How Do You Know if Your Website is Maximizing Conversions?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

If you’re not using web analytics to continuously learn and improve your website’s marketing results you’re marketing with a bag over your head.

The problem with analytics in most companies is that they don’t know what to do with all the data they can pull from the plethora of robust web analytics vendors on the market.

Where should online marketers start? Page views, unique visitors, leads, top exit pages, etc. It can all be overwhelming and daunting just to stay on top of and report much less use all of that information to improve your marketing results and be the superstar of the next management meeting.

The data in and of itself is useless, unless you:

  1. Establish Key Performance Indicators that are aligned with your unique business bottom line goals.
  2. Have a plan to produce measurable results that you can track with your web analytics tool of choice.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) allow you to see at a glance the current state of your web site as it relates to your specific business. Each business is different and requires a unique set of KPI’s that are relevant to achieving the business objectives you’re accountable for.

If you’re managing your online marketing to gain the most bang for your buck, your KPI’s will be directly tied to a continuous improvement process. First measure your current situation then make changes and measure again until you achieve your desired results. As long as you structure your improvements properly you will learn something that can be applied to the bigger picture and change your next iteration for improvement. Tracking your metrics against current conditions and changing the direction over time to increase your results is what every Internet marketer should be striving for.

Success in optimizing your web site is based on incremental and constant improvements. A website, unlike print collateral is never really finished. Web design is organic and flows back and forth constantly improving and learning from your unique visitors.

Your plan to produce measurable results will always come down to proper testing methodology and lead you back to designing for conversion. When done properly, the art and science of conversion rate design guides your users, by taping into human behavior to motivate and influence your visitors to take action that is measurable.

Designing for conversion rate does this in two ways

  1. Visual conversion rate design successfully guides your visitors through your site by using persuasive principals to compel visitors to take more action more often. Some ways visual persuasion accomplishes this is by removing roadblocks, improving visual communication and enhancing the usability of your site resulting in a better user experience with your company brand and your website.
  2. Verbal conversion rate design provides the right content at the right time in the right way to effectively encourage visitors to take action on your site. Content on your site designed around a persuasive path touches on a visual mental image within the imagination of your prospects. Compelling verbs, attention-grabbing nouns and spell binding adjectives will pull your readers through a persuasive pathway, at each step bringing them closer to closing the action that meets your business goals.

Businesses today can no longer separate design from conversion. They are both one in the same lying on the backbone of web measurement and continuous incremental improvement.

Photo credit: Courtney Bolton via Flickr

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Social CRM and Pre Conversion Rate Marketing

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

CRM Conversion Rate marketingThe holy grail of all marketing data enthusiasts is to tie all of your data together into one massive all powerful knowledge base that could be leveraged for sales and marketing. Unfortunately this has always been the dream and is not close to what is reality today. Perhaps IBM’s Watson can get right on this after Jeopardy and helping doctors diagnose patients, look out Doctor House.

I doubt Watson or Dr. Gregory House will be able to help us with an integrated marketing strategy, but our marketing dreams will not be crushed so easily. In the words of Yoda, “There is another.” According to a Gartner study about the use of Social CRM for customer service, one-third of “leading” companies will extend their online community activities over the next two years “as customer awareness and use of social CRM for marketing as a back door to customer service increases.” (also reported by Mashable)

Social media is all the rage these days and social customer relations management is slowly breaking new ground online, I’m not quite sure Social Media will be our holy grail for a one ring to rule them all kind of CRM marketing utopia world. Although that would be really neat and I defiantly be one of the first in line on the data ferris wheel. I’m sure the view would be amazing at the top.  It’s just that we’re still at that not even crawling stage yet.  Especially on the sales front as the recent Mashable post points out.

However, don’t quite leave the park without a spin on the teacups at least. I firmly believe there is room for opportunity even at the point we are in right now. Social CRM does have it’s place that we can leverage right now for both the pre conversion and the post conversion rate funnel. Opportunity at this stage exists for lead nurturing to take place before sales steps in. The online social aspect, weather it’s happening on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, or email for that matter needs to delight the prospect at each step of the customer service experience.

Delighting your prospect using data from social graphs and just good common sense rules of social media can create and build momentum for your prospects to convert on the pre conversion funnel side. On the other side of that conversion funnel, your post conversion CRM nurturing opportunity takes a different role, that of retention.  It doesn’t really matter what the platform is, Twitter, Facebook, or the next big thing. What matters is the strategy behind your social CRM / conversion rate marketing plan.

