Every product you use underwent at least some sort of marketing experiment. Soft drink taste tests, fonts used on movie posters, and those emails offering you great deals.

How did the creators know that what they were cooking up was going to work? They didn't. They used extensive market research, and more specifically, digital marketing experiments to engage in effective advertising.

Digital marketing experiments are invaluable tools used by marketers to read their target audience and anticipate future actions. But let's back up a bit.

What Are Digital Marketing Experiments?

Digital marketing experiments are a way to determine new methods that will work for your next marketing campaign. In short, it's about getting meaningful results to influence digital marketing campaign strategies.

For example, your company wants to grow its brand online through effective email marketing. But you have no way of knowing that email marketing will serve you well. That's where invaluable experimentation comes in. Marketing experiments will point to whether or not your potential email marketing strategy has legs.

Digital marketing experiments don't need to be massive, in-depth undertakings, either. An email marketing experiment could be as simple as composing a few email templates and sending them to past or prospective customers. Then you get an idea of possible outreach possibilities by viewing engagement and conversion rates.

However, marketing experiments still follow the scientific process: problem, hypothesis, experimentation, and result.

Using that tried and true method, marketers everywhere have run thousands of successful (and not so successful) marketing experiments.

Should I Run a Digital Marketing Experiment?

Yes, absolutely.

Whether you're engaging in comprehensive branding and custom website development or simply testing the waters for next quarter's ad campaign, running experiments is a great idea.

Plus, it helps you save time and money in the future by testing the market before you start a marketing campaign in earnest.

Running a Marketing Experiment

Now that we're more familiar with marketing experiments let's walk through a simplified process in which practical ideas are born.

The Brainstorming Session

We love a good brainstorming session. Some of our best ideas seemingly come out of nowhere when we get together, and the creative juices get flowing.

Likewise, a digital marketing team needs to cook up a comprehensive list of ideas for the next  best campaign strategies.

Perhaps your SEO efforts need a bit of a boost. Maybe you're not utilizing a whole bevy of good potential keywords. You think, maybe, if you use these keywords in good web copy, it could result in significant conversions. This leads to the hypothesis.

The Hypothesis

Now the fun begins. What's your hypothesis?

When it comes to your potential marketing strategy, what are you curious to discover?

Let's use email marketing as an example since it's significantly easier to measure results quickly over time.

You and your team think that customers would engage more if you were to send out captivating email templates advertising your product. By the end of the brainstorming sessions, you formulate some hypotheses:

• Adding a CTA to the end of the email will increase engagement by a certain amount.
• Using a friendly tone in the body text will have consumers opening emails more.
• Formulating catchy subject lines will significantly boost engagement over a short period of time.

After these hypotheses come to light, it's time to back up your thoughts with concrete marketing research.

Research: Hit The Books

After formulating a solid hypothesis for your future experiment, it's time to delve into existing research. This means observing statistics, past experiments, and marketing analytics data to determine if your email idea has any merit.

If you find a strong correlation between effective email marketing pushes during a campaign, chances are there's a lot of

What Are You Measuring?

Before starting the marketing experiment, you need to set parameters. What do you measure exactly? It's essential to be as specific as possible with your metrics.

Maybe you simply measure conversion rates to determine success in an email marketing campaign to keep things simple.

It's Experiment Time

Now that everything is in place (remember to be specific!), it's time to experiment and put your hypotheses to the test.

Time to draft those captivating emails with catchy subject lines and friendly content to boost engagement.

How Long Should You Run Digital Marketing Experiments?

It depends.

For our hypothetical email campaign, the results will pour in sooner than something like SEO results.

But even with email marketing or an avenue that will yield results more quickly, you need to collect enough data for it to be statistically significant.

For those who fell asleep during your statistics class, this means data that points to a result that likely doesn't happen due to chance. In other words, the results of your email campaign are due to your marketing efforts.

All in all, it will likely take a few weeks for nearly every avenue of digital marketing. With only a few weeks of your time, it's more important than ever to cover your future bases and perform marketing experiments.

Wrapping Up Digital Marketing Experiments

Now you know where digital marketers get their ideas of what works and what doesn't. They use research, experimentation, and hypotheses to refine and finely tune their approaches to digital marketing campaigns.

Need an extra boost for your next campaign? Try brainstorming some new ideas, form them into a cohesive hypothesis, back it up with research, and get going.