The Death Of CPM , The Death Of The Retail Store , The Death of Affiliate Marketing , The Death of the Open Web , The Death of Video Rental Stores , The Death of the Landline , The Death of the Book , The Death of the Desktop , The Death of Newspapers , The Death of the Press Release , The Death of Advertising , The Death of the Pageview

What’s going on here?  More importantly what can we learn from it? After studying these articles I have come to the conclusion that no, business isn’t dying…but it is evolving.  We’re evolving; as consumers and as marketers.

As consumers, we want to be marketed to as the individuals we are. “Technology is fueling the consumer’s desire for personalization.1″  As marketers, we are seeing that treating people as ‘the masses’ is no longer appropriate.  It’s no longer about measuring our audience size but about how relevant we are to our audience1. We must become more sophisticated in our targeting efforts.  One-to-one marketing is the key now, whether we are talking to other businesses or to consumers.

In One-to-One Marketing: The true promise of Dynamic Offer-Content Customization it states: “Customizing offers based on customer segments involves a sequence of steps, beginning with identification of meaningful customer segments. Any method of customer-specific message optimization requires knowing ‘who’ your customers are, beyond just their names and email addresses. You must also have some insight into what they ‘want,’ how they think, the words, terms and images that attract and inspire them (as well as those that repel them), and ‘how’ they think.”

There are two ways I know of to develop customer segments.  One involves analyzing the people who come to your website, or who you want to come to your website, and developing it around their needs.  In Online Customer Segmentation Made Easy it says “the easiest approach is to ask the five basic questions that all news reporters know:  Who, What, Where, Why and How. By taking time to answer these five questions up front, you will be able to make the most effective use of limited resources, as you build a website that meets the needs and wants of all your customers.”  While creating segments based on online behavior may yield actionable insights for your website, it also doesn’t truly represent your customer base if you sell in other ways, such as direct and retail.

In that case, there is another method that involves surveying your customers.  The company I work with, C.A. Walker, does this type of segmentation analysis.  We design a questionnaire that allows us to group customers as similar or dissimilar based on their attitudes, behaviors and demographics, yielding those segments that are most valuable to target.  Segmentations are a valuable look into customer groups’ beliefs,  lifestyles and habits.

Another point I picked up from these articles is to not be afraid to launch evolutionary products and services, even if a larger company could launch a competitive product/service with greater advantages.  Far too often “industry leaders are usually so focused on maintaining existing profit centers and business practices…they ignore the threat.”4

Lastly, measures of marketing ROI are evolving also.  In The Death of the Pageview it makes a great point: “The most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action.  If you’re not going to use it to make a decision, it’s a waste of time to even look at it.” Consolidating what these articles are saying, the important ROI metrics to gather and take action on are:

• Cost Per Customer (CPC)1
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)1 (links to my prior post on how to calculate and increase Lifetime Value)
• Value delivered — e.g. customers or inquiries1,  less stress2, saves time2, original products3
• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)5

In summary, it is my belief that businesses don’t truly die; they simply evolve and may become a stepping stone into something more relevant to people’s lives.  Marketers must become savvier in order to evolve with these trends and must monitor only those marketing metrics that can assist to improve conversion rates and gain a deeper understanding of  customer behavior.

Sources:

1 The Death Of CPM

2 The Death Of The Retail Store

3 The Death of Affiliate Marketing

4 The Death of Video Rental Stores

5 The Death of the Pageview

No related posts.

You may have heard of A/B or A/B/n Testing (“n” refers to the number of “cells” or groups of people who will see the landing page).  In this type of test, you create minimally two differing versions of your landing pages “A” versus “B” (and “C,” “D,” and so on) to see which outperforms.  You then serve the landing pages on an equal basis to the cells, and use cookies to make sure someone sees the same page again if returning.  Typically those who use A/B tests are testing wildly different landing pages, including number of images, copy and paths.

Multivariate testing involves testing the same landing page but with different elements on the page.  Essentially, you are swapping out images, buttons and text when you are certain you’ve chosen the best design layout from your A/B tests.

It is important to consider statistical significance when testing landing pages.  You want to make sure that you have served the landing page to a large enough sample size in each cell before inferring any conclusions. The company I work with, C.A. Walker, provides a sample size calculator on its site that is helpful for this.  First, you enter the confidence level – typically 90% or 95%  – then enter your maximum allowable error – typically 5% or 10%.  If you’re not sure which to use, go with a 95% confidence and 5% error level.

Population size is a bit more tricky.  You can try searching online for a population size, e.g. “population size of [target] in [your city or nation],” and see what research surfaces that you can use.  If you are in the U.S., you can try finding your population size on the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates page.  For example, if I want to geotarget an ad to Los Angeles women, I can see from the Age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin estimates under Population Estimates that there are 9.8 million people living in LA and 4.9 million of them are female.  Plugging this into the  calculator, the sample size is 384.  Therefore, I would need to test each landing page on a minimum of 384 women in order to infer conclusions.

Another way to look at this is using Marketo’s Landing Page Version Calculator, which allows you to enter the number of expected conversions per day and your confidence level to get back either the number of test versions you can have or the length of the test you need to allow.  If I enter 100 conversions per day at a 95% confidence level and 30 days for the test, it says I can run 13 versions of a landing page to generate statistically valid results.

