The last couple weeks here at MarketingExperiments we have held Web clinics in which our top analysts evaluated landing pages submitted to us from our journal subscribers. If you participated, you might have noticed that with every Website submission we asked for a two sentence statement of the Value Proposition for the business and of the product offered on the landing page. Simple, right? Well

According to our best analysts, there were hardly any true Value Propositions—maybe one or two out of all of the Web sites submitted. This didn’t seem right to me, especially when considering that all of a company’s marketing efforts should be an expression of its Value Proposition. Why were all these companies unable to put together a good Value Proposition?

It was at this point that I began to wonder, What is a good Value Proposition anyway? Truthfully, when I began to think about it, I myself needed some questions answered about formulating a good Value Proposition. I have heard it talked about over and over, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think I could actually make a good, solid Value Proposition. So, in the MarketingExperiment’s research spirit, I am setting out to find out exactly: What is a good Value Proposition? So far there are four questions I want to find answers to:

Question #1: What is it exactly that I am supposed to communicate in my Value Proposition? Is there a guideline or a formula of some sort for this?

Question #2: What does not belong in a Value Proposition?

Question #3: How long should a good Value Proposition be? And why?

Question #4: Can I see some examples of good Value Propositions?

So, these are my questions. In the next few days I will be scouring the ranks here at MarketingExperiments to see if anyone has the answers to these questions. I will try to keep you posted on my discoveries, and if you’d like me to ask something else about Value Propositions let me know. One good thing about being an apprentice at MarketingExperiments is the access I have to all of the great minds here. So let me know your questions and I will do my best to get them answered.

So it’s the end of 2007 and your online business is humming. You’ve honed your Value Proposition to a razor-sharp message. You’re always in the top 10 search results, and your Incentives and Friction control make doing business with you as silky as Yves Delorme sheets.

Then mobile marketing comes along.

With the current mobile seascape roiling with search engine companies, carriers, and content producers all trying to dominate new territory, it’s enough to make even the hardiest CMOs feel like losing their lunch over the side.

Google is (allegedly) working on the mobile phone Operating System (OS) of the future. Once Google gets a phone pre-conditioned for optimal search and ad delivery into the hands of millions of searching, discovering customers, ads could pay enough of the freight to make owning and operating the phone virtually free. The price of cellular services on all networks could drop substantially if that strategy becomes reality, as long as you don’t mind hearing five second pitches before every call or seeing tiny ads in, on, and around your display.

AOL is undergoing its own major transformation, repositioning itself as another device-agnostic portal leading you to services like MapQuest, CityGuide, and Moviefone, search, mail, and IM. They’ll also let you personalize the page and find your friends with GPS widgets. Of course Third Screen Media, AOL’s ad placement firm, will show you ads based on what you’re searching for, where you are going, and what you are doing.

Yahoo’s oneSearch also wants to be your default mobile search engine. Their strategy is to grow their global market as quickly as possible, talking with European and South American mobile behemoth Telefonica about being the primary cellular search engine in 15 countries.

But if you’re interested in reaching the Asian mobile market, better talk to Google. Though Baidu claims 60% of online search in China, Google crafted its own deal with China Mobile, the biggest cellular network in Asia with 300 million subscribers, back in January.

Meantime the carriers—the network providers—are trying to maintain their lucrative corner on cell phone “decks”—those menus of services pre-set on the phones they sell. Content producers like ESPN, Weather.com and game vendors cut lucrative deals with the carriers to be “on-deck,” and ad buyers cut deals with the content producers. Google’s new phone strategy could make those lists obsolete, replacing them with good ol’ top 10 search results and PPC ads.

According to a report by Colin Gibbs released by RCRWirelessnews.com last week, off-deck content producers have their own problems, citing inadequate billing systems and onerous revenue-share models.

With new developments and challenges in the mobile market coming out every day, will hard-won expertise in landing page optimization and search engine marketing be directly transferrable to your mobile strategy?

Yes and maybe.

Yes, because you must still answer the basic questions: who your customers are, where they came from, what they are looking for, how to get them to convert once they get to you, and how to keep improving your results.

