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

At MarketingExperiments, we’re always looking to find new ways to optimize webpages and, in turn, improve conversion. We have a big research team constantly testing and coming up with ideas to discover what works and what doesn’t. But the everyday marketer may not have access to this type of team. What if you are your own marketing and research team?

Trying to optimize a Web site with limited resources can be overwhelming and a bit scary. I mean there’s so much you can do. You can change your call-to-action button, remove columns, add pictures, blah, blah, etc. I could probably go on forever with changes you can make.

EUREKA!

Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to be scared and go crazy trying to figure out where to start. There is a little thing on your page that can quickly get you a lift, and believe it or not it’s been staring at you in the face the whole time. That little thing is your headline. And while this is one of the easiest tweaks you can make, it will only work if you do it right.

Your headline is important because it is your “pickup line.” It is what piques interest and gets the visitor to continue reading. You only have four inches to make a good impression, capture them and get them to continue in the process. And if your headline is not good, you run a high risk of losing that visitor, and that means money running off.

We addressed this issue on our last Web clinic, Headline Optimization: How testing 10 headlines revealed a 3-letter word that improved conversion more than major changes. There, MECLABS Managing Director (CEO) Dr. Flint McGlaughlin went over some key principles to engage an audience with your headline and get a lift. He also had two really smart members of our research team, Jon Powell and Tony Doty, join in and help our audience fix their own headlines by doing some live optimization. But, we didn’t get to optimize every audience submission.

Not-so-live, live optimization

Lucky for you, after the clinic I decided to kidnap our gentle giant, Tony Doty (he’s really tall), and get him to optimize a couple of submissions. And this is where I get to the meat of this post. We’re going to do a little “Blog Opt!” But we’ll pay specific attention to two common mistakes most marketers make when crafting their headlines.
Read more…

Some of my favorite tweets on #SherpaLPO (the hashtag for Optimization Summit in Atlanta) reflect the stark difference between evidence-based marketing and “song and dance” marketing…

Landed safe and sound in Atlanta, ready to nerd it up tomorrow with fellow website optimizers #SherpaLPO http://ow.ly/57ghH

– @DesignerMeg

Getting ready to geek out with @MarkKilens and @mgieva at #SherpaLPO

– @mcdmiller

To use a high school analogy, marketers are often thought of as the popular people – the Student Government president, the captain of the football team (or perhaps curling team for our Canadian friends).

But the 139 marketers listening to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin teach right now in our pre-Optimization Summit Landing Page Optimization Workshop in Atlanta (the next stops of this workshop will be in New York and San Francisco) are not seeking to learn about better ways to add a winning smile or flashy move to their marketing campaigns.

Evidence-based marketers are a little different. They are the chess club president or captain of the academic team (don’t worry, popularity comes when you start marketing based on business intelligence, instead of just intuition, and your campaigns produce results). Read more…

In our most recent Web clinic, Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire ecommerce website, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin shared our recent discoveries from our consumer marketing experimentation, set out a strategic approach to shopping carts and gave a few helpful fishing tips to boot.

As usual, we received more questions than we could possibly answer live during the Web clinic. A few were simple and straightforward (to which I say, “Yes,” “Maybe,” “One form field for name instead of three,” and “By the pier in Jacksonville Beach using Mayport shrimp as bait.”)

But one question particularly caught Dr. McGlaughlin’s eye…

How long should a shopping cart be? Is it better to have a long page or many short steps?

I passed this question around the lab, and here’s what our researchers had to say. We’d love to hear what you’re learned from your tests as well…

It depends on your product

I think this really depends on the product.  If you have a very simple product, like a DVD, you know what you’re getting as soon as you click “Add to Cart,” so I would get them through the process as quickly as possible.

If you have a more customized process, like ordering flowers with different vases and greeting card variations, I have no problem breaking them each out to their own special page so we can hammer home the value of each step without over-cluttering the long form. This also allows us to better track which specific step someone is dropping off on so that we can more easily determine the leaks in the funnel.

In the end, you have to test checkout process length.

– Tony Doty, Research Manager

The two optimization factors that you must balance

To the customer, shopping cart page length may be irrelevant unless the length is driven by unnecessary information.

I ran a test and discovered that reducing unnecessary fields on a single page inside the checkout funnel resulted in an increase in finishes, whereas including these fields in a similar process outside of the cart resulted in more conversions.

