I also want to note that this post was inspired by a recent post by Mark Bronlow over at Email Marketing Reports.  In particular, his infographic was extremely interesting, and I thought it needed to be tweaked and applied to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).  If you’re specifically an email marketer, I’m sure you’ll enjoy his post…but read mine first!

Begin by clicking to enlarge my infographic, then I’ll explain what I’m trying to illustrate about why CRO is so crucial and why the time to begin a formal effort to increase your conversion rate(s) was yesterday.

The Y-Axis represents the persuasiveness of your online presence: website, online marketing efforts, conversion funnel, etc.

The X-Axis represents time.

The blue trend line represents the steadily increasing level of persuasiveness needed to stay competitive in the online marketing and selling world.  This means how well your whole online system works to map your selling process to your prospects’ buying processes.  It includes visual design, copy writing, usability, how you invest marketing budget, the data you use to make decisions…everything!

Why does the blue line keep rising steadily? Because our prospects are getting savvier, more experienced, and more demanding when they go online to research, make decisions, and ultimately buy something.  Plus, the number of businesses with an online presence is growing, so it gets harder and harder to grab your prospects’ attention in the first place.  Ever changing technology and standards (eg. increasing availability of ways to connect and interact; Google’s search algorithm) also up the ante.  This trend line will always be on a pretty steady climb because the Web has essentially made it a “buyer’s market,” not a seller’s.

The purple trend line represents what the average site owner or online marketing team is doing today.  Most web organizations continue to invest in their website, but the efforts aren’t always focused in the right place.  For example, maybe you “re-skin” your site every two years to give it a fresh look.  Or, maybe you upgraded your shopping cart last year to a more expensive version.  Or maybe you continue to fight for more marketing budget so you can spend more on paid search advertising.

Your online system is improving due to your efforts, but is it improving fast enough?  I’m arguing that for most of you (those who are still profitable) it is enough…for now.  I also argue that a lack of a formal CRO effort causes the purple trend line to not be steep enough.  Without a plan and process to keep up (ie. continuously improve), you’ll slowly fall behind the technology and increasing expectations of your audience.

The dotted line represents the point at which what you’re doing to improve is no longer good enough to persuade your prospects to buy.  That is obviously a bad thing.  If you aren’t staying ahead of your prospects in terms of persuasiveness, sooner or later, you will cross that dotted line and your prospects will go somewhere else.  To your competitors, in most cases.

Mark Bronlow supposes, as do I, that most marketers are currently to the left of the dotted line.  But we both agree that the dotted line is inevitable if you don’t ramp up your efforts at continuous improvement.  I believe CRO is the absolute best way to make sure your purple line NEVER crosses below your prospects’ blue line, and that’s why I’m in this business

What do you think of these theories?  Is CRO the only way to “stay ahead of the curve”?  How close to the dotted line do you think your business is today?  If you’re not sure, drop us a line and we’d be happy to give you an outside opinion.

Despite an obvious bias, I still think I can offer some objective talking points, questions to ask, and things to think about if you’re going to pursue hiring help to optimize your conversion rate.  But before we go there…

Full Disclosure: FutureNow, Inc., the publishers of this blog, are in the business of optimizing conversion rates.  There, I said it.  And now you know

When you start thinking about optimizing your website’s conversion rate, the first thing you should think about is: Can I do it myself? Do I want to do it myself?  This is a pretty rare DIY attitude where someone has the time and inclination to take on all the extra work CRO entails, as well as having to learn quite a broad new skillset (psychology, design, testing methodology, etc.).

Next, you should think about whether this type of CRO effort should be handled in-house or with outside help.  So ask yourself if you have the right skill sets in your company already.  If so, do they have the bandwidth to add “optimization” to their job responsibilities?  Do they want to work on optimization?  If you decide to bring optimization into a larger, corporate culture, where in the organization will it live?  Who will be stakeholders?

If you decide to handle things in-house, there are more and more resources out there to improve a human resource’s optimization skillset: training courses, seminars, books, blogs (like the one you’re reading), etc.  Similar to how SEO started as a mostly “outside consultant” skill set, but has been moving more and more “in-house” over the past 5 years, I think CRO will follow a similar path.  It’s still pretty early to have this specialized skillset in-house, but as more people become practitioners, more and more of them will go in-house at the larger companies that can offer big paychecks and stability.

Assuming you decide to hire outside help, here’s a list of 20 questions to ask about, or directly to, the companies you evaluate.  Note that the actual answers may not be as important to how the questions are handled:

1. How fast can we be up and running, making optimizations?

2. What are your competitive advantages?

3. How long have you been in the Conversion Rate Optimization business?  Do you also work in other areas?

4. What are your qualifications, training, and experience?

5. How can you add value to my existing team?

6. How customer-centric is your service?  Do you really get to know my target prospects?  How?

7. How do I know which offering is best for my business goals?

8. What’s it like working with you?  Do you do 1-time major projects, or smaller incremental optimizations?

9. Who are some of your other clients?

10. Who will I be working with on a regular basis?

11. Do your clients have business models comparable to mine?

12. How do you work with other service providers like design agencies, SEOs, ad agencies, etc.?

13. What are your core business values?

14. How does technology play into your approach?  Are you a “platform” I need to be on?

15. Can I see a sample contract?

16. What are your cancellation policies?

17. What process or methodology do you use?  Is it documented?

18. What would the process look like after I signed with you?

19. How data-driven is your approach?  What about so-called “best practices”?

20. Why should I go with you over your competitors, i.e. what’s your Unique Value Proposition?

Like this list? We’d love it if you’d share it with anyone who’d find it relevant!

• Setting the wrong daily budget, only to have it spent within a few short hours
• Having all your clicks come from the “content network“ with few or no conversions
• Suspected click fraud
• Lower than expected conversion rates
• Struggling to bid the correct amounts for the various “match types”
• Lots of competitors bidding for the same ad space
• Suspecting that your PPC ads are bringing in unqualified (disqualified) traffic
• Building out your keyword list through keyword research, then not having time to optimize it
• And the list could go on!

Please don’t throw up your hands and pause your campaigns–there’s hope!  Believe it or not, the PPC game can be optimized and won.  You can get good ROI and good Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with the right skills and tools.

Since giving advice on all the above challenges would be better suited to a book or an eBook, not a blog post, I’ll instead focus on an aspect of the PPC optimization game I don’t think gets enough attention: the various skill sets needed to optimize PPC campaigns and spending.  The skills needed to correct ALL of the above list of problems fall into two distinct buckets:  I’ll call one “Campaign Optimization” and the other “Conversion Rate Optimization.” They are two very important sides of the same coin, but it’s arguable that no agency/consultant soliciting you today can be successful at both, because the skill sets are so different and there is so much work that often needs to be done on both sides.

PPC Campaign Optimization

A lot of the “low hanging fruit” in PPC cost control can be quickly accomplished via Campaign Optimization.  When I talk about this particular skill set, I’m basically talking about the practitioners who do keyword research, bidding, account administration, budgeting, geo-targeting, ad types, reporting, match types, and more.  All the things that live in the administration side of AdWords or Yahoo’s or Bing’s advertising systems.

