It’s happening in every industry as we speak. Decision makers are looking at information that tells them how the Internet is impacting their business and their industry.
It may be happening in your office.
A decision is going to be made:
a) To continue with business as usual
b) To commit to the Internet as a crucial part of the future of the business
Those businesses that choose a) may not be here in 24 months. Those that choose b) may not either, but if they are they will be the leader in their space.
In my Search Engine Land column 5 Ways to Jump Ahead in Your Industry, I outline the characteristics of a testing company, like Zappos or Amazon. These are the characteristics that can result in astonishing growth and amazing profitability. They include:
Accept The Internet As A Lever
Develop A Testing Culture
Invest Where It Counts
Know Your Numbers
Take A Non-Commodity Approach
It is no small feat to accomplish these, but those that do will enjoy a lead in their industry that will be hard to usurp by competitors.
I was on the hot seat at the Austin Content Marketing Meetup.
This isn’t your “play nice and listen while the guy reads his slides” sort of presentation. In the hot seat, the room is actively trying to destroy you, lobbing lit questions from across the room and questioning your every word.
Yes, it even got a little ugly. I think I held up OK.
You’re invited to sit back and enjoy the occasionally heated conversation on how to make your content convert visitors into sales.
The common wisdom among social media marketers is “put links to your social media everywhere.” The idea is that you should build as big a social media “tribe” as possible. As it turns out, this isn’t always a good plan.
If you’re paying for traffic to your Web site – and what traffic doesn’t require some cash, blood, sweat or tears to earn – then why would you send it off to Facebook or YouTube or LinkedIn to disappear forever?
You wouldn’t. But you might be.
In my Search Engine Land article How Mark Zuckerberg Stole Your Search Traffic & What To Do About It, I show you how your social media advertisements may be costing you conversions.
I also show you how to use social media in a conversion-safe way. Read the entire article
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
We have a little fun with Copywriters in my newest Content Marketing Institute post, How to Find the Right Copywriter for your Landing Pages. If you could only hire one professional that would increase the number of people who buy or become a lead on your site, it would be a copywriter.
They can paint more detailed pictures than a photographer.
They can use more colorful language than a designer.
Communicate with humans and search engines.
If you’re going to dominate your competition online, it is because they write their copy themselves. I suggest you find a good direct response copywriter and let them do their work.
To help you get familiar with the kinds of copywriters you might meet in a dark alley, I’ve described five that I’ve run into on a regular basis.
The Styrofoam Sandwich Writer
The SEO Substituter
The Frustrated Novelist
The Soviet-era Propagandist
The Persuader
Most copywriters you meet will be a combination of some of these.
Tell me about your favorite copywriter in the comments. Let us know what combination of the above he or she exhibits.
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Landing Page Basics: Don’t let your content go out without a strategy to draw readers back to your site and a landing page to get them to convert – even if that conversion is to get your next content offering.
In this article I’ll show you an example of how content can drive a reader to action. I also talk about landing page basics like these five important landing page strategies:
Pitch the offer, not your company
Remove distractions
Let the visitor know where they are in the process
Make forms the right length
Only ask for information you will use
Content marketers sometimes focus on the content and forget about the marketing.
Yes, we want to inform.
Yes, we want to educate.
Yes, we want to be seen as the thought leader in our space.
But, we also want more traffic to our website, more leads and more sales.
One of the easiest yet most often overlooked marketing tactics is the call to action. I recently gave you ideas on how to include calls to action in your content marketing, but where should you send people and what do you say?
Landing pages: Where visitors like to land
A landing page is a page on your site dedicated to delivering on promises made by the offers in your content. The goal is to get a consumer of your content to take another step toward becoming a customer.
Your home page is not a good landing page. Instead, you want to send your prospects to a page where they are asked to do something specific and logical.
So what makes a good landing page? Reader Sarah Mitchell responded to my last call for samples with a web page that illustrates how to integrate content marketing and landing pages.
She wrote the product page for ezytire.com. I like this example because businesses tend to use this space to talk about themselves and their products. They forget about the visitor.
A visit to your product page is a “buy sign,” making it a great place for calls to action. Mitchell does a good job of keeping the copy focused on the prospects, their businesses and their customers. She is also not shy about giving the prospect opportunities to take action.
ezytire about page with markup.
Landing Page Basics: Calls to action
In 12 Ways to Get Readers to Take Action, I implore content marketers to put calls to action, also called Conversion Beacons, in their content marketing. Mitchell’s ezytire page is the poster child for in-content and ad-based calls to action.
Notice that there are not one, not two, but five calls to action on this page to start a free trial. In addition, she has secondary offers to start a chat, “register your interest,” and watch a how-to video.
The bottom line is this: You never know when a prospect finally gets enough information to feel comfortable taking action, so you must always be offering ways for them to do so.
