1. Hunters. They already know what they want and are looking for the quickest, easiest, and safest way to get it and go.
2. Browsers. They may have ideas about a purchase but need more convincing, or they’re simply “window shopping.”

The problem most online retail sites face today? Their homepages have been developed without a clear understanding of the motivations and sequences of thought in the minds of these visitors.

During our May 7, 2008, web clinic, our expert optimization team looked at homepages and Value Propositions from five eCommerce sites and made recommendations to improve those sites’ ability to stop, engage, and effectively communicate with both Hunters and Browsers.

Today, ROI is everything – especially in a slumping economy. Are your current metrics giving you the full story?

Probably not.

MarketingExperiments estimates that up to 75% of the data Web marketers collect are either misleading or inaccurate. And expertise with Web analytics is rare, according to our recent poll.

Most marketers remain uncertain about what to measure, whether the results are reliable, and what steps to take based on their data.

This brief covers the key steps to determining your essential metrics, with four critical elements to keep in mind. We’ve also provided a tool you can use right away to improve your marketing ROI.

Which specific optimization steps have been shown to increase Conversion by reducing Friction and alleviating Anxiety?

In this clinic we looked at two case studies where Landing Page elements that overcame the value inhibitors of Friction and Anxiety increased Conversion. The increase attributed to these elements in one test was 162%.

Questions our research examined:

• How does providing more or fewer choices affect click-through and Conversion?
• Ensuring a Landing Page is “congruent” sounds like a simple step, but what exactly does that mean?

This brief completes the review of Landing Pages submitted by online businesses for live optimization analysis by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, MarketingExperiments’ Director; Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research; and Aaron Rosenthal, Director of Channels Research.

The reviews identified areas where applying key concepts of Landing Page Optimization to both B2B and B2C product, service, and subscription Web sites could result in significant improvements in conversion.

How do you know what to change, what to keep, and what really works when it comes to optimizing a Landing Page?

Online businesses searching for answers to that question submitted their Landing Pages for a critical analysis by MarketingExperiments Director, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin; Director Of Optimization Research, Jimmy Ellis; and Director of Channels Research, Aaron Rosenthal during the February 6, 2008, MarketingExperiments Webinar.

Those who submitted Landing Pages were asked for their Value Proposition as well as the primary traffic source for the page and what optimization steps they had already taken, if any.

The reviews identified areas where applying key concepts of Landing Page Optimization to both B2B and B2C product, service, and subscription Web sites could result in significant improvements in conversion for those businesses.

How do you know when it's better to raise prices to increase revenue or reduce prices and pump up Conversion Rate?

Price is undeniably a strong factor in the conversion decision process, but what will a price change do to your bottom line?

In this brief we will review the results of recent price tests and what they reveal about optimizing offers and increasing total revenue.

We're pleased with what we've been able to share with you during 2007: research results that anyone can use to optimize Landing Pages, PPC campaigns, search, emails, and testing itself. We sincerely hope you have benefited.

In this Brief we will look back at a few highlights from 2007 and then forward to 2008 with observations, predictions, and recommendations for growing demand for your products in the coming year.

A subjective factor like intuition might alarm those basing new Web site designs on test results that discover what really works when it comes to Internet marketing. It doesn’t seem scientific.

Yet the very nature of the optimization procedure includes an element of intuition. Where does it fit when identifying the most effective Internet marketing strategy?

Previous MarketingExperiments surveys showed intuition was unreliable when it came to predicting the best page performance, the best headline, the best copy in the test cases we studied. Our survey-takers were wrong at least 50% of the time.

In the interest of updating our previous findings on marketer’s intuition, we invited those attending our December 5, 2007, Web clinic to evaluate side-by-side Web site and email optimization choices and vote on which ones they believed performed best in our tests. We then conducted a live poll of the audience, shared the tally, and reviewed the actual test results.

Which changes will produce the best Conversion results when optimizing a Call-to-Action? Can distinct approaches be combined to increase both sales and leads?

Previous test results have shown that a single change is typically a trade-off: It may have a negative impact on direct, immediate Conversion but if combined with an effective basket-recovery effort it will increase overall Conversion.

In this brief we’ll look at a case study in which changes to a
Call-to-Action increased direct, step-level Conversion by 150% and Lead Generation by 2,379%.

