Effective marketing isn’t a case of set and forget. It requires ongoing testing and optimization to make sure you’re delivering content that resonates with your audience, converts shoppers into customers and continues to do so amidst fluctuating digital trends and consumer tastes.
But when it comes to optimizing your website and email marketing, there are so many different elements to optimize that it can leave you scratching your head and reaching for a strong coffee before you’ve even begun.
In this blog post, we take a look at how to optimize your Data Capture, sharing basic optimizations to get you started, next level optimizations to step it up a gear, and advanced optimizations to make your Fresh Relevance personalization best in class.
Let’s dive in.
Basic optimizations
Look and feel
First things first, the design needs to be right. Does your data capture stand out and compliment your website? Think about testing your copy and content, image sizes, and the size, color and messaging of your CTA. A CTA test could involve testing orange solid vs orange outline vs green solid, for example.
Timing
It’s important to discover the best moment to capture a visitor’s attention, for example looking at the difference in performance between displaying a data capture form on entry or exit of your site. If displaying data capture on entry, think about the optimum amount of time to wait after a shopper enters your site. Try testing a 15 seconds fixed delay vs 30 seconds fixed delay vs exit intent, for example.
Incentives
Incentives such as discounts off a shopper’s first order can entice customers to join your mailing list. But it’s well worth testing whether the ROI is appropriate. Look into whether a discount increases your list registrations and if so, what is the optimum discount you can offer. Try testing data capture with no incentive vs 10% off vs 20% off to get you started.
Next level optimizations
Where and when
Once you’ve mastered the basics, think about where the optimal locations on your site to request sign ups are. Is it your homepage, category, product pages or somewhere else? It might also be a case of how many products have been viewed before it pops up. Start by testing site wide data capture vs site wide after viewing a product.
Submission communications
You’ve got a customer to join your mailing list. Great! Now it’s time to think about how best to welcome and retain them. Consider testing different welcome communications to see how to keep members active in your database. Try testing a generic welcome email vs an email with personalization (such as banners and product recommendations) vs a welcome email with a discount.
Cookie expiry
This optimization is all about finding out how long until you can re-ask a customer to supply their email after they’ve dismissed the popover, for example 90 days vs 60 days.
Advanced optimizations
Form length
A more advanced type of optimization is finding out how much data you get from your customers before sign ups start to drop off. The more fields you have, the more likely it is that visitors are going to dismiss the form, but it’s worth discovering the sweet spot for your business. With Fresh Relevance, you can test different form lengths, such as capturing email address only vs email & first name vs email, first name & birthday.
Appearance style
Whether a subtle or more aggressive approach to data capture will be more effective is dependent on your business and audience. With Fresh Relevance, you can test placement on page and the appearance, for example popover, slide in, popup or full page. You could start by testing a dismissable data capture form vs shrink to small popover for later vs permanent header or footer.
Final thoughts
Optimization is a crucial part of effective data capture but with so many elements to test, you need a plan of action before jumping in. Once you have your data capture set up, start small with our basic optimizations, such as timing. Once you’ve gathered results and made changes, move onto our next level optimizations, such as discovering the optimal locations on your site to request sign ups, and finally try out the advanced optimizations, such as form length optimization.
Our Testing and Optimization tool empowers you to optimize your data capture in the ways discussed above and our customer support team is on hand to make your optimizations go further. Book a demo to learn more about testing and optimizing your marketing with Fresh Relevance.
