One of the most important jobs of a Digital Marketer is to understand how to create engaging and smooth user experiences targeted at well understood personas. One of the skills that I find a lot of Digital Marketers don’t possess is the understanding that unless you know how to create optimised user journeys, driving all the traffic in the world to that destination will not improve conversion rates. It behoves all marketers to research and figure out what works for their audience – and the only way to do that is to test. Because your own personal biases when creating online pathways and information flows will not translate into the ‘best’ user experience. There’s a myriad of testing tools these days on offer – a free tool that anyone can use is Google Website Optimiser. Very straight forward to run tests on variations of your webpages.

Embedded is a presentation, based on the ab tests reported on by a site called ‘Which Test Won’. It presents a whole series of tests based on a hypothesis, two test versions and goes through the winning version. Have a look through, and start analysing your own site and ask yourself the question – is the site clearly understood to users, both new and returning, in terms of who you are as a business, what you do, what problems you solve, and if they are your ideal customers why would they choose to do business with you (clear value propositions), and if they want to do business with you what are the next steps involved and how easy is it to get to the endpoint (Calls to Actions etc.). Most website do not do a good job of addressing these questions. Then of course, there’s the whole science and trial/error of testing checkout processes, landing pages, subscription and registration forms etc… This slidedeck is a good pointer to even get you thinking about it, regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C.