MarketingProfs focuses on conversion and takes control of complex landing experiences.
We’re big believers in what ion does and were very impressed with the concept.”
Michael Goodman
Consultant, MarketingProfs
background
MarketingProfs specializes in providing strategic and tactical marketing know-how for marketing and business professionals in organizations worldwide through a full range of online media. With over 322,000 members and 300 contributors, MarketingProfs provides members with practical marketing tools and information.
In June 2008 MarketingProfs launched 911 Marketing Help, an online community designed for small business owners and entrepreneurs. The service is a small businessperson’s platform for interacting with marketing, sales and strategy experts.
911 Marketing Help is delivered in a number of ways—a weekly newsletter, articles about how small business owners solved their marketing challenges, audio-visual interviews with experts and business owners about a specific area of marketing, checklists, how-to guides, and other columns and video clips of interest to small business owners.
In addition, 911 Marketing Help offers four customized online consulting services at very affordable rates.
the challenge
MarketingProfs engaged with ion early in their process of exploring 911 Marketing Help. The launch of this new site and e-commerce-based consulting model represented a huge opportunity for the MarketingProfs team.
They looked to ion when, as MarketingProfs’ consultant Michael Goodman puts it, “We recognized the need for professional help with specific landing pages and paths. With everything we needed to do, managing them ourselves would have been completely overwhelming. We’re big believers in what ion does and were very impressed with the concept.”
The 911 Marketing Help objective is to sell four customized online consulting service products. The idea is that small business owners and entrepreneurs ask questions of top-tier marketing consultants via an online interface. In exchange for a modest fee, at least two professional consultants will provide personal and thoughtful answers to the question within 48 hours. ion’s mission was to create and deploy the landing pages to promote the consulting QA and warm respondents to make the purchase. ion’s secondary conversion objective for those not ready to commit to a purchase was to entice them to opt in for the 911 Marketing Help newsletter.
the solution
ion provided over 40 landing paths to educate and convert respondents. Clicks were fed from over 130 sources of traffic including intrasite banners and content on MarketingProfs.com as well as from email marketing and newsletters. Offline promotional materials were also used to drive traffic.
The most desirable conversion is earned by stepping respondents through an ion-crafted multi-step questionnaire. This allows respondents to provide 911 Marketing Help consultants with the information needed to effectively answer questions within a very tight, 48-hour timeframe. Once a respondent converts from a prospect to a client by completing the intake questionnaire, the 911 Marketing Help team is immediately and automatically notified by ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing platform. This allows 911 Marketing Help to get the right questions to the right experts as efficiently as possible. Michael Goodman says “One of the neat things you were able to do for us is provide immediate notification when we had a new client, including all the relevant input information. That’s important because we promise an expert response within 48 hours, so we can’t afford to lose time just finding out that we have a new client. We need to contact the appropriate experts quickly, and the automated notification from Liveball proved to be critical in cutting down on the time delay. (We even have two consultants in Australia who are awake and able to address client questions while we’re asleep!)”
Michael goes on to say “We quickly learned the importance of few choices and very simple landing paths. We were reminded that the Internet is a visual medium when results showed the effectiveness of a single, prominent large visual. ion’s intense, steadfast focus on conversion helped us keep our eye on the ball.”
LiveBall’s advanced rules model complex interactions in multi-page paths. Even though the revenue conversion takes place externally in MarketingProfs’ e-commerce suite, LiveBall’s real-time analysis instantly reflects success or abandonment. Returning respondents are treated differently and incomplete questionnaires are tracked and reported.
In-progress learning frames some powerful and useful observations
- Brand equity on MarketingProfs.com makes respondents much more likely to convert than those coming from the new 911 Marketing Help site. Banner conversions from 911 Marketing Help are 3.5-6.5% while analogous conversions from MarketingProfs are 14.8-18.4% (including margins of error).
- Contrast those numbers with an email eBlast conversion rate of 55.7-58.58% (again, including margins of error).
- All told, MarketingProfs’ 911 Marketing Help effort averaged 35.33% conversion (+/-0.99%) through September 10, 2008.
911 Marketing Help is a powerful, highly effective resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs. It puts top-tier marketing consulting within reach of a market that otherwise couldn’t tap those resources. ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing platform has focused MarketingProfs on conversion and helped them take control of complex landing pages to set their new offering up for success.