The fun folks over at Marketing Words assembled a group of website experts to critique a site, and invited the Conversion Scientist himself to submit his thoughts. iSiteBuild was kind enough to put their site out there for some constructive feedback!
The great thing about this group of professionals is that they all have different backgrounds, and they were given no specific guidance or rules. So their thoughts and feedback are strictly from their own experience. Each one brings a unique perspective to the table and all provide valuable feedback.
Thanks to iSiteBuild for allowing their site to be used, and thanks to Marketing Words for including Brian.
To read the full post, head over to Marketing Words.
26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I’d Known at 20
If there was one thing that defeats your efforts to market with data, it would be lack of resources. Marketing departments are notoriously under-staffed for the workload delegated by executives. It can become overwhelming to imagine doing tests when you’re just trying to get communications out the door.In the interest of helping you find more time and happiness in your work, I offer this excellent list of 26 “time hacks.”
Please. Do some split testing with the extra time you find. Your visitors will thank you.
3 Ways To Increase Conversion If Your Prices Are Not The Cheapest On The Market — Conversion Team
@conversion_team It’s easy to cut prices.It’s hard to build up the value of what you offer in words and images. If you can occupy the high-price category in your niche, life gets much easier.So, I was pleased to find this article which makes a bold statement: “Avoid Best Practice Conversion Rate Optimization”
What?
While your competitors are testing button color, you can be comparing yourself to the competition, being open about your profits, and doing the math for your visitors.
Best practices only get you so far. Here are some alternatives for online success.
Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.
We all rely on our analytics a great deal. Whether it’s checking out your growth in readers or customers, or seeing where your traffic is coming from, website owners like knowing they can see real measurements for their site.
But what do you do if you analytics seem….well….. off? How do you trust your reports when they aren’t producing correct results?
Brian’s new post on Search Engine Land is all about debugging your Google Anayltics installation to ensure you are getting the correct data from your analytics. He will take you through the steps he uses with his clients to get accurate information from Google Anayltics.
Read his full column on Search Engine Land and start debugging your analytics today.
Feb 23, 2013 11:10 pm
Comments:
- @neilpatel While it may sound self-serving to share with you an article on why you should spend money with a company like ours, a conversion optimization company, I think you’ll find the points made by Neil Patel are a great guide to choosing your conversion optimization strategy.
Yes, you need a conversion optimization strategy, even if you don’t hire consultants.
Given Neil’s background of creating companies in the online marketing optimization space (KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg), I hope we’ll see some more from him in the form of tools. – Brian Massey
Tags: conversion rate, optimization, neil patel
INFOGRAPHIC Crafting the Subject Line that Gets Your Email Read – Litmus
We’ve seen in email tests that subject lines can have implications far beyond the open rate. We’ve seen two identical emails with identical landing pages have the same open rates and the same click-through rates (CTR), but one generated more sales than the other.
What’s the difference? The subject line.
In short, subject lines are important. And they are difficult to write.
Build a Conversion Rate Heatmap by Hour & Day of Week in Google Docs
When we dig into a site’s analytics, we try a number of different approaches to the data. Sometimes interesting things pop out, and sometimes the data looks “as expected.
“This is an analysis we are going to start adding to our analysis: Heatmap of Conversions by Hour of Day. We will modify it for our ecommerce clients (as we track Revenue per Visit, or RPV).
You might try this and see if there is an interesting pattern in your data.
It’s Not My Job: Why Marketing is Broken
@TheGrok (Bryan Eisenberg) is one of the founders of the performance marketing movement — we’ve called it conversion marketing. He has the cred to ask the hard questions.
In this very impactful article, he asks “Really, is this so hard to do?” of the email marketers whom he sees as “broken.”These examples should leave you with a feeling of, “Oh yes. I get it now.”
That can be a very valuable feeling.
