Test Everything, Assume Nothing
By Anna Johnson on July 26th, 2008You’ve probably heard that you should test each key aspect of your marketing before assuming that one particular approach is more effective than another. All the same, it’s very easy to assume that if a particular tactic works for one target market / product / website, it should work just as well for another.
Big trap! While there are some universal principles… there are many elements that may work better or worse for a particular market.
For example, many people have modeled their name squeeze pages on Eben Pagan’s previous DoubleYourDating.com home page (it’s since been changed). Accordingly, they’ll have a headline, some bullet points and a name/email form. But is this necessarily optimal for your market?
While I’m still trying things, testing and tracking, I can tell you that initial testing has shown that, in some cases, having no bullet points has worked significantly better than having bullet points or any kind of lead-in copy. Yes, sometimes short copy beats long copy!
I’ve also found some other key differences between my various target markets. For example, on the “thanks” page (the page someone sees after signing up through my landing page) a prospect is given a link that takes them into the main area of the relevant site. Now you might think that the same word for that link e.g. “Next Page” or “Enter Site” might work just as well for all my sites. Not so! Early testing is showing that while one target market may be more responsive to “Enter Site”, another is more responsive to a different word. And that’s not to say that I have worked out the optimal link/word yet!
So, the big lesson here is to test everything, assume nothing!
