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

“What else can I test?” This is one of the most comment questions we get asked at MarketingExperiments. Perhaps only after… “What should I test first?” and “How do I test?”.

Before I help you determine what to test next, you must honestly determine if you really have exhausted your own test ideas. Testing is both a meticulous and iterative process, so there are no short cuts. There are no silver bullets. If “Page Z” is the most effective web page possible (most effective at the moment, since the universe is most certainly not static), then you need to test A, B, C, D…and so on in order to get to Z. By going directly from A to Z you will miss small subtleties and large revelations that would have influenced your design of page Z.

In order to exhaust your test ideas, there are two important stages to consider in a testing process:

• Radical redesigns
• Fine tuning

A shrewd procedure to adopt as you begin testing is to “Go radical, then fine tune.” This can apply to landing pages, home pages, shopping cart processes, etc. It’s an effective way to gain decisive knowledge in a short period of time.

Radical Redesigns

An intelligent test design includes a hypothesis that one page will respond very differently from another. By testing radically different strategies, your test will elicit much clearer and decisive results.

So what radical redesigns should you test? I suggest that you develop treatment pages that are a categorical shift from your current page. An example of a radical redesign may be:

• Divergent messaging (“set up free access” instead of “register”)
• Free trial instead of pay up front
• New layout
• New color scheme
• One-step checkout instead of a three-step process

In other words, once you get your testing budget approved, I implore you not to start with a button color test. Sure, a green button may be better than your current grey button, but you have to ask when designing the test, how much better is it? Test elements that you are confident will have a noticeable difference. Even if it’s negative, at least you will learn your grand new idea is actually not grand and you shouldn’t bring it up in front of the board at the next quarterly meeting.

Radical redesigns should save you time as well. In terms of time efficiency, the worst thing you can do when testing is design a test where only minimal difference in behavior is possible.

Fine Tuning

After you’ve ruled out the radical designs that don’t work and you feel you’ve arrived at your best strategy, then it’s time for some fine tuning. This includes:

• Tweaking the headline
• Small copy changes
• Button color/copy
• Order of your bullets/New bullets
• Images

However, you must consider one caveat when testing small elements on your web pages – it can be extremely time consuming. Finding the perfectly worded headline, then determining what color the button should be, then identifying if your primary image should be a man, woman, group… tested individually, fine tuning these elements could comprise hundreds of tests.

Multivariate tests are a way to test multiple small changes simultaneously, thus speeding up your optimization schedule to increase profits as quickly as possible.

Nowadays multivariate tests are easier and easier to conduct. So I’d encourage you to use them to your benefit as you begin the fine-tuning process. Choose a set of variables (headline, image, button), then choose their corresponding values (button: green, blue, red), and launch the test to determine the best combination.

What Else Can I Test?

Now that I’ve given you the background necessary to determine where you fit in the testing-optimization cycle, let’s revisit that juicy “What else can I test?” question.

Today, I will discuss a few strategies to consider for both e-commerce sites and lead generation pages. I will make a few caveats though.

First, these should not be the extent of your testing. These are just a few quick examples to get your brain percolating with test ideas that may deviate just a tad from the norm.

Second, some of these ideas might be quite radical, so I would proceed with caution if you decide to execute something similar.

Third, not every idea works for every site, company, industry, etc. You have to test to see what works for you. And you have to continually test because the Internet, the economy, and customer preference are all constantly evolving.

E-commerce – shopping cart

So often I go to an online clothing or electronics store and see, very prominently displayed, that I have no products in my cart. Well, I sort of know that because I just got here and have not added anything. Really, what’s the point of telling people “you have 0 items in your shopping cart”? It seems quite pointless when you think about it.

What if you used that space more effectively?

You could code that area of the page to communicate value or promotions whenever nothing has been added to the cart. Adagio Teas is a great example of this. They communicate in this space that you get free shipping with orders over a certain amount and that if you order within the next XX amount of time that your products will arrive on XX day. Two great pieces of information that are much more valuable than knowing I have zero products in my cart.

