How often does this happen:

A company budgets for a website, it’s built according to the budget and then it’s done. Hooray! … and everybody moves on to other important things.

Unfortunately too often.

Declaring it done is a waste of money

Your website is not done. Declaring it done is arrogant, stupid and will cost you a lot of money.

A newly built website is a hypothesis at best (hopefully it was designed with the user in mind). Now the real world test starts – and with it the process of continuous optimization.

No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers

- Steve Blank

If you just allocated a budget for launching a new site, you basically paid for a rough diamond. It works, but it doesn’t sparkle.  A cut and polished diamond is worth so much more.

It’s impossible to know in advance what will work the best for your customers. Yes there are heuristics and best practices, but they are a mere starting point for optimization. Once your new site is launched, you need to start optimizing it to figure out what works the best. Optimizing is the best thing you can do for growing your revenue.

A mindset change is needed

The era of just building websites, and keeping them the way they are until the next “new website” project, is gone. If you’re stuck in that mindset, your business is going to shrink and your smart competitors are going to eat your lunch (and dinner).

Your website budget has to include continuous optimization – it’s a non-removable part of your website. Having a website is not a goal – it’s a means to an end – revenue. Optimization is about getting MORE revenue out of your website (improved marketing efficiency).

It takes (depending on your traffic volume) at least 6 to 12 months to pick the low hanging fruits and get the initial gains (often very significant amounts of extra absolute dollars earned). But it doesn’t end there – it’s a non-stop process. When the conversion industry creators, Eisenberg brothers, work with a client, they have a 3-year perspective in mind.

My friend Chris Goward advocates what he calls evolutionary web design - ditching radical makeovers at all and just replacing it with continuous improvement. I support that idea wholeheartedly (with some exceptions – there ARE quite a lot of awful websites out there that have nothing going for them, those need a fresh start to get moving + continuous optimization).

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it for a long time. You may *think* you know what people want and how they want it. However, you don’t – you must talk to people, understand them and run experiments.

For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.

- Bryan Eisenberg

Data, Not Intuition and HiPPOs

Most sites are still built the stupid way – based on a committee meeting (where none are conversion analysts) or the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion).

Another prominent approach is copying what your competitors are doing. Trust me, most of them don’t know what they’re doing, and their website looks the way is does due to a combination of random factors. Plus, they probably copied somebody else.

 That’s a surefire way to crappy results, but even that could be salvaged and turned into something that works through experimentation and continuous improvement.

Continuous optimization is based on actual user behavior data. “But we used data when designing the site!”  Great! We should use behavior data every time we design a site! The problem is that even when your new site is designed by solely relying on user behavior data, it is a design based on data that happened in the past, on the old site. Your new website is a great hypothesis at best.

Better than the average person, but that’s not enough

Every conversion consultant has heard this a million times: “So what will our conversion rate be after you work on our site?“ If someone indicates they can answer that, they’re lying. Nobody can.

My friend Craig Sullivan says that even though he’s run thousands of tests over the years, and he’s better at guessing the outcome of the test than an average person – he’s still not that much better than flipping a coin. And this guess is made when running experiments based on solid data! Experienced optimizers know that you can’t be sure of anything – especially when you’re designing a new site.

Your success depends on the number of experiments you run and the speed of implementation. Knowing what to look for, how to operate with the data and using a structured approach will ensure your experiments are done right and they actually have a chance of achieving significant lifts. Traffic and time are precious resources that shouldn’t be wasted on random tests.

Marketers still rely on intuition

A study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition – marketers depend on data for just 11 percent of all decisions.

Funny that almost 100 years after the book Scientific Advertising came out we’re still relying on intuition more than anything. Dan Ariely notes in this excellent article:

Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.

Sadly, we the people are lazy and we’re after the one true answer. We want it now, without testing and experimentation. We want to believe our intuition or some experts’ opinion is the final truth. It’s not. Ariely again:

When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking. Never mind that asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers.

This study shows that an incremental 241 percent ROI can be generated by applying data to business decisions. And 91 percent of CMOs believe that successful brands make data-driven decisions, as per Columbia Business School.

If your website was built based on intuition, HiPPO and mere best practices, you’re losing money every single day. You could be earning a ton more, but your website sucks.

Stop paying attention to your competitors and best practices, and start benchmarking against your customers’ expectations. Can you meet or exceed those expectations? Your conversion rate will be a leading indicator.

Build – Measure – Learn

Ever thought that Lean Startup methodology and conversion optimization are similar? You’re right, they are. In fact, I’d even say that the overlap is so huge, they’re almost the same thing. In the end it’s about growing a company by figuring out what the customer wants and how they want it. (By the way if you haven’t read The Lean Startup yet, pick it up now – it’s amazing).

The critical piece of the puzzle is this diagram:

 

This is the process to follow on your website too. You have some ideas (based on data – both qualitative and quantitative). You build a website – and measure *everything* that’s going on there. You do whatever it takes to gather useful data – web analytics, user behavior, usability tests, email tracking- everything. You end up with a bunch of data, learn from it – and form new hypotheses for new experiments. And repeat, repeat, repeat. You just keep experimenting.

Bid data and research for research’s sake are stupid. What matters is what you do with the analysis and data you have – you don’t want to be “data rich and optimization poor”. One execution is worth more than all the unimplemented analysis in the world.

Structured approach to testing

Split testing via spaghetti method (testing random things and seeing what works) will only take you so far. Companies that employ a structured approach to testing get way better results.

Continuous optimization starts with a strategy – having an idea of what a successful conversion optimization system looks like, how to define the right goals, prioritizing where to test, how to plan for rapid-cycle testing and so on. Companies that have a structured approach to conversion are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales.

• Measure. You can only improve what you can measure, so measure everything. Be clear on your business goals, benchmark your competition for ideas, dig in your web analytics data, conduct customer surveys and analyze search behavior on your site.
• Analysis. Once you know your goals, it’s time to figure out what’s working well, what’s not and why. Analyze your content for relevancy and clarity, figure out if it matches user needs, do usability testing and analyze user paths/journeys on your site.
• Test. A/B and multivariate testing are the two most valuable methods for companies to improve conversion. Prioritize tests by potential value and cost.
• Optimize. After conducting tests, implement successful design and content changes.

It is a rather simple concept, but it is also complex as you can go very deep in analysis (too deep for your own good). To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.

Conclusion

Your website budget needs to account for both – getting the initial version done and running continuous optimization programs on it for 12 months or more. That’s the way to keep growing your sales while minimizing waste and achieving your potential.

Optimization never ends since the world is constantly changing – user preferences, devices they’re on, their mindset, market conditions, and so on. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Keep experimenting.

According to a comScore Study commissioned by Google, 63% of website visitors complete their purchases offline.

Online, we have plenty of ways to track visitor behavior. Tracking cookies, heat maps, click tracking, ad retargeting etc, but as soon as that person picks up the phone, we’re lost. But we don’t have to be.

Without call tracking, you have no idea what web pages that caller has visited. Therefore all of the effort you’ve put into designing user flows, and nurturing that lead when they’re online become all but nullified if they decide they want to connect with a real human being.

Combine that with the fact that not all customers enjoy filling out lead forms and inbound phone calls are 10-15 times more likely to convert than an inbound web lead, it becomes clear: if you’re not tracking your phone calls, you’re leaving money on the table.

What is Call Tracking

Call tracking is a method of generating unique phone numbers to track the overall effectiveness of a campaign where the primary call to action involves your customer calling the business.

For example, if your marketing campaign consists of PPC, Tradeshows, and Radio Ads, each marketing channel is assigned a different phone number so you could measure both volume and quality of phone conversation.

Online, top call tracking services will assign each visitor a unique phone number (known as a legacy number) that will sync with the  Google Analytics if dialed. When the visitor calls, you’re able to track what keywords they used to find you, measure the length of the call (to determine quality) and what pages they’ve viewed before & after the phone call takes place.

UK service Infinity Tracker has the perfect graphic to demonstrate:

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Compare this to the traditional method of well…wondering, it’s easy to understand how using call tracking enables you to have a more complete view of your marketing efforts, focus your budgeting, and tighten the screws on your overall marketing efforts.

Services like RingRevenue, Ifbyphone, Callfire, and Logmycalls, provide their own “legacy phone number” service along with their own unique features (like phone qualification surveys) to best suit your businesses needs.

How To Measure & Improve Your Phone Calls

Generally speaking, installing call tracking on your website is as easy as specifying call parameters within the app (e.g showing local numbers to local visitors) and inserting a snippet of Javascript.

Once the Java’s inserted on your site, you can configure most services to integrate with Google Analytics to track which pages a caller has visited and get a broad view of which pages generate the most calls. Setting the phone call as a conversion goal just like any other conversion goal.

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Most services have their own detailed call dashboard, and some will also integrate CRMs like Salesforce or Hubspot to apply the call information to the rest of your prospect’s lead information, such as discovery keywords, customer journey, and call time.

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Using this data, your sales person is better equipped to answer questions and anticipate objections, because they know exactly what the lead has been exposed to.

Take it a step further and  your marketing team could use the call data to better address throughout the marketing funnel so inbound leads come in even more qualified.

But what if you wanted to go even further?

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On a bit of a tangent,research by Top 100 Social Media influencer Steve Olenski indicates that 73% of leads never get contacted, and on average a sales person makes only 1.3 call attempts before moving on.

A joint study between M.I.T and InsideSales.com states that your chances of even making contact with a phone lead drop 100% within the first five minutes of expressing interest & the odds of qualifying that lead decrease 6x after the first 60 minutes.

What this really means is that contacting your new lead should be measured in seconds and minutes, not hours or days.

By combining call tracking to see browsing behavior with a responsive power dialer like Inside Sales, you can contact your new lead almost immediately after they enter their information & know almost exactly what they’re interested in.

Statistically speaking, by using both technologies, you’ll be reaching 92% of your phone leads which are  10-15 times more likely to convert than your web leads. I highly recommend you read the study.

Call Tracking & Google Adwords

Now what if I told you that 52% of all mobile ads result in a phone call AND there was a way to easily get your phone number in front of people searching from their mobile phone?

For experienced Adwords advertisers, this won’t be a major revelation, but back in 2011 Google introduced an Ad Extension called “Click To Call.”

What Click to Call does is displays your phone number as the primary call to action on a top sponsored result for whatever keyphrases you’re targeting.

For example an insurance agency could target the phrase “car insurance quotes” prompting the searcher to speak with an agent.

According to Google “click to call” Adword campaigns see an average of 5-30% higher conversions than their typical “click here” Mobile counterparts.

Using a legacy phone number system like we were talking about before,  you could generate multiple phone numbers to efficiently test things like which regions produce the best leads, 800 numbers vs local numbers, and of course, which copy produces the higher click through rates.

The best part about click to call (which you’ll see in the case studies below) is that it can be used at no additional cost. Considering that phone leads are typically more qualified than web leads, this makes for a much more effective use of ad dollars.

Case Studies

# 1 – Esurance Improves Mobile Traffic By 200%

Insurance company Esurance wanted to make good on their “Technology when you want it, people when you don’t” slogan.

By implementing Google’s Click To Call feature in Adwords, Esurance has been able to improve their mobile call volume by 200% year over year. By targeting mobile customers searching for “insurance quotes” or the like, Esurance is able to connect mobile searchers with a licensed insurance agent almost immediately after searching.

Doing this decreased their Cost Per Acquisition by 30% and tripled their mobile acquisition within the first year. Watch the video to see the case study

# 2 – JBE Holdings Earns $500K in Commissions Promoting Call Based Campaigns

Combining Pay-Per-Call with relevant affiliate advertising offers from companies like AllState, ServiceMagic, DirecTV and more, Justin Elenburg was able to experience average conversion rates of 20% and receive payouts between $10-$30 for every call placed through the phone numbers he promoted.

His strategy was centered around using Google Adwords to target “need based” searches made on Mobile phones then having his tracking number be the primary call to action in the ad. In the example below, he provides a use case where a user might search “Phoenix Plumber” because their bedroom has been flooded by leaky pipes.

By being top bidder for the keyword “Phoenix Plumber”, he is able to display his tracking phone number as the top search result. So if the user clicks his tracking number and calls the plumber who then comes out, Justin get’s a commission, the plumber gets a customer, the customer get’s their pipes fixed, and everyone’s happy.

In this case study he says, “Once the upfront work is done, I can pretty much put the campaigns on auto-pilot and watch the calls and commissions come in.”

# 3 – Ifbyphone Improves Conversions by 600%

Ifbyphone, a call tracking service itself, needed to improve both the quality and quantity of their inbound call leads.

Initially, their primary call to action “call to speak with us” was lost in distracting information (like a persistant bright red side navigation & alternate calls to action)

After agency Closed Loop Marketing did their first round of redesigns to the primary PPC landing page, total call count increased by 62% and the average call time for each call doubled.

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Revisions in Round 1 included:

• Visual Anchor Point at the Top of the page.
• Inserted primary call to action (click-to-call) at top of page, and repeated 6 additional times.
• Simplified the offer, and made it easier to understand
• Assigned unique phone numbers to different landing pages
• Integrated with Google Analytics to create a pageview once phone call reached a certain length

On that last bullet point, tracking the call length based on url & phone number would allow Ifbyphone to easily determine which pages/keyword targeting combinations would have the highest ROI.

If your company were running PPC campaigns that were segmented by geographic region, you could easily determine which geographic regions would have higher conversion rates using similar methodology, but more on that later.

Not being content & resting on their conversion rates, Ifbyphone came back to Closed Loop saying “we think we can do better.” and lifted all design restrictions.

This was the result:

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Key changes:

• Stronger colors and imagery.
• Human face as focal point.
• Much clearer calls to action.
• Compacted display of detailed information.
• Inclusion of video.

As a result, lead conversion improved by nearly 6% while lead quality remained stable.

The extended project saw a 600% improvement from Ifbyphone’s initial campaign.

Target Phone Numbers By Region On Landing Pages

One final trick I want to offer is that by using behavioral targeting techniques with Visual Website Optimizer, such as acknowledging the visitor’s geographic region, or referral site, you could see a dramatic increase in your call in conversions.

While not specifically about call tracking, Visual Website Optimizer was able to increase click throughs to their careers page by 149% by adding a small chicklet to the side of the page that acknowledged the visitor’s location.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s not difficult to imagine that adding additional relevance to a page saying something to the effect of “Free [offer] for [city, state] visitors, call [local number] to speak with a representive” would give a significant lift in conversion rates.

I wasn’t able to find a case study to confirm this, but the statistics behind behavioral targeting and call tracking all indicate these methods to be highly profitable.

