American Greetings

Using LiveBall to decrease cost-per-acquisition by 20%.

As soon as we get statistical significance on a test, we drive immediately to a champion in real time. On Mother’s Day alone, the real-time change in traffic splits resulted in over $45,000 in incremental revenue. That’s revenue that would have been lost without LiveBall’s actionable, real-time approach. We don’t continue to lose on any test — we auto-optimize as soon as we have significance.
Tessa Fraser
Interactive Marketing Manager, AG Interactive, Inc.

Click the image above for more American Greetings examples.

background

American Greetings Corporation is a leading manufacturer of innovative social expression products that assist consumers in enhancing their relationships. The company generates annual revenue of approximately $1.7 billion, and its products can be found in retail outlets domestically and worldwide. American Greetings has the largest collection of electronic greetings on the Web, including cards available at AmericanGreetings.com through AG Interactive, Inc., the company’s online division.

the challenge

AG Interactive drives millions of unique visitors from paid search and other online media sources. Their goal is to convert this traffic using online registration for a free trial subscription (which later converts to a paid subscription to AmericanGreetings.com).

In the past, this online traffic funneled into the www.AmericanGreetings.com home page, or a single, MVT-optimized landing page. The marketing team knew they needed to launch aggressive landing page testing in order to lift conversion rates, but faced some executional roadblocks. Implementing testing on the one landing page was slow and arduous, with a multi-month feedback loop to the marketing team. Experimentation with alternative design and content was slower still. When learning was extracted from this process it was months behind and often gave little reliable cause and effect determination.

In order to lift online conversions and reduce cost-per-acquisition, American Greetings needed to develop context-specific landing pages, experiment more broadly with content & layout and view test results & analyses in real-time. They turned to LiveBall, ion’s enterprise landing page platform.

the solution

American Greetings adopted LiveBall in order to increase agility, speed-to-market, specificity and to ultimately improve conversion performance to lower cost-per-customer-acquisition. With LiveBall, AG Interactive can easily create, test and optimize landing pages without IT resources. ion’s team worked closely with AG Interactive marketing manager Tessa Fraser to launch and test alternative landing experiences that were specific to market segments and traffic sources.

Within the first 3 months of testing with LiveBall, American Greetings moved from a single, optimized landing page to over 40 unique landing pages, each context-specific to its source of traffic. Three entirely different design formats were tested with 12 different price points across over 200 different audience segments. By speaking to each segment much more specifically, American Greetings was able to increase conversions despite economic fallout that actually reduced the flow of traffic.

Each unique landing page format was quickly customized and messaged to match closely with the PPC ads that were sending traffic. The testing resulted in an almost immediate 30% increase in conversion and a subsequent 20% decrease in cost-per-acquisition (which is a net benefit that includes the added expenses associated with ion’s LiveBall platform and conversion services).

After a few months of ion’s full-service landing page management to get them started, American Greetings now runs their landing page program on their own, using the LiveBall platform to easily create, test and optimize in real-time. Tessa says, “There’s so much flexibility in the templates. We run 13 or 14 tests simultaneously at any one time and get quick, actionable learning. And we’ve easily extended LiveBall with additional brands like BlueMountain and PhotoWorks.” Over their first five months using LiveBall, the American Greetings online marketing team has created over 700 unique landing pages tested across hundreds of unique sources of traffic.

The real-time testing & analytics in LiveBall ensure traffic arrives at best performing landing page for each unique traffic source. Tessa says “As soon as we get statistical significance on a test, we drive immediately to a champion in real time. On Mother’s Day alone, the real-time change in traffic splits resulted in over $45,000 in incremental revenue. That’s revenue that would have been lost without LiveBall’s actionable, real-time approach. We don’t continue to lose on any test — we auto-optimize as soon as we have significance.”

what’s next?

New tests are always in the works at American Greetings. The conversion goal for 2010 is over 40% higher than 2009, and 2011 is targeting another 33% lift over 2010.

Perhaps the most substantial opportunity for conversion rate improvement lies in optimization of the pages that follow the initial landing page — the product romance pages. Until now, American Greetings’ optimization efforts have focused solely on the initial landing pages of multi-page experiences. However, initial tests of alternate romance pages suggest that even the smallest adjustments result in significant increases in conversion performance.

