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A/B Testing Social Media to Increase & Optimize Traffic

2012-01-26T14:42:00.000-05:00

This blog first appeared on iMedia Connection on January 26, 2012.

A/B testing is now widely used by marketers and ecommerce pros to let their live audiences decide the best-converting content for them. Many case studies point to sites seeing an increase in subscriptions, signups, and sales through even the smallest changes to elements on their website. Now, with the world-wide-web having gone social, marketers should start to consider how their social sharing buttons are performing. Just like with most other site elements the location, design and content of these buttons can have a big impact on how much your users engage socially with your brand. And as we all know, optimizing your social traffic can result in more shares, followers and an increase in click-thru rates—to name a few advantages.

So if you want to be a well-tested site, it’s time to add social presence into your strategy.

Think about Social Button Placement

Just as with your call-to-action buttons, social share buttons are aimed at driving users to convert—with the conversion being sharing your blog, article, product or promotion across a variety of platforms. These conversions can ultimately lead to more site traffic, brand or product awareness, and potentially, revenue.

1. Move it Around – Try out different places for the home of your social buttons along your conversion funnel. Does it make sense to keep on the landing page of the promotion, or is it better served in a location after a user has made a purchase? Perhaps it’s both. When it comes to publications, you ultimately want users to be able to easily share your article. Some sites find that social icons work best right under the title, while others convert better on the left hand side of the article. Whatever it is, try it out. Just because your social button placement works well in one area doesn’t mean it will in another. Let testing tell you the truth.

2. Keep It Minimal – They say less is more, and this definitely rings true with the amount of social share buttons your site offers. Let’s face it: most readers and customers are not going to share on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, and RSS Feeds (gee, wouldn’t that be nice!). You may find three to four essential social buttons will suffice—as well as should ultimately link back to your social strategy: where your customers are sharing and where you want them to share. Too many social button choices can overwhelm users and potentially kill conversion rates.

Optimize Your Social Profile

First impressions are just as important in real life as they are in the digital world. So when you’re attempting to attract new fans and followers, you want to make sure they are presented with a social profile that intrigues them.

The first step in optimizing your profile is to create a landing page and/or space that lets users really understand who you are, what you do, and why they should engage with you. It may sound basic, but items such as the profile photo, “About Us” and wall postings, have on impact on follower conversions. Also, make sure to include a bio and description, as these things contribute to higher organic search engine rankings.

While testing your social share buttons and social profile content, start to monitory our profile’s performance for a couple weeks. Gather how many fans, followers and members you have accrued during this time and then make any adjustments you see necessary, testing and evolving along the way.

Know When to Share

As marketers, we know that half the battle is reaching people at the right time, in addition to the right place. The same rings true with social media marketing. It’s imperative to identify when your followers and target audience are online, so your content reaches its engagement potential—ultimately increasing the chance of conversions, re-tweets, and re-shares exponentially. It’s also important to test out various times for sending through promotions, blog posting, email marketing, etc., and segment and analyze your traffic—and the results—accordingly.

Helpful hint: check out the following tools to help you discover when your fans are online and peak promotional times:

Tweriod

Crowdbooster

We all know social media is a crucial piece of the marketing puzzle. But, just like your web and mobile efforts, it’s important to test, analyze and discover what really works for you and your audience. For help understanding the different types of testing available, I encourage you to download a new eBook from Maxymiser: “Creating the Ultimate Online Experience: Conversion Immersion” Happy testing.

We Love our Customers, and Infographics!

2012-01-19T15:03:00.004-05:00

It was a very busy 2011 at Maxymiser in many ways. We hired a whole lot more people in all of our offices: USA, Germany, Ukraine and of course, the original, London. We brought on several new clients, up and even managed to throw some serious kick-ass Holiday parties across the globe.

The other day, one of long-time designers, emailed this awesome infographic to show how our design and tech teams support our hundreds of amazing customers in terms of design and test requests, as well as how much coffee they drink. The two aren't mutually exclusive, ya know.

5 Steps to Capturing Fickle Consumers

2011-12-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

How to catch comparison shoppers..and keep them.

With expendable income being scarce in today’s economy, consumers have become highly skilled at comparison shopping. While shopping for the best deal once required serious effort — driving from store to store and/or comparing catalogs — it’s an easy process now. With just a few clicks, consumers can typically (and quickly) find the best price or sale available. It’s not as though consumers even need to be at home in front of a computer. Smartphones, now almost ubiquitous, allow consumers to have access to this information in their pocket. As a result, consumers are more fickle than ever and cultivating loyalty is a real challenge for retailers.

To meet this challenge, retailers need to deliver value and personalization as consumers go through each stage of the buying cycle — e.g., price comparison, coupon search, checkout, etc. But there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach for consumers. They come with different budgets, purchasing habits, locations and shopping lists. Where do retailers begin?

To read the 5 steps for reigning in those promiscuous customers, head over to retailonlineintegration.com, where you can read the full article here.

Personalization – Web Marketing’s Holy Grail

2011-11-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

This article first appeared in Website Magazine on November 25, 2011.

What does “personalization” really mean? You’ll be forgiven if you have absolutely no idea. As trendy catchwords go, “personalization” has become a go-to term for websites and online marketers, laden with all the possibilities of connecting with individual consumers and a departure from the limitations of one-size-fits-all.

Nearly every online marketing vendor touts some form of personalization as their secret sauce for helping you target customers.

It makes sense. The potential of personalized online marketing, when done well, is enormous – and for that reason, it’s a compelling sell. The problem is … it hasn’t been done very well thus far. And, thanks to vendor hype and over-promise, just mention the word “personalization”, and most have learned to greet it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But personalization isn’t just marketing hype. It’s a complex concept that really can live up to its billing. But first, retailers, in tandem with their marketing vendors, must identify what personalization really means – and what it means to their business and target customers.

Furthermore, when it comes to their websites, mobile sites, apps and CRM platforms, major ecommerce players need to realize that only through a customized combination of multivariate testing, optimization and personalization best practices, can they truly begin to reach consumers with personalization that is effective and impactful. There are no easy answers or instant solutions for creating personalization that works – it’s about evolution rather than revolution.

Defining Personalization
A truly personalized customer experience – what amounts to a custom website for every consumer – has been the Holy Grail of marketing for over a decade. Yet the very concept is conflicted, fragmented and confusing. Ask 10 marketers to define personalization and you’ll get 10 answers. You’ll also find that despite all the hype, the bar has been set low; most of these same marketers are hoping for nothing more than a few product recommendations or more effective targeting.

Even the experts don’t give us a whole lot of direction on personalization. According to Forrester, Web personalization is “creating experiences on websites or through interactive media that are unique to individuals or segments of consumers.” Just about as vague as every other definition.

In reality, every specific piece of information you can gain about your customer – from search information to online behavior and purchases – can be used to create a personalized experience. Which means that your approach to personalization can be as simple (using one or two collected insights) or complex (a detailed formula based on multiple insights) as you want it to be.

With the right combination of technology, research and testing, ecommerce businesses can now deliver a personalized online experience that far exceeds anything that can be delivered in store – short of hiring a dedicated personal shopper. With the right personalization strategy and tools, companies can create an online equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store where anything a consumer might want is located in a single aisle.

Technology is So Personal
It goes without saying that your marketing team is comprised of geniuses, but a lack of imagination – and technology – may be limiting their vision when it comes to personalization.

Yes, they’ve thought about segmentation, recommendations and retargeting, but these techniques are only a fraction of what technology now allows. New sophisticated real-time automated SaaS solutions empower marketers to create personalized experiences that far exceed what was previously possible. With SaaS solutions working in tandem with strategy and implementation, companies can begin to move towards complex forms of personalization – and achieve online what is already being done offline with propensity modeling and other business analytics.

Really, knowing about low-cost SaaS solutions – and how to use them to take advantage of opportunity – might just be the most significant indicator of marketing genius.

Getting Started with Personalization
Once the right technology is in place, one of the best ways to get started with personalization is with a set of “rules” that define parameters. These rules establish conditions for a specific visitor experience; for every insight gleaned, you create a more and more personalized experience.

Of course, rules don’t exist in a vacuum. When defining them, you must take into account known consumer behaviors, including the various stages that shoppers go through when making any kind of purchase and the fact that they may visit your site several times before actually pulling the “buy now” trigger. While this knowledge might seem to complicate your rules in the immediate, it can be used to your advantage.

Sure, go ahead and create rules for first-time visitors, but you can and should also create more complicated formulas that incorporate insights and data from previous visits and apply them to future visits. So, for example, retarget a repeat visitor based on the last product they searched for during their last visit. This rule path can then be enhanced with complementary content or offerings, whether for discount on the searched product or an up-sell on similar items. It’s personalization that gives customers what they want and shows them that you value them – a must for creating relationships and loyalty online.

Keep in mind, however, that while targeting with rules is effective and often a great place to start, it does have its limitations.

Marketers will find it nearly impossible to manually define rules for expansive websites that have vast and diverse daily traffic. In this case, technology needs to be partnered with sophisticated behavioral targeting through mathematical models that allow you to predict the most compelling content and offers based on known insights and data points about each visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts dynamically over time to optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach is also better for the broader range of content (product types, specific brands or destinations) that each individual can get based on unique predictive attributes.

Using Product Recommendations the Right Way
Want to see great personalization in action? Amazon continues to set the gold standard for best practices in personalization. The site has an unparalleled ability to recognize and deftly exploit consumers’ online browsing and buying habits. (Of course, it also has the advantage of customer interactions living entirely online, while most retailers have offline presences that dilute their ability to gather insights.)

Because of Amazon’s clear success, almost every major ecommerce site has taken steps to mimic Amazon’s highly successful interactions with returning customers. (“You were interested in XYZ, so you may enjoy ABC,” etc.)

But that doesn’t mean they’re getting it right. Everything from competing recommendations (you want shoppers to buy more, not different) or recommendations for products that are out of stock to a lack of testing and product reviews mean that many recommendation programs are falling flat or, even worse, counterproductive.

To offer successful personalization through recommendation, focus on the essential elements. Product recommendations should be placed on category pages, product pages and the shopping cart or basket page, with each page type getting its own recommendation formula and approach. This allows for more targeted recommendations and for segmented testing and optimization of recommendations. Recommendation content, placement on the page and the design of a promotion all play a role in the success of recommendations. Segmenting and measuring the conversion impact of every detail (e.g., images, fonts, colors, the number of recommended products, the placement on pages, and the recommendation model used) will help you identify the approach that yields the highest conversion rates for your visitors.

With a program for monitoring and improving recommendations, you improve the shopping experience for each customer – and increase revenue and cart sizes.

Maximizing Opportunity
Companies that have already successfully leveraged new SaaS solutions along with optimization and personalization strategies have achieved, on average, a double-digit increase in conversions. And with these programs becoming more common, consumers are coming to expect a sophisticated level of personalization.

The good news is that with the SaaS-based model, companies can have personalization programs up and running immediately. Add in multi-channel data from call centers and stores or branches, and they can create an organization-wide, cross-channel approach to personalization within a quarter.

There is no doubt that, after years of hype and hyperbole, we’ve finally found the holy grail of online marketing: Personalization

10 Retail Tips for Improving 2011 Online Holiday Sales

2011-11-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

This blog first appeared on imediaconnection on November 16, 2011.

Well, it’s arrived: the holiday shopping season. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, December sales, January promotions…you get it. This year, the Associated Press says, retailers are focused on price in hopes to counter the (still) worn down economy, while the National Retail Federation claims that shopper’s shouldn’t expect lower prices than any other year, but rather free shipping, deals and giveaways.

Any way you look at, the competition, both online and offline, will likely be cut-throat, yet again. As consumers becoming more shopping savvy and consult your website for their gift-buying tasks, it’s important you make sure you’re ready to serve them the best performing content, offers and online experience that turns them from browsers and bargain-hunters into paying customers.

1. Get in the holiday spirit. #Obvious

Hopefully you’re already on this one, but customizing your website with a festive look and feel lets people know your holiday sales have started. Clearly display the items most likely to sell during the holiday season on the most popular pages.

2. Don’t Overdo Dynamic Elements

Resist the urge to have snow falling, lights flashing and stars sparkling all over home page. Video, banner ads and flash can be great elements to enhance the online customer experience, but only in small doses. Numerous tests with our clients have shown that visitors need at least 1-2 static page elements in order to maintain their focus, and thus their ability to convert into a paying customer.

3. Test your campaigns, now and later

Yes, retail sites undoubtedly stay busy year-round, with peak selling times during the obvious seasons. But if you’ve waited to test and optimize your promotions or discount offers on the day before Christmas, you’re too late.

Holiday shopping is going to bring you wealth of new and returning visitors. It’s a great time to (well any time is) to enlist the help of live multivariate testing and iterative tweaking to drive higher conversion rates. Even subtle changes such as font size, color and language can have a huge impact on revenues. Continually test different variations to see what yields the best results, and monitor results for both in-season and off-season traffic.

4. Segment & Personalize for the Season

As I said, you know you’ll have an influx in traffic and purchases, and you’ve put in a lot of work into your sales, promotions and branding. Personalization and targeting are excellent for increasing conversion, but remember, people are buying gifts, not shopping for themselves. So don’t spend too much time targeting based on their past purchases in the off-season—it may not have much of an impact since they are shopping for a loved one, friend, co-worker, etc.

