“I feel like eating Cheetos with my grilled cheese & turkey sandwich, but I have none ”

This presents a huge challenge to the modern marketer. We all see social media and the real-time web as a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But with these new media awash in so much “pointless babble,” finding success with social media marketing is akin to trying to find that rainbow against a psychedelic sky of endlessly flashing colors.

So before our next free web clinic – Social Media Marketing in 4 Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 marketers – on which MarketingSherpa Research Director Sergio Balegno will share actionable insights from research on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging, we thought we’d post this simple (and simply blunt) question to marketers:

How do you use social media to make money?

From the obvious (”cultivate relationships”) to the iconoclastic (”you don’t”), marketers had many interesting takes on this question (what else would you expect from a group that has to think out of the box for a living?). Here are our favorite tips, techniques and insights:

Win real fans
I have a brand called Mocks (socks for mobile phones) which I started to heavily promote on Facebook last year. Basically, over three months I gained 12000 fans and doubled online sales.

I use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and engage customers so that they become fans in the “old” sense of the word. This then means that they buy more and tell their friends.

New way of thinking for a direct response pro
We have really embraced social media in the past year to raise our profile in our own industry (medical marketing). Until recently, because we come from direct response backgrounds, we focused all of our marketing efforts solely on targeted prospects, with little regard for the larger industry.

Our strategy has been to leverage the publication-quality content we were already producing for magazines and our newsletter base. Therefore, we are getting a lot of bang for little additional effort, leading to more and better client inquiries.

Long-term relationships over short-term profits
Social networking isn’t always about an instantaneous transformation into dollars. It is about a long-term continuous relationship with the customer. You stay on their mind even when they aren’t actively seeking your product.

Virtual Tupperware party
Direct selling on a social network is difficult. The best way to sell is to replicate the offline world to a certain extent by signing up online agents. The same people who would host a cosmetics party or a Tupperware party are natural networkers who will have large social networks on all of the primary platforms.

The possibility exists to build a platform that they can invite their friends to at specific times and, in effect, host online sales parties. Obvious inducements include discounts on branded goods and free prizes, but the key may be to create a uniform space for the agents that they can build into a profile for themselves.

Even without a platform, they could simply become discount agents for their friends. Somebody who all their friends know can get good deals on specific products or services.

For the agent, it is not abusing their relationships on the social network platforms. For the most part, their friends already know them as somebody who hosts sales parties and they will either be ignored or valued but are unlikely to be criticized for the entrepreneurial efforts among their friends.

A straightforward sale
E-commerce websites (especially B2C) are the ones who can reap maximum benefits out of social media. The best examples are Dell and Zappos. Dell has reportedly made $3.5 million in 2009 from Twitter promotions.

These retailers post updates about various product offers in Twitter, Facebook and other social media. And they also give additional promotions to followers. Timely promotions to a well-targeted market segment will spur an increase in conversion rates and hence an increase in revenue.

One emerging trend is Facebook and Twitter commerce. Retailers are trying to build applications around Facebook and Twitter to port their entire commerce platform.

Find out what customers want
By gaining a relationship or connecting with your customers and getting feedback, you can take the ideas they offer and put them into practice. For small businesses this is easier because most changes will be simple and not too costly. Larger business might need to run suggestions through a spreadsheet to find the most popular ideas before taking action.

Also, by doing this you pull in your customers and let them know they are being heard and that you’re really looking to make them happy. A great example of this type of mentality is Domino’s. They listened and then took action.

Track lead generation
When it comes to quantifying social media and social networking efforts into an actual dollar value, the best way I’ve discovered is to use a simple tracking system. This consists of a spreadsheet and/or entry into my CRM that shows: lead to customer and what channel they came through, whether this be blog, social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), or referral.

Present real value
Social media must be presented as a value proposition. It’s got nothing to do with befriending people and tweeting, but everything to do with brand value and lead generation.

Lead generation
If you are currently advertising for customers, you can now “advertise” for FREE by posting a sample, giveaway, or contest on Twitter and linking to your website. Ask for pertinent details that are important to qualifying your potential customers…and drive them to your site.