E-commerce – dynamic navigation menu

The things you can do with a top or side navigational menu these days are incredible. Bye-bye to the days where you just clicked on a category or chose a sub-category from a simple dropdown menu. This space can be used in place of category pages. It can be used to promote new products or items on sale. You can use it to guide visitors to the most popular areas or even to sections that are most profitable to you.

When visitors hover over the tabs on the Clinique site, they see a user-friendly menu that lists areas to dig deeper into the site. This type of menu allows your site to direct people to areas beyond simple sub-categories. In Clinique’s case, you can navigate to trends, tools, gifts, etc. Below these options, there is also plenty of room to promote free shipping, new products, or even an offer for a skin consultation.

Lead generation – technology

So often you arrive on a lead gen page that has the same old boring form. Name, email, phone, address…on and on. Well, I say spice it up a bit! There are many simple development techniques that can make your forms more user-friendly and also more visually appealing.

Here is an example of applying jQuery Expose to a form field. The form initially looks pretty run-of-the-mill:

And then when you click on one of the fields:

You may not be able to notice, but the entire page becomes lighter and highlights the singular objective you want the visitor to accomplish. This focuses the visitor’s attention on the form and hopefully away from any links, images, and most importantly that “red x” at the top right of the page.

Lead generation – Focusing attention to the middle of the page

One popular way of focusing attention to the middle of the page these days is the modal popup, or entrance popup. If you’re reading this blog post, you’ve probably seen it when you enter MarketingExperiments.com

Although it’s a popup and sometimes annoying, the reason why this strategy works for many people is that you eliminate all the distractions caused by copy, links, ads, images, and other shared real estate a homepage usually has, and forces visitors to look at one thing. Hopefully it’s something that is impactful to the business.

Question: What if we executed this “idea” completely differently? What if we made a complete paradigm shift? The following is a PPC landing page in which we tested the “idea” of the entrance popup (page anonymized):

[click image to enlarge]

The page looks like an entrance popup. It eliminates distraction like an entrance popup. It focuses the user’s attention on one objective like the entrance popup. But, it’s NOT a popup.

The text, images, and background colors have all been dimmed to place primary focus on the central objective. I know this is an extreme example, but if used judiciously, this strategy can be very effective.

Our test treatment received a 19.6% relative increase over the control. And what did the control look like? It was almost the same design but without the pseudo “entrance popup” strategy.

I hope you received some value from these test ideas. Stay tuned to the blog for more ideas from the ongoing “What else can I test” series to hear new ideas from many different researchers in the MarketingExperiments lab.

Related Resources

What else can I test … to improve my lead generation rate?

What else can I test … to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate?

What else can I test… to increase email clickthrough rate?

Ecommerce, Research Topics

This weekend I was paying for the 10 gallons I had just put into my old 1997 Honda Civic, when I decided that I’d purchase a nice cold soda for the road. I pointed out the pump where my fueled-up car was located and then slid the cold beverage to the convenience store clerk. He informed me that my total came to $25.89 and then he stopped.

Looking me dead in the eyes, he asked me what my name was. “Austin,” I replied a little hesitantly. “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?” he asked. I nodded and attempted to hand him my Visa credit card.

He denied my overture and informed me that he could only help me if I were a member of his store. So not wanting to cause a scene with the five people who were now behind me, I conceded.

Can I just buy a soda?

He asked for my name again, and then moved on to more personal information. He informed me that my phone number, home address, and email address were all required for membership, but then gave me the option of telling him my age, date of birth, marital status, and household income level.

I, of course, declined. After all the information had been gathered, the clerk then passed me about 60 pages of the legal terms which I needed to sign to become a member.

Finally he took my card. However, in the middle of processing it, another clerk approached me saying that he noticed I was purchasing a can of soda. The coworker then made some suggestions concerning what I might like to buy along with my soda based upon previous customer patterns.

