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

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I sure hope I get a lot of great email marketing messages today.’” This was one of  Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s more clever quips at our recent B2B Summit.

And it hits close to home, because we all know how hard it is to get attention in those crowded inboxes, where your recipients are quickly sorting through messages mostly focused on deleting and unsubscribing, not diligently reading every word of your marketing messages.

This Wednesday at 4 p.m., Flint, our managing director, will share some of our discoveries about increasing response to email marketing promotions and campaigns in our next free Web clinic – Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%.

But first, we wanted to hear your peers’ top tips for increasing the effectiveness of email messaging. Here are a few of our favorite responses …

  Read more…

Nothing can be assumed when you’re sending an email. You cannot assume recipients know where to click. You cannot assume they realize that the landing page and the email are connected. When you make these assumptions, you’re really hoping the audience will “figure it out.”

But your audience does not want to “figure it out.” Sure, some of them will get it. But others will not realize your image is hyperlinked. Or they will not realize they are on the right landing page, and will leave instead. To avoid this, eliminate what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, calls “unsupervised thinking.”

This phrase came to mind repeatedly during the Actionable Design Insights session at ExactTarget Connections 2011. After teaching our Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop earlier in the week at Connections, I sat in the audience on Wednesday to hear best practice advice from Kristina Huffman, Sr. Design Consultant at ExactTarget, and real marketing examples from Laura Schraeder, Email Marketing Specialist at Helzberg Diamonds.

Below are just a few of the many takeaways on email design highlighted during the session: Read more…

This post is the first in a new series about using video effectively on your landing pages.

Many marketers assume that putting a video on a landing page is going to automatically lift conversions. As much as I wish that were true, results have shown otherwise.

Your video can have the best production value, best talent, best message, etc. — but if you don’t deliver the video in a certain way, you can actually hurt conversions.

There are many things I want to say about online videos. However, I’d like to start where your visitors start.

Your visitors need a reason to watch

The truth is none of your visitors start with a reason to watch your video.

Whether it is an email capture form or a registration page, as we have discussed in recent web clinics, your site must give a reason for every action you ask your visitor to take. The same applies to video.

You should not assume that viewers will automatically be drawn to your video. For visitors, there are many potential annoyance and risk factors associated with videos: How much time will this take? Will this have any good information? Will I have any technical difficulties?

Another way to say this is that watching a video has a value proposition associated with it. You must make sure that you are communicating this value to your visitors just to get them to watch the video.

For instance, maybe the value of the video is that visitors can get all the information of a page in less than a minute and they don’t have to read the full page. Maybe the value is that you can see and hear the CEO of the company speak about the product. Or maybe it’s a demo of the product or testimonials from other people who have used it. Whatever it is, there must to be some value that is expressed to the viewers up front.

How you communicate that value will vary. Video headlines, subheads, descriptive tags, thumbnails, and play buttons can all be used for this for this (see illustration). If you do this part right, you will see significantly better results from using videos on your landing pages.

For my next post, we will look at the relationship of the content of a landing page to the video, drilling down on what kinds of pages most effectively utilize videos.