Conversion Conference Blog

We are excited to announce the “Ask The Experts” session at Conversion Conference East – 2011.

The session will take place on Day 2 of the conference from 2:30pm – 3:30pm and is all about you…This is your chance to get those questions answered. Make sure you get your money’s worth.

We could all use more expert advice—but can’t always afford it…Here’s you chance (at no extra cost)

This session will feature a panel of experts in various areas who will field questions from the audience. Our speakers’ areas of expertise span across all channels and disciplines of conversion optimization including but not limited to

• A/B testing
• B2B
• B2C
• Form fill optimization
• Lead generation
• E-commerce
• and so much more…

Don’t be shy, let us know what EXPERTS you would like to be present and what topics you would like covered and we will make sure it happens.

Check out all the EXPERTS and their specialties

Post your questions in the comments section below or send us an email at conversionconference@sitetuners.com with the subject line “Ask the Experts.”

By Justin Rondeau
Director of Marketing, TemplateZone

Last time I spoke at the Conversion Conference, I was in the camp of ‘If you are asking what the ROI of social media is, then you are asking the wrong question’.  Obviously this was not a particularly popular stance, being among some of the top eMetric and web analytic minds today.  So let me revise my previous stance, with some tips that will help you reap the benefits of Facebook in a clear and measurable way.

First and foremost, when you start using Facebook (or social media in general) you need to have clear goals.  These goals should be clear and precise, nothing like ‘I want to increase my social presence’.  Define what about your social presence you want to increase, such as Like Count, increase engagement, decrease unsubscribes, etc…  As a rule of thumb, I wouldn’t be so concerned about increasing your like count to enormous degrees. I would be much more concerned with the percent feedback on each post.  I stress this percentage for two reasons:

1. The more engaged your fans are, the higher your EdgeRank.
2. Whenever a fan interacts with your page, this activity is placed into their network’s news feed increasing your social reach.

Obviously you cannot interact with fans if you don’t have any, so you need to increase your like count to a reasonable degree and then nurture your fan base. I would suggest driving traffic from your website with a ‘Like Box’ or other various social plug-ins.  If you don’t mind spending a little money use Facebook ads to drive targeted traffic to your page.

Fan-Gated Custom Tab

One of the single most important factors for companies who cannot rely on brand identity for an increased like count, is a custom landing tab.  A custom landing tab will increase your like rate by roughly 50%, per a study comparing an identical Facebook ad where in one case the user landed on the wall and the other on a custom page. The landing tab on Facebook is essentially the same as any other landing page, have a clear call to action that entices your unique visitor with an offer and visual cues.

It is not enough to have a single custom tab, you want to take part in Fan-Gating, the act of one design being served up for non-fans and as soon as the fan likes your page a new design is served up.  Some great Fan-gated pages can be found on Red Bull’s and Coca-Cola’s Facebook Page. Below is an example of a Fan-Gated page on the High Impact Designer Facebook Page.

Notice the first design uses the arrow as a visual cue and the semi transparency as a teaser of the content underneath. We also utilize a lead generation form to get more information about our fans, namely their email address.  In this campaign, when we email a user a Facebook audit, we ask if they would like to get promotional materials and more tips about Facebook with a double opt-in link. After a user clicks this link, we have successfully turned a Like into a marketable lead who is genuinely interested in our brand.

Fan-gated content can be difficult to create if you are not a coder.  There are free applications on Facebook, but they require you to have a completed design and HTML code completed prior to using the application. You then take the code and copy and paste it into the application and it develops the page.  If you come to my session at Conversion Conference I will have a handout reviewing this process in great detail.

What does Social do for You?

There is a lot of work that goes into creating a great looking Facebook tab, and sense there are still no real direct ways to measure the path from Like to Conversion people are claiming either ‘You don’t need to know the ROI’ or the opposite ‘There is no ROI so I won’t use it’.

Well both camps are completely wrong, when did we get so lazy? There are so many tools out there for measuring social media metrics, and there are some very BASIC tricks we can use to see where the conversions came from.

Personally, I use social media to build my list and generate qualified leads. I have, and until something drastic changes in the minds of Facebook users, will always oppose direct sales on Facebook.  There are some outliers, as there always are, where a page developed a successful eCommerce platform on Facebook. However, as we all know, just because a company is the exception to the rule doesn’t mean your company will be (The Amazon Outlier anyone?)

