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

Most experienced marketers tend to think of anything Internet-marketing related as new, cutting edge, and/or unproven. But a funny thing happened on the way to Google’s $180 billion market capitalization – search has become a commodity.

To wit, a site like GoodSearch. GoodSearch is a search engine, except it’s not. It’s really an advertising platform that donates 50% of its revenue to charities (“You search, we give”) that leverages the commodity of search, in this case Yahoo (which itself is powered by Microsoft Bing).

And, of course, GoodSearch is not unique in this respect. There are many businesses built on the commodity of search. Perhaps we’ll soon see a search futures market develop so it can be traded right along with pork bellies.

The paradox of search commoditization

Now here’s the rub. When most product categories achieve commoditization, innovation dies (think generic drugs) in favor of merciless cost cutting (since once a product is perceived as a commodity the only difference becomes price).

Search has been the opposite – innovation is still occurring at a breakneck pace. So we’re left at an interesting crossroads. Social media marketing is new enough that most marketers recognize the huge learning curve, print advertising is established enough that experience in itself is quite valuable, but search is a shade of gray. As the financial services ads (must legally) tell you, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Read more…

Editor’s note: Anyone involved in eretailing should know ecommerce analyst Linda Bustos. The driving force behind the award-winning GetElastic blog, Linda is also a MarketingExperiments certified optimization professional and knows our methodology inside-out. So we were delighted to have Linda as a featured guest on our ecommerce clinic and now on our blog, with her wrap-up and takeaway tactics from the session.

Just as shoppers often wait until the last minute to finish their holiday shopping, often online retailers find themselves behind on their holiday optimization.

Procrastinators need to implement ideas that don’t involve long lead times for design, development or approvals. In the Ecommerce Holiday Playbook for Procrastinators web clinic, we shared tips and tactics that online retailers can implement in as little as five minutes to make the most out of the “most wonderful (selling) time of the year.”

The 5 areas covered were:

• SEM (Search engine optimization and paid search)
• Shopping engines
• Email
• Landing pages
• Post-holiday (ring in the New Year!)

1. Search Engine Marketing

• SEO: Add value propositions in meta descriptions and page title tags to increase clickthroughs

If you’re familiar with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence, you’re well versed in the importance of value propositions. They are the key to success in any optimization effort. Are you leveraging your value propositions at every marketing touch point?

If it’s true that 80% of web sales begin with a search engine query, it’s important that you sell yourself in your search listings, whether they be organic results or pay per click. Are you communicating why someone should click on your link, instead of anyone else’s? What is it about your store that is unique?

Make sure searchers can see in your title tags and your meta descriptions what it is that makes shopping with you the best choice.

• PPC: Bid on relevant holiday keywords, such as …

People are not just searching for products, they are searching for ideas. It’s quick and easy to set up a holiday Ad Group or groups targeted to gifts and gift ideas for different holidays and recipients. Then flip the switch December 26th for after-Christmas sales. Last year Google Trends, which tracks the most popular searches of the day, exploded with searches for after Christmas sales.

2. Shopping Engines

• Add free shipping, value proposition
• Plan for increased bids during holiday period
• Know when to turn down your bids (after shipping cutoff)
• Sanity check data-feed accuracy
• Pull non-holiday categories if budget is a concern

We know that shoppers use search engines to hunt for gifts, and often their searches direct them to a comparison shopping engine like Google Products, Shop.com, BizRate, PriceGrabber etc. Shopping Engine Optimization is the “other other” SEO, and is also called Data Feed Optimization.

Data feeds are the way merchants provide their catalog information to these sites, and the information you include in your data feeds may vary from engine to engine. Some engines allow you to add shipping offers or other value propositions in extra fields. So it’s important that your feeds are tailored to each engine and really take advantage of your options.

On the strategic side, you should also be planning for increased bids to remain competitive. Holiday click prices are often higher than the rest of the year. While you don’t have to increase bids, depending on what other retailers are doing you may have to to keep appearing high enough in results, and it also provides you with a slight advantage if your competitors don’t turn up their bids.

