Conversion Conference Blog

By Brian Massey

Conversion Scientist, Conversion Sciences, LLC

A good writer can create images better than a graphic designer.
Whenever we design a Web site, we inevitably ask our graphic designers to give us three comps. Then we, the completely unqualified non-graphic-designers decide which one we “like” best. We might even ask a number of our equally unqualified colleagues to tell us what they think.

Then we pay a copywriter a fraction of what the designers get, and ask them to write the copy for the site, knowing full-well that when we get it, we’ll revise it until every ounce of color, every animating metaphor, and every shred of a story is squeezed out onto the ground in a pool of red ink.

A good writer can create images and convey meaning better than a graphic artist because the writer has the richer toolset. Put down your red pen. Trust your copywriter.

Be bold and your visitors will see you that way.
If you’re designing a new site or refreshing an old one, it’s time to be a little daring.

Tell the designers to hold on until you’ve completed the copy. They’ll look at you like you have an arm growing out of your head.

THEN, start interviewing copywriters. Tell them that you’ll pay them to develop three different versions of your Copy Body, the document that contains the text from which you will take your copy when writing headings, text, offers, emails and any other Web-based communications.

The interviews will be short. You’re looking for a certain reaction.

When you present this proposal to the right writer, their eyes will flash. A smile may creep across their face of its own will. Be careful, though. If they say “You’ll pay me?” you’ve gotten a false positive. You want to choose the writer who feels that you’ve just opened the door to a cage of mediocrity.

If you let them out, they’ll take you with them.

Be very clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as a business and what your visitors are trying to accomplish. Give them a set of personas if you can.

Take no steps.
Once you have your three copy “comps,” do not allocate time to have the writing revised by a committee. Do not attempt to combine the best from each. Do not seek to insert superlatives that declare you the “leader,” to be “unique” or “innovative.” If you have to say it, it ain’t true.

If you have the right writer, one of your choices will be far out, one will be written in business speak, and one will be somewhere in between. Throw away the one written in business speak and consider the remaining two very carefully.

Select the copy body that best illustrates your value proposition, the one that captures the essence of your company without stating it. Look for metaphors that can be applied to a variety of your benefits. Seek a story that can stitch every page together into a coherent theme.

Then fix the inaccuracies, and leave everything else alone.

Does this sound scary? Wait till you see what’s next.

You can let the designers into the room now.
If you’ve selected an engaging copy body, it’ll be really clear to the designers what their designs should express. They can create real images from the ones your writer paints with words. They can guide your visitor through the story with navigation. They can throw away stock photos of pretty people and choose images informed by metaphor and analogy.

Give them the copy body, the corporate style guide and tell them to create a design. One design. Sure, you’ll make decisions along the way and maybe even significantly change the first comp, but try to let them do what they do well.

Steps you could add.
If you realize the immense advantage that powerfully written copy gives you, consider investing in some testing. Implement two of the three copy bodies on your home page and on key landing pages. Use analytics to see which makes visitors stick and which generates more leads or sales.

Which has the lower bounce rate?

Which home page generates more page views and more time on site?

Which has the higher conversion rate?

There is no better way to know if you’ve made the right decision than to test. And you may need some proof when your colleagues tell you that your copy isn’t “corporate” — and they mean that as a criticism, not a badge of honor.

Do you know a great copy writer? Do you have a success story or test results that demonstrate the power of effective writing? Let us know in your comments and I’ll feature you in a future post.

Photo courtesy andrewcs via stock.xchng.

About the Author

Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and he has the lab coat to prove it. His rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses was developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, national speaker and writer. Conversion Sciences was founded to fill the Web with helpful, engaging and entertaining online Web sites that convert visitors into leads and sales. The company has helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. "There are places on the Web that make you feel like they were built just for you," he says. "Is yours one of these? It could be.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be talking more about copy and its role in persuasion and conversion at the Conversion Conference 2012 on March 5^th and 6^th in San Francisco, California. Join him in his session on “Creating Killer Conversion Copy: Emails, Landing Pages, PPC Ads and More.” See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Brian Lewis,

Director of Optimization, SiteTuners

Many times the name we call something greatly affects our attitudes about that something.

Take the term “home page”, for instance. In the context of the web, we all know that our home page is where most of our visitors will first meet us, experience our brand messaging, learn about our products and services, and hopefully determine if we offer solutions to their problems.

As such, many marketers treat their home pages as an electronic kitchen sink, throwing every message, offer, special, countless products and then further distracting us with endless rotating banners under the misconception that “we need to show everything … after all, it’s our home page”.

