Test, Test, Test, Test, Test, etc.

Bulletin from the powerful Altitude event in Los Angeles last week: Testing equals Big Bucks.

This shouldn’t be news, but it is for an alarming number of even veteran marketers. (I’ll certainly cop to being guilty of not testing anywhere near enough.)

The bottom line is that, at some point, you’ve got to step away from what you “believe” to be true about your market, your advertising, and your sales funnel… and test the critical parts of your pitch. Price, headline, bullets, voice, attitude, layout, guarantee, name capture, email follow-up, freebies, all of it.

The rewards of dedicated, focused and obsessive testing have never been made more obvious to me… than when, smack in the middle of the seminar, Eben asked the room how many people tested “regularly” on their Websites.

Bunch of folks raised their hands.

Then he asked how many tested EVERY DAY.

About half a dozen kept their hands up.

Then… and this is where it gets good… he asked each of the “every day testers” how much they were grossing.

Wow.

The low end take of that small group was over $12million/year. The mean average was over twenty million.

Moral: Testing rocks.

You will, of course, continue to do what you want to do. It’s your biz, after all.

However, you’ll never know how much moolah you’re leaving on the table until you test. And test often. And learn from your results.

Just a small tidbit from the vast mountain of stuff I learned (and re-learned) at the Altitude seminar. Eben really threw himself, and his entire organization, into making that event a shocking success… and you know you’ve done well when grizzled, cynical, “seen it all before” veterans like me give you an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Everyone I talked to — and the room was packed with movers and shakers — was ecstatic over the material presented and the opporunities offered.

Well done, Eben.

I’ll be synthisizing my notes over the next weeks, and sharing more soon.

My head is still buzzing from the overload of input…

Stay frosty,

John Carlton
www.marketingrebel.com