ion just got back from the DM Days
conference that was held in NY last week. The conference had
something for everyone whether your business is online or offline. The
exhibit hall was packed with vendors giving away plenty of freebies, as
Mickey Khan from DM News noted in his blog.
But most importantly, there was never a dull moment with the
back-to-back conference sessions, round tables and endless networking
opportunities.
The session that struck me as the most relevant to ion's post-click
marketing message was "Landing Page Optimization: You Got the Horse to
Water...Now Make it Drink." Although a primarily B2C session, the
speaker gave great examples from leading e-tailers of things to do and
things not to do to your landing pages to increase conversion rates.
The session also covered the importance of testing to increase
conversions. We couldn't agree more, although the relevancy of
the session with ion's post-click marketing services ended when it came
to testing strategies. The session covered multi-variate testing,
commonly referred to as MVT or the "Taguchi Method," while ion's
post-click marketing utilizes A/Z testing.
The basis of MVT is that on a given page with a fixed structure, you
can plug in multiple variations of different elements like the
headline, body copy, an image or a form. With MVT, you test all
of the given combinations of the different elements to determine the
most effective combination, although you need to be careful to make
sure that all combinations are compatible with each other to ensure
that the result is not one that can damage your message or your brand.
MVT has helped achieve strong results for companies, particularly
high-traffic e-tailers who have enough visitors to glean statistically
significant results from the myriad combinations available with
MVT. Although it generally works best when working with micro-level
variations and its most effective use tends to be in testing different
levels of offers or form lengths on a single page.
The power of A/Z testing is that very different paths can be compared
to see which holds the best net effectiveness. You can experiment
with both macro- and micro-level variations to create substantially
different paths to determine what works best in a variety of
circumstances.
A/Z testing is the foundational testing methodology of post-click
marketing and holds none of the constraints of MVT. Revisit the
ion blog to learn more on A/Z testing...
-Susan Delz