Test Planning: 3 simple tips to keep your test planning and optimization on the right track

Test planning and developing optimization strategies is a long, bumpy road of trial and error before you can reach a true discovery about your customers.

This is where I should also include an important caveat – even the experts can lose their way if they are not careful.

Today’s MarketingExperiments blog post features three insights from our research lab that we use to keep our test planning and optimization strategies on the right track.

Look for ideas beyond our own

For starters, we recognize no digital marketer – or scientist, for that matter – is an island.

We use peer review sessions to come together for open discussion and brainstorming on how we can develop testing and optimization strategies to help our Research Partners learn more about their customers.

These collaborative sessions range from fun to intense, but overall, they produce collaborative solutions to challenges that would have unlikely been discovered otherwise.

Use a proven methodology to turn those ideas into tests

Turning the ideas gained from brainstorming into tests that will help our Research Partners learn more about their customers is not easy – especially when considering a few of the important details of test planning:

• Should we use a radical redesign approach?

• What metrics should we us to track and evaluate tests?

• How do we balance risk and reward?

These are just a few of the challenges to consider in test planning. But, what about optimization?

Test planning is useless until we can understand how elements on a page influence conversion. While there are many ways to do this, one of the simplest – and likely most effective – is by learning how to see your marketing through the eyes of your customers.

To help us see through the eyes of a customer, we use the MECLABS Conversion Heuristic as a tool to help our optimization analysis.

Don’t overlook opportunities for value proposition development

A value proposition is the reason why your ideal customers should buy from you rather than any of your competitors.

So, if your value proposition is unknown or unclear, then you’re likely leaving revenue on the table as your ideal customers look to competitors for choices that provide them the most value.

Although test planning can help you build your customer theory, taking the time for value proposition development can help you build marketing that helps your customers move through your sales funnel with confidence.

Related Resources:

Analytics and Testing: 3 tips to optimize your testing efforts

Marketing Optimization: 10 resources to help your online testing efforts

Conversion Rate Optimization: Building to the Ultimate Yes