There’s comfort in familiarity. Whether it’s an old favorite dish at a neighborhood restaurant, or a sweatshirt you’ve kept in the closet since high school, people like to stick to what they know. The new and unknown is unfamiliar and a little daunting. And it keeps people from branching out to trying new things.
A little familiarity goes a long way when visiting someplace new. (via MarketingLand)
This applies to your website as well. When a first time visitor comes to your site, will they find familiar markers to guide them around? Or will they be confused by the completely new experience?
What can you do to make your site new-user friendly? Brian’s new post on MarketingLand is full of great tips on things you can do to make your site more familiar and comfortable for brand new users. A few suggestions from his post:
Make sure things work on your site the same way they work on other sites.
Speak the language of your visitors.
Give them a few options
Brian pulls some similar (and humorous) examples from his recent travels overseas, and illustrates how frustrating it can be to arrive somewhere new and be unsure of how to perform tasks that should be easy and commonplace.
Check out his entire post here on MarketingLand for an in-depth look at creating a user-friendly and familiar experience for your brand new site visitors.
48 Tweetable Stats To Make You An Online Marketing SmartyPants | Unbounce
@unbounce has provide a post with a double payoff. First, this is a great list of conversion-related stats and, second, a great example of how to design content to be sharable. The content is sharable for the following reasons:
The title contains the call to action “48 Tweetable Stats…”
There’s something here for everyone
The quotes are Twitter-sized for easy sharing in 140 character
Each quote has a call to action in the form of a “Tweet this” link. Every quote
So, if you’ve got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a “Tweet this” link with each.
These guys are real smarty-pants.
E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot | Custora Blog
The interesting graphic shown in this post by Custora shows how e-commerce businesses are gaining customers and how that has changed since 2009.
It is no surprise to see cost-per-click (CPC) search advertising growing over that time. However, it is gratifying to see that email has grown the fastest, far outstripping banner advertising, Facebook and Twitter.
In my book I say that email is the biggest social network on the planet. It appears to be so for e-commerce companies as well. Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.
They friend you. They fan you. They pin you. We love our social media tribes.
But how often to they customer you? How often do they buy, subscribe, or register?
When you get customered, your business grows, you gain another social influencer, and you get proof that your social media strategy is delivering what your social network wants.
Getting customered is an important part of the social media life cycle, and it’s also one of the trickiest.
I’m going to do a deep dive on getting your business customered at Engage Mexico in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, November 14-17.
You should be there.
The potential in your social networks
Your social networks store potential, like a battery stores voltage.
If you’ve been actively building your social networks, you have stored potential, like a battery has stored voltage. How do you hook up to the juice that turns that potential into leads and revenue.
Tapping this potential requires that you connect your social battery to something of interest to both you and your social denizens.
Use Content for Wires
Ultimately, you discharge your social batteries the same way you charged them. You use relevant content presented in a ways your crowd likes to get it.
Content might be blog post links on Twitter, contests on Facebook, and product pictures on Pinterest. Without the content, no one is going to find their way back. They just stay potential.
Many of us already have content strategies for our social networks, but what gets people to customer us when they visit?
Use social media landing pages to get customered
Connect them to your Landing Pages
Here’s where you need to start thinking like your visitors. Once read, great content is quickly dismissed.
What is the next step for me as a visitor and potential customerer of your business?
(Customerer??)
The golden secret is to treat your content pages as social media landing pages.
A landing page is a single minded page designed to do two things:
Keep the promise made by the link that was clicked.
Get the reader to do something that benefits them and your business.
A Social Media landing page, then, is a single minded page designed to:
Deliver the content promised.
Get the reader to customer you.
Both pages have content that delivers on a promise and a call to action that entices readers to do something wonderful.
NOTE: If you are building an email list, you get customered when you get subscribered. Think about it: the visitor is paying for content with their contact information.
NOTE 2: “Subscribered” is the last time I will verbify a noun in this article.
Where do Social Media Landing Pages Live?
Social media landing pages live anywhere you are drawing social visitors.
Your blog content pages have the content, but do they have the call to action? Is the call to action where it can be seen?
Add calls to action in or near the content.