The pre and post conversion rate marketing plan is something most of us forget to think through, perhaps because the CRM ferris wheel is less sexy than the Social Media roller coaster but you really need both to have a good carnival.

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Shopping Cart Abandonment Top 5 Killers

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

According to the Fireclick Index the average conversion rate is 2.2%, with a shopping cart abandonment rate of 67.6%.  Improvements in conversion rates is usually the most obvious path for many marketers, the problem is not many marketers know where to start (I’ll cover that in another post) and usually take stabs in the dark hoping to hit the right change that leads to a conversion increase. Most changes using A/B testing and Multivariative testing for conversion improvements is usually done on pages higher up in the funnel on detail pages and category or gallery pages. But to get the most gains an attack on two fronts is best. The first conversion rate army can take on the pages at the top of the funnel but a second regiment should be testing in the other direction from the bottom of the funnel up. Often times marketers stop testing or tracking at the shopping cart page, where more improvement gains can make of break your monthly revenue goals.

However, before you can optimize your shopping cart pages you first must know more about why your prospects might be abandoning. So here are the top 5 reasons.

The top five reasons for eCommerce shopping cart abandonment and how to know if you suffer from them:

  1. Shipping and handling costs were too high

    2. If this was happening on your website, how would you know? Often eCommerce sites don’t factor in the price of shipping and handling until much deeper in the shopping cart, if this is the case on your site take a look at your web analytics and look at what the bounce rate on that page is compared to other pages in your cart to see if you suffer from this problem.

  2. I was not ready to purchase the product

    3. This is a difficult question to answer but there is an opportunity to sell to this prospect later if you understand the power of follow up.

    Set up an auto pop up on exit and ask a question or two in a survey that also captures email to send a follow up offer for a coupon to pull those prospects over.

  3. I wanted to compare prices on other sites

    4. This is one of those harsh realities online that we as marketers have to live with. But how can you fix this if you don’t know it’s happening?

    Take a look at your time on site around the time of competitor sales and cross reference that with the what product detail pages or where ever you’re showing the price and your exit rate for those pages.

  4. Product price was higher than I was willing to pay

    5. This is another one of those tricky soft questions that can only be answered with qualitative information like exit surveys and other feedback tools.

  5. Just wanted to save products in my cart for later consideration

    6. Again the power of follow up here is king. If you can set up an automated email to everyone that has items in their cart you’re sure to increase your bottom line. If you really want to kick your conversion rates up combine this technique with the principal of scarcity and auto empty all carts after 2 weeks but be sure to tell your prospects that in your follow up email. That will give them a reason to come back and buy from you.

Image from Flickr used under creative commons license

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A/B Test of the Week Analysis

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

This test was featured on Anne Hollands Which Test Won.  The only difference between Version A and Version B was the addition of the phrase “Join 14,752 others and get free updates!” under the headline in Version A. Click here to see how it was implemented in the page.

Spoiler Alert: Version B was the winner. Most marketers, 78% of them believed that version A would outperform the winning version B. If this is not a reason to test I don’t know what is.

Here’s my analysis on the winner:

The question this test is asking is: Which version will get more email signups? The variable for this test is the social proof copy, “Join 14,752 others and get free updates!” used in version A, and eliminated in version B.

Usually adding social proof increases conversion rates, however in this case it’s clearly not the best with the non social proof version winning with 122% increase in eMail opt-ins. Here’s why I think it failed in this case. To be effective social proof needs to come from some one you know and trust. Or be from a peer group that is  as close to people you know and trust as they can be in an online situation. You need to identify with the group in order to be influenced. The social proof copy is simply that 14,752 have also joined. This lacks the power of peer to peer social proof and is simply a minor use of the principal. The prospect in this case has not yet identified with the group for this to be effective. To increase the power of social proof here there are a few supportive elements that can add to peer influence, such as photos of some people who have joined, short testimonials. In this case just a simple number is not enough of an influencer to move the needle.

Best of luck on follow up tests.

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Monkey See Monkey Do – Online Social Proof

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt
social proof

Social Proof

Social proof, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. When we just don’t know enough information or when we’re trying to fit in we make an assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation than we do. People generally believe that the behavior of other people is appropriate and follow their behavior. This is clearly illustrated in the famous cartoon above where just one person is standing on the street looking up. Soon another person joins him and before you know it there is a crowd of people wondering what it is they are looking at.

