A few days ago, I dialed into a teleconference on headline testing conducted by Marketing Experiments....


This teleconference was specifically for improving Web site results.
Some of the conclusions:
* Specificity is a key to winning headlines and to higher conversions: "Dental Plans for $8.33 a month. Acceptance Guaranteed" far outperformed "Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured."
* Among headline types -- promise, question and claim headlines do well.
* To write a good headline, you must truly understand its objective.
Guess what? When I was launching my career in 1964 writing direct mail copy for Prentice-Hall, that's what I learned. Clever still doesn't work. Question headlines shouldn't be able to be answered with a "Yes" or "No". The whole meaning of a headline can be changed by what type size, font and color you use. And testing headlines was then and is now the most powerful way to improve results.
If this is where I came in 42 years ago (I started when I was six), why did I stay glued to the phone for the entire hour? Because the Web has changed testing itself dramatically.
Online, you can test headlines for almost no cost. That's a very different situation from what we face in direct mail or print advertising. Given that, Flint McGlaughlin, Director of Marketing Experiments, urged that eternal testing go on. Testing, he said, is a process and not an event.
Once you have found a winning headline, don't stop there: play with individual words until you beat your control. Once your headline is perfected, start testing variations on the subhead.
By the way, if you're primarily an offline direct marketer like I am, you'll be interested to know that MarketingExperiments' online headline tests project direct mail and print results quite well. Direct is direct.