To the client/site, it is preferable to measure in multiple pages so they can track where the leaks are in the funnel.

If everything is one big page, it makes it much more difficult to track where or what causes a visitor concern enough to abandon.

In this case, showing the customer where they are in the process (progress indicator) helps keep the balance and alleviate the effects of that type of process friction (perceived process length).

– Jon Powell, Research Manager

Reinforce the value proposition

Optimizing the shopping cart path – including its length, sequencing of steps/forms, etc. – should conform to our foundation landing page optimization/conversion index analysis tenets. For instance:

• Not asking for any more information than you need
• Not asking for information you do need before you need it (to complete the process step)
• Managing form length and eye-path
• Avoiding ‘visual barriers’ such as horizontal bars across the page, etc.

The emphasis shifts slightly upon transitioning from ‘offer’ phase to ‘cart’ phase, shifting from ‘expression’ of the value proposition towards ‘support’ or ‘reinforcement’ of the value proposition to sustain (rather than build) cognitive momentum toward conversion.

– Bob Kemper, Director of Sciences

Optimize the page or the path

There are two approaches you can test to see which works best with your customers and products. Either have a clear descriptions of the steps (breadcrumbs) to let customers know how many to expect and where they are in the whole process, or create one longer page that includes all necessary billing and shipping fields.

– Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe, Research Analyst

Test on new and repeat customers

How long should a shopping cart be? It is better to have a long page or many short steps? It depends.

Every retailer should test as many different checkout processes as they can. Retailers need to know what their customer target group responds better to. Some visitors will prefer one single, long step and others will prefer a couple of short steps.

Probably for repeat customers, short checkout process (1-2 steps) will work well because they already trust the retailer and are familiar with the process. But even in this case, it is important to test.

– Gaby Paez, Associate Director of Research

Be brief and be thorough

I personally prefer a short cart, incorporating all of the steps in one with accordion-style sections. With this type of a checkout process, it’s easy to get back to previous steps with an ‘edit’ link and it appears short while still collecting all of the needed information.

My favorite checkout process is Gap/Banana Republic/Piperlime – it’s super intuitive and really easy to get back to any step to make a change

My biggest pet peeve is when a checkout does not work in a certain browser. I use Google Chrome, and the other day I was looking at something on the Hobo International site and I couldn’t select from a drop down in Chrome, but when I went to Firefox it worked. Most customers wouldn’t be that dedicated or might not think to check another browser.

– Gina Townsend, Director of Operations

Related resources

Free Web Clinic, May 18, 4-5 p.m. – Optimization Researched: Latest findings about effective LPO practices based on data from 2,673 marketers

Web Clinic Replay – Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire ecommerce Website

E-commerce: How your peers optimize shopping carts and product pages

E-commerce Shopping Carts: How a redesigned checkout process led to 13% increase in conversion rate

Shopping Cart Abandonment: How not being annoying can get you 67% more cart completions

It was time to get radical at Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp’s optimization class, and once again I was there to document it all for your reading pleasure. Because I care, naturally.

Since my last post, the student body has grown, and we now have five new research analysts eager to learn. Due to our uneven number, Adam decided to pit all of the analysts against each other for his optimization competition, instead of taking the usual team approach. This time around, their challenge was to create the most effective radical redesign for the Arbor Day Foundation homepage (which was submitted for live optimization during our Homepage Web clinic).

But before I show you the original page, I’d like to add that this lesson not only sharpened our optimization skills, but also proved that great minds don’t always think alike. And, believe it or not that can be a really good thing.

Diagnosing the homepage

Now, let’s get to down the “nitty gritty”…here’s the audience submission:

Click to enlarge

Before being given the task to create radical wireframes for the original homepage, Adam and the class discussed the page’s main issues. Here is their analysis the key problems visitors might face:

• The logo is too small. It gets lost in the page and also doesn’t help the visitor know exactly where they are
• There’s not a clear focus on the page

o   It has a confusing top navigation

o   It has three equally weighted columns (Trees, Programs, Lend Your Support)

o   It also has confusing objectives (Where do I click, what can I do on this page?)