Social media is about awareness, not revenue
We use it to drive business and increase our profile, nothing more. But do we make money from it? No, we make the money from the services that we provide to our clients. Our social media strategy could be the best in the world but if we cannot deliver then it is pointless. So yes, it drives traffic, increases awareness, and generates leads, but it does not make money.

As we confront this brave new world, let’s remember that there is nothing particularly new about it…

Personally, social media has been around forever. We have always had teenage hangouts, chambers of commerce, the restaurant breakfast/coffee club, the local newspaper and specialized magazines. The difference today is that our social media has more two-way interaction, is worldwide, and can be instant.

Social media is not a novel concept, we’ve just thrown a bunch of technology into the mix. And there are great benefits – speed, cost, and reach among them. But don’t get so caught up in the technology that you overlook what is really transpiring – a conversation.

Because, in the end, people don’t buy from social media platforms (or websites or email messages or even companies) – people buy from people.

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers

The campaign targeted “inactive” members of their list, which they defined as subscribers that had not opened or clicked an email in 120 days. They wanted to either reactivate those subscribers, or else determine that they were truly inactive and remove them from the list. So they set up a four-message reactivation campaign to encourage a response.

Each message took a different approach to the reactivation effort:

- The first was a survey about email preferences
- The second was a request for subscribers to update their personal information
- The third was a contest to win a book
- The fourth repeated the request to update personal information

What is more appealing than FREE?

Going into the campaign, the team believed the contest offer would have the best response. After all, people like getting free stuff, right?

Maybe not: The contest offer had the weakest open rate and clickthrough rates of the four messages. Its open rate was 60% lower than the best-performing email – the survey about email preferences. And the contest offer’s CTR was 82% lower than the best-performing email.

The good news is that the reactivation campaign was a success overall. They reactivated 9% of the inactive subscribers they targeted – and they won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for it.

They also learned important lessons about what motivates their subscribers. Their conclusion: “People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

Final lesson: Assumptions are no match for results data. So get testing!

Sean Donahue is the editor of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies, benchmark data, and how-to information read by hundreds of thousands of advertising, marketing, and PR professionals every week.

As I try to be informative and give back to the Twittersphere, one of my email-related tweets was picked up by a Florida marketing agency that services several metros nationwide. With our Email Optimization clinic series underway, I was more than happy to provide an analysis of a broad-spectrum campaign that they had planned. Luann, their president, was as excited as I was about making a Twitter connection.

With Luann’s permission, I wanted to share my thoughts and recommendations with our readers. Here is an edited copy of the email response that I sent to her:

Hi Luann,

(click image to zoom)

Here are a few thoughts based on the email message creative I got from Noele, along with the requisite assumptions I’ve made. I hope they will be helpful.

There are two important caveats:

1. I don’t believe in best practices. Everything I recommend is normally tested until I find out what really works for the particular product and customer segment.
2. I want to be as helpful as possible, so I am not pulling any punches; the comments below are not a reflection on your company’s competence or reputation—just how they are communicated via this email message.

The fundamentals: Optimizing thought sequences

In optimization, our objective is not to create better design or copy. Our objective is to affect different thought sequences, and design and copy are our tools. A useful way to examine the thought sequences we need to address is through three simple questions that arise in the mind of the email recipient immediately, whether consciously or unconsciously:

1. Who is sending me this email?
2. What is it asking me to do?
3. Why should I do it?

Our job is to answer these questions as directly and quickly as possible using copy, graphical elements, and layout of the email.

Without specific information about your list, I am going to assume (based on email content) that it contains a large segment that has never done business with your company and perhaps has never heard of it.

Communicating Efficiently: Make it an easy read

The body of the email appears singularly focused on its graphic design and a clever visual way to represent what you do. I suspect that your target customers would prefer a plain-English explanation instead.

They would also likely appreciate it being summarized into a strong, benefits-focused headline, supported with several key reasons why they should use your company’s services, rather than your competitors’.

How it appeared in my Outlook preview pane. (click image to zoom)

I am making an assumption about your target customer segment(s), but from my experience—especially with B2B—black text on a white background works best most of the time. There’s rarely a better way to communicate with busy professionals.

