The little yellow message in the upper right corner of your Google Analytics report can be somewhat unsettling. It appears when you use custom segments on a website has grown to hundreds of thousands of hits. The message is a warning you that the report you’re looking at is based on sampled data.
Does this mean the data is wrong? Can you use it to make decisions about your site? Can you share it with your boss?
The percentage of pageviews that Google Analytics reports in the yellow box can tell you how accurate your report may be. The more data that Google has to analyze, the longer it takes. So, if your report covers a larger the time, the sample size Google Analytics uses will be smaller. For certain types of reports, you’ll be limited to 90 days.
2: Use Sampled Reports for Large Datasets Only
If the number of datapoints in your segment is low, you will find the data in your reports to be less accurate. A report with on a segment with 50,000 sessions that is sampled may produce nothing but noise. I show you how to determine this in the column.
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3: Dialing Up the Sample Size Helps
“Moving your sample rate from 5% to 10% feels pretty insignificant. It’s not, especially for segments that return smaller datasets.”
The larger your sample size, the more you can rely on Google’s reporting because the bigger the sample, the clearer the picture that analytics will be able to make using the data.
When your website grows beyond a certain point, Google Analytics is going to start taking shortcuts.
Don’t be the victim of a big Google Analytics lie
Don’t be the victim of a big Google Analytics lie. Know what those shortcuts are and know how to get around them so that you are relying on data that tells the true story.
Exit-intent overlays are effective tactics for building subscriber lists. Incentivize signups, capture addresses, and target specific users.
The other day we gathered for an email brainstorming session. What followed was the usual list of half-baked metaphors:
“Email is like fine wine, it gets better with age.”
“Email is like styrofoam, it’ll take 10,000 years to break down.”
“Email is like a cockroach, you can’t kill it.”
We were repeating ourselves, but the point was clear: despite being 350 Internet years old, email has never been more important to ecommerce. How did this happen? Weren’t we all giving email the last rites in 2009 as ‘social’ stormed The Internets?
Instead, something peculiar happened: email grew some grey hair and stopped wearing cheap suits. It became a place for business, something we now use mostly for work, shopping, and all kinds of other grown-up stuff. Think about it: what did you do online in 1998 that you still do today? You don’t go on Yahoo Chat, and you don’t Ask Jeeves. But you still use email every day.
What the f*** was “Network Neighborhood” for?
And since Clooney got married, John Stamos stands as the last breathing representation of email: a relic from the ’90s that we still appreciate—and that still looks pretty damn good.
Email is like John Stamos. A relic from the ’90s that we still appreciate—and that still looks pretty damn good.
Email By the numbers
To illustrate just how valuable email has become to ecommerce, we need only look at a few telling statistics:
Over 77% of online customers prefer receiving marketing messages via email. (MarketingLand)
Email marketing produces a $44.25 return for every $1 spent.
Companies see, on average, a 4300% return on their investments in email marketing. (Digital.com)
79% of leads don’t convert to sales, and lack of nurturing is the main reason. (Unbounce)
Prospects who receive email marketing messages order 28% more often. (iContact)
Email is projected to grow from roughly 4.1 billion accounts (2014) to 5.2 billion accounts in 2018. (Radicati Group)
So why is it so much more valuable than social media?
The reason is that email addresses are much different than fans or followers. Gaining direct access to someone’s inbox is the ultimate sign of trust from an online customer.
“Without a doubt our email list is the best investment we’ve ever made.”
Douglas Karr, MarketingTechBlog
And if you build a list of subscribers who know and respect your brand, it’s likely to become your most powerful revenue channel.
The list-building conundrum: how exit-intent overlays can help
The sheer value of email subscribers creates a natural conundrum. How can marketers reach beyond signup widgets and accelerate list growth?
Sure your signup widgets and call-outs help. But they won’t build you a hugely valuable email list by themselves. And I’m not talking the dead-end ‘get one or two leads’ or ‘half the emails get returned’ kind of list.
I’m talking lists full of warm email leads that are familiar with your products, have read your content, and recently interacted with your brand.
The tool I’m going to discuss today is building some seriously kickass email lists for marketers across the web; Neil Patel has used it to double his email his email opt-in rate.
The tool is an exit-intent overlay, i.e. a modal lightbox that activates when a user is about to abandon your site.
An exit-intent overlay on Gr8fires.co.uk, activated when a user is about to abandon the site.
The juice that drives exit overlays is called “exit-intent technology,” which is designed to detect abandoning visitors based on user behaviour. Exit-intent technology identifies abandoning users by measuring the path a user follows through a site, sensing resting moments when users are idle, and detecting cursor movements the break the browser plane towards the ‘Back’ button.
When abandoning visitors are detected, the exit overlay activates and attempts to capture a signup by offering something of value to the user.
And when done right, exit overlays will build you a kickass email list in a relatively short period of time.
4 Reasons exit-intent overlays are the best list-building tool on the web
1. You can incentivize the signup
Customers need a good reason to sign up for your email list, and exit-intent overlays are fertile ground for providing this incentive.
Busted Tees uses an immediate discount as incentive in the example below.
The incentive you offer can take many forms. Here’s another example from CopyHackers, which incentivizes the email signup with the promise of valuable, free information that marketers can use to improve their business.
Offering a course has the extra advantage of guaranteeing multiple interactions with the prospect, as the offer can be served piece-by-piece.
2. Exit-intent overlays are big and bold—but not intrusive
Exit overlays have much better visibility than traditional signup widgets.
When an exit overlay activates, it dims out the rest of the window to maximize contrast and visibility, as per the example from The Chive below.
That said, exit overlays are not intrusive in the way old school pop-ups were:
They don’t disable or inhibit the functionality of the navigation bar
They don’t slow or prevent users from leaving the site
Since they’re served only to abandoning users, they don’t interrupt active browsing sessions
Essentially, an exit overlay acts as a second page view that’s only seen by segments of abandoning users you choose to target
3. Exit overlays can be targeted at specific users and pages
Abandoning users are not all the same; they leave your site for all different reasons. To accommodate differing motivations, exit-intent technology allows you to target specific user groups such as first-time or repeat visitors, cart abandoners, referral traffic, and paid traffic.
Targeting rules can also be applied to pages. You can target (or exclude) any page on your site—which comes in handy for appealing to different users who are at various stages of your conversion funnel.
For example, targeting first-time visitors from low-converting segments like social media traffic can be a very lucrative tactic for building email lists. Traffic from social media usually hasn’t established a relationship with your brand, so grabbing an email address from these users can be a valuable tactic for starting this relationship.
4. Exit-intent overlays capture signups from “hedonic” cart abandoners
If you’re like me, you believe the idea that abandoned shopping carts are costing etailers trillion of dollars per year is utter hogwash.
Yes, most virtual carts are ‘abandoned’. But by attaching a dollar figure to the “cost” of cart abandonment, we’re presupposing that everyone who adds items to a virtual cart does so with intent to buy.
The truth is, a good portion of cart abandoners add items out of interest, not commitment. They’re simply browsing, often using the cart as a bookmarking tool to save items for later.
And a group called hedonic shoppers makes up a large percentage of these ‘casual’ cart abandoners.
According to research, people have two primary shopping motivations: hedonic and utilitarian.
Utilitarian shopping is driven by our need for necessities like housing, food and clothing. For utilitarian shoppers, purchasing is a problem-solving activity.
Hedonic shopping, however, is driven by our desire for fun and entertaining shopping experiences.
To illustrate, here’s Shopify’s data on cart abandonment:
Note that hedonic motivations show up in two of the top five reasons for abandoning a cart. Hedonic shoppers don’t need to buy to get satisfaction; they need only browse. And we see these motivations manifest themselves most noticeably in cart abandonment.
So the question now is obvious: how do we engage hedonic shoppers beyond that first interaction with your cart?
Email is the obvious answer, yet according to BizReport, 80% of marketers aren’t sending triggered emails after cart abandonment.
Exit-intent overlays can rapidly build subscriber lists from abandoning cart traffic – especially when they promise more of the rich, engaging experiences the hedonic shopper desires.
Case Study: How Xero Shoes used exit overlays to grab 3,000 new email subscribers
Xero Shoes manufactures and markets “barefootwear,” a brand of light, low-profile footwear that feels like you’re wearing nothing at all.
In the words of founder Steven Sashen, Xero Shoes allows customers to Feel The World™.
Like all etailers, Xero’s fortunes rest on the performance of paid and organic traffic sources. And of course, email marketing is a key tactic for monetizing this traffic.
