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

It’s time, once again, to test the mettle of your marketing intuition. If you’ve never taken part in one of these before, here’s the premise:

Every so often we give our blog readers the chance to predict the outcome of the featured test in an upcoming Web clinic.

For today’s contest, we’re featuring two treatments that will be discussed in depth in “Hidden Friction: The 6 silent killers of conversion.” You can register and tune in today at 4:00 p.m. EDT to find out the conclusion to the test below.

What’s at stake this time?

This time we have a single prize for a single winner: a 2011 B2B Summit Training DVD ($299 value) with more than six hours of B2B Summit training footage. [Note: The landing page for that DVD link is for a DVD and Benchmark Report bundle. This contest is for the DVD alone.] All you need to do to enter the contest is leave a comment on this blog post stating two things:

1. Which treatment you think won
2. Why you think it won

The winner will receive a copy of the B2B Summit DVD and be featured on the blog as the marketing expert he or she truly is!

Now that housekeeping is out of the way, here’s the test:

(To view the slides in full screen mode, simply click the 4-arrow square in the bottom right corner of the SlideShare window)

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What are the most overlooked conversion killers … and how can marketers overcome them?

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic – Hidden Friction: The 6 silent killers of conversion – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share some basic changes many marketers make to their site to improve conversion, as well as some commonly overlooked optimization opportunities.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the top optimization advice we received from some of your peers …

Things that get in the way of converting website visitors to customers

• Too many banners
• Irrelevant content

 –        Robyn Kahn Federman, Director of Communications, Catalyst

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A marketing incentive is a lot like bacon. No one’s going to argue that it doesn’t taste good. It’s easy enough to make. And it is a quick fix for almost any recipe. Yet, if you were to eat bacon with almost every meal, you end up bloated and unhealthy … like General Motors before the government bailouts.

GM’s failure surely had a lot of causes – relying on the margins from block-long SUVs that go out of style when gas prices (shockingly) change, cultivating an incredibly adversarial workforce – but some of the blame must be pointed at incentives. After all, paying people to buy your cars because the product does not have enough true value is not a sustainable business plan.

Incentive has its place … at the end of the line

That’s why the MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Online Course teaches that, if you want to create an effective experimentation plan, we recommend you first test the other elements in the Conversion Sequence before testing the impact of an incentive for additional improvement.

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The landing page is the hub of most modern marketing departments. Think about it. Even beyond digital marketing – from print ads, to TV ads, to a QR code on a table tent in a restaurant – almost every aspect of your marketing campaigns drive potential customers to a landing page.

That is why landing page optimization can deliver such an impressive ROI. So I talked to my colleagues in the MECLABS Conversion Group to help identify the most common landing page mistakes they see every day.

These marketing optimization researchers help improve performance on landing pages, from Fortune 500 B2B companies to small e-commerce sites, every day. They’re the kind of folks that produce a triple-digit lift in the morning, and then shoot me with a Nerf gatling gun after lunch.

Here on the MarketingExperiments blog, we’ll explore the most common landing page mistakes they see encounter in their research, to help you increase conversion and improve your marketing performance.

E-commerce sites treating new and returning visitors the same

“This mistake is specifically targeted toward ‘landing pages,’ such as category/product pages,” according to Associate Director of Optimization, Adam Lapp. “A landing page isn’t always the neat, one-page, no navigation, clear headline type pages we typically think of. A landing page is simply the first page visitors arrive at.”

Let’s look at an example and see what Adam would think of it. I’ll go onto Google and search for “Patagonia jacket” to see how both a brand and a reseller e-commerce site (one with good SEO, might I add, since I’m just clicking on the top links I get) handle new customers …

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This time of year, many marketers are beginning to execute on their new marketing plans. However, sometimes you have to deviate from the plan and just need a sale or lead generation lift… RIGHT NOW!

When your boss or client challenges you to gain a quick conversion increase on your landing pages, what tools do you turn to in your marketing toolbox?

In Wednesday’s Web clinic – Rapidly Maximizing Conversion: How one company quickly achieved a 53.9% lift with a radical redesign – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top discoveries around how to quickly improve your conversion rate.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of our favorite “quick hit” tips from your peers …

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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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