Dennis van der Heijden has researched the implications of GDPR compliance on a variety of tools that we use everyday to optimize websites. He covers conversion rate optimzation (CRO) tools that include workflow, digital analytics, form analytics, heatmap, session recording, on-site surveys, QA, performance optimization, and A/B testing tools.
Sure, GDPR is complicated—but here’s one thing that is clear:
GDPR affects you.
(Assuming, that is, you collect any personal data, from any EU citizen, at any point, ever).
The General Data Protection Regulation is ambitious. It expands the scope of what counts as “personal data.” It creates new standards for how we ask for “consent” to process personal data. And it remaps who are held to these new rules.
These things taken together mean: if you collect EU email addresses, or have cookies on your site tracking EU web visitors, or use any tools that hold on to any personal data, of any EU citizen—you now should be complying with GDPR.
And so should every piece of data processing software you rely on.
It sounds overwhelming. But it’s more manageable than you think. Here we’ll break down the common types of CRO tools you may be using—and how to ensure they’re ready for GDPR’s May 25th enstate-date.
A quick note on personal data
Personal data is intuitive–but it might not mean what you think it means.
You may be familiar with PII (Personally Identifiable Information), the North American standard for data that identifies a person, and requires special consideration.
GDPR’s definition of Personal Data includes quite a few things that PII doesn’t cover. Here’s a full breakdown:
| Personal Identifiable Data (PII) |
Personal Data |
- Full name (if not common)
- Home address
- Email address
- National identification number
- Passport number
- Vehicle registration plate number
- Driver’s license number
- Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
- Credit card numbers
- Digital identity
- Date of birth
- Birthplace
- Genetic information
- Telephone number
- Login name, screen name, nickname, or handle
|
- Full name (if not common)
- Home address
- Email address
- National identification number
- Passport number
- Vehicle registration plate number
- Driver’s license number
- Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
- Credit card numbers
- Digital identity
- Date of birth
- Birthplace
- Genetic information
- Telephone number
- Login name, screen name, nickname, or handle
+
- IP-address
- Unique identifiers like Device IDs, UserID, TransactionID, CookieID
- Pseudonymous data (that’s unrecognizable data + key on different spot to make it readable again)
|
The big shocks here, if you’re used to the scope of PII, are cookies, and IP-addresses: both of which a readily collected by a number of our favorite marketing tools.
As we start to walk through the programs in your standard, marketing toolkit, we suggest you look at how your marketing software, gets you the information it collects, and whether or not, in doing so, it collects personal data.
Moving personal data outside of Europe
Transferring EU personal data, outside of the EU, can be a mess.
It’s easiest done when it’s transferred to a country that the EU has deemed have an “adequate” level of personal data protection.
That list is here.
It is short.
And the US is not on it.
Except, for entities that have participated in the Privacy Shield agreement.
Basically, a Privacy Shield company is a company that meets EU standards for adequate data protection. If you’re dealing with a company that is Privacy Shield compliant, facilitating data transfers is no problem.
But if you’re not, you have a few (exhausting) options: model contracts, and binding corporate rules. It’s too much to go into here, but the ICO has a great overview of what that looks like.
All this is to say: if you store any of the above mentioned personal data, in any of the tools you use for your CRO program, make sure the program is Privacy Shield Certified, hosted in Europe, or hosted in an “adequately” protected country.
Otherwise, you’re transferring data out of EU borders, and have to be ready to contend with some lengthy, bureaucratic headaches.
You can find a list of Privacy Shield countries here. And a list of marketing tools we’ve vetted based on GDPR compliance here.
Conversion Process Workflow Tools
Workflow tools like Podio and Asana, and the more specialized tools like Effective Experiments and Growthhackers Northstar may contain personal data that is covered under GDPR compliance.
For example, your European employees’ details can be stored there, which, in and of itself, is personal data. But also, you’d be amazed by how easily companies can store customer data in their workflow tools without realizing it.
It’s recommended to use links to your CRM when talking about customers in your workflow tools. Don’t use full names and email addresses. you might need to erase everything stored in there now that would be considered personal data, as all comments might not be editable.
Most of the workflow tools specifically designed with CRO in mind have an integration with A/B testing tools. Keep integrations like this in mind when you pull in any data that may contain personal data (like IP’s and orderID’s).
Whenever you store user information—you need a legal basis for doing so.
Your customer data might be alright, as long as you have a well written privacy policy. If your customers have opted into that privacy policy when they completed a transaction, they’ve opted into a contract, which can give you the legal grounds for storing their personal data.
Data like IP’s, and orderID’s, on the other hand, cannot be stored unless the website visitor gave consent. Or, your privacy policy states why legitimate interest was chosen as a legal basis.
In addition, check where the servers are located, depending on the country the tool might need a Privacy Shield certification.
Digital (Web) or Mobile Analytics
We’ve got amazing tools out there that analyze, and even predict what user might do. They automatically profile, categorize, and store a massive amount of data.
And that’s how we tend to use them. We store as much as we can about our user’s behavior—since we never know what segments, we, or our machine learning tools, will find to be profitable.
This is a problem.
GDPR compliance mandates data minimization, meaning that processed data is “adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary“ to fulfill a data subjects purpose (Article 5).
Processes that automatically profile, and make decisions, are explicitly mentioned in the law. You should be storing only the data you need to fulfill your audience’s purposes, or you should find a legal basis for which to store it (like consent).
For example, if your site’s sells clothes, and your visitors come to your site to buy clothes, combining their browsing patterns with third-party data to create consumer profiles doesn’t help them fulfill their purpose. It just adds to your data stockpile. This means, you require a legal basis—most commonly, asking for consent—in order to use those tools.
You should also make sure that automated profiling and decision making does not discriminate European users from seeing and receiving the same opportunities as others.
Tools like Google Analytics can be made compliant. We documented the process here. However, massive analytics storage tools like Heap, or predictive analytics tools will need a very close look over. If you’re going to continue to use them, it’s best to hire a legal professional to analyze your setup and its use.
Form analytics are useful. They’re key to discovering the optimal number of forms, and the order of form fields. They also can expose and store personal data.
For GDPR compliance, set your form analytics tools to mask all content and make sure you don’t store and analyze niche segments.
Here’s why niche segments can be a problem: if, when you combine all the data you collect, you have enough data to identify an individual—you are storing personal data.
Country data isn’t necessarily personal data. Neither is a company name. But if you’ve isolated the fact that I’m a team member of the company Convert, and you’ve stored my country, you’ve stored personal data. I’m the only one in the company working from Spain.
If you don’t setup these tools correctly, you might lose then from your toolbox with European sites.
You will also want to make sure that all scripts and data are stored and loaded from Europe, or you are transferring data outside Europe and the tool needs a data transfer agreement.
GDPR Compliance and ePrivacy
Let me interrupt discussion of the tools for a moment and share a little bureaucracy with you. GDPR is the law everyone writes about, and that is the one that actually becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018.
But there’s another law that works with it, hand in hand. It’s called the ePrivacy Directive, it’s a bit more specialized, it deals with all things digital (like cookies) and it’s already in place in Europe.
Most tools used in CRO and installed on your website are subject to the laws spelled out in the ePrivacy Directive. Their cookie use is regulated and, generally, the rules follow “opt-out” requirements. Basically, you should let your users know you’re tracking cookies, so they can decide to restrict it.
The problems we face as CRO experts are that GDPR changes these standards. Cookie identifiers and IP’s are now personal data (according to GDPR) and therefore require a legal basis to process, like consent, or legitimate interest.
So the ePrivacy Directive says cookies are opt-out and GDPR says they require a legal processing basis.
To make things even more complicated, new ePrivacy Regulations are coming, to replace the ePrivacy directive. These new regulations were supposed to be in place by May 25th as well but got delayed, and it may be a year or two before they get instantiated.
For now, there’s the draft legislation, which clarifies that cookie identifiers and IP’s need a legal basis.
There are, however, exceptions, like analytics tools. You can install these without consent and as long as they’re mentioned in the cookie notice or privacy policy.
So when you see vendors of CRO tools trying to tell you analytics tools are exempt from GDPR, they may be referring to a law that’s not in place yet (ePrivacy Regulations), or by using the existing “opt-out” precedent set in the ePrivacy Directive.
But know that when GDPR and ePrivacy Regulations are both in place this gap in clarity will be sorted.
