Test, Test, Test… Keep Testing

Many years ago right after I graduated from college, I went to graduate school and earned a Master’s Degree in Direct and Interactive Marketing. The program no longer exists as it was, and it was rolled up into another program at NYU.

Nearly every one of my other classmates but had already started their professional careers and had jobs related to Interactive Marketing. I probably would have directly benefitted more from the program had I done that, but that’s another story. I think the thing I retained the most from my graduate studies is the importance of testing.

“Test, test, test” was a mantra that was repeated by more than one instructor. We were advised to test everything in our marketing careers. In a direct marketing campaign, you can test things like the offer, the messaging, the graphics and colors, the target audience…etc. You can test virtually everything.

Once you have found a winning design, you can roll that out to the majority of customers. In the background, though, you should always continue to test its performance. If you find something else that works better, make a change and keep testing.

James Iles wrote about GoDaddy’s landing page design test. It’s a smart move for GoDaddy to test its buy it now landing page to improve sales conversions. My advice for GoDaddy is to keep testing.

GoDaddy has enough domain names parked on its servers and in its own portfolio that it should be able to test everything. It can test messaging, GoDaddy branding location, payment options and graphics, phone numbers, color schemes, pricing, purchase screens, chat boxes…etc. Not only can the company do A/B split testing on different domain names, but it can rotate different designs to different visitors. It can even show different landing pages based on IP address and location.

GoDaddy has become a huge company with virtually endless resources. I am sure the company has direct marketing and analytics staff who can design testing protocols and analyze results.

It’s possible GoDaddy already does the kind of testing I am referencing. I suspect they do not do this testing “in the wild” because domain investors would likely have seen different landing page iterations and shared them on social media.

While there is some benefit to consistency with branded landing pages, I would love to see more testing to know that the buy now landing pages are fully optimized based on regular testing.