You spend a lot of time studying the analytics for your website, and that’s important. Analytics can tell you a lot of things. But one thing it can’t tell you is why a visitor does what he does.

For instance, analytics can show you that 50% of your visitors exit your site when they reach the billing form page, but it can’t give you the reason for that drop-off.

Asking the right conversion optimization questions and developing tests based on those questions, however, can show you where visitors experience a disconnect with your conversion funnel.

Testing can give you a peek inside your visitor’s brain, helping determine what caused him to make the choices he did. Let’s take a look at five conversion optimization questions that will help you develop strong usability tests.

1. Is it clear what visitors can do, buy or get?

Visitors are on a mission. They have a need and they’re looking for a solution. Match up with their need and they’ll stick around and read what you have to offer. Cute titles and rotating images may be visually appealing but don’t convince visitors that they can solve their problem on your website. Know what lead your visitors to each and every page on your site and make that page a perfect match to their search results by telling them right away what they can do, buy or get.

2. Who is your audience, what is your niche?

One thing about the internet that visitors know is that they’ve got choices. Whether you’re searching for a new area rug, a gift for your sister or the best way to filet a fish you don’t just look at one site, you look at several. How do you help visitors decide to choose you?

You need an angle; something that differentiates you from the crowd. Narrowing your audience and identifying your niche is one way to stand apart. Sure you won’t appeal to everyone and that’s the point. You want to appeal to a specific audience. The more you identify with them and their needs the more they’ll believe that you’re the only choice for them.

3. Stop delivering facts and appeal to your visitor’s emotions

We’ve all heard the phrase “benefits sell and features tell” but what exactly does that mean?

I couldn’t live without my Blue Ball Microphone but this list of features is not what convinced me that it’s the mic of my dreams:

• Uniquely designed plug-and-play USB mic connects to either a Mac or PC
• Dual capsule design and unique three-pattern switch can handle everything from soft vocals to loud garage band
• Switchable mic patterns for a variety of recording applications, including podcasts
• Swivel mount located on the bottom center of the mic body
• No additional software required

I was sick to death of sounding like I was recording in a cave. Or, worse, my voice sounds screechy and not mellow like I envisioned. Once I switched out my $19.95 microphone for the Blue Ball I stopped being embarrassed about my audio recordings. Every recording sounds professional, every time.

It’s not that you do away with the features. It’s that you supplement them with some real dialogue about what it will be like to use your product or service. Once your visitors see themselves using your product they will sell themselves.

4. Does the page try to do too much?

 A good landing page is focused around one unified message. Too many elements competing for attention will pull the visitor away from the one thing you really want him to do—the conversion. Resist the urge to put lots of links and options on your landing page. Instead, streamline the page so that every element points your visitor to the next step, and the next and the next…everything leading to your call to action.

5. What will visitors get if they click on your call to action button?

Ecommerce sites have it all over lead generation sites when it comes to calls to action. If I see a dog leash I like and I click on the “buy” my intent and action line up and I know what I’m going to get…I’m buying a new dog leash.

The goal of a lead generation website is the same. Match intent to action and reinforce what the visitor will be getting. If I’m signing up for your newsletter don’t the words “sign me up” make much more sense than the overused “submit” button?

Put some time into coming up with persuasive language – action verbs – that compel visitors to click and reinforce the benefits.

All of these conversion optimization questions will help you design landing pages that are more usable and that communicate more clearly. Use them to develop tests that pinpoint holes in your conversion funnel, enabling you to make strategic changes rather than relying on guesswork to get the job done.

The post Five Conversion Optimization Questions for Better Landing Pages, written by Marty Diamond appeared first on Diamond Website Conversion.

How’s your conversion strategy?

When you’re in the process of optimizing a website, it can be easy to get so caught up in the details that you lose sight of your big-picture goals. Sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back and re-evaluate your plans to improve website conversion.

Strategy should drive every decision you make if you hope to boost your sales and increase leads, so if you haven’t thought much about the long-term plan lately, it may be time to regroup.

