Rudder management worked with us because the conversion rate on their website was below their expectations and, in order to meet business objectives, they needed to quickly improve the conversion rate of the sales funnel.

So, rather than tweak the website and make “opinion-based” changes, management chose to make data-driven decisions by running statistically valid experiments (smart!).

MarketingSherpa (my favourite online publication, hands down!) published an excellent write up of the Rudder case study here. Rudder’s is the fourth WiderFunnel case study they selected to publish (others include Tourism BC; SAP BusinessObjects; and Safe Software).

(In case you don’t know, MarketingSherpa is a research firm specializing in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing – and what does not. They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers… I have been reading their publications for about 10 years… so I am pretty sure I must be “subscriber number 3”)

The videos (and experiments) turned out great!

You can also find all the videos on the WiderFunnel case study page.

obama online
marketing article

Today, the local business publication, Business in Vancouver (BIV), picked up on my blog posts about Obama’s use of conversion optimization testing, which you can find below:

• Obama Used Conversion Rate Optimization to Win
• Obama’s Home Page Image Test

If you have a BIV subscription, you can read the article here. If not, we’ve republished it with permission here: Obamasphere’s online lessons for marketers here, or on the author, Alan Zisman’s, website.

This case is a great example of how paying attention to the details and providing enough information, but not too much, will maximize conversion rates.

Check them out:

“DemandGen Report” is a brand new publication, distributed electronically 2x per month, focusing exclusively on the strategies, tactics and measurements that are central to generating demand, a topic at the heart of what we do (and, presummably what you do as well, if you read this blog). The e-newsletter and interactive website provide intellectual fuel to help drive the growth engine at leading B2C and B2B focused companies.

They use real world case studies and in-depth research and so manage to provide an insider’s view of which companies are taking the right track to drive sustainable growth for their business.

To subscribe, go their registration page

The author captured the steps we took with the client, Christine Mykota, and the typical challenges of working within a Fortune 500 company’s graphic standards well.

I also gave the author a sneak-peak of the six factors in WiderFunnel’s LIFT™ Analysis, which we use to evaluate landing pages and develop test hypotheses.

At IMC in Vancouver I will take Conversion Optimization workshop members through the LIFT Analysis tool and will post it to this blog after the conference, so stay tuned.

In the mean time, take a read through the excellent Sherpa article.

(For example, here is a link to our Tourism BC Case Study highlighting precisely this point – which is mentioned in the posting itself.)

But best practices still hold: you should not just create the landing pages – you should test them as well to ensure you get the highest possible ROI from that investment.

And the next part is wonderful, as it reinforces something we have often blogged about: Google’s Tom Leung is quoted saying that marketers “can use landing page testing as a ‘bargaining chip to get a seat at the table with other marketers in your organization’” This is because the information gained from testing is highly useful to all your marketing colleagues planning offline campaigns.

BCIT’s Alumni publication, the Ambassador, ran a little profile of me this month with a good explanation of what we’re doing at WiderFunnel. Here’s a link to the pdf version, in case you’re interested.

Thanks Kate!

They even included a nice little shot of Tom Leung. I guess they like his picture better than ours. We’re happy to get the word out to direct marketers about the power of Google Website Optimizer’s A/B Split Testing and multivariate testing capability.