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

Remember the intensity of focus you had at that second-grade birthday party where you had five seconds to memorize the location of the piñata, or the donkey’s tail-less rump, before the blindfold descended?

Don’t you wish you could get that kind of focus from prospects now?

Unfortunately, the grown-ups perusing your pages are subject to endless distractions. But try applying a variation on the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey technique to your landing pages, just to see how easy it is for the adults you’re courting to find the targets you want them to find when they’re looking at your pages.

Inspired by a new tool that provides free five-second usability testing, I decided to apply the same technique to a landing page submitted for optimization by a recent attendee of a MarketingExperiments web clinic.

How the five-second usability test works

First, imagine you only have five seconds to look at the page below.  It’s not a contest, or spy training. Just relax your eyes and try to take in the page as a first time viewer would.

Second, cover your computer screen with a piece of paper and ask yourself how much you remember about what you just saw.

Structure your reminiscences with these questions:

• What is the page about?
• Which elements stood out?
• Can I describe them?

Third, pretend that the blank paper is a map of the landing page you just saw. Try and recreate the page from memory. Simply put a dot or draw a box on each section of the page and write down what you think was there.

Ready? I tested it with this page, submitted by one of our web clinic participants:

Five seconds with Virtual Classroom

After my five-second stare-down with Virtual Classroom, a site that offers teachers and students conferencing, chat and customizable on-screen whiteboard options for virtual classroom experiences, here’s what I remembered seeing:

Five-second test view

Scary, no? Give a prospect five full seconds and what he remembers most about all your hard work is “a bunch of icons.”

Still, as reality checks go, this five-second test is a useful one because it underscores the difference between marketer perception and prospect perception. I’m sure it wasn’t the intention of this page to have their verification box overshadow the value proposition.

Applying the Conversion Sequence to Virtual Classroom

Once you’ve tried the five-second test (or even pulled some innocent victim off the street to try it for you), apply what you’ve learned to your next optimization tests. Using the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence to structure your pages around a prospect’s thought sequence may increase your chances of being remembered, and remembered accurately, for what you want to be remembered for: the goods or services you provide.

Let’s see how focusing on three key elements from the sequence could help the Virtual Classroom landing page increase conversions …

1. Clarity of Value Proposition

Because of the size and color of the word “free,” my eye completely neglects the primary headline at the top left area of the page. Instead of instantly knowing what the product is and why I need it, I am forced to read through small copy. What’s more, the copy is in large paragraph form which many visitors will not have the attention span to finish.

Make the main headline stand out more than the sub-headline. Place the word “free” in it and make sure to communicate the essence of what your product is. You need to set a context here for how the user will experience the rest of the page.

2. Friction

I know there is a lot of good stuff adjacent to each one of the icons, but the three equally weighted columns makes it difficult to digest all of that information. I read the top two and then immediately become distracted by the icons in the next column and then the form on the right.

Each one of the benefits listed adds to the value proposition of the product, but the current design creates so much difficulty-oriented friction in the form of page flow disruption, that the benefits don’t impact the visitor as much as they should.

Instead, focus on the five or six best benefits, and make those the central message of the page. The others can be mentioned in a small chart or pop-up. If your offer is totally free, you don’t have to do too much selling. You just have to make it easy to sign up.

3. Anxiety

From the blindfolded usability test, you see that the word verification was one of the four elements that immediately stood out to me. Now this is not a bad thing.  It shows that you are concerned about fraud and the visitor’s protection.

But, it is so much more prominent than the product description and benefits, my eyes are drawn to it and it’s kind of threatening me, telling me that I if I stick around, I will eventually have to sign up for something. This makes me nervous since five seconds in to my engagement with the page I’m not certain what it is I will potentially be signing up for, much less if I’m willing to.

Since this is a two-step process, can you put the word verification on the next page? If not, just make sure you control the visitor’s eyepath leading them systematically from headline to key product benefits (and after this point, hopefully, they are primed for commitment), then to the form.

Ready to take off the blindfold?

Using this five-second test will lend you the perspective of a new visitor and enable you to quickly identify elements that may be problematic to conversion: the areas you didn’t intend to emphasize but are the ones that a prospect sees first.

Sometimes we let optimization become more complicated than it really is. Essentially, we’re just trying to take the blindfold off our prospects and help them achieve their aim.

Anna Jacobson contributed mightily to this post.

Marketing Insights, Practical Application, Site Design

As Managing Editor Hunter Boyle said a couple of weeks ago, we’re test driving a new format that allows on-demand replay of our popular Web Clinics.

Click here for the second installment of that test drive — the complete audio and slide presentation from our May 21, 2008 Clinic entitled “Simple tests, significant gains: How our partner increased revenue by 130% with small changes”.

We plan to roll out the new format to all of our MarketingExperiments Journal subscribers later this summer, but until then our loyal blog readers will get to test drive it first.

We’d really appreciate your feedback on the new offering. Do you like it? Find it useful? Want more of it? I’d also like to know if you’re passing it along, telling others about it.

Clinic Notes

Optimizing your transaction pages is one of the best investments you can make in your website. All too often, these are the pages that stop qualified prospects in their tracks.

