• Discover some of the quirky techniques we use to get amazing results, in this webcast that we co-presented with SeeWhy. The session generated a huge amount of interest. After 46 minutes, we opened up the call to questions, and we had to bring the whole thing to an end just before the two-hour mark. It contained some fascinating material. You can watch a recording of it here.
• We were interviewed by Econsultancy, which asked us how we’d grow the visual monstrosity that is LingsCars.com, without removing any of its crazy magic. Read the interview here.
• Confused by all the “quick fixes” and “Top 10 lists” available? Have a look at this interview we gave to Kampyle on the dangers of “instant” solutions.
• Our chairman (and resident rocket scientist), Dr Karl Blanks, gave his thoughts on the future of Internet Marketing — and on an amazing toy to buy for your kids — in an exclusive interview with BizzTeams.
• Got 58 seconds to spare? Watch this video, which shows how we used Crazy Egg’s great tool to boost our own website’s conversion rates. It was crazily simple and really effective.
• One of our clients has made number five on the list of the UK’s fastest growing privately owned businesses. Learn how they did it, here.
• Do you use the Gmail client (or the Google Apps version) for your personal or company email? If so, here’s a short article about how a simple tool called Boomerang can make you more productive .

Do you know any amazing conversion experts?

Do you have the skills and experience to become one of our consultants? If you believe you’d be a valuable addition to the team, get in touch with us—wherever you live, whatever your current situation, and whatever your earnings requirements. Look at our careers page here.

How to earn $2,500 in five minutes. Do you know a smart, ambitious conversion-oriented web marketer with a proven record of growing online businesses through conversion optimization? We’re offering $2,500 for a successful recommendation; have a look at our blog post on the subject here.

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We’re looking to recruit dynamic consultants with a proven track record of growing online businesses using conversion rate optimization. We’re an international business, and our consultants are based all over the world.

All you need to do is put them in touch with us.

It’s exactly this simple:

1. Check out our Careers page
2. Forward it on to the person (or persons) you think would thrive in the role

And that’s it.

The conversion expert fills in our online application form (making sure to mention you in the process!). If we recruit them, you’ll receive $2,500 for making the recommendation. That’s less than five minutes of effort, for potentially $2,500 of reward.

To find out more about the type of conversion-oriented consultants we need, and possibly make yourself $2,500 (or its equivalent in GBP) in just five minutes, review our role description here.

(For obvious reasons, if the person you refer works for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider them, unfortunately.)

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The challenge: increase our opt-in rate

Recently, we aimed to improve the opt-in rate for the following page:

The subscription page for our newsletter.

This page had been performing fine for us. We had surveyed our visitors using KISSinsights, Kampyle and 4Q, and most of their responses were complimentary. It wasn’t obvious that anything needed changing. In such situations, we often interrogate Crazy Egg.

Crazy Egg gave us the clue we needed

When we looked at the Crazy Egg overlay for our page, this is what we saw:

Crazy Egg revealed that some visitors were clicking on the sidebar.

Notice how most of the clicks are where anyone would expect them to be—in the sign-up area for the free toolkit showcased on the page. (Ignore the rectangular area near the top of the page—it’s an entry overlay.)

If it hadn’t been for that pesky sidebar…

However, also notice how we were getting some clicks on the right sidebar area. It wasn’t red-hot, but we still got a noticeable number of clicks.

We realized that our site-wide sidebar was distracting some people from the task at hand, which was to download our free toolkit. We were practically asking them to click off to the right and not stay on topic.

We whipped up another page where everything stayed the same, except that we removed the right sidebar. The information in that sidebar appears in sidebars on other pages, so we were confident that sooner or later our visitors would see it all. A much higher priority was to have those visitors get our toolkit right now, so we’d have a way of contacting them in the future with news and other information.

Here’s the test page we created:

We removed the sidebar from the page, because Crazy Egg had revealed that visitors were distracted by it.

We tested it using Visual Website Optimizer. Here are the results:

The Visual Website Optimizer results report.

The new version of the page generated 25.9% more opt-ins during the test period, and was 99% likely to be better than the control.

It never ends—nor should it

Crazy Egg is a powerful tool for understanding visitor behavior, which in turn allows you to help direct that behavior toward your desired outcomes. To discover some other fantastic tools, visit this page.

Disclosure: Crazy Egg is one of our clients—though we were recommending it years before it was a client.

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Top Cashback made number five in The Sunday Times “FastTrack 100.”

We’ve noticed that our most successful clients have many of the same traits in common. If you’re serious about growing your business, you should study and emulate their habits and culture.

Here’s a good place to start: One of our clients, Top Cashback, has made number five in The Sunday Times “Fast Track 100”—a ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the UK.

Top Cashback grew from sales of just £600,000 in 2008 to £15,500,000 in 2011. And the company did so in the midst of a severe recession and in a highly competitive industry. Top Cashback’s Operations Manager, Adam Bullock, has kindly given us an interview about how they did it.

In case you’re not already aware of cashback websites, here’s how they work: A consumer signs up for the cashback website and then purchases services or goods from other websites via the cashback website’s affiliate links. Once the cashback website has received its affiliate payments, the site pays a percentage of that payment back to the consumer. Top Cashback claims to be the first cashback site to pay 100% of the cashback payment to the consumer. It earns all of its revenue from online advertising.

