What I love most about this list is the way it segregates into sub-components or elaborations on Future Now’s  three questions that are the basis of Persuasion Architecture:

1) Who is coming to the site?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

3) What action do we want them to take, and how do we ensure this matches up with what they are trying to accomplish?  In other words, what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

Separating out Seth’s List

Here’s how I see Seth’s list falling into those categories:

1) Who is coming to the site?

• Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
• Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
• What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
• Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

• “If it’s the boss [that we are trying to please], what does she want?”
• “Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?

3) What action do we want them to take…what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

• What is the goal of the site?
• In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
• Are we trying to close sales?
• Are we telling a story?
• Are we earning permission to follow up?
• Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
• Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
• Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
• Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
• Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
• Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
• Do we want people to call us?
• How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?

Operational [and larger] Questions

Yet, while Seth’s persuasive questions are covered within these three categories, there’s a pile of operational questions left over:

• How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
• Who needs to update this site? How often?
• How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
• How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

In other words, what will this cost us? A question that opens the door for much larger debate of, do we really need to incur this cost in the first place?  What makes us think we need a redesign?

And that gets us to the question that our own Jeffrey Eisenberg tackled within his free report 7 Big Questions of Highly Effective Online Marketing. For starters he suggests that people interested in redoing their site should ask the big questions first:

• Do we need a redesign, or can we work with what we have?
• Exactly how would a redesigned site better serve our visitors?
• If the best-converting sites are often boring in their design, are we willing to design our site with that in mind?  [in other words, do we have the intellectual integrity to separate out an notional "want" for a prettier/slicker website from a real business need]
• Will we incorporate a scientific testing methodology into our redesign so we can optimize user interactions based on predictions of how our different audience segments will engage with the site? [in other words, are we really serious about redesigning to improve performance?  Serious enough to bake accountability into the very fabric of the redesigned site?]

And if you’re not sure if you need a redesign, perhaps it’s best to take a cold hard look at your current Website in order to:

• Isolate what isn’t working and what is
• Determine whether you need to re-conceive your site because too many elements bog down the original design

On Target as a Precursor and Follow-up to a Website Redo

While Future Now has been involved in hundreds of successful Website redesigns and renovations, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg clearly saw that there were far more sites out there in need of optimization and improvement than full scale redesigns.

And far more Website owners who couldn’t answer the majority of the questions posed in Seth’s post and Jeffrey’s report.

That’s how OnTarget was born.

OnTarget allows Website owners to gain insight into what is and isn’t working with their current site, and provides them with prioritized recommendations to optimize the site, fix the leaks, etc. Think of it as an incremental redesign based on measurable results.

With OnTarget it is only when major persuasive and usability obstacles can’t be surmounted without major retooling, re-skinning, etc. that a site redesign is contemplated.  And in those cases, the business owners are able to answer those critical questions posed by Seth and Jeffrey.

This often means walking away from big redesign projects.  But it always means providing the client with the wisest and best use of his online resources.

[Editors Note:  The author of this article is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

1. ProFlowers 24.0
2. Vitacost 23.3
3. 1800Flowers 19.5
4. Roamans19.2
5. Office Depot 18.5
6. Blair 17.3
7. QVC 17.0
8. Victoria’s Secret 16.8
9. DrsFosterSmith.com 16.4
10. Amazon 16.4

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

Increasing your conversion rate requires you to follow a continuous improvement program? If you need help improving your results let us know.

1. ProFlowers 38.6
2. Office Depot 28.0
3. Online Retail Total 25.6
4. Vitacost.com 25.0
5. Quixtar 23.4
6. ;Blair 23.4
7. Roamans22.6
8. 1800Flowers 20.5
9. Woman Within19.6
10. Spiegel 18.20

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

When you break that sentence down, you start to understand how to optimize your conversion rate.

Step 1 – Let’s understand “number of people“

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before?

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do some of those people come from organic search? paid search? emails? affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? Yahoo!? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occuring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of fireworks; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers: etc.?) all of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should.

Step 2 – Let’s understand “the action you want them to take”:

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus, just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actually click on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s visit.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “total number of potential people who could have taken that action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who did not convert? Why didn’t they convert?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions for today, but they aren’t ready to buy now? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

You need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes even if it would be the most impactful. That’s may sound like just common sense, but it catches many companiyes like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, ad copy, and even your customers’ needs change. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

Those of you who have been reading our blog and books for a while might recognize these steps as the fundamental steps of Persuasion Architecture®.

