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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Cyber Monday: Were You Ready?

Cyber Monday is undoubtedly one of the biggest growing trends for e-retailers and shoppers alike. According to InternetRetailer.com, nearly 90% of ecommerce shops had promotions planned for the Monday after Thanksgiving. While throngs of early-bird Black Friday shoppers still flock to stores, the ecommerce arena has responded to satisfy this new group of savvy online deal-seekers. But diligently advertising your promotions and playing pricing wars with competitors won’t help you win the Cyber Monday battle.

Specifically during the holiday shopping craze, many retailers have an easy task of driving traffic to their site, with most people already in the shopping mood—nearly 37% of online shoppers say they’ll be shopping that day, according to a recent Pricegrabber survey. With so much noise in the marketplace (it seems everyone has a digital camera for $79.99!), you must create a more relevant, personal and fulfilling online shopping experience for your customers or risk losing revenue to your competitors.

Cyber Monday was projected to bring e-retailers one-day sales increases of 14% to 16%—no doubt a significant number—but the truth is, a smart sales and marketing strategy ensures brand loyalty build-up well before the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush. While “Deals of the Day” or extreme discounting can certainly lure in new customers, you risk losing your current ones to competitors who many undercut you. With consumers holding much less disposable income these days, maintaining brand loyalty and profitable prices is a serious challenge.

So how can you achieve your holy grail of positive profit margins, consumer loyalty and increased sales and site traffic? The key to a successful ecommerce store during Cyber Monday, or any point during the year, is optimization and website personalization.

Prepare your site for your 2011 peak and off-peak selling seasons with a variety of proven tactics:

1. Employ Multivariate Testing: Most good ecommerce strategies start with (and continue with) the live testing of site visitors to discover the best structure, content and design to make sure they convert to a sale.

2. Don’t Be a Copycat: What works on your competitor’s site may not necessarily be successful for you—every visitor is different in their site interaction, from landing pages to check-out, even if you have the same product at the same price. So discover what your visitors expect from their experience with your site.

3. Plan to Personalize: Website personalization techniques help maintain consumer loyalty and improve revenues by providing a unique experience for each individual that crosses your brand. By effectively modeling the next best course of action your site should take in order to achieve your goals, whether it’s up-selling, cross-selling, more products per person or being their go-to retailers, you have provided a more relevant experience, regardless of prices or competitor promotions.

4. Channel the Results: Remember that your online store is only one slice of your marketing real estate. According to Shop.org, 62.7% of retailers will send customers Cyber Monday sale notices via email, most of which will likely feature a generic sales ad for their entire store. Multichannel integration technologies now exist to help you personalize and re-drive sales through multiple mediums including call centers, e-mail, direct mail, mobile, social media, etc.

Next year, be prepared. Use solutions to discover what makes individuals tick—and click. Then personalize the experience across all CRM avenues and turn your future Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays and every day in between, into a profitable and prosperous one.



Thursday, November 11, 2010

Join Maxymiser in NYC for a Free Night of Networking

Greetings Internet Marketing and Analytics Enthusiasts,

I'd like to invite you to a FREE networking happy hour event happening in NYC on December 1st: "Conversion Cocktails". This event will bring marketers, digital strategists and analytics experts together for a fun evening mixing networking, education and of course--cocktails!

Come network with your peers and discuss what you see as the most important marketing strategies for 2011 and beyond.

We'll also discuss how to market more effectively and improve the brand and customer experience--whether you’re in the B2C, D2C or B2B space. Learn small steps you can take to target, personalize and better optimize your digital channels, while vastly improving your marketing revenues and ROI.

Added bonus: one person will win an iPad! Find out how at the event.

I look forward to seeing you on December 1st!

Mark Simpson
Founder and President, Maxymiser, Inc.

RSVP NOW: Space is Limited!

Event Details
Wednesday December 1, 2010
6:00PM to 8:00PM
Stone Creek Pub
140 E 27th St #A
New York, NY

Cost: Free to attendees; includes beer, wine and appetizers


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Multivariate Testing: A rebuttal

In his October 9th blog post “Multivariate Testing – Thoughts from X Change” Gary Angel of Semphonic, argues that multivariate testing (MVT) is “useless” and “routinely encourages exactly the wrong sort of testing by making it extremely difficult to build a creative hypothesis.”

This is true only if you aren’t interested in huge uplifts in conversion and revenue, while saving money by avoiding subjective content decisions.

