Archive for June, 2005
What Will Make Your Cork Pop?
How will you measure success? It’s a simple but powerful question every potential client must answer.
The certain sign of a potential client’s failure is when they can’t define their objectives clearly; turn their business away or live to regret it. Those owner/ managers won’t stick to a strategy because are incapable of buying in. The Cheshire Cat explained their condition: "when you don’t know where you are headed any road will do".
Tim Miles, our friend and Wizard of Ads Partner, has a wonderful post in his blog: What Will Your Mom Say?. I recommend you read it.
If you like what Tim Miles has to say why don’t you come meet him and Bryan and me at our Call To Action Workshop in Austin, TX September 8-9.
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Are you a Customer Delighting SUPERstar?
While taking a stroll with TheWoman this weekend, we decide to amble into The Gap. After finding some shorts she desperately had to have, we were disappointed to learn they didn’t have the colors she had chosen, in her correct size. The sales associate checked the stockroom, and then the inventory of the surrounding stores, and came up with nothing within 20 miles of our location. Now here’s where the story gets interesting.
GapGirl offers another solution- we can order online. TheWoman immediately panics. It took me a month to find these specific shorts in the store, how the @#%#%$ will I ever find them again online? And what if the sale price isn’t honored online? I’ll have to pay for shipping too? This all sounds like a lot of time, effort and dollars down the drain.
GapGirl smiles, as she knows the pure delight that’s about to follow. If you’d like, she explains, I can place the order for you right now, at the same price we’re offering in store. In fact, you can even pay for them with your in-store purchases, all at the same time, on the same receipt. Since you’re placing the order from the store, we’re even happy to pick up the shipping for you. Would you like them delivered Tuesday AM or PM?
An organization’s Delight Factor is much more than aiming to please, it’s about absolutely blowing away the customer in delight. Under-promising, and over-delivering. And people say Conversion Analysts are always negative, pessimistic sorts. (It’s the curse of the job, really. Spending much of our time providing Real World Sales Analysis, our clients don’t pay us for affirmation of what they’re doing right- they pay for uncovery (and recommendations, of course) of all the things they’re doing wrong. So naturally, you can see why we’re not usually a hit at parties!) It’s important to note, you can learn plenty from studying the successes of others.
How exceptional is your site’s Delight Factor?
Related Posts:
Written by:Howard Kaplan
Unwritten Internet Rules
- No vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.
- No one is allowed to ride a bicycle in a swimming pool.
- A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket.
- Slippers are not to be worn after 10 p.m.
These are just a few of hundreds of silly laws U.S. states have on the books. It’s hard to know exactly why or how laws like these came to be. They must’ve made sense to somebody, some time.
The Internet is no exception. It has its share of silly (though unwritten) rules that the masses seem eager to follow.
Solid rules and best practices are great for managing well-established systems and keep social order. Online, following unwritten rules can be a recipe for rotten conversion. Here are a few of my favorite unwritten Internet rules.
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Sport a Personality with That Online Suit
Corporate professionalism has its place (frivolity rarely persuades an account exec), but downright pro forma business-speak rarely gets noticed, even by the Dark Suit Crowd.
Flickr won my online photo management business almost exclusively through their copyrighting. Stuff like this:
At the very bottom of their "about" page: The fact that you’ve read to the end of this entire document and are
hanging out at the bottom of this page with nothing but this silly text
to keep you company is proof of a deep and abiding interest on your
part. What are you waiting for? [call to action appropriately placed here]On their "create an account" page: Our hatred for spam is difficult to articulate.
On their "press" page: You suspected all along that our "Aw shucks" Canadian modesty was a big charade, and by George you were right!
From their company blog announcing acquisition by Yahoo!: Woohoo! What does this mean? It means that we’ll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid, schedule conjugal visits between trips to the colo….wait! That’s not what you want to know. This is what you want to know …
And Flickr cultivates our relationship through personality-rich communications like this one:
The Flickr team has up and moved this week to Californ-i-a and has been singing Beach Boys songs non-stop since arrival. And you’re moving too! … every pixel, bit and byte … Thank you, Flickreebies, for making Flickr such a wonderful place to share, connect, and befriend. We love you! (In an entirely non-creepyway.) - The Flickroobies
Remember, online you’re talking to your audience one person at a time. Of course Flickr’s personality won’t work for everyone. The point isn’t that you need Flickr’s personality. But a personality - something to distinguish you from the crowd - would be an idea.
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
How can you design Personae if you don’t understand them?
Don’t get us wrong, we love when people catch on to the need for designing to your visitors (and do it right), but sometimes we can’t help but chuckle at other executions.
