5 Strategies to Entice Consumers to Binge-Watch Your Product Videos

Continue watching.

These two words are infamous in the world of video streaming. When consumers are hooked, they want more to watch.

“Content marketers should consider the binging trend a sort of case study. All of the elements that make us binge are lessons,” says Kari Matthews, a content writer for technology companies.

“We can do what these [television] shows do, in our own way, in our own industries, to make the most of our content and build our brands.”

Work with your team to engage customers with binge-worthy product videos. Get them excited about your brand and ecommerce services.

Try these five strategies below to entice your consumers.

1. Cater to Diverse Audiences

Normally, experts suggest creating content to serve a select group of people. But when it comes to product videos, you may want to take a different approach.

You want your content to be shareable. So, it must serve several different audiences. And that includes people who will never purchase your product.

“Remember that not everybody who buys, buys today, not everybody who consumes content shares it, and not everybody who shares content buys,” states Scott Allan, chief marketing officer at AddThis.

“Instead of focusing on capturing leads, create memorable content that customers will draw on when they or their friends are ready to make a purchase.”

So, produce content that people can share with their family and friends. Focus on moments that everyone can relate to, like laughing with friends, hosting a summer barbeque, or attending a college football game.

Below is the noteworthy Dollar Shave Club product video. Not everyone who shared this content bought the shavers, but it did go viral and reached their target audience.

If your company wants avoid vulgar language, think of your product video like a PG-rated film. For instance, most Disney movies are meant for kids to enjoy, but they have enough common themes to engage the parent.

Don’t be afraid to serve more people with your videos. The goal is to spread the word.

2. Develop A Backstory

For product videos to gain your audience’s attention, the content must discuss more than the product. Yes, content must go beyond talking about your company.

In other words: Tell a story that emotionally attaches people. It’s all about showing your audience a new perspective. And giving them a different insight that humanizes your brand.

Studies show that “Americans alone consume over 100,000 digital words every single day, but 92% say they want brands to tell stories amongst all those words.”

The same holds true in the world of video. A written product description isn’t good enough. And a video regurgitating similar information is just awful.

According to For Dummies, a “backstory refers to everything that occurred in your story’s past. A character’s backstory may include family background, job history, psychological condition, and any memories you create for that person from childhood on.”

Instead, bring your videos to life with characters and a plot. Give the actors names and set up an environment where the product is being used, not displayed.

That’s what Amazon did when they introduced its Echo. Rather than giving consumers a run down of the product features, the eCommerce giant showcased the product’s value in a simulated setting.

Get creative. Show, don’t just tell consumers about your products.

3. Create Episodic Content

According to Netflix, the network’s 83 million members watch more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies every day. That’s a lot of time in front of a screen.

But what keeps viewers coming back for more?

One reason is access to uninterrupted content. Consumers don’t need to worry about commercials. Advertisement don’t get in the way of their favorite shows. Therefore, they can focus on viewing what they love the most.

Another reason is the addicting show plots. A great television show contains episodes that leave the audience wanting more. People are constantly wanting to know what’s going to happen next.

Will the main character finally locate the killer? Or will the antagonist prevail and destroy his enemies?

Image Source

Episodic content has people on the edge of their seats. And that’s how your team should set up product videos.

Shoot multiple videos with cliffhangers. Get consumers intrigued about your brand culture and latest product benefits.

“Episodic content enhances the credibility of your brand as people become more and more familiar with you and what you are about. This builds trust and value with your target audience,” says Kerri Ponder, a writer at Crowd Content.

One product video is fine. But a bunch can get customers hooked on your ecommerce brand.

4. Notify Customers of Updates

Your customers are busy. They have to manage both their work and home schedules.

So, sometimes certain things get forgotten. And that’s perfectly fine.

That’s where are your team steps in. Remind your customers of your new product videos.

There’s an old marketing adage: The Rule of Seven. It says that a “prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you.”

Create a special website pop-up telling them about new videos. Keep customers informed by sending notification emails leading up to the launch.

Your business already sends updates about new terms and conditions. Mimic the technique for product videos.

“Getting people excited about content that is perhaps not yet fully done whets their appetite and keeps them talking about you and your brand, days ahead of when your campaign or content actually is released,” writes Shanna Cook, senior social media manager at Nokia.

Like any marketing tactic, don’t over do it. Reminders can become nuisances if they are sent every single day. Take a look at your internal data and set times best suited for your target audience.

Ask customers to sign up for your email list for product video announcements. There’s power in notifications.

