MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

In this test - we found that embed­ding a user’s name within a head­line boosted the num­ber of peo­ple read­ing our sales copy by a whop­ping 46%.

Here’s the experiment.

First, users from Google Ads were directed to our land­ing page. The land­ing page allowed these vis­i­tors to sign up for 7 Free Tac­tics from our book.

Here’s what that  page would look like for a fic­tional vis­i­tor named James. James would need to pro­vide his first­name and email to subscribe

Now on the next page we ran a split test.  Half our sub­scribers would see a reg­u­lar headline.

What if there were a Way You Could Con­vert 15%, 25% — even 50% or More — of Your Web­site Vis­i­tors into Cus­tomers, How Much More Money Would You Earn as a Result?

The other half — would see the same head­line, but with their first­name neatly embed­ded into the begin­ning. (we’d know their name based on what they pro­vided upon sign­ing up). In this case, James would see:

James What if there were a Way You Could Con­vert 15%, 25% — even 50% or More — of Your Web­site Vis­i­tors into Cus­tomers, How Much More Money Would You Earn as a Result?

Every­thing else about the pages remained the same.

Here’s the page with­out the name included:

And here’s the page with the name included — as you can see, the change is subtle.

 At the bot­tom of the page was a link to allow the vis­i­tor to click on to learn about the pric­ing and bonuses avail­able for our ecom­merce course. Our goal was to see how many peo­ple clicked on this link.

The results were:

Click rate of peo­ple who saw the ordi­nary head­line: 33.33%

Click rate of peo­ple who saw their name within head­line: 48.70%

Long term results of course may not be as dra­matic. But based on the math the sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance of this test is over 95%. This means we can be 95% sure that embed­ding a first­name within a head­line will boost your response.

The ques­tion remains — who does one do this?

It can be done with sim­ple PHP cod­ing or you can pur­chase soft­ware that does this. We’ll be review­ing and test­ing one such soft­ware appli­ca­tion next week and will share our findings.

 Have you had sim­i­lar suc­cess with this tech­nique? Share your expe­ri­ence by com­ment­ing on this post.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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