5. Highlight the Timely Items: Shipping and Stock Status

For the inner-procrastinator in all of us! Those visitors who fall into mad-dash-last-minute shopping segment are need to focus on two important elements: shipping dates and stock status. The comfort this consumer receives in knowing that you have it in stock and they’ll receive it on time, no matter if there is a slight price difference, can help to ensure you win the business instantly. This is a huge factor in behavioral targeting and personalization, since consumer mindset inevitably changes, and purchase behavior, as well as browsing activity, will be impacted.

6. Analyze your Shopping Cart

Speaking of customer behavior, there is no better place to plan for and understand your actual consumers than at the check-out process. Analyzing buyer behavior from all your channels (not just the website!) is the most indicative and predictive data set for setting up successful segmentation and recommendations: discover what people actually buy, uncover buying patterns and help influence inventory decisions.

Marrying offline and online data from CRM, web analytics, POS output, call centers and mobile commerce will ensure you have a 360-degree buyer view to begin targeting and tailoring for your consumers. After the all the data nuptials are complete, analyzing behaviors such as “Bought this, Bought That” and “Best Sellers” will have you homing in on the best cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, for all your point-of-sale outlets.

7. Play Around with Pricing Presentation

You’ve probably got a few sales, discounts and promotions planned this season, but have you thought about how they actually look, rather than what they say? Time and time again, marketers are surprised at the impact that font, location, showing/not showing, and color of product pricing has on website conversion rates, While no single pricing strategy is correct for all brands, don’t be afraid to test it. We have found that some sites perform better without revealing the price before the product gets to the cart, while others convert visitors better by being up front about it. See what your visitors think—the results may surprise you.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Let Go of Brand Guidelines

It’s not likely that your brand guidelines always fit directly with the website elements—especially during the holiday season—that are the best converting content. That’s why multivariate testing and A/B testing is an investigation not only into your website elements, but also your brand. If your consumers perceive you differently than you believe them to, your website approach could be hurting conversions. Sticking strictly to the brand guidelines—whether in what you choose to test or change—might never lead you to discover that some brand-approved copy, tone, colors, page template, or call-to-actions, are holding you back from higher conversion rates.

9. Share the Love, Corporately Speaking

It’s no secret that it takes many forms (and people) of marketing in order to meet your brands revenue goals. And today’s internet-savvy consumer population is sure to land on your website at some point, so it’s best keep the lines of optimization communication open. Ensure all marketing departments and relevant employees are in the loop about your goals, website changes and promotions for this holiday season —so that SEO, direct mail, email, PPC, call centers, etc. are primed to collect and use the right optimization data when you’re ready to move to a true multi-channel marketing approach.

10. Get ready for the January sales

Many consumers are now spending just as much money in the New Year as they are in true holiday buying season. Make sure you are able to hit the ground running in January with fresh mobile content and product offers in order to stand out from the crowd. Remember to use live testing to help determine which offers have the most positive impact on your sales.

To learn more about conversion rate optimization in the online retail industry, check out the new retail white paper, "Capturing the Promiscuous Customer: How Online Retailers Can Use Testing & Targeting to Curb Disloyalty & Increase Conversion Rates" just released by Maxymiser—a company specializing in increasing the online revenue potential of online retailers. Find out more on to make your business faster, smarter and better with testing and optimization.

Turn Browsers Into Buyers: A New eBook

2011-11-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

Any smart marketer knows that providing excellent customer experiences is a great ticket to revenue and loyalty. This is probably even more true in today’s digital world.

Last year we surveyed hundreds of US marketers, and over 40% claimed converting site visitors into paying customers" was their primary website concern. So that’s why I decided to write “Turning Browsers Into Buyers: The Marketer’s Guide to Creating the Ultimate Online Experience”.

Now, if you're interested at all in website conversion, I should know that you don't wake up at night thinking, "How do I create the ultimate online experience?"

You certainly don't spend your day in a cold sweat, wondering how to "turn browsers into buyers”.

So, why did I write this eBook?

Because marketing and optimization should not be based on instinct.

Because you are a real business, with real conversion concerns.

So, if you want to know what color your Add to Cart button should be, you're going to hate this eBook.

If you want to know how to get your team abide to an Internal Culture of Testing and Optimization, start reading.

If you're looking for ten steps toward better landing pages, you're going to be disappointed.
If you're frustrated that your website isn't doing better, and you're not afraid of change, you should be reading this eBook.

And this eBook just doesn’t claim we know what we're talking about, we present you with real case studies from real brands all over the globe who have struggled with conversions and managed to find their way into their customer’s hearts.

Yes, the customer is always right. Are you ready to listen to them?

Download the ebook today. I promise you will learn something valuable.

A New Award For Maxymiser: Online Technology Vendor of the Year

2011-11-09T10:17:00.001-05:00

I'm proud to announce that Maxymiser's hard work, dedicated employees and field experts, along with a great enterprise-level customer experience optimization platform, have once again paid off for the company.

Two weeks ago we were awarded with Retail Systems 'Online Technology Vendor of the Year' Award.

By implementing our conversion management solution, Maxymiser's clients--many of whom are retailers--have benefited from conversion and revenue increases. Even with an economic downturn, our solutions are proof that when marketing, e-commerce and conversion technology band together to provide a relevant, targeted experience for customers, they will become more loyal to the brand.

With today's savvy consumer, retailers who put the customer at the center of all website content decisions will be the biggest winners of all.

You can read more about the award and case studies here.

Cheers,

Mark Simpson

Founder & President of Maxymiser

The Elements You Should be Testing and Targeting on Your Website (But Probably aren't)

2011-10-14T11:17:00.001-04:00

It's webinar time on October 26, 2011 at 2:00PM EST.

Maxymiser and The Conversion Scientist, Brian Massey are teaming up to bringing digital marketers a free webinar on "Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas, The Elements You Should be Testing and Targeting on Your Website (But Probably aren't)"
Sign up here: http://go.maxymiser.com/ConversionScienceWebinar_registration.html

In this webinar, we'll discuss how to choose test and targeting strategies based on your unique visitors personas, not website pages.

You'll Learn:
1. An easy way to model your best visitors into four "Modes of Research"
2. The limits of demographics and how to overcome them
3. How to use analytics to uncover persona behavior
4. The Conversion Quiz: Test your ability to apply personas to on-page tests
5. Why and how testing and personalization should impact your entire business, not just your marketing plans

Brian Massey calls himself a Conversion Scientist and he has the lab coat to prove it. “Conversion” is the process of converting Web traffic to leads and sales, and his practice, Conversion Sciences, brings these disciplines to businesses of all sizes. A veteran of more than 15 years, Brian began by developing open source marketing automation systems for companies seeking to build their online channels. Brian speaks to corporations and universities, and at national conferences including PubCon, OMMA, Innotech, Destination Design Management, and PIA's Converge Conference. He has developed training curriculum for professional organizations such as the Direct Marketing Association and Webmaster World. Brian is the author of the The Conversion Scientist, and is a columnist for ClickZ.com, Search Engine Land and the Content Marketing Institute. He lives and works in Austin, Texas where life and the Internet are hopelessly entwined.

Join us to learn how to point your website optimization and testing programs in the right direction with advanced personalization and testing techniques that bring home the bacon.

Loyalty Programs: Five Steps to a Five-Star Online Travel Experience

2011-10-05T10:53:00.003-04:00

Loyalty programs are huge for any travel brand these days. That's why Maxymiser feels it's important to integrate them properly into a 360-degree online customer experience initiative. Recently, an article addressing this was published in Hotelexecutive.com. Below is an excerpt. You can read the full article here with a subscription.
The travel industry is more diversified than ever before. With a myriad of online travel agencies providing one-stop shops for everything from airfare and room and board to transportation and tours, these sites aren’t only waging pricing wars against each other, they’re competing directly with hotels, airlines, rental car and tour companies.
Now, more and more consumers are taking advantage of this industry battle to please their own wallets. Always-on-the-prowl bargain hunters can make marketing in the travel industry difficult - especially for companies that can’t compete price-wise. But how do you create and maintain brand loyalty when consumers have hundreds, if not thousands, of choices? By ensuring that visitors have a successful browsing and booking experience.
Hotel CRM, loyalty programs, reward points and status levels—when executed correctly—can significantly boost customer retention and long-term brand loyalty. Even better, these programs give hotel marketers and on-the-ground team members - such as concierges, management and front desk agents - deep levels of personalized data on guests that can be used to significantly improve their experience from the time of booking to the time of checkout. But most hotel marketers have yet to use these rich data portals to provide a seamless 360-degree brand experience ...

To read on, please visit HotelExecutive.com

How Disloyal Customers are Driving the Banking Business… And How to Fix It

2011-09-02T10:41:00.000-04:00

This blog first appeared on iMedia Connection on August 31, 2011.

For consumers, retail banking is a buyer’s market. Offers arrive in the mail almost daily. Rewards and money-saving deals are peppered throughout websites. Banks are now competing for consumers in more ways than ever before—mobile, real-time recommendations, email, and so on. With so many options, and such little product differentiation, there's really very little incentive for consumer loyalty.

The fact remains that people simply don’t spend much time reading web pages—often ignoring parts of the page that are attempting to grab our attention. Instead, they are linking around the Internet from site to site and going to the most enticing pages, or to get answers to their questions. The opportunity to capture a visitor is often just a few seconds, yet the methods to present a compelling offer are often ineffective—targeting on a “one size fits all approach”, while limiting the promotions to only a few products.

But with this fickleness comes opportunity…for both banks and consumers alike.

Many customer-loyalty issues in banking and finance companies can be traced to poor marketing and customer service—which means that those that know how to effectively entice, capture, and maintain deal-hungry customers are looking at a blue ocean of opportunity. Meanwhile, customers can just keep playing hard to get to make banks work harder to meet their needs.

Today, online banking is transforming that way consumers’ research and interact with financial institutions. But, most financial services marketing teams are held back from effective targeting practices by their IT resources—as well as data security requirements—and are simply doing the best they can within the constraints of their existing web infrastructure. Cross-sell and up-sell offers tend to be served on a random or rotating basis, or with a tab-based approach within the main banners on the home page only. It’s simply one big guessing game.

Further, since this approach is presenting the same offers to each visitor, the number of offers is limited—usually to the top five or so. With these offers presented on an automated rotation or in a tab format left for the visitor to select, the chances of presenting the most compelling offer to an individual visitor is, well, very low. Visitors will not stay on the page simply to wait for the right offer to appear, nor do they page through the offers to see if something is right for them.

When it comes to banking and finance, customers simply aren’t that loyal if there’s a good deal to be found elsewhere. But, personalizing offers will give marketers the upper hand on competitors by making your customers feel more catered to and more secure—a crucial element in the ever-sensitive area of personal finance—despite marketplace pricing wars. Personalizing offers means that the most relevant offer is presented to each visitor based upon what you know about the visitor. In doing so, you will increase the range of offers that you can select from and show to each visitor, since all visitors will not see the same offer.

This is the issue addressed in new white paper, “Taming the Fickle Financial Services Customer,” just released by Maxymiser. Find out more on how to fix this fickleness.

Feng Shui for Mobile Marketers

2011-08-16T10:14:00.000-04:00

Best-Practices for Creating a Harmonious Mobile Environment

This article first appeared on Marketing Profs on August 15, 2011.

Here's the basic tenet of feng shui: With the mindful arrangement of objects in relation to one another and in the context of their environment, one can attract positive energy and good fortune, and generally usher in the good. That sounds manageable, right?

In theory, yes, but when you start bringing outside forces to bear—a sense of where things are supposed to go, an irrational desire to bring in the new while holding on to the old, the notion that more really is more—things gets a lot more complicated.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the mobile commerce space. For years, marketers have been working to perfect their e-commerce sites, figuring out what clicks and doesn't click with consumers, and creating just the right energy for happy shopping—and buying. Now, they're tackling the new mobile revolution head on—with the exact same strategies and the exact same websites!

Mobile sites are not the same as websites. Full stop.

The screens are smaller, the keyboards are smaller, and the experience people have browsing your site on a smartphone is completely different from how they view it on a computer screen.

Marketers need to take a step back and realize that mobile is a new environment, one that demands a new design and a new approach to keep their customers and win new ones.

Only by prioritizing your mobile strategy and making it a key element of your overall e-commerce planning will you be able to prove its worth—via customer retention, measurable revenue, and a stellar return on investment.

So what does it take to create a harmonious, customer-friendly mobile site?

1. Learn to let go

It's easy to get carried away with offers, content, and information on your website; after all, you have plenty of real estate to work with. But simply replicating that scope in mobile form is like trying to fit your Barcalounger in the breakfast nook: there just isn't space.

As you begin building your mobile marketing strategy, start by removing items from your website that are superfluous.

How do you decide what's essential and what's gratuitous? You're likely already storing a lot of analytics data about how your consumers interact on your site. Use that information to determine what your customers need from you, what can (and should) be translated to your mobile environment—and what you can dispose of.

But space is not the only factor to consider: load times and screen rendering are just as important. Get out that smartphone of yours, type in your brand's URL, and take note of the load times and overall layout. Are any large graphics or Flash pieces killing the mobile experience? What is hard or easy to find?

