The Blue Line is a Metaphor for Conversion
The Conversion Function is the number of actions taken for an online property divided by the number of visits to that property.
Here is where we find the solid blue line in our websites.
It runs through our sites and our landing pages. It slices our prospects’ mobile phones, their tablets and their computers.
We Pay for Our Visitors
We charter the digital transportation that will bring people in under the line, these confounding and complex people we call visitors.
This is not an inexpensive undertaking.
We cajole Google with it’s menagerie of penguins, pandas and hummingbirds. We cast our banners and our ads across the internet, chasing prospects as they surf. We create the content, we share on social, and we send the emails that bring them to us.
We pay their fares promising them a trip to a place meant for them. Our place.
Our Visitors Want to Convert
They arrive below the line, looking for that solution, that thing that will make them feel better, that product to adorn themselves, that moment of entertainment when they can let go.
The blue line stands as a ceiling to our visitors and they image how things might be different if they could just get up there.
Above the line.
They are always tempted by the exit, the back button, the next search.
It is this blue line that our visitors struggle with, which means that we as online businesses struggle with it, too.
Some will climb. Others will accept the help of friends and strangers.
We create the line. We draw our blue line. Sometimes higher. Sometimes lower.
Conversion Optimization Helps Them Rise Above the Line
It is our duty help of our visitors to rise above this line.
We choose the tools that will elevate them.
Will we give them just enough rope to hang themselves?
Will we provide the clear steps, to boost them in their efforts?
Will we ask them to make a leap of faith and trust in their agility to spring safely above our blue line?
Will we try to make it effortless using the machinery of our websites to transport them above the line?
And what will drive them take that leap, to step on, to push the “up” button.
The vision we have for our blue line is one in which many make the journey. They come with their money in hand, ready to spend, ready to engage.
We see them coming with ample intuition and a nourishing supply of common sense, all calibrated by the way we see our business, ourselves and our world.
As it turns out what we “call sense” isn’t that common.
These frustrating people we call visitors aren’t like us. They aren’t even like the people we know. They come with their own rules, with their own ideas of beauty and their own sense of how things should work.
They are not here to be manipulated. They are here to be understood.
Why Visitors Leave Your Site
When they are not understood, they seem mesmerized by the exit, transfixed and hypnotized. We paid to bring them here and they, in their flagrant individuality choose not to stay.
In our hubris, we create the quicksand that will trap them. Did our navigation confuse them, do our words lack clarity, did we call them to act in the way they like to act?
We are opaque to them, and this is scary. Our visitors fear us like a bad dream on Halloween. Are we lurking behind our website, ready to pounce, to steal from them or, worse, to make them feel stupid and incompetent?
Do we fear being known for who we really are? For it is the unknown that allows our visitors imaginations to run to places we did not expect them to go.
A Complex Problem
How are we dealing with this complexity? For this is a complex problem.
How high will we set our line? What distance must these lost souls cover to find their solution?
What have we provided them? Why should they put their fears aside? How will we transport them above the line?
For it is their journey from below the blue line that tells us who they are and who we should be for them.
Our job at Conversion Sciences is Conversion Rate Optimization.
Our job is to get your visitors above the Blue Line.
Find out how Conversion Sciences gets more of your visitors above the Blue Line.
How Motion in Business Videos Affects Viewer Attention
Conversion Marketing StrategyVideo is powerful. It can work for our business or against it. Here’s why.
I want to talk a little bit about motion and video. The human brain is wired to check out what’s going on if something moves in its field of vision. So, for business videos, this means that we can draw their attention to the video and hold it if we continue to move things.
Why the human brain is drawn to motion
The reason that the human brain likes motion is, because as we evolved, we associated motion with: a) something we can eat b) something that was going to eat us c) something we can mate with. Those are all very high-priority things in the lizard brain portion of our anatomy.
Making motion work in business videos
We can use that in our marketing to hold people’s attention. What kind of motion am I talking about? Well, in an eye tracking study we did, we found that: number one, people are drawn to faces and so, for instance, somebody who is moving their hands in the video, that was not sufficient to draw attention away from the face. But if you held up a prop, like a book, that would draw their attention away.
Likewise if you have a long period of somebody speaking to you like this – and in video today, a long period is like a minute – then you need to find some way of moving things around. Something as simple as this pan, is enough motion to re-engage the visitor, and keep their attention on the message that you’re delivering. Even though I’m talking, and my mouth is moving, I’m not perceived as moving until something else happens. Snap away, snap closer, snap to the left, snap to the right, pan. These are all great tools.