While online marketers used to be able to handle PPC in their “spare time,” it’s gotten so much more robust (and complicated) in recent years.  I would never, as an online marketer, try to run PPC campaigns while also juggling the management of a website, other marketing channels, SEO, etc.  Most online marketers outsource this skill set to a PPC agency or consultant, and I agree with the practice.  PPC administration is very specialized now, and it’s best left to the professionals. The downside, though, is that online marketers have to know enough about PPC campaign administration to keep their vendors honest.  For example, is your PPC agency actively doing match type keyword traps?  Or, does that sound like a foreign language?

While Campaign Optimization is a good way to get some quick improvements and cost savings, it takes dedicated effort, especially the constant testing, tweaking, and keyword list building that a successful PPC program needs.  Also, every campaign optimization done will only be successful if the traffic you pay for converts, so let’s talk about the other half of the story…

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

While it’s the job of your campaign optimizer to bring in the most qualified traffic for the lowest price, your website has to convert in order to realize the return on your ad spend.  The better you convert, the more money you have to bid on keywords, the more qualified traffic you can get, the more traffic you’ll convert, the more marketing budget you’ll have, etc.  It’s a glorious marketing cycle when it’s working!

The Conversion Rate Optimization skill set should be able to segment and analyze your PPC traffic and conversion rate, recommend effective landing page tests, suggest better ad copy, and help you optimize your conversion funnel specifically for PPC traffic.  An understanding of the paid search segment, and the user intent of different keyword queries, is essential.  Another key skill is understanding your Unique Value Proposition, and how that UVP can span from PPC ads, to landing pages, to conversion.  Finally, a CRO practitioner should have a firm grasp on persuasive copywriting, and how to apply it to both PPC ads and websites.

Is There Overlap Between the Skill Sets?

You may be asking this question soon after you start thinking about separating the skill sets into two distinct categories: Is there overlap?  Should there be?  We believe there can and should be a bit of overlap in the areas of analytics, ad copy, and keywords.  And there would need to be cooperation for executing landing page tests that are valid.

Let’s say you’ve hired a PPC agency to handle that aspect of your online marketing.  And, you’ve also engaged a Conversion Rate Optimization firm [hint: FutureNow ] to optimize your online marketing for conversion rate.  I would expect to work with your PPC agency if I need data, if I want to test different ad copy, if I want to test landing pages, and if I feel there are keywords that are ineffective or under-exploited. 

A good working relationship between the two specialties could add up to lower advertising costs via increased conversion rates.  And both of those “wins” will compound over time just like a good interest rate on a savings account.

Let me use an example. There is a climbing gym in Salt Lake City called “Momentum.”  [Note: This company is not a FutureNow client].  Let’s pretend that we know their traffic source mix:

• 15% of their traffic is Direct
• 68% of their traffic is Search
  • 38% of Search is Paid Search
  • 30% of Search is Non-Paid Search
• 17% of their traffic is Email

At this point, we should break down each of these traffic sources into segments based on different channels or campaigns.  Let’s come up with a scenario for their Paid Search traffic (CPC).  Let’s say that we’re able to break down their campaigns into three different buckets:

1) Some of the paid terms sending traffic to their site are brand specific; for example “Momentum” and “Momentum climbing gym.”
2) Some CPC terms are non-branded, but are specific to the qualities that Momentum has to offer, or location; e.g. “Salt Lake City climbing gym.”
3) Finally, some of the CPC terms are very general; e.g. “climbing gym.”

From this list, we can tell what group is more likely in the “late stage” of their buying process.  By visitors searching for brand-specific terms, they are showing us that they have a specific interest in the company, their products, and their services, and therefore this traffic should be the easiest to convert.  This is where we should first focus our attention when trying to improve our web site’s performance.  Where is the first place we should look to increase results for the late stage traffic?  The shopping cart and checkout, of course!  Start optimizing your shopping cart today by tackling these 5 questions visitors have while they are in your shopping cart.  Or, use these 10 tips to improve your shopping cart performance for your late stage visitors.

The analysis you do before starting your conversion rate optimization efforts needs to be nearly equal parts Art and Science.  Don’t rely on industry benchmarks or the metrics from other case studies; your analytics data should drive the planning, prioritization, and implementation of changes to your site.

It’s an interesting predicament that he, and like-minded entrepreneurs, are in: Can a unique, persuasive website be created if you don’t know anything about creating a website, and don’t have the resources to hire someone to do it for you?

YES! (I’m an optimist)…  BUT (I’m also a realist), you have to be willing to “do your due diligence.”

Because I know that many of our Grok followers are like my friend, and are of the DIY school of thought, I thought I’d create a list of where to begin if you’re inspired, “broke” (i.e. don’t want to shell out $100,000+), and want to create a website.

1. Figure out what you want to sell and if there’s a market for it. There are some markets that are over saturated; within which a mom-and-pop site would have difficulty competing.  Examples of this are SEO, iPods, and shoes. You generally have a better chance if your “product” is something with quality you can control, like a service. When you’re competing in an industry where everyone is selling the exact same thing, your only means of differentiating yourself from your competitors is price, delivery time, and freebies (like shipping).  This makes your chances of success much slimmer.  (I warned you that I’m a realist).

2. Check out the competition. Do some keyword research. Figure out who else is out there in the area that you want to succeed in. This day and age, it’s extremely rare that you’ll create website for a business that isn’t already out there. If you’ve already determined that there’s a market (see #1), make sure that you can offer something better than your competition. Go to their website(s) and pick out what you don’t like from a visitor/customer perspective and how you’d do it better, then make note (WRITE IT DOWN OR YOU’LL FORGET) to do it.

3. Create a UVP. If you’re a Grok follower, you’ve heard us (possibly for years) go on and on about creating a UVP (unique value proposition) but I promise that if you spend the time on the front end creating a strong UVP, you’ll reap the rewards in the long run. Think about why you want to start this business. What need is there in the industry? What do you want to do better (and with more passion) than anyone else out there? How will you accomplish this goal?

Ok, that’s enough to get you started. Stay tuned for part two! (Note: None of these steps can be completed in a few hours, let alone a few days, for even the most diligent of workers. Remember, you signed up for the long haul, and I’m not promising that you won’t have to work hard, but you’ll be working smart.)

As we all evolve our optimization approaches, one of the things to watch out for, especially for those who are just getting started using optimization tools and tactics, is what I refer to as “optimizing first and asking questions later.”

This means that you start investing in optimization (resources, new content, testing, etc.) without first asking the crucial “who,” “what,” and “why” questions related to your efforts. If you don’t know who your prospects are, how can you be thinking about optimization?  If you don’t know what you want them to do and have some informed ideas about what might be stopping them from being persuaded to do it, how can you design a proper test?  If you don’t know why their motivation is breaking down in the funnel, how can you develop more persuasive content?

I’ve seen some companies investing heavily in trying to optimize an aspect of their site, but when I ask, “What do you think is discouraging your prospects from converting?”, they don’t have a solid answer.  I guess that in some sense it’s my job to have that answer, or at least know the steps to take to arrive at one, but still I’d like everyone to at least have a reasonable and informed guess about what’s sub-optimal in their online conversion experiences.