Mouse Tracking / Heatmaps and Session Recording Tools
I think by now you can start guessing what I’m about to say. I don’t want to send the CRO market back to the middle ages because of compliance issues. But, in 2018, privacy matters, and you need to consider it as a CRO expert.
The easiest tools in this stack to make compliant are heatmaps and mouse tracking. Make sure you don’t track the mouse details or have your scroll depth set to one person. Don’t combine data from other sources to zoom into one user.
I don’t expect your mouse tracking to store personal data, but understand what is being used to track visitors, and double check the table on top of this article.
Session recording tools make me a bit more nervous. It feels more invasive—but if it’s being done without IP address, country data, or user data—you might be okay. Check the tools you are using and a legal professional.
Here’s why I’m doubtful, and I suggest you’d get consent before you use session recording.
It’s literally storing individual, personal, actions online. Trying to explain to an authority that “it’s not personal data” seems like a bit of a stretch.
It’s scary to admit, but this data may require opt-ins to use. Being fined for lack of GDPR compliance is a scary, too.
This isn’t Just About GDPR. This is About Your Brand.
What if you don’t ask for consent for some of these tools? Let’s say that you find a legal way to rely on the legitimate interests condition. And you hide this data usage in your privacy policy.
What if you’re hacked?
How do you explain to your customers, your users, or a journalist that individuals have their session recordings published online. And that technically, sure. It’s in the policy. People should’ve expected that.
Then replace “session recordings” with any of the other tools and see how you feel.
I’m not saying you couldn’t defend it in court, or with the privacy authorities. But ask yourself this: can you defend it in public? GDPR says you need to report breaches of personal data affecting users within 72 hours. So your contingency plan here should include the idea of defending this breach on TechCrunch.
It’s a great idea to apply this gut feeling and TechCrunch check when selecting the tools you use. We killed a lead generation method that we found hard-to-defend because of this check.
Quality Assurance Tools
You shouldn’t really face any roadblocks to improving customer satisfaction.
Once someone is a customer, they’ve likely signed a contract with you . They’ve acknowledged your terms and your privacy policy.
So they should already have given you the legal basis you need to process their data. Just make sure you add your tools, and your purpose for using them, in your privacy policy—so when customers opt-in, and begin a relationship with you, it’s clear what they’re getting into.
Qualitative surveys and polling tools after GDPR
If you use pop-up surveys which ask random people a few questions about your site, we don’t anticipate there being any compliance problems.
But if you survey people based on IPs, or country information, or more specific audience filtering, then your tool here might be storing personal data. It may even fall under audience profiling.
So when you use personal data to select who you will poll or survey, you’d need a legal basis first, before your survey ever pops up. You can’t just ask for consent with your pop up. That would be too late.
For customers, a simple NPS question can fall under the legal basis of a contract. You might be able to get away with using the legitimate interests condition, for people on the payment page who have already (legally) given you their personal data.
In contrast, you would have a hard time defending “legitimate interest” as a legal processing basis for a web visitor that browsed, say, five pages, over a three-day period. Here, you’d have dropped a cookie (personal data), stored a country (personal data), or an IP address (personal data), and held onto their browsing data — potentially, in conjunction with this other information, personal data.
Here, asking for consent to survey, is best.
Since these tools look from the outside to your website, there should no personal data (but your own) stored in the speed analytics tool. It shouldn’t cause a problem for your website visitors.
When, however, you have a system that stores website visitor, country, state, city, and device type—or maybe things like device ID, or multiple locations of the same device—then again we start talking about personal data, and you need to consider your legal processing basis.
Testing Tools
This is my bread and butter. To be transparent: I’m the CEO of Convert.com. We make A/B testing software and have been investing pretty heavily in GDPR compliance.
So I know more than a little on how tools like this need to adjust to comply with the law.
A/B testing tools can fall under “profiling” and automated decision making, for which GDPR compliance requires a legal basis. This fits the bill when you use third-party cookies to determine what pages users visited, or connect to services that share personal interest from other websites (for example: “person lives in rich zip code area”).
If you’re using your A/B testing platform this way, you are definitely going to need consent. And you need to make sure the consent was given at the time of the third-party data collection. So keep this in mind if you’re using testing and personalization enriched with third-party interest data.
When your A/B testing tools collect IP addresses, or zip codes, or city level data, and stores that data with the record of the visitor, you need consent. If you use segmentation or universal user IDs across sessions, and for a long period of time (months), I would suggest you get consent.
Accounting for this, we’ve made a lot of adjustments at Convert. If you’re A/B testing with another provider, ask them if they can answer “yes” to these questions.
Can you use the tool in the default settings without requiring consent? At Convert, we’ve stripped out all the personal data from our tool. We made everything work without transactionIDs, orderIDs, IPs, or modified cookies, so that anything GDPR would call a unique identifier, wouldn’t be stored.
Do they bucket data? At Convert, when a web a visitor enters an experiment, it is placed in the bucket “123”, which stands for variation A, of experiment 101, on a Chrome browser.
The buckets have a benefit that they pass the “gut feeling and brand damage” check. If a customer database were to end up in public, all that is accessible are buckets with visitor counts, never full visitor flows and visible paths.
Are their servers located in the right place? All of Convert’s servers are located in Europe, so we don’t have to worry about data flow outside of the EU.
Does the tool warn users if they want to segment based on the personal data mentioned above (IP addresses, or zip codes, cities, etc)? Convert will warn that these features require consent.
It took six months of development effort, but we’ve ensured customers can rely on legitimate interest and can use our tool in the default setting, without requiring consent.
With Convert, you can still capture 100% of your traffic for testing.
When you have to ask for consent to A/B test, that percentage can drop dramatically. A recent study from PageFair showed that, when consent is required, only 21% of users would opt-in to tracking.
So unless you can afford to test only a fifth of your traffic, we suggest you have a serious chat with your experiment software providers.
We’ve yet to see another company make the necessary changes, which would allow for use under the legitimate interests condition.
In Short
Any CRO tool can be redesigned to strip out all possibilities of storing personal data. Couple this with the mention of legitimate interests in your privacy policy, and you should be able to keep your traffic intact for testing, without breaking the trust of your web visitors.
If the CRO tools you select only place a temporary cookie, you store NOTHING of personal data, the legitimate interest basis might be an option for you.
If you then verify where all data is stored—and in the case of the U.S., check Privacy Shield certification—only then you can feel safe.
Now in case you’re wondering if the European Privacy Authorities will really come after you, I suspect yes, if you are collecting large volumes of data and/or you are a well-known brand. As the law is fighting to get itself taken seriously, there are bound to be companies used to set an example.
If you’re a small website, I don’t think that, come May 25th, you’ll be the first on the stack of on investigator’s desk. But I do think trust is something that you can optimize for. If you’re working in the European market, as CRO professionals, there is no excuse to be sloppy with your tool stack.
Do Online Reviews Really Matter?
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce CRODo online reviews really matter, and do they make a difference to your business? The answer is yes, they absolutely do.
Consumers increasingly use reviews left by other consumers as part of their pre-purchase research efforts, and a bad review can have serious effects on your sales.
Herd shopping psychology plays an ever effect on consumers’ behavior online. Groupon is a wonderful example of that, with deals kicking in only if a certain amount of people pay for them. Research shows that the more people have already opted in on a deal, the likelier it is new visitors will commit to it.
User reviews are not so far removed from this phenomenon.
Fake & Negative Reviews
Unfortunately, fake reviews exist, and they exist in a massive abundance. Competitors have been known to leave bad reviews on products posing as disgruntled customers, That is why more needs to be done to help consumers identify a fake review.
Here are just some of the facts why online reviews are not to be ignored:
Negative reviews aren’t all bad; these have been known to create a buzz around your business and increase its exposure, unlike fake reviews that have been so outlandishly obviously fake and ridiculous that they go viral.
Want to learn more about how online reviews can make or break your business? Check out our infographic.
User Reviews are the King
Josh Wardini, Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at websitebuilder.org. With a preliminary background in communication and expertise in community development, Josh works day-to-day to reshape the human resource management of digitally based companies.
Visualizing Your Marketing And Sales Process
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationWhen you think of the machine that is your online business, what do you picture? Do you see something organic? Something mechanical?
I think it’s helpful to pick a vision. The marketing and sales functions are too complex. The tools and channels are changing faster today than at any time in history. Thanks, internet.
Vizualize your marketing machine to make good decisions about where to invest.