Are customers getting what they expect when they reach your Landing Page, or are they receiving mixed or incomplete messages that disrupt the effective expression of Value Proposition and hurt Conversion?
After our recent clinic on Site Flow Disruption we received many requests for more information on the relationship of Continuity and Congruence and the clear communication of Value Proposition.

This brief reviews two recent case studies where improving Continuity and Congruence significantly improved Conversion for our Partners.

In the invitation for the October 10, 2007 MarketingExperiments live Webinar, participants were offered the opportunity to submit their own Landing Pages for real-time assessment by the MarketingExperiments optimization team.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and optimization specialists Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal reviewed each page, identifying areas where applying research best practices and key concepts of Landing Page Optimization could result in significant improvements in page performance for these Websites.

We asked those who submitted their sites to describe, in one or two sentences, their primary Value Proposition: Why should a customer buy from them rather than from their competitors?

In the invitation for the October 10, 2007 MarketingExperiments live Webinar, participants were offered the opportunity to submit their own Landing Pages for real-time assessment by the MarketingExperiments optimization team.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and optimization specialists Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal reviewed each page, identifying areas where applying research best practices and key concepts of Landing Page Optimization could result in significant improvements in page performance for these Websites.

We asked those who submitted their sites to describe, in one or two sentences, their primary Value Proposition: Why should a customer buy from them rather than from their competitors?

Are you missing sales by chasing after Conversions instead of generating leads? Is your website out of sync with your business model?

Getting prospective customers to land on your pages is just the beginning. You may need to capture leads before you develop relationships. Your products and market may benefit more from a lead-generation approach than from a direct sales strategy.

This brief shares what we discovered about Conversion and lead generation during recent optimization testing with three different research partners. The partners were from three distinct industries, but they shared at least one important characteristic.

How can you avoid sending conflicting messages about your value proposition and protect your landing pages from flow disruption?

Professional marketers have long known how essential it is to have a unique and compelling value proposition and how critical it is to be able to express it concisely.

Marketers must also understand how to protect landing pages against the #1 threat to conversion: Site flow disruption.

In this clinic we will reveal how two dangerous forms of disruption—Discontinuity and Incongruence—can keep customers from responding to your value proposition.

We have all probably designed a test Webpage or offer email that we expected to dramatically outperform the control and been stunned when performance is poor or the results come back inconclusive.

What can you do to get significant improvements or learn in those situations where you actually cannot complete your test or where you have a validity issue—particularly a validity issue connected to the size of your sample?

When the differences in conversion between the control and the experimental treatments are so small that the test results don’t validate, is all that time and energy a total loss?

It’s the nightmare scenario for any analyst or executive: Making what seems to be the right decision, only to find out it was based on false data.

Through online optimization testing, we try to discover which webpage or email message will perform best...

But is sample size the only factor that should be considered when assessing the validity of test results?

We are all familiar with the concept of using incentives, such as product discounts, free gifts, or free shipping to boost sales.

However, rarely have we done the kind of research that allows us to think through the true principles and the mathematics of developing highly effective incentives——that is, ones that result in the maximum profit at the end of the day.

In this clinic, we will combine foundational marketing and business principles with recent research findings to explore a simple but effective way to track down your “ideal incentive” using the two key concepts of Perceived Value Differential (PVD) and Return on Incentive (ROIc).

When prospective customers arrive at a website, they come with a specific intention or motivation. They may have come simply to browse or out of curiosity or by mistake. However, many come with the intention of making a purchase. For those prospects, it is the efficacy of the website’s purchase funnel——the pages that make up the buying process——that determine whether the visitor becomes a customer or merely a statistic.

Which will perform better, a landing page that has one clear objective or one that has multiple objectives?

As marketers, we are continually faced with the dilemma of determining what to show customer prospects when they arrive at our sites.

Should we present them with just one offer or option, or give them several and let them choose?

We examine research findings to discover what factors reduce “bounce” rate and keep visitors continuing through the conversion “funnel.”

We looked at what determines whether people who arrive on a business-oriented landing page will move forward on the site or “bounce” to a competitor’s.

The factors and principles indentified are the collective product of research conducted over many months across a broad spectrum of products and industries.

Content (contextual) advertising has become a staple of paid search advertising. In fact, in 2006 marketers spent an estimated $2.5B on content ads.