Google’s Website Optimizer is a free tool you can use for landing page testing.  To do so, you setup a “new experiment,” choose either A/B or multivariate testing, create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs, and then also create and publish a “thank you” page that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion.  You then add tags to your pages so Google can track.  From Google’s Adding Tags help page, “If you’re running a multivariate experiment, you’ll need to add tags to both your test page and your conversion page. If you’re running an A/B experiment, you’ll need to add tags to your original page, all test page variations, and your conversion page. You can find detailed instructions for adding all the tags in our Installation Guides for multivariate experiments and A/B experiments, as well as information about how to deal with tags in relation to shared headers and existing HTML code.”  Website Optimizer will then provide you with a report on your tests to see how well each combination or variation is performing.

If the idea of creating multiple landing pages and managing tags sounds about as much fun as a root canal, then consider your paid options.  I recently demo’d ion interactive’s LiveBall product, which does much of the work for you and is fully hosted on their site.  Their pricing starts at $1,295 a month for unlimited number of landing pages and 10,000 visitors per month, and goes down if you get more traffic than that.  For that price, they start you off with 12 landing pages complete with forms and images relevant to your industry; all you have to do is add copy.  They also include 15 templates that you can use to change the look-and-feel of your pages on the fly. The templates are designed around 1 theme for each brand, for each season, or for each client (if doing this for multiple clients) and include 1 stock image gallery for each business (or you can use your own images).

If you want them to design your landing pages for you, they offer that service for an extra monthly fee or on an ad-hoc basis.  They say some of their clients opt for the extra service for the first several months in order to build up their library and then do it themselves from there.

When you log in to their service as a client, the first thing you see is a dashboard to monitor real-time results of your landing page effectiveness.  Your landing pages are represented by bubbles on a grid:  the larger the bubble the more traffic you’ve received for that particular landing page, and the higher on the grid the better the conversion rate.  In addition, the bubble are “live” meaning you can click on them for greater detail on that campaign.

To use the LiveBall system, you first create a “portfolio,” then “campaign,” then add a “path” to the campaign that is either new – chosen from the optional “frameworks” provided – or you can choose to copy a path over from another portfolio or campaign.  A “path” is simply the series of pages that a person sees during the conversion process, which can be as simple as Page A and then the “thank you” page, or you can add intermediate pages that tries to upsell other products. I’m not sure how exactly, but was told their system also segments users to deliver robust landing paths/experiences. 

To add a page, you select from the pre-determined master pages provided, change out the nonsense text and remove areas you don’t want to use.  In addition, 3 forms are provided for you but are easily editable.

The last step is selecting the traffic source, e.g. Google, and it creates a unique URL for each traffic source for you.  Here you can also choose to “auto-optimize” your landing pages, meaning that the system will determine when the pages reach statistical significance and pull poor-performing landing pages for you.  You can also set it up to send people to another page when statistical significance is reached for that particular traffic source.

They also provide for you “advanced rules” (conditional logic) on the page or content level – 20 conditions, 15 actions.  They are useful for geotargeting – substituting content on a page based on the region coming from – or previous action,  such as adding the user’s specific search query into the page text or sending them to another page if they didn’t convert the first time they visited.

For reporting, you can view how a campaign is performing on a portfolio level, go into an individual campaign, or into individual paths.  The dashboard is dynamic, meaning you can easily switch from viewing your results as a tag table, a respondent funnel, a pie chart, or other options.  You can see other views there as well, such as which keywords are working best for you.

So that’s my primer on how to test landing pages and what some of your free versus paid options are.  Some other resources I recommend on this topic are:

• 7 Best Tips to Create Landing Pages for PPC Campaigns
• The Cost of Landing Page Optimization
• Landing Page Testing: How to test and what to test
• Autonomy’s Best Practices for Optimizing Landing Page Performance, who have their own landing page solution
• SiteSpect’s Best Practices for Site Optimization, who have their own landing pages solution

Happy ROI hunting!

No related posts.

Like a PB&J is not possible without peanut butter, behavioral marketing is not possible without an investment into understanding a company’s customers through segmentation.Segmentation is the foundation of behavioral marketing, but unless you are in the business of market research you may not understand how segments are derived and why the manner in which you derive them is important.

Of course, you can classify using a simple segmentation based on demographics (age, ethnicity, female/male) or by usage (heavy, light), but these rarely yield needed information.  In a true segmentation, people are typically grouped by how alike they are in terms of their behaviors and attitudes towards life or a particular topic.   This type of segmentation analysis is conducted by carefully constructing a questionnaire so that some questions are behavioral in nature and others attitudinal.

Results are then viewed by an experienced researcher, who identifies patterns in the data through the use of “cluster analysis.”  There are  multiple sub-types of cluster analysis (“algorithms”) that can be used to view the data from differing  vantage points, allowing the researcher to see the “stories” in the data.  From there, certain attitudinal questions are identified that yield the strongest differences, which are then used as the basis of behavioral analysis.

The resulting data cuts are then analyzed and clever segment names are created to represent different types of customers who share similar values or lifestyles.  For example, “Facebook Fanatics” or “iPhone Moms.”

Now the trick is…how to translate that customer knowledge into a marketing strategy that captures people’s attention at their interest points – their behaviors and attitudes.

A way that this data can be used is to evaluate which segments are worth pursuing through the creation of indices.  By looking at each group size, their spend levels, and how much the group likes the company/brand, it can be determined, for example, that segments 2, 3 and 5 are best to target.  They are the largest that spend the most and like the company/brand best.  Furthermore, we can look at their wants/needs and what they have in common with each other for marketing messaging.

As an aside, the company that I work with, C.A. Walker Research Solutions, regularly conducts segmentations for its clients, if you need assistance in this area.

No related posts.