There are many examples of the law of social proof used throughout marketing. One such example is the laugh track used in sitcoms. The audience sitting at home watching hears laughing at precise moments as a mental reminder that the moment we have just seen is funny which essentially influences your perception of the show for good or bad. The interesting part of this phenomenon is that the principals of social proof have been transferred from direct person to person interaction as in the example above to a digital source that exerts the same influence.

The persuasive laws of social proof are not just limited to passive media as in television or limited to direct interaction. These same laws can be translated to a website and can have just as much impact and influence. An excellent example of online social proof is illustrated in the example above from Amazon.com. In this example, 86% of the customers viewing the exact product you’re considering buying right now have purchased this product and have also given it 4 and a half stars. If everyone else has purchased this, or at least the overwhelming majority of 86% and have been happy with it based on it’s user rating chances are I’m going to be happy with it also.

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The 5 Most Important Factors for Online Conversion

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

Converting online visitors into customers is the key to a successful profitable business. It doesn’t matter how much website traffic your getting to your site or how little traffic you may have, if your not doing a great job of converting that traffic into revenue for your business you won’t be in business very long.
You could focus on increasing your website traffic, hoping to convert more visitors, by bringing in more clicks, and you may see an increase in overall conversions this way. But, most businesses can’t afford to keep increasing their online traffic budget each and every month in the hopes of getting more visits to convert into buyers. Eventually you will reach a breaking point and as soon as you stop feeding the traffic monster, not only will your traffic go back down but so will your overall converted visitors.
Luckily there is a smarter option – and that’s to concentrate on optimizing your conversions. By focusing on boosting the amount of people that take action on your website you won’t be chasing money down the mouth of the traffic monster. You won’t have to worry about feeding a hungry beast and you you’ll be able to squeeze more value out of your existing marketing budget.

Increasing your online conversion rate will have the biggest impact of any marketing activity that you can do. A higher conversion rate means more customers for all traffic and any future traffic. Unlike throwing marketing money at traffic, money invested in conversion improvements will live forever. Once your conversion rate is improved you’ll reap the benefits of gaining more customers month after month and year after year. Unlike the short lived strategy of just buying more and more traffic.
All websites generally have at least one conversion goal and each conversion goal should be examined individually. The most common types of sites that translate easily and benefit the most from a conversion rate boost include:

  • E-commerce Websites
  • Subscription Websites
  • Lead Generation Websites

These are the top 3 that are just naturals for a conversion improvement strategy, but almost all types of websites can benefit from a lift in conversions, even if your website is not selling anything. Conversion is not just about selling. It’s about getting your visitor to take an action that is valuable to your business. And it starts with the question, what are your business goals? What do you want visitors to your site to do that supports your business revenue model? Conversions can include signing up for your newsletter, taking a survey, downloading a pdf, watching a video, buying a product, requesting information, sharing some of your content with a friend or any action that ties back to your business goal.
There are many factors that go into increasing your online conversion rate and each business has it’s own unique challenges and issues that are exclusive to you or your specific market. You will need to approach those factors individually and optimize around each one if you want to increase your online conversion rate.

However, despite the differences in markets, products or customers the key to improving any site conversion rate can be clearly broken down to several factors. Here are the top 5 most important factors that affect your conversion success. All 5 of these critical conversion elements can be applied to any website or landing page.

The 5 Most Important Factors for Online Conversion
1. Analytics and Testing

2. Customer Insight

3. Usability

4. Momentum

5. Trust and credibility

Analytics and Testing
Analytics and testing is the single biggest factor to improvement. Without knowing where you are you can never get to where you want to be. It’s vital to measure your conversion rate across not only your site as a whole but also across each individual marketing channel.

Customer Insight

A deep understanding of your specific customers and market is essential to empathizing with your users. Being sympathetic to their needs and truly understanding where they are coming from during the buying process is vital for directing your overall conversion strategy.
Usability

If you just improve the usability of your site alone you can see a lift in overall conversion. Simply by removing roadblocks on your site and making it easier to use, you’re allowing visitors the ability to accomplish their tasks with less difficulty. Help your customers and you’ll help your conversion too.
Momentum

Once your visitor starts down a path they are moving through your site and further into your conversion funnel. Each click builds up a velocity that builds on itself. To increase your conversion you need to design for momentum through persuasive design. For both verbal persuasion and visual persuasion.

Trust & Credibility
Establishing trust and credibility at exactly the right points in the conversion process is essential to persuasion and conversion. If your visitor has no faith in you why should he or she buy from you?