As a word of warning though, being too invasive with your language could have negative effects on your conversions.  Research from eMarketer indicates that nearly 2/3 of people aren’t very fond of behavioral targeting once they learn about it.

Call Tracking Service Providers By Country

If you want to get started with call tracking, here are a list of providers broken down by country for you to look into:

Slide from Craig Sullivan’s Conversion Manager Course

For the USA, would also recommend looking into RingRevenue, Callfire, and Logmycalls to find a provider that will match your needs.

If your company is high volume phone sales, consider Inside Sales the industry leader in lead response managment to shorten the time between when someone fills out the lead form and when you get them on the phone.

Conclusion

If done well, closing the loop on phone call data provides robust information about your prospects that can influence every aspect of your online marketing strategy from discovery to lead nurture, final conversion, up-sales and beyond.

Responding quickly to inquiries with detailed knowledge about the prospect also better equips your sales person to answer any questions that may arise from the consultative sales conversation.

So my question to you is two-fold

1. From what you’ve read, what do you like about the call tracking process &
2. How would you use this in your own business to improve your conversions?

Looking forward to your responses, and if you liked this article, please share it.

Most people won’t buy anything on the first visit, so you need to capture emails. And then what? In this article we’re going to dive deep into a discussion about creating content for your autoresponder campaign.

We’ve talked about re-optimizing your autoresponders and creating effective drip campaigns before. This article is about how to not sound like a robot and keep that personal vibe even when your content is on auto-pilot. We’ll also look at how frequently you should be sending and length of your campaign to maximize it’s effectiveness.

By the time you’re done with this article, I guarantee you’ll be thinking more strategically about Autoresponders, and ready to create content that’ll help you automate trust building exercises, shares, and sales.

A Quick Note About What’s To Follow

Through my research, I’ve found that the popular use of autoresponders is to create a series of quick, short, automated blasts of slick pitch messages to ship products or services as quickly as possible.

That’s not what this article is about.

Everything I’ve found indicates that these heavy pitch oriented autoresponders lead to higher spam complaints, unsubscribes, and negative brand mentions through social media.

However, research supports that people read most or half of their emails,  respond to passion, hate being pitched, HATE irrelevance, and won’t mind frequent emails as long as that email is relevant, interesting, and specific to their needs.

Dan Zarrella of Hubspot has conducted some very interesting research using the Hubspot and MailChimp Databases, which talks about opens, click throughs, and a number other factors. If you’re interested you should watch the full webinar here

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Dan’s research combined with the other research I’ve found is that even though open & click through rates drop off over a subscriber’s life time, the value of long term subscribers tends to be higher.

This combined with other research and sentiment found throughout this article, leads me to believe that autoresponder campaigns should be a long, continual process, designed to consistently provide value, regardless to where your prospect is in their lifecycle.

Identifying The Starting Point of  Your Auto-Responder Campaigns.

Knowing where to start your autoresponder is difficult.

How are you able to tell where you should start your sequence, how frequently you should send, or even what to send?

Truth is, without looking at the data, you can’t.

BUT, if you go to your analytics right now and identify the pages with the highest bounce rates, and how people are coming to them, you’ll find ripe starting points for your autoresponders.

The search queries and links visitors click to get to these pages give you very valuable insight as to your visitors state of being. In a face to face networking situation, this would be how you enter the conversation.

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From here, determine a lead magnet that would best match the intent of the page.  Then consider what the logical progression of the conversation would be after the offer’s been made.

In this case study on Kissmetrics, Garret Moon, founder of Todaymade.com talks about how they targeted their 85% (or higher) bounce pages as a place to offer relevant lead magnets, which lead to doubling their optin rates within 7 days.

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Please realize though, your lead magnet doesn’t have to be an ebook. It could be videos, a free trial, discounts…whatever will be the most relevant to your visitor & your overall offering.

It’s also important to realize that just because a great lead magnet might increase your overall lead intake, doesn’t mean it’ll be lucritive to continually beat your subscriber over the head with sales messages shortly after they subscribe.

Though it seems counter-intuitive to not go right for the sale, according to Sirius Decisions, 80% of “bad leads” that sales teams disqualify due to lack of budget or timing do go on to buy within 24 months. Gleanster Research also reports that 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy.

In other words, most people are just figuring out they even have a problem and aren’t ready to pull the trigger right away.

If you’re respectful of that, the longer you keep in contact with them and provide value, research shows ”Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months.”

Adwords authority Perry Marshell’s “Autoresponder guy”, John Fanchersays:

“The method we teach is 80% content / 20% pitch. Rather than pitching in every message, we recommend making deposits first…for 3 or 4 messages of pure, helpful content. Zero pitch.”

What’s the “Content Story” for your Autoresponder?

Create story arcs that happen over the next few weeks, months, or even the next year when thinking about your sequence. Think about the obstacles your subscriber has overcome to get to you, and where they could go with with a little help.

In a revealing case study, Perry Marshell shows that by using this method within the first 8 days of his sequence, the “value per visitor” increases dramatically compared to traffic being sent to a page that simply asks for the sale.

Knowing they “make deposits” for the first 3-4 messages, it’s interesting to watch the value per visitor increase on the fourth message – likely when they make the first offer for the paid solution.

But here’s where data gets facinating. When you compare the value per customer with Dan Zarrella’s aggregate Click Through Data, you see a very revealing story.

As click through rates decrease, the value per visitor increases.

Why is that?

1. Opening/clicking/buying subscribers realized problem was bigger than they thought and admit they need to fix it (so they buy now).
2. Opening/clicking/Non-buying subscribers decide the problem isn’t worth fixing right now, but are interested in keeping tabs on a solution.
3. Non-Opening/non-clicking subscribers filter themselves out, leaving room for more valuable subscribers.

In other words, if the first 3-4 messages are designed to help the right people, the heros, your active subscribers, will make decisions that lead them to the next steps of your journey together.

When SeoMoz wanted to increase the amount of free subscribers to fully paying members, they made their “hero’s” decision to embark on the journey simple – They offered unlimited access to the full range of Pro Tools for $1 for the first month. To help them get the most of their $1 trial (and upgrade to full subscription) they created a 30 day “Quick Start” guide which gave them 10 emails of very actionable advice and let the hero generate “quick wins.”

The result?

In the span of four months, SeoMoz increased conversions by 170% and generated over $1 Million in additional revenue. Full case study here.

All because they took the time to understood where their free subscribers were, and helped them make the most out of their premium trial.

Disclaimer: This is provided you’re making sales. If your click through rates are low, and you’re not making sales, there are a number of things you could fix.

The 4 Stages of Relationships

In the last article about ReOptimizing your AutoResponder, I quoted a case study by Mauro D’Andrea about how he improved his email clickthrough rates.

In this case study he talks about how he based his content framework off of Professor Mark L. Knapp’s “Four Stages of Relationship Development” model and creates his campaign to reflect each stage.

Stage 1: Value Addiction

• Email every 2 days.
• Build a story about being an awesome source of content.
• Phase lasts for roughly 4 or 5 emails
• Light offer on last email of the phase (noticing a pattern yet?)

Stage 2: Sticking

• Slow down frequency to 3-5 days. Keep providing great content.
• Encourage deepening relationship by encouraging subscribers to reply to emails, take surveys, or comment.
• Ok to sell (small, but firm offer).
• Phase lasts for roughly 4 emails
• More obvious offer on last email

Stage 3: Rapport

• Slow down frequency to every 4-5 days.
• Sales email after 4-5 emails.
• Number of Emails 4
• Next step email at end of sequence.

This stage starts about 20 days out or more. At this point, the people who are still opening your emails and clicking your links are indicating they want to deepen the connection with you. The goal at this stage is to provide value in a way that will:

1. Help people who are really sticking to the DIY route but also
2. Reinforce the idea that a paid solution will be the easier way to fix the problem.

With SaaS businesses using the free trial, Phase 3 emails are those found near the end of the trial period. These emails could include things like checklists, recaps, & bonus content that addresses feedback you’ve received from Stage 2.

Stage 4: Loyalty

• Email every 5-6 days.
• Paid offer every 4-5 emails. (Cross sales, partner offers, conferences)

Though it may be easy to dismiss these people on your autoresponder – who have not yet purchased, but continue to open and click your links – these may be among your most valuable subscribers.

Think about it, after this long, they continue to interact with the content you’re putting out. Either A.) They’re not ready to buy, or B.) Your offer hasn’t quite matched up with their immediate needs.

If their needs haven’t been met yet, dig into the gap between their interest in your free stuff and determine why they haven’t bought yet.

This information could help you find relevant partners (if you’re an affiliate or in software), products to add to inventory (if you’re in e-commerce) or to add features, or at least learn to communicate the benefits of your features better.

 

It’s the loyalty phase where you would consider the “email forking” strategy where you make new offers based on specific interests (the Hubspot ebook strategy) & start the cycle over.

If for some reason there’s a group of people on your main autoresponder after several months, who continue to open and click, you should first look into your landing page optimization.

Provided everything is on the up & up, create a segment to test increasing your frequency with “special offer” emails (like JCPenny) or send “Vip club” type emails (like Zappos) to reward long term active subscribers.

Building Your Email Communication Strategy

If you want your email autoresponder to work for you as a way to build audience, relationships, sales long term, you have to change your thinking to a longer form story (kind of like a television series)

To do that, we have to use the Four stages of relationship building and fill each email in with the four types of content found in content marketing.

Viral/Emotional State

This content deals with the extremes of the human condition. Use to help subscriber know you understand roughly their goals, frustrations, and where they are right now.

Discussion
Encourage your subscriber to hit reply, fill out a survey, give some form of feedback. Ask for feedback starts small and increases with each Stage.

Lead
Further commit subscriber by encouraging downloads of bonus ebooks, offering specialized trainings or webinars. Goal is to provide deeper value while also gauging level of interest to fix problem. Tangental lead content throughout the sequence will also give you a strong indication of subscribers wants and needs based on the actions they take.

Sales
Similar to lead, however this content encourages subscribers to come to a firm decision to fix problem.

Sticking with the analogy that autoresponders are like the story arc for a movie, or a television series, let’s look at how these 4 types of content fit into the story arc that we’ve been building up to throughout this whole article.

Typically every story has three acts. if you apply the three act structure “acts” to each phase in your email sequence, you can create a story that will resonate with the people who stick around.

• Act 1 – Character (email 1 Understanding why customer signed up for lead magnet)
• Act 2- Conflict (Emails 2-3 digging into/discussing the problem)
• Act 3 – Resolution (Email 4 possible solution/offer)

This interview between Autoresponder guy John Fancher, and award winning filmmaker Josh Russell provides VERY valuable insight on applying film and television writing towards autoresponder content.

“Whoever is trying to get a product to an audience, they’re saying, ‘I have a solution for you’ but for the audience, a solution is alien. It’s outside their paradigm, it’s alien, it’s far away, it’s distant.” – Josh Russell

Create A Wireframe For Your Autoresponder Strategy

For your solution to not be alien for your reader, combine what we’ve learned in “The 4 stages of Relationships” and “The Four Types Of Content” to build a flow chart for your autoresponder campaign.

But wait, remember how in the very beginning of this article Marketing Sherpa indicated that many bigger sales happen well after the sales team consider a non-buying lead “bad”?

This is why I plan my Autoresponders for a full year to correspond with my overall marketing strategy.

In order to not become overwhelmed, I’ll spend a couple hours creating themes for each month. I then break down those months within weekly themes, then only after creating that framework, will I work on the individual messages.

I find this approach to be much more manageable, and it allows me to identify those “arcs” we were talking about before. (As a side benefit, I can also drive traffic back to my blog, when an old articles reinforce the points.

On a month to month basis, that wireframe/flow chat might look something like this.

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While this may seem like a lot of work, setting up the monthly then weekly frameworks only really requires a couple hours to sketch out.

The work, of course, is not just to set up the framework to capture more of your own sales over time, but to ultimately set up more behavioral email marketing campaign, which according to the e-consultancy email marketing census report only 14% of respondents are doing but 47% are planning on it.

But yeah, let’s save behavioral targeting for another day, shall we?

One Last Note About Autoresponders

Create the autoresponder framework first, sketch out the overall communication strategy starting with most likely optin area, and during the later phases of your autoresponder, link to existing content that supports your overall arguement.

Have your offers in place first, use your autoresponder as a way to help subscribers understand the problem. Share stories about how you came to the solution, admit failures that lead you to the conclusions you’ve come to.

If in doubt about frequency, use the A/B/A/C autoresponder vs autoresponder test from this article to find bigger wins.

And heed the warnings of the MailChimp blog…

…”be careful not to get TOO automated.The key to a good autoresponder campaign is to not let the recipient feel like it’s an autoresponder campaign.”

featured image credit

What’s the best way to persuade somebody when talking to them? You have to be confident, talk fast and swear a little, among other things. But what about persuading somebody without words – possible?

You bet.

Researchers installed a ‘fly’ onto urinals across different airports around the world:

The presence of a fly in a urinal literally changes human behavior. How come? Apparently men have an instinct to aim. When flies were introduced at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, spillage rates dropped 80 percent (don’t want to know how they measured it).

This is a clear case of getting people to do what you want without using words. Persuasive design in action.

Are people in Denmark selfish?

This graph represents the number of people who’re registered organ donors, divided by countries:

So only 4.25% of Denmark, but over 99% of Austrians – what’s going on here? Are Austrians more self-less than the Danes? Well, no. What’s really happening is, when the people represented with the yellow bars go get their drivers license, there’s a check-box on the application that says ‘tick this box if you want to become an organ donor’. In the countries represented with the blue bars, the check-box says “tick this box if you do NOT want to become an organ donor”.

People go with whatever is the default. Defaults are design, too.

Do people change software settings?

Here’s another tidbit. Back in the day, UIE analyzed people’s Microsoft Office settings. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in. Key lesson: people do not mess with defaults (unless they’re designers or developers)!

If you’d like more people to take action, make the preferred actions ‘default’. Of course, this can be abused – like RyanAir makes buying travel insurance a default option and Vistaprint used to enroll people in their “membership” by default. That’s not a way to make friends.

That being said, there are lots of opportunities with designing for default.

We spend very little time on deliberate thought

Have you read Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell) or Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)? You should.

Both of them present a compelling case on how we, humans, mostly operate on auto-pilot. We rarely stop to analyze and think when making decisions. We make snap judgments instead, and we don’t even know why or how we’re making those decisions.

When we have to justify or provide a rationale for our auto-pilot decisions, we bullshit. The truth is we don’t know.

Our decisions change depending on how we think

The outcome changes when we decide on auto-pilot versus when we put some deliberate thought into our actions.

