How To Do A/B Testing To Optimize A Blogger Contact Form?

With virtually endless variations templates and customizing the forrms to be included on your Blogger-hosted site, finding the right and optimal design so that all readers can see it clearly and in an instant, is a trial-and-error process.

So in order to simplify the testing process and for you to assist in your decision to find the most efficient and optimal layout for your forms, you need to have your blog subjected to A/B testing. This process tests different kinds of form and tab templates, and determines the perfect layout suitable for your blog.

A/B testing is available for both contact forms and newsletter forms.

For those who uses ContactUs.com to generate their forms, the A/B testing feature can be accessed via “Form Settings”. It's located in the third option.

This feature compares all the available tab and form templates that are allowed for your site, so you can choose which templates are best for your blog layout, based on the testing results.

The A/B testing feature offers different kinds of tests, based on what the webmaster needs. You can use just one of the, or you can use all of them for your needs

Tab Testing

By clicking on tab testing, the tool will make a random selection of templates for your blog, and you can even select their positions on where you want them to appear. Once you're done, simply click on “Save And Publish”, and these tab templates will start appearing at random spots on your website, after which you can then view the full performance results.

Form Testing

Form testing allows you to test different form templates, to determine which ones gives out the best results. Upon clicking “Form Testing”, the tool will show several templates available for the inline version of the form. Just simply click on one template, and after saving and publishing it, the form will embed itself on your blog. Full performance reports for this test are also available.

Available to both tests, you can also choose if you only wanted to see only one template combination to test, or you can set it to see different, random template combinations all at once. This can be achieved by setting the appropriate option located under “Visitor A/B Settings”.

Once the appropriate tests are complete, you can also view the full report of the tests by going to the upper-right side of the screen and clicking “A/B/ Reports”.

Here, you can see the complete results of all the A/B tests that you performed, whether it's by tab testing or form testing. To view the appropriate report, just click on any option above.

Tab/Form A/B Results

The A/B Results report gives you the detailed information on how the templates performed, such as times it was displayed, the amount of leads they received, and most important the success rate of Form-to-Lead conversions.It also assigns the top 3 best-performing templates for your blog, displayed on the left side of the screen.

Tab/Form A/B Chart

The Report Chart also gives a detailed report on the tests that are performed. It compiles all the reports generated, arranged them in a pie chart, and shows the best performing template based on the results.

You can also view the results in a bar chart, which also shows the top 15 best performing templates for your website.

Tab/Form A/B Totals

A/B Totals gives out the most detailed report for all the tests, and it also includes different filter options. This view is best used when you need to get the most detailed reports out of the tests that you did.

Conclusion

The A/B testing tool is a great help for all webmasters out there. With this handy tool, you no longer have to rely on lots of trial-and-error to determine on which tab and form placement provides the maximum visibility and leads for your blog. Using this tool, it's now possible to try out all the various template combinations available, check each of them, and determine which template performs best at getting leads. This would make layout optimization for your blog very easy.

The A/B tester is a very valuable tool for all webmasters who wanted to get the most number of lead-ins for their blog.

How To Integrate A Constant Contact Form In Blogger

A big part of blog management, is to be able for you to determine the popularity of your blog, and how much does readers enjoy each of your content. To be able to achieve this, it's recommended to add a newsletter subscription form to your blog, so that not only can you keep track of the number of loyal visitors that you have, but it also allows these visitors to be updates about the latest content of your blog, without them having to re-visit your blog every time.

While some form-generating solutions offer built-in lead notifications via e-mail, there are times that you may want to use your existing third party e-mail marketing service, such as the one offered by Constant Contact. Today, we'll discuss about the reasons on why would you want to integrate your Constant Contact service into your existing e-mail signup forms (such as the one offered by ContactUs.com), into your Blogger account.

Why Do It?

While most contact form solutions also provide an e-mail marketing system as part of their registration package, there are times that you wanted to use a different e-mail system for your marketing needs. The reasons for that can vary.

Perhaps you already have an existing account for an another e-mail marketing system which you frequently use before, and have gotten very used to its features that you're not willing to let yourself go for that service.

Or perhaps you prefer the other solution better for your e-mails, yet you prefer another solution for your forms.

Whatever the reason you have in mind, some solutions like ContactUs.com give blog owners a chance to integrate third-party e-mail marketing solutions like Constant Contact a chance to be integrated into their generated forms, you with just a few easy steps, you can get the best of both worlds.

The Actual Integration Process

Integrating your Constant Contact account into your Blogger account is actually very easy. If you follow these simple steps, the process should be seamless and error-free.

Note that for this example, you need (obviously), a Constant Contact account, as well as a ContactUs.com account for the integration process.

1.     First, log in to to your ContactUs.com account. This will immediately bring you to your account's dashboard. From here, select the “Form Settings” tab, which is located on the left part of the dashboard.

