MarketingSherpa Blog

The Boston Globe has been in the content business for a long time. The newspaper published its first edition on March 4, 1872. Now in the digital age, it offers a free online version. At the end of last year, the company decided to include a premium, subscription-based digital version as well.

This blog post reveals an early, inside look at the approach The Boston Globe is taking to launch a paywall, complete with an honest look at a few bumps the marketing team hit along the way.

Peter Doucette, executive director of circulation, sales and marketing, The Boston Globe, will present further information about the newspaper’s marketing efforts at the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Denver, June 11-14.

THE CHALLENGE

The marketing challenge for The Boston Globe is maintaining two Internet offerings, one free and one paid.

Peter says the issue is to grow digital consumer revenue while at the same time maintain and grow digital advertising revenue.

“In the end, how do you take a prospect and turn them into a customer?” he asks.

  Read more…

Landing pages get a lot of love. Here at MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments we often write about landing page optimization, and offer case studies on how marketers are testing and improving landing page performance. And landing pages deserve all that attention because often those pages are the direct connection between a marketing campaign and a closed deal. We think so highly of landing pages at MarketingSherpa we just released a publication dedicated to LPs — the 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report.

The homepage is a channel, not a destination

But because landing pages command so much real and virtual ink, the homepage can seem neglected. The first thing to consider is the homepage is unique to a website. For companies that only offer one product or service, the homepage may be no different than a landing page.

But companies with many products, services, divisions, etc., must look at homepages as a drastically different animal than a landing page. Unlike the landing page where you want to get website visitors to the LP, the homepage is channel where your goal is to get the visitor through the page.

The homepage is possibly the toughest page on a website to test because it “serves many masters” and typically has multiple objectives to achieve.

The usual elements in a homepage to test do overlap with landing pages:

• Eye path direction
• Strength of value proposition
• Color combination
• Image relevance

And testing a homepage involves five basic steps:

Click to enlarge

You may notice one word features prominently in each step — objectives. Homepage objectives should be broken into three categories:

1. Primary — these are long-term and should have high revenue potential
2. Major — short-term and are typically tied to a marketing campaign or other internal need
3. Minor — functionally necessary elements to the page such as navigation or legal copy

Taking a closer look at homepages, how they differ from landing pages and how tricky they are to actually test and optimize, caused one chart from the Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report to really stand out.

Click to enlarge

Boris Grinkot, Associate Director of Product Development, MECLABS, is the author the Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report and he took a few moments to share his thoughts on homepage optimization and metrics.

Before we get into the questions, here’s a quote from the report (I highlighted the final sentence):

A critical issue becomes the quality of the traffic that the homepage sends into the website. The quality of the traffic is broadly the degree of match between the visitor and the offer – in other words, the predisposition to convert. Reducing bounce rate may be a short-sighted key metric if more visitors get through, yet those are not the visitors that would ever be interested in becoming customers. Dedicating significant page real estate to a $10 gift card offer can explode the clickthrough rate (and conversely, minimize bounces), but it may turn away visitors exploring a multimillion dollar RFP.

In your LPO Benchmark Report, you mention the homepage is possibly the most difficult page for designing a test …

Boris Grinkot: Measurement on the homepage is complicated because so many things typically happen between it and the conversion step. The general point is that when looking at the funnel holistically, a test on the homepage can affect different metrics differently, and sometimes you can get contradictory results — bounce rate reduced = good, conversion rate reduced = bad.

The homepage as any entrance page acts as a filter, and changing it does not only linearly affect clickthroughs to the rest of the funnel, but can affect the quality of visitors that click through — in other words, the segments.

So, what metrics are most important when testing a homepage?

BG: It’s important that marketers monitor several different metrics to get a complete picture of what’s going on. Bounce rate or clickthrough rate measures what happens immediately on the homepage, or wherever it’s measured, but misses how this page affects the rest of the funnel. Overall conversion rate (CR) measures performance of the site as a whole, but ignores where the leaks might be.

More intricate measurement — such as using “active segments” or “goals” — can tell you what happens with visitors who viewed a particular page, meaning that a virtual segment is created based on what the visitor experienced. Segment-specific CR can be much more meaningful because it takes specific page(s) into account.

Boris Grinkot will be providing insights from his Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report and moderating a panel on “Overcoming institutional barriers to optimization implementation” at the first MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit coming up June 1-3 in Atlanta.

Related Resources

Homepages Optimized web clinic

Homepage Optimization: How sharing ideas can lead to more diverse radical redesigns

Homepage Optimization: How a more logical eye-path led to 59% increase in conversions

Homepage Optimization: Radical redesign ideas for multivariable testing

B2C Testing: A discount airline looks to increase conversion

(Members library) — Office Depot Site Overhaul Lifts Conversions 10%: 7 Tactics to Target High-Impact Improvements

I love hearing about Google’s early days and its meteoric rise. When National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” segment ran an interview with New York Times columnist Randall Stross, author of Planet Google, I was all ears.

