MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

One of the best insights into creativity I’ve ever discovered was scrawled into a Plexiglas window on a subway train.

“Boring is a choice,” the etching read.

As we zoomed through the dark tunnels, I wondered if the person responsible for the message was, in fact, so bored on their train ride that a little vandalism was just what the doctor ordered to cure their traveling blues.

While I’m not a proponent for vandalism, I do believe in the power held in those four simple words.

Boring is a choice.

I say this because boring marketing is often a pain point for B2B marketers.

Admittedly, it’s tough to create excitement around content in general, so I understand the struggle to find that wild spark in niche markets or with products and services that don’t seem to have an ounce of sexy on their surface.

In today’s post, I wanted to share a few examples from recent case studies of B2B email campaigns that used references to pop culture or “pop creative” to generate leads and win their battles with boring that you can use to aid your creative efforts.

Tennant invites prospects to take a ride on the wild side

When new products and services are set for market, the pressure is on as Chris Hawver, Team Leader, Americas, Tennant, can attest.

Tennant manufactures and sells floor cleaning equipment, ranging from the office vacuum to a massive street sweeper.

As Chris explained, its quarterly newsletter prior to the launch of two new products was on autopilot with no real strategy around the tactic.

“In quickly studying all of the campaigns of various manufacturers — including our competitors — it was like, ‘We’ve got to do something radically different,’” Chris explained.

Tennant added a few new members to its marketing team and brainstormed an email campaign using copy inspired by motorcycle culture that would appeal to the interest of Tennant’s customer base.

Chris, who will be presenting at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 next week, also found appeal in the campaign as an avid motorcyclist and founder of a nonprofit rider’s safety organization.

Results

The campaign increased open rates by 32.5% and added 20 demo requests to Tennant’s pipeline. The campaign was so successful, the company’s Australia team utilized creative in its own email campaign and a magazine ad.

To learn more about Tennant’s campaign, check out the MarketingSherpa case study, “Customer-centric Marketing: Adding fun to B2B.”

SunGard Availability Services ties zombie apocalypse to IT disaster survival

If there is an unsung beauty of using pop creative, it’s in the flexibility as one IT disaster company discovered.

SunGard’s zombie survival campaign was a multichannel marketing effort that used emails, a landing page, direct mail and social media to generate buzz – and a few leads. All of the campaign’s components served to deliver core messaging about SunGard’s products and services.

Results

The Disaster Recovery/Managed Recovery Program campaign created a 3% increase in click-to-open rates among president and owner titles, and the retargeting email reactivated 2% of contacts who had not interacted with SunGard in six months.

To learn more about SunGard’s campaign, check out the MarketingSherpa case study, “Multichannel Marketing: IT company’s zombie-themed campaign increases CTO 3% at president, owner level.”

If you’re interested, Christine Nurnberger, Vice President, Marketing, SunGard Availability Services, will also be speaking at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, presenting more results from this campaign.

Pop creative is about connecting with people

You can look at the results of these two campaigns and take away the thought that the folks who help keep things clean around the office are perhaps bikers and your boss may be a fan of “The Walking Dead.”

Or, we can look a little deeper and consider the idea that pop creative, although not the best strategy for everyone, proves the point that good marketing is about making a connection with real people.

How you make those connections depends on the risks you’re willing to take.

It’s a choice to think outside the box and connect with others.

Lest we forget, boring is always a choice.

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At some point in your marketing career, you’ve had a moment of artificial marketing brilliance.

It was a moment where you suspected your customers might respond better to a shorter form or a bigger and more colorful call-to-action button inviting them to a unique experience.

You might have even had the sneaking suspicion that changing some of the value copy on your homepage would boost sales of your product or service because no other competitor can boast figures close to your product’s success rate.

So, you make changes as your gut tells you, “Of course this will work.”

Afterwards, you kick back to watch the ROI roll in.

And then, it happens.

Your brilliant idea bombs in glorious fashion and you’re left scratching your head.

If your marketing is driven by intuition, at some point, you are going to fail and it’s one of the best things that can happen for your customers and your career. Read on to find out why.

Failure starts at relying on your gut

Many marketers use gut instinct in hopes of delivering optimal results, but when they fall short of expected results, those marketers never fully understand why.

But, if we use the hypothetical situation above, some clues emerge that can help us understand what leads to failure.

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), when marketers were asked …

Q: Instead of analytics data to make marketing decisions, we rely on the following:

Nearly half (42%) responded with gut instincts, followed by historical spending trends.

So, with almost half of marketers proclaiming instinct and prior spending as their decision engines, let’s fill in the blanks with a few primary sources of inspiration:

• Case studies performed by other companies
• Best practices picked up along the way
• Marketing research

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these resources because, let’s face it, it’s easier to borrow from a seemingly good idea than it is to create a new one from scratch.