American Greetings uses ion’s LiveBall platform to drive real business ROI at scale. Tessa says, “The little things make the biggest differences. LiveBall gives us incredibly fast speed to market and learning. It’s a visual tool that lets us focus on what’s working to improve our results.”

Caring Bridge

A nonprofit organization helps more people with LiveBall.

Focused Testing Leads to Conversion Lift

background

CaringBridge provides personal and private sites that connect people experiencing a health event to family and friends. Each day over half-a-million people use CaringBridge to send out health updates or show support for friends or loved ones. CaringBridge uses paid search and Facebook ads to help build awareness of their free services to families in need.

challenge

CaringBridge is a nonprofit organization that is funded by the generosity of donors. Like all nonprofits, they have to accomplish a lot with limited time and resources. CaringBridge has a small IT department that focuses their time supporting the service by developing new features, ensuring up-time and supporting priority organizational projects. This meant that it could take months to create a landing page for a marketing campaign and that online testing wasn’t even an option.

solution

In March 2011, CaringBridge started using LiveBall and their online conversion rates soared.

Using LiveBall, the CaringBridge marketing team was able to create landing pages for their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that segmented their PPC traffic into those visitors who were interested in building their own website and those who were interested in recommending the service to someone else. Not only could CaringBridge make landing pages more quickly, but now they also had the ability to test and optimize landing pages. Using LiveBall’s A/B testing features to test different layouts, CaringBridge was able to quickly increase their online conversion rate.

results

Since launching their first LiveBall campaign four months ago, CaringBridge has seen a 20% increase in online conversion rates for one of their Google AdWords campaigns, and a 100% percent increase in their Facebook ads conversion rate over the previous year.

LiveBall gave the CaringBridge marketing team the ability to immediately implement their ideas, the tools to test and, ultimately, the power to reach more people who could benefit from the free CaringBridge services.

“LiveBall provided a turn-key solution that helped us close the time-to-marketing, testing and reporting gaps in our landing page development and management processes. More importantly, LiveBall helps us reach more families in need and fulfill our mission to make each health journey easier.” explained CaringBridge Interactive Marketing Manager, Anna Squibb.

Not only did LiveBall give CaringBridge the ability to test, but it also made landing page testing easy.

“We like that fact that LiveBall makes that statistical significance determination on its own. It’s really nice to be able to just go in [to LiveBall] and see how pages are performing without manual calculations.”

what’s next?

CaringBridge has caught the test bug and they have plans to implement multivariate testing (MVT) on their LiveBall pages.

Centre for Arts and Technology

An Art School Gets Creative With LiveBall’s Custom Landing Pages.

As an art school we have to make sure that things are very visually appealing — and in that sense very creative — and before LiveBall we were very limited.
Teresa Doulos
Interactive Marketing Manager

CAT fashion school landing page example, currently running and created in LiveBall.

background

The Centre for Arts and Technology is a leading art and design college with three campuses located in Canada. The school offers thirteen post-secondary programs ranging from 3D animation and Fashion Design to Digital Filmmaking and Event and Promotions Management.

challenge

The Centre for Arts and Technology was using program-specific landing pages for their PPC campaigns, but they felt limited by their one page landing experiences. The landing pages that they used were hand coded and built by a third party, so it wasn’t easy to change content, make updates, or create entirely new experiences. Since these landing experiences were basically just a single form page, the space restricted the amount of content and images they could display. As an art school their potential students expected to see something visually appealing and creative, yet the process by which pages were created was limiting the marketing team’s ability to meet user expectations.

solution

The Centre for Arts and Technology began using LiveBall in September 2010.

With LiveBall, the Centre’s marketing team created seven individual program-specific microsites. Each microsite was paired with a targeted PPC campaign, and the ultimate goal of each microsite was to have potential students to fill out a contact form. No longer limited by one page, the Centre was able to showcase student work, testimonials, host videos, and outline program details. LiveBall gave the Centre a canvas to showcase their programs and to connect with future students without needing developers or IT resources.

results

The Centre’s conversion rates increased from 4% to as much as 19% by moving from single, hand-coded page experiences to content-rich microsites in LiveBall.