In a study students were asked to taste different jams and rank them in the order of preference. No explanation was asked – students were using their auto-pilot mode. The results were then compared with rankings by food experts from Consumer Reports. The ranking results were very similar.

Now, they changed it around – they had the students explain their choices – provide a rationale – which made them use slow, deliberate thinking. The results were vastly different.

It was not just about jam either – they did the same with ranking college courses. The results were very different depending on whether people had to justify their choices or not. That’s auto-pilot vs. deliberate thought in action; we make different decisions depending on how we think at a particular moment.

Know your target audience

The point of all of it is this: you need to know the rational thinking of your customer, and you need to understand their sub-conscious and emotional decision making processes. You figure this stuff out through talking to them, user surveys, usability tests and split tests. This post of mine will give you some ideas on how to do it.

You really need to understand how your product or service fits in the lives of your customers. Conversions will be at their highest when we offer something they need and want in the way that resonates with them.

Everything that follows will assume you have a pretty good idea about your target group.

5 key principles of persuasive web design

Follow these 5 principles for improved conversions.

1. Clarity above all

Our brain is a questioning organ. When we see something for the very first time, we instantly ask: “What is it?” (Can I eat it? Or will it eat me?)

It’s no wonder that when people are asked what’s most important to them on a website, they say ‘finding stuff they’re interested in’:

When a visitor comes to your site, he/she needs answers and needs them quick. The first thing they read needs to provide answers to questions like:

• What is this site?
• What can I do here / is it what I’m looking for?
• Why should I do it / how is it useful to me?

Learn to craft a compelling value proposition. Your value proposition needs to answer this: why should I buy from you and not the competition?

It’s not just your home page that needs to be clear – all of it needs to be. Product pages, about pages and so on.

Clarity is by far the most important thing for every page on your site – is it clear and understandable? Here’s as clear as it gets:

What is it: “Start accepting credit card today” + a clear, relevant image.
What can I do here: I can get a card reader.
Why should I do it: it’s free and just 2.75% per swipe.

My favorite bad example (can you tell what they’re selling?):

Our Point of Sale Systems Integrate Hardware, Software and Internet Social Media Marketing Into One Giant Revenue Super System.

Another example:

The good: they use visuals to communicate what they’re about. Human brain processes visuals 50 times faster than text. It’s a good idea to SHOW what you’re selling.

The bad: “the easiest way to find …”. People do not believe superlatives.

Be specific, don’t use superlatives

For some reason it’s tempting to start throwing around words like “best”, “easiest”, “fastest” and so on. If it’s true – provide ample evidence (NY Times said so, this scientific study confirms etc). If it’s your opinion – don’t say it.

Most of us see something like this every day:

“Best pizza in town”. Does anyone buy it? Nope. What about the line underneath: “home made pasta”. Do we believe it? Sure do! Why? Because it’s specific and contains no superlatives.

So instead of throwing around a claim like “best”, they could say “we deliver your pizza in 20 minutes” and everyone would believe it. Makes a good value proposition if they’re in the business of delivering pizzas.

2. Visual appeal

Once people understand that they’re in the right place and what we offer is interesting, it’s our job to draw them further in and push them down the sales funnel.

First impressions matter

As I said earlier, people make snap judgments. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not - whether they’ll stay or leave.

British researchers analyzed how different design and information content factors influence trust of online health sites. The study showed clearly that the look and feel of the website is the main driver of first impressions. Of all the feedback the test participants gave, 94% was about design (complex, busy layout, lack of navigation aids, ignoring web design especially use of color, pop up adverts, slow introductions to site, small print, too much text, corporate look and feel, poor search facilities). Only 6% of the feedback was about the actual content. Visual appeal and website navigation appeared, by far, to be the biggest influence on people’s first impressions of the site.

First impressions are important for these 3 reasons:

• first impressions lead to higher satisfaction,
• visual appeal is more important than usability for user perception,
• first impressions can last for years (high school reunion, anyone?)

This is the new Tesla Model S:

Most people haven’t seen it, but once they do, they conclude “it’s a good car” – solely based on its looks.

Same happens with your website. If it provides a good first impression, your job will become much easier. A negative first impression will be a drag and affect the whole perception about your products and services. If it looks like crap, must be crap!

What makes a web design good?

I like blue, you like green. So what makes a design good?

Google did the heavy lifting for us and determined that there are 2 key factors to “what makes people like a website”. The key findings from their study were that websites with low visual complexity (the simpler, the better) and high ‘prototypicality’ (how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites) were perceived as highly appealing.

Make your web design simple and familiar (follow conventions – e.g. people have a fixed idea of what an e-commerce site should be like). If you go for innovative, unconventional layouts – people are less likely to like them.

Here’s an “innovative” design. You need to hover over a number to see what menu item it is. How stupid is this.

Since it’s not “prototypical”, most people are not going to like it.

Here’s a site in Dutch. Even though you probably don’t understand anything on the site, you will find it appealing because it meets your expectations. You’ve seen many sites with a similar layout before.

This is a website with complicated, busy layout. Most people won’t find this attractive:

Here’s the opposite. A site with a simple layout:

Most will find it appealing.

3. Strong visual hierarchy

Squeaky wheels get the grease and prominent visuals get the attention. Visual hierarchy is one of the most important principles behind effective web design. It’s the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees.

Exercise. Please rank the circles in the order of importance:

Without knowing ANYTHING about these circles, you were easily able to rank them. That’s visual hierarchy.

Certain parts of your website are more important than others (forms, calls to action, value proposition etc), and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts. If your website menu has 10 items, are all of them equally important? Where do you want the user to click? Make important links more prominent.

Hierarchy does not only come from size. Amazon makes the ‘Add to cart’ button more prominent by using color:

Start with the business objective

You should rank elements on your website based on your business objective. If you don’t have a specific goal, you can’t know what to prioritize.

Here’s an example, it’s a screenshot I took of the Williams Sonoma website. They want to sell outdoor cookware.

The biggest eye catcher is the huge piece of meat (make me want it), followed by the headline (say what it is) and call to action button (get it!). Fourth place goes to a paragraph of text under the headline, fifth is the free shipping banner and the top navigation is last. This is visual hierarchy well done.

Exercise. Surf the web and consciously rank the elements in the visual hierarchy. Then go look at your own site. Is there something important (key information points that visitors are likely seeking) that is not high enough in the hierarchy? Change that.

It’s not about color

You see a lot of crap being floated around on the internet about which color converts the best. “Go with the big orange button”, some fools say. “Red is the best”, claim others.

This is the most widely spread color A/B test online:

Image credit

Their result was that red button outperformed green button by 21%.

What most people miss here is that it wasn’t about the color red – it was about standing out from the noise. As the dominant color on the site was green, red button got a higher place in the visual hierarchy. If your site is red or orange, you need to use a different color to make your calls to action stand out.

White space helps you emphasize what matters

The more space that is left unused, the more attention is driven to stuff that’s on the page.

Here, they want to sell you a bed. What gets your attention? The bed! It’s by far the most prominent thing on the page.

While it seems obvious, it’s not. Most e-commerce product pages are very different from this. They have much smaller images, more stuff next to the image, a menu and what not.

People buy stuff based on what it looks like – don’t forget that – so emphasize product photos and relegate everything else in the visual hierarchy.

4. Conserve attention at all costs

Once people know that your website has something they’re interested in, the visual design of the site draws them in and through strong visual hierarchy they focus on what matters – it’s important to conserve the attention we got at all costs.

It starts with where you place stuff – most of the viewing time is spent above the fold (and “the fold” gets lower and lower as screen sizes and resolutions increase) and on the left side of the screen (69% for people who start reading from left side of the screen).

Getting attention

Neuroscience research tells us that few things capture attention like larger than life images. The important thing is that you keep the images relevant to what you’re selling:

Someone I know once commented “I regularly go to Airbnb to look at the photos and dream of travelling“. Goal achieved!

Another great way is using photos of people, especially the ones that look straight at us. We always look people in the eye, it’s a surefire attention-getter.

Third good thing to use is contrast. Before & after. Then and now. Our minds are designed to spot the differences. In the primal age we constantly needed to scan the horizons to spot if anything has changed – is there a predator lurking in the shadows, an enemy approaching or someone we can eat.

While it clearly works for dental work, hair cuts and fitness stuff, you can use this in almost every business. Show the value your business adds through contrast. Works great for attention.

Another guaranteed way is using surprise. When we spot something we didn’t expect, we pay attention. Like here – “what’s with the weird guy?”. Of course, you need to figure out how the unexpected fits with your brand.

It’s not just about images, but also copy. Unexpected copy makes you read closer. Let’s say you’re looking for a copywriting course. You narrow it down to these 2 choices. Now which of these would make you pay attention and read closer?

The one on the right is what you’d expect. The one on the left – not so much.

Conserving attention

Getting attention is not *that* difficult, sustaining it is.

What are the 2 easiest ways to kill attention?

#1: A wall of text. See this if you don’t know what it looks like.

#2: Irrelevant, ego-centric jargon. Like this:

• “Welcome to our website”. — Complete waste of space that doesn’t resonate with anyone. Everyone is welcome on every public website on the internet. 
• “Who We Are”. — Who cares! People care about themselves and THEIR problems. Not you.
• “Our Philosophy”. — Seriously? No one gives a damn!
• Cheesy stock photos. — So fake I want to flee instantly.

Instead of this crap, always be user-centric. WIIFM (What’s in it for me) is a great principle to keep in mind at all times.

Your first order of business is to create relevant, interesting content. Then you have to present it well. Which of these 2 versions is more interesting to read:

Clearly, the one on the right! Stylize the text, add eye paths, use visuals, break the text apart, avoid patterns.

Human eye is constantly trying to recognize patterns. Once it identifies one, it will ignore it. This is why it’s critical to spice up any layout for improved attention.

Design for novelty

As I’ve written in several posts before – in order to make a lot of copy easy to digest and read, you need to design for reading. You need to provide novelty in every screen.

This means you have to constantly change the layout around – to keep it interesting. Sameness equals boring and drives people away. There are lots of psychological phenomena at play that I’ve written about here.

• Neuroscientists say, novelty promotes information transmission.
• Our minds seem to gravitate toward novelty. Not only does a novel experience seem to capture our attention, it appears to be an essential need of the mind.

Our brain pays close attention to patterns, and quickly learns to ignore anything that is routine, repetitive, predictable or just plain boring. This makes room for paying attention to anything that’s different. So novelty is what gets people to pay attention.

Ever wondered why so many sites constantly alternate the position of text paragraphs (text on the left, then text on the right, text on the left and so on)? Like here:

It’s for the very same reason – novelty. It boosts the number of people reading the content. Sub-headlines and white space help to achieve the same goal.

This is what Jerry Seinfeld had to say about attention:

Anyone who’s followed Lost, Dexter, Game of Thrones or other captivating TV shows knows what Jerry means. Now lets be honest, your website is no Dexter. BUT, you always can improve the attention paid to your site. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s possible to sustain attention for a long time.

Help people choose something

Once you get users to browse your products, you need to help them choose something. Choosing is hard work. Too much choice paralyzes. We’ve all been there:

First step is helping people narrow down the selection. You do this by employing filters. The role of the filter is to make finding most suitable products easy.

Winelibrary‘s filters do a good job:

All of the filters don’t fit on this screenshot, there are more. The order of the filters is by popularity: more common options like country and variety first, bottle size and closure at the bottom as they don’t matter to most.

If we can’t limit the choice, we need to make it easier to pick something. What stands out, gets picked. So lets say the user narrowed down the selection to these four. Which of these stand out:

The ones with points, of course! Product badging is very effective. There are tons of case studies where it has repeatedly boosted conversions and sales.

Product photos

What’s the most important factor when it comes to picking out a pair of shoes, a new shirt or a wristwatch? The way the product looks, of course! You’re going to buy shoes that you like.

While most e-commerce category pages look something like this:

- where it’s hard to fall in love with a pair – it would be much more effective when it’d look something like this:

Help people find a pair to fall in love with! Large category images will help you get the job done.

We recently did this for a client. They used to have 4 products in a row on the category page:

We changed it to 3 products, and made the image larger:

Result: 25% more sales.

The story of two chickens

This story will help you further understand why larger images work better.

Research participants were showed two photos. One was a nice looking, plump chicken. The other was a chicken that looked thin and sickly. Participants were told that the plump chicken was a natural chicken, and the thin chicken was genetically engineered.

Image source

The researchers informed half of the participants that natural chickens were healthy but less tasty, and genetically engineered chickens were tasty, but less healthy. The other half were told the opposite.

Overwhelmingly, both halves of participants preferred the nice plump chicken, but their reasoning was different. The first group claimed it was because they valued health above taste, and the second group said it was because taste was more important.

Neither group seemed to justify their choice based on how they felt about the chicken’s looks. They felt compelled to justify their emotional choices with non-emotional reasons, to the point that the two groups found completely opposite ways to justify the same decision.

Main takeaway: people were sold based on the picture. Product images are huge for conversions.

5. One action per screen, when they’re ready

You need to start with a clearly defined most wanted action for each page – and optimize them for it. This goes back to the clear message, visual hierarchy and drawing attention to that one action.

Campaign Monitor wants us to create a free account here. The single most wanted action is obvious:

Most of us will have secondary calls to action as well – and that’s perfectly okay – but they should be just that, secondary.

Here the primary call to action is to ‘see plans and pricing’, and secondary call to action is to take a video tour:

Okay that’s all pretty much obvious, BUT when should you ask for action?

This site here has an obvious primary call to action:

Will you sign up? Didn’t think so! They’re asking you to register before even explaining properly what the site is about and how it works. Not a good idea on their part. You have to present the call to action when the customer is ready to act.

Here’s a case study by Marketing Experiments where they split tested a short landing page vs. long landing page – the only difference being the amount of information given before asking for a donation. Result: more copy before the call to action brings in 75% more money. Guys at Zurb got a 350% lift in conversions just for burying the call to action button. There are many more case studies like that.

It’s not about hiding the button – but asking for action when the user is ready. IDC reports that 50% of purchases are not completed due to insufficient information – no wonder! People always want to operate with full information.

So when is the right time to ask for action? The rule of the thumb is that the more expensive and/or complex the product, the more information you need to provide before people are ready to take action. Start with this principle in mind and A/B test from here.

Fogg behavior model

This is explained well by Fogg Behavior Model: people will take action when you present the trigger (call to action) when their motivation is at their highest and it’s easy to take that action.

Used with permissions by Persuasive Tech Lab

You want to aim top right (high motivation, easy to do, a trigger in place). If you have high motivation and low ability (difficult to do), what you’ll get is frustration. If it’s low motivation, but easy to do (e.g. take out the trash), you get annoyance.

