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

I guess it was bound to happen. For last Wednesday’s web clinic — Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site — we packed in a bunch of research, special guest Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa, and two new case studies with gains of up to 56%.

We had a great crowd, lots of live Q&A, a cool contest — and, sadly, a vaporized recording. So you can now access the presentation in our standard research brief format (with all the charts, key points and takeaways from the session); however, the flash version is in the ether. Sorry about that.

Back to some good news, eh?

The five clinic participants who will receive a free copy of the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide are:

1. Cathryn Foster of Dot Zinc
2. Amy Wang of JPMorgan Chase
3. Richard Flaherty of CambridgeSoft Corporation
4. Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink
5. Tom Gray of Gray eMarketing

More good news?

Thanks to your feedback, we’re expanding our web clinics in several new ways, including: teaming up with more featured guests, pulling in more case studies and research from our community of marketers, and tackling some new topics.

A perfect example is our free web clinic next Wednesday, June 10: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Sign up for the free Twitter clinic, join the @MktgExperiments team, and keep an eye on the hashtag #webclinic in the days to come. Oh, and please share with your tweeps, too.

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.

For our recent B2C success stories web clinic, we took a new approach with our case studies — and turned the spotlight on our audience.

Our team walked through test results from four sites and how they achieved gains of up to 300% by applying key principles of the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence. (MP3 audio of the clinic is here; full presentation will be available soon.)

As a way of celebrating those gains, and helping others achieve them, we also included a special contest with this clinic: three attendees, selected at random, would win an on-demand MarketingExperiments Certification Course of their choice, including Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization, and Email Marketing.

Now we’re pleased to announce the three contest winners …

1. OperationSmile.org – a site that mobilizes volunteers and donors around the world to help repair childhood facial deformities.

2. Stockhouse.com — a community website for investors, offering a variety of market information.

3. HomeScienceTools.com — an ecommerce site that offers an array of science materials to families and teachers.

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to Matt Burghdoff, Ann-Marie Fleming, and Amanda Schaner, respectively, for entering our contest and participating in this special clinic. We look forward to featuring new success stories from your sites in a follow-up web clinic.

Coming soon: A B2B version of our audience case studies clinic, with a similar special contest. Don’t miss it. Get all the details via email or our RSS feed.

When it comes to lead generation, the battle over quantity vs. quality shows no signs of letting up, especially as dollars remain tighter and sales cycles longer. You know this battle. And the side you’re on usually boils down to your role on either the marketing or sales team.

Marketing wants a  flood of leads. Keep the pipeline full and let the sales team have at ‘em. Sales wants a flood of leads, too — but they don’t want to waste their time with unqualified leads and dead-ends. Oversimplified? Sure. But in general, this is still how the quantity vs. quality tug-of-war plays out in many organizations.

Who wouldn’t love to maintain or grow a steady stream of  leads while at the same time increasing the quality? Or at the very least, implement a way to sort leads more effectively?

Our April 8 web clinic, What’s working now in optimization: New tests and a 364% gain, explored how to improve lead generation and conversion rates by applying friction in specific, intentional ways with your site.

You can now access the complete presentation, listen to the MP3 version, or review the print-friendly research brief from the clinic and see how using a “two-dial” approach helped us achieve the best of both worlds. In one test, altering the registration path yielded the 364% increase in conversions alluded to in the clinic title. Our team also examined some of the differences that arise when using this approach on ecommerce sites.

We received several questions from the live clinic audience, and, as with our recent Spanish-language optimization clinic, we’ll follow up this post with selected Q&A and resources related to this clinic topic. Meanwhile, other recent web clinics that dealt with lead generation and offer page optimization include:

• Optimizing Offer Pages: Steps that increased conversion 148%
• A Proven Playbook for Growing Your Leads
• Filling the Pipeline: Lead generation strategies that got an 86% increase

Use the comments field to share your thoughts on this clinic, and hey, while you’re sharing, why not pass this post along to a friend (but not a competitor)?

Technically, this isn’t a preview because our Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce sites took place on Wednesday, May 7. But let’s set the semantics aside.

Thanks to your feedback, we’ll soon be reproducing our Clinics in a new format that integrates the audio and presentation slides. Here’s a peek at the new format.

We’ll be using this new format and making it available to our MarketingExperiments Journal subscribers this summer. We’ll also continue posting our Clinic content in the current formats (audio and HTML-based research briefs).

Our goal is to provide the information and examples in a variety of formats, so you can find the most convenient and valuable format(s) for you.

Got comments or questions about the new format? Please let us know.

(And if you missed it, you can find our April 16 Clinic on metrics here.)

I hope you were able to join us for yesterday’s Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce websites. It was a lively, actionable session and we were sifting through attendee comments all morning.

(NOTE: Subscribe to our free MarketingExperiments Journal and you’ll be notified by email when our Web Clinic content is posted online.)

Our optimization experts — Flint McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal — plowed through a series of research-tested concepts, best practices and pitfalls to avoid with eCommerce sites and landing pages. They also performed a rapid-fire review and critique of five eCommerce websites submitted by our Journal subscribers.

We’ll break out some of those sites and the specific recommendations in future blog posts. And if those sites apply the ideas, perhaps we’ll get some new success stories.

Meanwhile, one key takeaway was the idea that eCommerce site visitors fall into two main categories: Hunters and Browsers.

Hunters already know what they want, and are looking for a quick, safe transaction, while Browsers need more convincing and a different approach to prompt them to make a purchase.

To be most effective, an eCommerce site must address the motivations and thought processes of both audiences, and take them both into account when developing pages, site paths and conversion funnels. That’s the foundation that should be in place before the real fun starts with page elements and design using weighted objectives.

Keeping those two audiences in mind, here are five questions that will help to frame optimization efforts for eCommerce site pages:

1. Which type of visitor — Hunter or Browser — is this page trying to serve? (Consider the channels and traffic sources.)

2. What are the weighted objectives of this page?
3. How does this page stop the visitor and connect with them?
4. Does this page instantly communicate my Business Value Proposition to visitors?
5. How does this page attract my visitor deeper into my product mix as it relates to the weighted objectives?

When a site or page has these fundamentals locked in, it’s much easier to determine a baseline for success, test changes to increase conversions — and measure the results. Try these questions with your own eCommerce page and let us know what you think.

Want to have your website or landing pages optimized by our experts? Just sign up for the MarketingExperiments Journal. You’ll stay apprised of all our upcoming Web Clinics and have the chance to submit your site for a live optimization.