Is this a bait and switch? It isn’t, and we should never attempt to mislead our prospects. The page offers details on the product. Contact information has been moved to a dedicated “Contact” page.
Mitchell’s links go to a landing page that starts the trial enrollment process right away. It should be obvious that sending visitors to the home page here would have been disastrous for ezytire.
ezytire landing page trial.
We know this page is working. The bounce rate is very low, with only 14 percent of visitors leaving the page immediately. That means the page isn’t scaring people away despite having a total of eight primary and secondary calls to action.
Fully half of the visitors are starting a free trial, and 15 percent of them will purchase the service when their trial is over.
That’s a beautiful bottom-line conversion rate of about 6.45 percent. Many businesses are proud of a two percent or three percent conversion rate from landing pages.
Landing page basics
Here are five things this page does well, things that you should consider when you develop your landing pages.
Pitch the offer, not your company
The page is all about the trial, not about Ezytire.
No distractions
All of the content on this page is designed to help the reader get through the trial process. Ezytire should consider removing the top navigation as well to keep from distracting visitors.
The visitor knows where they are in the process
If it’s a pretty long conversion process, it’s considered a best practice to always let the visitor know where they are. You can see the “Step 1,” “Step 2,” etc. on the page that will provide the visitor with this feedback.
Forms are the right length
Long forms can be more daunting to visitors than multiple steps. For a “soft” offer like a trial, I recommend shorter forms and more steps. You should try different approaches with your audience.
Only ask for information you will use
The first step is pretty efficient: Name, email address, password. Ezytire could ask some qualifying questions, and may be tempted to ask for a phone number. Additional fields will, in general, decrease your conversion rates, so don’t ask if you won’t’ use the information.
The ezytire page Sarah Mitchell inherited only generated nine conversions in three months before Sarah reworked it. If you’re not thinking, “I need someone like Sarah to look at my pages,” you’re not really a business person, or your pages would have bottom-line conversion rates above 7 percent.
In my next post, I’ll share some ideas on how to find a great landing page copywriter.
Online services are making things so easy for online marketers, but they’re also creating an enormous number of blind spots. These are the services that host our webinars, sell tickets to our events, let people buy our products, manage our appointments and almost everything else we do as online marketers.
Sometimes, these services behave as if they don’t want us to know the conversion rates of their services. They are unmeasurable, opaque to analytics.
I wrote an open letter to them at Search Engine Land.
Dear Service Provider:
I expect to be able to measure you. I expect to have transparency into what my visitors are experiencing inside your systems. I pay good money to bring prospects to my site and I don’t want to send them off to a black box when they buy my products or sign up for an event.
It’s time for you to prioritize measurement and to give me control of the signup, subscription, or purchase process.
Here’s what you need to do if you want me to use your service. These features are going to appeal to the largest users, those customers that you really want because they will pay for a lot of your services.
Analytics Reporting & Integration
Eventbrite is running away with the event ticket sales market. Do you know why? Because they know what works and what doesn’t. They know what features sell more tickets for their customers. They eliminate those things that reduce ticket sales.
They recently did a study and can tell you (to the penny) the average revenue generated by a Facebook share or a Twitter tweet or an email invite.
Most importantly, they share the analytics love with people like me, their customer. This allows me to be as good in my marketplace as Eventbrite is in theirs.
I know where visitors to my Eventbrite page are coming from, and how many of them buy a ticket. If the copy on my event page isn’t working, I know it right away.
Dear everyone else: let me measure the visitors I am sending to your service. Tell me who is bouncing, who is completing the process, and make it easy for me to get to that information.
Your Service Providers Should Help You With Your Conversion Rate
Customizable Steps
I can’t recommend a shopping cart to my clients. I haven’t used them all, but I refuse to work with carts in general. They are universally inflexible and opaque. It’s as if the Shopping Cart Guild has decreed that only engineers can design them, and if those engineers don’t really understand the buying process, all the better.
I want to setup many different shopping carts on my site. I want to split test them. I want to test a three-step shopping cart against a ten-step shopping cart. I want all of this and I want to know which step is causing people to abandon the process. See above.
I expect to control the placement of the buttons, the location of trust symbols, the appearance of product images and the treatment of tax and freight charges.
I demand that you let me collect a name and email address on the first step, so that I can use email retargeting, but I do not want my visitors to have to create an account.
Dear shopping cart vendors: shopping cart abandonment rates are atrocious across the web and you aren’t helping. Please start thinking about the shoppers a little more.
Control Of The Thank You Page
When I complete a purchase, signup for a webinar, download a white paper or sign up for a trial, my eyes are assaulted by the bright white blankness of the “thank you” page. Usually those words and a logo are all that appears.