So you still want to sell?

Alright, so some people still want to sell on Facebook. Though I always suggest against this, here is a tip you can use to verify that your sales came from social.

First, if you are going to sell, create a fan-gated page with an offer ‘Like us and get X% off your purchase’. Once the user likes your page the coupon will be served up.  If you really want to get more out of Facebook, require them to fill a form out to get the coupon. Make sure you make a coupon that you can easily distinguish from any other promotions, e.g., FB25.  Now when someone purchases and uses this coupon (assuming it doesn’t leak out to coupon sites) you can attribute the sale to Facebook.

To Recap

Facebook is a great way to generate leads and build up a community of brand evangelists through customer interaction. Currently, the trend in social media is that community building is the most important part of your social campaign. I hold that it is impossible to build a community without first bringing people together.  A great looking action oriented Fan-Gated Facebook page is the most important part of your social media campaign.

It is worth noting that 90% of the people who like your page never return to your Facebook Page. Instead of visiting your page, they only interact with your page through status updates. This statistic and the below points are why social media specialists are honing in on interaction:

1. If your fans interact with your page, your EdgeRank will rise
2. If your EdgeRank rises, the more your fans see later statuses
3. If your fans see later statuses and are intrigued by the content, then they are more likely to interact with your page
4. If a fan interacts with your page, then your status is seen by their personal network
5. If your status is seen by your fan’s personal network, then your social reach increases
6. [Conclusion] If your fans interact with your page, your social reach increases

By increasing your social reach, your company’s messages are now viewable by people who are not directly fans of your page. On top of your company’s message being seen by more users it is seen juxtaposed to a trusted friend’s name. Essentially you are getting a personal testimonial to a particular audience who trust the person giving the testimony.

However, you can’t just expect to reach all sorts of new connections immediately. The ambiguity in the latter half of the third premise is a gigantic wildcard. You need to post content that people want to interact with; further interaction is what increases your social reach giving you the coveted ‘viral’ effect. I would suggest going to Byron White’s session about Content marketing to learn to create content that people want to read.

If this peaked your interest, come to my session where William Leake and I will go over tips for a great looking Facebook Page, Facebook ads, and how Facebook can not only drive traffic to your website but build your brand through a zealous group of brand evangelists.

About the Author

Justin Rondeau graduated Suma Cum Laude from the University of New Hampshire in 2009 with a BA in Philosophy. Though Justin studied Philosophy he found his niche in marketing while doing the copywriting for TemplateZone and found great success in analyzing social media trends. Justin believes that philosophy is what has made him so successful in the marketing field because philosophy, like marketing, requires rigorous analysis and an ever evolving approach. Justin directs social media strategy and email marketing for TemplateZone and its suite of services, including High Impact Designer. His expertise on landing pages and Facebook page layouts was instrumental in shifting the product mix offered by TemplateZone, in addition to setting a new course for the company’s marketing and branding.

See Justin Live!

Justin will be presenting a session with William Leake, of Apogee Results, on “Social Success: Using Facebook as a Landing Page & Converting in the Social Eco-system” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session. Also check out Justin’s new product site High Impact Designer.

Want to save $700 on Conversion Conference? Contact Justin to request a discount code!

By Kate O’Neill
CEO & Founding Partner, [meta]marketer
(Originally published 6/8/11 at CMO.com)

A video from the TED Talks series has been spreading through my digital marketing circles like a summer cold: Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles.” The video is often shared with a comment to the effect of, “You must watch this!” And, yes, it’s quite good.The upshot? That personalization algorithms for online content are shaping what we consume (and, to some extent, what we are able to consume) so that we are less and less exposed to divergent ideas.

Pariser’s talk goes beyond esoterica, though, and cites how Netflix, among other commerce examples, applies personalization. That’s what got me thinking about how this algorithmic content evolution relates to online marketing, e-commerce, and our ethical responsibilities as marketers. Oddly, even though many of my friends who shared this video are themselves thinkers about digital marketing and online social sharing, there seems to be very little introspection about what the “filter bubble” effect means in terms of online marketing and ethics. So if you’ll pardon the navel-gazing, I’d like to examine this a bit and would encourage you to do the same; let me know your thoughts in response.

