Test, Test, Test.
Marketing books and courses, gurus at seminars, all love to state sound bytes of truth. In sales and PMA (positive mental attitude) books and tapes, you’ll find even more. I’d like you to think about some of the marketing and sales truisms you’ve heard over the years, and ask yourself these questions:
- If it is to be, is it really all up to me?
- Is a blue signature really better in a letter?
- Why use a live stamp when you can get great post office discounts when you meter?
- If they click three times will I really always lose them?
Actually, all the truisms you’ve learned over the years are probably true, or at least they are for some campaign, for some product, for some point in time, to some universe of people! Every campaign is different. Every customer is unique. We are not trends, we are individuals. Your product, your company, your headline, your campaign will convert some people that another campaign for the identical product to the same people will not sell!
The only way to know is to selectively test different components of your campaign individually, and glean from the results what your market is telling you for your product, now.
Having thus said, don’t make the corresponding mistake of assuming that none of the marketing Maxims apply to your customer… that somehow your customers don’t respond to this or that… the Maxims are about why things work. The trick is finding what combinations work for you. Ultimately, they always work, but they have to be tailored and tested… not assumed away. The way we do this is through ongoing testing, which we’ll talk about in more detail in Section II.
