Mike Grehan just wrote a fascinating article at Click Z regarding testing; he’s a big fan, as am I, of the Eisenberg brothers and their team at Future Now.  I’ve bought every one of their books and will buy their newest, “Always Be Testing.” If you’re serious about improving your online results, you should also consider buying it; Google’s Website Optimizer, on which the book focuses, has been a staple of our client testing methods for the past several month.

This caused me to think about a talk I gave last week to a group of small business owners here in Cincinnati.  I asked the question, “How many of you know the value of a new customer, client, or patient?”  No hands were raised.  I’m not surprised by this response anymore, but it really is one of the basic numbers one has to know about his or her business.  If you don’t know what new customers, clients, or patients is worth (either initial or life time value), how can you make intelligent decisions about how much to invest in acquiring them?  I think the answer is, “You can’t.”

And it’s really not that hard.  The first decision one has to make is the hardest, that is to commit to finding it out.

This leads to the bigger picture of having a mindset of “test, measure, refine, and do it all over again.”  It’s a little easier to accomplish in the online world, but one still has to commit to do it.

One of our hard and fast rules is that we measure, and we measure everything.  We’ve made the business decision to not engage with clients that won’t commit to putting measurement systems in place.

All of this gets back to Mike’s post.  All of our marketing (and I believe, business) efforts are really just a test.  None of us knows all the answers upfront.  That’s why we need to continually “test”, to try to improve our last best efforts.  Google’s Website Optimizer gives you a fairly simple way to test all types of web page factors.

As a wise man one said, “When you get right down to it, life is a test.  If it weren’t you would have been given more instructions.”

Here’s to testing and measuring.