Certainly at [meta]marketer, we encourage our e-commerce clients to test behavioral targeting. There’s typically a great deal of convenience that this kind of targeting affords the customer. For example, Amazon knows that I tend to buy raw vegan cookbooks, and so it tends to show me the latest and best-rated related books in my browse path. I welcome this because I get exposed to books I somehow might have missed but will almost certainly like. On Netflix, too, there’s a good chance that showing me personalized suggestions will save me time and delight me, even as it reinforces my longevity with the site and ensures my subscription payments for months to come.

This selfish/selfless balance is the new normal in marketing optimization. It’s what I personally am passionate about: using data to create better customer experiences and, simultaneously, generate incremental profits. It’s what we do with our clients, and their KPIs speak for themselves.

But are we contributing to this insular and narcissistic phenomenon where the more time individuals spend online, the more they start to have mirrors set up around them so that they can no longer see diverse behavior, but rather increasingly similar likenesses of themselves? Perhaps. After all, one of the keys to the work we do is an emphasis on relevance. As I think of it, relevance is a form of respect. It shows customers that we respect their time and effort enough not to make them scour the site for what they’re after.

Chris Brogan and other digital thought leaders have spoken about social news as a serendipity engine. (Serendipity, incidentally, has long been my favorite word and a beloved concept.) In earlier iterations of social news, you got what you got. So, too, in early e-commerce. As the availability of information has accelerated, though, and personalization algorithms have evolved, some of that serendipity has been traded for distillation and, yes, relevance. So, sure, from an editorial perspective, in the video Pariser is justified in saying that Mark Zuckerburg’s example of “a squirrel dying in front of your house” is not as important as “people dying in Africa.” But in commerce, the dilemma of moral or ethical priority is not nearly so clear-cut. Perhaps the personalization of search and social news makes it less likely that you’ll happen upon something random and wonderful, but the continued explosion of long-tail content and commerce means there’s randomness even within niches. While the “filter bubbles” Pariser describes might obscure your view of the randomness and chaos of the Web, in general, personalization does help uncover hidden gems within customers’ interests.

Because the other side of all this tailoring and customization is that the long tail is getting longer in every area, and the realization that we’re not going to be able to see most of what’s out there is starting to sink in. So personalized content and merchandising is as much a response to information overload as it is to data availability. Going back to my earlier example, if I landed on Amazon’s home page and it made no effort to customize the content for me, it’s likely I’d have little idea of the breadth and depth of its catalog as it related to the semi-obscure offerings that appeal to me. Would I think to search for chia seeds, one of my recent purchases at the site, if it wasn’t made clear to me that Amazon carried food stuff as well as books (and tools and shoes and sporting equipment. . . and, and, and)?

After all, relevance and targeting are not new phenomena in marketing. We study demographic and psychographic information to understand customer profiles so that we can tailor our advertising placements, our message, and our follow-through for optimal results. What’s newer is the ability to adjust whole experiences on the fly based on behavioral performance. Imagine if you walked into a store–let’s use Nordstrom as an example, since it’s famous for its quality concierge service. As you looked around and your attention landed on an object, the other objects around you shifted. Would you feel more catered to or more pandered to? Or perhaps both? In the context of Nordstrom, where it has been established that it’s trying to improve your shopping experience, perhaps it would seem just another level of superior customer service. If you had the same experience in, say, Wal-Mart, chances are a savvy shopper might feel manipulated.

As a marketer, I see my job as creating meaningful connections between company and customer. (Note that I don’t say that my job is to convert customers: Read my previous CMO.com article on empathy-oriented optimization for why conversion as a single KPI is short-sighted.) As a data-driven, technology-savvy marketer, I know that behavioral similarities among visitors and, ultimately, customers often lead to clues, validated through analysis and testing, that can improve the customer experience overall–and, in turn, increases profit. That this also occasionally means limiting a customer’s view of the site and creating an insulated experience is not only an acceptable side effect, it’s intentional. Because that’s what customer behavior dictates. Customers become overwhelmed when presented with too much choice, and since niche options abound online, that means that if I’m HomeDepot.com and a customer comes in from a search for power tools, I’d best show top-selling power tools and not home appliances or ladders or whatever else.

