One change at a time!

Mark my words: if you try to move things too fast, you'll inevitably miss your next checkpoint. I learned it the hard way.

The WordPress service I'm developing is in its infancy: the landing page is still under construction, the offer is still awaiting feedback from a larger group of prospective customers. Our pace is only further hindered by the summer, which sees many decision-makers away on their annual leave. It's slooow.

Our preferred method of reaching the right people has been the email. We're quite well versed in it, so we quickly created a workflow that made the open rates look optimistic; the first meetings were happening. Still, we did not land any sales, all calls were discovery calls with the caveat that the decision would be made when September rolls around, at best. It was tiring. We felt we could speed things up, reach more people, create more opportunities - and so we decided to widen the range of industries we would contact, just to test the waters elsewhere. At the same time, I thought I would improve the mailing flow, based on what had been working and what had failed previously. The result? Next to no responses, the conversion rate was in the gutter.

It took me a while to realise what I had done wrong: the combination of a new mailing flow and a completely new recipient group, in fact, resulted in us using an untested approach to interact with people, whose needs and expectations were foreign to us. Due to my mistake, while starting work in uncharted territory, we exchanged a successful approach for an experimental one, that turned out to be much, much less effective.

Don't do that, please. A/B testing best practice says: one change at a time - then test!