This is one of the biggest missed opportunities in all of conversiondom.
What could be used in this space?
First, I need to add some copy that tells the new customer what to expect in my brand’s words.
I want to add links to my social networks. Genius.
For my events, there needs to be a link that adds an event to a prospective attendee’s calendar.
I want to list some of the other good content I have on my site.
Dear GotoWebinar: you won’t think of everything I will want on my “thank you” page. Send them to me when the signup process is complete. I know what to say to them.
This will also let me measure conversions in the software of my choice. That makes the first item on this list easier for you.
Subdomain Support
Unbounce, a online landing page platform knows that conversion rates go down when visitors are taken to a different domain to buy. It feels phishy to them. So, Unbounce enables me to send people to their landing pages using my domain. It’s called a subdomain.
Unbounce tells me exactly how to create a domain like “offer.buyschtuff.com” and point it to their system. When my visitors go from my site at www.buyschtuff.com to a landing page on their site, they see “offer.buyschtuff.com,” not “wp2.unbounce.com/id=8fdire*#$#.”
Thus, they don’t feel like they’ve been handed off to spammers. They feel at home. People who feel at home don’t abandon me.
This strategy also makes it easy to integrate Unbounce pages with my analytics package. Again, see above.
Dear online service company: don’t we all want higher conversion rates? Support subdomains, please.
Control Of Emails
The emails sent in the 24 hours following a purchase or signup will determine in large part the success of my product or the attendance at my event. It will determine how much social sharing will occur.
Unfortunately, dear service provider, the notification emails that come out of your system seem to work against me. The language seems to deter the very actions we want them to take.
I need to determine what goes into every email that gets sent out. Don’t tell me you’re trying to thwart spammers. My customers may like spam for all you know. My email service provider deals with spammers all day and night and seem to be doing just fine in the spam department.
I won’t use you if you’re going to subject my customers and prospects to your drivel written by the same guy that programmed the email delivery software. He doesn’t’ understand my business or my prospects.
In Closing, Dear Service Providers
You are benefiting and profiting from a time of great decentralization. Online marketers are using a different service for their meetings, another for their webinars, another for shopping carts, another for subscriptions, and yet another for appointment scheduling. There has never been a better time to be a provider of services.
However, if you want to be the leader in your space, you need to understand how we are using your service. You must provide measurability, customizability, domain support, and effective email tools. Then you need to watch us do our thing. What you learn will put you ahead of the competition.
Our social media avatars don’t have to be boring, and in fact they can be quite instrumental in engaging with visitors to our Web site, Facebook profile, Twitter stream and more.
We are well into the digital publishing world. I am fortunate to have my work appear several times a month in a variety of places.
Yet, I still love to see my mug in print, I don’t know why.
So, my digital friend, I thought I would share my mention from Chief Content Officer Magazine (free subscription) and fill in a few more details on the method to my headshot madness.
Your Social Media Avatar and Conversion Tips.
The Conversion Scientist’s Social Media Avatar Tips
1. Include something unusual in the image, something representative of your personal brand.
I wear the lab coat in every shot, even if it isn’t showing much. The human mind remembers such things.
2. Control the viewer’s eyes with your eyes.
Eye-tracking studies have shown that our gaze is drawn to faces that are looking at us. In fact, we may stare at a pretty girl long enough to forget why we came to your page in the first place. Have several versions of your headshot and aim your eyes at things you want people to see: calls to action, content, headlines, etc.
3. Be unexpected.
One of the things we want to do is engage the mind of the viewer. Things that will light up someone’s brain activity are the unexpected, off-center and the need to “fill in” an image.
4. Consider integrating action.
You can tell a story with a one-frame headshot. So, tell it. What am I doing in this shot?
I’m talking to an audience. I must be a presenter. Why, yes, I am! But, what am I holding (unexpected)?
I’m going in for the hug! That means I’m a connector, right??
Other avatar actions: Being passionate, banging a table, thinking deeply, contributing at a homeless shelter.
Our avatars don’t have to be boring, and in fact they can be quite instrumental in engaging with visitors to our website, Facebook profile, Twitter stream and more.
Jeffrey Eisenberg is not afraid to ruffle a few feathers.
He gave us his unique view on Social Media as only a expert with his experience can at the Keynote at PubCon Austin 2011. Here are my notes from his presentation captured as a real-time Instagraph.
Every site has one visitor in common: Googlebot. Googlebot is an unusual visitor that few of us understand. Understand the persona profile of Googlebot and use it to your advantage.
If you follow The Conversion Scientist, you know that a failure to understand your visitor is conversion suicide.
So how do we get copywriters, designers, developers and marketers to configure their site for this powerful king-maker visitor? The same way we do this for our human visitors: We personify them.