The risks of this approach are:

• Frustration – if you’re investing in optimization, and not moving the needle, it’s indeed frustrating
• Losing your optimization budget – if you fought for an official optimization budget, and don’t get results, guess where that budget is headed: elsewhere.
• Wasted time – if you take a ‘random luck’ approach to optimization, it will take you far longer to get the results you’re after
• Wasted money – if you’re investing human resources in developing test variations, or making content changes at random, you may never get your ROI.  Also, every day that goes by where you’re optimizing the wrong way has an opportunity cost.  As soon as you get it right, you start making more money.  So delaying the getting it right costs you money!

Let’s take a specific example: You target the first page of your checkout process for optimization because it has, say, a 68% abandon rate.  Any decrease in that abandon rate would likely mean real dollars, so it’s a good place to start.  So, you go out and look at a bunch of “big name” shopping carts, take notes, and start changing your page to look and behave like theirs.  Or, you develop some test variations where elements on the page are different colors, different labels, different placement, etc.

Taking this type of approach, you may luck out and experience some optimization-like results, but you’ll never know why!  And, where do you go from there?  Any further experimentation could undo your results. That is optimizing first and asking questions later; it’s dangerous stuff, folks.

How to ask questions first, and optimize later:

• Have a brainstorm with team members to capture possible reasons why your abandon rate is 68% on that page
• Doing competitive analysis is a possibility to get ideas (but not a good idea to just start copying other online stores)
• Ask your prospects via survey.  Comb your customer service transcripts for clues.
• Develop marketing personas (free PDF), and use them to help you empathize with the questions or concerns your prospects might have
• Look at the “scent of information” that prospects followed to get to the first page of your checkout.  Have you set expectations somewhere along the way, then forgotten to fulfill them or do some reassuring?
• If you’re not comfortable with these efforts, outsource your online optimization to experts.

Once you’ve completed these types of exercises, and asked the sometimes difficult questions, then it makes sense to start investing in formal Optimization efforts.  Like studying before an exam, we know that even some basic pre-work will amplify the results you’ll see

[Editor's note: the phrase 'optimize first and ask questions later' is loosely based on a quote attributed to Hermann Göring ("Shoot first and ask questions later...").  Seeing as Mr. Göring was a bad man, we want to convey that we aren't trying to cast any positive light on his deeds.]

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.

If you’re going to beat your competition and get the business this holiday season,  you’ll need to be creative with your promotions and make sure that they appeal to your potential customers. It’s obvious if you try to cut corners, this turns your visitors off. Go out on a limb, take a look at the specials your competitors are offering, and then offer your visitors something even more appealing.

DSW sends me emails and direct mail with coupon codes for exclusive, limited time offers. They have sent me “holiday versions” of these marketing communication pieces continuously over the last couple of weeks. Their site offers more limited time offers for free shipping and $20 off an online purchase of $99 or more. DSW successfully persuades first time visitors to take advantage of great offers and they also do a wonderful job at reaching out to existing customers with exclusive offers we simply can’t resist!

Apply some of these tactics to your own marketing communications mix. Feature free shipping and exclusive, limited time offer coupon codes on your site. Send emails and/or direct mail pieces to your existing customer base, and offer them a great deal. Where you don’t have room to offer your customers a lower price than your competitors, be creative with how you can differentiate yourself using “specials.” Free shipping on orders that meet a minimum dollar amount work great. You could also offer a $25 gift certificate for every $100 dollars spent. If you’re really strapped and can only offer deals where it’s going to have the biggest impact, you could offer the great deals to those who have demonstrated intent to buy but are unlikely to buy unless you offer them a deal.

What other types of promotions would appeal to potential customers when doing their holiday shopping? If you come across any sites that offer different promotions than the ones I’ve listed here, please share them.

Staying in a mediocre hotel in Albany, NY (with mediocre WiFi) got me thinking about another optimization tactic that we forgot to post about this year: SITE PERFORMANCE.

[Note: I was curious about how the big industry players were doing in terms of performance, so I started hitting them from my lousy WiFi connection.  The un-scientific results are sprinkled throughout this post, and they aren't all that surprising ]

So, if the goal is to for your site to be flooded with qualified, motivated buyers all through the Holiday Season, has your site been optimized for that flood of traffic? Performance testing is a good start, but that can only tell you how fast code loads, http response times, etc.

The more important thing is what the customer experience is like when your B2C site is under heavy traffic loads:

• What order do elements load in?  Is the user stuck staring at your logo while they wait for product images or navigation?
• Are your calls to action bulletproof?  If the button images are slow to load, do you have text behind them that loads first and is still prominent and high-contrast?
• Does your global navigation ALWAYS load quickly?  How about search?
• Have you been “naughty” or “nice” in regards to having good alt test behind images and links?
• Do javascript menus have alternate HTML versions?
• Was your site’s code architected to provide the best user experience under the worst server load conditions?

The software development profession uses the phrase “degrade gracefully” to describe a site or application that still works with javascript turned off, images turned off, on dial-up connections, on Internet Explorer 4, etc.

I like to think the same concept should be applied to sites that are under heavy traffic stress. If every GrokDotCom.com reader decided to hit your site within the same 10-minute period, would your site ‘degrade gracefully,’ or would it be completely un-usable?  Go try shopping on your site on a dial-up connection.  Of course, it’s going to be frustrating, but do the important things load first?  Can you at least navigate/browse/search while you’re waiting for pages to fully load?

Site performance optimization is definitely not FutureNow’s area of expertise, but these screenshots are a good reminder that all the fancy conversion rate optimization in the world won’t help if your site takes too long to load, or won’t load at all (ahem…Bing.com shopping site!).  Remember that “Functional” is the base of the Hierarchy of Optimization!

Ultimately, seeing our clients get positive results is what gets me out of bed in the morning.  Once in a while, I get to see a conversion rate trend line that takes a sudden turn for the better, and heads up towards the clouds.  This type of “home run” conversion increase usually happens when a major conversion obstacle has been removed, or a test has been run with very profitable results.  It seems like a lot of folks, clients and consultants alike, are fixated on chasing this type of increase.  I can’t really blame them–who wouldn’t want a triple-digit increase in conversion rate?

But I’d like to share the kind of trend line that I really find sexy.  It illustrates that “base hits” do add up, and you don’t need the home runs to win the game.  For my final baseball analogy, I remind you that most home run hitters strike out an awful lot!

This is a screenshot from our OnTarget conversion rate optimization product showing the trend line for a hardworking client.  The time period is about a quarter, and as you can see, the rate of increase of the conversion rate is decidedly un-sexy! This would not make the cover of “Trend Lines Magazine,” were such a silly magazine to exist

But here’s 3 reasons why this un-sexy trend line report turns me on:

1. It represents a 31.55% relative increase in conversion rate
2. It illustrates the hard work of continuous improvement.  It isn’t sexy, but if the client keeps up this pace, they could double their conversion rate in less than a year
3. We estimate this increase is worth $202,907 a month to the client.  That’s almost $2.5 million over the course of a year…assuming they don’t do any further optimization! You can start to see how a continuation of this un-sexy trend could lead to some very sexy year-end numbers

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.  What may seem like insignificant gains can really add up if you keep up the hard work of continuous improvement.  So make sure you can calculate the value of your achievements, and don’t be fooled by boring-looking trend lines–as long as they’re heading up, they’re gorgeous!