Your email signup pages have the call to action, but do they have the content that makes signing up appealing?
Give subscribers a better reason to sign up than “Get on another mailing list.”
Your lead generation pages, offering gated content have the call to action, but do you talk about the content you are offering, or do you talk about our company and your products instead?
Don’t talk about yourself like a socially awkward freak.
Any page to which your friends, fans and followers might come in search of education or entertainment qualified as a social media landing page.
Remember that these are Social Visitors
Product pages on ecommerce sites are another frequent social media landing page. The call to action is invariably there: Add to Cart.
Given that your visitors are coming from a social network, they will be more likely to want to see social content with the product information. You should oblige them.
Consider star ratings and reviews for your products.
Use social proof. How many others have customered (bought) this product? How many friends, fans and followers do you have?
Don’t invite them to become a friend, fan or follower. They already are. The only choice they should have is to customer you.
It’s one thing to get people to friend, fan, follow, and flatulate. It’s quite another to get them to customer you. Use content to connect your social batteries to social media landing pages and get customered.
The picture below illustrates all too well the dangers of running a website without some kind of conversion optimization effort.
What you are seeing is the office where an un-optimized website was hosted. The site was designed by an agency that let the charismatic CEO influence the design. Unfortunately, little attention was paid to the shopping cart. It was assumed that visitors would just figure things out.
They were wrong.
The abandonment rate – a measure of the visitors that start the checkout process but don’t finish – rose to alarming levels very quickly.
The abandonment rate of a website housed in this building approached infinity causing a gravity well, or “black hole” to form.
As the abandonment rate approached infinity, a rare singularity was created that threatened the entire building. Left unchecked, the entire business could have been consumed by the black hole that developed from the singularity. The gravitational forces of this website black hole are so strong, not even money can escape.
This is a situation in which a poorly designed website not only loses money, but sucks away all future opportunity. There is nothing worse for a brand than a bad online experience.
By inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site, the abandonment rate returned to safe levels, saving the business and several surrounding buildings.
A Conversion Scientist was able to avert catastrophe by inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site and completing some targeted split tests. Problems were isolated and corrected. The abandonment rate returned to safe levels saving the business — and several surrounding buildings.
The moral of the story is that untested websites not only threaten current sales, but can create ripples across the time-space continuum that some businesses never recover from.
Is there a black hole in your website from which money is not escaping?
Ask us about a Conversion Catalyst for your website.
Why do we have to work so hard to get our persuasive messages heard? Why is direct response copywriting so difficult? Why don’t people read?
This presentation from ConversionSUMMIT 2013 and ConversionJAM 3 introduces you to two “bouncers” in the human brain that keep marketing messages from penetrating and tells you what to do about them.
People often wonder why their site isn’t more successful. They ask themselves all sorts of questions: Is it too wordy? Is my product/service stupid? Do I need more flair? Well…..
Good news everyone!** Brian teamed up with Crazy Egg to share five website formats that are proven to get results.
Brian breaks down the five basic types of sites and explains their winning features and structure.
Read the full post to find out which category your site fits in:
The brochure site
The publication site
The online store
The consultative site
The online service
Once you determine which site style fits your company, you can put together a foolproof plan for building the perfect site for your needs.
Click HERE to read the entire post. Thanks to our awesome partner Crazy Egg! ** I will personally high five you or send you a Conversion Sciences sticker if you can be the first to tell me what the line that is starred above is from. Either tweet @bmassey with the answer, or leave it as a comment on the Facebook page. Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor! – CB
While I think we look smashing in our lab coats, I can’t say that I’ve ever thought of what we do as “Sexy.” Conversion Science is exciting, challenging and perplexing, a perfect combination for the trained and curious person drawn to this kind of work.
But sexy?
Writing in The Harvard Business Review authors Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil think that the Data Scientist is the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” Hmmm.
Are Conversion Scientists actually Data Scientists? Yes, they are — with a few important differences.
We’re looking for more Conversion Scientists. Are you a candidate? Find out
The HBR calls them “high-ranking professionals with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data.” I hate the phrase “big data” because it implies that mortal humans can’t get their heads around it. Trust me. We can.
