Relationships, Split Testing and Uncomfortable Conversations

Split testing is an element of marketing that’s been around for a long while. It’s a method of running two similar ads against each other and letting your customers vote on which one makes them want to buy more.

Travel back in time far enough, this was done exclusively in print ads. There would be some way to distinguish what ad customers would be responding to. Say if the advertisement had a tear-out a card to fill out, they would have printed some identifying number on the card. Later on as radio/television ads came in, marketers liked to use some variation of “ask for Janice” or “ask for the Squeaky Wheel Department”.

Not so surprisingly, there was no Janice, nor was there a Squeaky Wheel Department. There was a single phone line with an operator taking orders and tracking which ad the customer responded to. It was a zero sum game between ads.

The age of internet marketing saw an explosion of this kind of testing. Get a good software engineer with a little understanding of statistics, and you can set up a whole series of tests all at once. If we’re talking about a website with more than a few hundred unique visitors a day, you can split test dozens of different variables a day.

Facebook notoriously has had a whole pile of different ‘thumbs up’ they’ve tested since they introduced them.

Internet marketing did have a bit of a drawback where people started treating their customers more like a number. We’re not talking the big guys either. Little companies of only few employees were so focused on optimizing the funnel that they could forget the funnel was filled with people.

The element that really made the difference, then and now, was maintaining a relationship with your clients.

It’s well understood that it is much more expensive to to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer. Developing a rapport with the people that support your business is much more than just being neighbourly. You’ve got people that will not only be interested in purchasing from you again, but they can tell you more about the overall market of people who buy products like the one you’re selling.

You can do this by having conversations. You can do this by taking surveys. You can do this by creating unique sales funnels just for them. You can find out very explicit details about what’s working with your business, and what’s not.

A surprisingly underrated tool is to go through your own funnel.

Have you signed up to your own newsletter? Read through the autoresponders? Sent out contact information to the sales staff and gone through the pitch over the phone? Experienced the fulfillment cycle? Tried to contact the help desk?

There’s a lot of details we get hung up on in the business. But it’s critical to remember that every customer is also potentially another element of your overall marketing plan. They can be walking & talking testimonials out there in the world. If they have a good experience, they’ll remember that. The people they talk to will as well