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

There’s a lot written about headlines. Most of it is fluff. A little of it is true, or at least based on solid evidence. But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that actually helps marketers write effective headlines in the fury of the daily grind.

When you’re working on a project or a campaign, the last thing you need to do is sit around and wait for the creative muse to strike. You need to be able to write headlines (and copy for that matter) quickly and efficiently.

This post is my attempt (with a lot of help from Flint McGlaughlin) to give you a methodology to diagnose and solve the problem in a workman-like fashion, just like a plumber or mechanic would, for example.

After running several headline tests (one example), MECLABS has developed a methodology for writing headlines.

And unless you are a headline genius and you can nail your headlines on the first try every time, a methodology is exactly how you can make your headlines consistently successful in a timely manner.

So how can you write an effective headline on time, every time?

To answer that question, I sat down with our Managing Director, Flint McGlaughlin and worked on a few headlines for our previous Web clinic. The process he laid out is essentially four steps and based on the discoveries we’ve made through our research.

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…

If you have been following the blog over the past few weeks, you already know that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin recently taught live on “The 5 Best Ways to Optimize Email Response” at the 2010 MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami.

“The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!”

The session was very lively and included on-the-spot optimization of audience-submitted emails. Some even suggested cutting lunch to continue with more live optimization. You can watch a replay of the complete presentation below and here are a couple reviews from live attendees:

“Even if this was the third time I attended one of his lectures, I still learn from each new session. Flint is a tremendous speaker and his mathematical approach on all email marketing aspects based on serious testing is amazing.” – Kenny Van Beeck, EmailGarage

“After a reported late influx of attendees, people took to sitting on the floor to listen to the first session, delivered by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!” – Mick Griffin, Get Response Read more…

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” While some experts have dutifully penned entire tomes about this subject, the famous advice Franklin Roosevelt gave to his son about public speaking still resonates today for its stark honesty.

If Franklin Roosevelt 2.0 was giving advice about Internet marketing, he would probably change “brief” to “clear” (and perhaps “seated” to “testing”). While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down in the funnel, MarketingExperiments research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience.

Much of the complex analysis and formulaic methodologies used by our scientists to create optimized pages with triple-digit conversion improvements can be summed up in this truism…

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The first seven seconds, and perhaps just those first three, are vital to clearly guiding your visitor into an inevitable conclusion to engage in a transaction with you. Below is a quick excerpt from a recent live web clinic in which Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS (our parent organization), discusses how your visitors interact with your website in those first few moments they land on your page…

Yet Difficulty Trumps Clarity?

Of course, so many websites produced by experienced, professional marketers don’t follow this simple principle because, in reality, it can be quite difficult to truly be clear. Put another way, what is clear to an insider (a marketer that lives, breathes, and eats his product every day) can be meaningless and confusing to your visitor. And even when you have every intention to be clear, how many monkeywrenches get thrown your way (Sales wants one thing, Operations another, and don’t even get me started on Legal)?

To help you on your journey along the road to clarity and prosperity, you can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, Maximizing your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain, will be taught on January 13th from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.