Ready to improve website conversion strategy for your business? Let’s take a quick refresher look at these four pillars of conversion optimization:

1. Showcase Your Unique Value Proposition

Do you know what makes your company unique? Can you articulate it clearly? Is it prominently featured on your landing pages and home page? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you’re challenging your customers to figure it out for themselves – which is never ideal.

Visitors don’t just jump on the first offer they find. They check you out against your competitors. If you don’t clearly differentiate yourself from your competitors, your visitors struggle to figure out the differences and can come to the wrong conclusions. Help them out by clearly stating and showing what makes your company stand out.

2. Know Your Audience

It may seem ambitious to say “Our company is targeting anyone who wants to buy a car!” But is that really true? Is it feasible? Not really. If you sell straight-from-the-factory BMWs, you’re targeting a different market than the used car lot down the street.

Take the time to identify your customers and then learn everything you can about them. Income, age, shopping preferences, family life, education level, and anything you can learn about them that will help you form a picture of who buys your products or uses your services.

You’ll use this information everywhere on your website. From the images, colors, graphics, font styles and wording – everything will be directed specifically towards personalizing the experience so that your audience understands that you’re talking to them.

3. Identify and Eliminate Barriers to Conversion

Next, take a long hard look at your landing pages to determine what elements might be barriers to conversion. Watch your metrics—bounce rate, exit rate, shopping cart abandonment, time spent on page, visits to order—and see where your visitors are leaking away. It’s easy to become blind to the weaknesses in your design, so take the time to get other opinions and viewpoints to help you pinpoint problem areas.

4. Test

Finally, if you want to see significant, lasting changes in your conversion rates, you’ll need to implement a rigorous testing program. Don’t just guess about what changes need to be made. Test to find out what works best for your audience and your website.

If you’re ready to improve website conversion strategy and see a healthy boost in your conversion rates, you’ll need to stay committed for the long term.

Conversion optimization isn’t a one-time proposition. It’s a process that will help you continuously improve your website over time, making the most of each click.

The post 4 Pillars of a Strong Conversion Strategy, written by Marty Diamond appeared first on Diamond Website Conversion.

How Secure is your WordPress site?

The front door of the beach cottage had a large old horseshoe directly over the door.

We were struck by the size of it. Must have been a huge horse. Curious, we checked with the owner later that day and learned that the horseshoe was put there when the cottage was built, over 100 years ago, for protection and good luck.

I’ve been thinking a lot about protection lately; because several friends have had their WordPress sites hacked recently.

It seems that there’s a brute force attack going on at the moment designed to gain access to WordPress sites by targeting the “admin” account that every WordPress site sets up by default.

Using some 90,000 computers they aim to find the password of these accounts.  Once they break into a site they do such a lot of damage that many have to be completely rebuilt.

One friend’s site was broken into but she discovered them in the act. She contacted her host immediately and they blocked the hackers. The ISP determined that it was a brute force attack by a botnet (a group of computers that are banded together to perform tasks).

She got her site cleaned up and changed all the passwords and user names. Within 24 hours the botnets were back at it, attacking her site again. They didn’t succeed the second time but it was a very scary 48 hours until the attacks stopped.

Since then I’ve been on a mission to get everyone I know to take a look at the security and backup on their WordPress site. In this case an ounce of prevention could be worth a lot to you.

3 ways to protect your WordPress site

• Very Strong Passwords and unusual user name
• Plugins that limit logins and boost security
• Regular backups  of your site

Step 1: Strengthen your passwords and avoid using “admin” as your user name

If you have an “admin” user on your site with administrative privileges now is the time to change it to something less obvious. These brute attacks and previous WordPress attacks targeted those sites where one of the admin users is using the user name “admin.”

If you’re still using “admin” for a user name, here’s how you can change it.

• Go  into your WordPress account
• Create an account for an additional administrator using a more complex and unusual user name
• Log out and then log back in again with your new user name and password – just to check that everything is OK
• Delete the old “admin” user.

You may have posts assigned to this user that will need to be reassigned but that’s a small problem compared to having to recreate an entire site.

Next strengthen your password.  Even if you’ve already got a good user name, make sure your password is strong enough to sustain an attack and can’t be easily doped out.  Using letters, numbers and symbols in a longer string, 10 characters for example, makes it far more difficult to hack into your account.