Not only did conversion rates soar, but they also saw their lead quality increase. Instead of going to the Centre’s homepage (which has so much information that it’s hard to navigate), or a landing page with just a snippet of information, potential students were being sent to targeted, specific landing experiences that were very visual and informational. Potential students knew very quickly whether or not it was the type of program they were hoping to find, so when they filled out a form they were definitely interested.

With LiveBall, Centre for Arts and Technology now has the flexibility and ability to test new campaign ideas and custom landing page ideas as soon as they think of them. They recently launched a contest aimed at high school students where each contest category related directly to a post-secondary program at the Centre. Within four days, the Centre’s marketing team was able to build and launch the contest campaign microsite. Before LiveBall, this would have taken them two to three weeks.

As the Centre’s Interactive Marketing Manager Teresa Doulos explains, “LiveBall has given us another avenue to always have fresh content and fresh development, without having to worry about managing and updating a large website all of the time.”

what’s next

The Centre plans to create highly visual “gallery-style” custom landing pages that will feature student work and testimonials. LiveBall’s sophisticated and flexible templates give the Centre the ability to quickly create landing experiences that connect with their potential students and inspire them to think about what they too can create.

G Adventures

Creative use of LiveBall Custom Landing Pages Triples Output of Custom Travel Division

Taking the Sales & Customer Service Lead with LiveBall

Using LiveBall, we’ve been able to triple the number of proposals we send out on a weekly basis. We can create a completely personalized proposal in about 15-20 minutes, compared to more than an hour before.
Greg Hayes
Online Marketing Manager, G Adventures

background

G Adventures is the leading adventure and eco tour company, founded on the core belief that travelers should experience authentic adventures in a responsible and sustainable manner. The company offers hundreds of different adventure tours spanning the globe — even including expedition cruises to Antarctica — with enormous variety in activities, service level and style of travel. In particular, G Adventures specializes in creating customized itineraries for groups and independent travelers.

Customized travel is a high-touch service. After receiving inquiries via phone call, email or website form, G Adventure Specialists must create unique and personalized itinerary proposals for each inquiry.

the challenge

G Adventures first engaged ion’s LiveBall platform to create custom campaigns for lead generation via search advertising and email. At the same time, the group travel department was growing, and the company put a greater focus on building this business segment. In order to maintain its aggressive growth rate, G Adventures needed to increase the number of custom travel proposals created for prospective clients. The problem was that proposal creation was a time-consuming process: it took over an hour to prepare a proposal in Word.

the solution

After their initial experience with LiveBall, G Adventure specialists realized the platform could also be used to create custom proposals and itinerary pages on the fly without the need for additional design, web development or lT assistance. The ability to rapidly produce rich, customized proposals was essential to helping them meet their business objectives.

After custom travel inquiries come in via phone call, email or website form, G Adventure specialists create a personalized itinerary proposal for each individual or group using LiveBall. Each proposal is created as a two-page “path” including a personalized title, all itinerary details, maps and images specific to the adventure, pricing, terms and conditions, and a photo and contact information of the G Adventure specialist.

When the proposal is complete, an email is sent to the client including a personalized URL for the custom landing pages.

According to Greg Hayes, Online Marketing Manager, “Using LiveBall, we’ve been able to triple the number of proposals we send out on a weekly basis. We can create a completely personalized proposal in about 15-20 minutes, compared to more than an hour before.”

The LiveBall-created proposals have had a big impact on customer service as well. Greg says, “Clients love the personalization on the itinerary. It’s easy for them to share the URL with others in their group — for example, with a family reunion.”

Keeping all the proposals in one place also makes the team more flexible and agile. “Because all Adventure Specialists have access to the console, it’s much easier as a team to track when proposals go out, share information and follow up. If one consultant is out for the day, a fellow team member can easily step in,” according to Greg.

In their first 8 months of using LiveBall, the G Adventure specialist team has been able to create hundreds of custom landing experiences.  Because of their innovative use of LiveBall, G Adventures has been able to increase their output of group and custom travel proposals by 300 percent.

