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

As I prepare to wade through hundreds of submissions for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report, (sponsored by HubSpot) I was compelled to take a final glance at the 2011 edition.

While combing through the pages, many of last year’s submissions evoked some forward-thinking thoughts for 2012. Here are just a few of the standouts…

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“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I sure hope I get a lot of great email marketing messages today.’” This was one of  Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s more clever quips at our recent B2B Summit.

And it hits close to home, because we all know how hard it is to get attention in those crowded inboxes, where your recipients are quickly sorting through messages mostly focused on deleting and unsubscribing, not diligently reading every word of your marketing messages.

This Wednesday at 4 p.m., Flint, our managing director, will share some of our discoveries about increasing response to email marketing promotions and campaigns in our next free Web clinic – Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%.

But first, we wanted to hear your peers’ top tips for increasing the effectiveness of email messaging. Here are a few of our favorite responses …

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As has been the standard for recent MarketingSherpa Summits, leading marketing solutions providers sent several analysts to provide direct, one-to-one consultation for the attendees of B2B Summit 2011. Always an informed, yet creatively-driven group, I sat in a session and observed as Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization, MECLABS (parent company of MarketingExperiments), performed a succinct, but thorough webpage optimization.

The client (anonymized per company request) was a spend management consulting firm, looking to optimize a landing page where users arrive upon clicking through from an email. The email itself was devoid of HTML, as the company chooses to avoid spam filters and failed deliveries by keeping the sends plain text. The email content was fairly simple, only providing a small synopsis of the company’s services before providing a contextual link as the sole call-to-action.

Once the user arrives at the page, s/he is greeted by a simple, clean combination of graphic banner and plain text, seen below: Read more…

Nothing can be assumed when you’re sending an email. You cannot assume recipients know where to click. You cannot assume they realize that the landing page and the email are connected. When you make these assumptions, you’re really hoping the audience will “figure it out.”

But your audience does not want to “figure it out.” Sure, some of them will get it. But others will not realize your image is hyperlinked. Or they will not realize they are on the right landing page, and will leave instead. To avoid this, eliminate what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, calls “unsupervised thinking.”

This phrase came to mind repeatedly during the Actionable Design Insights session at ExactTarget Connections 2011. After teaching our Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop earlier in the week at Connections, I sat in the audience on Wednesday to hear best practice advice from Kristina Huffman, Sr. Design Consultant at ExactTarget, and real marketing examples from Laura Schraeder, Email Marketing Specialist at Helzberg Diamonds.

Below are just a few of the many takeaways on email design highlighted during the session: Read more…

Copy length. It’s been somewhat of an obsession of mine lately. For marketing copywriting. Heck, for content in general.

So I was really looking forward to running a pretty simple copy length test – long vs. short copy.

However, the interpretation was anything but simple. In fact, at first I thought there wasn’t a significant difference between the control and treatment…until we dove down a little deeper.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me set the test up for you…

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In college, I had a journalism professor who said, “Make your headline twice as powerful as the event.” This is sage advice if you’re covering the Kardashian beat for a weekly tabloid, but it doesn’t seem to directly apply to today’s marketers.

(Apologies to any members of the Kardashian marketing team who may have been offended by the previous comment. You’ve done a terrific job promoting whatever it is that made them famous.)

But maybe it is applicable, after all. Despite a marketer’s goal of thoroughly conveying value on a landing page through well-crafted body text and use of images, there often remains a need for a powerful “hook” to further motivate a potential customer.

(Just recently, MarketingExperiments held a Web clinic that covered this very subject.)

When it comes to landing pages, one would think that it would be much easier to get users to convert, as they have already expressed a certain amount of interest via search or email clickthrough. But these users still need to be quickly reminded of why their clicks landed them there in the first place.

In the following test, you’ll see that a continuation of the value proposition was deftly handled with the addition of a few short, powerful words, alongside a much-needed change in the way our partner asked for information. Read more…