MarketingSherpa Blog

Here are answers to questions SuperFunnel Cohort members put in the chat of recent MEC200 and MEC300 LiveClasses for ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel (feel free to register at that link to join us for an upcoming MECLABS LiveClass).

How many impressions or how much reach do we need for statistical significance?

I can’t give you a specific number, because the answer will vary based on several factors (described below). Also, MECLABS SuperFunnel Cohort members now have access to a Simplified Test Protocol in their Hub, and you can use that tool to calculate these numbers, as shown in Wednesday’s LiveClass.

But I included the question in this blog post because I thought it would be helpful to explain the factors that go into this calculation. And to be clear, I’m not the math guy here. So I won’t get into the formulas and calculations. However, a basic understanding of these factors has always helped me better understand marketing experimentation, and hopefully it will help you as well.

First of all, why do we even care about statistical significance in marketing experimentation? When we run a marketing test, essentially we are trying to measure a small group to learn lessons that would be applicable to all potential customers – take a lesson from this group, and apply it to everyone else.

Statistical significance helps us understand that our test results represent a real difference and aren’t just the result of random chance.

We want to feel like the change in results is because of our own hand. It’s human nature. A better headline on the treatment landing page, or a better offer. And we can see the results with our own eyes, so it is very hard to understand that a 10% conversion rate may not really be any different than an 8% conversion rate.

But it may just be randomness. “Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness,” Dr. Leonard Mlodinow explains in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

You can see the effect of randomness for yourself if you run a double control experiment – split traffic to two identical landing pages and even though they are exactly the same, they will likely get a different number of conversions.

We fight randomness with statistical significance. The key numbers we want to know to determine statistical significance are:

• Sample size – How many people see your message?
• Conversions – How many people act on your message?
• Number of treatments – For example, are you testing two different landing pages, or four?
• Level of confidence – Based on those numbers, how sure can you be that there really is a difference between your treatments?

And this is the reason I cannot give you a standard answer for the number of impressions you need to reach statistical significance – because of these multiple factors.

I’ll give you an (extreme) example. Let’s say your sample size is 100 and you have four treatments. That means, each landing page was visited by 25 people. Three of the landing pages each get three conversions, and the other landing page gets four conversions. Since so few people saw these pages and the difference in conversions is so small, how confident are you that they are different? Or perhaps you randomly had one more motivated person in that last group that gave you the extra conversion.

And this assumes an even traffic split, which you may not want to do based on how concerned you are about the change you are making. As we teach in How to Plan Landing Page Tests: 6 Steps to Guide Your Process, “Using an uneven traffic split is helpful when your team is testing major changes that could impact brand perception or another area of your business. Although the results will take longer to reach statistical significance, the test is less likely to have an immediate negative impact on business.”

Now, let’s take another extreme example. Say your sample size is 10,000,000 and you have just a control and a treatment. The control gets 11 conversions, but the treatment gets 842,957 conversions. In that case, you can be pretty confident that the control and treatment are different.

But there is another number at play here – Level of Confidence (LoC). When we say there is a statistically significant difference, it is at a specific Level of Confidence. How sure do you want to be that the control and treatment are different? For marketing experimentation, 95% is the gold standard. But 90%, or even 80% could be a enough if it is a change that likely isn’t going to be harmful, and doesn’t take too many resources to make. And the lower Level of Confidence you are OK with, the lower sample size you need and the less difference in conversions you need to be statistically significant at that LoC.

So is Estimated Minimum Relative Difference our desired/target lift if our test performs as expected?

Once you understand how statistical significance works (as I described in the previous question), the next natural question is – well, how does this affect my business decisions?

The first answer is, this understanding will help you run marketing experiments that are more likely to predict your potential customers’ real-world behavior.

But second answer is – this should impact how you plan and run tests.

This question refers to the Estimated Minimum Relative Difference in the Simplified Test Protocol that SuperFunnel Cohort members receive, specifically in the test planning section that helps you forecast how long to run a test to reach statistical significance. And yes, the Estimated Minimum Relative Difference is the difference in conversion rate you expect between the control and treatment.

As discussed above, the larger this number is, the less samples and time (to get those samples) it takes to run a test.

Which means that companies with a lot of traffic can run tests that reach statistical significance even if they make very small changes. For example, let’s say you’re running a test on the homepage of a major brand, like Google or YouTube, which get billions of visits per month. Even a very small change like button color may be able to reach statistical significance.

