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@LoriMeyer541 offers a nice summary of why conversion is important and important relationship between your traffic and your site's ability to convert. "You certainly need traffic because without it, your business is dead.  But, traffic is not everything - unless you can convert it."Her prescriptions for making a blog convert require some heavy content development, but the larger point is this: You must offer something relevant to your readers to start them down the path of becoming customers.

@yaost offers some good advice in this article. In particular, there are some testing "elephants in the room" that he points out. These include the fact that the Z score used by testing tools assumes a normal distribution -- a bell curve -- in the data. That is often not the case.

He also recommends ending tests on week boundaries. If you start a test on Friday and end it on a Tuesday, you may be exaggerating your results as Tuesdays are often bigger conversion days for ecommerce sites.

This article is just nerdy enough for most marketers, and you're going to have to add some nerdy to your repertoire if you're not already there.

 @trackur takes a bold position to take for a social media tool. Spoiler alert: the one metric they suggest you obsess over if Conversion.
You see, conversions is why your business is, well, in business. We couldn't agree more.

Rotating headers, called "sliders" are losing their favor on landing pages. Ultimately, this is a good thing. But these hedges don't have to be conversion killers.

In the article's summary of our tests on sliders, we've been able to make rotating hero images work by first testing the order. A large part of the increase in revenue per visit was from putting the most important panels first.

Notice that the two panels that delivered the best result were offer oriented (Same Day Shipping and Super Saver Shipping). It's possible that we could remove the conceptual panels ("Make a bold outdoor impression" and "Leader in digital mesh banner printing") without impacting the revenue per visit. This would save some load time.

Many have contemplated the counter-intuitive ability of "ugly" sites to win huge market share - think eBay.com, Amazon.com, DrudgeReport.com, PlentyofFish.com, CraigsList.org, MySpace.com, or usability expert Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com.

Retargeting Emails - Do E-commerce customers like or loathe them? March 10th, 2011Leave a commentGo to comments By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it's not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn't buy from his store. There are major differences, of course. We've long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust. They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy-either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn't work. In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks. The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are: the recovery rate the open rate the clickthrough rate the unsubscribe rate Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here's the evidence: (1) The recovery rate The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent. So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn't abandon their shopping carts. (2) The open rate The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, m

Conversion Science is becoming a category!

by @dragals We should set our sites on the long-term benefits of conversion science as marketers or business owners. This inevitably means a change in culture. Dave offers some good tips for planting the seeds of a testing culture.

Shopping Cart abandonment is one of the first places we look when helping e-commerce sites increase their conversion rates. Why spend time and money optimizing a site if the buyers can't get through a shopping cart? Pricing and shipping offers are two issues we have to address at a strategic level. Here is a very informative article from @SeeWhyInc. I particularly like their cart value vs. abaondment rate graphs. Check them out.

Their the Car Talk Brothers of Online Conversion

In my new book -- see preview on Facebook -- I isolate five conversion signatures, one of which is right for your website. One is the Site as a Service signature, and the first conversion strategy is "Turn Visitors into Tryers."

This case study bears out the importance of that strategy. SaaS sites have an advantage over ecommerce sites in that their visitors can try the product right there on site. Why not offer a trial? Find out the other strategies in a free video introducing the book's core concepts.

 Roll over the images at the top of this page. We know video is rocking conversion. Here's an innovative way to integrate video into a category page from apparel etailer J.Crew. I don't know if this feature is actually increasing conversion rates for J.Crew. Have you tried something like this to good effect? 

 @bennyblum We don't champion conversion for the fun of it, although it is fun. We do it because it makes us money on the bottom line and gives us leverage when finding more traffic.

Marketing Land's Benny Blum lays out the things you should do to find this leverage for your online advertising, SEO and PPC. Determine: What's a visit worth? Design for Conversion Get Your Message Right Establish an Organic Strategy

One of the advantages of optimizing for conversion is that Google can't take away your revenue arbitrarily.

Normally, we are thinking of SEO when we say this. Panda, Penguin and now Pidgeon are algorithm changes that may have hurt your business.

Now, it appears that Google is messing with paid traffic as well.

Mike Roberts of SpyFu.com has the analysis of an upcoming elimination of "Exact and Phrase Match keyword targeting" by Google.dealing with a 10% loss of revenue is not what I need now or ever. Optimize for conversion, and Google will not be able to reach into your pockets.

I reviewed 47 wordpress templates for a competition earlier this year. 98% of them used a "flat" design approach. Of course, we're seeing this style of design pervade websites.

Is this a good thing? Nielsen Norman Group says we can use flat designs if we follow some smart guidelines.

Here is another tool in the arsenal of the Conversion Scientist. PURE: The "Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts" Who names this stuff?

Dustin Sparks is another fixture in the Conversion epicenter we have here in Austin, an epicenter that includes both Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Dustin provides a very comprehensive and easy to consume list of the landing page mistakes that are costing businesses money across the Web. To find out how you can get a free copy of the Kindle edition of my new book join my Friends of the Author list now.

If you enjoy studying the psychology of persuasion the way we do here at Conversion Sciences, you'll love this infographic from the folks at Help Scout.

 @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.

I frequently say that there are thousands of ways to increase your conversion rate, lead generation and revenue. With that thought in mind, you should be less intimidated by this little list of 40 ideas from @KISSMetrics.