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

“Our job is to help you do your job better.” That’s how I sign every MarketingExperiments Journal email, and it’s a mission all of us at MarketingExperiments take very seriously.

One of the main ways we help marketers is through the production of MarketingExperiments Web clinics – free, hour-long webinars where we share our research discoveries, analyze what they mean, share actionable advice for using these discoveries in your day-to-day job, and often provide live optimization advice for submissions from our audience of their marketing material.

These Web clinics are crucial to our educational and enablement activities, so I want to take today’s blog post to introduce Web clinics to those new to the MarketingExperiments community while addressing some key comments that may be helpful to long-time audience members as well.

I’ll get to those comments in a minute, but first a look at the replay of our latest Web clinic…

[Presentation will open in new window]

While the Web clinic replays are valuable (you can find more replays in our Research Directory), please note that they don’t fully replicate the experience of attending a live Web clinic – which is usually a lively session with much interaction and two way-conversation.

I could rattle on about our clinics, but clearly I have a vested interest in them…my opinion might be a bit skewed. So let’s take a look at some comments from the 917 marketers that attended our last Web clinic (with some annotations from yours truly to shed some light here and there)…

“I really enjoyed the fast pace and real-life examples.”

– Erica Waitman, Director Business Development at ARG Inc.

“Lots of immediately useful information”

– Liz Bredeson, Consumer Marketing Director at Meredith Corporation

“I like the directness. They don’t waste time with marketing rhetoric or pull any punches. They just get right into the content, tell you what’s wrong or could be improved, and then give you actual ideas and solutions on how to do it.”

– Bob Curtis, owner at SoHo Business Services

“The Web clinics are straight to the point.”

– Veaney McIrvin, owner of Storefront Creations, LLC

“I always enjoy the webinars given by the MarketingExperiments team. I especially like it when the Doctor (Dr. Flint) is in the Web page operating room. If you have experienced a live page review, you must be pretty bold or want help. Flint is not PC when it comes to telling it like it is. On reflection, I would rather have total honesty and improved conversions than hurt feelings. If you want to strive to be the best, let the best critique your work or you will never get there. I have been sliced and diced by the best, it made me better! Great stuff Flint and team as always. I particularly liked the bluntness.”

– John Wolfe, COO at IntelaSystems Inc.

“This is the second MarketingExperiments clinic I’ve attended, and the only thing I wish is that they were a bit longer, so more user-submitted sites could be reviewed.”

– Melody Foster, Marketing Director at Zephyr Real Estate

Special thanks to Erica, Liz, Bob, Veaney, John, and Melody for allowing us to publish their comments as a sampling of all the great feedback we get. Keep it coming. It gets us fired up to help you more.

To Melody’s point, while Web clinics are currently 60 minutes long, we also optimize audience-submitted sites that we didn’t have a chance to get to on the Web clinic right here on the blog. Here are a few recent examples:

Landing Page Optimization: Clean air or a free backpack? (Which is the bigger incentive for Sierra Club members?)

Web Page Optimization: Consider this post the help desk for free trial landing pages

Landing Page Optimization: Regions Bank opts for the information underload strategy

Web Page Optimization: In search of a value proposition as fast and reliable as Verizon FiOS

“When you send out the email blasts about these webinars, you always say to submit our website for possible review during the seminar. But then I see that during the seminar you are reviewing sites from Wall St Journal and Microsoft. Why are you giving them free advice? They have teams of people that do this full-time. Help out the smaller company who can’t afford full-time employees dedicated to optimization. If you’re going to spend your time reviewing Microsoft’s site, why ask us for our URL?”

– Brian Bischof of Crystal Reports Online Training

In our most recent Web clinic, Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, Research Manager Adam Lapp, and Research Analyst Nathan Thompson did conduct live optimization on Microsoft Azure Platform and WSJ Wine from The Wall Street Journal pages.

But they also conducted live optimization on pages from Pure Pearls, Newave Energy, and Positive Parenting Solutions.

To give you a little behind-the-scenes look, we have a wide range of marketers who attend these events – some are sole proprietors, some are at agencies, and some work in the corporate marketing departments of the biggest global brands. Our desire is to serve all of these elements of our audience.

