Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 100

SPLIT TEST FOR MARKETING POWER

If I had to name the one activity that separates the big dogs from the rest of the crowd in the marketing industry it would be split testing.

Split testing is achieved with the following steps:

• Establish a baseline response rate to an offer or call to action.
• Create a second call to action or offer with one feature slightly adjusted (typically the headline).
• Send most of your traffic to the established baseline offer.
• Send a portion of your traffic to the second call to action until you have a large enough sample size to determine (with statistically significant certainty) if the second offer is outperforming the first or not.
• Once the second offer is determined not to be outperforming the first offer, it is scrapped and replaced with a new offer until a new winning offer establishes a new baseline response rate.

There are websites, blogs, and books dedicated to teaching the power of split testing and marketing. The good news is you can easily take advantage of the power of split testing by using some basic free tools.

Even if you don't want to dive deeply into the world of split testing every aspect of your marketing message, it could still really pay off to split test some of the most influential parts of your marketing message.