Archive for the "Conversion Strategies" Category
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 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 »
Boost your Christmas conversions by 10.2% with a simple JavaScript trick (code included)
Hot off the conversion press and just-in-time for Christmas.
Last year we posted about our Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays test we ran for one of our clients. This year we decided to some landing page optimization tests with variations of the Christmas theme.
If you’ve followed our blog before, you know that creating a sense of urgency for your users to act usually increases conversions. Since we practice what we preach, we decided to run a headline on one of our client’s websites doing just that. We tested a headline that reminds them how near Christmas is. We came up with 2 variations of this headline: one that just states the days, and another that states the days, hours, minutes, and seconds and counts down in real time.
The test:
Here’s the day countdown:
10 days til Christmas.
Here’s the realtime seconds countdown, +10.2% in conversion rate:
9 days, 13:22:03 til Christmas.
Expedia deletes one field from their registration process, increases profit $12m
The following test from Expedia shows how understanding how your users interact with your forms leads to conversion rate gains.
Here is (our mockup) of Expedia’s experiment – see the field deletion in Variant B?
At a glance, they simply dropped the “Company name:” field and that increased their site PROFIT by $12 million a year according to Silicon.com.
Why was changing this field so critical? Read the rest of this entry »
Sexy CRO: Segment your visitors by gender to increase conversion rate . . .
In person, salespeople sell differently to men and women – here’s why that works and how to duplicate it online.
Last week I overheard a conversation about how “stylists” are trained to sell hair coloring, premium hair products, and massages to men and women differently. Read the rest of this entry »
Find friction points in your conversion process. Profit wildly. Rinse and repeat.
What if changing one small field could increase your conversion rate to the tune of millions of dollars a year - do such things exist?
According to Expedia, the answer is a resounding yes – by adjusting on simple field on their checkout form they were able to increase their site PROFIT by $12 million a year.
How did they do it?
“We had an optional field on the site under ‘Name’, which was ‘Company’ . . . After we realized that we just went onto the site and deleted that field – overnight there was a step function [change], resulting in $12m of profit a year, simply by deleting a field.”
Why was changing this field so critical?
“It confused some customers who filled out the ‘Company’ field with their bank name. After putting in their bank name, these customers then went on to enter the address of their bank, rather than their home address, in the address field.”
This example illustrates that at LEAST half the battle in website optimization is understanding the points of friction that your users are experiencing.
From our recent interview, our favorite tools to understanding points of friction are:
1) UserTesting.com – For less than $100 you can have three complete strangers go through your website, attempt to perform a task, and listen to their annotation and observe them through a screen capture. Watching users flounder through your meticulously designed website is a humbling process, but invaluable to understand where your friction points are. A similar service that’s newer to us is userlytics.com which provides all of the above, but also includes video of the facial response of users on your site.
2) UserFly.com– UserFly is the more macro-version of UserTesting – this system allows you to watch as live user sessions play out on your site, and dig into the data.
3) ClickTale.com– Incredible set of tools, the “attention heatmaps” in particular have provided us with double digit conversion insights on a regular basis, well worth the price of admission.
Finally, worth a mention is a newer tool that has disruptive potential – GazeHawk.com provides eye-tracking studies for less than $50.00.
Online solutions like CrazyEgg.com mimic the functionality without being as exacting, and most traditional eye-tracking vendors rely on expensive hardware solutions and charge 10 – 20x that fee.
Definitely a service we’re experimenting with, and worth a test.
If you think $12 million is a big number, make sure not to miss the story of the button that increased sales by $300,000,000.
Check out more Conversion Voodoo content . . .
- Bank an 11% conversion rate increase with a “Commitment Checkbox”
- Proper placement of “trust logos” can make a huge difference in conversion rate.
- 3 Landing Page Teardowns for Inspiration
Contact us today to increase your Conversion Rate . . .
We put our money where our mouth is – click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our $10,000 guarantee!
More Landing Page Teardowns for Your Landing Page Design Inspiration
Whenever we start a new Landing Page Optimization project we like to start-out by seeing what else is out there.
In this new section we’ll run through high-traffic landing pages that we like, and highlight the good and bad.
To see our comments, just rollover the images. Read the rest of this entry »
3 font tips to increase your conversion rate
We’ve experimented with a variety of strategies for maximizing website conversion rates with font selections, and below we’ve shared a few ideas in these categories:
- Font color
- Font type
- Font size
Read the rest of this entry »
Why aren’t Apple’s error messages written by marketers?
This morning as I was updating my iPhone, I received the following error message in iTunes:
User Interface design, like website optimization, is all about removing friction for your end users, and I was offended by a number of Apple’s choices on this screen: Read the rest of this entry »
One simple secret from an 1890 economist nearly doubles website profits . . .
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 »
How to track conversions without a “conversion page” in Google Optimizer
When you set up an AB Experiment through Google Website Optimizer, it expects you to have a few separate pages:
- The Control Page
- The Variant Pages
- The Conversion Page
For most websites this isn’t a problem, but what if you’re unique? What if you don’t have a typical conversion page to thank the user?
Don’t fret – we’ll show you how to trigger that conversion script if your end goal is a download, redirect, or something else non-standard. You can even use these techniques to confirm your visitors are actually reading your copy.