MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Homepages are vital to any website. Many times, they can be the first interaction our prospects have on our website and therefore what we do (or don’t do) at that moment can significantly impact our future relationship with them. But this is not anything that most marketer intuition hasn’t picked up already – hence the constant battle lines drawn over use of the homepage.

Where the marketing intuition gets a bit fuzzy is when it comes to strategically actualizing all the goals we have for a homepage with an optimal design. We know what we want a homepage to do, but we just don’t know exactly how to make it happen.

And this is where a recent experiment might give us a little insight on how well we understand home page design. Below are two homepages that were recently tested.

Could you pick the better page on pure gut alone?

Experiment Background:

This is a homepage test for a B2B company offering email marketing solutions for small and large businesses. The primary objective that we were attempting to increase conversion for was the free trial. Therefore, the key performance indicator (KPI) for this test will be total free trial starts.

As follows, the primary research question for this experiment is, “Which homepage will generate the most free trial sign-ups?” and the test we ran was an A/B multi-factorial split test utilizing our radical redesign methodologies.

Experiment designs (two versions):

Experiment Results:

And the winner is…. well I’m pulling a bit of a cliff hanger here for a day. Sorry. But I will give you this (if you didn’t already discern it from the title of this post), one of these pages generated 59% more free trial sign-ups over the other. Later today, we will reveal the winning version on our free web clinic and tomorrow we will update this post with the winner as well.

How’s your marketing intuition?

For those who like to get a sense for how well their marketing intuition is fairing in today’s online market, here’s your chance in two easy steps:

STEP 1: Carefully study the pages embedded above (you can click to zoom)

STEP 2: Boldly choose a winner (blog comments welcome)

During Homepages Optimized: How using the homepage as a channel led to a 59% increase in conversion, we will look deeper into the results of the experiment above as well as discuss five key optimization strategies that should be utilized for every homepage.

Related Resources:

Homepages Optimized: How using the homepage as a channel led to a 59% increase in conversion

Homepage Optimization: How your peers use keywords and communicate with visitors

Research Report: Beyond Landing Pages

Clinic Notes

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic – Homepage Optimization: How using the homepage as a channel led to a 59% increase in conversion – Flint McGlaughlin (the Director of MECLABS Group) will share a few key optimization strategies to help you build an effective, ROI-based homepage.

But first, we wanted to hear your thoughts about homepage optimization. So we asked marketers. Here are a few of our favorite answers…
Keyword early, keyword often

1. Keywords are very important. Find the best for you site/business/product. Is your homepage going to be a landing page for your product or service? If so, you can use the appropriate keywords. Otherwise find the keywords that more generally describe your industry/product and use them for the home page.

2. Content: the keywords will be used to develop relevant content. Try to use the keywords early and often (but not unnaturally so) on the page. Especially effective if you can use them in a title, or bold, etc.

3. Title tags: use keywords in title tag, plus the name of your company at the end.

4. Write a good descriptive meta tag – remember this is going to be part of what shows up in natural results on a search results page

5. Limit graphics. For the graphics that are there, use Alt formatting to see that the search engine can read them.

6. Try to build incoming links into your home page

– Brent Carnduff, Owner at EchelonSEO

Optimize for people and spiders

A homepage needs to be optimized for two general audiences: Visitors and Search [...] Continue Reading…

Clinic Notes

“Many tradeshows have experienced a decline in attendance and exhibitors in recent years. In addition to companies cutting back on their tradeshow attendance due to financial reasons, many attendees are also scaling back their tradeshow participation, due to travel costs and time away from the office. Virtual events eliminate some of these issues.”

The above quote is from Chris Chariton, Vice President of Supplier Marketing & Marketing Services at GlobalSpec – the engineering search engine. To help you incorporate virtual events into your marketing mix, we conducted a virtual interview with Chris…

Let’s start with the obvious question – what is a virtual tradeshow and how is it different than a webinar?

Chris Chariton: Virtual tradeshows go beyond a webinar or webcast, as they include elements of both an educational conference and a tradeshow. A typical webinar lasts between 30 and 60 minutes, and is usually focused on a single topic.

