You suggested renting an e-mail list to test your offer before getting the snail-mail list. You need to clarify this point. While it\’s a cheap way to test, it could put you in the big spam doghouse. If you\’re like 90% of us you despise spam. It can give your business\’ reputation twin black eyes as one you can\’t trust. I\’m leery of any marketing method that is suggestive of spamming.

I\’ve been able to do mailings to several hundred with just a couple hundred dollars using cold-compiled lists from InfoUSA.

It\’s a lot of work, but when you\’re low on cash, you have little choice.

For my fiancee, who is an eyebrow artist (www.TheEyebrowArtist.com), I sent a letter to local female residents fitting our demographic profile. My response was 1% on the first mailing, and an additional 1% on the follow-up mailing. It was enough to pay for itself many times over since she got repeat business from it.

I\’m about to test a new letter and new offer that I believe is much stronger, and more personal. But the response will tell the story.

For my business, I\’ve been testing different lead-gen letters to different segments. Best response so far on one mailing: 1.3% on a mailing of 150.

Worst: 0% on a mailing of 300! (You learn something every time. That letter was too \”me\” focused.)

I\’m currently testing two other letters with a more personal approach and a \”grabber\” insert. Again, the response will tell the tale.

It\’s a lot of hard work, and even though I\’ve got envelope-stuffing knots in my shoulders, I\’m having a blast!

In the case of the full page ad test above, the cost for the full page ad was $30,000

If memory serves me correctly David was able to get hundreds of visitors to each landing page for the small PPC budget of $300

And time wise I think he only ran the test for 4 or 5 days.

In response to John\’s question maybe this will help. Here\’s what David Frey did a while back. He was looking at running a full page ad in Millionaire Blueprints magazine.

Step 1: He created 3 versions of a full page ad.

Step 2: Converted those one-page ads into one-page landing pages with specific call to action

Step 3: He set up multiple Google ads to drive traffic to the landing pages

Step 4: Every 3rd visitor was served up a different ad - Google can handle all the \’behind the scenes\’ scripting to handle this version of A/B and in this case /C split testing

Result: At the end of the test (for like $300 bucks) he found one ad out pulled & converted by like a 50-60% lift.

So John in your case you can be testing headlines in the Google ads themselves to see which mini headline and intro copy pulls the highest CTR (click through rate)

Then on your landing pages you can be testing either your full headlines or completely different letter versions.

Good Luck,

Eric Grimstead

I\’m getting ready to do some testing of my own with Google, and planned to test headlines in driving traffic to a landing page.

My idea is to work up three heads, and run each of them with a fixed budget to the same landing page–tracking the click-through rates of each, and use the highest performer in a mail piece later on.

I would think that conversion rate is the best test of the offer on the landing page.

If my best headline gets lots of click-throughs but no conversion, (assuming my heads were honest, and people got what they expected in head/lead on the landing page), then tweak the offer and test the best head again?

Is that a sound plan?

Now, one followup question/suggestion: You mentioned testing creative concepts very cheaply on line. It would be very helpful to me (and probably many others) to give us a track to run on. So, for example, say we had 6 totally different headlines or 4 differe offers and wanted to test them out via PPC marketing on Google or other. Could you walk us through an example of just how to do this, when to cut off each test run, how to keep the costs in line.

- John