Testing And Tracking Basics

The best way to test and track your marketing is to first run more low-cost tests on all your marketing, then roll out the sales idea which proved itself to be the most profitable.

When you’re testing you see huge variations in responses when you change your headline, price, storey, premium, trust offering, etc. When you have completed your testing on a small-scale and you determine the most profitable sales angle, roll it out to a bigger audience and do the same testing and tracking again, and continue to do so.

If you are mailing prospects - do split run tests. For example, if you are sending out 4,000 letters, split them into groups of 2,000 and do 2 different letters, one for each group, with different prices and sales copy, etc.

Run two different adverts in newspapers for two different regions. However you do it, just make sure you track everything. Here we see the biggest differences in response coming from the following:

1. The headline or opening sentence.
2. The body of the copy.
3. The price.
4. The offering.
5. The enticement into action.
6. The ordering mechanism.

You must test everything you do. To be able to test you must know what results you are getting from each one of your present marketing efforts. You do this by monitoring the results of every ad you run, every marketing approach you do and every letter you send.

Just make sure that you test everything on a small scale first, monitor the results and if it shows a good results, then, and only then, should you commit to using the idea, letter or advertisement on a large scale.

Ask yourself in all your marketing activities.

• What did it cost?
• How many people came in?
• How many people bought?
• What was the value of the average sale?
• How many people will come back after the first sale?
• What was my cost of inquiry, my cost per sale?

When you have the answers, you’ll be able to approach all your marketing efforts in a scientific and predictable way. Here are six ideas on how to test and monitor all your marketing activities:

1. Ask every customer who buys from you, or even customers inquiring to buy, how they heard of you. You could say. “We get a lot of referrals. Is that how you got to hear about us?” This will get a response of “Yes, it was a referral” or “No, I actually saw your ad in the…” You’ll get the answer you need.
2. Have a coupon on your ads. Ask the people to bring in the ad or the letter to receive the special offer you are making. Never commit yourself to any form of promotion or advertising where you cannot measure the results.
3. For every promotion you do, use an analysis form. Buy a binder and put plastic wallets in it. Place a copy of every promotion you do in a display page. On the other side of each promotion, record the results and insert the analysis sheet. Whenever a promotion shows a profit, keep on doing it. It becomes your benchmark. At the same time, keep testing on a small scale. Try to beat your control with different offers, headlines, people targeted or strategies. After a while, you’ll have a number of promotions that are showing a profit in your binder. You can then decide in advance which one you want to use. And you’ll know - in advance - what results you should get from it.
4. Write on every sales record what marketing effort that person came from. You can attach the relevant ad or coupon to the sales record if the customer had to present it to get his special offer. Have a large envelope and keep all the voucher and sales records there for your analysis after the promotion is over.
5. What should you test in your ads and letters? You should test headlines, prices, offers you make, people you are targeting, and different actions when you tell the reader how to take advantage of your offer. Test positioning on the page and in the publication. Test different publications, days of the week (e.g. recruitment days in newspapers for training advertisements if you’re a training company) and time of year when your ads appear.
6. What to test with sales people and telephone inquiries? Test different approaches that the sales people use. Test different follow up offers and different packages that they can offer.

If your customers and prospects phone your business, you can test prices and offers. You can test different ways of answering the phone and different approaches for getting appointments.

If you are getting ten calls a day and are making two sales, it makes sense to find the approach that will make one, two or more extra sales. You’ll double your sales and your profits will soar for no extra outlay.

Remember to actively track what you are doing and the corresponding response.

Test everything you do as we have yet to find a business that can’t do better!