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

During our August 26 web clinic on optimizing affiliate marketing, several participants wanted to know more about setting up and measuring their programs. We’ve distilled those questions for the latest edition of our Ask an Optimizer column.

Q: What kinds of businesses are suited to using affiliates?

I think businesses that are devoted to ecommerce or lead collection are going to be exposed to the greatest number of affiliates — especially those that are somewhat familiar for your marketplace.

Q: How do you identify & recruit the best affiliates?

Form a good relationship with affiliate networks/managers. Also, watch forums for affiliates that seem like they are worth approaching. A word of caution: some of the “top contributors” to these forums are not always the most successful. Approach with caution some of the “loud mouths” out there.

Having competitive payouts and reasonable offer terms are a must, and will also be attractive for recruitment.

Q: Are there any options for regionalizing affiliate marketing?

Yes, but traffic is going to be much smaller. Also, some of the bigger affiliates are not going to fool with these restrictions. I would team up with other companies in the same space, and just sell the leads that are not pertinent to your area of service.

Q: Which affiliate marketing tool is most effective? Banner ads, text ads, email campaigns, or mini web sites?

It depends on the offer and the audience the affiliate is trying to reach.  If you are promoting a good offer, you should develop most of these elements. Don’t handcuff the effectiveness of your affiliates and your business with a lack of materials. Make sure that you are tracking the effectiveness for each of these communication methods, as you might find some interesting data.

Q: How do I find niches I can be confident will yield sales? Or how do I test rapidly?

Testing rapidly is a good way to jump to conclusions, and fail. Obviously if the disparity is huge that is one thing, but do not rush to conclusions because we have all seen how internet traffic changes.  Do not ditch your confidence levels and testing best practices.

Q: How do I mix the “best techniques” for landing pages with “Google rules” for quality score?

Part of Google’s rules with quality score are items that you should have anyway. For example, a big part of quality score is how relevant the page is to the target keyword/phrase etc. I often see people suffer by trying to communicate too much within the images on a page. Make sure that good and relevant information isn’t contained in unreadable (to Google) images.

We also talk about having continuity between your ads and landing page. So make sure you have headlines that match keyword/phrases and will reassure the user they are in the right place, plus score relevance points with Google.

Q: What’s the simplest way to track keywords that are converting or predict them?

Talking to your offer company and discussing tracking options can open up true conversion tracking for you.

For prediction, if you are already running traffic, look at your CTR rates and try to estimate with this new traffic (keywords) — is it more relevant or general?  With that, try to look at what you are going to spend with this new traffic, and the conversion rates you are already observing.

Then factor the quality/relevance of the new traffic, and ask yourself: will the spend this traffic requires still allow me to be positive? Prediction really just comes with time and seeing what works. There is no guaranteed formula.

For more info, check out last week’s list of additional research and resources on affiliate marketing.

Have additional questions? Other things you’d like to Ask an Optimizer? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

This post picks up on the ideas we covered in part one and our ADMA webinar and applies them to an example page submitted by a webinar attendee.

Homepages that must speak simultaneously to multiple audiences are notoriously difficult to optimize. This is the main reason why you are better off driving traffic to channel-specific landing pages whenever possible.

Still, as long as you are getting uncategorized or direct traffic to the homepage, you will need to be able to detect the visitor’s motivation on the page.

Let’s take a look at the opportunities for optimization on the homepage of one of our web clinic attendees, Votiva. The company provides several distinct real estate and related financial services in Australia, and it’s a challenge to communicate the right offer to first-time visitors.

In this post, I’ll walk through Votiva’s homepage with our three-question checklist in mind.

What’s the primary objective of the page?

Before we start optimization, we must identify the page’s objective, for which we’ll optimize. Judging from what I’m seeing on Votiva’s homepage, I’m assuming that the objective is two-fold:

1. Communicate and support Votiva’s company value proposition, and
2. Guide the visitor to the right category page.

My other assumption is that each category page, in turn, communicates the respective product value proposition.

