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

Color can be used to guide customer thinking on a landing page by placing stronger emphasis on particular elements in your offer, and less emphasis on others.

Today’s MarketingExperiments blog post will show how the MECLABS research team discovered the impact color emphasis has on conversion.

Background: Company provides educational resources for health and fitness professionals who subscribe to one of its online memberships.

Goal: To increase number of membership sign-ups.

Primary Research Question: Which landing page will generate the highest clickthrough rate?

Approach: A/B split test (Variable cluster)

Control

Treatment

The research team hypothesized the control did not place any emphasis on distinguishing between price points in the offer.

In the treatment, the team simplified and sequenced the pricing, and used a color design to emphasize the value of the offer.

Results 

What you need to know

By strengthening the communication of the offer’s value through color, copy and layout changes, the treatment increased clickthrough by 81%.

You can watch the full free Web clinic, “How Do Website Colors Impact Conversion?,”  to see Flint McGlaughlin , Managing Director, MECLABS, reveal four more surprising findings from our optimization testing and experimentation.

Read more…

Optimization and testing is all about learning. What really works? What really doesn’t (even though we thought it would when we set up the test)? And, most importantly, how do you learn these lessons in a reliable, repeatable way?

Every year at Optimization Summit, we conduct a live test. We receive your input before and during Summit, release the hounds/treatments into the world and in an extremely short amount of time (before Summit ends), use the live test as a teaching lesson to help marketers better understand optimization and testing.

At Optimization Summit 2011, we (somewhat inadvertently) taught the audience about the importance of test design and validity using the live test.

At Optimization Summit 2012, the live test was a great example of using hypotheses when designing tests to make sure you learn from your testing.

This year, Spencer Whiting, Senior Manager, Research and Strategy, MECLABS, has been tapped to lead the live test at Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston. And, as we tend to do with the live test, Spencer wants to involve you in this fun experiment.

Generous guy that he is, Spencer will even give a MECLABS Landing Page Optimization Online Course to the person who leaves the best test idea for the control pages (you can see them below) in the comments section of this blog post by Monday, May 13, 2013 at 8:30 a.m. EDT.

Here’s some info about the test …

The goal is to have marketers to provide information about themselves on a form to receive a free copy of a 30-Minute Marketer about email subject lines.

We partnered with Dun & Bradstreet on this live test, and traffic will be driven to this landing page from the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments email lists, along with Dun & Bradstreet’s email list. There will likely be free and paid social media promotion, along with a possible social media contest.

There is a two-step conversion process.

Step #1 (Click to enlarge)

Step #2 (Click to enlarge)

Read more…

It’s no surprise folks everywhere like choices.

From the car you drive to the shoes you wear, paper or plastic, and the classic … would you like fries with that?

Choices are good, and having lots of them is even better.

So, it would make sense giving customers as many options as possible would be a sound principle of Web usability – or is it? Watch the below video for a MarketingExperiments discovery about presenting options to your visitors.

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, said, “People don’t need many options. They need the right options.”

You can watch the full free Web clinic – “The Usability Myth: 4 surprising discoveries we learned after testing the most common usability principles” – to see Flint reveal three other surprising findings from our optimization testing and experimentation.

Our goal is to show marketers key principles to use as a framework to aid usability and optimization efforts.

Read more…

When it comes to how color design affects a site’s performance, simple changes can produce a significant lift.

So, in today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, we’re going to look at how the MECLABS research team used a background color test on a landing page to increase account sign-ups 10%.

Background: A large sports entertainment provider seeking to increase conversion on its main landing page

Goal: To increase premium account sign-ups

Primary Research Question: Which color scheme will result in a higher conversion rate?

Approach: A/B single factor split test

Control and treatment side by side

The control was a design with a dark background and white text, and the treatment was an almost exact color inverse.

Results 

Read more…

Navigation is often considered a core element of website usability.

If you routinely put navigation on every single page of your website, you will likely be shocked by one of our recent discoveries …

You can watch the full free Web clinic – “The Usability Myth: 4 surprising discoveries we learned after testing the most common usability principles” – to hear Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, explain three other surprising findings from our optimization testing and experimentation.

Our goal is show marketers key principles that can be used as a framework to aid usability and optimization efforts.

Read more…

Ramping up for the fast approaching MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, this blog post features a video excerpt from one of last year’s presentations.

Watch Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing Division, firstSTREET, explain how radically redesigning a landing page led to a 500% increase in sales.

In this excerpt, Steve provided the audience advice on making the decision to conduct a radical redesign on a landing page.

He said to ask yourself a few questions:

• Will I achieve my annual goals by further tweaks?
• Do I have the resources to “go radical?” (Time, budget, outside-the-box thinking, internal support)
• How will I minimize risk?
• What happens if I win, draw or fail? (To my business? To my career?)

He also offered some recommendations:

• “Pre-plan your learning” in the test design
• Manage risk
• Get truly radical
• Apply what you learned, and apply your educated guesses

If you would like to watch the entire presentation, Steve covered the entire process of this case study, beginning with why he chose a very poorly performing landing page for a new product for testing and optimization, all the way through the radical redesign of the page and eventual increase in sales on the new landing page.

Read more…