1. Who do we want to take action? This is the “number of people” from step 1.

2. What action do we want them to take? This is “the action you want them to take” from step 2. Have you defined all of these clearly? Are you measuring them properly?

3. What do they need in order to take that action? This is where we analyze what content/effort went into understanding why the “total number of potential people who could have taken that action” didn’t. This is where experience helps a ton.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

1. ProFlowers 42.8
2. Vitacost.com 28.9
3. Office Depot 25.0
4. MetroStyle 24.5
5. Woman Within 23.0
6. Schwan’s 21.1
7. CDW 20.8
8. 1800Flowers 20.8
9. Landsend 18.8
10. Drs FosterSmith 18.30

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index:

1. Schwan’s 50.5
2. FTD 27.2
3. ProFlowers 24.3
4. Vitacost.com 23.7
5. Woman Within 22.7
6. Roaman’s 21.1
7. ColdWater Creek 20.0
8. Eddie Bauer 19.3
9. Blair.com 20.20
10. QVC 17.30

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Additional March Retail Benchmarks:

The online retail sector in general registered an encouraging increase in ecommerce activities in March 2009 compared to February 2009 (month over month) but down compared to March 2008 (year over year).

“Consumers who shopped online in March purchased nearly 12.0 percent more items compared to the previous month, while the average dollar value increased by more than 4.0 percent, suggesting that not only were consumers buying more items online, they were actually spending more money on average than they had just the month before.

Unsurprisingly, year-over-year retail metrics for March remain down across the board compared to March 2008. The average number of items per order, average order value and shopping cart conversion all fell significantly—8.1 percent, 6.3 percent and 3.4 percent respectively—compared to March 2008.“

Page Views Per Session 11.39
Average Time on Site (in seconds) 476.13
Average Items/Order 5.82
Average Order Value $143.93
Shopping Cart Conversion Rate 34.52%
Shopping Cart Abandonment 65.48%

* Source: Coremetrics LIVEmark Benchmarks US (PDF) – UK benchmarks PDF available.

Coremetrics LIVEmark leverages aggregate performance data across more than 300 participating brands to deliver over 35 benchmark metrics addressing performance indicators such as campaign and channel effectiveness, site stickiness and conversion rates.

Many people have commented in past posts about ProFlower.com’s incredible conversion rates. You’ll often see them with a conversion rate over 30%. However, most people won’t dedicate the necessary resources they need to achieve such success. Over at EM&C, they cover what’s behind Proflowers.com’s incredible conversion rate by looking at their email marketing.

Here are a 7 things you can do to improve your email marketing performance:

1. Delete your entire email list! You might not need to be as drastic as this however, list hygiene is important for ensuring email deliverability.

2. Segment your email list. Don’t treat everyone like they are the same.

3. Follow the email marketing secrets of other top converting websites (lots of tips here). Your write as you read. Subscribe to as many of the top converting website newsletters and review them regularly.

4. Rework your content to maximize the dynamics behind gr8 web 2.0 copywriting. People have changed their preferences on how they consume content online – have you revised the way your email marketing is written? Be innovative and relevant. Leverage the voice of your customer as well. Are you leveraging social media as well?

5. Improve your landing pages – test, test and optimize again. You don’t want your email marketing to suck. You need to always be testing.

6. Don’t send emails in the dark. Make sure your emails are being tracked by web analytics all the way through the conversion funnel and that you are making improvements and optimizing along the way.

7. Review all your auto-generated emails like your thank you for your order, subscriber or lead confirmation, autoresponders, etc. Make sure the dates are correct, unsubscribe links work (you don’t want to end up like this company), review what is being said, etc. Make sure to plan for more intelligent, dynamically generated emails based on visitor activity.

P.S. It never hurts to have an outside perspective to review your email marketing for you.

Join me and ClickZ’s Executive Editor Anna Maria Virzi on Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 1:00 PM EST/10:00 AM PST.

Please register early.

Have you ever received great advice from a consultant but couldn’t implement it?

A recommendation is just advice, no matter how excellent, until you implement.

It’s only when you implement a recommendation that you reap the rewards.

Even when you know the advice is great you can get consulting indigestion.

