Most marketing decisions can be reversed, so most can be made quickly. Here is how to sort the ones you can undo from the few that deserve real caution.
A line going around LinkedIn says to take the risk, because if you win you'll grow and if you fail you'll learn. That's true only if you're still in business after you learn. For an owner spending their own money, the useful question is how to take risks that can't hurt you badly.
Jeff Bezos gave a clean way to sort this in Amazon's 2015 shareholder letter. Some decisions are one-way doors: consequential and nearly impossible to reverse. Those deserve to be made slowly and carefully. But most decisions, he wrote, are two-way doors. They're changeable, and they should be made quickly by a person or small group with good judgment.
Marketing is full of two-way doors that get treated like one-way doors. An owner can spend a month debating a headline that could be tested and changed in a day. Meanwhile, the truly risky move gets a quick yes.
| Decision | Door | How to treat it |
|---|---|---|
| New ad headline or image | Two-way | Try it this week |
| A new offer on one landing page | Two-way | Test it with a set limit |
| A small budget in a new channel | Two-way | Set a cap and an end date |
| Redesigning a site that brings in leads | Harder to undo | Keep the old version and plan the page moves |
| Changing your domain name | Close to one-way | Slow down and get a full plan |
| Renaming the business | Close to one-way | Slow down and test the name first |
A reversible decision can still cost money, so put a limit on it before it starts. Decide the most you're willing to lose, and how long you'll run it. If you can say that number out loud and still sleep, the risk fits your business. If you can't, make the test smaller.
Then decide what success looks like before you begin. Without that, a test tends to run on hope, or stop at the first bad day.
Doors that are hard to reopen get a different process. A domain change or a full rebuild can affect pages that already bring you customers, so find out what currently earns before anything moves. Back everything up, write down what you'll do if it goes wrong, and do it when you have time to watch it.
Waiting isn't automatically safe either. Staying with a site that loses customers has a cost too, it just doesn't arrive as a bill. The point is to match the care to the door, not to avoid every door.
How WebKing runs this
Before a major site or brand change, we map what can be undone and what can't, then test the reversible parts first.
It's a decision you can reverse if it goes wrong. Amazon's 2015 shareholder letter says most decisions are like this and should be made quickly, while hard-to-reverse one-way doors deserve careful thought.
There's no universal figure. Choose an amount you could lose without harming the business, set an end date before you start, and make the test smaller if that amount makes you uneasy.
Changing your domain, renaming the business and rebuilding a site that already brings in leads are the hardest, because they can affect pages and recognition you've already earned.
It can be. A site or campaign that keeps losing customers has a cost, even if it never shows up as a bill. Compare that cost with the risk of the change.
Sources
The Lab is original analysis by WebKing. We summarize and interpret developments from the sources above for industrial, commercial, and small business owners. Figures are reported as published by their sources.
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