Nine conversion techniques from the 1920s to try today | Econsultancy
Jan 23, 2013 08:11 pm
Comments:
- @eConsultancy brings the excellent teaching of Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising into our online world. It’s almost conversion steampunk until you realize that we haven’t invented very much original.And we’ve left some smart ideas behind.Enjoy these nine tips and you should be able to find a free PDF of Hopkins’ book somewhere on the Web.If not, email me.
Which Site Seal do People Trust the Most? (2013 Survey Results) – Articles – Baymard Institute
Jan 23, 2013 07:07 am
Comments:
- When you place the logos of third parties on your site, you are “borrowing” the trust they have created for yourself. Such logos include client logos, website certified logos, associations you belong to, and even the credit card company logos found on checkout pages.Here is an interesting study on which common trust symbols are perceived as most trustworthy.
[bookpromo]
It’s job is to give you some ideas about where to invest to increase conversion rates and revenue per visit for your site.
Once you have been inspired, your next question should be, “What evidence do we have that would support any one of these strategies?”
Ask your team or give us a call.
Video
For complex sells or emotional purchases, video can deliver a great deal of information in a short period of time. Register for our report Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects to learn more.
Ratings and Reviews
Found more and more on ecommerce sites, ratings and reviews offer proof to and build trust with visitors. Star ratings offer comfort at a glance almost anywhere on a site. Don’t rule this option out for B2B products and services as well.
Live Chat
In almost any marketplace, there is a segment of the audience who just needs a specific question answered, or prefers to interact with another human being before they can take action. Live chat offers a quick and easy solution for these prospects.
Recommendation Engines
The psychology of presenting alternative products to visitors is complex. In some cases, it can help them discover more options. In others it can give them comfort at a glance that they’ve found the best combination of value and features. The best recommendation engines learn about your visitors over time, and this is a powerful capability.
Abandonment Remarketing
Technologies allow us to gather an email address even before someone has clicked “submit” on their transaction or registration. This gives us the opportunity to reach out to visitors who were close to buying by email. There is a chance to collect an additional 5% to 30% of revenue for those almost-buyers and near-subscribers who got distracted before completing their process.
Retargeted Ads
One of the first qualifiers of a prospect is that they visited your website. Remarketing is the process of targeting ads across the internet at those who’ve been to your site. Click through rates and conversions rates are more favorable that demographically targeted display ads.
Email Marketing
There is power in the list. We call an email list a marketing battery because it stores the potential generated by your advertising, potential that can be released through email. The right email strategy can fundamentally change the effectiveness of almost any website in any industry.
Content Marketing
Great content is proving to simultaneously education, entertain and build trust with prospects. It shortens sales cycles and creates tribes of people with similar interests across social media. It causes your message to spread for less than the price of purchasing media. Successful marketing departments are going to look more and more like publishers today.
Landing Pages
Every ad is a promise, and when you send ad clicks to generic pages, you break a promise. Landing pages are promise keepers. That is why they work so well. They are single-minded pages that keep your promises and ask a visitor to take action. They are easy to test and can be used for any kind of offer in any industry.
Let’s Talk About Accelerators
Conversion Sciences sees your online marketing effort as a reaction between your visitors and your value proposition. Accelerators are catalysts that make these reactions progress faster, burn hotter and deliver more energy.
Let’s have a discussion about how the online portion of your business could benefit, and how we can help you choose the right strategies based on data.
You’ll find us in the lab.
Email us there at: [hide_email TheLab@ConversionSciences.com]
Or call +1 888-961-6604
I remember the first time I heard about the strange “ad man” living in the hills outside of Austin where I live. I was told he was some kind of hermit genius, rumored to command a fee of $25,000 a day to tell companies how to communicate persuasively. This was perhaps 2004 or 2005.
Then someone shared with me a copy of The Monday Morning Memo, a weekly email that talked about the reasons our ads work. I subscribed and was soon drawn into a collision of two worlds; of the science of the mind and the art of literature and painting.
It was the same genius hermit, whom I would come to know as Roy H. Williams III.