One of the reasons marketers have gotten derailed trying to construct effective home pages is because this page is referred to as “the home page”.

Think about it … “Home” commonly refers to a place you are content to stay; a place where one lives. In baseball, it’s a place a runner wants to reach to end his journey around the bases and score a run.

On the web, though, we want to get our visitors off the home page and into our site as expeditiously as possible. An effective home page:

1. Quickly communicates  what it is we do;
2. Allows the visitor to quickly decide if the company can meet their needs, and;
3. Guides the visitor to the page in the site that’s of interest to them

I like to think of the home page as more like an airport terminal. Remember your last visit to an airport? The problem you were trying to solve was to get to your destination as quickly and easily as possible. You were looking for information to get you to the right gate, and the shortest path to that gate, so you could board your plane. You didn’t care about flights to other destinations and certainly did not want to spend any more time than necessary there.

Remember that your home page should provide clear navigational information and direct the visitor to their desired destination. The challenge is to meet the various needs of all the many types of visitors who’ll arrive on your home page while not creating an electronic kitchen sink.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the development of Use Case scenarios. To learn all about Use Cases, why they’re productive and how to craft effective Use Cases, stop by my session, “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco, CA, March 5, 2012 11:15 am.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.  ~Marshall McLuhan

About the Author

Noted author and speaker, Brian Lewis brings over 20 years of both hands-on and strategic online marketing experience spanning a diverse range of industries. In addition to co-hosting the Internet radio show “Best Search Strategies” on WebMasterRadio, Brian has led panels at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, Search Marketing Expo, SMX Advanced, PPC Summit, Conversion Conference, Affiliate Conference, AdWords Advantage, Online Marketing Summit, and Online Marketing Institute. Brian’s articles have been referenced in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Target Marketing, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, Website Magazine, SEM Journal, and DM News. He continues to be in demand for speaking engagements on PPC, SEO and conversion optimization around the world.

He earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be presenting a session on “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter  to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Jeff Eckman

CEO, Big Giant Conversions

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I just don’t know which half.” —John Wanamaker, 1838 to 1922*

Thanks to modern marketing technology and the commercialization of the internet, we now have the tools to know which half of John Wanamaker’s advertising budget was wasted. But the direct marketer has always held an advantage over the traditional brand marketer. Brand advertisers still rely on loose correlations to prove efficacy. The direct marketer (that is, most anyone who is involved in conversion optimization) has the rock-solid power of causality, and the ability to use attribution, to continuously optimize results. This often gets forgotten in all the commotion over analytics, digital media, marketing automation, which landing page color is better, etc. So, it’s time to go back to the basics, and remind ourselves that attribution is the mother of conversion.

But first, reflect for a moment: in this day and age, are there any excuses not to not take full advantage of the attribution potential that technology provides? Our marketing “founding fathers” had to go to extensive lengths to attribute a lead or sale to a specific marketing message—it would be doing them a disservice to not take full advantage of the resources available to the modern day marketer!

Before landing page optimization, before conversion optimization or before concerns about statistical significance, we must architect good, clean systems for attribution which will inform all downstream efforts. Modern technology allows for this, but only if we put systems in place to ensure it is accurate and meaningful. There are myriad systems out there for gathering the raw data and establishing genuinely causal “A leads to B leads to C” relationships. The key is implementing relevant and simple tracking mechanisms, then letting our natural human gifts of observation and creativity guide us toward optimized performance.
 

Attribution Types

The path to successful attribution can start by identifying different types.

• Consider classifying attribution into two categories: macro (e.g. click to sale) and micro (e.g. completed form to sales consultation).
• Then, identify which of these is most important in optimizing results. Attributing specific media buys should be considered especially critical, given the high cost of media relative to other downstream processes.
• Macro attribution is probably important to every one, but don’t ignore the little things—they can really help pick out problem spots in the funnel.
• Not all data is important data. Identifying focus points, looking for relevant attribution, helps in wading through large volumes of data, to ultimately focus on what really matters in driving results.

Back to basics: Why bother with attribution in the first place?

• If, for example, we are discreetly tracking results to each of several ads we have in market, proper attribution allows us to know which ad is generating the most volume, the best end results, etc. That specific advertisement can then have more budget devoted to it, leading toward a more optimized state.
• Attribution makes content matching possible in the creative. Let’s say in one ad, there was a promotional offer for a free widget. By attributing the potential lead to that specific ad, it allows all of the next steps to be relevant. Now, any messaging further downstream can reference the promotional offer, personalizing the engagement.
• Attribution generates clear, relevant data. Attribution allows a marketer to know which ad combinations are generating positive results further down the funnel.

