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

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” MarketingExperiments research analysts provide practical test ideas and examples in the “What else can I test?” column.

According to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” from the Center for Media Research, email marketing is still the most preferred and effective way channel marketers have to communicate directly with their customers. It is also the preferred method of communication by consumers as well. In its Email Benchmark Guide 2009, MarketingSherpa reported that consumers overwhelmingly identify email as the ‘best way for companies to communicate with me’ (see survey results).

In this post, we are going to review several tactics you can consider to improve the look and feel of your emails and, in so doing, increase clickthrough rate. However, please remember that improving email response starts even before designing the layout and content of your email. It’s very important you look at how to increase qualified opt-ins, rate of deliverability, quality of rented list, etc. These are topics we will review in future posts. Improving the content and layout of your emails can give you quick a win. Also, if you start testing now, you can be ready for great a performing email template for the holiday season.

Note: most of the email examples I’m using are from ecommerce retailers, but the same principles apply to services or B2B emails.

Here are eight tactics that you can use or re-visit to increase your email clickthrough rate:

1) Analyze and segment your list. No matter when or how frequently you send emails, if they are not relevant, you will never achieve the highest possible response. A customer segmentation analysis will help you increase relevance by identifying the number of unique customer segments and their main product/service interest. With this information, you can not only target the content of your emails better, but also reduce the number of calls to action per email; preferably to only one call to action (see NextStage Evolution study results of ‘Raising clicks: Reduce the Number of Actions‘).

As an example, I can cite a recent case study from MarketingSherpa that explains how The American Greetings team got a 70% lift in conversions from a simple email test that matched subscribers’ preferences to content in the offer. In short, they started from zero by analyzing the lifecycle of their subscribers, type of ecards they sent, and type of senders they were. For St. Patrick’s Day, American Greetings team designed two versions of the email – one promoting a traditional St. Patrick’s Day e-card, the other promoting a humorous St. Patrick’s Day e-card. Conversions, in this case, were people who went to the site after seeing the email and purchased the e-card or a $15.99 annual subscription. See email designs below:

Funny St.Patrick's Day Email

Traditional St. Patrick's Day Email

FYI – If you are interested in reading more about segmentation analysis, here is a great article from iMedia with application examples: Email Segmentation for Success

2) Maintain continuity from subject line to headline to call to action. The role of the subject line is to either match a specific motivation of your customers or spark it. In any case, once they are motivated by your subject line, the role of your email is to maintain and strengthen that motivation. Therefore it is important to re-state or support the offer in the body and call to action. However, don’t go overboard with long copy. Remember that the goal of the email is to get a click, not to do the sale. Short copy and bullet points are usually all you need to support the offer. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

Or this

3) Use simple and vertical layouts. As mentioned before, try as much as possible to design your email body for one specific call to action. Secondary calls to actions and support links can be present in the email but they need to be clearly de-emphasized. Consider always an email template that guides the eye path from top (headline) to bottom (copy and call to action). The same principles that we recommend to landing pages apply to emails (see Optimizing Offer Pages). In case you have seen that presenting multiple offers works better with your target customers, then I recommend using a vertical layout; list offers in order of profitability for your business. Usually the first offer on the email is the one that will receive the most clicks. See examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

4) Make sure your CTA stands out. Although you can design emails to be clickable anywhere in the body, it helps if you drive customers’ attention to a specific call to action. The more you can guide your customers’ eye-path to certain action the better the chances they will perform that action. At the end it is all about reducing unsupervised thinking! See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this	Not this
But this	Or this

5) Offer alternative-view options. In cases when images are blocked or customers are checking the email from their cell phones, it helps to present the offer with simple text links at the top of the email. Just adding clear, easy-to-follow text links can increase the opportunities for your customers to read and act on your emails. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

6) Try a PS note. A PS note is a great resource to complement the offer or add an additional incentive for customers to click. In terms of usability, PS notes are not only effective with those customers who were not sold initially and needed an additional push, but it is also effective with those customers who open the email and scan it from top to bottom to get a sense of what the whole email is about. When they scan from bottom up there is a chance they will act on the PS note of the email. See example:

Example

7) Leverage the footer for social media. We all want our customers to follow us in any way and everywhere. However, most of the time calls to action to become fan or followers are secondary goals on most email campaigns. The footer is a great place for secondary objectives like this one. The calls to action are not in the way of the main offer and do not compete with the primary call to action. See example:

Example

8 ) Advertise other products or present up/cross sells subtly. The same way visitors are used to identifying the left column of a web page as an advertising area, they identify the left column of an email or newsletter as another advertising area. As a result, the effectiveness of the advertising in your emails is minimal. Customers learn to automatically avoid this area. The most effective way to fight banner blindness is to place advertising in unusual places or use uncommon formats (atypical banner sizes and contextual text links instead of banners). See examples: (Amazon.com, 1-800-Flowers).