Hold on to what works, get rid of what seems clunky or cumbersome in a mobile browser, and if there's must-keep content that will need new presentation, make note of that, too.

When designing your mobile site, less is definitely more.

2. Create a harmonious space

Once you've cleared out the clutter, it's time to focus on making the best of the remaining content.

The first step is to get your hands on the Big 3 mobile devices—iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry—and view your site on each. Next, spend some time visiting mobile sites within your industry or of competitors, and download various types of apps on each device to understand what works—and what doesn't. Do you notice any patterns? What items do you like and dislike? What features and design components seem to be the most user-friendly... or unnecessary?

Though some of your impressions will be subjective, you'll gain a sense of whether your mobile site is set up to perform properly on a small screen. Within that context, you'll be able to focus on improving and optimizing successful elements, rather than wasting time on the irrelevant or unnecessary.

Whether you're simply looking for general inspiration or cross-industry best-practices, look to the successful mobile sites, such as those of Google, Amazon, or eBay.

3. Get a second, third, and fourth opinion

You've renovated and redecorated, but you'll know if you got it right only by testing your new look. A must for e-commerce sites, multivariate and A/B testing are just as important for mobile commerce sites.

With few tried-and-true best-practices for mobile conversion, even the most experienced marketers can't predict what elements of a mobile site will drive desired consumer behaviors. Small elements, such as headline placement, button color, or tone/copy tweaks can have a significant impact on sales—but you won't get it just right until you test.

But don't rest on your laurels: Mobile sites, like their online counterparts, are at the mercy of the ever-shifting demands of consumers and the marketplace. Developing your mobile site isn't a once-and-you're-done project. Mobile requires the same continual care and feeding that traditional websites do.

4. Make your mobile site comfortable (and personal) for everyone

No matter how the small the space, with the right personal touches it can feel like home. Your apartment might be the size of a shoe box, but when it's your shoe box, everything just feels better.

The same can be said for the mobile environment. Yes, there's a lack of real estate to play with, but you can make the mobile experience just as custom and personal as you can on a standard website—and, along the way, draw in and win over your customers. It's up to you to make every visitor feel comfortable and wanted—and eager to visit again and again.

Segmented personalization will allow you to capture behaviors and attributes about your mobile visitors to create content tailored to their location, their time of day, or even their brand of mobile device. Personalization can also be specific to each visitor: Users can be targeted by previous searches, past purchases, the time of their last visits, and even their activities in your physical store, call center, or website.

Personalizing the mobile shopping experience is an essential practice if you want to be on top of the mobile commerce game.

* * *

It's a lot to take in, but before you walk away thinking these best-practices seem too daunting to achieve, rest assured that technology resources can help you automate these processes. Just as feng shui experts and interior designers exist, so, too, do personalization experts who can save you time, budget, and internal resources as you achieve your mobile commerce goals.

Whatever path you choose, know that every successful mobile site specifically addresses both the demands of the medium and the needs of customers.

How to to build and maintain traveler loyalty with Automated Digital Personalization

2011-08-11T09:31:00.000-04:00

This article first appeared on Travel Mole on July 29, 2011.

When it comes to targeting consumers, the travel industry’s got it made. Think about it: to secure any type of travel—hotel, car, flight, tour, etc—customers have to release individual preferences and other information about themselves, which can later be used to personalize marketing efforts, and tailor the travel experience. Now, with the online world playing a major (and often, the only) role in the booking and research phases of trip planning, the opportunity to capture even more data about users and make their brand experience personalized across all channels is greater than ever.

Each visitor that comes to your website is equipped with a wealth of data that comprises their unique traveler “profiles”—powerful information such as previous trips booked, travel –related items they’ve researched, frequency and recency of travel, and ads or offers they’ve responded to (with a click or purchase). Needless to say, this information can help you better target content and offers for each individual, making their visit much more relevant, while helping you increase engagement, bookings and repeat customers. But how?'

One method is to define “rules” (or a set of conditions that must be met) that will dictate which visitor segments will get which experiences. When defining rules, it’s important that you take into account the various stages travelers go through when planning for their trips; they may visit a site several times before actually booking a reservation. Use this to your advantage. This type of personalization technique allows you to adapt and match each forthcoming experience to the data collected during their previous visits. An example of how a rule can be used to define the experience for a repeat visitor is to re-target them based upon the last destination they searched. This may result in an offer for a vacation package that includes tickets to a local attraction, which could result in enticing them to book, or even extend their trip.

While targeting with rules can be effective, it can be nearly impossible to manually define rules for monstrous websites with copious amounts of daily traffic. So for increased sophistication, another method of behavioral targeting uses mathematical models to predict the most compelling content and offers based upon all that is known about a visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach also enables a broader range of content—such as destinations or travel packages—to be presented to the right person based on their unique predictive attributes.

Examples of predictive attributes used to personalize the online experience:
• Planning days in advance of the trip
• Length of stay
• Number of people (adults and children)
• Last departure point (searched or booked)
• Last destination (searched or booked)

European airline carrier bmibaby, for example, uses real-time personalization to target visitors with different “Featured Destinations” on their home page. The destination each visitor sees is based on the visitor’s geographical region, past trips and searches. By personalizing in this way, bmibaby has seen a 34% increase in clicks on the Featured Destination features, and a 4% uplift in bookings.

Independent of which of these methods you choose, digital personalization will empower you to start targeting visitors at the right time, with the right content and offers based on their individual needs, wants and behaviors. Since visitor behavior can change with each visit to your website, targeting rules alone can grow to unmanageable numbers. When this happens, consider moving to automated behavioral targeting, which will help you properly personalize the real-time experience for each traveler, without the nightmare of creating and maintaining complex rules.

Finish Line, Inc. Teams Up with Maxymiser for Multivariate Testing

2011-08-10T09:35:00.003-04:00

As a follow up to last week's announcement about a new Maxymiser retail client, Teleflora, we have another client to add to the docket: Finish Line.

In addition to their booming online and mobile shopping presence, Finish Line operates over 660 stores in malls across the United States. More than 11,000 Finish Line sneakerologists help Finish Line customers each day connect with their sport, their life and their style. Clearly, Finish Line understands the value of providing exceptional experiences--both offline and online--to their customers.

With our OneTouch™ methodology, we've been able to get Finish Line multivariate testing and optimization campaigns off the ground quickly, without the need for coding and lengthy change control processes through their internal IT department. This means low cost ofownership, incredibly fast time to market and the ability to launch multiple test campaigns at once. Any retailer knows that being able to stay up to speed with seasonality, holidays, and savvy customers is a key to be successful in retail--that's why we've made Maxymiser's Conversion Management platform easy to launch, use and discover consumer insights.

Welcome aboard Finish Line! You can find the full press release here.

Optimization 3.0: Conversion Management

2011-08-04T08:56:00.000-04:00

This blog first appeared on iMedia Connection on July 29, 2011

Several years ago, marketers were in a frenzy – buying as many keywords as possible, hiring SEM experts and pouring tons of resources into the perfectly “optimized” website for Google.com’s number one ranking. This was all of course to drive as much website traffic as possible, since back in the day, this was key success metric. And over time, the price for keywords went up, while high traffic numbers alone continued to justify this increasing expense. But today, traffic acquisition is not enough. SEM and SEO are still important, yes, but they aren’t the end game to a successful ecommerce strategy.

Today more and more of big players are starting to make conversion optimization a priority. And from there, are starting to get really smart, targeted and personal with their websites. This method is helping to not only acquire consumers, but to keep them coming back for more. These solutions aren’t making SEO/SEM experts and web analytics gurus obsolete, they are simply the missing piece of the customer experience puzzle, and giving all marketers the greatest bang for their buck.

While conversion management is ramping up to be the next must-have technology (just like SEO/SEM was a few years ago), many brands have yet to shift their time, budget and plans to a conversion management program. I realize it’s not always easy to convince decision makers about the benefits of new technologies, but here are three basic reasons why this can immediately impact your business:

1. Technology is Smarter than You

Let’s face it, you know your website better than anyone. You may think it’s ugly and desperately in need of a revamp. Or maybe, your think your website is a rock star— it has after all received multiple “Best Design” accolades and awards. Either way, subjective opinions have no place in your website strategy—if it hasn’t been tested, there is always room to improve.

Remember a little thing called focus groups? Back in the Mad Men era, these were heavily relied on by consumer brands to understand how their customer thinks, what they react to, what they like, what they don’t like, etc. Today, we still need to understand these consumer insights, but focus groups just aren’t scalable, (or smart), when your traffic efforts are driving thousands, if not millions, of unique visitors per month. Are you going to sit them all down in a room and survey them? No. But your website is the perfect place to discover what people like and don’t like—from buttons, to products, to tone and copy—through A/B and multivariate testing. How your customer proceeds through a search or check-out phase on your site is just as important and the product merchandising plan or their brand perceptions.

The best way to gather insights and start making site improvements with testing is the iterative approach: laying out a plan of what you want to test, why and when; discovering the results and implement the changes over time. I’ve seen changes as simple as button copy and color in the shopping cart raise purchases by 3-5% in a month’s time. Every site is different, but every site has opportunity.

2. Search Marketing and Web Analytics Need You

Going forward, there is no point in purchasing keywords to drive traffic to an inefficient landing page or website. If it doesn’t convert, it’s not justifying budget spend. Like I said, driving traffic to your website isn’t the end goal anymore—Increasing revenue on your website is. And in today’s noisy, competitive market, it’s becoming a more precarious process driving a visitor to your site, capture their attention and convert them into customers. The great news is, all the hard work that your search optimization teams have done over the past few years will provide insights that will help drive and improve your conversion strategies. They have targeted certain types of visitors and customers, products, campaigns, keywords. They have data on what is working and what hasn’t. So it’s time to team up to make everyone’s marketing efforts a successful return on investment.

Testing and targeting once the visitor is at your site is a win-win-win for search, analytics and revenue. When a website is optimized for the customer, most effective content and design elements are used throughout the site), the cost of acquisition through search marketing is driven down, and it becomes easier to convert website visitors into customers. With the excess funds from search marketing budgets available, marketers have the ability to pay for additional key words and drive more traffic to the site.

3. You Need Recurring Revenues

Testing and optimizing your site is going to provide a better site experience for the majority of your visitors. But after that, it’s time to get really slick by enhancing each individual’s experience with personalized, relevant content. Every individual that your visits the site has a different profile— and every time they visit, you learn more and more about them—what page layouts, tone/copy, buttons, etc. they covert best with, what products they search, what they have purchased, what traffic sources they come from, the list goes on. With personalization, you’ll be able to not only serve them tailored content in real-time, but predict what they will want next and serve them up offers that they are likely to buy. Not only do these solutions allow you to collect and analyze more in-depth visitor data, but it will help turn them into loyal, recurring customers if the content, offers and experience fit the individual’s needs and wants.

Maxymiser's Client List Blossoms: Welcome, Teleflora!

2011-08-02T12:58:00.005-04:00

Yesterday we proudly announced one of the newest additions to our Retailer Client list: Teleflora. We first met up with Teleflora this past February at eTail West and have proudly brought them on as a customer to perform A/B testing, multivariate testing and behavioral targeting.

Teleflora, who has been in business for over 75 years, has over 18,000 member florists throughout the U.S. and Canada, and an additional 20,000 affiliated florists outside North America. Wow. With their extensive network, coupled with a commitment to exceptional customer service, we're happy to be working with them to improve the online customer experience.

With our OneTouch™ methodology, we've been able to help Teleflora launch testing and optimization campaigns without the need for coding and lengthy change control processes through their internal IT department. This means low cost of ownership, incredibly fast time to market and the ability to launch multiple test campaigns at once. For a company that runs heavily on seasonality and holidays, this is a must-have in order to target customers effectively.

So, a big welcome to Teleflora! You can find the full press release here.

Cheers,

Mark Simpson

Founder and President, Maxymiser

PS: Next week we’ll be announcing another flagship retail client! Stay Tuned.

The Vacation Should Start On Your Site

2011-07-13T12:18:00.000-04:00

Summer is in full swing and most of us can't think about much more than our upcoming vacation, or are still browsing our own Facebook albums from our recent trip (come on, admit it, you know do it). Either way, I got to thinking about trip planning and how the online booking experience for nearly 20% of travelers is frustrating. Don't quote me on that, refer to Forrester.

1 in 5 travelers experience problems when booking their online travel. They can't figure out how to use their well-earned loyalty points or miles, or even complete a reservation or booking. Today's impatient traveler means that instead of calling your help line, they're fleeing to less-frustrating pastures--also known as your competitor.

Would-be travelers come to your site preparing to book a relaxing trip, and if you're making the first step in the process a hassle, it's a not a good [brand] impression in their minds. The good news is there are several steps sites can take in terms of multivariate testing, personalization and user experience to ensure the visitor experience is seamless and easy. And next time they are ready to take flight, they are more likely to head your way knowing you operate with their needs in mind.

For these tips on making your travel site vacationer-friendly, head over to MediaPost to read the entire article here.

Bon Voyage!

Five Common Mistakes of Product Recommendations Campaigns

2011-06-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

This article first appeared on iMediaConnection, here.

