Testing and tracking, the art of assigning different value to your marketing efforts to establish a golden horse, needs to be systematic to work best. There is little good in wasted, misplaced energy!
It is best to have your system down pat before testing, measuring and interpreting your marketing efforts. You need a way to record the information, and how you will actually test. Whether it be a spreadsheet or a custom-made computer program, whatever you're comfortable with is fine. Head to elance.com to have a custom application built for advanced computer tracking once you know what you want, if that appeals to you.
Scale it up. Always test a small batch first! Never go guns blazing into an expensive advertising campaign without having split-tested the bejesus out of your headlines, offers, text, guarantees, etc. Fine tune multiple times before getting out there on a large scale.
Also, make sure that the test subjects are an accurate cross-section of your customer base - this is very important. Do NOT aim a test campaign at a group of 150 senior citizens with hearing disability. This is too narrow to give you a good idea of how your effort will impact your customer base as a whole.Make sure you draw up guidelines and document the process for colleagues and anybody else who is going to play part in this. They need to not only understand the how, but also the why, so get them on board with enthusiasm, too.
Basically, you are going to be optimizing your marketing by elevating what works and minimizing (or eliminating!) what doesn't. This will help your bottom line immensely, and, depending on the method of advertising, you may be able to pump twice as much money into your successful marketing efforts and expect the same ratio of profit/spend if you tracked correctly. It's all about tracking!
Systematic Testing and Tracking