Building Viral into Product DNA

Viral or social marketing are the hot topics of the moment. The attraction is obvious, you can spread the word about your product or service to people at a low cost, through trusted channels, namely their friends and family, and get them to pay attention and act upon the referral more easily.

However viral marketing isn’t as easy as it looks. If you truly want to base your marketing on social, viral or word of ‘mouse’ you need your customers to be really engaged with your product, to truly love it and feel the need to tell people about it.

Skype is a great example of a truly viral product. Skype let ‘the whole world talk for free’ but in order for users to call their friends for free they had to tell them about Skype and convince them to visit the website and download it for themselves. That way the user won, their friend won and in the end of the day Skype also won with huge growth and tiny acquisition costs.

Also your user experience should be filled with viral hooks within the customer journey, points in the interaction with the product when it makes sense for the user to share the product with their friends and family.

Hotmail is one of the earliest examples of viral marketing, which in the 1990s allowed Hotmail to grow from nothing to 12 million users in 18 months. This was achieved by a clever combination of offering free email addresses, and a powerful viral hook included in each and every email sent from a hotmail address ‘Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com’. In this way Hotmail ensured that users shared the product with everyone they communicated with using their Hotmail account.

For viral to work best marketing and product need to work together and encapsulate sharing in all aspects of the product from the very beginning. A great real world example of building viral into the product from the beginning is Graze. Graze is naturally viral and everything from the snacks themselves through to the packaging they arrive in is designed to have a Wow factor. People are naturally inclined to chat about Graze with their friends, show off the Graze box at the office and hand out trial coupons to others, spreading the word about Graze to their friends and family because they love the product.

Yes you can think about how you can help your customers to tell each other about the product and you can even reward your customers for spreading the word. However to truly harness the power of viral then you should be thinking about how to build a product that users will want to tell each other about or one that is different enough that people will naturally ask about it. Moo did a great job of designing a really different product that customers would naturally comment on when they launched their minicards. Mini cards were half the size of regular business cards making them a real talking point, helping minicard owners to stand out and ensuring that the word about Moo spread virally.

Viral isn’t something you can easily add retroactively, so to take best advantage of this powerful marketing channel think about it early and often and make it a part of your product’s DNA.

A B Testing: Marketing as Science

Recently I've been asked about A/B testing for online marketing and it occurs to me that many marketers spend a vast majority of their time working on new campaigns to drive conversion, acquisition, retention or monetisation and not nearly enough time perfecting existing channels and communications with the more scientific approach of AB testing.

What is AB testing and why is it important?
AB testing, also known as split testing, brings some science to the practice of marketing. Essentially AB testing involves making small incremental changes, one at a time, so that you can see what impact these changes will have on conversion, click through rates, sales or other targets. In this way marketers can scientifically prove the impact of specific changes rather than making recommendations based on gut instinct.

Before you start with AB testing you need to consider a number of questions:

• What do you want to test and in which medium or channel?
• How will you track metrics and measure improvements?
• What is your goal or objective?

What do you want to test and in which medium or channel?
AB testing can be used across almost any online marketing medium including emails, triggered messages, online advertising and web pages such as purchase flows or landing pages. In deciding where to start with AB testing you should consider what has the greatest impact on your business objective. If you can achieve a 1% improvement in people completing transactions when shopping with you, this is likely to have a greater and more immediate impact on the bottom line than a similar improvement to a landing page shown to new visitors.

How will you track metrics and measure improvements?
Tracking is essential for AB testing. What you’ll need to track will depend on the campaign, channel and objectives however you should think about tracking some of the following:

• No. of emails sent / page views
• Clicks
  
• Click through rate
• Sales
• Conversion

A baseline also needs to be established by measuring the performance of the current version of the communication. The current version will act as a control and will be run against a number of test versions, and therefore the baseline will provide a marker against which to measure improvements.

What is your goal or objective?
Before beginning tests you should decide on the key performance indicators for the test. By being clear about the objective of a particular communication in advance of the test you’ll be able to choose a winner from your results easily and without bias.

Running your AB Test

The golden rule with AB testing is to make one change at a time so you can see the incremental improvements achieved by each individual change. This allows you to isolate the revenue, conversion or CTR impact of each change. Therefore the next thing to do is to create your test versions. In creating the tests you should look at changes to the following areas:

• Headline
• Call to action
• Copy
• Graphics
• Colour
• Configuration / Layout of elements
• Headings

The temptation to make numerous changes is very hard to resist but remember in order to truly know which element has caused an improvement it’s very important to be patient and only make one change at a time.

Next you’ll need to decide on the proportional split for your traffic, e.g. 80/20, 50/50. Certain business issues may come into consideration, for example when testing on a page which drives the majority of your sales you’ll want to test among a small percentage of your audience to avoid negatively impacting conversion rates and therefore revenues. However in order to give you confidence in making decisions based on the AB test you’ll need to test with an adequate sample size. If your sample is small you have two options available: to test a smaller number of variants or run the test for a longer period.

Now you’re ready to start and a number of treatments (including your control) should be run concurrently. Essentially this means that you randomise which treatment is shown to each user and run them in parallel randomly splitting traffic between each treatment. If this isn’t possible you can split sequentially, by showing one version for a set amount of time followed by another version for the same amount of time, results will be less reliable but still useful.

The actual implementation of the AB tests can be done in a number of ways ranging from simple and cheap scripts to using sophisticated applications such as Offermatica, Inceptor, Optimost, Visual Sciences.

When the tests are complete you'll need to look at the metrics for each. The winning test based on your established key performance indicators then becomes the hero. The hero should then become live and be shown to your main audience in place of your previous control.

But that’s not the end, now you should start again by making individual improvements to the hero. And so the cycle of AB testing continues.

And what if you don’t have the patience?

AB testing requires a great deal of patience, however there is an alternative approach for those of us with a little less than the required measure of patience. At the beginning of your testing you can instead create and test a number of radical re-designs against your current version or control. The design which gets the best results becomes the hero and control going forward and then you make incremental and individual changes to that in the normal way allowing for potentially faster improvements but in a less controlled and scientific manner to begin with. Although less scientific in nature this may allow for greater improvements in a shorter timeframe.