Challenge and Strategy
Barefootwear is a complicated product that takes time to explain properly, and educating prospects on its benefits posed a big challenge for Xero.
Further, Xero’s email sidebar widget had a low signup rate—a common problem amongst etailers today.
But rather than see this as a barrier to sale, Xero hypothesized that they could kill two birds with one stone using an exit overlay campaign.
Bird 1: Accelerate growth of the company’s subscriber list.
Bird 2: Use the email content to explain thoroughly Xero’s product offering and overcome customer pain points/objections.
The creative was designed to position Xero Shoes as an alternative to what “shoe companies” offer and to drive curiosity around founder and owner Steven Sashen.
Xero decided to place their exit overlay on the company homepage—the highest-traffic page on the domain—with the intent of grabbing new signups from low-converting segments such as social media traffic.
Finally, returning visitors were excluded from viewing the exit overlay—ensuring the messaging wouldn’t irritate blog readers or existing customers.
Results
Over a six-month period, Xero’s exit overlay campaign averaged between 15 and 20 signups per day, resulting in a list of over 3,000 new subscribers.
This represented a 412% increase in email signups and drove a 9.81% boost in overall company order volume.
Takeaways
Gaining access to a prospect’s inbox is the ultimate sign of trust which is why email marketing has become so valuable to ecommerce.
Exit overlays – modal lightboxes that activate before users abandon your site – are one of the most effective tactics for building subscriber lists. With exit overlays, marketers can incentivize signups, capture addresses from uncommitted prospects, and target specific users and pages.
Angus Lynch is a conversion copywriter at Crowdvert, a Vancouver-based conversion rate optimization agency, and the Director of Marketing for Crowdvert’s proprietary user engagement tool, Rooster.
Welcome email tests that will help begin the onboarding process that turns tryers into buyers and buyers into long-term subscribers.
Email is still the most effective strategy for onboarding visitors. By “onboarding” we mean:
Getting tryers to use the product so they can become buyers
Getting buyers to use the product so they become long-term subscribers
Getting repeat buyers to share their appreciation of the product
Yes, email is important to your business. It can’t be done through Facebook or Twitter. It can’t be done through SMS. Maybe it can be done through direct mail. Maybe.
The first step in these processes is the ubiquitous Welcome Email. It gives customers a first impression of your business. Guides them through your product. And demonstrates the value that you can bring them. It’s what takes them from trial to paying user to a repeat user to a evangelist.
In fact marketers who utilize welcome emails find that they have a substantial effect on their conversions with some even experiencing up to a 50% conversion rate when implementing them into their onboarding marketing strategy. Impressive, huh?
Welcome emails aren’t as straightforward as you would think, however. They need to be tested. From timing to subject line, rigorously A/B testing the different aspects of your emails is a sure fire way to build the most effectual onboarding strategy for your business.
Today, we are going to focus on one aspect of welcome email A/B testing – Content.
Content is what entices your user to click-through and act. You need to get it right.
Welcome Email Tests to Engage Customers
Here are five A/B tests you should be doing on your content to optimize your onboarding emails and get users converting from trial to lifetime customers.
1. Test Simple vs. Hyper-Stylized Design
Let’s begin with design.
No matter how well-written your emails are, if it the look isn’t right the effectiveness will be hampered. Emails can be as simple or flamboyant as you wish. Generally they are divided into three types:
The first type is E-zine style. It’s flashy, hyper-stylized with images and bold font taking centre stage.
Next is SaaS style. It’s cleaner and simpler yet still professional.
And finally Personal. This has no branding, no design. Just a straightforward email.
It’s up to you to test what works best for your business.
Will your visitors prefer a stylized email or a simple “personal” email?
An interesting design case study comes from SitePoint, a specialist in content for web developers. After sending out over 40 newsletters, their campaign started to look a little lackluster.
Their initial emails were uncluttered and pared back in design. And they wanted to continue with this look but update it and get more clicks.
So they ran an A/B test.
The first thing they tested was the template, and the results were positive with an initial 16% rise in click through rates.
Next they tested images – should they include them or keep it plain text? SitePoint already had a hunch that their customers didn’t care for them and wanted a text only email. This assumption proved to be inconclusive as the results were 118 vs. 114 clicks in favor of no images.
This inconclusive test demonstrated that readers didn’t prefer nor mind images in their welcome email.
These welcome email tests were just the first round of experimenting for SitePoint. They went back to the drawing board and tested everything again. They experimented with images and templates until they found what worked best.
The winning email was simple, but a little design can go a long way.
The winning email retained the simple look of their original email. It was just updated, more attractive to readers and most importantly, increased their click-through rate.
Contrasted to this is Wishpond. After extensive testing of their own emails, they discovered images were just what their audience wanted. Using images produced a 60% higher click-through rate versus just using text alone.
These two contrasting examples are just to illustrate the fact that there is no single best design for all businesses.
There is no one template fits all.
You need to test to discover what your customers like and what drives results.
2. Test A Single Call to Action
When you send out your welcome emails we are betting you have one goal in mind – getting customers to use your product.
All too often we see businesses sending emails with multiple links and requesting customers do numerous actions. It’s confusing and will distract your user from your goal.
So here’s a challenge – try restricting your welcome emails to have only one call-to-action,
In 2014 they began rigorously testing all aspects of their emails. One of the tests had a goal of increasing click-throughs on the call to action.
To do this they sent out two emails. The first having only one CTA, while the second had multiple.
Optimizely tested emails with a single call to action against their one with several.
There was one clear winner. The email with only one CTA produced substantially more click-throughs with a 13.3% increase.
Narrowing down your email to one call to action can be a tough task. You have a limited amount of onboarding emails to send. Yet you have so much to say.
Try removing any unnecessary call to actions you have in your emails and just focus on what you believe is most important.
Ask yourself what is the most important thing you want your customer to do after receiving this email and make this your call to action.
Then test.
3. Test Urgency Inducing Copy
When sending welcome emails to onboard your users there are some tactics you can use to convert those trial users into paying customers.
One method is urgency. Using a sense of immediacy in your email to get your customer to act now.
MarketingExperiments tested the effects of urgency in their email campaigns.
They planned a Web Clinic Invite and sent out two emails. One was just the simple invite. The other however, had three extra urgency inducing words – Limit 1000 Attendees.
Urgency may induce more of your email recipients to act.
The email containing the urgency had a 15.4% increase in click-throughs. Pretty impressive figures considering the only difference was 3 words!
When sending welcome emails, urgency can be incredibly valuable.
Here is another example of urgency from Sprout Social.
To get trials to convert to paying customers they use copy to imply urgency and encourage users to act now.
Urgency can be communicated in may ways.
They use phrases such as “Only 2 days left” and “Time Flies – your trial period is over in just 2 days”. It shouts “act now or you’ll miss out!”
It’s a clever way to optimize your emails and get more customers converting.
4. Testing Email Length (How Long Should a Welcome Email Be?)
When a customer signs up you want to tell them everything about your business.
Explaining every feature and what you offer in a long winded email is going to show them the value of your business, right? Well probably not.
Conversely, saying too little can be problematic also. Customers might feel under informed and might not act at all.
Research has shown that the average open time for an email is only 15-20 seconds.
With such a small window of time, you need to test how long your emails should be to have the maximum impact.
iMedia Connection decided to carry out tests, with two versions of an email promoting an upcoming conference.
One email was verbose, containing all of the information about the conference within it as well as links to the website.
The other was half the length, with only a short description and a link to a website containing the information.
A bigger open rate doesn’t mean a higher click-through rate.
The shorter email proved to be more appealing. iMedia Connection reported that not only was the open rate on the shorter higher at 30% vs. 20% but the click-through rate was also higher at 11% vs. 5%.
Short, brief content was the winner here but that might not always be the case. Getting your emails length right must be tested.
Good ab testing will help you find the perfect balance between being informative while also being concise.
5. Welcome Email Tests: Test Personalization
Personalization is one of the most effective techniques to increase conversions from emails. Using a customer’s data to appeal to their interests has been proven to work time and time again. And it isn’t as complicated as you may think.
They recognized that Rottweiler owners wouldn’t want the same emails as Chihuahua owners. So they began to segment in the simplest way possible.
They began collection “doggie data” by asking owners one simple question – is their dog small, medium or large?
Based on this data, they created three email segments based on dog size. Each segment received an email that had products that were suited to their dogs.
DoggyLoot sent different emails to owners with different sized dogs.
The results were impressive to say the least. The personalized emails that were targeted at large dog owners had a click through rate that was 410% higher than the average.
Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. Just find whatever works for your business.
Doggyloot just asked the right questions on signup, enabling them to segment their audience with relative ease.
Whether you just add a user’s name or build comprehensive buyer personas, testing personalization can be a real asset to your welcome emails.
5 Welcome Email Tests To Turn Tryers into Buyers: Summary
These 5 A/B tests and case studies are guidelines. Some may work for your business while others might make no impact at all.
It is important to focus on how customers are reacting to your email content. Measuring click-throughs and conversions is essential. See what makes statistical significance, gets users converting and becoming lifelong customers. For more advanced A/B tests read our Ebook “Welcome Your First Million Users: The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing Your Welcome Emails”.
This infographic from Ecommerce Platforms gives us some insight state of eCommerce in 2015. It’s looking like online sales are going to increase to well over a quarter of a billion dollars (yep, you read that right: billion!), and even though retail sales online are still a relatively small percentage of total sales, brick-and-mortar shops are still feeling the pinch.
What piece of the ecommerce pie will your business get? It depends where you are. Note how much European shopping behaviors vary by region.
The 10% increase in ecommerce revenue is up for grabs. Your ability to capitalize will be based in large part on the conversion rate, or revenue per visit that you get from your site.
A 10% increase in buyers plus a 10% increase in conversion rate could deliver you 21% growth in topline revenue in 2015.
A 10% increase in buyers plus a 10% increase in conversion rate could deliver you 21% growth in topline revenue in 2015..
It’s February and we’re just now publishing our “Most Popular Posts of 2014” post.
We were in a bit of a quandary on how to go about this. Even though we are the masters of metrics, the mullahs of measurement, and mightier than mayhem, we weren’t sure how to measure “popular.”
Wipe that quizzical look off of your face.
Effective content marketing is one reason we have enjoyed so much success, and our blog is the heart of our content marketing efforts. We take it very seriously.
We want posts that are popular to our target audience, marketers struggling to use data and testing wisely in their online efforts. We also want content that grows our subscriber lists. This is how we begin a relationship with you, our readers.
While we want to give you a list of great content to read, we are more focused on learning something from 2014 so we can give you more of what you love in 2015.
Before we reveal our top ten, we invite you to follow us on our journey through the data.
What Tells Us That a Post is Effective Content Marketing?
Which metrics tell us that a post is popular with our target market? We considered several. Our final top ten list was a blend of all of these.
Here’s our thought process.
Visits, or Sessions
It seems to make sense that the most visited posts would be the most popular. We pulled our visit statistics from Google Analytics on a post-by-post basis.
Our most visited post by far is entitled 63 Great Email Subject Lines from the SXSW Catalog. Google has fallen in love with this post. It was published in 2011 and is perennially our most visited post. This year, it has three times the visits of the next competitor.
This post is our most popular by visits, but it really isn’t as relevant as some other posts.
We had fun writing this post, but it isn’t particularly relevant to our business. It has a low conversion rate, low engagement and generated few shares relative to the traffic.
Once we weighted some of the other factors found in this story, this post fell out of the top 10. In our final selection, only four posts were in among the ten most-visited. No, visits are not a good proxy for popularity.
Bounce Rate
If people are visiting our site, but not sticking around, we say they bounce. We measure a bounce as a visit lasting less than 15 seconds. Pages with a low bounce rate would be considered more popular than those with an above-average bounce rate.
Most people spent more than 15 seconds reading this post based on it’s low bounce rate (4.86%)
Overall, seven of the posts in our final top ten also had top-ten bounce rates.
Engagement: Time and Pages
If visitors are spending more time on our site, we could assume that they found the content relevant.
Of our top picks for 2014, Pages per Visit and Average Session Duration were highly correlated. Posts with high engagement also enjoyed high conversion rates and low bounce rates.
The post that generated the most subscribers for our conversion course was a case study from a prospect.
When we’re not sharing our expertise with you fine folks, we spend our days finding out what our clients’ visitors want from their sites. We don’t bother asking them. We let them vote with their wallets and their contact information.
The same is true in our consulting business. If our guests truly enjoy our posts, they should naturally subscribe to our content or sign up for our free course. Growing our subscriber list is critical to our business. This is how we begin a conversation with potential clients. This is pretty important.
For each of our most-visited posts, we calculated the conversion rate. A conversion for our blog is a subscriber to our list or a conversion course student.
So what kind of content has the highest conversion rates? Oddly enough, our “highly efficient” content also enjoys high conversion rates. Three of the highest converting were created from free consultations. One was a client case study. One was an infodoodle captured live at the Business of Software conference.
All-in-all, seven of the top-converting posts made our final ten.
Social Shares
If someone is sharing our content on social media and by email, we can assume they found the content, well, shareable.
Our most shared post was an infographic submitted by another company.
To size up social shares, I calculated the shares per visit, or SPV. The post with our highest SPV was New Ideas for the New Year: Online Marketing in 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC] at 48.9%. This means that for every two visitors, one of them shared on social media – 221 on Twitter, 33 on LinkedIn, 24 on Facebook, and two on Google Plus.
This story was NOT in our final top ten list. It was hurt by a low conversion rate and short average session duration. Clearly, people came, scanned and shared. This post was an infographic, and of the posts with the highest SPV five were infographics.
Of our top-ten posts, six had strong shares to visit ratios.
Other Influences
The major point of doing this kind of analysis is to provide more of what visitors are looking for in 2015. Feeding the content machine required original content as well as curated content and guest writers. Our analysis teased out the value of these strategies.
Guest Posts
Two guests posts made our top ten list.
We had a lot of guest contributors – eleven of the top-twenty most visited posts. So, we were surprised that only two of our final top-ten were contributed by guest writers. Curiously, these were both infographics.
If we just look at the ten most visited posts, six were guest posts and five were among the most shared. Four had high conversion rates.
In general, most guest posts fell out on engagement metrics. For some reason, readers of guest posts visited few other pages, and didn’t stay long.
Infographics
I’ve always been somewhat cool to infographics. They generate a lot of traffic, but didn’t seem to deliver the goods when it comes to engaged and converting visitors.
Boy was I wrong in 2014.
Of our top ten posts, four were infographics. Two of them were among the highest converting posts of 2014.
Two of the four were infodoodles, hand-drawn during live presentations. This is highly efficient content for us.
Doing infodoodles allows us to leverage “celebrities” – Rand Fishkin and Bryan Eisenberg in this case – who may be more likely to share our infodoodles with their audiences. Sometimes it works. Over 81% of visitors to Rand Fishkin’s infodoodle were new top our blog, the highest in our top-ten. Thanks, Rand.
Infodoodles are unique to The Conversion Scientist. It leverages industry celebrities.
Maybe more celebrities would share if we didn’t include caricatures.
Angie Schottmuller
Oli Gardner and Joanna Wiebe
Case Studies
Humans love stories, and that is what a case study really is. We relate to the trials and tribulations of others in a way that “How to” posts can never enjoy. Our top ten list bear this out, with four of the final ten being case studies.
We’ll definitely give you more of this in 2015.
Headlines
Contrary to popular belief, typical headline strategies didn’t seem to apply to us.
None of the headlines started with a number. You don’t have to troll Twitter for long before you see the proliferation of headlines beginning like “# Ways to…”. Only three of the top 20 most visited posts used headlines in this format.
Questions should never invoke a “yes” or “no” answer.
Three headlines were stated as a question. Questions are dangerous. If the answer to your headline question is “Yes” or “No” then visitors don’t tend to read on. An example would be “Are you Struggling with Your Landing Pages?” Question headlines should cause the visitor to ask, “What is the answer,” or “How will you do that?”
We don’t use question headlines on our sites much. Maybe we should do it more.
Other Insights
By creating a weighted score for our posts, we were able to select a list of the most engaging, educational and efficient posts for 2014. There were some surprises in this list.
Only four from the list were found among the ten most visited posts.
Nine of them scored well for engagement (pages per visit and session duration).
Seven where high-converters.
Six were among the most shared.
Two featured “celebrities” Rand Fishkin and Bryan Eisenberg.
One featured a brand (Amazon) and one featured places (Austin and Vancouver).
Our scoring system combined entrances (visits in which the post was the first page), bounce rate, pages per visit, average session duration, conversion rate, and shares per visit into a single score.
Here are the top scoring posts from 2014. Check them out.
Raise your hand if you’re considering a website redesign. Pretty much everyone, yeah? Well, before you undertake such a massive project, there’s a lot you should consider first…namely the effects such huge changes can have on your conversion rates.
