• Subject lines. Send your control email to one group, but swap in a different subject line on your challenger email.
• Headlines. Leave everything the same between control and challenger, except for the text of the headline.
• Body copy. Here’s where you put your copywriter to work. If your control has long copy, test shorter copy in your challenger (and vice versa). Or, if your control takes a gentle approach, test a punchy, in-your-face challenger.
• Calls-to-action. Reword your call-to-action in your challenger. Note that this does not mean you change the offer itself—only the way you drive people towards it.
• Single design elements. Let your graphic team get creative. Swap in a new banner, Download button, link color, or sidebar. Again—make only one change at a time!

• Aprimo Marketing Studio has campaign management tools to randomly split your groups for A/B testing of outbound messages. In addition you can use criteria to dynamically serve up different content in emails and microsites and monitor results through your dashboard to focus on the best results and learn for future efforts.
• Google Website Optimizer is a free Google service that lets you present different content and design options to your visitors. Google tracks the conversion results.
• SiteSpect lets you run not only A/B testing, but also multivariate testing in which you test many changes at the same time.
• Omniture Test&Target is an interface for designing and executing your tests.
• Webtrends Optimize provides a unified testing and targeting platform.
• Vertster speeds up the process of performing multivariate testing, when you’re ready to go there.

Got a gut feeling about what works and what doesn’t? Use testing to check those hunches and back them up with measurable results. You can be sure your top competitors are already doing it. So, move A/B testing to your front burner today—and make it an ongoing part of your efforts.

Like many other terms, Marketing Optimization (MO) can hold different meanings for different marketers.  For online marketers, it means developing marketing campaigns that do A/B testing on emails and microsite pages to see which one’s generate the most opens, click-thrus, conversions, etc.  Those emails and web pages that underperform are eliminated in favor of the best performers.  For other marketers, MO means optimizing your communication strategy across campaigns and marketing channels to improve response, customer loyalty and profit.  It is the later meaning that this article will focus on.

Initially, optimization was used as a way to mathematically determine the optimal allocation of scarce resources. The concept has been borrowed by business analysts to aid decision-making.  Optimization has been used in the areas of the manufacturing supply chain, airline revenue yields, and financial investment risk assessment. More recently, the concept is being adopted by marketing.

Every day, marketers face realities like competing business goals, campaigns, channels, budget constraints, and product managers with myopic views, to name a few.   Large companies are often faced with campaign calendars that may not represent an ideal communication plan with its customers.  The below diagram illustrates this phenomenon for an electronics retailer.



As you can see, campaigns and customers associated with these campaigns can easily overlap.  If you are a prospect in each of these campaigns, will you feel overwhelmed by the number of contacts?  If you are a marketer with limited budget, how should your prioritize your spend across campaigns to generate desired response rates or ROI?  With multi-LOB companies with many products and services, it makes great sense to employ some degree of intelligence into the marketing equation to ensure a win-win outcome for companies, LOB’s, and last of all but not least, customers.

MO across campaigns and channels typically relies on the development of business rules, the utilization of sophisticated mathematical algorithms, or both.  Most software applications that use mathematical algorithms typically use linear or non-linear algorithms that attempt to maximize an objective function (e.g., response rates, profit), while imposing constraints.  Constraints may include: budgets, minimum/maximum number of offers per customer and/or campaign, channel capacities, etc.  While very powerful, optimization algorithms are problematic to use.  They require statisticians that build customer response and valuation models, as well as profitability models.  This takes time and money.  Then there is the issue of ensuring the algorithms actually find the global minimum (cost) or maximum (response rate) as desired.  The image below helps to visualize this issue.



It’s possible for algorithms to find “local” minimum/maximums that lead to sub-optimal marketing outcomes.  That being said, in the hands of the right practitioners, mathematical optimization can create significant marketing ROI.  So, short of the required expertise and/or budget, what are marketers to do?

More recently, software vendors have tackled this issue via the development of business rules that marketers can build.  Business rules can work within and across campaigns to optimize your communication plan.  Examples of business rules include:

• No more than 2 weekly communications via any channel to a customer, to minimize fatigue
   
• Make the best of multiple potential offers based on profit, revenue, or likelihood to purchase, as examples.
   
• If a customer may be touched by multiple campaigns in the next month, only communicate with them about the two campaigns with the highest priority.

These types of rules can easily be developed using a point-and-click interface like that found in Aprimo’s Contact Optimization module. 

So, business rules are easy to create and use -- there must be a downside, right?  Yes, there are tradeoffs associated with simplicity and ease-of-use.  Some of those include:

• We are really not optimizing an outcome from a mathematical point of view.
   
• Business rules support “subtraction”, i.e., supporting the imposition of a maximum number of touches, offers, etc.  Linear and non-linear algorithms can do that, but they can also impose minimums like, the number of offers or contacts per campaign.

Keep a look out for my next article that will continue this discussion and provide some real-life case studies.

 

Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.

Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).

As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:

1.       Work longer hours

2.       Grow the team

3.       Find a smarter way of working

Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!

If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).

If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.

If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.  

Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment. 

Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.

During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your campaign management efforts accordingly.

