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... [...]

Jason Del Rey says, “Alibaba beat sales estimates for its first earnings report as a public company. The giant Chinese e-commerce company recorded earnings of 45 cents share on revenue of $2.74 billion in the September quarter. Analysts were expecting on average earnings per share of 45 cents on $2.64 billion in revenue. Net profit, meanwhile, fell 39 percent to $485 million. The shares were up about 3 percent in early trading. The report comes a month and a half after Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange by raising $25 billion in the largest-ever IPO. Alibaba’s stock price... [...]

Lara O’reilly says, “Apple is transforming itself into a huge e-commerce company. Look at these recent moves the company has made: Apple is expanding its in-app mobile ad platform iAd to 70 new countries,. It is rolling out its own mobile payment service, Apple Pay. It is installing advertising iBeacons into retail stores. Its iTunes credit card database is growing toward 1 billion accounts on file. It’s something Business Insider predicted earlier this year, but recent advances show how quickly Apple is growing its e-commerce empire. And this is fantastic news for advertisers”. Apple... [...]

Lara O’reilly says, “Facebook reported better than expected Q3 revenue and earnings per share Tuesday,although its stock price fell in after hours trading last night as the company spooked investors with its 2015 outlook – a year described as a major “investment” year for the world’s largest social network. But marketers and advertisers had plenty of reasons to be excited by the future Facebook the company described in both its earnings release and call. Here’s a few of the key outtakes: DAILY ACTIVE USERS Facebook’s daily active users continue to... [...]

Lara O’reilly says, “YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki confirmed at Re/code’s Code/Mobile conference last night that the Google-owned video platform is exploring the launch of an ad-free subscription service. Re/code reports Wojcicki said: “YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there’s going to be a point where people don’t want to see the ads” Just like Pandora and Spotify before it, there are just two options left on the table for users: you choose ads, or you choose to pay a fee... [...]