7 Tips for Testing Your Sales and Marketing

By Angela Wu
Posted Monday, October 11, 2004

One marketing technique may work wonders for someone, but that doesn't guarantee that it'll do the same for you. The only way to really know what works for YOUR products and YOUR target audience is to experiment. Testing and experimentation are crucial to increasing your profits.

1. Try using the occasional pop-up window to get more subscribers to your newsletter. Some people *really* hate these, so use them sparingly. For example, you could have a window pop up only the first time someone visits your site ... or you could have one appear whenever someone leaves your site. Try different scenarios to see what works best.

2. Change the price of your product and see what impact it has on sales. Even if your sales drop, you may still come out ahead when it comes to profits. Note: your sales may not drop at all; I increased the price of my own booklet from $12.95 to $19.95 and sales stayed the same. You never know until you try.

3. Test different sales copy on your website and in your autoresponder. Should you come on strong, be subtle, be extremely detailed? Does long sales copy do better than short copy, or vice versa? Do you get more sales by spreading your sales copy on multiple pages, or by putting it all on one page? Be sure to make backups of your previous work; if you find the new copy kills sales, you can always restore the previous version.

4. Track your advertising. There are a number of commercially available ad tracking packages that can help you see which ads are working well and which aren't. Discard anything that doesn't work, and try to improve on ads that appear to work well.

5. Experiment with the navigation of your website. For example, change the number of clicks required to get to your ordering page, or change the flow of navigation so that your visitor always ends up at an ordering page.

6. Test different types of links. You might try short ads in the margins of your web pages vs. text links within the context of an article, for example.

7. Test response rates between direct links to your sales page and the use of a follow-up autoresponder. Sometimes people just need an extra 'push' or a reminder to order. (make sure your autoresponder has an easy way for your prospect to unsubscribe)

About the Author
Angela runs several successful sites dedicated to helping beginners profit from the Internet. Her new web magazine, Online Business Basics, features step-by-step tutorials for eBusiness 'newbies'. To take the guesswork out of starting and building an Internet business, click over to (http://www.onlinebusinessbasics.com/)