Improving Conversion
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
Tips From a Client Who Doubled His Conversion Rate
When I wrote about how Mint.com quickly builds trust with visitors, I forgot to mention that — although coworkers had recommended Mint’s financial planning service — a former FutureNow client had written in to say he was impressed by how Mint’s website appeals to the four buying modes.
Ah, yes, the four buying modes; Spontaneous, Competitive, Methodical and Humanistic.
Since I was stuck in Competitive (fast + logical) buying mode, I ended up blogging about how Mint’s site addressed my trust concerns by using trigger words — “does not store your account numbers”; “bank-level data security”; “anonymous” — that appealed to me. Meanwhile, our former client, Patrick from JigsawHealth.com (see small picture above), was looking at the big picture.
Patrick even did a screencast to show how understanding the four buying modes is essential to creating a website that converts by speaking to many types of visitors at the same time.
If you’re interested, you can read the Inc. Magazine case study on how Patrick worked with FutureNow to double his landing page conversion rate from 10% to 20% making just a few copy and design adjustments in order to speak to these different buying modes.
There’s no doubt that Patrick’s a smart guy, but this is hardly the first time one of our clients has outwitted me with our own methodology. To be perfectly honest, it happens every day. Brian Bond, our VP of Marketing and Product, the guy who markets the marketers, is a former client.
I’d like to think the reason our clients consistently get strong results is because everyone who works here is a genius, but that’s not true. Could it be that only smart clients hire us? (As much as I’d like to say that and mean it, past experience suggests otherwise.) No, it’s much simpler than that. The reason FutureNow’s clients get results is because, once you optimize your website from the visitor’s perspective, you’ll never look at websites — any website — the same way.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Using Video to Build Better Customer Relationships
Advertising Age recently did a CMO roundtable video. It’s a great idea: Get a bunch of top Chief Marketing Officers with a moderator and ask them to discuss their biggest challenges.
I guarantee you a lot of CMO’s (and a whole lot of other people) tuned in to watch this frank round table discussion.
What industry is your website targeting? Are you a sales training company targeting sales managers? Why not get together a group of 3-4 sales managers and ask them to talk about their biggest challenges with employee training?
Are you a website development company targeting small business owners? Why not gather a group of small business owners and record a session where they talk about their experiences — good and bad — with trying to put up a website that increases business?
These would have to be candid, honest discussions about real issues people are facing. There’s no sales pitch for your company allowed in these videos. It’s simply your way to facilitate an honest discussion about the issues and challenges within your industry.
Consider of the power video. When a prospective customers comes to your site to watch this video, they gain knowledge and insight from watching peers discuss issues that are important to them.
THEN you can create copy and links, so that after they watch the video, you can show how your service addresses their issues, solves their problems, and overcomes their challenges.
It’s called building rapport. You’re letting your prospective customers know: “We understand you. We care about the same issues you do. We’re in touch with people like you, and if we’re listening to their concerns, needs, and desires, we’ll listen to yours, too.”
It’s about showing, not telling. Instead of saying, “We’re an industry leader, well versed in the problems that sales managers face every day,” SHOW them. It will be way more effective.
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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys; and co-instructor of FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, June 2nd in Manhattan.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Stop Paying for Bad Keywords in Three Steps
Web analytics reports can be deceiving. They’re great at showing you WHAT visitors did on your website, but they can’t tell you WHY they didn’t do what you hoped they would.
But with the right process and frame of mind, it is possible to use web analytics to get insight into “why” your traffic isn’t converting — especially if you do pay per click advertising.
Here are some ideas for attracting more targeted traffic in order to get higher conversion rates and a much better return on pay-per-click (PPC) spend.
One
• Look at your top traffic-driving keywords (PPC and organic).
