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A Critical Business Process Most Online Businesses Never Do
By Peter Knight of The Website Audit
Something that is often undervalued, ignored and not implemented with enough regularity is the practice of testing. It doesn't matter what business you have, it is critical to be testing. Too improve business results one has to have the right feedback. Only with good feedback can you improve and we get feedback by adopting a testing mindset. Testing can let you know the how, what and why of your business results. All business are ultimately about getting results and making an impact. Therefore, testing should be central to any business. Many business fumble and fall because they didn't test. They didn't test the market demand, market behavior, they didn't test the best mediums , the best message, they didn't evaluate their competition and they didn't test their website performance. They didn't test their assumptions. Because if they would, they wouldn't have fallen. Even negative tests results prevent failure because informative feedback is gold! You can't fail if you are testing. I work for the most part with online businesses, entrepreneurs and service professionals. They rely on their website and I try to make them understand the value of testing. Results are just that, good or bad, they're only valuable when you can leverage and compare them for the sake of future improvement. A main tool for testing in the online space is by the use of something called split testing. Being trained in psychology in an academic setting has gifted me with both a headache and a big advantage in online marketing: the knowledge and skills to perform good tests. With split testing, we can keep it very simple yet very effective. We test one control group against an experimental group and compare results. You can get instant results and feedback to work with. It's possible to discover that by changing one word or even a letter performance can increase by a significant margin (400% or more in some cases). Once a person witnesses a test result effecting their bottom line by changing one word in their advertising, you can imagine they quickly become fans of split testing. It's that powerful. But splittesting can be applied in a myriad of ways. For websites, you can test your copywriting, your articles, your headlines, your buttons, graphics and images, your incentives, your color schemes, your layout. You simply create an extra variation of what ever element you want to test and test it against the default. Then you find out what performs best and adopt the best version. Now that version is the default and you then try a different variation to see if you can boost performance once again. You can go on and on until you've maximized your return on investment. But split testing doesn't stop at just websites. You can test the title of a book through pay per click, you can split test a menu for your restaurant. You can test the effectiveness of two tools or mediums. The bottom line is, find what makes the most impact and test it. Think about the twenty percent that makes up eighty percent of profits. How can you improve the results in that area by testing? |
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