The two terms are relatively new. The term “Data Scientist” has only been around since 2008 when it was coined by the analytics brainiacs at LinkedIn and Facebook. “Conversion Scientists” was coined in 2006 by yours truly.
There is no degree program for either one of these professions.
Like Data Scientists, Conversion Scientists are hard to come by and we hope you will kindly send us a note if you’ve seen one in the wild. We’re hiring.
Davenport and Patil nail it when they say:
What kind of person does all this? Think of him or her as a hybrid of data hacker, analyst, communicator, and trusted adviser. The combination is extremely powerful.
But we would say the dominant trait among data scientists is an intense curiosity—a desire to go beneath the surface of a problem, find the questions at its heart, and distill them into a very clear set of hypotheses that can be tested.
And while people without strong social skills might thrive in traditional data professions, data scientists must have such skills to be effective.
Oh yah. That is a Conversion Scientist.
The Differences
The authors of the HBR article state that “More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data.” This would not be sufficient for a Conversion Scientist. Sure we wade, snorkel and Slip ‘n’ Slide through data. But we must also create our own targeted data. This is most commonly done with testing.
We design creative tests for web pages, paid search campaigns, emails, and shopping carts.
It is important to both professions that we be able to communicate effectively. Discovering things is only helpful when those discoveries result in “new business directions.”
For the Conversion Scientist, these new business directions must head toward more leads and more revenue. We’re the capitalists of the Data Scientist community.
That’s basically how you afford your Conversion Scientists: They produce measurable upsides in business results.
Are You a Conversion Scientist?
Since there is no degree program, Conversion Scientists come from the worlds of search optimization, online advertising and performance marketing. They choose positions based on how interesting the data challenges they will be working with are and how much of an impact they will have.
Conversion Scientists are fascinated with the things we learn about human behavior through testing and analysis. So are businesses, as it turns out.
The authors also state that, “…the data scientists we’ve spoken with say they want to build things, not just give advice to a decision maker.” This is true of Conversion Scientists. They want to see the fruits of their labor, not just present reports on their discoveries.
Does this sound like you? Yes, we are looking for our next Conversion Scientist and this quiz will help both of us understand if there’s a fit.
On-screen Markup can increase engagement and keep viewers around longer.
My online landing page webinars are quite different from most you’ve seen. Why is that?
Because I do live on-screen critiques of the landing pages. You can see me in action on August 21 during my webinar The Chemistry of the B2B Landing Page with Live Critiques.
Why not mark them up ahead of time and just present my findings? Here’s why:
1. It’s boooring. I mean webinars can be pretty uneventful, unless you’ve got a really talented presenter. This adds some pizzazz to the presentation.
2. It’s more fun for me to do. I like to do interactive events like this.
3. If I didn’t, then the critiques wouldn’t really be “live”.
4. It keeps your audience engaged longer, and we have some data to support that.
Why Online Markup is an Awesome Webinar Tool
You should consider online markup if you really want to deliver a captivating presentation that keeps the audience engaged for your entire message.
The interactivity helps people stay tuned into your presentation. There is something about drawings that just captivates the viewer and keeps their attention. We found this to be true in video.
Not only did the “whiteboard-style” video keep the eye on the video, it provided a higher conversion rate on a landing page than two other kinds of business video.
The on-screen drawing gives you a unique angle in a sea of “me too” webinars. Drop-off rates in my previous webinars have been significantly lower than in webinars I’ve done without the critiques. People hang around longer.
Less “multi-thrashing” by the audience. The myth of multi-tasking is alive and well in the webinar world. You may call this multi-bashing, but at any time, most of your viewers are checking email and social media while listening to your presentation.
As a webinar attendee, you can probably remember a time when you wished you could rewind a webinar. The presenter finally said something that caught your attention as you typed out an email reply, but you had no idea of what he said before that.
Since we don’t have Webinar DVRs yet, you want to minimize multi-trashing of your message. On-screen markup works.
Implementing Online Markup in Your Webinars
Most webinar software such as GotoWebinar and WebEx give you tools to markup your screens. However, I find the mouse to be an insufficient tool for writing and drawing. It takes too much concentration.
However, if it’s all you’ve got, you should use it.