But perhaps a lesson to take away from this is that there might be opportunity in exposing the customer experience to a little randomness where it doesn’t interfere with the customers’ intentions. A little unexpected cross-sell of something charming, a quirky-but-fun site feature, something surprising and fresh–these types of experiments with commercial randomness might be worth trying in your environment and seeing how customers respond. Because with all of the filtering we’re presented with, the savvy shoppers out there might be picking up on the sometimes heavy-handed crafting of custom-tailored experiences. And maybe, just maybe, we’re all overdue for a little serendipity anyway.

About the Author

Kate O’Neill, CEO & Founding Partner of [meta]marketer, developed her passion for data-driven business while managing content at Netflix. Several successive leadership roles within both startups and large companies (such as HCA) refined Kate’s crisp views on the interplay of content, experience, strategy, and profit. While leading customer experience and product development for Magazines.com, she also developed industry-leading expertise in conversion optimization, behavioral targeting, and strategic analytics. Kate has twice served on the Customer Advisory Board for the Omniture Test&Target marketing optimization product, and has also spoken about analytics and optimization at numerous national conferences.

See Kate Live!

Kate will be presenting a session on “The Human Connection: Persuading Through Caring,Empathy and Emotion” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save $700 on Conversion Conference? Contact Kate to request a discount code!

By Pete Olson, Amadesa

Companies have long embraced A/B and multivariate testing for website optimization and the creation of “personalized” customer experiences. These tools often perform well, improving conversion rates anywhere from 5 to 50 percent. Even with this success, it’s clear that there are far more possible customer segments and related options than just “A” or “B.” Customers may have common general attributes, but their specific traits can be used to deliver the single best offer, image or text tailoredto each individual. While a rules-based approach gets companies part of the way toward true personalization, automated content selection needs to be a part of a continuum of targeting options businesses employ to effectively personalize websites.

High-performance targeting offers numerous benefits beyond those provided by traditional, manual rules-based testing. These advantages include:

• The ability to match the right message to the right individual
• Automatic, hourly adjustments to changes in site traffic
• Reduced daily maintenance and freedom from running tests and building manual rules
• Insights and data regarding how content is performing, how traffic is allocated, and what is most beneficial to the customer

Onsite automated targeting is a powerful way to increase the ROI of existing website efforts, but companies shouldn’t jump into it without some pre-planning. Before running targeting on a site, time should be spent designing the approach and clarifying goals and objectives. These can include conversion rates, reduced marketing spend, loyalty and engagement increases.

Manual A/B and multivariate testing tools remain valuable; companies should use them as a starting point from which to design relevant website experiences for customers. As their strategies improve and mature, however, businesses should move toward more customer-specific personalization capabilities. Rules-based targeting solutions provide a greater level of control but require constant management to maintain. More preferable are automated targeting solutions that help businesses deliver truly personalized customer experiences and the kind of relevance, continuity and loyalty that results in increased conversions and sales.

About the Author

Pete is vice president of enterprise solutions at Amadesa. In this role, Pete is responsible for providing the strategic direction for the company’s technology platform, listening to the needs of customers, and offering a unique value proposition to the markets served by the company. He is also responsible for building relationships with key technology partners.

Prior to joining Amadesa, Pete was Senior Director of Product Management for Digital River, Inc (NASDAQ: DRIV), a leading provider of global e-commerce solutions for software and consumer technology. At Digital River, Pete was responsible for driving key decisions for the platform technology and internal integration strategies and he also assisted in M&A activity. Prior to Digital River, Pete was a member of the corporate marketing team at 3M. Pete has a BS degree in Marketing and Agriculture Business from Iowa State University.

by Justin Davis, Madera Labs

$2.9 billion.

That’s the amount of money that Amazon raked in during 2006 due to one simple feature on their site: recommendations.

Recommendations are a form of adaptation: delivering content to a user based on that user’s actions instead of simply serving up static content. This kind of thoughtful interaction design can deliver a much more personalized, targeted and engaging experience to the user, not to mention the possibility for hoards of additional revenue from increased conversions.