Some businesses will pour millions of dollars into a fancy and beautiful website redesign only to discover that their customers no longer know how to interact with (ahem, buy things on) the site. In other words, a double loss. If you think the design of your site is keeping visitors from spending money, consider an approach that’s a bit more slow-and-steady.
Brian suggests taking a scientific approach: he’s a scientist, after all. It has probably been some time since you’ve had to think much about the scientific method, so here’s a recap:
Research
Form a hypothesis
Create an experiment design
Run tests
Tabulate results
Analyze results
Do some research then come up with some small changes you can make and measure the effects of.
It’s a cycle that often ends with a surprise. Our visitors just don’t behave the way we think they should. There are great resources out there to help understand these people we call visitors, like Crazy Egg and Google Analytics.Don’t fret: there are absolutely resources out there to help you get the job done.
Here’s where I could say “You know your customers best,” so you should be able to come up with a solid list of hypotheses with which you could experiment, but I won’t. You should still come up with a list of ideas based on research, but you should be prepared for surprises.
And remember, I’m serious when he says to keep it scientific. Isolate a single variable as much as possible so that you know for sure what is driving changes in your site visitors’ behaviors.
There are special visitors on your site right now. They blend in with all of the others in your analytics, but they behave differently from the others.
They visit more pages, spend more time, share more often and are more likely to buy from you.
These visitors are your account holders. Some have bought from you. Some have not.
Account holders should walk around your site in their socks on the plush red carpet you’ve laid out for them.
They’ve put forth more effort interacting with your site than your other non-buying site visitors because they’ve shown you buying intent. And that’s a big deal for you.
If you expect your entire business to be suddenly infinitely more profitable just because you spent a few hours on website optimization, you’re going to be disappointed: website optimization is an ongoing process that requires ongoing attention and effort.
Your four hours don’t have to be futile, however. You can look to experts for guidance prioritizing that precious time, and Angus Lynch from Rooster asked five experts what they would do with their four hours, and Conversion Scientist Brian Massey was among those weighing in.
Brian was initially – and hey, let’s be honest, still is – pretty incredulous that you can do much with that time.
If I had only four hours to optimize a website, I would spend 5 minutes making myself a coffee, then 3 hours 55 minutes looking for another job.
If I had only four hours to optimize a website, I would spend 5 minutes making myself a coffee, then 3 hours 55 minutes looking for another job.
But with a threat of bodily harm he relented and said he’d take a look at a landing page on his website that’s performing well and come up with several different headlines for it then create a page with each of those headlines.
There’s a pretty solid consensus among these five conversion optimization experts that website optimization takes commitment, not an afternoon, but they, too, shared some pretty practical advice.
Peep Laja of Markitekt and ConversionXL says, “I would check Google Analytics to find where the biggest drop-offs are happening, and would focus all my efforts on those pages” and Michael Aagaard of ContentVerve doesn’t disagree. He frames his thoughts by saying “Check analytics for areas with the biggest potential lift.”
I would go through Webmaster Tools and fix any of the basic errors that they are showing. @neilpatel
I would go through Webmaster Tools and fix any of the basic errors that they are showing. @neilpatel”
So we have four folks focusing squarely on the technology, which is clearly necessary given the topic, but the fifth expert, Angie Schottmuller of Three Deep Marketing and Search Engine Watch, would approach this quandary by “interviewing actual customers or prospects to learn why they DO and why they DON’T buy.”
Read the full post, then ask yourself: what would you do with four hours to spend on website optimization? Tell us what works and what was a waste of time.
Your clock starts now…get to it!
We’ve all seen the numbers. Visual content outperforms text-only content by a landslide.
Need a refresher?
Content generates up to 94% more views if combined with compelling visual elements and graphics. (MDG Advertising)
40% of people will respond better to visual information than to plain text. (Zabisco)
High quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles. (Ansonalex)
While I’ve known these stats for some time, I didn’t feel like there was much I could do about it until recently. I would make sure to break my articles up with nice subheadings and insert quality stock photos or original photography when I had it, but that was about as visual as I got. “After all,” I thought, “I’m a writer—not a designer.”
How I Became More Visual
Things changed when I started writing a weekly column for a client whose company designs and builds custom homes. The column was to appear as sponsored content on a well-known luxury living blog. My goal was to conduct interviews and research on the latest trends in home design and present my findings in 500+ word articles along with some beautiful photography of the client’s work.
My logic was simple: The photography was already performing extremely well on social media. The pictures would be the hook, and people would stay for the insightful article.
The first article of the campaign. It goes on for over 600 words.
While this approach already seemed to be working on the client’s on-site blog, it didn’t have the effect I wanted it to on the sponsored column.
In fact, my first article performed pretty badly, despite all the effort I had put into conducting interviews, despite the great quotes and useful information I used—even despite the photos that had been shared thousands of times on social media. The first article—a piece that used anecdotes and advice from the client about finding inspiration for your home—received 84 views upon publication and continues to be one of the lowest performing posts of the campaign, with a total of 220 views.
The tiny blip made by my first article. We used tracking pixels to watch traffic on Google analytics. As you can see, traffic did not pick up after posting.
Then I started using Illustrator
I had been fumbling around with the program for several months, but never felt like I had time to use it properly. My approach had always been to write the best copy I could and to let a designer help out if they had time. But this time I was determined to do something—anything—different so that the column would prove worthwhile.
So I went ahead and designed some images for my next two posts—just some simple, vector-based elements to use as featured images and between subheadings. They weren’t great, but they were presentable, and the articles performed slightly better than the last.
I wasn’t sure if the slight increase in views warranted the extra time it took to create new visuals, but I decided to give it one more shot.
I’m glad I did.
Taking a cue from fashion magazine style collages, I cobbled together a collage using pieces of our original photography and used it as the central element of the next post. The post received 524 views on the first day of publication—over six times more views than my initial post. Even better, the post continues to rack up views, with 1,626 views to date.
My first post on the site to be primarily visual.
Since posting that article, I have continued to create similar content for this campaign (and others) that have performed just as well.
My next post also used a collage. It received 504 views on the first day of publication. Interestingly enough, this article was on the same topic as my initial failed article—how to find home design inspiration. The difference was all in how the information was presented.
Spikes in traffic from my first two collage posts done in Illustrator.
A few months later, new posts continue to create spikes in traffic, and we begin to gain a consistent viewership between postings.
While I don’t have all the answers to this change in performance, I attribute the success of the collage articles to two things: 1. their overall presentation, and 2. their particular appeal to my audience.
Overall Presentation
They stand out from surrounding posts in the blog roll.
In a sea of photographs, a small piece of graphic design can really stand out.
They look original.
Readers who are already engaged with the client’s brand may have already seen our best photography. These images made them brand new.
They look useful and cohesive.
A simple collage with numbered items promises practical, bite-sized content. Plus, people want to be shown how information relates. Sometimes, placing a great photo next to text isn’t enough.
Appeal to the Audience
They mimic the look of luxury magazine and blog articles.
In researching our audience, I checked out several sites that our demographic enjoys. (Facebook’s recent expansion of its search function is great for this task.) They gave me examples of the kind of short-form blog posts that our target audience typically reads.
They account for the audience’s browsing behavior.
If your prospective customers are visually inclined, too much text is a nuisance. By creating visual content, I was able to provide the kind of bite-sized articles that that my audience expected in that context.
Growing your capabilities will make you more perceptive.
There are probably several lessons to be learned from this incident, including one about knowing your audience. But the one I want to stress is this: learning how to design will make you a better writer.
How do I know? I’m not just basing this claim on the spike in traffic that came after I started creating visuals. I’m also basing it on the fact that now, when I set out to create content, I don’t ask myself, “How can I best express this idea through copy?” I ask, “What is the best way to express this idea? Period.”
I am also better able to take into account the browsing behavior of my audience. I wouldn’t be writing this out as a 1,000+ word article if I didn’t think that the audience of The Conversion Scientist was willing to read longer articles. Similarly, the content you create should cohere with the browsing behavior of the people you want to reach. No matter how great your writing is, you will never convince a non-reader to read—at least, not through a piece of content marketing.
Because I can now create a broader variety of content I also think much more about the behavior of my audience. That’s why learning Illustrator has not only made me more versatile—it has also made me more perceptive. If copy is only a small part of the equation, I can combine my strengths as a writer with my (developing) ability to design to create content that is cohesive, concise, and valuable. Colleen Ahern is a copywriter and content marketing strategist at Page Agency. She created the Page Agency Blog, where she writes about the rapidly evolving world of content marketing and social media. Follow her on Twitter @ColleenAhern.
