There’s been plenty of gloom, doom, and handwringing over this year’s holiday shopping season.
While your best bet is to keep projections grounded, not all hope is lost. Even in a tight economy, the Web has several advantages for shoppers, and ecommerce sites that capitalize on these will see more opportunities.
Optimizing a few key areas of your site and channels will help you increase traffic, make browsing and buying easier, and win more new and repeat customers – even beyond the holidays.

The MarketingExperiments research team has compiled this ecommerce holiday “playbook” with 13 specific practices to help you maximize your ROI in this difficult holiday season.

Do you think your value proposition is powerful? Would your prospects agree?

Most of the time, when we ask companies about their value proposition, we hear a description of their business model. But that’s not what most customers care about.

Customers not only want to know “What’s in it for me?” but “Why buy from you?”

This is an area that even seasoned marketers have trouble with, because there is so much confusion about what makes a value proposition effective - including how to find one in the first place.

Because value propositions are so important to conversion, making a few small but crucial changes can have a big impact across all of your marketing efforts.

During our September 24, 2008 clinic, we examined why value propositions are so vital to results, presented several ways to significantly improve your value proposition, and reviewed three examples from our workshop participants who optimized their pages with a greater emphasis on these areas.

Ever wonder if you’re approaching lead generation the wrong way?

You may be right. Research shows roughly 80% of leads are regularly squandered.

Good news: By optimizing a few key aspects of your lead management process, you can achieve major ROI gains in a short time (even in a shaky economy).

In our September 24, 2008 special guest web clinic, lead generation expert Brian Carroll and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin explored strategies to dramatically increase your B2B leads pipeline and conversion rate.

Carroll presented his proven five-step “playbook” for effective lead management, along with a powerful case study from a partner that applied the playbook and achieved gains of up to 375%.

Picture the salespeople who get on your nerves. They're too loud. Too pushy. They try to seem so clever, but that usually backfires.

Just like weak headlines.

Trying too hard to sell is one of the biggest mistakes we make with headlines and subject lines. Another mistake is not consistently applying three key qualities of successful headlines: clarity, relevance, and credibility.

In our September 10, 2008 follow–up clinic on headlines, we revisited those key qualities, examined two new case studies (email and landing page), and conducted an interactive live critique of subject lines and landing page headlines submitted by attendees.

Editor's Note: You can find the first part of this two-part clinic here: Optimizing Your Headlines: How changing a few words can help (or hurt) results

If you’re looking for ROI gains and you’re not sure what areas to test first, start with headlines or subject lines.

The impact of headlines on conversions is no secret, but the ease of testing (no design, coding, etc.) makes them even more valuable.

Caveat: Creating and testing effective headlines can be deceptively simple. There's much more to them than slapping a catchy subject line on an email blast, or cramming keywords into PPC ads.

The real challenge lies not only in crafting successful headlines, but using them to conduct effective tests.

The research brief below, drawn from our free Web Clinic on August 27, 2008, explores the objective and key qualities of successful headlines, presents case studies and examples of strong and weak headlines, and offers step-by-step methods you can use to test and optimize your own headlines.

Our August 13, 2008 follow–up clinic on PPC campaigns included a new case study, a review of the two types of relevance, and a live critique of five new campaigns submitted by clinic participants.

The pay–per–click ads and landing pages reviewed by our optimization team once again included a cross–section of markets: B2B, B2C, eCommerce, lead–gen and social media.

As before, the objective of these live critiques was to help marketers determine what changes to test using real campaigns. The team of Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis, and Aaron Rosenthal demonstrated how the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence can be used to identify obstacles to conversion, and optimize campaigns for greater ROI.

Increasing competition and bid prices are making conversions harder to achieve with paid search campaigns. To maintain a dominant position in PPC, you need to constantly improve your ads and landing pages.

The challenge: How can you determine what changes to test, what to keep, and what really works when optimizing a paid search campaign?

During our July 30, 2008, web clinic, our optimization team reviewed pay-per-click ads and landing pages from a cross-section of markets: eCommerce, lead-gen, B2B, and B2C. All information was from real campaigns submitted by clinic attendees.

The goal of this clinic was to demonstrate how the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence can be used to identify obstacles to conversion, and examine best practices, tests and strategies that would help these and other campaigns improve their ROI.

The clinic also included a case study from a former optimization workshop participant who used these same principles and strategies to improve a PPC campaign's conversions by 300% while reducing cost-per-conversions by 69%.

Editor's Note: You can find the second part of this two-part clinic here: Optimizing PPC Ads: Improving results from your paid search ads and landing pages (Part 2 of 2)

Are Internet users becoming indifferent to testimonials? Is “testimonial blindness” becoming the new “banner blindness”?

Skepticism toward this marketing tactic, combined with the spread of Web 2.0 style user ratings, has raised the bar for marketers. As testimonials and other credibility indicators become increasingly prevalent on Web pages, marketers need to know how to use them most effectively to help increase conversions.

In our July 9 clinic on this topic, we looked at tests that showed how testimonials can help — and sometimes hurt — results and examined strategies for making credibility indicators more powerful.

Editor’s Note: As we mentioned in the clinic, the following multivariate tests also included changes to other page elements. Our goal in sharing this research was to show that credibility indicators play a significant role in conversions — both positive and negative — based on the context in which they are applied. These tests did not isolate the specific impact of testimonials; however, the results make a strong case for additional testing and support the best practices we have identified in past experiments, as outlined in more detail below.

Our June 25 Web Clinic looked beyond our various formulas and heuristics and focused on one vital principle: clarity trumps persuasion.

While we used case studies from three subscription sites to illustrate this deceptively simple principle, the truth is it applies equally to any type of website, email, or other marketing communication channels.

This brief examines the results of those three tests and explores how applying clarity to your site pages can increase conversion and revenue.

Editor’s Note: The clinic also featured a live optimization session. Pages were submitted in advance for a critical analysis conducted by MarketingExperiments Director, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin; Director of Optimization Research, Jimmy Ellis; and Director of Channels Research, Aaron Rosenthal.

Whether your market is B-to-B, B-to-C, or both, testing and optimizing even a few key aspects of your landing pages can provide major gains for your lead-gen efforts.

The principles of the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence serve as a guide to optimizing your pages and your sales or lead-gen process to improve conversion and ROI.

This Brief examines three tests we conducted with our research partner to demonstrate how you can use Incentives and Friction to generate more leads.