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

Here at MarketingExperiments, we’re big believers in quantitative research. A/B split tests. Multivariate testing.

But, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to do a little qualitative research as well. Or as my Mom always says, “You’ll never know unless you ask a question.”

So I have an (incentivized) question for you – where do you want to go in 2012? Literally.

We were recently debating locations for our 2012 events, and while everyone on the event team has some pretty strong opinions, frankly, you know the answer to this question better than I do.

Share your opinion for a chance to win a $1,695 marketing summit ticket

So, we thought we’d hold a little unscientific, qualitative research.

Simply put, which city or cities would be most appealing to you for a future marketing event?

Let us know from the list below for your chance to win a ticket to a future MECLABS Summit, such as B2B Summit in San Francisco or Boston, Email Summit in Las Vegas, or the 2012 Optimization Summit in…well…you tell us….

(and if there are any cities we’re missing, feel free to let us know in the comments section below)

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to  Carol Reid, Owner/Marketing Consultant, Carol Reid Marketing, winner of a free ticket to a MECLABS summit. She has chosen the upcoming B2B Summit in San Francisco.

Related Resources:

Never Pull Sofa Duty Again: Stop guessing what your audience wants and start asking

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

New Marketing Research: 3 profitable traffic sources most marketers are ignoring

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

Your potential customers are ignoring the work you’ve invested thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into as you’re reading this sentence. That’s why we spend so much time on the MarketingExperiments blog talking about optimization. Because the less people ignore us, the more we can contribute to that ever fragile bottom-line.

But in order to stop being ignored, we have to get to know who we’re talking to. In the end, it’s all about sparking conversations and developing relationships with real people.

Knowing who those people are (and what they truly need) is harder than it seems. How can you gain this valuable marketing intelligence about your potential customers?

Let me tell you a story…
Read more…

As discussed in my last blog post, we reviewed how the marketing force of 200 marketers at Optimization Summit was utilized to design the following test:

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Control (click to zoom)                              Treatment (click to zoom)

You can read the experiment details, how we got 200 marketers to agree, and few insightful reader comments in Wednesday’s post. In this second post now, as promised, we will look at the results and what insights might be gained from them. Read more…

Last week I had the privilege of being in the world’s tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere, joined by over 200 other “nerdy” marketers, for what was the first-ever conference hosted by MECLABS on the topic of optimization and testing. Overall, it was a value-packed week.

But what I found most uniquely valuable about the Optimization Summit was a surprise live experiment in which the audience was asked to optimize and test a marketing campaign during the course of the conference. I had a backstage pass to what would become a thriller of an experiment, with many ups and downs, bends and turns. The only thing I could compare it to while in Atlanta was trying to hold two suitcases while free-standing on MARTA (which I successfully did by the way).

All in all, I learned a lot about testing in the process, and in the next two blog posts, I’d like to break out some of the key insights I walked away with. Read more…

In Flint McGlaughlin’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 session, our Managing Director (CEO) presented our well known and researched Email Messaging Optimization Index. I enjoyed the tweets that included the heuristic, eme = rv(of + i) – (f + a).

In a session on day three, Boris Grinkot, Associate Director of Product Development, MECLABS, moderated a panel — “Case Study: How to Track ROI for Social Media Campaigns” –where he announced that he is beginning to conduct research with Radian6 that will eventually serve as the basis for a social media marketing optimization methodology similar to the Email Messaging Optimization Index. Read more…

Earlier today at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011, in front of 700 marketers at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin worked without a net and engaged in live optimization with actual examples provided by Summit attendees.

Live Optimization #1: Email newsletter

The first was an email from Savings.com. The objective of the mail was to drive clicks and the mail itself is Savings.com’s email newsletter, so the mail went out to the entire newsletter subscriber base.

Flint’s immediate comment is that the information isn’t being presented at the right time in the right way, the mail doesn’t look like a typical email newsletter so there could be confusion on the part of the recipient, and the mail does not have a clear value proposition.

The submitter commented, “We’re trying to deliver the best coupons for that particular week.”

One attendee commented, the best value of the mail — the 30% off offer, etc. — is the hardest to find and read.

Flint’s additional comments were that the mail has no eyepath, enormous friction with seven calls to action and there’s no way to tell the difference between brands and button. Read more…