Testing is an important part of any online marketing initiatives. While the overall goal of testing is usually to increase conversions, which will ideally increase revenue, the real value in testing is the information you collect. What you learn from the success or failure of a test can be applied to your next test, and the one after that, and on and on. I’m finding that many people gauge conversion as the end-all-be-all metric of testing, which may often be the case. But, there are several other metrics that one can measure for success.

For instance, on a banner ad test, your CTR (click-through rate) may be your primary metric of success. An email test might also use CTR, or possibly turnover rate or open rates might be what you should be concerned with. And for landing pages, maybe lowering your bounce rate or improving your customer retention rate is the primary objective. Of course, all of these metrics will likely (and hopefully) help towards improving your conversion rate, but for the test at hand, CR may not be your top metric.

This is why it is so important to have a proper test plan prior to beginning any online marketing test. What the test plan does is establish what you are testing, how you will be testing, and what metrics you will be using to determine success or failure.

Test plans can be long, complicated documents with tons of detailed information, or they can be short, simple outlines with the high-level topics, but in any case there are 3 key bits of information that MUST be established for any test plan:

Hypothesis: Just like in scientific testing, the first thing that must be established is the hypothesis, or the preliminary question of what you are looking to learn. The hypothesis should be in question form, and be very short and simple to understand. For example: “Will changing our CTA button from red to green increase clickthrough rate?” or “Will moving the coupon code input field below the total price decrease cart abandonment?” As you can see, these are very short statements that explain what we are changing (button color or input field placement) and what we will measure (CTR or abandonment rate), without getting into the full details of how and what we need to do in order to make the test happen. Your hypothesis will drive all other information in your testing plan, and thus is the first and most important piece of information.

Prime Objective: This is where you can expand on your hypothesis with greater detail and state the specifics of what you are going to learn. For instance, using the button hypothesis above, your prime objective may look something like this: “Determine whether changing the bottom right call to action from a red color to a green color will increase or decrease click through rate on [Company Name's] lead generation landing pages.” While it may seem like we are simply repeating the hypothesis, upon closer look, you’ll see we are providing additional details, such as where the CTA button is (bottom right) and what page we will be testing (lead generation page). This hypothesis is a pretty straightforward and simple question, so in this example, our Prime Objective is fairly simple as well, but the more complex the test, the more clarification your prime objective may need. The important thing to remember is your hypothesis should be kept as short and simple as possible (and always in question form), leaving the further detail to the prime objective section.

Metrics: Here is where you state the KPI (key performance indicator) or metric that you will gauge success or failure of your test. The metric you use should be able to answer your hypothesis. Again, using the button hypothesis example, our primary metric would be clickthrough rate. As mentioned above, our goal of any test may be to improve conversion rate, but that is not the TOP METRIC for our button test. Based on our hypothesis, CTR is really the only metric we need to look at to answer our question. Some tests may require more than one metric, and I always like to add any secondary metrics (if applicable) that may be of interest or may help in future tests, but most importantly and at minimum, the metric that addresses our hypothesis should be listed. And obviously this should be a metric that you are capable of recording and viewing the data.

A fourth bit of information that many consider to be necessary in your initial test plan is Test Period (duration of your test), but I look at a test plan as a working document, and your test period could change during the actual test (you may need to extend the time period to get significant results, or stop the test if you are seeing dramatic negative impact), and thus is not a requirement at the initial stage.

There are several other elements that are extremely helpful to have in a testing plan including Measurement System, Baseline Metric and User Path, but most (if not all) of this information will be driven by the 3 points detailed above. It’s important to note, I am not recommending that your test plan should ONLY have these three points as a complete and thorough test plan will only help with current and future tests. What I am recommending is that at minimum and first priority, your test plan needs to have these three points.

View a sample online optimization test plan here (PDF). As you can see from this example, your test plan does not have to be long and complex, but it should be thorough. And while by necessity it may have technical language, it is very helpful that this plan is understandable by any member of the organization.

I hope you found this article and the example plan helpful. Please feel free to contact us to find out if we can help you in your online marketing optimization needs.

Hopefully you’ve been following along with this series, and you’re acquainted witht the Competitive (part 2), Humanistic (part 3) and Methodical (part 4) buyer modailities, and now we’ll discuss the last segment, the Spontaneous buyer. The second most prevalent type of buyer, the spontaneous buyer is optimistic and impulsive. They search for immediate satisfaction, and are more willing to take risks than other buyer types. They are less likely to need a lot of the granular details of a product, but that’s not to say they aren’t looking for reassurances as to why your product is the best fit for their needs.