For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, we at FutureNow define Unique Value Proposition as: The brief, memorable phrase that concisely and powerfully describes the value of your business and creates excitement in the prospect.  The value proposition is not a slogan or a phrase designed for advertising, although that is one potential use for it.  Instead, its purpose is to answer the prospect’s implicit question, “Why should I do business with you and not somebody else?”

If you haven’t yet developed, tested, and optimized a Unique Value Proposition, bookmark this post and stop reading. Go read this and this.  Oh, this one is good, too

If you do have a solid UVP already developed and placed on your homepage and other important landing pages, let’s get down to the business of taking your UVP to the next level!

Homepages and landing pages aren’t the only place where your UVP needs to do some persuading.  There’s a whole, entire experience with your company (marketing touch points, landing pages, conversion experiences, post-purchase support, etc.) that can and should emanate your UVP so that it can be felt through every second a prospect or customer spends with you.  That, of course, will help with the “memorable” part of the UVP definition.

Here are a just a few ways in which your UVP could “cascade” across the user experience:

• phone on-hold messaging
• marketing/merchandising/promotions
• email signatures from employees
• site navigation
• site graphics
• blog theme

If you have a UVP, does it currently inform design and optimization decisions?  Do your graphic designers and copywriters have it in front of them wherever they work?  How about Marketing, does the UVP find its way into promotions so they’re not run-of-the-mill?

Let’s look at some random ideas from real UVPs, and brainstorm on how businesses could leverage them across a holistic site experience.

These are paraphrased and excerpted from real UVPs out there on the Web.  [Disclosure: most of these come from present or past FutureNow clients.]

“…family owned and operated…” — Sure, this can differentiate.  It would be cool to see this “family” concept cascading across the site design with family member bios, in the About Us section, and maybe even through some humor, e.g. ‘Help us settle a family argument by picking your favorite of our new product line.’

“…guiding clients through the admissions maze…” — I like the mental image of a ‘maze,’ so there are lots of ways that could be incorporated into various graphics through the site.  And copy could play a part, too.  Imagine a confirmation message that says, ‘Congratulations.  You’re one step closure to making it out of the maze.’

“…enhance your relationships, finances, and spiritual life…” — 3 is always the magic number, so building these 3 aspects of life into a ‘trinity’ graphic showing the words and icons in perfect harmony could be very persuasive.  And it would make sense to have site navigation reflect these as categories.

“…what if understanding men could be easy?” — Using the ‘what if’ approach can be very persuasive, so imagine how a good designer and copywriter could team up to build that theme across an entire site?

“…connect to a thriving community of designers…” — Being able to connect with a ‘thriving community’ of any kind is compelling, but how to express that and substantiate it?  A ‘ticker’ could display every time a new member signed up for a community, or posted a comment, etc.  And graphics could be used to further enhance that feeling of thriving community.

This was just a one-sided brainstorm, so perhaps not the best quality, but hopefully they spark some ideas as to how you can work your own UVP further into the fabric of your online business.

Leave us a comment with any examples of companies you feel are executing on this concept in an elegant way.

1. Look Nice – You want to put your best face forward. Your homepage is often the first thing that your visitor sees when they visit your site, so make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Remember, for a vast majority of sites, the homepage has the highest bounce rate.  Give your a visitor a reason not to leave.

2. Make your prospect interested in what you have to offer – In the dating scene, this means opening up and making sure they know something about you that makes them want to learn more.  In website optimization, it means having a top notch Unique Value Proposition (UVP).

3. Remember them – Saving a visitor’s shopping cart for at least 30 days is a helpful tool for reminding visitors that they’re wanted (especially as Holiday shopping ramps up).

4. Don’t give them a reason to leave – The easier it is for your visitor to navigate your site, and the more quickly you can get them through their buying process, the more likely they are to convert.

5. Don’t talk up your best friend – The worst thing you can do is link to a site outside your own and push your visitor in that direction. Tools and references are always helpful, but don’t make them more attractive than the options that push them further though the conversion funnel. If you feel it’s necessary to link to outside domains, use a visual cue (like the common “tear off” icon) to indicate to the visitor that they’ll be leaving your site.

Now go ask for another date, or better yet, get down on one knee

1. It’s often where “low-hanging fruit” grows. Conversion obstacles can often be removed quickly, leading to large gains in a short period of time.
2. It’s an area where you’ve already succeeded in persuading the prospect. They are in the Late Stage of their buying process, so a relatively low investment can give you a relatively high return.  In other words, you don’t have to produce pages and pages of persuasive content to move the visitor forward in her buying process.
3. Customer expectations regarding their online shopping experiences are rising every day. If your competitor has a more optimized checkout, they may be taking market share from you.

There’s a very wide spectrum of online selling solutions, from a PayPal button on a single sales page to a highly-customized checkout with a floating/sliding/shining interface and behaviorally-targeted cross-selling.  Still, FutureNow’s clients tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps:  those with a 3rd-party cart and those with a custom-built cart.

There are pros and cons to each, which I’ll touch on briefly, but please don’t consider this brief post the authoritative work on the subject–there’s lots of research and reviews out there on the various shopping cart investment options.

3rd Party Shopping Carts, also known as “canned”: Some of the pros are lower cost, quicker time to market, and the efficiencies/convenience gained when you buy a package that handles payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption, etc.  Some of the cons are lack of control over look and feel, lack of control over the user experience, and more difficulties encountered with testing and optimization.  The tradeoffs seem pretty straightforward, but a lot depends on the IT resources you have at your disposal.

Custom Shopping Carts: Some of the pros are a user experience that’s more tightly integrated with the rest of your site, better tracking for better analytics, easier to make changes and add features, and easier integration with testing tools like Google Website Optimizer.  The obvious cons are higher cost, more operational overhead, and slower time to market.  Again, the tradeoffs are the same, and a lot depends on your company’s resources, budget, and business goals.

Those prospects we speak with who are interested in optimizing for a higher return on their eCommerce investments often ask questions like: Can I optimize my 3rd party shopping cart? The answer is a definitive “Yes!” even on the most restrictive 3rd party carts. One of our clients enjoyed a 38% increase month-over-month in their “funnel conversion rate” just by adding some reassuring copy and links only in the areas of their cart they had access to: the header and the footer!

That’s an extreme example, but with our guidance, clients can make the best of their current platform, whatever it happens to be.  And many clients, after getting a few “wins,” decide they want to upgrade from a 3rd party cart to a partially or fully custom cart.  In that situation, we often work to optimize their checkout before it goes live, saving them time and money, and then continue to refine the customer experience and persuasiveness of the live cart through more formal testing. We also work with several implementation partners who grok Persuasion Architecture and can build custom carts based on OnTarget recommendations.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t defer or avoid Optimization based on what type of checkout platform you have.  Persuasion Architecture is “platform-agnostic,” and the best time for Optimization is always “Now.”