Visualizing the process helps us focus on the pieces one at a time, instead of being overwhelmed by the mass of moving parts that feed our pipes, funnels and drips. When we work with clients, we tend to talk about knobs.
Here’s what I mean.
Our Marketing Machine Looks Like A Scientific Instrument
The most powerful metric for an online marketing ecosystem is acquisition cost.
The lower your acquisition cost, the higher your profit.
The lower your acquisition cost, the cheaper all of your advertising becomes.
The lower your acquisition cost, the more places you can afford to advertise.
But acquisition cost isn’t a dial you set. It’s the product of several dials.
The Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer
We control acquisition costs using a device called the “Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer” (ACS). This powerful device has two dials.
1. Traffic cost
2. Conversions — Typically leads or online transactions
We plug the ACS into any incoming channel — search engines, email, referrals, social media and so on. Then we begin to play with the knobs.
If we increase the traffic costs, but the conversions stay the same, we increase our acquisition cost, and the little red warning light turns on. If we dial down the traffic costs and keep the conversions the same, acquisition costs go down, and the red warning light goes off.
So, if we can increase conversions without increasing traffic costs, we get all the benefits of a lower acquisition cost. And for the paid search channel, we can actually lower the traffic costs by raising the conversion rate because Google rewards ads with effective landing pages by placing them higher on the search results pages.
Mathematically, the acquisition cost is calculated as:
Total Traffic Cost/Conversions
OR
Total Traffic Cost * Conversion Rate
If we put our metaphor down for a moment, we know that each of these “knobs” actually involves an entire process. Our “Traffic Cost” knob is controlled by an advertising and media team focused on getting the highest quality clicks for the fewest dollars.
Our “Conversions” knob is a metaphor for a team of data scientists, developers, designers and test techs focused on delivering the right experience to entice action.
All the marketer needs to do is determine if they should be investing in traffic or conversions, then fund the teams accordingly.
Vectron Conversion Analyzer
These are the primary knobs you turn when optimizing for conversion.
The Vectron Conversion Analyzer doesn’t actually exist, but we can visualize ourselve adjusting the knobs as we optimize our site.
When focused on optimizing a website for a given traffic channel, there are a number of knobs we control. I visualize a “Vectron Conversion Analyzer” as a metaphor for our process.
This amazing device allows us to control a number of “ingredients” that can lead to more conversions for any given traffic source. If you read this column, you’ll be familiar with most of the knobs on this little gem.
Value Proposition
The headlines, text, and images that spell out the value being offered by your company and products. Answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”
Layout and User Experience
The way the design draws a visitor’s eye to the important parts of each page and the cues that move them step-by-step along their exploratory journey.
Should important information be moved above the fold? Is there a visual hierarchy that tells the visitor what is important?
Credibility And Authority
A site design’s first job is to make the site seem credible. It should communicate that the company and products represent an authority in the solution space that it occupies.
Trust And Security
The visual cues that tell a visitor that the site will treat any information exchanged with care and veracity.
Social Proof
What do others like me think about this company, site and products?
Splitting The Signal
The Vectron machine splits the traffic up, allowing us to test different settings at one time. This is how we determine two very important things:
1. What is lacking from the site that visitors expect.
2. By how much each change increases the site’s performance.
AB Testing gives you the feedback on your conversion optimization work.
Visualizations That Help You Prioritize
We rarely have the budgets to invest in every part of our marketing machine. Having a metaphor by which you can visualize the pieces working together offers a powerful way to decide how to invest over time.
Using the visualization at the top of this page, you may not have any luck seeding your brand clouds with advertising until you’ve built brand awareness. When it rains, you should invest in the downspouts that drive leads into the soil of marketing.
If your sales close ratios aren’t flowering, you may need to look at the quality delivered by ads and conversion together. Once you have a low acquisition cost, you can again invest in more expensive advertising channels to seed your brand’s rain clouds and bring the rain.
7 Conversion Copywriting Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew About Sooner
Conversion Optimization, Conversion-Centered Design, Persuasion Science21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions
Note: The following conversion copywriting tricks are reprinted from the ebook 21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions.
You just lost some potential revenue.
There goes some more.
A poor conversion rate will pick your pocket day after day. That’s why you’ll love these 7 conversion copywriting hacks. They’re quick and easy. And you can start using them today.
REPEAT YOUR CUSTOMERS/PROSPECTS
You may have heard that you should write like your customers speak. It builds rapport and credibility. Readers are more likely to think to themselves, “This company gets me and my issue.”
But rather than just guess what your target audience would say, use their actual words.
That’s what Sarah Peterson did when promoting her Etsy course.
The highlighted phrase stood out among responses to a survey she sent to prospects.
A key phrase from survey response
She used that exact phrase to resonate with prospects in her sales email.
The key phrase inserted into marketing email
There are several ways you can do this same thing.
SWAP YOUR HEADLINE AND SUBHEAD
It’s amazing how many times I see a landing page where the subhead is stronger than the headline. Maybe the writer is trying to be clever or creative. Perhaps they think the headline shouldn’t be more than a few words long.
Whatever the reason, it’s killing conversions. If it’s not immediately clear what you’re offering me, why should I read on?
Fortunately, the subheads usually have this information. So an easy fix is to just make the subhead your headline.
Here’s a good example:
The subheading is the value proposition
A stronger converting headline
See how much clearer this page is when the subhead and headline are switched?
CUT YOUR FIRST PARAGRAPH
This is a hack that goes back to the heyday of direct mail. It’s designed to help you get right to the point.
Getting to the point quickly sounds pretty obvious. But you’d be surprised how many marketing pieces waste words trying to introduce themselves or state the obvious.
People don’t care about that. They care about themselves. What is it your offer is going to do for them? Tell them right away why they should care.
If your first paragraph doesn’t do this, scrap it and start with the next one.
ADD ASSUMPTIVE PHRASING
Here’s a nifty little psychological hack.
Write your copy as if the conversion is a foregone conclusion.
Simply look through your copy and add phasing like this to some of your statements:
“When you start your trial…”
“You’ll love how…”
“As you’ll see…”
The power of this hack lies with the endowment effect, a phenomenon where we value what we already own more than something we never had. By writing as if your prospect already owns what you’re selling, he or she imagines that situation.
Presuppositions are another type of assumptive phrasing you can use to add persuasive power to your copy. These statements infer something else is true. For instance, if I ask, “Which of these copywriting hacks are you going to use first?” that infers that you are indeed going to use them.
You must accept the inference to be true in order to avoid incongruence within the sentence. We’re wired to avoid incongruence because it requires more brain power.
Use this to your advantage by creating presuppositions with words such as:
Finally. “You can finally get in shape without spending hours in the gym.” (Presupposes that you had to spend hours in the gym to get in shape.)
Start. “Start earning the income you deserve.” (Presupposes that you aren’t currently earning what you deserve.)
Stop. “Stop wasting time on diets that don’t work.” (Presupposes that you are wasting your time.)
Again. “This car makes driving fun again.” (Presupposes that you once enjoyed driving but now find it to be a chore.)
Anymore. “Getting your kids to do their homework won’t be a battle anymore.” (Presupposes that getting your kids to do their homework is a battle.)
How will you use assumptive language in your marketing? (See what I did there?)
USE THE WORD “BECAUSE”
We like to think that we’re rational. That’s why we like to have a reason for doing things people ask of us. But here’s the interesting part. Simply having a reason is often more important than the reason itself.
Consider this famous social experiment:
In 1978, researchers approached people in line for the copier machine and asked to cut in front. They tested the effectiveness of three different phrases.
It’s not surprising that people let the researchers cut in line more often when a reason was given. What is surprising is that whether that reason was valid or bogus had no significant impact.
Look at that third phrasing again. Of course, they had to make copies. So did everyone else in line. That’s what a copier is for.
So why did that excuse work?
Often with small requests, we take a mental shortcut. Instead of processing the actual request and reason, we recognize that a reason was given, and we comply.
It’s important to note that the reason for the request becomes more important as the request gets larger.
When the researchers repeated the experiment with 20 pages instead of 5, giving a bogus reason had the same effect as giving no reason. Both were successful only 24% of the time compared to 42% when a valid reason was given.
To use this in your marketing, look for areas where you want the reader to do something and add a “because.”
“Act now because this offer expires in 10 days.”
“Because you’re the type of person who…”
“We’re giving away free samples because we want you to see for yourself.”
