Color preferences are deeply rooted emotional responses that seem to lack any rational basis, yet the powerful influence of color rules our choices in everything from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the cars we buy.
One study found that magazine readers recognize full-color ads 26% more often than black-and-white ads.
92.6% of people say the visual dimension is the #1 influencing factor affecting their purchase decision (over taste, smell, etc.).
2 out of 3 consumers will not buy a large appliance unless it comes in their favorite color.
Color has a powerful psychological influence on the human brain. Others have used color to their advantage and now you can do the same. Check out this infographic by our friends at KISSmetrics.
The Strongest Online Persuader You’ll Ever Encounter: Yourself
The things that make us effective marketers or stand in our way often aren’t external, but internal. Being a good marketer, copywriter or Conversion Scientist means coming to terms with our own demons, limitations and neuroses.
Dr. Aaron Balick maps out how our overburdened Ego does it’s best “while being goaded on by the Id and being told off by the Superego.”
Dr. Balick knows how to help us relate to these kind of issues in his latest article.
Why The New Google Search Ads Design Is a Subtle Work of Genius
If you didn’t know, Google has redesigned their search results pages recently. The change is primarily to the portion of the page that contains “sponsored content”, or ads.
The eye-tracking images provided by the folks at EyeQuant are telling.
The pages now drive more attention to the ads, taking attention away from the free results. Ironically, it also makes the ads more evident, with a bright icon beside each.
EyeQuant calls this “a Subtle Work of Genius”. What do you think?
11 A/B Split Testing Mistakes I See Businesses Make All The Time
Peep Laja has put into one blog post most of the hard lessons we’ve learned over the years of testing here in the Conversion Lab. Peep doesn’t mince words (“There is no best color”).
Don’t let all of this scare you. It’s better to try and learn from your mistakes than to not make any mistakes at all. Test away! Read Peep Laja’s article in its entirety here.
Are you a CRO Junkie? It Could Ruin Your Split Tests
Do you get a shot of adrenaline every time you see an uptick in conversions? We do. However, we often find our early excitement tempered when a test turns out to be inconclusive.
It can be hard to announce to a customer that you didn’t find a winner. In fact, it’s a discipline here.
Find out what you can do to keep from getting addicted to good test results.
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The audience for any website is unique.
In fact, it would be presumptuous to conclude that two websites selling the same or similar product are going to have equal successes. If this were the case, where would the challenge be? And what would we be doing for a living?
This is why we let your website visitors decide what works best. Seems legitimately reasonable to us. Your website’s success is measured by conversions. Whether that is a completed purchase, email obtained or newsletter subscriptions.
But how do we work through this process? Is there a specific protocol that we follow? Guided questions that we ask ourselves?
We live by a few mantras; truisms if you will. These 9 mantras assist and guide us through the decision making process, ultimately leading us to CRO victory for your website.
We proudly want to share these with you. We don’t keep them locked in a vault like Pepsi or Buschs’ Baked Beans, so here are our 9 CRO mantras. Enjoy!
Let us make your accountant smile.
You can get a free strategy session with a Conversion Scientist. We’ll help you see the possibilities for your visitors.
We publish a lot on our blog every week. That’s a lot to keep up with.
And then there is everyone else offering brilliant, helpful and overwhelming tips and how-to articles.
We’ve made things simpler, and (we hope) a little fun. We’ve created a mini course from articles on the Conversion Scientist. We’ve selected the nine articles that we think you really should read. We even included several Audio selections for your commute to work.
Each time you read or listen, you will collect points. Collect enough points and earn a badge.
Earn your Ph.D. in Conversion Awesomization, we’ll give you a special prize.
Three Levels of Learning
We have nine articles organized into three levels of learning. You can earn four badges you can earn.
The Student Badge is awarded when you sign up to start collecting points. You don’t want to stay at the Student level. It means you haven’t really done anything.
