The Ad Master Who Can’t Be Fooled

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In my earlier blog post, I told you about: The “Bible” of modern advertising, Claude Hopkin’s 1923 classic, Scientific Advertising which is perhaps the greatest 100 pages of marketing wisdom ever written.  Every serious student of direct marketing has read this little book at least 3 times.  Some even read it every year.

One of the “gospel truths” Uncle Claude teaches in this amazing book is the value of testing advertisements in direct mail.  It’s because back in Claude’s day, direct mail was the ultimate task master for a marketer.  It could not be fooled.  If you knew two offers and tracked the results, you knew for sure which was better.

Hopkins gives the example of a firm selling a $5 item.  One of their ad writers created an ad where the responses cost the company 85 cents.  In other words, for every sales letter they mailed, they earned $4.15.  Another writer in the firm submitted an ad which he thought would perform better.  The responses to that ad cost $14.20.  In other words, they paid $19.20 to the one order for $5.  What would happen if they hadn’t tested and tracked the second ad?  What if they just mailed it out again and again?  They’d be bankrupt.

So, what does this have to do with your online business?  Well, in an age where:

  • Every ad
  • Every subject line
  • Every email
  • Every sales letter
  • Every click
  • Every purchase

Can be tracked hundreds of different ways online, some marketers still don’t test and track as Uncle Claude recommended.  This is why they go bankrupt.  Even worse is that they’re trying and failing at things that other marketers have already figured out through their own testing.

Russel Brunson has paid out over $50,000,000 in commissions through Click Funnels.  You don’t pay out that much money without testing and tracking until you know exactly what works.  Click Funnels is a system which is proven through hundreds of thousands of tests to pay out $1000s of commissions.

The “Bible” of modern advertising