How I Improved My Sales Conversion by 39.7%

Improving the conversion rates of your landing pages can be a make or break for a lot of internet businesses.

And if you have landing pages for your products and services (or even a newsletter or lead magnet), you should certainly be focused on making them better.

Because if you can get this process right, it can mean increased revenue for your business, and more of your customers solving their problems.

The trick is simple. It’s called A/B testing (or “split testing”), and it’s been a game-changer for my business.

If you're not A/B testing, you're certainly leaving opportunities (and revenue) untapped. But most people either don’t know how to run an A/B test, or they don’t even realize it’s an option.

Let’s fix that.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B Testing is a simple method for testing user experience, using different variables.

You could A/B Test for just about anything. But in today’s case, we’re talking about landing pages.

When you build a landing page, it has one job. Get visitors to convert to buyers or subscribers (or whatever your desired outcome is).

Here’s the basic idea of an A/B Test. When people visit your landing page, you can experiment with different variables like fonts, colors, copywriting, and calls to action.

You create two versions of your landing page — one featuring your original page (your 'A' or ‘control’), and another with a tweak you think might perform better (your 'B' or ‘variant’).

You can also bake off two entirely different landing pages — that’s what I’ve been doing.

You then split your audience 50/50 between the two versions, driving half of your traffic to Landing Page A and the other half of your traffic to Landing Page B.

Then you measure which landing page drove better conversions (sales, signups, etc)

This experiment takes the guesswork (and emotional bias) out of your landing page design, and helps you use real, actionable data to make informed decisions.

A/B Testing gives you direct insights into what your audience actually wants, which enables you to fine-tune your approach for better results.

Now I’ll explain how I recently improved my landing conversions, so you can use my learnings in your experiments.

Step 1: Choose what you’re going to A/B test

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes of my most recent A/B test.

A few months ago, I updated my website and landing pages to feel more polished.

So far, the feedback has been awesome, and I’ve sold more of my LinkedIn Operating System than ever before.

But my Content Operating System conversion rate fell, and that surprised me.

After a lot of thought, I decided to re-create the old landing page design that had performed well, using my new fonts and colors. (Old design, with new brand assets.) I wanted to bake it off against the newer landing page that was not converting as well as the old one.

Enter the A/B Test.

I had my Control (The ‘A’) which is my current landing page and the Variant (The ‘B’) which is my old landing page that I updated.

Step 2: Install and execute

When the two versions of my landing page were ready, I opened up a 30-day free trial of Crazy Egg. (I'm not an affiliate, just a fan)

Crazy Egg is a service that will run your A/B Test for you.

All you need to do is sign up, install the code on your landing page, and then choose the two pages you want to split traffic between.

Then you set up a goal. For me, the goal was simply a purchase of the Content Operating System.

I wanted to see which landing page would convert to more sales for this product.

As your A/B Test begins, Crazy Egg will split traffic 50/50 between your two landing pages. Half of your audience will see Landing Page A, and half of them will see Landing Page B.

Pretty impactful.

Another thing I love about Crazy Egg is that they use a “multi-armed bandit method” which is a fancy name for something simple: The better one page performs, the higher percentage of traffic they’ll begin sending to the “better” page.

For example, if Landing Page A is converting at a 35% better rate, rather than continuing to split your traffic 50/50, Crazy Egg might start splitting it 60/40 with more traffic going to the higher-performing page.

So your experiment keeps running, but you reap the rewards of higher conversions. Win-win.

Step 3: Analyze, iterate and repeat

Once your A/B test is running, you can sit back and watch as the data pours in.

As you can see, the Variant page (or ‘B’) is outperforming the Control page (or ‘A’) by 39.7%. Obviously, this is a very small piece of data over a few days, so it's certainly not statistically significant yet.

So, I’m going to let the test run for 60-90 days to ensure I have enough data to reach a smart conclusion.

And once the data selects a winner, I can move onto further A/B testing like testing out new headers, sub-headers, pictures, etc. And with each test, my conversion rate should improve.

Once we have an ultimate winner? I’ll make permanent changes to my landing page.

Here’s the neat thing: I get roughly 10,500 visitors per month to The Content Operating landing page. So if I can really improve my conversions by 1.5%, that’s 158 more sales per month, at an average price of $130. That makes these small landing page improvements worth $240,000 per year.

And THAT is why A/B testing is so important.

Action Plan: Running Your A/B Test

• Decide what you will compare for a test
• Sign up for a free 30 day trial with Crazy Egg
• Define your “goal” for your A/B Test (sales, sign-ups, subscribers, etc)
• Install Crazy Egg on your website
• Choose the two pages you’ll split traffic between
• Sit back and watch the data roll in
• Update your landing page design with data-based insights
• Enjoy better conversions

Good luck!

P.S. If you enjoyed this issue, you'll love my new course, The Creator MBA, coming January 16th, 2024. Join 14,800+ entrepreneurs on the waitlist to learn more.