My “rig” is a bit more sophisticated. That’s OK because I like toys.
This is my presentation setup. Click to enlarge.
This setup provides the following:
A video headshot for live keynotes and other presentations that require a connection with the audience. Many live meeting services allow a picture-in-picture window for the presenter’s face.
Presentation monitor for static presentation slides via VGA output on laptop and multi-screen drivers.
Tablet screen and stylus for drawing markup.
Hidden microphone. Since I’m on camera, I don’t wear a headset.
Audio feedback is provided by simple ear buds.
Ability to type via a bluetooth keyboard. Since my laptop is converted to a tablet, its keyboard is hidden.
Ability to mouse around. Good for switching screens, driving polls and more.
My webinar setup
Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (429637U) 12.5″ LED Tablet PC – Core i7 i7-2620M 2.7GThe x230 is now available.
Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000 (Amazon.com)
Starbucks Dark Sumatra “Earthly & Herbal” Ground Coffee (drip brewed)
“Manhattan Project” Lab Coat woven from 1200 thread-count Engagium anti-spam nanofibers. Available at Buyschtuff.
VGA Plug-n-Play Monitor and multi-screen display drivers.
The downside of Live Markup
There are some things you need to be aware of if you choose to do one of these.
It requires switching screens from your presentation monitor, where static slides are shown to the tablet screen where you can do the markup. Most webinar services handle this pretty well, but it is another point of failure.
It requires some coordination. If you can’t talk and draw at the same time, you may find your train of thought leaving the tracks.
All of this tech means more points of failure. You have to work hard to have alternative solutions should any of these technologies fail.
See It in Action
Reachforce has asked me to put my rig in action again and you can see the results.
Join me for The Chemistry of the B2B Landing Page, Volume 2 — with Live Critiques from The Conversion Scientist on August 21, 2103 at 1:00pm central time.
I’ll be doing a brief training on how to create effective landing pages backwards and then doing some B2B critiques.
Your page can be one that I critique. You can submit the URL when you register.
@neilpatel collects some of the most interesting eye-tracking images available and provides seven insights that can help you design your pages and choose images. We have done our own eye-tracking study of business video and you can get the full report now. The report offers similar conclusions for the use of video in a landing page. It includes over 30 minutes of embedded video that you can watch yourself.
Neil’s conclusions include:
Be careful you you use [images of] people
That people love media (especially on search results pages)
That men and women look at images differently
That simple images can be more effective
The power of the left side of the page
The power of faces
That people love hand-written notes (my favorite)
Enjoy the images he provides.
Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why It Happens & How To Recover Baskets Of Money
@peeplaja offers a great post on shopping cart abandonment
In my book I say that abandonment is like cholesterol: There is a good kind and a bad kind. For each there is a strategy for reducing the impact of abandonment on your business.
Good abandoners leave because they aren’t done with their shopping process. The challenge is to get them to come back and buy when they are done. There are several strategies here for retargeting the visitor who abandons using email and ads.
Bad abandoners leave because you surprised them or didn’t provide the information they were looking for. This kind of abandonment can be treated by improving the checkout process and by using pricing and shipping strategies.
Abandonment is the most heartbreaking of conversion killers. it is also a fertile place to increase the performance of your website.
Perhaps you can help me. It turns out that optimizing websites has “caught on” so to speak. There’s reason to believe that applying science to the “art” of creating effective websites is going to be a big thing.
Our business is certainly growing and profitable.
Now, we are ready to grow our development team.
Do you know a Web Developer who fits this very special profile? If so, please forward this to them or have them call me.
* They make online apps and websites dance like puppets on strings. They may say things like “Javascript”, “JQuery” and “CSS” and something about a train named “Ruby” that runs on rails.
* They like puzzles. They can become a bit obsessed with understanding how things work. They are curious.
* They work with data. They use words like “analytics”. You might tune out when they talk about analytics. Most people do.
* When you ask them why they are in such a good mood, they say that they found and fixed a tough bug. You may wonder if they are moonlighting as an exterminator.
* They plan for the future. They are always working on their skills, making themselves more valuable. You suspect that they should get out more.
