Group items tagged

If you like to study the steady march of the generations, you'll find this study of Millennials fascinating. Basically, Millennials are here to frustrate the retiring Boomer generation. They are the revenge of GenX. I think you can see from this article that Millennials will baffle Boomers (and GenX) with their attitudes.

The key insight that I got from this @copyblogger post is that, regardless of our "resting" personality type, we are different when doing different activities. My Myers-Briggs type pegs me as generally an "Environmental" type. However, when I'm researching, I'm generally "Fantastical" (and I'm not just complimenting myself). When I'm writing I'm getting my "Structural" on. In short, we can't treat people as one personality type. We change from channel to channel. What are the four personality types when people are solving the problems your business solves?

Once you've blown your Web development budget on look and feel, you often find yourself short on the most important aspect: content; lead generating, social media supporting, expert making content. This is a great list of ways to generate and reuse content.

Whitepapers are great lead generators

We've seen in email tests that subject lines can have implications far beyond the open rate. We've seen two identical emails with identical landing pages have the same open rates and the same click-through rates (CTR), but one generated more sales than the other.

What's the difference? The subject line.

In short, subject lines are important.

And they are difficult to write.

This infographic does a great job of boiling things down to help remove the indecision when you are writing subject lines.

Bryan Eisenberg is a great teacher and is one of the fathers of conversion science. In this post, he asks his audience to make recommendations on pricing tables, those pages that ostensibly help us to choose the right product for us.

Here are my suggestions.

The main purpose of a page like this is "Help me choose." Choice, as it turns out, is a conversion killer, so these pages can be very helpful. This page needs to tell me which is "The best value." A badge would be helpful, probably on the most expensive item.

The little "signal bars" are unique and may be helpful, but don't really tell me at a glance what I want to know.

The copy is unhelpful. Instead of "Essential productivity..." how about "Great system for a tight budget." Instead of "Yield better results..." how about "Good value ready for your network." Instead of "2nd Generation Processor..." how about "This system has the power to do heavy number crunching, video editing and graphics."

There are too many prices here -- four to be exact. I say, pick two: Savings and total price. Crossing out "Starting price" is a proven way to communicate value.

Finally, put the coupon code near the "Customize & Buy" buttons to give those transactional shoppers an extra push.

What do you find frustrating about this page?

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.

 @gaspland The customer equation for an Online Store seems to be the least content intensive, with online proprietors being satisfied with manufacturer stock photos of products. High converting online stores, however, take pains to help the visitor "touch and taste" their wares. Here are some great ideas on how to generate content for your online store.

When considering how much to invest in social networks, the important question is not "Are my customers using social media?" They are.

A better question to ask is "Are my customers using social media to make decisions about my product?" Odds are, they aren't.

This paradox is most evident in the "fastest growing" segment of social media: those over 55 years of age. This segment is large, but it does not generally make buying decisions using social media. That's an important distinction.

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.

If all problems are opportunities, then error messages and error pages are generally missed opportunities. Marketing should be policing the errors reported on their website, messages that are usually written by a techie in IT. John Ekman give us five steps toward writing error messages that say "Yes!" instead of making the visitor feel like an idiot.

Put a special phone number on your site to see how many calls it is generating.

I recommend a kind of social media strategy that we call "Content-oriented" social media. This strategy revolves around creating content and sharing it with your social networks. If it gets shared around, you generate more qualified prospects to your site to convert. Clicks are measureable, which we like at Conversion Sciences. Here are nine errors we make that limits the amount of sharing that goes on around our content. NOTE: In #8, the writer defines six sharing personas. Note that 7 of the 8 prefer email as a tool of their sharing. This is an article on social media. The insinuation is that email is a social media tool. You may know that I call email the largest social network on the planet. Just saying...

Great page for lead generation.

 @KISSMetrics Viral content is generally a hit-or-miss proposition for most businesses. It's hard to tell which will catch the interest of the public or go main-stream. One strategy is to prepare ALL of your content to go viral, so that when you launch the right topic at the right time (e.g. get lucky), your content will have wings.

This infograph from KISSMetrics hits the key things you should consider if you want content that is viral-worthy.

A blog is critical for SEO. It can also be a great lead generator and email list builder.

The Conversion Scientist™ is crucial to our marketing efforts.

Rich Page has a great list of do's and don'ts here with examples. You should take a look. Annoying Ads Unclear value proposition Articles with no call to action Not mobile optimized Short articles, no sub-headlines Cluttered sidebar columns No social proof Bland articles Poor incentive to subscribe No exit-intent popups Start Here page

Just because you have the data that proves you are "right" about something, don't expect anyone to believe you.

It's not about the data, it's about how you present the data.

Since Conversion Optimization is ONLY about generating data to guide decisions, I love to explore the various ways of presenting it.

Here is some awesome eye candy from some amazing sites.

"Overall, a lenient return policy did indeed correlate with more returns. But, crucially, it was even more strongly correlated with an increase in purchases. In other words, retailers are generally getting a clear sales benefit from giving customers the assurance of a return."

I always tell my audiences that exit-intent popovers will increase lead generation and often increase sales in an ecommerce setting. However, there is a negative brand impression from them. Nobody likes popovers, if you ask them.

Now we have some data on what people THINK about exit-intent popovers.