2.     You'll notice that, by default, the form that will be created is set to “Newsletter”. Since we're going to create an e-mail signup form, just leave this setting, and immediately click “Configure Form” to bring up the form configuration page.

3.     In this page,you can customize all aspects of your newsletter form, but more important, this is where you can setup your form to use your third party e-mail marketing service, such as Constant Contact. To do this, just select “Delivery Options”, the select “3rd Party Integrations” to bring up another menu which displays all the supported third-party e-mail marketing solutions.

4.     As noted in the menu, DO NOT USE the version 1 of the Constant Contact integration service, as it's outdated, and might contain bugs and errors. Use the version 2 instead.

5.     To start connecting your Constant Contact account with your form, you need to input your API key, along with the other required fields. These credentials are usually located into the settings area of your Constant Contact account. Once you have these credentials, simply copy-paste them into the required fields. After you're finished, simply click on “Save”.

6.     Once you clicked on “Save”, this will bring you back to the “Form Settings” menu, wherein you can see your newly-created newsletter form. If you wish to make any additional changes to your form, you can simply click on “Configure Form” again. Once you're finished, click on “Get Code”.

7.     To start adding your newly-created form to your Blogger account, simply copy the code displayed at the top of the screen, and paste it on your Blogger account using any of the methods listed for adding third-party code to your Blogger account. Congratulations! Now whenever a visitor subscribes to your blog, the lead-in notifications will be sent directly to your Constant Contact account.

How To Integrate A MailChimp Signup Form In Blogger

If you're the savvy internet marketer who's interested in tracking the lead-ins that are being generated by your blog, then you'll need an effective e-mail marketing service to help you in easing up the process. One of those e-mail marketing services available on the market today, is the one offered by MailChimp.

Configuring your blog to use MailChimp's lead-in delivery service for your newsletter forms, and adding them to your Blogger-based blog is very easy. All it just needs is a little tinkering, and some code-searching.

NOTE: This tutorials obviously assumes that you already have a ContactUs.com account and a MailChimp account. If you haven't had one yet, it's strongly recommended that you create one.

Creating The Newsletter Form

The first thing that we need to do is to first create an e-mail signup form, also known as a “newsletter”, so that visitors may subscribe to updates on your blog via e-mail. Here's how you do it.

1.     Log in to your ContactUs.com account, which will immediately take you to the account's dashboard. Once you're in there, select “Form Settings”.

2.     You may want to leave the the “Add Form” field as it is, because it's set to “Newsletter” by default. Instead, head over and click the “Configure Form” button.

3.     Clicking the “Configure Form” button opens up a menu wherein you can customize many aspects of your newsletter form. For this purpose, we will need to configure the form so that it integrates with MailChimp. For that purpose, select “Delivery Options”, then select “3rd Party Integrations”. This will bring up a list of third-party e-mail marketing services that you can use for your ContactUs.com form. Once you're in there, select the button for MailChimp (located at the very first column).

4.     To integrate a third-party e-mail marketing service into your newsletter forms, different credentials are needed to be filled. For MailChimp, you needed an API key, and a Unique List ID. Both of these credentials can be found on your MailChimp account, right around the settings for it. Once you've secured these credentials, simply copy and paste them into the designated fields.

5.     Once you're done with customizing the newsletter form, simply click on “Save” to retain the changes you made. This will take you back to the main menu, and you can see your newly-published form. In order to see the code for it, simply click on “Get Code”.

6.     The field displayed above the page is the code for your newly-created form. Simply copy this code, and paste it to your Blogger using any of their methods available for integrating third-party code. Congratulations! Now your newsletter will be able to send any updates to your subscribers through your MailChimp account.

Enabling Double Opt-in For MailChimp

There are times when you may want your subscribers to give them a chance to see if they really want to subscribe to your newsletter or not. You can do this by having the subscriber be sent a confirmation e-mail which is automatically generated, and by having the user click the confirmation link which is located inside the e-mail.

This process is known as double opt-in, and MailChimp can offer that service.

If you've configured your e-mail signup form to use MailChimp, yet you're still not receiving any lead-in notifications to it, then turning on double opt-in may help resolve the problem.

To enable double opt-in, just follow these simple steps.

1.     Log in to your ContactUs.com account, then go to “Form Settings”. From there, select “Configure Form”, then “Delivery Options”. Afterwards, select “3rd Party Integrations” to bring up the list of the third party e-mail marketing services. Select “MailChimp”, which will display a pop-up regarding the integration of your MailChimp account. From here, just set the “Double Optin” option to “Yes”, to enable double opt-in.

2.     If anytime you wanted to disable double opt-in, just simply access the MailChimo integration menu using the same process described in the previous step, then set “Double Optin” to “No”. By disabling double opt-in, visitors won't be sent a confirmation e-mail whenever they subscribe to your newsletter. After filling out the required fields, they will be automatically subscribed.

By following all these steps, you will now be able to receive lead-in notifications to your MailChimp account using any of your ContactUs.com e-mail signup forms in Blogger.