Most SMB marketing “experiments” are excuses to spend money without a hypothesis. These five are different — they’re small, they have a defined kill criterion, and we’ve seen each one pay back inside 30 days across a dozen accounts in the last year.
1. The “dormant customer” reactivation email
Pull every customer who bought once and never came back, going back 24 months. Send one plain-text email from the founder’s address with a single offer (10–20% off, free add-on, fast-track consult — pick one).
- Cost: 2 hours of writing.
- Typical result: 4–8% reactivation rate.
- Kill criterion: <1% open rate = list is dead, move on.
2. The “loom video” cold outbound
Pick 50 perfect-fit prospects. Record a 90-second Loom of you looking at their website with a specific observation. One sentence email + Loom thumbnail.
- Cost: ~6 hours total over a week.
- Typical result: 18–32% reply rate (vs. 2% for templated cold email).
- Kill criterion: <10% reply rate = wrong list, not wrong tactic.
3. The “single landing page” offer
Take your most-asked-about service and build a one-page, nav-less landing for it. Drive the next 30 days of paid ads to this page only. No homepage detours.
- Cost: 1 designer-day.
- Typical lift: 1.6–2.4× conversion vs. homepage destination.
- Kill criterion: if conversion isn’t at least 1.3× in 14 days, the message — not the page — is wrong.
4. The “referral text” from your last 10 customers
Personally text your last 10 happy customers. One question: “If you had to send us one person who’d benefit from what we did for you, who comes to mind?”
- Cost: 30 minutes.
- Typical result: 3–5 named warm intros.
- Kill criterion: none. This experiment can’t lose; if nobody replies, you learned which customers aren’t actually that happy.
“I sent the referral text on a Sunday. Three intros by Monday. Two became clients. I’d been paying $3k/mo for cold outbound that produced one meeting a quarter.”
— Owner, $1.4M consulting firm
5. The “30-day audit teardown” lead magnet
Offer a free 20-minute audit of a specific thing in your category (their ad account, their website copy, their pricing page). Promote it on LinkedIn and via cold outbound only.
- Cost: ~5 hrs/week of audit time.
- Typical result: 1 booking per 10 outbound touches; 25–40% of audits become paid engagements.
- Kill criterion: <5% audit-to-paid conversion = your offer isn’t aligned with what the audit reveals.
Why only five?
Because most SMBs run too many experiments at once and learn from none. Pick one. Run it for 30 days. If it works, scale it. If it doesn’t, kill it cleanly and pick the next one.
Want this applied to your business?
Book a Free 20-min audit. We’ll pick the one experiment we think will pay back fastest for your specific business and walk you through how to run it. Pick a time.