If you want valuable customer insights, you need to test — and test some more. Columnist Jordan Elkind offers five approaches for more effective marketing experiments.
As a marketer, you’re often running tests to find which subject line gets the most email opens, what homepage content improves your search engine optimization (SEO), what button color leads to more purchases, and so on.
Sometimes however, you need to answer a different type of question:
“What can I do to cause an incremental improvement versus doing nothing at all?”
Let’s look at an example. Say you wanted to run an email campaign with a 20 percent discount offer to customers who are likely to want to buy knitwear. To determine whether or not this campaign is successful, you ultimately need to know how many people made a purchase from this campaign that wouldn’t have done so if they never got the discount email…