Building Empathy For Googlebot
Personas are a challenging topic. Personas are, well, personal to every business. You can’t cheat off of anyone else’s paper when putting them together. Whether you’re going to spend 30 minutes dashing off what you know about your online visitors or invest in a full workup to hack your company’s intelligence, you have to do the work. You can’t borrow from someone else’s case study.
There is one exception, and this visitor may be on your site as you read this.
I’m going to use a persona to help you relate to Googlebot. All of the components are here.
Building empathy for Googlebot.
Note: I’m sure those of you experienced in SEO could add to this persona. Please do so in the comments.
My Search Engine Land column “Building Empathy for Googlebot” this month is a persona profile of Googlebot, and any site should be able to use this to their advantage.
Put it somewhere everyone on the Web team can see it; print posters, put it up on Basecamp, add it to your war room.
It should go right next to your other personas. Don’t have any? Contact us and we’ll help you understand if personas will move your online business forward.
Here’s an excerpt:
Demographics
Name: Googlebot
Education: Ph.D. in Kindergarten
Gender: Male. Definitely male.
Description
While Googlebot is one of the most pervasive presences on the Internet, little is known about him. It is widely believed that he has an undiagnosed combination of savant syndrome and autistic disorder.
This condition is marked by super-human analytical powers combined with an inability to connect basic concepts or understand simple social norms. Googlebot does not have a sense of humor.
Another reason for this diagnosis is Googlebot’s amazing but selective memory. Googlebot has an unwavering fascination with words and an uncanny ability to remember the links that connect the Internet’s far flung pages.
It is widely believed that Googlebot is also good at counting large sums of money.
Googlebot can identify and recall a seemingly unlimited number of images and videos, but has no understanding of their meaning.
Mode Of Persuasion: Methodical
Googlebot analyzes information slowly and logically. Methodical visitors need lots of detailed information.
Visitor Commentary
These are Googlebot’s needs in his own words:
I’m an excellent surfer. I come to your site on Tuesday… definitely Tuesday afternoon. I read your pages. I see your words. That tells me everything about you. You use some words over and over and I can tell what you talk about. Of course there are the meta tags. Descriptions, descriptions are good; and the page title. Headings have words and I like to count the words in headings and see if they are in other places on your site too.
Links. I like links, definitely. Link text has words and I like to compare them, compare them to the other words in the other places. The link text words tell me about the place they link to. Must … resist … urge … to … follow … until … done … here.
Of course, you have links back to your site, 497 links — definitely 497 – and the words on those links – they call it anchor text, but anchors are on ships and ships float on water and I don’t see many sites about ships and water — and I can compare those link words to the words in the other places on your site.
I’m an excellent surfer, you know.
Uh-oh. Your site doesn’t change much. 99.93% of text is the same as last time I visited, 99.93%, definitely 99.93.
Uh-oh. Images. Video. Strange blobs of pixels. Of course, I can’t see them, but sometimes they have words, alt text words and then I know everything about them and I can compare those words to the other words on the site.
Sometimes people try to trick me with invisible text or wrong keywords meta tags or funny links from sites with very different words, and then I stop visiting and stop counting words and stop tracking links and then the site disappears since I don’t like lying liars.
Of course, I’m an excellent surfer.
Questions To Be Answered
What questions Googlebot is trying to answer on your site.
Which pages to index (sitemap.xml)
Which pages to skip (robots.txt)
Primary domain (canonical info)
Words that define each page site (title tag, description meta tag, keyword meta tag)
Words that readers can see: Heading tags, body copy
Words that readers cannot see: Image alt text and title text
Links to other sites
Links from other sites telling Googlebot what the site is about
Calls To Action
This is how we ask Googlebot to take action. For Googlebot, a “conversion” can be defined as getting a page on our site indexed in the Google database.
Sitemap.xml tells Googlebot which pages to index and how to prioritize them.
Internal links with keywords in the anchor text helps Googlebot find pages and associate words with those pages.
Recommended Strategies on Converting the Toughest Visitor of All
Do not attempt to sell Googlebot anything or invite him to join your email list.
Change content frequently. Googlebot loves blogs.
Don’t attempt to contact Googlebot or Google support.
Use video. Googlebot seems to like video, even though he can’t understand it.
Create content that makes other sites link to you.
Link to sites that have words similar to yours.
Put transcripts of videos on the page.
Is All Of This Necessary?
While it may seem unnecessary to experienced SEOs to have a persona for Googlebot, think of the copywriters who must write for the site, but don’t have SEO experience. Think of the designers that may not understand the search implications of their media choices. Think of the executives who don’t understand why they should invest in SEO.
All of these people will gain a better understanding of Googlebot and the challenges we face when designing a site for him (or her).
Now think about the human visitors to the site. How would a few personas help everyone communicate with real people?