But if you have lower traffic and a smaller budget, you likely need to take a bigger swing with your test to find a big enough difference. This does not necessarily mean it has to require major dev work. For example, the headlines “Free courtside March Madness tickets, no credit card required” and “$12,000 upper level March Madness tickets, $400 application fee to see if you qualify” are very quick changes on a landing page. However, they are major changes in the mind of a potential customer and will likely receive very different results.

Which brings us to risk. When you run valid experiments, you decrease the risk in general. Instead of just making a change and hoping for the best, only part of your potential customer base sees the change. So if your change actually leads to a decrease, you learn before shifting your entire business. And you know what caused the decrease in results because you have isolated all the other variables.

But the results from your experiments will never guarantee a result. They will only tell you how likely there will be a difference when you roll out that change to all your customers for a longer period. So if you take that big swing you’ve always wanted to take, and the results aren’t what you expect, that may rein your team in from a major fail.

As we say in Quick Guide to Online Testing: 10 tactics to start or expand your testing process, “If a treatment has a significant increase over the control, it may be worth the risk for the possibility of high reward. However, if the relative difference between treatments is small and the LoC is low, you may decide you are not willing to take that risk.”

With a test running past 4 weeks, how concerned are you about audience contamination between the variants?

Up until now we’ve been talking about a validity threat called sampling distortion effect – failure to collect a sufficient sample size. As discussed, this could mean your marketing experiment results are due to random variability, and not a true difference between how your customers will react to your treatments when rolled out to your entire customer set.

But there are other validity threats as well. A validity threat simply means that a factor other than the change you made – say, different headlines or different CTAs – was the reason for the difference in performance you saw. You are necessarily testing with a small slice of your total addressable market, and you want to ensure that the results have a high probability of replicability – you will see an improvement when you roll out this change to all of your potential customers.

Other validity threats include instrumentation effect – your measurement instrument affecting the results, and selection effect – the mix of customers seeing the treatments do not represent the customers that you will ultimately try to sell to, or in this case, the same customer seeing multiple treatments.

These are the types of validity threats this questioner is referring to. However, I think there is a fairly low (but not zero) chance of these validity threats only coming from running the test (not too much) past four weeks. While we have seen this problem many years ago, most major platforms have gotten pretty good at assigning a visitor to a specific treatment and keeping them there on repeat visits.

That said, people can visit on multiple devices, so the split certainly isn’t perfect. And if your offer is something that calls for many repeat visits, especially from multiple devices (like at home and at work), this may become a bigger validity threat. If this is a concern, I suggest you ask your testing software provider how they mitigate against these validity threats.

However, when I see your question, the validity threat I would worry about most is history effect, an extraneous variable that occurs with the passage of time. And this one is all on you, friend, there is not much your testing software can do to mitigate against it.

As I said, you are trying to isolate your test so the only variables that affect the outcome are the ones you’ve purposefully changed and are intending to test based on your hypothesis. The longer a test runs, the harder this gets. For example, you (or someone else in your organization) may choose to run a promotion during that period. Maybe you can keep a tight lid on promotions for a seven-day test, but can you keep the promotion wolves at bay in your organization for a full two months?

Or you may work at an ecommerce company looking to get some customer wisdom to impact your holiday sales. If you have to test for two months before rolling anything out, you may test in September and October. However, customers may behave very differently earlier in the year than they would in December, when their motivation to purchase a gift near a looming deadline is a much bigger factor.

While a long test makes a history effect more likely, it can occur even during a shorter test. In fact, our most well-known history effect case study occurred during a seven-day experiment because of the NBC television program Dateline. You can read about it (along with info about other validity threats) in the classic MarketingExperiments article Optimization Testing Tested: Validity Threats Beyond Sample Size.

Join us for a Wednesday LiveClass

As I mentioned, these questions came from the chat of recent LiveClasses. You can RSVP now to join us for an upcoming LiveClass. Here are some short videos to give you an idea of what you can learn from a LiveClass…

“If there’s not a strong enough difference in these two Google ads…the difference isn’t going to be stark enough to probably produce a meaningful set of statistics [for a marketing test]…” – Flint McGlaughlin in this 27-second video.