* They deserve to be part of a profitable young company in Austin, Texas that is loved by its clients because we do what no other agency can do: We find more revenue in their websites, and we have the data to prove it.
My search isn’t going to be easy, but you may be the person who knows this individual. If you would be so kind as to pass this on to anyone fitting this description, they will thank you and I’ll reward you for your generosity.
We have just the place for them.
Please have them read our job description. It’s boring but helpful.
We are also looking for the next Conversion Scientist to lead our optimization efforts. They are even stranger, but very very valuable to us.
My direct contact information is below. I’m waiting.
Best regards,
Brian Massey, Conversion Scientist
Conversion Sciences LLC
Austin, Texas
512-961-6604 Brian@ConversionSciences.com P. S. I’m still waiting.
How To Present a Tourist-Friendly Experience To Brand New Site Visitors
Conversion-Centered DesignThere’s comfort in familiarity. Whether it’s an old favorite dish at a neighborhood restaurant, or a sweatshirt you’ve kept in the closet since high school, people like to stick to what they know. The new and unknown is unfamiliar and a little daunting. And it keeps people from branching out to trying new things.
A little familiarity goes a long way when visiting someplace new. (via MarketingLand)
This applies to your website as well. When a first time visitor comes to your site, will they find familiar markers to guide them around? Or will they be confused by the completely new experience?
What can you do to make your site new-user friendly? Brian’s new post on MarketingLand is full of great tips on things you can do to make your site more familiar and comfortable for brand new users. A few suggestions from his post:
Brian pulls some similar (and humorous) examples from his recent travels overseas, and illustrates how frustrating it can be to arrive somewhere new and be unsure of how to perform tasks that should be easy and commonplace.
Check out his entire post here on MarketingLand for an in-depth look at creating a user-friendly and familiar experience for your brand new site visitors.
Tweetable Stats and E-Commerce Customer Acquisition – For Further Study
Ecommerce CRO48 Tweetable Stats To Make You An Online Marketing SmartyPants | Unbounce
So, if you’ve got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a “Tweet this” link with each.
E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot | Custora Blog
It is no surprise to see cost-per-click (CPC) search advertising growing over that time. However, it is gratifying to see that email has grown the fastest, far outstripping banner advertising, Facebook and Twitter.
In my book I say that email is the biggest social network on the planet. It appears to be so for e-commerce companies as well.
Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.
Tired of getting Friended, then nothing? Start getting Customered
Conversion Marketing StrategyThey friend you. They fan you. They pin you. We love our social media tribes.
But how often to they customer you? How often do they buy, subscribe, or register?
When you get customered, your business grows, you gain another social influencer, and you get proof that your social media strategy is delivering what your social network wants.
Getting customered is an important part of the social media life cycle, and it’s also one of the trickiest.
I’m going to do a deep dive on getting your business customered at Engage Mexico in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, November 14-17.
You should be there.
The potential in your social networks
Your social networks store potential, like a battery stores voltage.
If you’ve been actively building your social networks, you have stored potential, like a battery has stored voltage. How do you hook up to the juice that turns that potential into leads and revenue.
Tapping this potential requires that you connect your social battery to something of interest to both you and your social denizens.
Use Content for Wires
Ultimately, you discharge your social batteries the same way you charged them. You use relevant content presented in a ways your crowd likes to get it.
Content might be blog post links on Twitter, contests on Facebook, and product pictures on Pinterest. Without the content, no one is going to find their way back. They just stay potential.
Many of us already have content strategies for our social networks, but what gets people to customer us when they visit?
Use social media landing pages to get customered
Connect them to your Landing Pages
Here’s where you need to start thinking like your visitors. Once read, great content is quickly dismissed.
What is the next step for me as a visitor and potential customerer of your business?
(Customerer??)
The golden secret is to treat your content pages as social media landing pages.
A landing page is a single minded page designed to do two things:
A Social Media landing page, then, is a single minded page designed to:
Both pages have content that delivers on a promise and a call to action that entices readers to do something wonderful.
NOTE: If you are building an email list, you get customered when you get subscribered. Think about it: the visitor is paying for content with their contact information.
NOTE 2: “Subscribered” is the last time I will verbify a noun in this article.
Where do Social Media Landing Pages Live?