In bricks-and-mortar stores, spontaneous buyers are the reason there are so many products at the checkout counter (ex. candy). The reason is spontaneous buyers don’t always know that they want something until they see it. While their is no checkout counter online, you can still appeal to this market online using the same techniques. Large signs, bright colors, bold text and messages focused on savings tend to work with the spontaneous buyer.

While they tend to make decisions much faster then the other buyer modalities, they are still interested in things like product comparisons and customer testimonials. They will still shop around for the best deal, but they will move much quicker, spending less time on the small print. For this reason, it is important to use bolding and bulleting, with bursts and other elements that call out important info. They are also interested on how quickly they can get the product. They live in the moment, and want immediate satisfaction. They respond well to “overnight delivery” or “immediate access” type messaging.

As with my other posts, I will refer to the Market Sense blog on appliedproductmarketing.com for some great tips on marketing to spontaneous buyer:

Appeal: Drawn to top-rated items that are immediately available.

Website: Present summary information in easy-to-read charts. Leverage expert opinions and reviews.

Information Needs: Answer questions on why your product is the best solution for their immediate problem.

Understand: Why they should choose you. They want to know you are the best they can get at this time.

Process: They want to get to the end point quickly. By presenting the executive summary of the information they need to know, you can bypass buying process stages.

Time: They are poised to act quickly. Don’t burden them with unnecessary details.

Risk: They are not confined by convention. They may suggest creative solutions to help achieve their goals.

Decision: Need you be ready to act as soon as they make their decision. If you aren’t ready, you can lose them.

Below is another example from the same project as the other posts, this landing page of course being focuses on the Spontaneous Buyer Modality (click to enlarge).

If you’ve followed the complete series, hopefully you will notice the changes and can identify the elements that were used to focus on the spontaneous buying behaviour, including:

1. Lifestyle imagery of a casual woman at a computer, implying ease of use.
2. Bold text stating “Fast. Easy. Free.”
3. Bold colors and a bright red for the CTA
4. Large graphics for the screenshots of the product, as well as short descriptions of what the product delivers.
5. Repetitive messaging of “Free”. Spontaneous buyers (particularly online) respond well to the term “Free” (more so than terms such “bonus” or “plus”, etc)

Once again, the product and benefits are the same for each example, but carefully tweaking and adjusting colors, text, fonts and imagery can go a long way in targeting specific buying behaviours. You can find countless articles on Landing Page Optimization that tell you to test colors, and layouts, and messaging (which I obviously agree), but what will help even more is if you can identify the type of buyer you customer is and change those elements to target your audience. It’s not just about testing the messaging, it’s about finding the best messaging for your customer. Landing page testing should not only give you learning about how to sell to your customer, but also ABOUT your customer. Through improving conversion (and even lowering conversion), you can start to determine what kind of audience your page is attracting, and hopefully be able to adjust your page to fit.

That’s it for this series on Buying Modality, but I hope to do more testing and designing on Buyer Modality, and hopefully share some of the examples and results here. In the meantime, I hope my readers have gained a little more insight into Buyer Modality (what I like to call CHuMS), and are able to use that to create better focused landing pages in order to improve your landing pages.

Of course, if you are looking for any help with your improving your landing page conversions or any online marketing efforts, please feel free to contact me for more information at contact@spitshine-design.com. Thanks for reading!

In Part 2 and Part 3 of the series, I dug a little bit deeper into the Competitive and Humanistic buying behaviours (respectively). Both humanistic and competitive buyers are the two least prevalent shoppers, while the Methodical Buying Modality is the most prevalent, at about 40-45% of the general population. With this is mind, targeting the methodical buyer may be your best option to at least start your testing, but to truly reach the biggest audience, it is still always smart to test for all buyer modalities (which can also help you learn to know your audience).

The most apparent characteristic of the methodical shopper is that they are comparitive shoppers by nature. This fits in well with the online shopper since there is such an abundance of resources and online shopping sites to choose from on the web. They often know exactly what their problem is (what they are shopping for), but need that extra “push” to tell them why your product is the best fit. While they are eager to solve their problem, they are also very quick to jump to your competitors site before making any decisions. The challenge can often be giving them as much information as possible, but still always driving them through the conversion funnel.

Methodical shoppers are very detail oriented. They want all the information they can get on not only your product, but your business and your processes. They are less likely to take a risk, and need factual details on why your product is the best fit for them. They can often be the easiest shopper to provide what they are looking for, but the most challenging to convert. Methodical shoppers will tend to visit your site or page several times before making the first transaction, but can be loyal if you deliver a positive experience.