Q & A with Adam Bullock from Top Cashback

Q: Congratulations on getting so high on the “Fast Track 100.” How does it feel?

A: When someone suggested that we enter it, we thought we might make the top 100 or scrape along somewhere at the bottom in the 90s. When we saw that we were fifth, we actually went back and checked with them, as in “Are you sure?”

It was also remarkable because of the stiff competition and the fact that the numbers are calculated on three years of growth, not on just one great year.

Q: So you got invited to Sir Richard Branson’s house?

A: Yeah, they serve champagne to the winners, and we will get a tour of Richard Branson’s Oxford mansion. We’re all arguing about who gets to do that.

Q: Could you describe how Top Cashback started? What was the company like before we started working with you?

A: Mike and Oliver started Top Cashback six years ago. For three years, it was very small but kind of got by, with a few thousand new members each year. In the last three years, we ramped up our marketing a lot. We now have about 1.2 million members.

Before we worked with Conversion Rate Experts (CRE), we seemed to have no real structure to what we were doing. We, or an affiliate, would come up with an idea and we’d say, “All right, that sounds good,” and we’d stick it on the website. We just assumed that if we thought an idea was good, it would have a positive impact on growth. Before long, our pages became cluttered and we didn’t know what to do about it, because we were not measuring the effect of each successive addition. At the same time, we were quite afraid of making large changes, because we didn’t really know how to measure them.

When we signed with CRE and started to measure carefully, we soon realized that our assumption about a positive impact wasn’t always the case. We also gained confidence about making big changes because you told us that it’s the big changes that would have the big impact we had been looking for. We were more confident about testing them because our measurement tools were in place. If the changes didn’t result in the improvement we expected, we could promptly take them off and try something else.

Q: So measurement provided the safety net that made you feel fine about making those changes?

A: That’s it. Previously we wondered, “Should we make a change? Do we know if it’s going to work?” We were never on firm ground. We kind of knew about Google Website Optimizer, but we never really used it properly, and we had no confidence that we knew what we were doing.

CRE gave us that knowledge in terms of the best way to run tests. So nowadays, we run a lot of tests. Using your methodology, we continually come up with improvements—big and small—so we regularly have better-performing pages on the site.

Q: You have an amazing-looking sales graph now, don’t you?

A: Yeah, it’s pretty nice.

Top Cashback’s growth during a major recession.

Q: Many of our most successful clients have an amazing product or service. Our first task is often to communicate the benefits more prominently and clearly. Do you feel that was the case with our treatment of Top Cashback?

A: Yeah, but oddly enough it started not with listing the great features but instead with looking at objections. You helped us to put together surveys, and we got feedback from prospective members firsthand to explain why they didn’t sign up. And even if they did join but never signed in again, we tried to get feedback from them to help us understand what their objections were.

CRE came up with three lists: objections, “trust factors” (or things visitors didn’t believe), and things visitors didn’t understand. That gave us quite a clear structure of what we should be doing in terms of moving ahead.

So now we talk a lot in the office about trust factors. “What do we need on this page?” We might pull in a quote from The Sunday Times or The Telegraph or something like that to give us some credibility that Top Cashback isn’t a scam.

Q: What were the major challenges you found in terms of actually doing conversion rate optimization?

A: We initially worried that someone would come in and say we needed to drastically change the homepage and we would lose the whole message and half of the business. I mean, that was the main concern: that you were going to start telling us things that we didn’t really want to do.

When we actually started, you were very considerate. You described what would be ideal to do and what would be the minimum to do, and you then came up with something in between that would be a significant change but wouldn’t cause us to lose the whole experience of the site or lose the things that were important to us as a business.

One other challenge was just internally trying to make sure that our people had done their tasks before the next progress meeting with CRE. I guess that’s a problem with all businesses: that the day-to-day work sometimes takes priority over strategic things. But when we started seeing the results of the tests, we could justify it, and we managed to prioritize everything we needed to do.

Q: Can you remember how long it was before you saw positive results from the project?

A: Yeah, it was the very first test that we did, so it was within a few weeks. We were monitoring the Google Website Optimizer graph and we saw a 17% conversion rate improvement for people coming to the site and signing up. Because we’ve got millions of people visiting the site, that was great.

Q: One thing we find with lots of our clients is that sometimes a modest increase in the conversion rate can be the difference between their being able to afford certain types of traffic and not being able to. We’ve watched how you’ve managed to go from being a web company to being able to afford offline media. You’ve done a lot of that now, haven’t you?

A: Yeah, we did national TV advertising from June last year all the way throughout the rest of the year. We’re trying to see how we can reach out to people who aren’t aware of the Top Cashback site or still have doubt. As you mentioned earlier, when we sit down and look at our site, we sometimes think, “Why isn’t everyone using it?” It’s a no-brainer. “If you’re looking to buy products from a website, why don’t you come to us here? We can get you cash back.” Now we’re spreading that message both online and off.

Q: Some of our clients get more new ideas implemented than others. In fact, often there is a huge difference between the most productive clients and the least. Do you have any thoughts about implementation that you think make you particularly productive?

A: We thought if we’re going to be using CRE, then it was pointless to listen to your advice and not actually implement it. So we simply made a point of trying to do as many of the things that we’d discussed on the calls as possible. The other thing we do is not just make a change and move onto something new, but we circle back later and change it again. So for instance with the 17% conversion boost we talked about earlier, that was a change we made 12 months ago. We’re still looking at trying to improve it. Hopefully that 17% we saw may jump up to 19% or 20% or something like that.

We are also more methodical now about our decision-making process for tests. So when someone comes up with an idea, we now sit down and think, “What will this impact? Could it be done differently?” It helps us to avoid the negatives as well as achieve the positives.

Q: What surprised you about how our process has unfolded in your company?

A: For one, it was the amount of people who actually got involved and gave feedback and ideas. I’m used to getting sales pitches from companies where they seem great but then when the project actually starts, you get one contact who isn’t very contactable.

It was different with CRE—your consultant seemed always to be contactable, and at times you had multiple people giving feedback and ideas on what could be done to improve the site, which I think is something we needed. I hope as a company we are like that as well, but it was certainly refreshing to see that CRE would follow up on the promises you made.

Q: Can you remember why you chose CRE in the first place?

A: Two reasons, actually. One was that you were recommended to us personally. The other was that several of us had seen presentations by CRE at different events in the past.

Among all your slides is one where revenues jump up at the end with a massive spike. I’m quite skeptical of salespeople and what could be seen as a sales pitch, but after I spoke to you, it was pretty clear that all of your consultants were knowledgeable and passionate and that they had different transferable skills that they could apply. There seemed to be a big knowledge base from which we could pull to perhaps give us the direction that we needed, which we couldn’t see in our own little bubble.

See Top Cashback’s site

Top Cashback's homepage.

You may want to visit Top Cashback’s homepage to get some ideas about strategies to apply to your own site so that you can boost conversions.

Case study coming soon!

If you liked this interview and want to know the ins and outs of how we helped Top Cashback grow its business, stay tuned for our case study, which offers a more detailed breakdown of what we did. If you haven’t done so already, subscribe to our valuable email newsletter to be notified when the case study is published. If you’d like to explore the possibility of working with CRE, visit our Services page.

In the meantime, make sure you’ve read our other case studies, because they contain many principles you can apply to your business straight away.

This article and all of our case studies are subject to our Testimonial Protocol, which is described here.

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As you might imagine, getting into Conversion Rate Experts is extremely difficult, and working here is extremely tough and challenging, but the rewards are high too:

• First, there’s the satisfaction that comes from working with the best conversion rate experts in the world, and taking responsibility for growing some of the world’s most sophisticated brands—companies that are leading the web revolution.
• Second, we pay extremely well—considerably more than most other agencies do. That’s because we believe that one brilliant mind is worth a hundred mediocre ones.

(For obvious reasons, if you work for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider you, unfortunately.)

Nine great reasons to join us

• Work anywhere you choose. We are looking for the very best people, so we won’t be restricted by geographic location.
• Learn to be one of the world’s best conversion rate experts. We’ll reveal every secret we’ve ever discovered about growing web businesses.
• Industry-leading compensation—with even greater incentives when you “deliver the goods”.
• Prestigious clients: Lead projects for some of our great clients, like Apple, Google, Sony, Vodafone, SEO Book, SEOmoz and many exciting less-well-known businesses.
• Great colleagues. Our goal is to build and grow the world’s number one team of conversion rate experts. We also work with many of the world’s most respected marketers. So you’ll be in exciting and stimulating company.
• Join our private mastermind group. You’ll have access to our mastermind group in which we discuss the latest techniques we’ve developed, and the results they’ve generated.
• Opportunities to develop. You’ll be encouraged (and expected) to develop yourself. You’ll have freedom to utilize the latest technology, and to access the most advanced training programs. And you’ll have the budget to work with the best vendors in the world.
• Avoid all the nasty and boring stuff. You’ll only be required to work on the fun stuff: helping our clients to grow their businesses. We’ll take care of all the admin, paperwork, negotiating, invoicing and marketing, which leaves you free to concentrate on the activities that make you money (getting results!)
• Entrepreneurial, but without risk. You will receive a combination of guaranteed payment plus performance-based bonuses. You’ll receive regular training designed to optimize your performance, your time and your income.

What you’ll be doing

As a CRO Consultant, you’ll be joining our highly experienced team of experts who are responsible for providing one-on-one consulting to deliver amazing (and measurable) results for our clients.

You’ll be using…

• your personal expertise
• The CRE Methodology—our proven CRO process
• our internal mastermind group

You’ll provide our clients with…

• strategic advice
• content and ideas to measurably grow their businesses
• unbiased technology recommendations
• highly professional project management and leadership

Here’s the type of person we’re looking for

We’re looking for smart, passionate and ambitious web marketers with a proven track record of growing online businesses using conversion rate optimization.

You’ll have expertise in most of the following:

• Web analytics, SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing and offline marketing
• “Real world” sales and direct response marketing
• Understanding the psychology of a website’s visitors
• Usability and design of high-converting webpages and sales funnels
• Carrying out split tests and multivariate tests on websites
• Project management, motivating teams, and mentoring others

Most importantly, you’ll be obsessed with conversion and will already be getting amazing results.

We understand you may already have clients and/or projects of your own, so please mention this in your application form, (the details of which are at the bottom of this page).