Attribution Informs Testing

In the world of online testing and optimization, a page or experience is never declared the winner for long. The process continues in a cyclical fashion with results from test 1 helping to set the stage for test 2, and so on. Without good attribution, you may only have half a test, at best. Here are some questions that can only be answered with good attribution, and are critical to a truly meaningful test:

• While you may know which test won, what was the source of traffic that drove to the test?
• Did visitors come from online or offline?  Did callers get our number from the magazine ad or TV? Where were the form fills from?
• Which ads or campaigns are performing well and thus warrant a bigger spend and which are performing poorly and need to be dialed down?

Better Market Intelligence

With proper attribution in place, you can look for strengths and weaknesses across different channels, market segments, offers, time of day, creative/messaging and all types of demographics. Beyond the boost this can provide to your conversion efforts, think about what you can learn about your new customers as well as non-converters—your potential customers who decided not to commit:

• Which ads are connecting better?
• Is there a certain ad generating a lot of response at the top of your marketing funnel but failing to deliver conversions?
• What is the perfect combo of audience to ad to experience that generates the best results?

Conversion optimization, when done right, is a constantly evolving, virtuous cycle of growth, which attribution enables. At the end of the day, if we have succeeded in developing a causal relationship between the initial entry point from a marketing message, and the eventual conversion (or lack thereof), we can sleep well knowing which half of our advertising spend has been wasted. We can then rise the next day and shift our spending to the better-performing half. And, for now, let’s leave correlated relationships to the brand marketers, until they invite us to visit them on Madison Avenue.

* http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Wanamaker__John.html quote 100% attributed to John Wanamaker. just sayin.

About the Author

Jeff Eckman is the CEO of BigGiantConversions, a marketing startup that is boosting returns and consumer engagement from traditional and online marketing and advertising. Mr. Eckman has led conversion engagements with national and regional brands including California Closets, Athenahealth, Inc., and Children’s Hospital Boston, and the firm routinely partners with complementary marketing innovators including Digitas and ion interactive.

Mr. Eckman earned his BS in Operations Technology at Northeastern University, and holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. For over 14 years, he has been the drummer for Boston’s “Pressure Cooker,” an original reggae act. Jeff is also actively involved in regional business and community organizations.

See Jeff Live!

Jeff and Ginny Snook Scott from California Closets will be presenting a session on “How California Closets Boosted Revenues with Segmentation, Analaytics and Human Behavior” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Jeff on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Arnie Kuenn

President, Vertical Measures

If your business has been stalling right along with the economy, you might get a much-needed boost from content marketing.

Content marketing is the creation, sharing, and distribution of information that’s relevant to customers you want to attract, engage and retain.  Content can be informational, educational, promotional, or entertaining, and if presented properly, it can help you spread your message, enable dialogue between you and your customers, and increase business revenue.

Customers no longer just want standard products and services; they want more engaged vendors.  They want to know that the companies they buy from will go the extra mile to provide advice and information.  This has led to an explosion in content marketing.

However, the process of content marketing can be confusing.  Businesses know they need to do it, but they don’t necessarily know where to start.  Answering six basic questions will give you the insight you need to get your plan off the ground.

What are you presenting?
The type of content you create depends on what your customers want to hear.  You can provide details about your products or services, but you also need to present content that isn’t necessarily about you, but help your customer make an informed decision.

Your content can include industry trends, advice, or an overview of the benefits of buying a particular product or service.  You can also be more direct and talk about your particular products and services, and include a call to action to buy or call for more information.

Why are you presenting it?
The content you publish will depend on what you’re trying to achieve.  Do you want to position your business as knowledgeable?  Helpful tips look like free advice for customers, which makes them come back for more. Talking about trends in your industry makes you appear in touch with a changing market.

Are you trying to generate leads or sales?  A how-to guide about installing a specific product with a link or contact number gives readers an immediate way to respond, and it gives you an opportunity to see who’s interested in your offers, whether they become customers or not.

Match your content to your business goals and you’ll get the results you want.

Who are you presenting to?
Your target markets will affect the way you present content.  If you’re talking to customers, you can talk about new products they might like, or new service delivery methods that make life easier.  If you’re talking to prospects, take a less familiar approach, touting the benefits of your products and inviting them to learn more.

Your audience will also impact the tone you take.  Consumer content can be presented in an informal or even humorous style, but some business content needs to be more professional and objective. Consumers will respond to more emotional benefits, but businesses need more rational facts to see the benefits to their bottom line.  Both audiences will respond equally to calls of action, but make sure there’s enough information to keep them reading.

