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 affiliate marketing, affiliate summit, affiliates, Lead Generation, marketing, optimization, performance marketing

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 b2b, ebook, free, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, marketing, optimization, resources, sales, tools, webinars

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) clinic, copywriting, Ecommerce, landing page optimization, landing pages, marketing, pay-per-click, PPC, search marketing, SEM, Value Proposition

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 analytics, blogs, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, favorites, lists, marketing, metrics, optimization, search marketing, SEM, SEO

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 clinic, Internet marketing, landing page optimization, metrics, test, testing

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 clinic, free resources, landing page optimization, links, list, optimization, organic search, resources, search engine optimization, search marketing, SEO, tools

With our June 10 web clinic, Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?” featuring special guests Jason Breed and Marc Meyer, we knew we had a full house going into the session.

But we never expected to break into Twitter’s top 10 trending topics by taking down a chunk of the interwebs.

What our crew and 1,001 clinic participants also didn’t expect was that the webinar hosting service would go down three times due to a “service disruption … a result of unscheduled maintenance in our network.” Nice.

Despite all that, we managed to plow through the webinar and we’d like to send a special thank you to the 862 folks who stayed with us. This post includes some answers to your questions from the web clinic.

You can now access the presentation: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Pamela Jesseau, our razor-sharp new content queen, tackled the following clinic questions to help you set up your Twitter account, build your following, and expand your business. (Also check out her post: Twitter for businesses: 7 articles + tools you don’t want to miss.)

Q: How do I search Twitter for mentions of my company? What do I do with the results?

The simplest way is to use the search box in the right-hand sidebar of your Twitter page, or Twitter’s search page at search.twitter.com.  These will find mentions of your keyword within all Tweets.

One tool that was featured in the web clinic is Twazzup, a third-party application that can help you track mentions of your brand. Just enter your company name or search string to find out who is Tweeting about you. For example, the image below shows a search for a company that was recently in the news in North Florida.

You can also set up a search string within an application like TweetDeck, which will alert you when someone sends a Tweet with your name. Then what? Listen to what they are saying, address their concerns, thank them for their feedback, and follow them to engage the conversation and build your community.

Q: What if your company name is too long for a good Twitter name?

Twitter only allows 15-character usernames, so there are many companies which have to improvise. We ran into this issue ourselves and abbreviated MarketingExperiments to @MktgExperiments.

Your Twitter handle should still make sense and be fairly easy for people to remember.  Other examples of organizations that got around this issue using abbreviations, shortened forms, or acronyms include:

• @pdxtrailblazers – Portland Trailblazers
• @SBoSM – SmartBrief on Social Media
• @TheHSF – The Heart & Stroke Foundation
• @MarriottIntl – Marriott International

Q: If you are not tweeting with a big following, what is the point?

Everyone has to start somewhere.  You can build on a small following by first engaging and bringing value to those that do follow you.

Add yourself to the user-generated Twitter directory WeFollow and choose three tags that describe your business and industry — such as marketing, SEO, and software for example.  Others with similar profiles will find you when they are looking to expand their networks.  In turn, take the time to search for people in your target group and follow them.  But don’t stop there — start a conversation.  Retweet an article you found valuable, or start a discussion on a topic relevant to your sector.

Fridays provide the opportunity for you to recommend a colleague or partner by Tweeting their name to others and tag it with #followfriday. Some may return the favor, or at least tweet a thanks with your name to their followers. (Learn more about #followfriday and other hashtags at … wait for it … Mashable.)

Build and nurture your following, the same way you might do with other leads. You wouldn’t try to hard sell a new prospect in person, would you? So don’t do it on Twitter. Build the relationship, get your brand and yourself out there, and be there to respond to feedback.

Q: I understand why someone would have a lot of followers. But how can you follow thousands of people? It’s not manageable. It doesn’t make sense to me. Any advice on this would be great.

One of the most valuable tools that we have found for smart Twittering is TweetDeck. As mentioned above, this free application allows you to manage the tweets you receive with columns of separate, customizable feeds and filters.

You can group certain people, and create search strings to monitor mentions of your company, industry and even competitors. That way you can skip all the weather updates and lunch reports, without missing the feedback on your product, or opportunities to connect.

Q: Any results on running price specials via Twitter?

Dell Computer made news earlier this year when it revealed that $1 million in sales could be attributed to their Twitter feeds. Dell has several feeds, each targeting different segments. As we discussed in the web clinic, the company used @DellOutlet to Tweet discounts with a link to purchase the product from the Outlet Store. Shortly afterward, Dell started to offer exclusive deals to its followers. Twitter is still an emerging channel, but results like these show it does have real value for businesses.

Twitter training: Putting practical know-how into action to drive business results

In addition to the questions above, the live audience polls from our web clinic indicated that many marketers still aren’t sure how to use Twitter to improve their bottom line.

That’s why we are pleased to be able to team up again with Jason Breed, Senior Director of Business Development of Neighborhood America, and Marc Meyer, CEO of Digital Response Marketing Group, for a new training eWorkshop on using Twitter to boost your business results.

While our free web clinics provide new research findings, case studies and actionable ideas, our training eWorkshops are designed to help you advance from the “what” and “why” to the “how” and “how-to” with detailed, hands-on guidance and tools.

In this interactive eWorkshop, you’ll learn specifics on:

• Where to start (or restart) and how to map out your Twitter presence/s
• How to develop the most effective Twitter business strategy for your organization
• Ways to build and engage a following that’s more than just a numbers game
• Tools that will help you save time and maximize your efforts

eWorkshop: How to use Twitter to boost your business results
Tuesday, June 30
4:00 to 5:00 p.m. EDT
Training session: $129

Join us if you want to accelerate your knowledge, cut down on the learning curve, and start using Twitter to drive revenue, build equity and decrease costs.

