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

If you have been following the blog over the past few weeks, you already know that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin recently taught live on “The 5 Best Ways to Optimize Email Response” at the 2010 MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami.

“The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!”

The session was very lively and included on-the-spot optimization of audience-submitted emails. Some even suggested cutting lunch to continue with more live optimization. You can watch a replay of the complete presentation below and here are a couple reviews from live attendees:

“Even if this was the third time I attended one of his lectures, I still learn from each new session. Flint is a tremendous speaker and his mathematical approach on all email marketing aspects based on serious testing is amazing.” – Kenny Van Beeck, EmailGarage

“After a reported late influx of attendees, people took to sitting on the floor to listen to the first session, delivered by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!” – Mick Griffin, Get Response

(Replay) Optimizing Email Response – Part 1

Today we are hosting the “Part 2” of this presentation to focus on how to actually craft effective email messages. We will also be taking some additional time to work with and optimize your email campaigns live on today’s web clinic.

Today, we expect Dr. McGlaughlin to be as lively as he was in Miami. We hope you can make it to today’s presentation at 4PM EST.

Now, get some email optimization love of your own

Admittedly, we have already chosen most of the live audience submissions we will cover during today’s call. However, we did save one spot for our blog readers. So, if you have an email you would like us to look at today post a URL hosting the email in a comment or send it to us via email. We will choose one lucky blog reader from the submissions today. Good luck and see you this afternoon.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Practical Application

This has not been a banner year for marketing budgets by any estimation. So you might be surprised that two tactics actually garnered increased budgets in 2009 – email and social media. Your peers consider email a highly cost-effective tactic and see social media as a way to extend that content to new markets. This research comes from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which contains practical data to improve your budgeting and grow your overall business.

We’ve found email marketing to be a hot topic as well, with near-record attendance at Wednesday’s web clinic (If you couldn’t attend, please subscribe to the free MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the replay and research brief are available). To build on that clinic, which explored ways to maximize revenue from your house list, here is a cost-effective way to grow your list:

In the past year, low-cost has become the most popular modifier of the word “campaigns” for most marketers. Of course, you never want to sacrifice results simply for the sake of cost. According to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, blog contests are an inexpensive way to quickly gain motivated subscribers. Here are the seven key steps to making the most of blog contests to rapidly grow your list:

Bullseye

There are highly relevant audiences for blogs on almost every interest under the sun, including Sun (Microsystems, that is) and, likely, an audience with interests very similar to your best customers. But, contrary to popular belief, these audiences aren’t all micro. According to the web-traffic analysts at Compete, some so-called “mommy blogs” get well over 100,000 unique visitors a month. For an example, see Dooce (if you’re a parent, you know what she’s referring to).

Lay down the law

Make sure you clearly define a set of rules to keep everything running smoothly. For example, you could give extra entries to readers who refer friends. Or even host a second, private contest for the blogger who generates the most entries. And remember, the more compelling the prize, the more motivated your audience will be.

…and he told two friends…and she told two friends

After you set up a landing page to explain the contest and capture entrant’s information and referrals, email referred prospects automatically and invite them to join the contest as well. With luck (and a compelling contest), you may reach the Holy Grail of cost-effective online promotion – going viral.

Seek the source

To understand which channels deliver best, create coded links to track traffic originating from blogs (with unique links for each blog), referrals, newsletter emails to current subscribers, social networks, etc. If you hold a separate blogger contest as well, you could create an anonymized tracking page to show bloggers how many entries they’ve generated compared to competitors, which may encourage them to step up efforts.

Release the hounds

Once you have the mechanics of the contest in place, finding the right bloggers will take a bit of hunting on your part. Here’s one simple strategy. Use basic Web searches to find applicable blogs. When you spot a likely target, use its “blog roll,” or links section, to find similar sites. Look at the sites’ number of RSS subscribers (if publicized) as well as the freshness of its content. Then, you can reach out to the bloggers (using info found on the site or a “Contact Us” form) with an email that includes a description of the contest, a coded link to the landing page, a link to the stats page, and a link to a promo ad.

Remember your members

While these bloggers will hopefully drive new subscribers, don’t forget to let the current members of your virtual fan club enter as well. The contest deserves at least a mention in your email newsletter, Twitter feed, Facebook group, social networks, weekly coffee klatch, Pinochle tournaments, and any other place you regularly communicate with your most loyal customers. Not only are you deepening your relationship with existing customers, making it easy for them to pass the contest on to friends is another cost-effective, viral way to grow your list.

Rinse, wash, repeat

If you do not prevent multiple signups, you will have to scrub your list of duplicates. You may also want to remind new subscribers why they are receiving your email newsletter (“Thank you for entering our contest and signing up for…”). Include an easy way to unsubscribe, a must for the CAN-SPAM Act, since some may have focused more on your prize than the fact that they were also signing up for an email newsletter. This is also a way for your least motivated list members to self-select and get removed before too many of them hit the “SPAM” button and hinder your deliverability.

After you’ve counted all your new subscribers, look at your metrics to see what you could have done better. And then, start another contest with your newfound knowledge pushing you to even greater success.

For a real-world example of a marketer that used these tactics to grow a small email list to 20 times its previous size, turn to page 129 of the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. MarketingExperiments blog readers can receive a $100 discount.

And for a more in-depth look at making email and social media deliver for your bottom line, check out Email Summit ’10 in Miami from January 20-22. PLUS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will teach a Pre-Summit Live Email Optimization Workshop to help you maximize your email capture rate and quality. Register by January 8 to receive an early bird discount of $200.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/ / CC BY 2.0

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Research Topics

There are lots of proverbs celebrating consistency. “Dance with the one who brung ya” is a personal favorite. But another classic saying, “Never swap horses in midstream,” may not hold true for ecommerce marketers.

MarketingSherpa’s Ecommerce Benchmark Report 2009 emphasizes that consistency in message must be accompanied by fluidity in medium. In other words, not only must marketers driving a campaign be prepared to swap steeds midstream, if they want to reach prospects most effectively, they may need a whole stable of horses — or marketing tactics — to choose from.

This is particularly true for those seeking to integrate social media into existing campaigns.

In this most recent edition of their benchmark guide, Sherpa segmented their survey respondents and gave primacy to a faction they term “High Knowledge”, companies defined by their analytics usage and their knowledge and use of metrics.

The chart below shows how the H-K club ranks various social media tactics in terms of effectiveness.

What goals are these folks accomplishing through social media? Primarily brand awareness and brand reputation.

Remember that, according to Sherpa, those who report the most satisfaction promoting brand awareness through social media are High Knowledge companies like Zappos and Calvin Klein, whose brands were pretty ubiquitous to begin with.

Before embarking on a social media campaign, consider whether and how it will match your goals. Sherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist writes, if social media isn’t working for you, it may be that you’ve mismatched your goal and your tactic.

Sherpa surveys suggest consumer services are best promoted through viral video and social site profiles. However, if your goals are generating leads or increasing online sales, social media tactics should probably be at the bottom of your strategy list.

Another consideration regarding productive engagement with social media is the metrics we use to measure effectiveness. If tactics were horses, search and email would be the big purse winners of the marketing races while social media is still the untried colt.

Rein in that unruly youngster by using the appropriate metrics to evaluate his performance. It’s hard to track the effectiveness of social media by simply looking for an increase in clicks. Instead, Sherpa’s benchmark guide promotes looking at engagement per campaign, measuring activities such as registering, entering a contest, commenting on a list, or amending a profile.

In a recent blog post from MarketingMVP, John Bell, managing director of Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence Group, developed three strategies to track how word of mouth and social media were affecting his brand:

• · Reach: using Web metrics and tracking the volume of conversations taking place online.

• · Preference: includes metrics such as Net Promoter Score and a sentiment index – which gauges whether people are hearing the message, whether they have a preference for the brand or issue, and whether a company is increasing positive share of voice compared to competitors.

• · Action: this refers to any conversion that takes place as a result of a social media or word of mouth interaction, from a website registration to a product sale.

Ecommerce marketers seeking big wins must decide when to apply tried and true tactics and when to branch out into the new territory of social media. They might do well to take a lesson from jockey Calvin Borel.

Calvin Borel may be the first jockey to win the Triple Crown without help from a horse.  Any single horse, that is. As a rule, it’s unheard of for a jockey who’s riding a winner to change mounts. But that’s just what Borel did.

In the Derby, Borel piloted Mine that Bird to an unlikely first place but in the Preakness, second leg of the three-race journey, Borel did the unheard of and changed horses in midstream. For the second race, he rode filly Rachel Alexandra to victory.

As for whose colors he’ll wear in the Belmont? Borel hasn’t declared. Rachel Alexandra may not have the staying power for race number three, the longest race in the Triple Crown, and Borel, if he wants to maintain his winning streak, may have to switch horses again to cross that finish line in the style to which he has become accustomed.

Marketers, keep your options open.

And keep in mind that one way to do so is to attend our upcoming clinic: a special report on ecommerce with two new case studies and guest presenter Stefan Tornquist.

In this clinic, we’ll explore more of the 2009 Ecommerce Benchmark Report (and offer five attendees the chance to win a free copy of their very own). We look forward to seeing you–well,  hearing your comments and answering your questions–there.

General, Marketing Insights, Marketing Q&A

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