Here’s what the top marketing and research directors at MECLabs came up with on Tuesday afternoon, after three intense days of slicing, dissecting, analyzing, and optimizing email and landing pages at the MarketingSherpa eMail Summit in Miami. (Oh yeah, and after a power outage that made national and international headlines!)

#1: Marketers have to be more than marketers. According to Jeanne Hopkins, Chief Marketing Officer for MECLabs Group, CMOs need to understand more than just marketing. They need to understand the business as a whole, including the company’s finances and its technical capabilities and limitations. This means making allies of the CFO and the CIO, understanding their problems and concerns, and making sure they understand marketings'. Most importantly, marketers need to get across to the CEO in easily understood and quickly digestible terms, graphs, and pictures just how and how much marketing is contributing to the bottom line and the success of the business overall.

#2: Is 2008 the year that email marketers get religion on landing pages? Email experts and marketers are starting to “get” that email is not created, sent, and responded to in a vacuum. As MarketingExperiments subscribers know, Continuity and Congruence play a huge role. Emailers better understand how important it is to avoid site flow disruption: ensuring Value Proposition and its communication—from the product, to the offer, to the Landing Page, to the conversion—each step the visitor takes to get from one to the next—is not interrupted, doesn’t cause unnecessary Friction, and doesn’t make the customer so anxious they fly instead of click to buy (or sign-up, or donate).

#3: It's all about the message. Stefan Tornquist, Director of Research at MarketingSherpa, reminded the final session’s audience that the click-to-open ratio in email testing is a key metric when it comes to the quality of your content and the subjects your readers like best.

#4: Marketing + IT = Happy faces. See number 1. Marketing and IT must be able to communicate. IT must enable marketing. If IT doesn’t (or won’t) support and facilitate what marketers need, and more importantly, what prospects and customers need when they open an email, click, and get to a Landing Page, then marketing will fail to deliver all it can and remain adequate instead of excellent (right Flint?) and so will the business. Having been a CIO intent on changing the culture from within, here’s a nice synopsis of my perspective:

" IT is not an end in itself. It has no purpose and no value beyond supporting and enabling the business, thus there is a strong argument that ultimate responsibility for IT strategy setting and implementation should rest with the business leadership.”

IT Alignment: Who Is in Charge? The Information Technology Governance Institute, 2005

#5: Email isn’t dead. Email still delivers stunning ROI when done properly. Hence the need for professional training, sharing of what works and what doesn’t, and a community of marketers that wants their communication with customers to be timely, welcome, relevant, and above all, useful. After all, that's what customers want.

Pam McHugh, General Manager, U.S. Operations and Research, Mintel International said this morning at the MarketingSherpa eMail Summit in Miami that 1000 consumers recently surveyed by Mintel found only 26% of personal business email "relevant or useful."

McHugh presented the importance of each of the following in determining whether or not someone will open your email, thinking it's useful:

Opportunity to opt-in.

Give respondents every opportunity to opt-in to emails from your company, because 90% of "opt-inners" (opters-in?) said they were somewhat or very likely to open the email.

Make it clear who you are.

83% of Mintel's respondents said that knowing the sender is very or extremely important and 79% said when they know the sender, subject line is extremely important.

Clearly state the offer in the subject line.

McHugh used an example of a subject line from a credit card email. The original subject line said "enews update", but according to Hughes, "'earn up to $500 in statement credits' would be much better... My son is going to open that email." The email also contained no less than five Calls-To-Action to refer a friend to the program.

Mind your frequency.

When it came to frequency, Mintel received some "really astounding numbers" according to McHugh. If they know the sender, recipients will "tolerate" 9 emails per month from companies with which they do personal business. "They are not saying they are going to open it all, but they will tolerate it from marketers they are familiar with," said McHugh.
If consumers do not perceive they have a relationship with you, their tolerance is significantly lower, tolerating only three emails per month.

Target age-segment opportunities.

Those 65+ open less of their personal business email "even if they opted into it" according to McHugh. But once opened, they are fairly likely to respond, responding to 2.5 PB emails in the past week. Knowing the sender is extremely important for 79% of these respondents.
It was extremely important for only 38% of 18-44 year-olds.

Target affluents.

Those with household income above $100k were most likely to follow through with the purchase of a product or service if they opened the email. They also check their email about five times a day.

Best practices according to Mintel:

1. The more targeted the better. Build demographic information on your contacts over time to improve targeting.
2. Opt-in options. Allow your customers and prospects to opt-in to select types of communications.
3. Clear, concise, subject lines including your company name and offer. "Make that subject line speak to me, if you do, I just might open it," concluded McHugh.

Day 2 of the MarketingSherpa Email Summit here in beautiful Miami brought real-live experiences from an impressive range of companies. Bottom line? Better know your customers and what they like and need instead of blasting them with generic info and offers. The secret word is relevance.

First up was Annette Promes, director of email marketing for Expedia. She wanted to know which offer--points towards free travel, a cash discount code, or a general message promising savings--did a better job of increasing response to hotel offers from customers who had signed up for a ThankYou® Rewards Network membership.

