Tease and Trial Or Proof and Order?

[CashBomb]

I had an interesting experience recently after I tested a new sales letter for my product in the Forex space. Thought it might be useful for others as a case study.

The forex markets offers the potential for crazy short term returns if you know what you are doing, so I developed such a strategy, and used it to turn $500 into more than $1,500. I reset the account and did it again, turning $500 into $1,200 in two weeks. All done with real money, and I had the account records to prove it so I put them up on my sales page which used the real world proof as it's USP. (Which took them to a buy now button with 60 day guarantee.)

This converted at about 11% all through the launch phase, but now as I wear out my list and start to add in new traffic sources I noticed that conversions are way down and the new traffic did not seem to care about the video proof elements anymore.

They read through the sales letter, but did not push play on the videos...

So I changed my headline to make an outrageous profit claim and tease the proof elements....

218% in Less Than 24 Hours, 40% in Less Than 18 Hours, 35% on ONE TRADE?

...Heck, I Made 30% LAST WEEK!

And I Did It LIVE Forex Trading Online In Front Of An Audience!

(These Trades Are All On Video!)


I stripped the letter of all the proof elements like my bio, links to my books etc.. No proof now, it is just teaser copy and blind bullets with a Joe Karbo type delayed billing free trial for risk reversal.

...and BOOM!

It's converting at twice the rate as the old page...

It seems that with so many offerings and sales pages out there, the prospect doesn't believe your proof these days no matter how legit. They want to test the product themselves, and so the sales process is more about tantalizing them with how important it is for them to do the free trial and find out what they are missing...

Anybody else see a similar shift in conversion tendencies?