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

Several companies are offering multi-million dollar rewards to anyone who can pick a perfect bracket in the NCAA Tournament. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? You can enter for free, and the chances must be better than the lottery, right?

Ask yourself…what do you think the odds are? Maybe one in a million. Perhaps one in 50 million.

Or maybe you put a little more effort into it and do a few basic calculations. You figure that in the first round of 32 games, the probability of having a perfect prediction is one in four billion.

So if you’re prone to extrapolate you might think that, for the total 63 games in the championship, the overall chance would be something like one in eight billion, right? Logically speaking there are twice as many games, so half the probability.

I was wondering myself, so I actually ran the numbers. The chance of predicting a perfect bracket for March Madness is one in 9.22 quintillion. That’s one in nine billion billions. In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning, being hit by a meteor, and winning the Mega Millions lottery.

But wait – I know my college basketball

“But wait,” you say. “I’ve been following college basketball and I know which teams have a better chance of winning. No way Arkansas-Pine Bluff has any chance of beating Duke.”

Fair enough. In the above example, I used a random-result probability model (a 50/50 chance for every game). So I also created an informed-result probability model.

In this model, I assumed that the higher-ranked team had a two-thirds chance of winning in the first two rounds (after that, it’s still anybody’s game). The chance now is one in 9.29 trillion. Much improved, but still amazingly long odds.

But wait – I know my customers

There’s a greater lesson to be learned here for testing. Chance is an intuitive concept but estimating chance is not.

When running an online test, chance has to be accounted for. We can’t rely on intuition or a feeling that we know what our customers want. We can’t just assume that because we got the results we hoped for that the results are significant or a test has run long enough.

We need to implement the appropriate statistical validation to assure that what we are seeing is not just random chance, but likely representative of our market as a whole.

Bad data equals bad decisions

Here is an extreme example to show you what I’m talking about. Let’s assume we turn a test and our treatment page gets four visitors. If three visitors buy, and one visitor bounces, we cannot assume that 75% of our traffic will buy. Because once we get to 10 visitors, we may find that now six have bounced.

While the above example is obvious, not every testing scenario is. Perhaps you’ve run the test for a week and feel like that is long enough. Or the sample size seems quite large. Or, and perhaps the biggest danger which I referenced above, you feel that you know your customers well enough that when a result comes along that you were hoping to see, you’re prepared to stop testing.

Making a business decision based on any of these scenarios is a dangerous thing. And therein lies the power of true statistical validity. We are given an assurance (for example, 95%) that the results from the test we just ran can be relied upon and not attributed just to chance. This way, when we duplicate across the entire population (assuming we tested on a representative sample), we’ll sensibly be expecting similar results.

By doing so we never completely eliminate the chance of an unpredictable event (one in 9.29 trillion is still possible), but we gain a strong enough understanding of it to confidently make bottom-line decisions based on quality data.

Analytics & Testing

“…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” – Sally Field

Social media just makes us all feel so darn good, doesn’t it? I mean, look at me, my name and picture is right there in the upper left. Back in my advertising days, I had ads run in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, but no one would ever know, since my name wasn’t attached.

And I’ve got followers on Twitter. And LinkedIn. And…

Sorry, did I just become an egoblogger?

On second thought…don’t look at me

This is why most social media marketing is so, well, outright bad. To go back to that study by Pear Analytics, 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.”

In a discussion last week with Pamela Markey, our Director of Marketing, she came up with the perfect phrase to describe this phenomenon – antisocial media.

Social is defined as “relating to human society and its members.” But, how many social media marketing practitioners are really relating to anything beyond what they are trying to promote?

Automatic for the people

To make matters worse, there are social media “experts” who sell products that offer to automate social media promotion and marketing.

One product I came across allows you to auto follow targeted Twitter profiles, rapidly increase niche Twitter followers, have unlimited Twitter profiles, automate direct messages, and, consequently, spend time on other tasks while the program works for you.

Feature rich but concept poor. This begs the question, what’s the point? (And the second question, can any software automate blog writing so I can spend time on other tasks? Where is HemingwayBlogger v3.0)?

So, what is the point then?

The point of social media is to give the people what they want, which is not necessarily what you want to tell them. That’s why social media marketing success does not lie in you, it lies in them.

