In 2011, this blog produced 140 blog posts. Hopefully, you found some of those blog posts helpful in your day-to-day marketing work. If you did not, let us know in the comments and we’ll write 140 better ones next year.
Of course, as a marketer, you’re probably one of the busiest people alive and you probably missed a few, if not the majority of, posts this year.
So to catch you up, we sorted our posts by how valuable they were to you (as you and your peers communicated to us via the Twitter button) and created a roundup of the 11 most-tweeted posts in 2011.
Here they are in order of least popular to THE most popular MarketingExperiments blog post of 2011 (and potentially all time).
#11: Social Media Marketing: To tweet or to convert, that is the question
By Boris Grinkot
This is so true, and a great post. RT @yanmtl32: To tweet or to convert, that is the question #SocialMedia #Marketing – @MattKoyak
Social media has been the darling of the marketing world for years now. With the promise of free, overnight super-exposure for your brand or product, it’s no wonder. But getting a ROI from social has been plaguing marketers for almost as long as the medium itself. In this post, Boris Grinkot explains how to combine social media with LPO for bottom-line results.
Read more about social media marketing>>
#10: Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you
By Daniel Burstein
Using social media to discover your value proposition via @DanielBurstein featuring MMS’s own @i_mandi – @makemesocial
While it may be difficult to see an ROI from social media, one of the things it’s very useful for is market research. In fact, if you’re not testing to find your company’s value proposition, social media is a great place to start looking for it. In this post, Daniel Burstein highlights two ways to use social media for discovering why customers buy from you.
Read more about discovering your value proposition>>
#9: Email Test: Shorter copy brings 100% more total clickthroughs
By Daniel Burstein
We all knew this but good to read RT @MktgExperiments Email Test: Shorter copy brings 100% more total clickthroughs – @rommil
Since at least Aristotle, people have been discussing copy length. In this email test, Daniel Burstein explains why shorter copy brought 100% more total clickthroughs than a long copy control.
Read more about the short copy test results>>
#8: Copywriting: Long copy vs. short copy matrix
By Daniel Burstein
Free webinar? Short copy. Paid webinar? Long copy. (but you already knew that, right?) – @amaaanda
As we proved in blog post #9, short copy is the bona fide winner of the 2000+ year old copy length debate … or is it? It turns out that long copy can actually be more effective in certain situations. To help settle the debate, our Director of Sciences, Bob Kemper, developed a copywriting matrix to show when to use both forms.
Read more about long vs. short copy>>
#7: Social Media Marketing: Should Facebook host your landing page?
By Daniel Burstein
Should you host your landing page on Facebook? An interesting article outlining the pros and cons – @talbcopywriting
The idea of digital sharecropping (building your online presence on someone else’s Web property, i.e., Facebook pages, Blogger blogs, YouTube channels), introduced by Nicholas Carr, and expounded upon by Sonia Simone, is touted as, well … “the most dangerous threat to your online marketing efforts.” Of course, sharecropping exists because of the unbalanced distribution of resources inherent in human society. And if you’re a desperate marketer trying to hit your numbers when your development team takes a year to respond, you need an out. It is not ideal, but sometimes it’s the only way out. Read this post to help you decide whether it really is or not.
Read more about Facebook landing pages>>
#6: Email Subject Lines: Longer subject increases opens 8.2%
By Brad Bortone
So interesting, very important info: “Email Subject Lines: Longer subject increases opens 8.2%” from @MktgExperiments – @yasminbendror
When you’re depending on email as a major revenue driver in your organization, the subject line is everything. And you need all the help writing them that you can get. In this post, Brad Bortone outlines how a longer subject line achieved 8.2% more opens than the control.
Read more about subject lines>>
#5: Email Copy: Half the words, 16% higher clickthrough rate
By Brad Bortone
Lesson I learned early on and always worked:RT@MktgExperiments: Email Copy:Half the words, 16% higher clickthrough rate – @itdemandgen
Short copy wins again! After a subject line, the second most important factor in your email is the body copy. In this case, shorter copy achieved a 16% higher clickthrough rate than longer copy. Read the post to find out more.
#4: Lead Generation: Testing form field length reduces cost-per-lead by $10.66
By David Kirkpatrick
Nice. The marketing folks are learning that fewer form input fields = better conversion rate. – @jonathanstegall
For marketers, it’s all about the bottom line … or it should be. Just about everyone knows that shorter forms produce higher amounts of leads. But it’s not always cheaper at the end of the funnel to have shorter forms. That’s why it’s so important to test form length. In this post, David Kirkpatrick shows how Marketo tested and justified shorter forms for a big win.
Read more about lead form length>>
#3: Hidden Friction: The 7 Silent Killers of Conversion
By Austin McCraw
Really Nice stuff. 7 Silent Killers (ooh scary) of Conversion – @bobnunn
Friction on a page hurts conversion. Of course, spotting friction isn’t always as easy as stating the fact. In this post, Austin McCraw points out seven instances of friction that you could be missing on your pages.
Read more about hidden friction>>
#2: This Just Tested: Stock images or real people?
By Austin McCraw
Stock images or real people? Stock images are not the enemy here – irrelevance is – @megbutton
Marketers and advertisers have wanted to know if stock images really live up to their hype for a while. In this post, Austin McCraw presents a landing page test with an image being the only change. The control was a stock image and the treatment was a picture of the company founder. To find out which won, read on …
Read more about stock images vs. real people>>
#1: Optimizing Copy: The 7 most common copywriting mistakes we see marketers make
By Paul Cheney
LOL @ #3: “If you are, or ever have been married, you know exactly how this hurts conversion.” – @justinpremick
I just want to take this opportunity to say thank you to the marketers who tweeted this blog post and helped establish my reputation (much to the chagrin of my colleagues) as 2011’s most popular, engaging, and arguably (Editor’s Note: very arguably) best-looking MarketingExperiments blogger! Oh yeah, and you can read this post if you’re interested in common copywriting mistakes or just want to see what all the hubbub is about …
Read more about copywriting mistakes>>
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