Along with the detailed information about what they will get from the transaction, one of the most important messages to provide the Methodical buyer modality is what sets your product above the rest. Whether it is the lowest price, or the longest warranty, or the most popular – anything that can set your product above the others. They respond well to comparison charts and user ratings. Providing factual data will help in driving them through to checkout.

As with the other buying modalities, the Market Sense blog on the appliedmarketing.com website has some great tips on marketing and selling to the Methodical buying modality as follows:

Appeal: Drawn to proof that your product can solve their problem

Website: Provide lots of detailed information that they can easily explore. They want deeper levels of factual information.

Information Needs: Answer questions on what your product does and how it does it

Understand: How your product can solve their problem. They will think and deliberate logically.

Process: Will pace themselves and work through their buying process in an orderly manner. Don’t try to jump process steps.

Time: Will need time to research, evaluate, and come to a decision. Don’t rush them.

Risk: Everything is a trade-off. Allow them to define their risk boundaries.

Decision: Must make a responsible decision, having weighed the consequences.

Below you will see an example of a landing page I put together with the creative team to target the methodical buying behaviour (click to enlarge).

If you’ve been following this series of posts, you can probably guess that this example is for the same product with the same offerings for the competitive and humanistic examples. And you can probably guess, the largest segment of our audience was still the spontaneous buyer behavior, with the challenge being to appeal to the methodical buyer without alienating the spontaneous buyer. You can also see that this example is vastly different from the other examples, with some key elements as follows:

1. A strong visual chart chart demonstrating what the customer receives with the product.
2. A large amount of information copy (compared to the other examples).
3. The use of numbers, which was done purposely. Methodical users tend to respond better to numbers than the other buying behaviors.
4. The “9-Point Credit Protection” messaging. In the credit monitoring market, 3 is often used (for the three credit bureaus), the use of “9″ suggests this is better than competitor offers.
5. Use of customer testimonial which supports you can get all this protection in one place.
6. The option to click to view a “sample report”

While there are still other elements that could be added and changed to focus more on the Methodical Buying Modality, I think this is a good example of some elements that can be used to target the methodical buyer. As with the other buying behaviours, it’s important to test into and out of any changes, and to try and learn more about your customer in order to be able to focus and optimize your landing pages to match what they may be looking for.

I hope you found this post helpful, and hope you return for the last post in the series, discussing the spontaneous buying modality.

In Part 2, I talked about the Competitive Buyer Modality, and showed an example of a page targeted to that group. Now, it’s time to talk about the Humanistic buyer. While the true Humanistic buyer modality, like the competitive, is one of the smaller segment types, a lot of the humanistic elements can be carried over to the other buying modalities and so it is still very important. Humanistic buyers tend to be family oriented, and care about personal growth for themselves and others. They tend to be slow-buyers, but are very open-minded when looking for a solution. They can also be very loyal to product, and look for a strong relationship with the seller. When they are happy with a product, they like to share and recommend it, but, on the flip side, they can be just as vocal when they are disappointed. Customer service is important to them, sometimes just as much as the product itself.

Imagery of families, or pets, or cute animals draws their attention, even moreso than product imagery. Messaging of value, trust, strength and longevity are key. They also like community and environmental aspects, so “green” products tend to do well with humanistic messaging. Good examples of humanistic advertising tend to be found in cleaning products, bathroom items (soaps, toilet paper) and groceries. Because women (moms) typically do the shopping for these items, some advertisers might think humanistic should primarily appeal to female buyers, this isn’t always the case, and it should be based on your target market.

Once again, I’ll reference the Market Sense Blog on appliedmarketing.com as a good place to find tips on marketing to Humanistic Buying Modality:

Appeal: Drawn to authentic relationships.

Website: Present your product from the human perspective. Tell stories about how others selected, implemented, used, and solved their problems with your product.

Information Needs: Answer questions on who you are and who has used your product to solve his/her problems. Will want to explore the possibilities your product presents with you.

Understand: The big picture – how choosing you will affect their relationships. They will want the best people solution.

Process: They will want to explore the possibilities, understand the big picture, evaluate the human aspect of your product. The most important part of their process is the relationship.

Time: They will be relatively slow paced. You will have to spend more time than usual building and nurturing the relationship.

Risk: They are willing to take leaps of faith based on their intuition. Yet, they will steer away from decisions that create conflict and confrontation.

Decision: Will want the emotional confirmation that this is the right choice for the people.

The creative team I worked with also did a page focused on the humanistic buying behaviour, which is the example shown below (click to enlarge).

