Group items tagged

Picking up where we left off in the Marketing Experiments Conversion Sequence C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) -2a, the last couple posts covered "m" for Motivation discussing optimizing your ecommerce sites for "hunters" on home pages and search and navigation. Today I want to look at motivation from a different angle. I want you to choose a landing page that is top priority for you to optimize. For example, your most profitable product with the highest abandonment rate. I want to get you thinking about which customer motivations are most likely to match your business, your products, your typical customer and your landing page presentation.

Hanging out at SES Chicago last week, I spent some time with Stewart Quealy, VP of content development for SES, who told me that he enjoyed my last column about the power of a great unique value proposition. He suggested that as more new faces begin to adopt conversion rate optimization, some may not be as familiar with the fundamentals as many of us are. And of course, the end of the year is always a good time to talk the fundamentals. This week, I want to discuss another conversion rate optimization basic: the call to action (CTA).

We have worked with many demand or lead generation companies over the past 10 years. Most of the time when they come to us, they ask us to help them increase the number of people they convert into a free trial, a free download, or to create an account. Conversion Isn't an Event, it's a Process We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don't necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue. This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product. When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

On the face of it, viral marketing optimization (VMO) bears little resemblance to more established digital marketing practices. In retail and lead generation the basic principle to optimizing conversion is long established as driving people into the funnel and then pushing them down it. Viral Marketing turns this funnel upside down. The viral marketing end is really a beginning. Success starts at that single point of conversion and moves wider and the benefits of optimizing the viral funnel get compounded in ways other marketers can only dream of.

Many people, including myself, don't enjoy filling out forms. Forms are usually long, unclear, and contain too many required fields, etc. To the contrary, from a business perspective forms are an excellent tool for gathering information. Our job as web analysts is to make both parties happy and help optimize form length with input analysis.

To follow up our recent post on customer motivation and optimizing your website for hunters (e.g. moms armed with Christmas lists), I want to show you some examples beyond the search box and navigation menu. I'll use a personal story - I'm in the market for a car GPS. Previously knowing nothing about them (features, brands, prices etc), so I started off a howser. I decided I want to check Crutchfield (great product filters and product descriptions), Amazon (access to more products, the seller marketplace and more customer reviews) and Best Buy Canada (Canadian pricing, option to pick up in store).

Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix. Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

When evaluating and improving copy I work through these 10 steps one at a time.

Last week's reputation management post brought several emails about how to go actually go about implementing a reputation management program. With that in mind her are five steps that you can take to manage your reputation online (and control the search engine rankings also).

Learn how to optimize your weblog to rank well in Google and other major search engines.

According to Marketing Experiments' Dr. Flint McLaughlin, whenever you use an X-Y range in your ad, most people will revert to the first number as the mean (average) standard. In other words, on a range of 35-50%, one will assume that 50% off is the exception, and most items are 35% off. (Slide 18 of PPC Live Optimization Clinic replay)

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product! I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

Once the party's over, are you leaving customers out in the cold? Thank you pages typically don't receive much design or marketing attention. After all, by the time a site visitor sees a Thank You page the chase is over, right? The visitor purchased a widget, filled out the signup form, or downloaded a white paper - in other words, the web site has won, and another conversion stat has been chalked up in the company's analytics package. Success! Check out our positive ROI!

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will briefly define search engine optimization (SEO) and information architecture (IA), describe one of the many places where these marketing specialties intersect, and explain how easy and natural thematic structure and linking really is. I've also included a video. I should point out that this technique is very intuitive, and many site owners or designers are probably using it to some extent naturally. We are simply putting a name to these natural tendencies.

Salesmanship is about transferring confidence, and you can't inspire confidence without first establishing your credibility. So when it comes to Landing Page copy, credibility is truly Job #1.Here are five must-haves for building that credibility where it often counts the most:

The Internet Marketer's Handbook was compiled by Danny Dover and is the result of literally hundreds of hours of study and practice in internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques. The information below represents the web's best resources and tools. All of the items listed below are available to the general public and most are free of charge. Enjoy!

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing - particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization - it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This article will help you estimate the potential growth in traffic and sales that SEO efforts can drive to your site.

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering "free" white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn't treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won't either.