Multivariate testing is the first step to providing customer insights for marketers to build a creative foundation that will positively impact the marketing cycle. We’ve seen our own customers painfully pour thousands of dollars and hours into website re-designs—without testing first—only to watch their conversion rates plummet. But by using live visitor data, MVT lets creative teams in on which design and content directions are or aren’t going to yield the best conversion results—and swiftly avoid high cost and high risk situations.

However, I agree with Gary when he tells readers: “Don’t even think about doing multivariate testing till you’ve created a real testing plan...” At Maxymiser, we strongly encourage every client to adopt a testing culture within their organization, and help them create a plan and roadmap designed with their brand and creative in mind.

But the strategy shouldn’t stop at multivariate testing. Today, most organizations operate a “vanilla” site—it’s not dynamic, segmented or targeted, it simply “is”. But, it is a great starting point to understand the customer, build conversion uplift and improve revenues through testing, segmentation and personalization techniques.

Segmentation targeting takes testing to the next level by enabling different varieties of content to be tested with in a certain visitor attribute groups, such as demographics, marketing source, geographical data, offline activities, etc. By displaying more relevant, engaging content for all visitors to a site, segmentation can generate even greater conversion uplift than just MVT alone.

Similarly, personalization solutions can also drive uplift in conversion rates, but again, are best utilized when coupled with a website optimized by MVT programming. Without testing and personalization in place, high volume web pages and conversion funnels are missing out on their maximum potential and revenues.

With so many top brands employing testing, segmentation and personalization to achieve website conversion improvements, produce a better online experience and stay ahead of the competition, I don’t see how any marketer could deem this technology as “useless.” After all, the data doesn’t lie.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

SEO vs. Conversion Improvement: Where Marketers’ Spend Lies [STATS]

Digital marketers around the globe continue to face the same problem: turning their site “browsers” into buyers. So, in order to understand the strategies and focus that digital marketers are using to combat these problems as web technologies evolve, we here at Maxymiser conducted a survey of 300 senior-level marketing professionals.

Traffic Barriers

When asked the primary website challenges they faced, over 40% of the respondents indicated that converting their visitors into paying customers was number one—a distant second (26%) was “driving traffic to their site”. Yet, over half of those surveyed have a majority of their budget focused on search and traffic. So why doesn’t the solution match the problem?

Another interesting tidbit: despite 39% of the respondents thinking that converting leads is more important than SEO/search, over 50% still plan to invest in search, while only 37% plan to allocate dollars to conversion management strategies. Budget constraints are indicated to be the major barrier here, but why hold back from tools that can directly generate revenue? It seems as though most marketers believe driving traffic to improved landing pages is the key to converting visitors, rather than employing tools that can dynamically improve the site as a whole.

Going Beyond Website Analytics

As it turns out, very few marketers are actually testing their website on a daily basis (only 13% in this group), if at all—37% admitted to never having run any [multivariate] testing on their website, or only analyzing results after a major redesign.

How are they keeping tabs? In our survey, almost 60% of respondents solely use basic web analytics to drive content changes and design decisions. But oddly enough, the majority (80%) think content testing and results are critical for making objective decisions to major site changes and realize even the smallest tweaks based on real data can significantly improve revenues. However, only 28% of those survey correctly guessed the website page design that produced the highest conversion rate. So, the question rises again: why aren’t they budgeting for tools to manage and improve conversion?

Pieces of the Same Puzzle: Content, SEO and Landing Pages

Even though most marketers understand what needs to be done to improve their conversion rates, they haven’t demonstrated a willingness to budget for and test their site effectively. Perhaps the real value of testing, targeting and personalizing a customer’s web experience isn’t yet obvious, or because SEO and paid search has been such a tried and true method, the shift can be scary.

But, purchasing keywords to drive traffic to an inefficient landing page or website is like putting the cart before the horse. Content optimization is a powerful way to augment SEO and SEM efforts, while improving the overall customer experience and directly generating marketing ROI. When a website uses the most effective content and design elements throughout the site (including landing pages), the cost of acquisition through search marketing is reduced, making it easier to translate clicks into lasting consumers.

For more information on this survey or how to improve your website revenues, please contact us directly.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Having Trouble with Site Conversion? Tell Us About It and Win an iPad!

Maxymiser is surveying top marketers around the globe to determine the role that personalization, testing and conversion strategies play in their marketing strategy. We know your time and marketing spend are valuable to you, just as your opinion is to us.