Where will you present it?
Ideally businesses will present their content on their own sites, to reduce the number of extra steps for people to get there.  The question is where to go to find these new readers. You can advertise online or you can post content to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to link people to your site. However the very best approach is to optimize your content to give you the best chance to rank at the top of a search engine results page. That’s the vast majority of people will discover your content.

When will you present it?
A website should never be idle for long, and the last entry on a blog shouldn’t be too old. Otherwise, you end up looking inactive, which will drive away people who are looking for up-to-the-minute information.  Search engines love fresh, new content too. That’s why you need to keep your content as fresh as possible.

There’s no set rule for how often you need to post, but the general rule is between once a day and once a week.  However often you decide to publish, the content needs to be relevant to your readers.

How will you present it?
The answer depends on what kind of information you’re providing.  Blogs tend to be the most popular form of content, because they can be short or lengthy, and the topics can be pretty open.  But there are other formats that can drive business as well.

White papers and e-books are great for presenting detailed information, and as downloads, they make great take-aways.  Product sheets and press releases are great for sharing news about your business in a quick, concise format. Video is a booming, highly consumed type of content and is easier to produce than most people think.

Content is the new marketing, especially in the online world, so put together a plan to consistently produce engaging content to keep your business alive and thriving.  To do this, create an editorial calendar. Set modest goals like writing two blog posts per week, sprucing up 5 product pages per week and creating one video per week. Then get started and stick to it!

About the Author

 Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company helping their clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business.  Arnie has held executive positions in the world of new technologies and marketing for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon.

See Arnie Live!

Arnie will be presenting a session on “9 Powerful, Low Cost Content Ideas to Grow Your Business in 6 Months or Less” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Arnie on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and contact him to request a discount code!

By Joe Rawlinson
Senior e-Commerce Product Manager & Strategist, National Instruments

How to Use Defaults to Drive Results

We take recommendations all the time in our daily lives. You take the concierge’s recommendation when you go to the restaurant he mentions. You take your server’s recommendation at the restaurant when you order her suggested meal.

Likewise we take a website’s recommendation when we accept the default choice that has been presented to us.

A great example of this comes from Kiva.org. Kiva is a non-profit where you can provide a micro-loan to the working poor around the world. For example, you can loan money to Blanca in El Salvador so she can buy goods for her corner store. She sells those goods, repays the loan, and then you can loan the money to another entrepreneur.

Kiva really wants you to complete the loan to Blanca and other entrepreneurs like her. They don’t want distractions or roadblocks to get in the way of you completing that loan.

To help get you to complete the task at hand, Kiva uses the power of defaults.

Once you’ve decided to whom you will loan your money, Kiva shows you a defaulted amount that you can loan. In this case, it is $25.

This immediately answers the question: “how much should I loan to Blanca?”

The default sounds good so you move on to the next step.

Kiva also wants you to donate to their non-profit so they default an amount for that purpose as well.

All of these defaults are in place to propel you to finish and fund the loan.

By using defaults, the site eliminates the micro-decisions that you would otherwise have to think about.

Defaults not only push customers to complete a task, they can influence the direction you want them to take.

Caution: defaults are extremely powerful. People will take the default.

Carefully consider what you default when you present choices to customers. Are there any downstream consequences? Will you need to make more of the widget you default for purchase? Will there be more customer support issues for that particular product?

Map out the downstream consequences so that you can give customers a default that is good for both the company and the customer.

Try some defaults on your website, you’ll be amazed at the results.
Unfortunately, your defaults won’t work if your prospective customers never see them in the first place. To that end, you need to remove roadblocks on their way to conversion.

Remove Distractions to Increase Conversion

Removing distractions from your customer’s path is key to closing the sale.

Let’s look at an example from Dell.com. They segment their customers into several types. As the visitor to the website navigates down one of those paths, the website organizes the products and eliminates irrelevant options.

For example, the home customer isn’t distracted by the latest rack-mounted servers and the enterprise customer isn’t distracted by the home entertainment system.

To effectively get your customers to the point of sale, you need to clear the road of any obstacles.

These obstacles are choices and items that are distractions to the customer.

If your customer has made selections based on their navigation through your site, you should not show them products that no longer match those needs.

As you eliminate options which are not relevant to the customer, they can more quickly find what they are looking for and proceed to the point of sale.

Too often we try and show the customer all of our products and services all the time. We hope that will keep them around because every possibility is readily at hand.

However, this is not the case. Too many choices will confuse customers.

