A fellow copywriter wrote about a promotion they were involved in where…
A single word change in a headline gave a 30% increased response rate!
Thing was… they had simply changed ONE word.
The word “repair” was changed to “fix.”
Now, there’s plenty of reasons why the change might have worked better for the market the copy was aimed at.
But the simplest explanation I can think of is “fix” is just a simpler, more everyday kind of word.
The significance of this single word change was huge.
And might just give us a little pause for thought when writing our own copy.
Not to cause us a meltdown when picking every… single… word… we… write.
But just to give a little extra attention to how what we write might come across to the audience it’s directed at.
Because… word choice matters.
Now, the only way you could measure this 30% difference is if you’re doing some sort of testing.
You may have heard of A/B testing in marketing.
Testing a “Version A” of the copy. And seeing how many responses like opens or views are made when comparing it to “Version B”.
It’s common in email marketing to test one subject line against another.
It can also be done with web pages. Where different versions are shown to different visitors.
Even mail order promotions can be tested. With special codes on reply forms indicating which version was sent.
A common mistake is to approach A/B testing like it’s magic. And will always give useful results.
When, in in reality, you’re unlikely to get anything meaningful if you’re testing less than 1,000 readers. (Smart sciency types figured this out.)
Then with email, things get even more fun.
Because you need to pay attention to the spread of free, low quality email address. Such as those from Gmail or Yahoo. Versus addresses with custom domain names.
Because it’s not as simple as throwing any old 500 email addresses from my list into one group. And another 500 in another group. Then emailing them with different subject lines. And calling that a VALID A/B test.
If you have a pile of Gmail addresses in the group that’s seeing Version A. And much fewer in the Version B group. Then you can skew the results.
Because it’s just more likely you’ll have email going to spam folders, swipe file folders, and there’ll be abandoned addresses.
Fortunately, I can breath a sigh of relief about this stuff. Because if I’m A/B testing with BerserkerMail… and sending different versions of these daily emails… I don’t have to think about getting the distribution of free email addresses right.
BerserkerMail just takes care of this for me.
And, as far as I understand, it’s the only email system on the market that does.
Narwhals prove unicorns exist,
Ready to build your email list? Go here…
EmailForTheWin.com
Chris Milham