First, the headline made me consider why I think of myself as Hispanic but never use the term Latino to describe myself. For those of you confused by that, Spanish is my first language. I never learned English until I went to school. My parents immigrated to the US from Argentina in 1962 and my mother’s family spoke Spanish as their first language centuries before Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola, they are Sephardi jews.

Second, the image search is revealing. The way people use the terms, Hispanic & Latino, is often interchangeable. However, it’s obvious that the people using the term have different ideas about what they means. I simply never thought before about how valuable image search is in understanding the underlying terms. Marketers take note; what an interesting way to determine relevance.

Read the post, it’s short, but it might make you think too.

So what is the right term, Hispanic or Latino? If there isn’t one right term then how do you choose which one to use?

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.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s the promise Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, made to media buyers last November:

With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera] . . .

Several months later, this is the result:

Apparently, David at Broccoli & Cheese wasn’t a good target for this ad:

As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.

But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.

[…] Will someone out there besides Google please get their [expletive] together?

If MarineCFO’s Chief Financial Officer is reading this, chance are s/he’s not thrilled with Facebook.

To be clear, I don’t think MarineCFO was silly to place this ad. It’s just that, like me and perhaps even you, we’re easily seduced by the promise of demographics. We like to think it’s sufficient.

Demographics are like catnip for marketers.

They make being wrong feel so right. They always seem to have the right answer. They help us justify lazy decisions. They give us such wonderful opportunities to prejudge our audience — specifically, how they define themselves and what they want to hear, see or read — based on a few scant details. Yet by themselves, demographics can never be accountable for anything because they’re based on correlation, not causality.

Marketers, and the advertising platforms that prey on them, need to look beyond the logistics of ad placement and stop thinking of “targeting” as a one-way, two-dimensional process. Demographics are important, but without the context of psychographics [define], they’re quite often useless. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to a media buyer armed with vague demographic data, everyone looks like a target.

I wonder where and how these ads would have been placed had they planned the campaign with personas.

As first reported by Direct Magazine, the survey found that…

• 19% dislike learning an item was back-ordered or out of stock after said item was placed in a shopping cart
• 14% are frustrated by Web sites that malfunction as payment is being processed
• 8% are confounded by unclear return policies
• 6% don’t like unclear shipping information
• 6% dislike not getting an acknowledgment after an order has been placed

Adding another dimension to these numbers, Jack Loechner at MediaPost explains that:

. . . iCongo, Inc., released the results of a consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive that reveals [that] 33 percent of online U.S. adults indicated they are more likely to shop online rather than in-person at a store due to the high price of gasoline.

If there were ever a time to optimize your e-commerce website, it’s now.

What else causes friction? Read FutureNow’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey for answers.

. .

Join FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in New York City for the Call to Action seminar. Based on his bestselling book of the same title, Bryan will show you how to improve conversion and brand affinity by reducing friction for the customer. Register by this Friday and save $100!

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.

The IMC Mobile Marketing conference, in addition to offering a 20% discount to all GrokDotCom readers (click here for details), is letting us give away three free tickets to their event.

How To Enter

All you need to do is leave a question — not a comment — below that addresses a common or interesting concern about mobile marketing.

Be specific. The more detail you give, the better our chances of giving you a clear answer.

The three most interesting questions (according to Bryan and me) win. It’s that simple!

Who Should Enter

Anyone reading this who wants to learn more about mobile marketing; especially those who read GrokDotCom often but don’t comment. We’re setting one of the free tickets aside for a first-time commenter, so don’t be shy!

Why You Should Bother

Because EVERYONE’S questions will be answered. That’s right. Even if you don’t win, we will have mobile marketing experts (from the conference and others) answer your questions. Besides, your odds of winning free tickets are pretty darn good.

How You’ll Know if You’ve Won

We will email you. We’ll also announce the winners next Monday in a new post.

Good luck, and may the best questions win!

. .

Editor’s Note: Happening in the same hotel, the two days prior, June 2nd and 3rd respectively, FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting and Call to Action seminars give you even more profitable excuses to visit New York. Register by Friday, May 9th and to save up to $300.

