The Small Business Marketing Guide is a one-stop, do-it-yourself resource here to help you grow your business. This guide is your source for tips, inspirational real-world examples and how-to articles by small business marketing experts as well as helpful resources for designing your brand identity, creating marketing materials, launching direct marketing promotions and building an online presence.

I’m on of their small business experts, so please check it out!

My first post on the site is about split testing your direct marketing. Here’s a preview:

Unlike nearly all other forms of marketing, direct marketing allows you the unique opportunity to test the success of not just the complete marketing effort, but discrete pieces of the marketing program individually. This is called split testing.

A split test is a head-to-head test between two different versions (or variables) of a specific element of a direct marketing program. For example, when split testing a direct mail piece, you would send out two versions of the same sales letter.

Both letters are almost identical, except that one includes a bold headline that asks the customer to order. Both include different website URLs to visit to place an order. Each of the website order pages look and act exactly the same. The purpose is to record which sales letter the customer responded to. This type of split test would allow you to discover which of the two sales letters was most effective, the one with the headline or the one without.

Read the rest.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Original post by Dane Carlson