So while I empathize with Brian (I’ve been there myself…lacking the resources of the major enterprises), to truly live up to our mission – “our job is to help you do your job better” – we have to serve the enterprise audience as well. Besides, I’ve worked with those Fortune 500 companies before, and, trust me, big-time budgets don’t paper over every challenge they face. Everyone could use a little help from time to time. (Us, too. Have blog optimization ideas? I’d love to hear them.)

“We are developing a new website and really need some feedback.  What can I do?”

– Gina Dement, PR/Marketing at Five-County Mental Health Authority

The MarketingExperiments Optimize Group on LinkedIn has 3,092 of your peers that have (or are facing) the same challenges that you face and can provide feedback for all of your marketing initiatives. Many have even achieved certification in landing page optimization, email marketing, and/or online testing from MarketingExperiments training.

“Amy and I are very aware that our site needs work. That’s why I submitted it when I signed up. We were thrilled you guys selected it for use in your webinar and more thrilled to get the free feedback.  Unfortunately, I had a meeting and could not participate. Amy took as many notes as possible but you guys go so fast. Can I get a link to the recording?”

– Dave McCready, Owner at Positive Parenting Solutions

Web clinic replays are published eight days after the live Web clinic. To ensure you get a link to the recording, you can activate your free subscription and be notified when the replay is available.

“I would love to examine a partnership with Ecopaper.com. We would benefit greatly from your wisdom and it would be great for you since the tree-free paper market is brand new.”

– Aaron Schiff, COO at Ecopaper Inc

We received 365 landing pages for live optimization during the Web clinic, and while we try to offer free optimization advice on Web clinics (and right here on the blog) for as many pages as possible, we simply can’t get to every page.

If you need marketing help and haven’t been selected for live optimization, you may want to consider exploring a paid Research Partnership with MarketingExperiments.

Related Resources

Homepage Optimization: How using the homepage as a channel led to a 59% increase in conversion (with live optimization examples) – the invitation to our next free Web clinic

Optimizing Landing Pages: The four key tactics that drove a 189% lift – replay of our most recent Web clinic

MarketingExperiments Research Directory – you can find replays of all of our Web clinics here

Clinic Notes

It has been a while since we have published Pay Per Click (PPC) ad testing. Lately, it can seem like PPC has taken the back seat to topics like social media and mobile. However, PPC remains an integral part of the online marketing campaigns for many of our own Research Partners, so we are still testing to discover the most effective ways to craft PPC ads.

So enough introductions and segues, let’s get down to the test.

Background

This experiment involves a business-to-business (B2B) software provider. They were trying to optimize one of their best lead generation conversion paths. They started by focusing their test efforts on the channel driving traffic through this process, the PPC ad.

At the end of the day, they would end up testing and optimizing the complete conversion path (from PPC ad to form page). And the overall gains this company achieved are going to turn some heads on today’s web clinic, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s just look at how they optimized their paid search marketing campaign.

The original PPC ad

The original ad used mainly vague qualitative statements (e.g., “award-winning,” “business software,” “fully integrated”) throughout, giving the ad little distinction from others.

Of course, there are limited characters within a PPC ad and it can be difficult to include deep specifics for certain claims and offers. But, as we will see from this test, sometimes it pays to get creative with our ad copy.

The new PPC ad

For the test, we were able to fit a bit more specific language on the second line of this ad. We included exact figures that underscored the popularity of this software. They have more than 6,459 current customers and their software is the top used by businesses.

It is important to note that, though “award-winning” could be expounded and specified, we had to balance the information we wanted to include in the ad with the amount of characters available. So we made sure that “award-winning” was explained immediately on the landing page customers reach by clicking on this ad.

The results

Overall we saw the click-through for the new ad increase 20.9% with no significant increase to the cost-per-click. For such a crowded market, an increase like this is nothing to turn your nose up at. This PPC was just one part of a holistic optimization strategy that, in the end, decreased the cost-per-acquisition by 66.4% and increased revenue by 267.9%.

So what’s does this mean for you?

