If the Zombie Apocalypse struck tomorrow, and the only way not to become the walking dead was to throw away your mobile device, who would be the winners and losers?
According to an intriguing infographic, you’d be more likely to be file-swapping on Dropbox than binge-watching on Netflix. You’d be more likely to get your news the same way your grandparents do. You’d be back to reading the New York Times online instead of Buzzfeed, which now interprets world events by comparing them to your favorite episodes of Friends.
Would you have predicted that Sears would suddenly be more popular than Pandora. I guess we’ll be needing somewhere to buy a new Walkman to take to the gym.
Somehow Google would still manage to rule the Internet world which is hardly surprising since
“Encarta it” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Google it.”
In case you’re wondering where Encarta falls into the mix, I had to Google it to read a Wikipedia article about it.
This little thought exercise underscores the winners and losers in the mobile game. Many businesses claim that mobile isn’t important enough yet, or that their offering doesn’t lend itself to mobile. Netflix and Buzzfeed dominate their marketplace in part because they embraced mobile early and often.
If you believe your visitors are hunched over a desktop when they visit your site, you are setting yourself up to be the mobile-unfriendly loser in your marketplace. Are you creating your own Zombie Apocalypse?
And let’s all breathe a collective sigh of relief that Craigslist would still be a solid option for finding your next creepy roommate since its popularity doesn’t take quite the hit of more fashion-forward websites in this mobile-devoid alternate universe.
They had tried everything, and if you looked at their site, you would find a competent site from an optimization standpoint.
Products were presented in a clear way. Navigation made sense. Product pages handled most desires for information. Still, they struggled with a low conversion rate.
This company was not a customer of ours, but I gave the owner a few ideas and some Google Analytics reports to look at. In one of those reports, he found a culprit. But the news isn’t as good as it sounds.
Having a Team with Time to Investigate
Before I reveal the secret, I’d like to highlight the value of giving your business time to digest what it knows. This means that someone is given the mandate to pull out of the day-to-day rush, and begin answering important questions about your website.
Is something broken on one of the many browsers visitors use to buy? This is the source of many of our “wins.”
When we make a change to the site, does it impact our bottom line? This is the purpose of improving your site, is it not?
Is there some suspect traffic? This turned out to be key to our story.
Even if you have dedicated optimization people, do they have this important time to be rigorously curious?
Rent a Conversion Scientist
It’s expensive to hire. That’s why we’ve configured Conversion Sciences to provide conversion optimization services that are completely turnkey at a fraction of the employee rate.
You can have someone experienced, curious, and very good with data analysis finding undiscovered gold on your website. Our value proposition is simple.
We will find the money to pay for our conversion optimization services, and a whole lot more.
With Conversion Sciences, you get a team for less than the cost of an employee. And our fixed monthly fee covers everything:
Analytics setup
Testing
Design
Development
Administration
We’ve been so successful that 97% of our clients have continued with us after our initial engagement.
For Established Businesses
You don’t have to be an enterprise to take advantage of our talents. You only need have an established online business with around five hundred monthly transactions.
With some free advice, the owner of this ecommerce business found that his conversion rate had been artificially suppressed by visits from a robot called Halebot, like Halibut. This was very fishy (sorry).
So, while his website changes did improve his conversion rate, Halebot made it look like his conversion rate was going down. Had we been working with him, we would have discovered this early on and would have removed this invalid traffic from the equation.
We didn’t put any more money in his pocket, but, with just a few minutes of thought, we showed him that he was on the right path.
Let us put you on a path to growth with the traffic you are already getting. Schedule the call now.
Would you be brave enough to let a bunch of conversion experts tell you what is wrong with your website? Flex Fitness’s Ryan Ehler did just that when he won the privilege of having five website optimization experts evaluate a landing page for one of his ads. Digital Marketer published all of the recommendations.
The critiques may seem a little rough, but in the end Ryan was the recipient of some really solid advice (estimated to be worth $25,000).
Our own Brian Massey pointed out some problems that needed to be addressed. Here are the note from which his full critique was created.
Notes from Brian Massey’s review of Flex Fitness landing page.
What can you take away from this?
