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Conversion Diagnosis: Toyota Material Handling Nederland

December 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

On December 3rd in Haarlem, The Netherlands, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin spoke at the Dutch Email Marketing Association Summit, also known as the “Sexy” Email Event. The Director of MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingExperiments) discussed how to improve email and related landing page conversions and conducted live optimization of audience submissions. Below is one of those submissions, along with a conversion diagnosis that will hopefully give you some ideas to improve the performance of your own marketing efforts. Please note, it has been translated from its original language of Dutch.

This submission is a B2B website seeking to drive downloads of a whitepaper. Here is an interactive version of the page (rollover with your mouse and click to see comments):

For this particular page we have to assume that visitors are well qualified. They either have searched for “electric pallet trucks” or have navigated through the site to arrive here. Knowing this, the headline is pretty standard. It’s effective in several ways:
• Continuity between steps
• Communicates “where” visitors are

However, it does not answer two key questions:
• What can I do here? I don’t know if I can order, request more info, get a quote, or just view photos.
• Why should I order a pallet truck from Toyota instead of another competitor?

Several variations of the headline that add value and provide the visitor with guidance should be tested.

Value: You must add appeal, exclusivity, and credibility to give force to the value proposition of this product. Consider testing a quantitative variation such as: “Electric Pallet Trucks: 95% Customer Approval Rating” or “Electric Pallet Trucks: Crafted by Toyota for More Than 50 Years.”

Guidance: You must greet the visitor and “hold their hand” as they experience the page. In the primary headline, communicate value. But then in the sub-headline, you want to make it what exactly they can do on this page clear. For instance, “Download Product Details and Get Price Quotes.”

Once a visitor reads the headline, they are then forced to digest a bulky paragraph of six lines…a hard swallow. Most likely, your typical visitor may read the first or second line then have their eye-path drawn away from the paragraph by the large images. If you have important information in the last few lines, it will be missed. We recommend using a maximum of two-to-three lines of copy so that it’s easy to get to the point and move on to the next paragraph.

Also, there are no bolded words in the copy. This creates a disruption on the page that halts the eye-path and visitors just see one large chunk. Instead of moving seamlessly down the page, visitors may get lost in the copy. Important words such as “ergonomic” don’t stand out from trivial words such as “things.” It all just runs together.

You should also bold keywords so that your page adapts to different visitor segments. People who don’t like to read and just want to get to the point can just scan four words and move on. While people who need every single detail can still take their time reading the copy.

Where the heck do I click? Okay, so it looks like clicking on the triangles results in a whitepaper download. But they don’t appear clickable and they blend in with the images. This page should definitely make links that are directly below the images into buttons and ensure they have properties that make them appear clickable – such as bevel and drop shadow. Also, test button copy that is clear and provides a tangible benefit such as “Download Your Free Whitepaper.”

There is another place to click for visitors who already know all the information about the pallet trucks and are ready to buy. Do you see it? It takes a second, but it is at the bottom of the right column: “Yes, I want a quote for a pallet truck.” This is an important link for the actual bottom line of the company. People who click here are interested in buying. But it’s small, de-emphasized by location, and does not attract the visitor’s eye-path with color and so forth.

Someone ready for a quote does not need to download a white paper. So consider a test where this link is placed above the images, right after the paragraph. Also, a blue font will make it stand out from the other font. Blue is the Internet standard for a link and this color change will help make it more obvious that the link is clickable.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will next be speaking live about optimizing email response at MarketingSherpa’s Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami, Florida from January 20-22, 2010. He will also be teaching a live pre-summit Email Optimization Workshop on January 20.

Conversion Diagnosis: Toyota Material Handling Nederland

Filed Under: Email Marketing, Marketing, Online Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , ,

Email Marketing: Building Valuable Subscriber Lists on the Cheap

December 4, 2009 By 3 Comments

This has not been a banner year for marketing budgets by any estimation. So you might be surprised that two tactics actually garnered increased budgets in 2009 – email and social media. Your peers consider email a highly cost-effective tactic and see social media as a way to extend that content to new markets. This research comes from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which contains practical data to improve your budgeting and grow your overall business.