Slashdot sums up the new tax law:

“…based on a novel definition of what constitutes a presence in the state: It includes any Web site based in the state that earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of affiliates–from big publishers to tiny blogs–that feature links to its products.”

We should all support Amazon in their fight. This could affect all of us who buy online in the future — at least in the United States. Let’s all buy something from Amazon today to show our support of their fight.

P.S. - If you need a suggestion on what to buy, you can always pre-order our next book, Always Be Testing.

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.

A week ago, my friend called me to ask, “What’s the industry average time spent on a site?” Her boss asked her to find out because she was doing a presentation to the marketing team and would be attempting to describe what was happening on their website.

My friend was looking at her analytics reports, assuming they should be reporting metrics like “time spent”, but she couldn’t give me any explanation as to why they were measuring certain things or how it all fit together. This marketing team had no idea what their analytics were trying to tell them.

Sound familiar? Whether or not we care to admit it, this problem is all too common. By themselves, the facts can be deceiving. If the facts don’t fit into a larger story line, they’re meaningless. Just because something happened, that doesn’t make it newsworthy. That’s why…

Marketers should think like news editors.

Your web analytics program works for you, not the other way around. It’s the news wire that serves your staff of reporters and, as editor-in-chief, it’s your job to decide which stories are most important.

There are two types of approaches to web analytics reporting:

• The beat reporter reliably follows the same story from day-to-day. If you tell the beat reporter to follow “time spent”, she will diligently explain where visitors spent the most time, how much time they spent overall, and how much time they spent today versus yesterday, last month, last year, and so on.

• The investigative reporter tries to find the meat of the story; to get the bottom of what truly matters. If you tell the investigative reporter to follow the “time spent” story, she’ll start to ask big picture questions. She’ll want to know why time spent matters, how it relates to your other metrics, whether “time spent” means one thing on one page and something very different on another, and whether it even matters if visitors are spending more — or less — time on your site verses the competition’s. She even wonders if this whole “time spent” thing is really a distraction. She doesn’t want to spend her time chasing false leads.

Like other default metrics, average time spent tells us nothing on its own. The company that my friend works for has over a thousand employees. Most of the staff in their home office and brick-and-mortar stores use computers every day, and many of them likely have their browser set up to go directly to the company’s homepage automatically. Each day, a large amount of their traffic probably comes from employees, not potential customers. If this is the case, the average time spent on their site tells them very little about the customer experience on their website, because employees’ time spent would skew this number. Likewise, the traffic sources would be skewed and the average page views and bounce rates from the landing page would also be skewed.

Don’t use your analytics tool just to report the facts. Become an investigative reporter. For each piece of information you find, ask yourself why it matters. Ask how the metrics tie together. Most importantly, ask yourself how the web metrics you report on tie into your overall business goals.

That’s how reporters break news.

. .

About the Author: Melissa Burdon is an investigative reporter (or Persuasion Analyst) at FutureNow. She’s also a recovering Canadian. Oh, and it’s her birthday.

Why aren’t product descriptions more helpful?

Here’s one thought: Men and women may care about different things. Product descriptions may not be speaking to both genders’ needs. In product reviews, men talk about what they care about, and women talk about what they care about. This may be one reason why reviews help increase conversion.

Here’s a real life example. I searched for reviews for gas grills. Although the reviewer’s gender isn’t always obvious, I picked two that had a good chance of being either male or female.

First, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “dickiedo” — I’m guessing that’s a man:

Pros: It is sturdy, attractive and cooks good.
Cons: I wish the control knobs were on the front of the grill.

I bought this grill at Home Depot in the morning and that afternoon I grilled the best steaks I have ever cooked using the cooking instructions provided by Weber. The next day I grilled some great tasting hamburgers. Before cooking the burgers I heated the grill and easily brushed off the residue from the steaks leaving the cooking surface clean. I really liked cooking on my Weber charcoal grills, but I am now a firm Weber gas grill fan.

