Archive for the "General Posts" Category
How customer review formatting impacts conversion rate. . .
Incorporating reviews & testimonials into your website can instantly increase your conversion rate. This tactic works because it increases user trust – in fact a recent study explains:
“70% of website visitors trust opinions of unknown users [when making a product buying decision].” – Nielsen Consumer Survey
Because conversion rate testing is always tied to the small details, we recently designed an experiment to test two seperate directions for customer review formatting . . . Read the rest of this entry »
Increase Your Conversion Rate by Shutting Up
Today we’re going to focus specifically on optimizing “long-form” ad-copy.
Long-form sales copy is a term that represents a long, linear style of sales letter originated by Direct Marketers to increase sales from postal mail, and more recently the format has been translated to the web.
You’ll see long-form in play today selling eBooks, weight loss products, financial advice, and nearly anything where the inclusion of testimonials, a product description, and good old SELLING are applied.
In most sales letters, you’re asked to fill out a brief lead page, and then redirected into a long second page (or multiple long pages) before you’re ultimately asked to enter in a credit card to buy the product. Read the rest of this entry »
Proper placement of “trust logos” can make a huge difference in conversion rate.
Verisign recently published a study demonstrating that the “trust index” of your average web visitor is at a paltry 61.5 points out of a possible 100.
In other words, your average web visitor is extremely wary and rates the overall trust worthiness of unfamiliar websites just above an “F”.
It’s for this reason that many security & trust logos exist – they’re designed to bring outside credibility and reinforce that a new user can trust your website.
Most of the big players in the trust logo space offer a litany of studies demonstrating how simply adding their logo will improve your website conversion rate.
We’ve found, however, that proper placement of your trust logo can make a significant difference in how much the conversion rate will improve. Read the rest of this entry »
Personalizing your email subject lines can drop your conversion rate . . .
Building on our last post about optimizing your email conversion rate, the 10th eMail Marketing Metrics Report came out and contains many points that you can use to help increase your conversion rate and optimize your email campaigns.
But beware, there are some traps in their data that can lead your conversion rate astray – let’s start by looking at a few of their key points:
Personalization can work against your conversion rate . . . Read the rest of this entry »
Optimize your email conversion rate with 3 quick tips . . .
We’re known for our website optimization services, but we regularly optimize our clients’ permission email campaigns as well.
We recently doubled the conversion rate of a campaign for a large automotive insurance company, and I thought we’d share a few tips that we learned along the way. 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 »
Will HTML 5 browsers increase your conversion rate?
When driving responses online, a crisp and straightforward form is conversion gold.
With the implementation of HTML 5 in most next generation browsers, many new features will help you build simpler and more straightforward forms for your users that will help to increase your conversion rate. Read the rest of this entry »
A glaring conversion error that Amazon needs to fix . . .
“Up-selling” is a sales tactic borne out of telemarketing rooms and used car-lots whereby a salesperson induces the customer to purchase more expensive items or upgrades.
Online, this tactic is common, and Amazon.com has one of the most refined “Up-Sell” software engines in the world - but do they really want to broadcast this fact to their visitors?
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned in our years of conversion rate testing it’s that users are subject to the smallest subconscious cues.
In the image above Amazon.com has titled their up-sell engine as “view-upsell.html” - clearly letting me know that their software is hard at work to take more of my money.
That made me feel lousy, and I bet others notice it too, and respond in a similar fashion.
In fact I would be willing to wager $1000.00 cash to the Amazon.com testing team that if you changed “view-upsell.html” to something more customer-centric like “special-offer.html”, or “valued-customer-offer.html” you would see a meaningful increase in your actual “up-sell” conversion rate.
So there it is Amazon, the gauntlet is thrown - if you’d like some help contact us today to help with your website conversion rate 
!
Annoy users with audio for a 10.4% conversion rate increase . . .
We’ve been optimizing landing pages for nearly a decade, and one of the most consistent tricks that works is the addition of a simple audio message.
Not just any audio message, mind you, but a loud, intrusive, auto-playing message. Many of you right now are probably wishing horrible acts of violence against us for suggesting this - but it works!
First a disclaimer – this type of loud and auto-playing audio works well for mass-market traffic: think AOL, Google, FaceBook, and the New York Times.
For more technical or business savvy audiences, however, the addition of an audio can actually harm your conversion rate – so do your best to segment your campaign, and test, test, test!
So – why does it work and how can you test it?
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 »