The inherent problem is not where you get an idea. The problem is how you intend to use it.

This is the point at which many marketing campaigns were doomed to underperform because ideas untested are always at the mercy of uncertainty.

Life beyond using your gut

Your gut failed you … now what?

One of the best career moves you can make is to move away from gut instinct marketing and begin using an evidence-based approach that is methodical and systematic. Chances are, you’re going to have some questions after your first radical redesign where shorter landing pages resulted in a 10% decrease in clickthrough.

Did the larger hero image take away from the copy? Was the award for customer satisfaction from 2004 recent enough to provide credibility? What turned the audience away?

You’ll also have questions if your redesign brought you a 5% lift in clickthrough. You might even be pretty content and let things rest, even if you could do better.

Those strokes of “marketing brilliance” are coming from a different source – online testing results that can be used to build a customer knowledge base.

Did your customers like your new vivid red button? Did they respond well to reading you were the only company in your field to offer one-on-one tutorials with an expert?

If you changed the eye-path on the page, could you have achieved a 10% lift? 20%?

The inevitable question – Why?

You must realize that success and failure lead to an inevitable conclusion in marketing – you have to test to truly discover, “Why?”

You can try to isolate the factors that seemingly impacted your audience, or you can test them and measure their performance to know for sure.

Understanding the “why” of customer behavior is really the product of methodical trial and error through testing, discovering and optimizing what you think works …

And then, it’s time for more testing.

Both the small gains and big flops lead you to learning more about your customers, a path riddled with failure, success and discovery, that no gut instinct on the planet can come close to.

Read more…

With A/B testing, you’re examining and exploring the mind of the customer. You’re learning about your customers and you’re the one asking the questions. However, the newly released MECLABS Online Testing Course explains in great detail why you can’t ask just any question to get the answers you need.

There’s a formula for what goes into that question, and it’s all built around one imperative word.

Which.

The word “which” demands specifics and precision, allowing you to focus on something that can be answered with a split test.

Let’s expand this further by looking at one of the key principles Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, discussed in Session 2 of the course.

• A properly framed research question is a question of “which” and sets out to identify an alternative (treatment) that performs better than the control.

The guiding force of online testing is seeking to better predict the behavior of your customers. To achieve this, you need a research question to tests your hypothesis.

“If your research question is framed wrong, the entire outcome of the test is dubious because you haven’t approached it properly,” Flint said.

Below are some of the examples presented in the course that convey the importance of this essential word.

Not this: What is the best price for product X?

This isn’t specific. The question doesn’t set out particular items to test. “Best price” could be anything.

But this: Which of these three price points is best for product X?

This utilizes the imperative “which.” The implementation of “these three price points” gives you three precise price points to test.

Not this: Why am I losing customers in the last step of my checkout process?

Sure, you may ultimately want to discover why it is you’re losing those customers, but you must start out smaller. This question doesn’t narrow anything down. The last step of the checkout process is quite complicated and there isn’t just one element present.

But this: Eliminating which form element best reduces customer drop-off?

There’s the “which” again. The “form element” is the metric allowing you to compare one specific element to another. This gives you a particular element to test rather than just presenting a broad idea.

Read more…

A common question we often hear about social media is “I put some social media elements onto my page and have not seen much of a difference …”

I’m sure you can relate, because social media icons are everywhere. On landing pages. In emails. Heck, I even saw some on a billboard while I was driving the other day.

Now, on behalf of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their investors, I’d first like to thank you marketers of the world for all of that free co-op advertising.

All kidding aside, let me throw the questions back at you to help you get the most value from your sharing icons. In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll focus on three questions you should ask yourself about your company’s use of social media icons.

Question #1. Should we be using social media icons?

All jokes about free advertising aside, most marketers likely will find some value in using social media icons. And, here’s the key. While the value might not be great, it is likely higher than the cost.

Because, frankly, as marketing tactics go, simply slapping a few social media icons or sharing buttons on a landing page is fairly easy to do.  Almost any value you get creates an ROI since it is higher than the minimal cost involved.

For example, AT&T added Facebook and Twitter icons into an email newsletter.

This was one small part of a program that helped the AT&T Developer Program increase its Twitter audience 136% and Facebook audience 113%.

Of course, as you’ll see in the case study above, the team at AT&T did much more than just add a few icons to an email to get that lift. But since the cost, in both IT execution to add the buttons and real estate on the email, was likely so low, and it certainly couldn’t have hurt their efforts, why not add social media icons?

Well, here’s why not. For most brands, the answer is simple: not every brand needs or should be using social media icons and sharing buttons. For example, I interviewed Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing, firstSTREET, in the MarketingSherpa webinar “Optimization: A discussion about an e-commerce company’s 500% sales increase.”