The points treatment lifted click-through by 82% and transactions a whopping 347% while the code/coupon, while also doing well, increased clicks by 24% and transactions by "only" 106%.

Customers had signed up for the points program, and it was points they desired. Promes warned against training customers not to do business with you unless they get a coupon.

Kimberley Talbot, senior group manager of worldwide relationship marketing for Adobe also proved relevance is the key with her case study of the launch of the Creative Suite 3 product.

Talbot segmented the campaign to meet the needs of three customer segments in general: designers, photographers, and educators. The creatives got an email with one stunning, original graphic on a white background and a minimum of copy. Photographers got more tech specs to check out. Educators were told how the software could prepare students for future success.

Then Talbot used a propensity model to ID which customers were early, mid, and late adopters and crafted her email Call-To-Action accordingly. She focused additional direct marketing spend on the early adopters. Her results?

A mind-blowing email campaign ROI of 29,000% in North America and 5,000% worldwide. A 41% increase in overall order rate and a 72% increase in direct orders vs. a "no contact" control.

"Customers proved they know what they need," said Talbot. "They purchased what we predicted they would...but they were exposed to more products."

The take-away?

- Tailor use of media to the audience's preference.
- Version for segments whose needs have a material impact on response.
- Prioritize investment against those segments for whom the messaging is most relevant.

Want to know more about the future of customer engagement according to Adobe? Go to www.adobe.com/engagement/

More later...

It was interesting, intense, tough, and at the end of the day, very rewarding. The MarketingExperiments optimization team condensed 7 weeks of email optimization coursework into one day with a one-hour test.

Those who started the nine-hour day frisky and positive left a little less frisky, but the consensus was the jam-packed class (450 attendees) today at the Intercontinental Hotel Miami got exactly what they signed-up for: Expert understanding of how to optimize email capture, envelope fields, body copy, and landing pages (but in reverse--those who are "in the know" will understand) for their companies.

Malli Gero, principle, Gero Communications, who has worked in marketing and PR for 25 years, summed it up for me: "As a solo practitioner, I have to choose carefully what I sign up for, so I was excited about this summit. When I told my clients where I was going, they were really excited. My mode of speaking to the media is only through email, so writing that subject line is critical."

Eric Choi, manager of database marketing for Citrix Online, said he likes "the scientific approach" MarketingExperiments takes to professional certification courses. "The typical marketing approach is to go with your gut." Anyone who attended the Marketers' Intuition Revisited Web clinic in December knows how wrong that is. The majority of marketers who attended were wrong every time Dr. Flint McGlaughlin asked them to pick which landing page, which PPC, which email, etc. did the best in our tests.

Karen Imbrogno, customer communications manager for Insurance.com, was keen to add yet another ME stripe to her qualifications. Imbrogno has an Online Testing Professional certification already, and other members of her team have Landing Page Optimization certifications.

Karen told Dr. McGlaughlin and the class that her team "follows your advice religiously."

While we wait for the results of our tests, I think another of Gero's comments best sums up the day: "It's been great - it really adds a lot of value. I hope I remember it all!"

Me too, Malli. See you tomorrow...

We received a nice note last week from Eric Stevenson, who runs AXcess News. Eric submitted his co-brandnews.com Landing Page for live optimization at our last Webinar on Feb. 6th, and immediately began implementing our suggestions:

“Attached is the screenshot of the new http://co-brandnews.com site – totally rebuilt to follow the wonderful suggestions we were given in the last webinar:

We hope to have this online within two days in replacement of the old site and would be delighted if they could squeeze it in next week Wednesday – if not – I would be grateful to make the next window and have them discuss the ‘before and after’ look per those suggestions, such as putting the sign up form on the landing page and adding testimonials (which you can’t see on this screenshot; they’re below the area shown).”

Though Eric hasn’t posted his new site design yet, we’ve asked him to send us his test data after it’s been up for awhile. You know we love those numbers.

Dr. McGlaughlin and company will complete Part 2 of our live Landing Page optimization analysis tomorrow at 4:00PM EST. It’s always free and it’s always interesting, so sign up here and join us.

There was a TV ad that ran years ago. Though the product being flogged has been lost in the sands of time (the sands in my mind, anyway), the tag line was “Always buy the best and you’ll never be disappointed.”

Research published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences certainly backs up the premise that if you think it’s expensive, it certainly tastes better.

I would venture that things perceived as expensive look, sound, smell, and feel better, too.

The California Institute of Technology study used 21 volunteers to sample wines in a blind taste test. The researchers ran the test 15 times, putting five bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon wine in a random order, asking the volunteers to rank them in order of preference.

The volunteers were given two of the wines twice; once with the real price, once with a fake price. A $90 bottle was passed off as a $10 bottle, and a $5 bottle was passed off as a $45 one.

The participants also had their brains scanned for activity related to pleasure.

It comes as no surprise to me that the “expensive” wines both produced more activity in the pleasure centers of the subjects’ brains and also resulted in higher ratings.