Much of the interview was old news for search marketers, but I heard some good tidbits:

Read more…

The “should all content be free?” bandwagon has come around again, this time kick started by a Wired magazine cover article based on a forthcoming book by editor Chris Anderson.

The timing is kinda weird. Back when this idea was initially red-hot, the economy was, too. That way, happily bedazzled advertisers would foot the bill for all that content. The last time the economy and ad revenues were tanking in 2001-2002, however, paid content was all the rage. Otherwise, much more of the Web would have gone out of business….

If you are wondering what the reality is beneath the hype, here’s what I’ve learned from Sherpa Case Studies and personal experience leading a partly free/partly paid content company all these years:

#1. Ad-based content nearly inevitably gets crappy.

Media companies have been fighting this battle for eons. Their primary customers are the advertisers. Advertisers frequently want some type of control over the content they sponsor and, even when advertisers don’t push for changes, media companies pro-actively water down content for fear of offending sponsors. (It’s middle-management syndrome; you never risk anything that might upset the CEO even when the CEO, if asked, might approve more radical things than you imagine.)

Big trade shows have a similar problem – exhibitors nearly always push for speaking gigs and, if booth sales exceed ticket revenues, show programmers cave in. Which is why you hear so many sales pitches from show podiums instead of useful content.

Although they’re not reacting directly to advertiser pressure, content sites supported by Google AdSense revenues now often change the way they write headlines and even the types of stories and content they post to get more search traffic and then clicks on more expensive keywords. They’re serving the ‘bots more than they serve their readers.

So, free or partly free content winds up being less valuable to the consumer. Luckily, this truth helps the little-known-but-booming, *multi-billion* dollar subscription industry. More than 1,000 Web sites, including the massive Ancestry.com, non-profit ConsumerReports.org and tiny but influential eRobertParker.com, make most or all of their revenues through quality content dedicated to serving their subscribers’ needs instead of advertisers’. (If you’d like to learn more about the subscription industry, see link below.)

#2. Remove Registration Barriers to “Free” Content Online

Countless marketers have told me: “Our prospects understand that giving their contact information is the price they should pay for free access to our wonderful content.” Yeah, well, not always.

Actually, more often, the marketer is paying a price for that registration barrier. You are paying 90% or more for your possible audience, viral pass-alongs, marketplace education, and brand growth in exchange for the contact information of 10% or less of the prospects who are interested in your content. Oh, and of those 10% who do hand over that “price” for your content, roughly 50% will cheat you in some way with a false name, phone number or email address.

You’re also paying for those “leads” with 100% off your possible search engine spider visits to that content (spiders don’t fill out registration forms) and any resulting SEO traffic the related search rankings could have given your content.

Example: Consultant and professional speaker David Meerman Scott offers a ‘New Rules of PR’ eBook as a direct PDF download at his site without requiring registration of any kind. As a result, the eBook has been downloaded more than 250,000 times, making it one of the most read business white papers in history. The ultimate impact on David’s business has been very cash-flow positive.

#3. If you’re offering free content as a promotional exercise, don’t just do it virtually

Easy come, easy go. People don’t take things they get for free as seriously as they take things they pay for; it’s more disposable content. People also don’t remember online content or PDF content (anything they’ve only seen on a PC screen, perhaps fleetingly, for very long.

To be remembered, your content has to re-engage the consumer multiple times and, preferably, engage more physical senses than virtual content can alone. Consider offering your free content users the chance to get a hard copy (printed copy of a catalog or white paper, or a DVD of a video) of your “free” content. You may be surprised at how many prospects leap at the chance and at how well they ultimately convert into becoming paid customers for your real product or services.

Plus, offering people a mailed copy gives you a much better excuse for soliciting name and address. If your prospect wants the electronic version only, then they can get it without registering. But if they want the convenience and value of a printed version, they will certainly fill out a form for you and maybe even pay a couple of bucks for shipping and handling.

#4. “New” Can Beat “Free”

Since the 1930s, advertising copywriters have known a rule: “Free” is one of the most powerful words in advertising. But the word “New” can often work better for you. Why? “New” is nearly as powerful a response generator and it has the added benefit of not attracting that freebie-seeking demographic who’ll never pay for anything. Tire kickers don’t do anyone’s business any good – only qualified prospects do.
The word “Exclusive” can sometimes work as well as “New” too. So, your options are not totally limited.

So, those are my lessons. Hope they help you. Please write in and let me know what your free content lessons are too. We’re all in this “revolution” together!

Useful Related Links to this Blog:

Wired Magazine Free Article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit – a MarketingSherpa closed-door event now in its 8th year, held every may in NYC for top executives at Subscription Web sites and software businesses. For agenda and dates:
http://www.sherpastore.com/SellingSubscriptions2008.html?1150

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of PR ebook download page
http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/products_ebooks.htm