“…but that’s what Daniel was really touching on a moment ago. OK, you’ve got a [marketing] test, you’ve got a hypothesis, but is this really where you want to invest your money? Is this really going to get the most dollars or the most impact for the energy you invest?…” – Flint McGlaughlin, from this 46-second video about finding the most important hypotheses to test.

How far do you have to go to with your marketing to take potential customers from the problem they think they have, to the problem they do have? I discuss this topic while coaching the co-founders of an eyebrow beauty salon training company on their marketing test hypothesis in this 54-second video.

We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish edited excerpts of some of these conversations here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.

Dear MarketingSherpa: Hi there Daniel,

I quite like the sequence you have built, it’s quite relevant and well refined.

With regards to the personal note, very well done. I am guessing you get a mixed bag from this one.

I would like to ask a question, in your opinion, where do you think CRO is in the adoption lifecycle?

As an industry/set of processes do you think it is still early days or are we nearing the end or somewhere in the middle?

From: Kaleb Ufton, Director of Technology and Digital Marketing Strategy, EKOH Marketing

MarketingSherpa responds: The sequence Kaleb is referring to is the welcome email drip sequence, which includes emails written with a direct and personal tone, that marketers receive after subscribing to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

But then he asks a thoughtful and provocative question about conversion rate optimization (CRO). If you’ve read previous Ask MarketingSherpa columns, you know they are usually how-to questions about topics like value proposition communication or finding clients.

Kaleb’s question is more challenging. It essentially requires the ability to predict the future. I needed a little help with this one.

Fortunately, I work every day with one of the pioneers of the conversion rate optimization industry—Flint McGlaughlin. So I walked down the hall to get his take on this question, and here’s what he had to say …

Moving away from just testing pages to testing for new products

I think CRO is in the advanced segment of the first stage and beginning to move into the second. I’ll explain:

When we began our research, no one had a conversion budget; there was no one to hire to do conversion work. There was no training available for conversion. Now companies everywhere hire conversion optimization experts and are testing, but they do it very poorly. Stage 1 has matured to the point where it has become a common practice, but the quality of the execution is definitely lacking.

Tests are often run with major validity errors that no one detects. The testing tools are still primitive, and the biggest problem in the industry is that people don’t know what to test. Having a tool doesn’t help you if you don’t know how to really use it. So I think we are in the advanced segment of Stage 1, and Stage 1 would represent the general adoption of conversion optimization. Clearly some industries are far, far beyond, but in general, things have advanced significantly.

Now, how far do we have to go?

We have a long way to go. Conversion as it relates to personalization is not even close to being executed properly. The next phase in conversion will come through the advanced development of existing technologies. AI (artificial intelligence) is making big promises but delivering far less in practice. There will come a time when it can do more.

In addition, conversion is moving away from just testing pages to testing for new products and also testing for entrepreneurial software rollouts (full stack testing). These are new fields with greater opportunity. I think there is a stage coming where the practice moves to new areas, and then there is a stage coming where technology makes new possibilities.

— Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute (parent organization of MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments), and author of the book The Marketer as Philosopher

Since this question requires essentially making a prediction, I wanted to leverage the wisdom of the crowds and get a few other opinions as well from your marketing peers and CRO practitioners. So here are some other thoughts on the state of the CRO industry …

Read more…

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

Conversion rate optimization, often abbreviated as CRO, is the practice of improving the conversion rate in any advertising, marketing, sales or other business practice that has a goal of getting a person to take an action. (The conversion rate measures the number of prospects who take an action that you’re requesting.)

For example, let’s say you have an email that asks people to click to a landing page to buy a product. CRO would focus on getting more people to click on that email (improving the conversion rate of clickthrough), in addition to getting more people to purchase on the landing page.

CRO (or at least elements of it) is sometimes also referred to as marketing optimization, website optimization, landing page optimization (LPO), growth hacking, optimization and testing, customer experience (CX), usability (UX) or marketing experimentation.

Despite the prevalent use of the word “optimization,” it is a very different discipline from search engine optimization (SEO). CRO is focused on optimizing for human behavior, and SEO is focused on optimizing for machine behavior.

Web design, copywriting and analytics interpretation are key skills that go hand-in-hand with CRO. This is because many CRO changes are either to design or copy. Also, the ability to understand analytics will (1) give ideas on where in the conversion process you should make CRO changes to have the biggest impact, and once you’ve made the changes, (2) how impactful they have been to your conversion goals.

