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

As part of any value proposition, you must have an “only” factor. This means you must differentiate yourself from your competitors in at least one way. The two “only” factors that most commonly come to mind are price and quality. Price, especially, is often at the forefront of every consumer’s mind.

However, in some industries, the top competitors all compete on similar to identical pricing. You know it, your competitors know it and the consumers will know it after a little research.

So, what do you do when your price matches the other leading companies in your market?

First, you must determine another area where you outshine the rest of the pack outside the price arena. If not, as Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, says, “It’s likely that your value proposition is already going to be underperforming because it is not forceful enough.”

Second, you might consider hitting the price issue head on. Consumers compare prices – in this digital world, it’s a fact of life. With a few words in their browser search box, consumers can leave your website and find the prices of every competitor in your market.

Instead of letting them leave to find this information, you could present competitors’ prices right on your website. Some companies have already achieved success with this method of attack.

Progressive Insurance is a well-known example of this strategy. The company promotes its comparison shopping on its website, in its search marketing and in its television ads.

If you can’t see the benefits of providing competitors’ prices, let me share two specific advantages the MECLABS Optimization Team shared.

Benefit #1: Address a need in the buyer’s process

As part of any marketing strategy, you should know the steps your customers make in the buy process. Do they research companies, and then select a product from a selected company? Do they research products, determine the specific product they want, and then find the best deal on that product through price comparisons?

If it’s the latter, adding competitors’ prices to your site could be addressing a major need in your customer’s purchase cycle.

“Once they’re there, you’re answering all of their questions. You want to satisfy the perceived needs of the visitors to your site,” said Spencer Whiting, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS.

By providing a price comparison, you effectively solve one issue you know the customer will need addressed.  Spencer said when looking at analytics for many Research Partners’ websites, the number one link visitors click on is often pricing.

Addressing this need also cuts back on potential anxiety around cost. In any economy, but especially today’s, people want to know they are getting the best value for their money. Cost can be a major source of anxiety for many buyers, so addressing this need and correcting that anxiety can help propel the potential customer through to the next stage of the buy process.

Benefit #2: Optimize the thought sequence

Presenting competitors’ pricing offers a second benefit: optimizing the thought sequence. You don’t want your website visitors to conduct unsupervised thinking.

In fact, this is part of the foundation of the MECLABS Landing Page Optimization online course.

The importance of thought sequences is described by the MECLABS LPO Meta-theory: 

To optimize the thought sequence on your landing pages, you can make price part of the conversation. You want to steer the conversation toward a value exchange on your website.

“If you present competitor’s pricing on your site, you have much more control over the perceived cost and value of your product compared to others,” said Lauren Maki, Optimization Manager, MECLABS.

So by showing the similar pricing, you have established an equal perceived cost into the value exchange. As for the value of the product, as Lauren mentioned, you will want to refer back to that “only” factor you have included in your value proposition.

She went on to provide an example using cellular service carriers, “If you have a product for $100 and your competitor has a comparable product for $100, the cost/price is equal, so the visitor is left to decide which has the best value. This is where you want to have influence on the visitor’s perception. ‘Yes, they’re equal in price, but with [our product], you get the fastest and largest network – something you don’t get with the other brand. ”

Having communicated the answer to any questions about potentially better pricing the customer might have as well as providing evidence of a better value for that same perceived cost, you are preventing them from searching for the answer on their own – and off your site.

The below example is Omni Jacksonville Hotel’s listing on KAYAK. You can see how KAYAK, an online travel company, controls the thought sequence of its visitors.

By providing its pricing side by side with its competitors, KAYAK opens a conversation about pricing. Travel is an industry where consumers can easily find the best deals through a little Google research. So in opening the conversation right in the search results, KAYAK uses that opportunity to guide the conversation toward its value exchange.

As in the search result example above, when all the pricing is the same, what do you think the consumer will do? If the customer is simply looking for the best price because they already decided to stay at the Omni Jacksonville Hotel, they’ll likely click on that eye-catching, orange call-to-action button, “Select.”

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Background: B2C company offering package vacations. In this test, we focused on improving the checkout process.

Goal: To increase cart completions

Primary research question: Which cart page will generate the highest completion rate?

Approach: A/B split test (variable cluster)

CONTROL

(Please Note: Some details have been obscured to protect Research Partner’s competitive advantage).

The original cart was simple, but it included three equally weighted options from which the visitor had to select:

• “View Lodging Options”
• “Add More Activities”
• “Checkout Without Lodging”

This made the checkout process more cumbersome than was necessary.

Read more…

Tis the season to discuss all things e-commerce and one of the most underutilized optimization opportunities that can potentially add some serious ROI to your bottom line – the shopping cart.

Shopping cart optimization is considered a highly strategic tactic as presenters Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, and Jon Powell, Senior Manager of Research & Strategy, MECLABS, explained in one of our recent Web clinics on shopping cart optimization.

“It’s likely, depending on how many products you have, that your shopping cart might be the most visited page on your entire website,” Austin said. “If you can make a change to increase conversion in the shopping cart, then it will apply site wide.”

So to help you tweek your shopping carts, today’s MarketingExperiments blog post will share the six last-minute changes you can make to your shopping carts that Austin and Jon presented in the Web clinic “Optimizing Shopping Carts for the Holidays,” which you can use to aid your shopping cart optimization efforts.

First, before you explore the changes you can make, here are some key principles that were featured in the clinic:

• Effective tests are not simply designed to achieve a valid result, but a valuable result. The goal of a test is to get a learning, but some “learnings” are more strategic than others.

• Marketers must be able to identify where in the funnel is the greatest opportunity for optimization.

• For e-commerce companies approaching a holiday season, often the most opportune place for the increase is in the shopping cart for two reasons:
  1. Increased motivation levels
  2. Convergent funnel paths

Also, to help in getting this information to you faster, we’ve split up all the changes and direct linked to specific times in the hour-long Web clinic video replay when those topics are discussed.

Read more…

As we ease out of election season and into the holidays, an e-commerce marketer’s fancy turns to thoughts of customers filling their virtual shopping carts with all sorts of goodies and then, most importantly, completing the purchase.

To help you reduce shopping cart abandonment, Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will host a free Web clinic today – “Optimizing Shopping Carts for the Holidays: 6 last-minute changes you can make to your shopping carts to increase conversion.”

But, before we share our discoveries, we wanted to hear what you’ve learned about shopping carts. Here are a few tips from your peers …

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You spent years creating a valuable email list that gets Kim Johnson to opt in. Then, you craft an amazing email that inspires Kim Johnson to click to the landing page, where your marketing prowess is again on display, and Kim Johnson adds your product to her cart. And then… And then… Nothing. But why? And, what can you do to avoid this scenario as much as possible?

Well, at least you’re not alone – 88% of consumers have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing their transaction, according to a Forrester study. While you cannot eliminate cart abandonment, and many factors are out of your control (some customers just weren’t ready to purchase), you do have the ability to reduce abandonment.

 If you want to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates, follow these seven simple steps:

  Read more…

Identifying and optimizing a few elements early in your sales funnel might give you a few quick wins, but what about the bigger picture of thinking about your entire sales funnel and long-term solutions for fixing the revenue leaks deeper within your checkout process?

In today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, we’ll show you a checkout page experiment and two questions that every marketer should contemplate beyond their testing.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the research notes on the experiment. 

Background: A consumer company specializing in vacation rentals

Goal: To increase the number of vacation confirmations

Primary Research Question: Which page will yield the highest conversion rate from billing information to confirmation?

Test Design: A/B multi-factor split test

Control

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The control featured a two-step horizontal design that shaded and separated Step 2 (second half of the form) until a “Continue” button was clicked, allowing users to move forward in the checkout process.

Once users completed the second step, they would click a second “Submit Reservation” button.

Treatment

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The treatment changes the form design from a two-step horizontal flow to a vertical design with minimized form fields. The treatment also reduces the calls-to-action to a single “Book My Vacation” button.

Results

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The treatment outperformed the control by a relative difference of 36% at a 98% level of confidence. So what can we learn from this experiment?

What you need to understand

When I asked Kyle Foster, Research Manager, MECLABS, about what we can learn from this experiment, he offered two takeaway questions that marketers should ask themselves:

• Do I understand my sales funnel completely? – Kyle explained that every lift you discover in your sales funnel is a direct increase to your ROI, and thinking about your sales funnel holistically will give you the greatest possible leverage to discover those lifts.

Kyle added that thinking about your sales funnel on a larger scale can also help identify potential revenue holes deeper within your funnel. “You want to plug the holes in the bottom of the bucket by fixing the end of a broken funnel prior to bringing in more traffic.”

• Am I thinking beyond the data? – Similar to his suggestion on thinking about the sales funnel, Kyle explained that marketers should also think beyond their data and short-term goals to gain a greater insight on developing a testing cycle that will produce better results.

“Sometimes you just have to use a little common sense in treating areas that will have a greater impact,” Kyle said.

He further added, “Aside from testing individual page elements, marketers should really take into consideration the overall areas of opportunity that exist by thinking about where the problems are now and where new problems might exist in the future.”

Related Resources:

Landing Page Optimization: 3 test ideas from a WordPress landing page

Optimization 201: Fix the broken leg before you fix the broken toe

Landing Page Optimization: 4 test ideas for a free-trial, lead gen form page

Form Optimization: 3 case studies to help convince your boss (and Sales) to reduce form fields