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Blogs ยป Archive for October 24th, 2004
How to figure out what price to charge via split testing
Sspivey asked in a recent comment about how to know how much to charge for a product. This blog makes the assumption that he is asking about products sold via the web, although the process outlined here applies to almost any type of product sales.
First, some background. Before the web (for those of you too young to remember that simpler time), direct marketing professionals developed a series of processes that now inform lots of web-based marketing and sales.
So, let’s say the marketer of an Elvis collector plate wanted to know whether to charge $19.95, $29.95 or $39.95 for a “limited edition” Elvis plate. He (or she) would conduct a 3-way split test as follows:
1. Mail out three direct mail pieces to the same list (e.g. people who have visited Graceland and signed their name and address on the guest register). Send only to enough names for a statistical test (usually 10,000 names does the trick).
2. Change only ONE THING on the mailing: the price. Split the mailing 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 to the same list, but offering the plate at a different price point.
3. Collect response and determine which offer got the best response (e.g. most profit after all expenses).
This …
Portable Linux Virtual Machines
Quite the buzz is building over the technology preview released by MetroPipe. This package runs on Damnsmall Linux and uses QEMU (a CPU emulator).
Essentially an Internet communication system, it can run entirely on a USB mini-drive key (128 MB) and other flash-media devices, and even iPods. It includes a bootable Linux OS, a web browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), Enigmail GPG (for email encryption) and a persistent home directory.
It is this last feature that intrigues me from a web application development perspective. The core feature of this portable machine is that while it can run atop a Windows, Linux and OS X (the latter soon) machine, all traces of its activities are segemented on the bootable flash device, this also retaining a level of privacy.
This means cookies, logs and other trails of data do not get left behind as remnants on the host machine being used to boot the device - as the virtual machine exists as its own ‘computer’ while parasitically attached to a full computer.
The buzz has been primarily aimed at those seeking privacy and other individual profiles — I am interested in how web developers can find applicability for this in the applications …
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