5. Offer an Instant Reward

Everyone enjoys special gifts for their efforts. Reward customers for taking the time to watch or share your video.

Customers want to be delighted. They desire instant rewards that help them today, not tomorrow. So, stay away from mail-in rebates or points that can’t be redeemed today.

For example, at the end of a product video, offer a 10% promo code. And think beyond discounts. Giveaway exclusive access to a webinar or a free ebook.

Christian Karasiewicz, a social media marketing professional, suggests the following:

“Develop a video to showcase your expertise or further educate your viewers, then include a YouTube card that leads your audience to related material. This can be a transcription, checklist, infographic, SlideShare or downloadable PDF…”

YouTube cards are notifications that appear in your video. It’s a small rectangular box at the top right corner. It give your viewers a preview of the message. Check out the video below on how to add cards to YouTube videos.

Analyze which rewards consumers like the most. Then, start offering instant rewards for watching your product videos.

Binge-Worthy Content

On-demand video is attracting consumers to brands. The best ones hold the audience’s attention and keep them engaged.

Aim to create product videos for a diverse audience. Give your videos a backstory. And notify customers of new releases.

Produce captivating product videos. Let consumers continue watching.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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I Know You Are Tired of Hearing About Content, But . . .

I Know You Are Tired of Hearing About Content, But . . . written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Rachel Parker

Content, content, content – are you sick of it yet? The problem is that the need for strategic content is not going away anytime soon. The good news is that if you understand the strategic part of content creation and amplification, you won’t need to produce as much.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Rachel Parker, CEO of Resonance Content Marketing. She is also the author of The Content Marketing Coach: Everything you need to get in the game … and win! Rachel and I discuss the best strategies and tactics involved in producing high-quality content.

Rachel knows all about content marketing. Throughout her 15-year marketing career, she’s developed a distinct talent for being able to communicate in the voice of the client. Rachel has helped well-known brands to connect with their customers.

Questions I ask Rachel Parker:

• What exactly is content? And what are some suggested approaches for small business owners, or someone that just doesn’t have a lot of time, to produce quality content in a timely manner?
• How do you make content the voice of strategy, versus just another tactic?
• Do you have tips for creating content that people really want to share?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Why a blog or frequent publishing is essential for any business
• How to really identify with your audience and, in turn, produce content specific to their needs
• What constitutes a good marketing strategy and how it effects your sales funnel

Learn more about Rachel Parker and Resonance Content Marketing by visiting resonancecontent.com. You can reserve your copy of her latest book, The Content Marketing Coach, here.

This week’s Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Alignable!

Alignable is the network exclusively for business owners to network with each other, generate referrals and co-promotions together. Connect with fellow business owners nearby in your community today! 

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Making the Case For A New Email Marketing Metric

Before I get to my case for a new email marketing metric, I want to first make reference to something that was written not all that long ago. Entitled Understanding The Email 'Frequency Math Effect' it appeared on the Email Insider section of MediaPost and was penned by Loren McDonald.

I think Loren’s post was very well-written and certainly thought provoking, which is what a good post ought to do: get you thinking. And that’s precisely the effect his post had on me.

As we consider the impacts of the “Frequency Math Effect” we would be well served to remember that statistics, if improperly used, can lead us down false paths. 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli may have put it best when he wrote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics!"

To start, remember that any rate is calculated as a numerator divided by a denominator. For instance, Click- Through Rate (CTR) is Clicks (the numerator) divided by Pushed (the denominator). As you increase mailing volume, for any rate to remain unchanged then any increase in the denominator must be matched by a proportional increase in the numerator. And in reality as Loren pointed out in his initial post the Frequency Math Effect suggests that this is unlikely to occur: ever-increasing mailing volumes will generally tend to increase the numerator, but not as quickly proportionately as the denominator.

For email marketers a reduction in a rate is typically viewed as a bad thing. There are a couple of exceptions, however: Unsubscribe Rate and Spam Complaint Rate. A drop in either of these two rates is generally viewed as a good thing. This can lead the marketer down a dangerous path, however, particularly if cadence is being increased. Follow a reductio ad absurdum example with me to see the impact:

To start, let’s call the sum of Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints “Attrits” (yes, it’s a real word that is the base of the word attrition meaning to “wear away”). Using round numbers for illustration assume you have one million customers that you mail once a week and that this mailing generates a 0.1% combined unsubscribe and spam complaint rate (1,000 attrits). I think most of us would agree that if you mailed this customer list once a day you would likely get more than 1,000 attrits (for conversation let's say 2,000 attrits are generated by this higher cadence).

