Flow Testing: An Alternative to the Alternative?

I recently purchased a copy of Paul Hancox’s ebook, “Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate” from copywriting superstar Michel Fortin. You probably already know that most direct mail and PPC convert at somewhere between zero and five percent, so getting up to 10 is huge. I tell my clients they should be able to make a profit at half of one percent, even though we usually get much higher responses than that. But just in case…

Though it spends rather too much time at the beginning discussing things I already knew, this turned out to be a nice big juicy and informative product, and worth the $50.

There’s a big chapter on testing, covering A/B split and multivariate testing, as well as something new to me: “flow testing.” You send the reader through a series of short pages instead of one long one, and then track where clicks to the next page fall off dramatically. Fixing those holes plugs the leaks in your copy and ups your conversion rate.

Yes, extra clicks mean fall-off–so the challenge becomes making each unique page so compelling that most readers click to the next one, each time. And if one page loses half your visitors, that’s the one to fix.

My question: I wonder if Paul (or Michel) has tested putting not only a link to the next page, but also an order link. I wonder if people would abandon the letters in order to purchase, if they already feel convinced, rather than simply leave because the only option is to keep going all the way to the (unknown) end. It’s something I would certainly test in that situation.