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

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 social media, Twitter

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

Internet Marketing News

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provoked a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London

ANSWER:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for your question.

If I might broaden the question slightly to interpret its essence as a transferrable principle, could I restate it as…

How much validity is there to the conventional wisdom that, in the Subject Line of an offer email message, numbers, certain symbols (especially £/€/$, %, and !) and “SPAM words” such as “Free” and “discount” will cause a dramatic reduction in deliverability, and consequently effectiveness?

… if so, then it’s surely an important one.

In the case of the particular company and study referred to on Slide 22 – that was precisely one of the questions we set out to answer.

What you couldn’t see in the context of Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami is that this particular two-treatment comparative vignette was just a tiny part of a much larger and broader study. We intended to test the specific, widely accepted presumption you mentioned.

We were also exploring a host of other best practices to see how valid they remained through the evolution of regulations as well technical filter changes by email service providers (ESPs) since the time they were first introduced and anecdotally adopted (around 2003-2005).

This was important because we know from our foundational Offer/Response-Optimization principles of “clarity trumps persuasion” and “specificity converts,” that the clearer and more specific subject line – i.e., the one with the “15% Off…” copy – should convert better.

What we found was that there was, in fact, a small but significant difference in deliverability – interestingly, it was more pronounced among the smaller ESPs. In addition, as we had predicted based on the “eme” heuristic, the Open Rate actually declined (…by more than 25%).

In the end, though, the central research question was “Which email subject line will result in the greatest projected net revenue?” As revealed in Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation, despite the slight dip in Delivery Rate, and the (what would otherwise have been alarming) drop in Open Rate, the Click-through Rate (CTR) to the landing page was 60.3% higher.

What he may not have mentioned is that, in direct answer to the research question, the Treatment subject line yielded a 56% increase in projected net revenue vs. the Control.

So, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

I hope that’s helpful, Chris.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email marketing at MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich on March 8^th and 9^th.

Dr. McGlaughlin’s four-hour workshop and keynote presentation will cover email capture rate and quality, open rates, conversion, and building customer trust and loyalty with email. He will also be conducting live optimization of audience submissions – a lively and always-popular segment.

Email Marketing, Research Topics 2010 Email Summit, clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, webinar

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, webinar

“…that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
But might not be as well branded…”

Ugh, sorry for that. After a video, a blog post, and an interview, I’m all out of witty love-plus-marketing puns. Just goes to show, Transparent Marketing is more powerful than a marketing gimmick any day.

So I’m going to turn it over to the MarketingExperiments community. We asked you to send virtual Valentines to your favorite industry news sources to celebrate this well-marketed and quite gimmicky holiday that celebrates a martyr who…well let’s just say it moves a lot of product.

We wanted you to call out those blogs and websites that don’t just help you do your job better, but have truly found a place in your heart. Here is the response from our favorite Romeo…

XDA-Developers.com, you satisfy my nerdy need to update firmware in a collaborative workspace.
Your website and forums are the greatest place.
No warez are provided
and if they are – they’re quickly hide’d.
I’d give you a screaming hoot
for a working dual boot
Windows Mobile 6.5.5 + Android ROM that I can tinker, tweak and optimize
until I’m old and blind.

– Jason Croyle
Lead Generation Expert and Creative Social Media Strategist at InTouch and Owner of Total Perception 10,000 Marketing Solutions

Admittedly, Jason works for one of our sister companies, so picking him might seem more wrong than pairing up a Montague and a Capulet. But, the good pilgrim rhymed “dual boot” with “screaming hoot.” If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

So we will not make him deny thy company and refuse thy title to be named the MarketingExperiments community’s Romeo of Marketers. His love is true, even if his last attempt at rhyming was not.

Now let’s not forget Juliet…

Our ISPs are white(listed), our competitors are blue,
I most love CopyBlogger, Clickz and Brand New.

– Jade Ingmire
Corporate Storyteller at Marketfish and Editor-in-Chic of Bridezilla.com

Jade doesn’t just have love in her heart, but she clearly has a way with words as well (her job description is simply “Word weaver. Yarn spinner. Raconteur rockstar.”) So not only will we name Jade the MarketingExperiments community’s Juliet of Marketers, but she is now the Poet Laureate of the MarketingExperiments community as well.

While Valentine’s Day candy is now half off and most marketers have moved on to the next gimmick, it’s not too late to share your love in our comments section. And you don’t even have to stick to iambic pentameter.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialkrb/ / CC BY 2.0

Internet Marketing News marketing, MarketingExperiments

“Loooovin’ you, is easy because you’re marketable….la la la la la la la laaaa.”

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and love is in the air all throughout the MarketingExperiments lab. In honor of this well-marketed holiday, we sent a few virtual Valentines to our favorite advertising and marketing industry news sources.

Cuddle up with your favorite blog and watch the love flow…

Now here’s a little recap (for some link love)…

• Research Analyst, Adam Lapp, made like Pepé Le Pew with Vandelay Design Blog
• Yours truly got all weak in the knees about AdBusters
• Director of Marketing, Pamela Markey, said “You had me at click here” to Creativity
• Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, composed a sonnet about CNNMoney
• Senior Manager of Research and Strategy, Boris Grinkot, was our irrepressible Don Juan who refused to be locked into just one site…but he did confess to cruising Twitter in search of something appealing
• While we couldn’t drag our director, Austin McCraw, in front of the camera, the man behind the magic told us that his muse was Smashing Magazine

Nothing is harder than confessing to a (possibly) unrequited love. Now that we’ve walked the line, we want to hear from you.

What advertising or marketing industry news source do you really love? What blog or website just completes you? Send us your virtual Valentine via email, LinkedIn or as a comment to this post. We’ll publish our favorites in a future post right here on the blog…so be creative.

General, Internet Marketing News advertising, copywriting, design, Internet marketing, marketing, online marketing, resources

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation…

And like any good conversation, a few elements are key – clarity, proper timing, a common language, and a focus on how the person you’re talking to hears what you’re saying. Combine these elements with a methodology that allows you to optimize each part in a real-world, feedback-intensive setting, and you’ve mastered the basics of email marketing.

And do it all in a radically honest way – talk to your customers like a person, not like the typical marketer. In the end, being direct is the best way to earn the trust of a skeptical customer.

Dr. McGlaughlin ended this web clinic with live optimization of audience-submitted email messages. This last segment was so popular that we’ve decided to add a part three to our series on email response optimization that focuses exclusively on live optimization.

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching live during a free webinar with our sister company InTouch – Online Lead Generation: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads – on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, Email Marketing, email optimization, Flint McGlaughlin, marketing, marketing research, web clinic, webinar

When we asked for your 2010 Internet marketing predictions, you told us that local is going to be huge this year. And I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t wait for the day I can simply search for a product on one site and find the best price of an in-stock item at a small business or major chain store near me.

But in our fervor for the new opportunities cropping up at a micro level in our own hometown, let’s not overlook the macro possibilities. So today I’d like to take our focus off of local and discuss, well, the entire world.

After all, you are reading the MarketingExperiments Blog International Edition. Sounds fancy, and I loved seeing the International Edition of American publications when I was in Montréal (très chic!). But, of course, everything on the Internet is essentially an International Edition. After all, our readers include Stephanie from Canada, Meraj from Singapore, Inna from Germany, Gabriela from Argentina, and Gavin from the UK.

How well do you know your audience? For Americans at least, sometimes I worry we have a view of the world similar to Saul Steinberg’s famous cover for The New Yorker. But let’s not forget that this is the World Wide Web. Your customers are, or at least have the potential to come from, anywhere in the world.

So here are some thoughts to consider and ideas to test when appealing to an international audience:

Where in the world?

Now that the world is your oyster, where should you begin? Most analytics software, such as Google Analytics, will break down your traffic by country of origin (and drill down even deeper than that). Understanding where your current audience comes from can help you shape your message.

But don’t just limit yourself to where your audience is coming from today, consider where they could be coming from and think about how you can target content to that potential audience. In addition, if you have an ecommerce or even lead generation site, look at how your traffic compares to actual orders and leads. If you get a big chunk of traffic from a certain nation, yet they very rarely order or become a lead, what in your conversion process is stopping them?

Understand when it pays to habla Español

While you don’t necessarily need an entire website for every possible language, it is always a good idea to delve into proper segmentation of your current and possible audience. And if you find a big enough potential market, that commonality of language may significantly help your conversion rate.
You don’t even necessarily need to look beyond your borders to find that opportunity. For example, according to the U.S. Census, the buying power of Americans of Hispanic origin is projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2014. If that segment could generate a significant amount of business for you, you should probably consider testing custom Spanish-language landing pages to see if they are worth the investment.

Shalom means hello…and goodbye

If you do choose to test custom foreign-language pages, keep the word custom in mind. Don’t just settle for poor translations of your current pages, but truly put the time and investment into understanding that segment and its motivations…as you would with any other segment.

Marketing history is littered with funny (and costly) cross-cultural blunders – such as the introduction of the Chevy Nova in Central and South America. It doesn’t take a major blunder. Even simple bad translations can turn away potential customers. I probably would not shop in the “Exciting Dressy Fashion zone” or want to eat “Desktop bacteria rice.”

It’s easy to laugh at these snafus, but if we do not truly understand the cultures of global and bilingual markets we seek to enter, we may be making these same mistakes. We can’t be transparent marketers if our audience doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. And far from welcoming new customers, we may be turning them off to our message.

You can still spreek het English…

While custom foreign-language landing pages are worth testing if the segmentation is right for your organization, don’t feel like you necessarily need to invest resources to customize your site for every possible language. As French is la langue de l’amour, English is currently the international language of business and the Web (after all, ICANN is still an American organization).

Also, services like Google Translate and Babel Fish enable your non-English-speaking visitors to instantly translate your page into almost any language for free. So here are a few other ideas to test in your native language…

Ciao bello world!

As I said above, there is an entire world out there. Just make a right at the Atlantic or a left at the Pacific and you’ll likely find untapped markets. So acknowledge it…as I did in the intro to this post when I mentioned our readers from across the globe or as Boris Grinkot did in a recent post where he simply mentioned regulations to consider in India.

The first step to profiting from an international audience is recognizing that you have one. Test how often to mention different cultures and which cultures to mention and see how that affects your traffic.

6,809 ways to say “customer service”

Even better than acknowledging the existence of other cultures, show them that you truly cater to their needs. If you’re looking for some good examples, Israeli websites tend cater to a global audience well (a combination of state subsidies that makes international shipping cheap and the global interest of a nation that holds importance to three major religions).

One good example from that country is TheGreatShofar.com. This site clearly illustrates how it serves other parts of the world by, for example, having an American phone number and a testimonial from someone in America right on its homepage (leading us to believe that either America is one of its most important, sought after segments or this is a landing page optimized for Americans).

Also, the site clearly spells out in its FAQ that it ships around the world:

I live in Timbuktu.  Will you ship to me?

Yes.  We ship to Timbuktu as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China and pretty much anywhere that has a postal service.

To find out how much it will cost to ship to your location, just add your desired products to the shopping cart and our shipping estimator will display your shipping costs.

One way we try to cater to our international audience is through live training and speaking engagements around the world. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email response optimization at Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich from March 8-9, 2010. Register (in English) today. Or, if you prefer, register (in German) today.

General, Internet Marketing Strategy cultural marketing, marketing, online marketing

On Wednesday we showed you two pages and asked you to pick the highest performer. And congratulations to Brad Einarsen who not only picked the ideal incentive, but was closest to the conversion gain achieved by that incentive. But any site can just display a few screen captures and ask you which test won. The real value lies in truly discovering the principles behind successful experiments so you can test those principles on your own sites. With that in mind, here is the full story…

Response Capture’s B2B client wanted to find a scalable alternative to telephone-based opt-in collection and improve an established benchmark landing page conversion rate as well. This Beaverton, Oregon-based performance marketing company decided to test for the ideal opt-in incentive while experimenting with the landing page.

Control White Paper Landing Page: Friction at work

Potential customers were driven to a landing page by email. The conversion goal was to have visitors download a white paper from a respected industry author.
Response Capture quickly focused on a few areas that would be ripe for optimization. They sought to reduce distractions such as navigation, search, and account creation. They also wanted to present an image of the white paper offer, bank on the white paper author’s creditability, and reduce the friction generated by the amount of form fields.

Test #1: A wealth of information…and results

After removing distractions, presenting an image of the offer, and reducing the form field requirement to just email address (and even then, pre-populating the email text box for all known visitors), Response Capture achieved a 25% opt-in rate gain (from the check box option) and 36.4% conversion rate gain (of white paper downloads).

To gain the additional information that was lost when the form was reduced to just email, they created a second-step after the white paper download. This page used Amazon.com gift cards as an incentive to provide additional profile information. We’ll get to these results in a bit, but first let’s focus on this impressive landing page optimization.

“Adequacy is the Enemy of Excellence.” – Peter Drucker

These were significant gains that produced incremental opt-ins for the client. And if Response Capture had stopped here, this would be a very successful case study and an excellent example of how you can test key principles on your own sites. But, since we are profiling Response Capture on the MarketingExperiments blog, we all know that they did not stop there. Our story now takes us to the Emerald City.

Troy O’Bryan, the Co-Founder and Chief Response Officer of Response Capture, attended a Live Optimization Workshop taught by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin in Seattle. That changed everything.

“Troy was the first to take MarketingExperiments training program and he led the charge of implementing the learnings into the campaign that was referenced in the blog.” said Bill Kent, Response Strategist at Response Capture.

Before we continue with our story, I want to pause and ask you a simple request. Brag. I know what you’re thinking. In an age of Transparent Marketing, bragging is a totally inappropriate behavior. And I would agree. But I’m not asking you to brag to your customers; rather I want you to brag to your peers.
You see, we love hearing directly from our more than 2,000 alumni and learning about the success they’re creating in the real world. We only discovered Response Capture’s success from a Twitter comment about Bill’s blog post.

Alumni are often hesitant to tell us about their success directly because they worry we’ll poke holes in their methodology or suggest even bigger improvements they can gain. Don’t be shy. Tell us about your success in the comments section.

Test #2: After the Landing-Page-Optimization Certification Course

While Response Capture had already driven an impressive gain for the client, Troy noticed several areas they could further optimize after returning from the Live Optimization Workshop in Seattle. He learned that he needed to improve message consistency and created a new headline promoting the offer versus the generic “wealth of knowledge” headline from the previous test. He clearly supported the value proposition message by changing the copy to a bulleted list of white paper benefits. And he decreased the resistance to respond with a new, benefit-oriented button that says “Get the Free Report Now.”

Results: A 258% Conversion Rate Increase for the Client and additional projects for the Agency

The new landing page delivered a 162.5% conversion rate increase over the previously optimized page and a 258% conversion rate increase over the original page. The new opt-in rate for the continuation offer increased 201% over the original page and 141% over the previously optimized page. And these results came at a reduced cost per collected opt-in.

What’s In It for Me?

In addition, Response Capture tested the incentive that would generate the highest amount of profile completions. Remember, this was a two-part process. The landing page converted white paper downloads and allowed opt-ins but only asked for the email address. And then the continuation offer captured more information from the prospect.

They tested a sweepstakes offering 20 Amazon gift cards worth $25…

…against a sweepstakes offering 10 $50 gift cards…

The sweepstakes that offered less, more valuable gift cards (10 $50 gift cards) gained 31% more conversions. The total cost of the incentive was the same ($500), but by testing and discovering that prospects preferred quality over quantity they were able to increase profile completion.

These are excellent results any agency would be proud of. It’s always fulfilling to deliver for our clients, but let’s talk about what these numbers really mean for Response Capture. After the success of these projects, they were referred to additional divisions and there is now an ongoing relationship between Response Capture and its client. And it all started with one class…

“After attending the live course, I had one of our Response Strategists take the self-guided, on-demand Landing Page Optimization Course online. And we have another Response Strategist who is scheduled to take the course next quarter as well,” Troy said. “We are big fans of the MarketingExperiments curriculum. We learned not just how to optimize a page, but how to optimize the thought process of visitors. By applying these learning’s, our clients have realized stronger results and our organization has benefited from happy clients.”

Our story doesn’t end here. With every page, there is always room for our improvement. Troy asked our researchers to take a look at his most recently optimized page, and propose further ideas to test. Come back to the blog on Monday and see that advice.

Landing Page Optimization, Practical Application, Research Topics marketing, online marketing, online testing, workshops

This challenge comes to us from Troy O’Bryan, the Co-Founder and Chief Response Officer of Response Capture – a performance marketing company in Beaverton, Oregon. Troy is an alumnus of a Live Optimization Workshop taught by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin in Seattle.

Objective: Response Capture’s B2B client sought to improve landing page conversion rates while generating optins for ongoing communications

Goal: To gather profile information

Primary research question: Which incentive will generate the most conversions?

Approach: A/B single-factorial split test

“… a chance to win one of twenty “… a chance to win one of ten
$25 Amazon gift cards…”                          $50 Amazon gift cards…”

The Results:

As we teach in our Landing Page Optimization course, the objective of Incentive is to “tip the balance” of emotional forces from the negative, in this case represented by the Friction of filling in several fields of profile information as well as by the Anxiety of submitting personal information.

There is an “ideal incentive.” Incentives must be tested to find that ideal. And that is the challenge Troy took on with the above test.

But, dear reader, we post a different challenge to you…can you use your marketing intuition to guess which incentive performed best? Remember, the cost of these offers was the same, yet the formulation of the incentive produced a conversion rate increase for Troy’s client.

Which do you think performed best?

Take a good look at these incentives and let us know which one you think performed best in the comments section. Also, let us know by how much you think it improved conversion. The marketer that chooses the correct incentive with the closest conversion rate gain guess wins…the jealousy and admiration of his or her peers.

Come back on Friday to find the conversion gain winner along with the full story behind this successful test so you can drive similar improvements with your own pages.

Practical Application marketing, online marketing, online testing, workshops