Once I had assured his coworker that I just wanted a soda, the clerk then again reminded me that my total came to $25.89 and again stopped, looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?”

This might be how customers see our shopping carts

Ok, so this story is a bit of a stretch for a convenience store, but is an accurate reenactment of the experience at many ecommerce sites. This is exactly what we see across the Web with shopping cart experiences everywhere. In fact, we recently ran a test with one of our Research Partners and here is what the original checkout process looked like:

1)     Product page (click to purchase)

2)     Cart page (confirm you are ready to order)

3)     User account page (if you are new you must choose to create a new account)

4)     Create a user account page #1 (enter name, email and account password)

5)     Create a user account page #2 (enter shipping information)

6)     Create a user account page #3 (enter payment information)

7)     Order confirmation page (confirm order and account information again)

8)     Receipt page

To go from the product page to the receipt page took eight different steps. A customer has to register before being able to place the order, as well as confirm that order twice. After reorganizing and removing unnecessary steps, we were able to optimize this process to a single basic step. The increase in order completions was over 68%.

Is your shopping cart trying to do too much?

What this experiment illustrates is something we see over and over in the shopping cart process. Most shopping carts that companies use are bulky and have more features than needed (i.e. cart registration, order confirmations, cross-promotional offerings, etc.). Sometimes this means a shopping cart looks less like a basic transaction facilitator, and more like a boot camp obstacle training course with high walls and flaming hoops.

For instance, how many times have you had to join a web site before actually buying a product? How many “if you like this product, you might like this product” offers have you endured while checking out? Have you ever counted how many times you actually have to confirm your order before it goes through?

None of these features are bad per se, and some might even be helpful in the overall customer-client relationship. The only problem is when they get in the way of the natural thought sequence of a customer looking to purchase something at a specific moment in time.

Please, just let me out of here!

If I come to a web site, place an order in my cart, and hit “check out,” then please just let me check out. We must make sure our cart processes is sticking to the main objective – namely, closing the sale.

All these customer retention features and cross-promotional options can be strategically accomplished after the initial sale has already been completed. For instance, you can ask for the customer to create an account for future purchases or send them to a thank-you page that has cross-promotional offers.

Overall, this experiment leaves us with one key question: How many people might we be losing in the process by interrupting their order process? For this company, simplifying the checkout process meant 68% more orders. What is your potential?

Want to learn more?

For more information on how to optimize your shopping cart process, listen to our good friend Joel Book, the Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget and Charles Nicholls, the Founder of SeeWhy, in the free webinar entitled The 7 Secrets To Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts.

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

Ecommerce, Order Process, Research Topics

You get home from a long day in your marketing department or agency. Whip up a quick dinner. And just when you’re about to bite into your arroz con pollo, you hear that dreaded ring.

I call this situation Dan’s Lament. Our associate editor, Daniel Burstein, was sounding off to me about this situation earlier today. For some reason, at least in his household, they only get one type of phone call around 7pm and that, of course, is the dreaded telemarketer.

Now telemarketing is illegal at some level in the United States, as it is in many other countries, and Dan is on the National Do Not Call Registry. Yet there are those loopholes that ensure his phone still rings at dinnertime. In the latest case, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to discuss his fishing habits.

Surveys. Non-profits. Or my personal favorite…political push polls. They all have found a loophole.

The more you segment, the less you blindly dial for dollars

I’ve really grown to hate telemarketers. Not so much because they prevent foodie friends of mine like Dan from enjoying a good winter vegetable salad with fresh, in-season kale, but rather as a professional marketer.

The technology and science behind segmentation have helped marketers target their message so much better than before, so I feel professionally insulted that someone would think they can, precisely at the dreaded 7pm, offer sandwich-toting Dan something he didn’t already think about buying in a store or online.

So I am a fan of do-not-call registries…even if they are only marginally effective.

