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.
By @WAWorld
These are some of the tools you want in your lab. They are the beakers, bunsen burners, mass spectrometers, and Geiger counters tha tyou use to test and evaluate your online marketing experiments.
From Web Analytics World
It's like 1995 on the mobile web right now. In the 90s, we were feeling our way through the process of defining what a "web page" should be, mostly by just launching things.
Now we find ourselves in our own 1994 on the mobile web, trying to figure out what a "mobile experience" is.
Right down to how the navigation should work.
If you're struggling with how to present menus on a small screen, this article should help. My partner in CRO, Joel Harvey, will be spilling the beans on what we've been finding in our tests at Conversion Conference 2015.
@conversion_team It's easy to cut prices.It's hard to build up the value of what you offer in words and images. If you can occupy the high-price category in your niche, life gets much easier.
So, I was pleased to find this article which makes a bold statement: "Avoid Best Practice Conversion Rate Optimization"
What?
While your competitors are testing button color, you can be comparing yourself to the competition, being open about your profits, and doing the math for your visitors.
Best practices only get you so far. Here are some alternatives for online success.
In my book Your Customer Creation Equation I talk about the two conversions that online services have:Conversion from visitor to trialConversion from tryer to buyerI recommend that online services find ways to get the visitor started as soon as possible. Online services have the advantage that we can try the product right there online.
This article is further proof that getting the visitor engaged with questions is a more effective way to find more tryers and buyers than the typical home page.
@peeplaja has just saved you a whole lot of time. He's done the research and found the studies that you can use to refute the often poor advice your designers are giving your Web team.
Spend some time with this post and the links he references if you want to consistently create effective, high-converting websites.
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.
it's interesting that scientists side to use stories -- from The Moth podcast -- to stimulate test subjects' brains in this fMRI study. The conclusion is that these stories stimulate areas scattered across our cortex. Stories light up our brains. No wonder storytelling I'd so powerful in marketing.
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.
This is a good overview of design trends from 2016. Not all of these trends are good ideas from a conversion optimization standpoint.
Scroll Animations, Large Thematic Images, Animated Micrinteractions, and Brutalism are probably hurting conversion rates.
The author makes a very important point: "this sort of experiment requires thorough research and in many cases the final result comes via several iterations tested and analyzed in terms of usability and visual perception."
@jnmnrd puts it well: "By putting all of your time and effort into one concept that you're confident in, you save yourself time in which you can then apply towards user testing, gathering useful feedback and iterating."
If you've seen me present, you notice that I wear a lab coat during my presentations. The reason is that it gives me an unfair advantage. Studies have shown that, when I wear a lab coat, I will make about half the errors in cognitive tests as if I was wearing my street clothes. This video sums it up nicely.
Mobile traffic is probably one of your fastest growing segments. I don't care WHAT industry you are in. Here are some excellent things to consider when developing test hypotheses for your mobile website.
We test the content of header and footer bars on mobile websites--we call them stickies--and this includes the use of the hamburger menu icon. It doesn't always work well.
For apps and mobile websites alike, "an app's popularity is determined more so by user engagement and retention rather that its App Store ranking."
@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.