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

“There are no expert marketers; there are only experienced marketers and expert testers.” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin remarks from his keynote on day one of the Email Summit echoed through Friday’s post-Summit workshop about email messaging.

According to the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, the majority of small- and medium-sized businesses do not test or optimize their emails. In fact, 67% of small businesses don’t even dedicate a portion of their budget to testing or optimization.

As we learned through several case studies performed on larger organizations, if you’re not optimizing for your customers, you’re losing a huge chunk of sales revenue from leads who fall out of your funnel. In most cases, a simple change of focus for a landing page or call-to-action on an email capture form was enough to provide a significant lift in sales and conversions.

For the small business owner, simple and effective methods that can produce results without too much manpower are the best methods to pursue. Below are four takeaways from the post-Summit workshop that will help you view your email campaign through your customers’ eyes and effectively optimize for the best results.

Read more…

Early afternoon on day 3 of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas, I caught a case study with Justin Bridegan, Senior Marketing Manager, MECLABS, presenting with Frank Cartwright, SVP of Product and Platform Development, GamersFirst, a free online gaming website that offers premium subscriptions, items and packages for purchase.

The challenge at GamersFirst was getting more people through their sales funnel and turning them into purchasing customers.

To improve the performance of its sales funnel, GamersFirst extensively tested its email marketing.

Frank says, “We wanted to transform the email marketing division from a cost center to a profit center.”

GamersFirst’s funnel includes 100% of website users are registered, the company gets 80% of those registrants verified, 60% login to the site, and only 10% actually make a purchase.

One group of tests involved sending the validation reminder email to registrants. GamersFirst tested the format of the email – text or graphic, and the timing of the email – 24 versus 72 hours.

  Read more…

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 kicked off Wednesday, February 8 with Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MECLABS, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments.

Sergio emphasized this is a research-based event driven by the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, featuring W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, as the lead author. This book is our ninth annual benchmark study.

The benchmark report includes research and insights from 2,735 marketers, and identifies barriers to email marketing success and what marketers are doing to overcome them.

For example, here’s a chart from the report that illustrates email marketing challenges:

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As you can see, email marketers are facing a wide variety of issues at fairly high percentages. Everything from data systems integration to email efficiency comes in at 40%, or higher. Read more…

The majority of B2B organizations are increasing their marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics. One of the most popular of those inbound tactics is virtual events and webinars, with 60% of marketers increasing their investment according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

“It is essential for organizations to gain the trust of their buyers before they can hope to convert them,” said Jen Doyle, the Benchmark Report’s lead author. “Webinars offer an effective platform to improve thought leadership and reputation, both essential components to winning trust. The cost effectiveness of webinars is just the icing on the cake, so many organizations are shifting to include webinars as part of their marketing plans.”

Of course, a webinar isn’t very effective if no one attends. So in today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, Gaby Paez and I will give you some test ideas for those all important webinar invite emails (and if you’d like to see how we craft our own webinar invite emails, just sign up) by reviewing a live optimization submission from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Gaby is associate director of Research at MECLABS, and you can hear more of her test ideas in the Web clinic replay, Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%, along with some of the audience’s optimization advice for this submission.

Here’s the submission (and you can view it online as well) …

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BACKGROUND

Email – Invitation to a paid social media webinar, “Going Mobile: How Nonprofits Succeed,” which features a bonus opportunity to gain access to “an exclusive discussion group” and three speakers:

• Felicia Carr, Senior Director of Online Communications, National Parks Conservation Association
• Jason Wood, Director of Digital Communications Services, Salvation Army National Headquarters
• Cody Switzer, Assistant Web Editor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Audience – Nonprofit professionals in fund-raising, marketing, social media and development

Objective – To get registrants for a paid webinar

  Read more…

“The goal of an email is to get a click.” –Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS

Editor’s Note: It’s a simple concept and you have likely heard it a lot if you’re a regular MarketingExperiments reader. If you can provide your prospect with enough value to get them to click out of their crowded, highly competitive inbox and onto your landing page, the email has done its job.

Of course, it’s one thing to be able to say what the goal of an email is, and another thing entirely to accomplish it. It takes a lot of experience testing and optimizing emails to develop your own internalized methodology for writing effective email messaging.

To fill that void, Adam Lapp, our Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, was kind enough to lend us his years of experience in testing and optimizing emails and give us real optimization ideas for a specific audience-submitted email. By observing how Adam looks at a page, we can get a glimpse into the methodology he uses to optimize an email and draw out some transferable principles to apply to our own pages.

The following email was submitted by Zoe. The audience for the email is marketing managers and above. The objective is to introduce clients to the benefits of Data Enhancement through a free, downloadable whitepaper.

Email Sample: 

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So from here, I’ll let Adam take it away.

4 ideas for getting more clicks in the email:

Overall, this is a relatively good email. There are several things marketers could take away from the email as it is. For example:

• There is a clear problem and solution presented
• The benefits of the solution are clearly articulated
• The whitepaper has an image associated with it to make it feel more robust/tangible
• The side column is used for supporting material
• Personalization is used in the signature

With that said, I came up with a few ideas to increase the performance. Here they are in no particular order: Read more…

In July, I wrote the blog post, Email Marketing Research: 7 steps for successful email marketing testing and optimization. In it, I discussed how continuous experimentation is the quickest path to peak performance. It enables marketers to go beyond best practices to learn what works for their organization and, more importantly, their customers.

I’m preaching to the choir, right? Well, I also encouraged readers to take the annual email benchmark survey conducted by MarketingExperiments’ sister company, MarketingSherpa.

Thankfully, this blog’s readers, along with more than 2,700 other email marketers, participated in the study. In appreciation, I would like to share with you the current state of email marketing testing practices.

Email testing on the rise

The number of marketers who routinely test email campaigns rose 3% from 2010 to 42%. This is good news as the industry inches closer to making it a prevailing practice.

Unfortunately, nearly six of 10 email marketing budgets do not have any money earmarked for testing and optimization. The majority (63%) of tests are conducted by employees for whom the practice is a part-time and secondary job responsibility, but still a formal part of their job description.

The minority includes the 23% of the email researchers who report the task as their primary focus and full-time duty and the 19% of marketers who perform experiments on the side without it being listed in their job description.

Testing practices most routinely performed

This information may help benchmark your programs and processes against the industry. But for this year’s survey, we wanted to delve deeper into which formal processes and guidelines organizations routinely use to test and optimize email campaigns. Here is a look into what we found.

Chart: More time needed for brainstorming and defining the testing objective

How routinely does your organization implement the following testing practices?

The above chart displays common testing practices in chronological order from top to bottom. We asked marketers to share with us which tasks their organizations routinely execute. The survey uncovered organizations are spending the most time segmenting their lists, understanding the impact of the test on the entire funnel, and documenting their findings. Read more…