We’ve found email marketing to be a hot topic as well, with near-record attendance at Wednesday’s web clinic (If you couldn’t attend, please subscribe to the free MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the replay and research brief are available). To build on that clinic, which explored ways to maximize revenue from your house list, here is a cost-effective way to grow your list:

In the past year, low-cost has become the most popular modifier of the word “campaigns” for most marketers. Of course, you never want to sacrifice results simply for the sake of cost.391609724 6a85f6981b Email Marketing: Building Valuable Subscriber Lists on the Cheap According to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, blog contests are an inexpensive way to quickly gain motivated subscribers. Here are the seven key steps to making the most of blog contests to rapidly grow your list:

Bullseye

There are highly relevant audiences for blogs on almost every interest under the sun, including Sun (Microsystems, that is) and, likely, an audience with interests very similar to your best customers. But, contrary to popular belief, these audiences aren’t all micro. According to the web-traffic analysts at Compete, some so-called “mommy blogs” get well over 100,000 unique visitors a month. For an example, see Dooce (if you’re a parent, you know what she’s referring to).

Lay down the law

Make sure you clearly define a set of rules to keep everything running smoothly. For example, you could give extra entries to readers who refer friends. Or even host a second, private contest for the blogger who generates the most entries. And remember, the more compelling the prize, the more motivated your audience will be.

…and he told two friends…and she told two friends

After you set up a landing page to explain the contest and capture entrant’s information and referrals, email referred prospects automatically and invite them to join the contest as well. With luck (and a compelling contest), you may reach the Holy Grail of cost-effective online promotion – going viral.

Seek the source

To understand which channels deliver best, create coded links to track traffic originating from blogs (with unique links for each blog), referrals, newsletter emails to current subscribers, social networks, etc. If you hold a separate blogger contest as well, you could create an anonymized tracking page to show bloggers how many entries they’ve generated compared to competitors, which may encourage them to step up efforts.

Release the hounds

Once you have the mechanics of the contest in place, finding the right bloggers will take a bit of hunting on your part. Here’s one simple strategy. Use basic Web searches to find applicable blogs. When you spot a likely target, use its “blog roll,” or links section, to find similar sites. Look at the sites’ number of RSS subscribers (if publicized) as well as the freshness of its content. Then, you can reach out to the bloggers (using info found on the site or a “Contact Us” form) with an email that includes a description of the contest, a coded link to the landing page, a link to the stats page, and a link to a promo ad.

Remember your members

While these bloggers will hopefully drive new subscribers, don’t forget to let the current members of your virtual fan club enter as well. The contest deserves at least a mention in your email newsletter, Twitter feed, Facebook group, social networks, weekly coffee klatch, Pinochle tournaments, and any other place you regularly communicate with your most loyal customers. Not only are you deepening your relationship with existing customers, making it easy for them to pass the contest on to friends is another cost-effective, viral way to grow your list.

Rinse, wash, repeat

If you do not prevent multiple signups, you will have to scrub your list of duplicates. You may also want to remind new subscribers why they are receiving your email newsletter (“Thank you for entering our contest and signing up for…”). Include an easy way to unsubscribe, a must for the CAN-SPAM Act, since some may have focused more on your prize than the fact that they were also signing up for an email newsletter. This is also a way for your least motivated list members to self-select and get removed before too many of them hit the “SPAM” button and hinder your deliverability.

After you’ve counted all your new subscribers, look at your metrics to see what you could have done better. And then, start another contest with your newfound knowledge pushing you to even greater success.

For a real-world example of a marketer that used these tactics to grow a small email list to 20 times its previous size, turn to page 129 of the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. MarketingExperiments blog readers can receive a $100 discount.

And for a more in-depth look at making email and social media deliver for your bottom line, check out Email Summit ’10 in Miami from January 20-22. PLUS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will teach a Pre-Summit Live Email Optimization Workshop to help you maximize your email capture rate and quality. Register by January 8 to receive an early bird discount of $200.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/ / CC BY 2.0

Email Marketing: Building Valuable Subscriber Lists on the Cheap

Filed Under: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights Tagged With: , , ,

Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

December 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This is the first of eight articles that cover making money online. Is it really possible to make money online? Sure it is. The most important elements are belief and understanding. It’s not rocket science. All you have to do is understand how things fit together. So, to kick off the series we’ll start by talking about making money online using affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is essentially the process of promoting someone else’s products or services in exchange for a commission on the final sale. It really is a new spin on the traditional form of selling that has been around for ages. The new part of the process though is that technology has made it possible to track a single sale back to the person who made the referral.

Imagine that you could get a nickel for all the times you recommended a restaurant, a movie, or a car to one of your friends. You’d be rich right, if not at least a little better off financially than you are today. Well, online it’s possible for you to get a commission on referrals you make to someone.

