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How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Affiliates May Be a Tax Liability! Amazon Sues New York…
The New York Times is reporting on Amazon’s lawsuit contesting the recently enacted New York state law which requires online retail outlets to collect sales tax on items sold to the state’s residents.
Slashdot sums up the new tax law:
“…based on a novel definition of what constitutes a presence in the state: It includes any Web site based in the state that earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of affiliates–from big publishers to tiny blogs–that feature links to its products.”
We should all support Amazon in their fight. This could affect all of us who buy online in the future — at least in the United States. Let’s all buy something from Amazon today to show our support of their fight.
P.S. - If you need a suggestion on what to buy, you can always pre-order our next book, Always Be Testing.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads
Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?
Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:
1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.
2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.
3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.
Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.
Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.
We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.
Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service
Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.
Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.
- Include thumbnails of documents.
- Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.
- Let them know what they can do with the information.
- List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.
- Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)
If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.
Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.
Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).
Help for the Informationally Challenged
Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.
One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?
Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.
Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?
There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.
Establishing Trust and Expectations
Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.
Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.
Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.
- Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.
- Ramp up your About Us page.
- Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.
- Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.
- Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.
- Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.
- Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.
Now go get some leads.
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Originally seen on ClickZ.
Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Over 11 Billion Customer Reviews, and Counting…
How many consumer-generated reviews are out there today? We’re not sure, but it’s staggering to think that one firm has already enabled over 11 billion (with a “B”) customer reviews — and counting!
Bazaarvoice* recently started tracking their networks total “reviews served” and placed a counter on their homepage. If you’ve ever wanted to know how quickly the market’s demand for social commerce reviews is growing, this pretty much says it all.
Just yesterday, their CEO and founder, Brett Hurt, emailed to let me know that they had passed the 10-billionth-review milestone. And amazingly, since I grabbed the image you see here from their homepage about 30 minutes ago, Bazaarvoice has syndicated another five million reviews.
Is there still any doubt that customers want product reviews?
If you want to learn how to harness the word of mouth (that’s already out there) to boost sales and conversion on your e-commerce or brand website, I hope you’ll join me at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, May 28-30 in Austin, Texas.
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*Disclosure: Bryan Eisenberg is an advisor to Bazaarvoice.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Email Secrets of a Top Converting Website
ProFlowers is a conversion-rate heavyweight. Its top-line conversion rate has been in the double-digits for the past few years, and it consistently appears in the top 10 converting Web sites according to the folks at Nielsen Online.
This is not an accident.
ProFlowers.com is committed to a culture of ongoing optimization. A recent promotional email demonstrates its commitment to go beyond the Web site, extending into other touch points, specifically its email marketing.
Look at this screen shot of a ProFlowers email as it appears in my Entourage email preview:
Contrast that with this email preview from SmartBargains.com:
The ProFlowers email shows evidence of planning and optimization, while the second shows, well, a bunch of Xs.
Notice the top of ProFlowers’s email makes the offer part of the “Can’t view this email” line. Most only say something like, “Having problems reading this email? Please click here.”
Inspired by the ProFlowers example, today I’ll share a few tips so you can optimize your own email messages.
Optimize Your Email Marketing
• Use alt tags. Never place an image in an email (or anywhere else online) without an alt tag. It’s just smart, and there’s no downside. ProFlowers uses the alt tag in the large image on the left to reinforce the overall message, and most of the major images are tagged appropriately. I can easily preview the message and act on it, without even downloading the images.
• Test your subject line. The ProFlowers’s subject line gives me enough information to determine if I’m interested in the offer. While this direct approach won’t work for every situation, your subject line should show respect for the recipient’s time and inbox. At the very least, the subject line and content should be consistent. Don’t hook recipients in with a catchy subject only to let them down in the email body by hiding the offer or by making them scroll down to see it.
• Copy matters. It matters a lot. Make sure your offer is clear and concise.
• Test your offers. What are you offering? Sometimes a seemingly lesser offer performs better. Notice how the ProFlowers offer gives me a clear choice between two decent offers.
Get Into the Inbox
These optimization tips are all well and good — provided your email actually arrives at the intended inbox. So much opt-in email ends up in the junk folder because it’s mistaken for spam. I asked my friend, Yasifur Rahman, VP of Kobemail, to share a few other tips that will help marketers optimize deliverability:
• Images and text. It’s a good idea to work toward a 60:40 image-to-text ratio. Image-only creative is a big no-no. Always have both images and text in creative. Most spam creative is just center-aligned images, so this layout is a spam indicator for various filters. If you have a top header (usually a logo), keep it under 100 pixels and simple, if possible. And always linked to the sender’s landing page.