“In our case given our target market, you’re looking at an age 75+ customer, they’re not big social users. And, the ones who are on social media, they really just want to see pictures of their grandkids and their kids. So they’re not going to be as interactive in the social world. So from our standpoint, it’s pretty low on the priority list. There are no social buttons on this website,” Steve said.

He went on to share, “We’ve tested a little bit of that on some of our other properties. As baby boomers, the younger part that grew up with some social media lives grow older, yes, that will get more important. For my particular target market at this point in time, it doesn’t help.”

Question #2. Which social media icons should we use?

Ask your audience in direct conversations, in surveys, through customer service interactions and other customer-facing employees: what social networks do they use?

Then, be present on those platforms. See how they’re using social media.

And, look at your analytics.

Here on the MarketingSherpa blog, you’ll notice the prime social sharing button we use is from Twitter.

That’s because when we looked at our analytics, more inbound traffic came from Twitter than from any other social network.

You might also notice, at the bottom of our blog posts, we have social media sharing icons as well. 

That’s because the rest of our inbound social network traffic came from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious and Digg.

Your analytics won’t be foolproof. Over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy (we receive more Twitter traffic because we encourage the audience to share on Twitter), but combining your analytics with active listening to your audience through many means will at least get you in the ballpark of how they want to interact with your brand using social media.

Read more…

One of my responsibilities as a Research Analyst is to manage ongoing test planning with our Research Partners and at times, keeping tests running smoothly can be a challenge.

This is especially true when you consider testing is not a static event – it’s more like a living, breathing continuous cycle of motion.

But even with so many moving parts, effectively managing test plans can be made a little easier with two proven key factors for success – planning and preparation.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is three tips for test planning management. Our goal is to give marketers a few simple best practices to help keep their testing queue in good order.

Step #1. Create

Creating a universal test planner everyone on your team can access is a great place to start.

For our research team, we created a universal test planner including:

• Results from prior testing with our Research Partner
• Current active tests
• Any future testing planned
• A list of test statuses definitions that everyone on the team understands – (test active, test complete, inconclusive, etc.)
• A brief description of what is being tested (call-to-action button test, value copy test, etc.)
• A list of who is responsible for each task in the test plan

Step#2. Organize

As I mentioned in the previous step, the status of a test can change and, based on the results, so will the ideas and priorities for future testing.

Some tests will move forward in the queue, and others will be pushed back to a later time.

So, to help keep our team informed of changes in the testing environment, we update the planner throughout the day and in real time during brainstorming sessions based on results and Partner feedback.

This allows us to focus our research and testing strategy efforts on expanding on discoveries versus chasing our tails to keep up-to-date.

Read more…

One of the most common questions and debates we have here at MECLABS is, “How radical do we go?”

Let me explain – for every test, we have an objective we’re trying to accomplish and a set of metrics we’ll use to judge the performance and success of the test. If we “go radical” and change lots of different elements on the page, we might hit it big, or we might tank. But, either way, we wouldn’t know the true impact of any specific change.

If we “go conservative,” we’ll be able to directly tell what the impact of changing a specific element was, ensuring we learn something, but might never be able to hit that lofty conversion goal our team has set.

So, which approach is right? Well, the short answer is they both are. The long answer is the rest of this post.

The right blend between radical and conservative tests

That may sound like a cop out, but a successful test strategy needs to find the right blend between radical and conservative tests. Let’s try an analogy …

Let’s say you just started playing baseball. You’ve had batting practice with your coach and just can’t seem to connect on any pitches. So, your coach starts tweaking. Widen your stance. Lift your elbow. Tilt your head. Tweak, tweak, tweak. But you’re still not hitting anything.

Then, you try something radical. You walk to the other side of the plate and take the first pitch into the outfield. Turns out you bat lefty. That would have been good to know an hour ago. Chances are, you were never going to succeed with small tweaks, because there was something fundamentally wrong with your approach.

The same goes for testing. If you’re making progress with small tweaks, a headline here, button color there, you may never reach your true potential.

We always want to get a solid learning from every test we perform, but looking back through the archives, a lot of the largest wins we’ve ever achieved don’t come from single factorial tests, or variable clusters where we try to focus in on specific elements of the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic like friction or value.

Instead, they come from radical redesigns, where we test a totally new approach or simultaneously improve numerous elements we identified as issues with the page.

Read more…

At MarketingSherpa, we are often asked:

• Are my open rates low?
• What is the ideal conversion rate?
• Why do I have a high unsubscribe rate and how can I improve it?

Unfortunately, these are the marketing equivalents of “What’s the meaning of life?” While some blogs might have a pithy response with the perfect solution usually involving the product they sell, much like the meaning of life question, the answer likely varies based on your unique situation.

