This is part 7 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions.

All the testing, market research and analysis work you’ve done so far should have given you some ideas on what changes you can make to your website more trustworthy and effective at converting browsers into buyers.

The temptation might be to now plough ahead and to pull down your existing pages before replacing them with the shiny new benefit laden versions you have in mind. But now you’ve come so far, now is not the time to abandon the tested philosophy of website design we’ve followed thus far.

As with every step in this series, you need to test your thoughts and ideas on how your new website should be designed, rather than rely on intuition and guesswork.

Create wireframes of your new pages

Instead of getting bogged down in html, a quick way of creating web pages you can test is to use wireframe creation software. If you’ve got money to spend, Adobe Illustrator is the premier choice for creating test web pages.

Another option, that’s kinder to your wallet, is Balsamiq mockups. This is a rapid wireframing tool that enables you to create sketch like versions of the new web pages. A couple of mouse clicks later, and you’ve got a PDF or graphical version you can pass around to get people’s feedback.

Use Notable for decision making by committee (but in a good way)

Emailing off your wireframe and then trying to amalgamate everyone’s feedback is a headache just waiting to happen. Instead, you can use a collaborative feedback tool, like Notable.com, so everyone can contribute and share feedback in one place. Simply upload your wireframe and then invite team members to paste notes, vote on changes and suggest better ideas. This approach enables faster iterations and improvements to be made so you’re ready to move onto the next stage with the best version of your website yet.

Get feedback from actual visitors through usability testing

It’s easy to assume that you and your team know best when it comes to how your website should look, read and feel. But as I hope this entire series of posts has shown you, assumptions and guesswork aren’t the best way.

Instead, you need to get some third party feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what sends them clicking their way out the door. Two possible approaches are:

1. Ask visitors to your website if they’d like to take part in usability testing. Using Ethnio you can add a call out box to your website that pops up and offers visitors an incentive for taking part in usability testing. You can then conduct the tests individually over Skype or you could hold a group testing exercise using conferencing software, like GoToMeeting.
2. Sites like usertesting.com enable you to select testers matching the demographics of your target visitor. They’ll then record a video of them navigating through your website, performing tasks and hunting for usability bugs.

After all this, you’ll now have a new version of your website ready to be built and unleashed onto the world. But the testing isn’t over yet folks, because we still need to know whether the new version is more persuasive, engaging and higher converting than the one you have already.

In the final post I’ll give you an overview of how to use an amazing conversion rate optimization tool provided by Google that is probably worth $1000s but they generously give away for free.

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Themeforest and Divine Write.

This is part 6 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions. 

By now you’ve identified your website’s leaks, gained insights from your customers, assessed how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and collected together your ‘persuasive assets’. But before you set about making wholesale changes to your website, it’s sensible to identify the tried and tested changes you can make to improve its conversion rate.

Here are nine changes you can make that have proven, time and again, to be effective in improving the rate at which visitors become buyers:

Benefit laden headlines

It’s estimated that four out of five people will read headline copy, but only one out of five will read the rest. So it’s critical that every page has a benefit laden headline that reels in visitors to find out more about your offer.

It can be tempting to write headlines that are quirky or clever, but this risks alienating visitors who don’t understand what you’re talking about or see any reason to read further. So focus on creating punchy, persuasive headlines that offer a clear benefit and a solution to your visitor’s problem.

Clear calls to action on every page

As you will have discovered when setting up funnels in Google Analytics, people go through a journey on your website. And they don’t always take the path you’d like them to. So it’s important to signpost your website so you can usher them in the right direction.

You can achieve this with clear calls to action that tell visitors exactly what to do and where to click to get further information, to request a demo or to ‘buy now’. After viewing every page you want to keep nudging them along to the checkout or signup form, so there should be a call to action on every page.

Focus on benefits, not features

A popular adage in copywriting circles is that you’re not selling the drill but the hole. What this implies is that your web copy needs to focus on showing customers what they will gain from your product, rather than what it does.