Read more…

“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.”

• Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”

The song was an outlet for bassist Roger Waters to express his dislike for the forceful approach to learning that was popular in the British education system during his youth. This serves as a great analogy for why forcing your customers to register for accounts is not always a good idea.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, I want to demand that you allow your consumers to have their pudding, even if they don’t eat their meat.

But in some cases, I know that “required” just can’t be avoided, so I’ll also share two methods you can try when your company just won’t budge on “leaving the kids alone,” as the song goes.

Make buying easier for users with low motivation

Unless your brand has the near cult-like following of Apple or Coca-Cola, then it’s likely your website will play host to visitors with low motivation.

Now, what will chase away users – and metaphorical British schoolchildren – with low motivation faster than a 12-inch ruler?

Having to submit their information to yet another website!

If a new visitor – most likely an important demographic to your business’ revenue – is forced to commit to an account before they make a purchase on your site, then you could lose this new customer.

Avoid cart abandonment by keeping new users moving through your checkout

Another reason to avoid a required registration is the dreaded cart abandonment.

Combine a visitor with low motivation and subject them to a rather lengthy checkout process, and you are just adding another brick in the wall.

But sometimes, registered accounts simply can’t be avoided for whatever reason …

What do you do then?

Well, it’s all in how you approach a customer with your demands for their data. While I discourage required accounts, consider these two account registration methods from our research that you can test to hopefully increase your sales and minimize cart abandonment:

Method #1. Front-end option

Provide an optional account registration option at the beginning of the checkout process for users with high motivation or brand loyalty.

However, you may need to provide some incentives to convince that user the registration option is in their best interest.

Method #2. Back-end option

Most businesses still need to ask customers to fill out billing and shipping information during the checkout process.

Why not offer customers an opt-in to a registration after their information has been submitted?

This only requires one action from the visitor (a “yes” or “no” answer) and can be placed before or after the completion of the order.

You may also need some additional value copy to convince users that a registration option is in their best interest, but the beauty here is that you’re not making them jump through the same hoop twice.

No matter which option your pick, the goal here is testing your sales funnel to discover the most strategic place for a required account registration if you can’t avoid it.

  Read more…

I’m live blogging at MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco, and attending a brand-side case study with Jacob Baldwin, Search Engine Marketing Manager, One Call Now.

To begin a testing and optimization program, Jacob launched a test on the website with a radical redesign, attempting to improve lead capture. The program was executed sequentially as opposed to A/B split testing.

Jacob said each new homepage version replaced the previous – the marketing team created new treatments and “flipped the switch” to learn how the page would perform.

An important insight from this testing approach  is there isn’t necessarily a need for a complex A/B or multivariate testing program.

The testing program was run on the homepage, and there were several objectives:

• Increase conversion rate
• Increase traffic
• Reduce bounce rate
• Provide niched messaging via enhanced segmentation

Here is the test control and original website:

And, here is the radical redesign treatment:

There were several key differences with the treatment:

• Restructured navigation
• Consolidated calls-to-action (CTAs)
• Single value proposition – no competing headlines on the page
• Trust indicators
• Color palette
• New tag line
• New content

The original homepage, the control in this test, achieved 2.40% lead capture, and the radical redesign treatment pulled in 2.85% lead capture – an 18.75% lift over the control.

Jacob says the radical redesign was based on a revamped segmentation model.

“The new segmentation model drove the basic navigation structure and information architecture of the new homepage,” he explained.

This test with an early “win” was part of an ongoing optimization program. Not every test uncovered a lift, but every test did garner a discovery. The testing protocol involved taking the “winning” treatment and then refining the webpage layout, calls-to-action and length of the sign-up process for lead capture.

Through optimization, the sign-up process was shortened, and free trial sign-ups increased 55.3%, and the overall redesign of the entire website garnered a 89% lift in lead generation.

For the big takeaway, Jacob says, “Never stop improving. Complacency is lead capture optimization’s worst enemy and perfection is impossible. Complacency is conversion rate optimization’s worst enemy.”

  Read more…

Over the years, the Internet has become more adaptive to the things we want.

It often seems as if sites are directly talking to us and can almost predict the things we are searching for, and in some ways, they are.

