Case Study: Optimizing Name Acquisition

This is an abbreviated case study that illustrates how increasing the relevance and perceived value of your offer can produce stronger response on your landing page.  Flint McGlaughlin, CEO of MECLABS pulled me up onto the stage to share this at the MECLABS Landing Page Optimization Summit in Colorado last month.



You can read the more detailed post on the Marketing Experiments Blog.

"Best Practices Are Nothing But Polled Ignorance"

I wish I could say that I was the first one to say that, but I wasn't.  Last week, I attended the MECLABS Landing Page Optimization Summit in Denver, CO and one of the first things I wrote down was that quote from my mentor Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.  Flint went on to say that the marketer must be the philosopher of an organization.  Philosophers are constantly consumed with the question of "why."  This proves to be a difficult challenge when we face the perpetual barrage of questions that begin with "how."

How can I get this done in time?

How can I make my subject line more effective?

How can I increase my revenue?

Most marketers are too busy asking the questions that begin with "how" that they fail to ever ask the more important questions that begin with "why."

Why did this perform better than that?

Why do my customers/donors prefer this type of content over that type of content?

Why doesn't my landing page convert more people into customers/donors?

But it is precisely the "why" questions that lead to wisdom.  I recently performed an experiment that challenged a longstanding direct response best practice and it reminded me that asking "why" is okay.  The best practice goes like this:

Having more than one conflicting call-to-action on a landing page leads to non-decision and hurts conversion rate.

Now, I think that this actually makes a lot of sense.  What I wanted to discover through this experiment is whether or not there could be a scenario where having multiple calls-to-action could actually lead to a greater conversion rate.  The results were quite convincing.

 

The Experiment

In this experiment we tested two different landing pages that each had differing conversion paths.  The control had a two column layout with a donation form in the left column and copy in the right column.  The treatment was actually exactly the same with one exception: at the bottom of the right column below the copy we added a secondary call-to-action to register your email address to receive a free PDF download.  Now, because the PDF offer required a confirmation page, we decided to add a secondary opportunity to donate with a page layout similar to the control, but with different copy.

Once the control and treatment pages were developed we performed a simple A/B split test and diverted an even 50% of traffic to both versions over the next 30 days.  Once the results were compiled and validated, the control had a donation conversion rate of 2.52%.

The interesting thing is that the treatment, the version of the landing page with two calls-to-action actually had a statistically identical donation conversion rate of 2.51%.  However, the treatment also received a 4.98% name acquisition conversion rate for people that responded to the secondary call-to-action for the free PDF offer.

What was even more interesting is that the people that responded to the PDF offer then converted at a 14.16% donation conversion rate when provided a second opportunity to give.  This means that by adding the secondary call-to-action for the PDF, and adding a secondary opportunity to give, enabled us to create a 25% lift in donation conversion.

What I Learned From This Experiment

There were actually a few different takeaways from this experiment:

1. Donation conversion is greatly affected by visitor motivation.  This is something that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and his team at MECLABS talks about with their Conversion Heuristic:
   
   
   C = 4m + 3v + 2(i - f) - 2a 
   
   This expression in plain english goes like this: Conversion equals four times visitor motivation, plus three times clarity of value proposition, plus two times incentive minus friction, minus two times anxiety.  The variable with the highest coefficient is Visitor Motivation.  What this means is that if visitor motivation is high enough, then it can often overcome inhibitors like friction and anxiety.  Clearly when we add a secondary call-to-action to a web site we are adding friction into the process. But because the traffic that was coming to the web site was motivated to give, then it really didn't matter.
   
2. Reciprocity is alive in well in the donation conversion process.  Reciprocity is a psychological principle that suggests that when I give you something, in some way you feel indebted to me, and because our natural inclination is to not be in someone's debit we tend to want to settle the score by returning the favor.  When we offered a gift (free pdf) to the visitors to the site, they were more predisposed to return the favor (donating to the organization) after receiving the gift.
   
3. Best practices are not enough.  If you really want to maximize your revenue by optimizing your web pages, then relying on long-held best practices is not enough-- you need to be willing to challenge best practices and even conventional wisdom  by constantly testing within a rigorous methodology.  Science trumps the marketer's intuition every day of the week.  Remember what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin says, "Best practices are nothing but polled ignorance."

Happy Experimenting!