The Undergrad Badge signifies that you’ve completed the basic level of content (basic for a Rocket Scientist, maybe).
Copy that makes visitor stick.
Six email superstitions holding you back.
The four people who come to your site every day.
The Master Badge signifies that you’ve completed the basic level of content (basic for a Rocket Scientist, maybe).
Persuasive copy that converts.
The math of marketing.
Pushing past content marketing barriers.
The Ph.D. Badge signifies that you’ve injected all nine articles into your ever-swelling brain and you qualify for a free site review with a Conversion Scientist.
Writing test hypotheses.
Creating landing pages that convert.
Getting past the bouncers in our brains.
Now is the time to start. Go ahead and get your Student Badge. Within a few days, you will be a Ph.D. in Conversion Awesomization.
I do a lot of interviews. I love doing them, especially when they are on my favorite subject: me.
However, I must admit feeling a bit of trepidation at the thought of being interview by “The Web Pshychologist“, Nathalie Nahai. After all, her job is to peel back the layers of your marketing program until she finds the core issues that keep you from success.
I wasn’t sure I wanted my onion peeled.
My fears were confirmed as Nathalie guided me through some revealing questions using humor and genuine curiosity. I revealed some of my biggest secrets.
The ingenious test that shows wearing a lab coat makes smarter.
The information should you leave out of your website to ramp up your conversions and start making money.
Why your marketing messages bounce off of you visitors brain.
The biggest mistake your making online right now according to our tests.
How to give your customers hope that they can solve their problems.
Yes, these are questions you will want to know the answer to.
Listen to the entire interview
Subscribe to Podcast
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
We’ve redesigned our Conversion Upside Report so you can more quickly understand how much you should be investing in website optimization. We’ve used color and short commentary on six different criteria to help you understand where your site is on the spectrum of online businesses.
The Upside Report analyzes the current state of your online business and evaluates your readiness for an optimization program.
Every website will eventually add optimization to their tool belt. The question is when and how much should I spend?
The Conversion Upside Report seeks to answer that question.
All you need are the answers to three questions:
How much traffic do you get a month on average?
How much new revenue does your site generate a month?
How much is a new order or lead worth on average?
At a glance, the report tells you some important things.
Do we have enough traffic to optimize reliably?
Do we have enough transactions or conversions to split test our ideas?
How much is a visitor worth to us? Is it more than we pay for a click?
How much more would we make in sales if we improved our conversion rate?
These are the questions you should be asking now if you want to have future success online.
Get your Conversion Upside Report and let me know what you learn.
We have a purchase in mind. We drive to the store, any store, and focus all of our attention on completing this mission successfully.
We wander aimlessly around crowded aisles and end caps stuffed with closeouts and uncategorized “junk”. Giving up the scavenger hunt, we now look for a customer service attendant to help us out.
We wait. We continue to wait until we catch the eye of a reluctant employee. We ask for help and low and behold, they are out of stock.
What do we do now? We order it on Amazon.
You still might be asking yourself, if only 10% of purchases are made online, how is it that Amazon is kicking Walmart’s butt?
Selection
Price
Availability
Highest Customer Service Ratings
Jeff Bezos says
“We are not in the business of selling books, but of helping our customers buy books.”
“We are not in the business of selling books, but of helping our customers buy books.”
2/3 of Amazon visitors are return visitors.
Amazon can tell an email was unsuccessful as soon as it goes out.
Amazon changes their pricing 2 million times per day – no one can compete with that.
Brian Massey attended Conversion Conference and captured this infodoodle of Bryan’s Keynote Presentation: How Amazon Uses Relentless Customer-Focused Optimization to Crush Competitors.
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This is a guest post by Ryan Farris. According to a study conducted by Bain and Co., the cost of acquisition for a new customer can be 600-700% more expensive than retaining an existing customer. This is not surprising to anyone. So, why is that so many companies still struggle with high rates of attrition. Sure, part of it is “the grass is always greener” mentality that some consumers adopt, but part of it is that the people on the front lines are not equipped with the tools needed to build the trust and provide the value that customers need.