Personalization and conversion management initiatives can significantly increase revenue, boost conversion rates and reduce bounce rates, but many marketers are missing the mark and losing potential customers to competitors.

This quick two minute survey will also help YOU understand how you stack up against your competition. We'll send you the complete survey results when the research has concluded in order to help you identify improvements for your own strategy.

As an extra incentive, we'll also enter you into a drawing for a brand new Apple iPad.

Get started with the survey... [Sorry, this survey closed July 29th, please check back for more news from Maxymiser]

Friday, August 13, 2010

Maxymiser WaWs San Francisco - Meet us @ Web Analytics Wednesday

Maxymiser is proud to host the upcoming Web Analytics Wednesday in San Francisco on August 25th from 6-8pm at Harlot, 46 Minna St., San Francisco. Mark Simpson, our Founder and President, invites you to join us to share some fantastic insight on how ecommerce sites can increase conversion by removing the subjectivity from website content decisions and making user experiences more relevant through personalization.

For those of you who have yet to attend a Web Analytics Wednesday, they’re a great informal networking event that we can all enjoy cocktails and appetizers with other analytics & optimization ecommerce professionals…and some lucky guests will walk away with some cool prizes. Although the event is complimentary as a toast to our industry colleagues, we kindly ask that you register here to get in.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Glasses Direct Testimonial - client success story

[Editor's note: most of our client testimonials sit behind a data capture form but we thought we would open this one up to everyone]

Glasses Direct, the world's largest online prescription eyewear store engages Maxymiser to proactively manage conversion rate onsite through multivariate testing to discover winning content to improve performance. Making informed decisions on the most effective content and offers is an essential part of removing the risk and subjectivity from website management.

David Carruthers of Glasses Direct offers some background on his reasons for selecting Maxymiser and the impact we have had on the business.

“Glasses Direct is a high-growth business and we have achieved our growth through an aggressive pace of innovation. As our business matures, it is vital that this innovation is not stymied by the risk of making changes without proper measurement of their impact on performance.

Glasses Direct first used a/b/c…[n] and multivariate testing in 2008. The headline results we achieved were fine but the integration of tags had to be repeated on a per-test basis, meaning our roadmap was frequently held up by IT bottlenecks and pre-planned release cycles. We didn’t feel we had full freedom to test everything, everywhere due to the technical resource overhead we were faced with.

In late 2009 we decided to investigate whether other suppliers could better address our need. Having done a full market assessment, and used another paid-for multivariate testing provider in the past, we concluded based on a full and rigorous assessment of the technical capabilities of all multivariate testing providers that Maxymiser was our best and only option.

We moved to Maxymiser and their One Touch universal tag has taken the pain out of deploying multivariate testing and allows us to get more out of the engagement by reducing the amount of per-test technical time to practically zero. The Maxymiser team set up tests according to our requirements and hands back to us for approval using the floating On Page Console, allowing us to quickly preview all variants before publishing the test to live.

With Maxymiser, technical bottlenecks have been removed and testing moves at the speed we need, enabling us to make evidence-based objective decisions faster.

The results we have achieved with Maxymiser have exceeded our expectations. Testing is used as a basis for Glasses Direct to reach objective decisions based on customer response on almost all the changes we make online. As an example, there was considerable internal debate around the best call to action to use on a particular button. Testing a number of ideas led us to adopt a winner that now delivers 30% more clickthroughs to the basket.

Security logos in our checkout have also undergone testing, allowing us to be sure that the addition of a new certification earlier this year would deliver more reassurance to our customers. More fundamental aspects of the site have also benefitted from the Maxymiser testing. We discovered that separating men’s and women’s glasses offers right from the homepage leads to a 50% increase in clickthroughs, representing significantly higher engagement.

At Glasses Direct we enjoy working with Maxymiser’s multivariate testing technology and team which enables us to push testing hard and get results at the pace we need. Our decision making process on critical aspects of web design and content is no longer constrained by subjectivity or technical bottlenecks, meaning that we can innovate fast, improve our performance and stay ahead of the competition.”

David Carruthers, Glasses Direct, June 2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

Guess the Winner - The Results are in!

Thank you to those of you who took part in our recent Guess the Winner competition. As promised, here is the winning page:It is interesting to note that 69% of respondents guessed the wrong winner from the four options. We ran this campaign to demonstrate how making content decisions based on subjective opinion can be dangerous and commonly proves costly. This was only a quiz but marketers often ask us how our technology and expertise can help them address this challenge. Please get in touch if you would like to spend some time exploring how you can better manage conversion rate.

