Marketing Ninja

In my previous post I speculated as to whether or not most customers would prefer to be sold on a product through a blog or a static office document, like a PDF or a Microsoft Word document.

We’ve executed some email campaigns over the past month to test this theory. Here are the details that I can discuss:

• Our sample size was significant (I won’t say how large exactly so don’t ask;)
• We conducted four trials with the same audience;
• Each trial had its own unique subject and content;
• We sent the email at regularly scheduled intervals;
• We used a blog entry and a PDF alternative;
• The blog and the PDFs that we used contained the same information but with two different presentation philosophies, like the ones I outlined in my earlier post.

Given all this, here are the results:

These numbers are all click through rates (CTR) of people who opened the emails sent during each one of our trials.

I haven’t provided enough information about our audience to make this test an official scientific marketing study for the general public; think of these findings as a weathervane indicator – this test only tells you what direction the wind is blowing, not it’s magnitude.

I performed another calculation which resulted in the headline for this article; here’s the formula:

AVERAGE(PDF CTR)/AVERAGE(Blog CTR) = 8.31

This means that for every person who clicked through to the blog first roughly 8 people preferred to click through to a PDF document with the same information on average.

What are the implications of this finding?

• It tells me that the people on this mailing list are not comfortable with the concept of a “blog” as an information delivery mechanism.
• It tells me that given the choice between an online blog and a PDF download, many customers feel more comfortable with a PDF or other static document.
• It tells me that perhaps marketers like me, who recognize the obvious advantages of blogs as an information distribution mechanism, need to find ways to make blogs more appealing to older, more affluent audiences in general.

If you’d like to discuss this in more detail with me feel free to hit me up with questions on Twitter or on the comments here. I won’t be able to disclose many of the details but I might be able to answer other questions.

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