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

Copy length. It’s been somewhat of an obsession of mine lately. For marketing copywriting. Heck, for content in general.

So I was really looking forward to running a pretty simple copy length test – long vs. short copy.

However, the interpretation was anything but simple. In fact, at first I thought there wasn’t a significant difference between the control and treatment…until we dove down a little deeper.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me set the test up for you…

- Read more…

“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…

One of the most enjoyable parts of being a MECLABS employee is seeing tests performed for a wide variety of companies and organizations. From international conglomerates to regional mom and pops, we always welcome new opportunities to test, learn and share for the betterment of the marketing community.

[End shameless self-promotion]

However, while looking far and wide, there are often some very interesting things going on right under our noses. For example, when our sister company, MarketingSherpa, let us know they’d be trying something new with a promotional email for an upcoming event, we put away our passports and paid closer attention. 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…

In the wake of Director of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein’s vicious editorial attack on Seth Godin, I thought I would lift up Seth’s spirits by imitation (the highest form of flattery) of his crowdsourced book idea. As I wrapped up the final draft of the 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report (BMR), I realized that some of the key insights required a categorization of strategies and tactics based out of a broad spectrum of practices.

Problem: What to name these categories?

Allow me to illustrate. The most tweetable (already tweeted once – thanks, Dan!) phrase in the BMR is perhaps: “LPO is Web design with an agenda.” And that agenda is to achieve a specific objective in terms of the quantity and quality of the visitor response.

An LPO objective must be defined first in terms of the target business outcome: generating a lead, closing a sale, maximizing subscription length, etc. A significant portion of the BMR is dedicated to helping marketers discover ways of getting the visitor to act, which is vastly complex. But defining the objective should be easy. You just have to do it explicitly; otherwise you may end up simply pushing things around on a page without any useful results.

So I asked a few thousand marketers: Which of the following processes/transactions is the primary objective of your organization’s website?

1. Purchase of products or services directly on the site
2. Request for a quotation, proposal, or sales call
3. Free downloads, webinars, newsletters, or other content requiring form submission (lead gen)
4. Phone call or visit to physical location (takes the process offline)
5. Maximum ad impressions, interaction, or user-generated content
6. Providing company or product information

There are certainly other types of objectives that may not neatly fit these categories, and this research does suggest a useful follow-up study. (I was also deliberately devious with the last answer choice. It’s an “objective” that I hear far too often, but it’s probably not your website objective. You are not in the business of providing information, unless you are the Visitors’ Bureau. And even then, your objective is not to provide information. It’s to increase the number of searches, clicks to destination websites, etc. You should be choosing (5). I make a big deal about objectives in the BMR, but I digress…) Read more…

I’ve learned a lot in the past year.  I think we all have.

Due to a wealth of factors – most notably the economy – marketers were asked to grow, evolve, adapt and even take new risks to stay afloat in 2010. That being said, there’s a lot to be learned from the past year’s struggles … for all of us. If 2009 drove us down to unanticipated professional lows, 2010 taught us how to re-tune our marketing strategies and conform to a changing economic landscape.

As I prepare to cull through hundreds of submissions for the MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report, I felt it was only right to take one last look at the 2010 edition, to see where we were a year ago, and where we made strides along the way. While combing through the pages, many of last year’s submissions evoked some forward-thinking questions for 2011. I’ve highlighted a few of these below. If you have the same questions – or can provide some answers – I would love to hear your insights.

Below are some of the more commonly shared thoughts from last year’s report. Read on to see if last year’s wisdom still proves valuable as you prepare for 2011. Read more…