By improving any one of these five factors you will have a better website, but when all of these factors are combined together and directed toward the goals of your site that are in harmony with the goals of the visitors your conversion rate can experience massive gains.

Happy Converting!

I’m working on creating a conversion rate mini course, if you’re interested in knowing when it becomes available subscribe to the newsletter. The first 20 people who subscribe will get a Free copy of the mini course.

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Mobile eCommerce Conversion Optimization

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt
Using website best practice to increase mobile site conversion was the focus of a recent post on Mobile Commerce Daily by Mark Simpson, Founder and President of Maxymiser.
Mark makes several great points on the mobile commerce frontier. I’d like to specifically touch on Marks point on silos and cross channels for conversion optimization.
Here’s a brief snip-it from the post:
Allow for communication between channels
Time and time again, I see companies optimizing in silos, failing to properly connect their mobile efforts with the rest of their marketing strategy.
Yet, customers are, and will continue to, engage with brands across multiple channels.
Whether a customer uses a Web site, mobile site or bricks-and-mortar store, her brand experience should be consistent and personalized to her preferences and needs – regardless of the channel.
Few marketers currently take advantage of multichannel marketing tools that can create a 360-degree detailed view of each customer, and empower effective, automated Web site personalization during their mobile experience and beyond.
Here’s my take on this:
Since the user experience of mobile browsing at least on a smart phone, is usually a quick simple one task per app or consumption of smaller bite size chunks of content and engagement, it’s vial in my oppinion to create a conversion momentum that can be carried through across silos and different platforms. What i mean by conversion momentum is a course of motion for the visitor that carries conversion in a forward direction of linear movement across platforms and even time. Imagine the conversion process broken up into steps where a visitor moves one step forward in their mind today on a mobile device then moves a bit further perhaps on that same mobile device tomorrow and finally coming over to the side and converting later on on maybe another device all together, be it in store purchase, on their IP connected HDTV or even a traditional old desktop.
This theory of conversion momentum across platforms and devices actually goes against traditional conversion thinking of a linear path with no distractions so I also want to share my view on how mobile devices are in-line with current conversion rate optimization techniques that work today.
In my personal opinion mobile seems to be the perfect platform for conversion rate optimization because of the inherent limitations of screen size limitations and browsing experience. There aren’t a lot of side pathways a visitor can take or get lost down within an app. The rabbit hole only goes one direction, straight. Which is great in the sense that the user is not distracted from competing business or marketing goals that often plague a web page. A mobile app style experience provides the  minimum amount if not all together eliminates unsupervised thinking of the user when it comes to helping people convert.
I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on my thinking, so post a comment below and let me know your  opinion.

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The State of eCommerce Shopping

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

According to a Forrester eCommerce  research, growth in online retail sales will continue to outpace growth in offline retail sales, as low prices, convenience, and selection drive more shoppers to the Web. Amid a global financial crisis, U.S.A. online retail (excluding auto, travel, and prescription drugs) managed to grow 11% in 2009 to reach $155.2 billion. With a 10% compound annual growth rate. Total U.S.A. online retail sales alone are forecast to reach $248.7 billion by 2014.

This makes me wonder how much of online shopping will shift to mobile platforms in that time. With tablets being all the rage and new App experiences dominating the mobile landscape much of eCommerce shopping is changing right before our eyes. To me that means the next frontier for conversion rate optimization is in the mobile app experience.  Add on to that a layer of social along with open data and we are likely to see persuasion in the form of personalization gain new ground. But let’s not forget that the context of a sale online is vital to the experience a shopper has and even more so when it comes to converting more visitors into buyers.  With social shopping on sites like Groupon and new emerging experiences to come as a result of our social graphs and the tipping point of data, there are clearly very interesting times ahead. It’s a great time for Internet Marketing and experimentation.

Image from Flickr used under creative commons license

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A/B And Multivariate Testing In Plain English

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

When in comes to conversion rate optimization there is no failure only feedback. Testing is the key to getting to what works best for your prospects and visitors. All too often someone within your organization thinks they know what is best. Perhaps it is your design team, chief marketing officer or even your CEO. The brutally honest truth is that none of them know. They may be following best practices or concepts that have worked in case studies they’ve read but until you test you will never know for sure what truly works for your customers.

With free testing tools like Google Website Optimizer there is no reason not to test. Every marketer should always be in the middle of at least one test on their website at any given time. There just aren’t any excuses for not testing. Testing is how we improve.

