In last week’s article we briefly touched on the data provided by the digital landscape and how easy that made it to test your marketing. We thought we’d expand on that today. So what we have here is a guide to why testing is so important for effective campaigns and how to get in on the action yourself.

Testing marketing: what’s involved?

A/B Testing primarily. You split your audience in half and show them two different offers/landing pages/emails/etc. These are typically referred to as the A and B option, hence the name. From this you can work out if your fab new idea generates more clicks/conversions, if it needs some rethinking or (god forbid) it drastically damages your numbers.

Multivariate testing: this is essentially numerous AB Tests running concurrently. It’s an excellent way to ferret out which specific elements always produce positive results against a changing background. It is, however, constrained by the time it takes to build a sufficient, meaningful set of data. For this reason it might be a bit beyond the scale and scope of your average SMB, but if you have the digital foot traffic to pull it off more power to you!

It’s not just your website this applies to. Your email marketing campaigns can benefit for exactly the same techniques. Even better? Certain Email Marketing Platforms will provide inbuilt A/B Testing capabilities in the subscription price. Make use of that!

Why bother?

A/B Testing is a simple and effective way to identify what definitely works for your audience. It gets you away from “we think people prefer this” to “we know people prefer this” (and, just as importantly, we know what they don’t like).

The data lets you carefully fine tune all the elements of your online presence to capture your audience’s attention and limit your bounce rate while improving click throughs and conversions.

This careful testable approach should ensure you avoid major disasters like Snapchat’s recent catastrophic redesign or that time Tropicana overhauled their cartons and crippled their sales (a fall of 20%!)

Where to start?

So you now you know what A/B Testing and its ilk can do for you, where do you start?

Landing pages (whether for ads or email) are a major focus for A/B Testing. Whether simple fiddling with element design and placement or a comprehensive redesign you can get hard data on which is more effective at grabbing attention and converting visitors

On the subject of email: the subject line is the perfect place to start with that. It’s the first thing people see and will influence whether they are going to open that message in the first place. If your subject line doesn’t work your perfectly optimized content isn’t going to have an effect; it’s not even going to be seen.

Involved in ecommerce? Switch up the offers you send out to your mailing list. You can get a definitive snapshot of what discounts are most effective and what products your clients are interested in most.

There’s so much that can be measured, quantified, assessed and experimented with for your online presence you’d be mad to pass up the opportunity. Go forth and test!