Williams had begun to build an unusual business school in on ranch land outside of Austin. It’s a school that would fundamentally change my life and influence the way I communicate with the world.
The school seeks to teach its students how to do what great communicators and artists do naturally. The subjects are not typical business school fare.
The Magical Worlds Workshop
Da Vinci and the 40 Answers
Advanced Thought Particles
Third Gravitating Bodies
The Languages of the Mind
The name of the school was even more stopping: The Wizard Academy. Don’t worry. The school predated the Harry Potter series of books and movies.
It was here that I first encountered Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who’s writing and teaching would form the foundation of Conversion Sciences.
And it was here that I first heard Williams flagship presentation: The Pendulum. Williams’ used music, literature and historical events to paint Western society as the swinging of a pendulum, from individually-centered “Me” society to the communal “We” society and back.
Each swing of the pendulum was on an 80-year circuit, from the self-centered society of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the century, to the GI society of World War II, banding together to save the world, and back to the plastic, individualistic society that spawned the likes of Disco.
It was a fascinating way to look at society because it seemed to give us the ability to predict the future. In fact, in 2004, Williams said “Let’s hope the American economy doesn’t repeat in 2009 what it did in 1929.”
It did.
I’m not sure even he thought it would look so much like 1929 as we found ourselves in a “Great Recession” in 2009.
PENDULUM: 3000 Years of Swings
While Williams’ Pendulum presentation focused on the current cycle from 1923 to 2003, his new book with Michael Drew looks back 3000 years for evidence of this 80 year juggernaut.
The evidence is compelling.
According to Williams and Drew, the Pendulum works like this:
We oscillate between a civic-minded “We” society and an individualist “Me” society. In a “We” it is important to be part of something bigger than yourself. Society will come together to achieve some great task or fix some great ill.
Then we get a little nuts, insisting on conformity and ostracizing those who don’t adhere to group norms. We see witch hunts and McCarthyism during these extremes.
Then the “Me” society begins to emerge.
The “Me” society rewards individual accomplishment. Freedom and self-expression hold sway until things get out of hand (again) and our culture begins to honor fake, plastic and posing behavior. This is when we’ve seen Robber Barons rule (1903) and we’ve hired an actor for President (1983).
And the pendulum swings back.
During each swing there are transitionary periods, heralded by “alpha voices” in technology, literature, art and music. They predict the coming shifts from “Me” to “We” and then back again.
In Pendulum, Williams and Drew use data on book sales, the Billboard music charts and trends in art to map the most recent swings. Each swing is sliced into ten-year periods, in each of which we behave in similar ways as a society.
They then use the writings of historical figures and accounts of past events to map this 80-year cycle back over 2000 years.
It’s the most interesting history lesson I’ve read in some time.
The last portion of the book is a transcript of a conversation about the coming years
Predicting the Future: What does this mean for our craft?
Currently, we are swinging from a “Me” society to a “We”. In 2003 the pendulum swung past bottom and is now headed upward to a society that will celebrate working together, but will inevitably require conformity and punish those that don’t play along.
An right on cue, we have found the tools to collaborate and to solve the world’s problems in the Internet and mobile devices. Fewer and fewer decisions are made individually. Our youngsters have made saving the planet a rallying cry. “Be Green” is the new “New Deal” of the last swing to a “We” climax.
For those of us that communicate, it means that we can no longer control the message. We can no longer manipulate the masses by appealing to their self-centered desires. The community is deciding more and more what is valuable.
Transparency and authenticity are necessary to work together. And soon conformity.
Conflict is already developing as we join our tribes and fall in line. We are taking sides. Republican or Democrat? Are you the 99%? Do you go to church? Do you go to my kind of church?
Just as Communism and Democracy began taking sides in 1922, so too did we start taking sides in 2002.
Williams predicts that we will be more and more willing to give up our privacy for the common good. In the end, it will be the revelations from this openness that allows us to begin excluding others.
