Internet Direct Marketing Tip of the Day

If you do A/B/C or multivariate testing, you need significant amounts of traffic before you reach a confidence level worth acting on.

If you don’t get boxcars of traffic, you might be better served by doing quick and simple A/B split testing. This allows you to make smaller changes sooner rather than many changes all at once.

Teeming hordes of visitors allow large sites or highly trafficked pages to quickly measure many things at once and act accordingly. But, smaller amounts of traffic might cause you to wait weeks or more before you can make educated decisions about what to change on your website for better response rates. LC

Tags: Tip Of The Day by Larry Chase
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I’ve recently been conducting some online testing of certain assumptions that were based on classic direct-response wisdom. I’m finding out I don’t know everything.

Things that work a certain way in traditional marketing channels, like DRTV or Direct Mail, don’t necessarily have the same outcomes online. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s because screen reading is not as linear as DRTV or an outer envelope. It’s too early to tell.

What I can tell you is you need to test your most basic assumptions. Humans want certainty. While human nature hasn’t changed much, humans do change their habits from one medium to the next. You can’t assume that something which works well in one channel will work the same way in other channels.

More on these differences as I learn more. LC

Tags: Tip Of The Day by Larry Chase
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