These days, most people are less skeptical about the internet.  We think little of viewing bank statements, paying utility bills, and entering our credit card numbers online.  More often than not, visitors won’t think twice about making an online purchase, that is, until you give them a reason to.

Imagine this scenario:  You’re on a site, and you find the perfect TV.  You’ve seen it before in stores, talked to sales people, done your research on consumer reports, AND now you’ve found it 45% off and with free shipping!  You’re already imagining who you’re going to invite over to watch the big game… until you notice that there are 3 typos on the homepage, including the brand name of the TV you’re purchasing, and there’s no way to enter a shipping address that is different from your billing address.  Notice how quickly you’ve gone from ‘cloud nine’ to ‘too good to be true’.  Chances are, you are not going to be making this purchase and you rationalize that watching the big game on a little TV isn’t so bad, even if it doesn’t have HD.

Credibility is yours to lose.  Visitors will give you the benefit of the doubt until you don’t meet their basic expectations.  I often will give our clients little pointers about misspelled words or broken links as part of our efforts to improve their marketing results via an OnTarget subscription.  I am always a little surprised when they don’t seem too concerned about it.  The truth is, every visitor who notices these little things is less likely to convert on your site, return to your site or recommend your site to someone else.

The 3 most common credibility mistakes I see online:

1. Typos and grammatical errors. Examples: loose/lose;  their/there/they’re, its/it’s, a lot (it’s two words, people) etc.  Pick up a copy of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” if you want to set yourself straight on what is proper.  At 85 pages, it’s the most concise miracle ever written on grammar.

2. Lack of (or un-clickable) security assurances in checkout.  I even have a client whose privacy page is the most visited page by visitors who convert.  This is not un-likely if you have a very methodically minded product like insurance or software because people come to your site expecting to look for detail oriented information.

3. Un-professional design. Optimization is an ongoing task.  What may have been the norm for website design a few years ago is likely to be obsolete now.  If visitors come to your site and have to think about what they’re seeing, you’ve already lost.

So, proof-read your site, have someone else (preferably not involved in the creation of the site) go through it and make a purchase online, and remember not to give visitors an excuse to leave!

Are you simply looking at whether a marketing effort is converting and bringing in sales? Are you ignoring the step-by-step process visitors are going through from the marketing effort, to final conversion point, and making some assumptions for why one marketing effort might be converting more effectively than another?

Don’t just look at conversion rates, bounce rates, and click through rates this holiday season. Become an investigative reporter and find some meaning behind WHY something is happening, instead of just acknowledging ‘WHAT’ is happening.

Let me help you with the first few steps. Start by looking at your top landing pages and highlight your top 3 landing pages. For each of these top landing pages, find out the traffic sources that are driving traffic to each page. If search is driving traffic, then dig deeper and find out what the top 5 – 10 traffic driving keywords are for these top landing pages.

Now, you need to make some assumptions about the motivations and needs of the visitors who are coming to these top landing pages from these sources. The keywords visitors are typing when searching can tell us a lot about what they are looking for. The banner ad or other marketing efforts might be using specific language that can tell us a lot about what the visitor was hoping to find when she clicked.

Once you have come up with some ideas about the motivations and needs your visitors have when they come from the marketing effort to your landing pages, you need to follow through and determine if you’re effectively speaking to these needs and motivations on these top landing pages when the visitor gets there.

Are you featuring some of the keywords they were searching for, or that you used in the marketing effort to persuade her to click, in headlines on the landing page? Are you effectively providing the visitor various ways to navigate and move forward based on their motivations and needs? Are you providing a look and feel that is consistent with the marketing efforts or what the visitor is searching for?

At FutureNow, we help our clients increase their conversion rates and optimize their web sites by analyzing each site based on how existing visitors are coming to the site and what the visitors are looking to accomplish when they get there. One of the highest impact areas of your site are the top landing pages. You can get the best “bang for your buck” by providing more effective ’scent of information’ from your marketing efforts to your landing pages. You’ll not only experience lower bounce rates, but you’ll also reduce the likelihood that the visitor will drop out at the next click, because you’ll be leading her down the path she wanted, and expected, to follow.

