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

Email testing produces some of the most interesting results I see here at MarketingExperiments. The cause for this is a combination of constantly changing variables.

For one, content within email tends to change more often than your typical landing page. This makes optimizing for content more challenging as different topics are likely to garner different levels of interest from the segments within your email list. So results will change each month based on the content alone – making A/B testing the only reliable method for measuring progress.

In addition, email lists themselves prove to be a challenge, as what works for one list may not work for another list. Even within lists, especially aggregated lists, you will see different results based on the value proposition, content, layout, and calls-to-action (CTAs) used in your email.

And to further complicate matters, you are still dealing with a funnel process in which your email must first reach a user (avoiding spam filters, personal filters, etc.), your subject line must interest the user enough to open the email, your email must display properly (with images on and off) and be compelling enough to achieve a click-through to your landing page where the battle for a conversion wages on.

In today’s world of overloaded email boxes, people declaring email bankruptcy, spam filters and everything else, this game is only getting more difficult – for marketers and users alike.

With that said, I’d like to offer up my own favorite email testing tricks and tips. It’s important to understand that what works for one segment, list, or industry will not necessarily work for another. In fact what works one month for a list may not work next month. It’s an ever-evolving process in which you must always challenge your own best practices to maximize your results. Read more…

Earlier this week, Google formally announced the completion of its new web indexing system cleverly named Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches than its last index and is the largest collection of web content the search giant has ever offered.

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

– Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer, Google

This is great for those of us who use Google to search and find relevant results to our most common inquiries. Results will become timelier, more social and rely more heavily on keyword strings, ultimately providing more useful results as newer content can be indexed much quicker and from a much larger base of sites. Read more…

Search for “social media marketing” on Google (or Bing) and you’ll likely end up in a black hole of Twitter guides, bit.ly retweets, social media “mavens” and Top 7 Tips for Creating a Facebook Fanpage blog posts. And it’s no wonder everyone sees the need to discuss and “explain” how social media works for the 270 billionth time. With so much discussion on the topic, you need to be a social media expert just to navigate it all.

Yet, one social media topic manages to slip through the cracks. And it’s often the first obstacle companies encounter when they decide “social media” is the answer to all of their problems: Read more…

As you may recall from my last post, I spent nearly six days in Austin, TX attending SXSW Interactive, a conference which Advertising Age once famously referred to as the bellwether for what lies ahead for digital culture.

The event was a fantastic gathering of ideas, technology and core conversations – the kind of conversations that tend to happen when the Internet takes a moment to meet in person and exchange fancy business cards.

Test everything?

And speaking of fancy business cards, for this event MarketingExperiments ran an A/B split test version of our business cards. For those keeping count, Side B won, although the results are far from being statistically significant. Read more…

Every year, for the past 16 years, something amazing has happened in Austin, TX around this time. And this year hopes to be no different as Austin gears up for its annual South by Southwest Interactive technology conference – an event which can only be described as one of the largest, most exciting, most comprehensive collections of marketing and social web entertainment and technology this side of the Internet.

In what amounts to five days of epic conversations, presentations and social media events disguised as a “technology conference,” the world (and all of Twitter) tunes in to see the Internet trends of the last year scrutinized and the trends for the next year laid out in incredible, Apple-Keynote-quality detail. Read more…