Example

Example 2

Let us know if you test any of these variations with your email campaigns and how they do. Also, feel free to share with us any other ideas that you have seen working really well.

Not sure what you should test next? Want to share your testing ideas, questions or feedback on this topic? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @anagabydiaz

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions  are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” To answer these queries with practical test ideas and examples, we’re pleased to present our new “What else can I test?” column.

More than 60% of US online retailers are seeing shopping cart abandonment rates of over 20% this year, according to a recent eMarketer article. Among the most cited and common reasons for that abandonment: just doing comparison shopping, lack of money, looking for a coupon, and no alternative payment methods available.

In a recent survey with one of our research partners, we found that the number one reason for abandonment was shipping prices, followed by “I did not intend to purchase at this moment.”

Here are a handful of ideas, drawn from our research, that can help combat those issues and decrease your cart abandonment rates:

1) Offer alternative payment methods. Credit cards are still the most popular method of payment with about 55% of online retail purchase volume in 2008 (eMarketer), followed by debit cards with 27%. The forecast for next five years shows credit cards as the #1 payment type. However, alternative payment types like debit cards, Bill Me Later, PayPal, and Google Checkout are growing fast in popularity.

Test offering any of these alternative methods and don’t forget to promote them in your shopping cart as well as on your homepage and product pages. It’s important to let visitors know all the payment options available as soon as they land on your website. See examples:

Alternative method of payments - example 1

Alternative method of payments - example 2

Note: Some online retailers are seeing a significant improvement in average order value by providing a Bill Me Later option.

2) State your shipping prices or rules upfront. Simply state your shipping prices or rules in a visible area in your website and cart page. The best locations are next to the shopping cart, page header or footer or within content in the product pages. See examples:

Shipping prices upfront - example 1

Shipping prices upfront - example 2

3) Offer exclusive products online. These can help with shoppers who are just browsing and researching. You may need to do some research to find attractive products that you won’t lose money on if you only offered them online. See example:

Online exclusive offer example

4) Put your nav bar to work for your cart. It’s a common mistake to think that the navigation bar needs to stay the same in your cart page. I understand usability might be the reason, but you don’t want to offer more links to your visitors to abandon the cart. Instead your nav bar can become your center of “anxiety relief.” Use it to state your shipping prices, customer support options (phone number, email, chat), method of payments available, and security seals. The nav bar can help reduce your visitors’ anxiety by making them feel more secure and comfortable with your checkout process. (If you don’t have a navigation bar use the bottom section of your cart page). See example:

Anxiety relief nav bar example

5) Promote your promo codes. The feeling of missing a promotion because you don’t have a promo code can be frustrating. It actually can lead to abandoning the cart to go and search for promo codes online. Instead of wasting your visitors’ time, offer them a way to get promo codes directly from you. GetElastic provides a great example of how to do this. Another option, if visitors come from a channel that you can control (email, PPC, banner, affiliate), is to have the promo code prefilled for them. You can use the visitors’ session or URL to carry over the promo code value and use it right in the shopping cart page.

6) Plug in a progress bar. This is a very simple and easy update to your cart and checkout pages. Especially for those online retailers that have a short (two to four steps) checkout process, having a progress bar can help reduce visitors’ anxiety and encourage them to continue. For longer checkouts (more than four steps), I’d recommend testing first reducing the number of steps and then testing a progress bar. See example:

Progress bar example

7) Brand your checkout process. Along with the progress bar, naming your checkout process can reduce visitors’ anxiety. By naming I refer to using adjectives to describe the nature of your checkout process. For example, “easy checkout”, “1-2-3 checkout”, “express checkout”, etc. Test different names powerful enough that can create a sense of relief in your visitors’ mind. See example:

Branded checkout example

For more tactics and suggestions on how to optimize an eretail website, join us for our Sept. 30 web clinic: Ecommerce Optimization: A holiday playbook for procrastinators.