Why you might not want to work with us

This position is extremely demanding, and requires exceptional technical and communication skills. It’s not a job for your average marketer; after all, not many marketers are brave enough to insist that their clients test their advice—particularly when the advice is being given to clients as sophisticated as Apple and Google.

Here’s what our consultants say…

Interested? Here’s what to do next. (Applications must be completed no later than July 14, 2011.)

1. Read our about us page, to see if you share our values and beliefs. Also, read our free reports to see if you’re excited by the work we do.

2. Complete our online application form, giving us evidence that you have the skills we’re looking for. Please note, it’s pretty rigorous; though we’re sure you’ll appreciate that with a results-based business like ours, we have to be.

Deadline: Applications must be completed no later than July 14, 2011.

Note that, for obvious reasons, if you work for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider you, unfortunately.

If this job isn’t for you, maybe you know someone we should be considering. If so, please forward this page to them.

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If you ever find yourself creating reminder tasks like “Check that Bob replied to my email,” you’re aware of the following two problems:

1. If you send 50 emails a day, you need to check 50 reminders, even if 49 of those people end up replying.
2. It can be cumbersome to turn an email into a task. Gmail has unique URLs for each email thread, but they can be fiddly to copy and paste into a task list—and then slow to load when you click on them.

Boomerang helps you with these issues by adding a few buttons to the Gmail interface. The most useful of these says, in effect, “Notify me if I don’t hear back within N days.” So, whenever you send an email, you can tell Boomerang to notify you if the person doesn’t reply within a certain time frame. Ideally, the person will reply to you. But if—and only if—you don’t get a response, Boomerang will reply to you instead, reminding you that the person didn’t reply. Boomerang therefore allows you to “manage by exception,” notifying you only when someone doesn’t reply within the time you specified. And because of the way Boomerang works, the email thread gets moved to the top of your inbox, so it gets your attention.

We don’t profit from recommending this or any other software; we just love tools that help us get things done, and we know that you do too. If you found this useful, you’ll appreciate the following two articles:

1. SEO Book has recently published a more in-depth guide to using Boomerang.
2. Distilled has recently published a guide to other useful features of Gmail for search marketers.

Let us know in the comments if you find Boomerang useful.

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Well for the past few months, Neil and Hiten have been clients of ours. (So far, we’ve approximately doubled Crazy Egg’s revenues.) They kindly offered to turn our methodology into one of those beautiful infographics that the KISSmetrics guys create.

You can download the infographic here.

By the way, the KISSmetrics team have offered to create more infographics for us, so please send us your requests. (Leave them in the comments below.) What would you like to see?

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Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents his or her work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants suggest how to improve it. This process allows us to draw upon our team’s wide-ranging experience.

We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works:

• Consultants upload an image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.)
• The consultants choose whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image.
• Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments.

Collaborative feedback software (in this case, Notable) lets you gather feedback from your team, your clients, and anyone else. With Notable, users leave feedback by dragging an orange rectangle around the relevant area and then typing their comment. You can view comments by hovering over the rectangles.

The software allows us to easily collect all of the feedback in one place. We find it to be more effective than verbal feedback because it encourages everyone to leave concrete, specific suggestions.

In the early stages of a design, you may prefer the users to be from within your own team. However, you may also choose to use the software when presenting designs to clients or senior management.

Here’s what we were looking for

When we were shopping for suitable software, we found many lists of contenders (thanks to Tripwire Magazine, Six Revisions, Vandelay Design, and several others). Rather than giving you detailed, impartial reviews, we’re just going to tell you what we settled on and why, in the hope that we can save you from spending hours trudging through sign-up processes.

What we wanted

• The ability to upload large (and often very long) images. Many of the apps failed to handle the unusually large files that we often create. We tested them using a screen-capture image of a long page (1,905 by 14,704 pixels and 8.5 MB). Some of the software apps made the image blurry, some took ages to load and scroll them, and some of them crashed or stalled.
• The ability to keep everything private within a defined group of people.
• Pleasant to use.
• Works in Chrome and Firefox, so we don’t have to remember to switch browsers.
• A way to allow all the consultants to view everyone’s feedback, preferably in real time without having to reload a page.
• A way to discuss each comment.
• A way to check off each comment once it has been completed—so it becomes like a task list.

Some nice features that you may want, but we didn’t

• The ability to get feedback from an open community.
• The ability to create defined tests for users (Usabilla and Chalkmark do this—see below for details).

Here’s the list of software we considered

Just a few of the software tools we evaluated.

The following list describes the software tools we considered. Scroll down to the next section if you’re interested in seeing only the ones we chose in the end. Also, note that these aren’t supposed to be detailed software reviews—they’re just our initial impressions as to whether each software solution would be suitable for our specific needs.

Backboard. Has recently been acquired by box.net, and someone mentioned to us that it isn’t being supported anymore. It looked promising at first, but we gave up after failing to work out how to sign up for a paid account, and customer service didn’t reply to our email.

CritiqueTheSite. Wasn’t what we were looking for; it allows users to leave comments next to a site, a bit like Google Sidewiki.

ConceptFeedback. Doesn’t allow sharing with a closed community. Everything has to be made public.

Chalkmark. Is for moderated tests and does them well. We wondered whether we could use it for our needs, but it allows testers to click only once on the page, and then it moves to the next question.

