A friend of mine sent me an email this week that went something along the lines of “Oh man, I failed 7/10. And I call myself a marketer.” along with a link to www.whichtestwon.com
I spent about 10 minutes on this site and I have to admit, although I did much better than my friend (sorry!) I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. The site, if you don’t want to click the link, presents you with two creative concepts – direct mail copy, landing pages, email content, whatever – and asks you to take a guess (educated or otherwise) as to which did better in consumer response.
Most marketers understand the importance of A/B testing in materials. You simply send out two different creatives of the same ad campaign and monitor which did better, then adjust your future campaigns to more closely match the winning materials. It’s marketing kaizen.
The problem for most companies is the cost associated with multiple marketing runs. Aside from the cost of multiple print-runs (where the set-up printing costs might be 40% or more of the total cost) developing more than one campaign creative can be daunting. Is it any surprise that marketing managers use the same formats over and over again, thinking that “Well, it worked before” is good enough?
The questions marketing executives need to ask themselves isn’t “Did this work before?” but rather “Could this work better?” And the only way to test that is to do an A/B test.
Perhaps you’ve felt that your marketing design was always just “good enough” but not really great. Well, if you had license to design what you thought was a “great” campaign, isn’t it worth testing it against your “good enough” design? Even small scale testing of 100 – 200 consumers might be enough to give you insight that could change the whole direction of your next campaign.
The nice thing about MarketingBox and PrintBox is that by lowering the printing costs of your campaigns and shortening the development time, you can test campaign designs quickly and affordably, and reap huge rewards when you find exactly the right creatives that sell.