Tim Ash coined the term “Big fat bouncers in your brain” during an interview on his Landing Page Optimization podcast that he and I were on.
I love the image that phrase draws to mind, because it’s true.
The bottom line is this: If you want your message to affect and influence your readers and listeners, you must get past the big fat bouncers in their brains.
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Writing Killer Copy: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brian
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I’ve introduced you to these two bouncers and telling you how to write copy that gets past them.
Why register now? Find out how Betabrand achieved 432% growth for products nobody was looking for. Get my real definition of “copy”. See revealing brain scans. We all love brain scans. Discover my fool-proof method for great copy. Find out what business porn is and how to create compelling images. As always, we have FUN doing these.
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Writing Killer Copy: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brian
Caution: Sampled Reports in Google Analytics
Web AnalyticsThe little yellow message in the upper right corner of your Google Analytics report can be somewhat unsettling. It appears when you use custom segments on a website has grown to hundreds of thousands of hits. The message is a warning you that the report you’re looking at is based on sampled data.
Does this mean the data is wrong? Can you use it to make decisions about your site? Can you share it with your boss?
The answer is, “Sometimes.”
In my article Everything’s Bigger In Texas: Sampling & Google Analytics Reports, I’ve drawn three conclusions that, if kept in mind, will make sure your reports are telling you the truth about your website — or something close to it.
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1: The Amount of Data Affects Sample Size
The percentage of pageviews that Google Analytics reports in the yellow box can tell you how accurate your report may be. The more data that Google has to analyze, the longer it takes. So, if your report covers a larger the time, the sample size Google Analytics uses will be smaller. For certain types of reports, you’ll be limited to 90 days.
2: Use Sampled Reports for Large Datasets Only
If the number of datapoints in your segment is low, you will find the data in your reports to be less accurate. A report with on a segment with 50,000 sessions that is sampled may produce nothing but noise. I show you how to determine this in the column.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
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3: Dialing Up the Sample Size Helps
The larger your sample size, the more you can rely on Google’s reporting because the bigger the sample, the clearer the picture that analytics will be able to make using the data.
When your website grows beyond a certain point, Google Analytics is going to start taking shortcuts.
Don’t be the victim of a big Google Analytics lie. Know what those shortcuts are and know how to get around them so that you are relying on data that tells the true story.How to Growth-Hack Your Email List Using Exit-Intent Overlays
Lead GenerationThe other day we gathered for an email brainstorming session. What followed was the usual list of half-baked metaphors:
“Email is like fine wine, it gets better with age.”
“Email is like styrofoam, it’ll take 10,000 years to break down.”
“Email is like a cockroach, you can’t kill it.”
We were repeating ourselves, but the point was clear: despite being 350 Internet years old, email has never been more important to ecommerce. How did this happen? Weren’t we all giving email the last rites in 2009 as ‘social’ stormed The Internets?
Instead, something peculiar happened: email grew some grey hair and stopped wearing cheap suits. It became a place for business, something we now use mostly for work, shopping, and all kinds of other grown-up stuff. Think about it: what did you do online in 1998 that you still do today? You don’t go on Yahoo Chat, and you don’t Ask Jeeves. But you still use email every day.
What the f*** was “Network Neighborhood” for?
And since Clooney got married, John Stamos stands as the last breathing representation of email: a relic from the ’90s that we still appreciate—and that still looks pretty damn good.
Email is like John Stamos. A relic from the ’90s that we still appreciate—and that still looks pretty damn good.
Email By the numbers
To illustrate just how valuable email has become to ecommerce, we need only look at a few telling statistics:
So why is it so much more valuable than social media?
The reason is that email addresses are much different than fans or followers. Gaining direct access to someone’s inbox is the ultimate sign of trust from an online customer.
And if you build a list of subscribers who know and respect your brand, it’s likely to become your most powerful revenue channel.
The list-building conundrum: how exit-intent overlays can help
The sheer value of email subscribers creates a natural conundrum. How can marketers reach beyond signup widgets and accelerate list growth?
Sure your signup widgets and call-outs help. But they won’t build you a hugely valuable email list by themselves. And I’m not talking the dead-end ‘get one or two leads’ or ‘half the emails get returned’ kind of list.
I’m talking lists full of warm email leads that are familiar with your products, have read your content, and recently interacted with your brand.
The tool I’m going to discuss today is building some seriously kickass email lists for marketers across the web; Neil Patel has used it to double his email his email opt-in rate.
An exit-intent overlay on Gr8fires.co.uk, activated when a user is about to abandon the site.
The juice that drives exit overlays is called “exit-intent technology,” which is designed to detect abandoning visitors based on user behaviour. Exit-intent technology identifies abandoning users by measuring the path a user follows through a site, sensing resting moments when users are idle, and detecting cursor movements the break the browser plane towards the ‘Back’ button.
When abandoning visitors are detected, the exit overlay activates and attempts to capture a signup by offering something of value to the user.
And when done right, exit overlays will build you a kickass email list in a relatively short period of time.
4 Reasons exit-intent overlays are the best list-building tool on the web
1. You can incentivize the signup
Customers need a good reason to sign up for your email list, and exit-intent overlays are fertile ground for providing this incentive.
Busted Tees uses an immediate discount as incentive in the example below.
The incentive you offer can take many forms. Here’s another example from CopyHackers, which incentivizes the email signup with the promise of valuable, free information that marketers can use to improve their business.
Offering a course has the extra advantage of guaranteeing multiple interactions with the prospect, as the offer can be served piece-by-piece.
2. Exit-intent overlays are big and bold—but not intrusive
Exit overlays have much better visibility than traditional signup widgets.
When an exit overlay activates, it dims out the rest of the window to maximize contrast and visibility, as per the example from The Chive below.
That said, exit overlays are not intrusive in the way old school pop-ups were:
Essentially, an exit overlay acts as a second page view that’s only seen by segments of abandoning users you choose to target
3. Exit overlays can be targeted at specific users and pages
Abandoning users are not all the same; they leave your site for all different reasons. To accommodate differing motivations, exit-intent technology allows you to target specific user groups such as first-time or repeat visitors, cart abandoners, referral traffic, and paid traffic.
Targeting rules can also be applied to pages. You can target (or exclude) any page on your site—which comes in handy for appealing to different users who are at various stages of your conversion funnel.
For example, targeting first-time visitors from low-converting segments like social media traffic can be a very lucrative tactic for building email lists. Traffic from social media usually hasn’t established a relationship with your brand, so grabbing an email address from these users can be a valuable tactic for starting this relationship.
4. Exit-intent overlays capture signups from “hedonic” cart abandoners
If you’re like me, you believe the idea that abandoned shopping carts are costing etailers trillion of dollars per year is utter hogwash.
Yes, most virtual carts are ‘abandoned’. But by attaching a dollar figure to the “cost” of cart abandonment, we’re presupposing that everyone who adds items to a virtual cart does so with intent to buy.
The truth is, a good portion of cart abandoners add items out of interest, not commitment. They’re simply browsing, often using the cart as a bookmarking tool to save items for later.
And a group called hedonic shoppers makes up a large percentage of these ‘casual’ cart abandoners.
According to research, people have two primary shopping motivations: hedonic and utilitarian.
Utilitarian shopping is driven by our need for necessities like housing, food and clothing. For utilitarian shoppers, purchasing is a problem-solving activity.
Hedonic shopping, however, is driven by our desire for fun and entertaining shopping experiences.
To illustrate, here’s Shopify’s data on cart abandonment:
Email is the obvious answer, yet according to BizReport, 80% of marketers aren’t sending triggered emails after cart abandonment.
Exit-intent overlays can rapidly build subscriber lists from abandoning cart traffic – especially when they promise more of the rich, engaging experiences the hedonic shopper desires.
Case Study: How Xero Shoes used exit overlays to grab 3,000 new email subscribers
Xero Shoes manufactures and markets “barefootwear,” a brand of light, low-profile footwear that feels like you’re wearing nothing at all.
In the words of founder Steven Sashen, Xero Shoes allows customers to Feel The World™.
Like all etailers, Xero’s fortunes rest on the performance of paid and organic traffic sources. And of course, email marketing is a key tactic for monetizing this traffic.
Challenge and Strategy
Barefootwear is a complicated product that takes time to explain properly, and educating prospects on its benefits posed a big challenge for Xero.
Further, Xero’s email sidebar widget had a low signup rate—a common problem amongst etailers today.
