Secrets of The "Bad Boys" of Online Sales Conversion

These guys test the hell out of landing pages

We call them affiliate marketers, infopreneurs or online goo-roos. They push health care products, supplements, exercise tapes, and get-rich-quick schemes. At their best they are sophisticated landing page optimizers and savvy search engine technicians. At their worst they are spammers, forum trolls and comment leeches. These are the “bad boys” of online sales conversion (and they’re not all boys).
While many of us wouldn’t want to associate the hard-hitting big-promise experience with our brands, there is much to learn from these pages, and I tackled the task of cataloging some of the best techniques in my short presentation for the Uber Advanced PPC Panel at PubCon South 2010 in Dallas.
Don’t be fooled by the panel name. Christine Churchill, David Szetela and Wister Walcott dove deep into PPC topics. My angle was that improving conversion rates means more to spend on PPC.
Listen for yourself.
Enjoy the full audio and video right here, complete with Prezi.com animation.
Either way, I promise you will immediately find some new things to test on your pages.
Subscribe to The Conversion Scientist Podcast
Bad Boys Motorcycle Image ©Donna Golden

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Ecommerce Marketing Strategy for Online Sales

Are you a Whack-a-mole Company? You should be.

Wikipedia calls Whac-a-mole a "Redemption Game"
Wikipedia calls Whac-a-Mole
a “Redemption Game”

Every industry has them. Your company may be one of them. They are the whack-a-mole companies, sticking their virtual neck out, and striving to do things better, driving online sales with an evolving ecommerce marketing strategy.
And they often get whacked.
But the companies I’m talking about hunker down in their holes and plan their next chance to pop out again, with more force. It’s in their blood. The Internet is becoming the place they stage their emergence.
These whack-a-mole companies may sell products that range from the common to the mundane. Zappos was a whack-a-mole company. They started out in online sales of shoes. In ten years, Zappos outshone their competitors and sold an almost $1 billion business to Amazon.
The GoodLife Team is a whack-a-mole company in the very competitive real estate market. They are small by the standards of their peers, but like Zappos, I expect them to pop out of their hole with such force that they will leave the table altogether, flying free of the hammers that seek to drive them back.

Patience and Impatience

Whack-a-mole companies are both patient, and remarkably impatient. They are remarkably impatient to try new things. They aren’t careless. Successful whack-a-moles seek to find out what works and what doesn’t quickly.
Yet, they are patient in the long run. They know that they’re going to get whacked a few times, and they prepare for the blows. Theirs is a journey of learning and persistence.
I am drawn to these kind of companies. It is them that I find myself writing for.

Ecommerce Whack-a-moles

If you are a budding whack-a-mole in your industry and want to turn the Web into a powerful sales channel, find out how the highest-converting sites on the Web use ecommerce marketing strategy to maximize conversion rates and online sales. “Conversion” is the magic that makes you stronger than your competitors.
It gives you the force to fly free of your industry Whac-a-mole table by slashing your online sales costs.
Be free, my plastic mole friends!

Brian Massey Marketing Strategy and Conversion

Photo courtesy O Mighty Crisis Blog.

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Avoiding the Marketing Strategies that Don't Convert

Design your Web site around the strategies that drive leads and sales

image I had one of those meetings this week; a meeting with a company that has really come to understand the significance of online conversion in their business. I predict good things for them.
They’d taken advantage of a Conversion Sciences home page review, and had attended my workshops. It’s a good feeling to know that I’m making a difference.
They wanted to be sure spent their Web budget on the things that were going to help their business grow faster.
This is going to sound obvious, but take a good look at your own site before you dismiss this statement: They decided that focusing on strategies that would generate leads would alleviate the need to invest in things that didn’t. They would save money and sell more.
That makes sense, doesn’t it?

So what should you be investing in?

Find out which conversion strategies you should be building your Web marketing programs around. I’m covering the Five Core Patterns of Conversion Marketing for Search Engine Land’s new Conversion Science column.
The first pattern is “The Brochure.” Most of the business sites on the Web are like an online brochure. But “The Brochure” is not designed to convert. It’s purpose is to support sales, often after the visitor has already spoken with a salesperson.
If you have a brochure site, you may discover that you really need a site based on one of the other four patterns: a Portal, an eCommerce site, a Considered Purchase site, or a Site as a Service.
Over the next four months, I’ll be digging into each, helping you choose the right pattern for your business, and highlighting the conversion strategies that you must get right for each.
The next installment is coming next week. I’ll send you an email when each of these go live if you subscribe to The Conversion Scientist.
Photo courtesy http://www.sxc.hu/profile/rometree

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ConversionCast: Convert Someone to Your Valentine at Flavia

Is Flavia going to help us get some x’s, o’s and some !’s?

Happy Valentines Day from Conversion Sciences and Flavia
It’s time for another special ConversionCast compliments of our friends at Flavia. We look at the three strategies that will make or break an eCommerce site:

        

  • Categories

    •     

  • Product Pages

    •     

  • Checkout Process

We also take a hard look at their Home page.
Flavia has one thing going for them: they have metrics installed. In fact, they are double covered with metrics from Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics. This means they know if a change will make a difference in their sales.
[flash /ConversionCast/Valentines-ConversionCast-Flavia.flv width=500]
Will their customers be their Valentines by buying their products? I’ll try to find out for you.
Brian Massey's social graph
You can submit your site or landing page for a ConversionCast. Don’t miss our ChristmasCast if you’re into Holiday conversion.
“Valentine” courtesy Daniel Adam Johnson via the Podsafe Music Network

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ConversionCast: eCommerce Site Gradware.com

image In this ConversionCast™, we take a look at academic software and hardward eCommerce site Gradware.com, an academic software and hardware eCommerce site.
What are the key strategies you want to get right if you’re running an eCommerce site? I offer my opinion in the workshop “Identifying Your Key Conversion Strategies,” which you can listen to free. You can also subscribe to The Conversion Scientist Podcast for more on conversion and Web strategy.

The eCommerce Web Site Pattern

When we’re looking at an eCommerce Web site pattern, we want to focus on the following key strategies:

        

  • Product Pages

    •     

  • Category Navigation

    •     

  • Transaction or Shopping Cart

For this ConversionCast, we don’t have the time to dive into the purchase process, so we’ve focused on the Home Page, Product Pages and Category Navigation.
[flash /ConversionCast/ConversionCast-Gradware.com-eCommerce.flv width=500]
Tell us what your eCommerce site offers in the comments below.

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