General Mills Canada

Double-digit conversion rates across multiple teams, 9 brands and 2 languages

With the flexible, reactive nature of the LiveBall templates, I can modify and iterate landing pages on the fly which ultimately makes it so much easier to create targeted, specific landing pages.
Jesse Abrams
Digital Associate Marketing Manager, General Mills Canada

background

General Mills is among the world’s largest food companies, marketing some of the world’s best-loved brands, including: Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and Green Giant, in more than 100 countries on six continents. The company generates annual revenue of approximately 14.9 billion in the U.S. Retail, International, Bakeries, and Foodservice markets.

the challenge

General Mills drives millions of unique visitors from paid search and other online media sources. The goal? Convert this traffic using online registration for free newsletters that offer recipes, meal ideas, coupons and more. Prior to adopting LiveBall, the General Mills teams worked in a very decentralized manner, even though both were working towards the same lead generation goals. They needed an easy way to centralize the management of their landing pages and create a repository for standardized components such as forms, page layouts and data exports.

the LiveBall difference

The US team at General Mills initially adopted LiveBall (September 2010) in order to increase agility, speed-to-market, and ultimately increase overall conversions. Within a few months, the US General Mills team moved from having thirty general landing pages to hundreds of unique landing pages across seven different brands. After hearing about the success of the US team (conversion rates up to and beyond 30%), the Canadian team knew they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work in LiveBall as well.

For their first campaign, the Canadian team focused on their Life Made Delicious brand, a new online resource for parents that provides a great selection of tips, games, articles and recipes to help families find new ways to celebrate and enjoy their time together. Within a few weeks of adopting LiveBall, the team launched their first LiveBall landing page, with plans to launch 13 more in the upcoming weeks.

Having a central repository makes it easy for the two teams to standardize data collection and forms for easy implementation. LiveBall’s centralized libraries (for images, page layouts and data exports) allow the teams to easily reuse assets, making production of multiple versions of a page a breeze. As Jesse Abrams, the Canadian Digitial Associate Marketing Manager, explained best, “With the flexible, reactive nature of the LiveBall templates, I can modify and iterate landing pages on the fly which ultimately makes it so much easier to create targeted, specific landing pages.” ‘Winning’ templates are leveraged by both teams to accelerate testing and quickly drive conversion results.

The Generals Mills marketing teams finally have a tool that is agile enough for their hands-on approach, but also capable of easily centralizing online marketing efforts within one platform. LiveBall now helps the US and Canadian teams at General Mills manage well over 400 multi-page landing experiences with double-digit conversion rates across multiple teams, nine brands, and two languages. More importantly, they are building a culture of continued testing and sharing of results — everyone can now learn and work towards common goals together.

what’s next?

In 2012, the Canadian marketing team will be focused on expanding their landing page program with LiveBall by testing and optimizing holiday-themed campaign landing pages. Testing the registration flow — single step forms versus two-or three-step forms, progress indicators, and messaging — is also high priority.

University of St. Thomas

Tripling PPC, Advertising and Email Conversion Rates with LiveBall Microsites

Three-Person, In-House Team Makes it Happen in Just a Few Months

Before LiveBall we had anecdotal conversion metrics. Now we have 3x improvement, higher quality leads, more tailored campaigns and better forecasting. People believe it’s a magic bullet.
Mykola Sarazhynskyy
Marketing Manager, The University of St. Thomas

background

The University of St. Thomas is a private, 124-year-old university based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota. The school uses pay-per-click (PPC), banner advertising and email marketing to generate leads for many of its 200+ non-degree executive education and professionals development programs. A core team of three online marketers: a designer, a content manager and a senior strategist were searching for a platform to empower them to manage and test microsites. They found ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing platform near the end of 2008.

the challenge

The University of St. Thomas is proud of their high-quality executive education and professional development programs. The problem was that their frontline web experiences weren’t living up to the standards of the programs themselves. The University of St. Thomas had a user experience problem. They knew they needed program-specific tailored microsites to tell each program’s story as clearly as possible. They also knew that their cobbled-together CRM + Website Optimizer solution was far too cumbersome and inflexible to make it happen. Multivariate testing wasn’t working. They needed agility and practicality and they needed it fast.

