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

Your customers may be flat out ignoring your latest news, offers, and ads. Don’t blame them. It’s simple human nature.

Take a quick look at your surroundings – your cubicle, your office, your solarium – wherever you’re reading this. How much do you notice what’s around you? I mean…really notice?

Not as much as you think you do, I’m guessing. Take a recent experiment run here in the labs. And by “experiment” I mean “practical joke run by our Associate Director of Optimization, Adam Lapp.”

Adam Photoshopped a picture of one of our Research Analysts, Ashley, posing with a friend. It’s the picture in this blog post. Perhaps it looks normal at first glance, but if you take a closer look, you can see that the blonde woman on the right looks a little, well, masculine.

That’s because Adam Photoshopped the face of a male Research Analyst over the face of Ashley’s female friend. He then replaced the photo she had hanging in her cubicle with this photo.

And, Ashley didn’t even notice her friend’s metamorphosis until someone pointed it out to her. Even though it was right in front of her face all day. Why?

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People don’t notice subtle changes in familiar environments

Now I don’t want to throw Ashley under the bus. I fully admit, I’m no better (and neither are you…or our customers).

For example, we recently moved the official offices of MarketingSherpa from Rhode Island to right here in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. I’ve been very cognizant of the need to look for where changes of that address need to be made on our many Web properties.

But I didn’t notice that the change wasn’t made on the MarketingSherpa Twitter page – even though I look at it at least five times a day.

However, when I was interviewing Ryan Amirault, Digital Marketing Manager, Whole Foods Market, for his case study at Email Summit 2012, he instantly noticed the location and started talking about Rhode Island.

So while being new to, say, a landing page, makes the customer more likely to notice the discreet marketing message, even novelty may not help…

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Invisible Gorilla Test

What we’re really talking about when we say “banner blindness” is a phenomenon scientists refer to as “inattentional blindness” or “selective attention.” The typical person is overloaded with visual stimuli and inputs of all sorts, making it simply impossible to focus on everything. So, people often overlook things that are right in front of their face.

One of the most famous examples of this is the Invisible Gorilla Test…

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Now, I may have already primed you to see the gorilla in the above video. However, when Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University ran this test, they found that, in most test subject groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla.

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How can you get your customers to see your ads?

So if a gorilla doesn’t work, you might be thinking , “I need to go one step further. From now on, every ad I run will have a tap dancing chimpanzee with a neon tracksuit.”

Easy, big fella. You need not become a carnival barker to grab your audience’s attention. All I want to draw your attention to is the fact that what is obvious to you (since you likely eat, sleep, and breathe your marketing message) is not always readily apparent to your audience. And don’t take for granted that your message got across just because you put it at the top of your homepage.

Here are a few common sense thoughts to keep in mind as you seek to overcome banner blindness:

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Contrast: The more an object can stick out, due to bright colors, crazy patterns, or motion, the more people are likely to notice it. (Keep in mind, if you are running a pay-per-click ad, you want more than attention and curiosity clicks … you want quality clicks.)

Here is an example from the MarketingSherpa site. There is a clear contrast between the ad and its surroundings, thanks to the different color, the bright visual, and even in how “Reserve Your Seat” interrupts the “Limited seating still available” rectangle (please note, it comes out a little brighter on the screen than it does on the screen capture below).

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Click to enlarge

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A Multichannel Approach: Don’t think that just placing a message at the top of your homepage, smack dab in the middle (especially in a similar font as its surroundings), is enough to get your message across. I’ve made this mistake myself before. “What do you mean we didn’t tell people? It’s right there at the top of the homepage.”Most people won’t even see it. Especially if they visit your site often.

That doesn’t mean you can’t put your message there, it just means to reach your potential customers in as many way as possible with the message – email, social media, dedicated landing pages, offline communications – and not take for granted that the message was received just by placing it on your homepage.

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Get in the Middle: There are certain areas of webpages that most people usually relegate to background noise – the top and bottom headers, the right and left columns. When placing an ad, or putting information on your own site, try to get right into the middle of the content.