Step two: Use WordPress plugins to strengthen your site’s security.

Go to the WordPress Plugin Directory http://wordpress.org/plugins/ and do a search for Security to get the list of all the security plugins.

Login Lockdown limits the number of times an IP address can log into your account.  This slows any would-be hackers away from your site since with a more complex user name and password they’ll need multiple tries to land on the correct combination.

Two other security plugins we’ve used on client accounts are:

• Better WP
• Bulletproof Security

Both of these plugins have good documentation. There are some things you’ll need to do to configure the plugin for your site. A security expert at the Seattle WordPress Meetup told a group of us that the #1 reason that security plugins fail is not because of the plugin, but because they were installed and never configured.

There are overlaps among the programs so read the installation instructions and FAQs to learn which will be the best for your site.

Step 3 Regularly backup your website.

Backup Buddy http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/ is the current favorite among the bloggers I talk to regularly.  What everyone likes about it the most is that you not only backup your database but also your WordPress Theme and other Programming Files. This isn’t a free plugin. But it’s a reasonable one-time charge when you consider how much time you would spend recreating your entire site.

Some hosting companies do regular backups of their sites; check with yours to see if that’s the case.

You can also check out all the free plugins at the Plugin Directory and see if one meets your needs.

There are so many happy WordPress users that we’re a natural target for large scale attacks. Even though everyone in the WordPress community does what they can to keep the community safe, there are bound to be future attacks – we’re just too big a target.

Be safe…put a virtual horseshoe over the door to your website.  Since the botnets are looking for easy sites to break into, make yours unattractive to them by:

• Bolstering your password to something long and complex and at the same time removing that “admin” user name if you have one.
• Increasing  security with a security plugin
• Finding a backup program you like and use it at least weekly to back up your data.

How do you handle security and/or backups on your WordPress site?

The post Is Your WordPress Site Secure?, written by Marty Diamond appeared first on Diamond Website Conversion.

It was late on a Saturday night. We were out of town with the pups, and Scuba, our black lab went from sick to deathly ill in less than 30 minutes. Too late for the regular vet, we had to find an emergency vet fast.

Immediately we checked Around Me on the iPhone. Using the app we got the name, phone number and address of the nearest emergency vet. We gave them a call and the App’s GPS guided us right to the vet’s door.

This isn’t a commercial for Around Me, you may have an app you like better. No, it’s just how grateful I was for the app.  It was so helpful. Knowing right where to go relieved so much stress.

How helpful is your contact page?

It’s how I think about contact pages on websites. They’re a page specifically designed to help your visitors. But most of us are so focused on selling our products or services that we don’t put much thought into making our contact pages really helpful.

We don’t do a good job of giving our visitors the warm fuzzies when they come to our contact page.

Let’s start with why people come to your contact page.

• To find out where you’re located
• To get your phone number and call you
• To find out when you’re open
• To complete your contact form to get a question answered or to get more information

People look for your address on your contact us page.

This is obvious if you’re a dental office or a bead store, but what if clients don’t come to your store or office?  What if you’re a carpet cleaner, do you still need to include your address on your contact page? Maybe you work from home, and putting your home address on the contact page makes you uncomfortable.

There is no need to provide a physical address.  You can use a P.O. Box instead of your home address. Renting a small PO. Box from the post office is not very expensive.  You can also rent virtual office space or use the services of a private mail service like the local UPS store.

When you don’t have an address on your contact page, visitors will wonder why.  They don’t know you and no address leaves them wondering if you’re a real business.

Putting your address on your contact page boosts credibility and confidence. Including your phone number on your contact page increases your visitor’s confidence even more.

Some people prefer to pick up the phone and call you.

 When I ask our clients, “Do you want your web visitors to call you?”  They invariably roll their eyes, look at me like I’m a little dim and say “of course.”  So then I ask “Then why bury your phone number in a bunch of text so people can’t find it”? They act surprised.  It’s usually prominently displayed in their header and they don’t see what the problem is – they think the phone number is obvious.