Now I know what many of you may be thinking. “Wait a minute, Boris, I don’t mean to interrupt Dan’s enjoyment of a hearty winter vegetable salad or pastrami on rye, but these lists are a major challenge for me…I need to leverage the human touch for an upsell or to nurture a complex sale.”

The reality is that cultural and corresponding regulatory changes have led to a certain shift in the utilization of call centers, from making to taking calls. It’s not bad news. It’s great news for you savvy marketers that have the resources to leverage a call center, if you know how to do it profitably.

Is automation right for you?

If you are a Web marketer reading this, you might be asking yourself “what does this have to do with me?” However, looking at marketing holistically may be precisely where you can maximize return on your marketing dollars, as the automation afforded by the digital medium is not a one-size-fits-all solution to all sales processes.

Yes, it’s cheaper to sell online. Yet you may be doing a better job of selling and cross-selling over the phone, even though it costs you more. The question is where the higher net profit lies.

As the resident KPI (that’s key performance indicator) Guy at MarketingExperiments, among other things, I want to reintroduce you to a KPI that is critical to inbound marketing. It is the same KPI what would have been applied to a telemarketing campaign just a few short years ago: cost per acquisition (CPA).

The obvious use of this metric is to understand how much you can afford to spend on a media buy. You may be more familiar with this metric in the demand generation realms (paid search, affiliate marketing, lead gen, etc.). However, in conjunction with a bottom-line metric, such as revenue (preferably, lifetime) per visitor (RPV), it can also provide you with critical insights for directing your marketing efforts and formulating your messaging.

Even though your site can now do many things that have replaced telemarketing – from further qualifying a lead to completing an order to even getting that upsell – don’t let technology guide your decisions. Depending on the nature of your product, the human touch can be so much more effective for any or all of these steps.

So the best thing to do is… wait for it… test!

By varying the emphasis you place on calls to action that lead to a human interaction (phone number, live chat, call-me form), both in the layout of your pages (location, graphical weighting) and their prominence in the order process (from focusing the option as the primary action to not even mentioning it).

Experimenting with live chat is its own subject, as you can test how quickly (if at all) you want to turn the online chat into a phone conversation. You might even test a click-to-call button, although be wary of spam (and if you market in India, strict regulations).

What you’re trying to discover is whether the increased cost of acquiring a customer is offset or surpassed by an increase in closed orders, upsells, or higher-quality leads (e.g., for a complex sale, how does the increase in calls help your lead management efforts).

In other words, you will need to compare the change in CPA to the change in RPV (and depending on the nature of your business, both may need to be adjusted for the customer’s projected lifetime cost and value).

You have to be careful with how you juggle the numbers, as there are many potential pitfalls. Remember that your ultimate goal is increased profits. Depending on your business plan, your primary or close secondary goal is likely increased profits in the foreseeable future or over the customer’s lifetime. If adding human interaction results in sufficiently higher revenue per website visitor, it may be worth the extra cost.

But you’ll only know if you test. And use the right KPI.

How do you use inbound marketing, telesales, and customer service? What KPIs do you use to measure your success? Share your triumphs and ideas in the comments section of this post or start a conversation with your peers in the MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Ecommerce, Lead Generation, Marketing Insights, Research Topics

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

• When will their list get irritated?
• How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
• At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH

Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH

Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH

Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH

Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH

Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH

Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

Results: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
   1. 1-2 per month
   2. 3-5 per month
   3. 6-9 per month
   4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Research Topics

Why is the holiday shopping season so great? Your customer has an immutable purchasing deadline. Her fifth-grade, Wii-craving son won’t let her forget it, and neither should you. But as…tick, tick, tick…precious time passes in the make-or-break shopping season, are you flexible enough to take advantage of this natural urgency factor to get the greatest ROI out of your traffic?

In the September 22 Web clinic, our special guest Linda Bustos mentioned the idea of how online retailers may want to shift their focus from regular shipping of physical products to more holiday-conscious messaging, eventually moving toward downloadable products when the time runs short. I thought that this point deserved a deeper look.