I believe Votiva is on the right path with five prominently displayed category boxes. However, the lack of a conversation with the visitor on the page makes these boxes more prominent and lets them guide the visitor to the appropriate category.

Question 1: Where am I?

Of the three questions, Votiva does the best job on this one. The tagline (Realty * Strategies * Finance), top navigation link names, and the five boxes at the bottom do a good job of communicating almost instantly what Votiva is about.

The animation on the left also provides useful information, but that information is only as useful as the likelihood of a visitor noticing the one frame that connects with his motivation. Expecting your visitors to wait for the entire animation to play out is wishful thinking. You haven’t given them enough reason yet to give you that much of their time.

The megaphone graphic on the right is possibly the single most visually prominent element on the page, and it’s entirely irrelevant to what Votiva is. It ultimately draws attention to the News box, which doesn’t help answer any of our three questions.

Question 2: What can I do here?

The answer that would help meet Votiva’s second objective — to drive visitors to the appropriate category — should be “I can click on a category that represents my potential (or existing) relationship with Votiva.”

The clearest answers to this question are the category and sub-category links at the bottom. Their prominence helps mitigate an otherwise unguided user experience.

This page has far too many options that compete with the category links. The animation and the graphic on the right also compete with calls to action. To add confusion to the choices, none of the three links under the prominent “News” heading are, in fact, “news.”

Question 3: Why should I do it?

This is fundamentally a value proposition question and is therefore related to the page’s first objective. The answer must address both the “why” of the click you’re attempting to get and the “why” of doing business with you in the first place. Votiva fails to give its homepage visitor a reason to do business with them. The conversation never starts.

The “why” of the first three category links (buying, selling, rentals) is self-explanatory. The “why” of the other two (strategies and finance) is less clear, but some support is provided by the sub-category links below. The “why” of Votiva as a company, on the other hand, is almost non-existent.

The animation on the left is the only thing on the page that attempts to communicates Votiva’s value proposition, but again it depends on the visitor noticing the right frame or waiting through the whole thing. Items linked in the right column may support the value proposition, but they are an unlikely click away (the visitor isn’t given a reason to click on them).

Conclusions and recommendations

The biggest opportunity for Votiva on the home page is to express its value proposition more clearly, giving the visitor a reason to interact with the site. At the same time, it’s important to focus visitors on the specific actions that you’d like them to take, without confusing them with competing choices. The best way to accomplish this objective is with a conversation that starts with a headline and ends with a call to action (or a minimum necessary number of choices).

Here are my recommendations for testing potential improvements to this homepage:

1. Test starting a conversation with your visitor using the value proposition statements from the animation and About Us page in your headline and introductory copy.

• The introductory copy could contain links, in case the visitor is ready to jump to the corresponding section of your site.
• Quantify! Tell your visitors how many loans you have closed or how many properties you have sold last year, how many dollars you have saved or generated for your customers, or how many years you have been in business.

2. Test reducing or re-formatting the multitude of competing choices on your homepage.

• Use your three trademark areas: realty, strategy, finance; and then, under realty, list buying, selling, and rentals.
• Test introductory copy before these three choices.
• Test using just a strong headline before these choices, and no copy at all.

As it is now, Votiva’s page communicates the company value proposition. However, prospects may be reaching specific areas of the site from the homepage more by accident than design. Look at your home pages — especially the ones that are doing double, or even triple, duty for multiple audiences — to see if you are clearly directing diverse audience members to the show they want to see.

There are lots of proverbs celebrating consistency. “Dance with the one who brung ya” is a personal favorite. But another classic saying, “Never swap horses in midstream,” may not hold true for ecommerce marketers.

MarketingSherpa’s Ecommerce Benchmark Report 2009 emphasizes that consistency in message must be accompanied by fluidity in medium. In other words, not only must marketers driving a campaign be prepared to swap steeds midstream, if they want to reach prospects most effectively, they may need a whole stable of horses — or marketing tactics — to choose from.