RFM and data mining help you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns (personalized emails/microsites, direct mails, call center, etc.).  By targeting ONLY those likely to respond, you achieve about the same response/sales at a fraction of the cost.


Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management and Data Miner solutions provide the tools you need to survive and even flourish in the current economy.  No data miners on staff? Simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) can help you increase response rates and overall campaign performance.  The notion is those that bought most recently, purchase more frequently, and have spent the most, are your best prospects for future marketing campaigns.

If you're a B2B marketer, Aprimo Lead Manager (LM) can automate the nuturing and scoring of your prospects until they qualify for "Lead" status.  At that point, LM can automatically assign and route the leads to the appropriate sales person.  With Aprimo, no leads escape your sales funnel.  More to come on all of these topics soon!
 

The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple.  It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns.  It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite. 

A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.

Personalize - This means many things to many people.  It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message.  A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer.  Relevancy can be driven by events,  prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

• Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call.  A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options.  A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest.  Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
   
• Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases.  For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters.  Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services.  Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond).  We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
   
• Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations.  One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time.  For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product."  Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering.  Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.).  While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other.  Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name.  The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant.  If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have.  Let's look at an example.
  
  A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally.  The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data.  Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments.  Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles.  One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs.  This cluster also  enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers.  You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income.  By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones. 
  
  This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well.  Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content.  As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue.  This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time.  This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
  
  Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective.  Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions.  Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit.  Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts.  More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.

Let’s face it -- we’ve all gone to website pages that take forever to load.  Sometimes, the load times are so long, I just close the window or hit return and hope a competitor’s webpage loads faster.  So, what’s the culprit here?  Typically it’s a large Flash file or just a page with one or more images that have not been optimized for the web.  Non-optimized images and long page load times adversly affect conversion rates and marketing campaign results.  Whether you’re building a simple webpage, a marketing oriented microsite or an email, images must be optimized for the web. 

Optimizing images for email and microsite pages is the act of finding the sweet spot between a great looking image that takes too long to download and a grainy image that downloads in a second at dial-up speeds of 56kps.  The idea is to modify the image to retain a nice rendering while decreasing the overall file size.  Optimization becomes more and more critical as we add more and more images to any microsite page.

There are a number of software packages out there that allow you to resize images – Photoshop, Fireworks and Paint Shop are a few of the most popular.  By resizing, I mean changing the absolute size in pixels, as well as the file size itself.  Changing file size refers to changing the amount of data compression used for an image.  The most common image files used for the web are JPEG, GIF and PNG.  The difference in JPEG, GIF and PNG is the way they compress data.  GIF and PNG compression work almost exactly the same, but PNG often produces slightly smaller files.  JPEG compression is designed to optimize images with fine gradiations of color, while GIF and PNG are better at compressing images with large areas of color, such as illustrations.  The more you compress JPEG files, the more artifacts you see.  This is because you are actually removing “data” from the file.  Here are a few JPEG examples I created using Fireworks.



Look at the captions below each of the images.  The original uncompressed image on the left is 96K and would take 15 seconds to download if you were using a dial-up connection.  The image on the right manitains almost the same overall quality but has been compressed to less than 25% of the original file size, resulting in only a three second download.  Now imagine that there are four images on this page that are these sizes.  A webpage using non-optimized images would take 60 seconds to fully render, while a webpage using optimized images will only take 12 seconds.  This is the difference between losing and gaining customers that visit your web and microsites.  As you can see, "size" really does matter!

While GIF and PNG compressions do not actually lose “data” like JPEG compression, they do lose color fidelity.  GIF and PNG files are limited to 256 colors or less.  When compressing these files, we typically move to 32, 24 or 8 colors.  Here are a couple of examples of compression using PNG files.



The above images are virtually identical in appearance.  However, by looking at the captions, you can see that the 16 color, 8-bit image on the right is only about a third of the size of the original.  

Many companies today are adopting marketing management technology that allows marketers to easily create their own marketing campaigns, emails and microsites.  This is great, but companies need to also put safeguards in place to protect their brand.  This is where marketing asset management comes into play. That is, the notion of creating assets like logos and other images that have been optimized and approved for use in marketing campaigns.  Please feel free to visit our blogs on Brand Asset Management to learn more.

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

A microsite is a mini-Web site that interactive marketers use to enhance the company's primary Web site. Often, a microsite has its own domain or subdomain.

Microsites are a great tool that allows other marketing professionals to obtain targeted leads for specific marketing campaigns.

Despite its small stature, a good rule of thumb to follow when developing a microsite is to develop and execute the microsite based on a comprehensive plan and execution strategy.

Post campaign analysis is a critical component of of any online property. Your execution strategy must contain a way to measure campaign results. Tools like Google Analytics or more robust offerings from Omniture need to be a part of the comprehensive plan.

Other planning tools that can go a long way in aligning your Web team with the marketing area requesting a microsite, is a site map. Visio is often used as a microsite tool to build a site map, but many other free Visio alternatives are available.

As with any marketing project, don't rush the microsite, as the targeted content and approach a microsite offers, can be a great way to boost ROI in marketing.