But rather than see this as a barrier to sale, Xero hypothesized that they could kill two birds with one stone using an exit overlay campaign.
Bird 1: Accelerate growth of the company’s subscriber list.
Bird 2: Use the email content to explain thoroughly Xero’s product offering and overcome customer pain points/objections.
The creative was designed to position Xero Shoes as an alternative to what “shoe companies” offer and to drive curiosity around founder and owner Steven Sashen.
Xero decided to place their exit overlay on the company homepage—the highest-traffic page on the domain—with the intent of grabbing new signups from low-converting segments such as social media traffic.
Finally, returning visitors were excluded from viewing the exit overlay—ensuring the messaging wouldn’t irritate blog readers or existing customers.
Results
Over a six-month period, Xero’s exit overlay campaign averaged between 15 and 20 signups per day, resulting in a list of over 3,000 new subscribers.
This represented a 412% increase in email signups and drove a 9.81% boost in overall company order volume.
Takeaways
Gaining access to a prospect’s inbox is the ultimate sign of trust which is why email marketing has become so valuable to ecommerce.
Exit overlays – modal lightboxes that activate before users abandon your site – are one of the most effective tactics for building subscriber lists. With exit overlays, marketers can incentivize signups, capture addresses from uncommitted prospects, and target specific users and pages.
Angus Lynch is a conversion copywriter at Crowdvert, a Vancouver-based conversion rate optimization agency, and the Director of Marketing for Crowdvert’s proprietary user engagement tool, Rooster.
5 Welcome Email Tests To Turn Tryers into Buyers
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingEmail is still the most effective strategy for onboarding visitors. By “onboarding” we mean:
Yes, email is important to your business. It can’t be done through Facebook or Twitter. It can’t be done through SMS. Maybe it can be done through direct mail. Maybe.
The first step in these processes is the ubiquitous Welcome Email. It gives customers a first impression of your business. Guides them through your product. And demonstrates the value that you can bring them. It’s what takes them from trial to paying user to a repeat user to a evangelist.
In fact marketers who utilize welcome emails find that they have a substantial effect on their conversions with some even experiencing up to a 50% conversion rate when implementing them into their onboarding marketing strategy. Impressive, huh?
Welcome emails aren’t as straightforward as you would think, however. They need to be tested. From timing to subject line, rigorously A/B testing the different aspects of your emails is a sure fire way to build the most effectual onboarding strategy for your business.
Today, we are going to focus on one aspect of welcome email A/B testing – Content.
Welcome Email Tests to Engage Customers
Here are five A/B tests you should be doing on your content to optimize your onboarding emails and get users converting from trial to lifetime customers.
1. Test Simple vs. Hyper-Stylized Design
Let’s begin with design.
No matter how well-written your emails are, if it the look isn’t right the effectiveness will be hampered. Emails can be as simple or flamboyant as you wish. Generally they are divided into three types:
It’s up to you to test what works best for your business.
Will your visitors prefer a stylized email or a simple “personal” email?
An interesting design case study comes from SitePoint, a specialist in content for web developers. After sending out over 40 newsletters, their campaign started to look a little lackluster.
Their initial emails were uncluttered and pared back in design. And they wanted to continue with this look but update it and get more clicks.
So they ran an A/B test.
The first thing they tested was the template, and the results were positive with an initial 16% rise in click through rates.
Next they tested images – should they include them or keep it plain text? SitePoint already had a hunch that their customers didn’t care for them and wanted a text only email. This assumption proved to be inconclusive as the results were 118 vs. 114 clicks in favor of no images.
This inconclusive test demonstrated that readers didn’t prefer nor mind images in their welcome email.
These welcome email tests were just the first round of experimenting for SitePoint. They went back to the drawing board and tested everything again. They experimented with images and templates until they found what worked best.
The winning email was simple, but a little design can go a long way.
The winning email retained the simple look of their original email. It was just updated, more attractive to readers and most importantly, increased their click-through rate.
Contrasted to this is Wishpond. After extensive testing of their own emails, they discovered images were just what their audience wanted. Using images produced a 60% higher click-through rate versus just using text alone.
These two contrasting examples are just to illustrate the fact that there is no single best design for all businesses.
There is no one template fits all.
You need to test to discover what your customers like and what drives results.
2. Test A Single Call to Action
When you send out your welcome emails we are betting you have one goal in mind – getting customers to use your product.
All too often we see businesses sending emails with multiple links and requesting customers do numerous actions. It’s confusing and will distract your user from your goal.
So here’s a challenge – try restricting your welcome emails to have only one call-to-action,
That’s exactly what Optimizely did.
In 2014 they began rigorously testing all aspects of their emails. One of the tests had a goal of increasing click-throughs on the call to action.
To do this they sent out two emails. The first having only one CTA, while the second had multiple.
Optimizely tested emails with a single call to action against their one with several.
There was one clear winner. The email with only one CTA produced substantially more click-throughs with a 13.3% increase.
Narrowing down your email to one call to action can be a tough task. You have a limited amount of onboarding emails to send. Yet you have so much to say.
Try removing any unnecessary call to actions you have in your emails and just focus on what you believe is most important.
Ask yourself what is the most important thing you want your customer to do after receiving this email and make this your call to action.
Then test.
3. Test Urgency Inducing Copy
One method is urgency. Using a sense of immediacy in your email to get your customer to act now.
MarketingExperiments tested the effects of urgency in their email campaigns.
They planned a Web Clinic Invite and sent out two emails. One was just the simple invite. The other however, had three extra urgency inducing words – Limit 1000 Attendees.
Urgency may induce more of your email recipients to act.
The email containing the urgency had a 15.4% increase in click-throughs. Pretty impressive figures considering the only difference was 3 words!
When sending welcome emails, urgency can be incredibly valuable.
Here is another example of urgency from Sprout Social.
To get trials to convert to paying customers they use copy to imply urgency and encourage users to act now.
Urgency can be communicated in may ways.
They use phrases such as “Only 2 days left” and “Time Flies – your trial period is over in just 2 days”. It shouts “act now or you’ll miss out!”
It’s a clever way to optimize your emails and get more customers converting.
4. Testing Email Length (How Long Should a Welcome Email Be?)
When a customer signs up you want to tell them everything about your business.
Explaining every feature and what you offer in a long winded email is going to show them the value of your business, right? Well probably not.
Conversely, saying too little can be problematic also. Customers might feel under informed and might not act at all.
With such a small window of time, you need to test how long your emails should be to have the maximum impact.
iMedia Connection decided to carry out tests, with two versions of an email promoting an upcoming conference.
One email was verbose, containing all of the information about the conference within it as well as links to the website.
The other was half the length, with only a short description and a link to a website containing the information.
A bigger open rate doesn’t mean a higher click-through rate.
The shorter email proved to be more appealing. iMedia Connection reported that not only was the open rate on the shorter higher at 30% vs. 20% but the click-through rate was also higher at 11% vs. 5%.
Short, brief content was the winner here but that might not always be the case. Getting your emails length right must be tested.
Good ab testing will help you find the perfect balance between being informative while also being concise.
5. Welcome Email Tests: Test Personalization
Personalization is one of the most effective techniques to increase conversions from emails. Using a customer’s data to appeal to their interests has been proven to work time and time again. And it isn’t as complicated as you may think.
DoggyLoot, an online store experienced astonishing success when they began personalizing their email’s content.
They recognized that Rottweiler owners wouldn’t want the same emails as Chihuahua owners. So they began to segment in the simplest way possible.
They began collection “doggie data” by asking owners one simple question – is their dog small, medium or large?
Based on this data, they created three email segments based on dog size. Each segment received an email that had products that were suited to their dogs.
DoggyLoot sent different emails to owners with different sized dogs.
The results were impressive to say the least. The personalized emails that were targeted at large dog owners had a click through rate that was 410% higher than the average.
Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. Just find whatever works for your business.
Doggyloot just asked the right questions on signup, enabling them to segment their audience with relative ease.
Whether you just add a user’s name or build comprehensive buyer personas, testing personalization can be a real asset to your welcome emails.
5 Welcome Email Tests To Turn Tryers into Buyers: Summary
These 5 A/B tests and case studies are guidelines. Some may work for your business while others might make no impact at all.
It is important to focus on how customers are reacting to your email content. Measuring click-throughs and conversions is essential. See what makes statistical significance, gets users converting and becoming lifelong customers. For more advanced A/B tests read our Ebook “Welcome Your First Million Users: The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing Your Welcome Emails”.
eCommerce Growth Continues in 2015 in Europe and the US
Ecommerce CROThis infographic from Ecommerce Platforms gives us some insight state of eCommerce in 2015. It’s looking like online sales are going to increase to well over a quarter of a billion dollars (yep, you read that right: billion!), and even though retail sales online are still a relatively small percentage of total sales, brick-and-mortar shops are still feeling the pinch.
