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

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. Read more…

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… Read more…

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. Read more…

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provided a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London Read more…

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won… Read more…

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation… Read more…