The product offering is the same product as the comeptitive example in Part 2, a credit report monitoring service, and had the same challenges – Appeal to the humanistic buyer modality without alienating the spontaneous buyer. So, while this project isn’t a true example of a 100% humanistic approach, it does contain elements geared to the humanistic buyer modality in order to appeal to a broader market.

1. Use “parent/child” imagery.
2. Bold, bright color palette.
3. “Trust” element placed very prominently in the header
4. Messaging about “financial future”, coupled with the family imagery alludes to the fact that your finances can effect your family/children.
5. Prominently placed customer testimonial.

Again, this isn’t a fully focused humanistic landing page, and they are several other ways we could more directly target the humanistic buying behaviour, but the purpose of this was to repurpose the existing product and make it appeal to a different buying behaviour. The product itself, along with it’s benefits, use, delivery and purchase are exactly the same as the competitive example (and, as you’ll see, the same as the methodical and spontaneous examples in parts 4 and 5 of this series as well). The idea is to make changes in order to target a broader audience, or possibly target a direct segment. If this were a true “humanistic campaign”, there are other changes we would make not only to this lp, but also the “drivers” (banner, search listing, etc) to truly focus on the humanistic buying modality.

As with all the buyer modalities, it’s important to know your customer/audience, and choose which focus might work best for you. However, I hope this post gives you a little more insight on how to target a broader audience, and I hope you return to read the next part in the series.

As mentioned in part 1, the Competitive Buyer Modality is focused on how or why your product is the best, but more importantly how it can make them the best. They are looking for a way to “one-up” the competition. They tend to be very goal-oriented, and are usually very aware of their problem (in which your product hopefully can solve). They also can be a little skeptical about claims, but sometimes that can work for you, since they also believe they can overcome any obstacle.

I think a great way to look competitive geared advertising would be in reference to sports equipment (hit the ball farther, run faster, exercise longer, etc). Obviously most sports are competitions, so it’s smart to believe that sports enthusiasts would respond well to this type of advertising. That’s not to say all sports related products do (or should) use competitive buyer modality advertising, it’s just that there are great examples, and help to define the competitive buyer.

The Marketsense blog from appliedproductmarketing.com has some great tips on appealing to the competitive buyer:

Appeal: Drawn to superiority. Want to understand what makes your product the best.

Website: Provide proof of your competitive advantages. Demonstrate your credibility.

Information Needs: Answer questions on how your product is the better choice. Provide rational options. Share proof points.

Understand: What makes your product the best solution. They will take an analytical, logical approach.

Process: Will work through the process as efficiently as possible. They will disregard steps that waste time and resources. Let them drive. Don’t get in their way.

Time: They will work quickly with absorption. Because they hate inefficiency, quickly deliver what they need.

Risk: Are willing to take risk. Confident in themselves to ultimately solve the problem.

Decision: Want to know they have selected the best solution for the job. Will want to reach this decision quickly and efficiently.

Bringing it back to the project I mentioned in Part 1, here is an example of the solution the creative team I was working with came up with geared to the competitive buyer modality (click to enlarge):

The product offering is a credit report monitoring service, and typically, the customers were spontaneous buying modality, so there was a slight challenge to this project… Appeal to the competitive buyer modality without alienating the spontaneous buyer. So, while this project wasn’t 100% geared to the competitive buyer, there are some elements that we hoped would appeal to this type of customer.

1. Chose a colder, but strong color palette, with a very strong, bold color for the CTA
2. Strong competitive messaging with terms such as advantage, cut, speed and boost.
3. Hero image of successful looking business people, matched with  “competitive edge” type messaging. This imagery was very important, as this being a financial product, the imagery is happy, good-looking business people to imply that this product can help you succeed.
4. Messaging box for “Why be charged?” implying that you are getting something that others pay for. Competitive Buyers can also be competitive with how much something costs, and getting something for less than someone else can be important. However, on the flip side, competitive buyers can also equate price with status (i.e. most expensive = best), so it’s important to test price messaging with any buyer modality.

Again, these were changes we worked into our control pages in hopes to appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, it was hard for us to gauge the success or failure of this particular page since the driver to this page wasn’t always accurately matched up, but on the plus side, we did not see a huge negative impact which is always important. Given adequate testing through a full campaign (banner/text ad,  lp, ad placement, etc.) there is a lot of potential to target the comopetitive market.

I hope you found this post helpful, and hopefully it gives you some ideas of how to differentiate your creatives to appeal to a broader audience. Up next will be a closer look at the Humanistic Buyer Modality, and hopefully you’ll come back to read more.