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions  are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” To answer these queries with practical test ideas and examples, we’re pleased to present our new “What else can I test?” column.

As I wrote in a previous post, optimizing for lead generation is a more complex task than meets the eye. However, one area where you can run tests quickly and easily is with short lead capture forms (see example at right: short form embedded in product page).

2. Headline and call to action. These two elements together can make a significant improvement to your site’s lead generation rate. However, it’s critical that they communicate value and that there is continuity between them.

Both the headline and call to action can be used to re-state, clarify or quantify the value proposition or emphasize a specific benefit. Continuity refers to how well the page uses the call to action to confirm or reaffirm the promise of the headline and the supporting content elements in between.

What you’ll want to test with these elements can vary widely. But if your page doesn’t have continuity between the headline and call to action, your first test should be changing them so they’re more closely aligned. They don’t need to match word-for-word, but should be clearly and intuitively connected. 

[Example above right shows a form headline and call to action with continuity; click to enlarge.]

3. Form design. Some of the best lead capture forms are those that don’t even look like a form. Forms can create a lot of friction for prospects, whether it’s due to the length or the questions and required fields, or just the look and feel. As a result, form design is an area where you have latitude to alter several factors at once.

So where should you start? The more the form can be associated with the surrounding content of the page, the better. You don’t want it to be totally obscured, but to look and feel like a natural extension of the content, leading prospects to take that next step — sign up for access, request or download more information, and so on.

Test removing borders and boxes around the forms, or squares or dark colors that set it off from the content. In the example image, you’ll see that the short lead capture form is embedded in the content to connect with the prospect’s thought process.

[Example above right shows a form integrated with content; click to enlarge.]

Let me know if you decide to test any of these variations with your short lead capture forms, and look for the next column, where I’ll be looking at test ideas for ecommerce shopping carts.

Not sure what you should test next? Want to share your testing ideas, questions or feedback on this topic? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @anagabydiaz

If you’ve got a B2B website, you’re always looking for ways to generate more leads online. But while recent research shows 71% of B2B marketers view their site as one of the most important marketing tools, only 31% said their site is “highly effective” at generating leads.

That leaves a lot of room for testing and improving business results. However, optimizing for lead generation is not as straightforward as optimizing for conversion rate.

Conversion rate is the final metric that decides whether or not your online process/funnel is working. In contrast, lead generation only tells you a portion of the story. The leads you generate are really the start of a long process of qualification steps, both online and offline. If you don’t pay attention to each step, you will never be able to get the best out of this process.

How to use friction to your advantage

Think of the process of optimizing for lead generation as two interconnected dials. Each dial represents a step in your online process. One dial increases volume of leads by reducing friction. The second dial increases quality of the lead by increasing friction.

You can increase friction in several ways, such as adding more form fields or steps in the funnel process. Or, you can reduce it by subtracting various page elements or process steps. To adjust your lead flow, turn the dials: more friction will yield higher lead quality; less friction will increase lead volume.

Too much friction can make your visitors quit, but not enough friction will fill your pipeline with leads of a lower quality. So you need to test different approaches to determine what balance works best for your lead generation process.

Before you turn that dial …

Three keys to keep in mind when testing your lead generation process:

1. Choose the right time to add more friction. Think of your lead generation process as a personal introduction to someone. The moment you meet someone you don’t ask for a lot of personal information. If you do, you scare people away. The same concept applies here. For example, in a recent experiment, we tested moving the phone number field from the first step to the second step. Lead generation rate increased by 68% and the conversion rate remained stable.
2. Prioritize your requests properly. Think carefully about what information you ask first, second, and so on. It is important to keep a natural flow as you add and subtract friction elements. A good way to check for this with your pages and processes is to review every step and consider two questions: 1) Do we need this information? 2) Do we need it at this stage?
3. Pay close attention to your final conversion rate. We tested a three-step process against a four-step process. As expected, the three-step process had a higher lead generation rate. However, once the sales team got the leads and started following up on them, they found that leads from the four-step process were more qualified and easier to close. Bottom line: the four-step process had a lower lead generation rate, but ultimately a higher final conversion rate (sales).

To learn more about applying this concept, see our recent research brief, What’s working now in optimization or join our team at our optimization workshop at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit.

