Thursday, September 11  

I highly recommend that you read this

Good morning.

On most pages on the web site you might notice we have placed an ad for my book at the bottom. The ad contains links over to where you can buy the kit.

Someone emailed me yesterday with the suggestion that maybe I would be better off having a testimonial from a happy customer, instead of what I have written there:

"I highly recommend the kit for any web developer looking to start or grow their own business," Brendon Sinclair

That person is probably right. But there is a method in my madness.

We did a web site for a telemarketing company a while back. They sell holidays over the phone.

Their most successful close was:

"I highly recommend you buy this holiday now."

Incredibly it worked well. Better than anything that they'd ever tried before. Even though the person who is recommending it is the stranger who rang them up in the middle of dinner and started annoying them. And who is on a commission if they make the sale.

We analysed that one quite a bit and came up with a few psychological triggers why it might work so well.
(My theory is that people just believe it more because it's so unusual and also very personal.)

So I thought I'd test it on our own site for a month and then revert to the usual sort of recommendation after that. We'll compare the number of people who click on the links and see if there is any noticeable difference.

It's so important to measure each part of your marketing. Sure, my example method mightn't work as well as a 'normal' recommendation, but I'll have a basis for recommending/not recommending this strategy with clients in the future. And if it works wonderfully well, that will be a piece of very useful information for our clients (and it's better to try it on my site if it's a flop!).

Have a good day.

Regards

Brendon