Marketing is Design

Marketing is Design! That’s how Rob Welling describes it. This comes from a man who gained more than $1000 from tweaking a website and hit the jackpot by choosing the right words to advertise. Welling learned these three-fold moral lessons in internet marketing:

1. Know your customer.
2. Make your customer feel at ease with what he/she is buying.
3. Always be testing.

The first two numbers above are self-explanatory and all businessmen know this by heart. The third one is a bit tricky though and this is how Welling explains it.

“And by far the biggest lesson I learned is that you have to test everything. You use your experience and rules of thumb to come up with ideas to try, and then you have to try them and test to see if they work.”

Welling believes that marketing is different from coding in a way where coding is a highly constrained environment and the options in marketing are infinite and the ways to success are unique to each dilemma.

But what did Rob Welling really did?

Rob tweaked his website selling beach towels by updating his graphic design, added other products aside from the towels, adjusted shipping costs, and many other changes in order for the viewers become actual buyers of his products. He did those in 6 months, and each time he made the change, he noticed that there is actually no difference in his sales, not until he added only three small words which are:

“Low Price Guarantee”

Rob made the change on a whim and forgot about it until his sales skyrocketed from $210/month to $2200/month immediately.

The moral here is to be the cheapest supplier in any market and you will multiply your sales by tenfold. But the primary lesson is to make your customers feel at ease with what they are purchasing.

People buy beach towels (or any other items) from a website because they want to save time. They want to make the purchase as quickly as possible but they also want to know that they are making a right decision about their purchase, which is what “Low Price Guarantee” offers.

The moral of the experience is to always test your sales pitch. Marketing is always a trial and error thing, if one tactic doesn’t work, then it is time to move on and formulate something new.