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

Sometimes great products can be hard to sell on a website. The market is so saturated with mediocre goods and services that when a truly great one comes along, the same old marketing tactics simply don’t work anymore. Excellent products need excellent websites to communicate their full potential.

And that’s the main problem with this website submitted for live optimization by the makers of the Npower PEG on a past Web clinic.

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The product is essentially a battery you can hook to almost any device. But the fun part is that it charges with the kinetic energy you produce while you go about your daily life.

I personally found it fascinating. And I want one.

Unfortunately, (as the owners of the site probably know) the website doesn’t effectively communicate the prodigiousness of the product.

Perhaps you’re in the same boat as the Npower PEG. Maybe you’ve got a great product but you feel like your website doesn’t live up to it. Don’t tune this post out because it’s about someone else’s company.

To help you, I talked to Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS, about Npower’s website. From his years of optimization experience, you can hopefully glean some wisdom for your own site.

There are eight main test ideas that Adam highlighted in our conversation about how to improve this website.

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If you’re into online testing, you’ve probably experienced this problem:

1. You changed more than one element on a page (or an ad)
2. You ran the test
3. You recorded a significant gain (or loss)
4. Your boss asked you to replicate it somewhere else

What do you do now? What made the difference here that will make a difference somewhere else?

Any time you start changing more than one element in an ad, page or process, you start making interpretation and reapplication more and more difficult.

However, there is a way to interpret your radical redesign so that you can make it work somewhere else.

And, we’re going to show you how in this blog post. Plus, we’ll talk more about radical redesigns in our next Web clinic on Jan. 11 – Rapidly Maximizing Conversion: How one company quickly achieved a 53.9% lift with a radical redesign.

The answer is found in elementary math

Let’s take a trip back to the third grade to help us solve today’s problem.

Remember fractions? I remember the days when a teacher would ask me to add two fractions together by hand. What was rule number one?

If I wanted to do the addition, I would have to have a common denominator. The bottom number must be the same on both.

So what in the world does this have to do with marketing?

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According to the MarketingExperiments’ conversion heuristic, anxiety is one negative factor that reduces the likelihood that your potential customers will complete that lead form or buy from you. One of the chief causes of anxiety for customers of late has been privacy.

For example, 94% of 45-64 year olds think there should be a law that requires websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, according to research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

And you likely see more headlines every day. The Wall Street Journal has even been conducting a yearlong investigative reporting series titled “What They Know.”

And where there is customer sentiment, there is opportunity

So what if, instead of only responding to regulations and industry edicts, you became proactive with your products and services? What if you did such a good job of reducing customer anxiety around privacy, you turned it into a competitive advantage for your company? Here are a few ideas to get you started (and I’d love to hear yours as well in the comment section) …

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Let’s take a quick look at the typical marketing funnel in 2011 to see how you can improve your results. If you’re like the average marketer, you spend a lot of money on media, such as:

-          Broadcast TV ads

-          Newspaper ads

-          Magazine ads

-          Outdoor advertising, such as billboards and transit advertising

-          Radio ads

-          Internet advertising, such as banner ads and pay-per-click ads

In fact, marketers spent $238 billion in just the first six months of 2010, according to Nielsen.

Why do companies spend so much on advertising?

That’s a lot of loot. And, of course, marketers are spending that money to sell a product. However, they aren’t truly selling a product or service at all … they’re actually spending that money to drive customers to a landing page. In fact, according to Econsultancy, 65% of all UK print and television advertising now includes a Web address.

Even when the ad don’t specifically include a URL, ad-inspired branded searches drive many customers to a website as the next logical point of contact.

In other words, you’re spending a lot of dough to funnel traffic to your landing pages.

If you’re a long-time reader of the MarketingExperiments blog, you already know about the power of LPO and you might as well stop reading now because I’m not going to share anything new today (although, feel free to forward this post to your boss, colleagues, and mother to show the value of what you do every day).

However, if you are looking to improve the performance of your marketing campaign and are not yet familiar with landing page optimization, I hope you’re starting to see why this practice can have such an impressive ROI.

Essentially, if you’re spending all of this money to drive potential customers to a website, investing just a little in increasing conversion on that site (more sales, more leads, etc.) can have an outsize impact, as you can see in this research from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

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After all, the deeper into the funnel you improve performance, the bigger an impact it has.

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Every marketer is trying to find ways to tap into the traffic-generating beast that is The Google to drive conversions. Or, so I thought. You can imagine my surprise when I cracked open the new MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing  Benchmark Report – SEO Edition and found that just 51% of marketers use SEO landing pages.

And yet, 93% of marketers are using keyword/keyphrase research. Which tells me that marketers are spending a lot of time, energy and resources to drive traffic to a general site, homepage, or other page that isn’t specifically optimized for conversion. Hey, traffic’s great, but a man’s gotta eat.

So why aren’t more marketers using SEO landing pages?

Well, according to MECLABS Research Analyst Kaci Bower’s report, 54% of marketers found SEO landing pages to be very or somewhat difficult (that number hit 92% among marketers only in the Trial phase of SEO). And for good reason. I like to think of Google like the Federal Reserve, as Ben Bernanke once described himself, they are always “purposely vague.”

In essence, there is no scientific process to SEO, it’s mostly trying to figure out what the man behind the curtain is up to. So while we can’t remove all the mysteries that make SEO difficult for you, we can help you determine how to optimize the conversion on SEO landing pages in a way that lessens the chance of messing up an already high SERP ranking, or starting from scratch and creating a page with good SEO potential to begin with that you can also test and optimize to make sure it doesn’t generate traffic, but also converts that traffic.

So in today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EDT – SEO Landing Pages: How we achieved 548% more conversions without damaging organic rankings – MECLABS Managing Director Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will share our discoveries about optimizing SEO landing pages to help you overcome some of that difficulty.

Our focus will be more on LPO and less on SEO tactics. And, our goal is to help you determine the basic search engine optimization factors to consider when building a landing page, but mostly how to take all that traffic you can get from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and the like, and turn that into revenue, leads, and donations.

But before we share our discoveries, we asked your peers their top advice about SEO landing pages. Here are a few of our favorite responses, starting with the in-depth, very helpful first response … Read more…

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…