As we start to learn what the customer is looking for, help them laser focus down to the right product match for their needs.

Think about how you can organize your product offering and eliminate distractions based on what you know about your customer. This knowledge can come from past purchase history or even the last click they made on your website.

About the Author

Joe Rawlinson is a Senior e-Commerce Product Manager and Strategist at National Instruments, a technology company that equips engineers and scientists with tools that accelerate productivity, innovation and discovery. He defines the strategy of several key e-commerce applications critical to both company and customer success and specializes in improving online sales, leads, and efficiency through the e-commerce channel.

See Joe Live!

Joe will be leading a session titled, “B2B Success: How to Generate More Leads & Close Sales Directly on Your Site” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Joe at his blog ReturnCustomer.com and on Twitter and contact him to request a discount code!

By Eric Hansen
Founder & CEO of SiteSpect, Inc.

You have heard the saying, “When you optimize for everyone, you optimize for no one,” right? It sounds obvious: target your optimization efforts for the right audience to achieve your online marketing goals. But studies show that most digital marketers still do not optimize by audience – for several likely reasons.

First, there are many possible dimensions that could be considered for targeting, and marketers simply might not know where to begin. Second, some type of targeting functionality is required on the site, and you might not already have this implemented.  But with the end goal being to improve the user experience while simultaneously lifting conversion and engagement, the benefits stand to outweigh the costs so long as marketers conduct their efforts deliberately and scientifically.

Let’s look at some of the different categories of segments that can be targeted, and some examples of how you might change the user experience based on each:

With numerous ways to target content around unique attributes of the visitor, the question remains: how to you know which segments to target? 

You should begin by analyzing your site traffic using a web analytics or CRM solution to determine which segments are the largest.  Then, consider what the performance of those segments are vs. other segments, or vs. all unsegmented site traffic – do they appear engaged (as measured by pageviews, time on site, or repeat visits), complete purchases, or behave in other ways that indicate satisfaction and thus are profitable from a marketing standpoint?  If not, then you will recognize that large, underperforming segments are the ripest areas for targeting, and should thus be the focus of a targeting initiative.

Ideally you should also consider multi-dimensional segments, for example repeat visitors who browser during evening or weekend hours. More sophisticated cluster analysis techniques can be used to determine “sweet spots” of visitor who share similar characteristics and should be considered in your targeting efforts.

It is typical for web marketers to start out with a dozen or so “defined segments” with which to create targeted experiences.  The process of defining the segment and then creating the targeted content will vary depending on how your site is built and the technology that’s used.  Some web content management systems have targeting capabilities built in, but there are also separate targeting products available, many of which are part of optimization platforms that also include A/B and multivariate testing.

The examples above should suggest ways that you can create more engaging, relevant experiences for the visitor segments that you wish to target. Once you have launched one or more targeting efforts (typically called targeting campaigns), you’ll need to track their performance in your web analytics or CRM to see the effects and understand whether the campaigns are helping or hurting the user experience.  You should be looking at the same metrics you used to define the segments in the first place, typically a user goal like a conversion or registration.

The next phase after launching targeting campaigns typically involves testing two or more alternative experiences within the same segment. This is essentially a “targeted test campaign”, and has several benefits. First, since a well designed test will have a control group showing the site’s default (untargeted) content, it provides an easy and inherently accurate way to determine whether the targeting campaign has caused a change in user behavior. Second, it provides a way to continually improve the user experience by rotating in new challenger treatments, and pruning out losing treatments. This virtuous cycle of targeting and testing provides a powerful optimization technique for web marketers, and it’s no wonder that many testing and targeting technologies are in fact bundled together for this reason.

So when you’re looking for a way to improve the user experience, consider targeting as one of the advanced techniques you should have in your toolbox. And once you’re up and running with a handful of targeting campaigns, add testing to the process to produce even better improvements. Remember that a better user experience leads to happier, more satisfied users, which in turn impacts your key marketing success metrics.

About the Author

Eric Hansen is the Founder & CEO of SiteSpect, Inc., and the chief architect of the firm’s non-intrusive technology for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting and digital marketing optimization. SiteSpect, is a Boston-based technology provider for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting, and digital marketing optimization.

Eric is a frequent speaker at conferences covering web analytics and optimization, and writes regularly on topics dealing with the intersection of marketing and technology. He received a degree in Cognitive Science and Psychology with honors from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.

See Eric Live!

Eric will be speaking with Neil Patel, from KISSmetrics about “Getting Started with Landing Page Testing: From Baseline Data Through A/B & Multivariate Testing” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Eric on Twitter and contact him to request a discount code!