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

It’s time, once again, to test the mettle of your marketing intuition. If you’ve never taken part in one of these before, here’s the premise:

Every so often we give our blog readers the chance to predict the outcome of the featured test in an upcoming Web clinic.

For today’s contest, we’re featuring two treatments that will be discussed in depth in “Hidden Friction: The 6 silent killers of conversion.” You can register and tune in today at 4:00 p.m. EDT to find out the conclusion to the test below.

What’s at stake this time?

This time we have a single prize for a single winner: a 2011 B2B Summit Training DVD ($299 value) with more than six hours of B2B Summit training footage. [Note: The landing page for that DVD link is for a DVD and Benchmark Report bundle. This contest is for the DVD alone.] All you need to do to enter the contest is leave a comment on this blog post stating two things:

1. Which treatment you think won
2. Why you think it won

The winner will receive a copy of the B2B Summit DVD and be featured on the blog as the marketing expert he or she truly is!

Now that housekeeping is out of the way, here’s the test:

(To view the slides in full screen mode, simply click the 4-arrow square in the bottom right corner of the SlideShare window)

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What are the most overlooked conversion killers … and how can marketers overcome them?

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic – Hidden Friction: The 6 silent killers of conversion – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share some basic changes many marketers make to their site to improve conversion, as well as some commonly overlooked optimization opportunities.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the top optimization advice we received from some of your peers …

Things that get in the way of converting website visitors to customers

• Too many banners
• Irrelevant content

 –        Robyn Kahn Federman, Director of Communications, Catalyst

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A marketing incentive is a lot like bacon. No one’s going to argue that it doesn’t taste good. It’s easy enough to make. And it is a quick fix for almost any recipe. Yet, if you were to eat bacon with almost every meal, you end up bloated and unhealthy … like General Motors before the government bailouts.

GM’s failure surely had a lot of causes – relying on the margins from block-long SUVs that go out of style when gas prices (shockingly) change, cultivating an incredibly adversarial workforce – but some of the blame must be pointed at incentives. After all, paying people to buy your cars because the product does not have enough true value is not a sustainable business plan.

Incentive has its place … at the end of the line

That’s why the MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Online Course teaches that, if you want to create an effective experimentation plan, we recommend you first test the other elements in the Conversion Sequence before testing the impact of an incentive for additional improvement.

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You might have a highly optimized headline …

And you might have a highly optimized call-to-action …

But if customers never get from the headline to the call-to-action, what’s the point of that optimized headline and call-to-action to begin with?

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, discusses the major impediment that stops your customers from ever seeing your CTA — friction — in this video recording of a recent Web clinic planning meeting.

For the purposes of the MarketingExperiments testing methodology, friction is defined as a psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process.

There are three basic elements you can optimize to reduce friction and get more customers from your headline to your CTA. We’ll take a quick look at these basic elements, and then dive into seven more commonly overlooked causes of friction in our next free Web clinic – Silent Conversion Killers: How overcoming hidden friction boosted conversion 166%.

There are three types of low-hanging fruit to look for when optimizing to reduce friction:

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Sometimes great products can be hard to sell on a website. The market is so saturated with mediocre goods and services that when a truly great one comes along, the same old marketing tactics simply don’t work anymore. Excellent products need excellent websites to communicate their full potential.

And that’s the main problem with this website submitted for live optimization by the makers of the Npower PEG on a past Web clinic.

Click to enlarge

The product is essentially a battery you can hook to almost any device. But the fun part is that it charges with the kinetic energy you produce while you go about your daily life.

I personally found it fascinating. And I want one.

Unfortunately, (as the owners of the site probably know) the website doesn’t effectively communicate the prodigiousness of the product.

Perhaps you’re in the same boat as the Npower PEG. Maybe you’ve got a great product but you feel like your website doesn’t live up to it. Don’t tune this post out because it’s about someone else’s company.

To help you, I talked to Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS, about Npower’s website. From his years of optimization experience, you can hopefully glean some wisdom for your own site.

There are eight main test ideas that Adam highlighted in our conversation about how to improve this website.

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This time of year, many marketers are beginning to execute on their new marketing plans. However, sometimes you have to deviate from the plan and just need a sale or lead generation lift… RIGHT NOW!

When your boss or client challenges you to gain a quick conversion increase on your landing pages, what tools do you turn to in your marketing toolbox?

In Wednesday’s Web clinic – Rapidly Maximizing Conversion: How one company quickly achieved a 53.9% lift with a radical redesign – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top discoveries around how to quickly improve your conversion rate.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of our favorite “quick hit” tips from your peers …

- Read more…