How Testing in Marketing Fuels Innovation - Harnessing Experimentation to Drive Results

Today we are discuss the art of experimentation and conversion rate optimization with AJ Davis, the founder of Experiment Zone. In our conversation, we reveal how strategic testing can deliver great results.

We emphasize the importance of tapping into the wealth of knowledge within your organization and from your customers, using experimentation as a powerful tool to navigate the often costly landscape of digital advertising.

Join us as we explore how adopting an experimental mindset can be a game-changer for resolving team conflicts and validating diverse opinions within your marketing squad. AJ and I share personal anecdotes that highlight the unexpected outcomes of testing, which often challenge our preconceived notions and deepen our understanding of customer behavior. While not every idea might be test-worthy, the nuggets of wisdom gleaned from a strategic testing approach can significantly refine your marketing strategies. To dive deeper into these concepts and gather more expert advice, be sure to check out AJ's website.

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Transcript

Eric Eden 0:03

Welcome to today's episode. Today, we have an exciting topic. We are talking about experimentation in marketing, conversion rate optimization and how to get the full potential out of your website, and we have the perfect guest to help us talk through this today AJ Davis. Welcome to the show.

AJ Davis 0:23

Hey everybody. Eric, thanks for having me on.

Eric Eden 0:28

Do you run a company called the Experiment Zone? It's like the Twilight Zone, but so much better, right?

AJ Davis 0:35

It took us a while, we had to experiment with some different names, but yeah, it's really that's what we do. We help people figure out what experimentation is all about and how it can drive revenue for their company.

Eric Eden 0:48

Excited to talk about experimentation. I think in my years as a marketing leader I've been amazed on the impact that experimentation can have. Some of the companies that I've led marketing teams at at any one time we were running hundreds of experiments per year and it was pretty exciting to see what the results of these things were. And, to my amazement, once or twice I was wrong when I'd bet on the Akron level test. Just once or twice, not too often, but we're ready to be inspired. Can you share a story with us?

AJ Davis 1:34

about some of the best marketing you've done. The marketing and most product related to this topic of experimentation and testing. We've been running tests for a client for a while and we were trying to improve a landing page. So this is a pretty typical marketing experience where we're running ads Somebody's running ads, not us bringing traffic to a site and we're trying to connect with that audience. So the question is what do they need? What do they need to know about the company? How much information do they need?

AJ Davis 1:58

And we decided to take what was a very lengthy, well-informed page that the team had built, that the company had built, and we decided to tear it up and do something different. So very rarely do I do this. I almost always do incremental changes, but the incremental changes didn't move the needle. So we decided to take a big swing and we went in-house and interviewed a bunch of their frontline sales team to figure out what it is that they say to close the deal. What is the final thing they say to get people to sign on the dotted line and generate revenue for the company. And then we took that word for word and put that on the landing page. So like, why us and why now? And so it turned out, the things that closed the sale were also the things that got people interested in it in the first place.

Eric Eden 2:43

Wow, I love this story for so many reasons. You know, marketing, taking some messaging tips from sales is always a good strategy, but particularly putting it on the landing pages is brilliant. It reminds me of one time when I actually had the salespeople sit next to the online marketing people, and so the online marketing people could overhear the discussions of the inbound leads as they were coming in, and they then worked together through kibitz, talking to each other and overhearing each other's conversations, to improve the pages, and this is very similar to that. So I've seen this work really well and I think that's great, and the impact of doubling the conversion rate that's really the dream of these tasks related to landing pages, right.

AJ Davis 3:39

A dream, yeah, I mean. I'm always proud when anything's a 30% lift, let alone doubling. So it is something that it's often an incremental journey to learn what works and what doesn't with people and to just overnight, like one big switch, change how we're connecting with people and then layer back in what additionally might have mattered and have that be what's iterative, then iteratively removing or reorganizing information. So I feel really proud of this particular test because my background's in qualitative research and I always think you can learn from the experts you have in-house who are maybe your customer representatives or just directly your customers, if you can access them, and our best tests come from pulling in those insights and learning from it and not just guessing come from pulling in those insights and learning from it and not just guessing.

Eric Eden 4:27

More important today than ever before, when advertising on sites like Google is more expensive than ever, like some of the campaigns that I've been working on in recent times $40 a click for competitive keywords. So when you're paying that much just to get people to a landing page, converting everyone who gets there, or as many of them as you can, it's money, right. Like it's, you're wasting money if you don't do things like this to try to increase the conversion rate right.

AJ Davis 4:57

Yeah, I always tell people they say when is it time to start testing, Like, well, how much traffic do I need? What's important? And I say, if you're not considering your conversion strategy, if you're like, if you're paying for ads or you're paying for SEO and you're not having an equivalent investment and in CRO, you're losing out on all that potential revenue. Right, If you connect with one percent of people or we can bump that up to one and a half percent of people that makes a huge difference to businesses.

Eric Eden 5:24

Yeah, it's almost like you're wasting money if you're not doing these experiments right to get better results. It's almost like you're laying money on fire is the way that people have talked to me about this in the past. So tell us, when you are helping clients do this sort of experimentation, what are some of the keys to running good tests and experiments?

