January 8, 2012 in Articles, Lead Acquisation, Website Traffic Strategies by Conversion Leadership

How To Test Your Offers In The Market

Testing your offers is one of the most often overlooked details of starting a new business, or when launching a new product in an existing business.

The Internet makes it easier than ever before to find out if people will actually buy your product or service before you invest the resources to create it. That’s right, you can and should take orders for your product before you even spend the time and money to create it.

Isn’t that illegal?

Not at all, if you do it correctly.

So how do you test the market correctly for just a few hundred dollars? Well, you create a few different sales pages that test different variations of your offer. You then place advertisements in online search engines so they will send you traffic to that sales page.

You can use services such as Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, or Yahoo Advertising for these advertisements.

You can have the user proceed all the way through to the order page, and can even have them submit their credit card information. (Do NOT store credit card details because at this stage, the product is not really available).

Then, on the page where they would normally get a confirmation of their order, you give them a notice that the product is currently unavailable, and that you will get back to them later when it is available. That’s it. Anyone who makes it to the “currently unavailable” page was ready to buy your product today.

When you set up your advertising campaign, you will need to research what key words people actually use in the search engines to search for your type of product or service. In other words, you will need to specify what key words you want to “pay for” during your advertising, and you want it to be the key words that people are using to search for your type of product or service. Some key word tools you can use for your research include Word Tracker, Good Key Words, or the Google Key Word tool.

If you need to buy domain names for your test, you can use a domain registrar like Godaddy or Domain.com.

If you need to get inexpensive hosting, we recommend either Bluehost or Site5 because of the excellent service and technical support they provide.

Refining Your Offer From the Test Results And Repeat the Testing

Based on the results of your initial tests, you can refine your product offer and conduct further testing. If you had a lot of people visit the sales page but very few who make the “test” purchase, then the problem could be that your product offering is not compelling enough. Typical sales conversions usually range from 2% to 4% of visitors for a well-crafted offer, but this can vary for any number of reasons. So the numbers do not have to be huge to indicate a great potential product.

In any event, you have to do the math based on how much the traffic cost you versus how much you would have made on the sale.

Refine Your Business Plan Based On Your Test Results

Analyse the test results and see if they indicate this business idea has good potential. If so, then refine your business numbers up or down as required.

You’re now in a position to decide if your offer is worth scaling up into full-blown production.

For more information about customising offers for your market, contact us for a no obligation consultation.

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