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

How often have you placed an item in your shopping cart in a bricks and mortar store, a can of green beans for example, and then changed your mind before you forked over the cash and put those green beans back on the shelf without buying?

How about online? Ever drop something in the ol’ virtual shopping cart, but change your mind and decide not to buy?

If you’re like me, it’s very rare for you to change your mind in a physical store, but I do it online all the time. Why? And how can you reduce shopping cart abandonment and improve product pages on your own site? There is no one right answer to these very difficult questions, but we’re going to be sharing our latest research discoveries today at 4 p.m. EDT in our latest free Web clinic – Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire e-commerce website.

But first, we asked your peers these vexing questions. Below are a few of our favorite responses… Read more…

At the end of March, HubSpot, the marketing software company, held a webinar on “The Science of Timing.” The event drew almost 25,000 registrants and ended up with very close to 10,000 attendees. Driving this success was a fast-paced and extensive email campaign sent to different segments of HubSpot’s list, prospects and new leads.

“The Science of Timing” was hosted by Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist, and was built on a previous series of webinars over the last two years covering topics such as “The Science of Twitter,” “The Science of Blogging,” “The Science of Facebook,” and more. “The Science of Timing” covered when to do these social activities — when to tweet when seeking a retweet, when to publish new blog posts, when to update a Facebook status. Read more…

Value proposition is one of the most popular topics we teach about. Getting your value proposition right is maddeningly difficult but highly rewarding. As they say in “The Town” before robbing Fenway Park, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

So, it wasn’t surprising that we received an inordinate amount of questions during our recent Web clinic – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online.

Unfortunately, we can’t answer every single question we receive. But I passed several of the questions around the labs, and here is what our research team had to say… Read more…

A complex buying process is, well, complex. And as H.L. Mencken said, “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.”

So, if you have a buying process that requires more than grabbing a candy bar of the shelf, today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST is for you – Converting Leads to Sales: How one company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS, and special guest Brian Carroll (author of “Lead Nurturing for the Complex Sale”) will help you find the right answer for your company based on our lab’s discoveries.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers for tips you can use. Here are some of our favorite insights… Read more…

At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.

Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.

In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom… Read more…

Finding appeal for your PPC ads is never easy. But if you take the time to think like the searcher and then offer them what you truly believe they are looking for, you are one clear step closer to finding the key that unlocks the door to a significant increase in conversions for that segment.

Let’s see what the process of finding appeal might actually look like as I quickly apply it to one of our audience-submitted PPC ads from our previous Web clinic on PPC. Read more…