This is particularly true for those seeking to integrate social media into existing campaigns.

In this most recent edition of their benchmark guide, Sherpa segmented their survey respondents and gave primacy to a faction they term “High Knowledge”, companies defined by their analytics usage and their knowledge and use of metrics.

The chart below shows how the H-K club ranks various social media tactics in terms of effectiveness.

What goals are these folks accomplishing through social media? Primarily brand awareness and brand reputation.

Remember that, according to Sherpa, those who report the most satisfaction promoting brand awareness through social media are High Knowledge companies like Zappos and Calvin Klein, whose brands were pretty ubiquitous to begin with.

Before embarking on a social media campaign, consider whether and how it will match your goals. Sherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist writes, if social media isn’t working for you, it may be that you’ve mismatched your goal and your tactic.

Sherpa surveys suggest consumer services are best promoted through viral video and social site profiles. However, if your goals are generating leads or increasing online sales, social media tactics should probably be at the bottom of your strategy list.

Another consideration regarding productive engagement with social media is the metrics we use to measure effectiveness. If tactics were horses, search and email would be the big purse winners of the marketing races while social media is still the untried colt.

Rein in that unruly youngster by using the appropriate metrics to evaluate his performance. It’s hard to track the effectiveness of social media by simply looking for an increase in clicks. Instead, Sherpa’s benchmark guide promotes looking at engagement per campaign, measuring activities such as registering, entering a contest, commenting on a list, or amending a profile.

In a recent blog post from MarketingMVP, John Bell, managing director of Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence Group, developed three strategies to track how word of mouth and social media were affecting his brand:

• · Reach: using Web metrics and tracking the volume of conversations taking place online.

• · Preference: includes metrics such as Net Promoter Score and a sentiment index – which gauges whether people are hearing the message, whether they have a preference for the brand or issue, and whether a company is increasing positive share of voice compared to competitors.

• · Action: this refers to any conversion that takes place as a result of a social media or word of mouth interaction, from a website registration to a product sale.

Ecommerce marketers seeking big wins must decide when to apply tried and true tactics and when to branch out into the new territory of social media. They might do well to take a lesson from jockey Calvin Borel.

Calvin Borel may be the first jockey to win the Triple Crown without help from a horse.  Any single horse, that is. As a rule, it’s unheard of for a jockey who’s riding a winner to change mounts. But that’s just what Borel did.

In the Derby, Borel piloted Mine that Bird to an unlikely first place but in the Preakness, second leg of the three-race journey, Borel did the unheard of and changed horses in midstream. For the second race, he rode filly Rachel Alexandra to victory.

As for whose colors he’ll wear in the Belmont? Borel hasn’t declared. Rachel Alexandra may not have the staying power for race number three, the longest race in the Triple Crown, and Borel, if he wants to maintain his winning streak, may have to switch horses again to cross that finish line in the style to which he has become accustomed.

Marketers, keep your options open.

And keep in mind that one way to do so is to attend our upcoming clinic: a special report on ecommerce with two new case studies and guest presenter Stefan Tornquist.

In this clinic, we’ll explore more of the 2009 Ecommerce Benchmark Report (and offer five attendees the chance to win a free copy of their very own). We look forward to seeing you–well,  hearing your comments and answering your questions–there.

In a typical Landing Page Analysis, I methodically walk through a page identifying problems and providing potential solutions for testing.  But for the landing page featured in this post, I’d like to recommend a more radical solution.

My primary recommendation: Get rid of the first step altogether!

The landing page was submitted by a recent attendee to a MarketingExperiments webinar, ShrinkYourself.com.  The site’s name is a pretty clever pun as their primary product is a 12-week weight loss program that focuses on the connection between emotional health and dietary improvement.

