Do not fall in love with a cute marketing idea just because you and your team like it. This is a sure way to miss an opportunity and incur unnecessary costs. The key to effective marketing is to test, test and then test again before you commit resources to your campaign.
Example 1
General Electric ran two ads with identical headlines and text, but with different pictures in the ad:
A- A picture of a smiling baby
B- A picture of a woman putting a GE light bulb in a lamp
Which do you think out-pulled the other? Following review Ad B was found to have 3 times higher response than Ad A (according to a couple of sources)
Example 2
Which of these two headlines, run by an insurance company, had the better response?
A- If you are a careful driver you can save more money on insurance
B- Turn your careful driving into money
Headline A had multiple times better response than headline B.
Both outcomes were not easy to predict..
WHY?
Remember that there is a mind-boggling complexity behind why certain headlines (let alone full campaigns) attract more attention than others: psychological, economical, existing product alternatives, timing in market etc…you cannot possibly “predict” the right outcome.
The key is that you simply will not know before you test. And testing can make your (often expensive) marketing campaigns far more effective.
Test everything
So you test, test and test some more. Make sure you test as many variables as you can: headlines, guarantees, pricing, position in publications, timing, etc.
How to test?
Approach your marketing campaign as systematically and scientifically as possible. Change one thing at a time and observe the impact on response. For this you will need to track, for instance, where/how the prospect came across your offer; you can do this by using coded coupons, quote a code etc…
For instance, did you know that with a well-planned and executed email campaign you could monitor exactly what part of your campaign (headlines, pages, products, etc) generated the most interest or sale.
With these amazing tools, there are no excuses. You can easily test different variations of your campaign on a limited number of your client database. Then you simply choose the campaign that generated the highest responses, and send that to the rest of your database.
“In test after test I’ve conducted, I’ve rarely been able to predict which price would prove the biggest seller….I’ve honestly seen $19 outpull $17 by 300%. I’ve seen $69 outproduce $79 by more than double…As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have the right to determine what the market wants. But you have the duty to find out. “ Jay Abraham.