1. Make your landing page match the promises in your ad. Ryan does a good job here, matching copy and images.
2. Don’t try to be too cute with your copy.
Why do we want to catapult our results?? We want to keep them, don’t we?
Why do we want to catapult our results?? We want to keep them, don’t we?
3. Use images that support your value proposition. The image of the gym are supportive. The stock photos in the “Three Words…” section is not.
4. Make your calls to action clear. What will happen if your visitor submits a form or clicks on a button.
Read the full critiques from Brian and website optimization experts Chris Goward, Tim Ash, Justin Rondeau, Peep Laja.
Learn more about landing pages on The Conversion Scientist Blog.
If Austin is the conversion capital of the world, it was a supernova of conversion optimization brilliance this past week when the Conversion XL Live conference was held here. Luminaries from around the globe converged here for a program that covered topics from landing page design to “bandit” algorithms.
I learned a lot.
Here were some of the highlights for me.
The Dame, The Detective and the Double-cross
I used Humphrey Bogart detective movies to illustrate that conversion optimizers use a variety of data sources to determine what to test and what not to test. The femme fatale will appear in the detective’s office and pose a problem. The salty detective will investigate, looking for clues. If he’s not careful, he can be double-crossed by the data.
For a data detective, the initial hypothesis is the “dame’s” story. Of course, she is hiding something. He must find clues to tease out the truth using alternative data sources. He can use post-test analysis techniques to make sure he wasn’t double-crossed by his data.
Some of the alternative sources I discussed were:
Aggregated Behavioral data like Google Analytics and AB Testing Tools.
Aggregated User Interaction data like click tracking tools and form-tracking tools.
Individual User Interaction data, like session recordings, ratings and reviews data and live chat transcripts.
Self-reported data, such as surveys and online feedback.
Customer knowledge, often found by interviewing sales and customer support people.
When you prioritize hypotheses that have lots of support in data, you keep yourself from being double-crossed by unexpected results.
Mobile Website Design
We believe that the mobile Web is like the desktop Web in the 1990s: we will look back and laugh at the choices we are making today.
Amy Africa has done a lot of testing on mobile websites, and gave us a flood of Mobile Web 2.0 tips. My notes were extensive, but some of the her revelations were surprising.
Don’t think in terms of pages. Think in terms of screens and scrolls.
Make your “action directives” (action buttons, search options, etc.) big and bold.
80% of mobile success is having the right navigation.
One third to one half of mobile visitors will use search. Design search results pages as if only three items will be seen.
Mobile forms are abandoned more often on mobile.
Email is of even bigger importance with mobile users than desktop users.
Social logins can reduce abandonment if done right.
“Oversell the phone number” in the purchase process.
Responsive design comes with a mobile performance hit.
Transfer mobile visitors to the desktop by sending email or text.
Email will make up for deficiencies in the mobile experience.
She introduced me to some new terms, including “donuts”, “spreaders” and “cart hoppers.”
It’s clearly an exciting time in the mobile world.
Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning
Matthew Gershoff introduced us to the world of predictive analytics and machine learning.
Optimization = Learning efficiency + Applying the “best” learnings
New tools, such as his company Conductrics provides tools that use the key ingredients of optimization.
Setting goals
Sensing the environment, usually through analytics.
Having the ability to act and execute on learnings.
Observing outcomes.
Learning the decision logic of visitors.
These ingredients are the basis for machine learning.
He recommended courses on VideoLectures.com to get up to speed on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Conversion Maturity Model
Brooks Bell was interviewed by conference host Peep Laja about the Conversion Maturity Model that defines how advanced an organization is with respect to optimization.
Her namesake company surveyed 300 companies, rating them on six criteria.
Culture
Team
Tools and Systems
Process
Strategy
Performance
The executive sponsor at a company is key to the success of the optimization effort, she pointed out. Very true.
Conversion Optimizers from Everywhere
Austin truly was the Conversion Supernova of the World.
In from Vancouver, Oli Gardner of Unbouce took us through the rules of good landing page design. He provided us all with some free tools to help us evaluate our landing pages and forms.
André Morys runs one of the largest conversion optimization companies in the world. He’s both hugely entertaining and German.
Michael Aagard flew in from Denmark to share some of his most embarrassing testing mistakes and his triumphs.
