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As I'm putting the final touches on my up-coming book, it is very clear that content is the most important conversion strategy: It influences and enables almost every other strategy.

If you need to get started on content marketing here is a pretty complete list of resources to get you started.

 @peeplaja has given us another great post, full of examples and destined to change your fortune if you put it to work on your site.

The primary barrier to speaking clearly about our business is that we must choose to communicate with someone other than everyone. In other words, we must risk being uninteresting to some portion of our audience in exchange for really knocking our value prop out of the park for others.

Read carefully. Then choose.

I only touch on the issue of Mobile Apps in my new book Your Customer Creation Equation. So I'm happy to share this very helpful infographic on Mobile websites vs. Mobile apps.

Is it just me, or is it clear that mobile websites are the way to go (except in extreme situations)?

I only touch on the issue of Mobile Apps in my new book Your Customer Creation Equation. So I'm happy to share this very helpful infographic on Mobile websites vs. Mobile apps.

Is it just me, or is it clear that mobile websites are the way to go (except in extreme situations)?

I recently went to a website to buy a new keyboard for a laptop. I found the site with the right price and delivery and put the keyboard in my cart.

When I went to checkout, the first question on the billing form was Gender.

Gender?

Why does an electronics part manufacturer need to know if I'm a man or woman?

It introduced enough doubt in my process that I left -- I abandoned my order.

The unfortunate statistic is that 86% of visitors abandon forms of all kinds. It's doubly heartbreaking when they do so in thei cart, because that costs you ready buyers.

The eleven recommendations made here will set you on a path to reduce your abandonment rates. My favorites are: 5. Use a title that explains why the user needs to sign up 6. Show them their password (who said invisible passwords was a good idea?) 12. Put errors in an obvious place and make them visible. Happy Converting!

 @crazyegg hits us over the head with a list of mistakes we make when testing our site. The most brutal is "#8: You're testing a crappy site."

Fear not, especially if you're shepherding a new testing initiative for your company. There's great advice and encouragement here.

To avoid these mistakes in your business, consider a Conversion Catalyst program from Conversion Sciences. Your first call is free.

For those of you who are new to Google for our advertising, analytics or SEO, here's a nice set of tools to help you get better at making money online.

Landing pages are your friend, and here are seven tools that will make your pages very friendly to your bottom line. OMI is also teasing my new Conversion Crash Course. Check it out.

If you didn't know, Google has redesigned their search results pages recently. The change is primarily to the portion of the page that contains "sponsored content", or ads.

The eye-tracking images provided by the folks at EyeQuant are telling.

The pages now drive more attention to the ads, taking attention away from the free results. Ironically, it also makes the ads more evident, with a bright icon beside each.

EyeQuant calls this "a Subtle Work of Genius". What do you think?

If I was to rename this article, it would be, "20 Kinds of Best Practices and Why They Won't Work".

It is bad news to rely on best practices that are unsupported by data or testing. This article gives you 20 reasons why.

How a visitor interacts with your site is important to conversion. Here is an analysis of the identities used to login to news, business, entertainment, and other sites

New way of thinking about the sales funnel.

The Conversion Scientist gets a mention in this nice post.

This article talks about how visitors to web sites are more results oriented and selfish. Referred by Erin.

Not particularly in depth, but it covers the basic concerns.

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

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.

The keys to good landing pages is helping the visitor to decide what to do and what is important. Color and shape are two ways to announce visually what matters. I love this selection of tools (though I hate MS Paint). Even a marketer that is mocking up pages can use these tools to emphasize what is important for a designer. New tools for the conversion lab.

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...

There is more and more a tension between IT and Marketing. New tools put IT prowess in marketers' hands. The quotes from the CIO-CMO Forum show us an emerging strength in marketing. But IT is our friend in the process. They just need to realize that they can materially impact revenue in the enterprise. Marketing is a way IT can assert itself as a profit center, not just a utility. Great quotes.