With the availability of information online, on television, and real-time social media updates, customers are equipped with more information than ever before. With access to all of this free information, it is more important than ever to prove your worth. Today, your worth is measured by customer service, trust, and convenience.
The State of Customer Service in a Consumer Driven Marketing – ClickSoftware Field Management
If you cannot prove to be more valuable to them than the other sources, then you’re on your way to paying those inflated acquisition costs again.
Businesses find themselves unable to provide that value. In a recent study, Forrester determined that poor systems, outdated customer service interfaces and archaic applications meant that forty-two percent of customer service agents were unable to efficiently resolve consumer issues and disputes.
This poor service is not without consequences. A study by Global Customer Services indicates that consumers are twice as likely to share negative customer service experiences as they are positive ones. Avoiding negative reviews by equipping your reps with the tools necessary provide a positive experience would be a priority for any company.
This Zendesk infographic highlights the effects of bad customer service.
It isn’t sufficient to offer a great product at a great price.
According to Bain and Co., a customer is 400% more likely to switch to a competitor if their problem is with a company’s service.
According to Bain and Co., a customer is 400% more likely to switch to a competitor if their problem is with a company’s service. Your excellent service must be delivered promptly. Customers are 33% more likely to recommend a brand that provides a quick response, even if it proves ineffective. Twelve percent are willing to recommend a brand that provides an effective response even if it is slow. Clearly, speed is king.
To summarize, fast service is how you keep customers and minimize your acquisition costs. Fast service requires that your service reps have instant access to information that will allow them to deal with customer issues. This is as much a marketing issue as a service issue.
We call this “Relationship Marketing.” Relationship marketing platforms put important information in the hands of sales reps and service agents, information needed to satisfy customers. Marketing is no longer at the mercy of other organizations to retain customers with tools like these. Instead, they can feed the necessary content, assets and data sources directly to the people on the front lines.
When you retain customers, you retain revenue and can reduce acquisition costs. Relationship management empowers your sales and service organizations to succeed with existing clients.
Ryan Farris is the President of EarthIntegrate. At Earthintegrate, he has focused his energies on aiding and empowering enterprise companies to grow and manage sales/marketing in complex or regulated industries.You can connect with Ryan on LinkedIn. Visit Earthintegrate Resources to get more Technology Powered Resources, such as whitepapers and case studies, from Earthintegrate.
As scientists, we like to break things down to their essence, to understand the things that make them work. This works well when we’re optimizing websites.
Now it’s St. Patrick’s Day. What are the components of this rowdy holiday?
We decided to create our own website optimization holiday modeled on St. Patty’s Day. Our analysis indicates that we need two things:
A Patron Saint
Beer
Here’s what we did for today’s celebration.
Select a Patron Saint
Tell us who your patron saint will be. Image Credit: iconsatoare.
In selecting a patron saint for our holiday, we considered a number of the saints of the Web.
St. Phatty is the the patron saint of online apparel stores. St. Maverick is the patron saint of industry changing online services like Amazon. St. Splatrick is the patron saint of online paintball vendors. St. Hattrick is the patron saint of magician websites. Can you guess the what St. Latte is the patron saint of? You pick your own patron saint and get ready to celebrate.
We decided that St. Buyschtuff would be the patron saint of online business. We created a mythology for St. Buyschtuff.
St. Buyschtuff: The Patron Saint of Marketers and Advertisers
St. Buyschtuff is a mythical figure frequently credited with influencing important purchases. For example, St. Buyschtuff is credited with selling both the watch fob and brush set detailed in the classic story “The Gift of the Magi”. When the three wise men were debating what to get the future king of the Christian faith, who did they consult? St. Buyschtuff is often credited with recommending the Frankincense and Myrrh, but thought the gold a bit garish.