Yehoshua Coren is a cross-cultural phenomenon as the Analytics Ninja from Israel.
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.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
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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.
What if the Mobile Internet Wasn’t Important? [INFOGRAPHIC]
Conversion-Centered DesignIf the Zombie Apocalypse struck tomorrow, and the only way not to become the walking dead was to throw away your mobile device, who would be the winners and losers?
According to an intriguing infographic, you’d be more likely to be file-swapping on Dropbox than binge-watching on Netflix. You’d be more likely to get your news the same way your grandparents do. You’d be back to reading the New York Times online instead of Buzzfeed, which now interprets world events by comparing them to your favorite episodes of Friends.
Would you have predicted that Sears would suddenly be more popular than Pandora. I guess we’ll be needing somewhere to buy a new Walkman to take to the gym.
Somehow Google would still manage to rule the Internet world which is hardly surprising since
In case you’re wondering where Encarta falls into the mix, I had to Google it to read a Wikipedia article about it.
This little thought exercise underscores the winners and losers in the mobile game. Many businesses claim that mobile isn’t important enough yet, or that their offering doesn’t lend itself to mobile. Netflix and Buzzfeed dominate their marketplace in part because they embraced mobile early and often.
If you believe your visitors are hunched over a desktop when they visit your site, you are setting yourself up to be the mobile-unfriendly loser in your marketplace. Are you creating your own Zombie Apocalypse?
Ask Conversion Sciences how we turn low-converting mobile visitors into leads and sales.
And let’s all breathe a collective sigh of relief that Craigslist would still be a solid option for finding your next creepy roommate since its popularity doesn’t take quite the hit of more fashion-forward websites in this mobile-devoid alternate universe.
How this Ecommerce Company got a 37.5% Conversion Rate Lift Overnight
Ecommerce CROThey had tried everything, and if you looked at their site, you would find a competent site from an optimization standpoint.
Products were presented in a clear way. Navigation made sense. Product pages handled most desires for information. Still, they struggled with a low conversion rate.
This company was not a customer of ours, but I gave the owner a few ideas and some Google Analytics reports to look at. In one of those reports, he found a culprit. But the news isn’t as good as it sounds.
Having a Team with Time to Investigate
Before I reveal the secret, I’d like to highlight the value of giving your business time to digest what it knows. This means that someone is given the mandate to pull out of the day-to-day rush, and begin answering important questions about your website.
Is something broken on one of the many browsers visitors use to buy? This is the source of many of our “wins.”
When we make a change to the site, does it impact our bottom line? This is the purpose of improving your site, is it not?
Is there some suspect traffic? This turned out to be key to our story.
Even if you have dedicated optimization people, do they have this important time to be rigorously curious?
Rent a Conversion Scientist
It’s expensive to hire. That’s why we’ve configured Conversion Sciences to provide conversion optimization services that are completely turnkey at a fraction of the employee rate.
You can have someone experienced, curious, and very good with data analysis finding undiscovered gold on your website. Our value proposition is simple.
We will find the money to pay for our conversion optimization services, and a whole lot more.
With Conversion Sciences, you get a team for less than the cost of an employee. And our fixed monthly fee covers everything:
We’ve been so successful that 97% of our clients have continued with us after our initial engagement.
For Established Businesses
You don’t have to be an enterprise to take advantage of our talents. You only need have an established online business with around five hundred monthly transactions.
To be sure that we can keep your business from leaking dollars, schedule a free call with a Conversion Scientist.
The End of the Story
With some free advice, the owner of this ecommerce business found that his conversion rate had been artificially suppressed by visits from a robot called Halebot, like Halibut. This was very fishy (sorry).
So, while his website changes did improve his conversion rate, Halebot made it look like his conversion rate was going down. Had we been working with him, we would have discovered this early on and would have removed this invalid traffic from the equation.
We didn’t put any more money in his pocket, but, with just a few minutes of thought, we showed him that he was on the right path.
Let us put you on a path to growth with the traffic you are already getting. Schedule the call now.
Photo Credit: wplynn via Compfight cc
Entrepreneur Unleashes Website Optimization Experts
News & EventsWould you be brave enough to let a bunch of conversion experts tell you what is wrong with your website? Flex Fitness’s Ryan Ehler did just that when he won the privilege of having five website optimization experts evaluate a landing page for one of his ads. Digital Marketer published all of the recommendations.
