White Hat Guys

One key difference between wannabes and successful marketers comes down to testing. The wannabe is too busy looking ahead to his next great product launch or affiliate promotion. The successful marketer is testing everything to make absolutely sure he knows that every penny has been squeezed out of the current promotion before moving to the next idea or promotion.

This has always been true in direct marketing. Direct marketers would use different department codes in the address to test offers and magazine responses. This was critical to understanding what ads were profitable and which magazines pulled best. With the advent of the world wide web, testing is easy, cheap and quick. You can know what is working or not in a matter of hours or days.

What should you test?

The short answer is everything. There are two basic kinds of tests. Split Testing, as known as A/B testing, is simply testing one thing against another. For example, you might test two headlines to see which one makes your sales letter convert better. The other kind of test is called multivariate, sometimes referred to as Taguchi, is testing many things at the same time. Software tools make it easy to test many variables at the same time.

Start simple. If you use Aweber for your autoresponder, you have a great tool to test opt-in offers and email offers. It is very easy to do. You will be surprised by your results. We are often wrong about which offer will be most effective. We never go with our favorite offer, we test it against the current “winner.” Our goal is always to beat the “winner.”

The next step is to do split testing on your sales pages. Start with the headline or offer. Test every part of the sales page.

The final step is to purchase some multivariate testing software. This will allow you to quickly test the key parts of your sales page. It is amazing what you can test with this kind of software. It can be a little complex to set up and run, but your bank account will be very glad you did.

We will look into the different types of testing software and give you our recommendations in upcoming posts.

Get started testing with Aweber today.