"If you believe that the experience is better…the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better." said team leader Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at CIT.

The bottom line? Enjoyment increased in direct proportion to price.

So don’t short your customers' experience. Test for your ideal price point, and you might increase your joy and theirs.

The Landing Page optimization advice in our next free brief is too good to save till Monday's email, so I’m going to give you a couple of thousand dollars worth today. Jimmy Ellis’s, Aaron Rosenthal’s, and Flint McGlaughlin’s analysis of the Landing Pages that our subscribers sent in for evaluation at the Feb. 6 Clinic resulted in recommendations anyone can use to get an immediate bump in conversion rates and total revenue.

Here’s just a taste:
• Write a headline that quantifies key metrics. The goal of a headline is not to sell a product. The goal of the headline is get a visitor to read the first sentence of the next paragraph, getting them into the body copy.
• Don’t offer a multitude of products on one Landing Page. Drive visitors to a place where there is not so much unsupervised thinking. Don’t ask them to make choices between many options when they are still not sure they want you at all.
• Take all of the specific elements that help a customer figure out if this is the right product for them and move them closer to the image: price; free shipping; warranty; guarantees. If there is a product specific testimonial, put it right there.
• Customer ratings for products can have a huge impact on conversion. You absolutely need a product rating close to the image so visitors can see what other people are saying.

If readers of MarketingExperiments want to meet Flint, Jimmy, and Aaron (and me) in person, then the place to be is in Miami from Feb. 24-26. So pack your spring break togs and come on down to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. The MarketingExperiments Optimization Team will be doing live Landing Page analysis for attendees, among other duties. I hope to see you there!

I was really impressed by both the number of attendees and the quality of the questions and professional opinions we received from our audience yesterday at the “Optimizing Your Landing Pages” Webinar. We had over 1,200 marketers register to hear Dr. McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis, and Aaron Rosenthal analyze Landing Pages that subscribers submitted in advance of the Clinic.

I know a lot of subscribers wish we could spend more than one hour every two weeks doing live website optimization for our members or sharing our latest research findings, but if we expanded it we’d probably have to start charging to attend the Clinic and distributing the MarketingExperiments journal brief that comes out of it, and we don’t want to do that. We really want to keep it free.

Serving rather than selling is the key to marketing success, and Dr. McGlaughlin looks at what we do as a service to the industry as a whole. By freely sharing our best practices and latest scientific findings in Internet marketing—not just Landing Page optimization or email tuning, but charters for customer relations like our own MarketingExperiments’ Creed—he feels we’re on the right track.

Flint, Jimmy, and Aaron did such a deep dive on six of the sites we selected that we ran out of time to do more, so we’ll cover the ones we didn’t get to yesterday at our next Clinic on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4:00 PM EST. Our subscribers should look for the invitation to "Optimizing Your Landing Pages: Part 2," which we’ll send out next week.

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to our free journal, sign up today, confirm the email we send you, and you’ll get that invitation, too. You’ll also receive a free journal brief with all of the Landing Page optimization recommendations for the sites we looked at yesterday. There should be a lot of news everyone can use in the next edition.

If you attended yesterday's Clinic I'd like to get your feedback. I'm also really interested in hearing from those who submitted a site we selected for a free analysis. Let us know if you implement our recommendations and what happens, and I'll share it here.

We received several requests for more information on price testing subscriptions after our last Web Clinic on finding ideal price points.

Let me start by reviewing the concept of Price Elasticity of Demand (Ed), a measure of how much demand changes in relation to a change in price if all other factors remain the same.

• If demand is price inelastic (Ed < 1), a price increase increases total revenue and a price decrease decreases total revenue. Picture “necessary” goods or services or those without competition.
• If demand is price elastic (Ed > 1), an increase in price decreases total revenue and a decrease in price increases total revenue. When there is a readily available equivalent product from a competitor you are likely to see elastic demand.
• If demand is price unit-elastic (Ed = 1), price and demand are offset.

In order to use your Ed calculation to further your business goals you need to have done some testing of your product or service at several different price points. The example we used in the clinic was a subscription offer at $69.95, which was the Control price, against $50, $59.95, $75, and $79.95. We tested for two weeks and knew how many subscriptions we sold at each price point during the test period. 20% of traffic was directed to each offer page. Our calculations showed that demand was inelastic at all price points compared to the Control: when price went down to $50 for example, total revenue went down; when prices went up to $75 and $79.95, total revenue went up. Demand for the online subscription during those two weeks was price inelastic.

But if we isolated the $75 price point and its total revenue and did an Ed calculation comparing it to the $79.95 price point and its total revenue, demand turned elastic: total revenue dropped as if we’d reached a tipping point. More data points from further price testing would be needed to prove we’d reached the point of elasticity, but the test results could be used to set a new price producing more revenue in the meantime.

The brief on the clinic was posted today and should be emailed to our subscribers today, too. The brief has links to two free Ed calculators in it.

If you’re not yet a subscriber to MarketingExperiments, sign up for our free journal.

We hope to do more free clinics on online price testing in the coming year, so stay tuned!