USE PATTERN INTERRUPTS
Attention spans are short these days. Even if your copy is great, most readers will start to lose interest if you don’t shake things up a bit. Pattern Interrupts are a great way to do just that.
Pattern Interrupts are a neuro-linguistic programming technique designed to break the expected pattern of thoughts or behaviors. There are a couple of ways to use it in your marketing.
The first is to keep readers engaged. In a long-form piece of marketing, the reader expects paragraphs to follow paragraphs and on. This familiar pattern allows the brain to go on autopilot. You don’t want this. You want readers’ attention.
Break the pattern by adding testimonials, sidebars, callouts and other devices that temporarily interrupt the narrative of your text. Take a look at these examples.
Interrupting the pattern and flow
Interrupting the pattern and flow
You can also use a Pattern Interrupt to disarm readers or refocus their attention. People don’t like to be sold to. As a result, they reflexively put their guards up when they expect a sales pitch.
But what if your copy doesn’t start off as expected?
Use a Pattern Interrupt to disarm readers or refocus their attention.
Readers expecting a typical sales pitch will probably have a different mindset when they read something like this:
Shift the mindset
REMIND READERS OF THEIR FREE WILL
A team in France first proved how effective the “But You Are Free (BYOF)” technique is with this social experiment.
One of the experimenters would stop people in a mall and ask for change to ride the bus. In half of the instances, he or she added the phrase, “But you are free to accept or to refuse.”
Significantly more people gave money when the BYOF technique was used. Not only that, but the amount they gave was twice as much.
Follow-up studies have proved BYOF effective in requests for donations to a tsunami relief fund, participation in a survey, and many other situations.
It works by combating something called psychological reactance. Wikipedia describes it this way:
“Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away his or her choices or limiting the range of alternatives.
Reactances can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion.
With this one simple phrase, you remove reactance and open your prospect’s mind to your persuasion. “
Note: The specific wording doesn’t matter as much as the sentiment. You can also use variations such as:
When you see how well these techniques work you’ll wish you started using them sooner.
Download the full ebook for all 21 copywriting hacks.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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Finding Website Optimization Gems
Conversion Optimization, Conversion-Centered DesignHow do you decide which elements of your site to test? This question is at the heart of website optimization.
A better question is, “How do you determine what NOT to test?”
It’s relatively easy to come up with ideas that might increase your conversion rate. We typically come up with 50, 75, 100 or more ideas for each of our client sites. Filtering through this list is the hard part.
Here’s the approach we take at Conversion Sciences (my employer).
Step One: Look For Evidence
You should never test anything if you don’t have some evidence that it is a problem. These ideas are called hypotheses for a reason. A hypothesis is an educated guess, an informed fabrication, a data-based brain fart.
So you need to educate, inform and find data on your ideas, or they don’t qualify as hypotheses. They’re just happy thoughts.
The first benefit of looking for evidence is that you might be able to eliminate a hypothesis. You might find evidence that it’s NOT a problem.
Here’s an example hypothesis for the product page of an e-commerce site: “If we put an ‘Add to Cart’ button at the bottom of the page, more visitors will add an item to their cart.”
Sounds reasonable. Yet, if few people are scrolling down the page, this hypothesis won’t hold water.
We can look at attention data, or “heat map” data generated by click-tracking and scroll-tracking software such as CrazyEgg. This will tell us how far visitors are scrolling on the product pages of the site.
If they aren’t scrolling far, then we may save this hypothesis for another time.
When we’re identifying what to test, we give each hypothesis a rating from 1 to 5 for how much evidence there is.
A rating of “1” means there’s no evidence, that the hypothesis is just an idea. A rating of “5” tells us that there is overwhelming evidence that there is a problem this hypothesis could address.
I’ve written and talked about the sources of data that are available to help you with this.
Step Two: Rate The Traffic
We want to avoid optimizing the wrong parts of the site. Our hypothesis list should have ideas for site-wide improvement, as well as page-specific enhancements.
Changing the order of the site’s navigation, for example, is a site-wide change. Adding trust symbols to the checkout page is page-specific. If we were to rate the value of the traffic on a scale of 1 to 5 again, what would we give these two scenarios? They both might get a 5.
A site-wide change, such as adjusting the navigation, has an impact on 100% of the visitors. That’s a 5 in my book. Accordingly, changing a page that is only seen by 20% of visitors or less gets a 1.
Visitors to the checkout page often account for a small percentage of viewers. Why give them a 5? Because what this traffic lacks in volume it makes up for in opportunity.
Visitors who are checking out have demonstrated significant buying intent. These visitors are very valuable to us.
Other pages may not get much attention. The “About Us” and “FAQ” pages may not be so interesting to us. They might get a 2 or 3.
Favor hypotheses that have an impact on the most, or most interesting, visitors.
Step Three: How Hard Is It To Test?
For each of our hypotheses, we want to understand what the level of effort might be. It’s easy to change the text of a guarantee or offer. It’s much more difficult to add live chat to a site.
If we use our 1-to-5 scale again, we might give the change in the copy a 1 or a 2. Adding live chat requires hiring a live chat vendor, doing integration and staffing for our chatty visitors. This is a 5 in my book.
You don’t want to favor simple tests for simplicity’s sake. Don’t rush off and test button color just because it’s a 1 on your level-of-effort scale.
Likewise, hold off on swinging for the fences until the low-hanging fruit has been found. Leave your 5s for another time.
Step Four: What Does Experience Tell You?
Finally, gauge the impact you think this hypothesis will have. This is based on your knowledge of your prospects. It is based on what you’ve learned from previous tests you’ve done.
It is based on your experience as an online marketing team. It is based on research you’ve done, such as reading this column.
How about a scale from 1 to 5 again? If you rate a hypothesis as a 1, you’re saying that this is an arbitrary idea. If it has a big impact, that will be a surprise.
If you rate your hypothesis as a 5, you’re saying you believe this change will have a significant impact on the visitors and the site. You’re expecting a big win.
Our intuition can often lead us astray. You will find yourself rating hypotheses higher on this impact scale, not because of your experience, but because you want to try them. Or you might favor one because you like the idea.
These kinds of sentiments don’t belong in a scientific environment like the one we create. However, we cannot ignore the intuition of experienced business people.
This is only one of the four factors we weigh, the others being proof, traffic value, and level of effort. A high impact score may tip a hypothesis into the top 10, but only if it has good ratings in other categories.
Once a hypothesis has been proven or disproved, there is no more role for intuition. When the data is there, we favor the data. However, when deciding what to test, we like to mix in a little gut.
Step Five: Bucket The Winners
Once we have ratings for each of the five areas, we can weight a hypothesis. We simply add together the values for Proof, Impact and Visits/Buyer Affected. Then subtract the level of effort (LOE). Here’s what part of a hypothesis list may look like:
The top 10 hypotheses reveal an interesting pattern when you bucket them.
We take one more step and put each of our top hypotheses into one of five buckets:
It’s important to have these buckets because when we look at the top ten hypotheses shown in the figure, we see that six out of the ten are “User Experience” issues. This gives us a hint about the overall challenge with the site. It’s not well-designed for conversion.
We may spend our initial efforts finding out what kind of user experience these visitors want since our analysis says that the site doesn’t seem to be giving them what they want.
This is a simplified version of our process. If you’d like a copy of the “ROI Prioritized Hypothesis List” spreadsheet we use daily, send me an email at TheLab@ConversionSciences.com.
Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and author of Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist. Conversion Sciences specializes in A/B Testing of websites. Follow Brian on Twitter @bmassey
Email Marketing Facts
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationWith a limited amount of money in your marketing budget, spend it on things which are going to give you the best return on investment. These email marketing facts tell you why email remains a great way to spend your money.
Unfortunately, many people wrongly think that this type of marketing is dead. The amount of emails I get in my inbox each day says otherwise. Here are some facts about email marketing to prove my point:
Email Marketing Facts
Check Your CRO Toolbox for GDPR Compliance
Conversion OptimizationDennis van der Heijden has researched the implications of GDPR compliance on a variety of tools that we use everyday to optimize websites. He covers conversion rate optimzation (CRO) tools that include workflow, digital analytics, form analytics, heatmap, session recording, on-site surveys, QA, performance optimization, and A/B testing tools.
Sure, GDPR is complicated—but here’s one thing that is clear:
GDPR affects you.
(Assuming, that is, you collect any personal data, from any EU citizen, at any point, ever).
The General Data Protection Regulation is ambitious. It expands the scope of what counts as “personal data.” It creates new standards for how we ask for “consent” to process personal data. And it remaps who are held to these new rules.
