Regular creative experimentation is the best way to drive better results for your digital marketing campaigns.
You know that. We know that. Everyone knows that.
But we also know that experimenting, validating, testing, learning, and—when necessary—pivoting can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
It doesn’t have to be. With the right tools and methodologies in place, creative experimentation can be effortless to execute, maintain, and benefit from.
Let’s Get Started: Coming Up with Creative Automation Test Ideas
If you’ve ever been in charge of iterating and managing great customer experience (CX) before, you’ve likely got questions.
For example, even if you have an effortless way to run and manage tests, where do you come up with ideas?
Here’s what we recommend:
Think big.
We always recommend starting big by testing dramatically different ad concepts first. This is where you have the biggest opportunity to create a major performance lift, and it's a great way to start your cycle of always-on creative experimentation.
Talk to your customers.
Your customers represent a goldmine of information—and by engaging with them, you’re forging a connection and learning invaluable info at the same time. Ask for customer feedback, mine your reviews, and launch surveys to figure out directly from your customers what they love, hate, and wish for. Then, use that data to create experiments that directly address the stated preferences and needs.
Keep tabs on your competitors.
When you survey the competition, what are they doing? Is it working for them? Is it really not working? This isn’t schadenfreude; It’s research. Learning from the successes and failures of other brands can inform your experimentation without the same level of risk or investment.
Check to see what new tech and tests are available to you!
Now that tools such as artificial intelligence and business process automation are more mainstream, you can roll out tests and predict the outcome of strategies more efficiently than ever before. As you understand how to leverage new solutions, think about how you can expand experimentation while making it easier on your team!
Want more specific ideas?
While you should tailor the experiments you run to your needs and goals, here are five options that could be worth pursuing:
- A/B test ad designs to see how different visual elements perform.
- Vary your call-to-action (CTA) text or style and see if your audience engages differently.
- Test various webpage layouts for your landing pages to see if you can enhance conversion.
- Use punctuation, numbers, and emojis in your email subject lines to see if your open rates change.
- Consider switching up the way you segment and target your audience to learn if differently targeted content results in more or less engagement.
Got an idea of a test you want to pursue? Excellent. That brings us to a salient question: What happens next?
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing Always-On Creative Experimentation
If you’re ready to start—and maintain!—an always-on creative automation or optimization strategy, here’s your road map:
- Start by setting clear expectations and objectives. Define and write down what you plan to accomplish. This could range from improving conversion and close rates to seeing more engagement or just learning more about what your audience wants.
- Choose tools that can help you win at these goals. Select a platform that’s user-friendly, simple to start, and helps you use your current software tools even better. Then, make sure your team is trained on that solution before moving forward.
- Settle on your test ideas. Write them down, communicate your ideas and your goals to your team, and make sure everyone’s on the same page.
- Design your experiments, and then run them. Have your team help you determine what you need to do to run an effective test, define your scope, schedule your tests, and do it. And, remember, while planning out your experiments as comprehensively as possible is important, an imperfect test that’s actually run is more helpful than a “perfect” test that you never quite launch.
- Analyze your results. Once the test is completed, take a beat, and then look at what happened. Use data analytics to figure out which of your A/B variants worked better or to correlate engagement performance with specific CTA sets you used.
- Change strategy, set up further experiments, and repeat! To fully benefit from creative experimentation, you need to embrace its continuous nature. Take what you learned from the tests, tell your team what happened, and, together, come up with practical ways to implement what you learned in your processes to move forward.
Here’s an example: Did you find out that using punctuation in your subject lines increases your email open rate? If so, put that in your standard operating procedure for future use. Then, consider running a further test to see, for example, whether question marks are more effective than exclamation points, if using more than two punctuation feels spammy, or to find out whether you need to do it every single time versus varying your strategy from campaign to campaign.
This thoughtful, practical, and forward-thinking approach will help you see continuous improvement and adaptation to the ever-changing digital marketing landscape.
Take Your First Steps Toward Benefiting from Continuous Creativity Today
Remember, every test you run—whether it leads to a breakthrough or a dead end—is a valuable step in refining your marketing strategies. At Innervate, we’re delighted to facilitate helpful iteration with plug-and-play dynamic CX solutions that streamline the creative process so you can focus on innovation and growth.
Interested in learning more about how we can help you use iterative testing and creative automation strategically so you can experiment, test, personalize, and scale? Contact our team, and we’ll chat about specific-to-you solutions.
