I hear it a lot; how do I get started with "A/B" testing? I agree that it's not as simple as diversifying your email subject line and hope to make a monumental business lift. Moreover, more and more businesses are doing their marketing internally and therefore, don't have creative agencies that might do spending against focus groups, or do preemptive testing within a crowdfunding environment. Lastly, if you are dealing with an agency or creative house, you know that it can be extremely costly to make large campaign shifts.
Enter social media posts —
One of the many things that you could do is to create a "one-off" piece of creative and run as a social media post against your primary channels. It's not to say that you will have an overabundance of success with one particular post. However, boosting/promoting posts is relatively inexpensive, can be done in a short period of time, and can render even if minimal analytical results that you contest against. You'd be suprised how often this little trick is overlooked.
The agency likes it. The agency sells it well and the client likes it. Then off it goes with minimal testing (in some cases) if any testing and you're DUMPING scads of budget against a 6-month runner and praying for results. See the nice part about social media posting is not only can you test variability against large differentiations in creative but you can then dial in one piece and test subtle teaks to the CTAs and actionable offers.
The key to doing A/B testing was social media post is not much different than anything– be consistent with each one. Don't favor any particular piece of creative and assign the same amount of money to each individual insert as its own campaign – say one week at $100.
Once you've received your analytics back after the week, start to make tweaks against a silo'd campaign (while you test another creative outside of this directive) that has variations in specific attributes of called to action and content of the offer. Each time you rotate a cycle of creative, be sure to analyze your cost-per-action (or acquisition) dependent upon your business model. From there, as you adjust your creative spend, more money can be applied to the granularity in messaging to ensure the best combination of elements is working for you.
Now when you start down the path of ramping up a budget to a larger more complex content deliverable, like OTT or influencer campaign, you can do so with the knowledge that you've done far more than passive testing to ensure success.
Here’s an examples of a couple of creative pieces from various “micro-campaigns” that we’re testing online.