Signals vs. Noise in Marketing

Every audio geek knows about "signal to noise ratio": How much noise and hiss is in the background that's damaging the purity of your music.

Well, online marketers have their own version of signals and noise:

A moaner lurks in every crowd:
We ALL have defects, make mistakes, screw up orders and all that. We all get our fair share of complaints. But you've gotta protect yourself from the Psychic Vampires.

Example:

There was a student who has cracked the code on a medical problem that the "experts" in her industry consider unsolvable. She doesn't have the usual academic credentials but she does well know how to cure this problem.

And.... even though deep down she knows what she can do for others, she felt the need to prove herself by offering free advice via email to visitors to her website, to "prove" to visitors that she's for real. She said it was consuming all her time.

The advice is to, stop answering all those randomly-fired emails and - as quick as possible - get to where she would ONLY give her precious time to paying customers. The tire kickers ain't gonna respect the free advice anyway. They'll just suck up all her time.

Sincere questions from paying customers - that's the Signal. Accusations and complaints from people who want you to solve their problems for free, that's the Noise.

Web Testing:
There was guy who was making sales via online. He'd been making 2, 3, maybe 4 sales per day on his website and every day he would change his sales letter and either keep it or change it again the next day depending on whether sales were good or bad the day before.

Not only that... he didn't keep copies of each version along the way. Not even the original that had been working OK. So he woke up one day with a website that didn't work, and no way to get the old one back.

His test could not possibly produce good answers because he wasn't waiting long enough for the signal to separate from the noise; he wasn't even split testing at all. It was an Internet Marketing version of poorly managed Day Trading.

When you test, you gotta give enough time for the results to be solid. And ALWAYS keep copies of what you tested and the results.
Operating the Machine vs. Talking to the Customer:
It's fun to lurk in your cave, watch the traffic go by and hear the "cha-ching" as sales come in. But if that's ALL you do, you're invariably missing key parts of the story. At least for a time you should go out of your ways to take phone calls from, and if at all possible, physically visit your customers. Sometimes your entire picture of who that customer is and what they want changes dramatically.

Oh, and on a related note: It's a lot easier to make an automated business work when you make the manual labor version work first.

Can you sell it in person? Can you sell it on the phone? There's no clearer signal than when you talk to a real human being in real time. THEN you can automate it on the web.

Original Source: Perry Marshall