As you might expect, I work with a number of eCommerce sites. Companies that sell things online is a faaaaaast moving target, so I’m glad to have folks like Willo O’Brien to keep me up to date on best practices.
Warning: You’re being left behind by some very innovative companies.
Which companies? Check out my notes form her SXSW presentation Social Shopping: The Future of Selling Online.
How a Testing Culture will make you the Zappos of Your Industry
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingIt may be happening in your office.
A decision is going to be made:
a) To continue with business as usual
b) To commit to the Internet as a crucial part of the future of the business
Those businesses that choose a) may not be here in 24 months. Those that choose b) may not either, but if they are they will be the leader in their space.
In my Search Engine Land column 5 Ways to Jump Ahead in Your Industry, I outline the characteristics of a testing company, like Zappos or Amazon. These are the characteristics that can result in astonishing growth and amazing profitability. They include:
Accept The Internet As A Lever
Develop A Testing Culture
Invest Where It Counts
Know Your Numbers
Take A Non-Commodity Approach
It is no small feat to accomplish these, but those that do will enjoy a lead in their industry that will be hard to usurp by competitors.
Thanks to Extra Space Management for sharing their results with us at the Phone Smart Unconference Hawaii.
Hot Seat Video: Content Marketing and Conversion
Conversion OptimizationI was on the hot seat at the Austin Content Marketing Meetup.
This isn’t your “play nice and listen while the guy reads his slides” sort of presentation. In the hot seat, the room is actively trying to destroy you, lobbing lit questions from across the room and questioning your every word.
Yes, it even got a little ugly. I think I held up OK.
You’re invited to sit back and enjoy the occasionally heated conversation on how to make your content convert visitors into sales.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Are You Sending Your Store-bought Traffic Off to Mark Zuckerberg?
Conversion Marketing StrategyThe common wisdom among social media marketers is “put links to your social media everywhere.” The idea is that you should build as big a social media “tribe” as possible.
As it turns out, this isn’t always a good plan.
If you’re paying for traffic to your Web site – and what traffic doesn’t require some cash, blood, sweat or tears to earn – then why would you send it off to Facebook or YouTube or LinkedIn to disappear forever?
You wouldn’t. But you might be.
In my Search Engine Land article How Mark Zuckerberg Stole Your Search Traffic & What To Do About It, I show you how your social media advertisements may be costing you conversions.
I also show you how to use social media in a conversion-safe way.
Read the entire article
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Five Copywriters That Can Make or Break Your Conversion Rate
Persuasion ScienceWe have a little fun with Copywriters in my newest Content Marketing Institute post, How to Find the Right Copywriter for your Landing Pages.
If you could only hire one professional that would increase the number of people who buy or become a lead on your site, it would be a copywriter.
They can paint more detailed pictures than a photographer.
They can use more colorful language than a designer.
Communicate with humans and search engines.
If you’re going to dominate your competition online, it is because they write their copy themselves. I suggest you find a good direct response copywriter and let them do their work.
To help you get familiar with the kinds of copywriters you might meet in a dark alley, I’ve described five that I’ve run into on a regular basis.
The Styrofoam Sandwich Writer
The SEO Substituter
The Frustrated Novelist
The Soviet-era Propagandist
The Persuader
Most copywriters you meet will be a combination of some of these.
Tell me about your favorite copywriter in the comments. Let us know what combination of the above he or she exhibits.
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Photo courtesy nkzs.
Landing Page Basics: 5 Strategies to Make Your Content Convert
Landing Page OptimizationIn this article I’ll show you an example of how content can drive a reader to action. I also talk about landing page basics like these five important landing page strategies:
Content marketers sometimes focus on the content and forget about the marketing.
Yes, we want to inform.
Yes, we want to educate.
Yes, we want to be seen as the thought leader in our space.
But, we also want more traffic to our website, more leads and more sales.
One of the easiest yet most often overlooked marketing tactics is the call to action. I recently gave you ideas on how to include calls to action in your content marketing, but where should you send people and what do you say?
Landing pages: Where visitors like to land
A landing page is a page on your site dedicated to delivering on promises made by the offers in your content. The goal is to get a consumer of your content to take another step toward becoming a customer.
Your home page is not a good landing page. Instead, you want to send your prospects to a page where they are asked to do something specific and logical.
So what makes a good landing page? Reader Sarah Mitchell responded to my last call for samples with a web page that illustrates how to integrate content marketing and landing pages.
She wrote the product page for ezytire.com. I like this example because businesses tend to use this space to talk about themselves and their products. They forget about the visitor.
A visit to your product page is a “buy sign,” making it a great place for calls to action. Mitchell does a good job of keeping the copy focused on the prospects, their businesses and their customers. She is also not shy about giving the prospect opportunities to take action.
ezytire about page with markup.