Now, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “juliet166″ — I’m guessing that’s a woman:

Pros: weber quality, even cooking, portability, easy cleanup
Cons: 14oz. propane canisters, lack of warming tray, no side trays

I became a weber convert several years ago after purchasing a genesis silver c, and experiencing the exceptional cooking found in weber grills. Due to a divorce and move to a small apt without a deck, I was desperate for a grill that I could easily transport outdoors to use, but would not take up a lot of space inside my apt. Because of the dome shaped lid, it easily fits a small roast, or vertical rib stand. Clean up is easy just by letting the grill run a few minutes and then brushing with a wire brush.

I have not had any issues with the automatic ignition. I have been using my grill for 3 months now, and it always starts on the first or second push.

Here’s what’s interesting about these two reviews: They’re an example of the gender preferences Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution talks about on the iMedia Connection blog, where he insists that women purchase strategically while men purchase immediately:

Men make purchasing decisions based strongly on immediate or present needs.

Women want to know that today’s purchase will meet their immediate needs, mid-term and even their needs long-term needs. Long-term and far-term usability can even be a stronger consideration for the female purchasing persona than immediate need

Notice that in Dickiedo’s testimonial, he’s talking about purchasing the grill that morning and grilling that afternoon — great job of speaking to a guy’s immediate and present need.

In Juliet’s review, she’s commenting that even after 3 months, the grill still starts on the first or second push, meeting a longer-term durability need.

Carrabis discusses another gender difference:

Men are willing to make a purchase once it has been demonstrated that someone else was successful with the same purchase; kind of a, “that worked for Joe, so it’ll probably work for me” mentality.

Women posit things differently. It’s good to know if something worked for Sally; it’s better to know what Sally’s motivations were for her purchase. Success in itself isn’t meaningful unless the conditions leading to success are the same. (So much for women not being cut out for the sciences!) This can be thought of as, “it may have worked for Sally, but Sally bought it for reason A and I’m interested in reason B, so the same purchase might not work for me.”

Juliet shares her background motivation for purchasing the grill. She’s recently divorced and moved to a small apartment without a deck. She wanted something she could transport outdoors but wouldn’t take up a lot of room. Now a woman can compare her motivation to Juliet’s to see if it’s a good match for her situation, for her motivation.

How can manufacturers and e-commerce sites use this information to create better product descriptions that sell more products?

1. Talk about both immediate and long-term value. “Take it home this afternoon, grill steaks tonight”; “Our grills start at just the touch of a button now, and for months/years to come.”
2. Talk about different motivations for buying the product and successful uses of it. “With our even heating system, grillers of all skills can cook the perfect steak every time”; “If you live in an apartment but still want the that backyard grill experience, this is the grill for you. It’s small and portable, but with a domed lid, so it’s big enough to cook family meals like a small roast or vertical rib stand.”

One more hint. While both Dickiedo and Juliet mentioned “easy cleaning”, Juliet got very specific with what that means (”Let the grill run for a few minutes and brush with a wire brush”). This may also tie-in with women’s need for longer-term value. I know a woman who’s sworn off a famous cookware brand because their products are very sensitive and hard to clean. Remember, she’s not just thinking about cooking dinner tonight, she’s picturing how she’ll use the product for months, even years to come. Make sure you’re talking about what it’s like to use and maintain the product in the future as well as the present.

By using keywords that address the underlying motivations of both men and women, your product descriptions are sure to pick them up before the competition.

. .

About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys. If you’d like to become a customer pickup artist like Holly, join her on June 2nd for FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.

Here’s a great example of using video to sell a book online:

Riverhead Books and Penguin Books hired Lindsey Testolin to make made the words of Daniel H. Pink and the illustrations of Rob Ten Pas come to life in the shape of a film trailer — complete with gratuitous needle-dragging-on-record sound effect to suggest a sudden change of expectations. There’s a strong call to action for the book’s website and it insists at the end credits that Johnny Bunko is the best graduation gift of 2008.

Poor Johnny may not know where his career’s headed, but he sure knows how to market a book.

ERRATUM: Turns out that the publisher had nothing to do with the creation of the trailer. Hmm… No surprise there, really. Publishers, take note. This sort of content is worth your money.

