Group items tagged

 @copyblogger Here are the five most persuasive words we can use. Indivdually, each of these words appeals to a certain kind of person. If we use the Eisenberg Modes of Persuasion as a guide, we can assign each to a different mode.

"You" - Humanists are relationship oriented. When your voice shifts from "We" and "our company" and you speak to them in the first person, it feels more human -- and more Humanistic.

"Free" - This word appeals to the Spontaneous reader. These visitors are just looking for an excuse to take action.

"Because" - Methodicals want to understand the details. They make decisions deliberately and logically. Credible proof is important.

"Instantly" - This also appeals to our Spontaneous reader, who wants immmediate gratification.

"New" - This appeals to the Competitive, who wants to know what will make them better. New technologies, new versions, new looks get their attention.

So, two of the words are very Spontaneous, and we tend to act spontaneously when we've decided to buy something. "Free" and "Instantly" are bottom of the funnel words.

Read the research in this excellent post.

In my new book Your Customer Creation Equation I discuss the importance of getting new users of Online Services to return and login. This process is called "on boarding" and it is the process of making your new users experts at using your service. Wunderlist is how me and my wife share grocery lists. and their on-boarding process is very tight. Here's how they do it.

Just for fun.

If you want to understand the importance of charging your marketing batteries TODAY, just listen to Seth Godin, who has been building a following for a decade with daily blog posts, books and presentations: "[Kickstarter is] the LAST step, not the first one. I started working on this Kickstarter 9 or 10 years ago. That's the way you maximize your results. Dig your well before you're thirsty."

Seth was able to raise well over $100,000 to fund his new book using Kickstarter. He didn't set out to do that nine or ten years ago. When you've got a list and have built a relationship with its members, you can invite them to participate in new things as they arise. Start now.

A new tool for our online conversion lab! Facebook is apparently going to give us more insight into the behavior of individuals on our Facebook pages. The more we know about the success of these pages, the better decisions we can make about spending our marketing time and dollars on social media.

Despite all the hype, social networks are not a panacea for businesses, and many are putting too many resources into them without knowing the payoff.

When users look for information, they have a goal and are on a mission. Even before you started to read this article, chances are you did because you either had the implicit goal of checking what's new on Smashing Magazine, or had the explicit goal of finding information about "Navigation Design".

While this article focuses on urgency and social proof, take a look at the way this Ruby Lane product page is designed.

Price is prominently displayedAdd to Cart button is high on the pageShipping is handled before entering checkoutThe product description is near the hero shot (and well written)Several high-quality photos are provided.All are above the fold or close to it. Are you working this hard to help your visitors buy?

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're a frequent reader of our blogs, you won't be surprised by this report from Custora stating that email is a more effective marketing channel than social networks.

In fact, I say in my book that email is the biggest social network on the planet. Business people plan their days by their inbox. They program audible notifications when new items come into their inbox. It's not smart, but it's true.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should send self-promotional crap. That won't work in email, mail or social media. But certainly don't eliminate email from your marketing mix.

In my new book, I talk about the importance of having Marketing Batteries that store visitors attention for you to use over and over. The "Subscriber Battery" is your email list. The "Social Battery" will include your Twitter followers.

The problem with the Social Battery is that it discharges unreliably compared to the Subscriber Battery. As a result I recommend converting your social networks to email contacts. This charges your Subscriber Battery from your Social Battery.

Here is a great set of tactics to get more email subscribers from Twitter.

While Data Scientists are in demand, the ability to manage them to productive ends and incentivize them to drive the company forward are skills that managers will need to develop before they see ROI.

Data scientist agencies, like Conversion Sciences will thrive until internal management gets up to speed on what to do with these new brainiacs.

Regular expressions rear their ugly head in more and more places. Google Analytics is just one.

For me the regular expression showed up in the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. I needed to redirect a URL that had parameters, like this:

http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

To do this, I could not use a regular redirect, as everything after the ? would be stripped away. I needed to use a Regular Expression Redirect. However, this sort of thing -- using query parameters -- wasn't covered in any of the Yoast documentation.

This article gave me the hint I needed, and the technique that ended up working. To summarize, I used the following regular expression to match my URL with the parameters:

^\/conversion-upside-report($|\/.*$)

The parentheses save the matching contents into a variable, which I can access using $1 in the new URL, like this:

resources/conversion-rate-optimization-calculator/upside-report/$1

It worked great. Give it a try: http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

Thanks to Himanshu.

@101babich When we isolate the visitors to a website that use site search, we often find a significantly higher conversion rate and average order value. Searchers are great customers.

This does not imply cause and effect.

However, after running tests that improve the visibility of search, we have found that we can increase the number of searchers, and that these new searchers are more likely to buy.

It doesn't work every time, but it is certainly worth a try.

The lesson? Follow Nick's advice here.

 @KISSMetrics makes the point that plain is the new sexy; conventional websites sizzle. This article offers scientific proof that we consider a website "sexy" if it presents information as we expect it. You don't need to pay a creative team to come up with a unique site. In fact you will probably have to reel them in a bit once you've completed this article.

In my new book I liken abandonment to cholesterol: there is good abandonment and bad abandonment. SeeWhy.com CEO Charles Nichols was the person who helped me realize this, and his article shows you how to support your visitors natural need to abandon before they buy.

Barry Feldman @FledmanCreative leads this article off with a most vivid depiction of our end goal: "Start with a dead mouse." This is the ultimate goal of our content marketng. We want to accomplish something. The rest is equally as creative. My new book discusses content in the conversion process at length. I hope it is as entertaining as Barry.

I've put forth in my new book that adding social media icons to a landing page is a bad idea. I get a lot of pushback on this. Here's some support for my position. Simplicity sells. "Engagement" doesn't. This article highlights three components that consumers need to make it easier to buy. They need to trust the information they receive.They need to learn effectively without distraction.They need to be able to weigh options confidently. Help your visitors choose and choose confidently. Worry about your social media strategy after the sale.

 @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.

Testing is part science, part art, part perseverence. Here is a comprehensive list of resources for the new and experienced alike.

Taking a conversion approach to your website comes with some new thinking. There are challenges, unknowns, things that can't be predicted. There are plenty of disappointments among the wins. I wish I could tell you differently.

This little video makes you ask the question, "Am I open to possibilities or am I one of the roadblocks that will kill a performance-oriented marketing effort before its grown wings?

I find myself falling into some of these traps myself. Thanks to Roy H. Williams and the Monday Morning Memo for this.