True your phone number may be obvious in the header, but if you really want people to call, let them know it’s not just OK, it’s fantastic.  Make your phone number big and the message to call you inviting – on the contact page.

You know your phone number is in your header, but that’s not where your visitors are focused right now. They’re reading your contact page. If your phone number is in tiny type and out of the way, you’re giving them the impression that you don’t really want them to call.

Some phone calls, like “what are your hours?” you can avoid if you give people that information on your contact page.

When are you open?

Do you maintain regular hours?  For the bead store this is pretty obvious. You don’t want people to drive all the way over to buy beads only to discover that you’re not open on Wednesdays.  But this is not just about brick and mortar operations.

Whether you’re online, offline or both, people want to know when you’re available to answer the phone, process orders, or answer emails.  Do you have Saturday hours or just Monday through Friday?

And don’t forget to include your time zone.  There is nothing worse than your cell phone ringing at 5 a.m. because someone doesn’t realize that you’re on the west coast.

OK, finally we’re ready for the contact form.

Why do people come to your Contact Us page?

This is kinda like asking, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”   Well duh…they come to your Contact Us page to complete the contact form.  And as far as the form goes, you’ve probably got it pretty dialed in already.

You probably already know to ask only for the minimum amount of information, just name and email if that’s all you need.  Offer the option of a phone call back, but don’t make it mandatory unless there is a specific reason.  Give people a box to add comments, add some relevant button text (send is better than submit) and you’re done.

Well, not quite.

Visitors want to know when they’ll hear back from you.

Most people understand that you’re running a business and don’t expect an immediate answer. There are exceptions, but let’s not worry about them here. The thing that drives people crazy is not knowing when they’ll hear back. Do you return all phone calls by the next business day, within 24 hours, or what? If they fill out the contact form, when will they hear back from you?

From our own experience, the faster you get back to people the better. Their problem is burning a hole in their brain and the longer they wait to hear from you the more likely they are to contact someone else.   But sometimes it’s impossible to get back to people immediately.  What then?

Why setting expectations is so important.

If you walk into your doctor’s office and see a room full of people, you know you’re probably in for a long wait.  When you ask the receptionist, she probably says something like “Well the doctor is running late today, we’ll call you when he’s ready.”  After 20 minutes you check back with her and you get the same answer.  By now you’re pretty agitated.  Should you wait or try to reschedule?  The wait is bad enough, but it’s not knowing how long the wait will actually be that drives you crazy.

What if instead the receptionist had said, “Listen the Doctor is running about 45 minutes late because of an emergency.  If you want you can go around the corner to the Starbucks, get some coffee and be back in 45 minutes. By then we’ll be ready for you, or I can reschedule you right now.”   You may not be pleased, but you know what to expect and you’re not going crazy.

The same is true on your contact page. If you let people know what to expect, they feel like the situation is under control. A statement like “Expect to hear from us within 24 hours” stops them from wondering when they’ll hear back.

So here’s your contact page checklist:

•  Include an address – either a physical address or your mailing address
• If you want people to call, make your phone number obvious and inviting
• Give the days and hours you’re open for business and your time zone
• Make your contact form simple and easy to complete – ask for the minimum amount of information possible
• Tell people when they can expect a response from you

The post How to Create A Contact Page That Gives Visitors the Warm Fuzzies, written by Marty Diamond appeared first on Diamond Website Conversion.

What would the world look like from a bug’s perspective? That’s the question John Lasseter wanted to answer during the creation of the movie “A Bug’s Life.”

To understand the world through a bug’s eyes, his team created a miniature video camera on Lego wheels which they called the “Bugcam.” Fastened to the end of a stick, the Bugcam would roll through grass sending back a bug’s-eye view of the terrain.

When we test a web page,  it’s like we’re getting the visitor’s view of our page. The more we learn about their behavior, the more we can tailor a page to their needs which in turn increases your sales. Lately though, testing websites has become more of a numbers game. Instead of focusing on learning about our customers we’re obsessed over getting that big increase – that 125% gain we read about.

