The folks at CrazyEgg have a wonderful summary of the five website formulas found in my book.
Brochure Site
Consultative Site
Publication Site
Online Store
Online Service
Read this and you can skip chapters 3 and 4.
@CrazyEgg If you asked 14 conversion experts what they consider important for increasing the performance of a website, you would learn a great deal in a short time. This article delivers, with some very smart people (including me) weighing... for you.
@neilpatel While it may sound self-serving to share with you an article on why you should spend money with a company like ours, a conversion optimization company, I think you'll find the points made by Neil Patel are a great guide to choosing your conversion optimization strategy.
Yes, you need a conversion optimization strategy, even if you don't hire consultants.
Given Neil's background of creating companies in the online marketing optimization space (KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg), I hope we'll see some more from him in the form of tools.
We can detect pages with low scroll rates using click-tracking software like CrazyEgg. When we see a page with poor scroll performance, we have two options: Move key content higher on the pageAdd cues to increase scrollingHere are some ideas for how to increase scrolling.
WORD OF WARNING
Use of animations and parallax should be used with extreme caution. Test into these treatments as they may detract from your content, and introduce technical problems on certain devices and browsers.
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.
@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
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."
Why is conversion testing important? Well, get 12 experts in a room and you'll not find a great deal of agreement on what is right and wrong with a web page.
I will add that, had we all been given access to analytics, we would have come to some more common conclusions. Measure and test.
The "sales letter" is a style that is used in particular situations to convert. You may never need one. However, the four P's of copy are a golden nugget in this article. They should guide your copy in any landing page situation, sales video, etc. They are: PromisePictureProofPush