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

The purpose of a subject line is to get an open. However, the purpose of a subject line is not only to get an open. In our recent subject line contest, there were some curious submissions that made me think this blog post was necessary:

• Mom told me to wear clean underwear in case I was in an accident. I wish she had told me about this too …
• A priest, a rabbi and a MECLABS LPO expert walk into a bar in Denver …
• RE: The video showed a bald man. Why?
• 1 Thing You MUST Do in Denver Before You Die
• Want to find the end of a rainbow AND the pot of gold?
• Denver Flight #ME430 [Confirm your seat]
• Open &; Enjoy Real Bacon Smell…
• This is your brain on email.
• What the #@*? What should you test next?

I know some of these are likely meant as jokes, but if the amount of misleading subject lines that fill my own inbox every day is any indication, many of them are probably serious.

The road to unsubscribes is paved by good intentions

And I don’t mean to pick on our contest entrants. If fact, I’m going to show you a subject line test I ran making this same mistake later in this post. Even in the blog post, “Announcing the Winner of the Email Subject Line Copywriting Contest!” by Sonia Simone, CMO, Copyblogger Media, she discusses how I pushed back on one of her selections because I was worried it was misleading …

For example, we really liked the header “Testing — does this link work for you?” (We defined that one as a Curiosity headline.) But MECLABS had some concerns that the element of trickery would annoy their subscribers and lead to unsubscribes … definitely not the result we were after.

So why do we, as marketers, come up with these misleading subject lines? Well, I think our intentions are in the correct place: We’re simply looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace. However …

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Categories: Email Marketing Tags: Email Marketing, email testing, subject line test

The results are in. A few weeks ago, we asked the MarketingExperiments blog community and the Copyblogger community for help on a subject line test. Today we’ll look at the process we went through, the results, and what you can learn from it all.

Background

Through a blog post on the MarketingExperiments blog and a blog post on Copyblogger, we asked for your subject line test ideas for an email that promoted Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver. We received 409 entries through the MarketingExperiments blog and 492 entries through Copyblogger.

Then came the culling.

Nathan Thompson, Senior Manager, Research and Strategy, MECLABS Conversion Group, was the lead judge for the entries on our blog, and Sonia Simone, CMO, Copyblogger Media, LLC, led her team’s effort (Sonia wrote about their process today on Copyblogger).

“Some were clever, some were text-book marketing, and others were, well … weird,” Nathan said.

“Our process for cutting down the list involved removing those that were factually incorrect first as we didn’t want to incite a riot among our readers once they opened the email and realized we had tricked them. Then we removed those that were too long, too confusing or unclear.”

Once the list was narrowed down to the acceptable subject lines, Nathan and the MECLABS Conversion Group team began grouping them into categories based on what the subject lines were attempting to convey:

• Incentive
• Curiosity
• Value exchange
• Newsworthiness
• Etc.

“Then we voted on the subject lines we felt were the best representation of each of these categories,” Nathan said.

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Categories: Email Marketing Tags: Email Marketing, email testing, subject line test

The landing page for Desguaces y Piezas was performing quite well; however, the team wasn’t ready to rest on their laurels. By making a few minor changes, they significantly improved the conversion rate and reduced cost per conversion. Let’s look at this story and see how it can help you improve your own conversion rates.

The Background

Desguaces y Piezas is a lead generation site in the auto parts industry. The name roughly translates to “disassembling and parts.”

“Some time ago we were trying to convince a local auto parts company to run some SEO and PPC campaigns for their website,” said Wenceslao Garcia, CEO, Vexlan (the owner of the site).

“The owner told me he got another idea — most of the used auto part companies do not compete with each other because they have different catalogs, and they were (still are) spending so much money to get the same customer. So he suggested aggregating the PPC budget across them. And he was able to convince some other companies.”

The site provides leads to 25 companies across Spain. SEO provides 40% of traffic and PPC delivers the rest. The main form nets 4,000 leads per month, on average.

“Before running the test, for some time, we were happy enough with the 16.12% conversion rate. We thought it was a great figure and allowed us to make a decent profit out of it.”

The Test

Click to enlarge

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Categories: Landing Page Optimization Tags:

If you follow the MarketingExperiments blog, you know that small tweaks to a site can make a huge difference in conversion rates. Transitioning a site that is cluttered with information to one that makes sure the reader knows where they are, what they can do, and clearly communicates your value proposition can transition an ordinary site into an exceptional one.

It can make the difference between mediocrity and excellence — failure and success.

While researching and writing the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, we discovered some critical keys for optimizing a department the same way we optimize a webpage.

According to the executive guide’s results, 80% of marketing departments worldwide are using some sort of assessment analytics to identify those marketers who have the competence and character to do the job and do it well. The challenge is that this is as far as most marketing departments go with their people.

This is where a marketing manager or CMO has to step in and provide clarity for his/her marketers

You do this in similar ways to testing and optimizing a webpage. You work with each page (or in this case, person) and identify its unique characteristics, and then focus on conversion (which in this case is your employee or team member completing the necessary tasks to make your organization successful). Here are the steps: Read more…

Categories: Marketing Insights Tags: marketing career, marketing management

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein

Well, actually, that’s not exactly what he said. Here’s the exact quote from a lecture delivered at Oxford, June 10, 1933 — “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

So, in other words, Einstein’s quote on simplicity is not so simple. Because that not simpler part is key.

The same applies to landing pages for a complex sale. True, many B2B landing pages are overly complex thanks to interdepartmental turf wars and websites focused around what technical experts think is important, not what truly matters to the customer …

… and there are fair reasons to keep your pages simple, such as having a busy audience that thinks time is money …

… but, in the end, you’re still asking these people for a lot of money.

“Many of the rule-based and Web 3.0 design-centric websites look really nice and seek a more minimal design,” said Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization, MECLABS. “But what are you really saying to your customers? ‘Check out our pretty site and give us your information regarding this $10,000 product.’ ‘Read this one paragraph and three bullets and apply for a bank account.’”

A complex sale often requires a complex amount of information. Here are some so-called Internet marketing rules that Adam thinks are overused and, frankly, abused on complex sale landing pages:

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Categories: Landing Page Optimization Tags: complex sale, form location, landing page optimization, LPO

As we gear up to test the subject lines suggested by you, the MarketingExperiments blog reader, in our recent contest, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at some email testing research conducted by our sister company, MarketingSherpa:

This research chart, from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook, packs a lot of interesting information in a small amount of space, so let’s break down just the most common, most effective and easiest elements to test …

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Categories: Email Marketing Tags: Email Marketing, email testing, From line, MarketingSherpa, subject lines, target audience