When you invest time, money, and effort into marketing strategies, you want to get the highest ROI possible. Luckily, in today’s data-driven age, you can easily prove the value of campaigns with marketing experiments software.
With minimal effort, you can test, refine, and improve your campaigns over time. You’ll also get valuable insights into how customers behave.
We’ve rounded up 5 of the best marketing experiment tactics to try in 2022. But before we dive in, let’s explore why running marketing experiments is so important for your bottom line.
Why Marketing Experiments Are Crucial to Success
Experiments yield an abundance of insight. Using data to lead marketing campaigns removes gut-feel.
It builds respect in the boardroom. And proves the effectiveness of campaigns, allowing for innovative new ideas that push you beyond competitors.
Without marketing experiments and data-driven marketing, you’re essentially shooting in the dark, which is poor for growth and delivering ROI.
5 Marketing Experiments for 2022
There are so many tests you can run to help assess the impact of marketing at every stage of the sales funnel.
For example, testing to improve entry-level engagements, such as email open rates, through to carefully placed Call to Actions (CTAs) that prompt sales conversion.
Take a look at the top marketing experiments to run in your business this year.
1. Email Marketing
As far as marketing channels go, email continues to generate the strongest ROI. In fact, small businesses say email marketing has the highest return on investment.
Many marketers say email is the most effective channel for early-stage lead generation. And it also lends itself very well to testing.
There are several types of email marketing experiments you can test out:
Subject Line
To start off, your choice of a subject line can have the biggest impact on whether your audience decides to open your email or not.
Sopro ran tests on over 4 million email subject lines and found a 12% difference in open rates, simply by changing variables, like adding and removing personalisation.
Sopro found that it’s better to remove personalisation if it meant a shorter and punchier subject line. But that may not be the same for your audience, which is why experimenting is so crucial.
From Address
You can test whether you want to send emails from a person or a company. This can be reflected in both the email address and sender name.
It’s best to test send from info as early as possible. Once an individual becomes accustomed to the email address and sender name on your messages, changing it could be confusing.
That said, any confusion might lead to your emails getting caught in SPAM filters, which is never good. You want to do whatever you can to avoid being red-flagged by your subscribers for any reason.
Email Content
When it comes to the body of your email, you can test the length of emails, the various CTA options (using hyperlinked text or a button), and more.
Your best bet is to test at least one element of every email. If you’re testing email body content, it’s optimal to have one variable being tested at a time, as well.
You want to be able to clearly see the impact of each change that you make.
Images vs. Text
Some audiences enjoy HTML emails, with plenty of colours and images. On the other hand, there are people who want simple, text-only messages.
You can run a quick test to find out for sure how to best shape your email template. Look for click-through rates and read times as indicators of success.
Even if an audience prefers image-heavy emails, you may find that for simpler communications, such as download deliveries, a text-focused email works better.
Send Times
Your audience may prefer to open emails in the morning. Or perhaps they save email reading for the evenings. You can run a quick and easy test to improve open rates and click-through rates.
Simply choose a variety of delivery times over a few weeks or months, and keep track of how the times and days impact open and read rates.
Be sure to be mindful of holiday seasons or peak times, such as Black Friday preparations, as this will affect engagements.
2. Content Marketing
Did you know that 79% of marketers rely on content marketing to generate quality leads? That’s why creating high-quality content is fundamental.
But what format, length, and type of content will work best for your audience?
Ideal Content Length
Copy length is a long-debated subject. Does short-form copy perform better? Is long-form content the most effective?
The answer is: It depends. The only way to know the optimum length of content for your audience is to test it.
When it comes to SEO, it’s been shown that long-form content works best for Google’s algorithm. Aim for 2100-2400 words at minimum for a boost in ranking.
Funnel Stage
Mapping content to buying stages is essential. But how do you know what stage of the funnel your audience is at and where to send them next?
The key here is to test different nurture sequences with varying funnel stages to see which sequences generate the best results.
Unless you have a clear indication of buying intent, it can be impossible to know what stage of the funnel your audience is at.
This is why being consistently top-of-mind for when your audience is ready to buy is so crucial.
