Archive for the "Conversion Strategies" Category
How to Effectively and Un-Annoyingly Use Pop Ups On Your Website
We all hate pop-ups, right? Well, technically yes. In most studies, 90-95% of respondents claim to hate pop-ups. So, if this is true, why are they still used all over the internet? The honest truth of the matter is that they are used because, as much as people hate them, they respond to them. Many website owners have seen an increase in sales as much as 40% after adding pop-ups. However, you need to be careful and use un-annoying tactics when integrating pop-ups in your site.
As always, be sure to test your popup, as these are general guidelines and may not be the best for your traffic. Consult our Opt-in Email Newsletter Popup Best Practices for more inspiration on what to test.
What Your Landing Page and a First Date Have In Common
First dates and landing pages have nothing in common, right? Wrong! In fact, the two have a surprising number of similarities. Both can be awkward if done wrong, and great if done correctly. A good landing page, like a good first date, can lead to amazing things. A bad date, like a bad landing page, can lead to a nasty reputation.
First Impressions are Everything
Image via Flickr by wetwebwork
Have you ever been set up on a blind date? You open the door and take a look at the other person for the first time. What do you see? Unfortunately what you see first is what is going to stick in your mind for the rest of the date, and probably for a long time afterward. First impressions are crucial. You don’t want to assault the visitors to your site with painfully bright color schemes and outdated gifs. Don’t be the guy that shows up with overly greased hair and a Hawaiian shirt to go to a fancy restaurant. Read the rest of this entry »
What Do Your Color Choices Say To Your Visitors?
Colors – they say a lot about a website. As a society, we’ve been studying colors and the associations behind them for a long time. There have been sociological and psychological studies performed, history studied, and more. No matter what is behind how we perceive colors, there is no denying certain colors evoke certain emotions. What are the colors of your website saying to your customers?
Stay Calm with Blue
Image via Flickr by stevendepolo
Blue has long been seen as a calm, cool color. In web design it also shows that you are trustworthy. There are a variety of major companies that use cool shades of blue to help portray this in their branding. Take Microsoft for example. Blue works great with any number of products and industries.
Read the rest of this entry »
Social Integration: The Necessity of Social Media in Your Site
If you don’t have a social media presence for your website, you almost might as well not have a website at all. Ok, so it’s not quite that bad, but you really do need to have a good integration of social media. There are a lot of ways to do this, but today we are talking about why. What is the importance of using social media, and what are the consequences if you don’t?
Social Media Bumps up Your SEO
Image via Flickr by Jason A. Howie
Riddle me this – What do social media and search engines have in common? Answer – They both love fresh, new, relevant content. Because of this, they are working hand-in-hand today. Realistically, if you have a crappy social media presence, or none at all, you are likely to rank lower in the search engines. Maybe it sucks (depends on your opinion of social media), but that’s the way the world, and SEO, is going. The more social, the better. Read the rest of this entry »
If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter . . .
“Dr. Suess wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 words, so his editor bet him that he couldn’t write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Suess won the bet with Green Eggs & Ham, which became one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.”
This is a quote from my favorite chapter of Steal Like an Artist titled “Choose What to Leave Out”, and it applies directly to EVERYTHING in CRO.
Communicating rich thoughts and ideas with minimal waste is called “word economy” when we’re copywriting or designing headline experiments.
This is directly applicable to minimizing page elements, focused messaging, effective elevator pitches, or building your deck.
On the CRO side alone I’ve written out several examples of this concept in motion:
- Using simple language will improve your conversion rate
- Using simple, ugly design will improve your conversion rate
- Dramatically cutting your content will increase your conversion rate
Simple, beautiful and distilled messaging ALWAYS wins in my experience.
Kind of like this: “Full service conversion rate optimization on a performance basis – contact us today!“
Why price elasticity testing is a MUST over the holidays . . .
During the holiday season when retailers are at peak-spends to drive traffic to their websites, squeezing every nickel of profit out of each sale is crucial.
Back in the early days of web marketing (2002 to be exact) we managed website conversion testing for a site called Wholesaler’s Handbook.
The product was aimed at EBAY sellers to provide access to wholesale product sources, and was priced at $49.95.