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some clients who are driving traffic from their web sites to physical store locations. These clients share some basic challenges, so I’ve decided to cover things you should be focusing on if you’re an online business trying to drive traffic to a physical location.

First, decide what action you want your visitors to take. We know that you want your visitors to come off your web site and visit your physical location, but what actions do you want them to take ON your web site that demonstrate their interest in coming to your physical location? These are what we call micro conversion points.  “Micro” because they are stepping stones on the way to some sort of purchase, which we call a macro conversion.

Here are some examples of actions a site might want the visitor to take to show their interest in moving forward. The following points should be tracked as micro conversion points, and you should optimize to increase these individual conversion rates.

• A “locations” page where you feature your address and map with directions. If visitors get to this page, they are interested in where you are located, which shows strong motivation and intent.
• Some sites feature a “Find the nearest location” tool.
• Booking an appointment for a service or holding/reserving a product.
• Contact us page, phone calls and emails are demonstrating that visitors are looking for answers to questions.

Tracking these micro conversion points is important, but it’s also important to follow through and track whether visitors who take these micro conversion actions are resulting in physical store purchases. Many companies track one or the other, but they seem to have a hard time tracking micro conversion rates on their web sites or they have a hard time connecting actions on a web site to actual sales in the physical store.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to get the right tracking in place to start seeing how your online efforts are resulting in ‘brick and mortar’ sales.

Tracking whether a store purchaser was originally a web site visitor:

Are you tracking all in-store purchases, asking each purchaser whether they went to your web site before they came to your physical store? This will help you find out general stats on how many visited your web site prior to purchasing.

Are you collecting email addresses and sending out surveys to in-store purchasers to find out how they came to your store?

• For those who identify that they came to your web site before coming to your physical store, are you asking them if they already knew about your store and were just coming to your site to find the address/location or to call the store?
• Are you asking them whether they were actually searching for something online, and found your web site as a solution to a problem (and didn’t yet know about your store) and they only found out that you had a physical store from your web site?

Tracking phone calls from listed phone numbers on your web site:

Is the phone number listed on your web site unique from other marketing efforts so that you can track it separately?

Is the phone number you list on various pages unique from the other pages on your site? In other words, if you feature a phone number on the about us page, is it a different number than the one on your contact us page? This would help you identify what pages visitors are making a decision to call from, and will also help you identify what types of things they are asking after visiting specific pages on your site.

Are you collecting enough information from the caller on the phone, so that you can match this up if the visitor turns into a sale in the physical store location?

Purely “clicks and mortar” E-commerce sites see the importance of optimization before the Holiday Season because it directly impacts their sales online. “Bricks and mortar” companies that use their web site to drive traffic to their physical store don’t see the direct impact as strongly, but this could be because they aren’t tracking  the impact effectively. If you’re in this situation, use some of the tips above to begin tracking and optimizing. You still have time to optimize for the holiday season and beyond!

But did you know that traffic generation and website optimization aren’t mutually exclusive? There are tactics that will help you accomplish both goals at the same time, and one FutureNow Partner recently spoke to me about a tactic that’s working well.

Our Partner is a software development firm that specializes in web-based applications and good old web development and design. They are currently gaining leads and sales by being very active with their marketing mix: radio, billboards, PPC, SEO, etc. They identified that there is a clear separation between their leads based on the lead’s motivations and, more importantly, their budgets. Some leads are looking for a small and simple web site with a custom design, with an approximate $500 budget. Other leads are looking for very complex web sites with a lot of tools and capabilities with a much higher budget in the $5000+ range.

The marketing team recognizes the difficulty in trying to effectively speak to these very different segments on a single site. Even using landing pages, there is the possibility that one type of visitor may be turned off by content they read that was written for another type.  (FutureNow has a whole methodology for writing copy and mapping out buying paths for different types of visitors on a single site, but this takes a focused expertise and experience.) On top of trying to speak to all types on their main web site, this company creates completely different buying experiences on separate micro-sites for each segment. This drives more targeted and qualified traffic to these micro-sites. The micro-sites speak more directly to the segment and therefore move them through their buying process more effectively, without possible distractions from content that doesn’t speak to their motivations and needs.

They generate the smaller budget leads via radio ads. These radio listeners are driven to a micro-site in order to follow through on the messaging from the radio ad.

They also generate leads who are primarily interested in finding a web design/development firm in Utah via PPC ads with keywords such as “cheap web sites utah.” They send these visitors to a different micro-site and speak to their interests of a local company that can meet their web design needs.

As you can see, they send these very different prospects down customized buying persuasion paths based on the buyer’s motivation and need. By doing this, they are driving more targeted traffic to sites that have been more effectively optimized for a particular segment.

You can segment your traffic by the different products or services that they are searching for.  Or, you can segment your traffic by the different problems they are experiencing, or solutions they are looking for.  Are you driving all traffic to specific landing pages, or simply a single homepage on a single web site? Are you optimizing your site based on different motivations? These are good questions to ask yourself in order to get started optimizing your primary web site.

On top of optimizing your primary website, you should consider the micro-site tactic in order to drive more targeted traffic to your company and quickly turn this traffic into leads or sales. This tactic is applicable to multiple online business models; whether you’re e-commerce, lead generation, or a brochure site.

Note: Micro-sites are entities that can become part of your overall marketing strategy and shouldn’t be created and then forgotten about. Along with your other marketing efforts, micro-sites need to be continuously optimized and improved.

Are you ready for the challenge?

We often get asked:

How much traffic do I need before I start optimization?

Do I get enough traffic to my site to even consider optimization?

Will my tests take forever to run if I don’t have a lot of traffic?

How fast can I expect to see the results of optimization if my traffic is low?

These are natural questions from folks who haven’t dipped their toes into the optimization waters, but these questions indicate a few myths that I’ll attempt to dispel.

Myth #1: Traffic is the ‘magic metric’ when it comes to optimization

The fact is that the number of conversions is at least as important as traffic levels.  We’ve always said that a minimum threshold to do formal online testing is 5-10 conversions per week, and that this amount of conversions (regardless of traffic) can at least get you results in a matter of weeks instead of months.  A simple tool that illustrates the relationships between site traffic, conversion rate, and test durations is the Google Website Optimizer Duration Calculator.  This free tool lets you play around with data points and estimate test durations before you start your experiment.  I can personally say it has saved me a bunch of grief by warning me away from certain client experiments due to the duration estimates being way too long!  Try changing the page views metric, and see the impact on duration.  Now, try changing the conversion rate metric, and you’ll see it, too, can have a drastic impact on the duration.

Myth #2: Low-traffic sites won’t see results from optimization

The fact is that low-traffic sites can still see improvements from optimization.  Remember that “optimization” doesn’t just mean formal testing using a tool like those provided by Omniture or Google.  Optimization is about getting your company on a program of continuous improvement through hypothesis, change (via formal testing or not), and monitoring of the results of those changes.  Once you have “results,” you feed those learnings right back into the program and keep going.  Lower traffic sites may or may not be good candidates for formal testing methods like split testing or full factorial multivariate testing, but they may be great candidates for optimization!  We often try formal testing on low-traffic sites, and if it’s not productive, we switch our focus to “serial testing,” which means benchmarking the performance of something (an ad, a landing page, etc.), making a change, and then monitoring the impact of that change. Either way, we tend to get results.