A 10% increase in buyers plus a 10% increase in conversion rate could deliver you 21% growth in topline revenue in 2015..What piece of the ecommerce pie will your business get? It depends where you are. Note how much European shopping behaviors vary by region.
The 10% increase in ecommerce revenue is up for grabs. Your ability to capitalize will be based in large part on the conversion rate, or revenue per visit that you get from your site.
Thanks to ecommerce platforms for creating this.
Surprises from 2014: Popular vs. Effective Content Marketing
Conversion Marketing StrategyIt’s February and we’re just now publishing our “Most Popular Posts of 2014” post.
We were in a bit of a quandary on how to go about this. Even though we are the masters of metrics, the mullahs of measurement, and mightier than mayhem, we weren’t sure how to measure “popular.”
Wipe that quizzical look off of your face.
Effective content marketing is one reason we have enjoyed so much success, and our blog is the heart of our content marketing efforts. We take it very seriously.
We want posts that are popular to our target audience, marketers struggling to use data and testing wisely in their online efforts. We also want content that grows our subscriber lists. This is how we begin a relationship with you, our readers.
While we want to give you a list of great content to read, we are more focused on learning something from 2014 so we can give you more of what you love in 2015.
Before we reveal our top ten, we invite you to follow us on our journey through the data.
What Tells Us That a Post is Effective Content Marketing?
Which metrics tell us that a post is popular with our target market? We considered several. Our final top ten list was a blend of all of these.
Here’s our thought process.
Visits, or Sessions
It seems to make sense that the most visited posts would be the most popular. We pulled our visit statistics from Google Analytics on a post-by-post basis.
Our most visited post by far is entitled 63 Great Email Subject Lines from the SXSW Catalog. Google has fallen in love with this post. It was published in 2011 and is perennially our most visited post. This year, it has three times the visits of the next competitor.
This post is our most popular by visits, but it really isn’t as relevant as some other posts.
We had fun writing this post, but it isn’t particularly relevant to our business. It has a low conversion rate, low engagement and generated few shares relative to the traffic.
Once we weighted some of the other factors found in this story, this post fell out of the top 10. In our final selection, only four posts were in among the ten most-visited. No, visits are not a good proxy for popularity.
Bounce Rate
If people are visiting our site, but not sticking around, we say they bounce. We measure a bounce as a visit lasting less than 15 seconds. Pages with a low bounce rate would be considered more popular than those with an above-average bounce rate.
The standout post with regard to bounce rate was Rotating Headers Don’t have to Kill Your Conversion Rate.
Most people spent more than 15 seconds reading this post based on it’s low bounce rate (4.86%)
Overall, seven of the posts in our final top ten also had top-ten bounce rates.
Engagement: Time and Pages
If visitors are spending more time on our site, we could assume that they found the content relevant.
Of our top picks for 2014, Pages per Visit and Average Session Duration were highly correlated. Posts with high engagement also enjoyed high conversion rates and low bounce rates.
Our most engaging post was What are You Really Selling on Your Landing Page? [CASE STUDY]. This is what I call a highly efficient post.
Our most engaging post was taken from a free consultation. It did not require a great deal of research.
It took very little research to write. I took information from a free consultation for the example, and simply wrote up my conclusions.
This post brought a lot of return visitors, probably regular readers. It had the highest conversion rate and also generated the most comments.
Other high-efficiency posts included How to Present a High-Converting Value Proposition [CASE STUDY] and How Many Steps Should Your Online Checkout Have? [CASE STUDY].
Number of Leads Generated
The post that generated the most subscribers for our conversion course was a case study from a prospect.
The same is true in our consulting business. If our guests truly enjoy our posts, they should naturally subscribe to our content or sign up for our free course. Growing our subscriber list is critical to our business. This is how we begin a conversation with potential clients. This is pretty important.
For each of our most-visited posts, we calculated the conversion rate. A conversion for our blog is a subscriber to our list or a conversion course student.
So what kind of content has the highest conversion rates? Oddly enough, our “highly efficient” content also enjoys high conversion rates. Three of the highest converting were created from free consultations. One was a client case study. One was an infodoodle captured live at the Business of Software conference.
All-in-all, seven of the top-converting posts made our final ten.
Social Shares
If someone is sharing our content on social media and by email, we can assume they found the content, well, shareable.
Our most shared post was an infographic submitted by another company.
To size up social shares, I calculated the shares per visit, or SPV. The post with our highest SPV was New Ideas for the New Year: Online Marketing in 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC] at 48.9%. This means that for every two visitors, one of them shared on social media – 221 on Twitter, 33 on LinkedIn, 24 on Facebook, and two on Google Plus.
This story was NOT in our final top ten list. It was hurt by a low conversion rate and short average session duration. Clearly, people came, scanned and shared. This post was an infographic, and of the posts with the highest SPV five were infographics.
Of our top-ten posts, six had strong shares to visit ratios.
Other Influences
The major point of doing this kind of analysis is to provide more of what visitors are looking for in 2015. Feeding the content machine required original content as well as curated content and guest writers. Our analysis teased out the value of these strategies.
Guest Posts
Two guests posts made our top ten list.
We had a lot of guest contributors – eleven of the top-twenty most visited posts. So, we were surprised that only two of our final top-ten were contributed by guest writers. Curiously, these were both infographics.
If we just look at the ten most visited posts, six were guest posts and five were among the most shared. Four had high conversion rates.
In general, most guest posts fell out on engagement metrics. For some reason, readers of guest posts visited few other pages, and didn’t stay long.
Infographics
I’ve always been somewhat cool to infographics. They generate a lot of traffic, but didn’t seem to deliver the goods when it comes to engaged and converting visitors.
Boy was I wrong in 2014.
Of our top ten posts, four were infographics. Two of them were among the highest converting posts of 2014.
Two of the four were infodoodles, hand-drawn during live presentations. This is highly efficient content for us.
Doing infodoodles allows us to leverage “celebrities” – Rand Fishkin and Bryan Eisenberg in this case – who may be more likely to share our infodoodles with their audiences. Sometimes it works. Over 81% of visitors to Rand Fishkin’s infodoodle were new top our blog, the highest in our top-ten. Thanks, Rand.
Infodoodles are unique to The Conversion Scientist. It leverages industry celebrities.
Maybe more celebrities would share if we didn’t include caricatures.
Angie Schottmuller
Oli Gardner and Joanna Wiebe
Case Studies
Humans love stories, and that is what a case study really is. We relate to the trials and tribulations of others in a way that “How to” posts can never enjoy. Our top ten list bear this out, with four of the final ten being case studies.
We’ll definitely give you more of this in 2015.
Headlines
Contrary to popular belief, typical headline strategies didn’t seem to apply to us.
None of the headlines started with a number. You don’t have to troll Twitter for long before you see the proliferation of headlines beginning like “# Ways to…”. Only three of the top 20 most visited posts used headlines in this format.
Questions should never invoke a “yes” or “no” answer.
Three headlines were stated as a question. Questions are dangerous. If the answer to your headline question is “Yes” or “No” then visitors don’t tend to read on. An example would be “Are you Struggling with Your Landing Pages?” Question headlines should cause the visitor to ask, “What is the answer,” or “How will you do that?”
We don’t use question headlines on our sites much. Maybe we should do it more.
Other Insights
By creating a weighted score for our posts, we were able to select a list of the most engaging, educational and efficient posts for 2014. There were some surprises in this list.
The Final Top-ten List
Our scoring system combined entrances (visits in which the post was the first page), bounce rate, pages per visit, average session duration, conversion rate, and shares per visit into a single score.
Here are the top scoring posts from 2014. Check them out.
We’ll bring you more of what you want, dear reader, in 2015.
How a Little Science Can Save Your Website Redesign
Conversion-Centered DesignRaise your hand if you’re considering a website redesign. Pretty much everyone, yeah? Well, before you undertake such a massive project, there’s a lot you should consider first…namely the effects such huge changes can have on your conversion rates.
Some businesses will pour millions of dollars into a fancy and beautiful website redesign only to discover that their customers no longer know how to interact with (ahem, buy things on) the site. In other words, a double loss. If you think the design of your site is keeping visitors from spending money, consider an approach that’s a bit more slow-and-steady.