ProofHQ. Looked like it would do the job. However, we found the interface to be too complex for our needs (maybe because it has some sophisticated permissions settings and workflow functionality).

Onotate—Looked very good, but it gave a weird error (a file appeared to have been uploaded twice, and then when we deleted one of the copies, it deleted both of them). Also, we failed to share the file with each other, so we moved on.

BounceApp. Was created by the same people who created Notable. You might consider it to be “Notable Lite.” With Bounce, everything’s public, which is why it wasn’t suitable for our needs. There’s a good comparison of the differences between Notable and Bounce in this article.

Usabilla. Has some really promising features but failed to upload our large image.

Twiddla. Is a real-time virtual whiteboard. You can upload images and watch people adding comments in real time. Unfortunately, it was unable to handle our large image, reducing it to a blurry thumbnail.

Vyew. Is another virtual whiteboard software. It gave us the same problems we had with Twiddla.

Scribblar. Is whiteboard software. It failed to upload our image, giving an error message: “Error. Upload failed.”

FineTuna. Pros: It has a clever name and a cute cat logo, and it looked promising. Cons: It can’t upload images larger than 2,800 by 2,800 pixels, so we never got to see it in action.

Stixy. Maximum file size is 4 MB.

IDidWork. We struggled to sign up. Pages weren’t displaying properly.

RedMark. Our large image uploaded fine. It worked, but it ran a bit slowly, presumably due to the image size. The image became a bit cluttered with call-out lines once we’d added about ten comments. Also, there’s no easy way of scrolling down the image besides dragging it.

Cozimo. Managed to upload the image but struggled to display it. At certain zoom levels, parts of the image weren’t displayed.

Here’s the software we settled on

Unfortunately, we didn’t find one tool that had all the features we were looking for. We found two useful tools.

(By the way, none of the links on this page are affiliate links. We’re vendor neutral, and we don’t profit from recommending technology.)

1. Notable

So far, we haven’t been able to find anything that beats Notable. (That’s why we chose to use it for the image near the top of this page.) Notable doesn’t allow you to actually draw or write on the image—it just lets you attach comments to those orange rectangles. Also, we were hoping to find software that would allow us to see comments being added in real time without having to refresh the page, and that’s not possible with Notable either. However, for us, the fact that it runs really fast with no glitches more than makes up for that.

2. ConceptShare

ConceptShare has all the features of Notable and many more, but it feels a bit slower, and we find it less intuitive. Its customer support is very good.

One of its packages is purpose made for critiquing video. Video is really hard to critique remotely, so if you know people who work with video, they might find this feature invaluable.

We’d love to hear your views

Are you having success with collaborative feedback software? Do you know of any better software we should be considering? Do you think we’ve wrongly dismissed one of the software tools we evaluated? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments at the bottom of this page.

Would you like to learn more about conversion?

If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your business, you should see this list of useful tools for identifying why your visitors aren’t converting. You should also read the following case studies, which show our process in action:

• How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company
• How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails
• How we doubled the sales of a web app
• How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%

These how-to guides will come in useful too.

Would you like to outsource or delegate your conversion activities?

If you’d rather find out right away how we might help your company increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants. We’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.

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The Conversion Rate Experts Methodology (CRE Methodology™)—a systematic process.

Beyond best practices

Someone suggested we write an article about best practices for conversion. You know the kind of thing: magic buttons that convert, “killer” copywriting words, winning layouts, etc. Unfortunately, that little box of tricks doesn’t take you very far. In fact, it sometimes takes you nowhere.

The real best practice isn’t a particular type of page element at all. It’s a well-defined, systematic process—a series of steps you need to take.

The CRE Methodology™ is significantly different from what most people are doing. We’ve mentioned it in conference talks, but this is the first time we’ve published an overview of it. It doesn’t involve shoot-from-the-hip guesswork, and it doesn’t have the excitement and appeal of magic buttons. In fact, in many respects it looks a lot like hard work. It requires intelligence, experience, craft, and expertise in a wide range of disciplines. But experience has shown that it works, time and time again. It’s what we do every day for our clients.

And we’re proud that some of the web’s most sophisticated companies have adopted it; we’ve spent the past few years working with clients like Apple, Sony, Google, Vodafone, SEOmoz, SEO Book, and some outstanding, forward-looking small businesses. Double-digit improvements are the norm.

In summary, it works.

Here it is.

The CRE Methodology™ for growing businesses

Step 1: The Rules of the Game (and how to win at it): Coming up with your strategy, defining your long-term goals, and deciding how you’ll measure success

Many marketers start out by creating a list of things to test. We advise you to resist the urge at this stage. Here are a few reasons why:

You need to find out (not guess) which parts of your business are underperforming and why

Most clients come to us with a preconceived idea of what should be worked on. Ironically, the opportunities usually lie elsewhere—in their blind spots. First, we insist on discussing the client’s strategy and vision for the business. You need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will ensure you meet your goals.

You don’t yet know why people aren’t converting

At this point, you also don’t know why your visitors aren’t converting, so any suggestions you make would be theoretical rather than based on evidence. From our experience, evidence-based recommendations are much more likely to give breakthrough results than glib “best practice” ones.

