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

After being involved in our recent Web clinic on PPC ads, I feel it’s important to talk about one of the most misunderstood elements involved in effectively writing a PPC ad. This is the element of appeal. Let me take a step back for a moment. MarketingExperiments has done extensive research (here’s one example) about the elements of an effective value proposition in the hopes of creating a repeatable process that marketers can use to optimize their own value props. In an effort to help simplify this process, we have created a breakdown of what makes a value proposition truly forceful:

• Appeal – How much is this offer desired?
• Exclusivity – Is this offer available elsewhere?
• Credibility – How believable are your claims? Read more…

The MECLABS team is back from last week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit, where our Managing Director (CEO), Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, presented a two-hour session about email optimization, complete with live optimization of audience emails.

As usual, the audience wanted more. So in our next Web clinic, Crafting an Engaging Email Message: How a properly focused email message can increase conversion by 85% (plus live optimization, ten email campaigns will be selected (double the amount we usually choose) from attendees who send us their email marketing efforts when they register.

Live optimization will allow us to give hands on advice in the practice of crafting engaging email messages. Plus, Dr. McGlaughlin will review a recent, never-released experiment conducted by our researchers using the findings from this experiment to help you optimize your own email campaigns.

But before we share some effective tactics, we asked your peers – how can marketers craft an engaging email message? (hey, we don’t know everything, we’re making new discoveries every day). Here are a few of our favorite responses… Read more…

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provided a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London Read more…

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won… Read more…

This weekend I was paying for the 10 gallons I had just put into my old 1997 Honda Civic, when I decided that I’d purchase a nice cold soda for the road. I pointed out the pump where my fueled-up car was located and then slid the cold beverage to the convenience store clerk. He informed me that my total came to $25.89 and then he stopped.

Looking me dead in the eyes, he asked me what my name was. “Austin,” I replied a little hesitantly. “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?” he asked. I nodded and attempted to hand him my Visa credit card.

He denied my overture and informed me that he could only help me if I were a member of his store. So not wanting to cause a scene with the five people who were now behind me, I conceded. Read more…

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation… Read more…