But remember, this is an illustration in absurdity so what happens if you mailed the entire list once an hour? Or once a minute?! That would be 10,080 individual mailing drops (!) and I think we can be pretty safe in assuming that every customer would have unsubscribed or hit the “This is spam” button by the end of that week!  Effectively, after one week we would have turned one million opt-in subscribers into one million attrits.

In the example above total Unsubscribes plus Spam Complaints would skyrocket while at the same time their matching rates would plummet (to perhaps as low as 0.01% combined). This is what Loren calls the "Frequency math effect." But there is something more going on here that is important to recognize. While the so-called "Frequency math effect" can impact any rate that you measure in email marketing, for most of those rates the numerator can theoretically increase indefinitely at the same rate as the denominator. But that is not true for Unsubscribe Rate nor for Spam Complaint Rate.

Why? Because presuming they don’t later opt back in, a customer can only attrit from a mailing list once. In my absurd example above up to ten billion emails were pushed. However, even if that had been 100 trillion emails, the numerator could never have risen above the one million records on the mailing file. As a result, as mailing cadence increases both Unsubscribe Rate and Spam Complaint Rate become progressively less useful metrics for us to rely on to diagnose our mailing program.

The Proposed New Metric

I would like to suggest that we need a new metric, one I call the "List Attrition Rate." Similar to how email marketers typically calculate both a "Click-Through Rate" and a "Unique Clicker Rate," the List Attrition Rate is designed to be a measure of unique customer behavior. However, unlike other unique metrics commonly used in our industry this one is not based solely on one campaign, but rather is calculated using all touches against the customer in a given week.

The List Attrition Rate is calculated as ("Weekly Unsubscribes" + “Weekly Spam Complaints”) divided by "Weekly Unique Recipients Pushed." The higher your List Attrition Rate, the worse the health of your mailing program.  As a result this metric is intended as the “Canary in the Coal Mine” that can warn you of dangerous mailing practices.  Not coincidentally this metric is explicitly intended to act as a restraining force against our natural impulses to over-mail our customers.

Consider the List Attrition Rate metric in the context of our absurd example above:

Mail once per week:

List Attrition Rate =

1,000 Weekly Attrits / 1,000,000 Weekly Unique Recipients Pushed =

0.1%

Mail once a day (7 times in a week):

List Attrition Rate =

2,000 Weekly Attrits / 1,000,000 Weekly Unique Recipients Pushed =

0.2%

Mail once a minute (10,080 times in a week):

List Attrition Rate = 

1,000,000 Weekly Attrits / 1,000,000 Weekly Unique Recipients Pushed =

100.0%

The List Attrition Rate is an intriguing metric because it measures the rate something bad occurred (the -Unsubscribe or Spam Complaint) as a ratio to the number of times it could have occurred, remembering that each customer can only exit the mailing list once. Set your threshold List Attrition Rate at a low enough level and you may finally have a tool to push back against other voices in your business trying to get you to over mail your customers.

The bottom line in all of this is we marketers need to apply the one metric that is applicable to everything we do: The common sense metric. If we look at something, anything and it doesn’t make sense or seems of out whack then we probably shouldn’t do it i.e. sending over 10,000 mailings in a very short people of time as per my earlier example.

Modern Marketers must orchestrate and deliver marketing messages that are relevant to individual preferences and behavior. Getting email delivered to the inbox is critical to this process which is why you need to download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers.

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11 Common (and Avoidable!) Content Marketing Mistakes, As Explained by Memes

Question: How do you get better at content marketing?

Answer: You learn from your mistakes.

Follow-up Question: What’s even better than learning from your mistakes?

Answer: Learning from other people’s mistakes.

If you’re looking for bad content marketing, it’s a buyer’s market. Every brand is a publishing company now. Some are doing amazing work. Most are…not so much.

While bad content may not be of value to its target audience, it definitely is useful for content marketers looking to improve.

I know it’s no fun thinking about the (sometimes costly) mistakes content marketers make. And I definitely don’t want anyone to feel bad who has made these mistakes in the past. We’re not here to shame anyone; we’re here to do better.

So to lessen the negative emotional impact of these harsh lessons, I’m enlisting some of my favorite memes to help teach them.

11 Common Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them:

#1: The Random Act of Content

The Mistake: Content without strategy is like a baby deer on a frozen lake: lots of motion, but no progress. Yet many marketers are still slip-sliding around.

