I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.

Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.

Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.

Get the Math Right

When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:

• 100,000 people visit your Web site
• 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
• Your site gets 3,000 total conversions

What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?

• 3,030
• 4,000

Translate All Numbers Into Dollars

Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).

Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).

It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.

Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.

Leverage Your Reach

Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.

With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:

In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.

Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.

This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.

With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:

• Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
• Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.

Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.

Is There a Catch?

While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.

The Bottom Line

You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?

Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?

*Article cross-posted on ClickZ

. .

Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.

Related Posts:

• Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same
• eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, San Francisco
• The Price of Perfection
• Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis
• Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You

Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?

That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.

Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.

Abandoned.

Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.

According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.

Form without function is art, not business.

In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…

60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.

[…] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”

A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.

And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.

That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.

Related Posts:

• Is Something Wrong With Your Design?
• Internet Retailer Web Design Conference, Miami
• 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash
• Why Rivets, Not Icebergs, Sink Websites
• Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon

Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?

Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:

1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.

2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.

3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.

Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.

Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.

We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.

Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service

Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.

Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.

Include thumbnails of documents.

Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.

Let them know what they can do with the information.

List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.

Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)

If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.

Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.

Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).

Help for the Informationally Challenged

Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.

One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?

Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.

Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?

There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.

Establishing Trust and Expectations

Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.

Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.

Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.

Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.

Ramp up your About Us page.

Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.

Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.

Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.

Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.

Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.

Now go get some leads.

. .

Originally seen on ClickZ.

Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.

Related Posts:

• Bryan Eisenberg on Using Personas to Improve Sales
• Persona Models Presentation at SMX West 2008
• Why "Harmless" Stereotypes Kill Marketing Campaigns
• Getting the Most Out of Your Personas
• Does Your Website “Show-up and Throw-up”?

Just one year after Google [GOOG] launched Google Website Optimizer, the free A/B split and multivariate testing platform has shed its “beta” status and gone mainstream.

Formerly available only to AdWords users, Google Website Optimizer can now be accessed by anyone with a basic Google account. Even if you only have so much as a Gmail account, you can start testing your website — for free — regardless of whether you’re running a paid search campaign. (No worries, AdWords users, Website Optimizer still works seamlessly with the rest of the Google product suite.)

Companies of all sizes are getting results with Website Optimizer. And since it runs independently of your analytics program — or in sync with it, if you have Google Analytics — there’s little room for argument between departments as to whether or not your company should be testing. You should.

To find out more about Google Website Optimizer, visit their new…

• Website - Unglued from the AdWords site, you can visit Google.com/websiteoptimizer directly.
• Blog - Subscribe to websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com for product updates, case studies and ideas worth testing.

Why is FutureNow so excited about Google Website Optimizer? A few reasons:

1. Authorized Consultant - FutureNow was one of the original firms to be invited to test GWO with clients, and the case studies have been remarkable so far. Is yours next?
2. Writing the book on GWO - Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar, inventors of FutureNow’s patented Persuasion Architecture® methodology, have teamed up to write Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, in book stores this August.
3. It works! - The results speak for themselves.

Of course, knowing what to test — design elements, copy, etc. — is everything. If you’d like to start testing and you’re not sure if you need to hire a firm, here are several free resources to get started with Google Website Optimizer.

Got questions about Website Optimizer or testing in general? We’d love to hear your comments.

Related Posts:

• "What Should I Test?" Free Google + Future Now Webinar
• Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer
• Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites
• The Price of Perfection
• Google Website Optimizer: 7 Powerful Tests

Yesterday, exactly 96 years after she sank, it was revealed that the people who built the Titanic had used cheap iron rivets where — as fate would have it — the notorious iceberg hit.

The real tragedy is that all of this could have been avoided. (Imagine that, Kate and Leo fans! Your two love birds could have lived happily ever after.)

Harlan and Wolff, the shipbuilder that continues to deny that their choice of rivets was to blame for Titanic, must have known better — and, in fact, it seems they did. While their competitors relied exclusively on steel rivets for a ship’s bow, stern and hull, Harlan and Wolff used low-grade iron rivets for the bow and stern of their ships.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, they were building the three largest ships in the world — Britannic, Olympic, and Titanic — at the same time! But when a relatively common iceberg gouged Titanic’s bow, Harlan and Wolff’s riveting scheme proved disastrous.