These things taken together mean: if you collect EU email addresses, or have cookies on your site tracking EU web visitors, or use any tools that hold on to any personal data, of any EU citizen—you now should be complying with GDPR.
And so should every piece of data processing software you rely on.
It sounds overwhelming. But it’s more manageable than you think. Here we’ll break down the common types of CRO tools you may be using—and how to ensure they’re ready for GDPR’s May 25th enstate-date.
A quick note on personal data
Personal data is intuitive–but it might not mean what you think it means.
You may be familiar with PII (Personally Identifiable Information), the North American standard for data that identifies a person, and requires special consideration.
GDPR’s definition of Personal Data includes quite a few things that PII doesn’t cover. Here’s a full breakdown:
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The big shocks here, if you’re used to the scope of PII, are cookies, and IP-addresses: both of which a readily collected by a number of our favorite marketing tools.
As we start to walk through the programs in your standard, marketing toolkit, we suggest you look at how your marketing software, gets you the information it collects, and whether or not, in doing so, it collects personal data.
Moving personal data outside of Europe
Transferring EU personal data, outside of the EU, can be a mess.
It’s easiest done when it’s transferred to a country that the EU has deemed have an “adequate” level of personal data protection.
That list is here.
It is short.
And the US is not on it.
Except, for entities that have participated in the Privacy Shield agreement.
Basically, a Privacy Shield company is a company that meets EU standards for adequate data protection. If you’re dealing with a company that is Privacy Shield compliant, facilitating data transfers is no problem.
But if you’re not, you have a few (exhausting) options: model contracts, and binding corporate rules. It’s too much to go into here, but the ICO has a great overview of what that looks like.
All this is to say: if you store any of the above mentioned personal data, in any of the tools you use for your CRO program, make sure the program is Privacy Shield Certified, hosted in Europe, or hosted in an “adequately” protected country.
Otherwise, you’re transferring data out of EU borders, and have to be ready to contend with some lengthy, bureaucratic headaches.
You can find a list of Privacy Shield countries here. And a list of marketing tools we’ve vetted based on GDPR compliance here.
Conversion Process Workflow Tools
Workflow tools like Podio and Asana, and the more specialized tools like Effective Experiments and Growthhackers Northstar may contain personal data that is covered under GDPR compliance.
For example, your European employees’ details can be stored there, which, in and of itself, is personal data. But also, you’d be amazed by how easily companies can store customer data in their workflow tools without realizing it.
It’s recommended to use links to your CRM when talking about customers in your workflow tools. Don’t use full names and email addresses. you might need to erase everything stored in there now that would be considered personal data, as all comments might not be editable.
Most of the workflow tools specifically designed with CRO in mind have an integration with A/B testing tools. Keep integrations like this in mind when you pull in any data that may contain personal data (like IP’s and orderID’s).
Whenever you store user information—you need a legal basis for doing so.
Your customer data might be alright, as long as you have a well written privacy policy. If your customers have opted into that privacy policy when they completed a transaction, they’ve opted into a contract, which can give you the legal grounds for storing their personal data.
Data like IP’s, and orderID’s, on the other hand, cannot be stored unless the website visitor gave consent. Or, your privacy policy states why legitimate interest was chosen as a legal basis.
In addition, check where the servers are located, depending on the country the tool might need a Privacy Shield certification.
Digital (Web) or Mobile Analytics
We’ve got amazing tools out there that analyze, and even predict what user might do. They automatically profile, categorize, and store a massive amount of data.
And that’s how we tend to use them. We store as much as we can about our user’s behavior—since we never know what segments, we, or our machine learning tools, will find to be profitable.
This is a problem.
GDPR compliance mandates data minimization, meaning that processed data is “adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary“ to fulfill a data subjects purpose (Article 5).
Processes that automatically profile, and make decisions, are explicitly mentioned in the law. You should be storing only the data you need to fulfill your audience’s purposes, or you should find a legal basis for which to store it (like consent).
For example, if your site’s sells clothes, and your visitors come to your site to buy clothes, combining their browsing patterns with third-party data to create consumer profiles doesn’t help them fulfill their purpose. It just adds to your data stockpile. This means, you require a legal basis—most commonly, asking for consent—in order to use those tools.
You should also make sure that automated profiling and decision making does not discriminate European users from seeing and receiving the same opportunities as others.
Tools like Google Analytics can be made compliant. We documented the process here. However, massive analytics storage tools like Heap, or predictive analytics tools will need a very close look over. If you’re going to continue to use them, it’s best to hire a legal professional to analyze your setup and its use.
Form Analytics
Form analytics are useful. They’re key to discovering the optimal number of forms, and the order of form fields. They also can expose and store personal data.
For GDPR compliance, set your form analytics tools to mask all content and make sure you don’t store and analyze niche segments.
Here’s why niche segments can be a problem: if, when you combine all the data you collect, you have enough data to identify an individual—you are storing personal data.
Country data isn’t necessarily personal data. Neither is a company name. But if you’ve isolated the fact that I’m a team member of the company Convert, and you’ve stored my country, you’ve stored personal data. I’m the only one in the company working from Spain.
If you don’t setup these tools correctly, you might lose then from your toolbox with European sites.
You will also want to make sure that all scripts and data are stored and loaded from Europe, or you are transferring data outside Europe and the tool needs a data transfer agreement.
GDPR Compliance and ePrivacy
Let me interrupt discussion of the tools for a moment and share a little bureaucracy with you. GDPR is the law everyone writes about, and that is the one that actually becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018.
But there’s another law that works with it, hand in hand. It’s called the ePrivacy Directive, it’s a bit more specialized, it deals with all things digital (like cookies) and it’s already in place in Europe.
Most tools used in CRO and installed on your website are subject to the laws spelled out in the ePrivacy Directive. Their cookie use is regulated and, generally, the rules follow “opt-out” requirements. Basically, you should let your users know you’re tracking cookies, so they can decide to restrict it.
The problems we face as CRO experts are that GDPR changes these standards. Cookie identifiers and IP’s are now personal data (according to GDPR) and therefore require a legal basis to process, like consent, or legitimate interest.
So the ePrivacy Directive says cookies are opt-out and GDPR says they require a legal processing basis.
To make things even more complicated, new ePrivacy Regulations are coming, to replace the ePrivacy directive. These new regulations were supposed to be in place by May 25th as well but got delayed, and it may be a year or two before they get instantiated.
For now, there’s the draft legislation, which clarifies that cookie identifiers and IP’s need a legal basis.
There are, however, exceptions, like analytics tools. You can install these without consent and as long as they’re mentioned in the cookie notice or privacy policy.
So when you see vendors of CRO tools trying to tell you analytics tools are exempt from GDPR, they may be referring to a law that’s not in place yet (ePrivacy Regulations), or by using the existing “opt-out” precedent set in the ePrivacy Directive.
But know that when GDPR and ePrivacy Regulations are both in place this gap in clarity will be sorted.
Mouse Tracking / Heatmaps and Session Recording Tools
I think by now you can start guessing what I’m about to say. I don’t want to send the CRO market back to the middle ages because of compliance issues. But, in 2018, privacy matters, and you need to consider it as a CRO expert.
The easiest tools in this stack to make compliant are heatmaps and mouse tracking. Make sure you don’t track the mouse details or have your scroll depth set to one person. Don’t combine data from other sources to zoom into one user.
I don’t expect your mouse tracking to store personal data, but understand what is being used to track visitors, and double check the table on top of this article.
Session recording tools make me a bit more nervous. It feels more invasive—but if it’s being done without IP address, country data, or user data—you might be okay. Check the tools you are using and a legal professional.
Here’s why I’m doubtful, and I suggest you’d get consent before you use session recording.
It’s literally storing individual, personal, actions online. Trying to explain to an authority that “it’s not personal data” seems like a bit of a stretch.
It’s scary to admit, but this data may require opt-ins to use. Being fined for lack of GDPR compliance is a scary, too.
This isn’t Just About GDPR. This is About Your Brand.
What if you don’t ask for consent for some of these tools? Let’s say that you find a legal way to rely on the legitimate interests condition. And you hide this data usage in your privacy policy.
What if you’re hacked?
How do you explain to your customers, your users, or a journalist that individuals have their session recordings published online. And that technically, sure. It’s in the policy. People should’ve expected that.
Then replace “session recordings” with any of the other tools and see how you feel.