Music Attaches Itself to Life

I don’t remember where I was, but a Sheryl Crow song came on, All I Want to Do is Have Some Fun, and it was amazing how instantly I was whisked away to a (a-hem) party that I was at in High School.  I remember how I felt—young, unconquerable, yet inwardly insecure—I remember details like the front porch at my friend’s house that had these severely over-grown holly bushes that seemed to engulf the prime seating area on the porch.

When I hear the Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot, I think of my grandmother.  I was her live-in caretaker when she had entered into the early phases of Alzheimer’s.  I remember that song came on in a Best Buy and I was wearing a big suede coat with puffy fleece lining and recall vividly singing along to the words in the middle of the home audio section to the delight to Grams.

When I hear the classic hymn, Be Thou My Vision I remember standing at the alter next to my (soon-to-be) wife, holding her hand and marveling at the clouds finally parting from the soggy-wet rainy day and sun beams shining in through the big curtain glass window in the Bible Chapel where we took our vows.

Music is powerful.  The interesting thing is that it attaches itself to our lives uniquely.  My triggered emotions and memories connected to a particular song may be very different than your own.  Most likely, you have different emotions and memories—and most definitely different songs that have so deeply (and surprisingly randomly) attached themselves to you.

But music is a powerful, and woefully underutilized medium when it comes to marketing and fundraising.  How might we use music to attach itself to a positive giving experience?  We’ve become programmed to drop whatever it is we are working on to check the newest email that comes in when we hear that simple little email “chime.”  How might we create a similar sensory experience in the donation process?

Please share your thoughts on this—and some of your music-attached-memories. 

Too Much is Sometimes Too Much

I spend a lot of time on airplanes. More often than not, there are weather delays, or mechanical issues, or something else that prevents my flight from leaving at the advertised date and/or time. Usually when this happens we get some sort of message from either the pilot or flight attendant over the intercom. I'm amazed at some of the things that they'll say on that thing! Do we really need to know that the thing that they are fixing is imperative to our ability to take-off and land. I mean, if it's busted, I'm not so sure I want to be on this plane even after they fixed it. This introduces a whole new series of anxiety-inducing questions that I would have never needed to entertain.

'If that thing broke, what's to stop it from breaking again?'

'What if the guy fixing the broken part, doesn't do a good job?'

'What other little very important parts could have been affected?'

Sometimes too much information is not helpful-- it can be actually quite hurtful. When communicating with customers and donors, we need to give them enough information to accomplish our goal for that particular conversation-- but that's it. This is especially important when things go wrong. Often when there is a problem, we get insecure. When we communicate out of our insecurity, we often say more than we should say. When we say more than we should say, we may make things actually worse.

Here's a simple way to overcome this challenge: plan ahead. When you must have a challenging conversation with a customer or donor, think through what the goal of that conversation is. Write it out on a piece of paper. Make a short list of talking points that bring clarity to the goal you've defined. Finally-- and this is most important-- plan to listen more than you talk. Many times, the customer or donor just wants to be validated-- they want to be given the opportunity to voice their concerns or frustrations--and if you can give them that, then you can often accomplish more than your best speech ever could.

Confusing Activity with Productivity

I have a terribly bad habit. When I'm on an airplane, I have a tendency to be a "Nosy Parker" and try to read the magazine article, newspaper-- or even better-- powerpoint sildes of the people sitting in front of me. I'm fascinated by what occupies the attention of my incidental traveling companions.

So I'm sitting here, somewhere between Minneapolis and Dallas, spying the deck of the dude in front of me. Here's the headline of the slide he's been stuck on for the past 65 minutes:

"We are starting the process of identifying the implementation roadmap now, but it will not be complete until February 2012" (It is currently October 2011)

And then here is the schedule that followed:

October - Pre-draft of roadmap version 1.0
November - Workshop to refine roadmap 1.0; refine timeline, activities, and resource allocations
December - Review version 2.0 with Steering Committee; refine timeline, activities, and resource allocations
January - Incorporate findings from architecture assessment; refine timeline, activities, and resource allocations
February - Seek approvals for business cases and roadmap version 4.0

Really? Five months, just to get a plan together. Now, admittedly, I have no clue what this roadmap is for. But I think this is a good metaphor for how we often meet for the sake of meeting, and desperately quest for consensus when what we probably need is just strong leadership. To me, this seems like a throwback to a time where life moved much slower. In the digital, ever-connected age, we need to be agile and move quickly. What is cutting edge today is old hat tomorrow.

