How to test and optimize your promotional campaigns

To make your promotional campaigns as effective as possible, you need to know how to test and optimize them. An untested and unoptimized promotional campaign will never be as successful as it could be.

Our new white paper, ‘How to Test and Optimize Your Promotions’, covers the topic in more detail.

Here’s a brief look at some of the topics the white paper covers:

Testing

To put it simply, testing is the preparation you carry out before you take your campaign live. Testing serves a couple of different purposes:

• It helps you check that your campaigns are functioning as intended

• It helps you work out which campaign ideas are best suited to your specific business objectives
  

Testing campaign functions is pretty easy. Promotions software will tell you when there’s a logic error or some other type of discrepancy in your campaign.

But testing out campaign variations is a bit trickier. You need to be able to gather data about each live campaign variation in order to work out which one will help you achieve your objectives.

The best way to do this is A/B testing. This involves testing out small campaign variations to see which works best with your audience.

Optimizing

After your promotional campaign has gone live, it’s time to move on to optimization. Optimization usually involves altering aspects of your campaign in order to get closer to your specific campaign targets and wider objectives.

Optimization can involve altering campaigns in all sorts of ways. But, to optimize a campaign as effectively as possible, you need metrics. Metrics give you something to measure against, and they help you quantify any alterations you make to your campaign.

The one issue with metrics is the fact that there are so many. Unless you pick and choose the most relevant metrics for your specific circumstances, you’ll find yourself getting bogged down in the numbers.

Because of this, it’s important to choose a few key metrics that you can use to measure the success of your promotional campaigns.

One of the best top-line campaign metrics you can use, regardless of the type of promotion you’re running, is revenue lift. It gives you a simple figure for the amount of revenue your promotional campaign has driven.

For a couple of different ways to work this out your revenue lift, plus a number of other key optimization metrics, check out our white paper.

You can find out more about our platform, or promotions in general, in our Content Library.