Testing and tracking can seem tedious and boring but without it you have no chance to improve your site, product, marketing or anything else that can lead to success. I have struggled in the past (and still have to push myself sometimes) to actually do the tracking and testing. The results are almost always surprising!
While you want to run your business with passion, you want to avoid using your intuition or gut too much for essential decisions because data is always going to lead you in a better direction than your gut. If you don’t avoid testing and tracking, you’ll experience a lot of positives.
When it comes to your business, doing anything at all without data is a huge mistake. So, why do you want to track and test?
Know Your Return on Investment![testing and tracking ROI]()
It’s difficult to know how much you can spend on an advertisement or even developing a product if you are unclear about your actual return on investment (ROI). You may have an idea of what you want it to be, but until the data comes in, you have no idea. Knowing the real number helps you ensure your profit. Keep track of your expenses, including your time investments for every product you develop so that you know your actual ROI.
Improve Every Marketing Campaign and Launch
When you test and track, you avoid continuing a campaign that is not working, and you also avoid launching a product your audience doesn’t want. For example, you can test a subject line for your newest email marketing campaign to promote your digital product with part of your list to find out if it coverts as planned. If it doesn’t do anything, you can try again without having wasted too much time and effort.
Identify Your Most Valuable Content
When you’re looking at the data, you can see which subjects your audience likes to consume more often. You can find out what format they prefer due to their behavior and actions. You can also use that data to improve future content creation to create even more content that your audience will also love.
Develop Better Audience Segmentation
Make sure you use the behavioral and tagging features in your email autoresponder and landing page software. This may take a bit of work to set up to gather useful information but is definitely worth the effort. You can use the data you gather to segment your audience in more efficient ways.
Increase “User” Happiness
Your customer’s happiness is dependent upon their experience with you as a consumer of your content. This is usually called the ‘user experience’ and is a measure of your audience’s happiness.
If you want to increase happiness, tracking their actions and collecting data from those tests will help you improve the entire buying cycle and your customers’ experience with you.
Make More Money
Obviously, the main reason, aside from consumer happiness, to test and track is that you can make more money. When you give your audience what they want, how they want it, when they want it, you can’t help but convert at a higher rate. You can use the data from testing and tracking to ensure that you’re providing your customers with what they need and want.
Compile Valuable Data
All the testing and tracking you do is about the data you’re gathering and compiling for your business. Demographics about your audience, ease of use of your product, and even case studies will provide the testing and tracking you need to improve. Customer surveys can be a great way to gather this type of data.
As a small business owner, whether you sell products or provide a service, testing and tracking the offers you make, the actions you take, and the work you do is going to help improve results exponentially. Each time you test and track, you gather data to help improve the next actions you take. It’s a win-win for everyone, you and your audience.