So make it a priority to figure out when is the right time to trigger the audience.

Conclusion

You can influence people’s behavior without using words. Persuasive web design works.

These 5 principles leave you lots of freedom for execution,  but if you implement around them, you will end up with a more persuasive web design. Keep them in mind whenever you start a new design project.

Know those sales pages that are really, really long? They’re great, but they mostly suck. I mean the way they are usually implemented sucks.

Long form sales pages have their place, and they work extremely well in many circumstances. (Hell – my own agency has one).

Think about it – the reason you have a website is because you want to sell something. If you only have a single product, there’s no real reason to have more than one page. The only information you need to have on your site is what makes the user understand the product, i.e. its benefits and use cases. This helps consumers come to a decision as to whether the product solves their particular problem quickly. Clicking through several different pages only gets in the way.

Some call them mini-sites, some say one-pagers. Same same.

If you’re using landing pages to capture PPC traffic, and you want them to buy something , you’re probably using a sales page too (or should!).

Why that much copy?

The amount of copy you need depends on the complexity and cost of the product. The more complicated and/or expensive the product, the more you need to explain, show, educate, convince.

If you’re selling a box of matches for $0.25 – and I need one – I don’t need to read any copy. I just buy it. The product is simple and cheap.

On the other hand, if I’m on the market for a new car or a house – both complicated (many things to learn about them) and expensive – I will take weeks and months to do research, read and compare.

If you’re selling something that costs say $300 – I don’t need weeks, but I do need an adequate amount of information before I can justify (to myself, to my wife, to my boss etc) such an expense.

Buyers are readers

Worried that your copy is too long? Don’t. If somebody is ready to buy after just a brief skim – having just read ~20% of the copy – they can just skip ahead and click ‘buy’. No problem.

But if somebody reads ALL the text on your site and STILL has questions and doubts, then you’ve got a problem. This is why long form copy works well.

True – most people will not read the whole sales copy – and that’s okay. It’s not a novel. The consumers who do are the ones who are actually going to buy.

“My sales letter for Earn $1k is 47 pages long, but it converts very well. And when people read it, they will do things like this, they will nod their heads as they are reading the entire thing. We’ll see them stopping and we’ll see them resuming again. They’re really thinking about it.”

- Ramit Sethi in an interview for Mixergy

But long form sales pages are cheesy and scammy!

This is the reason I said “they mostly suck”. I agree – most of them are ridiculously cheesy and scammy. You’re absolutely right. This is why a lot of people hate them.

I went over to Clickbank and picked some random products from their marketplace. Here are 3 typical long-form sales pages.

Random crap I found #1:

Exclamation marks! Check. Hype! Check. THE Absolute best! Check. This must be selling like crazy. (In case you were wondering, it’s not.)

Random crap I found #2:

They couldn’t even get their logo display right and the headline is unreadable.

Random crap 3:

Another case of  ”proven headline formula” at work.

Hard cold truths about long form sales pages

• Most of them look like vomit. Worse, actually.
• The copy is written by idiots who think that adding exclamation marks and hype into every sentence boosts sales. (Grow up.)
• A lot of the products sold via long form sales pages are actually scam. It looks like the easiest business to do – just create a pdf file and start selling it. That’s why it attracts a lot of losers. The barrier of entry is extremely low, so any idiot can get started.

If you Google about long form sales copy, you will find lots of critical blog posts such as this one, but you will also see that the criticism is all about the implementation.

I want to remind you – it’s not the format, it’s the execution that sucks.

• Long form sales pages can look great.
• It is possible to hire somebody that can write great copy.
• Great products can be sold with long form sales pages – and not just infoproducts.

Here’s a long form page we just designed for a client. It’s not an infoproduct. The copy is not cheesy. Looks kickass. (Click to see the whole page).

Copy matters and is the first thing

Long form sales pages are mostly about the content. So in order to close the sale, you need really good copy. You don’t start to design before you have the copy in place. Content first.

You can only write excellent copy if you understand your target audience - and are the master of “little things” like knowing your way around with words, understanding persuasion, sales psychology and using proven frameworks.

“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing.  This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.”

- Jerry Seinfeld, comedian

While Jerry was talking about television, this applies equally to sales copy. No one is going to read it if it’s boring crap.

It needs to join the conversation in the mind of the customer, target their problems and desired outcomes.

I’ve written a thorough article called Quick Course on Effective Website Copywriting, but note that this article is more about the process – and less about style and techniques.

Be careful about picking a copywriter

I’ve used a ton of copywriters for various projects. My best advice: anyone worth hiring starts at $1000 (usually much more – in the $2.5k to $5k range). You’re better off learning copywriting and writing your own copy than hiring somebody cheap. People who are cheap are cheap for a reason (they usually suck).

Of course, price alone does not tell you the quality of the copywriter. There’s a myriad of jargon-loving “professional copywriters” out there (and I’ve had the misfortune of using several). If they’re using stuff like ‘leverage’ and ‘our principals are standing by’ in their portfolio copy, run!

A lot of them are also ego-driven (which is understandable – they’re human) which makes them poor at taking feedback, fierce about justifying their choices and it all results in mediocre copy at best. BUT – great copywriters do exist.

Decide what kind of copywriter you need

Another thing to remember is that brand copywriters and direct response copywriters are very different. It’s a whole different mindset. We once hired a brand copywriter who had an impressive resume, had been working with all sorts of big brands in the past. She completely failed at writing direct response copy. She just couldn’t figure it out.

If you’re doing copywriting in-house, I strongly recommend this book: Copy Logic! The New Science of Producing Breakthrough Copy (Without Criticism).

It teaches you an awesome technique for improving any copy through synergy and systematic approach – without anyone’s feelings getting hurt.

It’s (almost) all about readability

So you’ve got good copy. Congratulations? Not so soon. If it’s not structured and designed well, people aren’t going to read it.

First there’s how you structure your text:

• Large font size (minimum 16px).
• Short lines (40 to 80 characters per line).
• New paragraph every 3-4 lines.
• Use lists, quotes, tables – mix it up.
• Sub-headlines every 2-3 paragraphs.
• If you’re getting a decent amount of mobile traffic (20+ percent), you need responsive design.

This is basic, but oh so critical.

This wall of text is not gonna entice anyone to read:

 

Sub-headlines are completely missing here – but they’re enormously important.

The majority of users will only read the headlines – they use it to garner the entire story from start to finish. Scanners will scroll down the page, stop at the headings that grab their attention, read that content and begin scanning again.

Novelty

In order to make a lot of copy easy to digest and read, you need to design for reading. You need to provide novelty in every screen.

This means you have to constantly change the layout around – to keep it interesting. Sameness equals boring and drives people away. There are lots of psychological phenomena at play that I’ve written about here.

• Neuroscientists say novelty promotes information transmission.
• Our minds seems to gravitate toward novelty. Not only does a novel experience seem to capture our attention, it appears to be an essential need of the mind.

Our brain pays close attention to patterns, and quickly learns to ignore anything that is routine, repetitive, predictable or just plain boring. This makes room for paying attention to anything that’s different. So novelty is what gets people to pay attention.

Ever wondered why so many sites constantly alternate the position of text paragraphs (text on the left, then text on the right, text on the left and so on)? Like here:

It’s for the very same reason I just mentioned – novelty. It boosts the number of people reading the content. Sub-headlines and white space help to achieve the same goal.

Take a look at this new long form sales page by Appsumo guys. See how the layout constantly changes – it’s to sustain attention and keep you reading. Very good execution.

Click to see the full thing.

Test a video version

Video can boost conversions – and long form sales pages are no exception here.

While video-only sales pages can be successful at times, in most cases video should be supplemental to text. Most people will NOT watch the video (but the most interested people might), so the text content should be created with this in mind.

We recently tested 2 “text-only” vs “video+text” long form pages against each other.

In the first test, sales pages were identical except for one thing – one had an image above the fold (left) and the other had a video (right):

Result: video version drove 46% more sales.

The second test was similar – everything the same except for the above the fold area.

Result: The version with the video got 25% more sales. (And hard to believe, but auto-play converted 13% better here than “click to play”).

Don’t leave the page

Sometimes you have additional information that’s useful to some, but not all readers. On “regular” websites you could just link to a deeper page, but on minisites you can’t — or shouldn’t. So here’s what you do instead.

Expand/collapse information 

In this example, a minisite is used for an one-page FAQ. When you click on a question, it expands to show the answer. This design helps you make the page shorter and also makes it easier to find the question and answer readers might be looking for.

 

Open info in a lightbox

You can “hide” information behind a click, but instead of navigating away, open it in a lightbox:

Use Sidecar or similar

Digital Telepathy developed this nifty tool they called Sidecar. You can toggle information boxes making each box appear and disappear from the side of the page.

Great visual design matters – a lot

Oh where do I start. Design is half the marketing and sales battle. Great design is about building trust and guiding the reader along. It’s about bringing out the important information and minimizing the secondary.

If your site looks like crap, the perception of your product is also crap. Look at the 3 examples I brought out at the very top. Is there anyone on the planet who sees those pages and says “yeah, these look like trustworthy sites”? Don’t think so.

Many people have the wrong idea that good design is about bells and whistles and flash videos. Not true at all. Great conversion optimized design serves only one goal – getting people to buy. Any part of the design that does not support this goal has to be changed or removed.

I’ve seen blog posts touting the idea that ‘ugly websites convert better’. In every case where this was claimed and where the “good design” version was actually shown, the good design sucked ass. Here’s a screenshot from a forum thread:

The thread starter did not post the pages for comparison, so a part of me thinks this is all made up, BUT – let’s look at what’s being said here. “Professional looking”, “a lot of cute images, graphics… the works”. Oh my god. Perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t post the screenshots. I can only imagine the crap.

It looks like the reason some people think ugly sites convert better it because they think sites full of business porn and image sliders are what “good design” is. They just don’t know what good design looks like.

So let’s look at some of the arguments made for ‘ugly’ design and against ‘good’ design.

• #1: “If your website looks BMW-fancy your visitor is going to assume BMW-pricing.” Give me a break. They can SEE the actual pricing. If BMWs came with Suzuki pricing, everyone would drive one. So if your site looks like BMW, but the product costs like Isuzu, you’ve got a winner. Also, iPads are still the best-selling tablets around. Ever seen their site (and the price tag)? 
  
• #2: “Trust – Nobody likes advertising. “. Yes, trust is uber important. But it’s the other way around. Great design builds trust - crappy design kills it. The connection between great design and advertisers is stupid.
  
• #3: “Accessibility – Build for technology two cycles back.” - The claim that good design is somehow not accessible is silly. Good design is most definitely built with accessibility in mind.
• #4: Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist are ugly. – First of all they’ve never been ‘ugly’, always good enough (except for Craigslist). And in case you haven’t noticed, Google has undergone a design revolution recently and is taking design *very* seriously.  Both Amazon and eBay got a face-lift relatively recently. Craigslist is a unique case (there’s always one) – and it’s a success since it’s always been like that. Try starting a new, unknown site today that looks like Craiglist and see how far you get.
• #5: “Ugly websites are simple” – This is a non-argument. No reason why beautiful websites can’t be simple. Look at Simple, Blossom, Customer.io or Google “minimalistic website showcase” or similar stuff. You’ll find a gazillion simple, yet beautiful websites.
• #6: “The content should always be the highlight of the website – not design.” - Yes indeed. Design is always there to support content. Remember the Appsumo site example above? The design HELPS to read the content, not the other way around. In fact, in ugly websites the ugliness gets in the way of content and distracts.
• #7: “I tested ugly vs. a newer more sophisticated version and the ugly one won!” – Without seeing the “better designed” version it’s impossible to comment. My guess is that the better version in those case is one with automatic sliders, stock photos and perhaps some flash here and there. No wonder then. Until I see the ugly vs. good design side by side, these arguments are worthless.
• #8: “See – here’s a case study”. In this case the answer is given at the end of the article. “It has everything to do with providing the CTA in the correct place in the thought sequence.” The ‘pretty’ version gives you very little text (poor copy too) and then asks for money. No wonder it didn’t work. The ‘ugly’ version actually sells you the idea before asking for anything. Now if they’d take the copy and structure of the ugly site, but made it look good – I bet we’d see an improvement in results.
• #9: “But this ugly site sells well!” - I bet it will sell even better with a good design!

Any cherry-picked ugly site that converts well does not support the claim. The logic of “if X is ugly and sells a ton, then I’ll make an ugly site and sell a ton too” is a causal fallacy. What about all the beautiful sites that convert well. Oh my, a contradiction!

We’ve improved conversions on every long form sales page we’ve worked on. Sometimes only by changing the design! Give me an ugly page and we will make it convert better.

People judge everything they see – all the time. We meet somebody new – we judge them by their looks. We go to a new place – we make up our mind about it based on its looks. Your friend gets a new car – we decide whether we like it based on what it looks like.

When people see your website they form their opinion about it in less than 50 ms – and create a long-lasting impression (if it’s ugly, it will haunt you even if you re-vamp your site). (I wrote a whole post on the importance of first impressions - I recommend you read this post then the previous two links).

These impressions have a strong influence on conversions.

Three examples of awesome (and well-performing) long form sales pages

Every single page converts very well. How do I know? We built them.

The Renegade Diet

One of the best-selling fitness products.

 Click to see the full website

LinkedInfluence:

You will notice that this particular version is slightly different than the one I showed above in the video test example. This one converts more than double compared to version they had before we came along.

Click to see the full site

The Timeline Blueprint

This was built in conjunction with a high-converting email capture page.

Click to see the full site

Conclusion

Long form sales pages have their place. If you’ve only got one product or service, or use a PPC landing page where you want people to buy something right away, it’s a good idea to use one.

Most long form pages suck – but it’s not the format, it’s the execution. Strong research, great copy and good visual design have to go hand in hand in order to drive conversions.

A penny for your thoughts.

So you’ve used different landing page strategies, managed to entice visitors with a great lead magnet, and you’re capturing emails like a boss.

Question is, now that they’re on your list, what do you do with them?

What happens after they download your lead magnet, and how can you make sure they keep coming back?

We’ve talked about creating email drip campaigns before, and if you want to get the basics covered, you should really read this post to give yourself a primer on what an autoresponder is, and steps you should take to get one set up.

In this article we’ll talk about different ways you can optimize your auto-responder campaign to keep your subscribers engaged, converting more, and staying focused on relevant issues without burning out.

1. Test, Test, Test Your Open Times

When you’re first thinking about improving your email autoresponder sequence, it’s easy to think Googling “When’s the best time to send an email?” will help you out.

