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

So you’ve got a piece of marketing collateral you’re working on (an email, landing page, direct mail piece or ad perhaps) and you just can’t figure out what to use for your headline. You’ve asked your friends and associates and they’ve given you some ideas, but you’re not sure which one is right for what you’re doing. How do you decide? Read more…

Class was in session again at MECLABS, and this eager beaver right here decided to join in on the learning once more. Of course, I had the MarketingExperiments audience in mind, so I took my handy dandy notebook and jotted down what I saw and heard.

Once again, Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp, was front and center teaching our Research Analysts about, you guessed it, optimization. But, this class he focused on radical redesigns and the importance of multivariable testing when transforming a page in such a drastic way. After a lesson, it was time to put the learning into practice. And once again, being the cool teacher that he is, Adam set up a fun optimization contest. With bragging rights, being the main prize.

This time it wasn’t a battle of the sexes, but I can say it had a few surprising twists at the end. On one team you had MECLABS Research Analysts Aimee Bolton and Spencer Whiting and on the other you had Dustin Eichholt and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe. Their mission was to create the most effective radical redesign for a homepage. I will show you their designs as well as some advice from the teacher, pupils and myself. Hopefully you can apply it on your next testing adventure, especially in the case your design is a bit…um, far out. Read more…

To understand online advertising, you must understand women’s haircuts. To wit, have you ever heard this line: “How do you like my new haircut?”

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Gentlemen, you’ve probably been in this same boat before (and ladies on the other end of it). Your wife gets a new haircut. You don’t notice. Consequences ensue.

But as a man, I can attest that we only notice huge changes in things that vastly interest us. She had hair before. She has it now. What’s the difference?

However, if the wide receiver you’re starting on your fantasy team has even the slightest limp, you’ll instantly notice. Because you’re just that interested.

And I have news for you – your online advertising is not something that your audience is hugely interested in. “Visitors view Web pages as content in the middle with noise all around it. That noise is banner ads,” says Dustin Eichholt, Research Analyst, MECLABS.

So, how do you stick out among that noise and grab attention? Do you always want to? I had a discussion about that with our researchers at one of our recent Content Meetings (These are fun and educational meetings. A chance for the editorial team to pick our analysts’ brains. Think “Real Time with Bill Maher” meets “Science Friday with Ira Flatow.”) Here’s what they had to say… Read more…

We’ve been asked this question a number of times: how do you create an effective online banner ad that stands apart from the hundreds of thousands of others out there?

I would like to help answer that question by giving you the three major obstacles all banner ads face and options that you can use to overcome them. Read more…

At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.

Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.

In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom… Read more…

When it comes to designing a homepage, sometimes people forget that its purpose is to give multiple types of users what they want, and to do so as quickly as possible. After all, you only have their attention for a brief moment, and they can easily make your page disappear by simply clicking on that little “x” on the corner of their screen.

This is especially true, in the case of e-commerce Web sites — where visitors have differing motivations for visiting the page, and are probably looking for specific types of products. But, how do you effectively meet all those needs?

Well, that’s exactly what we wanted to find out during an Optimization Training Session class (which I infiltrated, by the way) taught at our labs by our Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp.

This is a class where some of our newest research team members hone their optimization skills – they even have homework! But, Mr. Lapp, isn’t one of those boring, monotone-lecturing teachers who puts their students to sleep (which reminds me, I really don’t miss school). He’s that cool teacher who lets you call him by his first name. And one of his latest, fun teaching tactics included launching an e-commerce homepage optimization contest. So, I brushed up on my journalism skills and took notes to give you a report on the contest results. Read more…