Personas allow you to answer your visitors’ questions through language and structures that help them make their decisions. So, if you were looking for a persona-design firm, what might your motivations be? Your fears? What issues might you want resolved? How would you like to begin understanding what this company could do for you? What words might you desperately want to read as evidence this company understands your needs?
You’d hope a persona-design firm would anticipate this stuff - presumably live and breathe it - and craft persona-based relevant messaging. You’d hope to see this messaging immediately, say, directly on their home page?
I guess that’s too much work for some "persona-design firms". Why not just put up an abstract logo with a link to a contact address. Yup, that’s much easier… have to wonder how many people are being persuaded though, huh?
Related Posts:
Written by:Howard Kaplan
Does Google Enjoy 100% Conversion?
Mark, a friend of ours from down under posed the following question:
In thinking about sites with high conversion rates it occurred to me that Google must be a site with close to a 100% conversion rate.
It loads really fast, the call to action is clear, the invitation is in the hot zone of screen space, there’s no ambiguity about what the site is or what the user is suppossed to do next.
If the purpose of the site is to get people to search, then anyone who gets tot he home page and conducts a search is a successful conversion.
(Obviously I don’t know what Google’s actual stats are, but I would imagine the conversion rate is almost perfect.)
In fact Google really seem to be masters of the KISS (Keep it simple stupid) principle. (And that’s never easy.)
And I don’t think I’m being incredibly simplistic in singling out Google.
Google was not the first in the search engine space, but quickly became number one, and its soaring stock price is further proof of the success of its business.
To say: "Well obviously people go to Google to search." just proves my point as there are hundreds of search sites that people don’t go to, to the same degree.
Therefore I put it forward as a site with a 100% conversion rate.
Whaddya think?
I reponded:
Is the goal of the searcher to search or to find? If every search generated a click-through to what the searcher found relevant then I might agree with a 100% conversion rate.
I know that I have way oversimplified this but I’d love some feedback on the Google question and on whether you know of websites with 100% conversion.
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Making Numbers Work for You
Three conversion metrics tips that help you optimize your online efforts
Gone are the rose-colored-glasses days of “Gee Whiz.” Return on investment is the imperative. Your bottom line depends on your ability to market intelligently. And your ability to market intelligently depends on the accountability you design into your online efforts. As Jim Sterne of Target Marketing wrote for us, “There is no such thing as a perfect website, there is only … change. Do not expect to ever reach the final version of your site. You want people to buy? Keep trying things and measuring the results.”The underlying beauty of a conversion system based on the principles of Persuasion Architecture lies in its accountability. For Call to Action, Jason Burby, Director of Web Analytics for Zaaz, offered these “number tactics” to help you shape the accountability of your conversion system.
Jason writes:
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 113
Related Posts:
Written by:The Grok
Bloggers getting on board
Jim Logan, guest blogging on ProBlogger.net wondered aloud "Is it time to talk more about conversion?" You can imagine we agree, but we did have to mention one teeny-tiny Freudian Slip:
Oh JSLogan, we were with you right up ’til the point you said “A site that is organized towards your purpose”
I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, because you clearly get it, that what you meant to say was “A site that is organized towards your VISITORS’ purpose, and invites your Call to Action”. This is the key to conversion: we don’t convert, we persuade. When we’ve done our job, and proven our ability to meet the visitors’ needs, they convert themselves.
Related Posts:
Written by:Howard Kaplan
Relevance Rules!
Make sure you’re delivering relevance - blissful, utterly reassuring, confidence-building, persuasive relevance - at every turn
I got everybody here one of those desk plaques extolling the critical value of communicating benefits rather than features. Now I’m planning one that goes something like this: Relevance Rules!
If you can’t deliver relevance to your visitors at every turn, how do you expect them to stay engaged with you? Irrelevance persuades no one.
And yet, irrelevance abounds in cyberspace. It’s one of the top reasons behind stunningly crummy conversion rates. Let me show you what I mean.
Let’s get a handle on this relevance thing by looking at the absurd end of the continuum. Imagine a live chat session between me and a customer service representative:
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 113
Related Posts:
Written by:The Grok
How to Develop a Landing Page Framework
Why do landing page campaigns so often convert poorly? Because in planning them, the creators fail to think beyond the page itself. Typically, prospects click through an email or a banner ad to a single landing page with a single call to action and little, if any, persuasive copy.
Don’t assume a banner or search result creates demand or understanding in a complex product or offering. Don’t assume everyone who clicks through to a landing page is ready to buy. These assumptions are the result of bad communication between marketing and sales.
Step 1: Define Campaign Conversion Goals
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
