Three Ways A-B Testing Will Improve Your Marketing. (Part 3) Into the Vortex.

Automating your Demand Generation functions is often referred to as a journey. However, your journey need not be aimless and without a destination. In fact, if you don’t have a destination in mind, your journey will take much longer then necessary and, in fact, may never end. As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”

While your ultimate destination may be something like “a world-class Demand Center,” you will need to establish some milestones along the way to measure your progress. Testing will help you to establish your progress toward (and beyond) those milestones. When it relates specifically to A-B testing, there are some great milestones against which you should always be measuring your progress! Those milestones may be found in your Demand Waterfall (or Demand Funnel).

Principle #1: Programs should be measured against movement
Marketers often fall into the trap of trying to generate activity. Activity is fine, but if that activity does not result in movement, it has both cost you money and gained you nothing. Let me explain.

Let’s say you create an outbound marketing program, sending 50,000 emails to your target audience. You have written incredibly compelling content with a CTA pointing to a wildly popular whitepaper. Your Subject Line drew a 50% open rate and your content prompted 50% of the opens to download your fabulous whitepaper, resulting in 12,500 downloads at a 25% conversion rate. My guess is you’d be jumping up and down at your success after posting these metrics. Not so fast! You’ve generated lots of activity, but have you generated any movement?

Unless you got paid for all of those whitepaper downloads, you’ve actually spent time and money to send out a free piece of information to your prospects, customer and, likely, your competitors. Here’s the real question: what did the recipients do as a result of reading the whitepaper? What was the goal of your program? Was it awareness, engagement or conversion? Did the readers react according to your goals?

Principle #2: Movement should be measured in terms of Waterfall Stages

You have a Demand Waterfall for a reason, which is to determine your prospects’ stage in their buyers’ journeys. Assuming your Waterfall accurately reflects that buyer’s journey, each and every program you deploy should have the specific purpose of moving the prospect from one stage to the next in the funnel.

In our previous example, let’s assume our whitepaper program was an engagement program, with the purpose of moving Inquiries to AQL (Automation Qualified Lead) stage. Based on this goal, we now have a movement objective against which we can measure the success of our program. We can determine the success or failure of the program in terms of how many Inquiries convert to AQLs as a results of the program.

Principle #3: Movement should indicate a significant interaction with your brand

Is downloading the whitepaper enough to indicate a significant interaction? Just because a reader downloaded it does not guarantee he or she even read it. How many downloads do you have just sitting on your hard drive waiting to be read at some future date? We can differentiate between insignificant and significant by creating a definition for those actions.

An insignificant interaction is a download with no continuation of the interaction. Sometimes I download something simply because I want the information and somebody has offered it for free. I have absolutely no intention of purchasing anything, but the information seems interesting or useful.

A significant interaction is a download with a continuing action. For example, a well-designed program might have a secondary CTA within the downloaded asset, prompting readers to engage more deeply with your brand. As an example, after reading mare about a specific A-B Testing solution, another CTA could prompt the reader to try a free testing tool or interact with a free testing framework generator. This continuation action would indicate the reader’s real interest in your solutions.

How do we measure movement?

Waterfall movement is a matter of understanding changes to a Contact record in your MAP. This change has a number of components you need to understand in the context of many other potential changes simultaneously affecting that same Contact record. So how do you isolate the movement you need to measure? The first priority is to make sure you are capturing the required data behind the metrics you want to measure!

1.     You should systematically link your Waterfall program to your response measurement. There are a variety of ways to do this; the goal is to attribute Waterfall movement to a specific response – almost always the most recent significant interaction. This is different from Campaign attribution, in which most organizations want to attribute closed revenue across all campaigns that touched the Contact during the Lead lifecycle.

2.     You need to record your program responses so they are actionable by your Waterfall program. This means you will not only need to understand which program, but when the Contact responded.

3.     In most cases, you will also need to record how the Contact arrived at the program CTA in order to convert. This is a great basis for testing which routes to the CTA are most effective.

Change the conversation.

Optimization should be conducted with the program movement goal in mind. If we go back to our original whitepaper marketing program, we would likely make significant changes to the way we determine success if our goal is Inquiry-to-AQL conversion. IN that case, 12,500 whitepaper downloads that don’t result in AQL conversion might look like a tactical success, but is actually a strategic failure. How would we change the conversation?

First, we would change our target audience to include only Contacts in the Inquiry stage. If the goal is to convert Inquiries to AQLs, what is the purpose of sending to any other than Inquiries? Second, we would insure our infrastructure was pre-built to capture the data points necessary to measure Inquiry-to-AQL conversion. There is no sense setting a goal we cannot measure. Thirdly, we set up our A-B testing points to measure the things we can both control and change, such as traffic sources. Did outbound emails work better than banner ads, or did paid SEM work better than purchased media?

Notes:

Testing must be performed with an overall objective in mind.

You should be testing movement, not activity.

Your infrastructure must be pre-built to capture the data necessary to your metrics.

Next week, we will take a look at how your MAP platform might be doing a whole lot of processing that accomplishes nothing. With SaaS and cloud-based solutions come a plethora of cloud-based add-ons. They do all sorts of nifty stuff, but do you really need or want them? Maybe, but there is a right and wrong way to look at cloud connectors and plug-ins. We will look at them in next week’s edition: Head in the Clouds? Why Less may be More.