AJ Davis 6:28

no-transcript version and a paid version that had some extra stuff on it. And we had their trust to run a test where we got rid of the middle option, because a lot of psychological research says three is better, and so we said that could be true, but let's see if it's true for your audience. And in removing an option, we simplified the decision and more people signed up. And so it's this evolution of not just saying here's what the best practice should be for this business problem or here's like what the books say, but actually going into the wild and testing what actually happens with your visitors. And so to come back to your question, like what is it? Where should you be doing testing? It should be everything, but it should absolutely be your most important business decisions.

Eric Eden 7:20

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and this whole conversion rate optimization optimization theme is a science right. What is the hardest thing about doing this with clients?

AJ Davis 7:39

I think it's a science and an art, and where the art is is what's maybe harder, right? So it's easy to measure the variance between the two. Things so like did this thing do better than this thing, yes or no? Pretty straightforward. You can dig into the details. Things so like did this thing do better than this thing, yes or no? Pretty straightforward. You can dig into the details you can take. You can have a deeper understanding of what happened, and there's some complexity there, but it's not hard.

AJ Davis 8:00

I think the stuff that's hard is knowing that you're testing the right thing.

AJ Davis 8:04

So what I like to think about is like if you know what your business goal is like a higher conversion rate or to have a bigger basket size, or to get more signups and you know what the problems are, we can be very confident in what your problems are by doing user research and digging into the data. The actual solutions of how you solve those problems are better if you take a couple swings at it. So I'm not gonna tell you a red button's better than blue. I'm not gonna tell you that three options is better than two or vice versa, or that your product should be a super dense version or give us lots of detail Because in reality, like it's not going to really move the needle on us if we don't know what problem it's solving. So the hardest thing is to get clients to focus on. Let's stop and think about the problem instead of like what the solution will look like. We need to know what we're solving for in order to make a big revenue difference. It's a world.

Eric Eden 8:57

Top couple things that you recommend to anybody who wants to run these sorts of experiments to get better results from their advertising and from their website. You're sitting down with coffee and just telling people the two or three things you've got to do. Yeah, what would this be?

AJ Davis 9:17

Give it enough time, get enough data. A lot of people pull the plug because they see some early data that shows like this is such an exciting result, but you only have like 20 people in it, so it's not actually pointing you in a clear direction. So give it time, make sure you have enough data in the data set to make it a confident decision. I like to recommend thinking about changes that are visible, so things above the fold, especially mobile, is a good direction to look Like. What should be on your screen on mobile before you do anything else. It's a good question Is it too complicated or is there a way to simplify it?

AJ Davis 9:53

And then I think, like thinking through the journey and what information might get lost from the beginning to the end is another piece. So very often you'll see a website where on the homepage you'll say here's what we do, here's the problem we solve, but then they forget to tell people that later on. So something we'll often do is say like let's make sure everybody knows about your free shipping policy and your free returns everywhere they go. So what is that thing? Everyone needs to know continuously in the funnel to feel confident in converting.

Eric Eden 10:28

So those would be like the three types of things I'd point people to love. These ideas and experimentation really applies to your, your website, but broadly all of the channels of of advertising right landing pages, google advertising, but also other marketing channels too, right.

AJ Davis 10:44

Yeah, absolutely my favorite partner. So we don't do any advertising or email testing or anything like that, but we have partners who do, who work with our clients, and my favorite thing is when we get to share with those partners the data we get and the data they get, because the more experimentation a company is doing or a marketing team is doing across the board, the more those things should layer together and be informative. So the copy that works in your email to get a click should also be copied. That might work on your landing page to get a click, and so making sure you're getting thematic takeaways as well as like specific here's what worked in, here it's what didn't.

Eric Eden 11:19

That's great If people want to learn more about how to be a great experimenter. What resources do you recommend?

AJ Davis 11:30

I think there's a lot of ways to learn about being an experimenter right, there's lots of books you could read, but I think the most important thing is to like start thinking of things as an experiment. So I would actually point people to this philosophy I take across my business, which is to think about everything as an experiment and to write it down. Here's the hypothesis If this thing works, this is what results we'll see, and if it doesn't work, then this is like. Then we won't see that, and then pull the plug on stuff if it doesn't work, because a lot of times, marketing teams, ceos, entrepreneurs all sorts of people start just layering stuff in on top of each other and they don't have a mechanism for evaluating did it work or not? So rather than saying like go read this book or go install this tool, I would say start thinking about any choice you have to make in the future as an opportunity to collect data and define what data you'll need to collect to know if it worked or not.

Eric Eden 12:27

I like that and actually some of the most controversial things in marketing that I've dealt with. Over the years, the way to solve the conflict has been let's test it, let's test things and everything to your point doesn't make sense as a test, but a lot of things do, and it's often a great way, if people have differing opinions, gather data and prove it. I think there are some tests that I'm like that's a ridiculous test and some there are ridiculous tests that you probably shouldn't run. But I think there are many, many good tests and I've been shocked more than once when my hypothesis was completely wrong, because the buyers just thought about things differently and I was just like I can't believe it. But it happens, right. I like the mantra of have thought process around experimentation and have a hypothesis and measure the data. I think that's really great. I'm going to link to your website so people can check it out and get in touch with you if they'd love to learn more about this topic. Really appreciate you being with us today. Thank you so much.

AJ Davis 13:44

Thanks, eric, it was a lot of fun.