You need to experience your business as a customer with a “fresh pair of eyes”

It is important to have customer empathy and to understand the thought processes your visitors are going through. If you look at your website from a marketer’s perspective, you’ll act like a marketer. So, if you aren’t already, you need to become a customer of your own site. (You’d be amazed how many people have never done this.)

Step 2: Understanding (and tuning) existing traffic sources

It’s impossible to critique a website without knowing from where its visitors are coming, on which landing pages they arrive, and how they navigate around the site.

Take a bird’s-eye view of your business, identifying the areas that appear to hold the greatest opportunity.

Seek to understand your entire conversion funnel, starting with the initial ad impression where someone first encounters your business and finishing with the thank-you page and beyond (there’s often a lot of opportunity in optimizing post-sale events such as referral programs, up-sells, and email marketing). To sketch your conversion funnel, map out every action that a prospect has to take to become your customer. Use whatever works best for you: Scribble on a whiteboard (tip: you can create huge whiteboards using adhesive film or this paint) or use software (Omnigraffle for Mac is particularly good because it has a physics engine that does the layout automatically).

Aim to work on the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your goals. Also prioritize your efforts on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to.

The best way to visualize this process is by thinking about blocked arteries and missing links. Just as an artery in your body is the highway that carries large volumes of blood, an artery in your business is a high-volume pathway that leads to sales. Once you have identified your business’s arteries, search for blockages in them—that is, aspects of them that are underperforming.

Discover blocked arteries with web analytics tools such as ClickTale, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, Google Analytics, and KISSmetrics.

Missing links are parts of your conversion funnel that have not been created yet, such as these:

• Turning a one-step sale into a multi-step sale.
• Adding a well-placed “Refer-a-Friend” program.
• Adding an effective email autoresponder sequence.
• Adding a series of post-sale offers.
• Growing a customer community.
• Rolling out successes into other media (online and offline).

Step 3: Understanding your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)

Don’t guess what the blockages are. Find out. This usually requires some research aimed at understanding your visitors and their intentions.

The key question is “Why aren’t visitors converting?”

The answer typically comes from research in these core areas:

1. Understanding different visitor types and intentions.
2. Identifying user-experience problems.
3. Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it shouldn’t take long.

1. Understanding different visitor types and intentions.

It doesn’t matter how good your website or product is if you’re asking the wrong people to do the wrong thing at the wrong time—which is why you need to start with an understanding of your different visitor types and visitor intentions. The process typically revolves around your web analytics platform and customer database.

Seek to understand your different traffic sources, and how they behave. Here are a few things you should consider:

• New visitors vs. repeat visitors.
• Which referring sources of traffic convert best?
• Do you have distinct visitor types based on the visitors’ situations, their past experiences, or their intentions?
• Branded keywords vs. generic keywords.

Understanding these different visitors will give you clarity about how to organize your conversion funnel so you’re showing the right content, with the right call-to-action, to the right visitors, at the right time in their buying journey.

2. Identifying user-experience problems.

All websites have some visitors who don’t convert simply because something prevents them from doing so; they’re willing but unable:

• Does the site load correctly in the browsers your visitors use?
• Do the pages load fast enough?
• Is it easy for users to navigate through the site and know what they need to do?
• Is the copy clear or confusing?
• Are forms easy to use?
• Do users encounter error messages that confuse or deter them?

There are many tools and techniques for identifying user experience issues. Once you’ve identified the problems, you can design tests to overcome them.

3. Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.

Next, seek to understand why most of your visitors aren’t persuaded. Those people, however, come and go without a trace! How do you know what they wanted? How do you know what would have persuaded them to take action?

If you owned a real-life bricks-and-mortar store, it would be easy: You’d hear their objections. You’d be able to ask questions. You’d hear what they muttered as they headed for the door.

Capturing the voice of the customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Start by implementing appropriate feedback mechanisms for capturing the most common objections. Then gather, record, and analyze the feedback.

We call this the Objection/Counter-Objection (O/CO) approach; identify (not guess) your customers’ objections and then present them with strong counter-objections.

Capturing the voice of the customer is difficult online. Tools like KISSinsights, Kampyle, and Ethnio make it possible. Here’s a full list of tools that reveal why visitors don’t convert.

Step 4: Advanced market intelligence

No business exists in a vacuum. Study your marketplace—for example, your competitors, any expert commentators, and what your customers are saying in social media and on review sites—and then explore possibilities for improving your positioning by building upon your company’s core strengths.

You can get a wealth of information about your marketplace using tools like Google Alerts, SEOmoz PRO, Twitter Search, and Yahoo! Answers.

Step 5: Spotting the hidden wealth in your business

Each of our clients has had elements within its business that would have been highly persuasive to its prospects but that the prospects never saw. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, and then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process.

Sometimes, the challenge lies in creating a wish list of persuasive assets that your company needs to acquire.

Your website should be a "proof magnet." Invest time acquiring, gathering, and displaying your company's persuasive assets.

Step 6: Creating your experimental strategy

It’s a myth that you can transform a business by making what we call “meek tweaks.” Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. Bold changes give you more profit, and you get quicker, larger returns (it’s a statistics thing). And they’re usually more fun. If you carry out “meek tweaking,” on the other hand, your tests seldom reach significance, you get disheartened, and, most upsettingly of all, you lose the commitment of your colleagues.

A graph showing the many advantages of making bold changes (rather than "meek tweaks").

