John Tackett says, “I’ve always loved this quote: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” – William Shakespeare To me, its beauty rests in the powerful meaning packed in six simple words. Brevity can also be used as a tool to aid your marketing, as I discovered from a recent email experiment. But first, a little more detail about the experiment. Background: A global producer of high-quality audio equipment and accessories. Goal: To increase clickthrough rates in an email. Research Question: Which email will generate the highest clickthrough rate? Test Design: A/B multifactor, radical redesign... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Forrester, the respected market research company, has a history of releasing reports that cast Facebook in a bad light in the eyes of advertisers. Last year it suggested Facebook was “failing marketers” by “abandoning” its promise of social marketing. Now Forrester is truly hitting Facebook where it hurts: it is advising advertisers to stop using Facebook if they want to build social relationships with their customers. The release of the “Social Relationship Strategies That Work” report follows Facebook’s announcement on... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Gobble, gobble. YouTube’s dominance of the worldwide video market is under threat as Facebook continues to ramp up its charge to increase its share of the lucrative online video market. In recent months Facebook began seeding autoplay videos into the News Feed, shortly followed by premium autoplay video ads; the company has increased its mentions of the importance of video in its quarterly earnings and investor calls; and it is reportedly actively trying to poach YouTube stars to create content made specifically for its platform. The results of energized... [...]

Madeline Stone says, “With more than 7 YouTube million subscribers, her own L’Oreal line, and a growing e-commerce beauty startup, hair-and-makeup guru Michelle Phan is one of the most successful YouTubers ever. But getting to the top was no easy task. Phan told Re/code that she was once rejected from a job at a Lancome makeup counter because she had no sales experience, and she and her family lived on food stamps for a period of time. Phan recently released a book called “Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty, Style and Success – Online and Off.” In it, she tells the... [...]

Jessica Lorenz says, ““If I am your ideal customer, why should I purchase your product rather than any other product?” – Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS (parent company of MarketingExperiments) At MarketingExperiments, researchers have used this question to develop value propositions over the past 20 years. Many things have changed over the past couple decades, which has now, more than ever, left room for the customer to answer the value prop question. Recently, Professor Wouter Van Rossum, a leading expert on value proposition and product development, held an Academic Lecture... [...]

Jay Yarow says, “Apple’s shares are up 1.64% today to $113.45. This is a new all-time high for the stock. More importantly, its pushing Apple’s market cap to its highest ever value at $663.2 billion. Apple’s previous market cap high was $658 billion in September of 2012. After that, things got ugly. It crashed to $373.65 billion in June of 2013 before resurging. When Apple was crashing many people thought Apple was doomed. They thought the iPhone business had run its course. They thought growth was over for Apple”. Apple Has Rocketed To A New All-Time High Market... [...]

Josh Wilson says, “If you have participated in a MECLABS, MarketingExperiments or MarketingSherpa event or education program, you may have been exposed to the patented Conversion Heuristic. It looks like this: C = 4m + 3v + 2(i – f) – 2a If you haven’t seen this before, it can be explained in minutes. However, it can take decades to master. My hope is this MarketingExperiments Blog post will help you gain a basic understanding of the Conversion Heuristic, and specifically, understand the anxiety element in the heuristic”. Customer Anxiety: One element of the MECLABS Conversion Heuristic... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Consumers are still converting at a higher rate on desktops than on mobile devices, according to a recent report from Marin Software. The report was based on 3Q14 data from advertisers and agencies that invest in excess of $1 million annually on paid search, social, and display advertising channels. Average conversion rates in the quarter were higher on desktops than on mobile devices for all three channels (search, social, and display), the analysis found. That gap was due to a range of factors, including the following: mobile behavior, such as using a smartphone for research... [...]

Daniel Burstein says, “From pay-per-click advertising to display ads, all online advertising is a micro-yes, a step in the process to the ultimate conversion. To help you improve conversion of this micro-yes, Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, created the MECLABS Online Ad Sequence based on online advertising experimentation for both B2B and consumer marketers. How can you improve conversion of your online ads? Focus on the three factors identified in the sequence”. How to Improve Conversion of Your Online Ads MarketingExperiments Blog  [...]

Katherine Boehrat says, “We can now text, tweet, iMessage, Facebook message, Skype and even leave one another disappearing messages. But old-fashioned email isn’t going away. It’s still a vital part of how we communicate. That’s not to say email is flawless — far from it. We mark items as “unread” so we will remember to deal with them later, then forget. We receive too much meaningless email and don’t know how to sort it. We try different methods for organizing our email, then even those methods become work, so we give up on them. For the past week, I relied on a new app from... [...]