It’s out there: the article with the answer to your online marketing question. All you have to do is find it.
As it turns out, I’m looking for answers to a lot of questions. It’s my job as the Conversion Scientist.
When I find a good checklist, best practice or how-to, I save it to my personal library. When my clients hit me with a question, this library offers a treasure trove of answers written by some of the smartest people in the business.
“But why wait for a call?” I thought. “Why not share this with my clients every week?”
Thus is born “For Further Study,” a scannable, quickly digested weekly email created exclusively for my clients.
I promise:
Quality sources
Conversion-enhancing content
Scannable emails with a short commentary by me to help you decide if you should read an article.
Here’s a sample of what to expect each week.
Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
Jul 21, 2011 09:39 am
This is an incredibly comprehensive yet accessible guide to social media best practices.
Tags: social media blog twitter facebook search engine watch
read more
Seth’s Blog: Articulating your preferred use case (what’s it for?)
Jul 17, 2011 03:36 am
What Seth calls a “Use Case” we call Personas in the world of conversion. Otherwise the benefits are the same: understanding your most important visitors, ending bad relationships with poor customers, and getting everyone on the same page.
I’ve written about being the “Cheerios Guy” of your organization; that is, running around talking up what you’ve learned as you’ve tested things on your Web site. Yes, it’s can be irritating, but it is VERY necessary.
The real question is, how do you equip your CMO to be the Cheerios Guy? You can’t show him or her the charts, spreadsheets and test results. When they get button-holed by the water cooler or broad-sided in the board room, they need a little swagger. You need to tell the story that lies in the data.
You need to give them a Book of Swagger.
Rose Holston takes us through the Book of Swagger, a device invented by digital communications guru Korye Logan in The Agile Marketer and the Book of Swagger.
The aim of the “Book of Swagger” is to be simple:
A prologue. A short narrative that sets the stage for the story. Statistics and web analytics define a baseline from whence we came (the past) and where we are today (the present).
Conflict and resolution. Talk about the drama of “wins” and “revelations” as the team completes scrum after scrum.
The future. Your communications toolkit becomes the basis for looking to the future. This is where your “Book of Swagger” illustrates the wins and losses that feed our mid-management and C-suite folks with information that helps to set the agenda.
The Junta 42 has published their annual (and last) list of 42 top content marketing blogs. The Conversion Scientist is #24, and honored to be among some great sites.
We have been following most of Junta42’s top 10 including Convince and Convert (#1), Top Rank (#2), Brian Solis (#3), Marketing Experiments (#5), Copyblogger (#6), Social Media Examiner (#7), Heidi Cohen (#10), and Duct Tape Marketing (#14).
We are actively exploring the others, and you should too.
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 work closely with the folks at Aviso Communications, especially Rose Holston. Her job is to get my recommendations implemented within our client’s organizations. Believe it or not, it is hard to get organizations to do the things that will increase their leads and sales, even the most progressive ones.
If you are the conversion champion within your organization, then you know what I’m talking about.
I’ve asked Rose to help us understand how she goes about getting the attention, support and resources she needs to help a team like yours get meaningful changes implemented. In The Agile Marketer’s Story, the second of three parts, she tells us how best to manage internal communications.
1. Building a Communications Toolkit
2. Building Evidence Through Empirical Observation
3. Telling the Story
I look forward to our next installment and the “Book of Swagger.” Read the full article on ClickZ
Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist, teaching businesses how to convert more of their Web visitors into leads and sales. Let Brian take a look at your site.
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.
Read the Articles that The Conversion Scientist is Reading: For Further Study
Conversion OptimizationWhen I find a good checklist, best practice or how-to, I save it to my personal library. When my clients hit me with a question, this library offers a treasure trove of answers written by some of the smartest people in the business.
“But why wait for a call?” I thought. “Why not share this with my clients every week?”
Thus is born “For Further Study,” a scannable, quickly digested weekly email created exclusively for my clients.
I promise:
Here’s a sample of what to expect each week.
Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
Jul 21, 2011 09:39 am
This is an incredibly comprehensive yet accessible guide to social media best practices.
Tags: social media blog twitter facebook search engine watch
read more
Seth’s Blog: Articulating your preferred use case (what’s it for?)
Jul 17, 2011 03:36 am
What Seth calls a “Use Case” we call Personas in the world of conversion. Otherwise the benefits are the same: understanding your most important visitors, ending bad relationships with poor customers, and getting everyone on the same page.
Tags: seth personas use case
read more
How Does the C-Suite Understand Conversion? The Book of Swagger
Conversion Marketing StrategyThe real question is, how do you equip your CMO to be the Cheerios Guy? You can’t show him or her the charts, spreadsheets and test results. When they get button-holed by the water cooler or broad-sided in the board room, they need a little swagger. You need to tell the story that lies in the data.
You need to give them a Book of Swagger.
Rose Holston takes us through the Book of Swagger, a device invented by digital communications guru Korye Logan in The Agile Marketer and the Book of Swagger.
Read the entire article
Photo courtesy bizior.
41 Other Blogs You May Enjoy
Conversion OptimizationThe Junta 42 has published their annual (and last) list of 42 top content marketing blogs. The Conversion Scientist is #24, and honored to be among some great sites.
We have been following most of Junta42’s top 10 including Convince and Convert (#1), Top Rank (#2), Brian Solis (#3), Marketing Experiments (#5), Copyblogger (#6), Social Media Examiner (#7), Heidi Cohen (#10), and Duct Tape Marketing (#14).
We are actively exploring the others, and you should too.
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.
3 Ways to Build Your Internal Credibility with Analytics
Web AnalyticsI work closely with the folks at Aviso Communications, especially Rose Holston. Her job is to get my recommendations implemented within our client’s organizations. Believe it or not, it is hard to get organizations to do the things that will increase their leads and sales, even the most progressive ones.
If you are the conversion champion within your organization, then you know what I’m talking about.
I’ve asked Rose to help us understand how she goes about getting the attention, support and resources she needs to help a team like yours get meaningful changes implemented. In The Agile Marketer’s Story, the second of three parts, she tells us how best to manage internal communications.
1. Building a Communications Toolkit
2. Building Evidence Through Empirical Observation
3. Telling the Story
I look forward to our next installment and the “Book of Swagger.”
Read the full article on ClickZ
Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist, teaching businesses how to convert more of their Web visitors into leads and sales. Let Brian take a look at your site.
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.