“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

Scientific Marketing

How’d you like a simple, 6-step framework for testing... well, anything?

Today I’m going to share the same steps I follow with any experiment I run, marketing or otherwise. It’s how I’ve developed the confidence to take our campaigns from thousands of dollars of adspend up to tens of thousands of adspend.

You can apply this process to any experiment you’re running. It’s nothing new. I didn’t invent this. I just apply it to marketing and advertising.

But to follow it? You need data.

This means you need to know how to get your data and how accurate it is. If you don’t have accurate data, this won’t work with 100% certainty.

When you don’t have data, follow the steps as best you can and intuit the results. Its better to follow some kind of process at all, than not to be testing.

You can still follow the process, but you’ll be shooting in the dark with your conclusions.

Alright, these are the steps in Scientific Marketing

1. Observation or Question

The basic starting point. Start with a question like, “What would happen if…”

You can also focus on a goal like, “Increase conversions from 1% to 2%.” Or, you could base it off your previous experiment and iterate on those results, “Based on the results from our last experiment, what would happen if…”

Once you have your question or observation, do some research.

2. Research Topic

Dive into everything you know about this particular question.

What have you tried in the past?
What might previous data have to say about your question?
What are other people doing that seems to be working?
Can you find proof from someone else’s work that this might work?

3. Hypothesis

Use your question and your research to develop a hypothesis. Sometimes these first three steps happen all at once, and sometimes you need to do more research.

The basic idea is to come up with a sentence like this, “If we do X, we believe Y will happen, because Z reasoning.”

Z comes from your research in Step 2 and your previous experiment observations.

A simple hypothesis I’ve used is, “If I change the headline on the sales page, I believe we’ll get more conversions, because the #1 benefit is more clear to the reader as soon as they reach the sales page.”

It’s tempting to skip the reasoning part. Don’t fall into that trap. Document and record what you want to do, what you think is going to happen, and why. If you don’t document your reasoning, you’ll likely forget or be unable to effectively report your conclusions later.

4. Test and Experiment

Now you implement your test. Change the headline, swap out the images, change the button color.

You’ll want to set a specific timeframe to review results. Base this timeframe on the quality and quantity of data you receive back. You need statistical relevance.

For example if you only have 10 people hitting our page, you’re likely not going to get statistical relevance. Make sure you have enough data coming back to you that you feel confident the results wouldn’t change.

Another caveat often overlooked:

Only change one variable, leave the rest the same. You want to isolate the change so you can identify what created the result. If you change more than one thing you won’t know what created the result.

One of your goals with following this process is to develop your own set of rules and principles to follow in your business. You do that by isolating the changes you make that improve your results. If you change more than one thing, you’ll never know what created the improvement.

5. Analyze

Once your experiment is complete, gather data and analyze.

What happened? Be specific. “Conversion rate went up by 14.57% during the experiment.” “Sales went down by 10.39%”

Was your hypothesis correct? Why? Was it incorrect? Why?

If the experiment does win, test the same thing again in a different situation and see if you achieve the same result. If you do, you’ve likely discovered your own “rule”.

Also, remember to take into account any outside factors you think may have swayed the results.

6. Report Conclusions

The final step is to gather data and results and share them with the team.

This is likely the most important part of the entire process, yet it’s often overlooked. By gathering, analyzing and reporting on your results, you force yourself to absorb the insights from the experiment.

It can be as simple as sending a slack message to your team, or, if you’re a solopreneur writing the insight down in a testing journal you can review later.

Where to Follow the 6 Steps 

Best places to follow this method?

• Everywhere
• Ad creative
• Ad copy
• Targeting
• Landing page hero section
• Landing page copy
• Email copy
• Social post copy
• Student support responses 

Remember, constant experimentation leads to constant improvement. Always be testing. 

Let’s Look at Data

We recently concluded our Black Friday sale. 

We sold $121,088 over the weekend. Not the best sale we’ve ever done, but nothing to turn up your nose at. 

In my opinion, the biggest win from the sale wasn’t the high-ticket sales from the big bundles. It was the massive increase in customers for the 30-Day Challenge. We discounted it by $20 for the entire week. 

During that time, it pulled in 482 customers and a total of $16,173. For comparison, the week before it pulled 90 customers total and $4,980 in revenue. 

Of those 482 customers, 268 were brand-new leads. Meaning, they didn’t exist in our database beforehand. 

Image of the Week

It can be difficult to know what to test... so here's the general guideline I follow: 

Test the biggest things first. Things you think will have the biggest impact. In general that's: 

• Anything above the fold 
• The lead
• The call to action
• The offer

Make big changes, don't just change the headline and say the same thing. Change the headline and try a completely different angle.

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

Insight from the Week

For the last three weeks, I’ve taken the first hour of my day to work on personal projects.

I think one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career is not building out my own email list. I’ve let it fall by the wayside, and now I regret it. There’s no audience built up… nowhere else to go but to keep chugging along with what I’m doing.

Not that I’m in a bad situation, it’s just that I’d like the option to transition to something else if I wanted.