Or, it may be that we satisfy ourselves with activity when we should be striving for productivity. I read a study recently that suggested that when we talk about our goals and plans, subconsciously it is just as satisfying as actually doing them. So maybe we need to talk (and meet) less and fixate on actually doing more. Perhaps we need to ask for forgiveness instead of begging for approval.

Or maybe I just need to mind my own business on airplanes.

The Human Assembly Line

If there is one thing that absolutely terrifies me, it is the assembly line. The thought of pressing the same button every day, week, month, year, absolutely nauseates me. Well, living in a post-industrial America, I shouldn't have to fear that any more...or should I?

As I survey the way that most businesses are organized, it is very comparable to a human assembly line. For some reason, we think that the best way to organize effort that leads to output is within very narrow, hierarchical units. The larger the organization, the more narrow, and the more hierarchical it becomes.

But is that really the most efficient use of resources? If you hired multi-talented people, couldn't they be able to perform multifaceted roles? It seems that the greatest loss of efficiency comes from one person trying to communicate to another person exactly what they are thinking.

For example, a strategist writes a document that outlines her strategic plan, and then an account person needs to pass that along to the client to get feedback that gets passed back to the strategist, and then the consolidated document gets passed to a project manager that breaks each element of the strategy down into smaller tasks that can be assigned to various talents. By the time it reaches the end-- no matter how well the initial concept is documented-- there is substantial disconnect between the people executing the idea and the idea's originator.

What if instead, they could just execute what they were thinking? Instead of investing in technology, and books about process, and consultants to help us break down tasks into smaller and smaller pieces that can be inserted into a queuing system and managed by yet another set of resources-- would it not be more efficient to cross train employees to be multi-talented? Looking back on all of the various projects that I have been involved in, I've found that I've been most engaged, most fulfilled, most stretched, and most rewarded on projects that I've been able to take from drawing board through results presentation.

Three Questions Every Employee Asks

Our senior management team just started reading 12: The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter, Ph.D. In the book, the authors break down the Q12 statements that were introduced in First, Break All The Rules. These statements are based on Gallup's data from over ten million workplace interviews and they represent what every employee needs to be truly engaged at work.

As I've thought about these 12 statements, I think they can be summarized within the following three questions that every employee asks themselves:

1. Do I matter?

2. Does what I do matter?

3. Does the company matter?


Let me break them down:


Do I matter?

If I truly matter to the company, I will be provided with the tools, training, and resources I need to do my job effectively. I will be compensated fairly. I will be provided opportunities to learn and to grow. I will have the overwhelming sense that I don't work for my manager, but that my manager works for me. I will be set up for success, not destined to failure. I will be provided benefits that give me and my family peace of mind. I will have a clear career path and a manager that helps me to constantly move forward. From time to time, my company will even provide opportunities for me to just have fun.


Does what I do matter?

If what I do truly matters, then I will will be missed when I'm not around. I will feel safe and free to speak up and provide my opinion. I will receive help when I need it without feeling threatened. I will freely give and receive trust. I will not live in fear of making a mistake. I will be able to easily draw a line between what I do and how it creates impact. I will be asked what I think about policies, processes, procedures, and people. I will be respected for my unique contribution to the team. I will be surround by people I genuinely like and that genuinely like me. I will receive public recognition for a job well done and private redirection for a job not so well done. I will know what success looks like and how I can obtain it.


Does the company matter?

If the company truly matters, then people will buy/donate/subscribe/retain/hire. Our competition will know us and study us. Our product or service will get results. Industry leaders will apply within, not have to be recruited. Other companies will try to copy us. Investors will want to own us. The way our industry, vertical, sector, or even the world works will be different.


These are just some initial observations, but from them I think a new credo may be formed from perhaps a single ageless question, "Where can I find meaning in life?" Some of the greatest minds in history have wrestled with this very question and it seems we are still wrestling with it today. Sadly, if we seek to extract ultimate meaning in our lives from our careers we will be perpetually disappointed. Industry is man-made and ultimately has an end. Many have reached that peak and found nothing but disappointment. So if we put our complete hope in finding meaning in enterprise, we will find that it is in fact meaningless. There must be something more that drives us, inspires us, and satisfies us with real meaning and purpose. Something that brings meaning to work, not in it. Something bigger. Something that surpasses everything that we can create through the work of our hands. Do you know what that is? I do.