Now I am not a social media marketing “expert” (which seems to be defined by having a five-figure following on Twitter), but there are certain discoveries we’ve made at MarketingExperiments that should logically work with these new platforms. Namely, the most important factor to conversion is motivation.

Let me take two real-world examples to show you what I mean.

Not only is Bill Gates richer than you, after only two months on Twitter, he already has more followers – 601,109. Then there’s That Guy (name changed to protect his anonymity). We were first tipped off to That Guy by a comment on this blog. That Guy has 84,466 followers.

Both pretty impressive. Now let’s look at another column on Twitter – “following.” Bill Gates is following 44 people. That Guy – 91,349. So how do you think That Guy got so many followers? Not only did he auto follow his way to “expertise,” he is trying to use that number of followers as a proof point for why you should buy his social media product.

Don’t be That Guy

In stark contrast, how did Bill Gates get so many followers? People likely want to hear what he has to say.

Of course, if you’re not a world-famous tech billionaire and philanthropist, people are likely less motivated to listen to you. But the same principle applies. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What can you tell them through social media that they’ll actually care about? How do they connect with your brand?

For example, I rarely tweet anything that’s not marketing related, but for a free Pearl Jam song I gladly added my 140 characters to the Twitterverse. Pamela is happy when she receives a 30% off coupon from J. Crew. And at MarketingExperiments we try to create valuable, free content that helps you do your job better.

My point is, there is no one right answer for how to use social media to tap into your audience’s motivations, but there is an answer for your brand.

And unless you tap into that motivation with your social media efforts, you’re just wasting your most valuable resource – time – while stroking your own ego at the huge “following” you have.

Am I right? Am I wrong? We’re listening. Use the Topsy button at the top of this post to tweet your opinion or leave a comment on this blog.

Marketing Insights

Afraid you’ll be the last brand picked for the kickball team? Worried you’ll throw a big party and no one will come? Sometimes it can feel like social media marketing is another trip through middle school.

The greatest social media challenge marketers say they face is getting their target audience to engage and participate. According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, 64% of marketers consider it a very important challenge to achieving social marketing objectives.

Translation: I’m a new kid in a new school and I’m worried no one will be my friend. So let’s take a look at a few Facebook beginner ideas…

This post is unusually tactical for me. I am assuming you already have a social media objective and strategy. You know WHY you need Facebook fans, and you know what to do with them.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a chance to send email

The knee-jerk digital marketing tactic is: hey, let’s send a note to all of our friends.

Sending email to your list is easy, but it’s another piece of spam that will get you unsubscribes. Just because you just embraced Facebook doesn’t mean that they did as well.

Instead, make it a reasonably distinct part of your site and whatever regular email you are already sending out to an opted-in list. People that are already on Facebook will recognize it easily. Don’t waste effort on trying to create new Facebook converts (unless your name is Mark Zuckerberg).

For a true friend, look a little deeper than your list

I would suggest deeper-reach strategies, starting from understanding your target audience and getting involved in related Facebook Groups. Through meaningful conversation, you can introduce them to your Page (or Group).

Facebook makes relevance fairly easy, if time consuming. Learning about both individuals and groups is naturally available through Facebook content. You can read wall posts, bios, etc.

This means dedicating some marketing or business development human resources to the project (the second biggest challenge according to MarketingSherpa, with 56% of marketers considering it very important). After all, relationships require time and effort.

Active, but measured and judicious participation with the objective of creating interest is what will net you a loyal following.

However, don’t neglect the narrower tactics of contests, special coupons or exclusive deals for your Facebook fans. While these incentives will on average create a less loyal following, their net effect can be very positive.

Understand what Facebook functionality will naturally (and free of charge) carry your message

In social media in general (and on Facebook in particular), retention and new member generation are very tightly related. Every time someone comments in your Page, it is reflected in their wall and visible to their friends, who can then learn about the group and join (individuals may change their settings, but this is the default option and happens most of the time).

You should look to all Facebook features that trigger visibility in people’s News Feeds. For example, creating events will push your Page into the News Feed of those that sign up for them. If you create a Facebook application, installing it (and some updates – wouldn’t you want to be another Farmville!) will generate a visible News Feed post.

There are other more creative tactics (may or may not apply to your Page depending on the tone), where you can invite people to tag themselves in an image, say, of personality types, etc.