Social media landing pages live anywhere you are drawing social visitors.
Your blog content pages have the content, but do they have the call to action? Is the call to action where it can be seen?
Add calls to action in or near the content.
Your email signup pages have the call to action, but do they have the content that makes signing up appealing?
Give subscribers a better reason to sign up than “Get on another mailing list.”
Your lead generation pages, offering gated content have the call to action, but do you talk about the content you are offering, or do you talk about our company and your products instead?
Don’t talk about yourself like a socially awkward freak.
Any page to which your friends, fans and followers might come in search of education or entertainment qualified as a social media landing page.
Remember that these are Social Visitors
Product pages on ecommerce sites are another frequent social media landing page. The call to action is invariably there: Add to Cart.
Given that your visitors are coming from a social network, they will be more likely to want to see social content with the product information. You should oblige them.
It’s one thing to get people to friend, fan, follow, and flatulate. It’s quite another to get them to customer you. Use content to connect your social batteries to social media landing pages and get customered.
Tweetables
Tired of getting friended, then nothing? Get customered!
Your social networks store potential, like a battery stores voltage.
The golden secret is to treat your content pages as social media landing pages.
Images by Brian Massey
The Black Hole in your Website
Ecommerce CROThe picture below illustrates all too well the dangers of running a website without some kind of conversion optimization effort.
What you are seeing is the office where an un-optimized website was hosted. The site was designed by an agency that let the charismatic CEO influence the design. Unfortunately, little attention was paid to the shopping cart. It was assumed that visitors would just figure things out.
They were wrong.
The abandonment rate – a measure of the visitors that start the checkout process but don’t finish – rose to alarming levels very quickly.
The abandonment rate of a website housed in this building approached infinity causing a gravity well, or “black hole” to form.
As the abandonment rate approached infinity, a rare singularity was created that threatened the entire building. Left unchecked, the entire business could have been consumed by the black hole that developed from the singularity. The gravitational forces of this website black hole are so strong, not even money can escape.
This is a situation in which a poorly designed website not only loses money, but sucks away all future opportunity. There is nothing worse for a brand than a bad online experience.
By inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site, the abandonment rate returned to safe levels, saving the business and several surrounding buildings.
A Conversion Scientist was able to avert catastrophe by inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site and completing some targeted split tests. Problems were isolated and corrected. The abandonment rate returned to safe levels saving the business — and several surrounding buildings.
The moral of the story is that untested websites not only threaten current sales, but can create ripples across the time-space continuum that some businesses never recover from.
Is there a black hole in your website from which money is not escaping?
Ask us about a Conversion Catalyst for your website.
Writing Killer Conversion Copy: Getting Past the Bouncers in Your Brain
Conversion-Centered DesignWhy do we have to work so hard to get our persuasive messages heard? Why is direct response copywriting so difficult? Why don’t people read?
This presentation from ConversionSUMMIT 2013 and ConversionJAM 3 introduces you to two “bouncers” in the human brain that keep marketing messages from penetrating and tells you what to do about them.
Writing Killer Conversion Copy Live
Writing Killer Conversion Copy Slides
Invite Brian to speak and entertain at your next event.
No More Guesswork: 5 Website Formats Proven to Get Results – via Crazy Egg
Conversion-Centered DesignPeople often wonder why their site isn’t more successful. They ask themselves all sorts of questions: Is it too wordy? Is my product/service stupid? Do I need more flair? Well…..
Good news everyone!** Brian teamed up with Crazy Egg to share five website formats that are proven to get results.
Brian breaks down the five basic types of sites and explains their winning features and structure.
Read the full post to find out which category your site fits in:
Once you determine which site style fits your company, you can put together a foolproof plan for building the perfect site for your needs.
Click HERE to read the entire post. Thanks to our awesome partner Crazy Egg!
** I will personally high five you or send you a Conversion Sciences sticker if you can be the first to tell me what the line that is starred above is from. Either tweet @bmassey with the answer, or leave it as a comment on the Facebook page. Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor! – CB
Is Conversion Science Sexy?
News & EventsSmart is sexy. Brains? Well maybe not.
