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

The first week of a new job can fill a person with anxiety. I should know, as I recently finished my first week as MECLABS’s new Junior Copy Editor. Lucky for me, any concern was answered by just a quick question or click of the mouse. The proximity (a click or call away), specificity (resources like previous articles and a company Style Guide) and intensity (“reply all” gets answers from multiple people) of each answer eased my anxiety. Optimizing your landing page can do exactly the same for your website visitors.

One of the many things I did during my first week was complete the MECLABS Landing Page Optimization Online Certification Course. While I enjoyed all of the sessions, the section on anxiety most stood out.

Like many of you, I have left websites on which I didn’t feel safe entering my information. Sometimes, I could easily pinpoint my anxiety. But other times, even as a visitor, I didn’t know what specific factors left me with such concern. This session of the course helped quell my doubts, from both the customer and marketer points-of-view. Read more…

Last Wednesday’s web clinic — B2B Success Stories: Four tests with gains of 21% to 254% — was the second in our series featuring case studies and test results from our course and clinic participants.

Like the B2C Success Stories clinic, we included a contest and offered three clinic participants the chance to win one of our optimization certification training courses. Our three B2B contest winners, chosen at random, will have their choice of Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization, or the Email Marketing course.

This clinic’s three lucky winners are:

1. PKWARE — a data security and file compression software company
2. LexisNexis –  a global research and information publisher serving several B2B markets
3. Research In Motion (RIM) — the brains behind the BlackBerry and other tech products

Along with a hearty congratulations to our winners, and a special thank you to Scott Lindberg, Jessica Carter, and June Macdonald, respectively, for participating in the B2B clinic and entering the contest, the MarketingExperiments team also wishes to thank the people and organizations whose case studies we featured in the clinic itself: Jeff Taxdahl of ThreadLogic, Sarah Frazier and Joe Haddock of Summit Business Media, Jake Atwood of BuzzBuilderPro, and Matt Dombrow of Clixo, who also joined our team to present his test results live.

As we discussed in the clinic, building relationships is about more than just tossing around the catch phrase. While we continue to look for (and test) ways to interact with our audience, and build a community around trying to “discover what really works” in optimization, we are grateful for the opportunity to hear about your successes and insights, share them, and continue to learn from them together as part of our research. We simply could not do this without your input.

Have some test results you’d like to share? Plug them into the comments field below.

Budgets are tight. Bosses are telling their employees that “nice-to-do” conferences and non-essential training and travel are out until further notice.

So here are two things to consider when deciding how best to spend that tight marketing budget.

One: Consider taking the MarketingExperiments online Landing Page Optimization course, and never leave your desk. That’s one way to make your boss happy. Training with no travel required. You can apply what you learn to your company’s site as you go, and once you pass the test, you’ll be MEC-certified in Landing Page Optimization.

Two: Consider the case for a very, very short trip to Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. during the first week in June, when we’re going to teach a condensed version of the LPO course in just twelve hours over one and-a-half days.

Yes, this workshop will be intense, it will be a lot to learn, and it will not be easy. But when you deliver that first short, sharp, shock to your company’s online performance, believe me, neither you nor your boss will regret it.

Those who have taken our professional certification courses know how substantial the ROI can be for a company that sends the marketing ranks through them. By making carefully selected changes and adjustments to a product’s or service’s Landing Page, the certified experts who come out on the other side of our course know how to help their companies gain double- , triple-, and in some cases even quadruple-digit increases in click-through rates, conversion, leads, and revenue.

Yeah, that’s right: quadruple. Sounds like essential training to me.

If you can’t make it to Ponte Vedra Beach, you can register here for the online courses in Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization with an emphasis on subscriptions, or on e-commerce, or email marketing.