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Always Be Optimizing: Don’t Forget Your Digital Marketing Crew

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Always be optimizing

‘Always be closing’ has been the most famous sales phrase for decades. ‘Always be optimizing & improving’ should be more than a mantra for customer-centric marketers, they should show it by properly supporting their digital marketing teams. Integrated, customer-centric and cross-channel touchpoint marketing is about optimizing each contact moment.

Furthermore, each touchpoint in the customer journey should be strengthened by the others as much as possible. The role of optimizing across all touchpoints cannot be emphasized enough. It also requires an attitude of ‘Always Be Testing’, as a book by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar is called.

Whether it concerns A/B testing or multivariate testing: testing to improve conversions, relevance of touchpoints and – thus – customer experience is crucial. Testing for the sake of optimization and user experience excellence leads to results and understanding of your customers.

Recent research by Econsultancy shows 81% of companies who regularly test their email marketing campaigns say the ROI of those campaigns is ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. Of the respondents who occasionally test, only 72% claim the same and among those who infrequently test, merely 65% report excellent or good ROI. And those that don’t test? 37%.

The same report found only 31% of companies surveyed regularly test. Indeed, that is less than one third. Note that this is just email marketing. What about landing pages? Customer service? Other channels?

People tell me businesses are investing more in optimization and testing than before. That might be true. However, then why are these numbers still so low?

There are few things in marketing and business that can’t be optimized. When simply looking at rather ‘classic’ digital marketing tactics such as email marketing or landing pages, you can come a long way using A/B testing (and within the right conditions, multivariate testing).

You can use Google’s Website Optimizer, you know it’s free and, by the way, it’s what Bryan’s book ‘Always Be Testing’ is about. You can use Visual Website Optimizer as many agencies I know do (and which has similar heatmap features as Clicktale offers, check out my post ‘Web analytics Is Not Sufficient For Customer-Centric Inbound Marketing‘).

There are several landing page creation tools such as Unbounce or Performable (now part of HubSpot’s Enterprise version which, for the record, we use).

A range of A/B and MVT testing tools such as SiteSpect or Verstster, to name just a few, target enterprises .

And finally, various software companies offer digital marketing solutions where A/B testing features are included so you don’t even need another tool.

The impact of human resources and skills on integrated touchpoint marketing optimization

So, why don’t we use them? If I look at email marketing, I don’t think it’s a matter of technology. After all, most email platforms enable you to test and optimize in relatively, even if sometimes basic,simple ways. I also feel it’s just partially a problem of skills, as the Econsultancy data seem to confirm.

I think the problem is one of having an ‘always be testing’ and ‘always be optimizing’ mentality and a customer-centric culture, as I wrote last week. I also think it’s a matter of priorities and of management but mainly of that customer-centric and data-driven focus. In that regard, I just read – with a lot of interest – a thought-provoking piece by Paul Cheney on the marketingexperiments blog, making a case for focusing on customer insights from A/B testing.

It’s as I recently wrote in my post: “Customer-Centric Marketing: Optimize and Integrate“…we even optimize to learn and understand the voice of the customer across all channels, not only to improve results in the short run”.

But again: if we have the tools to test, why don’t we use them? Often it’s because we focus on getting the message out fast. In the case of my site, it’s a matter of a lack of time (I prefer to focus on the sites of our customers first of course). Sometimes it’s simply because we just get used to work this way, and often it’s because the people we work for don’t understand testing requires some time and resources.

This understanding is crucial and managers of (digital) marketing teams must pay attention to the efforts it takes since it does take efforts. Efforts that pay themselves back, sometimes small and sometimes big.

It reminds me of how often bloggers or content creators are treated within businesses, especially when it comes to written content. It’s just about copying and pasting the stuff they or someone else wrote into a stupid CMS, blogging platform and whatnot, right?

Wrong. That’s how quite some managers see it. They ignore how much effort goes to optimizing titles and keywords, adding the right elements that make the content contextually relevant, etc.

The underestimation of the time and effort it takes to optimize, rewrite, test and improve, along with the unwillingness to use the tools we possess to make it happen, is what makes us spend too much on generating traffic.

If you want to persuade and convert the people whose attention you have caught, you need to keep earning it and respect their preferences. We know that, right?

However, as I said, we often forget to give the people that actually make the digital marketing efforts “happen” in daily practice the time, respect and resources to always be optimizing and testing.

An email campaign is more than hitting a button. Blogging for business is more than copying and pasting. Customers are more than targets. And maybe the people that make your campaigns happen, deserve a bit more understanding and if necessary, training. Customer-centric marketing is touchpoint marketing and requires continuous channel-agnostic improvement.


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