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 customeredConnect 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.
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 Indispensable Marketer
Conversion Marketing StrategyLet’s talk about your career as a marketer. Let’s talk about your power in an organization. Let’s talk about your ability to make things happen in a very real and salary-building way.
Marketing is seen as important by CEOs. However, the marketing department is often not seen as important.
We are too often seen as tactical teams working on strategic initiatives, but don’t own the strategy. Our skills are seen as commodities. Everyone with a word processor seems to know how to do marketing.
Marketers move in a valley between powers. They don’t have control of the products. They don’t have control over sales.
We are the soil and water (and fertilizer) that makes the grass grow, but at the end of the day, we’re not given credit for the grass.
The distinctions between a “typical” marketer and an indispensable marketer are subtle and huge.
The table is full of generalizations, of course. My aim is to describe a number of Power Processes that marketers can use to become indispensable.
Power Processes: Visible, Measurable, Repeatable
A power process has the following characteristics:
1. It has visible, demonstrable effects on the bottom line of a company.
Marketing success is too often relegated to graphs in the monthly marketing report. Power Processes are visible to the company, often creating problems in other areas when they work.
2. It is repeatable with consistent results.
Power processes are the things that can be relied on month after month to provide additional revenue and success.
3. It is measureable.
Marketers need to stop doing the things that don’t work. The success or failure of a Power Process should be obvious.
4. It provides a self-regulating learning curve.
A Power Process provides feedback as it is implemented. Learning happens in action. It is a more organic learning curve than can be provided by a campaign.
In my MarketingLand column Marketing Power Processes: The Lord Of The Rings, I talk about making the phone ring. It fits the model of the Power Process.
1. Sales or customer support knows when the website is generating calls. You might create some problems for them!
2. It will deliver month after month.
3. It can be measured and quantified.
4. You will learn over time what calls to action make the phone ring more and more.
Read the article or listen to it here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Why You are Frustrated with Your Landing Pages
Landing Page OptimizationOne of my favorite online videos of all time imagines how Microsoft might have re-designed the original iPod packaging. The comments on YouTube indicate that this was actually made by Microsoft to illustrate the problem with Microsoft’s policies.
MS iPod Parody
Landing Pages go through the same process and end up completely missing their intended purpose.
Done right, they keep the promise made by an ad, email or link.
Done right, they single-mindedly get visitors to take action.
Done right, they make the effective cost of your advertising shrink.
Done right, they focus on an offer and not the company that produced them.
However, many of them don’t deliver. It’s frustrating and maddening.
There is hope.
Our friends at Unbounce, the landing page Kings, have asked me and fellow Conversion Scientist Joel Harvey to explain how to get to “Done right.”
in our presentation The Chemistry of the Landing Page, we show you how to build a landing page backward and are going to critique a number of pages live online.
Several brave souls allowed us to critique their site as a part of the presentation. Watch now as submissions close on Thursday.
There is a recipe for landing pages that will work for you over and over. It involves a finite number of elements.
However, the most important feature of a landing page is a whole lot of nothing – nothing that isn’t supporting the offer, enabling action, building trust, providing proof or showing the offer.
Anything else is creating Abandonment.
We’ll talk about the problem of Abandonment and how your landing pages are giving visitors unnecessary opportunities to flee.
Ample Schadenfreude
We pick a few pages submitted by brave viewers for a live critique, applying the landing page formula.
This is not to be missed.
We have a lot of fun with these critiques and you will too. It’s perhaps the best way to get good at constructing landing pages.
Here’s a freebie just for reading
Here’s an example of how easy it is to apply landing page chemistry to the question, “Should we put social media icons on our landing pages?”
Is the primary page offer to like, friend or follow? Do the icons build trust or credibility? Do they create an opportunity for visitors to delay their action or abandon the page altogether?
For most landing pages, social media icons are a bad idea. They make visitors delay taking action and really don’t support the offer with trust or proof.
Save social media icons for the “Thank you” page.
Watch the complete presentation.
Confessions of an Über Optimizer-Craig Sullivan [INFODOODLE]
Conversion OptimizationIt was a pleasure to spend some time with Craig Sullivan, the pleasant but focused Scotsman now residing in the UK.
He’s not a man to mince words, but he knows his stuff, so he’s earned the right to be cranky when he comes across the websites of companies that just don’t get it.
You don’t have to wait for his wrath, though. He spelled it out in his ConversionSUMMIT keynote, and the Conversion Sciences doodlebot captured his presentation in HD resolution. All for you.
You will find his presentation slides on Slideshare.
September Wrap Up: ConversionSUMMIT and ConversionJAM
News & EventsI’ve got some eye-candy and ear-hums for those of you who hate reading. My tour of Europe (Frankfurt, Germany to Stockholm, Sweden) yielded a variety of media.
Our brains are good at ignoring the typical so that we don’t miss the life-threatening: Wind on the grass vs. the steps of a predator.
Per Axbom
Lab Coats Were All the Rage
My fantastic hosts, André Morys and John Ekman easily earned their Conversion Scences lab coats for exemplary work in progressing the science of conversion. Co-speaker Natalie Nahai (the WebPschologist) found the 1200 thread count thermal weave to be warming on a cool Stockholm night.
An Audio Preview
Live the Full Presentation as if you were THERE
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow along with the slides.
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