• Overuse of spam-flagged words. Symbols and words, such as “$,” “FREE,” “$100″ (or any other amount), “cash,” “!,” “Prize,” “!!!,” “click,” and “complimentary” increase your spam score exponentially when used excessively. A few of them used here and there won’t affect the email as much. But when they’re used consistently throughout the message, the email is open season for spam blockers.
• Backgrounds and alignment. Colorful backgrounds raise a spam score greatly. A white background is the lowest scoring color within an email. Also, most spam messages are centered. Left-align your creative to make it look legitimate. The combination of these changes will have a positive effect on your deliverability.
• Subscription date. Add a subscription date to your message, such as: “Thank you for signing up on 07/13/06.” This builds email credibility. The more information about the subscription you put in your email, the easier it is for ISPs to determine that the mailing was a legitimate, subscribed mailing.
• Broken image and text. A smooth transition between image and text makes your creative look professional. Plus, when images are disabled, the HTML won’t break. Combined with the earlier recommendations, it will be easier for email recipients to believe your email isn’t spam. And if reported, it’s easier for the sender to convince the ISPs that the newsletter was legit and not intended as spam.
You can get more of Rahman’s tips on his blog.
Email and the Big Picture
Email’s only one piece of the conversion rate puzzle.
Double-digit conversion rates don’t happen overnight. They take work and relentless testing, collecting insight after insight into why customers behave the way they do, making the changes, then doing it all over again.
What are you optimizing in your email marketing and landing page experience?
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Also seen on ClickZ.
Looking to improve email and landing page conversion? FutureNow can help.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Google Website Optimizer Webinar: What Should I Test?
In case you missed the live webinar or had technical difficulties while watching it last week, you can watch it on YouTube now.
The presentation is 63 minutes, and the sound on the YouTube version isn’t the best. If you prefer, you can watch it full-screen and with better sound via WebEx.
The webinar starts with an introduction to Website Optimizer by Google’s Tom Leung. Then I share some of what we have learned at FutureNow over the the past decade of optimizing websites, in order to show some of the most important things you should test. We then go into Q & A, but since there were additional questions that weren’t answered on the call, we will gladly answer them for you in the comments below.
As always, if you need help figuring out the specifics of what to test on your site, we can help.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing
Everyone’s using the “r” word. Just a month or two ago, online marketers were whispering the word for fear of contagion. Now it’s spoken out in the open. We all seem to sense that we’re in a recession or that one’s stalking us and tapping on our shoulder.
Some sites are experiencing slight sales declines; others are prepping for the recession by trimming marketing budgets and tightening their belts in other areas. Online marketers are being asked to do more with less. It seems it’s going to get worse.
It’s interesting to watch how different companies respond to tough times. Traditionally during a recession, most will cut their marketing spend and ask the sales staff to squeeze more from what marketing delivers. In the online world, most decrease ad budgets, but the first cuts are aimed at any sort of marketing optimization (like analytics or testing). This bunker-type approach often leads to stagnation. Optimization is the last line item you can afford to cut.
Others will pour more money into traffic acquisition and flashy advertising or gimmicks. This kitchen-sink approach is highly inefficient and risky.
Effective Optimization Is a Scientific Process
I prefer a more scientific approach.
The “r” word doesn’t mean failure or certain doom. While we don’t control the factors that cause a recession, we can optimize the factors we do have control over and do our best to build and continually improve a recession-proof Web site.
A site that converts better will decrease cost per acquisition and, in turn, will increase ad spend efficiency. A site being continually improved for conversion can withstand the storms of finicky economic times. Optimizing your site should be a scientific process that gives customer insight and is accountable, efficient, and measurable.
In the midst of the dot-com boom, we took on our very first conversion optimization client and helped the company build an internal process to continually optimize its conversion rate. Everyone else was talking about eyeballs and, to their detriment, got spanked by the mother of bursting bubbles. Site after site went into the trash heap, while our client’s continued to grow and thrive through the worst of it. During that time, the client enjoyed an aggregated 400 percent increase in conversion. Its advertising spend was potent, each dollar spent on advertising was worth four times more in top-line sales. Its competitors could spend the same and a lot more on advertising and couldn’t get similar traction. Some went under.
Building a recession-proof online marketing campaign is common sense, but you must work on it. It’s well worth it. It’s not about getting the occasional gain from a test or analytics but about having a continual process for doing so.
The Cost of Not Improving Your Conversion Rate
Let’s suppose your site draws 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have an average conversion rate of 2.5 percent. If you average sale is $50, then you gross about $125,000 a month. Let’s also say that after some optimization work and a couple tests, you increase your overall conversion rate by just 10 percent (a very achievable goal), and your conversion rate is now 2.75 percent. Your monthly gross is now $137,500. The annualized revenue realized by the move of the needle is $150,000. With a minor conversion increase, you’ve earned a baker’s dozen: 13 months of revenue in 12 months’ time.
If you continue to optimize better every month throughout the year, that 13th doughnut gets bigger and bigger. Assuming traffic costs remain static, ad spend becomes stronger and your cost of acquisition goes down. Even in the likely scenario that your traffic costs inch up, you’re riding the curve instead of falling below it.If you don’t become recession-proof, your competitors will. There are simply no more excuses. A decade ago, putting together the resources for optimization was a challenge. Today, analytics and optimization software are much more easily available and affordable when you look at them in this light. Google even offers them both for free.
Steps to Recession-Proof Online Marketing
Here are three steps you can take to make your online marketing recession proof:
1. Turn your analytics into customer insight. It’s not enough to get reports. Each click is an action taken by a real person. Learn why your customers do what they do on your site.
2. Turn your insight into action. If customers leave your site or landing pages, theorize as to why, then test variations to confirm or refute your insight based on step one.
3. Rinse and repeat.
Don’t become a victim of a recession; instead use it as an opportunity to take control of the things you can and jack up your conversion rate. The dot-com bust would have been a blip had many focused more on the fundamentals of increasing conversion online.I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live through another bust. So I leave you with the wise words of Blackie Sherrod: “The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay so little attention to it the first time.”
What are your plans to recession proof yourself? Let us know if you need help.
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Originally posted on ClickZ.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: February 2008
Here it is, the list of February’s top 10 converting retail sites*…
1. Snapfish - 17.4%
2. Vistaprint - 16.8%
3. Lands End - 15.2%
4. ProFlowers - 15.2%
5. Lane Bryant Catalog - 14.7%
6. LL Bean - 14.7%
7. HSN.com - 14.6%
8. 1800flowers.com - 14.2%
9. ebay - 14.0%
10. Blair.com - 13.8%
Last month, I wondered if we would see any Valentine’s day influence to this month’s list. What do you think?
This is the first time we are seeing Snapfish and Vistaprint. I wonder if they are being tracked for the first time ever or did they do something to move the needle. LL Bean dropped from a 23.6% conversion rate that they had in January and December.
Which one of our readers will make it to the list next?
*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: January 2008
Here it is, the list of January’s top 10 converting retail sites*…
1. LL Bean.com - 23.6%
2. J Jill - 19.8%
3. Proflowers - 17.8%
4. Office Depot - 17.8%
5. Drugstore.com - 17.3%
6. Coldwater Creek- 15.6%
7. CDW - 15.0%
8. Chadwicks.com - 15.0%
9. Bose.com - 14.9%
10. eBay - 14.9%
Several new sites made the list that we didn’t see in December, November, or October.
LL Bean tops the charts with an impressive 23.6% conversion rate. They had the same conversion rate during the holiday season. They must have had some great campaigns this month. (If you have screen shots, please let me know.)
I can’t wait to see those February results. I imagine we’ll see some influence from Valentine’s Day on retailers’ conversion rates.
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*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts
[Editor’s Note: Our original report on the top-converting sites for January 2007 mistakenly credited a previous year’s data. It seems a fellow blogger cited outdated numbers and we overlooked the error during fact check. Bryan stands by his analysis, however, as it was not intended to be time sensitive or bound to any particular retailers’ performance.]
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
How to Prioritize Your Optimization
Everyone wants to optimize. If you’re like most companies, you have a laundry list of things you’d like to do with your site. You know instinctively that all the items on the list are of equal value. You know some might have more impact than others. You also know these items require different amounts of effort and resources. So the obvious question is, “Where do I begin?”
