There's more to testing than image size and the color of your background, says Red Door Interactive president Reid Carr.
Many marketers realize the value of testing and what a few percentage points increase in click throughs can do for their company, especially on a large-scale ad campaign. But is there more that you can take from testing that can positively influence your marketing perceptions?
Once you decide to begin testing, the next question, naturally, is what should you test? Ad campaigns are comprised of a variety of criteria that you can review. Price, offer and creative are typically the three categories from which marketers choose.
With pricing, marketers might try a couple of price points, a limited time discount and/or rebates. With offers, marketers might try incentivizing customers with the promise of something free with purchase, buy one get one free, or a chance to win something. And, with creative, the ideas run across the map with different trials of images, colors, fonts, copy and layout.
Beyond these basic three, there are many other things that can affect campaign results. It is often a good idea to sit down and brainstorm other, not-so-obvious factors that can make a big impact -- some of which you may want to test, others of which you may not realize that you are testing, and still more that you may want to avoid testing completely. What is important is that you open your mind beyond the few basic categories better to optimize your overall marketing approach, past a single piece of creative.
First, realize that you may be testing many more things than just a few offers and a piece of creative. What you do when you initiate a testing plan is begin challenging the way you think your target purchases, the motivation that your target has in buying your product, and even who your real target is. Testing is an initiative that requires that you think broadly and creatively, execute clearly and analyze results carefully. Here are just a few of the things you may want to examine.
Creative Testing
Testing creative is one of the elements that most marketers feel comfortable with. It seems like a logical first step to try a few different dominant images, change the border color and massage the copy. These are the basics and, at face value, the results of these changes may have a positive affect on the single piece of creative.
When making aesthetic changes, however, do not forget: you have an image to uphold; you have carefully sculpted a brand. If you begin to employ tactics that may cheapen your product -- even though response might be high -- you may adversely affect the sales of some of your higher-end products due to the lower perception of your brand. Not only do you need to think on the micro scale of the single piece of creative, but also you need to develop boundaries to ensure you are protecting the entire brand, not just increasing sales on a single execution.
Technical testing, or, does it work on Safari and Firefox?
Once marketers get going into testing, it becomes easier to make changes and swap elements to test against the control, but when you are working to present creative on the Web, there are some fundamentals that need to be addressed. It may seem like a given, but marketers need to perform basic technical testing to ensure that the creative will reach the intended recipient in the first place to prevent results from ending up skewed from the get-go.
Ads should be tested for the various browser and computer platforms through which they will be viewed. The media venues from which you purchased your ad space should be able to provide a list of platforms and browsers they serve.
Timing
You may have completed a few rounds of initial testing that produced a marked improvement in conversion and decided to stick with that creative for a while. What you may not realize is that time of year might affect customers' perception of the product; similarly, the time of day that your user sees your ad might affect their response. Finally, your product's natural lifecycle might change the messaging you need to use in order to raise conversions.
Marketers should also assess the significance of time of year on advertising. Take the example of tax preparation software. In January, a customer may be more focused on a refund, as opposed to in April when they are simply concerned with getting their taxes done quickly. Your benefit statements should reflect prospect concerns at each of these points in time.
Time of day may also play a factor. As with a restaurant's promotion for meals, people respond differently to different types of offers that relate to lunch as they do to offers for dinners. They might perceive a group discount applicable to getting their co-workers to go to a particular venue, as opposed to a buy-one-get-one-free as something they could share with their spouse.
Another often-critical aspect of timing is product life cycle. Particularly if you sell a technology product, your product's life cycle may accelerate from education, to product awareness and finally to commoditization within a year or two. Your creative testing matrices should reflect some of those variables as you promote your product through its natural evolution. This can be viewed in more of a long-term format, however.
The Moving Target
Marketers may forget that they are testing an offer at different points in their target's lives. If you can classify your lists behaviorally, you may identify some early indicators about your target that may increase their propensity to purchase your product. Perhaps a target might be more inclined to respond to your offer after purchasing a house, having a baby or changing careers (even though you may not sell anything directly related to any of these activities).
This is one of those fine dissections that may result after you feel like you have tested everything, and is something that can help you identify specific promotional avenues that may change your entire marketing effort. For example, the price of your product may not be as big of an issue to someone who has just changed jobs, but it may be for someone who has just graduated college. These list dissections are out there; you simply need to consider this as an option.
Location and Geography
Depending on the location where you reach your target -- at home or at the office -- their response may differ. For others, it may not make a difference. Still, you should think about it for them when you send something out. This category is all about frame of mind. You may consider segmenting business email addresses from those that are clearly personal. AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and others clearly indicate a personal email address (whether or not your target is checking this email from work or not may depend on the time of day that your message is received).
Where a person lives can also play a big role on the success of tests within your creative. You might find that certain products sell differently in various sections of the map; each may have their individual reasons for buying or not buying your product. If you can identify that, you may unlock some useful secrets.
Make it reach
As we have seen above, testing can have major implications and, as a result, should affect your entire company. If you are going to invest in testing for one campaign, it should positively affect everything that you do to get the most value from the test. There is no need to reinvent the wheel each time. Learn from your findings; publish them succinctly for everyone in your company, because you never know who can benefit from what you discover.
Maybe you will find a new price point to hit, or a need for a new, trimmed-down product; you might find that you should produce your product in a different color, or, you might determine a new benefit statement that sales should highlight to close more quickly.
The primary benefit from testing should not stop at solely witnessing a lift in conversions on a single advertising campaign. It should be about learning and changing according to the response you receive in all your advertising for the greater good. The changes you make should come from continued creativity in the concepts and the criteria on which you test.
Keep an open mind about what you test. Realize that certain tests may be running in the background that you had not anticipated and continually adapt to the changing marketplace. You'll be surprised at what you find out.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, helping clients -- such as the San Diego Convention Center, SkinMedica, Benetrac and Sharp Systems of America -- to lay out strategies for their online presence and interaction activities. Before founding Red Door Interactive, Carr formed the interactive arm for the San Diego-based PR agency, McQuerterGroup. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer and accounts director at PBJ Digital, a bi-coastal Interactive development and incubator shop in Los Angeles; before then, Carr handled account management in both the Venice and Playa del Rey offices of TBWA/Chiat/Day. He has a BA from the University of Oregon's advertising program.