To learn how we produced this 16% uplift in enquiries for our client and removed subjectivity from their decision making process, please also see the full case study. If you missed the competition, please take a look at the posting below this one for the full background.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Guess the Winner & Receive a Multivariate Test

As specialists in this space, we’ve kept a keen eye on the conversion rate of online businesses over recent years. Last March we asked a sample of marketers to guess the best converting content from four options and only a mere 4.6% got it right.

What is interesting is that many large brands are still making fundamental changes without measurement of their success or failure against baseline. User experience has become more competitive and analytical and the risk previously inherent in making changes can now easily be removed.

To prove the point, I’d like to invite you to have a go at guessing the winning landing page from four variations. Maxymiser will give one of the correct entrants a free multivariate test.

Which variant delivered our client 16% uplift in registrations?

Good Luck!

PS – we’ll post overall results after the 15th March closing date.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Is Conversion Rate Out of Control?

Nobody will be surprised to hear that 39% of client-side marketers responding to a recent Econsultancy survey felt unhappy with their conversion rate. Everyone wants more sales but unfortunately 41% of respondents also said they had little or no control over their website’s conversion rate.

Marketers are increasingly winning responsibility for conversion rate but have until recently been without the tools to proactively manage it. We can measure and report on it just fine, web analytics does that. However, when it comes to managing conversion rate by doing simple things like testing changes to see whether they have a positive or negative impact, we’re often found to be woefully lacking.

This lack of control over conversion rates and online performance in general speaks volumes for the immaturity of the web channel. In the dot com boom, as an industry, we measured visits and page impressions. Since then, we’ve adopted web analytics and measured conversion rate by traffic source. That has led to an obsession with looking for efficiencies in our search and display ad acquisition campaigns whenever things fall below-par.

We don’t intend to belittle the work that has gone into making acquisition of traffic far more efficient at landing the right visitors on-site but this still gives us very little control over the effectiveness of our website at actually converting those visitors.

Econsultancy identifies a potential source for this lack of control over conversion; “Lack of ownership is identified as a major issue. Those with someone responsible for conversion rates are more likely to have experienced improved performance in the last year yet 40% of client side companies didn’t have anyone directly responsible for conversion.”

Now that much of the headroom for improvement has been eked out of traffic acquisition, it’s time to move forward with a focus on converting that traffic to achieve the next win.

Q: If we both run shoe stores and my site converts twice as well as yours, how much more do you need to invest in bringing visitors to your site to stay ahead?

Leading marketers are already realising that the next big win lies in out-converting their competitors rather than out-spending them on media. They are increasingly focussing on conversion rate to achieve precisely this competitive advantage. Do you have the right skills and tools on hand to stay ahead?

If you’re stuck for inspiration, take a look over our past work with brands including ASDA, Santander, bmibaby.com, Laura Ashley, National Express and Cancer Research UK. Testing can be deployed on top of current web infrastructure, there is never a need to rip and replace existing investments.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Q: What’s the Best Way to Improve Conversion?

Econsultancy: Testing Ranks as the Most Valuable Way to Improve Conversion

Econsultancy recently published their first Conversion Report, delving into how conversion rate should be managed and the most effective ways to improve it. By surveying over 300 predominantly UK based client-side marketers, they have produced the most comprehensive overview we’ve seen to date of the challenges faced by brands as they look to improve conversion performance.

Testing emerges as a key theme throughout the Econsultancy research with a/b testing coming top of the rankings for the most valuable approaches to improving conversion and multivariate testing close behind. Not only did testing rank at the top of respondent’s opinions of what works best, there was also a strong correlation between those who were satisfied with conversion performance and use of testing.

“Company respondents who said they were “very satisfied” with their conversion rates carried out more than four times as many test per month on their web properties as those who were “very dissatisfied” with their conversion rates” Conversion Report, Econsultancy.com, October 2009

As competition for high quality traffic continues to put pressure on acquisition metrics, we are seeing successful online brands increasingly turning to testing to ensure they are converting their traffic. More often than not, on-site conversion is now the weakest link in campaign performance yet the skills and tools exist to address it for a fraction of the cost of increasing acquisition budgets. On-site conversion offers a great low hanging fruit for marketers to attack when looking to boost performance through 2010.