You, the client, in consuming the advice can be the log jam or the hero of every consulting engagement. It’s rarely the consultant that makes the difference. If you choke or get indigestion then consulting leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Just-In-Time Optimization

We have always tried hard to screen for toxic clients with unrealistic expectations. Our NPS scores are excellent and our client successes speak for themselves.  Nevertheless, the most common lament among our clients isn’t about us it’s about them. They simply don’t have extra resources or time to implement everything we recommend.

We could ask our customers to change or we could change.

We chose to change!

Instead of providing you with a gut busting all-you-can-eat buffet we’ll provide you only the healthiest tastiest morsels of advice that you can actually consume and we’ll do it for much less money.

Think of it as just-in-time optimization. You tell us how much time and resources you can devote and we’ll prioritize our recommendations based on how much impact it will have towards reaching your goal.

You get analysis and recommendations without the considerable expense of having to hire an analyst.

We’re Not Crazy

Well at least we’re not dangerous, except to your competitors.

OnTarget, our new software-as-service model allows us to automate a great deal of otherwise costly consulting tasks that don’t provide as much value to you.

With OnTarget you get:

1. Our expert analysis of your online lead generation and sales efforts;
2. The best recommendations you can actually implement with an estimate of time & resources required;
3. Pricing based on your ability to implement (starts as low as $1,000 a month) so that you achieve the highest return on investment of your time, money & resources.

We are launching the OnTarget program this week. We will be busy revising our website all week but you can preview the OnTarget service description.

If you want to know more or want to inquire about our reseller program please contact us.

2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure if you are we-we-ing all over yourself.

3. BT Buckets – Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

4. 4Q from IPerceptions – developed with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

5. What’s the Buzz? – a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

6. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker – scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

7. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool – discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.

8. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 – can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

9. Website Grader – provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

10. Spider Simulator – help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

11. Spider Test – Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.

12. Google Analytics – web analytics with new “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

13. Google Website Optimizer – Free A/B and Multivariate Testing

14. Yahoo! Analytics – still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

15. Microsoft adCenter Analytics – by invitation only, but you can apply at the link provided.

16. Piwik – This is an open source web analytics solution.

17. Linkscape – allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

18. BacklinkAnalysis – Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

19. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

20. Firebug – this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

21. YSlow for Firebug – YSlow will analyze your page to make suggestions for how you can speed up the page. YSlow is integrated with Firebug.

22. Google Webmaster Tools – see which phrases your ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

23. Morgue File – offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

24. OpenAds – for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

25. Sitescore – analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

26. mon.itor.us – use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

27. Orangoo Spell Check – spell check your website.

28. The Scrutinizer – offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

29. Product Indexation Check – use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

30. Kamplye – allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage.

31. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine – create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

32. Feng-GUI – generates heatmaps for your website (upload a screenshot) by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of viewing your website.

33. Scrutinizer browser – a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

What are some of your favorite free tools to make websites better?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

What can you say when the owner of a company that had a 4.12% conversion rate improves it by 17% to 4.82%  in less than a quarter and says “we’re sort of disappointed“?

Even when clients can’t commit very much budget or resources to execute our optimization recommendations they may still have very high expectations.

Has FutureNow became a victim of of our own success? Our process has made FutureNow very successful; we have many third-party documented case studies where our clients achieved extraordinary results.

Bryan and I spent part of the weekend discussing this. Bryan wanted to republish a ClickZ column “The 5 Percent Solution” but I wanted to address this issue more directly than we did in “How To Get Buy-in For Conversion Rate Optimization“. We never addressed the real issue: commitment.

What Are Realistic Expectations For Conversion Rate Optimization?

Sales people will dance around this issue but I won’t. It depends on you!

I have never seen a website where with the right amount of time, energy and resources you couldn’t get at least a 30% improvement in conversion, but 10% is a slam dunk even without our advice.

Time, energy and resources!?!

If you are willing to commit yourself, with or without expert advice, you can consistently improve your conversion rates. We hear virtually every day about people who read one of our books and publications and went on to make huge improvements to their business. They make us as happy as client successes do.

Nevertheless, if you are focused only on 100% improvements or better it’s hard to celebrate a 10% gain. How sad.

You need to walk before you can crawl. For every huge success we have there are dozens of other happy stories. That’s why I asked Bryan to give me a list of successes he collected recently from our analysts.