While I think we look smashing in our lab coats, I can’t say that I’ve ever thought of what we do as “Sexy.” Conversion Science is exciting, challenging and perplexing, a perfect combination for the trained and curious person drawn to this kind of work.
But sexy?
Writing in The Harvard Business Review authors Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil think that the Data Scientist is the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” Hmmm.
Are Conversion Scientists actually Data Scientists? Yes, they are — with a few important differences.
The HBR calls them “high-ranking professionals with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data.” I hate the phrase “big data” because it implies that mortal humans can’t get their heads around it. Trust me. We can.
The two terms are relatively new. The term “Data Scientist” has only been around since 2008 when it was coined by the analytics brainiacs at LinkedIn and Facebook. “Conversion Scientists” was coined in 2006 by yours truly.
There is no degree program for either one of these professions.
Like Data Scientists, Conversion Scientists are hard to come by and we hope you will kindly send us a note if you’ve seen one in the wild. We’re hiring.
Davenport and Patil nail it when they say:
Oh yah. That is a Conversion Scientist.
The Differences
The authors of the HBR article state that “More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data.” This would not be sufficient for a Conversion Scientist. Sure we wade, snorkel and Slip ‘n’ Slide through data. But we must also create our own targeted data. This is most commonly done with testing.
We design creative tests for web pages, paid search campaigns, emails, and shopping carts.
It is important to both professions that we be able to communicate effectively. Discovering things is only helpful when those discoveries result in “new business directions.”
For the Conversion Scientist, these new business directions must head toward more leads and more revenue. We’re the capitalists of the Data Scientist community.
That’s basically how you afford your Conversion Scientists: They produce measurable upsides in business results.
Are You a Conversion Scientist?
Since there is no degree program, Conversion Scientists come from the worlds of search optimization, online advertising and performance marketing. They choose positions based on how interesting the data challenges they will be working with are and how much of an impact they will have.
Conversion Scientists are fascinated with the things we learn about human behavior through testing and analysis. So are businesses, as it turns out.
The authors also state that, “…the data scientists we’ve spoken with say they want to build things, not just give advice to a decision maker.” This is true of Conversion Scientists. They want to see the fruits of their labor, not just present reports on their discoveries.
Does this sound like you? Yes, we are looking for our next Conversion Scientist and this quiz will help both of us understand if there’s a fit.
Use On-screen Markup to Make Webinars More Effective
Conversion Marketing StrategyOn-screen Markup can increase engagement and keep viewers around longer.
My online landing page webinars are quite different from most you’ve seen. Why is that?
Because I do live on-screen critiques of the landing pages. You can see me in action on August 21 during my webinar The Chemistry of the B2B Landing Page with Live Critiques.
Why not mark them up ahead of time and just present my findings? Here’s why:
1. It’s boooring. I mean webinars can be pretty uneventful, unless you’ve got a really talented presenter. This adds some pizzazz to the presentation.
2. It’s more fun for me to do. I like to do interactive events like this.
3. If I didn’t, then the critiques wouldn’t really be “live”.
4. It keeps your audience engaged longer, and we have some data to support that.
Why Online Markup is an Awesome Webinar Tool
You should consider online markup if you really want to deliver a captivating presentation that keeps the audience engaged for your entire message.
The interactivity helps people stay tuned into your presentation. There is something about drawings that just captivates the viewer and keeps their attention. We found this to be true in video.
Not only did the “whiteboard-style” video keep the eye on the video, it provided a higher conversion rate on a landing page than two other kinds of business video.
The on-screen drawing gives you a unique angle in a sea of “me too” webinars. Drop-off rates in my previous webinars have been significantly lower than in webinars I’ve done without the critiques. People hang around longer.
Less “multi-thrashing” by the audience. The myth of multi-tasking is alive and well in the webinar world. You may call this multi-bashing, but at any time, most of your viewers are checking email and social media while listening to your presentation.
As a webinar attendee, you can probably remember a time when you wished you could rewind a webinar. The presenter finally said something that caught your attention as you typed out an email reply, but you had no idea of what he said before that.
Since we don’t have Webinar DVRs yet, you want to minimize multi-trashing of your message. On-screen markup works.
