At one time the Florida Marlins, with 23 wins and 14 losses, had the best record in Major League baseball.

But that meant the best-performing team in professional baseball was losing almost 4 out of every 10 games it played.

And remember: that was the best record in baseball.

What’s ironic is that businesspeople who accept this statistical truth about baseball without a second thought…absolutely go bonkers when even one of their marketing programs fail.

Experienced direct marketers know, and expect, a percentage of their test campaigns to under-perform the control or even lose money.

They accept this fact without despair, because they know that if one test mailing in every two or every three or even every five is a winner, they can make a lot of money.

Inexperienced direct marketers don’t get this, however.

As a result, countless small businesses test direct marketing once every few years.

And if they don’t hit a home run the first time at bat, they loudly proclaim that “direct mail doesn’t work” and abandon it wholesale.

If you’re a business owner or marketing professional, is there a better way to get direct marketing to work for you?

Yes. And it’s to do more testing than you do right now.

For example, let’s say you are planning to mail 5,000 postcards to drive people to a web page.

You just can’t decide which of two headlines you like—”Tastes Great” vs. “Less Filling”.

If you subjectively pick just one, your risk of selecting the wrong sales appeal—and therefore having your postcard mailing bomb – is 50 percent.

A much better approach is to split the postcard mailing into two batches, half with the headline “Tastes Great” and the other half with “Less Filling”.

Each drives traffic to a different URL so you can measure the click-through and conversion rates…and then see which generates the most leads.

Especially on the web, testing different variations—headline, copy, graphics, format—is relatively quick, easy, and inexpensive.

Therefore, if you create a long-copy landing page to sell a product on the Internet and your conversion rate is poor, don’t give up on the product.

Instead, test different headlines, visuals, pricing, offers, premiums, subheads, copy leads.

You’ll notice that one headline pulls slightly better than another…or one price generates 40% more orders.

Start incorporating the winners of these tests into your landing page, and in no time flat, you can take the promotion from marginally profitable to a real winner, all courtesy of testing.

I am amazed at how many marketers, both large and small, invest significant sums in developing products and promotions—both online and offline—and then just advertise each product with a single promotion…with no testing of any kind.

If you are doing this, then you are essentially hoping you get a hit with only once chance at bat.

In baseball, a .250 hitter who only gets one at-bat has only a one in four chance of getting a hit.

In reality, for product launches, the success rate is often as little as 10 percent, which means that a single promotion has only a one in ten chance of making money.

Therefore, the odds of winning with a one-shot promotion are 10 to 1 against.

By testing different copy, offers, design, and formats, you can significantly tip those odds in your favor.

Giving your marketing multiple chances to score a winner through testing is a much more sensible way to go.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.