Myth #3: Testing and optimization doesn’t really work for low-traffic sites

The fact is that optimization can definitely work, and even formal testing can work if you do it right.  One way to do formal testing on low-traffic sites is to focus on higher-trafficked pages.  Another is to test micro-conversions (e.g. reading product reviews as opposed to buying the product).  Still another is to make a B2C “view cart” page the conversion point instead of the purchase confirmation page.  There are plenty of methods to shortening the duration of a test, but we’ll keep a few of those to ourselves for now

Myth #4: It’s better to defer optimization until site traffic grows

The fact is that the time to optimize is always “now.”  There’s an opportunity cost associated with not doing anything, when you could at least be doing something less-than-optimal.  Your traffic may be less than optimal, but you can still optimize, and when your traffic becomes optimal, you’ll reap the rewards of earlier optimization work.  We’ve always used the metaphor of the “leaky bucket”:  If your conversion funnel is a bucket with a bunch of holes in it, why would you spend marketing money to pour more water (a.k.a. traffic) into that bucket?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to fix the holes, then start pouring more water?

We’re definitely invested in dispelling any other myths about testing and optimization, so feel free to ask questions or contact us if you think you have a unique case and aren’t sure if optimization is right for you.

A valid question/concern, to be sure.  Our answer is, of course, “It depends.”  However, here are a few approaches that we’ve seen work:

Extreme Effort Until a Certain Date

Look at your previous year’s analytics and the upward trend of conversions closer to the holidays.  When did it start to trend up in a consistent manner?  Mid-October?  November?  Late-November?  Based on last year’s trend line, pick a date after which you’ll stop optimizing and stabilize your site for the Holiday rush.  Then, free up all the budget and resources you can to work on an optimization to-do list from today until your stop date.  After the Holidays, you can finish everything that didn’t get finished before your stop date.

Optimize the Checkout Process

Another approach is to focus solely on the checkout process from now until the end of the Holidays.  This means leaving the homepage, landing pages, content pages, etc. alone until 2010, and just test and optimize the cart pages to squeeze every last conversion out of those folks you’ve persuaded.

Merchandise for the Holidays (a.k.a. Deck the Halls)

Some clients want a site-wide approach that ties in with Holiday shopping and gift-giving.  This is less about optimization and more about seasonal relevance, but it’s still a valid approach that could lift your Holiday conversions.  Many sites simply throw a Holiday-themed graphic on their homepage and call it “done,” but the world-class sites have little touches throughout the site to put their prospects in a shopping mood.  eBay has done some nice, subtle things to dress their site up around the Holidays, and I’m sure they have something up their sleeve this year.  One of our clients last year used empty real estate throughout the site, including the shopping cart, to display some Holiday messaging and graphics.  They also updated their checkout through the last week of the Rush to indicate how many days were left to have gifts reach recipients by 12/24, creating a nice sense of urgency as well as being informative.

Split Your To-Do List

A fourth approach is to simply brainstorm every optimization you think could impact your conversion rate.  Then, use various criteria to split the list into “pre-Holidays” and “post-Holidays.”  Commit the resources and intensity to get the “pre” list done, then leave the “post” list until everyone is back in the office and the 2010 budget is approved .  This is probably the easiest approach, but carries with it the risk that you’ll implement some low-impact optimizations, when you could have implemented the high-impact items.  In this case, we recommend outside help to prioritize that list!

We hope these ideas help everyone find an approach they’re comfortable with, execute well, and reap the rewards!

Your visitors are empowered with the ability to access information with the click of a button. You can’t pull a blind-fold over their eyes or manipulate them into anything. They’ll find out the truth with or without you being upfront about what that truth looks like. Being transparent means that you’re being vulnerable, exposing all your wrinkles, scars and bumps, but it also means you’re fully disclosing what makes you better and different.

How can you be completely transparent on your site, you ask? Compare your products and services to the visitor’s other options directly on your site. This will help you build credibility because you’re showing all characteristics and aspects of the product and service you offer, and are willing to display what might be better or worse about competing products and services. Let the visitor then make an educated decision based on this information. After all, the visitor’s main questions are; What’s in it for me? What makes you unique and different from my other options?

If you don’t make the comparison for the visitor, they’ll likely try and make a comparison on their own, and then perhaps the information they find out elsewhere will be skewed in the wrong direction.

Toyota gives us a great example, showing us how to effectively compare their product to their competitors. The screenshots show a compare tool that Toyota features on their site where you’re given the ability to compare a vehicle you’re interested in to all other brands and each model. They even show you the most common competing vehicles to the one you’ve identified. They make it easy for you to compare exactly what you’re looking to compare. They even have various in-depth comparison chart options, where you can choose to compare details on “cost,” “features,” “fuel economy,” etc.

Does anyone have any other great “comparison” examples? What other things can be done to achieve more and better transparency?  Let us know. Need help making your online presence more transparent and effective? Let us know.

If you’re interested in improving your product detail/landing pages and cross-selling, this video (and upcoming Part 2 video) is not to be missed.

In fact, the natural advantage of fast loading pages is one reason Google patented the sparse design of their home page.  They know that simplicity, speed and relevance rule the web experience, and that every millisecond counts.

Think about that time you had to connect to a website on your cellular phone or use the wireless network at a busy conference. Slow sites suck!

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you speed up your pages?

1. Run a speed test on your page.

There are several great tools that will tell you if your pages are loading slow. Here are the main ones we use here at FutureNow:

1. Web Page Analyzer

2. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug

3. Page Speed by Google – They have also compiled a list of some other great resources and tools to speed up your website.

These tools will identify if your code, javascript, css and or images are overweight. This post will only focus on how to optimize your images once you realize they are too fat.

There are several simple tools online that you can use to optimize your image if you are not familiar with Photoshop or the equivalent to squeeze those image file sizes down.

1. Smush.it

2. Dynamic Drive

3. Web-Resizer

Here is an example of how to do it with Smush.it:

1. Copy and paste the image urls of the images you want to optimize into Smush.it.

2. Click Smush.it

3. See the results of how much your images were smushed.

4. Right click the name of the file you requested to be optimized and save it to your computer.

5. Upload those files to your server to replace the bloated ones.

People expect fast-loading pages and quick response times from websites; it’s part of their internal clock.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with visitor expectations for:

• expected content/scent,
• answers to buying concerns and questions,
• the look and feel of the site and photos,
• or, for response times

Matching or exceeding those expectations always leads to higher conversion rate.  That’s why the Persuasion Architecture framework is so consistently successful at Website Optimization.

Or are you a lettuce picker? The sort of person that toils for long hours in the field and accomplishes a long day’s back-breaking labor of work that most white collar business execs would consider a less-than-optimal career.