It won’t.

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While it’s a good idea to use data like this as a guide post, please keep in mind that this is based on general trends and the data is industry agnostic.

While it’s true the data indicates, “more people open email during the day than at night”  if you were a company whose customers are notorious for staying up late (like programmers, freelancers, college students or anyone who buys Dream Water) general trend data like this is pretty useless to you.

Scott Stratten of UnMarketing says,

“The best time to never send an email is when someone else told you to”

He then sites three separate studies that say the best time to send an email is between 12am-3am, 8am-10am & 3pm -4pm, and 6am-7am.

The real key to making sure you’re sending your autoresponder at the “optimal” times is to watch your own data, and adjust your send times from there. All your major email softwares including GetResponse, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor allow you to track what time your email was opened, so make a point to locate this report.

Here’s how you find those times in Aweber:

If you must have more finite guideposts to start your tests, this post will give you a pretty good place to start.

2. Re-Optimize Your Subject Lines FIRST

Look at your existing auto-responder campaign. Are you’re finding certain messages have consistently low open rates?

The sad truth is, every time your subscriber doesn’t open one of your messages, you’re increasing the liklyhood they’re not going to open the next.

To fight this, create “re-broadcast” segments for each message in your auto-responder whose open rate you’d like to improve, and test new subject lines on the subscribers who never opened the first time.

To create that broadcast segment in Aweber, follow the steps in the video:

After you’ve created the “re-broadcast” segment, split test new subject lines. The one with the best open rate is the one that gets added to your auto-responder. Test out new styles by using modern headline templates or just saying what it is.

Mauro D’Andrea of BlogGrowth.com says:

“…changing the headline “How to Make a Best-Selling Product”to “Make Your Product Sexier than Nicole Kidman” doubled the openings for one of my emails. It went from a very poor 17% to 33%”

There are tons of great resources about writing great headlines out there, but I highly recommend starting with Jon Morrow’s Headline Hacks report to get 52 time tested headline templates that are proven to work.

If you’re worried that re-broadcasting your messages will increase your spam complaints, remember, the people on this segment never opened your message in the first place.

With my weekly auto-responder, I make a point to run this test every 30 days, targeting subscribers who opted in within that window. This allows me to keep the messaging fresh while keeping a pulse on what my subscribers want and need.

3. Test Your Calls To Action

With a little more digging into your email reports, you’ll discover which messages aren’t pulling too many clicks.

If you’re finding certain messages aren’t getting opened or clicked, augment the “re-broadcast” segment you created initially to include the “Links Not Clicked” field.

Now that you’ve singled out your low performing auto-responder messages, you can test changing your calls to action.

Play with the way you present your links.

Make them images, play with font sizes, test new colors, layouts, add more links, take links away, etc. MailChimp has published some very compelling research that shows higher click-rates from email spammers that can give you ideas on how to improve your calls to action.

(hint: More images/links typically translates to higher click through rates)

Again, the people receiving these messages never opened them in the first place, so the only place you have to go from here is up.

Contentverve has created an excellent round up of case studies that show big lifts in conversions simply by changing the call to action. You can read that here.

4. Identify The Weak Points, Create Mini Auto-Responders

On the flip side of links not getting clicked, let’s say you’re finding certain messages in your auto-responder that are getting opened and clicked like crazy, but your subscribers aren’t taking not taking the next step. (i.e buying)

Problems with the landing page aside, the data indicates your subscribers are interested, but they’re not ready to buy.

This being the case, don’t just move forward in the sequence and pretend nothing ever happened. Fork these interested, non action takers off the main list & add them to a short follow up sequence that preemptively answers any questions they may have about buying.

That overall flow might look something like this:

Top end email programs like Infusionsoft, GetResponse and Mailchip allow you to easily create segments or subscribe to new lists based on links that are clicked in the initial email.

If you’re an Aweber user, that functionality isn’t right in. Fortunately if you can get beta access to AWProtools, a third party add-on, you can “tag” subscribers based on the actions they take in your emails and automatically add them to different lists.

As it says on their website:

“When you can send out targeted broadcasts to specific segments of your audience based on what they’ve clicked on in your prior emails – your sales go up, your email complaints go down, and your subscribers feel like you’re having a one-on-one conversation with them.”

Even though setting this up takes a lot of work, taking the time to segment your list like this puts you leaps and bounds beyond most of your competition. According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 Benchmarking report, only 1/3 of email marketers are sending relevant email communications based on smart segmentation.

If the competitive advantage isn’t enough, this report from Lyris indicates the following benefits experienced by email marketers who segmented their lists:

5. Ignore The 7 Email Follow-Up Myth

There is a popular theory that relates to email marketing started by Corey Rudl that basically says “you need to email your email subscriber 7 times before they’ll be willing to buy from you.”

The problem is, too many email marketers take this out of context and think it applies to all industries.

While this might be the way to go for a high end software company like WPEngine who requires a much larger investment, sending 7 emails before asking for the sale in the retail, restaurant or daily deals sector would be silly.

The Kissmetrics blog talks about how Studentbeans.com (a daily deals site) tried building relationships with their subscribers via email before they ever made an offer and how that hurt their overall list activity.

Once they started making frequent offers up front they increased revenue by 13% and improved their open rates by 66%

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But the question is, what’s the “first few emails” strategy that’ll work best for you?

Is it a steady “trust building” campaign, or will a small discount up-front boost your sales (and you’ll make up the discount in quantity of business)?

Furthermore, is there a way we could simultaneously test both at the same time to see which campaign to see which converts best long term?

Finding the Highest Amount Of Conversions In The Shortest Amount of Time

Being a solo business owner, I don’t have a lot of time.

Ultimately, if I can figure out which combination optin Form & “first few emails” strategy, at the same time, the faster I can get back to building my business even more.

Luckily for you, I’ve devised a multi-variate optin form/”first few emails”  test that will let you know which optin form and “first few emails” strategy is going to work best for you

By the time this test is done, you’ll have answers to the following questions.

• Will “7 emails of ‘trust building information’” convert better than the “Instant Offers”?
• Is it better to “surprise & delight” by not offering either offer on the optin form but make it known in the welcome message?.
• Do “subscriber only” offers convert better than “trust building information” on the optin form?
• Will you receive more volume in business with the discount offer, or is the quality of customer better at higher prices?

The Technical Stuff – Split Testing the Optin Form

First impressions matter. So for the control in this test, I need to create identical optin forms for two separate lists.

List 1 sends a “Discount Offer” up front in addition to the lead magnet, List 2 sends a “Trust Building Email” sequence after the lead magnet is delivered but before the offer is ever made. Plug the embed code you get for each into Visual Website Optimizer to test which sequence gives you the better conversions.

To determine if offering the “Discount Offer” vs “Trust Building Emails” are going to convert more visitors to subscribers from the optin form, you have to understand how your email provider allows you to split test your opt in form.  

Knowing this, you want to conduct an A/B/A/C test and create two optin forms for each list.

The identical forms for each list stays the same as above, but the new forms state more clearly what happens when the user opts in.

Once you have the javascript for each split test, plug that into VWO.

Now you’ll have 4 forms, pointing to two different lists, testing two different “first few email” strategies. In other words, 25% of your visitors will be exposed to 1 possible optin form, and if they subscribe have a 50% chance of being hit with “Instant Discount” or “Trust Building Sequence”.

Once you have this data, you can use this method to split-test things like email frequency (more emails over shorter period of time vs. longer term drip campaigns), different email designs, etc.

As far as I know, there are no case studies that are testing autoresponder vs autoresponder because most A/B testing is applied to broadcast messaging.

However, I welcome you to use this methodology in your own testing and report back on the results. If you don’t have an account already, Visual Website Optimizer offers a free 60 day trial, which is the perfect amount of time to start testing.

6. Master Lists -> Sub-Lists ->More Targeted Offers = Better Conversions

As your relationship with your subscribers grow, their wants and needs are going to branch off from what your original lead magnet offered.

Like any marriage, in order to keep your relationship fresh, you need to be introducing new offers that are relevant to those needs.

The best example of a company that understands this really well and makes of their email lists is Hubspot.

If you’ve ever subscribed to ANY of their email lists, you know that they’re publishing ebooks all the time that solve specific problems.

Now while they might go overboard with it, it’s so they can know which angle to use to sell their software when they get you on the phone.

In other words, if you downloaded their “lead generation” ebook, then fill out their demo form, they’re going to focus more on how their software can be a lead generator. If you download any of their Facebook guides, they’re going to talk about how Hubspot can improve your Edgerank and get you more visibility in the News Feed.

A rough rough version of what this might look like is this:

The whole idea is to get a deeper insight to what your subscribers need. Doing this allows you to make offers for relevant services of your own, or send out relevant affiliate offers.

According to Mark Roberge in this interview for Forbes.com you need both quality and quantity content in order to keep people attracted and engaged.

The most important thing in an auto-responder sequence like this is that when the user subscribes to a new offer, you unsubscribe them from the master list, and set them on the new, more targeted path. Using the “mini auto-responder” method from earlier, you can create “warm-up loops” in your email content that happen when people move from one list to another (just remember to be respectful, and don’t overpitch).

If you’re finding that your subscribers are engaged with the master list but not biting on your sub offers, you could send a survey asking about their current challenges.

If they’re interacting with your emails by opening and clicking, you just haven’t made the right offer yet.

Ask, they’ll let you know.

Conclusion

“If it ain’t broke…” is one of the worst mentalities you could have with your auto-responder content.

Even though many of the tests shown here were done with Aweber, every major email marketing provider like Infusionsoft, Mailchimp, GetResponse & Campaign Monitor has the ability to segment & split test, you just have to dig in and really understand what your tools are really capable of.

If you’re happy with the level of leads and sales you’re getting, right now is the best time to test (not when things are about to fall apart) because at least you have something to go back to if your tests don’t work.

But if they do work…and they will eventually, you and your subscribers have a bright future together.

Now my question for you is how are you using your auto-responders and what do you see working?

When we revisit autoresponders next week, I’ll walk you through a few different message flows and content strategies you can use to guide your autoresponder efforts moving forward.

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Back in 1984, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini wrote a book called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” Since then, it’s been widely hailed as a seminal book on marketing, something that every self-respecting business shouldn’t be caught without.

The most significant aspect of this tome was the highlighting of Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence, which were reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

In the almost three decades since the book’s publication, its six principles have been adapted to Internet marketing, too, especially the business of conversion rates. This makes all the sense in the world when you think about it because conversions are all about persuasions. The next time a browser merely visits your website, you want to turn him into a shopper and then a definite buyer.

In the world of conversions, every little bit of persuasion counts. Here’s how you can use Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion to boost conversions.

Reciprocity: Give a Little Something to Get a Little Something in Return

Cialdini’s first principle of persuasion states that we human beings are wired to basically want to return favors and pay back our debts. In short… to treat others as they’ve treated us.

The idea of reciprocity says that people by nature feel obliged to provide either discounts or concessions to others if they’ve received favors from those others. Psychology explains this by stressing that we humans simply hate to feel indebted to other people!

Let’s say that you’re running a popular blog that offers its readers highly actionable and practical information that makes their lives better. Of course, all of this information is offered for free; they just have to visit your site and absorb all of the details. Based on the idea of reciprocity, your site visitors would be more likely to feel obligated to buy something from your website, providing you with an eventual conversion.

Example of Execution

One of the best examples of this Cialdini principle in action is the Quick Sprout website by Neil Patel. Neil’s been very successful in business, having already founded two Internet companies, KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. His website is centered around his blog, which is single-mindedly focused on giving its readers tips, advice and suggestions on how they can be more lucrative marketers.

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Neil’s business is that he sells his website-traffic consulting services and Quick Sprout Traffic System Pro, which is designed to drive more traffic to your retail website. Thanks to his very informative blog that churns out nothing but tips on making people money, regular site visitors are likelier to become actual customers of his.

Commitment: People Want Their Beliefs to Be Consistent With Their Values

The principle of commitment (and consistency, too) declares that we human beings have a deep need to be seen as consistent. As such, once we have publicly committed to something or someone, then we are so much more likely to go through and deliver on that commitment…hence consistency. This can be explained, from a psychological perspective, by the fact that people have established that commitment as being in line with their self-image.

Marketers have figured out how to use this second Cialdini principle in their efforts to obtain greater conversion rates.

Example of Execution

Marketers can rely on getting site visitors to commit to something relatively small and usually free-of-charge, such as a sample guide or a whitepaper that they can gain access to from the marketers’ websites. This increases the likelihood that those site visitors will eventually see themselves as customers, which allows marketers to follow up with an offer to buy their products or join their services.

A striking and memorable example of this Cialdini principle in action can be found on the Copyblogger website. Copyblogger is the brainchild of Brian Clark. While it’s also a popular blog, it’s really a software and training organization that sells content marketing software through Copyblogger Media.

On the Copyblogger homepage, if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll notice the big headline urging you to grab the company’s free online marketing course. All you’ve got to do is sign up by entering your email address. Clearly, this is a form of public commitment meant to get you to see yourself as a customer of the company. It’ll raise the chances that you’ll potentially go on to purchase one of their services, such as Scribe or Synthesis.

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Social Proof: There’s Nothing Like Feeling Validated Based on What Others Are Doing

Cialdini defined social proof as people doing what they observe other people doing. It’s a principle that’s based upon the idea of safety in numbers.

For instance, if our coworkers are working late, then we’re likelier to do the same; if we note that a particular eatery is always full of people, we’re likelier to give that establishment a try. We’re even more influenced by this principle when we’re unsure of ourselves or if the people we observe seem to be similar to us!

The field of social psychology is rife with experiments that beautifully illustrate this unavoidable, human phenomenon, but one of the most classic ones has to be the 1960s elevator experiment. Basically, whatever the majority of people in an elevator does, an individual who joins this group inside of the elevator will copy. For example, if the group looks to the back of the elevator, the individual will copy it and do the same, even if it looks funny! Note how the vast majority of people just refuse to think or behave independently!

Example of Execution

You can harness this power of social proof to drastically increase the conversion rates of your website because there are several ways to incorporate it, but one of the most powerful is through so-called “wisdom-of-the-crowds” social proof. Take clothing e-tailer Modcloth.

This website is very big on community, and, as such, it empowers its shoppers to vote on what specific styles they believe the website ought to sell in the future. Such styles are awarded the “Be The Buyer” badge. The shoppers are heavily influenced by the Modcloth community, as evidenced in the fact that styles with said badge sell at double the rate of styles with no badge.

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Authority: You Will Obey Me!