Natural Urgency: An Opportunity for Increased Relevance
The holidays are a goldmine because you have extra insight into what your customers want, and when they want it. I will use the example of Christmas in the rest of this post (because it’s the single most commercially impactful holiday in the world), but the same principles apply to other holidays or even to specialty products and services that exist in relation to a specific “deadline” that the customer has to meet, like a wedding, a housewarming party, or one of your aunt’s cats’ birthday. When you know that urgency is a factor in your customer’s decision whether to buy from you, it is critical that you help this customer not only understand why your offer is the best choice, but also how you can deliver it on time. Providing this helpful information will help your customer buy from you.

The underlying principle here is that you must use everything you know about your customers (and every interaction they have with your site tells you something) to present your offer in the most meaningful, relevant way. For example, knowing what holidays are coming up within the next few weeks, you may want to test links to “Christmas gift shopping” on your site. While your catalog of products will not change, you know that anyone that clicked on that link is looking for a Christmas gift, and now you have a date to work with. You can test letting your visitor choose the target holiday, or if you have the data to assume that your customers are predominantly Christmas gift shoppers, your site by default can address that particular holiday.

December 1: Make your site holiday conscious
Just twenty-five shopping days until Christmas. If you’re in B2C ecommerce, you probably know this number by heart. Share this sense of urgency with your customers, remind them about the last time they had to do last-minute shopping, and communicate the sense of content that results from knowing that you don’t have to worry about making it to the store after work when the gifts are being safely shipped and delivered.

Of course, the critical number that matters online during holidays has to do not with shopping… but with shipping. Make sure your shipping cutoffs are crystal clear on your site. “For guaranteed delivery by Christmas, you must purchase by…” If you fail to communicate this information, your customer will look for someone that does. Don’t expect your customers to dig through your “Terms” pages to figure this out. “Unsupervised thinking” on your pages is especially lethal and especially inexcusable when you know that there is specific information that your customer needs to make a purchasing decision.

December 15: Reflect urgency using clear delivery options
As you get closer to shipping deadlines, you may want to amplify the message that shipping costs will soon increase, and that the customer will save money by purchasing today. Not only does this help create a reasonable sense of urgency for your customers, perhaps it will also remind you to figure out what a Bakugan is before you end up arm wrestling another guy wearing a “World’s Greatest Uncle” t-shirt for one at the toy store on Christmas Eve.

December 19: Increase emphasis on alternative shopping options
You will reach a point where guaranteed delivery by Christmas is still possible, yet increasingly or even prohibitively expensive. If you have a brick-and-mortar companion store, now is the time to use that to your advantage. You can emphasize how customers can save money on shipping by ordering online and simply picking up at the store. Make sure you communicate how easy the pickup process is and the advantage of not having to fight through the maddening crowd of shoppers. You may consider an express pick-up line at the store, and if you have one, emphasize its additional convenience on your site. You can also offer a better price or holiday-specific bonus item for buying online (which would allow you to collect payment immediately) instead of at the store.

If you don’t have physical locations, proceed directly to the next recommendation…

December 24: Prominently feature electronic-delivery items
By now, the children are all nestled snug in their beds, and all the gifts are tucked under the tree… Or are they? Your target customer just might be pulling his hair out, trying to figure out a last-minute gift. Here is where an ecommerce site can be a huge advantage by creating a digital offering that last-minute customers can buy… even as the clock approaches midnight.

These could be either all-digital products, like streaming or downloadable audio, an online brokerage account, or a gift card, or you may have to get creative and craft an offer that combines digital and physical components, such as an instantly downloadable cookbook that goes with cookware that will be delivered after the holidays.

An important aspect of digital products is presentation. Especially in the case of gift cards (even the physical version isn’t much to look at), you need to help your customer create a sense of giving a “real” gift. That is, help your customer out and don’t make it look like he has forgotten to buy a gift for his mother-in-law for the third year in a row.

