4 Ways to Beta Your Way to Better

Adapting a Beta Mindset

We believe considering our work as “done” is not as helpful to our clients as it is to think of it as a journey toward even better. We call it our beta way of thinking, and it’s what drives us as marketers, co-workers and as individuals to find our better.

Here are several examples of how we believe adapting a beta mindset can similarly improve the results you get from your teams, your campaigns and yourself.

1. The Butterfly Effect

Small changes can lead to big—and even better—results, which is why A/B testing drives a beta mindset. It leads you to constantly test and refine different elements of your campaign to see what resonates.

For example, by testing different versions of an activation page for a new game, video game maker EA Games discovered that visitors who arrived on their site were already there to make a purchase. Leading them through an offer and messaging developed to convince them to make the purchase was interrupting the impulse to just hit the order button.

In our own shop, we’ve also found that moving the call-to-action up to the first or second panel of an activation page, boosts connections. It gives someone who is already “sold” something to do. If more convincing is needed by a visitor, we’ve found they will scroll to learn more.

2. Timing is Everything

It’s a 24/7 world. But for any single email to be successful, it needs to land in the right inbox at the right time, and when it’s relevant to the recipient. While this argues for testing different subject lines to see which is the most effective at different times during the day, it also highlights the need to take persona development beyond the statistical, to the behavioral.

That means giving thought to the day in the life of a potential target and understanding the frame of mind that person needs to be in to consider your message as something they may want to act on. Ideally, you want your subject line—or, for that matter, your programmatic headline—to hit when the problem you can help with is likely to be on their minds. For instance, if you are trying to reach working mothers with a message about their finances, you may want to test emailing not just after work, but after the kids are in bed and they have time to focus on personal matters.

3. Leverage what works across channels

Marketing in silos doesn’t make sense these days. Prospects operate across channels—they are online, opening messages on mobile devices, walking past digital displays, streaming their TV shows—your message needs to follow and be consistent.

For example, you may highlight a limited-time offer using percentage-off wording in one email’s subject line and an actual dollar amount in another version’s. If one version causes open rates to soar, consider adding a temporary banner to an area of your home page that mirrors the preferred language or adjust your digital ad campaign’s wording to see if the success rate of the tweak will carry over.

This enables you to leverage the momentum created by the A/B testing of your email to improve the rate of successful connections with those prospects entering your funnel through a different channel.

4. Be Iterative

Web developers use an iterative process to get the website, software or app they are working on released and in front of users faster. Then, they immediately start working on improving it by studying user behavior and soliciting feedback to identify any gaps and finetune the bottlenecks they missed originally for the next version.

Viewing projects more as a journey than an end, enables us as marketers to similarly debut campaigns faster, then test their elements through actual use, and adjust to increase the qualified leads and promote conversions.

Find out how to partner with Blue Flame Thinking as you beta your way to better. Contact Josh Stauffer at 616.559.2225 or jstauffer@blueflamethinking.com.