1. Office Depot - 20.9%
2. QVC - 19.0%
3. Vistaprint - 18.3%
4. Roamans - 18.1%
5. Lands End - 16.2%
6. eBay - 15.7%
7. 1800flowers.com - 15.5%
8. Ebags.com - 15.3%
9. L.L. Bean - 14.6%
10. Pottery Barn Kids - 14.2%

Last month, when Snapfish and Vistaprint found their way to February’s list (at the #1 and #2 spots respectively), Bryan wondered whether they were being tracked for the first time or if they had done something specific to move the needle. Although Vistaprint has slipped to #3 on this month’s list, their conversion rate has actually gone up. Snapfish, meanwhile, has dropped off entirely.

We also noticed on February’s list that LL Bean had dropped from the 23.6% conversion rate they had in January and December to the 14.7% conversion rate they achieved in February. This month, it seems LL Bean has held, but their position has slipped thanks to a higher overall average from the other sites.

Who do you think will make it to next month’s list?

. .

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Editor’s Note: Want to know the secrets of top-converting websites? Join Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in Manhattan for FutureNow’s Call to Action seminar.

I repeat, I got an email from Facebook this morning, informing me that I had been invited to the wedding of one of my best friends.

Apparently, he and his fiancé — also a friend — are worried their close friends, all devout music geeks, might buy tickets to this concert in September (a legitimate fear in my case) and thus have an excuse (albeit a weak one) to miss the wedding (which they would understand because they’d totally be there if they weren’t, um… getting married).

Have we gone too far?

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.

Jeffrey claimed to be sticker shocked from shipping cost inflation, a common reaction while shopping online. One minute, you think you know the whole price. Then — bam — you proceed to checkout, only to find that the price has shot up as much as 25%.

Was Jeff being cheap? Probably. But it’s understandable.

The truth is that online shopping has spoiled us. When Amazon ships for free — at least it feels that way if you buy into Amazon Prime — and when Zappos wants you to return those shoes (yes, really), anything less feels like a cheap plastic substitute for the real thing.

ToysRUs.com does so many things right. The product image views are clear and show multiple angles. The customer reviews are helpful and thoroughly integrated. I could go on, but the important thing — the reason they still haven’t sold Jeffrey a Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop — is that they set a poor expectation of total cost before checkout.

Here we see Toys ‘R’ Us insisting that their price is $39.99; a price even our CEO can afford.

Sounds like a great deal!

And look at these reviews:

Wow, that’s a popular basketball hoop! You’d think he were buying an iPhone.

But when Jeffrey proceeds to checkout…

Fifteen dollars isn’t a big deal, but it’s something you’d never be asked to pay in a toy store. It’s not as though Jeff doesn’t have fifty-five dollars to spend on his nephew. [Author’s Note: Jeff has reminded me that he was shown a $22 shipping fee, making the $40 toy cost over $70 after tax. This begs the question as to why we were shown different shipping charges since neither of us was asked to enter a postal code and we visited the website from the same office.] It’s just that, like you, me, and the millions of people who shop online, we’re turned off by hidden fees.

Is it believable that it costs the company $15 to ship this product? Of course. It looks big and bulky, if not heavy. Is it reasonable to expect them to ship it for less than that? No! In fact, it’s very unreasonable. But logic has very little to do with it. This is about setting the right expectation.

People rationalize buying decisions with logic, but we make buying decisions based on feelings.

As Sitebrand’s Carolyn Gardener points out,

. . . when shipping becomes a pain point due to lousy check-out procedures, strict delivery options and exorbitant fees, the odds of cart abandonment increase.

When you consider the abandonment literally squashes someone’s intent to buy, not to mention the e-store’s ability to make money, it’s a very serious issue.

How to Avoid Shipping Shock

Jeffrey insists that he still plans on buying the basketball hoop from toysrus.com — and I’m pretty sure he will — but let’s brainstorm some ways for e-tailers to reduce the emotional impact of shipping cost shock.