You’re likely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that human beings must first prioritize basic needs, such as food and shelter, before they’re able to seek higher needs, like social interaction and self-actualization needs. What good is owning a Harley-Davidson or finding the perfect outfit for a trip to a club if you’re starving to death?
Looking at your site in a similar fashion is extremely helpful. Since I first introduced our concept of the hierarchy of optimization last year, I’ve wanted to dig into it a little deeper:
Taking a step back and examining the entire pyramid will help you better assess where to start or assist you in knowing exactly what you’re optimizing now. The hierarchy also gives insight into optimization’s potential impact.
Let’s start at the bottom. Remember, the higher you go on the pyramid, the bigger the impact you’ll make on optimization. Also remember that the pyramid doesn’t indicate the level of effort needed to optimize, because this is as different from site to site as we are different from each other.
The Hierarchy of Optimization
Function is almost below the basics. Does your site have long periods of downtime? Do you deliver hundreds or thousands of 404s? Does your shopping cart constantly freeze up on visitors? Can users log in? Do images load? Is your site heavy on customer-facing errors? As a first order of business, work to make your site as reliable as the sunrise.
Another aspect of function is making sure that back-end functions are also in place. We’ve worked with companies that were spending ample on marketing and great site widgets, but the back-end shipping process was broken, causing an embarrassing amount of orders to go unfulfilled. This isn’t sexy marketing; it’s Business 101. Why go through all the hard work to market and sell a $1,000 dress only to have the customer walk up to a dirty checkout lane with a broken cash register circa 1950?
Having solid, clean user data for analytics also falls in the function level, otherwise anything higher up on the pyramid can’t be optimized with any accuracy or confidence.
How accessible is your site? Remember the recent lawsuit brought against Target.com for not having alt tags on its images? Font size, language issues, and pages and sections that don’t load correctly are other accessibility issues. Browser-specific issues fall in this level as well. Check your access logs to determine if you’re under-serving or ignoring a visitor segment. Optimize for people with disabilities, allow fonts to be resizable for users who need larger print, and solve browser-specific issues. If you remember, 38 percent of the retailers had difficult-to-read fonts in our 2007 Customer Experience Study. Optimize for dial-up users (there are still plenty of them out there). Access for mobile devices should also be considered.
Are your buttons easy to find and see? Is the search dialog where users expect it? Do you use drop-downs when you could use a radio button? Usability is about moving site elements around and using size, color, and contrast to improve the ease of use of your site. Thousands of great articles have been written about usability. Jared Spool’s are my favorites.
Call-to-action button optimization is a popular optimization item for marketers. For most, the effort is low, and it can have significant impact. Still, it’s only one aspect of the usability equation.
While similar to and often confused with usability, the intuitive layer is about improving the flow of the visitor’s site experience and optimizing aspects that keep the visitors from buying. Point-of-action assurances, product detail pop-ups, customer reviews, upfront shipping costs, and current in-stock messaging all reduce friction in the buying process, anticipate customer questions, and offer answers at the point the customer asks.
On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.
At the top of the pyramid are site elements that move a customer toward making a decision to buy your specific product. Persuasion issues are almost always high impact.
Improving persuasion on your site is mostly done by improving copy or product images. Product descriptions, feature tours, demos, and product comparisons (even with competitors) are considered persuasive issues. On a lead gen or B2B (define) site, it’s your service description, case studies, testimonials, and white papers. Make sure your copy addresses each of your personas.
Brand image and a site’s overall look and feel are often persuasion issues, especially if there’s a disconnect between the brand promise and site design. But have no doubt that a strong familiar branded product will forgive a multitude of site errors, as many of us have endured horrible sites and process to buy products and services we really wanted.
Assuming the bottom three levels are sound on your site, persuasion scenario planning will assist in planning and measuring the intuitive and persuasion challenges you face.
Conclusion
Start at the pyramid’s bottom and list each of the optimization tests or changes you need to consider. For each item, rank the effort it will take your team to make the change or test possible. Start with low-effort items, even if they’re low on the pyramid. Then work your way up.
Best of luck with your optimization efforts this year. If you need help planning and prioritizing your tests, we’d be happy to oblige.
This originally appeared in my ClickZ column from 2/29/08.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