But what do we know about how to create the best ads?

The architecture we use to manage our business may not be the same structure we should use to market it. Our business is to serve our customers, make it easy for them to get what they want, and create an image of class and competence that elicits goodwill.

Many online services offer a free trial as their primary incentive to attract new subscribers.

Generally, a free trial offer works well.

The research for this brief began with the question:

How does customer anxiety impact conversion?

1. What are the major retail seasons and how do they affect your marketing?
2. How can you take advantage of seasonal fluctuations? (11 key practices)

Many online services offer a free trial as their primary incentive to attract new subscribers.

Generally, a free trial offer works well.

However, this led us to ask the question, "If free trial offers work well, does their success make us complacent about the effectiveness of the offer pages or pathways we are using right now?"

The amateurs publish their video clips for fun and notoriety, and the professionals produce and publish them in order to drive traffic to their web sites and sell more of their products or services.

Tens of millions of people watch these short videos, but how effective are they at driving qualified traffic to web sites?

In the world of offline direct mail it has long been understood that creating urgency increases conversion rates. Typically a special offer of some kind will expire on a particular date.

Is the same true of the web?

Do expiry dates or warnings about limited supplies actually work?

And if so, is there a best way to express urgency, and are there pitfalls to avoid?

In this brief we cut through the clutter and show you how to:

1. Understand where and how your current metrics could be misleading and result in flawed marketing decisions.
2. Identify and track the metrics which are essential to reducing your costs and increasing your revenues.
3. Use a simple, Essential Metrics Dashboard that will enable you to track the metrics that are most important to achieving your goals.

We applied the Marketing Experiments Variable Cluster Testing Methodology. In this way we were able to test multiple variables with a single factorial "A/B Split Testing" test design.

After achieving high conversions from an optimized landing or offer page, after a few weeks or months it is not unusual to see a slow but steady decline in conversion rates.

What causes the performance of optimized pages to decline over time? And what can be done to slow down or halt this erosion?

In the world of direct mail it is well known that a minor change in a headline can have a significant impact on response rates.

But what about the web?

• What kind of impact can a headline have on page conversion rates?
• To get a significant difference in results, do you have to write completely different headlines? Or can a small change to a headline make a disproportionate difference?
• And are there any rules or guidelines to follow when writing different headlines to test?

The need to build campaign-specific landing pages is now widely accepted. However, what is not so widely understood is how to build landing pages that deliver.

In our most recent research we addressed the broad question: Which changes to my landing pages will deliver the greatest increase in conversion rates?

...one of the key indicators of a strong value proposition is that it lends itself to being articulated simply, clearly and very briefly.

• But what is a value proposition?
• Why is it important to your business?
• How can you "find one" for your business?
• And can an existing company find a new value proposition?

Here is the question we asked ourselves: In our focus to maximize increases in conversion rates by completely changing key site pages, are we ignoring the potential of small changes?

What is your conversion rate of visitors to subscribers? Are you leaving money on the table? Our own testing suggests you may well be.

We conducted a number of tests, with one research partner who wanted to increase their newsletter subscriber list, and with two others who wanted to increase sales of their subscription-based publications.

In both cases...

• Can your intuition and experience tell you which advertisement headline will result in the most click-throughs?
• Can intuition tell you which email subject line will result in the highest open rates?
• Can intuition tell you which web page design will give you the best ROI?

However, multivariable (or multivariate) testing allows you to test many changes simultaneously – five, ten, or even twenty. You'll still get accurate results, without having to increase your total sample size, and you will be able to identify the impact of each individual change.

But how does multivariate testing work? Is it reliable? How does it stack up next to A/B testing?

Does a 5% increase in click-through from a PPC ad sound disappointing?

On its own, that 5% may not amount to much.

But what if you also achieved the same 5% improvement in landing page conversion rates, completed sales, increased lifetime value, and other improvements to your site and marketing efforts?

The bottom line? At the end of our test, the calls received resulted in the generation of additional income.

Yes, you can make money by actually ENCOURAGING web site users to pick up the phone and call you.

Which will generate the most revenue? A lower price that drives more traffic and buyers? Or a higher price that may attract fewer buyers, but deliver more income per sale?

Our testing tells us that the answer to those questions is: "It depends."