Digital marketing and conversion - Test it and see

As digital experiences and technologies become a larger part of our everyday lives, consumer expectations are gradually becoming bigger, faster, richer and more and more personalised. Within this morphing landscape no digital technique is ever set in stone and in order to keep up with these expectations, companies and brands need to adapt.

This is one reason why I love working in digital; it's never the same strategy, the same approach. Every brand/company is individual with different products, different target markets, in the same way every consumer is individual and has different wants and needs. Add to this unstable environment the fact that the majority of the big players have only truly been actively marketing in the digital space for around 10 years, and you have a marketing discipline which is in its infancy, as well as in constant flux.

These factors contribute towards the fact that there is no equation you can create to help you see which digital strategy/approach will work best for your brand. The only way to truly know if a planned approach is right is to test it and see.

The big brother of digital marketing

Web analytics, or as I like to call it the 'big brother' of digital marketing, provides the insight you need to help you test and refine your activities and therefore make the right decisions. The implementation and testing of different tactics or tools and the measurement of consumer response using analytics helps you see how effective the marketing tools are in driving the consumer to your final end goal, whether that be to purchase, to capture data or to engage with your brand. With this insight into customer behaviour, you can test and refine to ensure that every decision made is inline with what customers actually want and not just what you think they want.

Test, analyse, refine

To get the best use of out analytics, you need to test, test, test. Every decision made should be tested, analysed and refined. Here are a few step by step examples of how you can test and refine in all aspects of digital marketing (there are many more):

• On page creative/landing page testing

  Google Optimiser can be used to test how users respond to changes in the overall look of a page.

  1. Choose which web page to test - use analytics to pick out the under performing areas of the site (e.g. high exit rates or low conversion)
  2. Create different versions of sections of your landing page to test
  3. Install optimiser code
  4. Preview and review test combinations
  5. Use Google website optimiser to run A/B testing variations on the page design against the original
  6. Multivariate testing can be carried out in the same way. It allows you to test many variations in the content of a page simultaneously. This should be used to test multiple content changes in different parts of the page
  7. Analyse results – which test has the highest click through/conversion
  8. Implement the most successful design/content
  9. This method can also be used to test landing pages for advertising such as pay per click or banner advertising

• PPC landing page and creative testing

  1. Use your paid search platform to split test ad creative
  2. Test the response by looking at click through and conversion rate of various different PPC ads with different copy e.g. 'free P&P' message versus '10% discount'
  3. You can also use PPC to test the response to different keywords in the view to spending time optimising them for SEO

• Email marketing creative and subject line testing

  1. The 80, 10, 10, test strategy is a great, quick way to test and refine your email communication strategy
  2. Split your total database into three segments (a number of email service providers offer easy segmentation); send the first two segments emails with the same content, but different subject lines
  3. For a quick test, leave for a few hours and check back on the open rates. Time can be increased dependent on how defined you need the results to be. You can test punctuation, length, capitalisation and call to action this way. E.g. 'Mid season sale now on!' Versus 'Don't miss final clearance'
  4. This is also an excellent way to test email design by sending different creative to the segments with the same subject line, content and links but different look and feel/design. Measure click through rates on each and send the successful one out to the remaining database
  5. Even unnoticeably small increases in open rates and click rates using these methods e.g. 0.2% a week can gradually equal a 2-3% increase in one year; this will also have a direct impact on transactions

Digital marketing is all about tactics. Being so close to a company/brand/product it's easy to just assume that you know what your customer's wants and needs are. You may be following a hunch or an idea you believe will work. However without actually stopping to look at what they actually respond to, you could be venturing down a long road to poor conversion and low engagement.

Be proven wrong

Testing should be an integral part of your digital strategy it not only provides you with the insight to make the right decisions, but essentially puts the decision in the customers hands, the page/email/advert can be optimised to how they want it to look and work and isn’t that what everyone online strives for – keeping the customer happy?

I have chosen to end this post with a recent Tweet from the analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik. I think this sums it up nicely...

This blog post was written by Gemma

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