Ever wonder why people in general have a tendency to obey figures of authority, even if those figures of authority are objectionable and ask others to commit objectionable acts? It’s simply the essential nature of the human animal!

Accessories such as job titles (Dr., for instance) and uniforms can infuse this air of authority into people, thus leading the average person to accept what a person in authority says without question. You can see this in commercials that, for example, utilize doctors to front their ad campaigns.

Example of Execution

The use of this principle can be seen in the case of ShoeDazzle, which is a startup Internet retailer that specializes in women’s shoes and accessories. Founded in 2009, the company was co-founded by personality Kim Kardashian, who also serves as one of ShoeDazzle’s chief fashion stylists.

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Even though this company was also founded by serial entrepreneur Brian S. Lee and O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro, that didn’t help ShoeDazzle attract conversions in the form of shoppers who became actual buyers on the website. How could it? To the target demographic of the startup—young women who are obsessed with shoes—Lee and Shapiro are no authority figures!

That’s why the company brought in Kardashian as a co-founder. Whatever your personal feelings about her fame, she’s seen as an authority figure among young women shoppers because she’s always wearing the latest shoe styles and being photographed in them. Her endorsement of this startup is a great example of authority in action.

Liking: The More You Like Someone, the More You’ll Be Persuaded by Him

What is it to like someone? According to Cialdini, it’s extremely meaningful because it will affect the chances of you being influenced by that individual. Welcome to Cialdini principle number five: liking. Liking is based on sharing something similar with people you like, and it’s also based on something as superficial as how attractive a person’s looks are!

This principle can be applied to conversions in the following way: A company that wants to boost its conversion rates simply has to focus on creating a very well-executed “About Us” page.

That almost sounds absurd, but it makes all the sense in the world when you understand that a company’s “About Us” page serves as an opportunity to tell potential buyers all about the similarities between its people and site visitors. Since similarity is one of the key building blocks of liking, you now see why investing time in an effective “About Us” page is so vital. To flesh this out more, let’s take a look at a case study.

Example of Execution

This Forbes case study centers on a little company called PetRelocation.com. This company aids pet owners from all over the world in moving their pets from country to country.

The company’s “About Us” page is chock full of bios of its staff, where every bio emphasizes not only the staff’s love of dogs, but also humanizing qualities of managers and employees, such as hobbies they enjoy. As a result, this humanizes the entire company and consequently increases its likeability, which in turn boosts the conversion rate of site visitors.

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In a much broader sense, businesses that are extremely successful experience this liking principle on a grand scale. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is liked by millions of loyal consumers who enjoy its mobile phone service (Virgin Mobile) and its airlines (Virgin America), among other businesses.

Scarcity: When You Believe Something Is in Short Supply…You Want It More!

Here we are, at the end of Cialdini’s authoritative list of persuasion principles. Scarcity is defined as the perception of products seeming to become more attractive when their perceived availability is rather limited.

For instance, human behavior is such that we are likelier to purchase something if we’re informed that it’s the very last one or that a special deal will soon expire. In short, people really believe that they’ll be missing out on something they have to have if they fail to act quickly!

Examples of Execution

Scarcity is one of the most popular Cialdini principles that various companies use over and over again in order to boost conversions and earn more money from people. Just take a look at this screen grab of Orbitz.com and its attempt to sell airline tickets with a greater sense of urgency.

By incorporating the line “Act fast! Only 2 tickets left at this price!” Orbitz.com is very blatantly telling its shoppers that the supplies of these airline tickets won’t last for very long. As such, this is a picture-perfect example of the scarcity principle being utilized in order to boost conversions for this webpage.

There’s also something called a time-limited scarcity. A great example of this is provided on Monetate’s website. Note how the same jacket sells on a particular retail site, yet in one instance, it’s accompanied by a blurb that reads “Offer Ends in…”with a countdown to when it’s no longer available. The use of this time-limited scarcity resulted in an average order increase of 0.07 percent – while a tiny increase, for this large online retailer, even such a small margin of improvement in AOV proved to be a “million-dollar campaign.”

Read more: http://monetate.com/2011/12/website-testing-time-scarcity-sells-for-a-limited-time/#ixzz2Ot6zzvkN

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Finally, never use fake scarcity because your site visitors will see right through you! Fake scarcity is when a site claims that supplies are limited or that a price won’t last for long, but it’s flagrantly obvious that it’s not true.

Conclusion

These 6 Principles of Influence or Persuasion have been used for decades by businesses and marketers, all to get you, the consumer, to part with your hard-earned money. Since the explosion of e commerce on the Internet, Cialdinis’ six principles have naturally been adopted there, too. The name of the game in the business world is persuasion, and you can make this work for you!

The goal of any business is always to make money, so pay close attention to these principles, learn what they’re all about, and apply them to your own landing pages. If you apply them properly, you’ll notice an unmistakable boost in your conversions over time. Don’t be afraid to give your potential customers a free sample or two, and definitely tell them how your products won’t be available for much longer at certain prices if they don’t act fast.

Do you have any other examples of Cialdini’s six principles being used to boost conversions? Share them in the comments section!

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We talk about creating high converting landing pages, getting traffic that converts, and making the most out of your conversion points quite a bit here.

But what we don’t talk about are outside of the box landing page strategies you can use to increase conversions right away.

Similar to the banner blindness phenomenon, sticking to the traditional methods (like linking to your homepage from your Twitter bio) is extremely predictable from a new visitor’s perspective, and leads to what I call brand blindness.

What follows are 13 unconventional landing page strategies that, if used well, will break your visitors expectations on first visit making them more receptive to what they find on the page and lead them into a flow through your site.

On that note, for these strategies to work it’s vital you consider the environment the visitor is coming from, and the conversion you’d like to take place. These pages are meant to bridge specific gaps, so without that consideration, you’ll be creating extra real estate without seeing any real results.

 

1. Start Here Page

It’s always easy to know the first page your visitors land on. Check your analytics, and you’ll see all sorts of “first visits.” Question is, what’s the second page these visitors go to?
This is where the “start here” page comes in. Think of it as an anchor for visitors who liked what they saw, but don’t quite know where to go next.

Your start here page is great real estate to quickly communicate the overall mission of your website, offer an irresistible lead magnet, and start your relationship with your new visitor.

 

In this post Corbett Barr says Think Traffic’s Start here page accounts for 7% of the overall email subscriptions.

This may not seem like a lot, but considering only 11% of all subscriptions come from more common real estate the post page sidebar, this page starts to make more sense .

 

2. Coming From (Social Network)

High Converting Landing Page Rule #1: Never send traffic from an ad to your home page.
It’s common knowledge within PPC advertising circles that pointing your ad directly to your homepage is a no-no. Somehow that same rule never caught on to social networks.

But really, isn’t social media a dynamic ad for your business?

Consider how people get to this page: They like what you have to say, click on your profile, read your bio, click the link. Why not capitalize on this interest?

 

 

The main point of this page, and many others in this roundup is to give extra context, acknowledge where the user is coming from, and convert that reader into a subscriber.

This page by Problogger does a great job at giving visitors a quick look at the most important sections of the site.

 

Now this is just my opinion, but I believe this page has too many links. Realistically, a visitor coming from social media channel won’t stay long because the switch from fast paced social media vs long form content is too jarring.

Instead, it’s worth using “Coming From (social network)” as a way to offer a resource related to the social network (& your business) in exchange for an email address.

Either that, or offer fewer options & link to the best stuff on your site to guide these visitors to a stronger point of conversion.

 

3. Custom Landing Pages for Guest Posts

The principle of this landing page is similar the last two. When you guest post, instead linking to your home page in your bio, link to a custom landing page specifically designed for the visitors of that site.

 

This tactic is especially useful if you’ve mention in your byline a lead magnet that solves the problem your guest post explores.
In this post Neil Patel talks about getting 1,000 subscribers in 60 days by guest blogging exclusively. He says,

“I’ve seen registrations jump over 10% with personalized landing pages like that.”

“That personalized landing page is a critical piece…so don’t skip it. It’s truly the best way to maximize all of your hard work!”

 

4. Blog Comment Landing Page

When you leave comment, you leave your name, email address, and Url. But if you’re linking directly to your homepage you’re not making the most of your comment.

Realistically, you won’t have landing pages for every site you comment on. But if you have landing pages for the sites you comment on the most, you can quickly orientate people after they’ve clicked your link.

To do this, acknowledge the site your visitor is coming from in the headline.

“Liked my comment on ConversionXL?”

Introduce who your site is for, how it helps, and include a brief blurb about you.

Most importantly, curate a list of links that are the contextually relevant to the section of site you’re commenting on.

For example, if you’ve written great UX tutorials, and you’re commenting on one of the UX posts on ConversionXL have your landing page include links to your best UX work to draw people deeper into your site.

Hat Tip to http://pro-landing-pages.com/ for the tip.

 

5. Post Subscription Sign-UP

If you want email subscribers to actually consume your content, the first step is to get them to confirm their subscription.

Ramit Sethi of Iwillteachyoutoberich.com uses a few age old practices to drive new subscribers back to their inbox and fully opt in.

While there are a number of things going on on this page, the most standout is the use of the timer.

Research shows when timers are introduced in “low impact” decision making, the added urgency compels people to take the path with the least resistance. On this sign up page, the path is laid out, as well as what you’ll be missing if action is not taken.

 

6. “Thank You” Page With Entry Level Offer

The “Thank You For Subscribing Page” is one of biggest missed opportunities online.

When you’re designing for user flow, you’ve lead your user through a series of steps to encourage them to sign up for your email list, so why stop there?

 

Now that they’ve committed to getting the free thing, it’s going to be much easier to apply basic upselling psychology to get them to buy into the paid thing, IF that paid thing is a lower cost, and if the paid thing is a logical extension of the path your visitor took to get there.

Depending on your paid offer, it’s worth playing with different pricing strategies here.

It’s also worth noting that this page could be used to convert higher priced offers if that offer acts as a shortcut. (I.e Free 20 week course on Facebook Marketing with an offer for a private hour long consultation session)

 

7. (Alternative) Thank You Page With “Refer A Friend” CTA.

Thrillist’s invite friends page encourages freshly subscribed visitors to share their new discovery with their peers.

 

 

Research by marketing professors Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein suggests that in order for something to go viral, three basic criteria must be met; giving the right message to the right messengers in the right environment.

In this case, the refer a friend thank you page is the perfect opportunity to encourage new subscribers who signed up for your lead magnet to share with their friends and increase your viral quotient.  According to Topsy, Thrillist’s use of this strategy lead to 77 extra mentions on twitter in the last month alone.

Bonus: Make the deal even more irresistible. In exchange for friends subscribing via their share link, offer a discount on your lower level offer.

 

8. Thank You Page w/ Survey

What better way to learn about your customers than to ask them a few questions right after the conversion takes place?

 

 

While this doesn’t directly affect your conversions, the feedback you gather in this survey can be critical to creating new offers or addressing design flows in the long run.

Don’t quite know what to ask? This report from Constant Contact gives you sample survey questions for different scenarios.

 

9. Social Media Hub Page

No doubt, at some point you’ve heard the phrase “curate interesting content.” problem is, doing this only through social media channels does nothing to directly improve your email subscription rate.

 

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Enter RebelMouse. A startup that focuses on pulling all of your social media feeds together and publishing the content into one easy to digest page. But how does this impact your conversion rates?

If email newsletters are a part of your overall strategy, this page is becomes the main hub for all of the content you’ve found share-worthy.

A call to action saying “Want me to email you only the best of what you see here?” is a great reminder that you take filtering the best seriously. This page is a huge visual reminder that an email address is a small price in exchange for finding and filtering content.

 

10. The Resource Library Page

If you find yourself recommending the same books and resources over and over again, the Resource Library page is a you to compile all of your most commonly used resources.

 

 

Generally speaking, this page is used for publishing various affiliate offers such as software, ebooks and books, information courses, or physical products.

Comparing January’s income report of SmartPassiveIncome.com against the resource page, you’ll notice that a total of 14 out 25 items on the income report are found on the resource page, making this page something to really consider.

If you haven’t gotten started with affiliate marketing yet, Shareasale, Clickbank, or Amazon Associates.

For more info on affiliate marketing:

• 30 Tips For Successful Affiliate Marketing
• Sugarrae’s Affiliate Marketing Category
• Affiliate Marketing 101

11. Clever Unsubscribe Page

What’s the most common reason people give for unsubscribing to your email list? Too many emails, right?

 

 

This clever unsubscribe page doesn’t let your email subscribers get away easy. Instead of making email email an all or nothing deal, users have the option option to receive fewer emails, in case it really is a matter of information overload.

Also, notice the social media buttons under the video? By giving an alternative to email, you’re respecting their decision while subtly reminding them they don’t have to shut you off entirely.

 

12. Email Signature Page

When someone clicks on the name in your email signature, where do you send them?

Most people, it’s going to be the home page, right? But what if you could take this opportunity to introduce who you are and what you’re passionate about?

While it may seem similar to the Blog Comment Page, or even the Coming From (social network) page, the major difference is, the person clicking on this link already has your email. Meaning you’re at a different point in your relationship than somebody who’s just passively checking you out on social media.

Use this opportunity to add a more personal touch to your communication.

Bonus: Using a service like http://dooid.me to power this page allows you to enable vCard information, allowing your new friend to add all of your details in just one click.

Hat Tip to http://pro-landing-pages.com/ for the tip

 

13. Live Hangout/ Consolidated Conversation Page

This is a new one I’ve just started playing around with, and I’m really excited to share it with you.

 

You see it all the time with live events, the event coordinator says “if you want to participate, use the hashtag #blahblah on Twitter.”

Problem is, too many people using a hashtag makes conversation difficult to follow, requires your users  and if the conversation is lively, your participants have a hard time interacting with each other.

Also, if you’re using a live-streaming platform like Google+ Hangouts, using the default tools vs embedding on your own site means you’re missing a chance to improve your “time on site” metrics & convert viewers into subscribers.

Fortunately, with a little pre-planning, this is easily fixed.

All you have to do is Embed your live-stream:

 

Embed the email signup:

 

And Embed Facebook Comments onto a single page:

Once this is set up, you’ll have a single consolidated place for viewers to watch, interact with each other, and get bonuses.

Bonus: Visitors can publish comments to their personal Facebook Profiles or Facebook Pages, sharing your page directly with friends and fans comment box. If your live chat is interesting, your visitors will happy to share with their friends, maximizing the potential reach for your live event.

Conclusion

By putting just a little extra thought into where your visitors are coming from, you can create additional real estate opportunities on your site to break expectations, increase conversions, and maximize reach with minimal effort.

Curious, are there other unconventional landing page strategies you’ve used that you’d like to share?

