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

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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“I didn’t fail. I just found ten thousand ways that didn’t work.” – Thomas Edison

The scientific process is a funny thing. Sometimes the biggest discoveries come from being wrong. Or unintentionally.

For example, Susan Freinkel, author of “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story,” explained how scientists first discovered that plastic was not inert…

But we’ve known since the early ’70s that DEHP leaches out of vinyl, and the way that we know is that there were a pair of scientists at that time who were doing some experiments with rat livers. It doesn’t really matter what they were trying to do.

But they kept finding this weird, strange compound that was fouling up their experiments, and when they set out to figure out what it was, they discovered it was DEHP. And they were very surprised because everybody had assumed that this is, you know, an inert material.

So how do you make sure that you gain value from each test you run, even when the changes you work hard on making lose to your original? How do you ensure that a loss is, as I like to call it, a “negative lift.”

Join us for our next Web clinic (educational funding provided by HubSpot) this Wednesday at 4 p.m. EDT when our Managing Director, Flint McGlaughlin, will share a loss from a test we ran…and how we ultimately used the learnings from that test to drive an increase in conversion – Negative Lifts: How we turned a 25% loss into a 141% increase in conversion.

But before we share our process, we wanted to hear how your marketing peers handle a loss. What happens when you run a test and don’t get a lift? How do you use a loss to improve your marketing? Here are a few of our favorite responses…
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I recently attended the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop in Boston and, though these events are always good for new information, I found myself surprised – and even outright alarmed – by one particular statistic cited at the beginning of the event: 61% of companies do not routinely test their email campaigns.

Sixty-one percent. See for yourself:
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