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

In 2011, this blog produced 140 blog posts. Hopefully, you found some of those blog posts helpful in your day-to-day marketing work. If you did not, let us know in the comments and we’ll write 140 better ones next year.

Of course, as a marketer, you’re probably one of the busiest people alive and you probably missed a few, if not the majority of, posts this year.

So to catch you up, we sorted our posts by how valuable they were to you (as you and your peers communicated to us via the Twitter button) and created a roundup of the 11 most-tweeted posts in 2011.

Here they are in order of least popular to THE most popular MarketingExperiments blog post of 2011 (and potentially all time).

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It seems like 2011 just started, and just like that, in a flash, it’s almost over.

Guess what?

You’ll be saying the same thing about 2012 soon enough. But before you do that, take a few moments to stop and think about what you learned in 2011 that can help you optimize marketing performance in 2012.

To spur your thinking, MECLABS a/v Specialist Luke Thorpe and I grabbed a camera and mic, went around to attendees and speakers at B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco (hosted by MarketingExperiments’ sister company, MarketingSherpa), and asked for their top “Aha moments” of 2011 …

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“What is the most effective copy for my buttons?” That is one of the most frequent questions we receive at MarketingExperiments. And for good reason. As our testing shows, simple changes to the copy on your call-to-action buttons can generate impressive results.

Yet even though we know that, we don’t always optimize our button copy. And in this case, I’m not using the royal “we” to try to refer to all marketers. Right here on the MarketingExperiments blog, where all we do is write about testing, optimization, and messaging, we had an unoptimized button.

But, fortunately, we also have an audience of savvy optimizers that constantly keeps us on our toes. In fact, on a recent post – Live Experiment (Part 1): How many marketers does it take to optimize a webpage? – Thomas Strunk made a comment on the post that rightly called us to task…

Also just another thing I just noticed is that your little green button below says “Submit Comment” and I thought that the word “Submit” was a BAD word Maybe you could do an A/B test on it with a button that says “Share Your Thoughts” or something like that… Who knows you might get more responses to your posts?

Good point, Thomas. To the splitter!
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If you’ve been reading this blog for just about any amount of time, you already know that landing page optimization is an effective way to increase the ROI of your website traffic.

But when most people think of landing pages, they think of pages tied to certain traffic sources. The most popular of those sources are generally PPC ads and email messaging.
But there are a few other opportunities to capitalize on your traffic with landing pages. Take a look at this marketing research chart from Boris Grinkot’s 2011 MarketingSherpa Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:

According to the chart, most marketers aren’t optimizing traffic from:

1. Social media sites
2. Referring sites
3. Organic search

Now right off the bat, you might be thinking that the reason those traffic sources aren’t capitalized on has to do with the fact that most websites aren’t getting traffic from those sources.

However, this data only factors in marketers who have traffic from these sources.

So for example, of the E-Commerce sites that are currently receiving organic search traffic, only 31% of them are capitalizing on it with dedicated landing pages.

The fact that some marketers are dedicating landing pages to these particular sources of traffic is a good indicator that they are working to convert that traffic, but that most marketers are simply missing out.

This one chart signals that there is a tremendous opportunity to get ahead of your competition and start capitalizing on more of your traffic.

Get 41 more charts like this one…FREE

This is simply one insight from one chart in the Benchmark Report. If you really wanted to, I’m sure you could get a lot more out of this chart. You’re only limited by your own business intelligence.

For the next few days, the entire chapter from the Benchmark Report this chart is in can be downloaded for free thanks to a generous sponsorship from HubSpot. All you need to do to get your 41 free charts including Boris’ insightful analysis is click the link below, fill out the form on the landing page, and download the chapter.

Get your free chapter now…

Click to enlarge

Relevance is not born on your landing page. Relevance starts with the ad that the visitor clicked. With SES New York right around the corner (hope to see you there!), I wanted to discuss how your ads effectively shape your site visitors’ motivation. When you understand motivation, you can build ad-page pairs that maximize relevance, and consequently conversion.

Recently, I discussed how clarity helped RealGoodsSolar landing page keep visitors on the page. Today, I wanted to take a closer look at the different motivations that their landing page meets from paid Facebook, LinkedIn and AdWords traffic. Read more…

Having worked both in the Landing Page Optimization (a.k.a., Conversion Optimization) and Social Media sides of marketing, I am amazed how quickly the latter stole our hearts and minds, while the former continues to be a mystery for most marketers.

When I set out to write the LPO Benchmark Survey for MarketingSherpa this January (publication date: May 4), I naturally—and erroneously—assumed that just like all the past research partners I worked with at MarketingExperiments, and our workshop attendees, and our webinar audiences, the marketers that hear about our survey would be at least accustomed to LPO as a category.

The survey is out now (Editor’s note: the survey closed on Mar 1), but what has surprised me is the response rate, compared to the response rate to the Social Media Marketing benchmark survey, which was fielded only a month earlier. Read more…