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

It’s a little over-simplified, but an email marketer’s job is to get the right message to the right person at the right time to achieve a specific goal. Doing that means understanding what motivates subscribers to open a message and engage with your offer – and that’s where the process gets tricky.

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers

The campaign targeted “inactive” members of their list, which they defined as subscribers that had not opened or clicked an email in 120 days. They wanted to either reactivate those subscribers, or else determine that they were truly inactive and remove them from the list. So they set up a four-message reactivation campaign to encourage a response.

Each message took a different approach to the reactivation effort:

- The first was a survey about email preferences
- The second was a request for subscribers to update their personal information
- The third was a contest to win a book
- The fourth repeated the request to update personal information

What is more appealing than FREE?

Going into the campaign, the team believed the contest offer would have the best response. After all, people like getting free stuff, right?

Maybe not: The contest offer had the weakest open rate and clickthrough rates of the four messages. Its open rate was 60% lower than the best-performing email – the survey about email preferences. And the contest offer’s CTR was 82% lower than the best-performing email.

The good news is that the reactivation campaign was a success overall. They reactivated 9% of the inactive subscribers they targeted – and they won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for it.

They also learned important lessons about what motivates their subscribers. Their conclusion: “People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

Final lesson: Assumptions are no match for results data. So get testing!

Sean Donahue is the editor of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies, benchmark data, and how-to information read by hundreds of thousands of advertising, marketing, and PR professionals every week.

Email Marketing, Research Topics email, Email Marketing, email optimization, test, testing

I’ll admit that I am a Twitter novice. Compared to social media gurus, some of whom have tremendous experience with the platform (up to two* years!), I am still very much in the learning-by-doing phase. Then again, aren’t we all?

As I try to be informative and give back to the Twittersphere, one of my email-related tweets was picked up by a Florida marketing agency that services several metros nationwide. With our Email Optimization clinic series underway, I was more than happy to provide an analysis of a broad-spectrum campaign that they had planned. Luann, their president, was as excited as I was about making a Twitter connection.

With Luann’s permission, I wanted to share my thoughts and recommendations with our readers. Here is an edited copy of the email response that I sent to her:

Hi Luann,

(click image to zoom)

Here are a few thoughts based on the email message creative I got from Noele, along with the requisite assumptions I’ve made. I hope they will be helpful.

There are two important caveats:

1. I don’t believe in best practices. Everything I recommend is normally tested until I find out what really works for the particular product and customer segment.
2. I want to be as helpful as possible, so I am not pulling any punches; the comments below are not a reflection on your company’s competence or reputation—just how they are communicated via this email message.

The fundamentals: Optimizing thought sequences

In optimization, our objective is not to create better design or copy. Our objective is to affect different thought sequences, and design and copy are our tools. A useful way to examine the thought sequences we need to address is through three simple questions that arise in the mind of the email recipient immediately, whether consciously or unconsciously:

1. Who is sending me this email?
2. What is it asking me to do?
3. Why should I do it?

Our job is to answer these questions as directly and quickly as possible using copy, graphical elements, and layout of the email.

Without specific information about your list, I am going to assume (based on email content) that it contains a large segment that has never done business with your company and perhaps has never heard of it.

Communicating Efficiently: Make it an easy read

The body of the email appears singularly focused on its graphic design and a clever visual way to represent what you do. I suspect that your target customers would prefer a plain-English explanation instead.

They would also likely appreciate it being summarized into a strong, benefits-focused headline, supported with several key reasons why they should use your company’s services, rather than your competitors’.

How it appeared in my Outlook preview pane. (click image to zoom)

I am making an assumption about your target customer segment(s), but from my experience—especially with B2B—black text on a white background works best most of the time. There’s rarely a better way to communicate with busy professionals.

Relying primarily on text, rather than images, will likely work better for you because in default Outlook setup with a preview pane, most people will see blank white boxes instead of your message—and promptly delete it. Alt text helps, but not as much as well-formatted HTML text. You need to make sure that your email degrades gracefully: it needs to read acceptably with images turned off and in plain text.