After being reminded of the project, I thought it would be a perfect idea to write about here, so What I plan to do is actually a series of posts that discuss the different buyer modalities, and share examples of the project.

To get things started, I’ll first give a brief summary of how I interpreted the subject. To get a much more detailed explanation of Buyer Modalities, I’ve been recommended the book “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark” by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg… I will admit, I haven’t read it yet, but it’s high on my list. Anyways, here’s my take on it…

The concept of buyers modality basically says that there are several types of buying behaviours that online (and offline) shoppers have. Competitive, Humanistic, Methodical and Spontaneous. I found a good way to remember the names is the acronym “CHuMS“, since understanding them, they can be your friends.

Here is the very short and sweet definition of each… I hope to discuss them in more detail in the future posts.

Competitive – The competitive buyer modality is essentially the Keeping up with (or beating) the Jones’. Competitive buyers look for reasons why your product is the best, or how your product can make them the best.

Humanistic – Humanistic buying types relate well to family or lifestyle imagery and messaging. They look for products that can be used for their family.

Methodical – The methodical buying behaviour is very detail oriented. They are comparative shoppers, and tend to do more research on products than the other modalities. They like comparison charts, and stats.

Spontaneous – The spontaneous buyers are looking for immediate satisfaction. They are less concerned with the intricate details, and just want what they want, and will find a reason to buy it.

So, that in a very small nutshell is the concept of Buyer Modalities. In the following posts, I’ll dig much deeper into the what, why and how to appeal to these different behaviours. The first step in the process is defining what type of buyer your audience is, and how to appeal to each one. Just like the old addage says, “you can’t please all the people all the time”, it’s the same is for marketing… “you can’t market to all the people all the time.” Which is why understanding buying behaviours and how to market to them is very imporant when it comes to Landing Page optimization.

It was extremely simple to set up an A/B test in Google Website Optimizer, since it clearly walks you through every step of the process. Simply click “Create another experiment”, and GWO provides step-by-step instructions for everything. No need to refer back to a tutorial (from anyone), it’s all right there!

Really, the only part that might give people trouble is adding the javascript snippets to your web pages. This, of course, should be left to page coders and not necessarily done by the person setting up the test (although GWO does provide pretty good instructions for adding the code). Fortunately, I not only set up the tests in Google Website Optimizer, but I also am the web desinger/developer, so I get to do it all (no need to wait around for someone to add the code in order for me to validate the pages!). However, I’d be comfortable handing off access to our marketing team to have them set up the tests (sans adding the code), and picking it up from there. That’s how easy setting up an a/b landing page test in Google Website Optimizer is.

I’m very excited to start using GWO more, but still just getting my feet wet so only have a handful of test running now. Since these test are on somewhat low traffic pages, it will take some time collect any significant results, but hopefully these test will provide useful information as I move forward with my goals to optimize not only Landing Pages, but full websites as well. It’s an exciting learning experience that has made going into work everyday a little more interesting.

The first step I took in the redesign process was to break down and analyze the original (or “control”) page that I was tasked with redesigning. In doing this, I identified 10 distinct elements of the control page, which would be required on any new iterations of the page. Click here to view the full screen shot, and I’ve outlined the key elements below.

Control Page Outline:

1. Header
Topmost area of the page with brand logo

2. Headline
Typically the first and most visible statement of the offer or page title (tells the viewer the purpose of the page)

3. Hero
The “product shot”. This can be the product itself or a visual of someone using the product, or how the product works.

4. Offer
This is a more descriptive presentation of the offer (from the headline).

5. Premiums
Image and/or copy of the “premium” of free item when you order.

6. Summary
This is a short, easily digestible text block that explains why someone would want this offer.

7. Value Proposition
Additional supporting copy of what the product or offer is. Additional support and clarification of “why” the visitor should want to order. Note: Value propostion is initially “hidden” on this lp and requires user action to view content (pros and cons to this approach, particularly from a customer service standpoint)

8. User Action
In this case, it is the form the user must fill out in order to accept the offer.

9. Call to Convert or Call to Action (CTA)
In this case, it is the acceptance of the offer (after completion of the form).

10. Footer
The legal copy.

Please note: This is just a dissection of this particular LP. However, most LPs typically use a several or all of these elements. With LPs it’s common practice that “less is more”, and testing is the only way to truly know what will or won’t work for your LP (but that’s a whole different blog post).

In the next day or two, I’ll post a similar outline of the “new” creative, so you can see the differences, but in the meantime, I recommend you look at your own landing pages and break it into components (and see how yours compares to this list). I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.