We all want our marketing programs to improve continuously. Sure, part of that quest is about beating goals and earning bonuses. But most good marketers are genuinely inquisitive about what works and what doesn’t work. All too often, though, we focus effort on tests that don’t increase our long-term knowledge, or we hold onto long-held, unchallenged beliefs of what works and what doesn’t. Marketers today need to organize their learning roadmap and develop a testing roadmap that aligns with it. What to learn The first order of business is to define what you care about learning. In terms of a learning agenda, there are thousands of insights you could glean and create tests to define. It is important to prioritize what you want to test, which means comparing the cost and effort required to learn further to the safety of sticking with a common, business-as-usual program. Determining what to learn should be a function of your role in the customer life cycle. Be sure to develop a plan that checks, validates and improves the underlying assumptions that drive the way you market to your customers. While the concept applies across channels, I’ll use email as an example. First, create a base knowledge map that serves as the foundation of your program. Make a record of it, keep it in a centralized place, and reference it regularly to identify gaps in learnings, as well as knowledge that you want to challenge again. Foundational items to analyze, solidify and monitor include: The speed of the confirmation/welcome email. The ideal time of day to send an email. And an evolution on this is when to send by the recipient’s time zone vs. the marketer’s. A further evolution is send-time optimization. Depending on your product or service, this may be different, based on […]

Read Full Story:  Building a learning agenda into your marketing program

Source:  MarketingLand