That fact is, when it comes time to harvest, virtually the entire crop must be worked on at the same time. You don’t have time to cherry pick, and anyway the average business isn’t expert enough in how and what to optimize to know which portion of the crop should be cherry picked. Instead, when that crop is ripe, it’s time to get out there in the field and put in a 14-hour day getting it harvested.

Often when we speak wiith prospective clients new to OnTarget™, they have the impression that there is some magical formula that leads to higher improvement rates and that it can be achieved without any hard work or commitment. The reality, however, is that our most successful clients who enjoy on-going regular improvements of 40-80% in their conversion rates year after year are the ones who are implementing change on a regular basis. They’re lettuce pickers, and not so proud as to let hard work get in the way of increased revenue.

Are you a hard-working lettuce picker when it comes to your website? Are you guessing at what changes will improve your site? Or do you work diligently every week, every month, and every quarter to effect continuous improvement?

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

Clearly, this company was dedicated to continual improvement and working hard to improve its conversion rate. The analytics shouted proof that someone was minding the store.

So why was its overall conversion rate painfully low?

I dug deeper into the analytics, going back and forth between the numbers and the site. Then I knew exactly what was wrong. I was curious if my staff would be able to see exactly what I saw.

As much as I’d like to brag about my staff for being brilliant (they indeed are), I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they’re trained to look where others don’t. Without hesitation, they saw exactly what I saw.

All Is Well…on the Surface

The marketing was good and relevant, the site was well designed, the landing pages and product pages were sticky, and traffic seemed to move through the site with ease. Even the checkout process was good. Instead, the site suffered from a severe persuasion scenario problem.

The site attracted interested prospects and gave them enough big call-to-action buttons and shiny products to browse, but made it difficult, even impossible, for prospects to gain any resolve to buy the right product for them. This is a site with a slow drip. Prospects are falling off one by one in hundreds of different places. It’s proof that landing page optimization isn’t enough.

Moving Beyond Best Practices, Usability, and Testing

Joel Spolsky best summed up this site’s dilemma in “User Interface Design for Programmers“:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a night club it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with plenty of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

The site is nice, well lit, well run, but not selling. So how do you begin fixing the problem? First, you have to understand it a bit.

We created a simple, one-dimensional persona who was early in her buying process. She knew she needed a certain product but didn’t know where to start. The site sells sporting recreational goods with the average price point in the hundreds of dollars. This isn’t an impulse-buy type of site.

We clicked through the site as this persona and, no matter where we started, we ended up hitting a virtual brick wall, confused and frustrated. The site seems to have good prices but little guidance on what products are best for the beginner. The site even offers packages to make it easier for the customer.

Yet it didn’t help the persona answer the question: which is the right package for me? Even when we were a persona further along in the buying process, we still had a heck of time sorting and finding the right products for our need.

Simple persuasion issues not addressed on product pages and category landing pages are the Lilliputians sucking the lifeblood out of the site’s conversion rate. Proof again that too many sites spend way too much time and money on best practices and page performance to the detriment of site performance.

The Good News

This site will get a makeover that will undoubtedly stop many of the drips. Some solutions are as simple as adding a little copy to category pages, creating several pages specifically addressing the needs of different buyers, and leveraging some great content already on the site.

The site can serve as a lesson to those of you who have come up short on your optimization expectations. It can remind you to optimize not just for better page performance but also for the actual visitor using those pages.

Here are a few steps you can take if you’re suffering from a slow-drip persuasion scenario problem:

1. Start with a simple persona, putting her in a typical buying process for your product or service.
2. Click through the site as that persona, doing your best to pretend that you don’t know where the content she needs is. Is it easy for her to find? Did she get distracted by something else? Does the content do what you intended it to do: does it move users forward through the site and give them greater resolve that they have found or will find the right product for them?
3. Run a usability test. Sometimes it’s hard to see your site with fresh eyes; you may need to bring in some help.
4. Remember that site engagement metrics, like bounce and exit rates, click-throughs, and time spent on site, are important key performance indicators. If your site’s engagement metrics look healthy and your conversion rate remains low or unchanged, you must now focus on selling and persuading the customer, not designing the right button or searching for a better hero image on a landing page or even finding better qualified traffic. You will likely need to create some content that will help visitors find the product they need and want. That’s a persuasion issue, not a usability or best practices issue.

Are you spinning your wheels, looking at your site analytics and running out of things to optimize or test? If you’re willing to share your situation with my ClickZ readers, tell me your story. My staff and I will select one or two sites to look under the hood of and share findings in a future column.

Sorry about the headline – the 80s flashbacks are getting to me.  Still, I really do “play stupid” as a Website optimizer and online copywriter.  Or at least I play ignorant.

Why?  Because all those terms and concepts you think everyone understands about your business and what you’re selling – well, you’re wrong about them!  Wrong about both the terms themselves and your potential audience.  If you think I’m mistaken, go back and watch the video again.

Or keep reading to see some real website examples. Either way, let me reassure you that way more of your website visitors just fundamentally don’t “get it” than you’d ever suspect.  Either those visitors:

1. have no idea what the industry standard terms you are using mean,
2. don’t really understand the finer distinctions the terms are supposed to represent, or
3. fail to draw the all-important conclusions and emotional implications that you may be basing your persuasive messaging upon.

Any one of those might be enough to kill your chances for a conversion.

And while there are some good reasons to only mention or allude to the “features” in order to hone in on the benefits, there’s also very few excuses* not to provide links, mouse-overs, and early stage content that can guide the perplexed to a better understanding of your industry and your messaging.

How an “idiot” could improve the Black Diamond Home Page

For those of you who haven’t heard of this company before, Black Diamond Equipment makes cutting edge climbing and skiing equipment.  And before we even look at one of their product pages, I suggest you just go to their website and get a feel for how user-friendly (or not) the overall design seems.  Seriously, go there right now.  I’ll wait.

Ok, now ask yourself this:

• Doesn’t it feel as if the company ONLY produces carabiners?  If you didn’t know the company produced headlamps, skis, tents, etc, would you ever think to look for those?
• Did it take you a while to figure out that the pictured carabiners could be clicked on and rotated towards you?  Or was that just intuitively obvious?  What do you think the designers felt about the “obviousness” of this design.
• If you weren’t interested in carabiners and never clicked on the “see all carabiners” link, would you ever have gotten to the pages dealing with other equipment?
• What do you think is keeping them from simply using a persistent top navigation scheme?
• Do you think “playing an idiot” for a day would help these guys out?

Idiot-Proofing Product Pages 101

Now let’s compare a product page on the Black Diamond site with one for the same product taken from backcountry.com.  We’ll start with a product page for a LED headlamp taken from the Black Diamond site:

What the heck is a “TriplePower LED”?

• Is it 3-times more powerful than a 5mm Nichia LED?
• Is it a 3-watt LED?
• Is it an LED with 3 power settings?

By using this terminology, Black Diamond has achieved the worst of both worlds, not only is the description not enough for a non-light geek to really understand, but neither is it technical enough for a light geek to feel confident in what he is buying.

How about underlining these terms and providing a mouse-over that would show comparisons of the LEDS, their real technical specs, and usage shots, so that an average user could get a sense of the light output and a techie could see the real specs?

