If you haven’t yet started a ‘test and learn’, or continuous optimisation, strategy for your organisation, now is a great time to start. Here are ten of the main benefits:
- It’s simple Getting started with digital optimisation doesn’t need to be hard. There are low-cost testing tools on the market that allow you to split test different content on our web pages. Small tweaks to copy, images or call-to-action buttons on a homepage or product landing page can have a big positive impact on conversion rates.
- It’s a great way to optimise the ROI of web pages As mentioned above, a few simple tweaks to a web page can cause massive upswings in conversion rates. Most companies know their businesses well enough to be able to identify ‘low-hanging fruit’ for testing, which should positively impact conversion rates without investing a huge amount of time or cost.
- It allows you to generate more leads and conversions Once you’ve identified the primary objective of a particular web page, you can hone in on the triggers that get people to convert. A conversion could be a subscription to a newsletter or adding a product to a shopping cart. By testing different versions of these triggers against each other, you can see which work best.
- It can provide a huge competitive advantage Many companies still aren’t doing test and learn properly (according to Marketing Sherpa only 40% of marketers validate their test results) and quite a few still aren’t doing it at all. If you are committed to embarking on a ‘journey’ of continuous optimisation for your company, and do it in a strategic rather than just a tactical way, it can pay dividends.
- It helps to eliminate subjective ‘design-led’ opinion Too often the view of the creative team is deemed to be gospel by the rest of an organisation. People take as read what the creative director or user experience architect say will work best, as they are the experts in their field. While that may sometimes be the case, nothing works better than A/B testing to validate or disprove subjective views.
- It provides ammunition to push back on HiPPOs Likewise, it’s usually difficult (and often career-limiting!) to argue against the highest paid person’s opinion (HiPPO). A/B and multivariate testing provide a great means to forearm you with data to go confidently into that battle. And you’ll usually get moody respect from executives if you can back up your arguments with solid data.
- It can help your company to innovate and develop new products and services Running frequent split tests allows you to present new product ideas to a small percentage of your website’s audience. Targeting a small number of customers means you can test the effectiveness of these products with low risk to the bottom line. If they don’t work you can go back to the drawing board, or iterate on the version you just tested.
- It engenders culture change within the organisation A test and learn approach can have huge implications to the way your organisation works. Shifting the mindset from ‘big-bang’ product or IT launches to ‘ship and iterate’ will quickly transform you from being a traditional company to one that operates in the same way as the likes of Google.
- It allows a better understanding of customer behaviour and audience segments With testing and optimisation, the best results are achieved when you identify your core audience segments (e.g. new visitors, returning visitors) and measure their performance against the overall visitor ‘universe’. Most testing tools worth their salt will segment your audience for you based on a number of parameters – and when you investigate the results of the test you can get some invaluable insights into how these different segments interact with your website.
- It promotes cross-functional collaboration Arguably the most important benefit of a test and learn approach is its ability to aid collaboration and break down silos across an organisation, irrespective of its size. Naturally you need to do a fair bit of spade work up front to show the different teams how testing can help them to achieve their goals, but once you’ve got them on board you’ll see what a difference it can make.
