From Malaysian Business

BUILDING YOUR BUSINESS

Are you building your business by guessing and testing? If so, it’s time for some effective testing.

Many Small to medium-scale businesses are run without proper development plans. Many ride on the crest of short-term successes and projects and once these run out, owners are left in a quandary on what to do next. There’s quite a lot of ‘Let’s give this a go’, ‘ I guess this will work’; ‘ Can we test-run this programme?’…. Are you building your business in similar fashion – guessing and testing?

A distributor for a network marketing company called me this week for help in promoting her business. Julie places advertisements in e-magazines and e-mail newsletter to generate traffic to the free website provided by her company. It appears she also sends postcards to several targeted mailing lists to generate inquiries and traffic to her website. When I asked her what was producing the most profitable results, she said, ‘ I don’t know.’ And for a moment, I must admit I was flabbergasted!

It is amazing how much money some business owners spend on advertisements, sales letters and other business promotions without evaluating how much profit each produces. Your advertising decision is only a guess if you don’t know how much profit it’s likely to produce. Advertising based on guessing is gambling with the future of your business. It is unhealthy! What do you do then?

Increase Profits and Reduce Risk

Effective testing increases your profits and reduces your risk. Decision based on the results of continual testing put you in control of your business profits. I once increased the response to a postcard promotion from 3% to over 20% by constantly making changes based on results revealed by repeated testing.

Testing may be fun for engineers but it’s boring for most entrepreneurs. That is why many business owners avoid it. If you are one of them, you’re making an expensive mistake. The benefits you gain and risks you avoid by testing make it valuable function you can’t afford to ignore.

Have you heard of the 80/20 Business Risk guideline? You may want to copy this novel guideline I use if you find it difficult to test your marketing efforts on a regular basis. I simply invest 80% of my advertising budget in proven promotions and 20% in testing new variations. This formula generates a constant stream of profitable business from proven promotions, while forcing me to continually test for better results!

Continually Test Everything

Continually test and evaluate everything you use or do to promote business. A partial list of things you should test include:

TIP: Test the headlines for an ad, sales letter or web page before testing what follows it. Find the headlines that attracts the most readers before testing what the headline attracts them to read.

Test only one change at a time or you won’t know what variable produced the new result. Code each variation you test and track the results. Every time a change and produces better results, make it your new standard and continue testing. There is no such thing as the perfect promotion. But continual testing gradually gets you closer to it.