Around this time we’d begun experimenting with “Price Elasticity Testing”, which was originated by an economist in 1890.
By applying this methodology, we nearly doubled the site’s profit margin in about 2 weeks . . . Read the rest of this entry »
Great Landing Page Optimization Tips from the 2012 Presidential Election
Presidential campaigns are tornadoes of cash. This year’s is the biggest yet. Floods of money have poured into campaign marketing. The money supports a mountain of tactics, and this year we’re seeing a lot of landing page optimization.
We looked over the campaign websites of President Barak Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Doing our best to ignore the politics, we drooled over their landing pages and saw a ton of conversion tactics.
Here’s what we found:
Landing page optimization — déjà vu
When you search for each candidate in Google, the campaign website is the first result. Both sites display an email capture form before the homepage, and we’re going to comment on these forms together. Take a look and you’ll see why:
Am I having déjà vu? In terms of landing page optimization, the pages are almost identical! Only a few details are changed.
Here’s what we see:
Grow Revenue Forever: Get a Solid Landing Page Optimization Process
Big results are great. You can point to them and say, “That’s what we do, son. We earn money.” But do you know what’s better than a great test? A solid landing page optimization process.
Optimization Testing: The sexy science
An optimization process is not as sexy as an A/B test, but it always increases results over time. A test only increases results once. How’s that for sexy?
The marketing team at Firstmark Credit Union knows this well. The bank has 11 branches around San Antonio, and its
marketing team went on a full-bore testing rampage last year. The team earned:
- 250% increase in average email conversion rates in 11 months
- 6.9% conversion rate on a recent direct mail campaign that leveraged insights from online tests
“There has been a continuous increase in response rate and converted sales throughout everything we’re doing,” said Fred Hagerman, CMO at Firstmark. “It’s a result of the process.”
We sat down with Hagerman and Mitchell Shaw, Senior Marketing Analyst at Firstmark, to understand how they set up an optimization process that never stops earning results. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Tips for Higher Conversions via the Adobe Landing Page Optimization Survey
Some recent Adobe landing page optimization research shows that marketers are catching onto this whole “optimization thing.” Many, however, have yet to grab some big opportunities.
The Adobe optimization survey queried more than 1,700 digital marketers. The findings are published in the “Top 5 Conversion Opportunities” report and a nifty infographic (note: you have to fill out a form to get the report).
The report’s insights are great, but we dug into the data and found a few of our own. Then we turned them into tips to boost your conversion rates.
Tip #1. Optimize more than landing pages
When someone says “conversion optimization,” marketers think “landing pages.” Not surprisingly, landing page tests are the most popular with 41% of marketers running them. And since the homepage is often a landing page, 33% of marketers are testing there as well.
The percentages start dropping like bricks from there. Here’s a chart from the Adobe report:
The big opportunity here is all the way at the top. Only 10% of marketers test their shopping carts and forms. Seriously!?! That’s less than half the number that test display ads!
Opt-in Email Newsletter Popup Best Practices for 2012
If you’re like the other gazillion websites trying to get people to sign up for an email newsletter, then you probably have an opt-in email popup form. You know, it’s that annoying lay-over popup box that asks new visitors to opt-in with their name and emails.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were landing page optimization best practices for designing these? Then your opt-in popups could grab many more subscribers right out of the gate. At the very least, it would be good to know which elements are worth focusing on in testing.
Since we thought it would help a LOT of people to get some straight answers on popup opt-in forms, we got Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker on the phone (Conversion Voodoo is very lucky to work with the best of the best in online marketing). We had an idea for him:
“Whaddya think about us running some tests on the opt-in popup for your newsletter?” Jeremy’s reply was about as easy as they come, “Have at it!” So we did.
Not only that, but Jeremy requested that we post the results for his audience. All we could say was “absolutely!” We rarely get to publish results because 99% of our clients want to remain anonymous — so this was sweet!
Our goal was to test the “default” settings on the popup to see if there were the better ways to convert visitors into subscribers. We hoped to find some best practices to share with you for your website that may not have a horde of visitors every month like the Shoemoney blog. Although we counted more than 30 different elements in opt-in popups, we whittled that number down to the most relevant (i.e. the ones you should care about), which you’ll see in the tests below.
Read the rest of this entry »