If you’re in the marketing world, you should always be testing something. The best marketers are the ones who enjoy split-testing their campaigns over and over again. However, it takes a different mindset from other business activities because marketing revolves around failure.
In most cases, you’d like to avoid failure, right? Too many failures and you go out of business. And while that’s still true for marketing, the runway is a lot longer AND it’s also the name of the game.
The mindset shift here is simple: Instead of thinking about all the things that failed, you’re finding new ways to market your firm that didn’t work. (Thomas Edison has a similar quote about his attempts to create the light bulb.) This is because marketing NEVER has a true end goal. There’s always something that can potentially be improved.
With that in mind, here are 4 easy things you can be testing in order to find the best results in your marketing.
1. Email Subject Lines
If you have an email newslette, try using different subject lines and see what gets a better open rate. Maybe it’s the title of your featured article versus something like “Smith Law May Newsletter.” Maybe it’s something like “September Updates from Smith Law Firm” versus the title of a featured video. There are tons of possibilities.
2. Website Headlines
Certain integrations within your website can allow you to A/B test different headlines on your site’s landing pages. You can try various emotional approaches, font sizes, and phrase lengths to try to grab people’s attention. The goal is to keep people on your page as long as possible, so track your “average session duration” in Google Analytics.
3. Image/Video Placement
Do images or videos work better at the top, bottom, or somewhere in the middle of your pages? You can use heatmapping and session recording tools like Microsoft Clarity to understand where people are focusing their attention while on your website. Again, the goal is to keep people on your site as long as possible so they continue to take further action.
4. Calls to Action/Buttons
Different button colors and call-to-action texts can have a HUGE effect on your conversion. Test different styles and see what works!
NOTE: Do NOT—under any circumstances—test more than one thing at a time. Many inexperienced marketers get too enthusiastic about their split tests and run several different variants at once. The problem results in not knowing exactly why a variant performed the best out of a group or which element contributed most to your success. Just stick to a Champion vs. a Challenger and make quick decisions. Test for a couple of days or even a week at a time before trying a new variant.
Also—your A/B tests don’t have to be an even 50/50 split. If you have a champion variant you like and that works well, you can go 60/40, 70/30, 80/20 or somewhere in between!