Landing Page Basics: Calls to action
In 12 Ways to Get Readers to Take Action, I implore content marketers to put calls to action, also called Conversion Beacons, in their content marketing. Mitchell’s ezytire page is the poster child for in-content and ad-based calls to action.
Notice that there are not one, not two, but five calls to action on this page to start a free trial. In addition, she has secondary offers to start a chat, “register your interest,” and watch a how-to video.
The bottom line is this: You never know when a prospect finally gets enough information to feel comfortable taking action, so you must always be offering ways for them to do so.
Is this a bait and switch? It isn’t, and we should never attempt to mislead our prospects. The page offers details on the product. Contact information has been moved to a dedicated “Contact” page.
Mitchell’s links go to a landing page that starts the trial enrollment process right away. It should be obvious that sending visitors to the home page here would have been disastrous for ezytire.
ezytire landing page trial.
We know this page is working. The bounce rate is very low, with only 14 percent of visitors leaving the page immediately. That means the page isn’t scaring people away despite having a total of eight primary and secondary calls to action.
Fully half of the visitors are starting a free trial, and 15 percent of them will purchase the service when their trial is over.
That’s a beautiful bottom-line conversion rate of about 6.45 percent. Many businesses are proud of a two percent or three percent conversion rate from landing pages.
Landing page basics
Here are five things this page does well, things that you should consider when you develop your landing pages.
Pitch the offer, not your company
The page is all about the trial, not about Ezytire.
No distractions
All of the content on this page is designed to help the reader get through the trial process. Ezytire should consider removing the top navigation as well to keep from distracting visitors.
The visitor knows where they are in the process
If it’s a pretty long conversion process, it’s considered a best practice to always let the visitor know where they are. You can see the “Step 1,” “Step 2,” etc. on the page that will provide the visitor with this feedback.
Forms are the right length
Long forms can be more daunting to visitors than multiple steps. For a “soft” offer like a trial, I recommend shorter forms and more steps. You should try different approaches with your audience.
Only ask for information you will use
The first step is pretty efficient: Name, email address, password. Ezytire could ask some qualifying questions, and may be tempted to ask for a phone number. Additional fields will, in general, decrease your conversion rates, so don’t ask if you won’t’ use the information.
The ezytire page Sarah Mitchell inherited only generated nine conversions in three months before Sarah reworked it. If you’re not thinking, “I need someone like Sarah to look at my pages,” you’re not really a business person, or your pages would have bottom-line conversion rates above 7 percent.
In my next post, I’ll share some ideas on how to find a great landing page copywriter.
Originally published article I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute
Your Service Providers Should Help You With Your Conversion Rate
Conversion OptimizationOnline services are making things so easy for online marketers, but they’re also creating an enormous number of blind spots. These are the services that host our webinars, sell tickets to our events, let people buy our products, manage our appointments and almost everything else we do as online marketers.
Sometimes, these services behave as if they don’t want us to know the conversion rates of their services. They are unmeasurable, opaque to analytics.
I wrote an open letter to them at Search Engine Land.
Analytics Reporting & Integration
Eventbrite is running away with the event ticket sales market. Do you know why? Because they know what works and what doesn’t. They know what features sell more tickets for their customers. They eliminate those things that reduce ticket sales.
They recently did a study and can tell you (to the penny) the average revenue generated by a Facebook share or a Twitter tweet or an email invite.
Most importantly, they share the analytics love with people like me, their customer. This allows me to be as good in my marketplace as Eventbrite is in theirs.
I know where visitors to my Eventbrite page are coming from, and how many of them buy a ticket. If the copy on my event page isn’t working, I know it right away.
Dear everyone else: let me measure the visitors I am sending to your service. Tell me who is bouncing, who is completing the process, and make it easy for me to get to that information.
Your Service Providers Should Help You With Your Conversion Rate
Customizable Steps
I can’t recommend a shopping cart to my clients. I haven’t used them all, but I refuse to work with carts in general. They are universally inflexible and opaque. It’s as if the Shopping Cart Guild has decreed that only engineers can design them, and if those engineers don’t really understand the buying process, all the better.
I want to setup many different shopping carts on my site. I want to split test them. I want to test a three-step shopping cart against a ten-step shopping cart. I want all of this and I want to know which step is causing people to abandon the process. See above.
I expect to control the placement of the buttons, the location of trust symbols, the appearance of product images and the treatment of tax and freight charges.
I demand that you let me collect a name and email address on the first step, so that I can use email retargeting, but I do not want my visitors to have to create an account.
Dear shopping cart vendors: shopping cart abandonment rates are atrocious across the web and you aren’t helping. Please start thinking about the shoppers a little more.
