A decent marketing programme is just as much about finding what doesn’t work, as what does. You also need to be able to dissect these failures in order to learn.

Much of marketing is about taking ‘best practice’ and applying it to new products. It should be a smooth journey – in theory. But no marketing plan survives first contact with the customer! One part of my work with DuoFertility.com was a great example of ‘best practice’ being a spectacular, crashing failure. DuoFertility sells a high-end fertility product. Price and affordability is an inevitable factor in customers’ decision-making.

In general, reducing price barriers makes a great deal of sense. More people buy when the price barrier is lower. Taken to extreme, this often leads logically to a free trial, to give buyers confidence. In theory, it should work, and it often does. It seemed sensible to implement this ‘try before you buy’ concept at DuoFertility, to help people overcome their natural fear of paying for a novel product. Our plan was simple. Let customers pay a refundable deposit for a free, 1-month trial. This should ensure that as many people as possible tried the product. The return rate was the only thing in question.

It failed, spectacularly. The return rate was 100%. Why? The problems were twofold. Firstly, the new customers were demonstrably different, partially because we put the offer to people who had previously seen the product, and partially because it was cheaper. Our traditional, full-priced buyers were eager, price insensitive and acted quickly to purchase. When we made the try-before-you-buy offer, we were therefore dealing with very different people. It turns out that we had efficiently attracted ‘test-drivers’ – but many of these were not like our typical customers. If it had cost us nothing, we could have continued indefinitely, but with a costly physical product that just wasn’t possible.

Secondly, we overlooked a very important principle: the customer wasn’t buying the product, they were buying the benefit (a baby). A baby is an all-or-nothing thing. At the end of the month’s trial, any customers who hadn’t fallen pregnant felt that the product hadn’t delivered. However, any who were lucky enough to get pregnant no longer needed the product! At the end of the trial potential customers were facing the full cost, but were still waiting for the benefit, and they didn’t proceed. Had we been able to bill ‘on delivery’ things would likely have been very different.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the takeaways are clear, and twofold: Inertial selling likely doesn’t work when the product benefits don’t appear early on. Secondly, by lowering the barrier to attract price-sensitive buyers, you can end up with customers who are a poor fit for your brand.

Lessons learned – move on. Failing hard and fast allows the quick ruling-out of ideas that don’t perform, leaving a marketing plan which is more clearly defined and much better tested. Failing is much better than not trying, because you don’t leave great opportunities untested. The cost of running this test was small, but the cost of NOT running it could have been enormous.

This single initiative isn’t the whole story. We were able to make a range of other changes which made dramatic improvements to other areas of the customer journey. By finding out about something that doesn’t work, we moved ever closer to finding out what does work. DuoFertility is continuing to go from strength to strength, and I’m proud to work on this fascinating and demanding account.