A guide to testing your marketing

A common theme in marketing is the idea that a novel and new method of marketing will unlock the doors to new business. Even if we’re currently running a marketing campaign, the idea that hundreds or thousands of potential customers are not getting the message drives ever more demand for marketing campaigns that think outside the box. However, engaging in new techniques and dropping existing activities cost time and money and don’t always generate new leads. In fact, the results could be worse and have a serious impact on your marketing performance. In test marketing, you can run the campaigns you currently have and simply make tweaks to see if they have an impact. It’s like a science experiment that anyone can do.

The Email Subject Line Experiment
We get hundreds of them a day, but there’s no way we can read them all. The only part of an email we’re likely to see is the subject line. So if you find that your emails go out into the world never to be seen again, it’s time to do a subject line test. This involves selecting two different subject lines and sending one to 10% of your email list and the other to another 10%. Once the open rates have been measured, use the winning subject line and send to the remaining 80% of the mailing list.

Landing-page Headlines Test
Landing pages are your website’s pages that collect visitor information via the lead capture function. These could be news or blog posts drawing visitors in – either way, they should encourage visitors to keep looking. Testing the headline requires you to create two identical content pages with different headlines. Don’t worry, visitors are unlikely to catch on. Whichever page gets more hits is the one you keep. Over time, you should be able to infer what kind of headlines your visitors find more attractive.

Test Marketing Price
Too often a price is calculated on how much the product costs to bring to market plus the expected profit based on a number of units sold. This isn’t usually the same price the customer wants to pay. Products and services can cost too much and too little. Somewhere there’s a Goldilocks zone and test market pricing finds this. Using your preferred method of advertising, email, direct mail or a sales pitch, do the same 10% testing to see which offer generates the most interest. You can repeat the test going higher or lower with 5% until you feel you’ve found the right price point.

Testing Blog and News Posts
Getting numbers back on page engagement through blog platforms is incredibly easy, but what you do with the information is the hard part. First, you need to look at visit lengths, responses to calls to action, likes and shares and rate your various posts in order of success. Once you can see which ones preformed the best, dissect them and try to repeat the success by changing the variables. You can then assess these posts for engagement to see if the variable you thought was a key was the right one. After some work, you’ll build a model for writing better posts which others in your company can use too.