Jennifer Hooper McCarthy, co-author of a new book on Titanic, exposes the pre-launch jitters:

“The board was in crisis mode … It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”

But before we judge Harlan and Wolff for cutting costs, or The White Star Line for apparently financing Titanic on the cheap, we should ask ourselves: Has the conventional wisdom really changed in the past 96 years?

Each day, CMO’s and small business owners are forced to make decisions that cause dangerous leaks in the websites they manage. Maybe they didn’t have enough time or budget to make sure it was built right. Maybe they compromised. Maybe they decided not to hire a good copywriter. Maybe they paid an agency to plan, build and write the entire website for them, just because a one-stop-shop scenario seemed easier to explain to the board. And when the site launched without sinking, it was considered a success because it was built with cafes, squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a barbershop, three libraries and cheap iron rivets.

With that mentality, is it any wonder why — year after year — the average conversion rate is between 2-3%?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

If your web strategy is more focused on bells and whistles than nuts and bolts (or rivets), maybe it’s time to stop shuffling the deck chairs.

. .

Already launched? FutureNow can help you test the rivets on your site.

Related Posts:

• Website Optimization vs. Redesign: The UFO Metaphor
• "If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers"
• Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: March 2008
• 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash
• Google Website Optimizer Opens Up, Sheds Beta

Who: Bryan Eisenberg

What: At webcom Montréal 2008, Bryan discusses “The Golden Rule of Interactive Marketing.”

The golden rule states that he who has the gold rules. However, today’s customers have the gold and they are clearly in control of their power that is the outcome of the transparency of choices interactive marketing offers. The voice of the consumer has never been so simple to find and so difficult to decode. Marketers are venturing into new, unfamiliar territories, juggling multi-channel strategies, allocating ad dollars among media, and trying to maximize new technologies — all at a time when consumers seem to find it easier than ever to bypass and ignore those efforts.

Today’s marketers are also being held to an unprecedented standard of accountability. The answer can’t be to A/B test everything and see what sticks. New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg will show you a how to persuade these redefined customers as they ignore marketing.

When: May 14, 2008

Where: Head Office of the ICAO | 999, University Street | Montréal (Québec)

Why: Because you want to know more about the impact of social media and emerging technologies on your marketing strategies — and you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit Montréal.

How much? Only $ 395 CDN for the day. Other discounts apply. Visit the webcom Montréal site for details.

Related Posts:

• eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, San Francisco
• Is Your Reputation Worth $15 Billion?
• Search Engine Strategies, London
• Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same
• How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization

As tax time looms in the U.S., personal finance management weighs heavy on the minds of those of us who would rather put it off until next year.

A few of my colleagues, two of whom had actually used it, recommended Mint.com. I had been to the site a few times in December when I first heard about it. Back then, I wasn’t yet thinking about signing up, but I did recall Mint.com being extremely good-looking and well-written.

Months later — and this is rarely the case for someone with my attention span — I still knew the site’s unique value proposition: Mint is a free, online personal money management tool that can access bank accounts and credit card records without compromising security. (Oh, and it can help you get better rates on a credit card, which I don’t much care about since I’ve sworn not to use them ever since getting in debt when I was in college. But I digress.)

All of that was clear from the homepage.

But what really impressed me when returning to the site was the “features” page. Right away, I saw this:

Mint does NOT store your usernames, passwords or account numbers. Mint partners with Yodlee, the leading provider of online banking services to major banks for more than 10 years, to ensure a secure connection to your personal financial information.

Mint protects your information using bank–level data security and 128 bit-encryption, verified by Verisign and HackerSafe.

Mint is TRUSTe certified to provide industry–leading privacy protection and partners with RSA to provide anti-phishing protection.

Using Mint does NOT require any personally identifying information, leaving you as anonymous as you would like to be.

Instead of diving into what I presumed would be a sales pitch on technical features — boom — they addressed my (significant) privacy concerns. Then they went into the sales pitch. Very smart.

But consider how the same copy reads with some minor text and formatting changes:

Mint does not store your account numbers, usernames or passwords. Mint partners with Yodlee, the leading provider of online banking services to major banks for more than 10 years, to ensure a secure connection to your personal financial information.

Mint protects your information using bank–level data security and 128 bit-encryption, verified by Verisign and HackerSafe.