Clients hear so much about outsized wins, the +125% increase in sign-ups and the 149% increase in clicks, that they’re completely deflated by a “measly 6% gain.” If you find yourself feeling bad if you only got a 3.27% lift from your latest test…read on.

Start by reframing the process … Instead of calling it a test, call it an experiment.

When we call something a test, our tendency is to grade the test results based on some sort of numerical ideal: • +100% or more an A

• +30% or more a B
• +10% or more a C
• everything below 10% either a failure or downright bad

Don’t get me wrong. I love the 150% increase as much as the next marketer. 

Everyone gets excited when you post a 150% gain in conversions. Problem is that you have a hard time convincing the client that they need to keep testing.

“We’ve got a winner, let’s stop here” is the response you hear.  It’s hard for clients to believe that there is more to learn and potentially more gains to come.

And it’s not just the outsized gains that create problems; it’s probably even more difficult to get clients to continue testing after a test that fails.

Coming back after a -15% test result can be difficult. 

Once I started referring to testing as a series of experiments; clients were accepting of the inevitable negative result. No one expects every experiment to be successful. Sure you’re not excited, but there is no feeling of failure. Instead, it’s on to the next.

Call it a test and you have different dynamic. After years of schooling and thousands of test results we know the difference between an A+ and an F-. And we view a -15% or -5% or –50% result as equally awful… well maybe not -50%….but you know what I mean.

A negative result on an experiment is part of the process and not a point of failure. 

When I started referring to the testing as experiments, all the anxiety and feelings of euphoria or defeat went away. 

Instead I was able to focus on what the experiment was telling me instead of the results. Here’s a good example of what I mean.

In a recent client experiment, the goal was to increase sign-ups for their service. They had a rather long, 10 minute video at the very top of their current sign-up page. We decided to test moving the video down the page and introduce it to the audience after they’d had a chance to read about the company and the service. That move resulted in 50% fewer video plays.

Our goal for the experiment was to increase sign-ups and they were up by 31%. But the real learning was about the video. On the next experiment, we moved the video back up to the top of the page, and the sign-ups increased even more.

It was something we couldn’t have anticipated without experimenting. Our premise, that their visitors would want to read about the service first and then watch the video was dead wrong.

If we’d only focused on the numerical result and not the learning we might have missed out on one their visitors key preferences -  video over copy.

You can’t know for sure what your customers will like.

The beauty of experimenting is that you don’t have to love every experiment. Try it and see what happens. When colleagues have a weird idea, go with the flow. Create a page based on their input, run an experiment and see what happens.

The less you “own” your site and the more you allow your customers to “own” your site the more open you’ll be to giving things a try. What do you have to lose? Well…what if the experiment crashes and burns?

What if the experiment is posting a -57% result almost immediately? 

First look at how much traffic and how many conversions have been recorded by the experiment. Are we talking about 25 visitors and 1 conversion or 500 visitors and 1 conversion? If it’s just a few visitors and conversions, try to wait to be sure the results are not just an anomaly. This is probably one of the most difficult things to do, but on low traffic numbers 1 conversion either way can make a huge difference in the results.

However, if you’ve had too many visitors to view the results as just a coincidence, stop the experiment. Gather all the information you can about why the experiment went wrong, regroup and try again.

Experiments gone wrong not only seize your brain, but they can show you very clearly what not to do in the future. Review your premise for the experiment design, layout and copy. Use what you’ve learned to create a more effective and compatible page.

Here’s a quick checklist to reframe the process 

• Think experiment instead of test – test implies good or bad while experiment implies a learning
• Think ideas instead of long term decisions – Experiment with everyone’s ideas, even those you’re not that excited about. No one, not you, not your boss, and not your colleagues, knows exactly what your customer will respond to. Guesses, even educated guesses, are no substitute for data.
• Think learning instead of numbers – a 6% gain with big insights for your whole site might be much more valuable for your business than a quick 125% gain on a single landing page

Just like the world looks entirely different from a bug’s perspective, you’ll view testing in a whole different light if you view it from the perspective of an experiment.

The post Test vs. Experiment? The Difference A Word Can Make, written by Marty Diamond appeared first on Diamond Website Conversion.