Relying primarily on text, rather than images, will likely work better for you because in default Outlook setup with a preview pane, most people will see blank white boxes instead of your message—and promptly delete it. Alt text helps, but not as much as well-formatted HTML text. You need to make sure that your email degrades gracefully: it needs to read acceptably with images turned off and in plain text.

Communicating Value: Make it clear why you are the best choice

Again, there is no real headline here. The question “Is your business missing something?” is so generic that I can’t imagine it being compelling at all. You can have a successful question-format headline, but it needs to point to a specific problem that you know your customer has.

A great way further to support your value proposition is by telling the reader what your customers say about you. It’s more powerful than anything you say yourself.

There is another challenge with communicating value: you are offering a range of very different services. Sent to a large enough list, this will get you calls, but I would invest some time into 1) trying to segment your list and offer only the most relevant services to each segment, and 2) if you can’t segment or still end up with a large “general” segment, help your reader understand which service is right for them.

Communicating Action: Make it clear what to do next

You don’t want to leave this up to the recipients to figure out. That’s what we call “unsupervised thinking.” You need to do most of the work for them—or you won’t get the click.

There is no clear next step. Here’s what I can picture a recipient thinking: “It looks like you just want me to sign up for the newsletter. It’s the biggest CTA (call to action). But I don’t know who you are. I really don’t care about getting latest news postings on your website. If we already have a relationship, why am I getting this generic email?”

In the end, you are not giving the reader a specific reason to contact you. This goes back to building the problem, explaining why you are the best solution, and telling the reader what they’ll get by clicking where you want them to click.

If this is an email to an unsegmented list, I suggest two options to test:

1. Have only one CTA (you can repeat it at the top and at the bottom, but ultimately you should be asking them to do one thing). The job of this email will be to build enough confidence/interest in your company to get a click. Then you can provide options (if relevant) on the landing page.
2. Have several distinct offers, making very clear which one applies to which customer segment or specific problem it’s solving (even if you can’t segment the list, you should know what the key segments are). Then the job of this email is to help the reader quickly decide which offer is most relevant, and click on the corresponding CTA.

I hope these insights will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing about the results you were able to achieve with them.

Sincerely,

Boris Grinkot

To see more email optimization ideas, you can listen to the replay of our last live web clinic, where the MarketingExperiments team offered testing ideas for audience-submitted email marketing messages.

* I’m not counting 2007—come on!

Other marketers are happy to jump at any social media marketing opportunity. To them, Facebook is one big opportunity that they’re just trying to find the right tactics to embrace (of course, it might help to wipe the dollar signs out of their eyes first).

Whatever works

I’m a pragmatist. I’ll leave my personal biases at the door any day in favor of solid metrics combined with scientific experimentation that shows what really works.

Social media measurement dreamers like myself may have a new champion. Omniture (recently acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion) will announce an expansion of its partnership with Facebook in a keynote address today at Omniture Summit 2010.

Omniture is going to expand its existing search management solution, and its SearchCenter Plus customers will now be able to manage and compare their spend on search engines and on Facebook in a single tool. Online Marketing Suite 2.0 will include Facebook social media optimization, integrating Facebook ad management with Omniture® SearchCenter®.

This unified reporting will help marketers more efficiently understand and respond to ad ROI (and perhaps move from tactical to strategic use of social media marketing).

What gets measured gets done (better)

Omniture’s powerful analytics and testing tools have provided users with reliable reporting and experimental implementation. (Disclosure: MarketingExperiments provides Omniture SiteCatalyst® and Test&Target® consulting and integration services alongside its own optimization and experimental design expertise.)

Detailed demographic and engagement data provided by Facebook’s login-required environment will further help advertisers position their message in front of the right audience. On the practical side of optimization, the ability to use this data is critical to experimental design (understanding performance on segment level), and the automation already provided by Omniture SearchCenter will help roll out tests on Facebook placement faster in the same convenient interface with search ad management.

Will Facebook become more attractive to major marketers?

This is an important step by Facebook to become a more mainstream publisher, opening it up to Omniture’s substantial customer portfolio of major B2B and B2C brands. Tighter Omniture integration brings additional legitimacy to Facebook as a marketing channel, whose power as a social media network has been as business-ambiguous for major ad spenders as it has been popular for tween marketers.