The critiques may seem a little rough, but in the end Ryan was the recipient of some really solid advice (estimated to be worth $25,000).
Our own Brian Massey pointed out some problems that needed to be addressed. Here are the note from which his full critique was created.
Notes from Brian Massey’s review of Flex Fitness landing page.
What can you take away from this?
1. Make your landing page match the promises in your ad. Ryan does a good job here, matching copy and images.
2. Don’t try to be too cute with your copy. Why do we want to catapult our results?? We want to keep them, don’t we?
3. Use images that support your value proposition. The image of the gym are supportive. The stock photos in the “Three Words…” section is not.
4. Make your calls to action clear. What will happen if your visitor submits a form or clicks on a button.
Read the full critiques from Brian and website optimization experts Chris Goward, Tim Ash, Justin Rondeau, Peep Laja.
Learn more about landing pages on The Conversion Scientist Blog.
Conversion Optimization Supernova
Conversion OptimizationIn 2014, we declared Austin, Texas the Conversion Optimization Capital of the World. We will be updating our yearly list of Austin’s greatest conversion minds on CRO Day, April 9. Subscribe and see if you agree.
If Austin is the conversion capital of the world, it was a supernova of conversion optimization brilliance this past week when the Conversion XL Live conference was held here. Luminaries from around the globe converged here for a program that covered topics from landing page design to “bandit” algorithms.
I learned a lot.
Here were some of the highlights for me.
The Dame, The Detective and the Double-cross
For a data detective, the initial hypothesis is the “dame’s” story. Of course, she is hiding something. He must find clues to tease out the truth using alternative data sources. He can use post-test analysis techniques to make sure he wasn’t double-crossed by his data.
Some of the alternative sources I discussed were:
Aggregated Behavioral data like Google Analytics and AB Testing Tools.
Aggregated User Interaction data like click tracking tools and form-tracking tools.
Individual User Interaction data, like session recordings, ratings and reviews data and live chat transcripts.
Self-reported data, such as surveys and online feedback.
Customer knowledge, often found by interviewing sales and customer support people.
When you prioritize hypotheses that have lots of support in data, you keep yourself from being double-crossed by unexpected results.
Mobile Website Design
We believe that the mobile Web is like the desktop Web in the 1990s: we will look back and laugh at the choices we are making today.
Amy Africa has done a lot of testing on mobile websites, and gave us a flood of Mobile Web 2.0 tips. My notes were extensive, but some of the her revelations were surprising.
She introduced me to some new terms, including “donuts”, “spreaders” and “cart hoppers.”
It’s clearly an exciting time in the mobile world.
Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning
Matthew Gershoff introduced us to the world of predictive analytics and machine learning.
Optimization = Learning efficiency + Applying the “best” learnings
New tools, such as his company Conductrics provides tools that use the key ingredients of optimization.
These ingredients are the basis for machine learning.
He recommended courses on VideoLectures.com to get up to speed on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Conversion Maturity Model
Brooks Bell was interviewed by conference host Peep Laja about the Conversion Maturity Model that defines how advanced an organization is with respect to optimization.
Her namesake company surveyed 300 companies, rating them on six criteria.
The executive sponsor at a company is key to the success of the optimization effort, she pointed out. Very true.
Conversion Optimizers from Everywhere
Austin truly was the Conversion Supernova of the World.
In from Vancouver, Oli Gardner of Unbouce took us through the rules of good landing page design. He provided us all with some free tools to help us evaluate our landing pages and forms.
André Morys runs one of the largest conversion optimization companies in the world. He’s both hugely entertaining and German.
Michael Aagard flew in from Denmark to share some of his most embarrassing testing mistakes and his triumphs.
Yehoshua Coren is a cross-cultural phenomenon as the Analytics Ninja from Israel.
Lukas Vermeer traveled from The Netherlands to share his conversion challenge game, So You Think You Can Test?
Michael Summers of Rockville, MD showed us the powerful insights to be gained from eye-tracking studies.
Anita Andrews showed us how using the wrong goal will result in poor testing decisions.
You should be at ConversionXL Live next year.
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.
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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.