This test underscores two key principles that we should all walk away with:

• First is the value of SPECIFICITY. Using clear statements provides a greater value perception in the mind of the user. If we want our PPC ads to stand out, we ought to use quantitative statements instead of (the much more common) qualitative claims. It’s a simple strategy, but it can have a significant impact on our efforts.
• Second is the importance of STRATEGY. This takes the complete picture to see clearly, but small gains are more powerful as part of a holistic optimization strategy. This 21% increase would be multiplied tenfold at the end of the day after we had optimized each step in the conversion funnel of this offer. So, when possible, test holistically.

Dr Flint McGlaughlin will be talking more about this second principle on today’s web clinic, as he walks through the entirety of this case study from PPC ad to the form submission page. He will explain in more detail how this company’s testing strategy took a 21% gain and multiplied it tenfold.

Related Resources

Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

PPC Innovation: How will Google’s new lead capture extension affect your pay-per-click campaigns?

Face Your Fears: Why visitors really bounce from your site, part 2

Paid Search Marketing (PPC), Research Topics

Live optimization is often one of our audience’s favorite aspects of a MarketingExperiments web clinic. For those not familiar with the term, live optimization is when marketers submit their advertising and marketing materials and, if chosen, receive free advice from our optimization researchers.

For our April 28 web clinic – Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124% – Jimmy Ellis (Director of Optimization), Gina Townsend (Senior Research Manager), and Corey Trent (Research Analyst) will apply the same MarketingExperiments Optimization methodologies that have driven triple-digit conversion gains for our Research Partners to your offline and online marketing (if you are chosen).

This clinic will focus on the integration of traditional and digital marketing. To have your materials considered for live optimization, just register for Wednesday’s free web clinic and complete the fields on the registration form. Or, send your creative (direct mail, print ad, billboard, you name it), along with the online marketing it corresponds with, to WebClinics@MarketingExperiments.com.

PLUS: We’ll pick one lucky marketer at random to win free enrollment in one of our Online Training and Certification Courses (winner chooses).

UPDATE: Congratulations to Stephanie Ivy of EB Medicine. Stephanie chose MEC-001 — Fundamentals of Online Testing.

If you missed this live web clinic, a replay is now available on our research website.

Related Resources

Live Optimization Workshops – Learn How to Increase Conversions on Your Landing Pages, Email and Websites

Live optimization + lead generation = better B2B landing pages in one hour

Live optimization: Boost your PPC campaign conversions

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Clinic Notes

If you’ve flipped through your favorite print magazine lately, you might have seen an ad for a product you’ve never seen advertised to consumers before – magazines. In fact, magazines now even have their own tagline – The Power of Print.

At the same time, the publishing industry is falling all over itself to promote the supremacy and fresh capabilities possible with every new digital distribution tool (Hearst is even looking at buying digital-marketing firm iCrossing). It is quite a post-modern experience for my print version of The Wall Street Journal to try to sell me on reading that issue on the iPad instead.

The way the publishing industry has reacted to the digital world is akin to your wife trumpeting how wonderful your marriage has been at the same time she suggests you would have been much happier with her sister.

I kid because I love

I kid the publishing industry because I love it so much. In my job, I read every publication I can get my hands on, and savor the knowledge awaiting me in every bound issue that arrives in my mailbox.

But I’m also picking on the publishers because I don’t want to turn that harsh spotlight on myself and my fellow marketers. Truth be told, while all these digital developments are exciting and spark the creativity inherent in marketers, they’re also a little scary.

And while there are sublime examples of marketers combining the traditional with the 2.0, many marketers are losing money by not putting the puzzle pieces together correctly.

On our free April 28^th web clinic – Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124% – we’ll share the latest discoveries to help you do just that. In the meantime, here is a look at how your peers are making the connection…

Start with the problem

For too long marketing budgets have been set and then an arbitrary percentage, say 10%, went to online without a true understanding of its impact. My firm, WCM, no longer differentiates between traditional and online because the separation is not necessary and new tools are constantly being developed. Online is mainstream.

Moving forward: Start with the business problem. Then make a list of the techniques you can use to solve that problem with marketing. Prioritize the list and diagram the best course of action. See where the connections lead – I suspect traditional is driving interaction through online channels.