Are they highly relevant to the industry you’re in and the products you sell? Do these keywords clearly indicate that the searcher has a motivation to find your solution to their problem? Some keywords may have double meanings and could suggest that the visitor had a completely different search intent than expected. Someone searching “training videos” might actually be looking for “workout training videos,” “management training videos,” or a variety of other things. If the traffic from these fuzzy keywords is converting poorly, don’t be surprised. Stop buying and doing search engine optimization (SEO) for ambiguous keywords. The ultimate goal should be to figure out which key phrases specifically relate to your industry, product or service, and do some PPC and/or SEO to get listed for more relevant keywords.
Two
• Don’t play the generic keyword game.
It both difficult and expensive to get traffic from the most generic keywords in one’s industry. Such keywords are much more competitive in the search engines. You pay more for text ads and it takes a lot of SEO effort in order to get listed organically for these keywords. A lot of these single-word keywords are really only attracting early-stage visitors who are not necessarily ready to buy, anyway! If I’m searching for “purses,” I probably haven’t yet decided on a brand or a style of purse and it could take me a lot longer to convert. When I search for “white Chanel purse,” though, you can be fairly certain I’m ready to buy. Focusing on phrases that are tailored to your product or service is what people really mean when they talk about “long tail keywords” [define] — and often it’s the difference between having visitors who are ready to learn and ones who are ready to buy.
Three
• Speak the customer’s language, not your own.
Sometimes, marketers get so focused on their own sales process that they convince themselves that would-be customers actually care about the words they use to describe their own products and services. When someone is searching for a solution to their problem, they enter search terms that sometimes don’t match up with what the company thinks people should be searching for.
Are you buying traffic for keywords that mean something to you but mean precious little to your customers? We’ve all done it before. Even brilliant marketers can assume that customers will think and behave as they do. This is what we like to call “Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome.” Although contagious, it is curable, but your web analytics reports alone can’t diagnose you.
Let us know if you’d like to optimize paid search from the customer’s perspective.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
Why Virgin’s Banner Ads Work, Even on Facebook!
Traditional banner ads can be frustrating. They’re easy to ignore. And all too often, the landing page on the other side of the click doesn’t fulfill the promise of the ad.
So why not try something new, like placing an ad on Facebook, where captive users are forced to see it right there in their news feeds?
That’s Virgin America’s strategy. But is it anything new?
Despite the hype, social media ads are rarely different than traditional banner or pay-per-click ads. The landscape has changed slightly, but the need for fundamental persuasion and conversion tactics remains. As always, better planning makes all the difference. Let’s take a look…
A Smooth Takeoff
Here’s Virgin’s latest “sponsored news feed item” — i.e., fancy contextual banner ad that targets only certain demographics:
As you can see, the language is simple and engaging. A time limit (March 28) is set, thus creating a sense of urgency without drilling it into the customer’s head.
Nobody likes to be yelled at, especially not on an airplane. So why yell at them to “BUY NOW”? Virgin knows better, and this ad’s subtlety makes it that much more click-worthy.
A Soft Landing (Page)
The landing page continues the scent trail that started with the banner ad. Notice how the exact wording carries over.
See that? Change may be “in the air,” but Virgin was smart to stick with their original verbiage.
What’s even more interesting is that this landing page is actually the VirginAmerica.com homepage. It was the homepage last week, when the March 28 promotion was happening, anyway. This week, there’s a new promotion, and a new homepage message to match.
Consistency across channels is what ensures the success of Virgin’s ad buys. By adjusting the homepage to match their current campaigns, they’re capitalizing on the persuasive momentum of their various banner ad campaigns. (This screen shot proves that Virgin’s Facebook ads are no different than any of their other banners. Would they change the company’s homepage just to match a persuasion scenario that starts at Facebook? Nope.)
Persuade → Qualify → Convert
Virgin America continues the momentum from click-to-click by keeping it simple and keeping visitors engaged on the active window. By showing all March 28-related promotions on a single page, they’re reduce friction in the buying process.
Virgin uses this page to reinforce the visitor’s original interest while introducing a few more offers, thereby qualifying our needs. We click through, and it’s off to the booking engine.
