Exit Splash

totally.. test test test that's the key to IM

You can make a valid decision for your business only by testing in your business: as you were just saying yourself a few moments ago, "Test, test, test - that's the key to IM".

The mistake, in this context, is the assumption some marketers make that an increase in opt-ins means one's necessarily gaining some benefit by using them. This is far from the truth.

Careful, accurate split-testing, monitoring longer-term income from two parallel groups over a significant timescale, may (and sometimes does) show the exact opposite to be the case. Some people are willing to assume that building a bigger list inevitably leads to more income. Those who test, again, quite often find the opposite (as I did, myself, when testing something else, in each of four separate niches). Again, some people are gullible enough to imagine that a discount exit pop-up is bringing them "additional sales" because "those were all people leaving the site, weren't they?" It genuinely doesn't occur to them to wonder how many would otherwise have returned a little later (few people buy at their first visit to a sales page, after all) and paid the full price - so it's pretty easy for naive marketers to be losing profit while imagining that they're gaining profit. :p

The reason some of these gimmicks survive at all is that few people quite appreciate what careful, accurate testing involves, and rather than troubling themselves with the details, they're pretty often content to rely on others' second-hand impressions, typically with reasoning along the lines of "Well, this stuff 'must' work, otherwise so many people wouldn't be using it, would they? They've tested it, after all". :rolleyes: :p