Here’s the page the site submitted:

A landing page walk through includes identifying friction, anxiety, and ways to improve communication of the value proposition but one of my favorite parts of the analysis process is to explore calls to action to see where they’ll take you.

What happens when I click the button?

In this case, the landing page sends visitors to a second page that, with a few tweaks, could take the place of the first page.  Check out the next page:

That first landing page is really nothing more than an extra step prospects must take to get to the primary offer and an extra step in a sales process, much like extra pounds, can be a big source of friction.

In addition, the second page has some key elements that would actually be more effective on a first page:

• 100% money back guarantee starburst
• Specific bullet points about the product components

I’m not suggesting entirely eliminating the first page. Instead, use aspects of it to modify the second step to make that one a legitimate landing page.  Modification includes using the headline, sub-headline, and copy from the first page, all of which are pretty strong.  On your revised landing page, consider placing the credibility indicators on the left column as well.

Combining the two pages would take a process that’s currently a little top-heavy and make it leaner. Keep in mind, it may be that your current landing page works well. Perhaps your ideal prospects need a longer period of discovery before signing up for the program. Or it may be that a unnecessary steps mean that folks abandon your pages in favor of a program whose streamlined single-page registration form suggests  quicker weight loss results.

But you’ll never know unless you test it.

Good luck!  Let us know if you decide to test this strategy and what your results are.

I recently spent a day and a half in Munich, Germany, taking part in the MarketingSherpa Email Summit and leading an optimization workshop.

The event brought together a diverse panel of presenters with very interesting case studies. Although the majority of attendees were, of course, from Germany, I also had the opportunity to meet marketers from France, Spain, and the UK.

For the most part, I found that European marketers face similar challenges as we do in the US, such as increasing their house list, improving the registration process, and optimizing their welcome email series.

However, I would say that two of the most popular topics of the event were multi-language campaigns and relevant content.

The importance of relevance (Relevanz, pertinence, pertinencia)

European marketers have the good fortune of access to many diverse countries in which to expand their markets, but these diverse markets are also a daily challenge. To remain competitive, these marketers need to consider localizing their campaigns in at least four of the EU’s top languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. And, as if they haven’t enough to do, they really ought to consider Italian or Portuguese.

It is not enough to just have a good database program or the technical capability to manage multiple languages. Among the many cases presented, success stories came from those that had a multi-language team that proofread and localized content. Even better off were the folks who had a multilingual, multicultural team (sort of a polyglot SWAT unit, if you know what I mean) to adjust campaigns to customers’ specific needs by country.

One interesting case presented by Avid Agency showed significant increases in clickthrough and conversion rates by localizing not only the copy but also prices. The campaign targeted Danish and Finnish consumers. They tested three variations of the same campaign:

1. Copy in English and prices in Euros
2. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in Euros
3. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in local currency

The third variation yielded the highest results, showing that even though there is one common currency for EU countries, local currency is still important and including it in an offer can make a difference. Consider whether this strategy might be more relevant for B2C companies than B2B companies?

The summit reaffirmed a key lesson for all marketers, wherever our target market is and whichever languages it speaks: the more relevant the email content, the higher the open, clickthrough, and conversion rates will be.

If you are concerned about your email frequency, I’d suggest looking first at how relevant your emails are and then worry if you have the right frequency.

Now it’s time to enjoy a good German beer and the cool spring weather here in Munich. Auf Wiedersehen!

[Editor's note: Don't forget to bring back those Hofbräuhaus München goodies and samples for the team, Gaby.]

Remember the intensity of focus you had at that second-grade birthday party where you had five seconds to memorize the location of the piñata, or the donkey’s tail-less rump, before the blindfold descended?

Don’t you wish you could get that kind of focus from prospects now?

Unfortunately, the grown-ups perusing your pages are subject to endless distractions. But try applying a variation on the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey technique to your landing pages, just to see how easy it is for the adults you’re courting to find the targets you want them to find when they’re looking at your pages.