So if your product pages are plastered in list of features, consider adding an introductory paragraph that explains the time/cost/happiness benefits customers will gain.

Answer objections in a comprehensive FAQ section

If customers have doubts about your product then they are unlikely to email or phone when they can simply click away and shop elsewhere. So it’s vital your website answers every objection they might have.

A clear and comprehensive FAQ section should list all the questions customers might have and then resolve them one by one. It’s also sensible to add your email address or a Google chat box at the end so you can win over customers through a prompt and helpful response to their queries.

Don’t underestimate the influence of the ‘About’ page

When using Google Analytics you might have noticed that the About page is one of the most popular sections of your website. This is because people like to do business with people – they want to know why they should trust the promises you make and what makes you an expert.

You can build trust and rapport with visitors through your About page. Rather than use the same old clichéd boiler plate copy on ‘exceeding customer expectations’ and offering ‘a paradigm shift in workforce solutions’, consider talking about the reasons why you started your business, a brief mention of your successes and other concrete details that will build trust in your expertise. Spending time on your About page can make a real difference in a crowded marketplace.

Create a sense of urgency

This is a mind trick you can borrow from those looong sales letter landing pages that many deride but are proven to work. Whether it’s offering a special promotional price within a limited timeframe or having a countdown on the number of products left, creating a sense of scarcity and urgency around your product can give hesitant visitors that extra nudge to unsheathe their credit card.

Differentiate your product with technical or specific information

It’s all well and good to say your air purifier is the best on the market but people need to know why. One way you can achieve this is by making your copywriting more complex, and to discuss specific details about your product that differentiates it and raises its value.

Legendary copywriter Joseph Sugarman used this tactic to shift millions of pairs of BluBlocker sunglasses by discussing how its ability to block out blue ultraviolet rays improved your vision (if you’re a copywriter and haven’t read ‘The Adweek Copywriting Handbook’ yet then you should make a swift trip to Amazon. It’s a copywriting canon I reread every year).

Give your website face to face sales appeal

Essentially your website should be able to sell your product as effectively as if you were talking to a customer face to face. But many business owners can struggle to replicate their sales patter into the written word. One way around this is to record a conversation with the CEO or sales rep and what they’d say when selling to a customer.

This can help you to identify what key points your website is missing and how you can answer objections to close a sale. You can these extra nuggets of information to your website to recreate the sense of a face to face dialogue and to turn it into a well oiled sales machine.

Lower risk bar with guarantee

A strong guarantee is a corner stone of selling digital products. Offering a strong no quibbles money back guarantee is a tried and tested method of removing risk and persuading hesitant visitors to take the plunge.

Offering refunds might seem like a generous way of handing over profits, but the extra sales you’ll gain through offering a guarantee should be enough to cover any losses you might incur.

So along with these nine tried and tested tactics for improving your website’s conversion rate, your persuasive assets and the other insights you’ve learned from previous stages, you are now in a position to start rebuilding your website the tested design way.

In the next post I’ll be discussing how to create a wireframe of your website and how to get it tested early, so you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater in the rush to attain higher website conversions and sales. 

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Themeforest and Divine Write.

This is part 5 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions.

In this day and age of marketing hype and hyperbole, it pays to be a bit cynical. And savvy consumers will now actively seek out reviews and recommendations before purchasing online, just as they would if, say, they were hiring a builder or buying a new TV.

With this in mind, if you want to improve the conversion rate of your website, you need to provide the ‘social proof’ people are actively looking for. In other words, you need to be able to demonstrate that people have actually gained the time/cost/happiness benefits you promise in your website’s effusive copywriting.

So how do you go about it?

You need to collect together all the ‘persuasive assets’ you can find about your company and then to plaster them all over your website. By ‘persuasive assets’ I mean all the third party endorsements written by real customers on their experiences with your product or service.

On my copywriting website’s home page, for example, I feature two testimonials and I’ve got a whole page more to persuade hesitant visitors, who don’t know me from Adam, that I can deliver what I claim.