Don’t make me quote the B2B Benchmarks stats again, people. You know it’s true. A majority of marketers are creating and releasing content that serves no immediate purpose, has no measurable goal, and is not part of a larger whole.

How to Avoid It: First, it’s important to recognize that it is possible to directly measure the effectiveness of content marketing. Then, before you create a single new piece of content, create a content strategy that features concrete goals and the metrics you will measure to evaluate progress.

 

#2: The Lightweight

The Mistake: The old-school content strategy was to go broad and shallow. Copywriters would churn out 250-500 words on any topic their audience conceivably could be searching for. It didn’t matter if the content delivered on the headline’s promise—what mattered was driving traffic.

That’s a tactic that won’t fly anymore. Search engines are evaluating the quality of the copy, and the way readers react to it, to determine rankings.

How to Avoid It: Focus on the few topics that are of greatest interest to your highest-value reader. Don’t worry about attracting the attention of thousands of people who will hit your content and bounce—create something valuable for the dozens who will read it and buy.

 

#3: The Island

The Mistake: Even the most in-depth piece of content is unlikely to address every aspect of a topic. Yet marketers still publish content without a single link to a related post, or suggestions for further reading. The more time customers spend on site, the more likely they are to take a next step with your company. So it’s worth giving them a reason to stay.

How to Avoid It: As you write, look for opportunities to crosslink the reader to other valuable content. For example, that content strategy link up in the first entry leads to another blog post. It’s relevant, it’s useful, and it entices the reader to stick around.

 

#4: The Enstuffening

The Mistake: Until recently, SEO was built around keywords. You find the word or phrase your audience might use, then stuff it in as many times as you can make it fit. As with lightweight content, it worked for a while—but no one was really happy with the arrangement. 

How to Avoid It: Search engines are now far more concerned with user behavior than keywords. Bake in your SEO by writing informative content that answers the reader’s question. You can start with a keyword, but use it as a jumping-off point to create content that resonates.

 

#5: The Sloppy Joe

The Mistake: As publishing content gets more and more simple, it’s easy to sidestep the gatekeepers of language, spelling and grammar.

That’s a good thing overall, but can lead to beautifully-designed assets marred by typos, or blog posts with phrases so convoluted they’re impossible to parse. Sloppy copy can damage your brand’s credibility and cause readers to bounce.

How to Avoid It: Treat every bit of content you create, regardless of the channel or format, as though it were a multinational ad with millions of dollars behind it. Even if it’s a post for your personal blog or your LinkedIn Profile. If you don’t have the patience (or a patient friend) to edit, these tools can help.

 

#6: The Great Wall of Text

The Mistake: We were trained early on to write in big blocks of text. The problem is, big blocks of text are torturous to read on a screen—especially on a small mobile device.

How to Avoid It: Optimize your text for digital consumption (which sounds like a disease, but means “reading stuff on a screen”). Use paragraph breaks every 2-3 sentences, wherever there would be a logical pause. Like here:

Include headers to provide a skimmable set of highlights for your piece as well. Readers will check out the headers before they decide to commit to reading the whole thing. If you don’t have these signposts, the reader will frequently opt out.

 

#7: The Eye Exam

The Mistake: Repurposing content is a fantastic habit to get into (more on that later). But sometimes what works in one format doesn’t quite work in another.

The slides from your presentation looked great on a 10-foot screen, but on SlideShare they’re illegible. Or the infographic you made looks awesome—until it’s compressed into a tiny window on your blog.

How to Avoid It: Make sure to adapt content rather than just putting it in a new wrapper. You can use those presentation slides to inform a new SlideShare presentation, for example, with less text, more visual interest, and a firm CTA to your blog.

 

#8:The Post and Pray

The Mistake: So you create an amazing content asset that speaks directly to your audience’s needs. You promote it on your social channels and optimize it for search. Then you wait for the likes and shares to come pouring in…and you wait. And wait.

How to Avoid It: It’s no secret that social platforms are increasingly pay-to-play. It’s simply not enough to rely on organic sharing and search—if you believe in the content, it’s worth putting a few dollars behind it. Start with the channel your audience uses the most, make a minimum investment, and optimize from there. 

 

#9: The Authority Gap

The Mistake: You know that you’re a reliable resource for your content. So you naturally expect your audience to find you credible, too. Unfortunately, your target audience may not yet know how trustworthy you are.

How to Avoid It: There are plenty of ways to add credibility to content. Cite statistics from a respected industry source. Curate quotes from trusted individuals in your field (and don’t forget to let them know you quoted them). Even better, reach out to influencers to co-create content.

 

#10: The One and Done

The Mistake: After pouring blood, sweat, tears and coffee into a great piece of content, it’s easy to publish it, forget about it, and move on. You may check to see if it’s gaining traction, but in general, you’re so over it. It’s an understandable attitude that leads to a lot of wasted content potential.

How to Avoid It: Repurpose your content by personalizing it for a different audience, changing the format, refreshing the stats, and more. Roll several pieces into an eBook. Turn the eBook into a SlideShare presentation (with legible text). Your content can find a new audience with every iteration.

 

#11: The Maze of Gates

The Mistake: A potential customer sees a promising headline for what looks like a fun, entertaining read. They click through—only to see a subscription pop-up before they can start reading. Or a contact form for a download. They’re not ready to make a commitment, so they bounce.

How to Avoid It: Many smart marketers are experimenting with 100% ungated content. Whether that strategy would work for you depends on your audience. Regardless, it’s important to have plenty of top-of-funnel ungated content to pull in casual readers. Entertain them, offer value, then ask for a next step.

Even the Greatest Make Mistakes

If you’re currently making any of these mistakes, good news! That means you have some untapped potential to unleash. Use these as a checklist for making your marketing more effective.

If you have successfully avoided all eleven of these, congratulations! Your next move is harder: You get to go out and make all new mistakes that we all can learn from. I’ll be failing and learning right along with you.

What was your most educational marketing mistake? Tell me your story in the comments.

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7 Reasons Your Site Isn’t Ready for A/B Testing

You’ve invested a lot of time and effort into perfecting your website and you want to get the maximum return from that investment. To achieve that goal, you’ve studied dozens of blogs on conversion optimization techniques. You’ve poured over countless CRO case studies, and you have a few tools to help you run A/B tests.

Before you start split testing to get those conversion gains, pause for a second. I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.

There are plenty of free tools to help you test your optimization – not to mention paid options from Optimizely to OptinMonster that’ll help you explore different facets of your site’s performance – so just about anyone can run A/B tests. But it’s not a matter of simply understanding how to do it.

The problem is that your site just isn’t there yet. A/B testing isn’t for everyone, and if it’s not done at the right time with the right conditions, you might end up accumulating a lot of false data that does more harm than good. Before you invest anything in testing and extensive optimization, consider these seven points:

1. The Traffic Volume Isn’t There

If this is what your traffic numbers look like, don’t bother A/B testing

There’s no doubt that A/B testing can be highly useful for businesses that want to improve their conversion rates. Having said that however, a lot of businesses shouldn’t bother with A/B testing.

Small businesses that are trying to grow, startups, e-commerce businesses in their early years and other micro businesses simply don’t have the traffic and transactions to accurately perform A/B tests. It takes a significant amount of traffic to provide accurate, measurable results.

In a post from Peep Laja of ConversionXL, he provided an example using a sample size calculator from Evan Miller, where the baseline conversion rate is entered. He then entered the desired lift.

Image Source

You can see from this image that in order to detect a 10% lift, the tool recommends at least 51,486 visitors per variation.

If the traffic isn’t there yet, you can still optimize your site based on audience data you’ve gathered, but A/B tests won’t be helpful for a while and they might produce false information.

2. You Don’t Have Anything to Test

A lot of websites function as a general brochure for a company with minimal conversion points. If you run a B2B site or you have a freshly-created site with little more than a contact form and an opt-in, then it’s too early in the game to start running concurrent A/B tests.

If your site is content-lite then it’s probably too soon to start running tests.

Even if the volume of traffic is adequate to run accurate tests, you may not see a significant lift from a general opt-in or estimate request form. For most businesses, the amount of effort and cost that would go into designing variations for the tests just to get a small lift around micro conversions isn’t worth it.

The same applies to newer e-commerce stores.

Your time would be better spent with your analytics, where you can set up goal tracking, creating marketing campaigns, and developing your content offers and resources. The A/B testing can come later once you have more to offer and traffic has grown substantially.

3. You’re Not Sure What Matters

Do you know what the choke points, leaks, and sticking points are in your funnel? I’m referring to the places where you’re losing prospective customers, as well as where you’re gaining the most.

Before you can run any kind of tests, you have to understand what matters, because some elements are more important than others.

For example: a marketing agency is driving visitors to their estimate request page. They spend a significant amount of time optimizing that page with A/B testing variations and micro changes. After extensive testing, they find that their efforts made very little difference with virtually no impact on their conversions.

