How to run marketing experiments
In past months I was working with some clients, helping them look at their growth using marketing strategy. They all had good revenue, and wanted to grow faster.
They knew they could do better but needed help with these questions:
- Where do I start?
- What tactics should I use?
- How should I measure my progress?
- Where should I focus?
May be the similar questions you too have.
Here are the step-by-step strategy we use at Goldenmace IT Solutions
Let’s get started to know how to run marketing experiments!
1.Transform your conversation into model
Sketch out your current sales funnel in metrics of these five stages.
i) Investment ii) Energizing iii) Engaging iv) Referral v) Revenue
The value of this model goes beyond landing pages and helps for actual use of app/product/service.
If new visitors arrive from whatever channel out of them how many would sign up (Energizing), how many would return and get value from the product (Engaging), how many would share or invite others (Referral) and how many would become cash generating for the business (Revenue).
2. Pick one area of focus
Once road map of five stages done, you will come to know where exact major problems are- and where to focus.
At GMITS for our customer work, the common areas were to work on tend to be:Energizing (to improve the rate of customers to sign up ) and Engaging (to help the customers who had signed up using their product or service through a process of engagement to help new users get sufficient value that they would then become paying customers).
I personally focus on Energizing and Engaging stages because every business is different and each business have these two stages in matrix.
3. Great Ideas
Now, in next stage figure out your existing ideas and come up with a list of new ideas that you and your team think that can make a difference.
For example:
- We think a video landing page will better explain to our product/Services/App
- We could change the text we use on our landing page to explain our product/Services/App
- If we help our users to understand our product and how they would get more value, by showing them demo videos or email marketing to new users which can help them to educate about product/Services/App
4. Prioritise your ideas for marketing experiments
List down your number of ideas and list down top three among them which you can think could make a difference. Look for inspiration from other business that you are fan of. Where did you last sign up of their services, how did they convince you, what was their landing page like, what kind of e-mail they were sending you?
5. Investigate each of your marketing experiments and write them in document
For each prioritised idea write a document that says something like if we will do “this” then we will achieve our goal by 10% rise.
For example:
- If we will add a brief video to our landing page our energizing will increase by 10%“
- If we send triggered emails to users to encourage them to add their pet name or photo our user engagement will increase by 10%.
6. Measure your baseline for each experiments otherwise you are just spinning your wheels
We personally believe that each experiments need baseline to measure results otherwise you are just spinning your wheels.
Now you can watch how your conversion rate changes as you run your experiments before that you have to complete all five stages of experiments.
7. Run your marketing experiments with the help of different tools
There are many available tools for example if you want to AB test changes to landing page tools, Visual Website Optimizer makes it very easy.
If you are developer and developer resources then Google experiments is very useful to split traffic.
8. Double your winners and repeat them
Never stop accepting the first improvement, keep pushing with improvement is one of the part of your business. Continuously and Systematically work on your idea until this matrix stops improving.
Once you have improved that part significantly than you can repeat the process from step 1.
An overall marketing strategy I’ve outlined here is part of an overall marketing analytics strategy to improve your business using data, creativity and a scientific approach and given title as how to run marketing experiments.
It is the combination of marketing analytics tools and driven strategy to enable your focus on specific part of your business for continuous improvement in growth.