Along with testimonials (which you should start collecting right away, if you don’t already), your persuasive assets could include reviews, media mentions, case studies, test results, survey results (e.g. gained from Survey Gizmo) and social media mentions (found using Radian6).

Giving your website social proof with third party endorsements is one of the most powerful ways of improving the conversion rate of your website. People trust the opinions of other people far more than the wondrous claims made in your website’s copywriting. So make sure you collect testimonials, reviews and feedback at every opportunity and keep adding them to your website.

In the next post I’ll be discussing what other changes you can make that will have the biggest impact on improving your website’s conversion rate. 

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This is part 4 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions

Rarely will new customers buy the first time they visit your website. Instead, they’ll browse to see what’s on offer before checking out the competition.

With this in mind, it’s vital to analyze your competitors so you can find a way of positioning yourself in a way that makes your offer more appealing, beneficial or unique.

Checking out your competitor’s website, downloading their brochure and signing up for their email campaign is a good place to start. That way you can see their online marketing machine in action from the perspective of a customer and see how it compares to yours. In particular, note down the USPs they like to push and where you can differentiate yourself.

But in this hyper-connected social media world we now live in, what customers are saying is becoming more important than what businesses say about themselves. Thankfully there are tools you can use to find out.

Listen, measure and engage with Radian6

Radian6 is a social media analysis tool that enables you to listen and measure mentions of your brand and those of your competitors in blogs, on Twitter, on YouTube and more. If, for example, you’ve launched a new product or marketing campaign it’s now possible to get real time statistics on the number of social mentions and your campaign’s reach. You can also drill down to read individual mentions and respond to Tweets, comments and blog posts.

Responding to people’s comments is great for branding and customer service. But it can also be used to get feedback on your brand or product’s positioning and how it can be improved. Through analyzing the questions, complaints or praise of your customers you can identify how to position your brand in a way that’s most appealing and will improve your website’s conversion rate.

In the next post I’ll be discussing how you can turn your website into a proof magnet by collecting together all your ‘persuasive assets’. 

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This is part 3 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions

In my previous post, I showed you how to use Google Analytics to identify which pages are losing you customers so you know which to focus on first to improve your website’s conversion rate.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing your traffic; however, it doesn’t show you why pages are leaking visitors like a sieve. And when it comes to website design, it’s easy to assume you know what your customers want – but if you don’t ask them how can you really know?

So the next step is to investigate what experience visitors have on your website. This will help you to identify which elements of your website are working, which are broken and which send visitors heading for the door.

Thankfully, through using these tools, it’s a straightforward process to find out:

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg provides you with a ‘heat map’ of your website, showing you where people are clicking, which parts of the pages capture their interest and which don’t. The heat maps also enable you to identify usability problems which might be preventing them from taking further action or progressing through your website.

With Crazy Egg’s ‘Confetti’ tool you can also segment visitors based on referral websites, search terms and other factors, so you can focus your website changes on your most profitable visitors. You can get started with a free trial, so why not get ‘cracking’ (sorry!).

ClickTale

This records every mouse movement, click and keystroke, with videos you can replay to see exactly what your visitors are doing.

Along with heat maps, ClickTale (yes, it’s an affiliate link) provides visual reports that help you to spot any problems or frustrations visitors are encountering. In particular, you can see how people interact with your forms and which questions cause the highest rate of form abandonment.

ClickTale is used by Groupon, Barnes & Noble and Cnet to improve their website conversion rates, and you can request a free personal demo to see its benefits in action for yourself.

Survey Gizmo

Heat maps and usability reports are useful tools, but it also helps to get feedback straight from the horse’s mouth. With Survey Gizmo you can ask your existing customers, fans and followers questions about your website and how it can be improved.

Survey Gizmo’s design wizard makes survey creation a five minute job. You can customize surveys with your own branding and integrate them with Salesforce, Mailchimp and Freshbooks, while real time reporting makes sense of all the data so you can gain valuable nuggets on how you can improve your website’s conversion rate.

