Brooks Bell Interactive

The four main factors to be successful with testing are 1) Time; 2) Traffic; 3) Technology; and 4) Trust.

Time
An effective testing plan should be iterative and ongoing. To be successful with testing, you need to commit a significant amount of time for your testing efforts to yield results. It’s not adequate to run a single A/B test, declare a winner and roll it out to the marketplace indefinitely.

Time costs money in resources, opportunity cost and priorities, so you should be cognizant of the investment you’re making in testing, calculating the value of the potential upside to the organization beforehand.

Traffic
Testing is fundamentally based on a sample size. Once you define your key success metric in a test, you need to base your test design on your expected sample size in each test cell. A rule of thumb is to have a minimum of 150 ‘successes’ in each test cell.

For example, if you anticipate that you will have 300 responses in a given campaign, then you should only run a 2-cell test. If you anticipate 300 responses each week, then you can run a new 2-cell test each week, or run a 4 cell test every two weeks.

Your traffic should also be fresh. Once a test subject has been exposed to a test campaign, he or she may behave differently from those who have not been exposed. It’s important to keep that factor in mind as you analyze your results.

Technology
Technology is what makes testing possible. It allows you to track, measure, target and segment your messages. You must have a basic testing technology in place before you can begin your testing plan.

We are a technology-agnostic partner and can either work within the parameters of your existing technology platform, or we can help consult with you to identify more powerful solutions.

Trust
Trust the iterative process to provide ultimate success. This is especially true if and when your tests fail to beat the control.  Each test period will provide you with optimized creative – win or lose – because you are always learning. 

We trust the data – not intuition or personal preference – to lead you to more effective creative, beating the control to provide emails, landing pages, registration paths, banners and other elements that will improve your conversion rate.