Will you be in Austin on Thursday, February 21st? If so, you should head over to Pubcon Austin to hear Brian speak.  There’s really no better way to spend a Thursday afternoon.
Brian will be speaking with Khalid Saleh (moderated by Peter LeShaw) on conversion rate optimization. Or, as Pubcon says…..
“You may have figured out how to funnel traffic to your site, but are you monitoring user activity post-click? Learn how to keep the momentum going and encourage users to become more than just traffic–evolve them into conversions. This session will look at specific techniques to increase conversion rates.”
Brian will be bringing real world techniques and tips that you can apply directly to your site to see improvement. And I can’t make any promises, but I can almost guarantee that there will be a lab coat in the building.
If you haven’t registered, get signed up for Pubcon here, and stop by to see The Conversion Scientist in action!
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In the world of sales funnels, acronyms rule. There’s the classic AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and the popular AILSB from Brad Geddes (Awareness, Interest, Learn, Shop, Buy). People have reversed, flipped, twisted, and backflipped the formulas, but for the most part, they stay pretty close to that theme. Surely you think there’s no need for another model. Well Brian does; so he created one.
Brian’s model is TEES, which stands for the following:
Trigger – What is happening in a visitor’s life that has caused them to search your keyword?
Empathy – Helping a visitor understand that you can help them with the problem that brought them to your site.
Education – Help the customer understand their problem.
Solution – Providing the proof that you can solve their problem, and prompt them to buy.
To learn more about Brian’s new funnel, check out his column on Search Engine Land.

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INFOGRAPHIC Crafting the Subject Line that Gets Your Email Read – Litmus

We’ve seen in email tests that subject lines can have implications far beyond the open rate. We’ve seen two identical emails with identical landing pages have the same open rates and the same click-through rates (CTR), but one generated more sales than the other.

What’s the difference? The subject line.

In short, subject lines are important. And they are difficult to write.

Build a Conversion Rate Heatmap by Hour & Day of Week in Google Docs

When we dig into a site’s analytics, we try a number of different approaches to the data. Sometimes interesting things pop out, and sometimes the data looks “as expected.

“This is an analysis we are going to start adding to our analysis: Heatmap of Conversions by Hour of Day. We will modify it for our ecommerce clients (as we track Revenue per Visit, or RPV).

You might try this and see if there is an interesting pattern in your data.

It’s Not My Job: Why Marketing is Broken

@TheGrok (Bryan Eisenberg) is one of the founders of the performance marketing movement — we’ve called it conversion marketing. He has the cred to ask the hard questions.

In this very impactful article, he asks “Really, is this so hard to do?” of the email marketers whom he sees as “broken.”These examples should leave you with a feeling of, “Oh yes. I get it now.”

That can be a very valuable feeling.

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Nine conversion techniques from the 1920s to try today | Econsultancy

Jan 23, 2013 08:11 pm

Comments:

  •  @eConsultancy brings the excellent teaching of Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising into our online world. It’s almost conversion steampunk until you realize that we haven’t invented very much original.And we’ve left some smart ideas behind.Enjoy these nine tips and you should be able to find a free PDF of Hopkins’ book somewhere on the Web.If not, email me.

by: Brian Massey
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Which Site Seal do People Trust the Most? (2013 Survey Results) – Articles – Baymard Institute

Jan 23, 2013 07:07 am

Comments:

  • When you place the logos of third parties on your site, you are “borrowing” the trust they have created for yourself. Such logos include client logos, website certified logos, associations you belong to, and even the credit card company logos found on checkout pages.Here is an interesting study on which common trust symbols are perceived as most trustworthy.

by: Brian Massey
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19 Things We Can Learn From Numerous Heatmap Tests | ConversionXL

Jan 05, 2013 01:04 pm

Comments:

  •  @Peeplaja has just saved you a whole lot of time. He’s done the research and found the studies that you can use to refute the often poor advice your designers are giving your Web team.Spend some time with this post and the links he references if you want to consistently create effective, high-converting websites. – Brian Massey

by: Brian Massey

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It’s job is to give you some ideas about where to invest to increase conversion rates and revenue per visit for your site.
Once you have been inspired, your next question should be, “What evidence do we have that would support any one of these strategies?”
Ask your team or give us a call.

Video

For complex sells or emotional purchases, video can deliver a great deal of information in a short period of time. Register for our report Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects to learn more.

Ratings and Reviews

Found more and more on ecommerce sites, ratings and reviews offer proof to and build trust with visitors. Star ratings offer comfort at a glance almost anywhere on a site. Don’t rule this option out for B2B products and services as well.

Live Chat

In almost any marketplace, there is a segment of the audience who just needs a specific question answered, or prefers to interact with another human being before they can take action. Live chat offers a quick and easy solution for these prospects.

Recommendation Engines

The psychology of presenting alternative products to visitors is complex. In some cases, it can help them discover more options. In others it can give them comfort at a glance that they’ve found the best combination of value and features. The best recommendation engines learn about your visitors over time, and this is a powerful capability.

