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

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…

Here’s one of the things I love about working with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CMO, MECLABS – he routinely looks at the most vexing marketing challenges and creates an entirely new paradigm; a new lens through which to approach these challenges.

Take the marketing funnel for example. Flint says that the traditional view of the sales and marketing funnel is, essentially, upside down. Literally.

In fact, you should take the traditional funnel and flip it. Prospects aren’t just falling into this wide net, waiting for someone to sell to them. Rather, you must keep pushing them up through the funnel, against the constant tug of gravity, which slows down and often stops your sales process. The force that pushes them up through that funnel and overcomes all the forces that can easily stop that sales is a powerful value proposition.

Flint spoke extensively about value proposition at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, and I grabbed him just after the Summit ended to ask a few questions about value prop for B2B marketers: Read more…

Upon the completion of the recent MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, we learned that because of an ever more challenging environment, B2B marketers are beginning to embrace sales conversion as a Sales and Marketing responsibility, and not just Sales alone.

We are on the right track. The challenge is that marketers are having trouble gaining funnel optimization maturity.

Chart: B2B marketers show high levels of maturity at top of the funnel, not at the bottom

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B2B marketers are the most likely to have formal processes established for lead generation, and the least likely to have them for overall funnel optimization. Now is the time for marketers to capitalize on this trend, and really get ahead of the curve to establish their companies and themselves as industry leaders and champion over the competition.

So how can marketers gain maturity in funnel optimization? As a highly complex process, it is likely the reason for marketer’s struggle. Starting with some funnel optimization is going to be more effective than paying no regard to it. In this interest, we have identified a simplified, five-step process to getting started with funnel optimization. Read more…

What can you do when your order path is eight pages long and “corporate headquarters” has strict policies that essentially tie your Web marketing hands behind your back?

Fighting the system, or sulking around the office out and aggravating your co-workers would get you nowhere. Your only option is to accept the parameters you have to work within and find a solution that gets results.

The MarketingExperiments research team was recently confronted with this situation (not the first or last time). One of our research partners had very limited options with their order process. All of our best practices pointed to removing several steps, eliminating unnecessary fields, and reducing friction and anxiety. But none of the strategies we initially proposed were acceptable.

Now what? How could we break out of the constraints to improve results?

Every online marketing professional is familiar with the idea of the order process as a funnel. From the start of the process, say your landing page, the number of prospective buyers gradually erodes with each ensuing page.

With that in mind, we took the path element with the highest impact on abandonment and moved it to the last possible step. The objective was to get prospects as deep into the funnel as possible before they ran into the most anxiety-inducing part of the process: facing a decision to submit sensitive information.

The results? Even we were surprised by the impact of this change: Our partner achieved an 86% increase in conversions compared to the original order process. Look for more details on our tests with this partner in our upcoming Web Clinics.