St. Buyschtuff’s name is invoked whenever transactions are made. He is rumored to have been the original Easter Bunny and to have worked under the pseudonym “St. Valentine.” Saint Nicholas (aka Santa Claus) is said to have consulted with him about how to best use flying reindeer. Historian Herman Sellers said, “History is rife with bad deals and ill-advised transactions. However, whenever there is a purchase or transaction that results in great good for both buyer and seller, St. Buyschtuff’s name is frequently invoked.”
Tell us who your patron saint is in the comments.
Before we can have a party, we have some work to do. The second step is to “make beer.” For this article, “make beer” is a euphemism, like “make bank”, “print money”, “rev the revenue”, or “buy papa a new pair of shoes.”
If you’re St. Patrick and just had a long day of driving snakes out of Ireland, you want a cold brew with a little kick.
If you’re St. Buyschtuff and just had a long day driving abandoners out of websites, you want cold hard cash with a big kick.
St. Buyschtuff’s Day Brew or How CRO is Like St. Patrick’s Day
St. Patty’s brew is created in a boiler with hops and malted barley. Heat is applied at key points and carefully monitored to bring out the starches. Then yeast is introduced as a catalyst that turns the starch into buzz-inducing ethyl alcohol.
The St. Buyschtuff brew, in similar fashion, is created on a website rather than a boiler. It is filled with content and offers instead of hops and barley. The heat comes from traffic. Trust and proof are the catalysts that convert visits into buzz-inducing conversions.
Content and Offers
Before you begin brewing your content and offers, you need to go through a process of cleansing the content of self-serving, posing and irrelevant messages. You want a pure value proposition, enticing offers and nothing more. We’ll add some of your company information into the mix near the end of the process.
Don’t neglect images and video. Avoid filler images and stock photography, what we call “business porn”. Instead use images to better communicate your value proposition.
Turn on the heat (more how CRO is like St. Patrick’s Day)
Our mix is heated in the fire of live traffic. Traffic may come from search engines, paid ads, email or social networks. Each of these kinds of traffic burns at different intensity levels.
Our beer-brewing brothers and sisters must maintain the temperature of the flame in a tight range. We try to control our traffic quality as well. We may get less traffic than we could, but bringing qualified visitors is key to keeping the right temperature.
StumbleUpon traffic is the wrong traffic for most businesses. Social media networks deliver visitors who were doing something else, and work mostly for spontaneous purchases. Where are your qualified visitors. Yes, this is the question we are always asking. We never stop asking this.
Add some Catalysts
To drive fermentation, beer brewers introduce a bacteria called yeast. It processes the sugars extracted from the barley and convers them into CO2 and ethyl alcohol. The CO2 is vented off. The alcohol is kept.
Likewise, we need to add a catalyst to our website. We choose trust and proof. If your brand, company and products demonstrates proof or builds trust, now is the time to introduce this to the site.
Proof and trust process the content on the site and convert it into abandonment and conversion. Abandonment is, by definition, vented off. It is an inevitable part of the process.
Conversion is kept and will give us a nice “checkbook buzz” on the celebratory day of our patron saint.
Experiment (yes, CRO is like St. Patrick’s Day)
Brewmasters experiment with their mix, and they can’t just test one stage. They change the process, the temperature, the length of each stage and even add unexpected elements like fruit to the process.
But they always complete the beer before judging their changes. They can’t sample the “wort” or the “trub” and predict how the final beer will taste.
Likewise, we must test our website to the dollars. We like metrics like Revenue per Visit and Revenue per Click when testing. Testing to “engagement” or email “click-through rate” doesn’t let us test the right result.
We always measure to the dollars.
Happy St. Buyschtuff Day!
We celebrate our wins like the Irish celebrate the St. Patrick’s driving away of the snakes. We summarize the results, take the credit, and slap high fives.
Then we start working on the next conversion rate increasing brew.
Tell us what you’re brewing up for your day of celebration in the comments.