Create Your Tribe
If you are to believe Williams and Drew, then you will begin to create what Seth Godin (whom I believe to be an Alpha Voice in marketing) calls a tribe. As marketers, we must give our customers something to join, and a cause around which to rally.
We can no longer define ourselves by what we sell. We must stand for something.
Beginning in 2013, things start to turn nasty. As we swing higher to the Zenith of our “We” cycle, we will be tempted to exclude those that don’t conform to the rules of our tribe. it will become easiest to stand against something to keep your tribe in line.
Summary
Pendulum is a fun, fascinating romp through our recent history with a long glance back far back in time. You cannot read it without becoming aware of the way things are changing. You’ll begin to read the news with new eyes.
If you’re like me, it’ll scare you and excite you all at the same time.
Get ready to see your future.
How does engagement affect conversion rates? Could it impact them positively or negatively? Is it possible to increase conversions by decreasing engagement?
We’ve just finished some very interesting research here at Conversion Sciences labs, and we love it when our deeply held beliefs get blown out of the water.
It’s happened again.
Most of us assume that if our pages are “engaging” to visitors, that they are more likely to convert to leads or sales. If they are engaged, they have more time to take action. If they are engaged, they will truly understand our value and become a lead or a customer.
Look at the following graph of three videos. These three different videos appeared on three otherwise identical landing pages. The graph is “Viewer Attention” as is recorded by YouTube. Basically, these graphs tell us how many visitors were still watching at any point in the video. It tells us how engaging a video is.
YouTube’s Viewer Attention metric would predict that “talking head” video would deliver the lowest conversion rate. In fact, it is the highest converting style of video. In this case, engagement doesn’t predict conversion.
Clearly, we would expect whiteboard style video to be the highest converting video, since viewers are more engaged for the entire length of the video. We expect slides to be almost as successful. However, we expect plain old talking head videos to perform poorly.
Now take a look at the following graph. This is a graph of the conversion rates of the same videos.
YouTube conversion rates graph.
This graph tells us that plain old talking head video is getting more visitors to click on our call-to-action button. This style of video is almost twice as likely to convert a visitor than the slide-style video found in most webinars.
How Does Engagement Affect Conversion Rates?
Clearly, engagement doesn’t predict conversion in this case. Here, engagement is actually distraction.
Learn more about the relationship between engagement, distraction and conversion in my article Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement?
I think you’ll be surprised by what you will learn.
[bookpromo]
My blog looks awesome on iPads with Flipboard. Watch the video and see how yours can, too.It was a Saturday. I was painting the walls of one of our bathrooms. The new color really brought out the tile we’d had installed the week before. Otherwise, things were pretty quiet around the house on this day.
But things were different on my blog.
As I painted, a series of machinations were in motion. A post I’d launched that morning which was being broadcast out to my mailing list.
My social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook – were being lit up with links to the content and people were clicking through.
Those spending Saturday morning with their iPads were seeing my post as a story in their electronic magazines using Flipboard and Zite.
All of this was happening without my participation. I was painting the bathroom.
Eruptions Happen Naturally
My content literally ERUPTS onto the web. I don’t have to push it. I don’t have to post and share.
How is this?
Content is a force on the Web. It wants to be shared. It needs to be set free.
All you have to do is give it a channel through which it can relieve the natural pressure.
Blogs are equipped with RSS feeds that make natural vents and fissures for your content.
It’s time you started letting your content free (while you do other things).
Free Video Preview Explains the Basics
Watch a short video (8 minutes) that I’ve put together for you. It’ll tell you why content creates pressure and detail many of the channels you can let your content escape through.
If you want to get more details, you can watch the full 40-minute video for just $29 at the Online Marketing Institute’s eLearning Center.
For that same $29, you will also get access to over 150 other videos on topics including:
- Social Media Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Web Analytics and Testing
- Content Marketing
- Digital Advertising and Affiliate
All in one place.
All for $29 per month.
I can’t think of a better value on the Web. Get started with my free video.
[bookpromo]