Like most e-commerce shopping carts, it seems flight-booking engines were made to confuse us. Not Virgin’s. Theirs is intuitive and straightforward. As you can see, several steps are combined into one. It’s the website usability equivalent of the magical airplane stall door lock (which doubles as a light switch, and triples as a switch for the fan).
The only downside to having a site that works this well is that now Virgin needs to make sure people enjoy the flight as much as they enjoyed booking it. But if the real experience is anything like the one online, it looks like they’ve got you covered.
CMO’s should take notice.
While there’s no such thing as a perfect website, you should still try to convert like a Virgin.
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Written by:Peter Lee
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
Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing
Yes, it’s that time again!
Recessions are the economy’s little reminder that your marketing needs to be more efficient. Lots of our friends and clients are being asked to produce more sales with less resources. (And if you’re reading this post, that might sound familiar to you.)
Traditionally, in the offline world during recessions, marketers had their advertising budgets cut, then pressure was placed on sales teams to close more sales. But in the online world, marketers are expected to deliver both traffic from advertising and sales from the customer experience.
The math is simple. More sales with the same or less advertising means higher conversion rates. If your conversion rate is higher, not only will you be more profitable but you should also gain market share from competitors.
You may not always be able to control the cost of your advertising — except for when you cut it — but you can control your conversion rate.
In the interactive marketing world, many companies seem confused about what to do in a recession. Companies need to improve their online conversion rates. It seems obvious to most of us, but not everyone.
We want to ask you, our readers, for feedback. Have conversion rate improvements become a higher priority for your organization? If not, is it because you aren’t feeling the effects of the recession yet, or does your organization simply not believe it can control conversion? Or is it something else?
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Read the follow-up post, “3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing“
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
How Website Images Affect Visitor Persuasion
Have you ever read a blog post that had so many interesting and profound ideas, you actually re-read it several times? That’s what happened to me when I read this fascinating article by Joseph Carrabis at iMedia Connections.
I originally read the article because it talks about gender and website design. But there’s much more to it than the title (”Website Marketing Across Genders”) suggests. For instance, the phenomenon he calls “Towards” and “AwayFrom” advertising.
I’ll dig into that in another post, but in the meantime, take a look at his description of using a visual on a page to draw visitors toward a specific action:
Let me give you an example of an automotive retailer site that also works in print. The goal is to have the visitor purchase a new vehicle. Place an image in the upper part of the screen or print piece. The left of the image is the owned vehicle, the right of the image is the desired or target vehicle. Just right of center is the couple or an individual facing the desired vehicle and walking towards it.
The web’s media capabilities allow the message to get across very well because the couple or individual can be seen actually moving towards the target vehicle. In a static image that implies walking have the right hand swinging towards the target vehicle, the left hand swinging towards the owned vehicle.
So simple. So powerful.
Speaking of simple and powerful, if you haven’t read Bryan Eisenberg’s award-winning article on images and eyetracking, you should. It definitely clarifies Joseph’s point.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
How Guinness Might Have Converted One Million
They say it’s better to be born lucky than rich. Guinness stout definitely has the rich part down (pun intended), but it seems they were a bit short on viral marketing luck this St. Patrick’s Day.
Guinness made a valiant attempt to make St. Patty’s a national U.S. holiday with their Petition 3-17 campaign. Their argument: Since there are nine times more Irish-Americans than there are people in all of Ireland, and since people of all ethnicities already miss work on March 17th in celebration of all things Irish, all citizens should be allowed to commemorate the day from the comfort of their favorite watering hole. With “a pint of Guinness stout or two,” of course.
To present it to Congress, Guinness needed 1 million signatures by the 16th. On March 17th, they had about 300,000 — a few parades-worth of revelers off their goal.
No worries. 300k signatures of loyal brand advocates is a huge achievement. And there’s always next year, right?
So, let’s take a look at how Guinness.com was feeding the campaign’s micro-site, Proposition317.com, and see what they might do to convert a million in 2009.
Guinness Means Business!
