If you're managing any kind of online outfit, you are no stranger to analytics, statistics and testing.
Wading through numbers and trying to see if your campaign is yielding results. To find some support for your hypotheses, and what may be really going on with your visitors' experience. Testing, campaign after campaign, design change after design change.
It's a never ending process and it can be grueling especially if you don't have a team member dedicated on the task. Though even if you do, it's still difficult. Collaborating and keeping up the known cycle of science. Observation, hypothesis, changing design and wording to test - then collecting and analyzing. Often without enough data points - and trying to guesstimate what must be going on.
It's not that these tools and methods don't work. And, there have been many new tools coming to market. Allowing for a bit more clarity to guess where things go wrong with your content. Such as A/B testing, heat mapping, marketing automation, Social based CRM platforms and others. No amount of tooling can help if your base hypotheses are not great to begin with.
It pays to have expertise on your side, and to use that to begin with good ideas. Doing it the hard way is often the costliest in both time and funding, or time squared. You have to start somewhere, you can take the shortcut and get a consult or put aside the time and do the research. Identifying the most cost effective solution for your stage.
Where you see a grueling tedious task that needs to be done continuously - think AI, or machine learning models.
We have been looking at many different approaches but nothing had won us over, until now - enter Sentient AI, our new partner. First off, we like their comparison to evolution. Think of your site elements like genes that formulate the DNA of your website. Any element can be a gene, or change. The engine can test all of the combinations with different visitors and then promote the best combinations. Just like the evolution of species. May the fittest combination survive, and win you a bigger slice of the market!
The genes or changes can be any element of your website. Wording, layout, images, design color or other snippets. Furthermore, no need to only apply this to your landing page but the whole site architecture. Allowing you to create a better funnel, and to optimize the whole user experience. The process keeps iterating, and through intuitive dashboards unlocks insights for better hypotheses.
But what does this all mean in numbers? A case study of a direct sale classic car aficionado website by Classic Car Liquidators. In just 7 weeks they could test 28,000 potential designs with their user base and 61 versions of 9 promotional elements. Arriving at an increase to Click Through Rates CTRs of 434%. In a few examples, Ascent was able to determine that with their audience, the best performing banner was one with the larger font. Additionally, the image of just a car and a red button. An alternative design was blue, but red happened to in this case perform better. Keep in mind, marketers often advise not using red for Call To Action (CTA) buttons, yet with this crowd they work. The audience and context, though, really defines what change will be most successful.
Having good ideas and expertise on your side, however, can get great results faster. Start with a great design that is tailored to communicate your message to your target audiences. Gaining insight from research on how color, shapes, and wording affect us. Match the elements and communication to the demographic the product or service. And, thanks to the power of this engine even try to tap markets that you didn't think were interested. It's easier to run more tests. With the cost of each additional experiment heavily reduced.
Even if you don't have a team that can learn to use Sentient Ascend effectively, we're here for you. Our team begins with the strategic Marketing, and expansion plan. The design and technical implementation of your site or app. Managing Sentient and other tools that can take you forward. Helping you grow, but also helping you grow sustainably.