I’m not saying you couldn’t defend it in court, or with the privacy authorities. But ask yourself this: can you defend it in public? GDPR says you need to report breaches of personal data affecting users within 72 hours. So your contingency plan here should include the idea of defending this breach on TechCrunch.
It’s a great idea to apply this gut feeling and TechCrunch check when selecting the tools you use. We killed a lead generation method that we found hard-to-defend because of this check.
Quality Assurance Tools
You shouldn’t really face any roadblocks to improving customer satisfaction.
Once someone is a customer, they’ve likely signed a contract with you . They’ve acknowledged your terms and your privacy policy.
So they should already have given you the legal basis you need to process their data. Just make sure you add your tools, and your purpose for using them, in your privacy policy—so when customers opt-in, and begin a relationship with you, it’s clear what they’re getting into.
Qualitative surveys and polling tools after GDPR
If you use pop-up surveys which ask random people a few questions about your site, we don’t anticipate there being any compliance problems.
But if you survey people based on IPs, or country information, or more specific audience filtering, then your tool here might be storing personal data. It may even fall under audience profiling.
So when you use personal data to select who you will poll or survey, you’d need a legal basis first, before your survey ever pops up. You can’t just ask for consent with your pop up. That would be too late.
For customers, a simple NPS question can fall under the legal basis of a contract. You might be able to get away with using the legitimate interests condition, for people on the payment page who have already (legally) given you their personal data.
In contrast, you would have a hard time defending “legitimate interest” as a legal processing basis for a web visitor that browsed, say, five pages, over a three-day period. Here, you’d have dropped a cookie (personal data), stored a country (personal data), or an IP address (personal data), and held onto their browsing data — potentially, in conjunction with this other information, personal data.
Here, asking for consent to survey, is best.
Site Speed Analysis
Since these tools look from the outside to your website, there should no personal data (but your own) stored in the speed analytics tool. It shouldn’t cause a problem for your website visitors.
When, however, you have a system that stores website visitor, country, state, city, and device type—or maybe things like device ID, or multiple locations of the same device—then again we start talking about personal data, and you need to consider your legal processing basis.
Testing Tools
This is my bread and butter. To be transparent: I’m the CEO of Convert.com. We make A/B testing software and have been investing pretty heavily in GDPR compliance.
So I know more than a little on how tools like this need to adjust to comply with the law.
A/B testing tools can fall under “profiling” and automated decision making, for which GDPR compliance requires a legal basis. This fits the bill when you use third-party cookies to determine what pages users visited, or connect to services that share personal interest from other websites (for example: “person lives in rich zip code area”).
If you’re using your A/B testing platform this way, you are definitely going to need consent. And you need to make sure the consent was given at the time of the third-party data collection. So keep this in mind if you’re using testing and personalization enriched with third-party interest data.
When your A/B testing tools collect IP addresses, or zip codes, or city level data, and stores that data with the record of the visitor, you need consent. If you use segmentation or universal user IDs across sessions, and for a long period of time (months), I would suggest you get consent.
Accounting for this, we’ve made a lot of adjustments at Convert. If you’re A/B testing with another provider, ask them if they can answer “yes” to these questions.
Can you use the tool in the default settings without requiring consent? At Convert, we’ve stripped out all the personal data from our tool. We made everything work without transactionIDs, orderIDs, IPs, or modified cookies, so that anything GDPR would call a unique identifier, wouldn’t be stored.
Do they bucket data? At Convert, when a web a visitor enters an experiment, it is placed in the bucket “123”, which stands for variation A, of experiment 101, on a Chrome browser.
The buckets have a benefit that they pass the “gut feeling and brand damage” check. If a customer database were to end up in public, all that is accessible are buckets with visitor counts, never full visitor flows and visible paths.
Are their servers located in the right place? All of Convert’s servers are located in Europe, so we don’t have to worry about data flow outside of the EU.
Does the tool warn users if they want to segment based on the personal data mentioned above (IP addresses, or zip codes, cities, etc)? Convert will warn that these features require consent.
It took six months of development effort, but we’ve ensured customers can rely on legitimate interest and can use our tool in the default setting, without requiring consent.
With Convert, you can still capture 100% of your traffic for testing.
When you have to ask for consent to A/B test, that percentage can drop dramatically. A recent study from PageFair showed that, when consent is required, only 21% of users would opt-in to tracking.
So unless you can afford to test only a fifth of your traffic, we suggest you have a serious chat with your experiment software providers.
We’ve yet to see another company make the necessary changes, which would allow for use under the legitimate interests condition.
In Short
Any CRO tool can be redesigned to strip out all possibilities of storing personal data. Couple this with the mention of legitimate interests in your privacy policy, and you should be able to keep your traffic intact for testing, without breaking the trust of your web visitors.
If the CRO tools you select only place a temporary cookie, you store NOTHING of personal data, the legitimate interest basis might be an option for you.
If you then verify where all data is stored—and in the case of the U.S., check Privacy Shield certification—only then you can feel safe.
Now in case you’re wondering if the European Privacy Authorities will really come after you, I suspect yes, if you are collecting large volumes of data and/or you are a well-known brand. As the law is fighting to get itself taken seriously, there are bound to be companies used to set an example.
If you’re a small website, I don’t think that, come May 25th, you’ll be the first on the stack of on investigator’s desk. But I do think trust is something that you can optimize for. If you’re working in the European market, as CRO professionals, there is no excuse to be sloppy with your tool stack.
Secrets of The “Bad Boys” of Online Sales Conversion
Ecommerce CROWe 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 in Dallas.
Affiliate Marketers Conversion Tips to Improve Online Sales Conversion
If you’re in the uber advanced PPC session, I am assuming you have the basics of conversion wired.
Your ads are driving people to landing pages and not the home page. The words in the heading on the landing pages match the words you used in your ads and you are doing perhaps some sort of testing to find that combination of things that works best.
When you increase your conversion rates, it makes your PPC math work better. If you can double your conversion rate from one to two percent, you have fewer acquisition costs so you can plow that money back into your bids or just reduce your spend because it doesn’t cost you as much to get a customer or lead.
So, if you are doing those things, I thought we would look at some more advanced things.
We call them affiliate marketers, infopreneurs. Some of them give the industry a bad name. But one thing is for sure, these guys test the hell out of their pages. So I thought we would look at some of their pages and review some of these affiliate marketers conversion tips.
I call them the bad boys of conversion.
Overcome your fear of long-form copy: Squeeze pages
This is a gentleman named Perry Belcher. He was indicted for selling health supplements that were ineffective to elderly people. Or at least that’s the way the DEA spun it. He received a 10 year probation, six months banned from the Internet. Shortly thereafter, he had like fifty thousand Twitter followers. This guy knows how to build an audience.
And these are the guys that get the bad reputation. But I’ve had the chance to meet Perry. He actually lives in Austin and he tests the heck out of his pages.
Let’s look at his sales page or squeeze page.
We associate these pages with spam because there are people out there using spam to drive traffic to these pages. Most of these information marketers actually build very qualified lists, and that’s why they get conversion rates as high as 70 percent on these pages.
Understand the incredible importance of the headline
This particular page is from a gentleman named Ben Settle. He’s a copywriter and teaches people how to create copy on landing pages that convert well. This was 20,000 pixel high. And this is kind of the rule.
What can we learn from them, though?
Number one, the hard hitting headline in red and centered. This may not work for our clients brand, but a hard hitting, active headline is a great way to get people engaged in the page.
If we have soft headlines, they won’t read the rest of the text. The job of the headline is to get them to read that first paragraph, and then your copy can carry them along. Be clearly relevant.
And in the case of pay per click, make sure that your headline is relevant to the ad they clicked on. You want to keep your promise.
A study of four diets reveals the key to weight loss success isn’t the diet, but how closely you follow it.
Properly bolding, highlighting can boost your online sales conversion rates
This is for hypnosis products. And this is what I’m seeing a lot. The alternating bold, not bold bulleted lists being used all over the place by people who know how to convert.
The key here is to help your reader through the copy so you don’t have to necessarily use the alternating bold list. But using subheads frequently down the page allows the scanner to get into your message and pick the parts of the page that they’re particularly interested in and increases your conversion.
Check out this article for the 8 elements of a high converting squeeze page.
From the Master of Direct Mail Sales Conversion: The Johnson box
You’ve got the cut out, the coupon style look.
