MarketingExperiments - Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

There’s a wonderful post and image over at the Church of the Customer blog. It points out that the Hilton Hotel online reservations service is not available between 2:00AM and 6:00AM. It seems their computer systems need a little shut-eye…

When testing, the validity of the data is a function of the how much a difference there is between your results, and the sample size. Simply put, if you have a larger variance between two results, then you will need a smaller sample size…

What are eco-ads? They spring from marketing strategies, often within large corporations, which address the need to present companies as being friendly towards the environment. Companies recognize that many of their customers are concerned…

Here are some interesting figures from a story on InternetRetailer.com Visitors returning to a web site are eight times more likely to make an online purchase than new visitors, according to new data from WebSideStory Inc. During the first…

Here’s another question that came in a few days ago. Someone wanted to know what the best practice is for changing the color or appearance of a text link after it has been clicked. Our Director Optimization, Jimmy Ellis, wrote up this…

This is another question raised during our teleconference call on Wednesday. We were looking at before and after versions of an offer page we had optimized. On both versions the “buy now” button appeared only at the end of the sales…

This question was raised during our teleconference call on landing pages yesterday. It’s a good question. There are times when simply saying “Add to Cart” on the button works just fine. But this is the case only with very simple and…

NOTES: These are the notes for our interactive May 10 clinic on Landing Pages. The recording of the event will be posted here in a few days. If you are participating in the live teleclinic, we will ask you to refresh your page several…

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be featuring the use of the Hacker Safe seal as part of our Landing Page teleconference call today. During our final edit we decided instead to run a separate call on credibility indicators. As…

According to an article on CNET today, the current boom in online ad spending is well protected from the kind of bust we saw back in 2001. The author argues that the presence and commitment of mainstream advertisers like Ford and Procter…

Recently we received an email from one of our subscribers who is looking for ways to encourage his own subscribers to whitelist his company’s emails and newsletters. He touches on an important topic. Email delivery is a ticklish issue and…

First, a thank you to the editors of 60SecondIdeas.com. They selected the Marketing Experiments Blog as one of their Top 10 Small Business Blogs for the first quarter of 2006. The recognition is much appreciated. Which brings us to the…

As you may already know, every couple of weeks we hold a 60 minute teleconference call during which we share some of our most recent research results. Our next call is on the topic of optimizing landing pages. We have quite a bit of new…

In yesterday's issue of USA Today there is an article about the “risks” marketers take when they try to emulate MySpace.com and open up their sites to include comments and feedback from their visitors. Here is an excerpt from that article:…

In a previous post we had talked about trash content sites and how they publish cheap or syndicated content simply to attract search engine traffic and make money from PPC ads. In that post we anticipated that Google, Yahoo! and others…

So says John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in a recent interview with Business Week. We agree. All too often marketers stagger from one marketing “event” to the next, without having a clear plan, or integrated system in place. This is…

In response to our teleconference clinic on headline testing yesterday we received numerous emails asking questions about how to determine the validity of test results. (The audio for the clinic is now available here. When listening to it,…

NOTES: These are the notes for our interactive April 26 teleclinic on Headline Testing. The recording of the event will be posted here in a few days. If you are participating in the live teleclinic, we will ask that you refresh your page…

Martin Lindstrom has written an interesting piece on branding. He talks about three rocks, of similar appearance...one from his garden, one from the Berlin Wall and one from the moon. Same looking rocks...very different cash values. I…