A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about how the FutureNow methodology to improve website performance applies to all business models. Regardless of business model and type of site, we always start our work by focusing on improving the experience on a client’s site for their late stage visitor because these visitors are ready to take action today, and therefore should be the easiest to convert. By finding the stumbling blocks preventing these late stage visitors from taking action,…

...continue to read "How to Analyze and Improve Your Landing Page"

What if I told you that asking 3 simple questions could help you optimize your website? Sound too good to be true? It isn’t!

The Three Questions Exercise is something that I’ve come back to time and time again over the years working with clients to increase lead gen and ecommerce conversion rates. So I thought you might like to learn about it and try it out yourself.

This exercise is “deceptively” simple because it’s just 3 very simple questions. But it’s harder…

...continue to read "Deceptively Simple Tool to Increase Conversion"

Today’s post contains something I wish all my posts had: a catchy phrase!

By now, everyone knows they should always be testing, but the real hurdles in optimization are deciding what to test, and in what order.

Yes, you can start randomly testing so-called best practices, like Big, green buttons always convert better, but you may not like it when your target audience behaves contrary to what the marketing gurus have told you. And, you can make an…

...continue to read "Testing Page Elements: Move, Remove, or Improve"

The “scent of information” is an important concept for anyone who wants to optimize their online conversion rate. It’s important enough that we’ve been writing about scent on this blog since at least 2006! We recognize, however, that optimizing for scent isn’t easy to do. It involves web analytics data, psychology, copywriting, and web design at a bare minimum. But, the payoff can be huge in terms of more sales, more leads, or more subscriptions from those who come to your…

...continue to read "The Fast Way to Optimize Your Site for Scent"

We all know what a “call to action” is: a link or button that urges your prospect to take an action, and move forward in some sort of process.  According to the seminal book written by FutureNow’s founders, calls to action are “motivations for the visitor to move further into the sales process.”

I would say that, in recent years, the definition of a call to action has been expanded to include the interactive element on…

...continue to read "Secondary Calls to Action: Unsung Heroes of Persuasion"

I had an interesting testing experience with one of my clients recently.  After looking closely at the data, I formed my hypothesis, and made a recommendation for a variation to test…and it underperformed the original version!  I was WRONG!

Now, I don’t expect to be right with every test (in fact, that’s WHY testing is so important), but my hypotheses are based on real data with a strong analysis behind them…and I have never been THIS wrong.  Was…

...continue to read "Conversion Optimization: How Being Wrong Can Lead to Good Insights"

Every time I see a button or text link that includes or says “click here,” I pull 10 hairs out of my head.  I have a lot of hair, so the good news is that I won’t go bald anytime soon.  It’s troubling to see that so many sites are still using this language within their calls to action. Using this flimsy phrase makes the call to action weak!

If the call to action is underlined copy, visitors realize…

...continue to read "“Click Here” Makes Me Rip My Hair Out"

Your objective: Stand out, differentiate yourself from your direct and indirect competitors.

Your challenge: You launch a great concept of a campaign, or on your website and weeks or months later you see something similar your competitor is now doing.

Your exercise: Go through all your current campaigns, website and landing pages that use stock images, and make sure your competitors aren’t using anything similar.

Some of you may remember the graph with the curved arrow on our FutureNow homepage. For those of…

...continue to read "Conversion Rate Exercise: Take Stock of Your Stock Photos"

Our last conversion rate exercise asked you to perform several very simple exercises to answer the question for your visitor: why she should  do business with you. Did you come up with a good TweetVP and identify the 25 interesting things about your business?

There are dozens of these exercises that you need to do to achieve the proper fitness level for maximum persuasionability.

Today, I’d like you to focus on identifying the value that your visitor needs, while differentiating yourself from…

...continue to read "Conversion Rate Exercise: Communicating Value"

Today I’d like to give you 2 exercises that will help your visitors get a better sense of why they should be doing business with you.

1. TweetVP – In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your Unique Value Proposition or Unique Campaign Proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you…

...continue to read "Conversion Rate Exercise: Why Should I Do Business With You?"