Archive for January, 2005
Words: One of Your Better Investments
Feedback, yes we get feedback. Some articles get more than others. This last GrokDotCom article about the value of words generated LOTS of feedback. It’s interesting to see what kind of content will get people to respond.
Have you read the article yet?
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
How To Measure Conversion Rates
Conversion rate measures the number of visitors who took the action you wanted on your site divided by the total number of visitors. Every end-goal conversion (Macro-conversion), like a purchase, is composed of Micro-conversion points, like the click-through path in a shopping cart. In order to achieve the Macro-conversion a series of decisions has to be taken by the visitor, these clicks are measurable evidence of those decisions.
Only when you define and plan for Macro-conversions vs. Micro-conversions then you can understand why conversion rate is truly a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action(s) you want them to take. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness in planning for every decision and the customer’s satisfaction with your plan’s implementation. Since every click represents a person making a decision then for you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs first.
- Overall conversion rate: Total number of actions considered conversion divided by total number of visits. This is a site’s overall effectiveness rating for getting visitors to fulfill your goals within a single visit.
- Scenario conversion rate: Total number of visitors starting a specific scenario divided by total number who complete it. Scenario conversion rates enable you to quickly identify specific conversion processes that require improvement or ones whose successes should be modeled.
- Linear – when visitors need to complete a registration process or checkout process.
- Non-linear – these are the explicitly planned or implicit scenarios that are created by visitor segments as they navigate your website. In this type of scenario we measure from where people enter the scenario to where they complete the intended scenario and whether or not they hit our key value pages. Explicitly planning these non-linear scenarios is what we call “Persuasion Architecture."
- Conversion over time: There are several measures that reveal a site’s effectiveness in generating conversions over time. Use this for situations where conversion is likely to occur over time or multiple visits.
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
What question are you asking?
Think of your customers going down different paths to the close, not simply one optimized path. If you ask a different question, you may get a different answer.
If your question is, "How do I build a single pipeline that gets me the highest conversion rate?" that’s likely to be what you build.
What if you asked "How do I build multiple pipelines that give me the highest conversion rate overall?" What might you build?
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Making Personas Sparkle Like Diamonds, Part 1
Early in our company’s life, persona development was largely an intuitive process. We wanted to develop a process we could use to train clients and partners to duplicate the persona development process. To do this, we delved into literature and film to understand character development.
We were fortunate to be introduced to a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and script evaluator, David Freeman. Freeman taught us about “character diamonds,” a tool he teaches in his course, Beyond Structure. Today, we’ll share what we learned about character diamonds. Next time, we’ll look at an advertising example and some issues surrounding these tools.
Identifying Character Diamonds
Freeman teaches characters as a series of layers. One layer is the character diamond. Each corner of the diamond represents a major trait in the character’s personality. A trait helps shape how the character sees the world, speaks, thinks, and acts. “Character diamond” loosely means the combination of three, four, or five traits that govern a character’s personality.
Some characters’ personalities are spread evenly among the traits. Others might have a trait so powerful it eclipses the others. In “Star Wars,” Darth Vader’s creepy evilness is his most salient trait, although he does possess others.
Let’s examine a character from “American Beauty.” Teenage Ricky Fitts is in love with Jane Burnham, daughter of Lester, the main character.
Ricky’s character diamond looks like this:
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Words: One of Your Better Investments
In this high-tech medium, your low-tech words will always give you the persuasive advantage
Everyone’s clambering for your development dollars - software systems guys, design guys, marketing guys, SEO guys, usability guys, information architecture guys. They’re all going to tell you their little piece of the pie is crucial to your success online. And they have a point … up to a point. I guarantee I have opinions on “the good, the bad and the ugly” in these subspecialties as they relate to the construction of an effective persuasion architecture for your ebusiness. So, I won’t sit here and warble that none of this stuff matters, ’cause it obviously does.
I will warble that none of this stuff matters if you are fundamentally unable to persuade your visitors to take the actions you want them to take. And the key element in your persuasive arsenal is your copy.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 104
Related Posts:
Written by:The Grok
Persona Development and the Law of Averages
“Persona” is a hot buzzword in this industry, yet most companies that create personas haven’t fully embraced everything they have to offer. Most personas are watered-down and hard to relate to. The worst of the lot are lifeless outlines of a company’s demographic targets. Most often, they don’t deliver the expected outcome from using the persona approach.
I’m contributing to a book about the persona development process with experts Tamara Adlin from Amazon.com and John Pruitt from Microsoft. I don’t have the space here to get into the nitty-gritty, but there are best practices you can use to maximize your persona set potential.
