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

Let’s take a quick look at the typical marketing funnel in 2011 to see how you can improve your results. If you’re like the average marketer, you spend a lot of money on media, such as:

-          Broadcast TV ads

-          Newspaper ads

-          Magazine ads

-          Outdoor advertising, such as billboards and transit advertising

-          Radio ads

-          Internet advertising, such as banner ads and pay-per-click ads

In fact, marketers spent $238 billion in just the first six months of 2010, according to Nielsen.

Why do companies spend so much on advertising?

That’s a lot of loot. And, of course, marketers are spending that money to sell a product. However, they aren’t truly selling a product or service at all … they’re actually spending that money to drive customers to a landing page. In fact, according to Econsultancy, 65% of all UK print and television advertising now includes a Web address.

Even when the ad don’t specifically include a URL, ad-inspired branded searches drive many customers to a website as the next logical point of contact.

In other words, you’re spending a lot of dough to funnel traffic to your landing pages.

If you’re a long-time reader of the MarketingExperiments blog, you already know about the power of LPO and you might as well stop reading now because I’m not going to share anything new today (although, feel free to forward this post to your boss, colleagues, and mother to show the value of what you do every day).

However, if you are looking to improve the performance of your marketing campaign and are not yet familiar with landing page optimization, I hope you’re starting to see why this practice can have such an impressive ROI.

Essentially, if you’re spending all of this money to drive potential customers to a website, investing just a little in increasing conversion on that site (more sales, more leads, etc.) can have an outsize impact, as you can see in this research from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

Click to enlarge

After all, the deeper into the funnel you improve performance, the bigger an impact it has.

  Read more…

Affiliate marketers have it tough these days. So many affiliates are attracted by the promise of building a business without having to involve themselves in the details of actually filling orders. With a marketplace so saturated, it’s difficult to get any kind of ROI out of affiliate campaigns.

So, how can affiliate marketers increase their ROI?

The same way a merchant would increase its ROI: by providing enough perceived value to guide the prospects to, and through, the offer.

Of course, increasing ROI is always easier said than done. And because that’s part of the job of our research analysts, Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization teaches an optimization training class every Thursday here at MECLABS. In it, Chris Rochester, one of our research analysts, developed a treatment homepage for affiliate website Safari.com as a thought exercise.

Click to enlarge

-

Now, before I go any further and show you Chris’ treatment, it needs a heavy disclaimer. Because Safari.com was submitted by one of our Web clinic audience members, we didn’t have any actual metrics for the site. In other words, Chris may not have made the suggestions he did in the treatment had he seen the real data behind the site.

Fortunately, our Associate Director of Optimization, Adam Lapp, developed some example metrics Chris could work from. So here’s some imaginary background for you…

  Read more…

I was talking to a channel marketing manager at a Fortune 500 tech company last week, when something she said really stuck out to me. She was working on a major lead nurturing campaign, and about half her time spent on this project was spent on selling the project internally.

Think about that for a second. In her case, marketing internally was just as important (if not more so) than her external marketing.

How proficient are you at internal marketing? I find that even many seasoned marketers struggle with this. So while we often teach about the powerful value propositions that can give you impressive lifts when expressed to your potential customers, let’s look at the value propositions you need for the three types of people you deal with in the hallways of your office every day. Read more…

One of the biggest problems our audience tends to struggle with understanding is – what do their tests actually mean? And sometimes, frankly, they see a result, any result, and are overly confident about what they’ve learned from it.

So recently, here on the MarketingExperiments blog, we discussed statistical significant and validity as well as confidence and probability.

When he read those posts, MECLABS Data Analyst, Phillip Porter made a good point, “Significance just tells us if there’s a difference, not if it’s important.”

Since Phillip dives into data like Greg Louganis off a springboard, I wanted to find out more…and learned a lot from him in the process (Phillip, not Greg Louganis). Let’s begin by backing up a bit… Read more…

As I was reading a few LinkedIn discussions about multivariate testing (MVT), I began to wonder if 2010 was going to be the year of multivariate.

1,000,000 monkeys can’t be wrong

Multivariate Testing (MVT) is starting to earn a place in the pantheon of buzzwords like cloud computing, service-oriented architecture, and synergy. But is a test the same thing as an experiment? While I am not a statistician (nor did I stay at the Holiday Inn last night), working at MarketingExperiments with the analytical likes of Bob Kemper (MBA) and Arturo Silva Nava (MBA) has helped me understand the value of a disciplined approach to experimental design.

What I see out there is that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. Good intentions behind powerful and relatively easy-to-use platforms like Omniture® Test&Target™ and Google® Website Optimizer™ have generated a misleading sense that as long as a multivariate test is large enough (several hundred or more combinations being tested), at least one of the combinations will outperform the control.

This notion has become the value proposition of a growing number of companies offering services around either the big-name or their own (simpler, and often therefore easier to set up) MVT tools. They are ostensibly betting on the technology, and not on a systematic approach to experimental design or any particular UI/UX (user interface/user experience) optimization theory.

Even though, as Bob has pointed out to me, it is reasonable that an MVT setup with a billion combinations may not yield a lift over the control, my contention is that the risk-weighted business cost of a dissatisfied customer is low. Therefore, little stops the burgeoning MVT shops from safely offering a “100% lift guarantee.” Just like the proverbial million monkeys with typewriters, somewhere among thousands of spray-and-pray treatments their MVT tests are expected to produce one that’s better than the rest. Read more…

Email design always proves to be a hot topic with marketers. And when you have top agencies competing against each other, the fire just gets hotter as we learned during last week’s live web clinic – Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.

We received a plethora of questions, most which we could did not have time to address during the hour-long clinic. So, as with every Web Clinic Extra, we have picked a handful of the most common questions to address here on our blog. This week we pulled in Andy Mott, the Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, to answer these questions…

Email marketing is a topic that comes up often in the MarketingExperiments community. In fact, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is delivering a keynote today at Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami as well as teaching a pre-summit Live Email Optimization Workshop. If you couldn’t make it out there this year to get valuable insights from your peers and industry leaders, come back to the blog on Friday for some key takeaways from this year’s summit.

You can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 2): How to craft effective email messages that drive your customers to action, will be taught on February 3rd from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.