Twitter web clinic attendees can save $30 on this eWorkshop when registering with the special savings code. Please check your clinic follow-up email for the code and secure your spot for this special training eWorkshop. (We’ll keep the interwebs intact this time.)

Clinic Notes, Marketing Q&A, Social Media clinic, marketing, online marketing, social media, tools, TweetDeck, Twitter, viral marketing, webinar

I guess it was bound to happen. For last Wednesday’s web clinic — Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site — we packed in a bunch of research, special guest Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa, and two new case studies with gains of up to 56%.

We had a great crowd, lots of live Q&A, a cool contest — and, sadly, a vaporized recording. So you can now access the presentation in our standard research brief format (with all the charts, key points and takeaways from the session); however, the flash version is in the ether. Sorry about that.

Back to some good news, eh?

The five clinic participants who will receive a free copy of the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide are:

1. Cathryn Foster of Dot Zinc
2. Amy Wang of JPMorgan Chase
3. Richard Flaherty of CambridgeSoft Corporation
4. Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink
5. Tom Gray of Gray eMarketing

More good news?

Thanks to your feedback, we’re expanding our web clinics in several new ways, including: teaming up with more featured guests, pulling in more case studies and research from our community of marketers, and tackling some new topics.

A perfect example is our free web clinic next Wednesday, June 10: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Sign up for the free Twitter clinic, join the @MktgExperiments team, and keep an eye on the hashtag #webclinic in the days to come. Oh, and please share with your tweeps, too.

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, Internet Marketing Strategy B2C, clinic, Ecommerce, eretail, marketing, optimization, pay-per-click, PPC, SEM, testing

Last Wednesday’s web clinic — B2B Success Stories: Four tests with gains of 21% to 254% — was the second in our series featuring case studies and test results from our course and clinic participants.

Like the B2C Success Stories clinic, we included a contest and offered three clinic participants the chance to win one of our optimization certification training courses. Our three B2B contest winners, chosen at random, will have their choice of Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization, or the Email Marketing course.

This clinic’s three lucky winners are:

1. PKWARE — a data security and file compression software company
2. LexisNexis –  a global research and information publisher serving several B2B markets
3. Research In Motion (RIM) — the brains behind the BlackBerry and other tech products

Along with a hearty congratulations to our winners, and a special thank you to Scott Lindberg, Jessica Carter, and June Macdonald, respectively, for participating in the B2B clinic and entering the contest, the MarketingExperiments team also wishes to thank the people and organizations whose case studies we featured in the clinic itself: Jeff Taxdahl of ThreadLogic, Sarah Frazier and Joe Haddock of Summit Business Media, Jake Atwood of BuzzBuilderPro, and Matt Dombrow of Clixo, who also joined our team to present his test results live.

As we discussed in the clinic, building relationships is about more than just tossing around the catch phrase. While we continue to look for (and test) ways to interact with our audience, and build a community around trying to “discover what really works” in optimization, we are grateful for the opportunity to hear about your successes and insights, share them, and continue to learn from them together as part of our research. We simply could not do this without your input.

Have some test results you’d like to share? Plug them into the comments field below.

Clinic Notes, Internet Marketing News, Lead Generation b2b, certification, clinic, landing page optimization certification course, online testing, optimization

It’s not often that I get jazzed about the topic of media relations. In fact, it’s usually just the opposite.

As an editor, ducking clumsy pitches (in all media) and screening calls are part of the job. But while working in the marcom trenches, I learned to sympathize with PR folks who have to deal with editors and reporters, and the often unfair bad rap that PR has to overcome.

The eye-opener? Working with a media relations pro who set the gold standard for the job.

PR 2.0 or Relationships 101?

It was never about cranking out banal press releases or heavy-handed pitches. Instead, she did hours of research, became a subject expert in her clients’ fields, provided compelling, relevant story ideas to the right journalists at the right times — and did all the right things to build relationships. She asked incisive questions, knew her stuff, and in turn, earned enormous respect. On a tight budget, too.

Prominent coverage followed. Major papers, tv news, trade pubs. Clip files that many organizations only dream about. And all pre-Twitter.

Social media doesn’t change everything

These days, with social media, Twitter and Facebook generating so much buzz, things are getting simultaneously easier and harder. Sure, these avenues can help you get your foot in the door easily with some media types, but others have already barred the social media door to PR. Are you linking in — or spamming? How do you figure out not only whom to approach, but how?

That brings us right back to the gold standard: relationship building.

Let’s face it, with or without social media, for many of us not named Godin, Kawasaki, Brogan or Battelle, cultivating relationships can still be time-consuming, hard work. It’s not always fun and there are no guaranteed shortcuts.

But there are tools that can help you get and stay organized, and make the process of building your media relationships much more efficient. And that’s what I’m jazzed about.

A special media relations eWorkshop and toolkit

Today at 4:00 p.m., we’re kicking off our new eWorkshop series with a session on building an effective, sustainable media relations program, including a half-dozen tools plus a campaign playbook.

After reviewing the toolkit, and seeing the components in action, I’m convinced that pros and novices alike will benefit from the tools and strategies in this special eWorkshop.

So no matter what your experience level, with the stakes getting higher every day, why not carve out an hour this afternoon to join us and raise your media relations game?

[Links updated to point to completed eWorkshop presentation.]

Events, Marketing Insights, Practical Application media relations, metrics, pr, search marketing, tools, training, webinar, workshops