For as long as business owners have had a location to hang their sign, they have tried to find more and more ways to get more and more people to buy from them.
What usually happens is that businesses (even experienced marketers) will simply create a punchlist of tactics that they think are important to do — if they do they’ll get sales.
Years ago, I was at a conference in Orlando, Florida and happened to stay across the street from Downtown Disney. I spent each of my nights there walking around, riding the water taxi, eating dinner and just relaxing. Usually when I travel for work, it’s all about work. Rarely do I find the time to enjoy my surroundings, so this was new for me.
I started thinking a bit about what Disney knows how to do right, and that is to provide the customer an experience that they won't forget. As I sat there one evening eating dinner I realized that my reality seemed suspended for a short while.
Think about Las Vegas. Every so often, a casino will be torn down so that there can be room made for a new one. The casinos get bigger and better. Moreover, they are all designed to give the visitors an experience that is otherworldly. It’s a design that is meant to suspend reality.
Now, I can understand that people want different experiences, but which experience do you think fosters a sense of excitement for your customers? Which experience do you think causes people to tell their friends? Which experience is worth more to the consumer?
If you are looking for a way to test the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, A/B testing (or split testing) is the way to go. A/B testing can be used with emails, web pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), etc. Essentially, you take one copy of a marketing material, and you tweak it enough to create two versions. You then experiment at random with users (or target specific user segments) to find which version they engage with the most or which variation performs better for a specified conversion goal.
If you are trying to run an effective online advertising campaign of any kind, then it certainly pays to look into creating a good landing page experience for your potential customers. A landing page is simply a stand alone page that is created for a specific purpose of converting a potential customer that is geared toward a specific ad group or campaign. While a conversion can mean many different things, the conversion rate of your ad campaign is a definitive number that can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful campaign.