I want to celebrate these successes:

• Increased client’s overall website conversion rate 10.5%, resulting in $250,000 additional revenue annually.
• Optimized a checkout page to increase conversion rate by 6.25%, leading to $150,000 additional revenue annually.
• Increased overall conversion by 27.5% with an A/B test on the product page.
• Doubled the number of sales with a Shop with Confidence assurance test.
• Achieved an 8% lift in sales from redesigned product page.
• Increased overall conversion rate by 51.49% over a 3 month program.
• Redesigned homepage and category pages to increase overall sales by 6%.
• Helped client realize a 108% increase in sign-ups for an e-course.
• Making one change to the flow of a client’s checkout process increased shopping cart conversion by 6.5% leading to an estimated increase of $55,000 monthly revenue.
• As a by-product of our conversion recommendations increased organic traffic visits by 19.91%.
• Improved conversion on a client site by 24% simply by changing product page layout.
• Increased a client’s funnel conversion rate by 24.40%.
• Increased visitor registrations by 12.5% by recommending changes to landing pages and the flow of the sign-up form.
• Increased overall website sales conversion rate from 3% to 7%, that is 133%, over a quarter long engagement for an online jewelry retailer.

Every one of these stories is worth celebrating. I praise our clients for the hard work they’ve done. I want to praise them for their commitment. I want to encourage them and you to continue improving your website and campaigns.

Stop Wishing and Start Doing!

If you get a 10% improvement and add 10% to that and then 10% on top of that you’re well on your way to 100%. Make up your mind and get started. Devote the right amount of time, energy and resources. You’ll learn a lot on the journey and the destination is so worth it.

I hope that helps.

Bryan and I want to make sure that you not only survive but thrive. FutureNow has lots of testimonials but one from Matt Coffin hasn’t been published in years and is appropriate to share. We trained Lower My Bills to optimize by increasing conversion rates during those dark days and we want to think that as least in small part it’s why they flourished.

In 2002 FutureNow asked Matt Coffin, then CEO of LowerMyBills.com about a training we conducted in 2001:

Q: Was the Introduction to Conversion Rate Marketing course worthwhile?
A: Absolutely

Q: What was good about it?
A:  Actionable, logical, boost to morale – everyone excited about increasing conversion rate.  Presentation and recommendations based on experience – “which most consultants don’t have enough of”

You are always welcome to avail yourselves of our regular services by filling out any of our contact forms or calling us. However, if you need special attention then please contact me directly to discuss what we can do now to help you improve your results. You can reach me directly at 877-643-7244 ext 3307 or email jeff (at) futurenowinc.com.

* To learn more about the photo read What I Learned from the Dot Bomb Revolution.

We define Home Runs as triple-digit increases in conversion rate.  When we help our clients hit home runs, we ring the bell and celebrate.

But one of the dangers of early testing efforts is the problem that some baseball players have: “swinging for the fences.”  (Apologies for the baseball references, but it’s getting to be that time of year.)  What if your test, or series of tests, doesn’t appear to raise conversion rate?  Do you dismiss the tests as failures because they’re not home runs?

Of course not!

Worst case scenario is that you’ve learned something about executing meaningful tests, and about what does or doesn’t resonate with your customers.  But more often than not, you are affecting your website in more subtle ways.  Remember that conversion rate is often a blended, averaged, blunt instrument.  Especially when it’s averaged across large volumes of organic search traffic, SEM traffic, email house list traffic, different product lines, etc.

Here are some things you can monitor when your tests aren’t having huge impacts on your overall conversion rate:

1. Micro-conversion rates – If you’re testing product detail page layouts and “Add to Cart” buttons, check if those test variables are having an effect on the micro-conversion rate of adding products to the cart.
2. Funnel conversion rates – If  you’re testing lots of minor copy changes to your shopping cart, check for changes in your funnel conversion rate.
3. Bounce rates – If you’re testing images, copy, or other changes designed to build up the credibility of your site, watch for changes in bounce rates.

These types of incremental improvements are tests results to get excited about!  If your micro-conversion rate increases, and your funnel conversion rate stays the same, that’s still more money in your bank account.  If you reduce the bounce rate, you’ve gained the chance to convert that customer later, instead of your competitor.