On the other hand, virtual tradeshows encompass a “conference” portion featuring many different educational sessions with a variety of speakers, as well as a “tradeshow” component including exhibitor booths, live chat and networking.

The platform for virtual tradeshows is much more comprehensive, the interactive capabilities are greater, and they offer additional multimedia opportunities, including video.

In what situations should marketers use a traditional event? When should they choose a virtual event?

CC: Two reasons why marketers use in-person events are the opportunity to be face-to-face with an existing or potential customer, and the opportunity for someone to see your products “in action.” Virtual events also [...] Continue Reading…

Events

So when Daniel Burstein proposed this oh-so-witty blog debate about Foursquare, the first question I asked him was, “What’s in your pants?” Sure enough he whips out his keys and there is a flimsy plastic reward keychain (complete with barcode) for Native Sun, an organic foods market here in Jacksonville.

Carrying around a Native Sun loyalty card while questioning the wisdom of Foursquare is a prime example of how the duality of man is witnessed through marketing. “Your idea is stupid, while mine is smart (yet they are both the same).”

It’s good to be the mayor

Foursquare allows marketers to conduct loyalty programs without having to rely on customers carrying around yet another piece of pocket flare with a bar code. In fact, it’s the easiest, most customer-responsive way to have a loyalty program.

A good analogy would be a comparison between a pay-per-click (PPC) ad and a TV commercial. A PPC ad gives you continuous, real-time metrics that can be changed to react to new information on the fly. A TV commercial is a great chance to go grab a beer before getting back to the Jaguars game.

In the same vein, with Foursquare you can change your promotions in real time. Perhaps you decide your #1 fan (your “mayor”) gets some free food. You can change that overnight to giving a reward for every five times a customer visits your restaurant…or even giving a dollar off for every check in.

Also, how many plastic pieces of junk will Dan carry on his [...] Continue Reading…

Marketing Insights

I recently found out that Andy Mott is the Mayor of MarketingExperiments. Which got me thinking…who rules the roost at other austere workplaces according to Foursquare?

Well, it turns out that Rob R. is the so-called Mayor of the White House. Rob who? I don’t know, but clearly not Barack O. So, if the Leader of the Free World can’t even be in charge of his own house, how valuable of a technology is this really?

I don’t care where you are
After I found out about his Mayordom, I also learned that Andy is the Mayor of a local Dunkin’ Donuts and Chili’s. But what do I really learn from this other than that Andy could be making healthier choices in life than scarfing down Boston Kreme donuts and Baby Back Ribs?
After all, when he checks in somewhere, all I really see is “I’m at BLANK.” So how social is FourSquare really?

The true power of social media is not that it allows people to be a shill to their friends (Andy ate a donut, and then two of his friends ate a donut, and then four of their friends ate a donut…). Social media, broken down to is essence, is essentially Transparent Marketing microcast to a highly niche audience – people who care what you have to say.
And the quickest way to turn those people off to caring what their friends and associates have to say is to shill.
Even in a [...] Continue Reading…

Marketing Insights

“Our job is to help you do your job better.” That’s how I sign every MarketingExperiments Journal email, and it’s a mission all of us at MarketingExperiments take very seriously.

One of the main ways we help marketers is through the production of MarketingExperiments Web clinics – free, hour-long webinars where we share our research discoveries, analyze what they mean, share actionable advice for using these discoveries in your day-to-day job, and often provide live optimization advice for submissions from our audience of their marketing material.

These Web clinics are crucial to our educational and enablement activities, so I want to take today’s blog post to introduce Web clinics to those new to the MarketingExperiments community while addressing some key comments that may be helpful to long-time audience members as well.

I’ll get to those comments in a minute, but first a look at the replay of our latest Web clinic…

[Presentation will open in new window]

While the Web clinic replays are valuable (you can find more replays in our Research Directory), please note that they don’t fully replicate the experience of attending a live Web clinic – which is usually a lively session with much interaction and two way-conversation.

I could rattle on about our clinics, but clearly I have a vested interest in them…my opinion might be a bit skewed. So let’s take a look at some comments from the 917 marketers that attended our last Web clinic (with some annotations from yours truly to shed some light here and there)…

[...] Continue Reading…

Clinic Notes