Motion during the call to action
One thing to be certain about here, is that if you’re using motion during a key part of your video, for instance, a call to action in which you want them to look at the page that the video is on, you should stop the motion. In fact if you could put a static image up of some sort, as you’re saying, “Go, and fill out this form,” then you will have a higher conversion rate according to our studies.
Watch all videos in this series
For more, visit our Free CRO Training Masterclass videos.
How Faces Influence Video Marketing
Conversion Marketing StrategyWhen you put people in your video marketing, something unexpected happens.
The Human Brain Loves Eyes
I want to talk a little bit about eyes and the importance of eyes in video marketing. First of all, the human brain loves eyes. We’re drawn to it, we want to look at it. And this can be really helpful in your videos if you want to keep people engaged in listening to the message. But it can also have a dark side in that it draws the attention away from something else that might be important. Let me give you an example.
When Eyes Hurt Your Conversion Rate
Let’s say you have a video on a landing page, and you want people to watch the video, get the message, and then take action on the page. At the point where you ask them in the video to take action on the page, if you have someone there looking at them, engaging them, they are less likely to look away and see the message on the page — either the form or the button that you want them to click on the landing page.
My recommendation is use eyes and heads – human beings – to keep people’s attention. But when you go to make the offer, consider shifting away to something that’s more static, something that doesn’t move, and something that doesn’t have attractive eyes on it.
Using Business Video to Solve the Subject Matter Expert Problem
Conversion OptimizationOne video can be the source of all kinds of marketing content
Now, we all know that video is a great way for us to tell a story and communicate with our prospects, with our customers, and with suspects – people who may not even know what our business does. But have you thought about how powerful video is in terms of communicating with the rest of the team?
A content strategy includes content from a number different sources – blog posts, infographs, reports, white papers, e-books. Your options are almost unlimited.
Solving the Subject Matter Expert Problem
The biggest challenge is what I call the subject matter expert problem. How do you get the knowledge out of the subject matter experts heads — either in your company or in your industry — and get them to turn what they know into these content?
The good news is you’ve got video.
It could be video like the talking head video above. It could be explainer videos that you’ve made, and even something as simple as webinar videos – videos captured while somebody delivered a webinar. The beauty of all of these forms of video is that the subject matter expert has sat down and thought about how they would explain what they want to teach on video.
Business Video Provides Everything Your Content Team Needs
Now, if you take that video and you hand it to the people who are producing your content, they should have everything they need, everything from how to lay it out and how to organize the explanations, and the thoughts, and the education, plus the graphics that come along with video.
Think about making video that’s not just for your prospects and clients. Think about making it for your internal team so that one video can cascade and turn it into whole bunch of other kinds of content. This page was ripped from the above video.
Business Video Intros Chase Viewers Away in the First Seconds
Conversion-Centered DesignOne mistake can cost you visitors in just seconds.
The First Question
Let’s take an example of someone coming to your site, who has just done a search for your products. They’re clearly looking for your product, but what is the first question in their mind? Is it “Is this the right product for me? Will this solve my problem?” No, the first question in their mind is “Should I spend time on this page to solve my problem?” That is the first question, and business videos have very little time to answer that question.
Headlines and calls to action can really help people understand if they should spend time on your page and watch your video, but there are some mistakes that we also make in our business videos that I want to point out.
The First Mistake
One of those things is that when the video starts, the first thing you see is the rotating logo with some sort of whooshing sound, and surround sound rumbles, so that you get the idea that company making this video is powerful and can solve all problems… I think I’ll just go back to the search page and start there again – see if I can find something else.
We see this effect in the data. While you are spending time making your company look good your visitors are leaving. We see a drop off in viewers. I’ve seen drop offs between 15 and 25%, but I can promise you there are certain situations when the drop offs are going to be even more.
Another Meaning for Attention Deficit
By “drop off” I mean drop off in attention, and this is one of my favorite graphs in YouTube. They will actually let you see what percentage of the people are still watching your video for its entire duration.
When to Insert Branding into Business Video
My recommendation is this: If you want to brand your company – don’t do it at the beginning. Your video needs to start with a message that says, “There is a good reason for you to watch the rest of this video.” Do your branding later. Do it at the end, do it at the middle, I don’t even care – just don’t do it at the beginning.
If you combine a great reason to watch the video in your headline and immediately jump in on your video, you’re saying “Here’s something that is going to be important for your decision making process.” You’re going to have more people watching your video longer, getting the message, and taking action on your pages. That’s what makes your business grow.
Watch all videos in this series.
Video Hosting: Why YouTube is the Wrong Choice
Conversion-Centered DesignVideo hosting is a critical decision.
From a conversion stand point, where is the best place that you can host a video? We’ve got Youtube which every body knows how to use it and it’s free. So wouldn’t use Youtube for all of our video?