Abandonment Remarketing

Technologies allow us to gather an email address even before someone has clicked “submit” on their transaction or registration. This gives us the opportunity to reach out to visitors who were close to buying by email. There is a chance to collect an additional 5% to 30% of revenue for those almost-buyers and near-subscribers who got distracted before completing their process.

Retargeted Ads

One of the first qualifiers of a prospect is that they visited your website. Remarketing is the process of targeting ads across the internet at those who’ve been to your site. Click through rates and conversions rates are more favorable that demographically targeted display ads.

Email Marketing

There is power in the list. We call an email list a marketing battery because it stores the potential generated by your advertising, potential that can be released through email. The right email strategy can fundamentally change the effectiveness of almost any website in any industry.

Content Marketing

Great content is proving to simultaneously education, entertain and build trust with prospects. It shortens sales cycles and creates tribes of people with similar interests across social media. It causes your message to spread for less than the price of purchasing media. Successful marketing departments are going to look more and more like publishers today.

Landing Pages

Every ad is a promise, and when you send ad clicks to generic pages, you break a promise. Landing pages are promise keepers. That is why they work so well. They are single-minded pages that keep your promises and ask a visitor to take action. They are easy to test and can be used for any kind of offer in any industry.

Let’s Talk About Accelerators

Conversion Sciences sees your online marketing effort as a reaction between your visitors and your value proposition. Accelerators are catalysts that make these reactions progress faster, burn hotter and deliver more energy.
Let’s have a discussion about how the online portion of your business could benefit, and how we can help you choose the right strategies based on data.
You’ll find us in the lab.
Email us there at: [hide_email TheLab@ConversionSciences.com]
Or call +1 888-961-6604

It’s not easy being a landing page. It has one job and one job only; provide the customer with what they were promised from the ad or email or offer they clicked on.  It may be a single task, but it’s a huge undertaking for a single page.
Being the first impression for a whole site is a make or break moment, and the landing page does everything it can to get it right the first time. Because it knows that it’s going to be sending those hard-won customers and leads to the rest of the site.
It’s not easy knowing that for all of its clarity and ease-of-use, a landing page will eventually have to send a customer on to other pages. Pages that are nosy like the Shopping Cart, or pages that are self-centered like the About Us section.
The landing page exists solely to deliver what the customer wants, and it takes its job very seriously.
So come on in. In If Your Landing Page Could Talk, What Would It Say?  the landing page wants to show you around and give you exactly what you need.
Enjoy your visit.
To read the Brian’s full article on the life of a landing page, click HERE.
Or listen to Brian read the article.
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Google Analytics Tips: 10 Data Analysis Strategies That Pay Off Big!

Jan 02, 2013 11:43 pm

Comments:

@Avinash Kaushik has a unique ability to make analytics human. I don’t share many analytics posts with you, as I don’t want to scare you off. But I fear I may be underestimating you.

Here are ten very good ways to get to know your visitors through Google Analytics. I believe you will be energized and excited if you open these reports in your own Google Analytics account.
This is a great way to start appreciating your visitors in ways that will make your site more successful.

by: Brian Massey

Karon Thackston: Phrasing Discount Offers for Maximum Results by Getentrepreneurial.com

Dec 29, 2012 01:47 pm

Comments:

How you phrase a discount is a powerful way to increase conversions. Some visitors do not like to do math, or will do it wrong. Therefore, offering 20% off is less effective than save $18. However, high discounts (50%, 90%) may draw buyers more powerfully than the dollar value.

You have to find out for yourself.
Karon offers a nice list of alternatives and some links to research for your enjoyment.

by: Brian Massey

The Top 5 Website UX Trends of 2012 | UX Magazine

Dec 29, 2012 01:40 pm

Comments:
While good UX (User eXperience) does not always translate into higher conversion rates or revenue per visit (RPV), these trends point to excellent hypotheses for what MIGHT increase the performance of your site.

  1. Single Page Sites: Simplicity is often a great way to increase conversion rates
  2. Infinite scrolling: Consider this for category pages. I haven’t tested this yet.
  3. Persistent top nav: I am very curious to see if this increases CR and RPV. Let me know if you’ve tested it.
  4. Web 2.0 Aesthetics: I hope this includes the rotating banners at the top of so many sites.
  5. Typography Returns: Your message is the most important part of your conversion optimization plan. Typography can help… or hurt

by: Brian Massey

I’m going to make this brief.

As a reader of The Conversion Scientist, I’m offering you free copy of Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist for your Kindle, iPad or Smarthphone.
All you have to do is visit the Amazon Kindle Store and have the book sent to your iPad, iPhone, Android, or Kindle.
You can read it on the Amazon Cloud Reader on your computer, or through the free Kindle App available for your Smartphone or iPad.
The book gives you the foolproof formulas to creating a website that not only gets the right traffic, but converts that traffic to customers, returning customers and advocates.
Some of the great things you’ll learn in this book:

  • Identify the unique customer creation formula for your site.
  • Set up your own digital conversion lab to measure your progress.
  • Develop landing pages for your site that actually deliver.
  • Charge your marketing “batteries” to reduce your advertising expenditures.
  • Communicate authoritatively with designers, developers, and executives.

So please, do not buy this book.
Go over to the Kindle Store and get your copy absolutely free. Your website will thank you for it.

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