sonuvapitch

This post originally appeared as an article in advertising+marketing magazine in Malaysia.

Now that’s a big promise. But wait, it gets even better.

Did you know there are three quick, easy and low cost ways you can do this? This means even if you don’t want to do all three, you can choose to do just one or two of them and still be guaranteed an increase in your ROI.

How’s that for thriving in time of recession?

OK, enough hype. Now let’s get down to business.

So we’ve spent money to drive traffic to our website or campaign microsite and the boss is after us to squeeze every last drop of return out of the buy. So how do we do this?

Guarantee #1:  Split test

I think it’s important to acknowledge that although we may be experienced marketers, we really don’t know which elements of our campaign will perform the best. The only way we can know is to test and see what happens.

Testing in digital media is quick, cheap and easy to do and split testing is the first easy and low cost way to increase ROI.

What is split testing? It’s an easy way vary certain elements of our creative and depending on which variation gets the best response, we throw out the worst performing version and continue with the best performing one.

This is guaranteed to improve results.

There are lots of different ways to split test but let’s review a few quick, easy and painless ones for now.

Split testing for email

On an email campaign, we can randomly select a subset of all people who will receive an upcoming email broadcast. We then send this group different versions of creative for the same campaign, wait 2-3 days and then send the best performing email to the rest of the recipients. In fact, we can test four different variations simply by testing two different subject lines along with the two different email body creatives.

The results can be significant. On one campaign we ran in China, one of our four tests resulted in 100% better response. There was no way to predict this other than to test it first.

Most professional email broadcasting solutions include a split testing feature already built in so running one of these is quick and easy. If your solution doesn’t include a built-in split test feature, no problem. It’s not much extra work to perform this type of test even in this case.

Split testing for web pages

What about the landing pages that our banners and emails click through to? Or the URLs that our print ads and TVCs reference?

Can we easily split test these web pages to improve their response rates? Sure we can.

This is where the free Google Website Optimizer comes in. Using this powerful tool, we can easily vary things on our web pages such as headlines, body text, call to action graphics and other elements. Then we can sit back and watch the Optimizer tell us which versions of our web pages perform the best. Then we throw out the bad ones and keep the good ones.

Guarantee #2:  Survey our site visitors

OK, so we’ve split tested our emails and web pages and have improved response rates. But guess what? We don’t have to stop there.

We can still do better. Here’s why:

Even with high response rates, most people will still not take the action we want them to.

What if there was an easy way to find why they were not taking action? What would these insights be worth to our brand?

This is where online survey solutions come in. These solutions are now quick, easy and painless to implement.

One of my favourites is a free survey tool called 4Q. Using 4Q, we can ask our site visitors four essential questions about their online experience and why they were not able to complete the task they set out to do.

These insights are pure gold to our brand. We can then make adjustments based on this knowledge and improve our results in the future.

4Q was developed with Google Analytics Evangelist and marketing metrics egghead Avinash Kaushik, so you know it’s good. Check it out at 4q.iperceptions.com.

Guarantee #3:  This is my favourite one

I’ve just posted the third guaranteed way to increase your ROI right here on this blog. Guarantee #3 will multiply your response rates with minimal time and investment. Sound interesting? Just stop by the post and leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Jeff Zweig
Chief Guru, Web Guru Asia
Recession-Proof Digital Marketing Specialists

Sonuvapitch Dog of the Post: Yes on 3, courtesy of Paul Keleher