How AdWords Could Have Gotten Me a Date in 1978
Archives: Daily Issues | Marketing/Internet | Wealthy
This one time, in 1978, I tried to get a date for the 8th grade Valentine’s Day dance at my junior high school. Acting like the marketer I would become, I first selected my target market of girls I was interested in, based mainly on their demonstrated ability to spend 20 minutes in my company without getting grossed out or offended.
Having narrowed my market, I next chose my medium. Face to face was out of the question, as the only way to get one of those girls alone would have been to shove her in a janitor’s closet. So the medium would be the telephone.
One night, about two weeks before the dance, I purloined the corded phone in my parents’ bedroom, locked myself in my room with a phonebook, and prepared for my first foray into outbound telemarketing.
It wasn’t going to be pretty. I was cursed with limited sales experience and a rather dubious product: three hours with me in a school cafeteria doing the Bump and the Hustle to what we knew even then was some of the worst music ever created. Not to mention the obligatory slow dances.
So I knew I would have to practice. Luckily, I had expanded my prospect list to include several dozen girls who barely knew I existed and, therefore, could be counted on not to have any predisposition to say no to my suggestion of a date.
I found the phone number of the first one and tried to dial. As my shaking finger punched the last digit, I realized with a shudder that I had forgotten the name of the girl I was calling. A man’s voice answered, “Hello?”
“Urggly,” I said.
“Hello?” he repeated. I began to panic. I had to do something.
“Um, hi, is there an 8th grade girl at this location?” I stammered through the asthma I had just mysteriously acquired.
“Who is this?” the voice demanded, in a somewhat hostile tone, I thought.
As I hung up, I remember feeling distinctly grateful that Caller ID would not be invented for another decade or so.
I obviously needed a plan. So I wrote a script, complete with openings crafted for any eventuality: phone answered by prospect, by prospect’s parent, by prospect’s sibling, by answering machine, by random burglar, etc.
I practiced that script in the mirror for several hours. Then I returned to the phone and started dialing. This time, I took note of the name of my prospect — Ilene, a girl who went to my Hebrew school and was, therefore, morally obliged to pretend to tolerate me, at least when her parents were watching.
I dialed six digits and then hung up before I could consummate the call, certain that my opening line of, “Hello, is Ilene there?” was going to be a total bomb. I crossed it out and wrote, “Hi, may I speak with Ilene please?”
But that seemed too formal. “Hi, is Ilene there?” seemed to convey the right tone, but I didn’t approve of the cadence. And so on…
Long story, short (well, not so short, but not as long as it could have been), I didn’t make a single call. I procrastinated by drinking water, doing my social studies essay three days early, brushing my teeth several times, and even gargling once. I think I might have actually practiced my violin at one point. Finally, exhausted and ashamed, I returned the phone to my parents’ room, caught the 11:00 p.m. rerun of M*A*S*H, and went to bed.
This brings me — in a rather roundabout way — to what I want to talk about today: testing and tracking, a key strategy for marketing success.
You see, no matter what your online conversion rate, the success of your telephone close, or the effectiveness of your newspaper advertising, if you aren’t routinely testing different approaches and measuring results, you are leaving the lion’s share of business on the table.
Mail-order companies have known about testing and tracking for almost a hundred years. But it was a well-kept secret, largely because it was a tremendously difficult endeavor. If you wanted to test two different headlines in a newspaper ad, you had to figure out a way to get half of the papers to show one headline and the other half to show the second headline. Major logistical nightmare. And then you needed a way to determine which customer saw which ad. Also not easy. And then you had to keep track of the results by using a paper spreadsheet or ancient punch-card-eating mainframe.
In the old days, testing was for the big boys only. And those who did it accumulated unbeatable advantages over their competitors. Their major task was to beat their “control,” to discover a new approach that was even better than their current best one.
For example, here are two headlines for a correspondence course in English grammar:
1. The Man Who Simplified English
2. Do You Make These Mistakes in English?
Headline #1 was a failure, while Headline #2 was a smash hit. Interesting, huh? (This example, and the one that follows, is from John Caples’s book Tested Advertising Methods, 4th Edition.)
How about this pair, for a hair-growth tonic?
1. 60 Days Ago They Called Me “Baldy”
2. If I Can’t Grow Hair for You in 30 Days You Get This Check
Which one did better, #1 or #2? Before you answer, consider that both headlines were considered strong enough to run by some of the smartest, most experienced, highest paid advertising copywriters in the world. (Keep reading for the answer.)
If those copywriters couldn’t tell for sure which one would be best, then how can you or I expect to find the perfect headline, offer, photo, story, price, guarantee, proof, testimonial, etc. to sell our goods and services? There’s no way, unless… unless… unless we can find a way to run our own tests and figure out the results. And for those of us who do our marketing online, that’s not a problem.
Enter (trumpets blaring) Google AdWords. With AdWords, you can test in minutes or days what used to take months. You can figure out for dimes what used to cost tens of thousands of dollars. You can test ads, landing pages, order forms, e-mail sequences — everything about your online sales process. And it’s easier than calling Ilene on the phone and asking for a date (in my experience).
That awkward segue brings me back to my Valentine’s Day Dance Sales Failure. I failed not because I called 45 girls and they all told me to get lost. No. I failed because I didn’t call any of them. I was prepared with several approaches, and it’s certainly possible that at least one of them would have worked. But because I didn’t try anything, I didn’t learn anything. So when the 9th grade talent show/social rolled around the following year, I was no better equipped to get a date than I had been the year before.
The point is, if you’re just serving one Web page to all your visitors, you’re not learning. You’re not improving. And if you’re standing still online, you’re falling back.
So… which one of those headlines for the hair-growth tonic do you think did better? Turns out that Headline #1 (60 Days Ago They Called Me “Baldy”) did much better than Headline #2 (If I Can’t Grow Hair for You in 30 Days You Get This Check).
In the old days, a lot of time and money had to be spent to get the answer. But nowadays, give me a Google account and $10, and I can give you a headline that can double your sales almost instantly.
[Ed. Note: Testing is the only way you can determine whether your marketing efforts are working -- or draining your coffers. And you can make money a lot faster with insider secrets for testing your product. The good news is you have the opportunity to get "mentored" by a team of business-building and marketing experts at our Information Marketing Bootcamp in November.
Bootcamp won't be officially offered for several months. But you can reserve your spot -- and get VIP seating, access to speakers, and more -- today. Make sure you don't miss out on this sure-to-sell-out event. Get all the details here.
Howie Jacobson is an Internet marketing expert specializing in pay-per-click advertising. To discover why most AdWords campaigns fail and how to make yours succeed, download Howie's free AdWords Emergency Room Report at www.askhowie.com.]
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