There are many questions surrounding the ultimate fate of Groupon’s IPO – except this: whatever the valuation winds up being, the group buying market has become a formidable local ad category, almost over night. An IPO, especially a successful one, will mean even more entrants into the market. And that will mean more choices, more channels and more opportunities to tweak the wording of a particular offering.

There is, of course, the casual, silly, tongue-in-check style made popular by Groupon and LivingSocial. Many attribute that lighter touch to the model’s success – consumers, so the theory goes, are tired of hard-hitting marketing copy. There is also a school of thought forming that says consumers are tired of this as well. Also, how many clever posts can one write about a local business? Finally, some companies marketing serious or high-end products on these sites, worry that a lighter tone will detract from the brand.
If you’ve been paying attention at all to best practices in ecommerce, you know what advice is coming next: AB testing of the offers,  especially as you branch out using new vendors.

Tools For the Small Business

Problem has been, such tests can be an expensive proposition, affordably only by companies with large marketing budgets. However, writes Jeremy Bieger, founder of UberTags at Open Forum, there are now a number of free and low-cost tools available to smaller businesses. These include:

Optimizely, which allows users to configure tests visually through a browser without needing to code HTML.

Visual Website Optimizer, which also creates variations of pages via a browser, and can show results of the test variations on over time.

Google Website Optimizer, which works by randomly redirecting user populations to different URLs and measuring the performance of the respective pages.