Several weeks ago a (possibly former) rebill advertiser got his assets frozen. Here’s an excerpt from the CBC article:
…cheated customers out of $450 million in an internet scam where products or services advertised as free trial offers or risk-free — such as health and beauty products — were actually being billed to customers’ credit cards monthly.
Now, obviously, there’s a lot of lessons to be learned here and some very serious allegations. However, I’m not an attorney so I’m not going comment on these legal issues.
There were quite a few rebill advertisers, but he outperformed them. I want to comment on an ethical technique that he used. I just read this article about the advertiser, “What’s he selling now?” that reveals something interesting:
Willms employed rigorous testing to determine what combination of graphics and ad copy resulted in the most sales. Consumers who clicked on an ad would see one of two different order pages, and the company tracked which page was more successful. Willms told the graphics department to make changes based on the results, and a new site was built nearly every day. “That was the number one thing that made Jesse successful versus any other competitor,” says a former employee. “Even now, nobody really puts in the time and energy to continually optimize.”
If I simply told you that the secret to successful landing pages is hard work, you would not have been too impressed by this advice.
But… it really is. You need to constantly test new landing pages. In the last year, I’ve tested over 200 different landing pages on just one single campaign. And, that does not even include the near-infinite combinations of multivariate tests that I’ve done as well.
In summary, split test every day.
One more thing…
I’m going to publish a few case studies on this blog that have a proven track record of increasing conversions by other marketers. Because I rarely blog, I recommend that you subscribe via RSS or email to get my latest post as soon as it comes out.
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