For optimization professionals, this also signals a significant opportunity to gain greater insights and deliver more relevant messages to target customers.

How do you use social to make money? Respond to the discussion in our LinkedIn group or drop us an email. We’ll feature the best tips, techniques, and practices in a future blog post, so make sure to include any info (Twitter handle, website) that you’d like to promote.

Proper timing = greater relevance

To illustrate how timing might affect open and click-through rates, think about how you read email.  In the afternoon when the day is dragging on and you need a break, do you give each email message a little more time than when you first get into the office in the morning and are confronted with 20 hot items bursting from your inbox?

So would an email with a more complex conversion goal (such as signing up for a recurring subscription) do better with you in the afternoon while a simple conversion goal (like signing up for a free web clinic) might have a better chance in the morning when you’re plugging and chugging and not putting as much thought (and perhaps doubt) into your actions?

While you were sleeping

If you subscribe to our informative email, you know that we send it in the middle of the night. By testing, we learned that email messages sent before 9 a.m. EST dramatically lifted click-through rates for our list. Here are the key takeways from our testing:

• Late-nighters in the management level and ‘indiepreneur’ crowds on the West Coast are opening work email up until the midnight hour. East Coast execs are responsive in the ‘early bird’ hours.
• Subscribers based in Asia and Europe respond to email messages that don’t get buried in their inbox during non-work hours.
• Time zone segmentation is worth a test for any marketer with a substantial international list – especially B-to-Bers.

What works for your audience?

Keep in mind, that for every demographic and persona that is part of your readership, their habits and optimal send time might be different. Test sending out at different times to see what affect that has on not only readership, but conversion – because even in these “tight time zones,” people might just glance at the email, (giving you the open metrics) but save the action for later. However, we all know sometimes “later” never comes.

Speaking of testing, it is not just good enough to just try different send times for entire lists. Aggregate testing like this can get you subpar results and hide the real conversions nuggets. Narrowing the scope to particular segments in your list (which you should always be doing…) will help you see how certain segments respond to timing and allow you to make stronger conclusions.

Sometimes the conversion gems that are waiting to be discovered are not only in the message itself, but how and (in this case) when it is being delivered. It is like when you asked your Mom to borrow the car – you knew not to bother her when she was busy if you wanted a good response.

Good luck in testing.

For a deeper discussion about timing and relevance, you can join our Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, as he explores Increasing Conversion with Right Time, Right Message Strategies on Thursday, March 11 at 2 p.m. This free BtoB Magazine webcast is sponsored by Eloqua.

Let’s say you make mass-produced pizza that tastes like cardboard. How would you sell it?

A) Hire Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson to tell everyone how good your pizza tastes
B) Have your founder drive across the country in a classic sports car to tell everyone how great your pizza tastes
C) Launch a nationwide campaign to tell everyone how bad your pizza tastes (and then make it better)

Domino’s Pizza actually picked option C (and if they didn’t, really, would it be worth blogging about?). In fact, the cardboard reference above is something Domino’s itself is promoting…





This campaign is a great example of two principles we teach about in our training workshops…

Transparent Marketing

So let’s get back to why I’m writing about a pizza campaign. It overcame one of the first hurdles in a crowded, overwhelming, thousands-of-sales-messages-per-day marketplace – it stood out. It grabbed my attention. And I even remembered the marketer’s name. How often can you say that about a pizza (or any other) marketing campaign?

As George Orwell has said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And, without being too harsh on my marketing peers, “universal deceit” is a pretty good summation of most marketing today. As Dr. Flint McGlaughlin has said, “When you say ‘sell,’ I hear ‘hype.’”

And that’s precisely why Transparent Marketing is so powerful. With the rise of social media, it is not hard for prospective customers to quickly learn the truth about your product. If you openly admit your weaknesses, you may be able to gain their trust. And, ultimately, every sale is an act of trust.

In Domino’s case, they are readily embracing social media – including every tweet, good or bad, right on their microsite:

Optimization Sequence

Of course, if your weaknesses are big enough, simply admitting them isn’t enough. You actually have to improve. Let’s take a quick look at the MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence formula:

Opr > Oprn > Ocnn ^©

Wherein:
Opr = Optimize Product Factor
Oprn = Optimize Presentation Factor
Ocnn = Optimize Channel Factor

As you can see in the formula, you must ensure you have an effective value proposition before you try to express it to prospects.

