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

Friction is one of the greatest obstacles to your conversion process, and though most marketers currently have some idea of what Friction is, many are only seeing half the picture.

When asking marketers to identify the Friction associated with a conversion process, the response is often very confident. Usually, the number of form fields on a page will be pointed out first, the number of steps in a process next, and occasionally a third comment might focus on the length of the individual pages themselves. The overall consensus from marketers is that if you can eliminate these simple elements, then you can eliminate Friction.

However, our research suggests that most of the Friction in a conversion process goes undetected. Further, this “hidden” Friction often is the most lethal to conversion. So, in this post I wanted to lay out 7 of the most undetected ways that Friction might be threatening your conversion rates. I have dubbed these The 7 Silent Killers of Conversion.

Read more…

Last week I had the privilege of being in the world’s tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere, joined by over 200 other “nerdy” marketers, for what was the first-ever conference hosted by MECLABS on the topic of optimization and testing. Overall, it was a value-packed week.

But what I found most uniquely valuable about the Optimization Summit was a surprise live experiment in which the audience was asked to optimize and test a marketing campaign during the course of the conference. I had a backstage pass to what would become a thriller of an experiment, with many ups and downs, bends and turns. The only thing I could compare it to while in Atlanta was trying to hold two suitcases while free-standing on MARTA (which I successfully did by the way).

All in all, I learned a lot about testing in the process, and in the next two blog posts, I’d like to break out some of the key insights I walked away with. Read more…

In the MECLABS Conversions Group, we spend a lot of our time trying to reduce the friction and anxiety inherent in our Research Partners’ sales funnels …since we have less control of the visitor’s motivation or the value of the product, service or incentives.

However, I have one Research Partner that values friction in their lead generation process. Read more…

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides for their research trying to explain why unemployment remains so high in the U.S. and other advanced economies. More specifically, they won for their analysis of markets with search frictions – any factors that keep markets from operating efficiently.

Being the amateur economist I am (CV: 11^th grade with Mr. Lamar, I’ve read several issues of The Economist), I was elated to hear about this selection. Theoretical economics is sometimes too, well, theoretical. Supply A meets Demand B and they live happily ever after.

With the notable exception of Dan Ariely, I often wonder if these economists live in the real world or just a magical Shangri-la where everyone always behaves rationally, and mere trifles like food and energy aren’t important aspects in the average family budget (I believe this Eden is called Princeton).

The world I live in doesn’t work that way. Which gets us to your landing page… Read more…

Quality traffic is essential for any marketing campaign. Shoot, it’s essential for any successful business. You could have a highly valuable product (let’s say a real cure for male baldness), at the best price (let’s say for just a shipping address with no strings attached), and the most optimized website presentation on the interwebs (let’s say it has undergone a year of MECLABS testing), but despite these advantages, if there are no address-owning bald men who can find your website, well then your business will look a lot like me trying to drive a stick-shift.

Ok, crazy example, but the point is this: Quality traffic is essential.

The question for marketers is – where can we find the most quality traffic on the Web? Should we work with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? Is it smart to invest in social media? Will external website banner ads be worth the costs? There are many options out there, but today, I want to bring your attention to an experiment that compared the traffic quality between two of the most common online channels: PPC vs. Banner Ads.

Now, explaining this test will be a little more tedious than usual because it deals with multiple experiments of a unique multi-step conversion funnel. But, rest assured, if you can just get a bird’s eye view of the optimization strategy, that viewpoint will be sufficient for what I am talking about in this post. Read more…

So often, beautiful design gets trumped by marketing objectives – and rightly so from a marketing perspective. The graphical elegance of a Web page might be worthy of an art exhibit, but if it doesn’t sell anything but “oohs” and “ahs,” what service does it really provide to anyone?

True, but it is at this point that we tend to divide. It’s them or us. Are you a marketer or a designer? Whose side are you on? As one popular design blog analyzes its relationship with marketing, “You can spell ‘team’ from the word ‘marketing,’ but I’ve yet to see a sense of it in marketing.”

But I think we (marketers) can and should live in both worlds. I believe design can be done in such a way as to actually contribute to the perceived value of an offer without being a distraction. I think marketing, whether they can measure it or not, is leaving money on the table when design is viewed as optional icing on the cake. Yes, I have a dream…

But, feelings aside, we must always default to testing – not our gut instincts. And so I was glad to see a recent experiment bring a little shimmer of hope to those of us who long for the day when these two often opposing worlds come together. Read more…