Pruitt, who pioneered persona development for Microsoft, comments:
Our goal was to help a development team understand and focus on a set of target users. We read Cooper’s 1999 book and looked around the industry and our company to see how other teams had defined their audiences and communicated that information to their broader team.
As Pruitt’s team learned more about personas, it uncovered the same pitfalls I’ve seen many others teams fall into:
- The personas weren’t believable.
- Persona attributes weren’t communicated well across the design team.
- Teams had little understanding of exactly how to use personas.
- There was sparse early commitment. Some departments used personas, some didn’t.
Creating profitable personas shouldn’t be a mysterious process, but neither is it simplistic. It involves a practical application of science, customer research, psychology, and customer empathy, which already exists in most successful sales processes.
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Beyond Conversion Rates
In that first second at midnight on January 1, something nearly mystical occurs. Though the only thing that really changes is the calendar, we somehow feel we’re making a fresh start. We begin plotting things in our lives or work that can be different and better. Allow me to challenge you to think afresh about the opportunities 2005 offers you and your Web site.
The Conversion Rate Game
Before the dot-com implosion, we were a small, lonely voice shouting about conversion rates from every rooftop we could climb up. Back then, few seemed interested in submitting themselves to conversion rate accountability. We knew sooner or later, the piper would show up and demand payment.
Now, conversion rate optimization is almost mainstream. Welcome to the conversion rate ballgame.
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Invisible Navigation
From GUUUI we read the following
Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there. Read the entire article.
Why weren’t we surprised? Could be that in 2001 our very own lovable persuasion guru Bryan Eisenberg wrote the following…
Clearly, the center area of the screen is prime real estate, the “active window” where you will either succeed or fail in persuading your visitor. This is the first place your visitor makes a conscious effort to engage with you. When her gaze returns across the screen from its preliminary scan, you want to make sure you present content that will capture her interest and motivate her through the conversion process. If anything on the page distracts her or requires her to disconnect from the center area, she is that much less likely to stay, rapt by your powers of persuasion. And if you’ve learned the Stanford-Poynter lesson, you’ll understand that your copy is much more important than your images. (from the article Where Oh Where Did My Eyeballs Go?)
If you are truly focused on persuading folks on your site put the time and effort you are tempted to put into navigation and focus it on the ‘active window’. Navigation is important, just not as important as everyone seems to think.
The shortest distance between your customers and conversion is not the navigation, it’s the embedded links in the active window.
From May 2001 Bryan also wrote…
But from our work with clients, we’ve discovered that the navigation scheme important to actually closing more sales is the embedded-links scheme. And it’s very easy to implement. Within the body of your (great) copy, you simply place links to the places you want prospects to go next. Of course, what works best on your site can be determined only by testing. And, naturally, embedded links are only one component of a complete navigation structure.
If embedded links are done well (a topic for another article), they will engage your users effectively as they browse within the “active window” of your site. The active window is the main area of your page, underneath or to the side of your main navigation. It is where you place your body text, display your products, and present your offer. It is also where you want to keep your visitors’ eyes focused. If you properly engage them in this area by providing the right choices to click on, you persuade them to follow the path you want them to take. This is also why it is very important to keep a consistent look and feel around the active window. Read the entire article.
Ok, what are todays magic words?
I’ll give you a hint.
It starts with an ‘active, and ends with a ‘window.’
Related Posts:
Written by:Persuasion Architects
Still Falling Short in E(xceptional)-tail?
More ways to examine your site through the eyes of your visitors
When it comes to online shopping, consumer confidence is increasing. More folks are turning to the Internet for their shopping needs – this holiday season alone, online spending was up 25% over the last holiday season (according to one statistic I ran across). That’s cheery news for all of us. But don’t whoop it up too much just yet. Truth is, the mere presence of more traffic isn’t going to net you higher conversion rates.
Formulating how to interact with the nameless and faceless hordes isn’t an easy task, but that’s where your solution lies. And it’s the reason why you want to construct the persuasion architecture of your site based on personas and their buying-path scenarios.
By sharing with you Danielle’s online shopping experiences based on her participation in our 2004 Online Retail Study for Customer-Focused Excellence, I tried to make those visitors in the trenches more real to you. Now, suppose I offer you some insight, collected from the same survey, on the etail shopping experiences of two experienced conversion rate specialists? Think the “real guys” have substantially different online buying experiences? Then think again!
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 103
Related Posts:
Written by:The Grok
