Test and Retest Your Online and Mobile Campaigns

It’s a cardinal rule in Internet Marketing. Whatever communications you create have to be tested again and again, on every possible platform and configuration. Even a simple website has to be reviewed repeatedly in different browsers, different browser versions, different operating systems, to make sure your message is properly formatted and reperesents your brand favorably no matter where it’s seen. If there are multiple steps from first touch to final purchase, the list of testing scenarios grows quickly.

This is the most tedious part of the business. And unlike many tedious tasks, it can’t really be delegated to the lowest levels of the organization. Someone who doesn’t have a full grasp of your communication goals can’t tell you if they’re being met. Fortunately, at Zacks, we’re able to divide the workload so each team member is responsible for two or three browser/OS configurations. Even so, a good chunk of time can be easily eaten up with creating test email accounts, logging in and out, deleting cookies and starting over again. When product or promotion launch deadlines are looming, it takes real discipline not to cut corners and actually go through all the steps.

Apparently, even the biggest companies with the largest marketing budgets have a struggle in this area. And mobile marketing opens a whole new frontier of possible platforms and formats. I was surprised recently to see the glaring neglect of testing in a mobile campaign for Coke Zero.

Checking scores in the excellent iPhone app SportsTap, I saw an ad headline that read "Join Facial Profiler." So far so good. It’s a mobile ad, so maybe this "Facial Profiler" does something cool using my phone’s camera. It got my attention and made me curious enough to tap the ad.
The landing page looks nice, and is obviously formatted for the iPhone. The imagery and typography are attractive and easy to read. Now I see that it’s a Coke Zero project. So now I think there’s an even better chance that it’s something cool, since they certainly have the budget to create something entertaining or engaging.
Scrolling down the page, there’s a video thumbnail. Whoever designed the campaign seems to have understood that I’m not going to keep reading forever, so here’s a video file to explain the promotion. Brilliant.
But that’s where the whole thing breaks. Somehow, they encoded or embedded the video in a way the iPhone didn’t like. This video is the only means I have to find out how the program works, so when it fails, the entire experience becomes a dead end. So now, whatever Coke spent on this campaign has been 100% wasted. Even worse, this experience lowers my opinion of the brand, so they’ve actually put their marketing budget to work in a way that damages their brand image.

It’s an excellent example of what can happen when you don’t commit to testing your entire campaign. And there are no shortcuts. Even when you duplicate an existing process and apply it to a new product or promotion, unforseen details almost always become obvious during testing.

If it can happen to a marketing powerhouse like Coca-Cola, on a closed platform like the iPhone, it can certainly happen to your email campaign or banner ad landing page. All the time, effort and money you spend promoting your product will be wasted if an overlooked error gets between your customer and the sale.

Update: Cheryl Gledhill at molt:n took the Facial Profiler application for a test drive and found that the actual feature was just as unsatisfying and poorly executed as the mobile campaign.

Tags: Coke, Facial Profiler, Internet Marketing, iPhone, Mobile Marketing, Online Campaigns