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

Writing an effective headline takes time. It’s arguably the most important part of your copy, and skimping on the time investment usually produces skimpy results.

When will inspiration strike? What will be your muse? As Douglas Adams said, “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.”

Unfortunately, as a marketer, you don’t have the time (or goatee) of a creative writing master’s student. However, you do have to write.

Your goal isn’t different though. It’s not art; it’s income. So you don’t have time to produce perfect headlines for every piece of copy you generate. And you can use a reproducible methodology that gets you in the ballpark of effective, conversion-driving headlines (and testing will take you the last mile).

So the question is this: how can you (a time-strapped marketer) write effective headlines in a relatively short amount of time?

In part one of this series, I proposed a methodology for getting headlines done quickly. It involves a methodology for evaluating and refining raw headline drafts. When you have a method for a task, it automatically becomes more manageable. In this case, you can write headlines the same way a plumber fixes a pipe.

However, I only gave you the first part of the methodology for evaluating your headline drafts.

For those who didn’t read Monday’s post, let me quickly fill you in.

I first wrote three headlines for our December 7^th Web clinic and chose one to evaluate:

The Year in Optimization: The top insights and transferrable principles from 121 tests in 2011

In Step 2, I underlined the noun phrases as these generally communicate the core value or what the audience will get.

Then in Step 3, I evaluated the force of the noun phrases around four key elements:

• Appeal: How attractive is the phrase to our ideal reader?
• Credibility: How believable is the phrase?
• Exclusivity: Can anyone else credibly claim to have what is offered in the phrase?
• Clarity: How easily can the reader understand it?

This second post highlights the part of the methodology for refining your headlines into a finished product.

So without further ado, I’ll continue with Step 4:

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While the true value of your offer is critical, if you don’t optimize the perceived value of that offer, that true value is meaningless from a marketing perspective.

Take our MarketingExperiments Web clinics, for example. I’m not going to point any fingers, but there are a lot of bad marketing webinars out there that aren’t worth your time. Someone throws a few sales slides together the day before, pushes their product really hard in the beginning, and then drones through 60 minutes of slides.

However, we invest a lot of time and resources in our Web clinics — effort and value added to each webinar that isn’t readily apparent on the invitation landing page or in the invite email.

In other words, they have hidden value

We wanted to reveal some of that hidden value, so we produced the below video …

Now, as a MarketingExperiments blog reader, I’m letting you in pretty early on in the process. Our editorial wunderkind, Paul Cheney, is literally creating the landing page as I’m writing this blog post, so I don’t have results to share yet.

I’ll get to our plans in just a minute, but let’s first talk about your product’s hidden value …

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“Marketing is the ultimate custodian of the value proposition.” Dig it, doc… but what about those pesky consultants? #webclinic

@aaron_bolshaw Tweeted this question through #webclinic during last week’s Web clinic.

I quickly Tweeted back…

As someone who has been a consultant I can say a mktg org w/ a well-defined value prop is much easier to work w/ #webclinic

And that’s how Twitter works. I made what Malcolm Gladwell would call a “blink” decision. It wasn’t until I was driving home that night that I realized just how profound Aaron’s Tweet was.

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The value prop is the glue that holds your company’s partnerships together

Core competencies. That is the sole focus of the modern company. If the function is not central to the way your company works, outsource it. This is the reason for the relationship with your advertising agency.

And the business ideology that spurred the explosive growth of, for example, Foxconn – a company with $110 billion in revenue, more than 920,000 employees, and its own “manufacturing city” in China. You many have never heard of Foxconn, but if you’re reading this on a Dell computer or an Apple iPad while receiving a call on your Nokia phone, you are, in essence, a customer.

And your company likely has many similar partnerships. So how do you herd these cats and focus them on your company’s, and therefore your customer’s success?

As I was driving home after the Web clinic, I was listening to “Drucker’s Contributions to Marketing” which I downloaded from iTunes U (on my iPod…thanks, Foxconn).

I had an epiphany and realized how important Aaron’s statement was. Wharton professor George S. Day was talking about this challenge that companies have with outsourcing, and said (I edited slightly for clarity)… Read more…

Email marketing has come a long way since the early days before CAN-SPAM laws and double opt-in email lists. Back then, it was easy to build a list and quickly get them to your offer pages. The average email recipient wasn’t bombarded with dozens, or even hundreds, of messages every day that need sorted or deleted.

Now, with email users being incredibly wary of any promotional email, most of the email we send gets deleted.

How do we ensure our emails get read and acted upon by the people on our list who need what we have to offer?

It essentially comes down to email messaging. If you can clearly communicate enough of your offer’s value in your email to earn a click, then you’ll more than likely see a significant increase in clickthrough (and ultimately profit).

We recently ran an email test for a research partner (anonymized in the emails) that needed to increase their number of leads from a rented list. One of the email treatments generated a 104% increase in clicks over the other. Here are the treatments: Read more…

“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 …

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A few years ago the idea of dedicating a landing page for a certain segment of traffic to a website was a novel idea. Then, with the rise of Google, PPC started becoming more popular.

When that happened, marketers realized that if they made keyword-specific landing pages, they achieved better results from the traffic they were paying for.

Marketers started to realize that they could make custom landing pages for other channels as well, like display ads and email campaigns.

There are other channels that most marketers haven’t capitalized on yet with a targeted landing page. One of those is organic search.

Take a look at the data on SEO landing pages in the following chart from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. For advanced marketers, SEO landing pages is an extremely effective tactic, but for the rest, it’s left untouched.  Read more…