You can test drive Survey Gizmo for yourself with a 14 day free trial, and with customers such as Vodafone, Skype and ING you can be assured that Survey Gizmo has pedigree.

4Q

As in the real world, the best time to ask people why they are abandoning your website is just before they leave. This is where 4Q comes in. With 4Q you can ask visitors questions directly on your website.

Key questions you could ask on how you could improve your website’s conversion rate include:

1)      How would you rate your website experience?

2)      Which of the following best describes the purpose of your visit?

3)      Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit?

4)      I) If not, why were you not able to?

Ii) If so, what do you value most about the website?

The customer always knows best

Through using  these website tracking and survey tools, you can create a list of the website issues that are costing you customers. You can then create a list of objections and usability problems to be fixed so you can reduce the numbers leaving and improve your website’s conversion rate.

In the next post I’ll be discussing how to analyse the competition and to listen to what people are saying in social media so you can build a stronger sales appeal on your website. 

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Themeforest and Divine Write.

This is part 2 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions

The old approach to web design was a bit knee jerk. If your website wasn’t performing as well as you’d hoped, you’d ditch the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch, hoping a new lick of paint would pull in the crowds. The problem with this approach is that you have no way of knowing which elements of your old design were turning people off and which were nudging them towards the checkout.

In fact, a new design could be even worse at converting customers. But without seeing what people were actually doing on your website, you’d have no way of knowing. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

This is why the first step in the new approach to web design is to collect data; primarily info on which pages your customers spend time browsing, which pages push them further through your website and which have them heading for the door. With this information, you can identify which areas of your website you should focus on to improve conversions and sales.

Inspect your website’s plumbing

Try and imagine your website is a series of pipes which capture people like rainwater and then transport them on a carefully structured route to a particular page or action. As with any system of pipes, you need to identify the leaks (i.e. the pages where customers exit the website) and fix them. This is where Google Analytics comes in.

In Google Analytics two simple ways of identifying leaks are:

1)      Bounce rate – This is the percentage of people that leave from the same page they enter on, without exploring further or taking action. A high bounce rate suggests a page doesn’t answer their questions or meet the expectations of what they expected to find.

2)      Exit Rate – These are the largest sources of leaks and the pages which cause people to abandon your website. These are the pages you need to improve in order to keep people engaged and clicking through your website.

How to setup funnels in Google Analytics

Along with bounce rate and exit rate, it helps to visualize the route people are taking before they take action and where the leaks are. To do this, you need to create funnels in Google Analytics.

First, write a list of the actions you would consider as a success on your website e.g. completed purchase, contact form completion, newsletter subscription or visiting a particular page. Then think about what route you’d expect visitors to take before they complete that action

e.g.  Home →About → Portfolio → Testimonials →Contact

With ‘funnels’, you can track the progress of your visitors through this path to success.

(This guide describes how to setup funnels using the old version of Google Analytics, while the new version is still in beta)

To create a new funnel click on ‘Edit’ next to your project name. Then in ‘Goals’, click on ‘Add Goal’. You can now create goals for visitors reaching a particular page, spending a certain amount of time on site or visiting particular pages.

To track where you are leaking visitors before they visit the contact page, for example, enter this as the Destination URL then list the pages you’d expect them to visit before reaching this page in the boxes further down. After returning to the main Google Analytics dashboard, click on ‘Goals’ to analyze how many people proceed through the funnel and which pages are leaking visitors like a burst pipe.

You can also visualize this graphically by clicking on Funnel Visualization:

Through this process, you can identify where the biggest leaks in your website are and which to focus on to improve your conversion rate. You’ll also get a clearer idea on the route customers actually take through your website take by tracking which pages they visit as they progress through the funnel.

If you’d like to take the website analysis stage to the next level then take a look at Kissmetrics. It’s not cheap, but it reveals a wealth of information Google Analytics lacks, such as lifetime customer tracking, clickstream analysis and it creates unique profiles per customer.

In the next post in this series I’ll be discussing which tools you can use to identify why your website’s pages might be leaking customers and how to tighten them up. 