Control Of The Thank You Page
When I complete a purchase, signup for a webinar, download a white paper or sign up for a trial, my eyes are assaulted by the bright white blankness of the “thank you” page. Usually those words and a logo are all that appears.
This is one of the biggest missed opportunities in all of conversiondom.
What could be used in this space?
First, I need to add some copy that tells the new customer what to expect in my brand’s words.
I want to add links to my social networks. Genius.
For my events, there needs to be a link that adds an event to a prospective attendee’s calendar.
I want to list some of the other good content I have on my site.
Dear GotoWebinar: you won’t think of everything I will want on my “thank you” page. Send them to me when the signup process is complete. I know what to say to them.
This will also let me measure conversions in the software of my choice. That makes the first item on this list easier for you.
Subdomain Support
Unbounce, a online landing page platform knows that conversion rates go down when visitors are taken to a different domain to buy. It feels phishy to them. So, Unbounce enables me to send people to their landing pages using my domain. It’s called a subdomain.
Unbounce tells me exactly how to create a domain like “offer.buyschtuff.com” and point it to their system. When my visitors go from my site at www.buyschtuff.com to a landing page on their site, they see “offer.buyschtuff.com,” not “wp2.unbounce.com/id=8fdire*#$#.”
Thus, they don’t feel like they’ve been handed off to spammers. They feel at home. People who feel at home don’t abandon me.
This strategy also makes it easy to integrate Unbounce pages with my analytics package. Again, see above.
Dear online service company: don’t we all want higher conversion rates? Support subdomains, please.
Control Of Emails
The emails sent in the 24 hours following a purchase or signup will determine in large part the success of my product or the attendance at my event. It will determine how much social sharing will occur.
Unfortunately, dear service provider, the notification emails that come out of your system seem to work against me. The language seems to deter the very actions we want them to take.
I need to determine what goes into every email that gets sent out. Don’t tell me you’re trying to thwart spammers. My customers may like spam for all you know. My email service provider deals with spammers all day and night and seem to be doing just fine in the spam department.
I won’t use you if you’re going to subject my customers and prospects to your drivel written by the same guy that programmed the email delivery software. He doesn’t’ understand my business or my prospects.
In Closing, Dear Service Providers
You are benefiting and profiting from a time of great decentralization. Online marketers are using a different service for their meetings, another for their webinars, another for shopping carts, another for subscriptions, and yet another for appointment scheduling. There has never been a better time to be a provider of services.
However, if you want to be the leader in your space, you need to understand how we are using your service. You must provide measurability, customizability, domain support, and effective email tools. Then you need to watch us do our thing. What you learn will put you ahead of the competition.
Originally Published on Search Engine Land.
Your Social Media Avatar and Conversion
Conversion OptimizationWe are well into the digital publishing world. I am fortunate to have my work appear several times a month in a variety of places.
Yet, I still love to see my mug in print, I don’t know why.
So, my digital friend, I thought I would share my mention from Chief Content Officer Magazine (free subscription) and fill in a few more details on the method to my headshot madness.
Your Social Media Avatar and Conversion Tips.
The Conversion Scientist’s Social Media Avatar Tips
1. Include something unusual in the image, something representative of your personal brand.
I wear the lab coat in every shot, even if it isn’t showing much. The human mind remembers such things.
2. Control the viewer’s eyes with your eyes.
Eye-tracking studies have shown that our gaze is drawn to faces that are looking at us. In fact, we may stare at a pretty girl long enough to forget why we came to your page in the first place. Have several versions of your headshot and aim your eyes at things you want people to see: calls to action, content, headlines, etc.
3. Be unexpected.
One of the things we want to do is engage the mind of the viewer. Things that will light up someone’s brain activity are the unexpected, off-center and the need to “fill in” an image.
4. Consider integrating action.
You can tell a story with a one-frame headshot. So, tell it. What am I doing in this shot?
I’m talking to an audience. I must be a presenter. Why, yes, I am! But, what am I holding (unexpected)?
I’m going in for the hug! That means I’m a connector, right??
Other avatar actions: Being passionate, banging a table, thinking deeply, contributing at a homeless shelter.
Our avatars don’t have to be boring, and in fact they can be quite instrumental in engaging with visitors to our website, Facebook profile, Twitter stream and more.
Headshots by Korey Howell Photography.
Social Media and Conversion by Jeffrey Eisenberg
Conversion OptimizationJeffrey Eisenberg is not afraid to ruffle a few feathers.
He gave us his unique view on Social Media as only a expert with his experience can at the Keynote at PubCon Austin 2011. Here are my notes from his presentation captured as a real-time Instagraph.
Social Media Conversion
INFOGRAPH: Jeffrey Eisenberg on Social Media and Conversion
Converting the Toughest Visitor of All: Googlebot
Conversion OptimizationIf you follow The Conversion Scientist, you know that a failure to understand your visitor is conversion suicide.
