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

Optimization Summit 2013, held May 20-23 in Boston, is just weeks away. To help get you in the proper mindset for four days of hands-on learning and expert-led presentations, we’re continuing our series of video shorts highlighting the most memorable sessions from last year’s event.   

As MECLABS’ Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin said at Optimization Summit 2012, “Best practices on the Internet are typically pooled ignorance.”

In the following video excerpt, Nathaniel Ward, Manager of Online Programs, The Heritage Foundation, and Tim Kachuriak, SVP, Innovation & Optimization, Pursuant, talk about how the conservative think tank tested and optimized its landing page by looking beyond established best practices and experimenting with new ways to use the website to build a quality email list.

[Please note, while MECLABS neither agrees nor disagrees with the political leanings referenced in the video, we seek to discover marketing lessons from all marketers. At Optimization Summit 2013, you can learn how Obama for America generated $500 million in donations using A/B testing.]

Ward and Kachuriak seemed to agree with McGlaughlin about best practices. During this session, they questioned several “sacred cows” of webpage design, such as inundating pages with email capture fields. Kachuriak spoke about how The Heritage Foundation put its website content into action with a short questionnaire about Obamacare, based on the popular children’s board game, “Operation.”

Kachuriak said, “Guiding people through that mental conversation that makes them more predisposed to want to accept our offer.” Indeed, while this short questionnaire added an extra step in the name capture process, it led to a significant increase in name acquisition conversion.

By garnering visitors’ names only after they completed the questionnaire, Kachuriak’s team was able to engage in a conversation with users, giving them a better understanding of the organization’s value proposition and reassuring them of the type(s) of content they would receive in exchange for entering in their email addresses.

This additional series of steps increased name acquisition conversion 282%, and a 900% increase in email sign-ups over the nonprofit benchmark.

Related Resources:

How The Heritage Foundation increased donations 274% – Full, free video replay of this case study

How The Heritage Foundation Increased Online Donations 274% Using the MECLABS Methodology – Complete slide presentation from Optimization Summit 2012

Marketing Strategy: How to find answers to the most common marketing questions

Content Marketing: Interactive infographic blog post generates 3.9 million views for small insurance company 

One of the most testing-oriented sessions at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, recently held in Las Vegas, was a presentation by Michael Aagaard, Copywriter and self-described test junkie, ContentVerve. Michael offered the audience 12 test case studies in 30 minutes in a talk titled, “How to Optimize and Test: Calls-to-Action for Maximum Conversions.”

For this presentation, Michael focused on call-to-action (CTA) buttons located on landing pages looking for a clickthrough, and this blog post will focus on three tests covering three aspects of call-to-action buttons: placement, copy and design.

CTA placement test

This test pitted a CTA above the fold in the control against below the fold in the treatment:

The results were somewhat counterintuitive with the below-the-fold treatment converting 304% higher than the control at a 98% confidence level.

“There are several other things going on in the treatment. So the whole lift can’t be ascribed entirely to moving the CTA below the fold,” Michael said.

He added, “However, the fact remains that the treatment with the CTA at the bottom of the page, way below the fold, outperformed the control variant with the CTA at the very top of the page – something that simply shouldn’t be possible if you subscribe to the best practice rule that the CTA should always be above the fold in order to convert.”

CTA copy test

This test is a little cleaner than the previous example from an A/B testing perspective, as it involves only changing one word in the CTA copy. “Start your free trial” in the control becomes “Start my free trial” in the treatment. 

As you can see, the treatment changing “your” to “my” resulted in a 90% lift in sign-ups.

“One might be inclined to label this test as a fluke, because it seems so out of proportion that one word could have such a dramatic effect. But I’ve performed the same test on multiple sites, and I’ve consistently seen lifts of 30% to 90% by simply changing the possessive determiner ‘your’ to ‘my’ in the CTA copy,” Michael explained.

He cautioned against applying this technique across the linguistic globe, however.

Michael said, “The funny thing is that I’ve performed similar tests in Danish, and it doesn’t seem to work.”

Read more…

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, Donna Krizik, Director of Client Communications, Crestwood Associates LLC, presented some impressive email copywriting tests. Let’s take a closer look at what she learned about email body copy today on the MarketingExperiments blog …

Background:  Crestwood Associates is a Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM reseller. The new release of Dynamics CRM touted 45 new features. Crestwood wanted both existing ERP and CRM customers, along with prospects, to sign up for an informative webinar, which would then get customers and prospects to schedule an upgrade or new deployment.

Audience: Marketing and Sales staff who either have CRM or are in the market for CRM

Objective:  Get customers to click on a link to register or learn more

Primary Research Question:  What email copy will maximize my clickthroughs?

Test Design:  Complete copy change. Donna’s team changed everything (just about).

CONTROL

After reviewing the above email copy, Donna identified a few elements that might be hindering conversion:

• Overall, there was just too much going on.
• The first line focused on the product, not the customer: “Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps you …”
• There were five calls-to-action (two in the main copy, plus three in the sidebar).
• The call-to-action language was generic and did not offer any value (“Click here” and “read this document”).
• The language in the bullet points was “fuzzy.”

TREATMENT #1

In this treatment, Donna reworded the main body copy to start with a customer pain point instead of a product. (“Are you struggling each month, trying to get a handle on your sales pipeline?”)

She also removed two of the five calls-to-action (CTAs), removing the “Top 10 Reasons to Choose CRM” whitepaper CTA from both the main body copy and the right-hand sidebar copy.

TREATMENT #2
 

For this treatment, the copy stayed the same as Treatment #1; however, Donna removed one more call-to-action (removing “click here to learn more about …” from the main body copy). This email had two calls-to-action, in the right-hand sidebar.

She also changed the right-hand sidebar background color from dark purple to light green.

TREATMENT #3
 

 
Again, Donna started with a pain point question her audience of salespeople might relate to along with a solution. This time, however, Donna “picked ONE feature of CRM that would solve their problem and focused on it (a very sexy feature) and quantified some ease of use and functionality they can take advantage of” instead of talking about CRM in general, high-level terms as in the previous two treatments that had more general language like “with CRM you can quickly identify your top customers.”

Here are some other changes Donna made in Treatment #3:

• Added a transition at the bottom of the main copy calling attention to the CTA on the sidebar
• Had only one CTA in the sidebar, which focused on the event
• Had a clear call-to-action that did not require much commitment from the audience for taking the next step – “Preview the Agenda here”
• Added urgency

RESULTS

The simpler email (one call-to-action as opposed to five) focusing on the customer’s pain points instead of the product, and suggested a specific solution, generated a 400% higher clickthrough rate than the control.

What you need to understand

Here are Donna’s key email body copy takeaways, based on this test:

• Focus on audience – speak directly with them and their pain point.
• Focus on one key benefit, map it to the pain and solve it.
• Eliminate multiple equally weighted CTAs. They are too confusing, and muddy the ‘What do you want me to do?’ question.
• Soften your ask (learn, preview, sample, see, view, tour).

Justin Bridegan, Senior Marketing Manager, MECLABS, moderated this session at Email Summit, so I asked him for his key takeaways from this test, as well.

“It’s very important in the first couple of sentences to really engage the audience. If you don’t engage them in the beginning, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the copy says. Pulling them in with pain points and benefits really makes a difference,” Justin said.

“Focus on your customers’ challenges and pain points first, before you get into your product. You have to pull them in, just like a good movie. On Netflix, I watch the first five minutes. If I’m bored, I pull it,” he added.

Aside from the opening copy, Justin also alluded to simplifying the email itself.

“In a movie, if too much is going on too soon, people will say, ‘Whoa, forget it.’ Every time she removed something she got a better result.”

“Marketers are under pressure to do too much with their emails right now. They keep trying to put more into it to get more out of it. That’s not the place, or the right time, to do that,” Justin advised marketers. “I’ve found that in my own copy. One call-to-action is better. This email is primarily for this one, specific goal. Then, let the landing page sell them.”

“It should all make sense together, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong in the email,” Justin concluded.

Aside from the simpler email more focused on the customer’s pain point, the specificity of the solution likely also played a role in the higher clickthrough rate.

“Specificity converts,” said Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS. “In marketing, there should be no such thing as a general message. The marketer communicates with an aim. This aim should dictate everything else we say. This aim should influence, even constrain, every word we say.”

Related Resources:

Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston, May 20-23, 2013

Email Copywriting: How a change in tone increased lead inquiry by 349%

Email Optimization: 4 optimization suggestions to test in your next send

Email Copywriting: Tips from 3 of your peers

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, Jim Ducharme, Community Director, GetResponse, interviewed Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, about the greatest challenge for email marketers …

You can watch the video above, and here are a few of my favorite quotes from Flint …

“We’ve forgotten that email is a two-way medium. We’ve forgotten that email is a messaging medium.”

“We no longer communicate as if we were expecting some sort of give and take.”

“Email has become another way to interrupt people’s lives. The marketer who sees it as a way to restore relationships and build some sort of give and take is the marketer that will take email to the next level in his organization.”

“We don’t talk to people, we talk at them. There is no dialogue here.”

“People don’t read email because they’re excited to read email. They’re looking through their inbox for any reason not to read your email.”

  Read more…

What can you learn about your customers from a test that produced a negative lift?

This was the central idea behind the opening keynote presentation, “The Internet as a Living Laboratory,” at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 from Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

In today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, we’re reporting live from Email Summit and will share one of the experiments featured in Flint’s session along with three important questions every marketer should ask themselves when a test results in a conversion decrease.

We hope you use these questions to view your negative lifts not as a failure, but as valuable learning tools about your customers that you would not have learned otherwise.

But first, let’s get some background on the experiment …

Research Notes:

Background: REGOnline is event management software that lets users create online registration forms and event websites to manage their events.

Goal: To increase the number of completed leads on homepage

Primary Research Question: Which page will achieve the greatest addressable lead rate?

Approach: A/B multifactor split test

Control:

The researchers hypothesized that in the treatment they could increase the appeal associated with the value proposition in the offer by focusing more on the product and its specific features and benefits.

Treatment #1:

So, in treatment #1, the research team changed the following:

• Headline was written to focus more on the product.
• Specific features and benefits are utilized to express the value.
• The page emphasizes “Free Access.”
• Ensured product-centric value was communicated in subsequent steps.

Read more…

Writing copy for an email is difficult enough – but what about tone?

Are you talking to your customers or at them? Do the offers in your emails entice or do they alienate?

Today’s MarketingExperiments blog post will share an experiment featured in our recent Email Copywriting Clinic, sponsored by Ongage, in which presenter Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS revealed the results of an experiment on how tone affects conversion.

Our goal is to show marketers the effectiveness of your messaging is impacted by how customers perceive it.

So, let’s take a quick look at the test background …

Background: Active Network, a large event management software provider.

Goal: To increase total lead inquiries – phone calls and form sign-ups – from visitors who abandoned the free trial sign-up process.

Research Question: Which email tone will result in a higher rate of lead inquiries?

Test Design: A/B single factor split

Treatment #1

In treatment one, visitors who abandoned the free trial sign-up were sent an email that focused on the value

of the software.

Here’s a closer look at the email copy in Treatment #1:

Subject Line: Your Free RegOnline Access

Dear [Name],

You’re just one step away from getting FREE access to RegOnline, our award winning Event Registration and Management Software. Quickly man an event website, try our event marketing tools, build a registration form template or even generate custom name badges.

Click here to finish your profile and get started. Your personal profile is kept secure and we promise NEVER to sell or misuse your information.

Have questions? Call us direct at 1-800-XXX-XXXX – we can even set up your free access over the phone.

Sincerely,

[Name of Representative]

Customer Service Representative

RegOnline

Direct: 1-800-XXX-XXXX ext. XXXX

Treatment #2

The approach in Treatment #2 is engagement through addressing the elements of anxiety  leading visitors to abandon the sign-up process.

Let’s look at the email copy in Treatment #2:

Subject Line: Your Free RegOnline Access

Hi [First],

I noticed that you started the process of getting free access to RegOnline but weren’t able to finish. Are you concerned about giving out your phone number? Are you worried about high pressure sales tactics or mandatory contracts?

We believe our product sells itself, so we’re just here to provide you with whatever assistance you need in getting your event up and running – in whatever way works best for you. We promise NEVER to sell or misuse your information.

Call me direct at 1-800-XXX-XXXX and I can help get you rolling. If you’d rather just try again online, use this link instead.

Thank you in advance for your trust!

Sincerely,

[Name of Representative]

Customer Service Representative

RegOnline

Direct: 1-800-XXX-XXXX ext. XXXX

Read more…