I came across this bit o’ trivia while writing my post on Ogilvy’s preferred ad layout.  I found it written up by Robert Rosenthal at Freaking Marketing, who had done the detective work to find and scan in this Pierce-Arrow ad that ran about 25 years before Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce campaign.

If you consider yourself a student of advertising, you’ll want to read Robert’s entire post to get all the historical details, but any copywriter should find it worthwhile to compare the two headlines and analyze the improvements Ogilvy made to his version.

First, let’s look at the two headlines

So here are the two headlines for comparison:

The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock

vs.

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the ticking of its electric clock.”

Why the Ogilvy Headline was far more powerful

1) Specificity: The Ogilvy ad gives an actual speed.  Not only are specifics  always more believable than generalities, but in this case, the specific speed makes the reader think that an actual test was conducted to determine this fact.  By comparison, the Pierce-Arrows ad reads like hype.

2) Quote marks:  The quotation marks around the Rolls Royce headline indicate to the casual reader, scanning the page, that this was a remark made by someone, perhaps by a tester or engineer.   And indeed, the subdeck and first bullet point confirm that this is the case.  Again, the Pierce-Arrow headline has none of this credibility-building substantiation.

3) Believability of the claim itself: Notice the change from “only sound” to “loudest noise.”  For the reader, conjuring up a mental image of driving in a car in which the electric clock is actually louder than the engine is relatively easy, whereas the mind rejects the idea of a moving car making absolutely no noise except for that of the clock.  Consequently, the Pierce-Arrow ad practically provokes skepticism and dismissal from the reader.

4) Words fat with emotional associations: the difference between sound and noise may seem subtle, but the emotional connotations are miles apart.  Sound could be anything, and all else being equal, the word alone usually has positive associations.  Noise, on the other hand, is a nuisance.  Tell me I won’t hear a sound in a car, and I’ll think you’re exaggerating or  speaking figuratively – would anybody even want to drive in the kind of sensory deprivation chamber that that would require?  But tell me that the loudest noise in the car comes from a ticking lock, and I’ll want to experience the serenity of such an exquisitely engineered car/cabin that is capable of nullifying the unpleasant noises and nuisances of the road.

Why the Ogilvy Ad was far more modern

In some ways, my comparison is simply not fair since the Pierce-Arrow ad hails from a far less cynical age than the Rolls Royce Ad.  One could suppose that back in the days of the Pierce-Arrow ad, “yeah, sure” and “prove it” probably weren’t the automatic responses to any advertising claim that they are today.

But the transition in audience attitudes wasn’t instantaneous.  In fact, you can already see the need for proof and substantiation by the time Ogilvy’s ad rolls around.  That’s why the Rolls Royce ad:

• Includes engineering and expert testimonials or quotes.
• Provides no less than 12 bullet points of factual copy – facts proving the extreme quality, engineering, and attention to detail that goes into making a Rolls Royce
• Openly states the price of the car without dancing around the subject.

How to apply this to the Web

If you are an online copywriter here’s what you need to ask yourself:

1) Are you doing the research that Ogilvy did in order to come up with powerful headlines?  And once you have that angle of approach, are you anywhere near as careful with your wordsmithing?

2) More importantly, do you think the public has grown any less cynical since the time of that Rolls Royce ad?

3) Most importantly, are you providing more substantiated copy, proof, and pricing information than Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce ad does?  Or are you providing less?

So start your headline optimization process with a close look at scent.  These links will help drive home the point:

Bryan Eisenberg gets interviewed on Scent and Landing Page Stickiness:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How lack of scent feels like “bait and switch” to website visitors

Broken scent between e-mails and landing pages accounts for 35% of failed campaigns

Step 2. Angle of Approach: After you understand what it will take to provide continuity of scent, you’ll need to do the research and idea generation to come up with that compelling hook, or angle of approach that will compel readers to stop and scan the article.

