Business thrives on competition, and every competition involves winners and losers. You want to be on the right side of that equation every time, but landing wins isn’t always easy in an increasingly competitive marketplace. There’s one way to guarantee a win, and that’s beating yourself at your own game. Marketing AI creates the ideal playing field for you with A/B split testing. When you implement testing as part of your marketing automation system, you gain an edge by competing against yourself.
Leads won’t always tell you what they want, but with split testing, you’ll learn their preferences quickly. When your new variable outperforms the control, you win. If your control beats the variable, good news: You still win. By looking at how to beat your own best performance, you consistently improve. While you can test any number of variables in successive runs, stick to changing one variable at a time for best results. Here are some possibilities to explore.
Copy
What marketing copy connects with your leads? What level of expertise do they have? How much time do they spend with your content? A/B split testing of your copy can make a huge impact on every aspect of your branding, from web pages to email marketing messages. Regular testing of your copy across platforms keeps you tightly focused and on-brand.
Voice
Your brand has a distinctive voice, and you need to know how it resonates with your prospects. You would expect a bank or law firm to express itself in neutral, professional language, while a music studio or IT start-up might adopt a more casual, tech-savvy brand voice. Even within a single company’s content universe, voice can vary; a blog post and a landing page should feel contextually related but not identical in their formality, for example.
Call to Action
Leads have many different motivators, and by testing your offer, you discover what moves them most. The wording, design, position, and even the offer itself are valuable testing variables for your call to action.
Timing
Some leads are larks; others are veritable night owls. Learn which is which when you test the timing of your emails. Your marketing automation system can also test to find out the ideal intervals between emails, the optimal time for replenishment reminders, and the best time to approach leads with follow-up messages.
Site Design
Marketing automation has revolutionized how marketers see websites. Instead of static landing pages, dynamic design allows you to create customized pages that adapt to fit any device a viewer uses. The possibilities for testing are incredibly broad – everything from overall layout to custom fields to graphics can make a significant impact on responses.
These are just a few possible variables to explore in your testing. To get more ideas for beating your own records and rising to new heights of success, download our white paper featuring 25 email elements to test.
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