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

If you’re an affiliate marketing novice, you and I have plenty in common. A few weeks ago, I knew little about the ins and outs of affiliate programs: how they work, the players involved, how to get started or how it fits into the typical multichannel marketing mix.

That’s partly how we arrived at today’s web clinic on the subject.

Back in 2003, MarketingExperiments tested affiliate programs, interviewed affiliate industry pros, and published an extensive, two-part research report on the topic: Affiliate Marketing Tested, Section 1 & Section 2. In 2006, further experiments by our team led to another research brief: The ROI on PPC vs. Affiliate Marketing.

Upon review, it seems many of those findings and recommendations still hold true for affiliates and merchants today.

And after our director of channel optimization, Aaron Rosenthal, and analyst and affiliate specialist Rob Reynard returned from the buzzing Affiliate Summit East show, we felt the time was right to revisit this topic and look at some new affiliate experiments we’ve conducted — including how those tests achieved gains of up to 165%.

Research and resources for affiliate marketing novices

For our web clinic, 57% of early registrants characterized themselves as “novices”  and 27% called themselves “experienced” in this area. So the following shortlist contains a dozen of the best articles, research, forums, and related resources we’ve seen that can help those who are just starting out.

• 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report
• The Future of Affiliate Marketing
• Is It Time to Affiliate?
• Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Affiliate Classroom Blog
• Affzilla: Affiliate Marketing Tools
• Sugarrae: Affiliate Marketing
• Shoemoney.com (see cutting through the BS)
  
• Media Trust Blog: Podcasts
• Reputation Management for Affiliate Marketing
• 5 Star Affiliate Programs Forum
• ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum

Let us know if you find these resources helpful and be sure to check back next week, when we’ll be posting Q&A and takeaways from today’s clinic.

Reminder: Our web clinic hashtag is #webclinic and you can follow us @MktgExperiments.

Clinic Notes, Events, Uncategorized

What is it about lead nurturing that makes it so hard to get it right?

Is it the all-too-familiar disconnect between marketing and sales? The hassles of CRM systems — or lack of them? Or the gray areas surrounding lead definitions, scoring, nurturing strategies and who owns what customer touchpoints?

For many organizations, it’s a combination of all the above (and more). And the need for a shift in perspective, if not in the organizational culture, can be a tough sell when monthly and quarterly sales numbers aren’t exactly rosy. That is, unless you can point to proven results and budget-friendly methods you can implement quickly.

If you’re looking for ways to start, or get more from, your lead nurturing process, I’d recommend two new, free resources:

1. In his webinar, Putting the Human Touch into Lead Generation, B2B lead nurturing expert (and colleague) Brian Carroll broke down a case study and several action steps that show how you can use multiple channels — social media, email, webinars, phone and mail — together more effectively. Most organizations are reaching out to prospects in these ways, but they’re not consistently doing it in an optimal way. This one-hour webinar can help you get there.
2. The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, a new eworkbook from our friends at Marketo, not only offers several best practices, but provides the worksheets and real-world examples you can adapt or adopt (i.e., ideas you can steal). What’s best about this guide? It’s not just another whitepaper pitching services; this is information and research that marketers and sales teams can literally plug into their existing processes, or build those processes if they don’t already exist. You can download the guide here.

You’ve heard the MarketingExperiments team say many times that people buy from people, not websites. Invest some time in these lead nurturing resources and you’re sure to find new ways to cultivate the business relationships that ultimately generate more sales.

Lead Generation, Marketing Insights, Practical Application

At our July 29 web clinic on optimizing PPC campaigns, several participants wanted to know more about using forms and keyword insertion.

We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.

Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page?  Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?

In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:

1. When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
2. When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.

Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?

The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.

As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.

What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.

Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?

If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.

Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.

Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.

Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.

You can hear more from Corey via the full clinic presentation and follow him on Twitter: @ctrentmarketing

Clinic Notes, Marketing Q&A, Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

After a full week of pushing ahead on new marketing initiatives, mapping out your plans through the end of the year and into 2010, and brainstorming new tests — you got through all that this week, right? — you’re probably ready for some weekend reading.

