For years Internet marketers have spent time on search engine optimization (SEO) which focuses on driving more free traffic to your website by improving the likelihood of people finding your website through an unpaid search result. In the early days of the web and even to some degree today, the mentality has been once you have web traffic the rest would take care of itself. Unfortunately this is not even close to being true. Very few marketers have spent any where near the time and devotion on conversion rate optimization (CRO) as they have on SEO, although the number of smart marketers concentrating on conversion is growing more and more.

Traffic is only one component of success, getting people to your site is necessary but if 98% (based on an average ecommerce conversion rate of 2%) of those people are just getting there and not buying or signing up or completing whatever your conversion goal you have for your website, you’re leaving money on the table. Money that could be yours, by improving your website conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimization is the process of scientifically changing elements of your website in an attempt to make your website more effective. These elements can include but are not limited to web pages, landing pages, images, words and processes used on your site, or simply taking away what does not work. Conversion rate optimization is powerful because it increases your website conversion rate without increasing the number of visitors to your site. By increasing total conversions you should increase overall revenue, depending on the specific definition of what your business considers a conversion. For example an ecommerce website would consider a conversion a sale, a lead generation website might consider a conversion as some one who has filled out a request for information form or downloaded a white paper, etc.

The practice of conversion rate optimization has evolved out of two main schools of thought. One school is focused on jumping straight into testing various elements and pages of your website to discover the best version that will increase conversion rates. The second school of thought is focused on first understanding your visitors thought process and then moving onto the testing phase.

Neither school of thought is better or worse than the other. Each has a place depending on the needs of the business. However, they both come down to scientifically testing and letting your customers choose what works best. There is no room for ego driven decisions when it comes to conversion optimization, it always comes down to your customers and consistently rigorously testing, over and over again. Any test is better than not testing at all.

For more information on how to optimize your website for higher conversion rates, please contact bobby @ creativethirst dot com.

Trust and credibility are two very powerful persuasion principles that are rarely talked about in relation to a website. Any good salesman knows that people buy from people they know, like and trust. But an online buying experience is about as far away from this principle as you can get, yet people are still hard wired to buy this way online or off. The human need for buying from someone they know, like and trust still needs to be satisfied in an online buying situation.

Trust and likability play an important role in boosting your online conversion rate despite the distance from an in person experience. Your prospects need to know, like and trust you before he buys online still needs to be satisfied it’s just interpreted differently online than in person. We as a species have hundreds of years of burn in with direct face to face interaction we’ll need a bit of time to catch up online.

In order to successfully use the persuasive principle of likeability as part of your conversion rate optimization strategy, your website first needs to be trustworthy and credible. Simply stated the more we like someone (or a company or a brand) the more we want to say yes to him or her.

Do Your Prospects Trust You?

Do customers feel one way towards your brand and product and another way about your website? Or do they see your company and your website as one in the same? With technology becoming more and more pervasive in our lives, it is my belief that customers carry feelings they have of your company and transfer them to your website and vise versa. If your website looks old or is difficult to use your brand takes on those characteristics. The connection between your product and your website is more akin to an integrated marketing approach. Just take a look at the apple website to see how it’s in-line with the brand not just from a design approach but also from a usability and personality point of view. This is a lot harder to get right because it is a soft touchy feely kind of right but it is worth it to spend the time to get right, your conversion rate will be the proof of that.

Just as the company we keep and the books we read and the possessions we own are extensions of ourselves so are similar factors about your brand. I like to think of brands as an individual. We associate ourselves with the brands we are truly passionate about. If a brand that we are raving fans of were a person, they would be our friend, or perhaps our best friend. That’s why brands often reach beyond the product and take stands on the environment and other causes.

So if brands are individuals then they are complex and multidimensional, just like people. There are multiple factors that represent them and in which we can associate ourselves with. An example of this is the Hell’s Angel Bikers, they are simply extensions of the Harley Davidson brand, as much as the distinctive sound of a Harley engine or the spirit of the open road is. The brand and the website have to match in imagery, copy and usability.

So How Do You Use These Principles To Get More Visitors Buying?

As with any conversion rate optimization strategy the more conversion principles you use in combination the larger gains you will see. There is a multiplying effect here but in this particular case – the trust, credibility and likability combo have a compounding effect and all three need to work together in order to support your conversion rate marketing strategy.

The combined conversion punch of trust, likability and credibility online can be broken down into 4 main components.

1. What You Already Know
2. Look and Feel
3. Content
4. Customer Service

What You Already Know
All your prospects have baggage. We already know something about every company or at least we feel something about an industry even if we don’t know anything about it. Visitors have already mentally decided the level of trust and likability about you before they even get to your website. If you’re an offline brick and mortar store like Home Depot, Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, people already have a certain feeling about you that they are bringing to your website. If you have no offline presence or are a smaller site that’s not well known then visitors bring a level of trust with them about your industry. To design an effective lean mean converting machine you have to be aware of what baggage your prospects are bringing with them before the click in order to effectively use persuasive web design to reinforce or counteract that baggage.

Look and Feel
First impressions are everything. Not only does your site need to look professional but your overall site design needs to match what you are selling. If you’re selling safety and security your visitors have to get that in the first 2 seconds without reading a single word of your copy. The look will set the stage for your brand. There’s no room for dissonance here. Your site needs to match the brand and reinforce trust.

Content
Your content supports all the other elements in establishing likeability, trust and credibility online. This is the glue that is held together with transparency. There is no better support for likability and trust than being completely transparent and honest in every interaction you have with your customers.

Beyond transparency likability, trust and credibility extends to your value proposition and of course your products and services. Generally people want to be reassured and don’t want to be lied to. Tell them about the history of your company, the company values, the people behind the curtain. Make your content human and it will naturally be more transparent.

Customer Service
What happens after the sale? Is it easy to locate who and how to contact your company if there is a problem after your customer has made a purchase? Are there resources online that can help? Do you answer your customers with a personal email or one that is clearly a stock message? The availability and ease of locating and contacting you after a purchase all contribute to trust, likability and credibility.

There are a lot of elements that build on trust with online interactions, this is by no means a complete list. And this is not something that you do once and forget about it. Trust is built slowly one small step or interaction at a time. There are hundreds of ways to build or destroy trust online many of which don’t even need to be on your website. Social media sites such, as Facebook and Twitter are excellent places to start to build that relationship, which ties back to the first component of what your prospect already knows about you before ever arriving to your site.

You should follow me on Twitter here to continue our relationship.

Buying a product online has always been an isolated experience. The closest it has gotten to social shopping so far has been reading reviews of other people you didn’t know. That was good and we loved it. The collective knowledge allowed us to get a better sense of the quality of the product and Amazon made it easy for us by comparing the worst review and the best review side by side. Don’t get me wrong, reviews and rating systems are great and they clearly have an impact for online conversion rates. But we’ve entered into the age of the social web and that’s going to change things. We have to change the way we think about social e-commerce shopping and online conversion. We need to  re-engineer persuasive design in this new social space.

As the web evolves into more of a social tool it will impact the way we decide which products to buy and from whom. Fundamentally this shift comes from better communication tools, which are spreading social influence. Social media is really just our pursuit for conversation and connections between people.

The social influence of friends on purchasing decisions is nothing new. We’ve always had friends or family members who were the resident “expert” within our group about some product category that we were considering buying at one point or another. Perhaps we asked the opinion of a friend before a purchase or even brought our expert friend with us to the store to help us buy because they knew more about choosing the best product than we did and their opinion has always carried a lot of weight. Social influence has and always will be a part of the buying process, perhaps more so for larger ticket items, but technology is enabling us to extend the reach and impact of our own individual circle of influence. The ability to communicate with our friends and family anywhere and anytime instantly is just the world we live in today.

The social web will change the way we buy and shop online.

A great example of this change, which we’ll be looking at in depth here, is BestBuy and Facebook. Best Buy is using some very interesting social online buying strategies that all e-commerce sites should take a look at.

They’ve incorporated their online store into Facebook with a simple Product Search feature. Nothing too earth shattering here but the strategy is what’s important. They brought the store to the people, instead of the people to the store. The importance of this will be more apparent in a bit.

The influence of a social online shopping experience is illustrated with two simple buttons, a SHARE button, and a GET ADVICE button. The share button pops open a pre populated message box with the product picture, a link to the BestBuy site and space to share what’s on your mind with your group of Facebook friends. Bravo to BestBuy for giving up control and allowing the people to express themselves, good or bad next to a product they carry and their brand. Giving up control and providing tools for communication is key to influence on the new social web. This allows a genuineness that is coming form someone you know rather than being forced on you from an advertisement. This is a big shift in mindset for marketing.

But how is this important to raising your online conversion rate?

The SHARE button taps into two very powerful persuasive techniques, commitment and consistency. Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistent principle on direct human action. Prominent theorists Leon Festinger, Fritz Hieder and Theodore Newcomb view the desire for consistency as a central motivator of our behavior. Essentially we fundamentally have a desire to appear consistent with what we have already done or said we would do. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our decisions. This pressure is amplified if we put it in writing and make it public.

The SHARE function takes advantage of this persuasive principle brilliantly. BestBuy is hoping a prospect will share their intent to buy, a virtual real time wishlist. “I want this.” Which is both written and made public as a Facebook update to all your friends. Once you’ve committed to the product, you’re intent to buy has just been magnified and the invisible psychological pressure to be consistent with your commitment begins to build. Having brought the store to the people amplifies this even further if your friends reply to your post with a comment or “Like” click as a way to support your commitment. This would not be possible on the BestBuy website, only in the social space where you’re interacting with your friends can this persuasive principle be fully leveraged. You can then choose to take the next conversion step right inside the walls of Facebook and click to buy, which takes you to BestBuys site.

For as great as this is BestBuy should go one step further. Their strategy is spot on but are they truly tying the product and commitment with BestBuy? A prospect has publicly announced their intent to buy but who will they buy from? To fully leverage the power of the consistent principle there needs to be commitment to buy specifically from BestBuy. This commitment does not have to be to buy now, as you may not be ready to purchase, yet. But it does need to be added to the feed post in order to be public, which will start the psychological pressure for me to be consistent with my commitment. I suggest the addition of an optional check box or a dropdown with a few choices all geared toward buying from BestBuy at some point in the future. The simple click of that “Buy at BestBuy” or “BestBuy has the best price”, etc. would be enough to tie the commitment to BestBuy psychologically.

The GET ADVICE button spreads our sphere of influence and expands our circle of resident experts that influence our purchase decision. We no longer have to rely on that one friend who knows more about this product than we do and is available to come with us to the brick and mortar store. We can now tap into our extended social network. All of who can play equal roles in influencing our choice of product and purchase decision. Never has it been more important to have a quality product than now. You can’t hid behind marketing and advertising any more.

This social influence is extended even further with a gift ideas feature, where prospects literally reach out to the knowledge of the crowd for gift ideas. The social aspect of tapping into a collective consciousness is a new element in online shopping and we are only at the forefront of innovation in the social influence space online.

This is the beginning of the game changing social shopping experience in the new age of the social web. I encourage you to play with these new social tools, see how they work for you personally then let me know what you think.

The layout and position of your web copy is important if you want your website to convert browsers into buyers. Often web text is simply copy and pasted text from a company print campaign or placed into a web page after the design work is finished or at the comp stage.

