Master Marketing by Mustering Clusters
By:Michel Fortin

A great benefit of ecommerce, when compared to the traditional brick-and-mortar world, is the ability for an online marketer to track, assess and correct marketing endeavors -- almost at the click of a mouse. A specific product, service of offer is hot (or not) right now? A particular marketing effort is doing (or not doing) so well? A specific sales letter, text or even graphic on your website is causing sales to go way up (or way down)? Or one webpage is more popular than the others?

That's the beauty of online marketing.

This opens the question: If tracking, analyzing and correcting one's online marketing is so simple to do, why are people not taking advantage of this to its fullest extent? One can easily and quickly find out if any activity is producing the results anticipated. But questions I'm often asked include, "Will this (or that) work? What's best? What should I do? What ... Etc." Then a great debate ensues.

My answer is usually quite simple: "Why not test it?"

Test, test and test some more! That's the "secret" to online success. There are no other "secrets." There are no specific ways of doing things that will work for everyone all of the time. In fact, many of the experts in and contributors to the Marketing Challenge private site are far from being marketing experts per se. They are only entrepreneurs like you and me.

All they really did was try different things and in different ways. And if they're anything like me, they failed countless times. They tried, tried and tried -- until one day something worked (and made them a fortune)! They are master "testers," so to speak. And you should be one too. Internet marketing, particularly the web itself, is really one big testing ground.

For example, one particular Internet marketer I know has staff on his payroll that -- and believe it or not -- test all day, every day! That's all they do. Is it worth it? To illustrate, one thing his staff found was that, after removing one small graphic from his home page, it increased his sales by 26.3%.

Granted, the problem does not stop at the lack of testing but also includes the inability for most marketers to aggregate, analyze and use the mounds of data available to them. Harvey Mackay, author of "Swim With the Sharks (Without Being Eaten Alive)," once said, "People say 'knowledge is power,' but I say knowledge is *not* power -- using that knowledge is used."

The Internet is one huge ocean of information that can make anyone drown, which is probably the reason why analyzing all of the marketing intelligence at one's disposal can be quite cumbersome -- and thus easily ignored. One can surely measure the results of a marketing campaign or a website's traffic, even the site's conversion ratio (be it action- or sales- based). But there is more to marketing analysis than that. There are many ways of making use of information.

There are even many ways to analyze it. But if there's one thing to keep in mind when working with all the data you collect, it's this: Information alone is never enough. In other words, it's not bits and pieces of information that provide insights into a specific marketing activity but "information based on changes in a cluster of activities" that can provide some real clues.

For example, if your website is running in a certain way, with a certain copy and with a certain content, that's one cluster of activities right there. Document as much as you can, such as what your site is currently offering and doing in terms of results. Then, as you implement any change whatsoever to your site, no matter how significant or infinitesimal, you should gauge the difference in results your change has incurred.

There's the key to testing.

To illustrate the importance of testing and analyzing clusters of information, here's a case in point. In her book, entitled "Now or Never," author and Forrester Research's VP of research Mary Modahl has found that a site's download speed is almost directly proportional to its sales ratio. Using a client as an example, she wrote that, after he had cut down his website's download time in half, her client tripled his online sales.

Look at it this way: If your site takes X number of seconds to download, measure that against not only your level of traffic or sales but also your current conversion ratio. Try to speed up your download time by, as an example, removing unnecessary graphics, compressing them (like with GIFBot, a tools offered by http://NetMechanic.com/) and reducing the number of tables. After a while, compare your site's conversion ratio against ratios of various download times. Is there a difference?

And don't stop there. Try different approaches, different sales copies, different graphics, different formats, different color schemes, different offers, different layouts, etc. And compare the results before and after you make these changes.

Become a "master tester" instead of a master marketer, in other words. Heck, you might just be pleasantly surprised!

About the Author
Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter and consultant dedicated to turning sales messages into powerful magnets. Get a free copy of his book, "The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning," when you subscribe to his free monthly ezine, "The Profit Pill." See http://SuccessDoctor.com/ now!