Ken Bowen says, “On February 22, we brought you a live blog post from MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, the signature event of our sister site. In the post, we looked at a presentation from Summit’s Digital & Data track by Mike Loveridge, Head of Digital Test and Learn, Humana. In his presentation, Mike discussed how he and the Humana team harnessed strategic, incremental testing to drive healthcare enrollment. While at Summit, Mike took the time to sit down with Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, to discuss this iterative approach that the Humana team leveraged, including... [...]

Liva LaMontagne says, “A recent study by MECLABS Institute, the parent research organization of MarketingExperiments, found that age is one of the factors that predicts the likelihood of consumers paying for a subscription to news sources. Older people were more likely to pay for subscriptions. The researchers tried to understand whether Millennials’ and older generations’ attitudes toward the news are different. How do Millennials see the value that news provides? A breakdown of attitudes toward the news by age shows Millennials’ views about keeping up with the news as less of a civic... [...]

Daniel Burstein says, “Startups can reveal some pretty enlightening information about what makes a successful value proposition. After all, unlike established companies with divisions and brands and patents and factories and distribution networks, the main asset many startups have is their value proposition (often communicated as an “elevator pitch”). CB Insights recently conducted a post-mortem of more than 100 failed startups to try to figure out what went wrong. The top reason they failed — “No market need,” cited by 42%. To put that into marketing terms, their value proposition... [...]

Andrea Johnson says, “Everyone has a physiological blind spot — an area without vision — because there’s a tiny part of the retina that doesn’t respond to light. Likewise, every marketer has a blind spot — their own lack of vision — which prevents them from seeing their marketing through the eyes of their customer. During his recent featured speaker presentation at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas, Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute, revealed critical steps to overcome your marketing blind spot so you can drive more revenue and opportunity.... [...]

Micah Shull says, “Earlier this month, I brought you the first in a series of 2015 Testing Year in Review blog posts. For this next post, we’ll be looking at tests using both KPI macro-yes(s) (conversions) and micro-yes(s) (clickthrough). Here are results of the 2015 tests we ran based on the primary test metric and level of confidence achieved. Anything under 95% level of confidence (LOC) is considered inconclusive, meaning the test did not have statistically significant findings. We want all the tests to be above 95% LOC because then we can say (with 95% confidence) that the changes... [...]

Paul Cheney says, “I recently got an email forwarded to me originally from one of our Research Partners. In it, there was a question: Could you give me a little primer on what you consider best practices in writing promotional, informative and entertaining content that captivates readers? What follows is Part I of my answer to that question … Let’s Rephrase the Question When my mother-in-law (read: least likely person to read this post) Googles something, it’s always painful for me to watch. She’s one of the more intelligent people I know, but she doesn’t really have a clue how... [...]

Ken Bowen says, “Editor’s note: I would like to extend a heartfelt apology to those of you who experienced difficulties streaming portions of today’s special live Web clinic. We’re working to identify the problem, determine why it effected some of you but not others and prevent it from happening again in the future. In the meantime, the video replay is now available! This is Ken Bowen, reporting live from the Bellagio hotel in beautiful Las Vegas for MarketingSherpa Summit 2016. For over a decade, Email Summit has been one of the most exciting weeks of the year for email marketing... [...]

Daniel Burstein says, ““Most email clients nowadays pull and display a preview text in addition to the sender (or ‘from’) name and subject line of an email. While all inbox fields are fertile ground for optimization and A/B testing, optimizing preheader snippet is frequently a quick win,” Laz Tyrekidis, Digital Marketing and Audience Director, Metropolis Business Media, said. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the quick wins from preheader testing run by Laz and his team. But first, a quick primer on preheaders in case you’re unfamiliar. Preheaders, as seen below, are frequently... [...]

Shelbey Dorsey says, “Every month the MarketingExperiments team hosts a Web clinic designed around a specific topic to help marketers create stronger campaigns. January’s “Boosting Your Only-Factor” clinic discussed the relationship between appeal and exclusivity, and how it’s not enough to have just one — you have to have both. In order to have an “only-factor,” there has to be an overlap between the appeal and exclusivity of your product or service. Basically, not only does your offer have to attract the interest of prospective consumers but you also have to give them a reason... [...]

Micah Shull says, “As Test Database Specialist at MECLABS Institute (parent company of MarketingExperiments), my days are spent sifting through thousands of tests, analyzing the results and searching for insights to inform future testing. While looking through our hundreds of tests from 2015, two top testing categories emerged for increasing clickthrough and conversion rates: value copy and friction reduction. Value copy Value copy testing stood out in 2015 with high rates of success and low levels of failure. Testing in this area was often successful and appears to be of high value to Internet... [...]