So how do we get copywriters, designers, developers and marketers to configure their site for this powerful king-maker visitor? The same way we do this for our human visitors: We personify them.
Building Empathy For Googlebot
Personas are a challenging topic. Personas are, well, personal to every business. You can’t cheat off of anyone else’s paper when putting them together. Whether you’re going to spend 30 minutes dashing off what you know about your online visitors or invest in a full workup to hack your company’s intelligence, you have to do the work. You can’t borrow from someone else’s case study.
There is one exception, and this visitor may be on your site as you read this.
I’m going to use a persona to help you relate to Googlebot. All of the components are here.
Building empathy for Googlebot.
Note: I’m sure those of you experienced in SEO could add to this persona. Please do so in the comments.
My Search Engine Land column “Building Empathy for Googlebot” this month is a persona profile of Googlebot, and any site should be able to use this to their advantage.
Put it somewhere everyone on the Web team can see it; print posters, put it up on Basecamp, add it to your war room.
Here’s an excerpt:
Demographics
Name: Googlebot
Education: Ph.D. in Kindergarten
Gender: Male. Definitely male.
Description
While Googlebot is one of the most pervasive presences on the Internet, little is known about him. It is widely believed that he has an undiagnosed combination of savant syndrome and autistic disorder.
This condition is marked by super-human analytical powers combined with an inability to connect basic concepts or understand simple social norms. Googlebot does not have a sense of humor.
Another reason for this diagnosis is Googlebot’s amazing but selective memory. Googlebot has an unwavering fascination with words and an uncanny ability to remember the links that connect the Internet’s far flung pages.
It is widely believed that Googlebot is also good at counting large sums of money.
Googlebot can identify and recall a seemingly unlimited number of images and videos, but has no understanding of their meaning.
Mode Of Persuasion: Methodical
Googlebot analyzes information slowly and logically. Methodical visitors need lots of detailed information.
Visitor Commentary
These are Googlebot’s needs in his own words:
I’m an excellent surfer. I come to your site on Tuesday… definitely Tuesday afternoon. I read your pages. I see your words. That tells me everything about you. You use some words over and over and I can tell what you talk about. Of course there are the meta tags. Descriptions, descriptions are good; and the page title. Headings have words and I like to count the words in headings and see if they are in other places on your site too.
Links. I like links, definitely. Link text has words and I like to compare them, compare them to the other words in the other places. The link text words tell me about the place they link to. Must … resist … urge … to … follow … until … done … here.
Of course, you have links back to your site, 497 links — definitely 497 – and the words on those links – they call it anchor text, but anchors are on ships and ships float on water and I don’t see many sites about ships and water — and I can compare those link words to the words in the other places on your site.
I’m an excellent surfer, you know.
Uh-oh. Your site doesn’t change much. 99.93% of text is the same as last time I visited, 99.93%, definitely 99.93.
Uh-oh. Images. Video. Strange blobs of pixels. Of course, I can’t see them, but sometimes they have words, alt text words and then I know everything about them and I can compare those words to the other words on the site.
Sometimes people try to trick me with invisible text or wrong keywords meta tags or funny links from sites with very different words, and then I stop visiting and stop counting words and stop tracking links and then the site disappears since I don’t like lying liars.
Of course, I’m an excellent surfer.
Questions To Be Answered
What questions Googlebot is trying to answer on your site.
Calls To Action
This is how we ask Googlebot to take action. For Googlebot, a “conversion” can be defined as getting a page on our site indexed in the Google database.
Sitemap.xml tells Googlebot which pages to index and how to prioritize them.
Internal links with keywords in the anchor text helps Googlebot find pages and associate words with those pages.
Recommended Strategies on Converting the Toughest Visitor of All
Is All Of This Necessary?
While it may seem unnecessary to experienced SEOs to have a persona for Googlebot, think of the copywriters who must write for the site, but don’t have SEO experience. Think of the designers that may not understand the search implications of their media choices. Think of the executives who don’t understand why they should invest in SEO.
All of these people will gain a better understanding of Googlebot and the challenges we face when designing a site for him (or her).
Now think about the human visitors to the site. How would a few personas help everyone communicate with real people?
As it turns out, personas help a lot.
For more on user personas.
Originally published on Search Engine Land.
How to Convert Social Shoppers into Online Sales [SXSW]
Ecommerce CROWarning: You’re being left behind by some very innovative companies.
Which companies? Check out my notes form her SXSW presentation Social Shopping: The Future of Selling Online.
Click to Enlarge
INFOGRAPH-Social Shopping: The Future of Selling Online
Also from SXSW: 63 Great Subject Lines from the SXSW Catalog
Brian