I’m an Aggie, which is Texas version of Polack, and I’ve actually tried to cut them out of my screen before. It isn’t pretty.
The take away here is that we want designers to make us look cool and unique from a conversion standpoint. The designer has to be good at getting the eye to our primary messages.
And inside the Johnson box, you put an important copy point. That’s where you put your offers because it is just tested and tested to continue to pull the eye. How can this be effective? It continues to work.
Explore the magic of testimonials
Testimonials will work in almost any industry. There is a science to the testimonials. The pictures will significantly increase the value of the testimonials, especially since we’re all looking for avatars in our social media.
Use testimonials. Testimonials work. Add them to your landing pages.
The guarantee or risk reversal
Zappos has this amazing guarantee. “Return the shoes at any time in a year and we’ll pay shipping both ways.”
They make it easy for you to buy four or five different sizes of the same shoe, keep the one you want and ship all the others back.
Risk reversal. Have a guarantee or a promise that removes the risk from the person taking action.
We respect your privacy is an example of risk reversal and lead generation. That tells me, “oh, the risk is lower because these guys have a privacy policy and they’re not going to spam me or sell my name to somebody else”.
One of the most tested calls to action on the Internet: The Belcher button
Or the buy button. This is the Belcher button. He claims that this has been tested through five million or more impressions and this is the control that continues to work.
Test your buttons and your call to action to increase online sales conversion rates.
So, you’ve got the price crossed out, new price, add to cart this color specifically, that particular shade, the credit card icons have to be there. And you also have to have the link below the button.
This is actually a full image, but people recognize the underlying as a link. So they know that there’s something to click there, whereas they might not recognize the button.
So, test your buttons and your call to action and you might consider starting with this design. Notice it’s in a Johnson box.
Boost your Online Sales Conversion with Lead Generation
If you’re selling something, you might consider putting something early on, something that will generate a lead. If they’re not going to buy, you might as well go ahead and get the lead.
Now, the downside of that is they fill out their information as a lead could actually reduce your buy conversions. Make use of pop overs, literally putting a box, something that has a higher contrast, that will draw the eye. And incidentally, there has to be some sort of an offer there. So you want to deliver something white paper, promise of a newsletter. There has to be something of value in that.
Capturing abandons
So they come, they don’t take action and they’ve decided to go away. Can we get another shot at them? If they try to close or navigate away from the page, they get an on exit intent message. Ask them once again, are you sure you want to leave? And you have to use these according to how easily irritated your audience is.
The abandoned cart email
If you can capture the information about the person when they clicked add to cart, if you require an email address, you can then use that email to get another chance at them.
“Hey, we saw that you left your card empty.” You can sweeten the deal with a discount. Very, very effective. A great way to get more out of the traffic that you’re driving to your site with pay per click.
Leverage Ad Retargeting on your Paid Campaign
So this stuff can be very, very powerful. Again, you’re taking your investment in PPC and you are just making sure that that visitor has every opportunity to buy your product because it’s in their best interest.
So real quickly, the takeaways from this. Don’t be afraid of long copy and storytelling, great copywriters do an amazing job of this stuff on these long pages.
Consider asking for contact info even when if you want the sale. Pop overs might be something you want to try.
Consider offers for information as well as promotional ads. So just like the newsletter that you’re starting to get a lead, consider doing that instead of just asking them to buy the product.
Use design to draw the eye to your offers. Our friend the Johnson box is an example.
Every communication is a test. And these guys got good at this because they tested. Everything you send out should be a test, at least measure it. And if you can, try doing two versions of it. And I’m talking about emails, web pages and ads.
Don’t sell products that don’t work or you’re going to end up like this guy. And as I was doing some research on Perry, I came to this law resource. And what did I get? I got a pop up.
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 right here.
Subscribe to Podcast
Either way, I promise you will immediately find some new things to test on your pages.
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Visitors Need Value Propositions
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationYour website visitors need value propositions because, given too many options, most people’s decision making process shuts down and they default to making no choice at all.
Out on the internet, consumers have a million choices. And most of the time, all of the choices look the same to consumers.
This drives people crazy. How are they supposed to know which choice to make?
They try to figure it out, but doing so often leads to analysis paralysis which then leads them to not make any choice at all.
Have you ever had one of those nights where dinnertime was fast approaching and a unanimous decision had to be made on what to choose for carryout…. only nobody could decide what to get?
You might hear a lot of ….”just not burgers again”. Or…” please not pizza”. Everybody has something that they’ve just had too much of and they don’t want the same old thing…again.
Everyone is looking for that something….that oomph for dinner…that dish that just makes you feel good. Something different. Because a good meal can change a bad day.
And then all it takes is for one person to mention Chinese and the thought of trying to eat rice and wontons with chopsticks while drinking piping hot tea and cracking open a fortune cookie to find out your fate afterward seals the deal.
Now we know that for most of us, eating with chopsticks is almost impossible. But c’mon, it is kind of fun. And not all of us drink hot tea with dinner. And we know that those strips of paper inside our fortune cookie aren’t really going to predict our future. But it’s kind of fun, right?
It’s so simple and yet so genius. It probably doesn’t cost more than 30 cents for the chopsticks, fortune cookie and tea combined – but it adds a unique value to your eating experience.
For decades Domino’s pizza offered one of the best value propositions around. Get your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free.
It’s probably the only time you’ve wished your pizza would get there a couple minutes late so you could eat for free. It’s a little like playing pizza lottery. One too many red lights and heavy traffic means 31 minutes and you win.
What Is a Unique Value Proposition?
A unique value proposition is something that you offer that stands out from your competitors.
When consumers hear the same offerings over and over and over, they begin to tune them out. If it requires a lot of thought to choose one over the other with not a lot of differentiation, they tend to experience cognitive overload. They begin to shut down.
Until a product or service enters the picture that makes their ears perk up again.
Something uniquely refreshing, adds value and doesn’t make them think too hard.
When visitors arrive on your website and they are greeted by a strong unique value proposition, it stops them in their tracks and keeps them from immediately clicking over to your competitor’s website.
It also helps them to commit to engaging further with your website.
Visitor motivation is always going to be the number one driver in consumer decisions. If they’re not hungry – they’re not going to eat at your restaurants. If they don’t want to be followed every moment of the day with emails, text and social media – they’re not going to buy your smartphone.
But visitor motivation is not something we can control. We can harness and steer it. But we can’t control it. That’s in our visitor’s hands.
However, a unique value proposition is something that we can control. That’s why it’s imperative that you invest in drilling down, uncovering and revealing a really good one.
Identifying Your Strongest Value Proposition
Not every value proposition is created equal. And as you’re about to find out, just being “different” or “unique” isn’t enough.
First, dig deep and write down every possible way in which your business and offering is unique. Every possible way. Don’t leave anything out. Just like no question is a dumb question – the same holds true for brainstorming for value props. Include them all. You just might have a hidden gem and don’t even know it.
It’s been a long held belief that if you just come up with something really unique and different then that is enough to define a unique value proposition.
But what if nobody wants it?
A toy that teaches kids the nutritional value of eating broccoli is great for parents. But if the kids still don’t want to eat their greens – it’s useless.
So when you nail down your UVP, make sure that it’s something that your audience really wants.
Secondary Differentiators
Once you’ve identified your strongest value proposition, don’t stop there.
Also, identify secondary differentiators. These secondary differentiators will help support your unique value proposition. It will help to strengthen it when it comes to visitors making a choice whether or not to choose you.
These secondary differentiators can be things like free shipping, membership rewards – anything that provides added value.
Display Your Unique Value Proposition Prominently
Sometimes businesses have already have a pretty cool value proposition but it’s hidden from the world. I was analyzing a website recently and didn’t discover their unique value proposition until I was reading their About us page.
It was awesome. But it shouldn’t be hidden only on their About Us page. Only a certain percentage of visitors will read that page.
It should be smack dab on the Home page.
Most people aren’t willing to invest 5 minutes on 10 different websites to see if they have a unique offering. Their time is too valuable and to spend 50 minutes total browsing websites only to find out at the end that nobody provided anything with unique value is too much of an investment.
They’re likely to only spend a few seconds before deciding if they should stay.
So make sure you convey your unique value proposition immediately.
Other Ways To Differentiate Value
Having a unique value proposition that sets your business and your offering apart from your competitors is a crucial first step. But there’s also other areas where you need to highlight your value props.
