Content Crooner

photo credit: skittzitilby

Happy with your marketing results? Excellent, now continue improving them! Even if you’re currently turning out some great results on a campaign there’s always room for improvement. And if your current marketing and advertising continues to tank, you don’t want to continue riding that sinking ship down to Davy Jones’ Locker.

Performing split tests within your marketing provides an inexpensive way to test the waters and see what will work best. (Split testing simply means that you split your audience into groups and test different marketing pieces to see what works best. You can test anything in this way, from body copy, to headlines, images and colors, and you’ll often be amazed by the results.)

Split testing lets you gauge your prospects’ responses and then tweak your existing marketing plan or create a new one based on the results. This will help you get the best idea of what they’re looking for and the best way to address your target audience.

Find out What the Public Thinks and You Will Generate more Revenue

One of the easiest traps to fall into is caused by falling in love with your product or service. While having a passion for what you do is one of the most powerful tools for increasing sales, it can also blind you to potentially poor public reactions. To help you take those blinders off, create at least two different versions of a sales letter or direct response marketing piece. Even if you already have a stellar ad going out to your prospect list, who’s to say it couldn’t be doing better? Would you rather make 100K or a million in revenue?

Make sure you concentrate on the same product or service in your message or you’ll skew your results. Similarly, you must market to the same demographics. While you may like to think that you can sell ice to Eskimos, that approach won’t garner accurate testing results if your other marketing piece selling ice went out to people in Death Valley, CA. If you’re selling ice, then test both your pieces in the same geographical location. Likewise, you must pay special attention to vital statistics such as financial status, age group, etc. Basically, you want to keep everything apart from the marketing material you are testing constant across your test.

As a reminder, you should always conduct plenty of market research before you even begin marketing and always keep your target market in mind whether you’re split testing or not.

Make it Different, but not too Different

Concentrate on making just a few major differences in your pieces. If both pieces are completely different it will be harder to determine what exactly caused an increase in conversions in one piece over the other. And because you’re a diehard marketer, we’re sure you’ll be excited to take the more successful piece and then test that against yet another variation in round two of your split testing. Think of it as a sports tournament bracket with the winner of each round progressing to the next game—you’ll eventually see that the underdog can make you some serious cash.

One of the best places to test conversion results is with your headline. Headlines still carry a great deal of clout when it comes to pulling readers in and getting them to read about your product or service. Test two different headlines and see which one is more successful.

You should also try testing different guarantees or warranties. People love the comfort of a promise and offering two different guarantees will show you the best way to get them to buy. This will help you avoid offering too small a guarantee as well as preventing you from offering a guarantee that could cost you thousands if something completely random goes wrong.

Think you’re throwing money down the drain by having multiple pieces written? Not true. While you may have to pay a copywriter to write an additional piece, you are fine tuning your marketing machine, so your added ROI should more than compensate.

Keep things fresh and test, test, test. Truly victorious companies and entrepreneurs know that success is temporary if you fail to do anything new for your business.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!