“Consumers who viewed this product, also bought that product…” Amazon’s been doing it for years, and for them and other ecommerce pros who are getting it right, product recommendations are a very effective way to beef up shopping cart sizes and pull in more revenue per customer. This specific form of online targeting, however, hasn’t always been so easy for marketers to achieve. The good news is that with new automated solutions in play, they can now easily execute similar types of cross-sell and up-sell campaigns on their site.

As they venture into what may very well be new territory (despite being relatively commonplace), marketers should avoid making the following five common mistakes that plague product recommendation campaigns:

Mistake #1: You try to manually set all the recommendations rules
Until now, teal-time targeting and recommendations have been considered too difficult for marketers to implement because only rules-based models/technology existed. And let’s face it: we’re only human. It’s nearly impossible to predict all possible behavior combinations and rules necessary to target and tailor to shoppers needs and wants. Think about the number of products you hold. Now, multiply that number by the number sold per month (or even per day) and the amount of site traffic you have… The mathematical logic here is enough to make anyone’s head spin.

But now automated solutions exist that empower marketers to achieve this level of targeting without creating complex matrixes and rules, or bogging down their web developer and IT resources. When it comes to recommendations, your best bet is to find a software that automates the process for you, that employs a predictive model that learns and adapts about consumers behaviors over time, that can perform testing within your campaigns and of course, easily integrates with your POC system. Make it easy on yourself—the ROI rewards alone will be worth it.

Mistake #2: You don’t test your recommendations
Anyone who runs a complex ecommerce site has probably already done a fair amount of A/B testing and Multivariate Testing to test user journeys, shopping carts, search, buttons…and anything that impacts conversion rates and the user experience. You feel you’ve got content optimization down and are ready to move on to the next big thing: product recommendations.

But a common error most marketers make is forgetting to perform testing on the actual recommendation campaigns. The truth is, just like every thing else on the site, the “how” and “where” of the product recommendations’ presentation, including their content and design—is just as important as the recommendations themselves. Your site and consumers will always be evolving, and therefore testing and optimization is a continuous process for all important conversion elements.

Mistake #3: You recommend products that are out of stock
Next to a poor site experience, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting a customer interested and excited about a product only to find that it’s unavailable. Bottom line: Don’t kill your recommendations efforts by pushing a product that’s no longer available.

This is an easy one to avoid: your back-end POS system should carefully track stock quantities and this knowledge can be easily integrated with your product recommendations technology to ensure that no out-of-stock items show up in your campaigns.

Mistake #4: You don’t integrate product reviews
Next to price, product reviews have one of the biggest impacts on customer buying decisions. Whether you’re selling a hotel room or a cell phone, consumers want to be reassured about what they are buying—and will go looking for reviews wherever they can find them. If you haven’t already, test out placement of product reviews in the buying phase and make it easy for the consumer to retrieve the information they want about products buy hosting product reviews from both a previous buyer and editorial perspective. Don’t risk them wandering away from your site and abandoning the check-out process.

One caveat here, though: leave the product reviews for the pre-shopping cart phase. Once your customer has already performed the “Add to Basket” or “Book Now” click, don’t distract them with information that isn’t imperative to entering credit card details and hitting a complete button.

Mistake #5: You offer a distracting or competitive product in the shopping cart
Your recommendations technology offers you insight that allows you to predict products your visitors might be interested in, and therefore, by default, products they either wouldn’t be interested in or those that will distract them. Distracting products are those that compete with known preferences. For example, if your technology recognizes that a visitor has added a Blackberry to his or her shopping cart, it should not recommend a DROID. This type of recommendation not only interrupts their buying thought process and make them reconsider the purchase path they’re already on, it eliminates the opportunity to offer them complimentary items, such as a case or headset at the time of purchase. These recommendations increase cart sizes and overall revenue, rather than disrupt the flow of the purchase.

Another recommendation that might work here would be a “Buy one Blackberry, get a second for half-price” deal.

Bottom line: your recommendations campaigns are meant to enhance, not distract.

Customer Experience Management: How Online Travel Companies Can Increase Engagement and Loyalty

2011-06-07T09:29:00.001-04:00

Last night I flew to Miami, along with several members of the Maxymiser team to attend one of the best events for online marketers in the travel industry: EyeForTravel's Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2011. This morning, I'll be keynoting on a great panel about "Keeping Pace with a Rapidly Changing Online Travel Distribution Landscape." This is such an important topic for online travel marketers, and one which I am highly passionate about. Today, travel customers have increasingly high expectations of brand, it's important to understand what movements in the field of Customer Experience Management have led to improvements in loyalty across different marketing channels.

Prior to the show, I had a chance to sit down with EyeForTravel to discuss the power (and necessity) of personalization to improve the online booking experience. This originally published on eyefortravel.com here.

Q: Which according to you has been the most striking or potentially path-breaking development in the travel sector in the last six months or so? Would you call it a real innovation at this stage?

Mark Simpson: With the shift of owning the customer moving back towards suppliers the need for competitive sites which relate to each individual visitor is more than ever. This focus will create innovation. However, the biggest innovations are actually happening outside the travel industry, but have a dramatic affect on the way in which travel businesses need to operate in order to compete and be successful.

Social, Mobile, Coupons, Group Buying and Customer Experience Management all hold massive potential upside for travel businesses who get their strategies right.

Q: It is considered that travel personalization is still in its infancy. Considering the myriad of options available for planning and booking, what do you think are the major challenges that travel suppliers and intermediaries are facing today? How can their websites enable them to overcome challenges pertaining to optimizing relationships with their audience?

Mark Simpson: There is no doubt that the travel market is more competitive than ever with suppliers competing with intermediaries and OTAs, as well as each other.

The biggest opportunity to increase engagement and loyalty is in customer experience management – empowering customers to give direct opinion on how your digital sites should look through A/B and multivariate testing (which sets the base line) and personalizing the customer experience – so you become the most relevant travel brand for that individual.

There are now solutions on the market that drive content in real-time based upon a visitor’s online behavior to be more directed to the needs of each individual at that point in time. For example, if a traveler returns after starting a reservation, the experience could be more targeted to enable that visitor to complete the reservation.

Content decisions may also be driven by a traveler’s loyalty status and reinforce their loyalty status and importance during the online interaction.

Q: What do you recommend when it comes to developing customer experiences based on objective, data-driven decisions and continuous website optimization?

Mark Simpson: The leaders in the online space – Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc - have one thing in common: they have never gone through a major website redesign. Instead these brands have continually iterated their sites, testing every change before rolling it out to all visitors. This daily, weekly and monthly iteration allows customers to "tell" companies what they like (and don't like) through real interaction. The data driven results are un-contestable. This is available to every company now, and in recent developments pioneered by Maxymiser, the control of content testing and personalization sits with the business, rather than IT, so the speed required for true iteration is now a reality.

Q: Can you elaborate on how new travel sites are setting benchmarks for the industry to follow?

Mark Simpson: Gone are the days where markets are slow moving. If you're not innovating and continually improving how you interact with your customers you will fall behind. If your competitors don't overtake you can bet your bottom dollar that there is someone in their bedroom focusing on doing what you are, but in a different way. Recent research has shown that 1 in 5 travelers encounter problems when booking their travel. These people are young and tech-savvy, and a third of these people's first port of call when problems arise is to find a solution with a different company.

Q: In your opinion, how can travel sites go about utilizing features such as videos, blogs etc and set specific, measurable goals related to business metrics, and then track them regularly and measure the ROI?

Mark Simpson: The only way to accurately measure the performance of new content, whatever that content may be, is to test it in a live environment against a default, and measure the change in desired response(s).

Every site change needs to be measured by its impact on conversion rates, revenue, lifetime value and overall success of the visitor completing the objective, no excuses. The biggest failing is not to try. If you aren’t trying, you aren’t moving forward. It’s easier than ever to safely try new and innovative content using a dynamic testing platform.

Q: Travel sites are connecting more with their customers through social media and interactive website features, including mobile applications or offering a Live Help feature. How do you think sites are starting to move beyond the traditional price/ date/ destination search criteria to provide more flexibility to customers?

Mark Simpson: Companies have had to move beyond traditional search methods. Customers are looking in many areas and through other channels for travel ideas, advice, research, information and booking methods. This breeds opportunity, particularly for travel companies to touch the customer with targeting and personalized messaging as more is known about their preferences and behavior.

Q: Can you elaborate on the latest trends pertaining to conversion management? How do you assess the maturity level of A/B and multivariate testing solutions in the travel sector?

Mark Simpson: Content testing has become mainstream thanks to significant innovations in the market coming from Maxymiser. The ability to test without touching IT is the single biggest leap as it empowers marketers - truly allowing testing anywhere, anytime with a low total cost of ownership. Some of the claims of incumbents in the market are only now playing out due to these advanced solutions.

Automating the use of learning algorithms is another major step forward allowing for faster testing, less risk and substantially increased flexibility, which in turn enables companies to be able to test without encroaching on day-to-day business practices.

Q: How do you think the travel industry is going about machine learning and is leveraging semantics dynamically to understand what people might like at the moment they search, creating a unique personalized filter through which they can see what’s most relevant to them? What do you think have been major breakthroughs for machine learning considering that its still early stages for the same?

Mark Simpson: I see very few travel companies doing this successfully right now, However, for the first time it is easy to achieve this with SaaS-based solutions. So the good news is there is no reason not to try it.

Mark Simpson to Keynote at EyeforTravel 2011

2011-06-02T12:04:00.007-04:00

Mark Simpson, Maxymiser's Founder and President, will be a featured keynote presenter to kick off the EyeForTravel Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2011 on June 7-8 in Miami, FL. Mark will speak alongside Gareth Gaston, SVP Global e-Commerce, Wyndham Hotel Group, Krista Pappas, Global Travel Industry Director at Bing.com, Microsoft, and Tom Bacon, Former VP Revenue Planning, Frontier Airlines, to discuss how to "Keep Pace with a Rapidly Changing Online Travel Distribution Landscape."

For nearly a decade this well established event has helped hundreds of travel marketers, get ahead and stay ahead with the world of online marketing. The highly researched program line-up never fails to deliver insightful presentations, case studies and poignant debate.

Mark is also set to moderate a session track on Day 1, entitled, "Create the Perfect Travel Website - Inspire, Engage and Convert". He will be joined by speakers from National Park Trips, Nickelodeon Hotels, ICE Portal and Accor North America.

A travel industry veteran, prior to Maxymiser, Mark headed up online marketing and business development for Travelport, focusing in particular on the acquisition and integration of ebookers, Octopus Travel, Hotel Club and RatesToGo. Latterly Mark headed-up the Business Development, Search and PPC teams for Travelport.

Maxymiser still holds a few extra FREE conference passes for anyone who would like to attend the premier online travel event of the year. We hope to see you there!

Taming the Fickle Financial Services Customer

2011-05-26T13:19:00.001-04:00

Last week Maxymiser US hit the road for our second big trade show of the year in the Windy City. Net.Finance is one of the biggest shows for financial services marketers, and though I was very tempted to roam the streets of Chicago with my new DSLR camera, it was fun to rub elbows with some of the biggest names in finance—Mastercard, HSBC, Citibank, USAA, and many, many more.

Our presence at the event dramatically increased when I was asked to provide a keynote presentation on day two of the event. Being that multivariate testing, personalization and optimization is our thing at Maxymiser, I led attendees through an educational presentation of how even small changes and targeting techniques on their websites can dramatically improve conversion rates, the customer experience and lifetime values.

What as most surprising is how few people in the audience raised their hands when I asked who today was performing testing and segmentation on their sites. Literally 4 hands out of hundreds went up.

It’s no secret that financial services marketers meet many roadblocks to successful digital marketing, in real-time. Their websites are complex, hosting dozens of products and offers. Then there’s the privacy, security and legal concerns. No wonder most optimization projects probably never get past the IT team.

The good news is, technologies (yes, like Maxymiser) have the ability to eliminate IT from the picture, test and optimize even in secure areas, and help financial services significantly improve the digital experience for their customers.

For more information on getting started with this, I invite you to download our recently released Financial Services White Paper.

Back to Net.Finance. The second half the day was met with a private luncheon we hosted for eCommerce and Marketing VP's. I was delighted to have Ben Lang from Santander fly across the pond to speak on Maxymiser’s behalf. Santander is a long-standing successful financial services client of Maxymiser’s, and together we spoke on the importance of implementing a culture of testing within in a financial services organization to streamline conversion rates, revenue and customer loyalty, by ensuring no new content or products hit your site without first being tested.

Maxymiser hits the road again in a couple weeks, when we speak and sponsor the EyeForTravel Online Marketing Conference in Miami. We hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Mark Simpson

Founder and President, Maxymiser Inc.

Why You Should Segment by Recency and Seasonality in Ecommerce

2011-05-12T11:02:00.000-04:00

In a recent post, Brad Weitz, our Director of Client Services, wrote about segmentation strategies based on click-behavior. Now it’s time to move past click behavior and ramp up your segmentation strategies based on buying behavior! The time a consumer comes to your site and the season play a huge role on not just click behavior, but buying behavior.