Think of it this way, if scent is about matching information, keywords, and look and feel, angle of approach is about matching your copy to visitors’ emotional drives, motivations, hopes, dreams, fears, etc.  Of course, it’s also about introducing a compellingly interesting thought into the reader’s mind.  For some incredibly helpful tools and techniques on Angles of Approach,take a look at the following blog posts:

How to connect with your prospect’s dominant emotion

How to polarize an audience to speak to the prospects you most want

Roy Williams on Choosing Whom to Lose

Why writing to a specific person (or persona) Overcomes the 200 Headlines Myth

The power of Magic Words – and how to find them

Sean D’Souza on the Power of New & Knew

Sean on how specifics beat generalities when it comes to Angles of Approach

Roy Williams on Framing First Mental Images

Compelling the visitor to keep reading

Why your headline may want to refer to an unseen action

I’d recommend you come up with at least a couple of different approaches and test them.  This might cause you to rewrite your first paragraph or two of body copy for each test variant, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 3. Wordsmithing: Once you have the angle of approach and the “Scent” requirements, then it’s time for some of the traditional wordsmithing normally associated with writing headlines.  Can you sharpen the point?  Can you increase the curiosity factor?  Should it be a statement or a question?  Can you swap out words to create different emotional associations or connotations?  Can you test fractions vs. percentages?  What kind of presuppositions can you bury in And so on.

Here’s a monster list of links containing some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Headlines:

First, go sign up for Sean’s newsletter and get his free PDF report on Why do most headlines fail.

Second, read through Jay Abraham’s list of 100 Greatest Headlines Ever written

Third, listen to Gary Bencivenga’s explanation of why you should build credibility into your headlines

Now feast on Brian Clark’s brilliant headline articles:

5 Simple Ways to Open Your Post With a Bang

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

7 More Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

Warning: Use These 5 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

And for sheer tonnage of listed techniques, it’s hard to resist Chris Bloczynski’s post:

99 Headline Techniques Revealed

Or SEO Blackhat’s 54 Headline Templates That Sell

Of course, it goes without saying that with all these choices, you’ll want to test and optimize, and the Grok’s own post on Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines is a great place to start, or you can watch the webinar on testing headlines and calls to action:

What: “Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action

When: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 12:00pm EST

Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

About this session:

Last month kicked off the series with a webinar on testing trust and confidence building elements on landing pages (view archive ). Our August session will continue to explore landing pages focusing on testing calls to action and headlines. register today! Space is limited.

“Always Be Testing” Webinar Series is a monthly webinar that covers specific testing ideas, how to structure tests, and how to use Google Website Optimizer. The best part is that Google has decided to participate in it first-hand, offering the lastest tips and insights straight from Tom Leung, Google’s Business Product Manager.

“Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action Webinar” will be on August 27th, at 12:00pm EST and last 30 minutes.

For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm

We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.

About the Series:
Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test. Along with these ideas each month Tom Leung will bring you useful insider tips and tricks about using Google Website Optimizer to easily test your marketing campaigns and website. Lastly, the two will team up to answer a popular question spotted on the Google Website Optimizer forums or sent in by our readers and listeners.

Jeff Sexton, our resident copywriting pro, makes his Copyblogger debut today, revealing secret techniques for alluring headlines. Here’s a peek…

I bet you didn’t know that the main characters of HBO’s Sex and the City represent one of the better examples of the four personality temperaments, did you?

Just about every personality typing system—from Hippocrates’ humors to Myers-Briggs/Keirsey or DISK—groups personalities into four primary temperaments. Only the labels differ:

• sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic
• spontaneous, methodical, competitive, humanistic
• artisan, guardian, rational, idealist

and so on.

And, yes, each major character on Sex and the City typifies one of the four temperaments…

Want to know how it’s done? Just order up another cosmo and click here.

After publishing more than 2 million words — online and print — we’re convinced that King was right. To become a good writer, one must first be a studious reader. (How else will you know whom to steal, er, borrow from?) So, in that spirit, we’ve compiled a list of some of GrokDotCom’s favorite Web copy resources in hopes that copywriters everywhere will steal the best tips from our colleagues, friends, and staff. Enjoy!

Writing Headlines

1.) “Headlines: Do You Really Need 200 to Land a Good One?” — Attversumption.com

2.) “Are Your Headlines Missing These Precise Psychological Triggers?” — Ezine @rticles

3.) “Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines” — GrokDotCom

Readability

4.) “Nobody Reads Web Pages — But Everybody Engages Websites” — American Small Business

5.) “The Secret of Writing to be Read” — Seth Godin

6.) “People Really Do Read Online — Who Knew?” — Marketing Interactions

7.) “Fight the Bull” — Bullfighter software helps to eliminate jargon from web copy

Customer-focused Copy

8.) Test your customer-focus ratio with Future Now’s ‘We-We’ Monitor.