So don’t dismiss the base hits because you’re disappointed about not hitting a home run (this time.)  Take it from a patient analyst who’s favorite baseball player was famous for lots of base hits and not all that many home runs

1. It’s in a contrasting color (I know on our last conversation red was discussed and is used here, but if your site’s overall color-scheme is red it will not be effective at catching your customer’s attention).

2. It’s located in a place that the customer is already looking. By placing the error message where your customers last click was, there is a great chance that it will get noticed if everything else remains the same.

3. It’s outlined. By boxing-in the error message it acts as a magnifying glass, drawing attention further to the message.

4. It calls for an action. Nothing is worse than an error message that says “error” with no instruction on how to remedy the problem. You want the customer to continue on through your site, make this error moment as easy to pass as possible.

Remember: It doesn’t matter how explicit, creative or beautifully written your message is.  If no one is reading it, it might as well not exist.

Ever get frustrated that they didn’t utilize the wish list tool? Your online shoppers may be falling into the “add and abandon” method of online shopping.

There are 3 core reasons people don’t utilize your wish list.

1.    Sites often require you to fill out loads of personal information prior to even creating the list.

Recently on shopbop.com I found an amazing pair of shoes, and rather than behaving in my traditional add and abandon method, I chose to create a wish list. Upon entering the link, I was overwhelmed by the personal information that I had to fill out.  An array of blank fields loomed in front of me, awaiting for me divulge all the information that categorizes me as an individual in the online realm.

Gathering information from your customer is great, but make sure they see the mutual value in entering their personal information. Rather than overwhelming you customer with questions simply allow them to create a list, in the same format as the “add to cart” list.

After they add their items ask them if they’d like to save their wish list by registering to save it for another visit. During this stage it is ok to ask for your customers information or create a login with password, but not before. With a call to action such as “register” or “join” there is an implied sense that personal information will be required. It prepares your customer for what is coming.

The call to action of “create a wish list” does not imply the same expectations and when presented with a page such as this, it can appear that you’ve presented something they didn’t ask for.

2.    There’s no add to cart option

Another feature of the wish list that is frustrating is that seldom is there an offer to transfer your wish list directly to your shopping cart. Some sites will offer an link from the item in the wish list that goes back to the product page where the item can then be added to their cart, but a one click process that can transfer either a few or all of the items from the wish list to the cart will help get your customer to the checkout sooner.

In other words, wish lists can act as a dead-end if you don’t create an opportunity for them to purchase. Allowing them to take action from this page is a win-win, they get an easier checkout process and you get them to spend money. Boom!

3.    You don’t get a running total

Wish lists often appear as a list of the products. Some offer pictures of the products but seldom do they include all the tax and shipping costs that might be associated with the order. Often people want a running total of their desired purchases, especially if they are operating within a budget.

Wish lists are a great tool for both you and your shoppers; just make sure yours is easy to use and appealing.

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.

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.

. .

[Image credit: Kistyn E]

Why would Crutchfield go against the norm?

While there’s a good amount of info on this product page, are they sure that visitors are more likely to purchase when the call to action sits to the left of the product? Have they at least tested determine, without a doubt, which side yields a better conversion rate and higher average order value?

I want to believe there’s some rhyme or reason to Crutchfield’s logic. Still, I wonder if they really know which sells best.

[Read John's follow-up on how to test this feature: "Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You"]

So, let’s take a look at some of the changes to their product pages and shopping cart to get a better sense of what they’ve done a good job of so far, and share a few ideas for other changes worth testing…

Better Image Views on Product Pages

As you can see, the site allows you to easily zoom into the product you’re looking at by using your mouse as a virtual magnifying glass. This saves the visitor time by not requiring them to open a pop-up window to view the product in detail — although they provide that option as well, it’s not as helpful as this excellent zoom view. By not forcing the customer into an extra step, the zoom feature will likely reduce Bounce Rate. But more importantly, better product views make people more likely to buy.

Easy Size Adjustments + Cart View

When you add items to the cart, you’re not taken directly to the cart and away from the shopping process. Instead, they acknowledge that your items are in the cart with this mini-cart drop-down on the upper-right side of the screen. After you’ve added the item, the mini-cart retreats to a simple checkout summary (# of items in cart and total price). Of course, you still have the option to go to checkout if you’re done shopping, but they’re not in a rush — in fact, they’d like it if you bought more stuff — which should help increase Average Order Value.