After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

1. How likely is it to double your conversion rate?

Asking this question helps to ensure that you’re prioritizing the big opportunities. Bigger, bolder tests should be given a higher priority; meek tweaks need to be demoted.

2. How easy is it to implement the test?

Look for the quick wins with the biggest financial impact, so changes that are easy to implement are given a higher priority.

3. Has this idea worked before?

Once you’re testing, you’ll quickly start learning what your visitors respond to. Every test we develop is documented so that we can review and prioritize ideas that are inspired by winning tests.

Step 7: Designing your experimental web pages (your “challengers”)

This is the point at which you’ll create the content you’ll be testing.

Note that novices usually begin at this stage. They base their designs on guesswork and so-called “best practices,” and then they get disheartened when their tests fail. Our experience has shown that the significant wins come from basing the new content upon insights that were gleaned from the previous six steps.

First, create a wireframe of the new page (or page element). The wireframe must be designed to be more persuasive, more believable, and more user-friendly than the existing version. Pay particular attention to critical copy elements such as the headline, introductory paragraphs, and calls-to-action. Carry out several usability tests on the wireframe and discuss them with anyone who has an empathic understanding of your customers.

Create your wireframe first (we love Balsamiq) and then design the final "challenger." The example above generated 52% more sales for SEOmoz. (See the case study here.)

Step 8: Carrying out experiments on your website

There are many software platforms for tracking and testing, each of which has its own benefits. If you don’t already have one in place, you may wish to use Which Multivariate—our comparison website for multivariate testing platforms—to identify which you should use, based on your needs.

Which Multivariate—our comparison website for multivariate testing platforms.

Once the split testing platform is in place, run through and verify that everything is set up properly. Then, for each split test, follow a procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is:

• Why you’re running it.
• How it fits into the site.
• How it aligns with the business goals.
• How you’ll measure success.

These experiment plans create a valuable archive of your business’s evolution.

Once a test is started, the software takes over. All split testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page has generated significantly more conversions, from a statistics perspective, than the others. At this point, you can end the test and promote the winning version to be your new “control.”

Step 9: Transferring your winning campaigns into other media

Diversifying your customer acquisition channels gives your business more stability. Your increased conversion rate will mean you can profitably invest more in advertising channels such as SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing, and offline media.

Also, explore how you can implement the insights from your winning experiments in other parts of your marketing funnel; e.g.:

• A winning appeal in a landing page test can provide a winning headline for your AdWords campaigns (or vice versa).
• A winning landing page can be adapted for space advertising in offline media.
• If a particular offer performs well in your own marketing materials, your affiliates may benefit from using it too.

This offline ad featured in several major travel magazines. It was inspired by split-tested, high-converting landing pages. We tripled the sales of this business in 12 months.

Each win often reveals new opportunities

The CRE Methodology™ is iterative; subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments. Each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones. Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. After each split test, it’s important to “zoom out” and look at the whole conversion funnel again, to determine which part of the business you should focus on next.

CRO creates a virtuous circle that accelerates your business’s growth. To see examples of businesses we’ve grown, click here.

Conclusion

As this overview has shown, The CRE Methodology™ is not about best-practice page elements; it’s a process of activities that encompass a wide range of disciplines. Although it sounds less appealing than applying “magic buttons,” we don’t know of an easier, more reliable way to grow an online business.

What you should do next

If you’d like to learn more about conversion

If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your business, read the following case studies, which show our process in action:

• How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company
• How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails
• How we doubled the sales of a web app
• How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%

These how-to guides will come in handy too.

If you’d like to outsource or delegate your conversion activities

If you’d rather find out right away how we might help your company increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants. We’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.

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Our consultants recently discussed ways of getting users to scroll down a page. You may be interested to read this summary of the techniques that arose from the discussions.

Why you should be testing long pages

As a rule of thumb, your page should contain at least as many words as you’d use when selling your product or service face to face. That’s because you don’t have the luxury of being able to ask for objections, so your page needs to address all of the most common objections. When SEOmoz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, told us that it takes him about nine minutes to sell SEOmoz’s PRO service face to face, we realized that the landing page would have to be long. The winning page we designed for SEOmoz was six times longer than the control, which it outperformed by 52%.

Some marketers are wary of long pages, associating them with aggressive sales techniques. Whenever someone tells you that they’d never buy from a long page, remind them how long Amazon’s pages are.

Sometimes your sales copy needs to be bigger than a man: Amazon’s Kindle page is three Hasselhoffs high.

Where is the fold?

In web marketing, the term “above the fold” refers to the area of a page that users can see without scrolling.

An illustration of the fold on Amazon’s homepage.

The position of the fold will be different for different users, depending on many factors, including their screen resolution, how many bars (toolbars, tab bars, menu bars, system bars, etc.) are open, and whether they’ve zoomed in on the page. FoldTester is a tool that shows you where the fold will appear for different users.

The growing usage of mobile-phone browsers throws yet another monkey wrench into the fold machinery.

How to analyze the way your users scroll

Here are two ways to determine whether your users are missing important content because they aren’t scrolling:

1. Conduct usability tests and observe whether the users scroll.
2. Use a tool like ClickTale, which gives scroll-reach heatmaps about how far users scroll down your page.