Web copy is mistakenly treated as an after thought and really needs to be though of as part of the design and incorporated into a web page as a part of the whole. Treating web copy as part of your verbal design strategy will maximize your conversion rates. Assuming that is if your copywriter is writing for the web, which is vastly different than writing for any other medium. But lets be honest, most in-house marketing departments or ad agencies take the easy way out and reuse existing copy to save time and effort. Sure this will save you time but this form of laziness will get you no where when it comes to converting your visitors into revenue.

The main reason why web copy needs to be thought of in a different way than any other copy is partly due to the motivation of web visitors and partly due to how people read a web page. People read online very differently than they would a book or a brochure or magazine ad.

To start with, people scan copy on the web, which is why web copy should use headlines, sub headlines and bulleted copy, which you normally don’t find in print writing. In addition to writing in an inverse pyramid format, putting the most important information up front in the first paragraph.

Generally, visitors won’t read your entire web page, in fact they may not even get as far as they would in a magazine article, with the exception is perhaps a blog, that type of reading on the web is rare and will happen in some cases depending on the psychological personality type of the visitor and what stage they are in of their buying cycle.  

Moreover, reading print is linear vs the webs nonlinear format. The chief contributor to the non-linear type of reading is encouraged through hyper links. Imagine this scenario. A visitor lands on your web page in search of solving a problem. He’s interested in the page because your headline and sub headline support the problem he’s looking to solve because you chose the right words to use and designed them in the right place. You’ve effectively grabbed the reader, congratulations. He continues to proceed across and down the page, skimming through the copy your writer painstakingly wrote. He runs across a linked word that also cleverly supports the problem he’s looking to solve. He stops reading doesn’t make it any further down the page and clicks on the link, remember he’s on a mission, he wants to buy he just needs help converting. He needs to be sure your product or service will really solve his problem.

Your visitor follows this pattern over and over on multiple sites skimming and clicking, skimming and clicking. Your web copy has to support this and be designed in such a way to not only allow this to happen but to strategically allow this to happen, so that your visitor can go down his own conversion path and when he is ready, he will buy. Do you see how a nonlinear writing format is something so different than any copy you may already have someplace else in your marketing arsenal?

But that’s only the beginning when it comes to the verbal design of your site to increase conversions. According to most eye tracking studies on the web, visitors consistently read web pages in an F pattern.  (Eye tracking studies are done with “heat maps” which is a graphical representation of visitor’s eye movements. Red areas represent the hottest areas, which is where visitors spent most of their time looking.) Visitors first read horizontally across the top or active window of a web page, this is the top of the letter F. Next visitors move down and then across forming the second horizontal bar of the letter F. Finally, visitors scan down the left side forming the bottom of the F shape.

The F shape-reading pattern has many implications when it comes to page layout and conversion.  For example most e-commerce shopping cart checkout pages don’t take advantage of this for cross-selling and up-selling offers. Cross-selling opportunities are usually placed in areas outside the F pattern; so most visitors are not even looking at them much less buying. Imagine how much this would increase the total order per customer if this one element of design were used more effectively.

There’s a lot that goes into designing a site for maximum conversion and we didn’t even get into half of it, perhaps in a future post.

It’s a rare find online when you come across an e-commerce shopping cart that not only works well but is also designed well from a usability and persuasive point of view. So when I found one during my last minute holiday shopping this season I had to make note of it, and take my hat off to Office Depot for designing their shopping cart so well, if only all online e-commerce sites were like this perhaps there would be less abandoned shopping carts and more online sales. If you have an e-commerce site please learn from what www.officedepot.com is doing right.

So many online shopping carts put a major barrier right in the first step of checkout, but Office Depot removes roadblocks right from the moment of checkout. After you’ve filled your cart clicked the checkout button and are ready to complete your transaction you’re in step one of the cart buying funnel – login. Most sites at this point only offer you one option, to create an account before continuing to complete your transaction, Office Depot offers their customers two options, Log in for returning customers with accounts and a continue to checkout option for new customers.

