Here’s what we don’t know yet (and this is crucial): which one generated the largest profit? You can’t really form a conclusion until you know which version created the highest average customer value.

Nonetheless, this will be interesting to all copywriters.

1. Finding prospects
2. Turning those prospects into customers

Facebook and Twitter, for instance, are great for finding prospects. This, I think, is well known.

What seems to be not as well known is just because you found the prospect on that platform, you do not need to convert her into a customer on that platform.

Facebook and Twitter, in my experience, suck for customer conversion. You aren’t typically in a buyer’s mindset when you’re cruising your activity stream. As a result, I avoid selling any sort of purchase because pushing someone into that mindset is very, very hard. There are just too many road blocks to bring her all the way up to that level of commitment.

However, giving me her email address is a much lower commitment.

As a result, I don’t focus my Facebook and Twitter (or most any other social media interaction) activities on scoring a sale. Instead, I give her content and tips to try to generate email signups. Once she enters my world (I’m a much better email marketer than social media marketer), I’ve got her. I know with much more precision how much she’s worth to my bottom line. I know the psychological triggers I need to hit. I am much more confident I can score the sale.

Social media marketing gets a ton of air time, but you need to understand which marketing stage it fits into. For the hookah store, they fall into the prospect-acquisition stage. All our tweeting, Facebooking, and blogging are focused on generating email signups. Then, once she’s entered our chosen world, we put on the full court press.

I think it would be wise to assess your key strengths, understand where you can best convert prospects into customers, and then decide how the different social media communities can feed into that funnel.

(Inspired by this podcast.)

Great to see a software company focusing on email lead generation and using information marketing to build relationships with relevant prospects.

The implementation for the button isn’t the prettiest (I’m quite certain it physically hurt my designer to do it), but given Eric’s deep experience, I wanted the possible conversion boost if it was there.

Original version without Ultimate Button:

Alternate version with Ultimate Button:

Test Results

Original
Conversion Rate: 29.3%
Conversions: 129

Alternate (with Ultimate Button)
Conversion Rate: 29.3%
Conversions: 132
Observed Improvement: -0.17%
Chance to Beat Original: 49.4%

Conclusion

Interestingly, the button produced very little difference for this case. Traffic sources were quite broad, coming from both endorsed affiliate promotions and AdSense advertising.

While the current observed improvement is minimal to slightly negative, I have decided to add the button to my standard page template for now. I’ll definitely test button design further in the future, but for now we’ll end this test and begin testing more important elements, like the headline.

If you’d like to learn more about copywriting and website conversion, you should join the community at DirtyCopywriting.com.

(Apologies for the weird headline clipping. I think the YouTube video was giving hell to my screen shot plugin.)

An Exact Target design tweak that increased sharing. Pretty cool how they observed behavior, then tweaked the design a second time to embrace visitor habits and increase sharing further.

And a copywriting post from yours truly.

… and doubled revenues several years in a row.

I wonder how the ad is working for Resume Tracker:

Looking to test different buttons on your page? Read Eric Graham’s recommendations for maxing your button test results.

Jimmy D. Brown discusses the multiple ways to monetize the same content (and why this lets you charge higher prices).

As in, what is the difference between those fancy blobs versus combining a few twitter search columns in TweetDeck with a couple good Google alerts flying into your inbox each day?

In something as emotionally driven as blog and social media conversations, I as a marketer see much more value in actually reading the exchanges happening. The dash board overviews don’t give you the real market/customer insights that will take a brand from 98% awesome to 98.5% awesome. You need to get down and dirty if you’re already at Gatorade’s high level.

But it’s still cool to see them not only experimenting, but actually acting on the data they’re getting.

How does your product provide the connections we know they’re yearning for?