Perhaps you can make an attractive, customizable PDF that the customer can print out to give the digital gift a physical nature. Communicating the benefit of giving (remember, your value proposition here is in part what the giver will feel) such a digital gift may take some education as well. Again, do not rely on unsupervised thinking. Don’t expect that it’s obvious to your customer that printing out a gift card document (really, its only function is to have a record of a coupon code) and putting it into an envelope will put them right back on the “favorite nephew” list. You could test communicating this by showing an image of someone giving this virtual gift to a delighted recipient.

The bottom-line is – it must seem substantial enough that the customer doesn’t feel self-conscious about giving it in person. If the gift is for a long-distance recipient, perhaps you could use video or Flash to make a customizable, attractive gift.

This is a great opportunity for nonprofits and charities as well. Consider buying paid search ads with keywords such as “last-minute gifts” on the 24th and 25th. Create a virtual gift that embodies the power of your charitable mission – perhaps an ebook of stories from people that have been helped or a virtual gift card so the recipient can choose where the donation is spent.

Above all, make it seem like a real, worthwhile gift that anyone would be happy to receive. Even with all-digital gifts, you can give your customer the option (perhaps for a small additional fee) to have a physical document mailed to them later, so that the digital gift will feel a little less digital (and, again, clearly state that “you will be receiving an official copy of your donation certificate…”).

Beyond December 25
Obviously, the above recommendations are ideas on how you can make best use of timing to play up a sense of urgency for a universal deadline. Except, it’s not universal. There are many other dates to keep track of this time of year. Hanukkah begins at sundown, Friday, December 11th. Military families often face much earlier shipping deadlines for guaranteed Christmas delivery to deployed family members. As do those shipping internationally in general.
Use the power of Internet marketing to serve these segments as well. Buy paid search ads with keywords relevant to these customers, and make sure you link those ads to relevant pages that focus on the dates important to them (don’t display your countdown to Christmas for customers that searched for “Hanukkah gift ideas”).

Sometime in January
Now that you’ve had time to recover and learned what a Bakugan is, take a look at your metrics. How much did the metamorphosis of your offer from regular shipped products to driving customers to a physical location to selling an all-digital gift improve your ROI? Whether it was a banner season or a disappointing season, make sure you learn what works best for your site and use that information next year.

As always, the ideas above are meant to be tested, and we hope that you will share some of your interesting test results with us.

Daniel Burstein contributed to this blog post…and hopes Boris goes wassailing around the office with his guitar for the holidays.

To listen to Boris Grinkot’s last-minute holiday tactics to increase revenue from your house email list, join us this Wednesday for our next free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Ecommerce, Practical Application, Research Topics

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” MarketingExperiments research analysts provide practical test ideas and examples in the “What else can I test?” column.

According to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” from the Center for Media Research, email marketing is still the most preferred and effective way channel marketers have to communicate directly with their customers. It is also the preferred method of communication by consumers as well. In its Email Benchmark Guide 2009, MarketingSherpa reported that consumers overwhelmingly identify email as the ‘best way for companies to communicate with me’ (see survey results).

In this post, we are going to review several tactics you can consider to improve the look and feel of your emails and, in so doing, increase clickthrough rate. However, please remember that improving email response starts even before designing the layout and content of your email. It’s very important you look at how to increase qualified opt-ins, rate of deliverability, quality of rented list, etc. These are topics we will review in future posts. Improving the content and layout of your emails can give you quick a win. Also, if you start testing now, you can be ready for great a performing email template for the holiday season.

Note: most of the email examples I’m using are from ecommerce retailers, but the same principles apply to services or B2B emails.

Here are eight tactics that you can use or re-visit to increase your email clickthrough rate:

1) Analyze and segment your list. No matter when or how frequently you send emails, if they are not relevant, you will never achieve the highest possible response. A customer segmentation analysis will help you increase relevance by identifying the number of unique customer segments and their main product/service interest. With this information, you can not only target the content of your emails better, but also reduce the number of calls to action per email; preferably to only one call to action (see NextStage Evolution study results of ‘Raising clicks: Reduce the Number of Actions‘).

