Are you skipping Test day, still?
Posted by 
on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 
at 9:27 AM 
in Maybe it was your 7th grade history teacher… Or maybe it’s the pressure. But for whatever reason, “testing” seems to ring a negative tone to a lot of us. However, when it comes to your landing pages and emails, you stand to reap great benefits if you do put in the time to test the marketing messages that you push out to prospects and customers. There are two different types of tests that we will talk about now:
- Usability testing
- Design and Message testing
In regards to usability testing, we have probably all fallen short on this in some regard. Perhaps we’ve come up with a great landing page design and campaign idea. We put it together, check it out on our computer, and a smile appears from ear to ear. Then, we send it to the boss. Unfortunately, that same smile that we had doesn’t appear. Yes, even though the page looked great on our computer, the page ran into quite a bit of trouble when viewed on a different setup. The reasons for this aren’t always fun to acknowledge. But it is important that we do. People view the web and their emails on different browsers, clients, and operating systems. They view content with different monitor sizes, resolutions, and more and more people are checking things out on their mobile devices. Now, we are not advocating that you devote a giant chunk of your budget to testing. It’s nearly impossible to account for every different type of setup. But you need to take a look at your audience, take a look at the most likely scenarios for their setup, and proceed from there. This will certainly add a bit of time before you can make your campaign go “live”, but trust us: it will save a lot of heartache when that first recipient calls and says “I received this great mailing promoting how your company can do Personalized URLs, but I’m having a lot of trouble viewing mine.”
As for design and message testing, this can actually be a lot of fun. In order to be a successful marketer, you need to believe in your product, and your ideas. But as a creative person, your brain is most likely going to be bouncing around many different ways that you could try to sell a product.
Eventually you do have to make decisions, but with today’s technology, you truly can push out various messages to people, test which ones work, and then make the corrections on the fly.
It could be something simple: maybe someone insists that people respond better to links with red text. But you think that makes your page look tacky. Well, split up the mailing list! Half the people see the red text, the other half see the black. Watch the results come in! Certainly, there are other variables that affect why some people responded. But without a doubt, a test like this will at least give you some data to analyze. Otherwise, you’d simply be battling the design debate in your head, without any real numbers to support either side. There are many other items that you could test about your campaign… Which pictures to use, what email subjects turn people on or off, and more… To find out which ones truly do work, certainly keep your design “eye” in mind… but also, let the users speak. Test, test, test!
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