Posted by: Daniel Levis
July 1, 2009
Issue #705

Could This BIG LIE Be Setting
Your Business Up for the KILL?

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Quick question before we get started: What’s the biggest surprise you ever got from a marketing test? Hold that thought because I’ll be asking again …

You’ve probably heard the saying, “if it ain’t broke — don’t fix it.” Heard that, right?

It’s one of the reasons major corporations today have become so fat, satisfied and bureaucratized that managers are afraid to fart without circulating a memo for fear of disturbing the status quo.

Just one problem … there is no status quo. The world is in a constant state of flux. It’s fluxing faster each day.

Business leaders envision goals and make grand plans based on the world as they know it.

They build rigid, monolithic companies that are too big and too rich to fail. And as we’ve seen … their enormity can no more protect them from the firestorm of change than enormity protected the dinosaurs.

Bloated, slow-moving corporate behemoths, however, do not hold a monopoly on rigidity and complacency …

As a small business owner, if you build your success by designing a company that can withstand change — without changing itself — it, too, will soon die.

Show me a business that doesn’t worship innovation for innovation’s sake, and I’ll show you a business that’s gradually withering and failing.

Your business may appear to be chugging along just fine, but if your systems and processes are not in a constant state of forced innovation, your business is stagnating. And if your business is stagnant, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll lose it.

Every day, markets morph. New competitors emerge. Consumer tastes change. Technology advances.  Time waits for no man. And damn few women.

The minute you deploy a successful marketing campaign, system, or process, the inexorable forces of change begin tearing it down and robbing you of your success.

You must learn to embrace disorder and uncertainty — even outright chaos — and use them to your advantage. And be more adaptable than your competitors. There’s no other way to succeed in today’s marketing maelstrom — but how?

Adaptability is a discipline.

It’s like a muscle you must flex regularly to keep strong.

Truly successful marketers don’t wait for negative feedback from the market. They go looking for it … continually experimenting with new ideas and testing them in real time in the marketplace. 

This is, of course, counter-intuitive … because most of these experiments fail to increase the velocity of the business. And they cost time and money.

That’s why so few businesses engage in such active innovation. Most prefer to react to change rather than initiate it. The unfortunate result is they soon become rigid and inflexible, unable to react quickly when the mud hits the fan.

This is exactly what happened to the big car makers in North America …

While the Japanese were proactively forcing themselves to innovate and create constant improvements in every area of their businesses … the American companies thought they could simply react to change when things got ugly.

The lesson is clear: By making a constant effort to break things before they go broken, you maintain a culture of innovation within your company.

And if you go about it intelligently, you reap the added benefit of continuously improving your results.

This goes way beyond simply testing a headline here and there. It needs to be applied to every aspect of your marketing.

Small scale tests conducted as scientifically as possible will keep you on your toes. And eventually point you to breakthroughs.

Here are just a few areas for you to consider … merely the tip of the iceberg to inspire your thinking:

The Look and Feel of Your Marketing: Sometimes something as simple as the type of website you use can have a dramatic impact on your results.

Recently I decided to test using a Wordpress blog as a squeeze page versus a traditional web page. This resulted in a very significant increase in the amount of traffic Google sends me. Who’d have thunk it?

Have you tried using videos instead of long scrolling sales pages? Adding audio to your squeeze pages? HTML e-mail versus text e-mail, or vice versa?

Your Offer Strategy: There are almost infinite ways to structure an offer. If you’re using a traditional hard offer to sell your product — where you collect all of the money upfront — have you tried using a soft offer with deferred payment?

Tried different price points? Added an up-sell for people that buy? And a down sell for people who don’t?

Experimented with adding a trailing continuity program to your main offer? Toyed with fixed term continuity programs versus “until forbid”?

Every different offer strategy has an impact on profitability and the amount of money you can afford to invest to bring on a new customer. How can you measure that impact if you don’t try a variety of different offer strategies to see how they work for your particular business?

Your Promotional Strategy: Every different lead source has a different lifetime customer value. You can’t simply look at the cost of acquisition. I do a lot of joint ventures and I see a huge disparity in the quality of leads that result. I see the same thing with paid traffic.

The keywords you bid on with PPC … the networks you use … the sites you buy banners on, etc. all impact your results.

Are you experimenting with different lead pools … watching to see which promotional strategies create the best leads … measuring the performance of those leads over time as they make their way through your marketing funnel?

Your Copy Strategy: We tend to think of headline tests when we think of copy experiments, but there’s so much more. Different themes and appeals can all have a big impact on your results. The structure and sequence of your campaigns are also key factors.

Sometimes breaking your sales process up into graduated steps helps, sometimes it hurts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s not always best to collect e-mail addresses before going for the sale.

What other online marketing truisms that may not be true for you might be hurting your sales? You have to test.

Your Product Strategy: Ultimately you’re selling an outcome — a result. But sometimes the nature of the vehicle you use to get your prospect to that outcome can have a big impact on sales.

What can you do to make your info-products physically more enticing?

Will offering multiple modalities increase sales or allow you to raise your prices and profit margins? What about incorporating testing and accreditation? How about forcing people to prove they’ve mastered one module before allowing them to progress to the next?

Considered giving away part of your product to build trust and involvement? What about giving away a free mp3 player to listen to your material?

Just as importantly, what can you say about your physical product that makes all of its advantages immediately apparent?