Recency

First up is recency, or rather “when did the activity or purchase happen” and “did multiple clicks or purchases occur?” Ask yourself how far apart these activities happened, and does it impact your specific business:

Retail: Purchase cycles have a huge impact on browsing or purchase activity, so make sure you mind that data before segmenting and targeting too quickly. Take a retailer like LL Bean, whose purchase cycles tend to be short and sweet. Customers may buy pants one day, and a shirt the next, so your product recommendations may need more emphasis on items bought in the same cart or visit, or items viewed in the same week. Don’t try to reach too far back in the analytics around that consumer, because chances are they’ve moved on to a new shopping mentality.

On the flip, for companies similar to Best Buy, basket analysis is still important, but reaching back into the past can also be beneficial to your recommendations. If a customer had previously purchased a higher ticket item, such as a TV, stereo system or washer/dryer, the purchase cycle is much more infrequent, but still relevant when the time comes around to upgrade that appliance.

Travel/Leisure: With the cost-comparison factor playing a huge role in online travel booking, behaviors will undoubtedly vary by time of year and type of travel product being purchased. Time on the site is a huge factor that, if used correctly, can dramatically boost your targeting and personalization conversions. Travelers usually browse several days, or even weeks, before they purchase vacation packages, hotels, rental cars, flights—you name it. Expect most consumers to browse and compare prices earlier in the week and complete the booking later that week.

Media is more about browsing, rather than buying, but still holds a great opportunity to target. Be mindful on when consumers are viewing content, particularly within the same session or visit. Browsing activity is very dependent on content. For example, ESPN browsing is based on sports season whereas the New York Times will be more story and topic specific.

Seasonality

The second wave to watch for is seasonality. This is a huge factor in segmentation since consumer mindset inevitably changes, and purchase behavior, as well as browsing activity will be impacted.

Retail – Holidays, holidays, holidays. You can already expect an increase in traffic and purchases, and you’ve put in a lot of work into your sales, promotions and branding. But remember, people are buying gifts, not shopping for themselves. So, first of all, don’t spend too much time targeting based on their past purchases in the off-season—it may not have much of an impact since they are shopping for a loved one, friend, co-worker, etc. However, the important items to highlight for this mad-dash-shopping-segment are shipping dates and stock status. The comfort they receive in knowing that you have it in stock and they’ll receive it on time, no matter if there is a slight price difference, can ensure you win the business instantly.

Travel – In the winter, recommend getaways to the Caribbean or sunny destinations, while for long weekends emphasize last-minute getaways that you know people can actually afford money and time-wise. If you notice a consumer frequents the same destination year over year, or changes up their vacation, recommend and target accordingly. Remember, it’s all about giving them what they want, not steering them to somewhere they’d never go. Additionally, if you know a visitor is a business traveler, up-sell dry cleaning or room service add-ons, or highlight babysitting services or kid-friendly local attractions.

Don’t forget that the ability to integrate your loyalty data to highlight different discounts and benefits, in addition to recency and seasonality will leave you with highly personalized campaigns, for the right person, at the right time and on the right product.

A Vanilla Website Is the Worst Flavor of All

2011-05-10T09:12:00.000-04:00

With warm weather arriving, the ice cream trucks that pop on every corner here in New York have it pretty easy when it comes to offering consumers value: All it takes is a nice cone of vanilla—maybe with some sprinkles thrown in—to make people happy. But where vanilla might be all the flavor people need to get excited about ice cream, don’t assume the same holds true for other businesses. When it comes to selling your products online, be warned: sticking to vanilla won’t get you anywhere.

You know what I mean when I say vanilla. You’ve been to these ecommerce sites, and you haven’t been inspired. They’re not dynamic, segmented or personalized; they simply “are”.

Boring.

About a month ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at a very unique virtual event, The Personalization Revolution. In 60 minutes, 60 speakers spoke for 60 seconds each on various topics on website personalization—a hot topic in the online marketing world right now. After listening to the variety of expert opinions and best practices, I got to thinking: Why would any marketer today NOT employ personalization techniques to attract and retain consumers?

I’m not talking about inserting someone’s first name into an email (Hi Debbie!)—we all understand that companies have at least grasped Excel Best Practices 101. I’m talking about truly knowing your consumers on the individual level and providing that experience across all channels, in real time—starting with your website.

It hasn’t been easy for every digital brand to jump on the personalization bandwagon, as easily-integrated, real-time solutions were hardly the norm until recent years. But technology has moved forward, as it always does, and the potential to be impactful with real-time personalized marketing is now a reality.

Not only is the web responsible for the strongest growth in recent sales, but it’s also partly responsible for making customers more demanding—and more fickle—than ever. Sure, tried-and-true marketing practices still work at some level, but these days, brands have about seven seconds to capture consumers’ attention with their websites. And even after brands master the basics of capturing consumer attention, retaining their loyalty is a constant challenge in a very noisy marketplace.

The real trick for retaining consumer interest lies in being able scoop out and serve up (non-vanilla) relevant, personalized content and offers for each individual who comes in contact with your brand.

By providing each consumer with a unique experience—and one that helps you achieve your business goals—whether through up-selling, cross-selling, offering more products per person or being their go-to retailer, you have ultimately provided a more relevant experience, regardless of prices or competitor promotions.

Our Newest New Hire: Mitch Williams

2011-04-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have noticed a flurry of press releases recently. Okay, well, maybe not exactly a flurry, but at least one a month for the last few months. That’s because in addition to company news, we have had a streak of new and impressive hires who are an important part of Maxymiser’s continuing growth. Most recently, we welcomed California-based Mitch Williams to the Maxymiser team. Mitch joins us the Vice President of Sales and Customer Success, and he’ll be working out of our San Francisco office to expand our client roster in the Americas.

Mitch has more than 20 years of experience leading sales and business development for enterprise SaaS companies, and he’s ready to hit the ground here at Maxymiser running. Before joining us, he was the Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development of The Vanella Group. Prior to that, he was at Art Technology Group, where he increased revenue 40% year-over-year for his region. Mitch has also been responsible for sales growth and success of several enterprise software start-ups, including Pacific Edge Software, Valdero Corporation and Kadiri Inc.

Mitch holds a BA from Columbia University and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He currently resides in Half Moon Bay, California, with his wife, two children, and the family’s Labrador retriever.

You can read more about Mitch in his Press Release here, or Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Segment, Recommend, Rake It In

2011-03-10T11:46:00.004-05:00

I've been playing the segmentation game for years, and unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past ten years and haven’t so much as browsed an eCommerce website, you’ve seen product recommendation and segmentation technologies at work a time or ten. Amazon.com, as you probably know, championed the technology of “collaborative filtering” for product affinity models.

Yep, using product recommendation technology for cross-sell, up-sell and website personalization campaigns is nothing new. But I've seen companies not set up the right strategy for executing a truly successful segmentation strategy. And it's OK, it can be daunting. The challenge is making sense of the wealth of analytics and user information, all of which are based on multiple factors, and gleaned from every type of visitor coming to your website. As desperate as you might be to sink your up-selling claws into their shopping carts, missteps will kill your site’s credibility. So get it right the first time.

There are three essential data methodologies for setting up successful, revenue-driving segmentation and recommendation campaigns, that will ensure you “know before you show”:

1. Click Behavior

Simply counting clicks to understand visitor behavior had its brief fame in the early days of web analytics. But the days of rudimentary analytics are long gone. With the resources available today, it’s time to move on and get a little more personal. It’s a deep analysis of click behaviors that gives a more insightful picture of your consumers.
There are 4 key click behaviors that are essential to understanding your customers and how to reach them:

Viewed this, also viewed that
Viewed this, bought that
Most viewed
Rated this, rated that

Not only does click behavior showcase a user’s navigation through your site, but it reveals their product interests and possible segment categories, allowing you to better focus your segmentation and recommendation campaigns based on your users’ interest, product offerings and promotions. You may even discover new segments and behaviors that you didn’t even know existed. A double win!

2. Basket Analysis

There is no better place to plan for and understand your actual consumers than at the check-out process. Analyzing buyer behavior from all your channels (not just the website!) is the most indicative and predictive data set for setting up successful segmentation and recommendations: discover what people actually buy, uncover buying patterns and help influence inventory decisions.

3. Click & Buy

While some users zoom to your site already knowing which product they are going to purchase, there is plenty of data to be had from those who first spend a lot of time clicking around, researching, comparing products, saving items to a wish-list, and finally…finally, making a purchase. Discovering behaviors such as “viewed this, bought that” will reveal both interests and buying behavior. A combination of this click behavior and basket analysis can help you easily pinpoint segments and recommendations to target at the right time in the buyer’s decision-making process, as well as discover which avenue their most likely to complete the sale at.

Hint: Take #1 and #3 and put ‘em together!

I’ll leave you to start gathering and analyzing this goldmine of data you’ve probably been sitting on for quite some time. Brace yourself: it’s going to be an eye-opening discovery session for your entire business. And your customers will (silently) thank you as well, with a lot more loyalty.

Brad Weitz is the Director of Client Services for Maxymiser. Formerly the Vice President of Operations for Autonomy Optimost, Brad has been at the cutting edge of online marketing for over 8 years. Now Brad has joined Maxymiser to develop and oversee all client relationships with a 360-degree digital marketing strategy for improving content optimization, increasing website conversion rates and producing outstanding marketing ROI. Before being acquired by Autonomy, Brad led the Optimost analytics team providing insight and ROI for Fortune 500 clients such as Delta, Bank Of America, Wachovia, and Walmart. Read more about Brad here.

Trekking the U.S. with Maxymiser

2011-03-08T08:56:00.023-05:00

It's hard to believe that we're in the last month of Q1 2011 already, which inevitebly means that trade show and conference season is well under way. Maxymiser attended our first big show of the year in February at eTail West 2011. I was just thankful that my booth showed up in one piece, while the rest of the Maxymiser attendees enjoyed networking, attending sessions, hosting our private, sponsored luncheon and eating some really great seafood (OK- so I had fun too.)

With the excitement of a successful show still fueling me, I returned back to NYC from a week in Palm Springs (hold your envy right there--I was literally working the entire time) and furiously mapped out the remainder of our speaking, sponsoring, exhibiting activities. We're excited to be attending some of the best shows it the U.S. this year. And hopefully, we'll bump into you along the way.

OMMA Metrics \\ March 23, 2011 \\ NYC

Created to bring together members of the digital measurement ecosystem, the OMMA series allows you to hear from industry experts and senior professionals who can provide their practitioner perspectives to answer your strategic and tactical questions and more. This conference brings together the best and the brightest in digital measurement today -- on-stage and in the audience -- for learning, listening, collaborating, and networking in order to evolve not only our companies and clients, but our entire industry. Maxymiser's Founder and President, Mark Simpson, will be moderating a panel presentation "Optimizing the Digital Experience: Testing Ads, Landing Pages, Content, and Features to Improve Conversion"

Join Us: OMMA Metrics Registration

The Future of Marketing: Technology-Driven Personalization \\ March 29, 2011 \\ eConference

You don't even have to leave your desk for this one. The Future of Marketing, a virtual 'microconference' featuring 60 luminaries each sharing critical trends, cutting-edge approaches, and big ideas in 60 seconds or less. In just one hour, participants will gain a 360-degree view of what's emerging and what will matter in marketing over the next several years. Join us as Maxymiser's Founder and President, Mark Simpson, gives his 60 second take on using technology to create personalized experiences.

Free Registration here.

Digital Hollywood \\ May 2-5, 2011 \\ Marina Del Ray, CA

Panelist Mark Simpson, Maxymiser President & Founder, will join the conversation about Social Media, Brands and Target Markets, The Apps: Dating, Comedy, News, Music, Kids, Teens, The Arts, Women, Sports, Politics, Religion etc. Transforming and Disassembling the World of Traditional Media and Communications

Register Here

Net.Finance \\ May 16-18, 2011 \\ Chicago, IL

Financial services marketers unite! Learn how to thrive in the digital marketplace, now that the economy is rebuilding! Financial marketing teams are looking for new ways to become part of their customers’ daily lives, and many marketers are using the latest digital technologies to give customers the most meaningful experience and to meet the growing demand for mobile financial services. Maxymiser is hosting private luncheon with a Financial Services digital marketing expert!

If you are interested in joining Maxymiser as our complimentary guest to this event, please email marketing@maxymiser.com; or if you'd rather register on your own, go here.

Web Analytics Wednesday \\ May 18, 2011, 6:00PM \\ Chicago, IL

WAW returns to Chicago for a a night of networking, education and fun as digital marketers and web analytics gurus come together to learn from and for each other. Did I mention that Maxymiser is picking up the tab? Hurry and RSVP before your spot is taken.

Vist the Web Analytics Wednesday site.

EyeForTravel: Online Marketing Strategies for 2011 \\ June 6-8, 2011 \\ Miami, FL

It's gonna be hot, hot, hot in Miami. But not quite as hot as our Platinum Sponsorship of this pinnacle travel event! You could spend months researching the latest online marketing trends to affect the travel industry. Or you could attend EyeforTravel’s Online Marketing Strategies for Travel event and get all the answers you need in just 2 days! Look out for Maxymiser as we lead a keynote discussion, a panel, and some oh-so-cool personalized passports for all participants. We're so excited we can hardly contain who the our featured speaker will be. But, we have to (for now!).