I recently spent a day and a half in Munich, Germany, taking part in the MarketingSherpa Email Summit and leading an optimization workshop.

The event brought together a diverse panel of presenters with very interesting case studies. Although the majority of attendees were, of course, from Germany, I also had the opportunity to meet marketers from France, Spain, and the UK.

For the most part, I found that European marketers face similar challenges as we do in the US, such as increasing their house list, improving the registration process, and optimizing their welcome email series.

However, I would say that two of the most popular topics of the event were multi-language campaigns and relevant content.

The importance of relevance (Relevanz, pertinence, pertinencia)

European marketers have the good fortune of access to many diverse countries in which to expand their markets, but these diverse markets are also a daily challenge. To remain competitive, these marketers need to consider localizing their campaigns in at least four of the EU’s top languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. And, as if they haven’t enough to do, they really ought to consider Italian or Portuguese.

It is not enough to just have a good database program or the technical capability to manage multiple languages. Among the many cases presented, success stories came from those that had a multi-language team that proofread and localized content. Even better off were the folks who had a multilingual, multicultural team (sort of a polyglot SWAT unit, if you know what I mean) to adjust campaigns to customers’ specific needs by country.

One interesting case presented by Avid Agency showed significant increases in clickthrough and conversion rates by localizing not only the copy but also prices. The campaign targeted Danish and Finnish consumers. They tested three variations of the same campaign:

1. Copy in English and prices in Euros
2. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in Euros
3. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in local currency

The third variation yielded the highest results, showing that even though there is one common currency for EU countries, local currency is still important and including it in an offer can make a difference. Consider whether this strategy might be more relevant for B2C companies than B2B companies?

The summit reaffirmed a key lesson for all marketers, wherever our target market is and whichever languages it speaks: the more relevant the email content, the higher the open, clickthrough, and conversion rates will be.

If you are concerned about your email frequency, I’d suggest looking first at how relevant your emails are and then worry if you have the right frequency.

Now it’s time to enjoy a good German beer and the cool spring weather here in Munich. Auf Wiedersehen!

[Editor's note: Don't forget to bring back those Hofbräuhaus München goodies and samples for the team, Gaby.]

It’s always fascinating to see smart, unique, and occasionally crazy concepts come to life. Most interesting are those that somehow connect with a brand and really support brand awareness.

Just a couple weeks ago, Ad Age released its Viral Video Chart for the week of April 6, 2009. Here a few of my personal favorites from the complete list:

• E-Trade’s babies (229,799 views that week)
• Samsung’s Extreme Sheep LED Art (1,114,491 views that week)
• Cadbury’s Eyebrow Dance (438,407 views that week)
• T-Mobile’s Dance (742,120 views that week)

Besides being funny and eye-catching, what have these videos done right?

They connect in a personal way with our minds and more than grabbing our attention, they create a rush to share them with friends.

However, we can share videos all day long and enjoy happy feelings, but still be left with no connection to any brand in particular. Here is where, I think, great videos differentiate themselves.

The power to make connections

What really makes some of these videos stand out in terms of their marketing objective is how they help viewers intuitively connect the message with the product or brand.

For example, E-Trade jokes that babies could master their product but, within the joke, manages to plant the idea that their product is seriously easy to use. In other words, E-trade’s video overtly displays their product strengths and subtly addresses the anxieties prospective customers might feel about getting involved in the online stock market.

By showing shepherds developing a sheep-borne light show, Samsung engages the “can-do” energies of creative and scientific professionals who will watch the video and simultaneously be amazed and think, “I can top that.” ( Doubt me? I forwarded the email to two performance artist friends and within a day received their email proposals for mobile LED displays based on four-legged, two-legged, and wheeled choreography.)

Furthermore, Samsung’s video showcases the same energy and teamwork that goes into any performance and also points out that their product is tough, versatile, and will perform in difficult conditions.

Engaging viewers is merely the beginning

It is important to have an engaging concept for your viral video. That’s what makes people watch, and more importantly, forward or, even better, stick that link on the ol’ Facebook page.

But it is vital for the success of your campaign to choose a creative concept that makes an intuitive connection with the benefits and advantages of your product, service or offer. Then you’re not only making a video people will pass along, but spreading a brand that viewers will want to remember and reengage with.