Your Systems Strategy: Marketing is about automation — salesmanship multiplied through technology.

Do you find yourself doing rote, repetitive tasks that could be automated with software or outsourced to someone else at a tiny fraction of your hourly rate? Don’t forget that driving costs out of your marketing is yet another way to make your marketing more effective.

How much more productive and agile could you be if you did nothing but copywriting and marketing strategy?

The Bottom Line:

If you’re not already committing yourself to a program of proactive innovation for your business, isn’t it time you got started?

Personally I budget time and/or money to try at least one new small scale experiment every week, for no other reason than to learn something new.

From a purely monetary perspective, many of these experiments are failures. Others are mild successes that sometimes lead to further experiments which reveal true breakthroughs. I don’t see any of them as failures … simply a cost of doing business.

What about you? Test much? If so, what’s the biggest surprise you’re comfortable sharing?

Maybe you were convinced something couldn’t possibly improve your business, but someone you respected insisted you test it. And you were shocked at the results. Or maybe something you were convinced would be an improvement bombed. Tell us your story.

And if you’re new to testing and just have a few questions to ask, you’ve got a great resource here in the TTP community … so fire away! I’ll try to pop in a couple times myself over the next week and share in the discussion.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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8 Comments »

1. Comment by Steve Newdell — July 1, 2009 @ 5:34 pm

   Hey! hello,, elloooo? Is any body ody there ere ere???

   This was so good I’m swiping some of it for a piece I’m doing for the local market — and giving Daniel credit for it of course.

   It’s not just for “us copywriters.” This is excellent for every small merchant and service provider on Main Street and the side streets too.

   Many thanks, Daniel. You’re an excellent teacher.

   Steve Newdell

2. Comment by stevieod — July 1, 2009 @ 10:31 pm

   Hey Clayton,

   Daniel Levis is right, but the vast majority of American corporations and companies will simply pooh-pooh what he wrote away as blatant anti-American balderdash.

   It has been made very evident that the American way is a wholly corrupt and doddering edifice ready to collapse totally. The Japanese naturally, have been made fun of, and demonized as the enemy of the American way.

   Hmmm, sounds rather jingoistic, don’t you think?

   In America, Alfred Deming came up with a way to revolutionize the way things are manufactured and he was laughed out of the American corporate boardrooms.

   He was invited to go to Japan to show the manufacturers there his methods, and history speaks for itself.

   So, as America finds itself sliding further and further into Third World status, will Americans still think that the American way is still the best and ONLY way?

   This also applies to the internet marketing world, as there is a certain amount of head-in-the-sand mentality as well as inertia and inflexibility exhibited by certain ‘gurus’.

   It’s as if you can literally see the dinosaurs disappearing.

   As Daniel Levis said it, we need to be ready and flexible enough to change when the currents changes.

   Regards,

   steve

3. Comment by Daniel Levis — July 2, 2009 @ 8:52 am

   Wow, quiet. Either everybody was celebrating Canada Day or split test results are just too darn personal to discuss.

   Steveiod, I certaily didn’t mean to imply that the American way is “a wholly corrupt and doddering edifice ready to collapse totally”. I certainly don’t share that sentiment.

   I do wholeheartedly beleive in the profound wisdom of Kaizen and Deming’s principles. They are imminently applicable to marketing. And as I tried to point out in the article, counter-intuitive.

4. Comment by Kevin — July 2, 2009 @ 9:08 am

   Take just 10% of the obscene amount of money being wasted to prop up the automotive industry and retrain all those auto workers in numerous other skills. It’s really just common sense when you think about it. Sadly, this means it won’t be implemented by Washington.

5. Comment by Daniel Levis — July 2, 2009 @ 10:47 am

   Yes Kevin. Patently insane. Government should not be in the car business. I would take a step further and invite them to get out of the education business as well.

6. Comment by John Eager — July 2, 2009 @ 11:06 am

   It is easy to criticize “the American Way” and the automotive industry, both of which have served the world very well, being the primary bastion of freedom when some new thinkers like Marx and Hitler were designing utopias where the government would take care of everything, like teaching people how they should think and what they had to do to be successful. There is nothing wrong with the American idea of free enterprise and a capitalist economy; few who are finding fault have little knowledge of how many great minds and centuries of trial and error it took to realize that man, when free to exercise his self-interest according to the Golden Rule, would figure out how to find a need and fill it with benefit to all rather than depend on some politician who couldn’t make an honest living to tell everybody what to do from a marble tower in Washington. No other country in history has come close to accomplishing what we have done using the above system. Our dinosaurs and fossilized thinking is coming from Washington where they think Marx and Hitler were advanced thinkers.

7. Comment by Angela Cockburn — July 5, 2009 @ 5:00 am

   Thank you - I needed that article. Excellent advice, and a spur to get on with it.

8. Comment by Eran Malloch - No BS Search Engine Marketing Blog — July 5, 2009 @ 11:04 pm

   I recently trialled a direct mail test using postcards that I expected to do OK to well, but it totally bombed, much to my embarrassment.

   Hindsight being 20/20 vision, I would have done it very differently if I had a chance to repeat the experiment, but all I can do now is learn from the mistake and move on.

   At least I did learn some valuable lessons from it…

   

   I do agree that constantly testing, refining & improving is the way to go for any business wanting to stay on top of its game. Doing this in the marketing area is just 1 way to achieve results.

   Thanks Daniel - valuable article.

   Eran