Testing Your Sales Letter

Testing your sales letter is the single most important task in internet marketing. If you don't know what the conversion rate is on your letter, whether it's a webpage, email or offline direct mail letters, your doomed for failure.

Webpage Sales Letter
Your webpage sales letter is easy to test. Setup a targeted traffic campaign to point to your letter. The campaign has to have the ability to track clicks your letter.

The best way for tracking click thru rates(CTR), number of impressions divided by the clicks to your site, is setting up a pay per click(PPC) campaign. Whether it's Adwords, Adbrite, MSN Adcenter, or Yahoo's Publisher Network, you will be able to track how many clicks your ad is getting to your sales letter.

Now you know much traffic your sales page is getting, number of people seeing the letter. Take this number and divide it by the number of sales your letter receives. This is the conversion rate of your sales page.

If you're unhappy with the results of the conversion rate, and you should always be unhappy with these results unless it's 100%, you can do split testing. Create a second sales letter and setup a PPC campaign similar to the other one and only change one aspect of the old letter, usually the headline.

If your new letter gets a better conversion rate then this now becomes your control and make it the primary page. If doesn't beat out the first letter then change something else, the postscript(PS), and try again.

The headline and the PS are the 2 most read pieces of your sales letter. I would try changing these two features first before I moved onto the body or the offer. The body is the least read part of the letter so I would test it last.

Email Sales Letter
If you are gathering leads then selling your product through an email campaign it's very easy to track your conversion rate. All you have to do is divide the number of sales by the prospects on your list.

If you have multiple sales letters in your autoresponder series you will have to check to see when the prospect signed up to know which letter sold the product. This will allow to split test your letters with the autoresponder.

Most marketers like to send their prospects to a webpage sales letter to complete the sale by clicking a link in an email message. If you are using this process you will need to test your webpage letter first before starting your lead generation campaign.

To know which letter is getting the clicks to your sales page, you can set up a sales page for each email letter. This will help in your split testing.

It doesn't matter if you have a great looking website, thousands of prospects on your list, and a fool proof campaign, if your not making sales it's because your sales letter SUCKS!

Never stop testing your sales letters. Eventually you will kill the sales. Then test some more! And then some more!