Test, test, test...

Right, just to give back to this section of the forum a little, here's a personal case study about the importance of testing.

This won't be new to the more experienced here, but it might help some.

We've struggled in the past to get decent conversions to our lightbox opt-in on my site.

My husband has written literally hundreds and hundreds (if not over a thousand) different short pitches to our visitors (pre-dominantly busy professional females and mothers).

Here's some interesting findings:

• He discovered that the slight delay of using an image gave them time to close the box without being captivated.
  
• He discovered that capitalising each word in the heading caused conversions to drop.
  
• He discovered that anything REMOTELY pushy, pitchy, or sales, caused conversions to drop.
  
• He discovered that being brief was absolutely critical, and that even a list of 3 bullet point benefits didn't seem to work.
  
• He discovered that different coloured headlines (like red) lowered conversions.

We even hired a copywriter and his pitch didn't pull any higher than some of my husbands.

It seemed like we couldn't get much higher than 2%.

Yup, that was all hubby, or the copywriter could get.

Now, it's never going to be like a squeeze page. It's a lightbox intruding people visiting a blog where people come from Google from all sorts of different keywords, so it's hard to target them all to keep their attention and get them to convert.

One of our better ones which we ran for a long time went like this:

One moment...

Just because this is your first visit, as a gift, I'd like to send you my book, "Secrets of the Naturally Thin" (valued $27) today...FREE!

There's no catch.
However, you'll NOT see this message again.

Just fill in the form below and I'll send it immediately.

Helping you succeed,
Melanie (Registered Dietitian)

But my husband started playing with the opt in again about a week ago. Testing, testing, and testing different approaches.

He went back to bullets, but no avail. And after a few different things, managed to get it to a solid 2.5% with an alternate version of the above.

Not much, but when you get 3,000 daily uniques, 0.5% is an extra 15 people/day.

However, he put a new one up this morning, changing the heading from 16px to 14px, and the body from 14px to 13px:

Hello Guest!

Just because you're new here, as a gift, I'd like to send you my book 'Secrets of the Naturally Thin' absolutely FREE for today only!

There's no catch.
However, you'll NOT see this message again.

Just fill in the form below now and you'll also get a few other surprises thrown in.

Helping you succeed,
Melanie (Registered Dietitian)

And... it's currently converting at 5.9%

Now, it's early days yet. There's only been 250 displays, so it may drop.

But, even if the worse comes to the worse and it goes down to 2% for some reason, there's a lesson here...

Keep testing. Don't copy others. Don't make the headline red because others do. Don't capitalise each word of your headline because others do.

It might not work like it does for them with your market.