You may have clicked this post without reading the subject line, but I hope you noticed before opening it.
My guess is that compared to other blog articles, less people will actually open this one. This is mainly because the subject line doesn’t demonstrate to you that there is any value in opening our email this week.
But you‘ll never know if you never try and I will be sharing the results of my little test next week.
Most importantly, the lesson here isn‘t that wacky subject lines are the way to go. The key message of this edition of Top Tips is that ‘testing and measuring’ is critical in every aspect of your business.
The digital world and Social Media in particular give us unparalleled ability to measure the effectiveness of what we are doing, whether it be how many people are opening your newsletter, how many people are watching your website videos or how many clients have chosen to engage with your company on Facebook.
‘Testing and measuring’ is something that we place at the centre of absolutely everything we do at The Social Adviser. But why is it so important to you and your firm?
Testing
There are always better ways of doing things. Whether it be the best time of the day to send an email or how to structure an SOA for maximum client engagement, the world today has only advanced past the Stone Age because of humankind‘s ability to continually innovate and challenge the status quo. Testing is the first step in discovering a better solution to a known problem and in fact, if you’re not making mistakes, the chances are you’re not improving either.
Measuring
If we don‘t know where we started or where we are now, we don‘t know how far we have come. In every aspect of your business, you need to be able to monitor your progress so you know if your testing has had a positive or a negative effect on your performance. Even when something doesn‘t work out how you planned, it is a critically important learning on the path to finding a more appropriate solution to your problem. As they say, “the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result“.
So, whether it be a particular aspect of your website, a step in your client review process or even what you say in your emails to clients, test and measure a different way to do things. It is the absolute foundation of making sure tomorrow is better than today.