Adjust Your Order Without Leaving the Cart

Once again, OldNavy.com is looking out for the customer — right in the shopping cart, this time. They make editing item details as easy as I’ve seen it on any e-commerce site. One click of the “edit” button brings up this slick tool (pictured above), which allows you to change the size and color of your items in case you have a last-minute change of heart. Now that’s a smart way to lower cart abandonment. (Here are a few more.)

Ideas Worth Testing…

• I’m not sure why they’re advertising “free returns on all womens plus styles” when all the items in my cart are menswear; nor does it make sense that they let me know they have the product “Up to XXXL” when I’ve already chosen “Large” as my size; but those are minor details that shouldn’t have much effect on the shopping process. Still, this is prime real estate they’re wasting by delivering me a message that’s meant for someone else. The OldNavy.com team should consider tailoring these messages based on what customers have already added to cart, and testing whether it improves conversion and/or average order value.

• When planning an e-commerce site, ask yourself at least this one question: “What do I hate about shopping online?” I’d be interested to hear your response in the comments section, but in the meantime, I’m sure that if I were to poll everyone at Future Now, most of us would answer, “When sites make me ‘register’ before checking out.” They should test getting rid of that immediately. If you want to a customer’s permission to be contacted when they’re not currently trying to give you money, the least you could do is ask them instead of forcing the issue. If you do ask — and you most definitely should — please do everyone (your customers and your CFO) a favor and only ask people to ‘register’ after you’ve got both their money. You’ll have their email address by then, anyway, so it’s not as big of a deal at that point.

[Editor's Note: Want more tips on how to optimize your e-commerce site? Read our free white paper on website optimization. Need specific ideas for your checkout process? We can help.]

Copyblogger’s Brian Clark concludes, “Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response.”

Sure, but there’s more to this story than just telling people to “click here” all the time. Absolutely. Keep in mind, though, that just because “Click to continue” won this time, in this particular context, doesn’t necessarily mean using “Click [whatever]” works best in all cases. Clark’s point about using “the exact action you want them to perform” serves as a solid guideline — and a strong place to start when deciding which verbiage to test.

Here’s what Jared Spool, CEO and Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), has to say about links:

UIE research showed that when a link and its associated text comprised seven to twelve words, people could successfully follow the links 50 to 60% of the time, with the optimal length being 9 to 10 words. Jared quipped, “One of the things you do in a usability test is you try to use your psychic powers to get people to do things.”

However, he said, “It’s not just the size of the link.” Links should include trigger words or “they’ll fail. …You have to be careful what words you choose. A one-word link is fine if you know it’s a trigger word.”

Whereas “click here” can work as a call to action — or anchor link, as it’s often used — these one-trigger-word links Spool’s referring to are called Points of Resolution (define), and the greater context has a lot to do with how effective they are. The context is what we call “scent,” and it’s up to you to provide your visitors with a scent trail worth following. As Spool explains, “when they are on the right track to finding their content—they follow the scent of information.”

As an aside, AdvertisingLab hints at one of our favorite factoids: Adobe ranks #1 for the term “click here“. (It is hard to resist even though you know the answer, isn’t it?)

Oh, and here’s a link to the Marketing Sherpa study, if you’re interested. (Just mind the persuasion gap with that extra free trial sign-up step they don’t warn you about if you’re not already a member.)

If the links on your website suffer from bad scent, don’t wait around as would-be customers politely excuse themselves. Test the verbiage, and see what converts best. We can help.

[P.S. -- Tim, does this answer your question?]

Location: Anywhere. Don’t ya just love webinars?

About: Elastic Path Software presents “7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate.”

Your ecommerce bucket is about to be filled with tons of eager holiday shoppers, ready and willing to buy. Plugging your conversion rate leaks now will maximize your holiday success. We will show you 7 simple ways to lift your conversion rate that do not require a ton of effort to implement, yet deliver big results. Register to attend and find out how to make your holiday sales sing a merry tune.

Future Now Persuasion Analyst Melissa Burdon and Elastic Path Software VP of Innovation Jason Billingsley will be your panelists. As always, bring your questions and our experts will address them during the live Q&A session.

For More Info: Visit Elastic Path’s Get Elastic blog or register for free today.