Offering a continue checkout option without forcing a potential customer to fill out account information eliminates friction from the very beginning of the online buying process. This one simple addition to the checkout process lets you get right to the billing and shipping process. No hurdles to jump over no commitment, just simply buy. This is the way it should be on all e-commerce sites. When a website requires it’s buyers to join and or create an account, even if it’s as simple as creating a login name and password it psychologically puts a lot of pressure on the prospective buyer and creates friction in the buying process. It’s a stretch for every online shop to assume that every potential buyer want to engage in a long term buying relationship, something like that where a customer comes back again and again has to be earned and built over time through small successes and several purchases. Forcing a potential customer to create an account from step one is just placing a hurdle in front of them that they are forced to jump over. Why give them any reasons to not buy from you? Why put anything in the way of them giving you their billing information and completing the sale? The lesson learned from this example is to make it easy for a potential customer to buy from you. Remember just because they have reached this page, this step in your buying process doesn’t mean that the sale is done. The selling has to continue through every page of the shopping cart.

At the end of this cleaver buying process is when the sale has been made and the time to ask for extraneous unnecessary things like creating an account, which is exactly what OfficeDepot.com does, brilliantly.

Creating an account is a commitment from your visitor that they need to be ready for and willing to do. If this is the first time they have purchased from you, they may not be ready to enter into such a committed relationship. More online e-commerce sites need to be more like this and understand what is happening in the mind of their customers. Too many shopping carts are designed with no regard to the customer.

After the sale is made the customer is at the most cooperative, This confirmation page does an excellent job of stating the benefits of creating an account at the right time in the process, which doesn’t act as a barrier since the visitors intent, to buy has been satisfied. The lesson to learn is to satisfy the customer first, then the needs of the marketing department.

The only thing that Office Depot could do better at this point is to use the $20 OFF offer at the top of the order complete page as an incentive to creating an account or to signing up to receive special offers from Office Depot. This is the way to begin and build a valuable lasting online relationship online not by adding hurdles for the sake of easy web programming or just because that’s how almost everyone else online is doing it. Bravo Office Depot, there’s a lot to learn here.

Design is more than simply layout and color. When done correctly design extends far beyond look and feel.

I received a marketing e-mail from McAfee the other day. We often forget the lonely e-mail campaign in these days of new media marketing and social networking sites but that doesn’t mean e-mail is dead. According to a recent Jupiter Research report e-mail marketing is set to grow 75% by 2012, to reach $2.1 billion dollars. Open and click through rates are still very much big business that produces real marketing results for many businesses. Building a solid opt-in house list is still vital the importance of which is often preached by John Wall and Christopher S. Penn on The Marketing Over Coffee Podcast.

The thing that struck me about this email wasn’t the email itself it had a clear call to action button, despite the poor choice of blue text links on a red background and didn’t use too many images so as not to get throw into my spam box. The problem with this e-mail campaign is where Order Now link took me straight to the McAfee shopping cart with a 1 year subscription already in the cart, talk about pushy sales people. I might expect this if I’m buying a used car but please not in my e-mail box. To make matters worse an emergency recovery CD was also added to the shopping cart page without my approval.

This e-mail campaign could have been way more persuasive. They had a strong offer with a 50% savings on a 1 year subscription but they failed to develop the relationship and persuade me.

Buying online is like dating you have to go slow and take small steps especially when the click starts somewhere as personal as my in-box. You have to start with flirting and work your way up to handholding. The e-mail ad didn’t answer all my questions and concerns; I’m not quite ready to buy just yet. A more persuasive pathway would have taken me to a dedicated landing page, specifically designed to answer my concerns and guide me further through the persuasion-buying funnel and increase their overall conversion rates.

Despite McAfee’s approach and lack of a persuasive marketing plan they are doing some things right on their shopping cart page but I’ll save that for another blog post.