The decision to innovate or iterate is one of the most important you can make. While you need to do both, the timing of when you innovate and how often is the driver of how high you can take your segmentation and conversion rates.

Innovation in Post-Click Marketing

It’s important to understand what innovation is in post-click marketing. If you’re an avid reader of this blog, it’s likely you’ve heard of our ‘apples-to-oranges’ testing phrase. This is innovation. It means exploring and experimenting with drastically disparate ideas.

Examples of innovation in vary by context and a campaign’s place in its own lifecycle, but consider the following examples:

• Changing the number of pages in your landing experience—adding or subtracting steps
• Altering the segmentation strategy—for example product-centric vs. lifestyle
• Changing the number of segments—for example, going from two to three forks
• Changing the segments themselves—for example, going from demographic segmentation on age to demographic segmentation on number of kids in the household
• Changing the form-factor of your landing experience—for example, testing a landing page against a conversion path or a microsite
• Changing fundamentals of the user experience—for example, using a Flash carousel instead of flat graphics for segmentation
• Changing your conversion mechanism—for example, testing a lead capture form against social conversion
• Changing branding fundamentals—for examples, testing a branded versus generic presentation

There are many more examples of innovation in landing pages. My examples just scratch the surface. But I hope I’m painting a picture of the magnitude of change that warrants the term ‘innovation’.

Iteration in Post-Click Marketing

Iteration is equally important as innovation. But when you limit yourself to iteration you sell your success far short of its potential.

Again, context and lifecycle have a lot to do with the definition of iteration in post-click. Have a look at these examples:

• Experimenting with positioning or ordering of content elements within a page—for example, image high versus image low
• Experimenting with specific content—for example, testing varying images or headline wording
• Experimenting with call-to-action labels—for example, ‘download now’ versus ‘get white paper’
• Experimenting with the ordering or labeling of form fields
• Experimenting with fulfillment method—for example, direct download versus email delivery or email link
• Experimenting with the length of, or detail in copy

Again, there are many more examples than what I’ve included here. When you iterate, you take something that’s performing well and you make incremental changes. This effort will yield incremental lift in performance.

When to innovate? When to iterate?

These are the million dollar questions. The traditional school of thought is that all landing page testing is essentially iteration. Multivariate testing (MVT) and other page optimization methodologies are based on iteration in search of incremental gains. I’m not suggesting that these gains are trivial, but they leave a lot on the cutting room floor.

We’ve found time and time again that innovation must be an integral piece of the upfront effort—and that it must be repeated. A single innovation cycle is of huge value. But multiple innovation cycles are of even higher value.

The innovation/iteration cycle

When you come out of the gate and look at your post-click marketing objectives, think creatively about potential solutions. This will lead you to develop innovative approaches. Test those ideas and get to a quick champion (or two). Then start your first iteration cycle where you polish your winner by testing minor differences. Once you see diminishing returns from your iterated challenger landing pages, it’s time to start thinking out of the box again.

The hardest part is returning to an innovative state of mind when you are experiencing great success from your first round. It’s scary and feels very risky. It’s easy to get caught in the ‘but what if that doesn’t work?’ death spiral. This is why innovation in post-click marketing is so rare.

You have to trust that continued innovation will provide additional leaps in performance. And you have to mitigate the risk by allocating a limited percentage of your traffic to your new ideas. Yes, it will take longer to reach statistical confidence in your results, but at least you’re continuing to push the envelope. And you’re never going to feel like you’re innovating yourself out of your quarterly bonus.

I can tell you from almost daily personal experience that this repeated cycle of innovation is an absolute necessity. When we push ourselves to innovate for our clients, it’s scary. But it’s also when we find the blockbuster winners that iteration has no chance of uncovering.