Constant optimization with A/B testing played a big role in the campaign’s fundraising efforts (emphasis added):
A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on which combination would raise the most money, and often the pools got it wrong. Michelle Obama’s e-mails performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the underperformers.
Chicago discovered that people who signed up for the campaign’s Quick Donate program, which allowed repeat giving online or via text message without having to re-enter credit-card information, gave about four times as much as other donors. So the program was expanded and incentivized. By the end of October, Quick Donate had become a big part of the campaign’s messaging to supporters, and first-time donors were offered a free bumper sticker to sign up.
The Obama campaign succeeded online in part because it didn’t know what worked–and admitted it. That’s the hallmark of a good marketer: humility about your skills, a willingness to constantly check your core assumptions.
To succeed as a marketer, you have to take risks and put your ego on the line. As Pixar president Ed Catmull reminds us, “if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job.”
A/B testing can help you make great leaps in optimizing your online marketing, but it’s not a panacea. It requires a lot of measurement, commitment and patience.
Most A/B tests won’t produce huge gains (and that’s okay)
There’s a lot of waiting (until statistical confidence)
Trickery doesn’t provide serious lifts, understanding the user does
This is spot on. Most of the tests I have run have failed to achieve any lift, while others were inconclusive statistically even after collecting considerable data. And his final point is critical: focus your testing not on the quick win but on how you can best convince your customers to buy.
If I had to add a fourth point, it’d be this: Run tests only to learn something, not simply for the sake of testing. What question are you trying to answer with your test, and how would the results lead you to do things differently in the future?
When hiring, finding job candidates with the right technical skills is the easy part. Bryan Goldberg offers advice on how to separate the merely adequate applicants from the all-stars:
[I]f a candidate can’t even tell you why they liked their last job, or what they got out of their college experience, or any of the million other questions that speak to their basic humanness… Then no amount of experience will make them valuable.
The way to boost your site’s Google ranking, Paul Boag says, is to write quality content that your customers want to link to. Don’t waste time with consultants’ SEO voodoo.
“[I]t all comes down to content,” he writes. “If you create great content, people will link to it, and Google will improve your placement. It really is that simple.”
Seth Godin says non-profits need to be more innovative, which means they need to be more willing to accept failure:
Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don’t.
This is absolutely right. A non-profit group should do everything it can to better advance its mission. That may mean trying new and better ways to be even more effective. Fear of failure is the surest way to maintain the status quo.