Be Jealous of Your Hard-won Visitors
When you are using video in a persuasive argument and you want the video to be bringing people closer to taking action, you want to make sure you’re not giving them any way to slip away. You want to be jealous of these visitors. You probably paid to get them there, either by paying for the clicks on an ad or by investing in SEO to get organic traffic to come to these pages. When they are there, you do not want to send the off to Youtube?
All YouTube wants to do is take your eyeballs and advertise something else to them. Can you imagine putting a video on your site, letting Youtube take them away, and them seeing a competitor’s ad displayed over your video? We wouldn’t want that to happen.
Choose a Host You Can Control
I recommend if you’re using video on landing pages on your website, or is any part of a persuasive argument that you get another host, someone who will not be interested in drawing them away, you want a video host that can give you options.
Can you hide the controls that go at the bottom and allow the user a fast forward through your videos?
Can you autoplay the video on your page? Sometimes that will convert more than a non-auto playing video, whether or not you are going to allow them to share this with other people. In most cases, you probably don’t want to use autoplay, especially on landing pages.
Load Time is Critical
Your videos need to really deliver the goods. In other words, when somebody presses play, that video needs to show up as soon as possible with little buffering if any at all. You want a host that gives you the options and can deliver video at high rates. If you do that then you are not going to have people running off to YouTube and seeing the ads of your competitors.
Multiple Video Hosting Providers
This doesn’t mean that you don’t put your videos on YouTube. If you think you are going to able get traffic from Youtube by putting the videos there, go ahead and put them there. Just don’t use YouTube as your host.
You get the best of both worlds. A nice clean interface on your landing pages that doesn’t let people slip away and more viewers from your YouTube channels coming to landing pages where they can take action.
Watch all videos in this series.
Why Conversion Optimization is so Important
Conversion OptimizationThe Blue Line is a Metaphor for Conversion
The Conversion Function is the number of actions taken for an online property divided by the number of visits to that property.
Here is where we find the solid blue line in our websites.
It runs through our sites and our landing pages. It slices our prospects’ mobile phones, their tablets and their computers.
We Pay for Our Visitors
We charter the digital transportation that will bring people in under the line, these confounding and complex people we call visitors.
This is not an inexpensive undertaking.
We cajole Google with it’s menagerie of penguins, pandas and hummingbirds. We cast our banners and our ads across the internet, chasing prospects as they surf. We create the content, we share on social, and we send the emails that bring them to us.
We pay their fares promising them a trip to a place meant for them. Our place.
Our Visitors Want to Convert
They arrive below the line, looking for that solution, that thing that will make them feel better, that product to adorn themselves, that moment of entertainment when they can let go.
The blue line stands as a ceiling to our visitors and they image how things might be different if they could just get up there.
Above the line.
They are always tempted by the exit, the back button, the next search.
It is this blue line that our visitors struggle with, which means that we as online businesses struggle with it, too.
Some will climb. Others will accept the help of friends and strangers.
We create the line. We draw our blue line. Sometimes higher. Sometimes lower.
Conversion Optimization Helps Them Rise Above the Line
It is our duty help of our visitors to rise above this line.
We choose the tools that will elevate them.
Will we give them just enough rope to hang themselves?
Will we provide the clear steps, to boost them in their efforts?
Will we ask them to make a leap of faith and trust in their agility to spring safely above our blue line?
Will we try to make it effortless using the machinery of our websites to transport them above the line?
And what will drive them take that leap, to step on, to push the “up” button.
The vision we have for our blue line is one in which many make the journey. They come with their money in hand, ready to spend, ready to engage.
We see them coming with ample intuition and a nourishing supply of common sense, all calibrated by the way we see our business, ourselves and our world.
As it turns out what we “call sense” isn’t that common.
These frustrating people we call visitors aren’t like us. They aren’t even like the people we know. They come with their own rules, with their own ideas of beauty and their own sense of how things should work.
They are not here to be manipulated. They are here to be understood.
Why Visitors Leave Your Site
When they are not understood, they seem mesmerized by the exit, transfixed and hypnotized. We paid to bring them here and they, in their flagrant individuality choose not to stay.
In our hubris, we create the quicksand that will trap them. Did our navigation confuse them, do our words lack clarity, did we call them to act in the way they like to act?
We are opaque to them, and this is scary. Our visitors fear us like a bad dream on Halloween. Are we lurking behind our website, ready to pounce, to steal from them or, worse, to make them feel stupid and incompetent?
Do we fear being known for who we really are? For it is the unknown that allows our visitors imaginations to run to places we did not expect them to go.
A Complex Problem
How are we dealing with this complexity? For this is a complex problem.
How high will we set our line? What distance must these lost souls cover to find their solution?
