Brand & Capture

If your inbox is anything like mine, then it's flooded constantly throughout the day with various marketing emails, coupons, news from friends and family and funny cat photos; but when it comes to receiving the content you actually want to read—what's the best time to receive it? And if you're on the flip-side—pushing content to your readers—what's the best time of day to send your email marketing message?

As marketers, we understand the importance of A/B testing, especially with our email communications. Testing allows us to make decisions based on concrete data rather than gut instincts. But due to time constraints or limited resources, some marketers skip testing all together or limit their testing to just the subject line. According to the 2011 MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, 72 percent of marketers test the phrasing or length of the subject line while only 39 percent test the time of day.

When it comes to raising the customer retention and conversion rates of your base, there are few exercises more helpful than A/B testing. A/B testing is pretty much what it sounds like: comparing one method to another. And when I first learned of A/B testing, I was immediately intrigued. It’s almost as if you get to conduct a virtual competition to see which element will perform better for your marketing campaign and generate more success for your business overall.

Gone are the days where you anguish over the writing and designing of the perfect call to action. Should it say “Click Here” or “Learn More”? Should you have an image of a person or a product? Should it have a number or should it be all text? You can find a blog post or a presentation telling you to do one thing or the other as a best practice, but is it a best practice for your customers?

The science/art of landing page optimization for maximizing conversion rates has long been understood. In fact, through testing, many industry insiders have been able to publish best practices to include do’s and don’ts; so much so that many of these best practices are considered conventional wisdom today.

Multivariate and A/B testing has been around for many years. The process is straight forward – make two or more variations of a webpage and randomly rotate them to visitors over time. Through analytics tracking webmasters can be fairly certain as to which version of the page produces the most desirable outcome.

Every year there seems to be a new emphasis in inbound marketing. In 2010 we were pushing hard to get found online via SEO, content and social media. This year we moved down the sales funnel a bit, looking for new ways to convert more visitors to leads via landing pages and calls to action. Where are we going in 2012? I believe we are continuing the progression down the funnel with conversion rate optimization (CRO) - getting the highest possible conversion rates for sales as well as for leads. One of the key methodologies in CRO is A/B testing.

Traditionally, inbound marketing has been viewed as a sales funnel-filler – sending lots of leads to a website through SEO, social media, blogging and the like. However, the truth is, when deployed with the right strategy and technology it can be a sales funnel-usher as well – ushering leads swiftly through the steps of a company’s sales process so that the sales cycle is considerably shorter. Delivering the right content to the right person at the right time on the right channel is how to combine a sales funnel-filler campaign with a sales funnel-usher campaign. This can result in increased funnel velocity and an overall widening of the middle and bottom of the sales funnel. Below are five ways to usher leads through the inbound marketing sales funnel.

As a designer I understand that what visually appeals to one generation or population may attract absolutely no attention from another. A/B testing of inbound marketing landing pages is absolutely essential in order to gain the optimum click-through rate.