Inspired by a new tool that provides free five-second usability testing, I decided to apply the same technique to a landing page submitted for optimization by a recent attendee of a MarketingExperiments web clinic.

How the five-second usability test works

First, imagine you only have five seconds to look at the page below.  It’s not a contest, or spy training. Just relax your eyes and try to take in the page as a first time viewer would.

Second, cover your computer screen with a piece of paper and ask yourself how much you remember about what you just saw.

Structure your reminiscences with these questions:

• What is the page about?
• Which elements stood out?
• Can I describe them?

Third, pretend that the blank paper is a map of the landing page you just saw. Try and recreate the page from memory. Simply put a dot or draw a box on each section of the page and write down what you think was there.

Ready? I tested it with this page, submitted by one of our web clinic participants:

Five seconds with Virtual Classroom

After my five-second stare-down with Virtual Classroom, a site that offers teachers and students conferencing, chat and customizable on-screen whiteboard options for virtual classroom experiences, here’s what I remembered seeing:

Five-second test view

Scary, no? Give a prospect five full seconds and what he remembers most about all your hard work is “a bunch of icons.”

Still, as reality checks go, this five-second test is a useful one because it underscores the difference between marketer perception and prospect perception. I’m sure it wasn’t the intention of this page to have their verification box overshadow the value proposition.

Applying the Conversion Sequence to Virtual Classroom

Once you’ve tried the five-second test (or even pulled some innocent victim off the street to try it for you), apply what you’ve learned to your next optimization tests. Using the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence to structure your pages around a prospect’s thought sequence may increase your chances of being remembered, and remembered accurately, for what you want to be remembered for: the goods or services you provide.

Let’s see how focusing on three key elements from the sequence could help the Virtual Classroom landing page increase conversions …

1. Clarity of Value Proposition

Because of the size and color of the word “free,” my eye completely neglects the primary headline at the top left area of the page. Instead of instantly knowing what the product is and why I need it, I am forced to read through small copy. What’s more, the copy is in large paragraph form which many visitors will not have the attention span to finish.

Make the main headline stand out more than the sub-headline. Place the word “free” in it and make sure to communicate the essence of what your product is. You need to set a context here for how the user will experience the rest of the page.

2. Friction

I know there is a lot of good stuff adjacent to each one of the icons, but the three equally weighted columns makes it difficult to digest all of that information. I read the top two and then immediately become distracted by the icons in the next column and then the form on the right.

Each one of the benefits listed adds to the value proposition of the product, but the current design creates so much difficulty-oriented friction in the form of page flow disruption, that the benefits don’t impact the visitor as much as they should.

Instead, focus on the five or six best benefits, and make those the central message of the page. The others can be mentioned in a small chart or pop-up. If your offer is totally free, you don’t have to do too much selling. You just have to make it easy to sign up.

3. Anxiety

From the blindfolded usability test, you see that the word verification was one of the four elements that immediately stood out to me. Now this is not a bad thing.  It shows that you are concerned about fraud and the visitor’s protection.

But, it is so much more prominent than the product description and benefits, my eyes are drawn to it and it’s kind of threatening me, telling me that I if I stick around, I will eventually have to sign up for something. This makes me nervous since five seconds in to my engagement with the page I’m not certain what it is I will potentially be signing up for, much less if I’m willing to.

Since this is a two-step process, can you put the word verification on the next page? If not, just make sure you control the visitor’s eyepath leading them systematically from headline to key product benefits (and after this point, hopefully, they are primed for commitment), then to the form.

Ready to take off the blindfold?

Using this five-second test will lend you the perspective of a new visitor and enable you to quickly identify elements that may be problematic to conversion: the areas you didn’t intend to emphasize but are the ones that a prospect sees first.

Sometimes we let optimization become more complicated than it really is. Essentially, we’re just trying to take the blindfold off our prospects and help them achieve their aim.

Anna Jacobson contributed mightily to this post.