Two of the most common online testing methods are the A/B test and the multivariate test. Here’s a plain English explanation of each that you can take to your boss to get the testing ball in your organization moving in the right direction.

A/B Testing

In an A/B test there are two versions of a web page, version A and version B. Version A is usually the control page, or the existing page and version B is the alternative page. The winning version becomes the control page in a follow-up test against another alternative.

Half of the traffic sees version A and the other half sees version B until each version has enough traffic and enough conversions (that’s the goal of the particular page you are testing and the goal should be the same for both versions) has been gathered for the test to be statistically valid for a wining version to be declared.

An A/B test is the most common and easiest type of test. It’s a great place to start with testing and it gives you the largest range of possibility. If you have a specific landing page that you’re driving traffic to from a channel like pay per click adwords start with an A/B test.

The advantages of an A/B test is that it allows you to complete freedom to come up with a totally different page version to test against the control. Which means you can try wild solutions in order to get the biggest gains. You’ll also get the fastest results with an A/B test since there are only two versions. Version A and version B, even though version B can be completely different than version A.The more versions of a page the longer a test needs to run and the more traffic it needs to be declared a statistically valid winner.

Multivariate Testing

In a multivariate test there are several versions of one or more elements on a single page. The combination of theses elements are what’s being tested. An element can be anything, an image, a headline, the words on the page, a call to action button, etc. For example let’s say you have 3 different headlines you thought might increase the conversion rate of the page along with 2 different images and 4 different call to action buttons.

So you have 3 different elements in this test, the headline, the image and the call to action button. Your testing tool such as Google Website Optimizer would pull in each element to make up every combination. In this example there would be 24 different combinations or versions of this test page. 3 x 2 x 4 = 24 (3 headlines x 2 images x 4 buttons) With each different version a visitor would see only one combination of elements. This is what’s known as a full factorial experiment.

The advantages of a multivariate test is that it’s much more granular with different combinations of elements you can really get specific, not only with each element but also the combination of elements. The disadvantage is that it requires more traffic to achieve statistically valid results since there are more than 2 versions and it can easily get out of hand with the amount of versions as in the example we had 24 different versions of the page.

In conclusion, each type of test is dependent on the needs of the business and the goals of the page. The important thing to remember is that testing is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing effort for continuous improvement. Remember this is just a basic overview of these two types of tests, we’re just scratching the surface of this very broad and deep topic.

Photo via Flickr by Mykl Roventine

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The New Marketing Mix

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Bobby Hewitt

We’re all familiar with the 4 P’s of marketing Product, Price, Place and Promotion but in today’s Internet age of Social media, Web 2.0 and ROI is the old marketing mix still cutting it?

Surely the 4Ps still have some place in the world of marketing if anything as the basis for marketing but long gone are the days of a marketplace where the store vendor knew everyone of his customers personally. Where interaction was on a one to one level with real human voice and physical connection, despite the promise of a one to one website application.

Today the customer is clearly in the drivers seat with both hands on the steering wheel, which is why marketers need to add a 5th P to the marketing mix, Persuasion.

The New P – Product, Price, Place, Promotion and Persuasion

  • What specifically helps a user make a choice?
  • What information tells your prospect why they should believe your product or service is the best solution for their problem?

This is where Persuasion comes in. But first let me make one thing clear. By persuasion I don’t mean some sort of trickery or manipulation. Persuasion focuses on your prospects experience with your product or service. It’s what makes a Browser into a Customer. Persuasion focuses on making a prospective buyer comfortable and increases his or her trust level with your brand. The greater the trust the greater the likeliness your browser will buy.

Persuasive Design

Visual persuasion removes roadblocks, improving visual communication. Verbal persuasion provides the right content, in the right way at the right time. The combination of verbal and visual is what makes up persuasive design and can greatly encourage your prospects to take action.

Everything Old is New Again

Persuasion is what takes the place of the vendor at the corner store who once knew everyone of his customers personally. That old marketplace vendor was the embodiment of trust and ease of use. Both visual, if he needed to conduct a product demo, and verbal, with his reassurance and commitment behind his product, all at once.

How are you using Persuasion in your marketing mix?

  • Is your website strategy integrated with your sales cycle?
  • Does your Web site reflect your offline brand?
  • Have you clearly defined what you want customers to do online?
  • Are customers accomplishing those tasks on your site?
  • Can customers find the information they need on your site?
  • Do your online marketing efforts have a major impact on your bottom line?
  • Photo via Flickr by Martin Cathrae

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