Archive for the "Tips" Category
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 »
Landing Page Inspiration for iPhone App Download Pages
Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by seeing what else is out there to help us get inspired and to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for iPhone app download pages.
For our landing page inspiration blog posts, we like to run though and point-out the good “best practices” on the pages, as well as highlight some of the elements that we would recommend testing.
Please use the comment area below to post some critiques and questions. Please add your thoughts on elements that should be pointed out on the pages. Often times, there are more gold nuggets there to find.
To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.
“Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” showdown – nearly double the conversion rate!
The Wall Street journal suggests that “Merry Christmas” still reigns in popularity as a season’s greeting over “Happy Holidays”
So how does emailing customers with one or the other impact conversion rates?
We selected a 100,000 customer list for a client who tested these subject lines:
A few additional notes on the test:
- The client is a large retailer, their customers mirror a general sample of the USA.
- The email mirrored the subject line’s message; all other elements were the same.
- We sent the email on the 21st of December.
The results show a HUGE difference . . .
As you can see the “Merry Christmas” subject line drove nearly double the click through rate of the other subject lines.
While we haven’t included the “buy rate” in the chart above due to client confidentiality, the results were similarly impressive.
Nearly doubling the number of transactions by changing an email subject line fairly well illustrates why if you’re not rigorously testing every facet of your online business (or letting us do it for you!), you’re throwing money away.
More fun with email testing:
- Personalizing your subject line can drop conversion rates . . .
- Optimize your email conversion rate with three quick tips . . .
- Unsubscribe links at the top of your emails will improve conversion rates . . .
P.S. – Contact us today to increase your conversion rate . . .
We work on a performance basis and charge nothing up front.
If you want to drastically improve your conversion rate contact us today.
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!
Social media widgets are killing your conversion rate . . .
Your website’s performance will drastically impact your conversion rate, and that’s a fact:
- A one second delay in page load time drives a 7% loss in conversions. -Aberdeen
- Each 100ms in reduced load time at Amazon dropped conversion rate by 1%.
- Yahoo reports that a 400ms in reduced loading time increased traffic increased by 9%.
So forget hiring us to manage your conversion rate optimization, just upgrade your server and get serious about measuring load time.
Anyhow, last week on Hacker News a thread popped up noting that “Your social widgets are losing you visitors right now. . .”.
The thread author pointed out that social media widget’s often default to load themselves before any other page element.
This means your users are sitting on their hands waiting for pages to load, and it’s for that reason that we make the following recommendations:
- Load all scripts asynchronously to avoid this blocking behavior.
- Put all social media bookmarklets into an iFrame to reduce the chance that errors or slowdowns impact the rest of your webpage.
If you’d like us to take a look at your website, contact us today!
- Click here to contact us right now for a free analysis or call 1-800-454-5882.
- No money up front - we work on performance, backed by a $10,000 guarantee!
- You’ll get a full team of designers, copywriters, marketing gurus, and technical overachievers working overtime to increase your website conversion rate!
You have nothing to lose and everything to gain – contact us today
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 »
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 »
11% conversion rate increase with a “Commitment Checkbox”
Increasing website conversion rate is what we do, and what we love.
We’re always astounded by the little things that help to increase conversion rate, and then discovering the reasons why they work so we can apply them more effectively in the future.
In February we began an optimization project for a mortgage company, ultimately driving a 37% increase in completed refinancing applications from their site.
One of the most successful elements that we tested as part of this project was to implement a simple checkbox on the front page of their website:
Read the rest of this entry »