Testing Mindset Can Help Elevate Your Business
Digital Analytics has become more important than ever. Resulting in a shift towards teams & executives desiring to be more digitally savvy & conscious by leveraging analytics maturity initiatives to make strategic & optimization decisions. The key to elevating business strategy to ensure continued analytics growth & uncovering hidden potential is adopting a testing mindset.
Most businesses have an analytics team &/or analytics vendor, that provides analytics implementation & analysis support – guiding businesses to have a good data quality foundation & uncover important signals (insights) through analysis. If businesses have systematically valued analytics, then those businesses are able to take it one step further by identifying opportunities from said insights.
Unfortunately, this is where most businesses stall in their analytics maturity journey. Along with identification of opportunities, uncertainty is also identified. The uncertainty, big or small, becomes a huge deterrent, especially when businesses do not have the additional resources available to explore the opportunity validity further.
To minimize, and potentially remove uncertainty, businesses have begun efforts to adopt a testing mindset (also referred to as an experimental mindset) to assess validity prior to a larger scale &/or permanent change.
Testing mindset, which is creating an environment open to learning through doing, allows for businesses to collect quantifiable proof (data) that taking action & investing resources in a relevant opportunity is valuable.
Although testing mindset in analytics is usually correlated with businesses undertaking A/B (or split) testing strategies on web design, flow, &/or functionality, it can also remove uncertainty in both online & offline strategic marketing decisions or marketing attribution strategies.
See our blog post The Tactical Approach to Conversion Rate Optimization to learn more about the types of tests & when to use them.
Some benefits of adopting a testing mindset are:
- Quantitative proof (data) prior to a larger undertaking/permanent change
- Create an innovative & forward thinking environment
- More agile approach to validify opportunities
- Minimize risk & uncertainty
Eastpak, a backpacking company, is an example of business that has successfully adopted a testing mindset, resulting in a positive impact to the UX for users, conversion growth rate & revenue.
Eastpak Test & Result Examples:
Navigation – Fold Out the Search Bar
Test: Eastpak tested folding out the search bar instead of only showing a “magnifying glass.”
Result: The result was +80% in conversion rate (FR) and +60% in revenue.
Make Your Call to Action Catch Attention
Test: Eastpak tested ghost buttons against more contrasting color for their primary CTA.
Result: The result was +8% in click through rate (UK). (+4% in click through rate in IT, status quo in FR. Tested on mobile.)
Adopting a testing mindset within businesses is not something that can be done overnight, below are a few considerations for businesses to keep in mind as they begin, revive, or reassess their efforts.
1.Use Insights to Determine Business Relevance
Although it is tempting to deep dive into testing &/or use case studies to guide the opportunities to “test”, it is likely to be perceived as too spontaneous or not relevant to the business/industry by business stakeholders.
Using the insights from analysis to identify test opportunities will be instrumental in communicating rationale & provide structure to tests that most stakeholders are eager for. Having clear objectives & hypothesis outlined will also help build businesses’ confidence in testing efforts & acceptance of the results post test run.
2.Start Off Small & Identify Low Risk-High Impact Opportunities
Beginning with a “bigger is better” policy can have a detrimental impact on creating a testing mindset within businesses when tests are unsuccessful, especially when it results in a negative impact on revenue or performance.
Which is why starting off small & identifying low risk – high impact opportunities is recommended.
What qualifies as high impact will need to be assessed in relation to the business’s objectives & vision. While low risk can be achieved in a few different ways: from only performing tests on a small subset of users, to starting with testing on non-revenue generating initiatives/functionalities.
3.Explore Ways to Minimize Resources Required
Resource investment required to begin online testing efforts does not need to be inconvenient &/or a huge undertaking. There are free & user-friendly testing platforms such as Google Optimize, that minimize/remove the initial start-up cost & internal expertise required (you don’t need to be coder!).
Experimentation platforms generally have standardized reports that can be leveraged for analyzing results, successful variants & communicating rationale to stakeholders, minimizing the time commitment required to building customized visualization reports/dashboards.
4.Failure is a Learning Opportunity
As scary as it sounds, adopting a testing mindset means being okay with failure, and embracing it as learning opportunity.
With a clearly defined test objective & hypothesis prior to test commencing that will allow for both successful and unsuccessful tests to uncover truths & validity of opportunity and changes to your digital platform, marketing initiatives etc. Proving or disproving a test hypothesis takes the unknown away from insights/opportunities and provides quantitative proof that the previous method or a new method is how the business should proceed. Ultimately this can aid with providing rationale on whether a larger scale investment in an opportunity is valuable.
As mentioned previously, adopting a testing mindset within a business is not something that can be done overnight, but it is valuable.
Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about adopting a testing mindset, success stories &/or how to begin your efforts.
If you have successfully adopted a testing mindset within your business, leave a comment about other considerations to keep in mind for those beginning their efforts!