But … I can help you answer these types of questions for yourself, by answering this question we received from Jim on a recent email marketing webinar …

• What is the biggest mistake people are making in today’s environment?

To me, every marketing campaign (and really, everything we do in life) can be improved by taking these three steps …

1. Learn
2. Test
3. Iterate

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, I’m going to focus on the “learn” step, because I sometimes feel marketers don’t cast a wide enough net during this crucial step. And, that’s what we do here at MarketingSherpa – we help you learn.

Of course, once you have new ideas about what might work for your company, test them. In this way, you can try some really radical ideas to drastically improve results while mitigating risk. Our sister site, MarketingExperiments, can teach you more about testing.

And, of course, iterate. Or as the shampoo marketers like to say – repeat. What works now will not necessarily work in the future. The marketplace is not static. You must constantly learn new ideas, and try them out.

Learn

Here’s where MarketingSherpa can help. We can give you examples of what other marketers have learned through case studies and how-to articles, webinars, Benchmark Reports and blog posts such as this one.

When we look for case studies to write, we cast our net far and wide. This is where some marketers struggle. Unless the case study subject is from the same exact niche they serve, sometimes they struggle in finding the transferable principles.

On the flip side, when the case study is about a subject from the same exact niche, sometimes marketers overemphasize whether these lessons will work for them. Even if they are in the same niche, after all, they may have a very different value proposition.

So, as you try to address these challenges, ask yourself:

• How are you learning from other marketers?
• What biases are holding you back from learning from other marketers?
• Are you overvaluing marketing tactics your competitors are doing simply because you’re in the same space?
• On the flip side, do you undervalue tactics your competitor is doing because they “play for a different team?”
• Do you look outside of your particular industry to bring new marketing ideas to your space?
• What biases do you hold against tactics other marketers use outside your industry (B2B vs. B2C, for-profit vs. nonprofit vs. political)?
• What biases do you hold against tactics other marketers use based on your personal opinion of their product, service or cause?

So, let me give you some examples …

In Thursday’s MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Newsletter, we distributed a case study called “Search Engine Marketing: E-commerce site turns an 82% bounce rate around for a 400% conversion increase.” I really like this case study because it covers one of those common, all-encompassing questions we often receive:

• Why does my landing page have a high bounce rate?

Learn from marketers in any industry

This case study is about how Tops Products answered that question, and the resulting improvement in conversion rate. If a marketer saw the case study was about an office supply company, and they were perhaps a B2B service provider or a brick-and-mortar store, they might overlook the key transferable principles.

Tops Products was getting a huge bounce rate because the great inbound link it was sending people to the wrong page. After using a 301 redirect, Tops Products reduced bounce rate 39% and increased conversion 400%. That lesson is helpful to marketers in any industry.

Read more…

In part one of this blog post, Rick Jensen, Senior Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Constant Contact, provided his thoughts on where SMB marketers should focus their efforts in 2013.

Both of these MarketingSherpa Blog posts were prompted by research from AWeber, which found 68% of small businesses plan on increasing the marketing budget in 2013. That prompted me to reach out to experts in the SMB sector for tips and tactics specific for SMB marketers.

Today’s post offers more details from the AWeber research, along with more insight from industry experts.

The AWeber research was conducted during November and December of 2012, via an interstitial greeting AWeber customers received when logging into the company’s system. Visitors were invited to participate in the research, and 3,159 completed the survey. The methodology included randomized multiple choice options presented to respondents.

Here is an infographic summarizing the results of the survey:

Data and infographic by AWeber

Read more…

During our second annual MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments Optimization Summit 2012 two weeks ago in Denver, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingSherpa), presented some interesting data points on brand-new MECLABS research conducted by Meghan Lockwood, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, for the upcoming MarketingSherpa Website Optimization Benchmark Report.

I live blogged this material for MarketingExperiments, but I thought the research was worth sharing with our SherpaBlog readers as well.

One data point from this research from our Website Optimization Survey, which will be presented in an upcoming benchmark report, really stood out to me:

Click to enlarge

  Read more…

“What is the objective of this page?” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin asked audience member Maile Keone at the Pre-Optimization Summit LPO Workshop in Denver.

“To get people to call.”

The problem is the page isn’t achieving the objective — at least not to the extent the marketers (including Maile) at VacationRoost want it to.

The page was plastered on two huge screens at the front of the room here at the Denver Marriott Tech Center with 150 marketers from around the world scrutinizing it.

Click to enlarge

So, to help Maile and her team from VacationRoost, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin offered some recommendations for ways to improve the page.

To begin, we need to ask three critical questions from the perspective of the customer, Dr. McGlaughlin noted:

1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it?

When we ask these questions, three optimization recommendations for the page come to mind.

  Read more…