So, rather than continue to let my inactivity in this area keep me from taking action, I decided to move forward.

My first project was to update my 30-Day Email Copy Challenge and my Email Copy Handbook. Both were exciting at the time, but after I finished them I completely lost steam.

I found myself wanting to avoid taking the hour in the morning. I lost my direction. I lost focus.

This morning, I think I discovered why… and it starts with this quote from Sean D’Souza:

If you sell pizza, it's not solving a problem. If you sell pizza for vegetarians, it solves a specific problem. If you sell "tiny pizza" it solves a problem for those who want to eat pizza but end up eating too much. Pizza itself solves the problem of food, but the moment there's an additional issue involved, the problem creates clarity and urgency.

After reading that, I realized what I've been creating is still very generalized. I just sat down with the resources I had already created and thought, "What could I create with this?"

But everything I have is still extremely general.

While it's true the content I have could help someone write emails, I don't think there's anything truly unique about what I've put into it. I've just aggregated all the information I've learned from other people and put it into one place.

What I think I could create that would be unique and solve a much more specific problem is an iteration on what I have... and focus it on the niche I have the most experience with: Alternative Health & Wellness. Even more specifically, Alternative Health businesses that sell digital products. If I wanted to get more specific, it's something like... Yoga, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong businesses with digital offerings.

I believe I could create something much more specific for this group about writing emails that inspire your students to show up and practice.

This seems much more specific and suddenly adds the frame of urgency you were speaking to in the thread I linked above...

You're a yoga teacher that teaches online classes, you have an email list and know you should send email to them, but you don't know what to write.

It's all the same problems, but focused on a specific person with a specific kind of business and a specific kind of customer.

So, where I’m at now is I’ve completed the Email Copy Handbook… but I think I need to rework it from the ground up to focus on one single person. (Duh, Marketing 101) I have far more to add to the conversation about how to write emails that get people excited to practice than I do to the email copywriting conversation in general.

To bring this home to you, dear reader, I pose a question.

Where are you avoiding focusing on a single person in your product creation and marketing? 

Let’s Look at Data

This week we closed enrollment for our Breathwork Online Course. You can see the sales page there.

We’ve had 294 students enroll so far, but cart closes at midnight tonight so I’m guessing we’ll get a few more before then.

Just going off the current numbers, we’ve had 5,175 unique visitors to the sales page. That gives us a 5.68% conversion rate on the page I linked above… and this isn’t even a live course.

The last launch we did for a similar style of course only had a 2.09% conversion rate.

I think it did so well because:

1. We’re getting close to Black Friday, people are in the mood to spend money.
2. The topic is better. More people in the audience are interested in it than a niched topic like the previous course.
3. We’ve kind of pre-sold it in other places by mentioning the course over and over again as a good remedy to many ailments. 

Image of the Week

Always have a backup.

“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

Insight from the Week

Start training your replacements early. 

This last week's been one of the busiest of my life with work. 

Long hours of Zoom calls, Slack messages coming in left and right, planning live events for 2023, a Black Friday sale, launching a course, and training a new Marketing Manager. I’m sure I’m missing something in there. 

It’s the first week that I feel like my energy is overtaxed since I’ve started the transition into General Manager. It was the addition of the training for the Marketing Manager that did it. They suddenly need hours of my time every day… that I don’t have to give. 

The problem? I didn’t train anyone else on the team how to do things I could’ve easily trained them on. 

Now I’m left with a lot of non-management tasks on top of all the management responsibilities. 

I think the lesson from all this is: 

Start training other people how to replace you far earlier than you think. 

Because by the time you want them trained up, it’ll be too late. You’ll realize you don’t have the capacity to train them effectively and it’s far faster to simply do it yourself. 

But if you keep just doing it all yourself your days will keep filling up, and filling up, and filling up. 

So, get it all off your plate three, six, twelve months before you think you need to.

Anyway, that’s my main insight from this week. 

Let’s Look at Data

We’ve been heavily focused on improving our 30-Day Challenge funnel since June of this year. 

The goal is to get it to breakeven on Day 0 (meaning we spend $1 and make $1 back almost immediately). 

At launch it was pulling in about 6 customers a week. Last week it pulled 106 customers who spend $5,954 off $7,713 in adspend, getting us to 77% ROI. 67 of those customers were brand-new. 

What’s made the biggest difference in conversions? 

On the sales page itself, I used the copy from top-performing ad and made that the lead for the sales page. Essentially using the data from the ads to inform what to put on the page. This also creates more congruency between the ads and the page itself. 

What we’re testing next: 

1. A completely separate sales page 
2. Adding another upsell to the purchase process 

Why these tests? 

Right now we’re getting an average conversion rate on the page of about 0.75%. Meaning out of every 100 people that land on the sales page, about one of them will buy. If we can increase the base conversion rate and increase the average order value for every purchase, I think we’ll cross the “spend a dollar, make a dollar” threshold.

Image of the Week

Sometimes appreciating ourselves can feel like a punishment. Remember to take time to appreciate everything you've accomplished in your life.