Instead, they should have looked for mistakes in their funnel leading up to that page. Maybe the content that led the visitor to that point was where the changes needed to be made. Maybe the search intent of the customer didn’t match the content they found.

Another example: a brand selling shoes online puts a great deal of effort into optimizing and testing product pages, only to realize that the lift in conversion was insignificant. Instead, they could find ways to improve the average order value or review their funnel in Kissmetrics to find the biggest leaks where customers are dropping off and fix those problems instead.

Don’t know where to test? Find where you’re losing customers (and money) with the Kissmetrics Funnel Report.

If you randomly try to test what you think matters, then you’ll only be wasting time.

One study from Forrester showed that 60% of firms surveyed saw improvements in their website when they used a data-driven approach to design. It’s important to take the time to research what really matters to your business so you know what to optimize and where to make changes.

4. You’re Copying Content

While a competitor site (or any site for that matter) might look like an attractive design that your customers will probably engage with, you can’t waste time testing if you’ve played copycat.

Any tests you run after replicating their design and content will only be wasted. If the solution was as simple as copying what we thought worked well for our competitors (or even conversion case studies) then every e-commerce website would function exactly like Amazon.

The fact is, websites are highly contextual and they should relate to both the audience and what you’re promoting. Wal-Mart and Whole Foods are in the same business of selling food products, but they cater to completely different audiences and sell vastly different products.

If I stacked up my own services against another marketing agency offering identical services, there would still be contextual differences in how we market, how we service customers, the channels we use to engage them, and how we direct traffic to our sites.

You need to make sure your website is designed specifically for you, your channels, your audience, etc. before investing in testing.

5. The Data Isn’t There

The more capable you are with analytics tools like Kissmetrics or Google Analytics, the better off you’ll be. But, if the extent of your knowledge consists of checking traffic quantities, referral sources, time on page and bounce rates, then you’re only scraping the surface.

If you don’t know what data you need to monitor while A/B testing, then testing is a waste of time.

You have to approach your testing and analytics with a problem so you can find an answer in the data. That way, you can identify issues and confirm what aspects you need to change.

Learning a bit more about your analytics can tune you into:

• How site elements or offers are performing
• How your content is performing and whether it is keeping people engaged
• What people are doing on your site and the routes they typically take
• Where people are landing, as well as where they’re leaving
• Where your funnel is losing money

The data won’t specifically tell you how to fix problems; it’s just a starting point where you can discover actionable insights. Without that data, and without the ability to interpret it, A/B testing is pointless.

6. Your Site Has Usability Issues

When was the last time you tested your website in a browser other than the one you typically use? Have you tried going through your entire site on a mobile device?

Have you ever performed a full usability test with a variety of browsers and devices?

This is something a lot of marketers don’t consider when they start A/B tests. Ignoring usability issues, tech problems, and bugs is a huge mistake, though. Even minor bugs and slow load times can dramatically impact your conversion rates.

Just a one second delay in load time can drop conversion rates by as much as 7%.

You won’t get accurate results from A/B testing if segments of your audience are bailing due to usability issues. Some of your audience may never make it to your conversion point, and even if they do, their progress could be hindered by bugs or load times that will ultimately skew your results.

This misinterpretation could lead to changes and further variations of elements that are actually part of your winning, optimized design.

7. You Don’t Know Your Audience

Audience research should be one of the first steps of any marketing strategy. If your goal is to drive lots of traffic to your site with content marketing and paid advertising, I would hope you’ve done some measure of audience research.

Without it, you’re shooting blindly into the darkness and hoping to score a bullseye.

Researching and defining your target audience gives you in-depth information about who you’re targeting, such as their pain points, interests, behaviors, demographics info, and more. That information helps you craft compelling copy, winning headlines, and attention-grabbing offers.

How well do you know your target market?

Without it, you’ll resort to guessing what to change about your copy, headlines, offers, and calls-to-action. Every variation you test will be just as random as the one before it, and you likely won’t see any significant change in performance.

Know who you’re marketing to before you make a large investment in A/B testing.

Testing isn’t for Everyone

While there’s a wealth of articles and advice online telling you test everything you do and to A/B test every variation, you don’t have to. For many statups and growing online businesses there just isn’t enough traffic early on to create an accurate sampling with measurable results.

Focus on growing your business for now. As you grow traffic levels, learn more about your customers, and targeted traffic increases you can start testing variations to go after those micro wins.

Do you use A/B testing on your site or landing pages right now? Have you found issues with the quality of your results? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

About the Author: Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, their Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

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