Brian suggests taking a scientific approach: he’s a scientist, after all. It has probably been some time since you’ve had to think much about the scientific method, so here’s a recap:
Do some research then come up with some small changes you can make and measure the effects of.
It’s a cycle that often ends with a surprise. Our visitors just don’t behave the way we think they should. There are great resources out there to help understand these people we call visitors, like Crazy Egg and Google Analytics.Don’t fret: there are absolutely resources out there to help you get the job done.
Here’s where I could say “You know your customers best,” so you should be able to come up with a solid list of hypotheses with which you could experiment, but I won’t. You should still come up with a list of ideas based on research, but you should be prepared for surprises.
And remember, I’m serious when he says to keep it scientific. Isolate a single variable as much as possible so that you know for sure what is driving changes in your site visitors’ behaviors.
Find out how Conversion Sciences can GUARANTEE our redesigned website will outperform your current website.
Tracking Your Most Valuable Visitors with Google Analytics [AUDIO]
Web AnalyticsThere are special visitors on your site right now. They blend in with all of the others in your analytics, but they behave differently from the others.
They visit more pages, spend more time, share more often and are more likely to buy from you.
Would you like to know them better?
Would you like to know how to treat them better?
Would you like to have more of them?
Subscribe to Podcast
Transcript
These visitors are your account holders. Some have bought from you. Some have not.
They’ve put forth more effort interacting with your site than your other non-buying site visitors because they’ve shown you buying intent. And that’s a big deal for you.
In my Marketing Land column Use Google Analytics To Treat Your Account Holders Like Royalty I show you how to isolate these wonderful visitors and see how they behave.
What is tripping them up?
Where do they come from when they visit?
Do they respond to email?
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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How 5 Conversion Optimization Experts would Spend Four Hours
Conversion OptimizationIf you expect your entire business to be suddenly infinitely more profitable just because you spent a few hours on website optimization, you’re going to be disappointed: website optimization is an ongoing process that requires ongoing attention and effort.
If I had only four hours to optimize a website, I would spend 5 minutes making myself a coffee, then 3 hours 55 minutes looking for another job.Your four hours don’t have to be futile, however. You can look to experts for guidance prioritizing that precious time, and Angus Lynch from Rooster asked five experts what they would do with their four hours, and Conversion Scientist Brian Massey was among those weighing in.
Brian was initially – and hey, let’s be honest, still is – pretty incredulous that you can do much with that time.
But with a threat of bodily harm he relented and said he’d take a look at a landing page on his website that’s performing well and come up with several different headlines for it then create a page with each of those headlines.
There’s a pretty solid consensus among these five conversion optimization experts that website optimization takes commitment, not an afternoon, but they, too, shared some pretty practical advice.
Peep Laja of Markitekt and ConversionXL says, “I would check Google Analytics to find where the biggest drop-offs are happening, and would focus all my efforts on those pages” and Michael Aagaard of ContentVerve doesn’t disagree. He frames his thoughts by saying “Check analytics for areas with the biggest potential lift.”
Another tactic could be what Neil Patel of Quicksprout, KISSmetrics, and Crazy Egg suggests: “If I had only 4 hours, I would go through Webmaster Tools and fix any of the basic errors that they are showing. @neilpatel”
So we have four folks focusing squarely on the technology, which is clearly necessary given the topic, but the fifth expert, Angie Schottmuller of Three Deep Marketing and Search Engine Watch, would approach this quandary by “interviewing actual customers or prospects to learn why they DO and why they DON’T buy.”
Read the full post, then ask yourself: what would you do with four hours to spend on website optimization? Tell us what works and what was a waste of time.
Your clock starts now…get to it!
How I Became a Better Copywriter When I Learned Illustrator
Conversion-Centered DesignWe’ve all seen the numbers. Visual content outperforms text-only content by a landslide.
Need a refresher?
While I’ve known these stats for some time, I didn’t feel like there was much I could do about it until recently. I would make sure to break my articles up with nice subheadings and insert quality stock photos or original photography when I had it, but that was about as visual as I got. “After all,” I thought, “I’m a writer—not a designer.”
How I Became More Visual
Things changed when I started writing a weekly column for a client whose company designs and builds custom homes. The column was to appear as sponsored content on a well-known luxury living blog. My goal was to conduct interviews and research on the latest trends in home design and present my findings in 500+ word articles along with some beautiful photography of the client’s work.
My logic was simple: The photography was already performing extremely well on social media. The pictures would be the hook, and people would stay for the insightful article.
The first article of the campaign. It goes on for over 600 words.
While this approach already seemed to be working on the client’s on-site blog, it didn’t have the effect I wanted it to on the sponsored column.
In fact, my first article performed pretty badly, despite all the effort I had put into conducting interviews, despite the great quotes and useful information I used—even despite the photos that had been shared thousands of times on social media. The first article—a piece that used anecdotes and advice from the client about finding inspiration for your home—received 84 views upon publication and continues to be one of the lowest performing posts of the campaign, with a total of 220 views.
The tiny blip made by my first article. We used tracking pixels to watch traffic on Google analytics. As you can see, traffic did not pick up after posting.
Then I started using Illustrator
I had been fumbling around with the program for several months, but never felt like I had time to use it properly. My approach had always been to write the best copy I could and to let a designer help out if they had time. But this time I was determined to do something—anything—different so that the column would prove worthwhile.
So I went ahead and designed some images for my next two posts—just some simple, vector-based elements to use as featured images and between subheadings. They weren’t great, but they were presentable, and the articles performed slightly better than the last.
I wasn’t sure if the slight increase in views warranted the extra time it took to create new visuals, but I decided to give it one more shot.
I’m glad I did.
Taking a cue from fashion magazine style collages, I cobbled together a collage using pieces of our original photography and used it as the central element of the next post. The post received 524 views on the first day of publication—over six times more views than my initial post. Even better, the post continues to rack up views, with 1,626 views to date.
My first post on the site to be primarily visual.
Since posting that article, I have continued to create similar content for this campaign (and others) that have performed just as well.
My next post also used a collage. It received 504 views on the first day of publication. Interestingly enough, this article was on the same topic as my initial failed article—how to find home design inspiration. The difference was all in how the information was presented.
Spikes in traffic from my first two collage posts done in Illustrator.
A few months later, new posts continue to create spikes in traffic, and we begin to gain a consistent viewership between postings.
While I don’t have all the answers to this change in performance, I attribute the success of the collage articles to two things: 1. their overall presentation, and 2. their particular appeal to my audience.
Overall Presentation
Appeal to the Audience
Growing your capabilities will make you more perceptive.
There are probably several lessons to be learned from this incident, including one about knowing your audience. But the one I want to stress is this: learning how to design will make you a better writer.
Colleen Ahern is a copywriter and content marketing strategist at Page Agency. She created the Page Agency Blog, where she writes about the rapidly evolving world of content marketing and social media. Follow her on Twitter @ColleenAhern.
How do I know? I’m not just basing this claim on the spike in traffic that came after I started creating visuals. I’m also basing it on the fact that now, when I set out to create content, I don’t ask myself, “How can I best express this idea through copy?” I ask, “What is the best way to express this idea? Period.”
I am also better able to take into account the browsing behavior of my audience. I wouldn’t be writing this out as a 1,000+ word article if I didn’t think that the audience of The Conversion Scientist was willing to read longer articles. Similarly, the content you create should cohere with the browsing behavior of the people you want to reach. No matter how great your writing is, you will never convince a non-reader to read—at least, not through a piece of content marketing.
Because I can now create a broader variety of content I also think much more about the behavior of my audience. That’s why learning Illustrator has not only made me more versatile—it has also made me more perceptive. If copy is only a small part of the equation, I can combine my strengths as a writer with my (developing) ability to design to create content that is cohesive, concise, and valuable.
Copywriting: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brain [TODAY]
Persuasion ScienceTim Ash coined the term “Big fat bouncers in your brain” during an interview on his Landing Page Optimization podcast that he and I were on.
I love the image that phrase draws to mind, because it’s true.
The bottom line is this: If you want your message to affect and influence your readers and listeners, you must get past the big fat bouncers in their brains.
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Writing Killer Copy: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brian
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I’ve introduced you to these two bouncers and telling you how to write copy that gets past them.
Why register now?
Find out how Betabrand achieved 432% growth for products nobody was looking for.
Get my real definition of “copy”.
See revealing brain scans. We all love brain scans.
Discover my fool-proof method for great copy.
Find out what business porn is and how to create compelling images.
As always, we have FUN doing these.
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Writing Killer Copy: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brian
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