Register Here

Shop.Org Annual Summit \\ Sept 12-14, 2011 \\ Boston, MA \\ Booth #551

A hop, skip and a train ride will put the Maxymiser team in Beantown for what's sure to be one of THE biggest events for the online retail world this year. We'll be setting up camp at booth 551, and there are sure to be some more fun surprises from Mayxmiser at this event, but in the meantime, be sure to reserve your spot and register. Last year was record-breaking attendance, can you imagine what this year will hold?

There's more on the way from Maxymiser. Stay posted on events and news on our website, Twitter or Facebook.

They Like Us...They Really Like Us!

2011-03-04T09:33:00.001-05:00

During the fun, but busy time at Etail West last week, I was honored to find out that Maxymiser had secured its first award of 2011. Anne Holland's WhichTestWon.com site is widely known in the A/B and multivariate testing community (who doesn't love to guess the winning test on a weekly basis?), and we are proud to be a part of it.

Deciding which great tests to enter was the tough part. I asked my testing teams to carefully think about their favorite tests from 2010 and specifically, which ones they felt had not only great conversion rate increases, but proved to be a stimulating and challenging task for them and the client. Choosing a test from Fragrance Direct was a no-brainer.

Heartbroken after putting a lot of effort (and budget!) into re-launching their website a few years back, only to be met with worse conversion rates, Fragrance Direct came to us in search of a new, data-driven path to customer satisfaction. We've done a lot of testing with this great company to help bring them back to the top of the perfume game, including home page upgrades, product page improvements, and search results optimization. And we've watched their corporate culture really embrace testing and optimization, which has had huge, positive impacts on their marketing and business development.

BEFORE

This recent (now award-winning!) test on their check-out page has proven to be one of the best yet. Specifically, we have been awarded the Best B2c CheckOut Page Test. A 23% increase in order placements resulted from the "winning" check-out page. And honestly, even if this didn't win us an "official" award, that's a huge win anyways in my book. It's what we're here to do for clients, day in and day out. So, congratulations to the real winners of this test, Fragrance Direct.

The Awards Judges were all too kind in their feedback about our testing approach, “We gave this test the Gold Award because the Maxymiser team really thought about buyer psychology. Do customers deep into the checkout process still need to see prominent images and info on

what they’re buying on each page? Or can you take it as a given and focus on the info for each particular page? (in this case shipping address info entered on the prior page.) Turns out maintaining “scent” or buyer excitement by showing the product as prominently as possible won in this case."

WINNING EXPERIENCE

This feedback is so gratifying for me. It really speaks to the approach Maxymiser takes to each client, no matter which industry they sell in. Anyone can turn on a piece of technology and make it work, but turning it into a successful solution, and understanding the process behind it, as well as your target audience and the retail mind-set, is extremely important to getting the most out of A/B and multivariate testing.

With that being said, the awards come around again in August. We look forward to entering again and sharing the love with the testing world.

Optimizing, Personalizing and Multi-Channel-izing: Insights from eTail 2011

2011-03-02T10:28:00.009-05:00

Last week Maxymiser’s NYC team (or at least a lucky few of us) left the snowy cold and headed to the sunshine, palm trees and snow-capped mountains of Palm Desert, CA for eTail West 2011. This was our first trip to one of the biggest shows for online retailers, and though I admit lounging by the pool seemed like a very tempting option, the who’s who of retailers in attendance (Best Buy, eBay, Kohls, Officemax, Williams-Sonoma, etc.) made it easy—or at least easier—to stay focused on work.

The highlight of the event (for me, at least) was a private luncheon for eCommerce and Marketing VP's that I hosted along with one of our top Hospitality clients...who shall remain unnamed, at least for the time being. Together we spoke on the importance of multivariate testing and website personalization to increase conversion rates, revenue and customer loyalty—topics of high importance for these online retailers.

I also had time to attend several keynotes and sessions, as well as to chat with delegates to get the inside scoop on new challenges for e-tailers. As with any event, it didn’t take long for some key themes to emerge, and I thought I’d share them with you—along with my thoughts.

1. Multi-Channel Marketing Requires a Multi-Channel Culture

The first keynote session “Moving Beyond Internal Challenges to Create Effective Multi-Channel Experiences” featured Brookstone and Boston Proper, and it was obvious that this is a big topic (and challenge) for retailers. How do they break down internal silos to ensure a seamless experience for the consumer across marketing platforms?

It starts with creating a multi-channel culture. Boston Proper has ONE Creative Director, ONE Head of Marketing, ONE Merchandising Director, etc., all of whom work together to ensure consistency in positioning and messaging across the website, brick-and-mortar stores, direct marketing, email marketing, mobile, and any other marketing channel they utilize.

I couldn’t agree more with this culture shift, and my sense is it’s one that will allow some retailers to thrive while others fall behind—in the short term and long term. Though we may not be inside our clients’ teams, we’ve developed a real focus on helping our clients achieve this. Our new Director of Client Services Brad Weitz is rabidly passionate about helping marketing teams understand the value of this.

Perhaps the best quote I heard regarding the multi-channel experience was: “The consumer expectation is that they receive a seamless experience across channels. It’s mindless to them. The only time they notice it is when it breaks down.” So, aside from using advanced technologies to mine and marry your data, don’t let your internal multichannel strategy break-down due to poor culture and structure—lest your customers notice and run elsewhere.

2. Personalization Is King
I hear the term "personalization" being used more and more in the digital marketing world, and its definitions run the gamut from “placing the receivers name in a mass email” to targeting the next best action/content/product for an individual user on the website. It’s clear that no matter which line of traditional or digital marketing you play in, offering personalized content is becoming a total must-have.

A panel discussion with marketers from ESPN, BestBuy.com and Forsee Results offered some great insights in what can be done today to offer this tailored approach to consumers.

From Forsee Results President Larry Freed: “True conversion rates are from those visitors who came to the site with an intent to buy.” In other words, while marketers all have their own goals and definitions for what defines a conversion, website and mobile personalization solutions can really play a key role in targeting these types of converting (paying!) visitors.

BestBuy.com’s Director of Analytics, Lynn Lanphier, warned that being too personalized may cause consumers to feel like they’ve missed an offer or product. So how do you find that solution that’s “just riiiiight”? By using personalization tools to target the next best action/content that individual is likely to take or buy. When you make a connection with a consumer who feels like you know and understand them, it’s a win-win. They aren’t missing out, but getting just what [maybe even didn’t know] they wanted.

The major takeaway? There is no room for a one-size-fits-all approach in the online marketplace. Ever. Again.

3. Mobile Is the Commerce Hub of the Future. And the Future Is Now…
I don’t even really have to say it. We all know it’s a big, huge, giant opportunity for this year. But with most marketers in unchartered waters with this new ecommerce platform, marketing strategies are going to have to shift. Most retailers at eTail were concerned with the decisions to develop a mobile site vs. app, slow page-load times on mobile sites (which lead to a frustrated—rather than satisfied—consumer) and how their customers are going to use mobile for their brand (to buy, to search and location, or to just see if they have the product for the cheapest price).

I was more than a little surprised that there were no presentations or chatter about how improving website experiences and conversion rates should be applied to mobile commerce.

Yes, marketers are moving their ecommerce sites to a smaller screen with an aim to please the on-the-go, hurried site user—but they’re still approaching the experience as if the consumer were using a laptop or PC. Big mistake. Mobile commerce is a different planet. Sure, brands might attract the same users, but don't assume that mobile interaction mirrors desktop/laptop interaction.

Clearly, the retail industry needs to perk up and start paying more attention to consumer behaviors and conversion management for mobile. What’s the point of spending a lot of time and budget on developing these applications and sites, if there’s no eye to the maximizing ROI for the new medium? Mobile consumer spend has nowhere to go but up, but launching a strategy without mobile optimization and personalization strategies will make you more irrelevant than Zach Morris’s cell phone.

Maxymiser Customer Symposium Rocks London

2011-02-24T14:24:00.012-05:00

Maxymiser UK kicked off 2011 with a fantastic event last week at Vinopolis in London. We packed in nearly 150 people from all ends of the eCommerce industry, representing companies such as American Airlines, Avis, Eurostar, Hertz, HSBC, Jimmy Choo, Kodak, Motorola, Nokia, Santander and many, many more.

Ecommerce and Marketing pros were eager to hear how our guest speakers from EasyJet, M&M Direct, KwikFit Insurance and Paddy Power are utilizing our state-of-the-art conversion optimization solutions to drive website conversion rate growth against a backdrop of austerity measures, VAT increases, and rising unemployment.

EasyJet takes attendees on a trip through conversion management best practices and strategies.

Kwik-Fit Insurance lets marketers in on their website conversion rate increases.

Attendees are keen to learn how our clients make decisions about using an enterprise solution to improve conversion rates, and how they created a culture of testing within their organization.

A great opportunity for peer to peer networking.

Wine, wine, wine! We couldn't let a trip to Vinopolis go by without taking part in a wine tasting. Yummy!

The rest of the photos from the Customer Symposium can be viewed here.

We want to sincerely thank all who came out, we had a really great time. And if you missed it, we hope to see you at a future event here in the city or around the globe.

Cheers,

Ashley Eckel
Marketing Manager
Maxymiser, Inc.

Guess the Winning Test - The Results are In!

2011-02-17T14:32:00.010-05:00

Thank you to those of you who took part in our recent Guess the Winning Test competition. As promised, here is the page that produced the biggest increase in conversions for ASDA (A division of Walmart):

So, how did you do?

Nearly 75% of marketers guessed the wrong variant!

But don't feel bad if you didn't choose correctly, it happens to the best of us! Which is why we here at Maxymiser will always firmly stand behind the notion that making content decisions about your web or mobile site based on subjective opinion can be dangerous and even costly.

Multivariate testing is not a secret solution that only a few brands are using. But, Maxymiser’s Content Optimization solutions—including A/B testing, multivariate testing, segment targeting and online behavioral targeting—take the guesswork away from your creative process and empowers your creative teams to deliver the optimal website experience. Coupled with our best-in-class reporting dashboards, this unrivaled depth of insight will help you determine the best design and site content for your brand, while enabling a continuous content optimization program.

If you are interested in making your web and mobile data actionable and pro-actively pursuing conversion rate increases, let us know. In the meantime, our case studies can help you see how many brands globally are letting live customer data guide their marketing strategies to improve revenue.

And keeps your eyes peeled next month for another chance at Guess the Winning Test!

Cheers,

Mark Simpson

Founder and President

Maxymiser, Inc.

@MarkJ_Simpson

A Record-Breaking WAW Returns to NYC

2011-02-15T10:23:00.022-05:00

After a small hiatus of NYC-based Web Analytics Wednesdays (WAW), the Maxymiser team was anxious to help revive this must-attend networking event for digital measurement specialists last Wednesday, Feb 9th, in the Big Apple. And what a turn-out. Over 100 analytics and internet marketing enthusiasts poured into the basement of the Houndstooth Pub, representing companies such as Bloomingdales, Barnes & Noble, Conde Nast, Monster.com, Morgan Stanley, MTV Networks, The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Warner Music Group and WebMD.

All set to check-in our enthusiastic attendees (and give away an iPad!)

I was excited to see, literally, a line to get into the event.

An exchange of ideas for 2011 and beyond.

Maxymiser President and Founder, Mark Simpson, leads the audience through a game of "Guess the Winning Test", proving that making decisions about website content that drives conversion rate increases should only be left to A/B and multivariate testing solutions.

Try it for yourself during our monthly online competition here.

WAW attendees are surprised to hear the results don't match up with their answers!

Congratulations to our iPad winner!

The rest of the photos from this Web Analytics Wednesday event can be viewed here.

We want to sincerely thank all who came out--we had a blast! And if you missed it, we hope to see you at a future event here in the city or around the globe.

Cheers,

Ashley Eckel

Marketing Manager, U.S.

Maxymiser, Inc.

Maxymiser Plays Cupid

2011-02-11T11:21:00.002-05:00

I admit it. Valentine’s Day isn’t a holiday that tends to be top of mind for me. I am, after all, a guy. And most guys have to set ten calendar reminders just to remember their wedding anniversary.

But I’m not totally unaware of the social pressures of the holiday, and the Maxymiser team has worked with plenty of companies that want to optimize their sites for the big day. (Plan the perfect romantic evening! Buy flowers! Chocolate! Lingerie!). We’ve also worked with a couple of dating sites such as Loopylove.com and DatetheUK (now both cupid.com). All of which got me, and some of the team around here thinking: What if we put our optimization skills to use for one particular group out there that might be looking for a little help this time of year?

With that in mind, we put our heads together to come up with online dating profile optimization tips for the lovelorn out there who are hoping to land a big date for the big day. The complete article appears on MarketingProfs today, and I hope you’ll check it out.

No, it’s not scientific. No, I don’t guarantee success. But it can help you up your online dating game, get your profile noticed, and attract some [more] attention. So go, optimize, and land a date.

Happy Valentine's Day!

How Good is Your Gut?

2011-02-08T11:27:00.006-05:00

Here at Maxymiser, we've been watching website conversion rates of online brands for the last few years. Last year, we asked a sample of marketers to guess the best converting website content from four options and only 4.6% got it right.