Good luck. And let me just remind you of your Mom’s advice on the first day of middle school (assuming your Mom was a marketer). You’re a likable brand, don’t send out desperate notes for friends. Just go out there, be yourself, engage in the activities you love, and you’ll be the most popular brand in school.

Internet Marketing News

Every year, for the past 16 years, something amazing has happened in Austin, TX around this time. And this year hopes to be no different as Austin gears up for its annual South by Southwest Interactive technology conference – an event which can only be described as one of the largest, most exciting, most comprehensive collections of marketing and social web entertainment and technology this side of the Internet.

In what amounts to five days of epic conversations, presentations and social media events disguised as a “technology conference,” the world (and all of Twitter) tunes in to see the Internet trends of the last year scrutinized and the trends for the next year laid out in incredible, Apple-Keynote-quality detail.

How far can testing go?

This year, MarketingExperiments will not only be tuning in, but will take part in this conversation to discover not just what works in email and landing page optimization, but what is working in social media and other areas of the Web as well. In addition to small and large business owners, how are bloggers, designers and the social media crowd testing, measuring and collecting results? What’s working, what isn’t, and what’s to come in 2010?

If there’s ever been an ongoing topic of conversation here at MarketingExperiments, it’s the ever-present question of how far we can go in testing. How do we improve and build upon the tools we have to increase ROI, discover new insights and push the boundaries of online testing to give us more accurate, more actionable results? How will social media continue to change the way we hold conversations and gain trust with our audience online? How will we measure and apply what we learn?

See you in Austin

What better way to seek out the answers to these questions than by employing SXSWi as my backdrop for a discussion on how the Internet will continue to evolve to the tune of testing and optimization, as well as hear first-hand how other marketers, bloggers, and Internet fans in general see online testing influencing the design and execution of ideas on the Web.

And if you happen to see me there, be sure to stop me and tell me your thoughts on these issues as well.  Also, ask me for one of my “split test” business cards. More on that later…

Internet Marketing News

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter, it will probably not shock you to learn that about 40% of tweets are “pointless babble,” according to Pear Analytics. In fact, in their recent study, they rated only 8.7% as having “pass-along value” – the gold standard for true viral marketing.

“I feel like eating Cheetos with my grilled cheese & turkey sandwich, but I have none ”

This presents a huge challenge to the modern marketer. We all see social media and the real-time web as a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But with these new media awash in so much “pointless babble,” finding success with social media marketing is akin to trying to find that rainbow against a psychedelic sky of endlessly flashing colors.

So before our next free web clinic – Social Media Marketing in 4 Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 marketers – on which MarketingSherpa Research Director Sergio Balegno will share actionable insights from research on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging, we thought we’d post this simple (and simply blunt) question to marketers:

How do you use social media to make money?

From the obvious (”cultivate relationships”) to the iconoclastic (”you don’t”), marketers had many interesting takes on this question (what else would you expect from a group that has to think out of the box for a living?). Here are our favorite tips, techniques and insights:

Win real fans
I have a brand called Mocks (socks for mobile phones) which I started to heavily promote on Facebook last year. Basically, over three months I gained 12000 fans and doubled online sales.

I use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and engage customers so that they become fans in the “old” sense of the word. This then means that they buy more and tell their friends.

New way of thinking for a direct response pro
We have really embraced social media in the past year to raise our profile in our own industry (medical marketing). Until recently, because we come from direct response backgrounds, we focused all of our marketing efforts solely on targeted prospects, with little regard for the larger industry.

Our strategy has been to leverage the publication-quality content we were already producing for magazines and our newsletter base. Therefore, we are getting a lot of bang for little additional effort, leading to more and better client inquiries.

Long-term relationships over short-term profits
Social networking isn’t always about an instantaneous transformation into dollars. It is about a long-term continuous relationship with the customer. You stay on their mind even when they aren’t actively seeking your product.

Virtual Tupperware party
Direct selling on a social network is difficult. The best way to sell is to replicate the offline world to a certain extent by signing up online agents. The same people who would host a cosmetics party or a Tupperware party are natural networkers who will have large social networks on all of the primary platforms.

The possibility exists to build a platform that they can invite their friends to at specific times and, in effect, host online sales parties. Obvious inducements include discounts on branded goods and free prizes, but the key may be to create a uniform space for the agents that they can build into a profile for themselves.

