Creative – it’s the line item in many marketing budgets that is often the hardest to judge…let alone actually measure.
What are you getting for this spend? How do you know if this investment is having an impact on your bottom line? And which creative execution should you pick?
MarketingExperiments collaborated with ExactTarget, a leading global provider of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions, to find a scientific approach to a discipline that is usually more associated with art. The study, in the form of an email redesign contest that pitted three agencies against each other on the email campaigns for three real-world clients (AAA, Pier 1 Imports, and MarketingExperiments), revealed three key principles:
Objective must be results-driven and ROI-focused.
When you start a marketing campaign, it is important on the front end to identify the one key business objective you are trying to accomplish, write it down, and make sure all of your efforts are aimed at accomplishing that one objective.
Designs must be based on methodologies that transcend best practices or gut feelings.
At MarketingExperiments, we are always testing marketing intuition and more often than not we find that even the best marketers with the most experience choose underperforming designs. Our intuition will never be as good as our ability to test.
Success must be determined by scientifically viable and statistically valid tests.
It is a bad thing to not know what design performs best, but it is an even worse thing to have invalid testing techniques that lead you to believe that you know which page performs best when you really don’t. If we are going to test, we must test right. Because if we don’t, we not only get in the wrong car, but we then drive it off a cliff.
Read the clinic summary (PDF) or view the full presentation video to learn principles that can help you better judge and measure the value of your creative executions.
PDF will open in new window
Presentation will open in new window
You can also hear answers to audience questions that we did not have time to answer during the web clinic on the MarketingExperiments Blog.
Credits:
Editor-in-Chief — Dr. Flint McGlaughlin
Writer(s) — Daniel Burstein
Pamela Markey
Austin McCraw
Key Researcher(s) — Andy Mott
Contributor(s) — Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education, ExactTarget
Greg Burningham
Production — Austin McCraw
HTML Designer — Landon Calabello