“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”
– Tom Peters
Why is testing so important? At the end of the day, testing is all about doing what you say you will do. Do the work and test your offer – because if you don’t you’re just guessing. This puts your credibility on the line. You risk other people’s money. It’s straight-out wrong. And from a business perspective, it’s very wrong.
Let’s go through this. You create a product and come up with an offer. You build a funnel that starts out with a squeeze page designed to capture a prospect’s data. This leads into a marketing sequence. Most people, especially if they don’t know what they are doing, stop here and go out to find JV partners.
This is nowhere near enough. You cannot accept a cool-looking squeeze page just because you designed it or happen to like it. Before you go to your partners you must test its effectiveness. You measure the results based on your call to action. I suggest you put up three or four versions of a squeeze page and split your traffic so that you test which one works best.
Maybe you set up a video-based page. Perhaps it’s a webinar registration page. It doesn’t matter. Think about that page on a mobile device. Can you set up 4 different designs – all with the same copy and the same colors, similar to what is on your site? Then you send the traffic to all of them to pick one or two winners of the style test.
Once you have the style, you move to the next level. Maybe you run a test on your video. Can you put two videos on the same style page and test them one versus the other?
Then you can test several different styles of headlines. It’s purely a process of elimination. You continue to optimize once you have a basic foundation of your style or your video. You can even play with things like colors and boxes on your squeeze page.
The process of optimization never stops and it’s important to remember that it is your responsibility to get the best possible result for your partners. This is really important because, at the end of the day, your partners are the ones who are taking the biggest risk. They are sending you their traffic at no cost to you. They have plenty of offers that they can mail for and when they choose to promote you, they are giving you a vote of confidence. It’s up to you to do the work and live up to that.
Of course, it’s important to test as much as you can from an economic perspective. It’s equally important from a relationship perspective. You are looking to build long-term partnerships with people who will support your business for years to come. They will only do that if you do the necessary testing to get them solid results. That’s good for you and good for them.
Testing is economically intelligent and it’s the right thing to do.