Even without a platform, they could simply become discount agents for their friends. Somebody who all their friends know can get good deals on specific products or services.

For the agent, it is not abusing their relationships on the social network platforms. For the most part, their friends already know them as somebody who hosts sales parties and they will either be ignored or valued but are unlikely to be criticized for the entrepreneurial efforts among their friends.

A straightforward sale
E-commerce websites (especially B2C) are the ones who can reap maximum benefits out of social media. The best examples are Dell and Zappos. Dell has reportedly made $3.5 million in 2009 from Twitter promotions.

These retailers post updates about various product offers in Twitter, Facebook and other social media. And they also give additional promotions to followers. Timely promotions to a well-targeted market segment will spur an increase in conversion rates and hence an increase in revenue.

One emerging trend is Facebook and Twitter commerce. Retailers are trying to build applications around Facebook and Twitter to port their entire commerce platform.

Find out what customers want
By gaining a relationship or connecting with your customers and getting feedback, you can take the ideas they offer and put them into practice. For small businesses this is easier because most changes will be simple and not too costly. Larger business might need to run suggestions through a spreadsheet to find the most popular ideas before taking action.

Also, by doing this you pull in your customers and let them know they are being heard and that you’re really looking to make them happy. A great example of this type of mentality is Domino’s. They listened and then took action.

Track lead generation
When it comes to quantifying social media and social networking efforts into an actual dollar value, the best way I’ve discovered is to use a simple tracking system. This consists of a spreadsheet and/or entry into my CRM that shows: lead to customer and what channel they came through, whether this be blog, social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), or referral.

Present real value
Social media must be presented as a value proposition. It’s got nothing to do with befriending people and tweeting, but everything to do with brand value and lead generation.

Lead generation
If you are currently advertising for customers, you can now “advertise” for FREE by posting a sample, giveaway, or contest on Twitter and linking to your website. Ask for pertinent details that are important to qualifying your potential customers…and drive them to your site.

Social media is about awareness, not revenue
We use it to drive business and increase our profile, nothing more. But do we make money from it? No, we make the money from the services that we provide to our clients. Our social media strategy could be the best in the world but if we cannot deliver then it is pointless. So yes, it drives traffic, increases awareness, and generates leads, but it does not make money.

As we confront this brave new world, let’s remember that there is nothing particularly new about it…

Personally, social media has been around forever. We have always had teenage hangouts, chambers of commerce, the restaurant breakfast/coffee club, the local newspaper and specialized magazines. The difference today is that our social media has more two-way interaction, is worldwide, and can be instant.

Social media is not a novel concept, we’ve just thrown a bunch of technology into the mix. And there are great benefits – speed, cost, and reach among them. But don’t get so caught up in the technology that you overlook what is really transpiring – a conversation.

Because, in the end, people don’t buy from social media platforms (or websites or email messages or even companies) – people buy from people.

Marketing Insights

It’s a little over-simplified, but an email marketer’s job is to get the right message to the right person at the right time to achieve a specific goal. Doing that means understanding what motivates subscribers to open a message and engage with your offer – and that’s where the process gets tricky.

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers

The campaign targeted “inactive” members of their list, which they defined as subscribers that had not opened or clicked an email in 120 days. They wanted to either reactivate those subscribers, or else determine that they were truly inactive and remove them from the list. So they set up a four-message reactivation campaign to encourage a response.

Each message took a different approach to the reactivation effort:

- The first was a survey about email preferences
- The second was a request for subscribers to update their personal information
- The third was a contest to win a book
- The fourth repeated the request to update personal information

What is more appealing than FREE?

Going into the campaign, the team believed the contest offer would have the best response. After all, people like getting free stuff, right?

Maybe not: The contest offer had the weakest open rate and clickthrough rates of the four messages. Its open rate was 60% lower than the best-performing email – the survey about email preferences. And the contest offer’s CTR was 82% lower than the best-performing email.

The good news is that the reactivation campaign was a success overall. They reactivated 9% of the inactive subscribers they targeted – and they won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for it.

They also learned important lessons about what motivates their subscribers. Their conclusion: “People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

Final lesson: Assumptions are no match for results data. So get testing!

Sean Donahue is the editor of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies, benchmark data, and how-to information read by hundreds of thousands of advertising, marketing, and PR professionals every week.

Email Marketing, Research Topics

I’ll admit that I am a Twitter novice. Compared to social media gurus, some of whom have tremendous experience with the platform (up to two* years!), I am still very much in the learning-by-doing phase. Then again, aren’t we all?

As I try to be informative and give back to the Twittersphere, one of my email-related tweets was picked up by a Florida marketing agency that services several metros nationwide. With our Email Optimization clinic series underway, I was more than happy to provide an analysis of a broad-spectrum campaign that they had planned. Luann, their president, was as excited as I was about making a Twitter connection.

With Luann’s permission, I wanted to share my thoughts and recommendations with our readers. Here is an edited copy of the email response that I sent to her:

Hi Luann,

(click image to zoom)

Here are a few thoughts based on the email message creative I got from Noele, along with the requisite assumptions I’ve made. I hope they will be helpful.

There are two important caveats:

1. I don’t believe in best practices. Everything I recommend is normally tested until I find out what really works for the particular product and customer segment.
2. I want to be as helpful as possible, so I am not pulling any punches; the comments below are not a reflection on your company’s competence or reputation—just how they are communicated via this email message.

The fundamentals: Optimizing thought sequences

In optimization, our objective is not to create better design or copy. Our objective is to affect different thought sequences, and design and copy are our tools. A useful way to examine the thought sequences we need to address is through three simple questions that arise in the mind of the email recipient immediately, whether consciously or unconsciously:

1. Who is sending me this email?
2. What is it asking me to do?
3. Why should I do it?

Our job is to answer these questions as directly and quickly as possible using copy, graphical elements, and layout of the email.

Without specific information about your list, I am going to assume (based on email content) that it contains a large segment that has never done business with your company and perhaps has never heard of it.

Communicating Efficiently: Make it an easy read

The body of the email appears singularly focused on its graphic design and a clever visual way to represent what you do. I suspect that your target customers would prefer a plain-English explanation instead.

They would also likely appreciate it being summarized into a strong, benefits-focused headline, supported with several key reasons why they should use your company’s services, rather than your competitors’.

How it appeared in my Outlook preview pane. (click image to zoom)

I am making an assumption about your target customer segment(s), but from my experience—especially with B2B—black text on a white background works best most of the time. There’s rarely a better way to communicate with busy professionals.

Relying primarily on text, rather than images, will likely work better for you because in default Outlook setup with a preview pane, most people will see blank white boxes instead of your message—and promptly delete it. Alt text helps, but not as much as well-formatted HTML text. You need to make sure that your email degrades gracefully: it needs to read acceptably with images turned off and in plain text.

Communicating Value: Make it clear why you are the best choice

Again, there is no real headline here. The question “Is your business missing something?” is so generic that I can’t imagine it being compelling at all. You can have a successful question-format headline, but it needs to point to a specific problem that you know your customer has.

A great way further to support your value proposition is by telling the reader what your customers say about you. It’s more powerful than anything you say yourself.

There is another challenge with communicating value: you are offering a range of very different services. Sent to a large enough list, this will get you calls, but I would invest some time into 1) trying to segment your list and offer only the most relevant services to each segment, and 2) if you can’t segment or still end up with a large “general” segment, help your reader understand which service is right for them.

Communicating Action: Make it clear what to do next

You don’t want to leave this up to the recipients to figure out. That’s what we call “unsupervised thinking.” You need to do most of the work for them—or you won’t get the click.

There is no clear next step. Here’s what I can picture a recipient thinking: “It looks like you just want me to sign up for the newsletter. It’s the biggest CTA (call to action). But I don’t know who you are. I really don’t care about getting latest news postings on your website. If we already have a relationship, why am I getting this generic email?”

In the end, you are not giving the reader a specific reason to contact you. This goes back to building the problem, explaining why you are the best solution, and telling the reader what they’ll get by clicking where you want them to click.

If this is an email to an unsegmented list, I suggest two options to test:

1. Have only one CTA (you can repeat it at the top and at the bottom, but ultimately you should be asking them to do one thing). The job of this email will be to build enough confidence/interest in your company to get a click. Then you can provide options (if relevant) on the landing page.
2. Have several distinct offers, making very clear which one applies to which customer segment or specific problem it’s solving (even if you can’t segment the list, you should know what the key segments are). Then the job of this email is to help the reader quickly decide which offer is most relevant, and click on the corresponding CTA.

I hope these insights will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing about the results you were able to achieve with them.

Sincerely,

Boris Grinkot

To see more email optimization ideas, you can listen to the replay of our last live web clinic, where the MarketingExperiments team offered testing ideas for audience-submitted email marketing messages.

* I’m not counting 2007—come on!

Email Marketing, Practical Application, Research Topics

To the detractors, Facebook advertising only works for dating sites (and perhaps online degrees). As we demonstrate with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Heuristic, motivation is the most important factor influencing the probability of conversion. And the detractors would claim that most people who visit Facebook are motivated by one thing and one thing only.

Other marketers are happy to jump at any social media marketing opportunity. To them, Facebook is one big opportunity that they’re just trying to find the right tactics to embrace (of course, it might help to wipe the dollar signs out of their eyes first).

Whatever works

I’m a pragmatist. I’ll leave my personal biases at the door any day in favor of solid metrics combined with scientific experimentation that shows what really works.

Social media measurement dreamers like myself may have a new champion. Omniture (recently acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion) will announce an expansion of its partnership with Facebook in a keynote address today at Omniture Summit 2010.

Omniture is going to expand its existing search management solution, and its SearchCenter Plus customers will now be able to manage and compare their spend on search engines and on Facebook in a single tool. Online Marketing Suite 2.0 will include Facebook social media optimization, integrating Facebook ad management with Omniture® SearchCenter®.

This unified reporting will help marketers more efficiently understand and respond to ad ROI (and perhaps move from tactical to strategic use of social media marketing).

What gets measured gets done (better)

Omniture’s powerful analytics and testing tools have provided users with reliable reporting and experimental implementation. (Disclosure: MarketingExperiments provides Omniture SiteCatalyst® and Test&Target® consulting and integration services alongside its own optimization and experimental design expertise.)

Detailed demographic and engagement data provided by Facebook’s login-required environment will further help advertisers position their message in front of the right audience. On the practical side of optimization, the ability to use this data is critical to experimental design (understanding performance on segment level), and the automation already provided by Omniture SearchCenter will help roll out tests on Facebook placement faster in the same convenient interface with search ad management.

Will Facebook become more attractive to major marketers?

This is an important step by Facebook to become a more mainstream publisher, opening it up to Omniture’s substantial customer portfolio of major B2B and B2C brands. Tighter Omniture integration brings additional legitimacy to Facebook as a marketing channel, whose power as a social media network has been as business-ambiguous for major ad spenders as it has been popular for tween marketers.

For optimization professionals, this also signals a significant opportunity to gain greater insights and deliver more relevant messages to target customers.

How do you use social to make money? Respond to the discussion in our LinkedIn group or drop us an email. We’ll feature the best tips, techniques, and practices in a future blog post, so make sure to include any info (Twitter handle, website) that you’d like to promote.

Analytics & Testing, Internet Marketing News, Social Media

Many marketers I talk to are quite interested in optimizing the content of their email messages. They test images, calls to action, subject lines, and the tone of the email. However, how many companies test the timing of email sends and how this affects readership?

Proper timing = greater relevance

To illustrate how timing might affect open and click-through rates, think about how you read email.  In the afternoon when the day is dragging on and you need a break, do you give each email message a little more time than when you first get into the office in the morning and are confronted with 20 hot items bursting from your inbox?

So would an email with a more complex conversion goal (such as signing up for a recurring subscription) do better with you in the afternoon while a simple conversion goal (like signing up for a free web clinic) might have a better chance in the morning when you’re plugging and chugging and not putting as much thought (and perhaps doubt) into your actions?

While you were sleeping

If you subscribe to our informative email, you know that we send it in the middle of the night. By testing, we learned that email messages sent before 9 a.m. EST dramatically lifted click-through rates for our list. Here are the key takeways from our testing:

• Late-nighters in the management level and ‘indiepreneur’ crowds on the West Coast are opening work email up until the midnight hour. East Coast execs are responsive in the ‘early bird’ hours.
• Subscribers based in Asia and Europe respond to email messages that don’t get buried in their inbox during non-work hours.
• Time zone segmentation is worth a test for any marketer with a substantial international list – especially B-to-Bers.

What works for your audience?

Keep in mind, that for every demographic and persona that is part of your readership, their habits and optimal send time might be different. Test sending out at different times to see what affect that has on not only readership, but conversion – because even in these “tight time zones,” people might just glance at the email, (giving you the open metrics) but save the action for later. However, we all know sometimes “later” never comes.

Speaking of testing, it is not just good enough to just try different send times for entire lists. Aggregate testing like this can get you subpar results and hide the real conversions nuggets. Narrowing the scope to particular segments in your list (which you should always be doing…) will help you see how certain segments respond to timing and allow you to make stronger conclusions.

Sometimes the conversion gems that are waiting to be discovered are not only in the message itself, but how and (in this case) when it is being delivered. It is like when you asked your Mom to borrow the car – you knew not to bother her when she was busy if you wanted a good response.

Good luck in testing.

For a deeper discussion about timing and relevance, you can join our Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, as he explores Increasing Conversion with Right Time, Right Message Strategies on Thursday, March 11 at 2 p.m. This free BtoB Magazine webcast is sponsored by Eloqua.

Email Marketing, Research Topics

Let’s say you make mass-produced pizza that tastes like cardboard. How would you sell it?

A) Hire Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson to tell everyone how good your pizza tastes
B) Have your founder drive across the country in a classic sports car to tell everyone how great your pizza tastes
C) Launch a nationwide campaign to tell everyone how bad your pizza tastes (and then make it better)

Domino’s Pizza actually picked option C (and if they didn’t, really, would it be worth blogging about?). In fact, the cardboard reference above is something Domino’s itself is promoting…





This campaign is a great example of two principles we teach about in our training workshops…

Transparent Marketing

So let’s get back to why I’m writing about a pizza campaign. It overcame one of the first hurdles in a crowded, overwhelming, thousands-of-sales-messages-per-day marketplace – it stood out. It grabbed my attention. And I even remembered the marketer’s name. How often can you say that about a pizza (or any other) marketing campaign?

As George Orwell has said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And, without being too harsh on my marketing peers, “universal deceit” is a pretty good summation of most marketing today. As Dr. Flint McGlaughlin has said, “When you say ‘sell,’ I hear ‘hype.’”

And that’s precisely why Transparent Marketing is so powerful. With the rise of social media, it is not hard for prospective customers to quickly learn the truth about your product. If you openly admit your weaknesses, you may be able to gain their trust. And, ultimately, every sale is an act of trust.

In Domino’s case, they are readily embracing social media – including every tweet, good or bad, right on their microsite:

Optimization Sequence

Of course, if your weaknesses are big enough, simply admitting them isn’t enough. You actually have to improve. Let’s take a quick look at the MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence formula:

Opr > Oprn > Ocnn ^©

Wherein:
Opr = Optimize Product Factor
Oprn = Optimize Presentation Factor
Ocnn = Optimize Channel Factor

As you can see in the formula, you must ensure you have an effective value proposition before you try to express it to prospects.

Of course, this can be the biggest challenge for marketers. First, admit your product has a problem. And then second, investing the resources and (in some cases) political capital to try to improve it.

In this case, social media can be your friend as well. Don’t just use services like Twitter as a one-way communication tool. Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Use this feedback, combined with other ways of communicating with (not to) your customers, to find ways to improve your product and build a case internally to invest in these improvements.

Grab the zeitgeist and don’t look back

If you look closely at how Domino’s Pizza applied these principles, they didn’t do it in a vacuum. The name of their campaign is The Pizza Turnaround.

The word Turnaround has been splashed all over the news in the past few years. With the biggest financial and automotive companies in the world needing government assistance to stay solvent, and then looking to make changes to return to profitability, the public has gotten quite used to companies needing to improve the way they do business.

So if you haven’t yet, now is a quite auspicious time to begin applying the principles of Transparent Marketing. Heck, even the notoriously broody band Pearl Jam has been writing about making a turnaround of sorts. As Eddie Vedder sings in the recent song “The Fixer”…

When something’s dark
Lemme shed a little light on it

When something’s cold
Lemme put a little fire on it

When something’s broke
I wanna put a little fixing on it

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