Maybe, because the current lack of real estate (a handful at best) on mobile devices and the state of flux in mobile technology mean optimization, search, and testing techniques and tools will need tweaking, if not a purpose-built redesign. It’s certainly an exciting opportunity to find out what really works when it comes to mobile marketing.

If you consider yourself an old hand at mobile marketing and you’ve already got some tips and anecdotes, please share. We’d certainly love to hear them.

You can tell a lot about what’s most important to an industry by what conference organizers offer on day one while attendees are bright-eyed, receptive and hungry for insight, edge, and vision. The Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago this December is no exception.

Pow! Understanding the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Latin American search markets and mobile search are offered right out of the gate, inviting Chief Marketing Officers to venture beyond their borders, beyond their PCs, and beyond their comfort zones to answer some tough questions.

With every business in the world having an equal opportunity to be simultaneously local, mobile, and global in 2008, how are you going to ensure your business is present, found, and understood by cosmopolitan customers—whatever end-device they are using—instead of ignored or worse, buried?

If it gets to be 2008 and your product isn’t in the top 10 search results on Baidu, embedded in South Korean social networks, wrapped around a Brazilian YouTube video, certified carbon neutral, and bookmarked on a Google gPhone, will you need a cardboard box for your Super Chief Marketing Officer award?

If you can’t answer those questions, don’t worry; you still have time to sign up for the December 3-7 conference and get started on a global, mobile search strategy for 2008.

Or you could just go get that box.

We just received confirmation of a 133% increase in conversion for a recently completed test.
It's one of hundreds of positive results we’ve seen by testing “calls to action” but only the second time we’ve seen it happen “on accident” while we were running a basket recovery test.

Here’s the setting. . . . We have a subscription based site with a free trial that we have been testing for months. There have been quite a few significant bumps up in conversion and we had yet to run a basket recovery test which has been a never-fail winner in terms of increasing conversion through recovering lost subscribers. The setup for the test was simple: just add an email capture field to the current call to action, give the customers a reason to enter their email address, and follow up with a friendly customer service email if they do not complete the sign-up process.

Typically, adding the email capture field has a negative impact on direct conversion (people signing up on their initial visit) but you make up for it plus some with the basket recovery emails that follow up if they leave the site before completing.

Here is a very typical set of results:
Conversion before basket recovery: 1.21%
Conversion after basket recovery (but before recovery emails sent): 1.09%
Conversion after basket recovery (after emails sent): 1.45%

Most companies would gladly take a 10% hit in direct conversion for a 20% increase in overall conversion. In this test, the results were drastically different and counter intuitive.
Instead of direct conversion decreasing a little, it more than doubled. It’s a rare case where adding friction and anxiety with the email capture field actually increases conversion.

Here are the results:
Uniques to offer page without email capture: 32,782
Free trial sign-ups without email capture: 222
Conversion: .68%
Uniques to offer page with email capture: 30,479
Free trial signups with email capture: 480
Conversion: 1.57%
Increase 133%

If you are scratching your head saying, “Add an email capture field next to my call to action and my conversion will go up,” it’s not quite that easy. We’ve had precisely this same result at least one time before, so let me spell out the similarities so you can determine if you should test this with your own site. An ideal site for this test (one that would most likely get a positive result):

• Is monthly subscription based
• Offers a free trial (or a solid money back guarantee)
• Uses longer copy-style pages where the call to action is typically at the end of the content
• Has a relatively low monthly cost (both are under $30 monthly)
• Is currently using a button or text for their call to action (not a form).

We did not think we would get this result from the actual changes in the call to action. It was totally unexpected. When you are running call-to-action tests with your own site, it’s essential that you test variations that are counter intuitive and just keep testing. We stumbled upon this one, but some of our greatest improvements have been because of precisely the same thing: We were testing for one thing and instead got a result from another that was unexpected.

P.S. If you run this test or have run a similar test in the past with little or no results, let me know and I may be able to take a look and make a few suggestions. Just make a comment.