• Offer multiple shipping options - Why should the retailer choose the shipping method? By giving the customer their choice of delivery options, the conversation becomes more about how soon they want it and how much the parcel service will charge them, not how much you’re going to charge them. Doing this also makes it easier to provide some level of free shipping. But good luck getting anyone who’s been spoiled by Zappos’ free overnight shipping policy to get excited because you offer complimentary snail mail. Still, as long as you show the costs for each shipping option right there in the shopping cart, you should be fine.
• Include shipping in price - Why not say “all prices include shipping” upfront on the product page? Some sites allow you to enter a postal code on the product page to estimate shipping rates. Others use new e-commerce technologies to show an estimated cost to ship to the visitor’s current location. If you don’t want to do either of those, at least tell the customer that shipping is not included in the price on the product page. This is especially true for larger items that are expensive to ship.
• Offer free shipping - A lot of established retailers may consider this to be a channel conflict. (”Why should we offer free shipping online? It would kill our profit margins.”) Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but if it’s at all a viable option, it will almost certainly lead to increased volume. Jeffrey would have gladly bought the same product on Amazon, but they told him it would take 1 - 3 months to ship. The irony, of course, is that without free shipping, it might take Jeffrey 1 - 3 months to actually buy it!

What other ways are smart e-tailers reducing shipping shock? If you have examples, please do share them in the comments.

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Want to reduce cart abandonment without sticker-shocking your CFO? We can help.

In the second and final installment of Bryan’s interview with Ralph Wilson — recorded at February’s Search Engine Strategies conference in London — the two shift their focus from personas (as discussed in Part 1) to improving landing page conversion by creating better “scent” for the visitor.

In the video, Bryan talks about a study conducted by usability guru Jared Spool that shows, among other things, that…

• When visitors found the “trigger words” — keywords that either get stuck in their heads, either consciously or subconsciously, often from advertising — on the landing page they’re sent to, they were content with what they found a whopping 72% of the time.
• When these same visitors didn’t see their trigger words on the landing pages they found, their search was only successful 6% of the time.

Despite all the heady research that analyzes how people actually search for — and find — things on the Internet, it’s so obvious that it’s almost funny: We sniff around for relevant info like animals on the hunt. We go where the scent takes us. If we find what we’re looking for, great. Game over. If not, we retreat to home base, regroup and go out on a slightly more refined path until we see it in the corner of our eye. Then we pounce.

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Want Bryan’s advice on how to make your website stink (in a good way)? Meet him at FutureNow’s Call to Action seminar on June 3rd in Manhattan.

It’s not that we don’t like Flash. When used purposefully, Flash has the potential to dramatize a product or service’s benefits in ways that static pictures and text can’t quite match.

The micro-site for the Sigma DP-1 camera (choose language preference to start) is a good example of Flash done right.

Notice how the choreographed presentation of text and pictures dramatizes the benefit of having a DSLR image sensor in a compact camera body. And notice how the site’s designers capture your attention from the beginning of the presentation and lead you to a place where you can then interact with the camera’s features.

Sigma’s Flash presentation creates persuasive momentum, then leverages it by bringing viewers to an interactive website where they can drill down into specifics.

For an example of Flash used within a website — rather than as an introduction to a website — I recommend taking a look at this page from the Leo Diamond website. No, it’s not the prettiest site out there, but the Flash tools provide visitors with a better feel for diamond carrot size and color than either text or static pictures could. And it works.

Flash can be an effective tool when used intelligently and sparingly. But before you decide on using it, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What will this allow me to convey that text and static images wouldn’t?

2. Am I actually conveying benefits or just adding sparkle and glitz?

3. Is there a way to make this more interactive and not just a push-presentation?

4. If I can’t make it interactive, what can I do to hook the viewer right from the start, so they don’t skip the presentation? (You ARE going to provide a “skip” option, right?)

5. What pathways am I providing to the flash viewer when they are done with the interactive tool or presentation?

6. Are there clear links and pathways forward that will lead to conversion?

7. Will the static content allow visitors to drill down into the topics most important to them?

8. Does it address the visitor’s true concerns?

9. Will you capitalize on the persuasive momentum from the Flash presentation?

10. Do your calls to action continue to build on that momentum?

If you can answer those questions, it might be smart to use Flash sparingly.