If you aren’t able to, try to make sure your information is at least at a natural stopping point for the content – for example, just to the right of or below the end of a blog post or article.

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Break out of the Box: Many marketers place information in a box on their homepages or landing pages that doesn’t necessarily need to be in that box…and therefore their audience is overlooking it.

From a headline on a homepage that is placed in a box (and therefore ignored) to testimonials that look like text-based ads, this mistake is all too common. When you’re on your own website, make sure you are not inadvertently making important information look like a banner ad that will be — you guessed it — totally overlooked by your visitors.

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Related Resources:

The Ultimate Click: How to get what you pay for with pay-per-click advertising

Banner Blindness: Optimize your online display advertising to stick out (or blend in)

Online Advertising: The 3 obstacles you must overcome to create an effective banner ad

Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift

Banner Design Tested: How a 35% decrease in clicks caused an 88% increase in conversion

According to the MarketingExperiments’ conversion heuristic, anxiety is one negative factor that reduces the likelihood that your potential customers will complete that lead form or buy from you. One of the chief causes of anxiety for customers of late has been privacy.

For example, 94% of 45-64 year olds think there should be a law that requires websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, according to research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

And you likely see more headlines every day. The Wall Street Journal has even been conducting a yearlong investigative reporting series titled “What They Know.”

And where there is customer sentiment, there is opportunity

So what if, instead of only responding to regulations and industry edicts, you became proactive with your products and services? What if you did such a good job of reducing customer anxiety around privacy, you turned it into a competitive advantage for your company? Here are a few ideas to get you started (and I’d love to hear yours as well in the comment section) …

  Read more…

After driving potential customers to your website through PPC ads, organic search results, or a targeted campaign to create online traffic, the most logical way to turn those visitors into leads is by getting them to register via an online form.

For this blog post, let’s assume you’ve already presented an offer with a strong enough value proposition to get your visitor to actually be interested in filling out your registration form. Let’s just focus on optimizing the form itself.

A form can have any number of fields, of course, and it would seem if you have more required fields on the form, you will generate more lead information for the database.

Can we all agree to that point? Great, let’s take a look at a recent lead generation test then. Read more…

It was time to get radical at Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp’s optimization class, and once again I was there to document it all for your reading pleasure. Because I care, naturally.

Since my last post, the student body has grown, and we now have five new research analysts eager to learn. Due to our uneven number, Adam decided to pit all of the analysts against each other for his optimization competition, instead of taking the usual team approach. This time around, their challenge was to create the most effective radical redesign for the Arbor Day Foundation homepage (which was submitted for live optimization during our Homepage Web clinic).

But before I show you the original page, I’d like to add that this lesson not only sharpened our optimization skills, but also proved that great minds don’t always think alike. And, believe it or not that can be a really good thing.

Diagnosing the homepage

Now, let’s get to down the “nitty gritty”…here’s the audience submission:

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Before being given the task to create radical wireframes for the original homepage, Adam and the class discussed the page’s main issues. Here is their analysis the key problems visitors might face:

• The logo is too small. It gets lost in the page and also doesn’t help the visitor know exactly where they are
• There’s not a clear focus on the page

o   It has a confusing top navigation

o   It has three equally weighted columns (Trees, Programs, Lend Your Support)

o   It also has confusing objectives (Where do I click, what can I do on this page?)

1. What is the difference between a membership, a donation and buying a tree?

• Unclear call-to-action

o   The first and largest call-to-action a visitor sees is “Visit the tree nursery”

o   Makes the visitor ask, “What is a tree nursery? Is this a place to buy trees or a clever metaphor for a type of product or page?”

o   Visitors have unclear expectations of what the next page will be and are a little lost at this point.

Radical Solutions

After pointing out these issues, the analysts had to figure out how to tie in all these objectives together into one goal. And when it was time to present their radical wireframes, each analyst came up with a completely different design and goal in mind (remember the original page had several objectives).