But while copywriters are focusing on snappy offer language, and designers are worrying about typefaces and buttons, information graphics (like a comparison matrix) can get lost in the shuffle. So does the ROI that these page elements can help produce.

Our sister company, MarketingSherpa, recently reaffirmed this with a test.

By adding a comparison matrix (see image) to underscore the benefits of membership, Sherpa increased free trial subscriptions by 76%.

Testimonials to the right of the new chart and below the call-to-action also reinforced the facts, demonstrated the value of a membership, and helped relieve anxiety.

Why did a simple matrix table get such a dramatic response – especially when its length increased the amount of friction on the page? Because the eyes and mind process the comparison much faster than if the information was written out in copy.

Scan the matrix and the thought process goes something like: “OK, non-members get this. Members get all that. Wow, that’s a lot more good stuff for members. Seems worth it to me. And this is a free trial? Let me get my credit card. . . .”

When potential customers are in a hurry, weighing their options and facing a decision, the best thing your transaction pages can do is make their choice easy, comfortable, and fast.

Tony Vacarcel, Marketing Optimization Manager for MECLABS, contributed to this blog post.

Internet Marketing Strategy, Site Design

Mission: Take a Web site with multiple domain names, channels, and products, and make it sleek, sexy, and ready for boffo business (in other words, optimized).

The twist? This major optimization project has to be completed and live in mere weeks–when the site will get a tidal wave of traffic from its promotion on an upcoming TV series.

At today’s Training and Solutions Session (TSS), analysts and managers from the MarketingExperiments science and journal teams learned several techniques to help us deconstruct and solve online marketing challenges like these.

The question posed by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin: “What is the most effective way to help [the company] capture the highest yield from the TV opportunity?”

Put another way: What can we, or should we, change or test–with only four weeks until showtime? We can’t test everything that needs to change.

As most marketing researchers know, to achieve confidence in your findings, a test must have run a certain number of cycles. Four weeks isn’t much time to complete valid tests. Within these constraints, Flint asked, what is the best that we can accomplish?

After hearing which elements the group would change first, Flint recommended a simple, linear “ultimately optimizable” approach:

• Pare down the number of confusing, competing URLs;

• Sequence the offers, highlighting the product being advertised during primetime;

• Create a moderately-priced subscription offer to complement the main product; and

• Capture email addresses at every opportunity along the transaction path.

The thinking behind that approach: Maximize simplicity and revenue. And focus on the areas with the biggest potential impact given the time crunch.

Which of these changes will be implemented? How well will they meet the objectives? Will these ideas continue to drive revenue long after the series ends its run? That’s why they call it a cliffhanger.

Tune into our summer or fall Web Clinics for the answers…

Internet Marketing Strategy

At our last free Web clinic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin talked about the value inhibitors of friction and anxiety and how to apply MarketingExperiments’ best practices to overcome them.

Unfortunately, our Internet connection failed 15 minutes before the end of the clinic, and we did not go into depth about one of the key elements for overcoming friction—an ideal incentive.

What IS an ideal incentive?

It’s the one that gives you a major boost in conversion; whether that’s lead information, a subscription, a sale, or simply more clicks through your content. Unless your current incentive is giving you that lift, you haven’t found the right one yet.

This coming Wednesday, April 2nd, we’re following up with a clinic on how to determine which incentive will work best to overcome friction on your Landing Pages and deliver maximum return. We’ll also cover the common errors to avoid.

I hope you’ll join us at 4:00 PM on April 2, 2008. Please click on this link: Finding the Ideal Incentive: How We Increased Email Capture by 319% to register for this clinic.

As usual, the clinic is free to anyone interested in learning more about our research into what really works when it comes to online marketing.

Internet Marketing Strategy

The Landing Page optimization advice in our next free brief is too good to save till Monday’s email, so I’m going to give you a couple of thousand dollars worth today. Jimmy Ellis’s, Aaron Rosenthal’s, and Flint McGlaughlin’s analysis of the Landing Pages that our subscribers sent in for evaluation at the Feb. 6 Clinic resulted in recommendations anyone can use to get an immediate bump in conversion rates and total revenue.

Here’s just a taste:

• Write a headline that quantifies key metrics. The goal of a headline is not to sell a product. The goal of the headline is get a visitor to read the first sentence of the next paragraph, getting them into the body copy.

• Don’t offer a multitude of products on one Landing Page. Drive visitors to a place where there is not so much unsupervised thinking. Don’t ask them to make choices between many options when they are still not sure they want you at all.

• Take all of the specific elements that help a customer figure out if this is the right product for them and move them closer to the image: price; free shipping; warranty; guarantees. If there is a product specific testimonial, put it right there.

• Customer ratings for products can have a huge impact on conversion. You absolutely need a product rating close to the image so visitors can see what other people are saying.

If readers of MarketingExperiments want to meet Flint, Jimmy, and Aaron (and me) in person, then the place to be is in Miami from Feb. 24-26. So pack your spring break togs and come on down to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. The MarketingExperiments Optimization Team will be doing live Landing Page analysis for attendees, among other duties. I hope to see you there!

Clinic Notes