Of course, this can be the biggest challenge for marketers. First, admit your product has a problem. And then second, investing the resources and (in some cases) political capital to try to improve it.

In this case, social media can be your friend as well. Don’t just use services like Twitter as a one-way communication tool. Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Use this feedback, combined with other ways of communicating with (not to) your customers, to find ways to improve your product and build a case internally to invest in these improvements.

Grab the zeitgeist and don’t look back

If you look closely at how Domino’s Pizza applied these principles, they didn’t do it in a vacuum. The name of their campaign is The Pizza Turnaround.

The word Turnaround has been splashed all over the news in the past few years. With the biggest financial and automotive companies in the world needing government assistance to stay solvent, and then looking to make changes to return to profitability, the public has gotten quite used to companies needing to improve the way they do business.

So if you haven’t yet, now is a quite auspicious time to begin applying the principles of Transparent Marketing. Heck, even the notoriously broody band Pearl Jam has been writing about making a turnaround of sorts. As Eddie Vedder sings in the recent song “The Fixer”…

When something’s dark
Lemme shed a little light on it

When something’s cold
Lemme put a little fire on it

When something’s broke
I wanna put a little fixing on it

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provoked a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London

ANSWER:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for your question.

If I might broaden the question slightly to interpret its essence as a transferrable principle, could I restate it as…

How much validity is there to the conventional wisdom that, in the Subject Line of an offer email message, numbers, certain symbols (especially £/€/$, %, and !) and “SPAM words” such as “Free” and “discount” will cause a dramatic reduction in deliverability, and consequently effectiveness?

… if so, then it’s surely an important one.

In the case of the particular company and study referred to on Slide 22 – that was precisely one of the questions we set out to answer.

What you couldn’t see in the context of Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami is that this particular two-treatment comparative vignette was just a tiny part of a much larger and broader study. We intended to test the specific, widely accepted presumption you mentioned.

We were also exploring a host of other best practices to see how valid they remained through the evolution of regulations as well technical filter changes by email service providers (ESPs) since the time they were first introduced and anecdotally adopted (around 2003-2005).

This was important because we know from our foundational Offer/Response-Optimization principles of “clarity trumps persuasion” and “specificity converts,” that the clearer and more specific subject line – i.e., the one with the “15% Off…” copy – should convert better.

What we found was that there was, in fact, a small but significant difference in deliverability – interestingly, it was more pronounced among the smaller ESPs. In addition, as we had predicted based on the “eme” heuristic, the Open Rate actually declined (…by more than 25%).

In the end, though, the central research question was “Which email subject line will result in the greatest projected net revenue?” As revealed in Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation, despite the slight dip in Delivery Rate, and the (what would otherwise have been alarming) drop in Open Rate, the Click-through Rate (CTR) to the landing page was 60.3% higher.

What he may not have mentioned is that, in direct answer to the research question, the Treatment subject line yielded a 56% increase in projected net revenue vs. the Control.

So, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

I hope that’s helpful, Chris.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email marketing at MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich on March 8^th and 9^th.

Dr. McGlaughlin’s four-hour workshop and keynote presentation will cover email capture rate and quality, open rates, conversion, and building customer trust and loyalty with email. He will also be conducting live optimization of audience submissions – a lively and always-popular segment.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

I remember being a scrawny high school kid, band geek, 97 lbs, and hearing over and over that I would never make it through boot camp. By the time I got there, I actually started to believe it myself. But, nine weeks later, I had finished all the trials, gained 25 lbs, and was marching with the rest of my class in the pass-in-review ceremony. I had done it, and (to borrow a popular phrase from that year) thought I was the king of the world.

What does being in boot camp have to do with online marketing?

Well, let me say that when you first get to boot camp, your mind does wander to thoughts of quitting and getting back home to a comfortable life where all you really had to worry about was next Friday’s math test. However, you can’t just quit when you get to boot camp; no, they make you persevere. And by the time it’s done, you’re very glad you stuck through the tough times and accomplished something remarkable.

