screencast
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
Screencast: How the Super Bowl Ads FUMBLED Online
This year’s Super Bowl ads once again found us scratching our heads. If you’re going to spend $2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time in order to send people to a website, why not sell them your product once they get there?
In this screencast, we’re going to show you how two brands — Tide to Go and Under Armour — continue to miss out on converting browsers into buyers, even after the post-game traffic surge is over. Depending on who you ask, these sponsors’ ads (”Interview” for Tide and “The New Prototype” for Under Armour) were pretty decent. The products don’t seem to be the problem, either.
Nope. What we have here is a failure to convert. So, much like the New England Patriots are doing right now, let’s see what we can learn from some video analysis:
Let’s take a look at some post-game stats from Reprise Media’s Search Marketing Scorecard:
- 6% of companies included a call to action, asking viewers to visit their websites–a decrease of nearly two thirds from last year
- 93% did not buy search placement for concepts relating to their ads, including spokesperson names, slogans and taglines. Among the brands that failed to buy featured stars’ names as keywords were Bridgestone Tires (Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons) and Sunsilk (Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna). Unfortunately, notes Reprise, given that the celebrities are often the only thing that viewers remember about an ad.
- 74% still neglected to include a call to action on their Web site landing pages, leaving users “directionless.”
These figures are important because they illustrate a common misconception among multi-channel marketing campaigns: While the TV ad’s success can be measured by the traffic it drives to the website, the traffic alone is meaningless. When visitors can’t convert, you lose.
Want help converting online? Download “10 Tips to Start Optimizing Your Site” for free!
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Screencast: Making Online Gift Shopping Easier
Although the idea of shopping for gifts online sounds easy, too many e-commerce sites make it more difficult than it should be. Sure, you could buy a gift card for everyone on your list, but what does a piece of plastic really say about how you feel? What ends up happening when customers give these unoriginal “gifts” is that they end up sending friends and family back to the same websites that didn’t inspire them to buy something cool in the first place — and the whole cycle of “Hmm… what should I buy?” starts over.
In this edition of Screencast, I’ll show you how some e-tailers are helping their online shoppers navigate the gift-giving season, while others are, well, let’s just say they’re hoping to receive (your money). For instance, WalMart.com doesn’t seem to do anything special to help gift shoppers. Meanwhile, Etsy.com — a site where independent clothing designers and artisans from around the world their wares — proves you don’t need a Wal-Mart-sized budget to sort merchandise into gift guides for the customer. BarnesAndNoble.com has a nice gift guide that helps you find gifts to match the person’s style, but good luck finding it; their guide is hidden in drop-down menus and poorly phrased navigation buttons. Amazon.com does it best, and although there’s room for improvement, as you’ll see, they engage gift shoppers front-and-center on the homepage (a smart thing to do in December) and they do a good job of limiting choices. That’s right. When it comes to deciding between gifts, less is definitely more more — just be sure to show them things they’ll like.
Our gift to e-tailers? How about some holiday bonus tips:
- Provide a Gift Buying Guide
- Overcome “analysis paralysis” by limiting choice
- Allow customers to shop THEIR way…
- By relationship
- By “most popular“
- By price
- By characteristic (i.e., type of gift)
- ASK your customers how they would like gifts sorted
(If video doesn’t load, click here.)
There you have it! Sort. Categorize. Limit their choices to stuff that’s relevant, and let that momentum pull them toward the sale. And do yourself a favor: Don’t wait until Cyber Monday ‘08 to help gift shoppers spend their money on you. Engage them directly by using language and navigation that address their needs right away. And if you’re still leaving cash on the table, make a resolution to get help.
[Special thanks to Conversion Analyst Ron Patiro for his help finding these examples.]
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Screencast: Guarantee Holiday Sales
One of the most important — and often overlooked — ways to boost your conversion rate while improving the experience for your customers is to focus on point-of-action assurances. Basically, these are the messages that smart e-commerce sites give us, just as we’re ready to check out. Point-of-action reassurances help us overcome that one last moment of doubt (”I think she hinted at this one, but can I exchange it if she wants that other digital camera instead?”). These types of messages are especially important when dealing with customers who are buying gifts online.
Offline, returns and exchanges are less of a concern to shoppers. They can simply take their purchases back to the store they bought them from. Many retailers even offer gift receipts so recipients can take the merchandise back and exchange it.
Online, the gift exchange/return process looms more ominously in shoppers’ minds. What if shoppers want to return or exchange orders? What do gift receivers do? How about gift givers? Where do they go? How fast will they get a refund? Return-shipping costs, shipping hassles, price-matching concerns, and other questions hover like conversion-rate-chomping gremlins, threatening to devour your sales. Online retailers must resolve these questions, manage expectations, and inject confidence into their visitors, or their “buy now” buttons will look like black holes threatening to suck shoppers’ cash into the ether.
