Web sites are rarely set-and-forget. Their audiences grow and change, the functions they serve for those users evolve, and their marketing and lead-gen needs develop over time.
Military.com, a Web site founded in 1999 to keep current and former members of the military community up to date on news, benefits and career advice, knew that it was time for a design refresh and wanted to overlay that with some multivariate testing to make sure its pay-per-click and e-mail landing pages were performing to expectations.
“We wanted to get into the weeds on our lead and registration funnels,” says Breanna Wigle, online marketing manager for the site, an independent subsidiary of Monster.com. “We’re a free-membership site with 10 million members and have many landing-page entry points into the site.” Almost all of those were six years old in design, she says, and in need of buffing up. Military.com wanted to make sure those changes could be measured and tested for optimum impact on its unique audience.
“If you’re trying to communicate with someone on a submarine, you have to make sure you’re designing your pages appropriately,” she adds.
So in mid-2009, Military.com signed with Web-based testing platform SiteSpect to perform measured testing on its landing pages. The process is now at about its midpoint, but Wigle says the site has seen a 20% lift in conversions on some of the PPC landing pages by tweaking their messaging.
In e-mail, recipients are already segmented by service branch and by active or veteran status, but Military.com was funneling them all to the same landing page. With testing, the site hopes to build e-mail conversions by tailoring landing pages to the interests of those segments in a measurable way.
“It’s not personalization,” Wigle says. “It’s segmentation taken to the next level.”
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