Communicating Value: Make it clear why you are the best choice

Again, there is no real headline here. The question “Is your business missing something?” is so generic that I can’t imagine it being compelling at all. You can have a successful question-format headline, but it needs to point to a specific problem that you know your customer has.

A great way further to support your value proposition is by telling the reader what your customers say about you. It’s more powerful than anything you say yourself.

There is another challenge with communicating value: you are offering a range of very different services. Sent to a large enough list, this will get you calls, but I would invest some time into 1) trying to segment your list and offer only the most relevant services to each segment, and 2) if you can’t segment or still end up with a large “general” segment, help your reader understand which service is right for them.

Communicating Action: Make it clear what to do next

You don’t want to leave this up to the recipients to figure out. That’s what we call “unsupervised thinking.” You need to do most of the work for them—or you won’t get the click.

There is no clear next step. Here’s what I can picture a recipient thinking: “It looks like you just want me to sign up for the newsletter. It’s the biggest CTA (call to action). But I don’t know who you are. I really don’t care about getting latest news postings on your website. If we already have a relationship, why am I getting this generic email?”

In the end, you are not giving the reader a specific reason to contact you. This goes back to building the problem, explaining why you are the best solution, and telling the reader what they’ll get by clicking where you want them to click.

If this is an email to an unsegmented list, I suggest two options to test:

1. Have only one CTA (you can repeat it at the top and at the bottom, but ultimately you should be asking them to do one thing). The job of this email will be to build enough confidence/interest in your company to get a click. Then you can provide options (if relevant) on the landing page.
2. Have several distinct offers, making very clear which one applies to which customer segment or specific problem it’s solving (even if you can’t segment the list, you should know what the key segments are). Then the job of this email is to help the reader quickly decide which offer is most relevant, and click on the corresponding CTA.

I hope these insights will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing about the results you were able to achieve with them.

Sincerely,

Boris Grinkot

To see more email optimization ideas, you can listen to the replay of our last live web clinic, where the MarketingExperiments team offered testing ideas for audience-submitted email marketing messages.

* I’m not counting 2007—come on!

Email Marketing, Practical Application, Research Topics email, Email Marketing, email optimization

To the detractors, Facebook advertising only works for dating sites (and perhaps online degrees). As we demonstrate with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Heuristic, motivation is the most important factor influencing the probability of conversion. And the detractors would claim that most people who visit Facebook are motivated by one thing and one thing only.

Other marketers are happy to jump at any social media marketing opportunity. To them, Facebook is one big opportunity that they’re just trying to find the right tactics to embrace (of course, it might help to wipe the dollar signs out of their eyes first).

Whatever works

I’m a pragmatist. I’ll leave my personal biases at the door any day in favor of solid metrics combined with scientific experimentation that shows what really works.

Social media measurement dreamers like myself may have a new champion. Omniture (recently acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion) will announce an expansion of its partnership with Facebook in a keynote address today at Omniture Summit 2010.

Omniture is going to expand its existing search management solution, and its SearchCenter Plus customers will now be able to manage and compare their spend on search engines and on Facebook in a single tool. Online Marketing Suite 2.0 will include Facebook social media optimization, integrating Facebook ad management with Omniture® SearchCenter®.

This unified reporting will help marketers more efficiently understand and respond to ad ROI (and perhaps move from tactical to strategic use of social media marketing).

What gets measured gets done (better)

Omniture’s powerful analytics and testing tools have provided users with reliable reporting and experimental implementation. (Disclosure: MarketingExperiments provides Omniture SiteCatalyst® and Test&Target® consulting and integration services alongside its own optimization and experimental design expertise.)

Detailed demographic and engagement data provided by Facebook’s login-required environment will further help advertisers position their message in front of the right audience. On the practical side of optimization, the ability to use this data is critical to experimental design (understanding performance on segment level), and the automation already provided by Omniture SearchCenter will help roll out tests on Facebook placement faster in the same convenient interface with search ad management.

Will Facebook become more attractive to major marketers?

This is an important step by Facebook to become a more mainstream publisher, opening it up to Omniture’s substantial customer portfolio of major B2B and B2C brands. Tighter Omniture integration brings additional legitimacy to Facebook as a marketing channel, whose power as a social media network has been as business-ambiguous for major ad spenders as it has been popular for tween marketers.