Now, I’d like to tell you that the process is as simple as just telling your buddy to go see the new James Bond movie, or telling them to order the steak at your favorite steak house, but there’s a little more to it than that. Just as you build up trust with your friend through small daily interactions, so do you build trust with your online audience. It’s only once you have that trust that you can turn it into referrals that make commissions.

But don’t fear the process of building a site, publishing content, and gaining trust. It isn’t rocket science. A lot of people have done it and so can you. All you have to do is be willing to believe that you can do it and then actually spend the time doing it.

Here are five things you can do to get started.

  1. Pick a topic to write about – choose a topic you are passionate about so that you’ll have the strength to continue writing about the topic even when things get tough.
  2. Start a blog – start capturing your thoughts so that you can share them with others. Blogs are the replacement for traditional sources of publishing. Writing on a blog makes your words available to millions of people all around the world. That’s a big audience and if you only capture one percent, that’s still a lot of people.
  3. Write about what you know – every one knows something and has something they can share with others. If the information you publish helps someone else solve a problem or save time by short cutting a process then all the better. If you don’t know how to do something, then interview someone who does. Expert interviews are the best way to learn something new while creating content for your website at the same time.
  4. Identify products and services you want to promote – be sure to promote products and services that you truly find valuable or think your audience will find valuable. Promoting something just for the sake of promoting it won’t get you anything.
  5. Be consistent and seek to add value for your readers – Stephen Covey say we should seek first to understand and then be understood. Take the same perspective with your readers. If they find value in what you share with them, they will want to know more about you and what you have to say. This will lead to more sales and better conversions. So, make everything about them and then they will reward you.

The rest is rinse repeat with a few tips and tricks picked up here and there along the way. What’s really important to remember is that you can do it. You already do it for free offline. The only difference is that online you can get paid to do what you already do.

If you’re stuck on how to choose a topic, then take the plunge and enroll in a course that teaches you step by step how to become an affiliate marketer. It will be well worth the money. In most cases, all you need is one idea to make the course worth the admission fee. Of course, you can always join the other members of Open Source Marketer who are getting the information they need to succeed with affiliate marketing.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at selling products and services directly off of your website. Sometimes that means having a physical inventory, and sometime it means having a digital library of products to offer. What you sell is really up to you, but then we’ll talk about all that tomorrow.

Dig it, grove it, own it,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With:

8 Ways To Make Money Online

December 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Never before have we lived in a time where someone can have an idea, set up a website, and turn it into a profit all without leaving their home. These days, with a little bit of focus and effort an industrious person can make money online, no problem.

To help emphasize this point, here are some of the ways we’ll discuss as part of a new article series on making money online.

  • Affiliate marketing – promoting and selling someone elses services online is one of the easiest way to earn a commission for your sales efforts online.
  • Direct sales – selling products or services directly off of your website is a solid way to make money online.
  • Drop shipping – selling products or services that someone else offers and then having them ship orders to your customers is an easy way to make money online without carrying an inventory.
  • Membership sites – we have transitioned from being a manufacturing economy to an information based economy. If you can turn what you know into what someone else will pay for then you have a nice formula for success.
  • Ad networks – advertisers are eager to get their products and services in front of the right audience. The easiest way for them to do this is by creating ad campaigns using ad networks. You’ve seen examples of this in the form of banner ads on websites.
  • Text link ads – search engines see links as a way of determining website value. Selling text links on your website has become an easy way to make money on your website.
  • Paid reviews – writing a review about someone’s products or services is an easy way for an advertiser to buy the trust of your audience. Selling paid reviews is an easy way to make money online.
  • Direct sponsorships – selling ads directly on your website is a profitable way to make money from your online efforts. This is different than having ad network banners on your website, because unlike ad network ads, you get to keep 100% of the ad revenue that comes in from selling ads directly on your website.

In the next series of articles we’ll talk about the pros and cons of each of these revenue streams and we’ll discuss ways you can implement these money making ideas into your website to start making money online.

To kick off the series, tomorrow’s article will discuss affiliate marketing and how you can turn your blog into a publishing empire that makes money just by using the words that are commonly found in the dictionary.

Let’s do this thing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Read Part 1 – How To Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Become an Open Source Marketer

8 Ways To Make Money Online

Filed Under: Getting Started Tagged With:

Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contest

December 2, 2009 By 1 Comment

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

  • When will their list get irritated?
  • How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
  • At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

    Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH
    Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH
    Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH
    Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH
    Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH
    Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH
    Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

email sends graph Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contestResults: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

  1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
    1. 1-2 per month
    2. 3-5 per month
    3. 6-9 per month
    4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Test Your Marketer’s Gut: Email frequency contest

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, ECommerce, Email Marketing, General, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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