The Advantages of Split Testing Your Lead Generation Ideas

When it comes to practical lead generation strategies, most of your ideas and decisions are likely to be based 100% on assumption. In such cases, executing on those strategies often lead to unexpected and sometimes disappointing outcomes.

Precisely in this context, eventual results could be far below or beyond your expectation. However, I am very much certain you’ll always want a better return on invested time and money.

Perhaps, this is the exact reason why you are actively interested in the advantages of split testing your lead generation ideas.

One obvious thing is that businesses often differ a lot even when they are operating in the same niche market. So assuming that what worked for other successful businesses in your niche will work for you could lead to more losses than profits. Even when it works, it doesn’t work exactly the same way.

That’s why measurable results like conversion rate and profit margin often differ among the same type of businesses using the same lead generation tools and strategies on the same platform.

But then there is always a place to start.

At this time, you are likely to have unique ideas on the traffic sources, best types of lead magnet and creative copywriting that will work for you. In the case that you have executed some strategies with these variables but didn’t get the results you wanted, there is something you can do differently.

Putting your lead generation ideas to test could give you a competitive advantage. Interestingly, the following paragraphs will clarify and help you to understand the specific benefits of doing so.

But before going forward to that, let’s look at some niche-specific examples you can put to test in your target niche market. Just as there are real differences between niche markets, the type of lead magnet ideas that works in one won’t necessarily work in the other. That’s the essence of bringing you these niche-specific ideas worth testing in your next lead generation strategy and email marketing campaign.

Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas

With regard to quality real estate lead generation strategies, there is are many ideas that have been proven to work in this market. However, you just have to select few appealing ones, put them to test before going all in. Here some examples.

• Recent Listing Email List – If your blog or website is generating a sufficient volume of traffic, you can use an email marketing tool like MailOptin to build a list of buyer leads interested in new findings and listings within specific neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, you can set a marketing budget for sending traffic to this opt-in form.
• Open House Video Landing Page – Video content influences more buying decisions than mere texts and still images. This explains why video advertising spends has increased to 53% across many sectors. From the advert creative to the landing page, you can use video to show the specific features of each available homes for sale.
• Home Buyer’s Guide – Whether you want to use free popups or premium lead generation WordPress plugin with event triggers and page-level targeting, creating a home buyer guide will help you deliver value while generating real estate buyer leads.

These are some, not all of the real estate lead generation ideas that can be used for profit-boosting A/B test campaigns. If you have gotten some ideas on your own, we’ll also get to the real advantages of putting them to test before spending your entire budget on traffic generation.

Recruitment Lead Generation Ideas

How do I promote my recruitment agency?

This is the question that many agency owners wake up and sleep in their minds all day. To help you answer that question, here are some proven strategies that you can combine with other relevant variables and then put them to split testing.

• Upcoming Events Email List – Email is a perfect medium for sending timely and periodic updates. Instead of merely saying for email updates, you can use Meetup, Eventbrite other sources to curate a list of location and niche-specific events that will match your website visitors’ interests.
• Live Webinar – Many of the people in your target market have current challenges facing them in their business or workplace. Even if you don’t have the expertise you can collaborate with others to leverage live webinar for recruitment agency lead generation. Check this link for examples of recruitment webinars.
• Business Blogging – If you are not generating any leads from your recruitment agency blog, you are probably doing it the wrong way. With an attractive lead magnet integrated into your business blogging strategy, you’ll be positioned to convert a percentage of your readers into quality leads and eventual clients. Check out this business blogging case study for more insights.

Please note that some of these lead generation ideas are not meant to be used within the above niche markets alone. Practically, you can use your creative clout to find better ways of using these ideas within your own peculiar niche market or business.

Now you have the ideas, what next? Before you commit to spending your entire marketing budget towards generating more leads via Facebook Ads, paid search advertising or SEO, let’s look at the basic definitions. From there we move to the specific advantages of putting your lead generation ideas to test.

What Is Split Testing?

– Source: GetApp

This is a process of creating, testing and comparing two different variables in a marketing campaign in order to discover the one that produces the best desirable outcomes like increased quality of leads, conversion rate and profit margin. In some circles, it is also referred to as A/B testing. And the process can range from the simplest to highly complex test campaigns.