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This is the first in a series of posts on improving a website’s conversion rate. Over the coming weeks I’ll be explaining how you can identify the reasons why your website isn’t converting and then how you can make measurable improvements.

I’ll be covering a range of tools and tactics for making your website more persuasive, ‘sticky’ and profitable. So stay subscribed folks!

It’s a fact – most websites don’t perform anywhere near their potential. Too often, they’ve been built based on assumptions and guesswork. Businesses will then spend a fortune on driving traffic, but without a clue whether their website will generate any sales.

But there’s a better way.

The internet is a marketing medium that’s trackable to the last click. Instead of best guesses and hope, you can test exactly what works and what doesn’t.

Using real info on what people are doing, you can mould and improve your website’s conversion so it’s better at persuading visitors that buying your product is the smart thing to do.  Instead of relying on preconceptions, you can see what actually works.

There are businesses that have literally doubled their revenue from implementing a tested approach to improving the conversion rate of their website. It’s for a simple reason: it works.

It doesn’t require magic buttons, HTML tricks or the ability to write like David Ogilvy. What it does require is:

1)      Understanding your customers’ objections

2)      Identifying how you can resolve these objections and build trust

3)      Implementing changes and testing the results

4)      Rinse and repeat, until you arrive at a higher converting website

Businesses spend thousands on PPC and SEO but without fine tuning their website. But this is the wrong way round. It’s like spending a fortune on a highway to a shopping centre without knowing whether visitors will buy anything.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be showing you a system for flipping this equation the right way round. I will show you how to make real improvements to your website you can measure to the last click.

Literally any website can benefit from a tested approach to improving website conversion. Stay tuned to find out why.

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We now have the tools to test what effect every element on a web page has on response rates. But as yet, these tools are criminally underused.

Is it due to laziness? A desire to just get copy signed off and the job done? Or lack of awareness? Probably a combination of all three.

So next year I aim, in my own small way, to change that, with a new tested copywriting service.

Out go best guesses, assumptions and hope. In come stats, analysis and higher conversions.

My newfound enthusiasm for testing has been inspired by the fantastic book ‘Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion’ by Ben Hunt (yes, it’s an affiliate link. But as you know, I’d never promote to you, dear Crucible fans, anything I don’t use myself).

Drayton Bird’s endorsement was enough to get me interested, and as I started ploughing through its pages it was like switching on a light bulb. Ben explains, step by step, how to identify customers at different stages of conversion (or steps on the awareness ladder, as he calls it) and how your website needs to be organised to drive them through a trust building process until they’re ready to take action. Hitting them with sales messages from the get go isn’t going to cut it.

In particular, he explains how to use Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to track, analyse and verify your website is performing as an optimised sales machine. This is where assumptions and best guesses translate into clear, transparent figures.

I’d like to say it’s a page turner but you’ll find yourself constantly putting it down to action one of his suggestions to your own website. Eventually I gave up and read it at my keyboard.

So why not treat yourself to another Christmas present and discover how you can implement a smarter, tested approach to your website’s copywriting and design, and watch your response rate grow:

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Copyright © Matt Ambrose at The Copywriter's Crucible Blog.

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There are few professions that can compete with the air of mystery that surrounds SEO. In fact, David Copperfield could learn a thing or two about misdirection and creating mystique from a chat with an SEO consultant.

But things are changing.

Google’s algorithm is getting ever more sophisticated, and the attempts to game it ever more antiquated. Pretty soon, it will be what other people say about your website that decides its ranking, rather than the tactics you can deploy yourself.

But for now, here’s a basic rundown of how SEO works:

On page optimisation

Title tag <title> – Placed in the header section, this helps Google identify your page’s subject, and defines the description that appears at the top of the browser window

URL – Having keywords in your domain name and page name also helps

Heading tag <H1> – Tells Google what the title of your page or article is

Body content – Keyword stuffing is more likely to get you blacklisted then patted on the head. But it’s wise to aim for a keyword density of 2-4% to keep the SE spiders well fed.