Featured image credit

Google is a strong advocate for responsive design. Mashable named 2013 “The Year of Responsive Design,” but is responsive web design actually the answer to boosting mobile conversions?

2012 was a milestone year in the consumer devices market. For the first time since 2001, PC sales were lower than they were the previous year, and tablet sales are expected to top laptop PC sales for the first time in 2013. In addition, Nielsen reports that 55% of U.S. mobile subscribers own smartphones, and 2 out of 3 Americans opt for a smartphone instead of a feature phone when purchasing a new mobile.

Mobile telephone usage is increasing and translating into a growing percentage of mobile visitors. If businesses operating online want to benefit from this trend, they need to optimize the mobile experience for their website visitors.

Shopping on mobile devices can be a pain

The process of trying to buy something from a desktop design site with a smartphone can be summed up with one word – pain. On top of navigating and zooming a computer monitor-sized site on a three-inch screen to find relevant content, internet retailers assume that you are a screen-tapping ninja that understands the relevance of their lengthy forms and “Terms and Conditions”. All of these obstacles make it an unexpected challenge to reach the checkout page. It’s no wonder that 61% of mobile visitors move on to competitors’ sites after encountering a frustrating mobile browsing experience.

Meanwhile, mobile visitors are becoming more comfortable in taking action with their mobile phones, when it’s convenient. Nielsen reports that 29% of smartphone owners have used their device for online shopping. The percentage will surely increase as businesses improve the mobile browsing experience on their sites. Companies that have already acknowledged the buying potential, and have invested in improving the mobile experience, are reaping the benefits.

A good example of a company who is successfully converting mobile traffic is Webundies.com, a family-owned retailer of underwear, sleepwear and lounge-wear. Webundies.com announced 2012 mobile commerce sales of $168,000, accounting for 5.4% of total sales. For Webundies.com, mobile sales in 2012 increased a whopping 169.2% from 2011. The company is implementing both a responsive design and a tablet-optimized catalog to boost their mobile and tablet conversions, and clearly it’s paying dividends. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy the same success?

A business with a desktop design website that would like to enhance the mobile browsing experience and boost conversions has three options in general:

• Build a website using responsive design.
• Build a dedicated mobile web.
• Build a mobile app.

Responsive web design

Is a flexible, liquid layout that adapts to fit various screen sizes, resolutions and devices. It allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution, whether on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, creating a user-friendly interface when visitors browse websites.

If you’re viewing this blog post on a desktop browser, you can test responsive design in action. Try making your browser window smaller and you’ll notice the images and content column shrink to fit your screen.

A good example of responsive design, in action, is the The Boston Globe website. Notice how the same content adapts to fit the various devices.

Image source

Responsive design has gained a lot of advocates due to its benefits compared to alternative solutions:

• One website to build and manage: A strong advantage for businesses who update their content often, as it is no longer necessary to ensure content parity in various locations.This advantage also pays dividends in conversion optimization – for example in A/B testing, as there is only one body to conduct tests on. In addition, visitors encounter a cohesive brand experience regardless of whether they’re using a laptop, smartphone or tablet.
• Search engine optimization: All links and bookmarks point to one URL. No wonder Google recommends responsive design.
• Social Media: With responsive design, the URL’s visitors’ encounters are the same regardless of whether they’re browsing with a laptop, tablet or smartphone. That makes sharing content through social media foolproof, as it’s guaranteed that the recipients will also be able to browse the content in the most optimal view.
• Analytics: One complete view of all the traffic.
• Future-friendly: Whatever the new trend-setting device might be, responsive design has it covered by shrinking content to fit the resolution of the device.

The effect of responsive design on mobile conversions

Let’s take a look at some examples of how implementing responsive design has boosted mobile conversions. All of the following companies have gone from a desktop site to responsive design:

O`Neill Clothing

The popular e-commerce store O´Neill Clothing racked up some impressive results after implementing responsive design. O`Neill monitored conversions, transactions and revenue for three weeks prior to going responsive. Then, after deploying the responsive conditions to the already live site, they monitored the same metrics for another three weeks. The results are staggering:

For iPhone/iPod:

• Conversions increased by 65.71%
• Transactions increased by 112.50%
• Revenue increased by 101.25%

For Android devices:

• Conversions increased by 407.32%
• Transactions went up by 333.33%
• Revenue increased by a whopping 591.42%

Think Thank Photo

Think Thank Photo (TTP) is a company that produces equipment and accessories for photographers. After witnessing their mobile visitors triple in a year to 13% of their overall website traffic, TTP made the to decision to rebuild the site using responsive design.

As a result of the new responsive layout and other optimization efforts, TTP achieved a 188% increase in revenue from Black Friday through Cyber Monday compared to 2012. Transactions from users on smartphones and tablets increased more than 96% and pageviews among mobile users increased by 224%.

Skinny Ties

A family-run company that has been designing and producing neckties since 1971, Skinny Ties decided to reinvent the brand’s identity and build a platform that would be future-friendly. Bearing in mind the increasing penetration of smartphones and tablets, the company opted for responsive design. The site launched in October 2012 and within a couple of weeks Skinny Ties experienced massive improvements in sales metrics compared to the previous three months:

• Revenue from iPhone grew a staggering 377.6%
• iPhone conversion rate increased 71.9%
• Revenue from all devices went up 42.4%
• Overall Conversion rate increased by 13.6%
• Bounce rate dropped 23.2%

Maxatec

Maxatec is a company that offers POS & EPOS systems, mobile and bar code products. Similarly to the previous examples, Maxatec saw an increase in mobile visitors and decided to the improve the user experience of tablet and smartphone visitors and boost conversions in that segment.

The results: mobile visitor goal conversion rate went up by 12% and the average time to complete a task decreased by 50%.

Conclusion

As predicted, the described case studies unambiguously show that responsive design is far superior to desktop design in converting mobile visitors. Businesses who attract mobile visitors to a desktop design are missing out on a large chunk of potential conversions and revenue, and as smartphone penetration is increases, having a desktop design could turn out to be expensive (in terms of lost conversions and revenue).

Dedicated mobile website

A business may also opt for building a dedicated mobile site to enhance the browsing experience of mobile visitors. A dedicated site lies separately (separate URL) from the desktop site and it’s sole purpose is to host mobile visitors.

An example of dedicated mobile website: Amazon

The advantages of a dedicated mobile site:

• Mobile Behavior: Dedicated mobile sites optimize for both mobile behavior and resolution, while responsive optimizes for only resolution.
• Faster load times: When Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wanted to improve their site’s mobile experience, BlueTrain Mobile made an example of how one page of their website would have looked if they had adopted responsive design and how the page would have looked in a dedicated mobile site. In the same mobile network, it took 15 seconds for the page in responsive design to load while the dedicated mobile page loaded in just 2 seconds.
• Optimization: Easier to optimize for mobile conversions. Dedicated mobile sites focus solely on mobile visitors, while with responsive keeps in mind laptops, tablets and smartphones.

The disadvantages of dedicated mobile sites are basically the same as the advantages for responsive design:

• Two bodies of content to manage
• Separate URLs: if you’re using content marketing to attract visitors, this is a huge disadvantage as link sharing in social media is problematic.

Mobile app

Building a mobile app to enhance the browsing experience of mobile visitors is a good idea if you have a unique social or interactive platform OR when your site is your product. If you’re not Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – build a dedicated mobile site or use responsive design.

Just think about it. When your site is not your product, can you think of any realistic reason of why anyone should download your app from an app-store,  install it and use it just to visit your site? No? Thought so.

The additional disadvantages of apps are that they have a restricted amount of content and functionality, plus they’re operation system specific. Most probably you’ll need need to build for both Android and iOS to optimize for your mobile visitors.

Responsive vs. Dedicated Mobile: which one should you choose?

Responsive has a lot of advocates for a reason. When comparing the two alternatives, responsive design is more future-friendly, has one body of content to manage (assures content parity), provides a constant brand experience and is social media friendly.

Dedicated mobile sites have basically one advantage – faster load times. But with the improvement of mobile networks and faster downloading speeds, the loading time differences between responsive design and dedicated mobile will lessen.

From a conversion optimization standpoint, the fact is that with both alternatives you’d need to follow the same route – constant improvements, A/B testing and multivariate analysis. Therefore, it would be wise to go with the alternative that provides the most advantages – responsive web design.

5 things to keep in mind when optimizing responsive design for mobile conversions

1. Focus on the important

When optimizing for mobile visitors, it’s important to remember that the most annoying thing for mobile visitors is going through a sea of plain text. If mobile visitors can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’re gone.

Critically review your content and keep everything that helps mobile visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly. Get rid of anything that may lead to visitors clicking away.

Make sure that the first thing your mobile visitors see is your value proposition (VP). A value proposition is a clear statement that explains how your product solves customers problems, delivers specific benefits and why the customer should buy from you and not from the competition. For more information about building a viable value proposition, read this blog post.

Fork, an open-source CMS, is a good example of a responsive web that has a highly visible value proposition for mobile visitors. When browsing the site, a mobile visitor will immediately know what Fork is and its benefits. The questionable part of the VP “will rock your world”, which really communicates nothing. Replacing it with a statement that says who Fork is aimed at (eg “small businesses”) would be much more informative.

Although a dedicated mobile site, Kumon is a very good example of a business that is correctly communicating its value proposition. At a glance of the site, you have a clear understanding of what the service is and who it is designed for.

In addition to making your value proposition visible, statements developed for boosting conversions, for example free shipping and money-back guarantees, should also stand out from the rest of the content.

2. Make your CTA-s stand out and in accordance with mobile behavior

Make your call-to-action buttons so large that they take up the entire width of the mobile screen. This ensures that mobile visitors don’t need to zoom to focus in on the CTA button.

Also, put your CTAs in accordance with mobile behavior. A 15-page white paper may be a conversion hit on a desktop site, but it’s highly unlikely that a mobile visitor will be interested in going through the trouble of downloading the paper and then reading it on a tiny mobile screen. “Sign up for Our Newsletter” or “Like Us on Facebook” are better call-to-actions for a mobile visitor who are on-the-go.

A clever idea is to implement mobile specific call-to-actions under contact information, such as “Call Now” or “Get Directions”. The mentioned CTAs will start a phone call or open a map application, resulting in a more targeted mobile browsing experience.

Audi has a highly visible CTA on their mobile landing page. Though not responsive design, it’s a great example of a well placed CTA, leaving mobile visitors with no confusion on what to do next.

Image source

3. Make use of photographs and videos

Reading plain text on a mobile phone is tiresome and difficult, especially when you consider that most of mobile browsing happens on the fly with texting and apps interfering. Photographs and videos on the other hand are great for capturing the attention of mobile visitors and communicating your marketing messages.

A great example of a responsive design site that uses photographs to capture mobile-visitor attention is Food Sense, a food recipe blog. When on the hunt for recipes for delicious meals, it’s highly likely that you’ll stop on a site which uses remarkable pictures to develop a craving for food.

Another company that is effectively using images to capture mobile-visitor attention and communicate its brand values is Starbucks:

With creatives, keep in mind that more photographs and videos translate into a longer page load time. A study found that 67% of people expect a mobile site to load in under 4 seconds. Also, never use flash as it’s not supported on some mobile devices, for example iOS.

4. Cut down your forms

Long forms are conversion killers on desktop sites. They’re even worse for mobile visitors. Filling out forms with a smartphone is time consuming and uncomfortable. To boost mobile conversions, keep your forms short.

Review forms with the view of “Is this field absolutely necessary?” If the answer is no, delete it. You can ask for additional information after the actual conversion with a follow up e-mail or call.

5-6 fields are the maximum recommended amount of fields in a form when optimizing for mobile visitors. In addition use vertical-align labels (top) instead of left-aligned labels.

A good example of a business who has made filling out forms as easy as possible is Hertz, a car rental company. You can get a quote on a rental car by filling out four information fields. No name, address or contact information needed – they’re irrelevant when requesting a quote and can be gathered later, when the customer has made the actual purchase decision. Well done Hertz!

5. Use expandable content or tabs to avoid mobile scrolling

When running an e-commerce business, try implementing expendable content or tabs on your product pages. The point of tabs is to structure information based on categories so that mobile users can find what they’re looking for quicker.

For example, instead of scrolling through waves of content to find product reviews, a mobile visitors just clicks on the “Review” tab of the product page and ‘voila’ – he has the needed social proof to make the transaction.

Tria offers a good learning example with their desktop product site and the same page as a mobile landing page. Notice how all the content on the bottom half of the desktop site is placed as expandable content on the mobile landing page.

In addition, Tria gets credit for the CTA, which is highly visible and well-placed. Also notice how “Free Shipping” has been made more visible compared to the desktop site. “Reviews” have been altered in the same manner to provide social proof to mobile visitors.

Image source

Conclusions

• An increasing amount of website visits are performed on smartphones and tablets, meaning that businesses who want to benefit from this trend must enhance the browsing experience for these devices.
• Responsive web design allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution whether on a desktop, tablet or smartphone; thus creating a user-friendly interface when visitors browse websites.
• Companies that have invested in improving the browsing experience of mobile visitors, and have gone from a desktop design to responsive design, have seen increases in mobile conversions.
• When optimizing responsive design for mobile conversions, make sure your VP and other conversion boosting elements are highly visible. Use images and videos instead of plain text, and make your forms as short as possible.

Featured image credit

What kind of content should you have on your site? How should you structure the menu? What should be the first-level menu items? One or two menus? What should the menu links be called? This post will give you the answers.

Information architecture is no joke, yet overwhelming majority of businesses have structured their site using the IMO method – “in my opinion”. While common sense is a useful tool and a lot of sites are very simple (e.g. 5 pages total), there’s a better way to go about it.

If you already have tens of pages on your site, you should do proper information architecture analysis. Guiding people through the vast amount of information on offer is something that requires thought and research. Intuitive navigation doesn’t happen by chance.

What is information architecture?

As per Wikipedia, it’s “the art and science of organizing and labelling data including: websites, intranets, online communities, software, books and other mediums of information, to support usability”. We could simplify it to “the art and science of organizing websites” (we’re only talking about it in the context of websites in this article).

Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (information architecture gurus, you should read their book) defined the ‘three circles of information architecture’ as content, users and context of use:

 

It’s about organizing the content and flow of a website based on research and planning. The end goal of information architects is to come up with a structure / design that balances the users’ desires with the business’s needs.

Users have four fundamental questions when they arrive at a website: Am I in the right place? Do they have what I am looking for? Do they have anything better (if this isn’t what I want)? What do I do now? One of your key tasks is to make sure you do a good job at answering these questions – on every page of your site.

