Tests Time! (Part 1 of 2)

Subjects: Testing
Principle: You don’t know what works best: the only way to discover is to test
Potential Worth: Extra sales at no extra effort
Referenced Reading:

• “Tested Advertisement Methods” by John Caples
• "Failing Forward" by John Maxwell

This post deal with a major factors in the success of any marketing or sales activity (not only for big multinationals, but also for small companies, 2-people shop etc): Testing.

If you are relatively new to marketing, let me share with you the worst kept secret in the industry: in marketing nobody knows in advance exactly what is going to work best and what will fail... Now that you know this, as Jack Burns in "Meet the Parents" would say, you are in the "Circle of trust" ;)

Nobody knows with certainty beforehand: not the managers, not the advertising gurus, not the sales people. Sure, people with experience in the field will have gut feelings, suspects, suppositions, hunches but the reality is that there is only one entity that will be judge and jury: the Public.

As a consequence, the only way to really see if the advertisement (or email, or fax, or small ad in the Sunday paper… anything you use to communicate with the world) version that you prefer will do better that the one your friend/colleague/business partner prefers is … to try both and compare the results. This is called Testing.

So, your mom was right: tests do not end when you finish school. “Life is a never ending test” would say mine.

It is the good, old “Trial and Error”: that’s the way we learn to walk, to talk, to ride a bike. We try, stumble, fall, try again, correct, cover more ground, fall again etc. But without the feedback mechanism, we would never improve our performances. A good book on how to learn to fail in life and move forward is "Failing Forward" by John Maxwell (you can see it here)

Basically, different versions of the same advertisement (or offer, headline, sales pitch, proposal) are tried in the same conditions and the results carefully collected and farmed into an all-powerful Excel spreadsheet to see which one is yielding the best results for the same investment. It looks simple, right?

The biggest obstacle is to actually start the procedure: it can be boring to continuously work on testing new combinations, new ideas, and new approaches. But the payout can be really consequential. Actually, this could be one of the highest return you get for the time you invest in any sales and marketing operation in your company.

For example, if you are a small entrepreneurial company providing car repair services and you are putting the same ad every week in the Sunday paper, you are missing a big opportunity to get more bangs for your bucks: Testing different headlines, different offers, and different copy plots could bring your response rate dramatically higher, even doubling or tripling your inquiries.

(Continues in the next posting)