When you provide different services and products to your prospects those services and products need to be differentiated by their unique value. Why? Because it helps them to better understand which one they should choose. Remember, if they don’t know or can’t make a choice, they might not choose anything.
Not only will you be differentiating your products and services from each other so prospects can make a choice. But you’ll also be specifically differentiating them from your competitor’s specific products and services as well.
And what about your About Us page? Are you differentiating the value of your team? Your team members are like no other team. Make sure that you are highlighting their very unique value too.
Delivering a Strong Value Proposition
I hope you have a little bit better of an understanding as to why a value proposition is so valuable. Not only does it give you an advantage over your competition, it also helps your visitors to sort through all the marketing messages they receive. Without it, it can be very hard for them to make a choice.
Value proposition’s are effective in that they stop visitors and grab their attention. Once they see something they like, they are now more willing to commit to reading more of your message and delving deeper into your site.
So take the time to identify your strongest unique value proposition. Add on secondary differentiators to support it and make it stronger. And remember to find the unique value in each and every one of your products and services – or in any other area when you can.
Live Chat for B2B Conversion Optimization
Conversion Optimization, Lead GenerationIt may not seem intuitive business to business brands to implement live chat for B2B conversion optimization. But live chat is no longer only reserved for B2C brands. While Live Chat hasn’t become popular with B2B decision maker just yet, more organizations are adopting this rich media tool to support their conversion optimation efforts.
Live chat can not only assist with customer service, but it can help with customer acquisition and retention. In fact, studies show that live chat can increase conversions by up to 20%. Source: Bold Software LLC, a live chat software vendor.
Furthermore, customers who live chat are three times more likely to make a purchase. When it comes to customer service, live chat shows higher rates of consumer satisfaction when compared to all other customer service touchpoints.
With the uses of live chat for conversion optimization clearly established, it’s time for a complete how-to guide. Here is all you need to know to make live chat work for you in 2018.
Don’t Skimp on Security
For live chat for B2B conversion optimization to be productive, your audience must be assured that their data will be kept private. A full two-thirds of brands promise security to their live chat customers. Doing the same would be wise, and an overall great move on your part. Source: AMA.
Put Experts at the Helm
Customers using live chat want instant answers to their questions, which means that proper and thorough training, as well as modern communication, are the orders of the day.
Integrate Add-On Solutions
Live chat can be effective all on its own, but you can enhance your efforts by adding click-to-call functionality and screen sharing solutions, for instance. Both of these technologies will make engaging with customers easier.
Add Live Chat Data into the CRM
Your live chat agents should be trained to enter all consumer interactions into the CRM to ensure all data is up-to-date. Better yet, you can integrate live chat with your CRM to ensure data is transferred automatically.
Live Chat integrated with Infusionsoft, for example, allows your agents to recognize your customers instantly, making the interaction more personal and efficient.
Live Chat integrated with Infusionsoft
Use Preset Responses Appropriately
It’s common for your agents to field the same questions day in and day out, and pre-set responses can help to break the monotony. However, ensure that staff is trained to use preset responses so that customers always know they’re talking to a person instead of a robot.
Instead of
“I am going to put you on hold for a moment.”
you can be more relaxed, such as,
“I’m going to place you on a brief hold while I look up this answer. I’ll return in a moment.”
While still canned, it’s a bit more personal and could reasonably have been typed live by your agent before hunting for the customer’s query response.
It is important to note that a preset response used inappropriately or at the wrong time can make the consumer feel ignored and frustrated, which should be avoided at all costs.
It’s Not About You or the Agent
Your live chat representatives should be trained to focus on the person they are interacting with and their needs. All organizational and personal agendas should be kept at bay until the consumer’s problem is resolved.
Pass on Information Quickly
If the person on the other end of live chat needs to open a support ticket or wants a call back from the head of IT, then that information needs to be passed on right then and there and followed up with.
Consumers should be able to feel confident that live chat agents always have their best interests at heart, and will fulfill all promises made.
Test Live Chat Often
Don’t just set live chat on your website and then forget about it.
Every so often, test the functionality of your live chat integration, and determine if anything can be improved upon, such as the colors, language used, training of your staff, preset responses, or the add-ons that can only improve enhance this amazing consumer-facing channel.
Make it Personal
Agents should be trained to ask for a customer’s name straight away. Using the person’s name and other identifiable information, such as their birth order, job title, and even location, can help to build rapport, and that’s always great for business.
Take SnapEngage, for example. The brand tells web visitors precisely which experts they’ll be chatting with, making the interaction helpful and personal.
Tell visitors who they’ll be talking to
Use the Best Software
In 2017, the best rated Live Chat software options included Live Chat, Capterra, and HelpCrunch. Olark, Smartsupp, and GetSiteControl were some other honorable mentions. They were chosen for their ease of use, availability of convenient add-on options, and ultimate reliability.
Arm Agents with the Proper Collateral
Your Live Chat staff should be trained to disseminate marketing materials depending on which stage the consumer happens to be at along the buyer’s journey.
From awareness to the consideration stage, presenting solutions to consumers in the form of marketing collateral helps to build trust, with 77% of chat users reporting that Live Chat helped to improve their perceptions of the companies they interact with.
Training Should Include Consumer Education
While assisting customers, Live Chat agents should be aware of any opportunities to inform and educate. B2B sales cycles are on the longer side, and the more education your agents can provide the better.
All that education will successfully sway the customer in your favor when it comes to deciding between your organization and the other guys.
Collect Data
While not the focus of any Live Chat interaction, there is no hard and fast rule that you can’t mine your customers for relevant and valuable information.
For example, just before the Live Chat session ends, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask the person if the website performed to their needs. Did they find your content to be of the highest quality? Were their pain points addressed? Did they find the navigation to be intuitive or way too difficult to figure out?
Don’t take up too much of the person’s time, but at the same time, you should never let a customer interaction go to waste.
Action-Specific Chat
You don’t always have to use Live Chat to sell a first-time customer or provide customer service.
Virgin Airlines, for example, only uses live chat to upsell customers who have already made a purchase. Crazy Egg reports that brands that use live chat for upselling report a 15% higher additional order value.
Go Responsive
40% of respondents said that they would be willing to connect with a brand via live chat on a mobile device if such an option were offered. The lesson is clear. Go responsive or get left behind.
LeadForensics makes Live Chat available on desktop and mobile for ease-of-use no matter which device you’re using.
Make Live Chat available on desktop and mobile
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Give a Rundown
If you want to be extra helpful, provide your customers with a copy of the live chat transcript. That will keep your brand and the conversation fresh on their mind, which can contribute to lead generation and brand loyalty.
Don’t Be Intrusive
While it is acceptable to have a LiveChat box pop up after the visitor has remained on a page for a certain duration of time, you should not bombard the visitor with popups, noises, or anything else. Live Chat should be available when needed without harming the user experience.
Take pet insurance brand PetPlan, for instance. The Live Chat tag is out of the way and unassuming until it’s needed. That’s how web visitors prefer it.
Live Chat tag is out of the way and unassuming until it’s needed
Add Chat to Email
Inserting a “Chat with an Agent” in your emails to give your customers instant access to a help agent anywhere they happen to be.
Analyze Customer Behavior
Agents should be aware of how your customer has interacted with your site leading up to visiting live chat. This insight into the actions of your consumer can help your agent further provide targeted assistance, leading to a more satisfying interaction overall.
Use Live Chat for B2B Conversion Optimization on Important Product Pages
Mark Tuchscherer, co-founder, and President of Geeks Chicago recommends using live chat on those pages where you tend to have a lot of drop-offs. Live chat can help to overcome hurdles and objections, and that can sometimes be all it takes to earn the deal.
Live chat can help to overcome hurdles and objections
Conclusion
Live chat for B2B conversion optimization can be used to assist customers, generate leads, qualify leads, entice conversions, and foster loyalty. To accomplish all of this, all of the above points about live chat could be condensed to the simple advice of: Be immediate with your audience, be helpful, be knowledgeable, and always pass of information accurately and on time. That’s a helpful live chat agent, which is precisely what customers should expect from your world-class brand.
Multivariate Testing: Promises and Pitfalls for High-Traffic Websites
Artificial Intelligence, CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingMultivariate testing offers high-traffic websites the ability to find the right combination of features and creative ideas to maximize conversion rates. However, it is not sufficient to simply throw a bunch of ideas into a pot and start testing. This article defines what a multivariate test is, explains the advantages and pitfalls of this kind of testing, and offers some ideas for the future.