I think that my experience at boot camp can be a lot like the experience we marketers go through when starting to test online, except it’s MUCH easier to quit testing than it is boot camp. There is a large temptation to think that it will just be too much work – first figuring out what to test, designing alternative creative, selecting a testing tool, getting your boss to sign off, then moving mountains to get the IT work prioritized. It’s easy for a marketer to just stick to the status quo and quit the fight before it’s even begun.

Why the mountains are worth moving

I’m not going to deny that testing, like boot camp, has challenges we must persevere through and overcome. But just like boot camp, testing also has significant rewards that we might miss out on if we are jumping ship in fear. Rewards like the incredible feeling of accomplishment when you actually get that first test done, and one of your treatments won! Rewards like knowing you’ve discovered how to stop the leaks in your funnel and contribute directly to your company’s bottom line.

At MarketingExperiments we’re lucky because we get to feel this all the time with our research partners. We get to see our partners grow and establish the culture of testing in their own organizations, which really breathes new life into the old marketing routine that many of us know all too well – “Hey guys, St. Patrick’s day is coming up, let’s trot out all our old shamrock creative and talk about finding a pot of savings at the end of the rainbow.” You won’t ever have that conversation again.

So my message to you is this: don’t give up

The good news is that if a 97lb band geek can experience the reward of surviving boot camp, then there is much hope for the marketer out there starting to online test. You can survive; you can make it.  Just hang in there, don’t give up, and know that the rewards will far outweigh the struggles.

If you are like me and are going to be at the Omniture Summit this year (currently sold-out), consider spending a day with the MarketingExperiments team learning how to optimize your online marketing campaigns. We will be teaching our Landing Page Optimization Workshop during the Omniture University training day in Salt Lake City this year. I’ll be there with the MarketingExperiments team helping your fellow peers learn how they can apply a decade of marketing discoveries to their own campaigns.

Photo provided by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78428166@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

Ugh, sorry for that. After a video, a blog post, and an interview, I’m all out of witty love-plus-marketing puns. Just goes to show, Transparent Marketing is more powerful than a marketing gimmick any day.

So I’m going to turn it over to the MarketingExperiments community. We asked you to send virtual Valentines to your favorite industry news sources to celebrate this well-marketed and quite gimmicky holiday that celebrates a martyr who…well let’s just say it moves a lot of product.

We wanted you to call out those blogs and websites that don’t just help you do your job better, but have truly found a place in your heart. Here is the response from our favorite Romeo…

XDA-Developers.com, you satisfy my nerdy need to update firmware in a collaborative workspace.
Your website and forums are the greatest place.
No warez are provided
and if they are – they’re quickly hide’d.
I’d give you a screaming hoot
for a working dual boot
Windows Mobile 6.5.5 + Android ROM that I can tinker, tweak and optimize
until I’m old and blind.

– Jason Croyle
Lead Generation Expert and Creative Social Media Strategist at InTouch and Owner of Total Perception 10,000 Marketing Solutions

Admittedly, Jason works for one of our sister companies, so picking him might seem more wrong than pairing up a Montague and a Capulet. But, the good pilgrim rhymed “dual boot” with “screaming hoot.” If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

So we will not make him deny thy company and refuse thy title to be named the MarketingExperiments community’s Romeo of Marketers. His love is true, even if his last attempt at rhyming was not.

Now let’s not forget Juliet…

Our ISPs are white(listed), our competitors are blue,
I most love CopyBlogger, Clickz and Brand New.

– Jade Ingmire
Corporate Storyteller at Marketfish and Editor-in-Chic of Bridezilla.com

Jade doesn’t just have love in her heart, but she clearly has a way with words as well (her job description is simply “Word weaver. Yarn spinner. Raconteur rockstar.”) So not only will we name Jade the MarketingExperiments community’s Juliet of Marketers, but she is now the Poet Laureate of the MarketingExperiments community as well.

While Valentine’s Day candy is now half off and most marketers have moved on to the next gimmick, it’s not too late to share your love in our comments section. And you don’t even have to stick to iambic pentameter.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialkrb/ / CC BY 2.0