Each submitted wireframe focused on one of the following goals:

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-Directly pushing a membership

• The headline is action oriented, specific and includes a membership incentive
• It drives the visitor’s attention to a primary call-to-action (become a member)

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-Getting visitors to donate and help the Arbor Day Foundation’s mission

• Headline immediately says where you are
• The options on left let visitors know what to do on the page (donate/help)

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- Giving the gift of a tree or allowing visitors to pick 10 trees for themselves now

• Page objective is simplified and the incentive of 10 free gifts with donation is emphasized
• De-emphasized supporting column with core information about the foundation

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-Engaging visitors with an interactive game

• Headline tells visitors exactly where they are
• Focuses on letting visitors interact and become familiar with the product through question game

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-Pushing all objectives in a new navigation-focused design

• Visitor can quickly choose a path from the easy to see, simple, and short left navigation on the top portion.
• Has a rotating banner will draw the eye path to the four most important objectives, then presents four core values in a controllable (and testable) sequence

Five heads are better than one

These five separate takes on one Web page got us thinking about the brainstorming process and how important it is for marketers to create a blissful marriage between individual ideas and teamwork.

In a marketing team, not everyone is going to think the same way, but this doesn’t mean that these differing thoughts can’t turn into a great collaborative effort.

This reminds me of the weekly peer review meetings we have at out lab, where the research team gets together and reviews Web pages as a team. Usually, one person starts off the conversation and then another person bounces off an idea about that topic, sometimes agreeing or challenging the previous comment. The idea here is to brainstorm in the correct way, by being open to different ideas and avoiding groupthink. Of course, not every idea is a good idea, which is why you have to test.

This is exactly what happened during Adam’s class. Each analyst initially came in with a different idea for the homepage and after everyone’s thoughts were put on the table, each individual thought grew into one improved and cohesive approach to developing treatments.

“If one person in charge of this page only relied on their own ideas, we may not [be] able to achieve the highest level of success,” Adam said. Of course, this hypothetical collaborative effort would have to be tested to make sure it’s actually effective.

“There’s no such thing as expert marketers, only expert testers,” Adam said. “AND the best way to get diverse test ideas is to leverage other people with other ideas.”

Lesson learned

In the end, even though it started as a free-for-all competition, with the right guidance and frame of mind, it turned out to be a great team effort.

Now that we’ve learned that lesson, I would love to start a collaborative effort with the audience, and ask you to share your ideas to optimize this homepage. Feel free to use the comments section to get this brainstorming session rolling.

Related Resources

Homepage Optimization: Radical redesign ideas for multivariable testing

Homepage Optimization: Creating the best design to quickly meet multiple visitors’ needs

Informed Dissent: The best marketing campaigns come from the best ideas

Landing Page Optimization: What cyclical products can learn from CBS Sports

How often have you placed an item in your shopping cart in a bricks and mortar store, a can of green beans for example, and then changed your mind before you forked over the cash and put those green beans back on the shelf without buying?

How about online? Ever drop something in the ol’ virtual shopping cart, but change your mind and decide not to buy?

If you’re like me, it’s very rare for you to change your mind in a physical store, but I do it online all the time. Why? And how can you reduce shopping cart abandonment and improve product pages on your own site? There is no one right answer to these very difficult questions, but we’re going to be sharing our latest research discoveries today at 4 p.m. EDT in our latest free Web clinic – Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire e-commerce website.

But first, we asked your peers these vexing questions. Below are a few of our favorite responses… Read more…

At the end of March, HubSpot, the marketing software company, held a webinar on “The Science of Timing.” The event drew almost 25,000 registrants and ended up with very close to 10,000 attendees. Driving this success was a fast-paced and extensive email campaign sent to different segments of HubSpot’s list, prospects and new leads.

“The Science of Timing” was hosted by Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist, and was built on a previous series of webinars over the last two years covering topics such as “The Science of Twitter,” “The Science of Blogging,” “The Science of Facebook,” and more. “The Science of Timing” covered when to do these social activities — when to tweet when seeking a retweet, when to publish new blog posts, when to update a Facebook status. Read more…