Some of the core variables that can be tested with regard to different variations include the following –

• Web page layout
• Headlines
• Images
• Video
• Text copy
• Call to action
• Lead magnet
• Opt-in form type
• Button colour
• Content positioning
• Value proposition

In a typical split testing campaign, the original variable is called, the control version while there is a variation created from it. For example, you can have two different landing headlines with a control version emphasizing the benefit of revenue growth while the variation emphasizes the solution to a known pain point. Here is what I mean.

Headline A: How to Generate Recruitment Agency Leads Without Wasteful Cold Calling Hours

Headline B: Best Proven Recruitment Agency Lead Generation Strategy for Growing Monthly Revenue

Now all things being equal, if you send the same volume of targeted website traffic to these different landing pages, you are likely to see unequal results. The thing is that one will end up performing better than the other in terms of conversion rate.

To understand the possibilities in a better way, you can use the above example to think through the other types of variables mentioned earlier.

Advantages of Split Testing

If you think deeply about it, there are so many potential advantages of split testing your lead generation ideas. However, unless you make the required commitment, you’ll remain excluded from these benefits. Let’s look at some of them below these paragraphs.

Conversion Rate Improvement

In case you have been looking for ways on how to increase conversion rate in your lead generation strategy, split or A/B testing can help you achieve that. Probably at this time, you have some ideas and assumptions regarding the variables that will work better than others. However, this is what the majority of marketers and business owners in your niche are doing. They start with assumptions.

Beyond that, you can put your ideas to test in relation to variables like headlines, page layout, lead magnet, type of opt-in form etc. By doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to discover which variation delivers the best result in terms of a higher conversion rate.

Moreover, a higher conversion rate will definitely affect other performance metrics in a positive way.

Increased Quality of Leads

– source: Optimizely

For many marketers and business owners, generating leads with an email marketing tool is not a problem at all. The real challenge is about the quality of leads coming into your sales pipeline. Perhaps, the results you are getting recently is enough proof of the need to do something differently. Did I tell you the quality of leads you get can be within your control?

Besides, assuming we are to do a 30-day campaign towards segmenting and converting your leads into paying customers, the outcome will certainly surprise you.

At the end of the day, you’ll see that some segments of the leads in your pipeline have higher quality than others.

But then, how are you supposed to find out?

This is exactly how split testing can help you increase the quality of leads you generate from time to time. The other important point worth noting here is that the quality of the lead magnet somehow relates to the quality of leads you get. In other words, all lead magnets are not created equal.

Practically, the offer has to be tightly related to the value your product or service is meant to deliver. And when you do a real test, the real quality of leads will certainly differ from one segment of your target market to the other. Here is a lead generation case study of using tightly related offers to attract people that will eventually buy your product.

Elimination of Marketing Waste

Whether you are using business blogging, paid search advertising or Facebook Ads to send traffic to your offers, you are definitely going to spend money in the process. It doesn’t matter if you are the one doing all the work on your own or you hired someone else to do it.

After all, time is money. And I am sure your own time is worth some money too. Why would you want to waste that money on marketing guesswork?

One advertising veteran, John Wanamaker once stated:

‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.’

But then that was a long time ago in the nineteenth century. Between then and now, many things have changed drastically. Today, there are different tools that can help you identify with certainty, which half or what percentage of your lead generation budget is wasted. This is the essence of split testing with lead generation software tools like MailOptin.

At this point, your ideas around variables like value proposition, headlines, page layout, type of lead magnet, opt-in popup forms and even call to action are likely to be based on assumptions. Why not put them in a little controlled test before spending all of the available money and time?

Measurable Revenue Growth

In many different types of businesses, conversion means different things at different stages of the customer journey. With regard to the low quality of leads, it is practically possible to experience increased conversion without a measurable increase in revenue.

In practical terms, converting people from website visitor to paying customer through email marketing is really hard. So if you stop at building an email list, you’ll have subscribers that will always come to read your blog post and bounce off without giving thought to any other thing you have to say.

But here is the interesting side of it. With insights derived from split testing, you can realign your budget for higher quality lead generation and improved conversion rate.

To get the best results, testing all of these other variables against some defined audience segments within your target market is also very important for growing revenue.

Obviously, some of your competitors are probably not doing all the things discussed here. So don’t stop at building an email list. That’s where most of the businesses in your niche stops.

Just so you know, there are some, not all of the advantages of split testing your lead generation ideas. If done very well, this is likely to give a competitive edge in your niche. Better to assume nothing and test everything than to depend 100% on tricky guesswork.