Example: For a hospital network, we are creating pre-scheduled, topic-specific discussions on Facebook. (Most companies still use Facebook as a broad discussion board). By using traditional marketing (TV, radio, posters), we will drive patients and caregivers to the daily discussion and grow the loyal and active fan base. Monday is a discussion on nutrition and diets for those combating cancer, Tuesday is all about fashion tips (“looking beautiful when your hair is gone”) etc.

Marketing tool selection should be based on how you want to interact with your audience, but more importantly, how they prefer to be communicated with. For example, those struggling with cancer generally crave interaction with people. Social media makes it happen.

– Rick McKenna, President of Wallwork Curry McKenna

The hub or the mirror

There are a thousand different techniques used to integrate online and offline marketing. For a lot of companies, the website is the “hub” that all other marketing efforts connect with. And if the website is not a “hub” then it works as a “mirror” to reflect what other channels are promoting.

With that in mind, online and offline marketing work best in tandem. And they work best when there is a common strategy with outlined goals and pre-defined benchmarks for evaluation.

Here are some obvious techniques:

• Developing a plan for accounting for untrackable web sales (it’s going to happen)
• Making sure a website’s URL can be used as a response mechanism
• Including the URL in all marketing efforts (if it fits strategy)
• Allow the website to “enhance” the content or messaging of your offline efforts
• Other than the URL, make sure your site can be found; using keywords in offline marketing that are mirrored through paid and organic search

In the end, your customers do not necessarily care about the techniques used, only that their ease of shopping or ordering or learning, etc. is as seamless and unobtrusive as possible.

– John Kennerty, Director of Marketing at Sinclair Institute

Communication and eliminating silos

You must first align your goals, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) around one strategy and then speak the same voice across all channels. The communication internally and externally must mesh and meet the customer’s expectations in each channel.

Beyond this, cross promotion and teasers are great. Examples:

• In your catalog, place the copy of a hot blog, but only put the first couple of lines and refer to the blog. Or have a fun fact and point people online to learn more.
• Make your homepage either match any direct mail or retail pieces that are active or at least have a space for it.
• Have a virtual catalog online and/or a virtual showroom.
• Have your email messages, direct mail, direct response television (DRTV) or other advertising hit at the same time with the same message. Make sure your promotions/discounts are available through any ordering method.

There are many other examples and ideas, but at the core you must stay true to your brand and message in all channels.

– Steve A. Cates, VP of Multichannel Marketing at Carrot-Top Industries

A detailed method

Here is a strategy we tested that has worked successfully for us since 1999. We used it for over 30 Fortune 500 clients, mostly publishers. Word of warning: excellent technology will not take a bad campaign and make it good. However, if you have an otherwise excellent effort, it’s worth adding powerful technology behind it. Passing some of Marketing Experiments’ exams would truly help you understand the power of this method.

Overview:

1. A direct mail piece goes out with a common URL and a unique login ID for each recipient.

2. There is an incentive and a deadline to encourage recipients to log in.

3. When they do, the campaign owner will be notified.

4. Additional enhancements (leads delivered by email, SMS, stored and exported to delimited or mainframe formats), are all possible to add value to your client (if you are an agency).

A brief non-technical explanation:

Direct mail list (database if you will) gets an additional field, let’s call it UniqueID. This number can track each individual as well as campaign constants (campaign ID, incentive used, etc).

The recipient is offered an attractive incentive in the mail piece to log in with their unique ID (raise motivation).

When a login occurs, the campaign owner is notified. If a form must be completed, the information we already have about recipient can be conveniently pre-populated (reduced friction).

Notice how even if they DO NOT proceed to claim your offer (but just log in) you are still notified, giving you the ability to identify “warm leads.”

If the user is supposed to complete a form, this can be pre-populated with variables which display values from the same database used for the mailing. When they log in, the form they are supposed to use for ordering is already filled out (they can correct any mistakes / update info and continue).

Some marketers make intentional mistakes, to “push a button” in people to correct a misspelling (and in the process subscribe to something they offered).

Simply having the technology (your prospect receives a mail piece that allows them to log in to claim a desirable bonus) puts the merchant in a better light (reduced anxiety).