Mint is TRUSTe certified to provide industry–leading privacy protection and partners with RSA to provide anti-phishing protection.

Using Mint does not require any personally identifying information, so you remain totally and completely anonymous.

Which version do you find more persuasive? I’d be interested to hear your comments.

In the meantime, I’m going to create a Mint.com account. If it works as well as the site looks, and if it can get me to manage my money better, I’ll be thrilled. My only real concern — the only thing I didn’t see addressed on the website — is whether the credit card companies are going to spam me with “Limited Time Introductory Rate!” emails. (Mint is, after all, an affiliate site. They’ve got to make money somehow.)

. .

This Just In: FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar returns to New York City on June 2nd.

Related Posts:

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Who: Bryan Eisenberg.

What: Join Bryan as he discusses themes from his forthcoming book, Always Be Testing.

From the eEmetics site: Companies realize how hard it is to drive more and more traffic to their websites. The rising costs of traffic places tremendous pressure on the landing page to convince visitors to take a desired action. Improving landing page conversion rates has become a key focus because even a slight improvement can dramatically boost profits. A/B or Multivariate testing has become a technical darling, but where do you begin? What exactly should you test? How do you get corporate buy-in? How do you maximize returns on testing investment? How do you go from a culture of having to “always be right” to “always be testing?”

Where: Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA

When: Monday, May 5th | 1:30 - 2:30 pm PST

Why: Because you’ve realized that knowing what to test is more than half the battle. Is this something you can do on your own, or should you hire an optimization firm? That all depends on the time and resources you’re willing to put into it. But before you dive in with both feet, it’s smart to know what’s worth testing.

How much? Prices vary. Visit the eMetics Marketing Optimization Summit website for details.

Related Posts:

• Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same
• Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer
• How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
• webcom Montréal 2008
• Google Website Optimizer Webinar: What Should I Test?

You probably didn’t notice, but Amazon just made it easier to quickly glance at the product you want and get all the information you need in order to buy.

All it took was few simple changes to the text on their product pages. By adjusting the size, color and font of the text and removing unnecessary words, they’ve cleaned up the product pages and made them easier to scan and skim.

Here’s what’s new:

• Font & Word Choice — Larger, color headline. Selective bolding. Price is larger. Less verbiage.

• Up-sell Area — Now shows product image. Cleaner headline matches product page headline.

Before…

This is how Amazon’s product descriptions used to look. As you can see, there’s not much differentiation in the text. Although there’s a lot of important stuff to read, it’s all in bold — which basically makes bolding meaningless (think “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”).

After…

Product Name, Price and Availability are things that all visitors want to see when they’re on a product page. With these changes, Amazon has further highlighted what’s essential — as they did by changing the size and color of the headlines — or cut the fat — as they did by editing out unnecessary words and turning bold into light gray. After all, should we be looking at the word “Price” or at the actual price?

Exactly.

So, how does Amazon know which changes will make their website more easy to use and therefore convert better? It’s not because they’re any smarter than you or your CMO (although we’re sure Amazon has some very smart people). It’s because they’ve built “a culture of website optimization.”

If you want to test strategically (like Amazon), we can help.

Related Posts:

• Old Navy's New (E-commerce) Tricks
• That's My Amazon Kindle, But Those Aren't My Hands
• Website Optimization vs. Redesign: The UFO Metaphor
• How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Google Website Optimizer Opens Up, Sheds Beta

In case you missed the live webinar or had technical difficulties while watching it last week, you can watch it on YouTube now.

The presentation is 63 minutes, and the sound on the YouTube version isn’t the best. If you prefer, you can watch it full-screen and with better sound via WebEx.

The webinar starts with an introduction to Website Optimizer by Google’s Tom Leung. Then I share some of what we have learned at FutureNow over the the past decade of optimizing websites, in order to show some of the most important things you should test. We then go into Q & A, but since there were additional questions that weren’t answered on the call, we will gladly answer them for you in the comments below.

As always, if you need help figuring out the specifics of what to test on your site, we can help.

Related Posts:

• Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer
• "What Should I Test?" Free Google + Future Now Webinar
• Grokcast: Google's Tom Leung on the Google Website Optimizer
• eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, San Francisco
• Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites