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

When you think of conversion optimization, you likely think of a page with a very clear funnel and conversion objective. For example, selling a product or getting an email address in a lead capture form. But what if your goal is to simply engage more with the visitor?

In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at a conversion optimization test from a publishing site.

The Challenge

“We noticed a huge increase in traffic since we hired a new SEO. We also noticed that this brought in mostly new visitors who were, by definition, not loyal and bounce rate spikes were correlated with spikes in SEO traffic,” said Ian Larson, Senior Product Manager, PMC.

PMC is an online publisher. The company operates HollywoodLife.com, among other sites. For this site, the goal of a first visit to an article page is for a new user to view more than three pages and stay for more than 90 seconds.

  Read more…

What does it take to get a customer to act? Several micro-yeses that lead to the Ultimate Yes.

This graphic illustrates the different factors at play in obtaining that Ultimate Yes – a marketing conversion. Even more important, this graphic illustrates the factors you can optimize to improve the probability that you gain that conversion.

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“The funnel represents and should be thought of as a representation of what is the heart of marketing, and that is a series of decisions,” said Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS.

“Those decisions are key transitions; I would call them micro-yeses. There are a series of micro-yeses necessary to helping someone achieve an ultimate yes. The Ultimate Yes is the sale in most cases. At each of these junctures, we have to help people climb up the funnel.”

Let’s break down each element in the funnel and the role it plays in achieving a marketing conversion.

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When you break marketing down, strip away marketing automation platforms and analytics and clickthrough rates, marketing is essentially communicating value to the customer in the most efficient and effective way possible so they will want to take an action.

Of course, thanks to all the other complexities of daily life in the marketing department that I just mentioned, and many more, it’s easy to lose sight of this simple fact.

To communicate value, you need everyone who works on your marketing campaigns to have a clear understanding of your value proposition – not just for your company as a whole, but for every action you desire a customer to take.

Answering the question before you make the ask

“We need a way to identify and craft value propositions more specific to our current marketing efforts,” said Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS. “Underneath all value propositions is an even more fundamental question.”

The fundamental question is: “If I am [a particular prospect] why should I [take this action] rather than [this/these other action(s)]?”

“Understanding this fundamental question gives us the flexibility to modify and create more specific ‘Derivative Value Propositions’ at four essential levels,” Flint said.

To aid you in crafting effective marketing, MECLABS has created The Value Proposition Spectrum to help you identify the questions that you need to answer at each level of your marketing efforts.

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1.       Primary Value Proposition

Your company needs a primary value proposition, which is the answer to the question: “Why should your ideal prospect buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

But many marketers stop there. However, every action you ask every type of customer to take requires a value proposition. Whether you’ve taken the time to state it explicitly or not, your potential customers subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) ask themselves the value (for them specifically) of taking any action you ask them to take.

Here is an example of an anonymized page where the expressions of the company-level, primary value proposition are highlighted:

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2.       Prospect-Level Value Proposition

The best way to use this visual is from the inside out. As I said, start with the primary value proposition (which depending on your role within the organization, you may or may not have a hand in crafting), and then break out which key prospects you are targeting with your marketing.

For each prospect, you should answer this question: “Why should [PROSPECT A] buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

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3.       Product-Level Value Proposition

Now that you’ve identified your prospects, which products are you trying to sell them? Each product requires its own value proposition, which you can craft by answering this question: “Why should [PROSPECT A] buy this product rather than any other product?”

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4.       Process-Level Value Proposition

As I said above, every action you ask a prospect to take requires a value proposition.

Now that you’ve identified a value proposition for each product you’re trying to sell each prospect that aligns with your company’s primary value proposition, you have to craft a value proposition for each conversion step associated with a specific product.

Here is an example question to ask yourself to help identify this process-level value proposition: “Why should [PROSPECT A] click this PPC ad rather than any other PPC ad?”

You need to answer the same question for an email capture page of, in the case of the example below, a webinar registration …

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Related Resources:

Value Proposition: A free worksheet to help you win arguments in any meeting

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Value Proposition: Revealing hidden value in your products and offers

There are two ways to improve results:

1. Get more budget to send more traffic to your landing pages through print ads, PPC ads, or time-consuming tactics like SEO and social media.
2.  Improve the conversion rate of the traffic you’re getting.

So what are some of the easiest ways to do the latter? Simple changes to make to your landing pages to improve results?

On Wednesday’s free Web clinic, “Quick Win Clinic (Part 1): The 5 easiest changes to make to your landing pages right now,” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECABS, will share the principles we’ve discovered to help you improve results.

But first, we wanted to hear what your peers had to say about easy landing page changes with big impacts … Read more…

The purpose of a subject line is to get an open. However, the purpose of a subject line is not only to get an open. In our recent subject line contest, there were some curious submissions that made me think this blog post was necessary:

• Mom told me to wear clean underwear in case I was in an accident. I wish she had told me about this too …
• A priest, a rabbi and a MECLABS LPO expert walk into a bar in Denver …
• RE: The video showed a bald man. Why?
• 1 Thing You MUST Do in Denver Before You Die
• Want to find the end of a rainbow AND the pot of gold?
• Denver Flight #ME430 [Confirm your seat]
• Open &; Enjoy Real Bacon Smell…
• This is your brain on email.
• What the #@*? What should you test next?

I know some of these are likely meant as jokes, but if the amount of misleading subject lines that fill my own inbox every day is any indication, many of them are probably serious.

The road to unsubscribes is paved by good intentions

And I don’t mean to pick on our contest entrants. If fact, I’m going to show you a subject line test I ran making this same mistake later in this post. Even in the blog post, “Announcing the Winner of the Email Subject Line Copywriting Contest!” by Sonia Simone, CMO, Copyblogger Media, she discusses how I pushed back on one of her selections because I was worried it was misleading …

For example, we really liked the header “Testing — does this link work for you?” (We defined that one as a Curiosity headline.) But MECLABS had some concerns that the element of trickery would annoy their subscribers and lead to unsubscribes … definitely not the result we were after.

So why do we, as marketers, come up with these misleading subject lines? Well, I think our intentions are in the correct place: We’re simply looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace. However …

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The results are in. A few weeks ago, we asked the MarketingExperiments blog community and the Copyblogger community for help on a subject line test. Today we’ll look at the process we went through, the results, and what you can learn from it all.

Background

Through a blog post on the MarketingExperiments blog and a blog post on Copyblogger, we asked for your subject line test ideas for an email that promoted Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver. We received 409 entries through the MarketingExperiments blog and 492 entries through Copyblogger.

Then came the culling.

Nathan Thompson, Senior Manager, Research and Strategy, MECLABS Conversion Group, was the lead judge for the entries on our blog, and Sonia Simone, CMO, Copyblogger Media, LLC, led her team’s effort (Sonia wrote about their process today on Copyblogger).

“Some were clever, some were text-book marketing, and others were, well … weird,” Nathan said.

“Our process for cutting down the list involved removing those that were factually incorrect first as we didn’t want to incite a riot among our readers once they opened the email and realized we had tricked them. Then we removed those that were too long, too confusing or unclear.”

Once the list was narrowed down to the acceptable subject lines, Nathan and the MECLABS Conversion Group team began grouping them into categories based on what the subject lines were attempting to convey:

• Incentive
• Curiosity
• Value exchange
• Newsworthiness
• Etc.

“Then we voted on the subject lines we felt were the best representation of each of these categories,” Nathan said.

  Read more…