In this screencast, I’ll show you how big online retailers like LandsEnd.com, WalMart.com & BestBuy.com handle these concerns during the holiday crunch. You’ll see how adapting these techniques to your own checkout process can help close the sale and keep them coming back — not just to return things, but to buy from you year-round.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Screencast: Building Trust & Credibility Online
If the roof of your home started leaking, you probably wouldn’t waste much time trying to fix it. And unless you happen to be a carpenter, you’re likely to find someone else to do the job. You’d probably call a professional; someone with experience, who can find the source of the problem and patch things up. A leaky roof isn’t generally a good place to shop on price alone. You want to know that whomever you hire can be trusted.
Well, your website isn’t much different. Each day, visitors come to your site, hoping to find someone they can trust. The strange thing is that people tend to think that the words they use online are somehow different than the words they use face-to-face. They’re not. But online, you need to be even more careful about how you relate to would-be customers. They’ve got less to go on. Looking you in the eye isn’t an option, and talk remains cheap — even if it’s in the form of web copy. So, it’s your job to change that around; an especially difficult thing for smaller and/or local brands.
Today, I’m going to show you how one of my clients, Roof Life of Oregon (www.rooflife-oregon.com), used Persuasion Architecture™ to replace their own, virtual roof. I’ll show you how each page uses trust-building elements to create persuasive momentum with the customer to make them feel at home.
Have you used any of these techniques before? Are there any websites you like to visit that inspire confidence? Ones that need fixing?
If you have questions about how to build trust online, please share them in the comments.
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Written by:Dave Young
Screencast: Does Your Site Appeal to All Buying Modes?
You may have heard the news that I joined the faculty at MarketMotive. I had a great time recording my first session, “The Power of Perspectives in Persuasion.” During the session, I explained perspectives (the four basic personality types) and how they impact what people look for on a website.
People View the World Through All Four Perspectives
At Future Now, we always caution people to be careful not to use this information to stereotype. While individuals operate from each of these perspectives, we do have preferences. It’s similar to right vs. left-handedness. For instance, people who would generally be considered Methodical can become Spontaneous at any moment. Just as it’s far easier to sign your name with your preferred hand, you can sign it with the other — even if the result is a bit awkward. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to design your website for only lefties or righties.
All Sales Are Complex
Since individuals each go through their own personal buying process, any sale has the potential of being a complex sale. As you’ll see in this screencast, the shift between a customer’s buying modalities, and the failure of a website to address them, can cause the buying process to break down. Companies must invest in understanding and planning for how these different modailities influence the buying process. This is why many companies have chosen to use customer Personas to help plan not just their websites, but entire multi-channel strategies.
When Personas Fail
Personas fail for a few sad-yet-predictable reasons. We’re often asked by potential customers to review and refine the Personas they’ve received from other firms in order to make them actionable, the way the Personas developed by Future Now are. It’s not always possible, but we try to salvage that investment. Oftentimes, the Personas they received elsewhere are nothing more than traditional market segments, lacking the types of nuanced personal insights it takes to really make them actionable. (Please contact us at Future Now if you want to learn more on about making your customer Personas actionable.)
In this screencast, I’ll show you a real life example of how — believe it or not — even my brother Jeffrey (also Future Now’s CEO) and I can shift from our own buying preferences to different modalities without realizing it at the time, or even consciously switch modes in order to complete a certain task. Everyone does this. It’s how Personas and buying modalities work together to create persuasive momentum.
Understanding Customer Buying Modes
(If video doesn’t load, click here.)
. .
[Editor’s Note: Want to know what motivates your customers to buy? We can help.]
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Screencast Smackdown: Wii vs. Xbox 360
When you have as many kids as I do, video games are a necessary part of life.
My family’s been hobbling around on the original Xbox for a few years now, and I’ve decided a game console upgrade is long overdue. If I were more patient, I suppose I could wait until Christmas — but patience is overrated. I supposed the release of Halo 3 has me chomping at the bit. (At least I’m not the only one. Check out how Halo 3 is moving Xbox consoles.) So, I’m trying to decided whether I want to buy the Wii or the Xbox 360 now, and which one will have to wait until Christmas. The only thing up in the air is which console I’ll buy first.
To help me make this decision, I’ll go online to visit each console’s main site. This screencast documents my journey and, ultimately, the winner:
(If you’re reading this via RSS, click here for video.)
I could’ve made dozens of suggestions for each site, but it was the category pages that made the biggest difference in helping me make my decision. The Xbox 360 game listing page looks good. While it did give me the ability to sort and search games, it was limited compared to the Wii. New games or not, sometimes these subtle differences are enough to send comparison shoppers like me to the competition.