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About the Author: Jeff Sexton is a Persuasion Architect, and on June 2nd, he’ll be taking the day off from helping clients fuse style and substance to teach FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.

Quick question for anyone with a lead-generation or e-commerce site…

Which is easier: Getting people to trust your website and complete its web form or checkout process, or getting them to literally donate their hearts and eyeballs?

Take your time.

Apparently, the answer depends on where they live. While 99.98% of Austrians agree to donate their organs upon death, only 12% of Germans do the same. Virtually all French citizens will donate a kidney to save a life, but the Brits? Only 17% of them seem willing. Meanwhile, your chances of having a heart (transplant) are nearly four times better if you’re having a triple bock in Antwerp than they are if you’ve already had a triple bypass in Amsterdam.

Seems odd, doesn’t it? Take a look at this graph from a recent Freakonomics article:

Here’s how Dan Ariely — Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions — explains this bit of research (from colleagues Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein) in the Freakonomics post mentioned above:

…It turns out that it is the design of the form at the D.M.V. In countries where the form is set as “opt-in” (check this box if you want to participate in the organ donation program) people do not check the box and as a consequence they do not become a part of the program. In countries where the form is set as “opt-out” (check this box if you don’t want to participate in the organ donation program) people also do not check the box and are automatically enrolled in the program. In both cases large proportions of people simply adopt the default option.

You might think that people do this because they don’t care — that the decision about donating their organs is so trivial that they can’t be bothered to lift up the pencil and check the box. But in fact the opposite is true.

This is a hard emotional decision about what will happen to our bodies after we die and what effect it will have on those close to us. It is because of the difficulty and the emotionality of these decisions that they just don’t know what to do, so they adopt the default option (by the way this also happens to physicians making medical decisions, and also to people making investment and retirement decisions).

[…] The moment you realize that your intuition about your own behavior might be wrong it is clear that you need another, more objective input.

This is what experiments are all about. We could have never intuited the opt-in, opt-out effect, nor could we have intuited the magnitude of this effect, and this is why empiricism is so important.

If you know anyone who’s skeptical about testing content from the visitor’s perspective, please take a moment to share this with them.

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[Image credit: Kistyn E]

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.

Bazaarvoice* recently started tracking their networks total “reviews served” and placed a counter on their homepage. If you’ve ever wanted to know how quickly the market’s demand for social commerce reviews is growing, this pretty much says it all.

Just yesterday, their CEO and founder, Brett Hurt, emailed to let me know that they had passed the 10-billionth-review milestone. And amazingly, since I grabbed the image you see here from their homepage about 30 minutes ago, Bazaarvoice has syndicated another five million reviews.

Is there still any doubt that customers want product reviews?

If you want to learn how to harness the word of mouth (that’s already out there) to boost sales and conversion on your e-commerce or brand website, I hope you’ll join me at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, May 28-30 in Austin, Texas.

. .

*Disclosure: Bryan Eisenberg is an advisor to Bazaarvoice.

I had a chance to sit down with Cathy von Birgelen to talk about what’s on the mind of Pennsylvania business owners, and what they want to know about improving their websites and other online marketing efforts. You probably have a lot of the same questions and I think I may have some answers for you.

You can either download the interview (by right-clicking here) or just listen to it streaming below:

Click here for Holly’s interview

Hot Topics

Need to bookmark this for the next time you’ve got a few minutes? No problem. I’ll be going into more detail in the actual presentation, but…

Here’s what’s covered in the interview:

• How to start a meaningful relationship with Customers. (Hint: don’t ask them to marry you on the first date.)

• The four buying modes — Spontaneous, Competitive, Humanistic and Methodical — and how to increase conversion based on understanding what information each type wants and how they want that information presented. (There’s no such thing as an average customer.)

• How to use personas to create persuasive messages that speak to people in their language about what they care about. (Because it can’t always be about you.)

• The real purpose of your homepage and how to reduce those nasty battles over that prime real estate. (I know, I’ve seen the scars and bruises.)

