I test con­stantly in an effort to boost my response rates. So it’s no won­der why some peo­ple have asked me about mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing. Specif­i­cally, they want to know what is it, how does it work, and what’s “Taguchi.”

First of all, Taguchi is just one form of mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing. I’m not a math­e­mati­cian. And Dr. Genichi Taguchi and his work specif­i­cally relate to the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try, which was later proven ben­e­fi­cial in the car industry.

Not direct mar­ket­ing. (At least, not at first.)

Dr. Taguchi’s for­mula was only recently extrap­o­lated to the areas of direct mar­ket­ing, adver­tis­ing, and now Inter­net mar­ket­ing, and has become the basis behind mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing and the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing as a whole.

More often than not, the name “Taguchi” is a buzz­word often bandied about, even by peo­ple who’s mul­ti­vari­ate tests do not use Taguchi’s method specif­i­cally. The for­mula is rather com­plex, and I’ll leave it to those more capa­ble than me to explain it to you.

But in this arti­cle, let me explain the basics of mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing, using layman’s terms and as best as I can. I hope not to lose you along the way. Fin­gers crossed.

What mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing is, is this…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I know Paul Hancox.

Paul is a fanat­i­cal tester. He’s also an excel­lent copywriter.

But what you may not know is that Paul is also the cre­ator of the very first split-​​testing soft­ware I’ve ever used. We’re talk­ing, um, circa 1999, I believe. It was called “Sales Page Mas­ter Pro.” (Paul has a new ver­sion out now.)

Well, another copy­writer, Paul Myers, rec­om­mended this new “report” writ­ten by Paul Han­cox. I snatched it up in a heart­beat. I did because the sim­ple title piqued my curios­ity. In it you dis­cover how to raise the con­ver­sion rate of any piece of online copy you write.

Not to 2% or 3%. Not even to 5%.

It shows you how to boost your con­ver­sion rate…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Hold on tight.

On Thurs­day night, I will be on a con­fer­ence call with Armand Morin and Marc Quar­les in prepa­ra­tion for the launch of a new prod­uct so rev­o­lu­tion­ary, it’s going to com­pletely change the way you look at copy­writ­ing for the web, write your copy, split-​​test your copy and opti­mize it.

And no, it’s not “Video Generator.”

Read the rest of this post or share it »