The study, Digital Window Shopping: The Long Delay Before Buying, was conducted by Bay Area security certification firm ScanAlert and comprised of 480 tests by some 470 organizations–small, medium, and enterprise, B2B, B2C, retailers, non-profits, content publishers, manufacturers, ecommerce pure plays, you name it. As it turns out:

[...] Slightly over one-third (37%) of shoppers took more than 12 hours to make a buy decision. Twenty-six percent took more than three days, with almost five (18%) of these “cautious shoppers” taking one week to decide where to buy.

ScanAlert, whose “Hacker Safe” badge can be seen at trusted internet retailers everywhere, first conducted this study with the same methodology back in 2005. This time around, they were able to open it up to some bigger players, making the data even more compelling. People taking three days to buy jumped 23%, one-week shoppers went up 28%, and customers taking 2 weeks to buy increased 50% over 2005.

Digital Window Shopping suggests that, “Clearly, consumers do a great deal of [comparison] shopping ‘research’ before selecting a retailer.”

After hearing of the study, I called Nigel Ravenhill, ScanAlert’s Director of Marketing Communications. Nigel explained that, as intriguing as this study’s findings are on face value, it’s inspired them see if anything changes according to industry.

So, stay tuned. They’re doing a follow-up analysis on this one, and we’ll have Nigel over for a podcast in the coming weeks to discuss the findings.

There was a big red button with copy that said ‘press when ready to order.’ Although I’d never been to a Sonic before in my life, I’ve been to a drive-through before, and the copy on this menu board clearly told me what action to take. I placed my order as my mouth began to water.

The order was in, but I had no idea what to do next. I sat in my car for a short while, wondering if someone was going to come out and bring me my order, but it seemed to take awhile. I looked around on the board next to me but nothing explained what to expect after placing my order. I thought that perhaps I was expected to go to a drive-through at this point, or maybe I was expected to go inside.

I decided to press the big red button again and ask what they wanted me to do, and was explained that someone would be out shortly with my order.

If this scenario had happened online, I probably would’ve bailed out of the checkout process. People just don’t spend a significant amount of effort and time trying to figure out what your sales process! If the customer has questions that aren’t being answered once they’ve entered the checkout process, they’re likely to just drop out and go somewhere else.

Check your analytics. Take a look at how many people are entering your checkout process and dropping off before converting. And ask yourself: Why would you be willing to give your customers’ dollars to your competitors?

I recently wrote about hitting the landing page optimization wall. I discussed the problems of trying to optimize traditional landing pages. It appears I am not alone.

Check out the No More Landing Pages blog.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Whatever your conversion rate is, you can do better if you lose the shackles of the landing page. Whatever brand damage you’re inflicting can be reversed if you think differently. Landing pages are outdated, archaic and, like Anna said, they’re a crutch. Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Find out more about new ways to think about landing pages to get better results.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that exciting. eMarketer has the scoop:

Online merchants convert an average of 2%-3% of their site visitors into buyers, according to the e-tailing group’s “Sixth Annual Merchant Survey.”

That’s about the same as last year. And the year before that.

The group says that driving the right customers to sites and increasing sales and retention all require more targeted tactics every year. It points to analytics and data mining as the way to make this happen.

Fair enough. But as Future Now’s Holly Buchanan points out, data can only tell you WHAT visitors do, not WHY they do it.

Year-after-year, our ability to capture and report data has gotten better and better. Why, then, are Conversion Rate averages still down overall since their tepid peak of 3.2% in 2001?

Or, better yet, while so many sites convert so poorly, why is ProFlowers.com leading the pack at 24.5%? That’s 10X the industry average!

What’s their secret? Aside from having a great product–which never hurts–ProFlowers routinely looks beyond the data in order to provide a better customer experience.*

So, does this say more about ProFlowers or the sad state of online marketing in general? We’d love to see your comments…

As for eMarketer, they seem to agree that “retailers with industry-leading conversion rates are doing more than just looking at numbers.” Says eMarketer Senior Analyst Jeffrey Grau:

Online retailers who go beyond using traditional Web analytics data to truly understand their customers’ intentions, perceptions and concerns will be rewarded with higher conversion rates.

If you’d like to look beyond the data for real-world insight into how to improve online conversion and customer loyalty, please join us next week in New York City for our Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars.

Wouldn’t it be great to see your site’s name on that list once next spring rolls around?