Yeah I know, it's a silly question, who doesn't love waking up to the fresh smell of newly minted stacks of money?

Back when I was an active affiliate I loved the feeling, but what I loved even more was the ability to squeeze more profits out of the same ad spend by just making tweaks to my conversion funnel.

One extreme example involved making 4x more profits by changing the format of a thank-you page after an email opt-in.

How did I know the 2nd version of the page was better? I did a very simple A/B test for a few days. The results told me immediately that switching all my traffic to this new better converting page would increase my revenues and more importantly profits.

That was way back in the day when you had to actually do math and manually create split-tests. These days, it's so much easier to run split-tests. So there's no excuse for any one of you reading this to not have tests running every day.

Over here at Tracking202, we like to practice what we preach. I'd like to share some of the tests we run every day and the tools we use to make that happen.

We Test Every Single Email Headline

It's safe to assume that you have an email address, and get a ton of email every day. Many of them even go unread. We send out two types of emails.

1. News, company and software updates etc. Whenever we have something important to share with you, an email is sent out.

2. Promotional emails for our partners. Since Tracking202 is free software, one of the ways we generate revenue from our user base is through partnerships with companies that provide tools and services we feel you will be interested in.

Both types of email are important to us and hopefully you too! So we do everything in our power to ensure you want to open, read and click on links in every email we send you. (hint, hint).

To help with that, we track the performance of every email we send out. Specifically, we test and tweak our email subject lines religiously. Before we mail out to everyone on our list, we do a small test to approximately 2000 subscribers. Once a winner is found, we broadcast to everyone. Here's a screenshot of an A/B subject line test from the last email we sent out.

In the image above, the Subject Line for Group A had a 8.39% higher open rate and a 33.33% increase in clicks. Before sending out the email, I had a feeling Group A would have a higher open rate, but had no idea that the increase in open rate would come with such an increase in the CTR on links by such a high amount.

Cash Results: On the day of the email we generated 10x more sales than the day before. In 3 days, the total revenue generated following the email promo made up over 65% of this month's net revenue for the promo we are doing for the StackThat Money Forums. It's worth noting that the email went out during the 24 hr discount promo the guys run earlier this month.

We Also Test Banner Ads

Advertising is another revenue source for us, we run house ads for our partners (for affiliate commissions) as well as traditional advertising deals.

If you are an active prosper202 user, you should have noticed some of these ads below.

For a lot of people, ads may seem intrusive and annoying at times. Two ways to actually make them useful, are to partner with companies and individuals offering tools or services that you are highly likely to be interested in. Additionally, we also split test and auto optimize ads based on CTR. This helps us to serve you the most relavant ads at all times.

Of Course We Test Landing Pages Too

The most important component of all our testing is the one we do to convert site visitors into users of our software. For the past few months we've been running such a test on the Prosper202 home page.

It was a pretty simple test, in fact all we did was change a word on the download/registration button. The new version of the button text, is now converting 6.65% higher than the control. What does this mean in actual dollars?

For example, at a revenue per download of $20, it means that we make $133 more for every 100 people who visit our site. This works out to an additional $1.33 RPV (Revenue Per Visitor).

This is huge! Imagine what you could do if you could profitably bid $1.33 more than your competitors for clicks to an offer you were promoting. With some traffic sources, being the top bidder equates to being the one who gets all the traffic.

Hopefully, you can see how valuable testing can be for your business and campaigns. We are in the final stages of getting the same software we used for testing launched as part of the next version of the Prosper202 suite of software. Very soon you will get access to a powerful new conversion optimization software, that will enable you to quickly and easily run the same kinds of tests we did. In future posts, we will show you more about what this new software can do for you. Stay tuned...

[Update 8/28]

I thought you may be interested in the headline test we did for the email announcement for this blog post.

The two headlines we tested were:

Subject Line (Group A): Do These 3 Simple Things: Each One Increases Profits
Subject Line (Group B): Shake Out More Profits Guaranteed: No Earthquake Required

Which one do you think won and why? Click the image below to find out: