When it comes to testing, it’s exciting to focus on big tests, but being too focused on large-scale changes can hinder marketers from seeing smaller opportunities to test. Oftentimes, small tweaks to ads, copy or smaller webpage elements can lead to dramatic lifts. Cindy Lu, Senior Marketing Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy, VMware, is more than familiar with the lift potential quick wins can offer.
“For each company that I’ve actually worked at, I’ve had the opportunity to quickly identify some of the low-hanging fruit opportunities,” Cindy said. “It generally blows everyone away in your organization because they didn’t realize such small tweaks could have such meaningful impacts on actual conversions.”
At MarketingSherpa MarketingExperiments Web Optimization Summit 2014, John Tackett, Manager of Editorial Content, MECLABS, sat down with Cindy to discuss the five optimization lessons she learned from testing VMware’s website and conversion funnel. One of the most important lessons Cindy highlighted was identifying and capitalizing on quick wins.
Watch the session excerpt to learn how one of VMware’s quick win tests resulted in a 956% increase in clickthrough.
The banner ad test
This test focused specifically on VMware’s small and medium business (SMB) segment. Cindy and her team saw an opportunity to test the banner ad in the hero spot of VMware’s SMB pages.
The control of this hero banner featured a call-to-action that drove the consumer to a PDF. The team decided to test directing visitors to the main products the company promoted to SMB users.
“When I first started at VMware, I noticed that the SMB page could use a little bit of improvement,” Cindy said. “Essentially, for the SMB pages, we’re trying to drive customers to the right product, whether they’re in healthcare, whether they’re in finance, but essentially helping them locate which products in the SMB suite are best for them.”
The team wanted to increase the “Try,” “Buy” and engagement clicks to these promoted SMB products. They conducted an A/B spilt test with two variants and a 33/33/33 split.
Variant B promoted the company’s vSphere Essentials kit, which, as per VMware’s description, includes an affordably-priced industry-leading virtualization platform for small businesses. Variant C promoted the vRealize Log Insight product, which is a real-time log management system for VMware environments.
Results
From this test, Cindy and her team saw a 956% increase in clickthrough for Variant B and a 330% increase in clickthrough for Variant C.
“My boss was astounded that we had such a significant lift,” Cindy said. “In my email, I had put the precise numbers — 956% — and he’s like, ‘Cindy, why don’t you just call it out and just round it up to 1,000 and call it like it really is.’”
Cindy concluded by encouraging all marketers to look for quick win and low-hanging fruit opportunities as they optimize sites.
Kayla Cobb is a Reporter for MarketingSherpa. She’s pretty awesome, and you should really follow her on Twitter @itskaylacobb.
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