Once you visit a website, you may get a cookie saved within your browser that stores information about your interactions with that site. Websites use this cookie to remember who you are. You can use this same data to segment visitors on your own websites by presenting visitors with a tailored Web experience.

Much like a salesman with some background on a client, webpages are able to make their “pitch” to visitors by referencing  information they already know about them to encourage clickthrough and ultimately conversion.

Webpages get this information from cookies and then use a segmentation or targeting platform to give visitors tailored Web experiences.

Cookies can also be used to provide visitors with tailored ads, but in today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, we will concentrate on your website, and how segmentation can be used on your pages to provide more relevant information to your potential customers.

Test your way into cookie-based segmentation

At MECLABS, we explore cookie-based segmentation the only way that makes sense to us – by testing it.

It’s fairly easy to identify the different variables you would want to segment visitors by, but how to accurately talk to them should be researched. It’s also easy to become distracted by the possibilities of the technology, but in reality, the basic principles of segmentation still apply, as well as the following general rules.

Rule #1. Remember you are segmenting the computer, not the person

There are more opportunities for error when segmenting online because multiple people may use the same computer.

Therefore, online segmentation has some mystery to it. You can tailor your message to best fit the cookies, but that may not accurately represent the needs of the specific person sitting in front of the computer at that time.

Many segmentation platforms boast a 60% to 80% confidence level when it comes to how accurately they can segment visitors, but I think a better way to position this information is there is a 20% to 40% margin of error.

That is pretty high!

Be cautious with how you segment. Make sure the different experiences you display are not too different and do not create discomfort for the visitor.

For visitors who do not share a computer, error can still be high. They may be cookied for things that do not accurately describe them.

I bet if you looked at your browser history, it may not be the most precise representation of who you are as a person. Therefore, don’t take cookie data as fact because it most likely isn’t. It should be used as a tool in your overall segmentation strategy and not serve as your primary resource for information about your customers.

Rule #2. Be helpful, not creepy

People are getting used to the Internet making suggestions and presenting only relevant information to them.

Some have even come to expect this sort of interaction with their favorite sites. However, there is a fine line between helpful and creepy. Visitors probably don’t want to feel like they are being watched or tracked. Marketers should use the data collected about their visitors in a way that does not surpass their conscious threshold for being tracked.

For example, providing location-specific information to visitors in a certain region is alright, but providing too much known information about those visitors may not be.

Cookies can tell you income level, demographic information, shopping preferences and so much more. Combining too much known information could seem overwhelming to the visitor and rather than speaking directly to them, you risk scaring them off.

Instead of making it blatantly obvious to visitors you have collected information on them, I would suggest an approach that supplies users with relevant information that meets their needs.

Read more…

As a research manager, when I look at a homepage, I always ask myself two questions …

• Who are the customers?
• Was the homepage designed with those customers in mind?

I often find a homepage design makes perfect sense to the company’s executives, but not to the most important audience, the customers.

As homepages increasingly become the center of a company’s marketing and sales universe, making sure your focus is on the customer is more important than ever.

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, I wanted to share three common telltale signs your homepage is driven by company-centric marketing.

I’m sure this post is likely to raise a few eyebrows, but my goal here is to help you raise revenue by helping you see your marketing efforts through the eyes of your potential customers.

Sign #1. Our homepage is a collage of department products instead of popular products

I generally tend to hope the most popular products and services offered on a homepage within direct eye-path, which is also prime real estate on a homepage, are what customers came to your homepage to find, versus products and services the company wants to sell.

However, it is not always that simple when you are in a large company with various departments with different sales goals all competing for that prime real estate on the homepage.

The big issue with this is when departments become only focused on the product or service, and marketers lose sight of what the customers want.

If a product or service that is not the primary driver of your sales traffic is overtaken on the homepage by a minimal interest product or service, should it really be placed within the customer’s direct eye-path?

The obvious answer is no, and I understand it is more complicated than that.

I also understand the chances of success for a business model that tries to force the sale of products or services to people who don’t need or want them are also slim in the long run.

So, if you find yourself in this position, I encourage you to take a step back and develop a strategy to work collaboratively with other departments to build a homepage that improves the overall customer experience.

Sign #2. Our value copy talks “at” our customers instead of “to” our customers

Have you ever read about a new product and still had to ask yourself, “What is this thing and what will it do for me?”

