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

Class was in session again at MECLABS, and this eager beaver right here decided to join in on the learning once more. Of course, I had the MarketingExperiments audience in mind, so I took my handy dandy notebook and jotted down what I saw and heard.

Once again, Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp, was front and center teaching our Research Analysts about, you guessed it, optimization. But, this class he focused on radical redesigns and the importance of multivariable testing when transforming a page in such a drastic way. After a lesson, it was time to put the learning into practice. And once again, being the cool teacher that he is, Adam set up a fun optimization contest. With bragging rights, being the main prize.

This time it wasn’t a battle of the sexes, but I can say it had a few surprising twists at the end. On one team you had MECLABS Research Analysts Aimee Bolton and Spencer Whiting and on the other you had Dustin Eichholt and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe. Their mission was to create the most effective radical redesign for a homepage. I will show you their designs as well as some advice from the teacher, pupils and myself. Hopefully you can apply it on your next testing adventure, especially in the case your design is a bit…um, far out. Read more…

At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.

Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.

In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom… Read more…

“…that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
But might not be as well branded…”

Ugh, sorry for that. After a video, a blog post, and an interview, I’m all out of witty love-plus-marketing puns. Just goes to show, Transparent Marketing is more powerful than a marketing gimmick any day.

So I’m going to turn it over to the MarketingExperiments community. We asked you to send virtual Valentines to your favorite industry news sources to celebrate this well-marketed and quite gimmicky holiday that celebrates a martyr who…well let’s just say it moves a lot of product.

We wanted you to call out those blogs and websites that don’t just help you do your job better, but have truly found a place in your heart. Here is the response from our favorite Romeo… Read more…

With hundreds of lists of Twitter tips and tools, and dozens more popping up each day, it’s getting impossible to keep up unless you work for Mashable.

So in advance of today’s Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?” web clinic, we wanted to share some of our favorite tips, tools and articles related to the business side of Twitter. Instead of a laundry list of 87 tools or 143 people to follow, here are seven of the most valuable articles and resources we’ve seen lately. Enjoy …

• 10 ways Twitter will change American business: A look at how businesses can drive hyper-local marketing, conduct marketing research, and charge for goods and services on the large independent economy that will emerge on Twitter.

• Twitter brand smackdown: The winners and losers: Reviewing several sets of competing brands across various vertical categories and comparing the effectiveness of their overall Twitter strategies.

• 12 Twitter Tools, Tips, Tricks, Techniques and Twoubles: See what 12 search engine marketing industry leaders have been saying about the best and worst of Twitter. Featuring video clips from SES London and SES New York earlier this year.

• 10 ways to decide if your business should tweet: How a breakdown of your specific business goals, sales cycles, and target audience can help you decide if – and how – you can make Twitter work for your organization.

• 5 Twitter marketing experiments: A look at 5 companies and how they are using Twitter in unique ways to improve company performance.

• 3 ways a small business can use Twitter: How small businesses can maximize Twitter in just a few minutes a day and without adding more staff.

• 10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps: Mashable selects the best of the many third party apps designed to help you take control of Twitter and organize your followers.

We hope you’ll find this list particularly useful because you can skim all the articles fairly quickly.

Let us know what you think in the comments field — or @MktgExperiments — add your own favorite articles, and Tweet this post yourself. Then join us for today’s free Twitter Experiments web clinic and look for a special announcement.

UPDATE– Follow-up Twitter eWorkshop on June 30:

Due to the overwhelming response to our Twitter Experiments web clinic [and the ensuing system crashes with the free clinic] we are pleased to announce that we’ll be conducting a special eWorkshop: How to use Twitter to boost your business results.

We’re teaming up again with our featured presenters, Jason Breed and Marc Meyer, to help you get from the “why” to the “how” with hands-on guidance on using Twitter to drive revenue, build equity and decrease costs. Join us on Tuesday, June 30 for this virtual training session.

In this interactive Twitter for business eWorkshop, you’ll learn:

• Where to start (or restart) and how to plan your Twitter presence
• How to develop the right strategy for your organization
• Ways to build and engage a following that’s more than just numbers
• Which tools can help you maximize your efforts

Take advantage of this opportunity to accelerate your knowledge, reduce the learning curve, and capitalize on this rapidly expanding business community. (Attendees from today’s web clinic will receive a special code to save $30 off this eWorkshop. Today’s clinic will be freely available on our site, as always.)

Note: This eWorkshop is limited to 400 participants, and spaces will fill up quickly, so register today and secure your spot for this special eWorkshop.

I recently spent a day and a half in Munich, Germany, taking part in the MarketingSherpa Email Summit and leading an optimization workshop.

The event brought together a diverse panel of presenters with very interesting case studies. Although the majority of attendees were, of course, from Germany, I also had the opportunity to meet marketers from France, Spain, and the UK.

For the most part, I found that European marketers face similar challenges as we do in the US, such as increasing their house list, improving the registration process, and optimizing their welcome email series.

However, I would say that two of the most popular topics of the event were multi-language campaigns and relevant content.

The importance of relevance (Relevanz, pertinence, pertinencia)

European marketers have the good fortune of access to many diverse countries in which to expand their markets, but these diverse markets are also a daily challenge. To remain competitive, these marketers need to consider localizing their campaigns in at least four of the EU’s top languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. And, as if they haven’t enough to do, they really ought to consider Italian or Portuguese.

It is not enough to just have a good database program or the technical capability to manage multiple languages. Among the many cases presented, success stories came from those that had a multi-language team that proofread and localized content. Even better off were the folks who had a multilingual, multicultural team (sort of a polyglot SWAT unit, if you know what I mean) to adjust campaigns to customers’ specific needs by country.

One interesting case presented by Avid Agency showed significant increases in clickthrough and conversion rates by localizing not only the copy but also prices. The campaign targeted Danish and Finnish consumers. They tested three variations of the same campaign:

1. Copy in English and prices in Euros
2. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in Euros
3. Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in local currency

The third variation yielded the highest results, showing that even though there is one common currency for EU countries, local currency is still important and including it in an offer can make a difference. Consider whether this strategy might be more relevant for B2C companies than B2B companies?

The summit reaffirmed a key lesson for all marketers, wherever our target market is and whichever languages it speaks: the more relevant the email content, the higher the open, clickthrough, and conversion rates will be.

If you are concerned about your email frequency, I’d suggest looking first at how relevant your emails are and then worry if you have the right frequency.

Now it’s time to enjoy a good German beer and the cool spring weather here in Munich. Auf Wiedersehen!

[Editor's note: Don't forget to bring back those Hofbräuhaus München goodies and samples for the team, Gaby.]

I got a shiny, snailmail brochure today touting a famous research organization’s upcoming workshop. One track offers expert advice on social marketing to “Generation Y.” According to the blurb, selling to this audience requires a “non-traditional approach” that includes “adding YouTube and Facebook to your marketing mix and leveraging user-created content.”

Yawn. It sounds so 2006, I’m already asleep.

As I said in an Oct. 2007 blog post, if it gets to be 2008 (Mr. or Ms. CMO) and your product isn’t in the top 10 search results on Baidu, embedded in South Korean social networks, wrapped around a Brazilian YouTube video, certified carbon neutral, and bookmarked on a Google phone, better get out the cardboard box and start packing your stress ball.

Yet I’m sure hundreds of CMOs will shell out thousands to attend the yakfest, hoping to gain an edge and keep their jobs.

Why does it seem that all of these events are led by Baby Boomers who’ve never skated, surfed, played Tekken 6, or shopped at Karmaloop? I say spend your $2,000 to come on down to Jax Beach and holla at these kids surfing by the pier on spring break instead.

According to the South by Southwest interactive festival Web site, a similar panel at that conference discussed and nominated “ten terrible ad campaigns that abused the ideals of people-powered media.” The campaigns the panelists roasted included:

• Businesses pretending to be bloggers.

• Businesses pretending to be journalists.

• Businesses pretending to be “Joe Blow” in order to flog their products in blog comments.

• Bloggers and vloggers who turn out to be paid floggers.

Trouble is, the panel voting on “The Worst of the Worst in Social Media Marketing for 2007” included reps from companies that oh-so carefully arrange for product pitches on blogs.

As Jack Nicholson said, “My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.”

My advice to those who want the scoop on social media and reaching the elusive GenY:

#1: Don’t lie.

#2: Don’t have others shill, lie, and pretend to be authentic for you. You will be discovered, and you will probably regret it.

#3: Be authentic. If you are a zillion dollar global leviathan, own it, be it, learn to love yourself. Don’t try to be something you’re not. It’s as repelling as grandma wearing Zoë Bikini. You don’t want to see it, and neither does GenY.

Did any of the companies mentioned in this blog (except of course my fulltime employer, MarketingExperiments) pay me for it? Not a chance.

For more on this subject, check out the MarketingExperiments Creed – our attempt at an in-house reminder to keep it real. And let us know if you’ll be dropping by the beach. Our own GenY crew just got a new grill and they’re waxing their boards for these killer waves.