Copywriting Techniques

9.) “Six Types of Words That You Should Axe in Business Writing” — Bizcovering

10.) “Going for Broca: Show Don’t Tell in Action” — GrokDotCom

11.) “Time vs. Money” — GrokDotCom

12.) “What is Substance?” — GrokDotCom

13.) “Style vs. Substance” — GrokDotCom

14.) “Pain vs. Gain” — GrokDotCom

15.) “Intellect vs. Emotion” — GrokDotCom

16.) “Emotional Perspective Redux” — GrokDotCom

17.) “You Ain’t All That! — A Marketing Copy Autopsy” — GrokDotCom

Trust & Relationship Building

18.) “Transparent Marketing: How to Earn the Trust of a Skeptical Consumer” — Marketing Experiments Journal

19.) “Inspiring Online Credibility” (a three-part series) — GrokDotCom

20.) “Screencast: Building Trust & Credibility Online” — GrokDotCom

Email Marketing

21.) Retail Email blog

22.) MailChimp resources center

23.) GravityMail — keeps your emails and newsletters from getting junked by sp@m blockers

24.) SpamAssassin — Open-source spam filter

Copywriting Blogs & Resources

25.) Copyblogger — Brian Clark

26.) The Copywriter Underground – Tom Chandler

27.) Grammar Girl — Mignon Fogarty

28.) ChrisG — Chris Garrett

29.) ProBlogger — Darren Rowse

30.) The Copywriting Maven — Roberta Rosenberg

31.) WebInkNow — David Meerman Scott

32.) Visual Thesaurus

33.) Word Spy

Transcription Services

34.) SpeakWrite

35.) Casting Words

36.) AccuConference — Record interviews and conference calls, download them as MP3 files, and even have them transcribed for an extra fee. Great for podcast interviews, content planning and tutorials.

Copywriters

37.) Jack Forde

38.) Cynthia Williamson

39.) David Garfinke

40.) Chuck McKay

41.) Bob Bly

42.) Tim Miles

Public Relations

43.) “Podcast: David Meerman Scott on the New Rules of Marketing & PR” (a two-part interview on how to make the most of multi-channel public relations) — GrokDotCom

Blogging

44.) “Blogging for Beginners” — ProBlogger (Whether you’re starting a blog or just thinking about it, this is the place to be. A great collection of must-read how-to posts from Darren Rowse.)

45.) “5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang” — Copyblogger (Finesse tips from Brian Clark.)

46.) “Write a Review — Rediscover Your Blogging Groove” — ProBlogger

47.) “How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic — The Ultimate Guide” — Copyblogger

48.) “The Two Most Important Words in Blogging” — Copyblogger

49.) “Lessons in Corporate Blogging” — Nicholas Carr for BusinessWeek

Persuasive Online Copywriting

50.) Persuasive Online Copywriting: How to Take Your Words to the Bank by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis. In our first book, the Future Now team gives a step-by-step tutorial in writing for the Web. Out-of-print since 2006, you can either pay $100 or more for a used copy on Amazon, or download the ebook for just $19.95.

Part 2 of the Cheat Sheet…

Since there are so many great resources to copy, we’ve decided to start with the essentials first — but, yes, there really are 101 links! In Part 2, we share some our favorite tips, including how to use web copy to engage different customer personas and personality types. To make sure you don’t miss out on future copywriting and marketing optimization tips, subscribe to GrokDotCom (weekly, monthly, or daily newsletter — or read daily via RSS). Thanks for reading!

. .

EDITOR’S NOTE: Join us on June 2, 2008 in Manhattan for FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar. Tickets are only $795 for this popular one-day crash course on the most profitable ways to move the bottom line with nothing more than words. Just words.

So, why not put your best foot forward? Look at your site’s conversion stumbling blocks and find ways to break through them. Test a couple of examples, find the best combination, then do follow-up tests. Doing so helps keep your site relevant to the visitor while showcasing it in a professional manner. Simple persuasion elements like headlines can be easily tested and, oftentimes, these are the things that end up making a big impact overall.