This means that you have to

• Assure visitor’s they’re in the right place (always make it clear where they are).
• Make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for (clear navigation, search etc).
• Make sure visitors know what their options are (links like “See also”, “Related products”).
• Let them take various kinds of action (clear CTAs).

What’s the end deliverable?

The final goal is essentially to come up the architecture of the site. The end deliverable might be things site maps, site-flow diagrams, and wireframes to convey how the site will work from a practical perspective.

It should determine the big picture – organizing the content on the site to support the tasks that users want to perform. Information architecture should also include little things like deciding that products on a search page should be ordered by price rather than by name.

And all of it should be based on actual research and data. Not much room for opinions here.

There are multiple ways to approach getting the website information architecture right. Here’s the method that has worked for me over the years.

Five steps to putting information architecture together

You achieve your business goals when you help people achieve their goals. You can only do that when you fully understand your user’s goals, problems, and aspirations.

Step #1: Gather data about the users

It’s critical that we get inside the user’s head. Before you embark on working on the information architecture, you need to know answers to these questions: What problem are we solving? Who needs it? What’s this site for? The earlier the purpose and goals are clearly defined (and written down!), the more easily problems are identified and solved, the easier it is to stay focused, and the better the end result.

Talk to your users. In person interviews and phone calls are best, but online surveys are also great. Here’s a post I wrote about conducting user research. 

The end goal here is to really understand what your users want and why they want it. There will be probably different intents and use cases, and that’s to be expected.

Step #2: Create customer personas and write user stories

Your website should be designed for somebody, not everybody. This is where personas come in.

Personas are fact-based (derived from user research) fictional representations of your users. They represent the goals, motivations, characteristics and behaviors of the most important groups of your users. This is a great article on creating data-backed personas.

Here’s a sample persona (attaching a photo to a persona helps us imagine a real person we’re building the site for):

Image credit

Next step is connecting use cases with personas. Use cases provide a simple means to decide and describe the purpose of a project. Use cases have 2 components: actors and goals.

Actors are people using the website. You only want to focus on the most prominent groups – the user personas. Goals are what one, some, or all of the personas want to achieve. Every use case must have a specific goal and the actors that will perform tasks to achieve that goal.

Goals might be things like read a blog post, check account balance, book an appointment, download software, take a test and so on. Use cases define goals and purpose: the problems we are trying to solve.

When you approach your website organization thinking about personas and what they wish to achieve, you will work with greater confidence, clarity.

Step #3: Metadata, scenarios, pages.

Once you have an understanding of the users – their intent, the why behind it and how they’d like to achieve their goal - you can begin to figure out how to present your content in a way that will make sense to your users.

There are several good methods to do this, but here’s one that I like to use:

Figure out the metadata

Metadata is information about information. It’s what helps users find the content they’re looking for. Let’s say you want to buy a coffee grinder, and go to a website that you know that sells those. If you browse around and can’t find it, it’s a sign of bad metadata. If you get your metadata right, you’ve already cleared the first hurdle of effective site design.

You have to determine what kind of information to store about stuff that people care about – life coffee grinders. Maybe they’d like to search by blade size? Color? Brand? Knowing what are all the different parameters and variables you need to store in your system is crucial for excellent search results.

The metadata for a book could be title, description, author, release date, ISBN, comments, cover image. Plan for it!

More on the importance of metadata.

Create user scenarios

To design the most pleasing experience for your users, start thinking about scenarios featuring user personas. A scenario is a story about someone (your user persona) using your website to carry out a specific task or goal: like booking a flight, buying yoga pants or applying to speak at an event.Scenarios work together with personas by serving as the stories behind why the particular persona would come to your website.

What does the persona hope to accomplish on your website? What can help him complete the task at hand? What might cause friction? You should focus on users and their tasks rather than on your site’s organization and internal structure. As a result, you will get insights to what content the site must have and how it should be organized.

Further reading on scenario mapping.

Map user tasks to individual web pages

Before you even start thinking about actual design, you need to have the content in place.

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) May 5, 2008

Next step is to decide what happens on your web pages and how many pages exist on your site. You must balance helping the users accomplish their current task while making certain the tools for what they need to do next are also available.

Each page must do two things:

1. help the user accomplish one specific task,
2. make the next step easy to access.

When you’re designing the site, making sure the user accomplishes each task is vitally important. However, achieving their objection usually consists of a series of small tasks, and it’s the relationship between tasks that creates the entire experience. Each page on your site needs to help build this chain of tasks.

There are three types of pages on your site:

• Navigation pages. These help users determine where to find what they want, and give them access to it. Their goal is to send users somewhere else. Typically that’s a home page or search results page.
• Consumption pages. These  are the “somewhere else” you usually go to: articles, videos, pricing information and so on.
• Interaction pages. These pages let users enter and manipulate data. Think search page or a sign-up form.

Each type of page is optimized for a different kind of user task. Understanding the type of page you need helps you tailor the interface design. When you draw a site map or map out your user flows, it’s important to note there whether a page is a navigation page, consumption page or interaction page – and design accordingly.

Offer the right help at the right moment in the most unobtrusive way possible.

Some web pages are easy to use, some might require some learning. Plan for help texts and microcopy to make sure users can complete tasks without confusion.

Information should be offered in context. Users should get answers to any booking related questions on the page where they would book stuff. Testimonials and FAQs that are on separate pages are not an optimal solution and information is not offered when it’s needed.

On-page FAQs do have a place though – when they’re used to answer actual questions, and not as a sales tool (“Should I buy it?” -> “Of course you should!”). I really like how R. Stpehen Gracey put it:” A good FAQ is like insurance for your users: There when they need it, but hopefully they never will.”

Here’s Groupon answering questions in context: the on-page FAQ on their checkout page:

Step #4: Create user flows

Now that you’ve figured out the kinds of pages you need on your site, map out the optimal user flows (I’ve written about creating user flows here).

When designing flows, it’s also important to know the four modes of searching information. There’s an excellent article by Donna Spencer on this very topic. According to her, the four types are:

• Known-item search. Often, when people know exactly what they are looking for and what it’s called, they’ll mostly use search. But some prefer navigation, so it has to work with search to get people where they know they want to go.
• Exploratory seeking. This happens when users may have a need, but aren’t certain what will fulfill it. They might be looking for a re-marketing solution or a new laptop. People will recognize an answer to their question, but won’t know if they’ve actually found the right answer (doesn’t know if there’s a more suited option out there).
• Don’t know what I need to know. Sometimes people don’t know what they need to know. Somebody looking to buy gemstone jewelry will realize that she has to figure out precious metals, treatments, gemstone clarity, hardness and many other things. They’re looking for one thing, but discover they really need to know about something else.
• Re-finding. People may want to go back to things they discovered in the past. If they saw something they liked on your site during their previous visit, make it easy to find it again (change the color of visited links, use permanent shopping carts etc).

Each information-seeking behavior relies on specific navigational tools to succeed.

Step #5: Create sitemaps, wireframes – and gather feedback

You’re only 1 person, and you need fresh sets of eyes and brains to challenge your thinking. Maybe you missed something, maybe you misunderstood the importance of something. This is why you need go through it all with your team mates (or other peers).

You can use sketches, diagrams, site maps or wireframes to communicate your findings and proposals for going forward.

Gather feedback, iterate, and move on to planning your site structure.

Techniques for figuring out the optimal menu structure

Intuitive navigation doesn’t happen by chance. Here are research and testing techniques UX professionals use to determine the best information architecture, workflows, menu structure or web site navigation paths.

Card sorting

You have a bunch of pages on your website that need to be categorized. What should go where? Card sorting lets you figure out where people would want to find something. It’s an awesome (and reliable!) method for finding patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality. It works the best if the subject matter is something people understand (e.g. audio-video equipment or apparel).

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Here’s how the basic method works:

1. You take a set of index cards (e.g. those yellow post it notes) and write a term (e.g. name of the page, content) on each one of them. Each card represents a (category) page  on your website. If you’re an audio-video ecommerce site, you might write down things like ‘digital SLRs’, ‘Canon lenses’, ‘DVD players’ etc.
2. Test subjects (people that you’ve recruited for this purpose, representatives of your ideal customer) are given a set of index cards with terms already written on them.
3. You ask people to put the terms into logical groupings, and find a category name for each grouping.
4. This process is repeated with each test subject.
5. After going through the exercise with all the test participants, you analyze their output and start seeing patterns.

Here’s a great video explaining the concept in 3 minutes:

There are 3 main types of card sorting:

• Open card sorting. This is where the test participants create their own names for the categories. It gives you insight to how your customers think and mentally classify items.
• Closed card sorting. Here participants are provided with a predetermined set of category names. Their goal is to assign the index cards to these fixed categories.
• Modified Delphi method. This is different from the rest. Here participants work one after another, refining a single model. The first test subject does a traditional open card sort. The following testers start with whatever the previous tester created. A participant can choose either to modify that organization (rename or restructure stuff), or even scrap the whole thing and start over (create a new, different organization). You repeat the process until participants are no longer making any significant changes (the structure stabilizes). The possible threat here is that since anyone can start over, an outlier participant could compromise the whole study.

Modified-Delphi method in action (see the changed category name):

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Tree testing (reverse card sorting)

Tree testing is where you create a menu structure (either yourself or based on other card sorting research outcomes), and you let people find items from the menu. The goal of tree testing is to prove that your site structure will work – before you get into actual user interface design.

It is done on a simplified text version of your site structure – without the influence of navigation aids and visual design.

Example:

Screenshot source

In this example the user would navigate through the menu structure until they think they’ve reached the place where they’d expect protective cases to be:

Reverse card sorting is perfect for validating your menu structure assumptions (or getting necessary feedback for re-arranging it).

Online (remote) card sorting

You don’t have to conduct card sorting in person. Doing it online is cheaper, doesn’t require logistics planning and can be done without geographical limitations. You can’t be “there” and moderate it (although you could be having a Skype chat at the same time), so proper pre-education of test participants is a must. Some pros and cons of online card sorting are pointed out in this article.

The limitation of these online card sorting tools is that they can’t be used with Modified-Delphi method.

Online tools you can check out for this:

• Websort
• OptimalSort
• SimpleCardSort
• ConceptCodify
• usabilitiTEST

These tools will also help you analyze the results (as opposed to doing it 100% manually).

Analyzing card-sort results

2 questions that often come up about results.

• #1: What if half the people want to find page X from category Y, but half the people from Z? The answer: it’s okay to have the same link under 2 different categories! If that helps people to find content they want, that’s the way to go.
• #2: Do I just use the results as my site structure? Not quite.You should use card sorting results mainly as a guide to organization and labeling. Don’t just blindly take the results and use them as your actual site structure. Your card sort results can (and should be) supplemented with additional user research and task analysis.

As you design your navigation system, ask yourself, “What do the bulk of the visitors coming to my site want?” And ask yourself a follow-up question: “What do I want my visitors to be able to find easily?”

How many users to test with? 

Tullis and Wood (authors of a prominent study, 2004) recommend testing twenty to thirty users for card sorting. However, based on his research Jakob Nielsen recommends to test only 15 users (and 30 users in big projects with lavish funding). Testing it with more people does give more insight, but there are diminishing returns and when testing past 15 users the costs are often not justified.

Further reading: Here’s a great guide to card sorting.

Guiding principles for navigation design

Card sorting technique will help you figure out how to structure you menus. What about navigation menu design?

In good navigation design, links look clickable.

They have clear labels that set expectations of what lies beneath. Unclear menu links cause click fear.

Take a look at the navigation menu I have up there. I’ve done a good amount of testing to find the perfect good enough wording for those. (If some of those are not clear enough, do let me know).

Here’s another one:

The menu items do look like obvious buttons, but I would argue that “learn more” and “order now” are pretty poor choices here. It’s impossible to understand what will I learn more about and what am I ordering?

Provide consistent, reliable global navigation

Whatever links you have in your navigation menu and footer, have to be the same on every page of your site.

Wherever you go on Made.com, the top menu remains unchanged:

Where to put the menu?

Should the main menu be horizontal or vertical? While there’s a strong case against the left vertical menus, two studies (2003 and 2004) actually claim it’s better. I say you should opt for horizontal menu whenever possible, but go for the left vertical menu if you’ve got a ton of menu items (Amazon!). This eyetracking study says top menu is easier to use, but there’s only so much space there.

If you do use vertical menus, make sure they’re aligned left. Right-aligned menus impede scannability.

Global and local navigation

Almost all websites with more than 1 page have some sort of global navigation:

Then there’s also local navigation (sub-menu):

Local navigation should appear below the global navigation. This is logical as conceptually global menu is the main category and local navigation is like the sub-categories below it. Local navigation links should be closest to where the user needs them. Content is #1, but once the user is done reading the content, he’s going to reach for the local navigation before looking at the global navigation.

Similarly, if the page does not have the content he’s looking for, the local navigation is the navigation he looks for first.

How many levels of navigation do you create?

As many as you need  - without driving users crazy. Some websites with a lot of content – like Schwab – have 4 (sub-sub-sub-menus) or more levels of content:

They feel that each level of navigation helps users zero in on their goals.

Most websites only have enough content for two levels of navigation—the global navigation and one level of local navigation.

Tools to use

• Balsamiq Mockups. A great, fast wireframing tool. There’s almost 0 learning to get going, and I love the fact that it focuses on the big picture, and not the little design elements.
• Omnigraffle. The tool of choice for a lot of UX professionals. Diagrams, process charts, quick page-layouts, website mockups, and more. Mac-only.
• Microsoft Visio. Many people prefer it for diagramming and website planning.
• MindJet MindManager. Mindmapping tool that’s also great for diagramming and sitemaps.
• LovelyCharts. Diagramming application that allows you to create diagrams of all kinds, such as flowcharts, sitemaps, wireframes and more.

Conclusion

People can only buy what they can find. There are a number of studies (e.g. this) that show websites are losing money because the navigation system has failed and user can’t find the product they are interested in. I’ve seen the claim “up to 50% of sales lost due to bad navigation” being thrown around, but I haven’t found the actual study confirming this. Nevertheless, good navigation is critical. Check out this Jakob Nielsen article on costly content organization and navigation mistakes.

Information architecture works hand in hand with usability and conversions. If your information architecture is good, but your usability sucks, your visitors will be able to find what they are looking for, but will struggle to complete the purchase flow – resulting in poor conversions. However your web site information architecture is bad (even if your usability is good), most of your web site visitors won’t even be able to find what they are looking for, and thus will leave your site even before entering the sales funnel.

Gettting the information architecture of your site right will ensure a great user experience, which in turn leads to higher retention rate and improved conversions.

Featured image source