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

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 the wake of Director of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein’s vicious editorial attack on Seth Godin, I thought I would lift up Seth’s spirits by imitation (the highest form of flattery) of his crowdsourced book idea. As I wrapped up the final draft of the 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report (BMR), I realized that some of the key insights required a categorization of strategies and tactics based out of a broad spectrum of practices.

Problem: What to name these categories?

Allow me to illustrate. The most tweetable (already tweeted once – thanks, Dan!) phrase in the BMR is perhaps: “LPO is Web design with an agenda.” And that agenda is to achieve a specific objective in terms of the quantity and quality of the visitor response.

An LPO objective must be defined first in terms of the target business outcome: generating a lead, closing a sale, maximizing subscription length, etc. A significant portion of the BMR is dedicated to helping marketers discover ways of getting the visitor to act, which is vastly complex. But defining the objective should be easy. You just have to do it explicitly; otherwise you may end up simply pushing things around on a page without any useful results.

So I asked a few thousand marketers: Which of the following processes/transactions is the primary objective of your organization’s website?

1. Purchase of products or services directly on the site
2. Request for a quotation, proposal, or sales call
3. Free downloads, webinars, newsletters, or other content requiring form submission (lead gen)
4. Phone call or visit to physical location (takes the process offline)
5. Maximum ad impressions, interaction, or user-generated content
6. Providing company or product information

There are certainly other types of objectives that may not neatly fit these categories, and this research does suggest a useful follow-up study. (I was also deliberately devious with the last answer choice. It’s an “objective” that I hear far too often, but it’s probably not your website objective. You are not in the business of providing information, unless you are the Visitors’ Bureau. And even then, your objective is not to provide information. It’s to increase the number of searches, clicks to destination websites, etc. You should be choosing (5). I make a big deal about objectives in the BMR, but I digress…) Read more…

Bmibaby is a low-cost airline that flies from four UK bases to 34 European destinations, and around 95% of its sales come through its website. Because bmibaby is selling a discount product — airline seats in this case — getting the most value from each customer really impacts the bottom line.

Ian Stewart, Head of Commercial at bmibaby, says, “Anything for me that increases our conversion, that increases the number of people that book flights with us is great.”

One way bmibaby looks to increase its conversion is through regular testing on its website. Read more…

In our most recent Web clinic on optimizing leads, we quickly reviewed a recent case study in which two banner images were tested – a generic stock image vs. an image of a real person. This experiment led to more insights than we had time to cover last week; so, I thought I’d give it a little more room to breathe here on the blog.

CONTROL: Who doesn’t love a generic smiling lady?

If you haven’t yet watched the Web clinic replay, the company (blurred intentionally) we were working with in this experiment was a consumer credit counseling service offering free debt consultation. Their homepage had been the focus of many previous radical redesign tests, but for the scope of this research project, we were focusing on one particular issue: The main banner image. Read more…

Email marketing is not limited to email. There are several factors that create an effective campaign — not least of which is the email’s landing page.

Too many marketers design fantastic emails only to link them to generic pages, such as product pages.

Our research has shown that email-to-landing page continuity is vital to conversion. If you don’t answer three key questions in the first seven seconds, your visitor is likely to bounce.

Yet, according to Kelly Lorenz, Email Marketing Strategist, Bronto, many marketers are skipping this important step. “In my experience, I would say 95% of online marketers who use email don’t use custom landing pages.”

Experiment after experiment has shown that it is essential to increase relevance between the landing page and the subscriber’s motivations for clicking the email. If a subscriber clicks an email to learn more about a sale and the landing page does not emphasize that sale, then the subscriber is leaving — quickly.

The best way to maximize email conversions is to create a dedicated, optimized landing page for each campaign. As Lorenz noted: “Email is not the destination. It’s how you get there.” However, not every marketer has the resources to create new pages for each effort. Read more…