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

Early afternoon on day 3 of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas, I caught a case study with Justin Bridegan, Senior Marketing Manager, MECLABS, presenting with Frank Cartwright, SVP of Product and Platform Development, GamersFirst, a free online gaming website that offers premium subscriptions, items and packages for purchase.

The challenge at GamersFirst was getting more people through their sales funnel and turning them into purchasing customers.

To improve the performance of its sales funnel, GamersFirst extensively tested its email marketing.

Frank says, “We wanted to transform the email marketing division from a cost center to a profit center.”

GamersFirst’s funnel includes 100% of website users are registered, the company gets 80% of those registrants verified, 60% login to the site, and only 10% actually make a purchase.

One group of tests involved sending the validation reminder email to registrants. GamersFirst tested the format of the email – text or graphic, and the timing of the email – 24 versus 72 hours.

  Read more…

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 kicked off Wednesday, February 8 with Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MECLABS, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments.

Sergio emphasized this is a research-based event driven by the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, featuring W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, as the lead author. This book is our ninth annual benchmark study.

The benchmark report includes research and insights from 2,735 marketers, and identifies barriers to email marketing success and what marketers are doing to overcome them.

For example, here’s a chart from the report that illustrates email marketing challenges:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, email marketers are facing a wide variety of issues at fairly high percentages. Everything from data systems integration to email efficiency comes in at 40%, or higher. Read more…

This week at the San Francisco leg of MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2011, Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS, and Nicolette Dease, Program Manager, MECLABS Leads Group, provided tactical training on optimizing lead generation.

Part of this presentation was a case study on finding the most efficient list source based on a test that looked at several different lead sources.

The objective of the test was to determine if higher-cost/higher-quality data can drive down overall cost-per-lead, and the primary research question was, “Which campaign data source will drive the most efficient value?”

The test design looked at six list segments with 300 accounts and 80 hours of calling per segment. Let’s first look at how much each lead costs for discovery:

• Multi-source 1, validated by phone based on role – record cost $24
• Multi-source 2, validated by phone based on title – record cost $14.50
• Multi-source 3, validated by phone – record cost $6
• Multi-source 4, validated by email – record cost $3
• User-generated, validated by business cards – record cost $1
• Single-source, no validation – record cost $0.49

Read more…

At the West Coast leg of the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week the first case study of the day featured IBM’s homepage redesign and the overall approach IBM uses in its redesign process. Joan Renner, Content Manager, Corporate Marketing Digital Initiatives, IBM, presented on how Big Blue engages in site redesign.

But they don’t stop at the landing page. They go the next step into the funnel and test landing pages, as well.

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Landing page testing

Joan says, “Having great landing pages is very high value to the company and these tests wouldn’t be difficult to perform.” These two attributes made landing page testing a high priority in their testing backlog, which is their list of tests they’d like to run, ranked on three factors to determine priority:

• Internal visibility
• Difficulty
• Value

And she added, “We’re putting into our organization the ability for any division to come forward and ask for help.”

In this case a test was created to improve the landing page for the IBM X-Force Internet security and threat report landing page and led to a dramatic improvement in the page’s performance.

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Toward the end of last year, Active Network, a technology and media company specializing in online registration and event management software, began a testing and optimization program on the website of one of its brands, RegOnline.

This week’s MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter article is a look at that entire program, but for this blog post I want to highlight an interesting test conducted in the middle of the cycle. This particular test deserves a closer look because it created impressive results, but more importantly, it illustrates why it is important to be flexible with a testing program.

At the beginning of Active Network’s testing cycle, the tests were conducted on the RegOnline homepage. The problem was that tested treatments were not producing positive results — and the homepage accounts for about 90% of RegOnline’s revenue.

Essentially, with the treatments being outperformed by the control, the homepage tests were hurting RegOnline’s bottom line.

This caused concern and discouragement with both the testing team and top-level management at Active Network.

A decision was made to begin testing other channels, such as landing pages, PPC ad copy and email messaging, to hopefully find some learnings that could inform future homepage tests. Another benefit was because these other channels had a more singular purpose than the homepage, it was easier to design a test to get a “win” and ease some of the discouragement.

Lauren Guinn, Director Online Marketing, Active Network, explains, “Because there is so much business risk testing on our homepage, we shifted to smaller tests on other channels and then applied these learnings to big tests on our homepage.” Read more…

Along with 45,000-plus attendees, I’m at Dreamforce ’11 in San Francisco this week as a guest of HubSpot. On Wednesday afternoon, I caught a session by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot about “engineering contagious ideas” using social media. You may be familiar with Dan from his personal website, his very popular HubSpot webinar series (including the recent Guinness Book recognized largest webinar ever) or his books such as the recently published, “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.”

Dan’s talk at Dreamforce was based on his new book and his hierarchy of contagiousness:

• Exposure
• Attention
• Motivation

He broke down each of the three areas with a series of “best practices” myths, and presented the reality based on his research using publicly available information, or metrics on his own online real estate.

For this post I’m pulling one example from each of Dan’s hierarchy zones. Read more…