Obviously, adaptation can be a powerful tool for driving deeper engagement. Amazon’s example is only one of many case studies on the power of delivering content to users based on behaviors, as opposed to a carefully curated content structure. But is it really this easy? Can we really just add recommendations and boost revenue? To answer that, we first need to explore what adaptation is, so we know how it works and how it might be used to increase engagement with our customers.

From Static to Dynamic

At its core, adaptive interaction is the change of an interaction over time, according to some kind of input from the user. While simple in theory, creating effective adaptive interfaces takes careful planning and a thorough knowledge of how adaptation works.

In an adaptive interaction like Amazon’s, there are four moments that act as a kind of “adaptation loop”: Initial interface, user response, system judgment and interaction adaptation. These different moments work together in an endless loop, driving the ability for an interface to adapt to a user.

The loop goes like this: an initial interface is delivered to a user, generally with some kind of content or call to action. The user acts on this (user response), and the system makes a judgment as to the nature of the user’s interaction (system judgment). This judgment is often in the form of evaluating the relevancy of content to a user, based on their actions on it. In short, the system is asking: “Did the user like what I put in front of them?”  The answer to this question is the judgment, which directly drives a change in the interface (interaction adaptation), changing the nature of the interface before the next time the user interacts with it.

The Adaptation Loop

Amazon employs two adaptive modalities: content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. In content-based filtering, the system delivers content to the user based on their consumption of similar content. In this model, the user response is the consumption of other content (any action that defines “consumption” is appropriate: reading, buying, sharing, etc.). The system then makes a judgment based on that action. In the case of a content-based system like Amazon’s recommendations, the user’s action (“purchase”), drives the system to make a judgment: “this person likes X type of book”. After that judgment is made, the system adjusts its output and serves up more relevant content the next time the user interacts with it.

Collaborative filtering is similar, but changes the criteria for user response. In a collaborative filtering system, recommendations are made according to what other users have done, providing a socially-based recommendation system that parallels the kind of real-life interaction a user may have with their friends (“My friend is like me, and they love this book. I’ll probably love it too!”). With this model, the user response is not the active user’s consumption of content, but other users’ consumption of content. This model is more difficult to implement, requiring more advanced models of predictive analysis, but can prove to be a powerful and engaging content discovery method for users.

Knowing this, how can we design more interesting moments into our websites using adaptation? How can we carve out a 35% revenue stake based on the notion that the website should adapt to each user?

A few guidelines:

• Think about the user’s interaction with you over time. A user’s experience with you doesn’t begin and end with a discreet session on your website. In reality, a user’s full experience using your site has a dimension of time attached to it. When looking at your website, ask yourself how it might change over time to each user.

• Write a story. When planning your site, use user stories to bring the dimension of time to life. Make up a character and write a narrative describing how they interact with your site over a period of days or weeks. After writing this story, look back and examine it for areas where adaptation makes sense.

• Start small. Getting this right takes a lot of time. Don’t scrap your current site in favor of a new, adaptive one. Try inserting a sidebar for related content or recommended items. Attach conversion metrics to this to evaluate ongoing effectiveness.

Without a doubt, adaptive interfaces can be very powerful revenue generators. Delivering custom interactions to users based on their behavior creates a hyper-personalized and engaging experience, but it takes time and planning to do correctly. Revisit your website: where can you deliver different content over time to each user? How can you create interesting moments that excite and engage your customers?

Maybe, just maybe, you can carve out your own $2.9 billion stake.

About the Author

Justin has a passion for making things better. From making websites easier to use, to making the grocery shopping experience a better one, he believes that great design is the key to great experiences. With a background that involves technology, music, architecture, and beer (once the host of a podcast about craft beer), this diversity of exposure means Justin approaches problems from unique standpoint, always turning to design to help solve the problem of how to make a customer’s experience better. Justin believes that the customer should be where design starts, and takes a user-centered approach to designing better products and services, using research, observation and interviewing to make sure that the design really works like it should for the consumer. He has a relentless passion for finding opportunities to make experiences better, actively challenging the status quo to help companies move out of their dogmatic safety nets into innovate territories that their customers love.

Justin will be speaking on adaptive content and behavioral targeting at Conversion Conference, March 14th in San Francisco.