A Prescription in Marketing

There’s no question the web has made it easier than ever to test your marketing campaigns and come up with new controls.

In the old days, testing was time-consuming and expensive. You had to segment your list and mail out multiple versions of a sales letter. Then you had to wait for two or three weeks.

Display ads in magazines took even longer, typically 3 months or more to gauge results.

Nowadays testing can take place in days or even hours, depending on how much traffic you have coming to your site.

If you don’t test your sales letter online, you really are missing out on some easy and cheap ways to maximize your sales and leads. Software to automate the process is as plentiful and cheap as ever. I even bundle a free tool with my upcoming Copywriter’s Toolkit.

But have you ever considered testing by traffic source?

What I mean is, do you have an A/B sales letter evenly split between ALL of your traffic as a whole, or do you have different tests in place for different sources of traffic?

The difference between the two can make quite a difference to your bottom line.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.

Suppose you sell a weight loss product, and you sell to both men and women. Each of the two will likely require a different sales message to maximize your chances for success.

If one source of your traffic is from an ad in a women’s ezine, do you want to send them to the same sales page as you’re sending men from another ad?

More than likely you do not.

So when you’re split testing two different sales letters to see, say, which headline performs better, you should have an A/B test set up for both the women’s traffic source and the men’s. That is, you really have each test conducted independently of the other.

It doesn’t matter if the sales letters in the test are identical (although in this example they likely wouldn’t be). What matters is that the test results should be tallied for each traffic source.

Here’s another example: if I’m sell inbound and outbound call center services, I might have 2 selling points that primarily set me apart from my competition:

1) Price - my call center services are cheaper than most

2) Features - we offer more features than our competitors

But let’s say I’m not necessarily sure which of the two will appeal to my prospects more. So when I write my sales letter, I create 2 different versions, one with a headline and lead that appeals to bargain-hunters, and another that appeals to those seeking the most features.

Now I go ahead and test the two to see which one comes out on top.

Except…if I’m getting traffic from people seeking call center services for computer support, they may be concerned more about price, since many of them view such operations as a “cost center”.

And if I’ve got traffic coming in from people who want to conduct outbound telemarketing to their house list, they may be more concerned with features, since theirs is a “profit center”.

You see, if I just did my testing for all my incoming traffic as a whole (using just those two sources as an example for now), the bigger traffic source will decide the winning sales letter.

In other words, if the computer support traffic is bigger than the outbound telemarketing traffic, and they’re more concerned about price, then overall sales might be highest with the sales letter that has the price headline/lead.

But this is misleading, because if you split tested the two sales letters independently of each other for each traffic source, you might find that the price one wins for the computer support prospects, and the features one wins for the telemarketing crowd.

But you would never know this unless you tested in this manner.

Make sense?

Now you’ve got a sales letter customized for each crowd coming to your site. And you would continue to test from there to maximize sales even further.

Now “stay tuned”, because tomorrow I’m going to be publishing a white paper I’ve been working on, entitled The Profit DNA: How To Unlock The Code To Maximum Profits Through Self-Evolving Websites.

It’s going to take testing to the next level and more…

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