For optimization professionals, this also signals a significant opportunity to gain greater insights and deliver more relevant messages to target customers.

How do you use social to make money? Respond to the discussion in our LinkedIn group or drop us an email. We’ll feature the best tips, techniques, and practices in a future blog post, so make sure to include any info (Twitter handle, website) that you’d like to promote.

Analytics & Testing, Internet Marketing News, Social Media analytics, Facebook, omniture, social media

Many marketers I talk to are quite interested in optimizing the content of their email messages. They test images, calls to action, subject lines, and the tone of the email. However, how many companies test the timing of email sends and how this affects readership?

Proper timing = greater relevance

To illustrate how timing might affect open and click-through rates, think about how you read email.  In the afternoon when the day is dragging on and you need a break, do you give each email message a little more time than when you first get into the office in the morning and are confronted with 20 hot items bursting from your inbox?

So would an email with a more complex conversion goal (such as signing up for a recurring subscription) do better with you in the afternoon while a simple conversion goal (like signing up for a free web clinic) might have a better chance in the morning when you’re plugging and chugging and not putting as much thought (and perhaps doubt) into your actions?

While you were sleeping

If you subscribe to our informative email, you know that we send it in the middle of the night. By testing, we learned that email messages sent before 9 a.m. EST dramatically lifted click-through rates for our list. Here are the key takeways from our testing:

• Late-nighters in the management level and ‘indiepreneur’ crowds on the West Coast are opening work email up until the midnight hour. East Coast execs are responsive in the ‘early bird’ hours.
• Subscribers based in Asia and Europe respond to email messages that don’t get buried in their inbox during non-work hours.
• Time zone segmentation is worth a test for any marketer with a substantial international list – especially B-to-Bers.

What works for your audience?

Keep in mind, that for every demographic and persona that is part of your readership, their habits and optimal send time might be different. Test sending out at different times to see what affect that has on not only readership, but conversion – because even in these “tight time zones,” people might just glance at the email, (giving you the open metrics) but save the action for later. However, we all know sometimes “later” never comes.

Speaking of testing, it is not just good enough to just try different send times for entire lists. Aggregate testing like this can get you subpar results and hide the real conversions nuggets. Narrowing the scope to particular segments in your list (which you should always be doing…) will help you see how certain segments respond to timing and allow you to make stronger conclusions.

Sometimes the conversion gems that are waiting to be discovered are not only in the message itself, but how and (in this case) when it is being delivered. It is like when you asked your Mom to borrow the car – you knew not to bother her when she was busy if you wanted a good response.

Good luck in testing.

For a deeper discussion about timing and relevance, you can join our Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, as he explores Increasing Conversion with Right Time, Right Message Strategies on Thursday, March 11 at 2 p.m. This free BtoB Magazine webcast is sponsored by Eloqua.

Email Marketing, Research Topics

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provoked a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London

ANSWER:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for your question.

If I might broaden the question slightly to interpret its essence as a transferrable principle, could I restate it as…

How much validity is there to the conventional wisdom that, in the Subject Line of an offer email message, numbers, certain symbols (especially £/€/$, %, and !) and “SPAM words” such as “Free” and “discount” will cause a dramatic reduction in deliverability, and consequently effectiveness?

… if so, then it’s surely an important one.

In the case of the particular company and study referred to on Slide 22 – that was precisely one of the questions we set out to answer.

What you couldn’t see in the context of Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami is that this particular two-treatment comparative vignette was just a tiny part of a much larger and broader study. We intended to test the specific, widely accepted presumption you mentioned.

We were also exploring a host of other best practices to see how valid they remained through the evolution of regulations as well technical filter changes by email service providers (ESPs) since the time they were first introduced and anecdotally adopted (around 2003-2005).

This was important because we know from our foundational Offer/Response-Optimization principles of “clarity trumps persuasion” and “specificity converts,” that the clearer and more specific subject line – i.e., the one with the “15% Off…” copy – should convert better.

What we found was that there was, in fact, a small but significant difference in deliverability – interestingly, it was more pronounced among the smaller ESPs. In addition, as we had predicted based on the “eme” heuristic, the Open Rate actually declined (…by more than 25%).

In the end, though, the central research question was “Which email subject line will result in the greatest projected net revenue?” As revealed in Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation, despite the slight dip in Delivery Rate, and the (what would otherwise have been alarming) drop in Open Rate, the Click-through Rate (CTR) to the landing page was 60.3% higher.

What he may not have mentioned is that, in direct answer to the research question, the Treatment subject line yielded a 56% increase in projected net revenue vs. the Control.

So, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

I hope that’s helpful, Chris.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email marketing at MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich on March 8^th and 9^th.

Dr. McGlaughlin’s four-hour workshop and keynote presentation will cover email capture rate and quality, open rates, conversion, and building customer trust and loyalty with email. He will also be conducting live optimization of audience submissions – a lively and always-popular segment.

Email Marketing, Research Topics 2010 Email Summit, clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, webinar

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, webinar

This weekend I was paying for the 10 gallons I had just put into my old 1997 Honda Civic, when I decided that I’d purchase a nice cold soda for the road. I pointed out the pump where my fueled-up car was located and then slid the cold beverage to the convenience store clerk. He informed me that my total came to $25.89 and then he stopped.

Looking me dead in the eyes, he asked me what my name was. “Austin,” I replied a little hesitantly. “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?” he asked. I nodded and attempted to hand him my Visa credit card.

He denied my overture and informed me that he could only help me if I were a member of his store. So not wanting to cause a scene with the five people who were now behind me, I conceded.

Can I just buy a soda?

He asked for my name again, and then moved on to more personal information. He informed me that my phone number, home address, and email address were all required for membership, but then gave me the option of telling him my age, date of birth, marital status, and household income level.

I, of course, declined. After all the information had been gathered, the clerk then passed me about 60 pages of the legal terms which I needed to sign to become a member.

Finally he took my card. However, in the middle of processing it, another clerk approached me saying that he noticed I was purchasing a can of soda. The coworker then made some suggestions concerning what I might like to buy along with my soda based upon previous customer patterns.

Once I had assured his coworker that I just wanted a soda, the clerk then again reminded me that my total came to $25.89 and again stopped, looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?”

This might be how customers see our shopping carts

Ok, so this story is a bit of a stretch for a convenience store, but is an accurate reenactment of the experience at many ecommerce sites. This is exactly what we see across the Web with shopping cart experiences everywhere. In fact, we recently ran a test with one of our Research Partners and here is what the original checkout process looked like:

1)     Product page (click to purchase)

2)     Cart page (confirm you are ready to order)

3)     User account page (if you are new you must choose to create a new account)

4)     Create a user account page #1 (enter name, email and account password)

5)     Create a user account page #2 (enter shipping information)

6)     Create a user account page #3 (enter payment information)

7)     Order confirmation page (confirm order and account information again)

8)     Receipt page

To go from the product page to the receipt page took eight different steps. A customer has to register before being able to place the order, as well as confirm that order twice. After reorganizing and removing unnecessary steps, we were able to optimize this process to a single basic step. The increase in order completions was over 68%.

Is your shopping cart trying to do too much?

What this experiment illustrates is something we see over and over in the shopping cart process. Most shopping carts that companies use are bulky and have more features than needed (i.e. cart registration, order confirmations, cross-promotional offerings, etc.). Sometimes this means a shopping cart looks less like a basic transaction facilitator, and more like a boot camp obstacle training course with high walls and flaming hoops.

For instance, how many times have you had to join a web site before actually buying a product? How many “if you like this product, you might like this product” offers have you endured while checking out? Have you ever counted how many times you actually have to confirm your order before it goes through?

None of these features are bad per se, and some might even be helpful in the overall customer-client relationship. The only problem is when they get in the way of the natural thought sequence of a customer looking to purchase something at a specific moment in time.

Please, just let me out of here!

If I come to a web site, place an order in my cart, and hit “check out,” then please just let me check out. We must make sure our cart processes is sticking to the main objective – namely, closing the sale.

All these customer retention features and cross-promotional options can be strategically accomplished after the initial sale has already been completed. For instance, you can ask for the customer to create an account for future purchases or send them to a thank-you page that has cross-promotional offers.

Overall, this experiment leaves us with one key question: How many people might we be losing in the process by interrupting their order process? For this company, simplifying the checkout process meant 68% more orders. What is your potential?

Want to learn more?

For more information on how to optimize your shopping cart process, listen to our good friend Joel Book, the Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget and Charles Nicholls, the Founder of SeeWhy, in the free webinar entitled The 7 Secrets To Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Ecommerce, Order Process, Research Topics eccomerce, Ecommerce, marketing, shopping cart abandonment, shopping carts, webinar

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation…

And like any good conversation, a few elements are key – clarity, proper timing, a common language, and a focus on how the person you’re talking to hears what you’re saying. Combine these elements with a methodology that allows you to optimize each part in a real-world, feedback-intensive setting, and you’ve mastered the basics of email marketing.

And do it all in a radically honest way – talk to your customers like a person, not like the typical marketer. In the end, being direct is the best way to earn the trust of a skeptical customer.

Dr. McGlaughlin ended this web clinic with live optimization of audience-submitted email messages. This last segment was so popular that we’ve decided to add a part three to our series on email response optimization that focuses exclusively on live optimization.

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching live during a free webinar with our sister company InTouch – Online Lead Generation: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads – on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, Email Marketing, email optimization, Flint McGlaughlin, marketing, marketing research, web clinic, webinar

If you have been following the blog over the past few weeks, you already know that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin recently taught live on “The 5 Best Ways to Optimize Email Response” at the 2010 MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami.

“The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!”

The session was very lively and included on-the-spot optimization of audience-submitted emails. Some even suggested cutting lunch to continue with more live optimization. You can watch a replay of the complete presentation below and here are a couple reviews from live attendees:

“Even if this was the third time I attended one of his lectures, I still learn from each new session. Flint is a tremendous speaker and his mathematical approach on all email marketing aspects based on serious testing is amazing.” – Kenny Van Beeck, EmailGarage

“After a reported late influx of attendees, people took to sitting on the floor to listen to the first session, delivered by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!” – Mick Griffin, Get Response

(Replay) Optimizing Email Response – Part 1

Today we are hosting the “Part 2” of this presentation to focus on how to actually craft effective email messages. We will also be taking some additional time to work with and optimize your email campaigns live on today’s web clinic.

Today, we expect Dr. McGlaughlin to be as lively as he was in Miami. We hope you can make it to today’s presentation at 4PM EST.

Now, get some email optimization love of your own

Admittedly, we have already chosen most of the live audience submissions we will cover during today’s call. However, we did save one spot for our blog readers. So, if you have an email you would like us to look at today post a URL hosting the email in a comment or send it to us via email. We will choose one lucky blog reader from the submissions today. Good luck and see you this afternoon.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Practical Application 2010 Email Summit, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, Flint McGlaughlin, marketing, MarketingSherpa, optimizing email

Editor’s Note: Troy O’Bryan and his team at Response Capture drove a 258% conversion rate increase for their client through two rounds of testing and optimizing a landing page. Yet when I interviewed Troy to write his team’s success story, he made clear that they weren’t content with their achievement. They’re constantly considering optimization ideas for a new test.

So I crept into the lab, distracted Dr. Optimize (a.k.a. Adam Lapp) from his current experimentation, and convinced him to apply his complex genius to this page. Here’s what he had to say…

It’s great to hear a fellow marketer realize the power of testing. Congratulations Troy! Without testing, how will you ever know if your landing page or website is performing the best that it could?

Never stop testing

Let’s all take a lesson from Amazon.com. No matter how much money or market share Amazon creates, they have never stopped testing. They are constantly proving and disproving new ideas and concepts. I have no doubt they have eliminated thousands of page designs that did not work. But that’s indicative of a true testing culture.

If we compare the laboratories of our online marketing colleagues to that of scientists finding cures to common ailments, there are many similarities. How many concoctions do you think doctors will rule out before they find the cure to baldness? I’m sure that number will dwarf the number of landing pages the average marketer will rule out before they find the one that works the best.

That’s the number one optimization recommendation I can give to anyone…keep on testing. And I’m glad to see the team at Response Capture working (and succeeding) by following that creed.

What to test next

Of course, it’s one thing to know the importance of continuous testing. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is deciding what to test next. Let’s take a look at the successful landing page:

My advice is two-fold:

1. Test several more radical redesigns

Then when you think you have a design that can’t be beat by other new treatments…

2. Begin fine tuning (multivariate tests work really well for this)

Radical Test Ideas

The current page does a lot of things right, but there is still room for improvement. The first thing I would test would be the tone.

Currently the look and feel of the page can only be described as “slick.” You look at and say “Wow!” It’s dark and sleek. The bright blue pops out at you. And the overall feels is that this page has been designed by a professional design firm with a very high proficiency with Photoshop.

As great as it is, is this the best tone to go with? At MarketingExperiments, we’ve spoken about the concept that “Ugly converts.” That concept really doesn’t necessarily mean that ugly pages perform better than pretty pages. Rather, we want to remind you that strategy is more important than design.

So what different tones can Response Capture test? Here are a few ideas:

TEST IDEA #1: Simple, plain layout

This page does not have a complex objective – just enter your email to receive a free whitepaper. Assuming most visitors are very qualified (i.e. they know what a PDN is and are your ideal customer), you don’t really have to do much selling.

We see a common mistake across many industries where a landing page is composed of elements that just over-complicate the objective.

For example, if you only want to know if a newspaper is delivered in your area, then your landing page only needs a headline, ZIP Code field, and button. Bulky copy, testimonials, demos, videos, images, and other fancy page elements are just not necessary.

The Washington Post is an excellent example of a simple ZIP Code entry:

Compare this to the New York Post:

I just want to find out if you deliver to my area. I don’t need to know about the top columnist or the Page Six gossip section.

This applies for companies that provide free quotes for insurance or a similar service. A visitor just wants to enter a few pieces of information and see a number. Putting layers of clutter in their way just creates friction.

To summarize, I would test a page that has the following:

• A non-descript background
• Simple headline: “Download your free report on PDN Simulation”
• Sub-headline: “Tell us where to send the report”
• Email field
• Button

Just make it as simple as possible.

TEST IDEA #2: Report style

So if someone clicks through, we know we have their interest. They are ready to read about PDN Simulation (must be a page turner!). Then give them what they want right away.

Upon landing, visitors could see a page that looks like a report. Here’s one I found quickly from Google Research:

They clicked through with the expectation of seeing a report, and that’s what you have given them with this treatment. Get them engaged right away. Provide an abstract or first couple of paragraphs, then place a call to action to “download the full report.”

Just make sure that you clearly communicate that the whitepaper is free because this treatment strategy communicates much more value than the others. The report style has more of a high-brow, university type of tone – which isn’t always free. It may work or it may not, but the idea is to test.

Those two test ideas should give you a good start, but if you can think of more, test them and let us know how they work out.

Fine Tuning Ideas

Once you’ve found a primary strategy that works, then it’s time to fine tune. Nothing is off limits here. Let’s assume that the current design has stood the test of time…it has defeated several other radical redesigns you have thrown at it. What do you test?

1. Headline

• Test variations that quantify what’s in the report
• Create urgency (i.e. “available for a limited time” or “you have to know this now”)
• Think of several benefits from reading the report, then test each one in the headline
• Pull out several one-liners from the report that announce an exciting finding
• Test a few provocative questions

2. Rotate bullets and add new bullets

3. Choose three or four different images to test

• Other images of the report
• Photographs of people that may connect with the target audience
• Charts and graphs
• Other items related to PDN (I have to admit, I’m not your target customer so I’m not quite sure what they would be)

4. Button copy – it’s pretty good now, but you could definitely stumble upon something better

5. Color scheme

• Test several different background/font combinations
• Will a light background with dark font work better?

6. Placement of gift card incentive

• In the headline
• As one of the main bullets
• Before the button
• To the right of the button

Now we put this challenge in front of you, the MarketingExperiments community. Use the comments field to post your suggestions for this landing page, agree/disagree with this assessment by Dr. Optimize, and let the page owner know what you would do differently.

Landing Page Optimization, Practical Application, Research Topics landing page optimization, marketing, online marketing, optimization