Here are five highly recommended articles from the past week, covering different areas of online marketing:

• Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety — One of our favorite blogs does it again. Linda Bustos of GetElastic shows how ecommerce sites can increase sales by addressing customer concerns, from product pages to cart and checkout pages. The post also links back to the Ecommerce Report.
• PPC / SEM Analytics: 5 Actionable Tips To Improve ROI — The title speaks for itself, but in this post, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shares five “non-normal” analyses that you can apply to boost your ad revenue.
• Finding and Using Niche Blogs — The tips in this SEOmoz blog post can help you with two frequently overlooked areas related to SEO and PR: your link building and blogger outreach efforts.
• The Ultimate Community Management FAQ — Social media and community-building strategies are still raising a lot of questions for marketers trying to get a handle on how to use them for business. Amber Naslund answers a bunch of those questions, and in doing so, offers several ideas and tools for socializing with a purpose.
• Annoying Consumers with Too Many Emails — A straightforward post that seeks to answer the questions all email marketers should be asking: “How often is too often? When does the frequency of a program start to drive people away?”

Have some favorites of your own? Putting any of the ideas from these articles into practice? Drop a comment.

Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights

Many of you, frustrated by testing challenges, have vented on this blog and in our optimization group on Linkedin.

Those comments inspired our [July 15] web clinic: Optimization vs. frustration: Overcoming barriers to better tests and gains.

With this clinic, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and our research team will explore reviewed some of the biggest obstacles to conversion testing and how you can overcome them. To get you thinking, check out these resources related to optimization and testing:

• Designing tests for maximum impact (part 1) … Before implementing a testing cycle, there are three factors you need to be aware of that can make a major difference to your outcomes. Andy Mott, our senior research manager, explained these three factors in this post: Better tests, better results – here’s how.
• Designing tests for maximum impact (part 2) … Ready to dig deeper? Our team of analysts distilled months of experiments and case studies into our year-end research review, and the overarching theme was planning and executing more successful marketing tests.
• Choosing the right pages to test … The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog put together a 60-second video to help you figure out which of your pages most need improvement: Picking a good test page with Google Analytics.
• Learning the math … Great post from Hubspot on the math that will help marketers (especially from the creative side) with various types of tests, including landing pages, PPC and email subject lines: The Math You Need for Marketing Experiments.
• Testing different stages of your marketing funnel … Jimmy Ellis, our director of optimization, uses a test that achieved a 103% conversion gain to lead you through the key steps of testing, from identifying the right elements to optimizing the offer path, before discussing advanced testing strategies with the Omniture team in this joint webinar and optimization guide: Landing Page Optimization: How You Should Be Testing At All Stages of the Marketing Funnel.

What’s holding you back from testing your way to bigger conversion gains?

[Post updated July 31, 2009]

Clinic Notes, Marketing Insights, Practical Application

If you’re joining us for this afternoon’s SEO live optimization web clinic, you already know the topic is way too broad for one hour.

Learning the fundamentals of search engine optimization is only step one. Keeping up with the frequent changes, learning and testing the latest best practices, and steering clear of the mountains of misinformation? That’s a full-time effort.

If you’ve been around the block with SEO, you’re already a regular reader of the following sites and tools. Still, when it comes to reliable SEO info, these resources consistently rise to the top of my shortlist.

10 SEO resources you’ll want to bookmark

• SEOMOZ
• SEOBook
• Search Engine Roundtable
• SearchEngineWatch
• SearchEngineLand
• SearchEngineGuide
  
• TopRank Blog’s Resources list and Big List of SEO Blogs
• HubSpot and Website Grader tool

That’s it? Why not an exhaustive list of 400+ SEO sites?

A few reasons: First, TopRank already has a megalist; it’s right up there (thanks, Lee!). Second, from the sources above, you can branch out to any number of free and paid tools and augment your own list based on your experience level, needs, and preferences. And third, if you really have time to regularly read more than a dozen sites on SEO, more power to you and your Google Reader and/or RSS feeds.

Feel free to add your own favorite SEO resources in the comments section.

And check back with the blog as we’ll be following up today’s SEO clinic with responses to the live audience Q&A, additional resources and specific articles, plus our clinic contest winners — some lucky marketers will not only have their pages optimized, they’ll also win seats at our Landing Page Optimization Training Tour.

Clinic Notes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Design