What have we provided them? Why should they put their fears aside? How will we transport them above the line?
For it is their journey from below the blue line that tells us who they are and who we should be for them.
Our job at Conversion Sciences is Conversion Rate Optimization.
Our job is to get your visitors above the Blue Line.
Find out how Conversion Sciences gets more of your visitors above the Blue Line.
What is a Conversion Scientist? (Video)
Conversion OptimizationEditor’s Note: For our new year, we thought we would look back, way back to November 29, 2009. Did I ever really look that good?
Jonas Lamis at Tech Ranch invited me to sit down with him and talk about my favorite topic: conversion.
For some unknown reason, I was succinct and somewhat articulate. Go figger.
Watch the video to find out why you might need a Conversion Scientist in your business. I also give my best advice to any entrepreneur who wants to make the Web a key strategy in their business.
Brian Massey and Jonas Lamis talk Conversion
Register for BYOContent: The Extreme Conversion Makeover and see for yourself how to turn content into leads and sales.
It's Too Late to Optimize
Ecommerce CROFor those of you who optimize, and benefitted from a more efficient online store or higher lead conversion rate this holiday season, we straighten our lab coats and salute. You should enjoy one of our more cheerful holiday treats.
For those that aren’t going into this holiday season with a 20%, 30% or more revenue lift from this year’s optimization efforts, we offer this cautionary tale set to the music of Timbaland feat. One Republic.
2016 is just around the corner. Don’t be singing this song next year.
Sing along to the instrumental video at the bottom of the post.
I’m holding onto hope
Got the holidays coming ‘round
It’s Black Friday night
But my cart don’t make a sound
You tell me that you need me
Then you go and simply bounce
But wait…
You tell me that you’re sorry
Then you bought from someone else, and said…
That it’s too late to optimize, it’s too late
I should have hypothesized, it’s too late
I want another chance, make a call, add to cart, click through
And I need you like a heart needs a beat
(But that’s nothing new)
Yeah yeah
I offered you a discount, fifteen percent, it’s true
And you say
Sorry like the buyer Google let me think was you,
But I’m afraid
It’s too late to optimize, it’s too late
My shoppers were traumatized, it’s too late
Woahooo woah
It’s too late to optimize, it’s too late
No calls to super-size, it’s too late
I shouldn’t have compromised, it’s too late
I just didn’t realize, it’s too late
My site wasn’t quantified, it’s too late
I’m going to be down-sized, it’s too late
And now I am ostracized, it’s too late
A hanky to wipe my eyes, it’s too late
I’m holding onto hope
Got the holidays coming ‘round…
Why We Need CRO and Personality Traits of CRO Experts
Conversion OptimizationWhat are the Conversion Scientists reading these days?
Forbes: Why CRO Is Absolutely Essential in 2015
Forbes doesn’t mince words when talking about CRO. Author Niel Patel has built several online businesses, including CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics. He would know.
The article starts off with a great insignt: “Conversion optimizaiton works.”
So, how did you do this year?
Read more.
Conversion Conference: 8 Qualities of Successful Conversion Rate Optimizers
Lance Loveday’s keynote presentation at Conversion Conference this year shared eight traits that gifted CRO experts share. Wouldn’t you know it that Conversion Science’s own Brian Massey and Joel Harvey both ranked in Conversion Conference’s top 25 conversion experts in 2015, so they’ve definitely hit all of Lance’s high points.
Which of these qualities most helps you excel at CRO?
Read more.
“Quick and Easy” is not a Value Proposition [PODCAST]
Landing Page OptimizationAt the outset, your form may seem quick and easy. Everyone should know the answers to easy questions like name, email address, and birthdate. Furthermore, these are questions that everyone asks online. People should expect to answer these questions.
Yes, we know the answers. Yes, we’ve given this information up before. But, don’t call it quick and easy. It takes effort to decide if you’re trustworthy. It takes effort to decide if you’re safe. And it takes more effort than watching TV.
Subscribe to Podcast
So, we just say, “It’s easy.” Sometimes it works. In my Marketing Land column To Buy Or Not To Buy: When “Quick And Simple” Is Just A Lie, I propose that you will enjoy more success if you take the time to build value in your offering, rather than assuming your visitors are lazy and can’t be bothered to work for or spend on something valuable.
Quick And Simple Is Not A Metric. It Is A Perception.
Too often “Quick and Simple” is a lie.
Quick And Simple Is Not A Metric. It Is A Perception. I offer the following flowchart in the article:
Quick and easy is probably different for your visitors.
Mobile experiences are getting more and more sophisticated, which means we are doing less and less work. You’re definition of “easy” is getting eroded. I recommend you build value.