1. What is the difference between a membership, a donation and buying a tree?

• Unclear call-to-action

o   The first and largest call-to-action a visitor sees is “Visit the tree nursery”

o   Makes the visitor ask, “What is a tree nursery? Is this a place to buy trees or a clever metaphor for a type of product or page?”

o   Visitors have unclear expectations of what the next page will be and are a little lost at this point.

Radical Solutions

After pointing out these issues, the analysts had to figure out how to tie in all these objectives together into one goal. And when it was time to present their radical wireframes, each analyst came up with a completely different design and goal in mind (remember the original page had several objectives).

Each submitted wireframe focused on one of the following goals:

Click to enlarge

-Directly pushing a membership

• The headline is action oriented, specific and includes a membership incentive
• It drives the visitor’s attention to a primary call-to-action (become a member)

Click to enlarge

-Getting visitors to donate and help the Arbor Day Foundation’s mission

• Headline immediately says where you are
• The options on left let visitors know what to do on the page (donate/help)

Click to enlarge

- Giving the gift of a tree or allowing visitors to pick 10 trees for themselves now

• Page objective is simplified and the incentive of 10 free gifts with donation is emphasized
• De-emphasized supporting column with core information about the foundation

Click to enlarge

-Engaging visitors with an interactive game

• Headline tells visitors exactly where they are
• Focuses on letting visitors interact and become familiar with the product through question game

Click to enlarge

-Pushing all objectives in a new navigation-focused design

• Visitor can quickly choose a path from the easy to see, simple, and short left navigation on the top portion.
• Has a rotating banner will draw the eye path to the four most important objectives, then presents four core values in a controllable (and testable) sequence

Five heads are better than one

These five separate takes on one Web page got us thinking about the brainstorming process and how important it is for marketers to create a blissful marriage between individual ideas and teamwork.

In a marketing team, not everyone is going to think the same way, but this doesn’t mean that these differing thoughts can’t turn into a great collaborative effort.

This reminds me of the weekly peer review meetings we have at out lab, where the research team gets together and reviews Web pages as a team. Usually, one person starts off the conversation and then another person bounces off an idea about that topic, sometimes agreeing or challenging the previous comment. The idea here is to brainstorm in the correct way, by being open to different ideas and avoiding groupthink. Of course, not every idea is a good idea, which is why you have to test.

This is exactly what happened during Adam’s class. Each analyst initially came in with a different idea for the homepage and after everyone’s thoughts were put on the table, each individual thought grew into one improved and cohesive approach to developing treatments.

“If one person in charge of this page only relied on their own ideas, we may not [be] able to achieve the highest level of success,” Adam said. Of course, this hypothetical collaborative effort would have to be tested to make sure it’s actually effective.

“There’s no such thing as expert marketers, only expert testers,” Adam said. “AND the best way to get diverse test ideas is to leverage other people with other ideas.”

Lesson learned

In the end, even though it started as a free-for-all competition, with the right guidance and frame of mind, it turned out to be a great team effort.

Now that we’ve learned that lesson, I would love to start a collaborative effort with the audience, and ask you to share your ideas to optimize this homepage. Feel free to use the comments section to get this brainstorming session rolling.

Related Resources

Homepage Optimization: Radical redesign ideas for multivariable testing

Homepage Optimization: Creating the best design to quickly meet multiple visitors’ needs

Informed Dissent: The best marketing campaigns come from the best ideas

Landing Page Optimization: What cyclical products can learn from CBS Sports

The mobile Web will be bigger than desktop Internet use by 2015, according to Morgan Stanley. How will that affect landing pages that have been optimized for computer users? And what impact will it have on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in general?

This week marks the opening of MarketingSherpa’s Eighth Annual Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Survey (Editor’s Note: MarketingSherpa is the sister company of MarektingExperiments). In putting this together, I found myself rereading last year’s report. Once again, I was particularly struck by marketers’ perceptions of mobile search. We surveyed more than 2,000 marketers regarding the impact of mobile search on their businesses. Interestingly, more than half stated that mobile search has no impact. Read more…

Value proposition is one of the most popular topics we teach about. Getting your value proposition right is maddeningly difficult but highly rewarding. As they say in “The Town” before robbing Fenway Park, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

So, it wasn’t surprising that we received an inordinate amount of questions during our recent Web clinic – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online.

Unfortunately, we can’t answer every single question we receive. But I passed several of the questions around the labs, and here is what our research team had to say… Read more…