Don’t forget to turn down your bids after your shipping cutoff date. This is different for every retailer, so make sure you have a process to do this.

And make sure your data feeds are accurate – that you’re not listing out of stock product, pre-orders, backorders and non-holiday items, especially when you’re working with a set budget and you’re spending more per click. It may make sense to remove categories that are typically not gifted to others (like computer cables if you’re an electronics store) temporarily for the holiday season.

3. Email

Stress the benefits of online shopping in your subject lines, including:

• Save time
• Save gas
• Avoid lines
• More selection
• Hard to find items
• Gift finder tools

Some of my favorite examples from last year are (emphasis mine):

Easy-to-Make Holiday Cards. We’ll Mail Them.
Avoid the Rush! Get Your Gifts Now, Save $15 & Pay NO Shipping!
Avoid the crowds – Shop from Home and get Free Shipping
The Gift Guide Is Here: The Best Gifts at Even Better Prices
Email Exclusive Free Shipping, No Threshold. Today Only!

Holiday time is both great and gruesome for sending retail email. On one hand, when you deploy retail email you hope that the recipient is interested in shopping that week. During the holidays, you’re nearly guaranteed that he or she is. However, you are also competing for attention against any other retailer that the subscriber has opted in to.

Like Dr. Flint McGlaughlin says, the goal of the email is not to sell but to generate interest in visiting your site. The offer and the creative is important here, but before one sees your email message, they must be persuaded to open your message. Subject lines matter!

Remember that we as ecommerce marketers want customers to use the online channel to shop. It’s great if you have local stores that may still benefit from your demand generation, and converting online can be attributed back to which campaign and email version referred the visit. This gives you better insight into what is and isn’t working. So may I suggest that you really communicate the benefits of shopping online, as well as shopping from you. The above examples do that.

4. Landing Pages

Address the FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts, or, Anxiety)

• Clear link to gift guide (create new category if needed)
• Clear link to store locator
• Clear shipping cutoff link
• Shipping policies, return policies, countries ship to
• Customer service number (every page is a landing page)
• Promote e-gift cards (never too late!)

Just as important as driving traffic is having an optimized website prepared to convert it.

If you already have a gift guide feature, make sure you’re flaunting it — not just in navigation as a text link that blends in with the rest of the links, but clearly on your homepage and on product/landing pages.

Have a clear link to your store locator if you have offline stores. It’s fine to have it subtle the rest of the year in the header or footer menu, but around the holidays – especially after your shipping cutoff date — this deserves more prominence.

Customers want to know what your hours of operation are and even telephone numbers, so make sure that info is on your store locator page.

Shipping cutoff information is also very important. Many retailers do put this information front and center on the homepage. I recommend you show it on every page, because every page is a potential landing page. Don’t assume everyone starts at the homepage and absorbs your messaging and remembers all your details (research shows that’s often not the case).

Ditto for links to return policies and shipping policies, including countries you ship to. Even if your shopper is in the US, they may be shipping overseas.

Don’t forget customer service numbers on every page of your site and every step of the checkout process.

And if you do offer electronic gift cards which can be sent instantly, this is important to showcase – especially after your shipping cutoff.

5. Post-holiday

Post shipping cutoff strategies include promoting gift cards, any in-store pick up options and even gift notifications sent immediately to gift recipients, letting them know they weren’t forgotten but that their gift may arrive a bit after the holiday.

For example, Upresent.com is a service for merchants to offer such messages.

Last holiday, Musician’s Friend offered a $20 comeback coupon for the gift buyer, which is a great incentive to come back and purchase again during the typically slow month of January.

Finally, though we are really close to the holiday, it’s not too late to think about your merchandising for post-holiday. Popular approaches include showcasing items for New Year parties…

…and New Year resolutions – like Drugstore.com’s emphasis on products to help you lose weight, stop smoking, get fit, look your best, go green or be healthy.

For more ecommerce tips, tactics, ideas and research, be sure to visit (and bookmark) the excellent GetElastic blog.

At our July 29 web clinic on optimizing PPC campaigns, several participants wanted to know more about using forms and keyword insertion.

We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.

Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page?  Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?

In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:

1. When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
2. When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.

Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?

The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.

As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.

What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.

Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?

If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.

Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.

Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.

Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.

You can hear more from Corey via the full clinic presentation and follow him on Twitter: @ctrentmarketing

Are you all Microhoo’ed out yet? Here’s a shortlist of cool, helpful posts from the past week, covering a range of online marketing topics.

• Social media: Our colleague and B2B pro Brian Carroll shares his thoughts on how to generate leads with LinkedIn without alienating your network.
• Email: ClickZ reminds us that Christmas is just around the corner (sort of) and provides a “must-do now” e-commerce checklist to help you get ahead.
• SEO: Winning the Web provides a list of don’ts to keep you from landing in SEO purgatory.
• Copy: Karen Thackson at Marketing Words Copywriting explores how an effective call-to-action is more than just using call-to-action words.
• PPC: Search Engine Roundtable notices that more advertisers have been granted access to Google’s bid simulator tool in the past week.
• Design: A catalog of e-commerce buttons and iconography from Checkout Optimization to inspire and delight e-marketers.

Note: In August, we’ll be returning to our regular schedule with more frequent blog posts. Look for that starting next week, with upcoming posts covering PPC, lead generation, testing and analytics, new landing page critiques, and more …

Need a shortcut to your weekend marketing reading? Our favorite articles of the week will get you started on your review of online, search and social media marketing. These made it through our feeds and into the idea bin.

Stuck In A Rut? 20 Places to Find Entrepreneurial Inspiration — A roadmap of motivation for when you need a boost. Alyssa Gregory of SitePoint pulls from her list of favorite blogs, success stories and magazines for when your inner entrepreneur needs a shot in the arm.

Top 3 Google Gadgets to SEO Your iGoogle Home Page — Download the tools and gadgets that you’re probably already using to your iGoogle Home Page for quick, easy access. Search Engine Journal points you in the right direction — and I agree with Ann Smarty that the general lack of great iGoogle gadgets is surprising.

33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business — LinkedIn is much more than an online resume, and Web Worker Daily shares ways to use LinkedIn more effectively for your business. (The MarketingExperiments LinkedIn group has been growing steadily thanks to tips like these.)

Gmail Offers to Automatically Unsubscribe You from Mailing Lists — Gmail is offering an unsubscribe option for even authenticated mail from reputable senders; Life Hacker has the details.

Beware of Low Bids and Low Budgets When Setting Up Your Google AdWords Account — PPC Hero asks Google about keywords not showing up due to a low keyword bid.

If you’re looking for more PPC advice, join us for our PPC Live Optimization web clinic on July 29. Submit your campaign for review and the chance to win a seat on our Optimization Training Tour.

After a full week of pushing ahead on new marketing initiatives, mapping out your plans through the end of the year and into 2010, and brainstorming new tests — you got through all that this week, right? — you’re probably ready for some weekend reading.

Here are five highly recommended articles from the past week, covering different areas of online marketing:

• Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety — One of our favorite blogs does it again. Linda Bustos of GetElastic shows how ecommerce sites can increase sales by addressing customer concerns, from product pages to cart and checkout pages. The post also links back to the Ecommerce Report.
• PPC / SEM Analytics: 5 Actionable Tips To Improve ROI — The title speaks for itself, but in this post, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shares five “non-normal” analyses that you can apply to boost your ad revenue.
• Finding and Using Niche Blogs — The tips in this SEOmoz blog post can help you with two frequently overlooked areas related to SEO and PR: your link building and blogger outreach efforts.
• The Ultimate Community Management FAQ — Social media and community-building strategies are still raising a lot of questions for marketers trying to get a handle on how to use them for business. Amber Naslund answers a bunch of those questions, and in doing so, offers several ideas and tools for socializing with a purpose.
• Annoying Consumers with Too Many Emails — A straightforward post that seeks to answer the questions all email marketers should be asking: “How often is too often? When does the frequency of a program start to drive people away?”

Have some favorites of your own? Putting any of the ideas from these articles into practice? Drop a comment.