Marketing Profs

Direct marketing professionals don't guess. They base their decisions on statistics and calculate what the return on their investment will be.

Because of what is known as split-testing or test runs, direct marketers rarely get it wrong. Why then do Web “professionals” rarely if ever pay attention to this incredibly powerful strategy?

This article is about how to run a split test, or A/B test, on your Web site and how it can affect your Web site conversion rate only in a positive way.

What has direct marketing got to do with it?

I used to work for one of the biggest direct mailing houses in the UK. It used to send over 100 million letters for many different companies to different types of prospect every month, over 1 billion letters per year.

Its success was largely due to its methods of testing. If it had a mail shot of 100,000 sales letters, it would do a test run on 1,000 targeted people and measure the response. It's fair to say that if it got a 2% response from those 1,000 people, it would get the same response rate from the same target market for larger mailings. So from 100,000 people they would bring in 2,000 sales.

In that way, it was very easy for this company to justify the expense incurred in sending the mail shot and optimizing the sales letter. The customers of this company knew what the return on investment (ROI) was going to be. So they lined up to get this company to sell their products.

There were still times when something went wrong, of course—but never by so much of a difference that a customer would lose money. This was all because of the testing. This company would never do a mail out without a measured test run, and it never tested to less than 1,000 people.

(Incidentally, the highest conversion rate we achieved while I worked for the company with this method was 4% sales conversion from 1 million sales letters (40,000 sales), resulting in a profit for the customer of over $200,000.)

What has this got to do with Web marketing?