If the campaign is an email, the login step can be eliminated. Clients can click and land directly on a pre-populated form or personalized welcome / landing page.

This is something I’ve done for a decade and I can elaborate at length, if anyone is interested in the technical details.

– Dan Banici, Business Analyst at Incentive Server

Win a free ticket

Are your worlds colliding? Or are you a smooth operator at making the digital and the analog flow seamlessly together? Let us know how you integrate traditional and digital marketing in the comments section. Our favorite comment will win a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Paul Pacun, winner of a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

Related Resources

Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124%

Press Releases — How we tested the impact of press releases on website traffic and inbound links, and found that effective PR can deliver an ROI superior to PPC advertising

Are video clips medium-agnostic?

Marketing Insights

If you’ve been following the MarketingExperiments blog in the past few weeks, you’ll quickly learn that we’re a little obsessed with two things – the real-time, real-world results of online marketing testing and the strong desire to fight squirrels.

No, not literal squirrels with their cute little acorn-filled cheeks. The squirrels we seek to battle are figurative. That is the name we’ve given to that bad idea your boss has that just drives you nuts (pun intended). The “squirrel” is that red herring that diverts your audience’s attention from the main conversion objective. Of course, since squirrels are more personable and cuddly than herrings (not to mention easier to train), that is the analogy we went with for our videos…

To see how our dynamic marketing duo initially tried to fight the squirrel, please watch Part 1 and Part 2 in our ROI-increasing/squirrel-slaying trilogy.

To help you win the budgetary and executive approval to defeat your organization’s squirrels, watch a replay of our latest free web clinic – The Business Case for Testing: How one marketer convinced her business leaders to start testing and drove a 201% gain in the process.

Related resources

Online Marketing Optimization: Does my 95-year-old Grandmother Understand Split Testing Better than your CMO?

A/B Split Testing: How to use A/B Split Testing to Increase Conversion Rates, Challenge Assumptions and Solve Problems

Multivariable Testing: How testing multiple changes simultaneously can save you time, speed up your optimization schedule, and increase your profits

Analytics & Testing

Whenever anyone says to you, “He reminded me of a used car salesman,” we all have the same image in our head. High pressure, no class, just wanted to get you “to sign on the line which is dotted” (as Alec Baldwin said in Glengarry Glen Ross).

We’ve probably all heard the famous sentence, “So, what will it take to get you in this car today?” and shuddered. And because of this, many of us are adverse to the entire idea of selling. But in reality, we are all selling things all the time, right?

We sell the idea of a particular vacation spot to our families. We sell our experience and expertise in job interviews. We sell our teams on our genius marketing plans. In today’s free MarketingExperiments web clinic, we’re going to talk about how to pull off the last vague sell you’ll ever have to do – because every idea you will pitch after you sell enterprise-level use of the testing-optimization cycle will have black and white numbers to back it up.

Decision makers don’t care about testing…

They care about making money. Or meeting some other business-level goal they have. And testing only matters to them if it helps them meet one of these goals.

We’ve talked about how to execute great tests, and what to test, and how to deliver results for your organization for years. But, as a team, we’ve generally failed to help you push past the organizational red tape and bureaucracy to give your idea some teeth.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with many of you who have expressed an interest in testing, but for one reason or another couldn’t get your organization to see the vision the way you see it. Believe me, you’re all in great company – from global corporations to SMBs, everyone is still having the challenges they were having a year ago to really make the case for testing.

…but they care passionately about results

In today’s live web clinic, I’ll share a success story that I’m sure you can easily relate to – a behind-the-scenes look at not just how we made a change on a landing page to get a big result, but how one company ran a series of successful tests, worked through setbacks, and eventually created a culture of testing and optimization in their organization.

And for all who dislike selling, I have some good news. We’re going to take our hour together today to talk about how to make the case for testing and equip you with the tools you’ll need to convince the powers-that-be that they should be making a strategic investment in optimization.

Because once they do, and you get your chance to create that culture in your company, the results will do all the selling for you.

Related research

Execute great tests

What to test

ROI

Analytics & Testing