Campaign Optimization
Welcome to ABC’s blog series, where we share our bite-sized, quickly consumable perspectives on trending or highly-discussed topics in the CX, digital platforms, and marketing world—breaking down the buzzword to its most foundational forms, and sharing how to apply it to your business. As simple as ABC.
Today we’ll be discussing a marketing favorite: Campaign Optimization! If you’re a digital marketer, chances are this has been part of your quarterly (and sometimes weekly) lexicon for the past decade.
But what does it mean??? Simply put, campaign optimization is the exercise by which a company revisits their launched campaigns, and continuously improves them based on learnings they gain after the campaigns have gone live.
Question: What is the purpose of optimizing campaigns?
Answer: So you can better understand why your customers act the way they do and tailor marketing efforts accordingly. It keeps you from “setting and forgetting” your campaigns!
Selling point: Campaign optimization is the quickest way to get the best bang for your buck with your marketing automation software—building smarter and more successful campaigns across all channels, rather than using guesswork to crank out campaigns (and having to build from scratch each time, without taking advantage of the highly valuable learnings your existing campaigns give you!). There are customers out there seeking and purchasing the data you already own and have access to: performance metrics and customer behavioral feedback, which they want and need to design the most intelligent and personalized campaigns.
Below are five examples on how to optimize your digital marketing campaigns today:
A/B Testing
Form Testing
Mobile Optimization
Audience and Journey Workflow Testing
Experimenting with the Marketing Matrix
A/B Testing:
Test gated content against non-gated content
Test paragraphs vs. bulleted lists
Experiment with shorter copy vs. longer more detailed copy
Try a different form location
Test different subject lines
Test different button designs and copy (call-to-action)
Form Testing:
Test the length of your forms
Try a new offer
Change the Call-To-Action (form CTA)
Use progressive profiling to ask for different information each time they visit
Mobile Optimization:
Ensure that all of your assets are mobile optimized! And remember: mobile optimized is not the same as mobile friendly. Just because it can be viewed accurately on a phone does not mean you are delivering the best, most beautiful interactive experience for your customer.
Use your marketing automation software to view/test how your content renders on different mobile phones, and create different imagery for mobile to facilitate that seamless experience.
Audience and Journey Workflow Testing:
Refine your segments using analytics. You've seen how your marketing automation can drill down on customer behavior and identify where they are in their journey. Use that information to develop new audiences or personas that might be interested in an upcoming campaign.
Add additional nurturing engagement streams: In the evaluation stage of your campaigns (where you assess how your customer is responding to your communication touches), some of you might just be adding them to a segment, or exiting them from the program. Instead, we recommend sending them to a different “unengaged” nurturing program, or creating a separate workstream to nurture them. In general, there should be a campaign journey for most high-value scenarios. (like a win-back campaign for larger accounts.)
Experimenting with the Marketing Matrix:
This is the most varied way to optimize: Work with program manager! Here, you can introduce new elements into your campaign:
An additional touch
Longer cadence in between sends
Embedding Youtube videos on your landing pages
Incorporating sales signatures
Deploying at a different date/time from usual
The list goes on!
You know your audience (or, you’re getting there, but you will know your audience), so this is a continual process to learn what works and what doesn’t for them.
Happy optimizing! And as always, reach out to us if you have any questions or help implementing optimized campaigns at your company.