Implementing Online Markup in Your Webinars
Most webinar software such as GotoWebinar and WebEx give you tools to markup your screens. However, I find the mouse to be an insufficient tool for writing and drawing. It takes too much concentration.
However, if it’s all you’ve got, you should use it.
My “rig” is a bit more sophisticated. That’s OK because I like toys.
This is my presentation setup. Click to enlarge.
This setup provides the following:
My webinar setup
or
Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional Condenser Microphone
(Amazon.com)
The downside of Live Markup
There are some things you need to be aware of if you choose to do one of these.
It requires switching screens from your presentation monitor, where static slides are shown to the tablet screen where you can do the markup. Most webinar services handle this pretty well, but it is another point of failure.
It requires some coordination. If you can’t talk and draw at the same time, you may find your train of thought leaving the tracks.
All of this tech means more points of failure. You have to work hard to have alternative solutions should any of these technologies fail.
See It in Action
Reachforce has asked me to put my rig in action again and you can see the results.
Join me for The Chemistry of the B2B Landing Page, Volume 2 — with Live Critiques from The Conversion Scientist on August 21, 2103 at 1:00pm central time.
I’ll be doing a brief training on how to create effective landing pages backwards and then doing some B2B critiques.
Your page can be one that I critique. You can submit the URL when you register.
I hope to see you there.
Eye Tracking Conversion Lessons and Shopping Cart Abandonment – For Further Study
Ecommerce CRO7 Conversion Lessons Learned From Eye Tracking
@neilpatel collects some of the most interesting eye-tracking images available and provides seven insights that can help you design your pages and choose images. We have done our own eye-tracking study of business video and you can get the full report now. The report offers similar conclusions for the use of video in a landing page. It includes over 30 minutes of embedded video that you can watch yourself.
Neil’s conclusions include:
Enjoy the images he provides.
Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why It Happens & How To Recover Baskets Of Money
@peeplaja offers a great post on shopping cart abandonment
In my book I say that abandonment is like cholesterol: There is a good kind and a bad kind. For each there is a strategy for reducing the impact of abandonment on your business.
Good abandoners leave because they aren’t done with their shopping process. The challenge is to get them to come back and buy when they are done. There are several strategies here for retargeting the visitor who abandons using email and ads.
Bad abandoners leave because you surprised them or didn’t provide the information they were looking for. This kind of abandonment can be treated by improving the checkout process and by using pricing and shipping strategies.
Abandonment is the most heartbreaking of conversion killers. it is also a fertile place to increase the performance of your website.
I want to talk to that developer you know
News & EventsPerhaps you can help me. It turns out that optimizing websites has “caught on” so to speak. There’s reason to believe that applying science to the “art” of creating effective websites is going to be a big thing.
Our business is certainly growing and profitable.
Now, we are ready to grow our development team.
Do you know a Web Developer who fits this very special profile? If so, please forward this to them or have them call me.
* They make online apps and websites dance like puppets on strings. They may say things like “Javascript”, “JQuery” and “CSS” and something about a train named “Ruby” that runs on rails.
* They like puzzles. They can become a bit obsessed with understanding how things work. They are curious.
* They work with data. They use words like “analytics”. You might tune out when they talk about analytics. Most people do.
* When you ask them why they are in such a good mood, they say that they found and fixed a tough bug. You may wonder if they are moonlighting as an exterminator.
* They plan for the future. They are always working on their skills, making themselves more valuable. You suspect that they should get out more.
* They deserve to be part of a profitable young company in Austin, Texas that is loved by its clients because we do what no other agency can do: We find more revenue in their websites, and we have the data to prove it.
My search isn’t going to be easy, but you may be the person who knows this individual. If you would be so kind as to pass this on to anyone fitting this description, they will thank you and I’ll reward you for your generosity.
We have just the place for them.
Please have them read our job description. It’s boring but helpful.
We are also looking for the next Conversion Scientist to lead our optimization efforts. They are even stranger, but very very valuable to us.
My direct contact information is below. I’m waiting.
Best regards,
Brian Massey, Conversion Scientist
Conversion Sciences LLC
Austin, Texas
512-961-6604
Brian@ConversionSciences.com
P. S. I’m still waiting.