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

“She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.” – Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

Sometimes, as marketers, this is one of our biggest challenges. We must make sense of the “wild enchantment” inherent in our audience so we can call each offering we have by its right name. After all, the way we think about our products can be vastly different from the way our audience thinks about them. This is why specific words matter, and for more than just SEO.

Let’s take a look at a recent test conducted by MarketingSherpa (sister company to MarketingExperiments), to determine which words best tap into the audience’s motivations. Read more…

Here at MECLABS, we have a pretty singular focus – to help you optimize your sales and marketing funnel. Or as I like to say in every email I write: Our job is to help you do your job better.

But, as Tom Cruise said to Katie Holmes (or maybe it was Cuba Gooding, Jr.), “Help me, help you.”

So evidence-based marketers, on what topic do you need more evidence? Evidence to help you understand what your peers are doing? Evidence to help you understand what really works? Evidence to do a little internal marketing to your business leaders (or for the agency folks out there, your clients)?

Below are a few key topics you’ve been telling us you want to learn more about. We’re trying to decide on the topic for our sister company’s next MarketingSherpa Benchmark Report. In which topic should we invest 5 months of a research manager’s time digging into to discover the evidence you need. 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…

Professional infiltrator should seriously be added to my job description. Because once again, I gathered some marketing “intel” from somewhere that I wasn’t quite, how do I put it…invited to?

This time, I stepped out of the MECLABS classroom and into a beautiful, oceanfront hotel in Jacksonville Beach for a MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Workshop. There, I blended into a crowd of about 70 marketers; listening to the presenters, Director of Training, Chuck Coker, Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp (Mr. Lapp when class is in session) and MECLABS Managing Director (CEO), Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

As I sat there taking notes, one subject really stood out to me, and that was testing. It seemed as though many questions were geared towards that. “How big does your sample size have to be in order to know your test results really worked?” “How long should you test for?” “What should you test?” etc… Read more…

Ask any senior citizen and they’ll tell you that there is such thing as a free lunch. They’ve likely been invited to an “educational” investment “workshop,” with great urgency. After all, there is “limited space availability” at the seminar.

When you’re giving away something for free, from valuable content to a sample of Miracle Whip, you may think that all you have to do is, well, make it available. After all, who could say no to free? And, basically, not to put words in author Seth Godin’s mouth, but that seems to be the position he takes. Read more…

We usually share tests on this blog that our optimization research analysts conduct in our labs with our Research Partners. Sometimes we share tests from our audience is well, but rarely do we share our own tests.

In today’s blog post I wanted to share a recent email test from our own marketing team. Not because the results were impressive. If you’ve followed MarketingExperiments for any time, you’ve certainly seen us share results from 162% lifts and 59% gains. Today, we’re going to discuss what to do when you get something entirely different. Read more…