As an example, I can cite a recent case study from MarketingSherpa that explains how The American Greetings team got a 70% lift in conversions from a simple email test that matched subscribers’ preferences to content in the offer. In short, they started from zero by analyzing the lifecycle of their subscribers, type of ecards they sent, and type of senders they were. For St. Patrick’s Day, American Greetings team designed two versions of the email – one promoting a traditional St. Patrick’s Day e-card, the other promoting a humorous St. Patrick’s Day e-card. Conversions, in this case, were people who went to the site after seeing the email and purchased the e-card or a $15.99 annual subscription. See email designs below:

Funny St.Patrick's Day Email

Traditional St. Patrick's Day Email

FYI – If you are interested in reading more about segmentation analysis, here is a great article from iMedia with application examples: Email Segmentation for Success

2) Maintain continuity from subject line to headline to call to action. The role of the subject line is to either match a specific motivation of your customers or spark it. In any case, once they are motivated by your subject line, the role of your email is to maintain and strengthen that motivation. Therefore it is important to re-state or support the offer in the body and call to action. However, don’t go overboard with long copy. Remember that the goal of the email is to get a click, not to do the sale. Short copy and bullet points are usually all you need to support the offer. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

Or this

3) Use simple and vertical layouts. As mentioned before, try as much as possible to design your email body for one specific call to action. Secondary calls to actions and support links can be present in the email but they need to be clearly de-emphasized. Consider always an email template that guides the eye path from top (headline) to bottom (copy and call to action). The same principles that we recommend to landing pages apply to emails (see Optimizing Offer Pages). In case you have seen that presenting multiple offers works better with your target customers, then I recommend using a vertical layout; list offers in order of profitability for your business. Usually the first offer on the email is the one that will receive the most clicks. See examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

4) Make sure your CTA stands out. Although you can design emails to be clickable anywhere in the body, it helps if you drive customers’ attention to a specific call to action. The more you can guide your customers’ eye-path to certain action the better the chances they will perform that action. At the end it is all about reducing unsupervised thinking! See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this	Not this
But this	Or this

5) Offer alternative-view options. In cases when images are blocked or customers are checking the email from their cell phones, it helps to present the offer with simple text links at the top of the email. Just adding clear, easy-to-follow text links can increase the opportunities for your customers to read and act on your emails. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

6) Try a PS note. A PS note is a great resource to complement the offer or add an additional incentive for customers to click. In terms of usability, PS notes are not only effective with those customers who were not sold initially and needed an additional push, but it is also effective with those customers who open the email and scan it from top to bottom to get a sense of what the whole email is about. When they scan from bottom up there is a chance they will act on the PS note of the email. See example:

Example

7) Leverage the footer for social media. We all want our customers to follow us in any way and everywhere. However, most of the time calls to action to become fan or followers are secondary goals on most email campaigns. The footer is a great place for secondary objectives like this one. The calls to action are not in the way of the main offer and do not compete with the primary call to action. See example:

Example

8 ) Advertise other products or present up/cross sells subtly. The same way visitors are used to identifying the left column of a web page as an advertising area, they identify the left column of an email or newsletter as another advertising area. As a result, the effectiveness of the advertising in your emails is minimal. Customers learn to automatically avoid this area. The most effective way to fight banner blindness is to place advertising in unusual places or use uncommon formats (atypical banner sizes and contextual text links instead of banners). See examples: (Amazon.com, 1-800-Flowers).

Example

Example 2

Let us know if you test any of these variations with your email campaigns and how they do. Also, feel free to share with us any other ideas that you have seen working really well.

Not sure what you should test next? Want to share your testing ideas, questions or feedback on this topic? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @anagabydiaz

Email Marketing, General, Marketing Insights, Practical Application, Research Topics