• Common conversion mistakes and how to make simple changes that can have a big impact on your bottom line. (Seriously, you’ll be smacking your head and going, “duh” — here’s how Amazon does it.)

• Content for search engines vs. content for customers (Who said you had to choose?)

• What analytics to focus on that can actually tell you something about your site and where it’s most broken. (Hey, if you want to go ahead and read those 20 page analytics reports,knock yourself out. But if you want to know 5 specific metrics to look at, let’s talk.)

. .

About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys; and co-instructor of FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, June 2nd in Manhattan.

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.

I guarantee you a lot of CMO’s (and a whole lot of other people) tuned in to watch this frank round table discussion.

What industry is your website targeting? Are you a sales training company targeting sales managers? Why not get together a group of 3-4 sales managers and ask them to talk about their biggest challenges with employee training?

Are you a website development company targeting small business owners? Why not gather a group of small business owners and record a session where they talk about their experiences — good and bad — with trying to put up a website that increases business?

These would have to be candid, honest discussions about real issues people are facing. There’s no sales pitch for your company allowed in these videos. It’s simply your way to facilitate an honest discussion about the issues and challenges within your industry.

Consider of the power video. When a prospective customers comes to your site to watch this video, they gain knowledge and insight from watching peers discuss issues that are important to them.

THEN you can create copy and links, so that after they watch the video, you can show how your service addresses their issues, solves their problems, and overcomes their challenges.

It’s called building rapport. You’re letting your prospective customers know: “We understand you. We care about the same issues you do. We’re in touch with people like you, and if we’re listening to their concerns, needs, and desires, we’ll listen to yours, too.”

It’s about showing, not telling. Instead of saying, “We’re an industry leader, well versed in the problems that sales managers face every day,” SHOW them. It will be way more effective.

. .

About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys; and co-instructor of FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, June 2nd in Manhattan.

Although I read Darren’s blog, I actually found out about it after receiving a link from his colleague, Chris Garrett, thanking me for commenting on his blog over the past year.

It’s no secret that Chris and Darren are smart guys. They knows how to get comments, trackbacks, RSS subscribers, ad revenue… all the stuff bloggers claim to want. In fact, they’ve even co-authored a new book, Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. I haven’t yet read their book, but after following their blogs for a combined three years, I can tell you that their biggest secrets are (*spoiler alert*) that they actually enjoy what they do and they know how to engage and give energy back to their readers.

They also know how to ask for things without being tacky. At one point last year, Chris had an author’s note at the bottom of each post that read, “If you found this post useful, buy me a coffee!” (with “buy me a coffee” linked to his PayPal account). Brilliant.

It must have been a good post. I payed real dollars to buy him a virtual double latte.

So, in the spirit of this imaginary international holiday, here’s GrokDotCom’s short list of bloggers who, for various reasons, we appreciate:

• Linda Bustos & Jason Billingsley
• Mary Schmidt
• Matt McGee
• Andy Beal
• Brian Clark
• Baratunde
• Matt Pace + crew
  
• B.L. Ochman
• Aaron Chronister
• Dave Young
• Rand Fishkin
• Alex Harris
• Joanna Wiebe
• Roger Dooley
• Marshall Sponder
• Linas Simonis
• Avinash Kaushik
• Fred Reichheld
• Andrew Goodman
• Paul Williams
• Gord Hotchkiss
• Joshua Porter
• Adele Revella
• Jim Novo
• Ayat
• Edward Tufte
• Amanda Watlington
• Mal Watlington
• Garr Reynolds
• Tom Limongello
• Olivier Favre
• Jennifer Laycock
• David Armano
• Richard, Marshall, Sarah, Josh & Alex
• Bob Walsh + comrades
• Julien Hervouet & Florent Gosselin
• Peter Kim
• Andy Sernovitz
• Stoney deGeyter
• Jimmy B.
• Tim Huijbers
• Chuck McKay
• Steve Clark
• Kim Krause Berg
• Josh Bernoff & Charlene Li
• John Jantsch
• John Moore