While working with Jigsawhealth.com we decided to do some testing using Google Website Optimizer on a page to move visitors forward, through the product categories. The links on the page were ineffective, so we decided to test a bolded version of the links with the gray “Supplements” bar beneath the links. This resulted in a 7% increase of conversion.

When such a simple thing like bolding can affect a site’s conversion rate, imagine what can be done once you optimize your site’s other persuasion elements…

Brian Clark told an interesting story in his delightful Copyblogger. Two guys put up essentially the same post about Paris Hilton. Guy One got a handful of “diggs,” while Guy Two was at 1072 “diggs” as of Clark’s post time. The difference? Guy Two wrote a snappier, more descriptive, more appealing, funnier headline.

Headlines. Eight out of ten people read them. Only two out of ten people bother reading anything else. Guess where you want to spend time flexing your copywriting and testing muscles?

Add hyperlinks to your persuasive headlines and you’ve got an element that moves more of your visitors deeper into your conversion process. That’s the fast part.

Do you need an IT person to make these kinds of changes? To write the persuasive copy? To do the hyperlinks? I hope not. That’s the easy part.

Give your headlines some attention. Improve them. Link them. Test them. It leads to a better conversion rate. That’s the riches part.

We’ve spent the month of January working on Quick Start Guides that can help you understand which elements have the biggest effect on your conversion rates and how to test them using a simple A/B (or split) test: we now have a guide for retailers and one for lead generation. And we’ve also been working closely with Google to create a 10 Minute guide for their Website Optimizer.

When we created our example test for Google’s nifty (and free) online testing tool, we chose a headline. When it comes to the persuasive copy you create for your website, headlines should rank as one of your highest priorities.

Why are headlines so important? They are among the very first elements of your persuasive process with which visitors actively engage. Readers of your pages use headlines and sub headlines (headers and subheaders) to understand the content on a page and decide if they want to read more of your copy. Headlines aid in the visual task of scanning and skimming, which helps your visitors organize the information you present. Worded appropriately, they encourage your visitors to go deeper into your persuasive copy.

How do you go about creating highly persuasive headlines? What sorts of things about headlines can you test? These are the same questions the Google folks asked us. So, for our documentation, I created a list of ways you can test your headlines. Below is an excerpt of the top ten, with examples.

1. Test fractions or percentages to prove your claim

Nine out of ten children in Sub-Saharan Africa have HIV

90% of the children in Sub-Saharan Africa have HIV

9/10 of the children in Sub-Saharan Africa have HIV

2. Test asking questions in the headline (make sure you directly answer the question after the headline)

Make a difference in the life of a child

Do you want to make a difference in the life of a child?

Can you make a difference in the life of a child?

Will you make a difference in the life of a child?

3. Test using emotional-laden words

Bring comfort and solace to the life of a poverty-stricken child

4. Test different types of formatting: bolding, fonts, colors, capitalizations, sizes

Make a Difference in the Life of a Child

Make a difference in the life of a child

Make a difference in the life of a child

MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIFE OF A CHILD

MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIFE OF A CHILD

5. Test the number of words used in the headline

Make a difference in the life of a child

Make a difference in a child’s life

6. Test using exclamation points

Make a difference in the life of a child

Make a difference in the life of a child!

7. Test using text to convey the benefits versus the features of your products or services

Your donations help us make a difference

Your donations bring medicine to the needy and support research

Your donations go directly to the front lines in the global war against AIDS

8. Test self-focused (we/I) versus customer-focused text (you)

We help make a difference in the life of a child

You can help make a difference in the life of a child

9. Test using quotations in the headline (consider the length of the headline)

President Bush has committed to make a difference

President Bush has committed “to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations”

10. Test the reading level of the headline

Few receive pediatric antiretroviral treatment (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = 12)

Few get appropriate medical help (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = 9.9)

Few get the medicine they need (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = 2.4)

Writing good headlines is an art. It takes time, practice, patience. It also takes knowing what works best for your audience (which is not always what you think will work best for them). When you test your headlines, you’ll be able to add knowledge of your audience to your copywriting equation. And that’s when your headlines will be at their persuasive best!

Good luck and let me know how your testing goes.