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

There’s a myth being propagated across the Internet as we speak …

It’s the myth of “one variable at a time” testing.

And it’s mostly bunk.

Well, at least in the way most marketers think about testing “one variable at a time.” Usually the result of testing one thing at a time is a page that looks like this:

This page was submitted by Jerry Everett, a marketer from our Web clinic audience. When our researchers provided live optimization suggestions, Jerry asked us to review his page in depth. We thought it would be the perfect opportunity to illustrate this point.

While Jerry didn’t necessarily test only one thing at a time to get to this page, he did a redesign based on specific variables in the page design. He was focused on the individual headline, the bullet points, the button, etc.

It looks as though it may have been designed by a committee (even if it wasn’t).

The problem with Jerry’s (and most marketers’) approach to landing page treatment design stems from a misunderstanding of the term “variable.”

Usually, marketers think of variables as single elements on a webpage, e.g., a headline, a button, a layout, etc.

When we view variables as physical elements on a page, we miss the bigger picture.

In reality, variables do not occur on a webpage; they occur in the mind of the customer. When a customer views your landing page, they don’t see particular elements on a page. They see a means to an end.

And, the elements they see to get them to that end are not necessarily related to individual headlines, buttons and layouts.

Part of our jobs as evidence-based marketers is to name the variables in the mind of the customer.

To help us do that, we developed the Conversion Sequence heuristic.

Each of the elements in the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence heuristic tends to correspond with variables in the mind of the customer.

When we look at those variables, and adjust them accordingly, we can come up with effective treatments. Here is what our researchers developed when looking at the page with customer-centric variables in mind:

Stay tuned to the MarketingExperiments blog for part 2 of this post where we’ll dig into why we made the changes we did.

In the meantime, help Jerry and his team out. What do you think will work better in the current wireframe? What do you think won’t work at all? Let us know in the comments.

Related Resources:

Common Landing Page Mistakes: Form fields that stop selling value

Quick Win Clinic (Part I) – The 5 easiest changes to make to your landing pages right now

Landing Page Contest: So you think you have a good lead gen page?

Landing Page Optimization: Improving Conversion 50-60% by Applying Continuity and Congruence

When you break down all of the challenges you face on a daily basis — from subject line writing, to landing page optimization, to graphic design — they all break down into the most basic, essential proto-challenge that faces all of marketing: How do I get access to the knowledge that will allow my campaigns to be successful?

On Wednesday’s free Web clinic, “What Your Customers Want: How to predict customer behavior for maximum ROI,” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECABS, will share the principles we’ve discovered to help you answer this question.

But first, we wanted to hear what your peers had to say about predicting customer behavior …

  Read more…

I’ve got a research question. Now what do I do with it?

A few weeks ago, Daniel Burstein wrote a blog about writing research questions. In that blog post, we emphasized the importance of asking “which” rather than “what” questions because a “which” question is clearly testable.

You might ask, “Which page format results in the most lead submissions?” or “Which price point generates the most revenue?” Both questions are clearly stated and include two key pieces of information:

• An independent variable you are going to test
• The dependent variable you will use to measure your results

To know if something is better, first you must know if it is different

With the research question on paper, we can easily create a hypothesis. For the former question: “All page formats will result in the same number of lead submissions.” This type of hypothesis is so famous in research circles that it has a name: “The Null Hypothesis.”

In general terms, the null hypothesis states that varying the independent variable will result in no change to the dependent variable.

In other words, you’re testing to see if changing the page (the independent variable) will change the number of leads (the dependent variable). After all, if there is no change, one cannot be any better than the other.

Why not “The new layout will result in the most lead submissions,” you ask. Because there is no concrete reason to know that there will be a change. Besides, if you already knew the effect of A on B, why would you need to test it?

  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…

As discussed in my last blog post, we reviewed how the marketing force of 200 marketers at Optimization Summit was utilized to design the following test:

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Control (click to zoom)                              Treatment (click to zoom)

You can read the experiment details, how we got 200 marketers to agree, and few insightful reader comments in Wednesday’s post. In this second post now, as promised, we will look at the results and what insights might be gained from them. Read more…

Last week I spoke on the “Overcoming Operational Barriers to Optimization Implementation” panel at Optimization Summit. The buzz was loud there, the birds were flapping their wings, the bees were swarming, everyone was talking about Landing Page Optimization.

Aside from this event, there are start-up companies with a central focus around this one discipline. There are courses, webinars, books, and even theories about Landing Page Optimization. So here’s the million-dollar question, “Is it possible to optimize a landing page?”

I could sit down with you and tell you a number of ways that you could improve your page:

• Greet the visitor with a clear headline
• Eliminate multiple, equally weighted objectives
• Reduce the number of fields you have
• Be more transparent about your shipping rates
• Add or remove copy

And on, and on, and on…but none of this is landing page optimization.

Even if you tripled your sales by taking my advice, implementing what you saw in a webinar, or going live with a new design provided to you by an Internet marketing company, you still have NOT optimized a page.

To delve into what optimization really is, let’s take a look at the three types of marketing managers I most often come across… Read more…