And what about the “NRG Rechargable battery”?

• Is it a Lithium-Ion battery?
• Is it Metal Hydride?
• How much does it cost?
• Does it improve or hurt the battery life of the light?
• Can I buy the light already bundled with the battery and it’s charger, etc?

Finally, there’s the “single position switch.”  I’m guessing it’s some sort of rubberized button-looking thing and that you just have to keep clicking it to rotate through all 7 of the modes until you get the one you want.  But wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure:

• That a single position switch = clicky switch, like on a Mag-Light
• What exactly those 7 lighting modes are, and why I’d need that many modes
• Where the button is located?

From the pictures it looks like the “single position switch” might be on the bottom of the light, but assuming that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better to link the term “single position switch” to a mousover of that picture along with an explanation of how the switch functions and what the 7 modes are?

As for backcountry.com’s product page for this same headlamp, the page is too long for me to snap an encompasing screenshot and place it here, but I suggest you go to that page and take a look at all of the content rich resources that are provided, including:

• customer photos of the product in-use,
• user reviews, Q&A’s, and
• some actual, non-bullet-pointed, real copy.

But since we’re focusing on the copy, I’ve cut and pasted it below.  Read it and see how many questions this copy answers that Black Diamond’s bullet points leave unclear:

“The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp uses two different types of LED bulbs to give you ultra-bright lighting when you need it and to save battery power when you don’t. The 3-watt center bulb has three settings for light up to 80 meters. Switch to the four SuperBright LED bulbs to get a 200-hour burn time when a lot of light isn’t necessary. This combination of long-distance lighting and long burn time makes the Black Diamond Icon Headlamp a stand-out choice for everything from backpacking to climbing to night skiing. In fact, it impressed Rock and Ice so much that they gave it their Best In Gear Award.

Bottom Line: The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp provides both bright lighting and long-lasting battery life for days on the trail, the rock, and the snow.”

Even if it’s not perfect, that copy is still much clearer, isn’t it?  And understand this: the majority of what isn’t covered in this copy is covered in the user reviews, Q&A’s, etc.  In fact, I’m convinced that the persuasive power of user reviews has as much to do with previous buyers unintentionally answering other customers’ questions within the reviews as it has to do with the increased credibility of user reviews.

Also, understand that this unexplained-term phenomenon isn’t exclusive to technical products, either; it happens in product descriptions for almost everything.  I could have just as easily used tents and asked what the hell a double-wall tent is and why it should matter to me, and so on.

Reverse “The Curse” with Idiot Exercises

While “The Curse of Knowledge” can be hard to overcome, here are a few** sure-fire techniques to get you started on your journey to idiot-optimized copy:

• Do usability testing.  Get someone outside your industry (go ahead and specify minimum industry knowledge in your user request) and watch them move through your site while recording their questions, thoughts, etc.
• Highlight every industry term, phrase, or concept on your site, write them down on a piece of paper, and start interviewing random people on the street about them, just like the guy did in the video.
• Willfully play the part of a 5 year old and ask repeated why questions regarding your industry terms and concepts.  It’s best to team up with a partner/colleague on this one.  Force each other to come up with answers a 10-year old would understand.

After having done any one, or all, of the 3 strategies, go back and re-evaluate your copy.

P.S.  Hat tip to Seth Godin for finding the video and creating a great blog post around it

* Actually, there’s only one excuse: you’re purposely excluding a general audience in order to tightly focus on a hard-core group.  In that case, go ahead amd talk the lingo without apologies, letting anyone and everyone else catch up if they can.  Just realize that you WILL be alienating visitors and potential customers in order to appeal to that smaller, hard-core group.

** Of course, the best sure-fire method of escaping the curse of knowledge is simply to hire an outside copywriter/consultant/optimization specialist

[Editor’s note: the author of this blog is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com

To do web analytics correctly you have to make a to-do list regularly.

That list should be done monthly or weekly depending on your organizational needs and should include:

• What marketing efforts or parts of your site have challenges.
• What you think needs to be improved.
• What things you want to test.

It should also include (based on your results and your resources):

• What efforts you should do less of.
• What efforts you should do more of.

Are you currently generating a to-do list to keep your goals on target?

I’ve got many other secrets to share on how to turn your web analytics into a money making machine, but I’ll wait to share those at Search Engine Strategies. Will you be there?

Do you have any tips you want to share?

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 your competitors. This exercise works equally well for retail as it does for business to business products or services.

First, how this works for retail:

Pick a few of your products and find the same model (or something similar if you are selling non-branded items) on at least 2 of your competitors’ websites.

Print off the product descriptions for each and as you go through your product description find the copy on your competitors’ descriptions that say approximately the same thing (even if it is in slightly different words).

A Retail Example:

As a working example, I’ll choose the digital camera Sony DSC-W80 (it’s a bit older now and fewer retailers have it in stock today). Take a look at the description for the Sony DSC-W80 from these retailers below:

They all are pretty much identical in what they say. They may say it in different formats, some in sparse bullet points, others with the details a bit more fleshed out, but essentially they aren’t providing the visitor with any unique, new information from which to make a purchase decision.

This is what Amazon figured out early is one of the advantages of having review information. If all you are going to provide is the manufacture information, you can not communicate anything of value differently to your visitors other than price (and competing on price alone is not the best strategy).

Unless of course you’re in a commodity business, in which case the only thing to communicate that has any value is your differentiator. What would you bet that all the retailers above would strongly object to being described as being the commodity business — despite that by their action and inaction they are treating their product precisely like a undifferentiated commodity.

So once you realize there is nothing very different in your description from your competitors,  how can you find out what is of value to your visitors? In Amazon’s case it is reviews. Let’s look at the summary of reviews for this product on Amazon using the Pluribo plugin for Firefox:

Almost all the reviews talk about the speed of the camera as a key benefit. Now go back to all those retailers and notice how not one listed speed anywhere in the description. This is where all the customers are seeing “value” in this camera –  don’t you think your visitors who haven’t yet made that decision to buy might find “speed” as important? What you should be doing is incorporating copy that plays on speed as an important aspect of the product. If you don’t have the benefit of all these reviews, it is your responsibility if you want increased sales to find out these key benefits and communicate them. Someone is going to sell that camera to that customer — and if it’s isn’t you, then that’s your fault.

B2B Product or Services Example

On the B2B side, let’s look at online meeting or conferencing software as an example, since so many people are familiar with it.

If most of what you are saying is that you can easily give presentations on both Mac and PCs, that people can meet online all across the globe, that you can use the product for training, sales or collaboration, is that seriously enough to differentiate you from all your other competitors? As Bruno might say, “Ich don’t think so.”

Take a look at competitors who offer similar solutions and focus on the benefits that differentiate you. You still need to include some of these basics so that people know that you work on both the Mac and PC — because if all your competitors offer the same benefit it almost “converts” the benefit into a plain ol’ feature –  but you need to find out why your potential customers would choose you over your competitors.

Keep in mind as you (and your competitors) evolve your online efforts, you need to evolve this approach as well.