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

I guess it was bound to happen. For last Wednesday’s web clinic — Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site — we packed in a bunch of research, special guest Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa, and two new case studies with gains of up to 56%.

We had a great crowd, lots of live Q&A, a cool contest — and, sadly, a vaporized recording. So you can now access the presentation in our standard research brief format (with all the charts, key points and takeaways from the session); however, the flash version is in the ether. Sorry about that.

Back to some good news, eh?

The five clinic participants who will receive a free copy of the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide are:

1. Cathryn Foster of Dot Zinc
2. Amy Wang of JPMorgan Chase
3. Richard Flaherty of CambridgeSoft Corporation
4. Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink
5. Tom Gray of Gray eMarketing

More good news?

Thanks to your feedback, we’re expanding our web clinics in several new ways, including: teaming up with more featured guests, pulling in more case studies and research from our community of marketers, and tackling some new topics.

A perfect example is our free web clinic next Wednesday, June 10: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Sign up for the free Twitter clinic, join the @MktgExperiments team, and keep an eye on the hashtag #webclinic in the days to come. Oh, and please share with your tweeps, too.

As part of our mission to “discover what really works” in marketing and optimization, we often use “radical redesign” tests to help research partners improve results.

In that same spirit, we had a little fun with our recent B2C landing page optimization web clinic: a contest with multiple winners, audience voting, additional content on the blog, and a game show angle.

The reviews and recommendations were grounded in our optimization research, as always. But the delivery included an extra dose of levity.

Based on feedback from our live audience of more than 828 marketers, these elements were a hit, so look for us to continue testing new ideas.

B2C Landing Pages: Live optimization

You can now access the Feb. 11 clinic in three formats for your convenience:

• View the complete presentation (slides and audio)
• Read the print-friendly research brief with additional links
• Listen to the MP3 version

Our research team also analyzed six more B2C landing pages for the blog, from the “elimination-round” contestants.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the live web clinic — especially those who submitted their landing pages for review.

Got some ideas for upcoming clinics? Want to share your thoughts on this one? Use the comments field below.

At our recent clinic on PPC campaigns, our optimization team critiqued actual landing pages and ads submitted by attendees. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to get to all of them in the hour-long session.

One page we weren’t able to cover was sent in by FreedomVOICE Systems. You can click on the screenshot for a larger view of the page and sample PPC ad. (To avoid skewing their numbers, we won’t use the real URL.)

FreedomVOICE said top performing keywords included “toll free number” and “800 numbers” and that optimization steps they’ve already taken included testing ad copy, using negative keywords, and setting position preference.

The analysis and suggestions that follow are from two of our leading analysts, Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research, and Aaron Rosenthal, Director of Channels Research.

Jimmy Ellis:

The current page is trying to do too many things at once. The objective of this page is most likely to get someone to “search” for the phone number. And the results page (if they find an available number) should be trying to get them to “start their free trial”.

Some of the obstacles and problems I see include:

• Ad copy starts with 800 numbers and a 15 day free trial and landing page starts with “unmatched reliability” and no “real” headline.
• Design does not flow properly and has multiple competing elements and objectives that are not in the proper sequence. Currently visitors are asked to “order” … then to learn “more” … then to “search for 800 numbers” … then to compare plans… but why are there contracts with a free trial?
• You should never put an “order” section or button on a free trial offer. It instantly increases customer anxiety and makes them second guess the benefit of the free trial.
• The sequence that would likely work best would be: Search for the toll free number, then compare plans, then start the free trial (ordering is removed completely), with links to allow them to learn more if they need more information after their number search.

To reduce friction and anxiety, increase the expression of the value proposition, and improve the clarity from top to bottom, here’s how I would redesign the page:

1. Start with a headline that says something like, “Toll Free 800 Numbers — 15 Day Free Trial”.
2. Subhead: Search for your new Toll Free 800 Number.
3. Then feature the blue phone/search box.
4. Security and credibility indicators go under the blue box (move up from the bottom of the current page).
5. The End.
6. The order info, features, and comparison would be displayed and communicated on the phone number results page — when they are ready to make a decision.

Aaron Rosenthal:

• That incentive “Free teleconferencing for 1 year” at the top of the page gets lost in the design. Most people won’t even see it.
• All the different boxes make the information very difficult to digest.
• As for the ad, you may also want to test using “free” in the headline and in the URL subdomain.
• Also, make sure to test subdomain vs file folder. We have seen that subdomain does not always outperform a file folder; sometimes the file folder format works best. Example: TollFree.FreedomVoice.com (subdomain) vs. FreedomVoice.com/TollFree (file folder).
• If your rates are substantially lower than 2.9 cents per minute you may want to test using this in your ad copy because it would give you an advantage over the advertiser in the number one spot.
• That takes me to your value proposition: If you are the least expensive, or you’ve been doing this the longest, or …? Test that in your body copy.

I concur with all of the above and would reiterate that the eyepath on this page needs immediate attention. We know that your designer will hate our suggestions. Nevertheless …

• Try using heatmaps and clickmaps to see where visitors’ eyes and clicks are going. Then simplify the graphics. There are 18 shiny bubbles on the page, including the keypad and five different call-to-action buttons, splashed from corner to corner, drawing visitors’ eyes all over the place. The different colors don’t provide enough contrast to overcome the similar shapes. Plus, all the shiny bubbles and fish-eye warped stock images convey more of a funky, grab-a-ringtone vibe than a B2B offer.
• I’d also examine the analytics against your sales funnel to refocus those calls-to-action. How many clicks do you get on the live help, “Click to Call” button? Not many? Test a new page without it.
• You could also use stronger calls-to-action on buttons if you broke out of the bubble shape with an oval or rectangle. Example: “Get Your New Number” instead of the “Search” button below the keypad.

The goal is to strip out any elements that get in the way of a clear path to a decision/conversion. By making this a more focused, relevant page that closely matches visitors’ expectations from the ad, you can expect significantly better results.

We hope you find these ideas useful and, just like our clinics, we’d like to hear your feedback as well. Use the comments feature to share your thoughts on the page and/or these suggestions.

Thanks again to FreedomVOICE Systems for providing its campaign information for the live optimization critique.

Technically, this isn’t a preview because our Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce sites took place on Wednesday, May 7. But let’s set the semantics aside.

Thanks to your feedback, we’ll soon be reproducing our Clinics in a new format that integrates the audio and presentation slides. Here’s a peek at the new format.

We’ll be using this new format and making it available to our MarketingExperiments Journal subscribers this summer. We’ll also continue posting our Clinic content in the current formats (audio and HTML-based research briefs).

Our goal is to provide the information and examples in a variety of formats, so you can find the most convenient and valuable format(s) for you.

Got comments or questions about the new format? Please let us know.

(And if you missed it, you can find our April 16 Clinic on metrics here.)