Two Marketing Birds
With One Stone: Split Testing With Your Sales Letter
by
Dina Giolitto
You
can't beat the web for low-cost and no-cost advertising...
and yet there are thousands of solo entrepreneurs
who have
yet to create a sales page and start aggressively
marketing their information product. Which brings us to
the obvious
question: WHY create a product if you aren't going to
market it?
One
of the most delightful and economical features
of the Web is the ability to split-test
your sales letter
to multiple markets at nearly ZERO extra cost.
You can do this yourself, and leverage your sales potential
exponentially while keeping
a tight clutch on your purse strings. Or, you can farm it
out to a professional, and even still for thousands less
than it would take to create two fresh ads from scratch,
ask for multiple sales letter versions at a bulk rate that
have you hitting potential target markets faster than your
grandpa can win at the county fair Whack-a-Mole game.
In the world of corporate print advertising, split testing
is performed via ad versioning. Millions of companies put
ad versioning to work so they can squeeze every drop of profit
potential out of their paid ad campaigns. Ad versioning involves
taking a single ad (which could be anything from a sales
letter, catalog, newsletter, print ad, etc.) and creating multiple versions of it that speak to subgroups of the primary
market.
An
example: U.S. fashion retailers run versioned catalogs
to their hot and cold weather market segments.
The "Cold
Zone" version of the piece might feature winter coats
and accessories, where the "Warm Zone" would replace
the winter items with lightweight outerwear. The remaining "neutral" items
and the jist of the ad promotions stay the same. So, the
versioned catalog would look *almost* identical to the original,
with the exception of those select items and/or headlines.
In what way is this important? Because why
would you try to sell ski jackets to folks in Florida
when you know they'd
be far more likely to pay for a windbreaker? Laser-targeting
to specific sub-groups makes sense for ANY marketing and
brings increased revenue to companies large AND small.
For
large corporations, ad versioning incurs additional blackplate
change fees by the printing company.
The split
testing comes in after the season is finished and sales are
analyzed. If the versioned ads don't yield enough profit
to cover the additional printing expenses, then they're dropped
the next year. That is, assuming the marketing people are "on
the ball." ;)
What
does this have to do with YOUR web marketing? It's
clear that ad versioning works, or the world's top corporations
wouldn't use it. Testing makes sense. It's a critical part
of your sucess strategy and should be implemented wherever
and whenever possible.
It's
MUCH less labor-intensive, and far more cost-effective,
to create ONE advertisement and then modify parts of it to
suit the audience, than to start from scratch every time
you want to address a sub-group of your market. The beauty
of having a sales letter on the web, is that you can easily
create as many versions of the same copy as you'd like to
appeal to multiple market segments.
For
example, let's say you're marketing the handy-dandy "Soap
Chip Recycling Machine" (I can't take credit for this
idea - saw something like it on an infomercial back in the
'80s). The Soap Chip Recycling Machine lets you take those
annoyingly
small,
slippery soap chips that collect in the bathrooms and kitchen
of your home, and mash them all together in a special soap-bar
compactor to form a new, fresh bar of soap. As the creator,
you think this is a breakthrough product that will change
the lives of millions and save the world a ton of money on
soap... and you want to pitch it to the right people/make
yourself a nice fortune.
Who do you think you'd market this thing to? Consumers of
course... so, you write a sales letter that covers the myriad
benefits of this miraculous soap maker, and in it you speak
to Mom, because she's the one who's in control of the weekly
grocery shopping and you know she'd like to save money on
soap, not to mention avoid dealing with those pesky little
soap slivers.
But then you think, well, old folks might like this nifty
gizmo too, because seniors are often frugal and more likely
to stick with the traditional bar soaps that they grew up
with. So now you take the same sales letter, replace the
photos of Mom with some old geezers, change a few of the
headlines and some of the copy, and you've got a variation
on the soap bar theme that you can pitch to a new audience
and it didn't cost you a RED CENT to make the change and
potentially DOUBLE your profits.
Split-testing works particularly well if you're grappling
over who you should be marketing to in your ads. Why
choose one audience over the other, when for dollars per
ad (or
for nothing, if you write your own copy), you
can hit two marketing birds with one stone? Of course, if you're going
to split-test your sales letter on the internet, you'll want
to fork the marketing road and follow both paths. Take the
letter you wrote to Mom, and market it via articles and press
releases that you submit to home and family websites. Take
the other sales letter and do the same, but for senior sites
instead.
I hope that this lesson in split-testing
with sales letters has whet your web marketing appetite and helped you realize
that the only thing that's stopping you from selling to a
planet full of prospects is your lack of action. The time
has come to take action and start selling. So let's get with
the marketing program, get that sales letter written, and
put your marketing materials to the test.
Copyright 2006 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.
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