Xbox 360 does a few things right:
- Great use of game thumbnails
- “Buy Now” call to action
- Top searches
Some suggestions for the Xbox folks:
- Add a “view all” function, so we can scroll the entire listing
- Allow sort by more criteria (e.g., # of players, release date)
- Printable & sharable listings
While the functionality of the Wii’s listing page was superior and helped me make my decision, that doesn’t mean this page is great. The Wii page is far too complicated and looks out of place in comparison to the rest of the site. So, raw functionality wins, but this doesn’t exactly feel as effortless as using one of those magic wand-like Wii controllers.
Here are a few suggestions for the people over at Wii:
- Add thumbnails to the listings
- Include a call to action
- Change dreary page color to match the rest of the Wii site
- Add “view all” function to scroll entire listing
- Printable & sharable listings
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Screencast: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion, Part 3
Now that you’ve seen Parts 1 and 2, where we found that the smartest way to persuade early-stage customers is to educate them, let’s focus on how to provide a consistent experience for them.
As we look at how Cabelas.com and BassProShops.com prepare to catch the Early Bird customer, consider the following:
- Relevance — If they’re not ready yet, don’t get carried away. (Is your website proposing marriage on the first date?)
- Screen Space — Early Birds need to know that they’re welcome, right from the homepage. Give them enough space, and combine relevance with scent to lead them in the right direction. (Use the battleship grid to protect the Early Bird from winding up in irrelevant worm holes.)
- Scent Trails — Not even the brightest of basset hounds can help you with this one, but creating the right scent for the customer to follow is key; particularly when they’re early in the buying process, and may not even have the vocabulary to know what they should be asking. If they come in with the wrong questions, and don’t buy, they should at least leave with the right ones. Help them find their way.
- AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
- Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.
Once again, it’s time to go huntin’ for Early Birds…
(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)
If you have a moment, share one of your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Which sites have done a particularly good job of persuading you to buy, or turning you off, when you were only pecking around?
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Written by:Dave Young
Screencast: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion, Part 2
Now that you’ve seen Part 1 — you did see it, right? — you should have a handle on the basics of selling to early-stage online shoppers. They may not be ready to “Buy Now!” but giving these Early Birds the information they need, when they need it, will ensure they come back once they are ready. One of the smartest ways to persuade early-stage buyers is to educate them.
Take hunting, for instance. While an experienced hunter may know exactly what she’s looking for in terms finding the right gear, a novice hunter might be more worried about his friends laughing at him for not knowing the first thing about it.
As we look at how Cabelas.com and BassProShops.com prepare to catch the Early Bird customer, consider some of these finer points:
- Scent Trails — Not even the brightest of basset hounds can help you with this one, but creating scent for the customer to follow is key; particularly when they’re early in the buying process, and may not even have the vocabulary to know what they should be asking. If they come in with the wrong questions, and don’t buy, they should at least leave with the right ones. Help them find their way.
- AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
- Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.
Once again, it’s time to go hunting for persuasion…
(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)
Check out Part 3 to learn how to catch the Early Bird before the competition does.
In the meantime, share one of your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Which sites have done a particularly good job of persuading you to buy, or turning you off, when you were just trying to educate yourself?
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Written by:Dave Young
Screencast: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion, Part 1
Hunters face many of the same challenges as marketers. Preparation is everything. Once you’re out in the field, you can’t just go in for the kill right away. You have to be patient or you’ll scare the deer. If you don’t have the right bait, the right technique, you can kiss your bass goodbye. Such are your customers online. Try to make them “Buy Now!” when they’re not ready, and they’ll scatter.
But that’s where the analogy ends. When marketers don’t give early-stage buyers the confidence they need to move forward, it’s they who look like deer in headlights (usually around the time they look at their cart abandonment rates).
So, with hunting season upon us, we figured it was time to give Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops a try. Offline, Cabelas in particular is known as a destination spot, a must-see experience for hunters. Can they live up to that experience online? You’ll see what exactly what happens in Part 2. But first, let’s go over a few key points about persuading early-stage buyers to take action by starting out with a question: “How early is early?”
- AIDAS — Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action. Satisfaction. If customers aren’t aware of you, there’s no place to move forward. If you haven’t grabbed their interest, forget it. If there’s no emotional desire to lure them in, they won’t bite. If it’s difficult for them to take action, they’ll run away. And if they’re not satisfied, they won’t return.
- Inside-the-Bottle Syndrome (the other “IBS”) — “When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label.” This is the biggest challenge marketers face. They know too much about their own products, too much about their own companies. It’s the “Curse of Knowledge” and you must overcome it to persuade.
So, without further ado, let’s go huntin’ (for persuasion)…
(If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click here for video.)
We’ll update you once Part 2 is up. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it, watch as Anthony Garcia shares his early-stage buying process as he looks for car insurance for his teenage daughter. It’s an eye-opener.
Also, don’t hesitate to share your early-stage buying experiences with us in the comments. Any hunters out there who plan to buy gear online this season?
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Written by:Dave Young
