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

What’s the best way to keep visitors on track, moving through extensive fields requiring personal information?

At this week’s Training and Solutions Session (TSS), our roundtable of optimization experts brainstormed ways to help a partner offering a credit counseling and debt management service.

While the team has offered a design that streamlines the process as much as possible, it still requires an extensive amount of personal information and effort. Many visitors run off the rails, abandoning the process before they finish. In other words, it’s a Friction and Anxiety generator.

The challenge? Design an email that will convince these folks to come back and finish what they started. Perhaps a radical copy change will work. The present one is fairly generic.

Our previous research has shown that starting an email “basket recovery” sequence with a customer service-oriented message works really well, so I imagine a personal email from the credit counselor assigned to the potential customer. The subject line says “Do you still need our help?” She offers to assist the customer through the process. The copy prominently features a toll-free number with a direct extension to the counselor. She also offers to call at a convenient time if the visitor would prefer that.

Ending an email campaign with an attractive incentive works well, too.

In the case study I have in mind, the objective was to recover partially completed but abandoned orders for a financial services company. We started with two basket recovery emails and then added a third email offering a discount. Adding the third email and using a great incentive recovered 152% more orders than the basket recovery emails alone.

We’ve seen that a warm, personal, customer care attitude and a great incentive pay off, but we know timing is everything, too.

In a previous test of a basket-recovery campaign for a subscription site, emails in sequence “A” were sent 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours later. Emails in campaign sequence “B” were sent 30 minutes, 24, 48, and 72 hours later.

While both Recovery Email Sequences (A&B) had a positive impact on the final conversion rate, Sequence B performed much better.The key factor was when the first email was sent.

Sequence B’s first email, sent 30 minutes after visitors submitted an incomplete order, produced a 350% higher conversion rate than Sequence A’s first email, sent 24 hours after a visitors’ incomplete order.

It seems it is more effective to remind and convince visitors to complete their orders while their mind is still fresh with the purchase they were considering.

Embedding a hyperlink in the email bringing visitors right back to where they left off and allowing them to easily complete a process instead of starting all over is extremely important as well. It supports continuity and reduces Friction.

Another idea at TSS was to add elements of urgency and incentive to the subject line and copy, something like “You’re only 2 steps away from debt-relief” or, “. . . days away . . . ” or, “your debt analysis report is almost ready.”

Hopefully our new email tests will begin in the near future and we’ll have some interesting results to report on what increased open and click-through rates as well as conversion for this partner.

Yesterday I attended an internal training session that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin presented to the MarketingExperiments sciences, partner services, and journal teams.

Our session focused on the current conversion path (from a home page, to landing page, to offer page) for a long-time MarketingExperiments partner.

Flint set up the challenge: Get another significant sales lift from pages that we’ve optimized many times.

But wringing significant lifts from pages that we’ve been optimizing for months, even years, isn’t the only challenge: Making a change, especially a radical one, isn’t something large companies do very well (yet).

To help with the first challenge, Flint had the group take a fresh look at the pages by going back to our own basics. We applied the MarketingExperiments Conversion Index to the pages, and came up with at least a dozen ideas to change and test.

I won’t go into all the details, but here are some points to ponder until you see those test results appear in a future case study:

• Conversion takes place in the mind. Pages that create friction and anxiety lead to “unsupervised thinking” and “site flow disruption” in the mind of the visitor. These hurt conversion, and it doesn’t matter if your goal is more sales, subscriptions, donations, readers, or clicks.

• Clarity counts. Ensure that your Value Proposition is clearly, continuously, and congruently expressed in each step of the conversion process―from channel to landing page to offer page.

• Specificity converts. Have a specific landing page for each channel, whether it’s PPC, email, or a link from a home page.

• Find the ideal incentive. Just don’t create competition between your offer and your incentive.

The second challenge is far more complex: getting executives with P&L responsibility, creatives with egos invested, and an overloaded IT department to all sign off on minor Web site changes (much less radical ones).

Flint reminded the group that you have to start from a position of authority. I’d add that without authority and trust, you have no chance of making it happen.

I would enjoy hearing from marketers who have tried and failed and from marketers who have tried and succeeded to get corporations to act on their recommendations. How did you establish your authority? Once established, how did you build your credibility and maintain trust? Or did the whole relationship disintegrate before it ever got started?