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

Comment on To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Social media is a great way to get customer feedback…just be wary for potential blowback by Corey Trent

Corey Trent — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:06:02 +0000

Carolyn,

Those are some great points to add. Thanks for contributing!

Comment on Twitter and Social Media: Pointless babble or pot of gold? by tweet

tweet — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:02:09 +0000

Great article!
Social media is a great way to spread the word without any cost. But the only way to be effective is to target the sites properly instead of posting a link at any random social media space.

With so much of media exposure around, its increasingly difficult to get noticed. As a marketing professional, I find it really interesting to read about new and innovative marketing strategies that are being implemented.

I regularly login to idea database, such as, getmemedia.com just to check out various innovative strategies on marketing. Such a delight to read about ideas from a wide spectrum of people. Definitely worth a look!

Comment on Twitter and Social Media: Pointless babble or pot of gold? by Chris W.

Chris W. — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:11:51 +0000

I’m a Web writer. I use social media for finding/building client relationships, and to research customer desires for my projects. Being independent, the one-to-one helps me out a lot in terms of weeding out people unlikely to be good clients.

Signed up for the web clinic here too!

Comment on Email Marketing: Taking the mystery out of customer motivation by Tim Watson

Tim Watson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:33:16 +0000

I read a lot of the MarketingExperiments material and its great stuff. Always good insight and stimulating points.

I’ve an observation on this one and some experience, which could change their conclusion of:

“People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

I’ve read the full case study and reviewed the emails used by VNR.de.

The first and most significant point is that the book being offered was one on Gardening. The VNR.de audience is not biased towards Gardening. Its thus likely the offer only appeals to a fraction of the audience. No wonder the response was lower.

When using incentives, from tests I’ve run, its not hard to get a 400% difference in response by use of different incentives of the same monetary value. A change in incentive would have made the contest outperform the other emails.

Also of note is that the copy (I read German too) and size/placement of call to action for the survey is much better than the request to update personal information.

Testing is vital but some of the challengers have been put at a big disadvantage and its little wonder they didn’t work.

I would have taken a win back approach of survey combined with incentive and tested around that theme to find best incentive, copy etc.

Comment on Shopping Cart Abandonment: How not being annoying can get you 67% more cart completions by Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:29:57 +0000

Have you done any evaluation of the various software packages that email abandoned carts that made it far enough to enter their email address? I have seen the study of the effectiveness of such emails but I am looking for information on the various software packages and features so I can decide what is most important. There is a primitive function in our e-commerce package that can send emails to abandoned carts but I am afraid it is missing some of the key features that would make these emails effective. Thanks! Sarah

Comment on Shopping Cart Abandonment: How not being annoying can get you 67% more cart completions by Dave from WFB

Dave from WFB — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:43:51 +0000

Excellent point Austin. We’re in the process of redesigning our entire cart process and it certainly makes more sense to let them buy & then give them the option to create an account. They’re going to essentially have an account either way, but better to just let them buy & do the upsells after we’ve already gained their trust of the initial purchase. We did a test a few years ago that proved that reducing the checkout process by 1 step actually hurt overall conversion, but I think redesigning it entirely could change that. For larger ticket purchases, people seem more comfortable with a more involved process, as their instincts tell them it shouldn’t be that easy to spend $2000+. As people get more comfortable buying online, they’ll just want it fast & easy.

Comment on Twitter and Social Media: Pointless babble or pot of gold? by Mark Mathson

Mark Mathson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:16:41 +0000

Thank you for including me in this article! Great insight from the other marketers included. Your upcoming web clinic looks interesting. I will check it out.

Comment on To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Social media is a great way to get customer feedback…just be wary for potential blowback by Carolyn Rhinebarger

Carolyn Rhinebarger — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:12:57 +0000

You all make good points. I would add that there are at least 2 additional circumstances to be aware of:

1. Social media may not be a good fit if upper management does not support transparency. For example, if marketing is trying to implement a social media inititative in a tightly controlled organization, blow back will only serve to reinforce management’s negative view of social media.

2. Social media may be a real threat if an organization is in labor disputes or subject to information distribution restrictions, etc. For example, a financial planner may not be able to blog or tweet about stock market trends without getting prior approval which can take days or weeks. A local school board undergoing picketing may find it difficult to overcome a groundswell of negative posts–a real case scenario where I live. (And I know that in this case they could use social media to address the negative but it can be a question of manpower versus the public masses!)

Comment on Email Subject Lines: Do symbols hurt email marketing response? by David Hand

David Hand — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:48:19 +0000

My question is: Was the 56% increase in projected net revenue measured against the number of contacts sent to, or the number of emails delivered? The reason I ask this question is because logically, in my mind anyway, the number of deliveries will significantly drop due to various spam catchers put in place, whether by ISPs, email providers, or corporate I.T. departments. So if you measure against the delivered emails only, The 52% increase wouldn’t give a real indication of what special characters do to an email subject line. If measured against the delivered email, then of course the more concise subject will prompt a higher open rate which will in turn (hopefully) lead to a revenue increase.

I would imagine the delivery rate would have been higher, resulting in an even higher revenue increase if the same thing were said without special characters. for example “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!” could have been put as “15 Percent Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You”. Here you’ve removed the special characters of “%” and “!”, but have said the same thing.

Comment on To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Social media is a great way to get customer feedback…just be wary for potential blowback by Ron

Ron — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:22:24 +0000

Backlash on social media is a very real thing, it doesn’t matter what your brand is if you come across like an idiot – now it IS your brand. Look at this one guy who sent out a bad press release bragging about his Twitter account – 447 Diggs later, he is crowned “the biggest douche in social media”:

http://digg.com/business_finance/The_Biggest_Douche_In_Social_Media