How a peculiar Calendar cranks conversion rates on your webite

How To Grow Your Conversion Rates with an A/B Testing Calendar You want to grow your conversion rates, right? One of the best ways to do that is with A/B testing.

If you’re wondering what A/B testing is, here’s a definition: simply put, A/B testing is split testing.

Here’s an easy, real life example. You own a coffee shop, and you want to see which type of packaging sells best. You offer a green package and a yellow package. You test them for one month. In the end, you learn that people buy the same flavor of coffee more often when it’s in the green package.

You just conducted an A/B test.

As it pertains to website conversion rates, A/B testing is the comparison of two versions of a web page to see which one works better – page A or page B. You compare the two, see which one converts better, and you move forward with the one that has a higher conversion rate.

A/B testing takes you from “you think” to “you know.” You might have “thought” people would like the yellow package, but after the test, you realized the green sells better. The same thing applies to website marketing.

A/B split testing allows you to spend your online dollars wisely because you learn what drives your customers and compels them to take the desired action.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to grow your conversion rates with an A/B testing calendar.

You’re probably thinking, What the @&%# Jon?!?! Who cares about a stupid calendar? That isn’t going to increase anything. I have a My Little Pony Calendar from 2013 sitting on my desk, and it does nothing but collect dust.”

OK, got it. You’re right, sort of. Putting your strange fetish in desk calendars aside, a testing calendar keeps you testing, even when you don’t want to. When you’ve grown bored or frustrated or are just to busy cleaning out the 31,384 emails that accumulated in your email box before the end of the year.

To be successful, you must be disciplined and keep pushing. After a while you will gain insights and break-throughs you never thought possible. Put a calendar together and kick yourself in the ass and get moving. These are the basics that actually work. The results WILL come!

Make a Plan

You don’t want to be testing just for the sake of testing. You want to amplify your conversion rate optimization, so you want a plan, a guide that moves you forward on a profitable path.

Continue reading “How a peculiar Calendar cranks conversion rates on your webite”

How to use Conversion Optimization to Battle Shopping Cart Abandonment – An Infographic

Lots of people come to us for landing page optimization, but there’s a great deal to be learned from shopping cart abandonment as well. Today we’re excited to release an infographic showing the major concerns and solutions to battling shopping cart abandonment. Here are a few core concepts we always find interesting:

  • Ecommerce sites have an average cart abandonment rate of 55% to 75%
  • The average online checkout process includes 5.6 pages
  • 40% of shoppers are hesitant to create an account because they expect to receive spam

What surprises you?

(Click the image to view a larger size.) Continue reading “How to use Conversion Optimization to Battle Shopping Cart Abandonment – An Infographic”

How to Stop Vultures from Stealing Your Landing Pages

3 vultures of landing pagesCopywriting and landing page optimization are an investment. You put in the effort and the time, and you get a reward. People known as “vultures” try to steal this reward by copying your landing pages and copy. We know this is true because, hey, it happens to us!

Competitors have stolen our services page, our homepage, and we assume other pages as well. Had they read our blog, they would know that stealing a competitor’s landing page is insane. They’re probably not big on reading, though (one even forgot to change the phone number from our homepage. Need we say more?).

We’re always looking for the positive in life. Instead of publicly shaming these companies as vultures, we will consider their scavenging a form of flattery. Today, we turn their theft into our opportunity to show you how to prevent competitors from stealing your landing pages and what to do about it when it happens.

Scare the vultures away

People will grab your content for all types of reasons. Some will scrape your blog to help their site’s SEO. Others are just lazy. They would rather eat your leftovers than write and test their own landing pages.

Continue reading “How to Stop Vultures from Stealing Your Landing Pages”

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.

sexy science 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. Continue reading “Grow Revenue Forever: Get a Solid Landing Page Optimization Process”

6 Ways To Radically Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

High shopping cart abandonment rates is a thorn in the side of every ecommerce marketer. People load their carts, see your shipping rates, and say “adios.” Instead of being frustrated, you should see abandonment for what it really is: a big fat opportunity to slash shopping cart abandonment rates!

One of Many Abandoned Shopping Carts

More than 75% of all shopping carts are abandoned, according to Listrak’s six-month shopping cart abandonment index. That means only one out of every four shoppers converts. The question is, how do you get the other three to pony up some dough?

Here are six facts you need to know to lift shopping cart and checkout conversion rates:

Fact #1. Shoppers want free shipping

Shipping costs are to blame for 44% of abandoned carts, according to Forrester. It’s the number-one cause of cart abandonment, and has been for years.

What do people want to pay for shipping? Zero dollars. Free shipping and coupon codes are everywhere. They’ve conditioned consumers to expect a deal. If you don’t have a deal, they’re going to find someone who does.

This leaves ecommerce sites with two options: Continue reading “6 Ways To Radically Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates”