« The Ten Dumbest Marketing Mishaps - #02 | Home | The Ethics Of Persuasive Writing - Part 1 »
The Ten Dumbest Marketing Mishaps - #01
Mishap 1: Failing To Test
It is amazing how few companies ever test aspects of their marketing and compare it to some type of control. They bet their destiny on arbitrary, subjective decisions and conjecture. This is sad for a number of reasons.
First, we don’t have the knowledge or the power to predetermine what the marketplace wants and what the best price, package or approach will be.
Rather, we have the obligation and the power to put every important marketing question to a vote by the only people whose ballot counts: customers and prospects.
How do we put a marketing question to a vote?
By testing one sales initiative against another, one price against another, one ad concept against another, one headline against another, one TV or radio commercial against another, one follow-up or up-sell overture against another. I could go on and on.
The point is, and this is not guesswork — when you test one approach against another and carefully analyze and tabulate the results, you will be amazed that one approach always substantially outpulls all the others by a tremendous margin. You’ll also be amazed at how many more sales or how much larger the average orders you can realize from the same effort.
The purpose of testing is to demand maximum performance from every marketing effort.
If each of your field salespeople averages 15 calls a day, doesn’t it make sense to find the one “sales pitch” or “package” that lets them close twice as many sales? One that increases their average order by 40%-100% — all with the same amount of effort?
You can easily achieve immediate increases in sales and profits merely by testing.
Tomorrow, have your salespeople use different pitches, different hot-button focuses, different packages, different specially priced offers, different “bumps” or upgrades, different follow-up offers, etc.
Each day review the specific performance of each test approach, then analyze the data.
If a specific new twist on your basic sales approach out-closes the old approach by 25-50%, doesn’t it make sense for every salesperson to start using this new approach?
Test every sales variable. Any positive or negative data can help you to dramatically manipulate the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
But don’t stop at merely finding those approaches, offers, prices, or packages that outperform the others. Once you identify the most successful combination, your work has just begun. Now you should find out “how high is high!”
Keep experimenting to come up with even better approaches that outpull your current “control.”
Your control is the concept, approach, offer, or sales pitch which has consistently proven, through comparative testing, to be the best performer.
Until you establish your control concerts. techniques, and approaches, you can’t possibly maximize your marketing.
Once you find control concepts or approaches, keep testing to see if you can improve on their performance, thereby replacing one control with a better one.
Price Testing
Test your prices. Different prices often outperform one another on the same product by an enormous margin.
- I’ve seen $19 outpull $25 by 300%.
- I’ve seen $195 outpull $245 by huge margins.
- I’ve seen $295 outpull $195 on certain offers, which netted my client a cool $100 more per sale!
Why does one price outpull another?
You won’t know until you look at the data . . . and you can’t look at the data if you don’t harvest it. But that’s an entire series of articles in itself. Suffice to say, for now, that the reason one price outpulls another has more to do with psychological image of value, perception of quality, etc.
Every situation is unique, so I urge you to test several different prices. You’ll be amazed at the difference in profit and total orders one price will produce over another.
Testing applies not merely to outside sales efforts but to every aspect of marketing.
If you run ads in newspapers or magazines, test different approaches, different headlines, different hot button emphases, different packages, different rationales, different pricing, and different bonuses on top of the basic offer.
Test different directives to the reader or listener on how to respond and what action to take.
Test positioning in the front, back, right, or left-hand side of the page. Test where your commercials run.
Make specific offers and analyze the number of responses, traffic, prospects, and resulting sales for each specific ad. Then compute the cost-per-prospect, cost-per-sale, the average sale-per-prospect, average conversion-per-prospect, and the average profit-per-sale against your control. This reveals the obvious winner, the control that you will keep running until a better control beats it.
Remember, salaried salesmen cost you the same fixed amount, whether they make one sale a day, three sales a day, or more.
An ad costs you the same amount of space, production time, or air time whether it produces 100 prospects, 1,000 prospects, or 10,000 prospects.
Therefore, it stands to reason that you should test different ad approaches and find those that outpull all the others, then use those approaches to maximize your investment.
Test everything starting right now.
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps |