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

Back in my days as a copywriter, headline writing was one of my favorite parts of the job. Sometimes, my office walls would be littered with possibilities. And when that didn’t work, it was off to the pages of CA to remix what some smarter, more creative writer came up with.

Hey, as Austin Kleon said in Steal Like an Artist, “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

With that said, in today’s blog post, we’re going to show you five common headline errors to avoid, along with positive examples you can, um, borrow from.

These errors were taken from, and you can learn more in, the video replay of our “Minor Changes, Major Lifts: How headline and call-to-action optimization increased conversion 45%” Web clinic.

  Read more…

In today’s Web clinic, “What Your Customers Want: How to predict customer behavior for maximum ROI,” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will present a recent PPC experiment from our lab in which you, the MarketingExperiments blog reader, helped create the treatment.

But before we do that, we wanted to give you a chance to predict which PPC ad received a higher clickthrough rate.

The marketer with the best answer will win a copy of Kristin Zhivago’s book, Roadmap to Revenue.  Kristin is a speaker at the upcoming Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver.

The background

In one of North American Spine’s recent PPC tests (designed in part by Amy Harold), they wanted to see which ad would generate more clicks. The goal here was to learn enough about the audience to be able to plan a content strategy that would pull in more prospects to their offer.

Here are the details:

How to win

To win the book (and the respect of your peers), you need to tell us two things in the comments of this blog post:

1. Which treatment won
2. Why it won

The marketer who guesses the correct treatment and gives us the best reason why they think that treatment won, will win the contest and be featured on this blog post as having near-psychic levels of marketing intuition.

So go ahead and study the slides embedded above and then leave a comment below. But do it quickly because the deadline is 4:00 EDT today.

P.S. To be among the first to know whether you were right or not, you can tune into today’s Web clinic at 4:00 pm EDT (hence the deadline) where we’ll reveal the results and dive into how you can predict your customers’ behavior.

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to Tanith, who gave the nearest thing to a correct answer of any of the commenters!

If I wasn’t diagnosed, but wondered if I had the condition, I’d go for T4.

Technically, Luke Thorpe was the only one who gave the absolute correct answer, but because he works in this office, I’m not sure I believed him when he told me he hadn’t seen the winner beforehand.

So I can’t in good conscience make him the official winner.

Tanith will be receiving a copy of Roadmap to Revenue in the coming week or so.

Thank you to all of our commenters, and thank you especially to Tanith for having great marketing intuition!

Related Resources:

What Your Customers Want: How to predict customer behavior for maximum ROI – Wednesday, March 28, 4 p.m. EDT

Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Search Engine Marketing: Finding appeal for your PPC Ads

As we put the finishing touches on the agenda for Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver, we’re considering including some bonus add-on clinics as well. To help decide which clinics would be most helpful, we’ve decided to turn to an expert consultant …

You. The customer.

Please let us know which topics would be most valuable to you in the poll below. And if you have any further insights to share, please use the comments section as well.

Related Resources:

Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver on June 11-14, 2012

Optimization Summit 2011 Wrap-up: 6 takeaways to improve your tests and results

Landing Page Optimization: Test ideas for a B2B lead capture page

Optimization Summit: Tests with poor results can improve your marketing

Website Optimization: How your peers increase their conversion rate…quickly

Subject lines are by far the easiest element of your email marketing to test. Heck, probably the easiest element to test period.

And it’s a good thing too. There’s a lot you can learn about your audience from testing subject lines:

• What elements of your value proposition are most appealing?
• Do you have to offer an incentive to get your customers to take even a basic action?
• If so, which incentive works best?

But here’s another thing about subject line testing … sometimes you just hit a wall. To quote The Barenaked Ladies, sometimes you just feel like, “It’s all been done.”

HOW DO YOU BREAK THROUGH THIS WALL?

As a one-man wolf pack — an individual copywriter or marketer writing subject lines — sometimes you simply run out of ways to rearrange a few characters in a small space. At these times, you need to reach out and get fresh, outside test ideas to push the envelope:

• Designers
• IT
• Sales
• Customer Service
• Your marketing peers within (and outside) your company
• Your audience

This is why we’re turning to you today. We’ve written a lot (and I mean a lot) of subject lines, and are looking for a truly fresh perspective for an upcoming marketing send about Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver.

And we’ll make it worth your while. The winning subject line in our test will receive a free ticket to Optimization Summit 2012 plus a free MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Online Course. That’s a $1,900 value.

  Read more…

The funnel is a convenient paradigm for the complex process of guiding a potential customer from initial interest to final conversion. Convenient, yet flawed.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin elaborates in an interview with Jim Ducharme, Community Manager, GetResponse Email Marketing, in this video from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012.

A few key points:

1:05 – The flawed image of the traditional Marketing- Sales funnel. “Gravity is not our friend”

1:58 – The “gravity” you, as a marketer, must overcome

3:08 – The “yeses” you need to get from your customers to make that happen

Related Resources:

Video produced in cooperation with GetResponse Email Marketing. See more at: http://www.getresponse.com/promo/emailtv

Marketing-Sales Funnel Optimization: 3 questions to ask as you kickoff 2012

Marketing Funnel: How to optimize your Sales and Marketing funnel in 5 steps

B2B Funnel Optimization: What happens after you capture the lead?

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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