January 2003 till August 2003, it was proved beyond doubt
that a consistent level of conversion of new visitors can
be achieved. Conversion Chronicles is the result of these
tests.

It was found that:
1) Headlines can improve the click through of a page by up
to 35%! Over two months on one page we tested the headline
and looked to see how many more visitors moved onto
another page.
The first month with the headline "Just On Site, Improve
the way you do business online" only 15% of readers went
onto do another action and stayed on the page (reading
presumably) more than 3 minutes.
With the headline "Do you know if your website is a
success or a failure?" 50% completed another action and
stayed on our website for more than 3 minutes. A terrific
improvement when you consider it was only one line of text
we changed. Ok, we think the content was pretty good
anyway but the first headline was poor and so readers just
immediately left rather than read.

2) Scan proofing greatly improves the chances of
clickthough in your pages. By writing for a reader who
scans rather than reads and making the key words appear in
bold so that (if feasible) the bold words string together
in a rough kind of sentence we found a similar increase in
response to the page. There was again over a 30%
improvement by scan proofing the text. If you want to find
out more about scan proofing read the e-book available from http://www.conversionchronicles.com. There is a
section dedicated to it.

3) Active voice writing (referring to the reader as you
and your) dramatically improve the rate of readership and
conversion. When I say dramatically, it is pretty dramatic
to see 4 times as many people respond to text which says
exactly the same thing but written in a different way.
Again there is a whole chronicle dedicated to active voice
copy writing so read it if you don't understand what I
mean.

Of course it depends on the service, the kind of
incentives, the clarity of your content and the overall
architecture to the pages. We found all this by using a
constant measure in conversion (the percentage of
subscribers from visitors rather than the number of
subscribers/enquirers) and a constant control in the email
address that was used to subscribe to.

The implications of this are that if you can do this with
your website you are in an informed enough position to
make a descision on what to spend to drive more traffic to
your website. If you get the conversion consistently right
then there is no reason to expect that the conversion rate
percentage will change simply because more qualified
traffic arrives. The key word here is qualified. If the
visitor isn't interested he won't stick around so you
still need to carefully plan how to get the traffic (the
job of SEO experts).

So if it costs you 'a' to drive 1000 visitors to your site
and you know your average conversion rate is going to be
10% you know that 'b' = 100 of those visitors will on
average be in your database. You then can do the maths and
figure out what the campaign is going to be worth to you.
Simple when you think about it.

In other words you have done what the direct mailing
marketer does, tested, experimented and then spent the
money rather than blindly hope that more visitors equals
more sales.

Have you tried it on your website? If not why not?