Unfortunately, this happens frequently.

Sometimes, we try to impress our customers with creative copy, hoping to sound professional and intelligent. This is great as long as it makes sense to the customer.

Remember, you understand your products/services inside and out and your potential customers are more than likely just learning about it for the first time.

The value copy from a customer’s perspective should answer one essential question – what is in it for me?

For example, I did a quick search online about cloud services, which is a complex product, and the first homepage I found left me even more confused.

Some of the cloud’s value copy explained this company’s service features“Open architecture based on OpenStack technology with no vendor lock-in.”

That may be an awesome feature, but I have no idea what it means.

Some of this company’s customers may understand this terminology, but the majority of customers are likely left just as confused as I am. Failing to provide clear and digestible information for customers could induce anxiety, increase frustration and ultimately leave visitors with no choice but to exit your page.

So, when I looked at the next cloud service homepage in my search, here’s what I found …

This homepage makes no assumptions about my level of IT sophistication.

It offers a short video and even lays out copy explaining what cloud service is and how it can help me.

And, there’s more …

Further down the page I found links to the options available that offer additional short videos combined with value copy explaining what cloud computing is and how the option can help me.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to optimize on this homepage as well.

The overall point here is to understand that I left the first homepage confused about how a solution could help me and I left this one with a clear understanding of what cloud service is and how it could help me.

  Read more…

Ever since I was a little girl, baking has been a hobby of mine.

There has always been something satisfying about attempting to master the complexities of baking.

Although the realist in me knew I wasn’t going to hit the big bucks through baking, I have found a few ways to apply some of the lessons I’ve learned from baking to my work as a research manager at MECLABS.

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog, I wanted to share three insights into how I think about testing and marketing as a result of my baking attempts.

Don’t stick with the directions on the box

Some of my best cakes have come from getting creative and literally thinking outside the box by adding different ingredients, or from asking friends what kind of crazy cake ingredients they’d like to try.

When working with one of our Research Partners to create a testing strategy, I often find myself confined to my own thought track – which I’ll admit can cause the creativity of test ideas to become stale and truthfully, can even get a little boring sometimes.

So, brainstorming with others in our peer review sessions is a great way to add those “new ingredients” to a test design to hopefully help our Research Partners learn more about their customers.

Beware of offering coupons in the Sunday paper too soon

Betty Crocker’s coupons excite me every time, and it’s a marketing tactic that stretches all the way back to 1929.

That’s when the company first decided to insert coupons into the flour mixture part of the box mix. And, I’ll admit the tactic works on me because I often find myself staring at the Save $1.00 off TWO boxes of cake mix coupon and debate a trip to the store.

But, here’s the big question … am I being motivated to buy more because of my aggregate experience with the product, or because of the value proposition offered in the coupon?

Before I even saw the coupon, I wasn’t planning on buying cake mixes, but now I’m thinking about it – why should I buy more cake mix from you?  It will cost me more regardless of the coupon savings.

Now, I understand the idea of incentives and they can work – people have a hard time letting savings slip through their fingers, but offering incentives right off the bat isn’t always the best answer to increasing conversion and here’s why …

At MECLABS, we generally stress incentives should be the last resort in your testing efforts to see a quick win. The reason for this is offering incentives can skew your understanding of true customer motivation, as you can tell from my coupon example above.

My need for cake mix is why I initially purchased, and a coupon incentive may not be the optimal solution to keeping me as a return customer or attracting new customers.

So, before you worry about the coupons and other incentives, try to make sure you have the basics covered first:

• A website that visitors can easily navigate and find what they’re looking for.

• A simplified purchase flow for potential customers.

• Easy, accessible support for your customers when they can’t figure things out.

If those items are in place and you’ve tested for the optimal user experience, then you can begin to explore incentives.

Read more…

Google AdWords campaigns are a terrific way to target specific audiences.

Unlike advertising on television or billboards, which tries to convince consumers they have a need for the product, search advertising tries to fulfill a need the customer already has.

The only problem is figuring out exactly what searches your customers are performing to express the need your product is the answer to.

Answering the following three questions is a great start to understanding your customers a little more, and will help you fulfill their needs and provide them with solutions.

Question #1.  What phase of the sales funnel are our targeted customers in?