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

To prove the point, we'd like to invite you to have a go at guessing the winning page from four variations of ASDA-Walmart's product page: Guess the Winner

One of them delivered our client a significant uptick in conversions. Guess which one and you could be selected to receive a free MVT test of your own.

We'll announce the winners next week!

Good Luck,

Mark Simpson
Founder and President, Maxymiser, Inc.

www.maxymiser.com

Twitter: @MarkJ_Simpson

Eleven Conversion Rate Optimization (and Digital Marketing) Tips for 2011

2011-02-04T09:33:00.004-05:00

More and more marketers are using content optimization solutions to improve digital conversion rates, and subsequently increase revenues, brand loyalty and ROI on all marketing efforts. So, if you’ve already adopted some form of A/B or multivariate testing, behavioral targeting or website personalization for your site, or are thinking of doing so—great. This year, get the most out of these solutions and capture your revenues and ROI faster: come prepared with clearly-defined goals and objectives, as well as these lessons we at Maxymiser have learned optimizing with some of the biggest brands in the world.

#1 Be Prepared for the Real Buying Season

Retail and travel sites undoubtedly stay busy year-round, with peak selling times during the obvious seasons. But if you’ve waited to test and optimize your promotions or discount offers on the day before Christmas, you’re too late.

Take vacationers for example. While we know the peak vacation times occur in June to August and November to December, most consumers have begun their search, booking and buying efforts months beforehand. Website conversion rates (and revenues) are more likely to skyrocket when you’re optimizing on destinations and promotions in March and September. Then, focus on a product recommendations and behavioral targeting strategy to upsell, cross sell and increase engagement.

#2 Never Stop Optimizing

Most of us currently running A/B and multivariate testing should be following the 95% confidence rule of knowing when to end a test, and identify a “winner”. However, over the course of running thousands of tests, with millions of users, for hundreds of clients, we have seen that using a “continuous optimization” methodology is great route to consistently increasing website conversion rates—by always serving the best performing content.

Your site should be treated as growing and evolving centerpiece of your brand. Many factors can change how even your most loyal customers use your site, perceive your brand and impact the products they are purchasing. If at one point your tests reveal a “winning combination”, there’s a great possibility they could very well discover a new one, based on your live, ever-changing, visitor feedback.

#3 Watch Your Tone (and Copy)

Website wording is an often-overlooked area when it comes to optimization plans. Most brands have a universal standard on brand tone and copy, but using this one-size-fits-all approach on a website can be a conversion rate killer.

Ensure your copy is both brand and consumer friendly by testing a variety of copy and language tones, such as neutral/passive vs. aggressive voice or casual vs. conservative tone. For example, financial services sites often convert better with passive tones, due to the highly sensitive nature of information being transmitted by users. Be mindful of your various traffic sources, and test copy across multiple landing pages and promotional offers.

#4 Don’t Overdo Dynamic Elements

Flash, video, Flash, music, pop-up ad, Flash…did I mention Flash? While executing Flash elements or banner ads on your website can allow you to circulate more advertising or give your site an added professional quality, you’ll send your visitors into a dizzy spell if it’s too much. Numerous tests with our clients have shown that visitors need at least 1-2 static page elements in order to maintain their focus, and thus their ability to convert.

#5 Clean Up Your Errors

Error messaging is an important component for any site, especially when it comes to sealing the deal with a customer, since most user-input errors occur during the check-out, registration or form process. Pay careful attention to the location, design, display and wording of your error messages. If a visitor doesn’t see it or understand it, repeated frustrations will only lead them exiting your site before the most important conversion of all: the sale.

#6 Stop Repeating Yourself

It’s great that you’ve decided to hold a sale or introduce a promotion, but mentioning the word “free”, “discounted”, “improved”, etc. too much will only make visitors question your offer or product, and diminish the likelihood that they convert beyond your promotional page. Test the location, font, and number of times certain eye-catching or promotional words appear on landing pages, and you just might discover that sometimes, less is more.

#7 Play Nice, Corporately Speaking

It’s no secret that it takes many forms (and people) of marketing in order to meet your brands revenue goals. And today’s internet-savvy consumer population is sure to land on your website at some point, so it’s best keep the lines of optimization communication open. Ensure all marketing departments and relevant employees are in the loop, so that SEO, direct mail, email, PPC, call centers, etc. are primed to collect and use the right optimization data when you’re ready to move to a true multi-channel marketing approach.

#8 Play Around with Pricing Presentation

Time and time again, marketers are surprised at the impact that font, location, showing/not showing, and color of product pricing has on website conversion rates, While no single pricing strategy is correct for all brands, don’t be afraid to test it. We have found that some sites perform better without revealing the price before the product gets to the cart, while others convert visitors better by being up front about it. See what your visitors think—the results may surprise you.

#9 Determine Relevancy (of Anything and Everything, for Everyone)

A “general audience” approach to your digital marketing strategy will only get you so far: delivering tailored, relevant messaging to individuals will ensure conversion rate increases along with improvements in revenue per visit, cart sizes, and consumer lifetime values. Look into deploying website personalization techniques alongside content optimization. One of our airline customers dynamically targeted Featured Destinations on their ‘Inspire Me’ page using behavioral targeting techniques, and drove an immediate 35% increase in conversions and higher levels of customer loyalty.

#10 Don’t Be Afraid to Let Go of Brand Guidelines

Multivariate and A/B testing is an investigation not only into your website elements, but also your brand. If your consumers perceive you differently than you believe them to, your website approach could be hurting conversions. Sticking strictly to the brand guidelines—whether in what you choose to test or change—might never lead you to discover that some brand-approved copy, tone, colors, page template, or call-to-actions, are holding you back from higher conversion rates. MVT and A/B testing solutions provide the opportunity to “survey” consumers without them knowing it, allowing you to gain real, live brand insights, and even more revenue over time—if you’re willing to adjust those guidelines accordingly.

#11 Prepare for Mobile Optimization

I don't even have to tell you that this is one the biggest revenue opportunities for any marketer these days, so let’s cut to the chase: this year alone, smartphone sales will double and app sales will reach $15 billion. Consumers have come to rely on mobile devices for shopping, price comparisons, work, banking, social interaction, on-the-go research, and the overall management of their, well, lives. So, if you really want to be a true mobile player, find a way to deliver your customers a unique, personal, and relevant experience, and start using those testing and targeting practices on your mobile sites and applications.

Cyber Monday: Were You Ready?

2010-11-30T08:00:00.004-05:00

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.

Join Maxymiser in NYC for a Free Night of Networking

2010-11-11T10:17:00.005-05:00

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

Multivariate Testing: A rebuttal

2010-10-20T10:20:00.009-04:00

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.

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

2010-09-16T12:02:00.019-04:00

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.

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

2010-08-25T10:35:00.001-04:00

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]

Maxymiser WaWs San Francisco - Meet us @ Web Analytics Wednesday

2010-08-13T03:57:00.002-04:00

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.

Glasses Direct Testimonial - client success story

2010-06-24T15:28:00.008-04:00

[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

Guess the Winner - The Results are in!

2010-05-17T08:31:00.000-04:00

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.

Guess the Winner & Receive a Multivariate Test

2010-03-09T05:30:00.002-05:00

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.

Is Conversion Rate Out of Control?

2010-01-27T03:00:00.002-05:00

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.

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

2010-01-25T04:23:00.002-05:00

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.

Why do marketers who engage external expertise gain more from testing?

2009-12-15T18:00:00.002-05:00

Recent research by Forrester shows that marketers who engage external expertise to plan and execute multivariate tests benefit from higher levels of uplift. Our own experience has also shown that those marketers who engage a full service model will tend to receive more uplift than those who do not. The difference can be up to threefold.

"…organizations that leverage a managed service model achieve greater gains. On average these gains are two percentage points higher, which could equate to millions of dollars for conversion-based Web sites."
The Online Testing Vendor Landscape, Forrester Inc. October 2009

Is it simply the case that marketers don’t get as much testing done when they don’t have someone external to proactively drive the project forward?

We looked into it but found there was no significant difference in the actual number of tests completed so it must be something about how the tests are run that makes all the difference. To explore this in a bit more detail and see whether we could pin down a reason for the difference in results from self-managed testing compared to engaging external expertise, we ran an experiment of our own.

Earlier this month, we invited marketers to take part in an experiment. We showed the before and after pages from a multivariate test where the differences were fairly subtle. Marketers were asked to guess which bracket they thought the uplift in conversion rate would sit within.

Only 9% of our sample got it right. It’s not hugely scientific but what is interesting to note is that the remaining 91% of marketers under-estimated the impact that this test would have on the bottom line. 31% of marketers suggested the uplift would be in the region of 0-10% when the actual uplift in clicks to booking page was 30%.

To be effective, a multivariate testing campaign needs to test the right hypotheses and in the right order. Knowing what to test and in what order is key to achieving results and answering questions and fast. 91% of marketers under-estimated the importance of the position of price and call to action buttons on this checkout page. Identifying the subtle changes which will have a large impact on critical pages in the funnel is vital to achieving good results.

We’d suggest therefore that much of the value of engaging external expertise in planning and executing tests arises from being able to take a strategic view of the testing process, identifying the most effective places to test and then testing the changes most likely to make a difference.

Marketers who overlook the process of determining what tests are most effective do so at their peril. By underestimating the impact of apparently subtle changes, a significant amount of benefit is lost. Multivariate testing entered into on an ad-hoc basis simply does not generate the uplift that can be attained by knowing what to test, where and when based on a wealth of expertise and past experience.

Can You Spot the (Profit) Difference?

2009-12-08T08:15:00.003-05:00

In March we challenged you to guess the winning variant from a multivariate test. Over 500 marketers took part and we were surprised that only 4.6% got it right!

We’ve launched another challenge with a new twist and we’d like to invite you to have a go in order to test some more preconceptions. We will share some anonymous results afterwards so you can see how you did against your peers.

What impact do you think these very subtle changes had on our client’s conversion rate?

Play Spot the (Profit) Difference

This is designed to help you think about your web content and ways in which it can be managed to proactively improve conversion metrics.

Good luck!

Forrester: Online testing is a critical component of an efficient marketing optimization solution

2009-11-02T10:53:00.006-05:00

Forrester has published its first overview of the online multivariate testing vendor landscape. Their analysis shows a high level of maturity in the market with testing being a must-have for online marketers.

John Lovett’s paper opens, "Online testing is a critical component of an efficient marketing optimization solution in the burgeoning field of web site optimization"

Forrester surveyed client-side businesses and give a wealth of insight into both the biggest benefits of testing and some of the challenges faced. Of the marketers surveyed, 48% felt that the increase in conversion rate they had achieved was the top benefit of testing. A significant number also cited customer satisfaction as having improved. Reduction in the risk and guesswork associated with making changes online isn’t covered in the report but is a recurring theme in the discussions we have with our clients.

Within the vendor comparisons, Maxymiser is identified by Forrester as one of only two companies offering a full suite of methodologies and service levels. What’s more, we appear as the firm with the most people dedicated to testing worldwide. Some larger firms for whom testing is only a small element of overall business declined to give figures. Our sole focus at Maxymiser is helping our clients to proactively manage conversion rate and we’re proud of that and the results they have achieved.

We were happy to see that managed service offerings, comprising test strategy, implementation support and analysis receive praise. Forrester notes that clients engaging for such services gain greater uplift from their engagements which mirrors our own experience at the coal face.

"While evidence shows that testing can result in improvements regardless of the method employed, organizations that leverage a managed service model achieve greater gains. On average those gains are two percentage points higher, which could equate to millions of dollars for conversion based web sites" Forrester, October 2009

This increased effectiveness as a result of leveraging external expertise in testing is something that is mirrored in our own day to day work with marketers. Our experience is that marketers who combine external expertise and a testing tool to create a conversion management strategy rather than adopting a tool and driving it in-house benefit from 30% more uplift. Marketers we work with also tell us that adding test design, creative and deployment skills to the managed service model for testing to create a full service conversion management offer creates yet more benefit by enabling them to get the right tests live and in a timely manner.

At our recent client seminar, both Chris Dalrymple of ASDA Wal-Mart and Martin Smith of easyCar commented that they benefit from leveraging external expertise. A full service allows them to get more of the right tests done and to conduct testing without placing high demands on busy marketing and technical teams.

If you are yet to include testing in your online marketing strategy, Forrester’s Online Testing Vendor Landscape report gives a great level of insight into how marketers are deploying multivariate testing, their motivations and some of the challenges they face.

Conversion Management – More than a testing tool

2009-09-24T19:12:00.002-04:00

The notion of proactively managing onsite conversion rate has reached a tipping point. Conversion management transforms conversion rate from being a figure that is simply reported to something that can be strategically managed and measurably improved.

“It is vital that we continue to innovate and improve online to stay ahead of our competition and Maxymiser is a very important part of that strategy. The uplift generated by Maxymiser has delivered us millions of pounds in additional revenue.”
Matt Douglas, Senior eMarketing Manager, Alliance & Leicester
See our multivariate testing case studies for this and more examples

To achieve these fantastic results, it is not only the choice of test tool that is critical, but also determining who will support the tool, create testing strategies and execute them. The resources and expertise you are able to leverage in effectively managing conversion rate will be the major determinant of the bottom line benefit to your business.