In a recent Webinar and MarketingExperiments journal issue titled Lead Generation: Is Your Sign-Up Process Costing You Leads or Maximizing Them?, we tackled the problems of online businesses either failing to effectively capture leads or not even realizing that their site is better at lead generation than conversion.

The bottom line? Sites where the perceived level of investment or purchase risk is high—or where the process is comparatively complex—may be poor candidates for online conversion but good candidates for a lead generation approach.

But in addition to knowing how much information to ask for online and when, and understanding how important a timely follow-up is once you’ve got that lead, consider the motivated customer who wants action immediately, but just needs help in making her final decision: Don’t underestimate the power of offering instant access to a real person who can answer questions and take charge of complicated procedures. Adding short-cuts like the prominent placement of a toll-free number, or offering real-time purchasing assistance through click-to-call or chat access, can instantly reduce anxiety and get the deal closed.

I recently had a negative online experience with a prominent travel booking site. I was trying to find a pet-friendly hotel. In theory I was supposed to be able to sort hotels by whether they accepted pets or not. Being wary of hidden charges, I decided to call my first choice. It turned out they didn’t accept pets at all! Same result with my second choice. After sending an angry missive to the site owners, I tried another travel site. There I was offered a toll-free number, where a nice lady on the other end called a hotel herself to confirm they took pets and didn’t charge anything extra for it. When I told her I was in the middle of my online booking process, she offered to take charge of it. Now they have a loyal customer.

Businesses offering complex or expensive transactions should also consider what I’m calling “rest stops”: incorporating links that automatically email landing page information to prospects for later consumption, or adding gadgets like Google’s Send to Phone tool. Even pointing out handy features like Internet Explorer’s “send page by email” and “send link by email” functions and the “Send to” function on Google’s toolbar may help ensure visitors have your information ready once they are ready to make a decision.

Complex or expensive online transactions can be frustrating and scary. Reducing friction and mitigating anxiety are critical. Excellent service is key. Trust is everything. Instead of offering long and winding roads of information for weary online travelers to read, sort and digest, offer short-cuts and rest stops. Prospective customers will reward your hospitality with their business.

Quick now, before the marketing hype subsides: Are most of the widget and gadget apps offered by SocialMedia, Google and Slide.com the new, killer way to reach the upscale audience in social networks who are bailing out of old-school media like appointment TV and paper newspapers?

Not if what I see on Facebook is representative. Two of Facebook’s most popular widgets let you have a virtual food or water fight with your friends. Upscale? Not.

But if you want to give away virtual bumper stickers, posters, fish, flowers, etc. so Facebookers can add to the general teen-bedroom ambience of most profiles, this is definitely the place to be. It’s all about personalization and choice, of course. Like I told my mom whenever she yelled at me because she could no longer see the floor in my room: “I like it this way!”

The trick for widget and gadget-oriented marketing is providing either a “pow” moment of fanatical fun with a must-have virtual toy or experience-of-the-moment, then riding the viral wave; or providing some real functionality, like Google’s video messenger gadget, VidiMe. Like giving away free coffee mugs with your company’s logo, if people don’t see them and use them every day, you might as well have handed out Styrofoam cups. Offering a gadget with true value and convenience is the key to establishing a long-term relationship with millions of social network users.

Tameka Kee, writing recently for Online Media Daily, snagged a great quote from Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia. One of SocialMedia’s most popular widgets—with almost 150,000 users—lets you invite friends to a virtual Happy Hour. Goldstein said: “People are so engaged in the social network, if you require them to leave to monetize them, you'll never win. . . . You build an app where they stay and you use it for branding, direct response, or to get some data."

So are Facebook pages really the new, virtual living room—so comfortable and conveniently furnished with widgets and gadgets no one ever wants to leave? Are widgets and gadgets the marketing equivalent of a hotline for pizza delivery?

If your Value Proposition looks a lot like a food delivery operation, or you’re marketing convenience-driven, instant-gratification products or services, perhaps you should consider offering some virtual swag for those who live on their Facebook or MySpace pages and the pages of their friends. Otherwise, you may be missing the virtual living rooms of millions of virtual couch potatoes.

Food fight!