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

Imagine for a second that you’re running a banner ad campaign on a website with a black background. Now, if you were going to choose a color for that banner to get more clicks, would you choose a dark shade of blue or bright yellow?

If you’re like me, you would have guessed yellow. Unfortunately for our marketing intuition, a recent test we ran with a Research Partner proves otherwise.

For this test, we ran two different versions of a banner offering a large financial institution’s branded version of a credit card, alongside a $50 gift card incentive. Essentially, if the visitor applied for the branded credit card (the same brand as the site on which the banner ad appeared), they could get a $50 gift card after making qualifying purchases. The test itself was an A/B sequential test. Read more…

Copy length. It’s been somewhat of an obsession of mine lately. For marketing copywriting. Heck, for content in general.

So I was really looking forward to running a pretty simple copy length test – long vs. short copy.

However, the interpretation was anything but simple. In fact, at first I thought there wasn’t a significant difference between the control and treatment…until we dove down a little deeper.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me set the test up for you…

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We’ve all heard the saying “someone’s trash is another one’s treasure.” The same holds true to the value your product and/or service offering brings to the world. If different pockets of people like you better for different reasons, how can you create a single, competitive value proposition that addresses all of them?

Austin McCraw and Flint McGlaughlin are researching and writing a book to help you craft effective value propositions. With the topic buzzing through the labs of late, over the past couple of months, I have been surveying various members of the MarketingExperiments optimization research team as well to try discover how they approach this challenge. Here are some key discoveries so far, and I look forward to reading the final book:

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In college, I had a journalism professor who said, “Make your headline twice as powerful as the event.” This is sage advice if you’re covering the Kardashian beat for a weekly tabloid, but it doesn’t seem to directly apply to today’s marketers.

(Apologies to any members of the Kardashian marketing team who may have been offended by the previous comment. You’ve done a terrific job promoting whatever it is that made them famous.)

But maybe it is applicable, after all. Despite a marketer’s goal of thoroughly conveying value on a landing page through well-crafted body text and use of images, there often remains a need for a powerful “hook” to further motivate a potential customer.

(Just recently, MarketingExperiments held a Web clinic that covered this very subject.)

When it comes to landing pages, one would think that it would be much easier to get users to convert, as they have already expressed a certain amount of interest via search or email clickthrough. But these users still need to be quickly reminded of why their clicks landed them there in the first place.

In the following test, you’ll see that a continuation of the value proposition was deftly handled with the addition of a few short, powerful words, alongside a much-needed change in the way our partner asked for information. Read more…

When planning a testing and optimization cycle, there are plenty of marketing elements to tackle — landing pages, pay-per-click ad copy, form fields and more. The question is: What test will provide the biggest impact?

A great place to start is to ask your customers.

CrazyEgg, an analytics company that creates heat map data visualizations for websites, did just that when beginning a complete overhaul of its website.
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It’s time for yet another marketing intuition contest. If you’re new here, every time we have a new web clinic, we give our blog readers a chance to predict the outcome of the featured test. In our last contest, we chose three winners who correctly predicted which of the two test treatments received a higher conversion rate.

For today’s contest, we’re featuring two treatments that will be discussed in depth in today’s clinic—Negative Lifts: How we turned a 25% loss into a 141% increase in conversion. Register and tune in today at 4:00pm EDT to find out the conclusion to the test here.
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