Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is legendary among the scientific community. He started Muppet Labs in 1976 with the mission of bringing the world of tomorrow to us today. He’s broken a lot of ground and amazed us with his achievements and I dare say that he and his assistant Beaker have made the world a better place.
Obviously, Dr. Honeydew is a proponent of testing! On every episode of the Muppets, he would be demonstrating and testing some new invention. So, since testing is so important, it seemed a good idea to look to his years of testing examples for some basic tips about testing your marketing via email and the web.
Muppet Labs is big on A/B split testing
Splitting your list and testing the components of your campaigns is something not enough email marketers do. Test everything from CTAs to rendering to subject lines and a lot more. When Dr. Honeydew developed his “exploding attire” he had several things to test and dutifully tried out each one. What he found was that people seemed to be a lot more concerned about the exploding ear muffs than they were about the exploding neckties. Now, you may point out that there’s not much difference in threat levels there, but the testing did indeed show a preference.
Test your subscription and unsubscribe forms on a regular basis
When people fill out that form to opt-in and especially when they decide to opt-out, you don’t want to cause them frustration because the script is broken and the button does nothing. Even if the form seems to be working at a casual glance, it could still be broken – test the entire process on a regular basis. A non-functioning unsubscribe form especially is going to have a very negative impact on your image.
As the Doctor points out: “I test my Gorilla detector every month to be sure it’s working properly because you just never know and the last thing you want is to be surprised by an angry Gorilla!”
Test and optimize your landing pages
Dr. Honeydew knows quite a bit about landing or perhaps, it’s better to say that his assistant, Beaker knows a lot about it. That’s mainly because Beaker seems to get blown up a lot which is followed by the obligatory and sudden return to solid ground. Just as you test your actual emails, test every component of your landing page to see what is working and what is not. Something as simple as streamlining the content or adding some testimonials can make a big difference. On the landing page what you want to do is ask that question which perhaps Beaker should be asking more before he volunteers for testing: “What’s in it for me?”
Speaking of Beaker, it’s only right that we give him the last word on why testing is so important…
“Meep mee meep woo woo meep woop!”
Can I get an “amen” please?