Incidentally, ClickTale’s analysts have published some excellent research into how users scroll, which is based on the wealth of data that their tool captures.

Techniques for encouraging users to scroll

Here are six design strategies that may fix scrolling problems. As with any web usability issue, there’s no universal solution. Try to identify why users aren’t scrolling, overcome that particular problem, and then verify it with a split test. (If you’re new to split testing, see this comparison of multivariate testing software.)

1. Horizontal objects near the fold: how to avoid them, and what to replace them with.

This is a long page, but the horizontal band of white space near the fold gives the impression that it’s not.

Beware of horizontals. A band of horizontal white space that lies on the fold can be mistaken for the end of the page. (We call this a “false bottom.”) If you can’t remove the white space altogether, try to reduce its thickness so that you minimize the number of users for whom it lies along the fold.

A horizontal line or bar just above the fold also creates a false bottom, so be careful with those too.

You can avoid having horizontal lines across your page by ensuring that page elements in different columns end at different heights. (If you’d like to see a case study of how we grew this business by £14 million per year, click here.)

If a page element is clearly straddling the fold, users will intuitively understand that the page continues below the fold. A simple way to remove all horizontals is to have page elements in each column end at different heights on the page. That way, at least one page element will straddle the fold, regardless of the user’s computer settings.

Ideally, the page elements that straddle the fold should be ones that have a well-known form, so it’s obvious when they are incomplete.

It’s obvious when some objects are incomplete. (By the way, this image is by Scott McCloud, whose books on writing comics provide a great way of learning about storyboarding videos.)

2. Use a background for the sides (and top) of the page.

Here’s an intriguing way to make it obvious that the page continues below the fold: Give the top, left-hand, and right-hand borders of the page a shade or texture that contrasts with the main content.

An example of using border shading to encourage scrolling.

This technique appears to work because of the Gestalt effect, by making it clear that you can see all but one of the page’s sides.

3. In your sales copy, explicitly urge readers to scroll.

Be clear and direct with your users, telling them exactly what you’d like them to do. Don’t feel afraid to explicitly ask them to scroll; it’s fine to say, “Scroll down this page to…”

As with the rest of your copy, users will be more likely to act if you give them reasons for doing so. For example, “Scroll down this page to get a $10 off coupon” or “Scroll down this page to discover [valuable information]” is likely to outperform a reasonless call-to-action.

4. Add a please-scroll graphic just above the fold.

You may choose to add a please-scroll graphic just above the fold, where it’s likely to get noticed. Such a graphic may be placed where most users’ folds lie, as in this example:

A please-scroll graphic in the form of handwritten text (the bit in the bottom-right hand corner).

Here’s another:

An example of a please-scroll graphic for a web app. To see how we grew a web app’s sales by 100%, see this case study.

Alternatively, you may wish to add the graphic to a freestanding object that’s fixed to the bottom of users’ browser windows. The graphic will then appear at the bottom of their page regardless of what their screen resolution is. Advantages of objects like these are that they don’t disrupt the design and that you can add them by using a simple script.

The Wiltshire Farm Foods website has a simple “Scroll for More” label fixed to the bottom of the browser window. The label fades away when users scroll down.

5. Add click-to-scroll functionality.

Make your please-scroll button clickable.

Why not make your please-scroll graphic clickable? If you click on the “Scroll for More” button on the Wiltshire Farm Foods page (see the image above), the page smoothly scrolls down.

To learn how to do this using JavaScript, click here.

Create links to target locations within the same page.

HTML allows you to link to target locations within the same page. Clicking on such a link automatically jumps you down to the section you’ve linked to.

These links can be incorporated into a Johnson box, as we did in our SEOmoz case study, allowing users to jump to the section that interests them most.

The Johnson box we incorporated into SEOmoz’s page contained jump links to different sections of the sales copy. To get a free annotated PDF of this “million-dollar landing page,” subscribe to our free newsletter.

6. Don’t force users to scroll horizontally.

Horizontal scrolling doesn’t come naturally to most web users. It normally becomes an issue when the users’ browser windows are narrower than the width for which the website was designed. One way to get around this is to design for small screen resolutions. Another is to separate your content from your layout, so you can use different style sheets for different devices, or use a liquid layout that automatically adjusts to the browser width.

Of course, every rule has its exceptions. Here is a showcase of creative websites that are specifically designed to use horizontal scrolling. However, even this showcase includes the caveat “Horizontal websites are not very user friendly.”

An effective way to implement horizontal scrolling, if it adds to the page’s value, is to implement arrowed slider screens such as the one on this Amazon page. (Click on the link to see which book we’ve just bought.)

Conclusion

Long pages are effective, but only if your users know that they can scroll and are given compelling reasons to do so.

If you’d like a PDF screenshot of a long page that generated an additional million dollars per year for the client, with many detailed “tooltips” explaining the persuasion techniques behind each page element, just sign up to receive our free newsletter.

An excerpt from our “Conversion Secrets of a Million-Dollar Landing Page” PDF.

In this article, we’ve outlined some techniques for encouraging scrolling, but did we miss any? If so, scroll down and let us know in the comments. (See what we did there?)

Learn more

Want to learn more about how you can improve your site? See our Services page. You can also discover how we’ve grown companies in software, travel, recruitment, and other industries. These how-to guides will come in useful too.

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