|
A few days ago, I dialed into a teleconference on headline testing conducted by Marketing Experiments....
This teleconference was specifically for improving Web site results.
Some of the conclusions:
• Specificity is a key to winning headlines and to higher conversions: “Dental Plans for $8.33 a month. Acceptance Guaranteed” far outperformed “Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured.”
• Among headline types -- promise, question and claim headlines do well.
• To write a good headline, you must truly understand its objective.
Guess what? When I was launching my career in 1964 writing direct mail copy for Prentice-Hall, that’s what I learned. Clever still doesn’t work. Question headlines shouldn’t be able to be answered with a “Yes” or “No”. The whole meaning of a headline can be changed by what type size, font and color you use. And testing headlines was then and is now the most powerful way to improve results.
If this is where I came in 42 years ago (I started when I was six), why did I stay glued to the phone for the entire hour? Because the Web has changed testing itself dramatically.
Online, you can test headlines for almost no cost. That’s a very different situation from what we face in direct mail or print advertising. Given that, Flint McGlaughlin, Director of Marketing Experiments, urged that eternal testing go on. Testing, he said, is a process and not an event.
Once you have found a winning headline, don’t stop there: play with individual words until you beat your control. Once your headline is perfected, start testing variations on the subhead.
By the way, if you’re primarily an offline direct marketer like I am, you’ll be interested to know that MarketingExperiments’ online headline tests project direct mail and print results quite well. Direct is direct.
|
Comments
Thanks Lee... :)
Flint
Posted by: Flint McGlaughlin | 05.02.06
Right on, Lee! Clever is for amateurs. The real DM pros practice what T.S. Eliot preached: Find the objective correlative, the tangible, visible, physical THING that manifests the promise and makes it real. (Such as statistics, concrete analogies, physical attributes, etc.)
Posted by: Jonathan Kranz | 05.02.06
I agree, Lee; these results are not surprising.
As a direct marketer myself, I know that the key is benefit-driven copy, starting with the headline. (That benefit could be saving money, solving a problem, providing peace-of-mind, etc.)
And, in my book, this tenet is not just for direct mail; it is for all forms of communication between business and customer/client.
In the client's/customer's mind, there is no more important question than: "What's in it for me?" And the sister question, "Why should I care?"
Posted by: Sandra Eggers | 05.02.06
Lee is right on target! Direct marketing principles are even more relevant today given our ability to test. Anyone who wants to boost their website traffic should begin by rewriting their content and testing it rigorously.
Posted by: Stephanie Diamond | 05.02.06
One of the reasons we conducted that teleconference clinic was because so few people test web page headlines.
I’m old DM pro myself, of almost thirty years now. And yes, all this is known by the DM community.
But whenever I read threads on this topic, I hear everyone saying, “Oh yes, of course. We know that.”
So here’s my question...
If we know it, why don’t we do it?
Even the few companies which do conduct simple A/B split tests of web page headlines often don’t understand the finer points of testing. Many aren’t even sure of the validity of the results they see. Some will make changes to pages based on invalid results.
Meanwhile, we DM pros sit back and mutter, “We already know that stuff. It’s obvious.”
So why don’t we apply what we know?
It sometimes feels like the DM community is observing, but not participating.
Posted by: Nick Usborne | 05.02.06
Thanks for the support, all. I thought I was a goner six/seven years ago when all the people launching dot.com companies seemed to have no respect for dm principles.
And, Jonathan, it's interesting you bring up T.S. Eliot. In my last newsletter, I said "April reminds me of T.S. Eliot and that reminds me of the Prufrock line "Do I dare disturb the universe?" And I think about TESTING copy and offers that do disturb the universe.
Posted by: Lee Marc Stein | 05.02.06