Understanding where your target customers are within your sales funnel will help you know how they are searching for your products and what kind of queries they will be using to find them.

Here are a few points to consider when creating a Google AdWords campaign based on what stage of the purchase decision process a potential customer is in before they buy:

Initial – Very early on in the funnel, your potential customers may not even know your product exists. It is up to you to make them aware of your product, and to let them know what the benefits are of using it. For example, if a customer is just beginning their search for a new computer, they’ll probably start with general keywords like “laptop deals” or “cheap desktops.”

Intermediate – Even if your customers have a good understanding of what your product is and are interested in it, they are going to do more research on your product and compare it to similar products. This is where search queries will become more specific for products like “lightweight laptops with dual-core processors.”

Also, keep in mind at this stage, customers may begin to query brand names in their search efforts as well. This is where your keywords should become more specific about the details of your products.

Advanced – This is the stage where a customer has done their research and has reached a decision. In keeping with our computer example, it’s where search terms will likely be brand or name specific as the focus has now shifted to buying.

So if you are aware of what stage in the purchase decision process your customers are in, you can alter keywords to meet their specific needs.

You can even create different ads to match specific keywords customers will search for during each of the different phases as shown above. This will also help you discern which phases you should focus your paid search marketing efforts on.

For example, if most of your keywords are targeting customers in the early stages, you may want to concentrate on adding keywords they would use later in the funnel to make sure they follow through with the buy as ultimately every phase has the potential to turn into a buy.

Question #2. How are customers searching for us?

Potential customers generally search the Internet to find answers to questions or solutions to problems.

So, how will customers search for the answers and solutions your products can provide?

There are an infinite number of possibilities considering their queries may be an actual question, a symptom that they have a description of their problem or the cause of their problem.

For example, if someone’s air conditioner is broken, they may search “broken ac” or “how to fix a broken ac,” “why is my ac freezing over?” or  “ac repair in [anytown USA].”

Your ultimate goal is to answer those questions and solve those problems.

And, in order to do this successfully, your AdWords campaign should consider as many of the different search possibilities that relate to your products as possible.

It’s also worth mentioning whichever search terms customers use will also set certain expectations that your landing page or process needs to deliver.

So, when conducting your keyword research, you should list as many search query possibilities customers would likely use to search for your products, and match those searches with keywords that offer the most relevant solutions and answers.

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For roughly the last six years, my focus has been customer research – specifically how and why people behave the way they do when they come to a point of decision online.

After directing hundreds of real-time online tests and conducting a number of brand-side marketer interviews, I’ve discovered there’s simple a secret to using the Conversion Heuristic of MarketingSherpa’s sister brand, MarketingExperiments, to unlock some of the double- and triple-digit gains I’ve witnessed first-hand over the years.

I’ll explain with a recent story of my own.

There’s a story behind everything that’s bought

On January 2, my wife went from happily seven months pregnant to becoming a new mom two months early – in less than 48 hours.

She suddenly put her career on hold and committed to meeting the challenges our daughter faced from premature birth. We were in the hospital every day for a month and brought our bundle of joy home a month earlier than expected.

It’s safe to say my wife’s recent journey has been one of rediscovery with little notice. And, with her birthday coming up soon, I wanted to find a way to delight her and confirm her talent as a person. So, I went to build a custom gift presentation focused on one of her most promising and enjoyable hobbies: baking.

A company becomes my cornerstone

The first place I went to buy products for this presentation was one of the e-commerce stores she visits most – King Arthur Flour. Over the last year, she has mentioned things she would love to have from the site, so I decided to fulfill those requests all at once.

The added bonus here is it would excite her to have all of the new tools and special ingredients she wanted and would confirm my belief in her baking talents … one delicious confection after another.

So, from the homepage to checkout, I processed every piece of marketing content in context of what I was trying to do for my wife. If something didn’t fit my vision for this presentation, then it wasn’t for me.

My cornerstone gets cracked

It’s inescapable for anyone in e-commerce – some errors will occur. A potent baking ingredient came apart during shipment and also ruined two other key items for my presentation. Making matters worse … her birthday was in less than two days.

I quickly contacted King Arthur Flour to see if they could help. When I spoke with someone from the team about my situation, they agreed to process an overnight replacement of those items without question.

All seemed to be well again …

Until the package didn’t arrive the following day.

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