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It's great to meet email professionals that 'get it." By "It" I mean conversion, or "What to do after the email recipient clicks through."

If you have any doubts about "It" then you will appreciate Scott Bratcher's summary check list. He even links to one of my stories.

 @Hubspot-One of the Unexpected Formulas from my new book is: "Choice is a conversion killer." How is that? Don't buyers want choice?

It turns out that choice requires us to delay our decision to say "yes." Tell your visitors which choice to make, why that is a good choice, and why you are the best company to supply that choice.

 @KISSMetrics - You don't have to be a psychologist to create good messages and strategies for your business, but it really helps to know the subtle things that make people more comfortable taking action. This article summarizes some of my favorite research on buyer psychology.

If you offer a trial of your product, use email to deliver "mints" of helpful information. This will increase the likelihood that they will buy. See #4.

Design your pricing in clusters around your most profitable offering. See #5.

Be specific in your calls to action. See #3.

Community involvement and social proof are also covered. See #1 and #2.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

This is a nice summary of my @PubCon Masters Group Training. You can watch the free 14 minute video of my PubCon "Social Moonshine" presentation at http://conversci.com/vuh8 

Site as a Service Home pages have one purpose: To get visitors to become "tryers" of your application. In general, we want to be as efficient as possible, asking for only the required information to join a trial. Then we let email carry the mail. Lander offers an interesting experience on their home page. This treatment requires several clicks when one would suffice. This does two very important things: It conveys a sense of the company's personality and brandIt discourages poorly qualified visitors making their list convert to buyers betterThis is a good trade-off a lower conversion rate (to tryer) and improving the quality of a list.

For the Online Service, the home page is a Landing Page. It's job is to sell the trial. Here is a good example of an effective home page, complete with the opinions of fourteen smart conversion marketers.

I hope you know your abandonment rate. Take the number of purchases you get on your site divided by the number of people who put a product in your cart. This is your cart conversion rate. Subtract this number from 1 and you get your abandonment rate, or the percentage of people who abandon their shopping cart.

If your abandonment rate is high (expect it to be over 70%) there are some things you can do about it. Here is a great infographic from Monetate that will show you some reasons people leave full carts.

 @unbounce has provide a post with a double payoff. First, this is a great list of conversion-related stats and, second, a great example of how to design content to be sharable.

The content is sharable for the following reasons: The title contains the call to action "48 Tweetable Stats..." There's something here for everyone The quotes are Twitter-sized for easy sharing in 140 characters Each quote has a call to action in the form of a "Tweet this" link. Every quote So, if you've got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a "Tweet this" link with each.

These guys are real smarty-pants.

Imagine if you were given six months of identity protection by Target or Zappos or Neiman Marcus before they had an online security breach. Imagine if the identity protection was valid for any purchase you made. This is the promise of AllClearID. They are a client of ours and are at the forefront of revising the way we look at online security.

If you run an ecommerce site, this is a value proposition that will increase your conversion rates. We've done the tests.

@neilpatel collects some of the most interesting eye-tracking images available and provides seven insights that can help you design your pages and choose images. We have done our own eye-tracking study of business video and you can get the full report now. The report offers similar conclusions for the use of video in a landing page. It includes over 30 minutes of embedded video that you can watch yourself.

Neil's conclusions include:Be careful you you use [images of] peopleThat people love media (especially on search results pages)That men and women look at images differentlyThat simple images can be more effectiveThe power of the left side of the pageThe power of facesThat people love hand-written notes (my favorite)Enjoy the images he provides.

@tim_ash doesn't mince words, and his post on the pitfalls of stock photogrphy is no exception. "Marketers have turned to stock imagery as a crutch - hastily grabbing an image off the web rather than taking the time to develop an effective page design that will move visitors into the conversion funnel," he says.

Read on to learn how to NOT be one of these hasty marketers.

Do you get a shot of adrenaline every time you see an uptick in conversions? We do. However, we often find our early excitement tempered when a test turns out to be inconclusive.

It can be hard to announce to a customer that you didn't find a winner. In fact, it's a discipline here.

Find out what you can do to keep from getting addicted to good test results.

 @peeplaja has put into one blog post most of the hard lessons we've learned over the years of testing here in the Conversion Lab. Peep doesn't mince words ("There is no best color").

Don't let all of this scare you. It's better to try and learn from your mistakes than to not make any mistakes at all. Test away!

 @richpage offers up 25 things you can do to impact your conversion rate. Not all of these are really "free" when you consider the cost of time and effort. None of them require sending money to an ad network or Google or an agency.

My favorites are: #7 State your value proposition clearly #8 Create landing pages for your PPC ads #13 Run an A/B test for the subjet line of your next email #18 Improve your webpage load time #22 Discover what your visitors are really doing using CrazyEgg

Marketers have it tough. Just look at all of the things we can optimize! Where do we start?!

Well, we can start with these 25 articles, including one from yours truly. Search Optimization Social Optimization Local Optimization Email Marketing (No Optimization?) Mobile Optimization Content Marketing Conversion Optimization Reputation Management

Forbes doesn't mince words when talking about CRO. Author Niel Patel has built several online businesses, including CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics. He would know.

The article starts off with a great insignt: "Conversion optimizaiton works."

Jeffrey Eisenberg gives you a boat load of great Conversion techniques

If conversion is important, think twice before letting your designer drop stock photos of pretty people onto your site.

Scott Brinker builds the bridge between landing page optimization and content marketing.

Everything is true about email, except that it is dead. When you factor in conversions, sales and engagement, email is just getting better.