By Kim J. Walsh-Phillips
Do you know the one thing I am 100% sure about in marketing?
That is, I don’t know all of the answers (or even most of them).
In my career I am blessed to be able to do a lot of professional speaking and often I am asked questions about the best ways to execute strategies. I get questions such as how often to post a new Facebook status, the best times to send out an email, or the most effective headlines to generate the biggest response. While I can offer general best practices (post at most once per day, don’t send out your emails on a Monday, and make the headline about the target audience’s pain), I can’t offer specific strategies until I would be able to take one very important step with the brand’s messaging…testing.
Testing communications strategies to a small segment of the target audience before launching to the entire audience is a way to gather data on the most effective method of communication. This is done prior to wasting money on a way that is shown to be ineffective. Testing is the #1 way we prevent wasting money in our clients’ marketing campaigns and can show continuous improvement.
This is similar to an ice cream manufacturer releasing a new flavor. They don’t just put something together and send it to the stores for sales. They create several versions, test in-house, test out-of-house and then choose the option that performs best. Your marketing should be treated the same way with no guesses or assumptions. We recently split test email times for one of our clients and found that sending out the email in the evening received double the response rate of the same email sent out in the morning. We can use this data to optimize their future messaging.
Take the emotion out of your marketing and execute your strategies based on the measurable results from your testing.
Our motto…Test small and launch big.
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