MarketingSherpa Blog

“We should always strive to better understand our customer, and in particular, to understand the essence of our value proposition,” Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, explained at Email Summit 2013.

In this video excerpt, learn how email marketing is one of the most effective ways to quickly test your value proposition with your customers rather than relying on company logic to determine the best way to sell to them. Email marketing, he argued, cultivates testing.

Ease of change

Email marketing is easy to change. Unlike traditional marketing channels, with a couple of clicks, an entire message can be changed. A headline, copy, a postscript, everything in an email is easily adaptable, easily changed, easily tested. If you want to find out what motivates a customer, just see which email they open.

Large sample size

Additionally, email marketing can produce a large sample size if your list is big enough. This allows a marketer to test different value propositions across different segments to see what resonates and what flops. Austin reiterated numerous times, “the goal of a test is not simply to get a lift, but to get a learning,” which indicates some tests will be more successful than others, but it’s all in an effort to put a face on your customers.

Do you stand out in the inbox?

Email also cultivates a highly competitive environment, where every company a customer is subscribed to is also attempting to get the customer to open its email. However, if a typical customer is anything like you or me, getting 20 or more emails a day from different companies, they’re selective about which emails they open, let alone click through. Discovering what value motivates your customer to open the email, or respond to its call-to-action, is a breakthrough.

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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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MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013 is rapidly approaching, and today’s video excerpt offers an exciting preview for one of the sessions, “Boston Globe: Discovering and optimizing a value proposition,” featuring Peter Doucette, Executive Director of Circulation Sales & Marketing, The Boston Globe.

At last year’s Summit, Peter’s presentation was titled, “The Boston Globe: Managing a transition from free to paid product,” covering an ongoing and relatively early-stage testing and optimization program. This year’s presentation will discuss part two of that process.

In this excerpt, Peter and Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, MECLABS, talk about how tablets became an important digital form factor for The Boston Globe’s new online subscriber strategy, some of the customer insight that began informing the strategy and the new direction insight created at The Boston Globe.

Also, if you would like to hear the entire process Peter and his team at The Boston Globe undertook to transform the way it approached both its online and offline audience, watch the full presentation from last year’s Optimization Summit from the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

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“The meaning of a test is to get a learning, not a lift.” 

Chances are, you’ve heard the above from us before. At MECLABS, we often speak of online testing as a means to learn insights directly from the customer, prospect, visitor, etc.

Well, what if you could be overlooking areas of your website that can give you valuable customer insight without testing anything at all. Would you be interested in using this information to improve your online operations and maybe increase conversion? I know I would. Could you use this information to inform future test ideas and test plans?

You could. And probably should.

While the following information may not seem revolutionary – or even unique, for that matter – you might be surprised by just how many large corporations fail to take such readily available information into account, even though it is supplied to them directly from the customer or prospect.

There are numerous places on your website that reference the customer. But, the areas we need to focus on are the ones in which the customer provides direct feedback, in their own words.

1. Comment boxes in form fields

Everyone has seen the ubiquitous form field box on contact forms across the Web, but who actually takes the time to fill these out? Depending upon the complexity of the product and your traffic levels, there could be quite a few.

Now, if you take those few comments you receive daily and extrapolate them over a lengthier period – let’s say three months – you might begin seeing trends in the types of comments or questions your customers are asking.

Yes, this would take some analysis from a staff member, but the payoff could be huge. Just remember, the analysis doesn’t have to be complicated, and this type of quick analysis can be applied across the other areas.

You can use any program you like, but take the time to quickly go through the comments and categorize those matching or sharing a similar root problem or theme.

Once you have completed the analysis phase, see if  any comment groups emerge as a significant portion of the overall sample. If so, then you have likely identified an area of friction that could be addressed on the website to potentially aid in conversion.

How you go about addressing the issues should also be considered. Will a simple copy improvement suffice, or is there a larger issue with the website or process needing to be addressed? It’s ultimately your decision, but before rewriting all your Web copy, remember you’re working with a fraction of your overall traffic. There is no need to revamp areas that don’t need it.

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