Effectively leveraging a multivariate testing tool to provide a successful conversion management strategy requires more thought than many anticipate at the outset. Effective conversion management strategies require careful analysis of web analytics data and past performance to identify the most profitable pages to test. Identifying the best variants to test also requires careful consideration and benefits from expertise in what is worth testing and where. This can only be built up by running tests day in and day out. The creative and copy to be tested also takes time and skill to develop.

The question of who will support the tool is one of risk reduction; any situation where your agency or IT department can bill you by the hour whilst they fathom how to deploy a free tool to your site is to be avoided. Our clients benefit from named account managers who have the ear of our R&D team meaning we can go very technical at very short notice to ensure your tests are deployed on time without unexpected cost.

When it comes to conversion management, remember to give these areas a thought. Feel free to get in touch if we can help by providing further details of how we resource our accounts to ensure we provide a full conversion management service, not just a testing tool.

Businesses need to use their websites more effectively

2009-09-18T10:13:00.002-04:00

Most businesses are still taking a very hit-and-miss approach to the design and navigation of their websites.

A recession is no time to be taking a stab in the dark with promotional activities of any kind, yet, with the exception of some forward-looking companies, most businesses are still taking a very hit-and-miss approach to their websites – arguably the most powerful shop window they have.

In a bricks-and-mortar store, the layout of the aisles and displays will have been carefully designed to steer customers to buy the most during their shopping experience. The high-street retail experience has been researched in great detail so that, not only does the customer fill up their basket, they will keep coming back for more. This means they need to enjoy the shopping experience, and be able to find what they need easily.

On the web, all of this applies equally. So why is it, then, that websites are still being designed backwards – without any feedback from customers until it’s too late?

A sub-standard shopping experience

E-commerce has been a booming business for a long time now, yet the majority of online store experiences remain dire, and the very opposite of intuitive - from failing to include search facilities, to wiping clean forms if the customer goes back to a previous page, and numerous shambolic omissions in between.

The result is that customers are still being bounced around poorly put-together websites in such a way that they are left dizzy and frustrated by the time they shut down their PC, with their basket still empty.

Given that many people now shop exclusively online, this lack of customer-centricity and quality control is shocking. It doesn’t matter how ‘expert’ the web designer. If they are not monitoring customers and tracking their preferences as they move around a website, they are missing the point.

Test as you go

Bricks-and-mortar stores invest heavily in testing the layouts of their stores to maximise results. One thing that retail store designers can’t do, which web developers can, is test out thousands of slightly different variations in a live environment to see which yields the best results. It is also very easy and affordable to do – and has been shown to represent much greater value for money than search optimisation.

Multivariate testing enables designers to be as creative and innovative as they want to be and then, crucially, see if it works, by gradually feeding out test pages to designated groups of real customers.

Amazon does this all the time, testing every tweak to its page layouts and content on its customers without them being aware of it.

What’s exciting about live, multivariate testing is just how well it works. The smallest and most subtle change can have a surprisingly significant impact on conversions and customer stickiness. One of the most astounding success stories saw a leading news and careers website gain a 1,000% uplift in completed registrations simply by changing the structure and layout of its forms. The content itself remained the same.

Subtle text changes deep in the checkout process for National Express, meanwhile, boosted the flow through that page by 14pc. The subtle changes that can have a massive effect on success are all too often missed by marketers.

Marketers miss the point

No example illustrates this more clearly than that of DIY supplies chain, Wickes. Four different designs of a proposed sign-in page were shown to a sample of around 500 marketers. They were asked which one delivered 11% uplift during live visitor testing. When the responses collated, it was discovered that only 4.6% of the marketing experts had guessed right!

This is the kind of thing that can’t be predicted.

What a risk these companies are taking, with their flashy glorified marketing brochures! The most effective websites are works in progress, which use ongoing, iterative changes to continually hone the customer experience.

Being innovative needn’t mean making radical or costly changes. It’s about paying more attention to the detail of how customers navigate and behave on your web site, and then responding with enhancements that can be delivered quickly – without having to wait for the next development cycle.

Can You Spot a Winning Webpage to Increase Conversion Rate?

2009-08-24T05:28:00.000-04:00

User experience is becoming more competitive and analytical. An ever growing number of ecommerce marketers are moving to a process of making informed decisions about their online content based on the response of live visitors.

From the 100s of multivariate tests we have run, one thing strikes us time and time again: dull design elements turn visitors into customers. To prove the point we’re sharing the variants from a very dull test that we did that added the best part of £1m ($1.5m) to our client’s bottom line.

Take the increase conversion rate challenge now!

Not all of our tests are dull; increases in conversion rate arise from testing and improving content on pages from landing pages through to checkout pages and all the steps in-between. Our experience of running 100s of multivariate tests over the past three years gives us a unique advantage in knowing what to test and where on your site to best increase conversion rate.

Once you’ve completed our challenge and have hopefully been surprised by the results, drop us a note or give us a call to hear our take on why the winning page won.

Good luck!

New Multivariate Testing Case Study

2009-07-16T06:25:00.004-04:00

Our client Fragrance Direct has just approved a case study detailing some of our recent success in improving their conversion rate. Just one multivariate test has delivered a 33% uplift in visitor entering the checkout process. That’s one more lead for every three that were entering prior to the test.

The initial multivariate testing focussed on the Fragrance Direct product page template, identified as a good candidate because it suffered a high abandon rate before our engagement. A number of subtle variations were tested with live visitors to determine the winning approach to improve conversion performance:

the position of saving vs. RRP information
the layout of stock level and add to bag button
the page viewed after clicking ‘add to bag’

The winning page, shown to the right, delivered 33% more clicks into the checkout, significantly improving funnel performance and reducing the abandon rate of the product page.

Downstream metrics indicate that this improvement in traffic flow will have a significant effect on conversion to sale, delivering an ROI of multiple times Maxymiser’s fees. By proactively managing conversion rate with Maxymiser, Fragrance Direct was able to take effective action to improve site performance.

Jenny McKenna of Fragrance Direct, who spoke at our recent client seminar concludes that “live visitor testing with Maxymiser’s specialists allows us to continually challenge and beat the status quo, driving a continuous improvement in our online performance”. Fragrance Direct sells branded, discounted perfume, aftershaves, cosmetics,hair care, skincare and beauty products.

To read the full case study and see our complete selection of testimonials and references, please take a look at our multivariate testing case studies page.

Stemming the Leaks Online

2009-06-18T11:48:00.001-04:00

Amazon’s web site didn’t achieve success through guesswork and a two-year re-launch cycle. Live testing and iterative tweaking is the key to high conversion rates.

There’s nothing like a recession to focus marketing spending, as the cost of pay-per-click traffic has soared, other vehicles such as social networking have been exploited to ensure a constant stream of new visitors. Almost every avenue has been exhausted now, making it difficult for marketers to achieve sustainable business growth through traffic acquisition alone.

In one end, out the other

At the same time, businesses have begun to wake up to the appalling leakage that is taking place as visitors move through their web pages. In retail conversion rates average just 3-5%; in the travel industry it’s lower still at 1-3%. This means that, in spite of the investment in acquiring them, a staggering 97% of visitors are still not spending or registering.

With the slowdown threatening budgets, the logical next priority must surely be to maximise the conversion and retention of hard-won visitors to reduce cost of acquisition and increase profitability.

The devil is in the detail

When National Express experimented with its heading, strap-line and call-to-action buttons in the checkout process using multivariate testing, it saw a double-digit uplift in conversion rates at the checkout. And when Jobsite split its single-page registration form into two pages, effectively introducing an extra stage to the registration process, it saw completions soar by 48%.

The need for such subtle modifications and the bottom line measures of their success are unlikely to have been unearthed in the traditional approach to web site redesign, involving closed-door meetings of a company’s key strategists and web designers. They came to light following live multivariate testing with real web site visitors.

Removing the guesswork

In conversion management, the real, live responses of visitors are crucial. Even if visitors are polled for their opinions, this may not reflect the way they actually pass through a site. The only way to know for sure that they will respond as expected is to test different versions of a site in a live environment, so that real customer responses can be measured and capitalised on.

Amazon has known this from the start, and has practised live, iterative site development from the beginning, continually a/b and multivariate testing and refining offers, layout and calls to action. At Amazon, conversion rate improvement is embedded in the company culture.

Most other online businesses, by contrast, continue to rely on blind faith in their web development – following gut-feel, best practice or, at best, reactive feedback from small research samples in lab environments. Alternatively, they may spend large sums of money on retrospective site activity analysis, which is then fed into a protracted and expensive complete redesign.

Chasing 10% more high quality traffic to your site will cost over 10% in additional spending - only for 97% of that traffic to drop out without purchasing. By redirecting the same level of investment into improving conversion performance, organisations stand to see far greater returns from the existing traffic base.

The average uplift in metrics our clients have seen so far in 2009 is 43% which is having a huge impact on the bottom line.

Keep what you’ve sown

These are frugal times when cost-justification reigns. Now is no time to leave the tap running when there are leaks in your bucket. Take care of the leaks, and the bucket will runneth over...

Convert More Traffic - Free Best Practice Event

2009-06-17T09:15:00.002-04:00

We're pleased to announce that we have the following clients signed up to speak at our customer event "Convert More Traffic" in London on 8th July 2009.

Patrice Bendon “Securing 15% uplift in surveycompletions with Maxymiser”

Jenny McKenna “How subtle changes increasedclicks to checkout by 33%”

Jason Hall “How conversion management techniques allow seatwave to continually improve performance”

Places are strictly limited for this free event, register now to avoid disappointment. If you haven't already recieved our invitation by email then please use this link to register.

How can you proactively increase conversion rate?

2009-05-05T04:28:00.003-04:00

Maxymiser's MD, Mark Simpson, will be speaking at the forthcoming SMX expo in London. He will show how multivariate testing and segmentation testing strategies can increase landing page performance in support of search marketing and help increase conversion rate and ROI on campaigns.

The session starts at 2.45pm on Monday 18th May, see SMX London for more information.

Learn how multivariate testing and other conversion management techniques discover winning landing pages allowing you to spend higher than your competitors and improve returns.

Leading brands are benefitting from a continuous improvement in web performance by intelligently serving the right content to the right visitor at the right time. We show you how to close the loop on search marketing by automatically discovering winning pages for visitors from different campaigns, keyword groups or keywords.

We will provide a practical success-driven demonstration of how some of our 60+ clients in the UK have benefited from this approach. By drawing on our experience and case study materials from clients such as National Express Coaches, Laura Ashley and Wickes, we will show how these technologies can improve your bottom line.

Why Can Only 4.6% of Marketers Identify Winning Content by Eye?

2009-04-21T10:20:00.003-04:00

We were surprised by the result of a competition we ran recently. Of 452 marketers who had a go at guessing the best performing content from a multivariate test, only 21 got it right.

This perhaps isn’t the most thorough survey but it has highlighted that just 4.6% of those working in our industry were able to identify the winning content from four options. Some preconceptions of what works well online must be guiding these choices as they’re so far below even what random selection would produce.

We don’t know what those preconceptions are but it would appear that they get in the way of selecting the best content and page layouts online. The client we ran this test with benefitted from an 11% uplift in clickthroughs as a result of implementing the winning content based on the response of live visitors.

We assume that, in practice, those who selected wrongly are using some better means of determining the best content to drive conversions on their own sites than gut feeling. However, the results highlight the value of making content decisions based on live visitor feedback over and above less empirical approaches.

Preconceptions run deep, it was the default page that over 60% of respondents selected as the likely winner, which had a lot of text and looks rather more complex at first sight. We frequently see cases where reducing the amount of text on a page leads to a significant increase in performance.

A proper process of conversion management using live visitor testing including techniques such as multivariate testing really is the only process that marketers should be putting their faith in for content decisions that are going to have a huge implication for conversion rate.

How does your company choose the copy, images, calls to action and product offers presented online?

Please contact us if you’d like us to help you make the right choices and increase conversion rate.

Your Visitors are Unique, Give Them Your Best Content

2009-03-24T05:04:00.002-04:00

Why present the same content to all visitors when you already know a lot about what they want?

In a given day, your site will be browsed by thousands of visitors, all looking for different things. Targeting these visitors with the content most relevant to their needs will allow you to more effectively drive them to purchase and manage your cost of acquisition.

Segmentation should not be a process of simple categorisation, filtering your analytics reporting on visitors depending on their actions. To gain real benefit, visitor segmentation must be conducted as part of a closed loop process. Once segments are defined, winning content should be identified for each through a process of live testing.

With winning content being targeted to each segment, your site will be in much better shape to exploit visitors, taking into account their differing needs at a given point in time.

The segmentation criteria can range from time or day of visit through SEO / PPC entry keyword right up to day of week or any combination therein.

Maxymiser Content Delta is an on-demand solution allowing marketers to build sophisticated and measurable conversion uplift by targeting visitor segments. By harnessing readily available information about your visitors such as the intent given in search terms, their purchase history or referring campaign, you can proactively target visitors with the content and offers proven to be most likely to result in a conversion.

Can you serve the content that is most likely to convert first time vs. returning visitors or target an offer to those who have previously purchased a related product?

Read more about Maxymiser Content Delta and start showing each visitor your winning content. Multivariate testing is only the start.