MarketingExperiments Research Journal

|  View with Images  |  View Mobile Version  |  Forward to Colleague  | Dear Readers: The goal of a test is to get a learning, not a lift. While putting together this issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, the MarketingExperiments team also hosted our first-ever Optimization Summit. And before I got up and spoke for the opening session, I had to distill a lifetime of optimization research down to one line for our sell-out crowd of marketers to walk away with. The biggest lesson I've learned is this: my most valuable activity is continual learning. While our labs work with real-world marketers that must realize ROI from their testing efforts, a lift is not the first goal we aim for. Our goal is to devise tests that give us new knowledge about the unique motivations of our Research Partners' audiences, a firm understanding of their true value proposition, and deeper insights into the anxiety their customers face while traveling through the Research Partners' sales and marketing funnels. This is the business intelligence we need to help them gain a sustained competitive advantage, not just a lift on an individual test. So as you read through the latest edition of our MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, look for transferable principles that spark testing ideas for you, tests that will give you new business intelligence about your own audience. Read latest issue Here are a few of the discoveries that were most interesting to me: For every action you desire a visitor to make (a click in the case of PPC), there must be an immediate promise of value that outweighs the cost of that action. Like the Primary Value Proposition, this Sub-Value Proposition of a specific action can be measured by its appeal, exclusivity, and credibility. Both, the Primary Value Proposition and Sub-Value Proposition, must be communicated throughout the entire conversion process. By effectively crafting and then expressing the value proposition in a PPC ad, our researchers drove a 203% increase in projected profit in this PPC experiment. See "Optimizing PPC Ads" on page 114. But how do you identify your Value Proposition? Value Propositions must be tested. Then, once identified, three marketing elements should be used to express a Value Proposition on a Web page. Learn more about those elements in "Do You Have the Right Value Proposition?" on page 12. The objective of an email is to get a click. Therefore, your email message must engage the recipient with enough value to inspire them to click for more information. Read on to see how a properly focused email message increased conversion by 85% in "Crafting an Engaging Email Message" on page 52. Optimization doesn't stop online. To ensure your optimization gains are not lost in the funnel, strategic steps must be taken to optimize a lead after it has been captured and prior to passing it to Sales. Learn how one company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months in "Lead Optimization" on page 138. We seek to continually optimize how we share what really works in digital marketing optimization with you. To that end, we will be creating a new, more intensive way to help you improve your company's performance. We are currently working on focused multimedia reports, in which we compile our research and methodologies into a concentrated training that will help you optimize key components of your sales and marketing funnel. Future topics include Friction, Value Proposition, Copywriting, and many more. So be on the lookout for this new training framework in the next few months. In the meantime, feel free to share this issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal with your friends and colleagues. Thank you for your trust, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS P.S. Also if you're interested in learning a proven, systematic methodology for improving your conversion rates and you would like to get certified in landing page optimization, join me in New York, July 12th for the Landing Page Optimization workshop. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This email was sent to you at the following email address: ignoble.experiment@arconati.us. If you would like to unsubscribe, go here For more info about us, go to: http://www.MarketingExperiments.com This email was sent by: MarketingExperiments, LLC 1300 Marsh Landing Parkway, Suite 106 Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250 USA Powered by: ExactTarget http://www.exacttarget.com