CTAs
There’s one question to ask yourself when you’re creating content. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog post, landing page, or even an “about” page.
You need to ask: What action do I want my audience to take next? Try testing different Call to Actions (CTAs).
For example, try offering free trials, a premium piece of educational content, or simply asking for a purchase with a “Buy Now” button or hyperlinked “Add to Cart” text.
Gated vs. Un-Gated
There’s often a big debate around to gate or not. But what does that mean? Gating is the term used when you require contact details for offered content. For example, a downloadable report or ebook.
Gating may be useful when your aim is to nurture leads with additional thought leadership. However, it could be a major turn-off for your audience, as it adds an extra step to the customer journey.
As a general rule, if your aim is for as many people to read your content as possible, then it may be better not to gate it.
But if your strategy focuses on lead nurturing for the purchase of a high-ticket service or product, then gating may be the best bet.
3. PPC Ads
To make the most of your pay-per-click ads, you’ll want to make sure the advert is as appealing as possible to your target audience. After all, PPC advertising can be extremely costly.
Ad Copy
Essentially, an ad that isn’t bespoke to a buyer persona will likely flop, and that will be reflected in your analytics.
You can easily test the difference in the performance of ad copy, and continue to tweak it to drive the best engagements.
Try running campaigns using long-tail keywords that are relevant to your target buyer persona. These are much more effective than more broad terms, and that makes them a much smarter investment.
Thoughts vs. Products
Should you focus on thought leadership or product sales? Again, it depends on your objectives. But a safe way to go is testing out both options.
Thought leadership ads tend to outperform product-led campaigns, because there are typically more people at the top end of the sales funnel doing research and looking for value-adding content.
As a rule of thumb, the majority of your audience at any point in time is not yet ready to buy. But on the other hand, product-led campaigns can also appeal to those that are ready to buy.
Run a marketing experiment that showcases both, and see which type of ad copy leasds to the highest conversion rate for your team.
4. Landing Pages
There are numerous aspects of your landing page you can test, such as headlines, images, videos, font colour and size, forms, and numerous other aspects.
CTAs
Your landing pages will likely have a primary goal, whether it’s to drive a guide download or to book a free trial. Consider where you place this and how your copy and visual designs direct people to the CTA.
A clear CTA in the top banner of a page is unmissable, and you could add two to cover different stages of the sales cycle and test their impact: “Buy now” and “Book a demo,” for example.
If you’re testing a long-form web page, CTAs should also be peppered throughout, so the audience doesn’t have to scroll through to find them.
User Journey
Simple navigation alone drives engagement and action. What may be simple to you may not be obvious to your audience and this is why testing is important.
For example, is your blog easy to find, is it called something obvious like blog or insights? All this can be easily tested.
As well as using marketing experiment testing tools, if you’ve time, you could also run user journey tests, where you watch how a potential customer navigates through your website. It may not be how you think!
5. Social Media
Trying to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts can be frustrating. After all, you often can’t see exactly who is engaging, and how they’re doing it.
But the good news is that social media platforms tend to share plenty of analytics to help you assess the impact of posts, such as impression and view metrics.
Post Types
There are so many different types of social posts that you can create on the various social media platforms. For example, you can share company news, industry insights, product updates, and your own thoughts on your industry.
So, which one is the best when it comes to getting the results you want? You can test which types of posts perform best and skew your content calendar to focus more on these types of posts.
Hashtags
With so many hashtags to choose from, testing comes in especially handy by allowing you to see if hashtags are increasing reach and clicks.
Keep in mind that some platforms’ algorithms prefer you to use fewer hashtags. For example, LinkedIn likes you to use 3-4 relevant hashtags per post.
Start Experimenting Today
These examples should help to focus your experiments in the initial stages. Aim for those likely to have the highest impact, and hopefully also inspire additional tests.
Whilst these are tactics and examples, these should form part of a long-term strategy for growth, rather than flitting from one A/B test to another.
Look for marketing experiment tools that are able to streamline collecting and analysing data, so that your marketing constantly pushes the boundaries.