Popping your website address into SEOBugz.com will tell you whether you’ve ticked off all of the above.

Off page optimisation

It’s all about the backlinks baby. So how do you get them? Here are some common tactics:

1. Blanket email/spam website owners offering a link exchange.
2. Beg relevant websites with a high Page Rank for a backlink
3. Manually create mini websites for posting backlinks
4. Post articles to directories with linked keywords and phrases
5. Post links in social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit)
6. Post relevant comments in blogs

These tactics are all well and good. But they can be very time consuming and there’s no guarantee Google won’t flick a switch (e.g. Panda) and reduce their impact.

There are 100s of other SEO tricks you can try, but they could all stop working tomorrow.

Instead, there’s a better approach to SEO that combines marketing, PR and sales into one juicy cocktail. What am I talking about? Yep, you guessed it – customer focused SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting should focus on answering your customers’ questions

The aim of a forward thinking SEO campaign should be to attract links naturally.

To do this, you need to create content that people want to link to. So rather than produce keyword stuffed articles that scrape, copy and mash together content already available, SEO copywriting should focus on being valuable, interesting and original.

For topic ideas, consider what questions your customers might ask before buying your product or what queries they’re typing into Google. Answering these questions through your content will:

1. Attract ‘long tail’ traffic from search queries
2. Build trust in your expertise
3. Pull customers into your sales funnel if they subscribe to your blog
4. Attract links from people sharing your articles with friends and colleagues in social media
5. Attract links from other bloggers in your field (posting helpful comments on their blogs is a good way of attracting their attention)

To get these benefits, your articles will need to deploy the persuasive and psychological techniques used by generations of copywriters. These are skills not easily found in article writing sweatshops, which continue to pour their bilge onto the web.

As word spreads on the new long term approach to SEO, expect to see more businesses investing in high quality SEO copywriting in 2012 – which provides useful information with a sales pitch weaved between the words.

It’s one SEO tactic that’s destined to always generate results.

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Ah, the long form sales letter. Such a bone of contention among copywriters. Many will deride their length, saying nobody has the patience to read pages of copy these days, whilst direct marketing copywriters, who test avidly, will tell you otherwise.

When discussing long form copy, many people will picture those get rich quick schemes covered in bold red headlines, where you can earn millions with only ten minutes work a day while drinking pina colada’s on your beachfront balcony.

With this sort of reputation, you’d think a long form sales letter has no place being on a serious corporate website.

After all, business folks are busy people. They’ve got a mountain of emails to plough through, meetings to attend and conference calls they’re already late for. They don’t have time to wade through pages of copy, or will be fooled by your copywriting mind tricks.

But is this correct?

Perhaps it’s time to take a scientific approach. To stop basing the length of B2B copy on intuition and to find out what actually pulls in the numbers.

Long form copywriting gives you space to answer objections

Long form sales pages have the potential to dramatically improve conversion rates on B2B websites.

This was the argument put forward in a recent Internet Marketing Podcast interview with Dr Karl Blanks, the co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts. With a client list that includes Google, Apple and Sony, when he speaks you tend to listen.

One example he gave was how the changes they made to the landing page for SEOMoz increased revenue $1 million/year. Their approach included all the classic traits of a long form sales letter. These tactics would be equally effective on a B2B landing page.

After all, whether you’re selling sparkplugs or software, your website still needs to convey the same information as you would selling face to face. And you wouldn’t tell your sales people to stop talking after three minutes, now, would you?

Write for the customer, not for yourself

Too often, corporate home pages focus on trying to make the company sound important and impressive. They’ll use longwinded clichéd gobbledegook rather than tell the customer what they actually want to know.

A landing page should be focused on the customer. It should answer all their questions, counter their objections, remove risk and give proof that you can deliver what you promise. This is a lot to cram into 300 words.

Ultimately, landing pages should be as long as they need to be to win a sale or to trigger an enquiry. Maybe long copy isn’t always the answer.

But (as the SEOMoz case study shows) it’s certainly worth considering and testing.

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