The Four C’s of Marketing Orchestration Testing

Working within the Strategic Services team, one of our core competencies is to empower our clients to get the best out of the platforms that they use by doing many different things; one of the most important is testing! How many times have you sat around and thought “What should I test to increase my marketing’s effectiveness?” or even better, the simple solution to an argument with a colleague “Why don’t we just test it”. 

But testing for the sake of testing is downright dangerous, costly and most of all a waste of time. So what should we test?

Let me introduce, the four C’s of marketing orchestration testing. 

1. Content
Probably the most obvious of all the four C’s. I have seen Open Rates of emails go up by 20% due to a well-crafted subject line, conversion rates go down because a GIF like video (it was roughly 30 seconds long) was placed into the email and I’ve seen conversion rates increase because the call to action (CTA) changed to two simple words.

So when we are looking at content, what should we be testing?

− Subject lines
− CTAs
− Personalisation
− Dynamic content
− Animation

2. Campaign

One of the most amazing things about digital marketing is that a minor change in a campaign can have a monumental impact… not to mention campaign is the most fun to test. I’m talking about testing engagement, I’m talking about landing pages, do you have one? Do you need one? Deep linking, the design, is the campaign programmatic and is it mobile optimised? That’s why testing campaign is fun:

− Engagement
− Landing pages
− Design
− Deep linking
− Programmatic
− Mobile Optimised

3. Customer

The holy grail of database marketing. The customer and what we know about them. Now whilst this is fun (ok… it’s all fun), this particular C is also the hardest. This is when we start to test engagement, not campaign engagement but customer engagement, has a particular group engaged within the last 6 months? This is when we start to sift through the data and find segments of customers to test with various Content (C ²… amazing). If we look at purchase behavior we can then look at purchase intent! If we have intent and purchase behavior, maybe we can do predication modeling and basket analysis. Now you can see why this C is the hardest!

− Customer Engagement (not campaign engagement)
− Database Segmentation
− Purchase Behavior
− Purchase Intent
− Prediction modeling and basket analysis

4. Channel

So how should we test channel? We should look at what channel a customer entered from, look at what has triggered off a communication and where a customer is in the journey and is there a need for a new channel. The biggest and most important reason for testing channel… if you have been testing Customer Engagement, you will find out that you have customers that have not interacted at all (around 5-10%) and you will also find out you have a large proportion of customers who haven’t engaged in 270+ days. So you tell me… if a customer hasn’t engaged in 270+ days, is this a content, campaign or customer issue? Possibly, but it is more likely a channel issue.

− Channel entry
− Program entry
− Channel engagement
− Channel need

So now we have some structure for all our tests: Content, Campaign, Customer and Channel. The four C’s of testing will help you stop to testing for the sake of testing… please stop doing that… seriously.

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Author's Bio: Ben Fettes is a strategist with 10 years agency experience, Ben has worked on some of Australia’s largest brands and is currently the lead strategist across APAC financial and airline industries with experience in both B2B and B2C marketing automation strategies. Ben prides himself on finding actionable insights that drive revenue for clients cross-channel marketing efforts.

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