It’s evident that Guinness means business, as a Proposition 3-17 banner owns the Guinness.com homepage:
The banner is clean, simple, and straight to the point. Unfortunately, this falls slightly flat on this landing page:
Once here, visitors aren’t efficiently persuaded to follow through from the driving point (in this case, the homepage). The homepage was exciting and bold, but it didn’t say much about the campaign, which makes this landing page especially key. Since Guinness’s site exists to support its beloved brand, we can assume that most people who visit the site are already fans of the product.
They just need to keep visitors on track to sign the petition.
Testing is Good for You
If Guinness were a client, here are a few things we’d have them test:
• Tone — Rather than leading off with a “raise your pints!” attitude (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and party pictures, they may have benefited from speaking to personality temperaments other than Spontaneous (i.e., Humanistic, Methodical, and Competitive). Other parts of the site do speak to Humanistic visitors by explaining why it’s important to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday, but that sentiment isn’t clear on the landing page. Perhaps they could borrow a line or two from the other pages to make the why-you-should-sign argument stronger. (Is your site speaking to each temperament?)
• Better placement of content — Eyetracking studies also show that staring faces distract visitors. People immediately look to the center, then the flashing signature moves the eye to the right, then down to the quotes and pictures of other supporters. Meanwhile, the “Sign the petition” Call to Action is all the way on the opposite side of the page.
• Make the Call to Action eye-catching — The Call to Action needs to persuade and entice people to sign-up, but theirs is encased in a dark gray button and overpowered by the total signatures. Saying something less generic, like “Make it official,” might yield better results.
• Try counting down instead — This last one’s more of a hunch, so I’m curious to know whether any of you might find it more persuasive to sign the petition if they had it counting down from 1,000,000 (a pretty daunting number) rather than counting up. Example: “Only 650,048 signatures needed to make St. Patrick’s Day official. Don’t just sit there, tell your friends!”
Could Guinness have met their goal? I guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the meantime.
Proposition 3-17 may have missed the mark, but it wasn’t a failure. Anyone else fancy a pint?
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[Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with the so-called “luck of the Irish” knows that success requires hard work and dedication. Such is website optimization. You should test your luck.]
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Written by:Peter Lee
5 Ways to Optimize Your Website Credibility
In response to our “Ask the Experts” post, Nathan wanted to know how to test and optimize for Trust and Credibility online. It’s a great question and a huge issue, so forgive me if I link off to a lot of resources before getting down to practical “how to” information.
First of all, take a look at Dave Young’s screencast on “Building Trust and Credibility Online.” Dave does a fantastic job of breaking down specific techniques he used to build a website capable of inspiring confidence. Once you’ve taken a look at that, I humbly suggest you look at my series on Inspiring Online Credibility.
After reviewing those articles, I would recommend these five things to virtually everyone:
• Test your contact info. If you’re not already prominently displaying your contact number, test making your phone number larger and showing it clearly on the top-right corner or right-hand column.
• Test different images. Your images should actively help to evoke credibility. Let visitors “see for themselves.” (Dave’s screencast goes into specific ways in which a roofing company uses videos to inspire confidence.) Generally, stock images won’t help you in this regard.
• Test your Point of Action assurances. Do you have privacy policies, hacker safe icons, guarantees, etc? Are you placing these assurances next to the appropriate calls to action? (Bryan offers some ideas in this screencast.)
• Test your ‘About Us’ content. Do you recognize the power of the About Us page?Are you letting visitors see into your values, motivations, and history and track record? Are you making visitors aware that there are likable, committed, stand-up people behind your organization?
• Substantiate your claims. Visitors are rightly skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. If you make a claim (”best value,” “most reliable,” etc.), prove it. Proving what you say will build credibility. Determine your most important claims, then support it by avoiding the 7 deadly claims.
I hope this helps, Nathan. Best of luck to you. Let us know how it goes!
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[Editor’s Note: Got a question for FutureNow? All you have to do is “Ask the Experts“.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