The University of St. Thomas identified three core post-click campaign management requirements that needed to be satisfied by web-based technology:

1. The ability to deploy, test and manage a wide array of highly usable program-specific microsites
2. Actionable analytics enabling reliable testing and performance comparison
3. The ability to test forms, collect lead data and seamlessly link that data to their CRM

They chose ion’s LiveBall platform in late December 2008.

the solution

The University of St. Thomas’ three-person team quickly went to work in early January. They had one version of a microsite launched in short order and over the course of five months have tested 12-15 versions per program. The flexibility and speed afforded by LiveBall’s no-code approach to creating and testing enables them to focus on what they’re testing instead of how they’re testing it. The results speak for themselves:

• 3x conversion rate improvement
• Higher quality leads
• Tailored, long-tail campaigns
• Improved forecasting
• PPC, advertising, and email spend moved to most efficient vehicles, messages and keywords

LiveBall has given the The University of St. Thomas team the freedom to try completely new approaches. Recent testing showed that video testimonials more than doubled conversion, extended time spent on pages and extended the number of pages browsed in the microsite. What started as a one-off idea has blossomed into a focused direction and powerful results.

In addition to video testimonials, in just a few months, The University of St. Thomas has tested:

• Long-tail messaging
• Discounting and other narrow incentives
• Second-level segmentation
• Three levels of narrowing by user intent

Mykola says “now the web reflects the quality of our brand and our programs. We never had that before.” All-in-all, The University of St. Thomas has deployed and tested more than 15 different experiences across over 20 campaigns. And they’re just getting started.

Western Union

Growing a global landing page program.

Previously, we had a tool, but no solution. Now, we have a tool and a solution.
Josh Carroll
Digital Marketing, North America Western Union, Inc.

background

The Western Union Company is known as an innovator in financial services and has become an industry leader in global money transfer with approximately 450,000 Agent locations in 200 countries and territories. Western Union offers fast, reliable, and convenient services for transfer of money — consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, and business-to-business. For more than 160 years, the familiar signs of Western Union have stood as a trusted symbol for connecting friends, family and businesses around the world.

the challenge

Western Union needed a better, easier way to create and optimize targeted landing pages. Although the Western Union® marketing team did have a tool to help with landing page creation, it required code and was overwhelming for the content managers. Without a way to easily create targeted, specific landing pages, the Western Union team knew that they were missing out on results and ROI. The Western Union team needed a solution that would make it easy to create, test and manage targeted landing pages for various online marketing channels such as PPC and display ads.

the solution

In December 2010, Western Union adopted ion interactive’s LiveBall landing page platform. Not only did they now have an easy-to-use, code-free platform to help their marketing team create and test landing pages, but they also had the support of the ion interactive’s professional landing page services team.

the results

LiveBall has empowered Western Union with enterprise-scale marketing agility that has helped them grow their landing page program and their conversion rates. As Josh Carroll, explained, “LiveBall gives us flexible management and optimization of robust web experiences. It has given us the ability to optimize pages with real-time responsiveness which has resulted in dramatic improvements in digital campaigns.”

With LiveBall, the Western Union team now has close to 300 landing pages and co-branded microsites managed in one centralized platform including mobile landing pages, localized pages for 15 different countries. What was once a complicated process, is now managed by marketers. Western Union has content managers from numerous teams scattered across the globe who, thanks to LiveBall, now have the ability to test and optimize landing pages without development resources. 

With better landing pages, Western Union is getting better results. For instance, a recent 30-day promotion advertised through Google PPC ads converted at 19% — a 1,800% increase over typical Western Union lead generation rates (under 1%).

While the Western Union team creates most of their LiveBall landing pages themselves, ion interactive’s services team is a helpful resource for large, complicated, or pressing projects. Recently, Western Union engaged ion to quickly create customized templates for their Small & Medium Enterprises microsite.

The microsite launched in November 2011 and Josh was immediately impressed by the results. As he put it best, “Our 22%+ conversion rates are a dramatic improvement over previous benchmarks. LiveBall is the best landing page solution that I have used; we really love that it is robust enough to support microsites as well as single pages.”

what’s next?

The Western Union marketing team plans to focus on nurturing the B2B community by providing topic-specific microsites for industry verticals like mortgages, insurance and government. Their goal is to provide recommendations, education and thought leadership to build awareness, credibility, and trust.