The web is a great place to learn because you can quickly access a lot of information from a variety of sources. The reason it’s easier to learn about something even as difficult as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity online is that you can have it explained in so many different ways that you’ll eventually find bits and pieces that you can understand; bits and pieces you can cobble together into a comprehensive explanation.

What if you want higher conversion rates? Again, the web delivers truckloads of information, advice, examples, case studies, AB test results, – you get the idea – that guide you towards better rates.

Or you could just learn while you surf. The only downside to the amount of info the web presents is the time it takes to filter through it all. But just by paying attention to your experiences and impressions as you surf, whether holiday shopping or finding a new supplier, you can still get lots of information and insights about what works, what makes you click and what doesn’t.

Web Surfing to Increase Your Conversion Rates

It’s simple really. While you’re surfing, start thinking of yourself as a conversion optimization expert. Assess the sites and landing pages you come across for their optimization tactics. You can start by asking yourself a few simple questions about each site:

• How does the site make me feel?
• Is the design up to date?
• Does the site deliver what I expected when I clicked on the link to get there?
• What tools or tactics does the site use to get me to convert?
• Can I navigate the site comfortably and sensibly?

You can develop your own “questionnaire” as you go. In any case, whether yours is an ecommerce site, lead generation site, B2B or B2C, you’ll soon develop a keen eye for what works and what doesn’t work.

Let’s take a look at a few sites to see what we can learn about conversion optimization just from visiting their homepages.

If it’s not too immodest, we’ll use the Invesp homepage as a starting point, if only because it’s about what we’re looking for – optimized conversion rates:

Needless to say, the Invesp homepage has it going on when it comes to conversion tactics. In addition to using the headline to quickly and boldly deliver the value proposition in the form of customer benefits – “More Sales, More Leads, More Conversions” – Invesp plays a number of other conversion-boosting aces:

• Establishes Credibility & Trust – Who wouldn’t want to work with a company that has over three decades of combined international experience; one that is lead by best-selling authors on precisely the subject we’re interested in?
• Provides Social Proof (more trust and credibility) – If Invesp is good enough for the likes of dish, 3M, Ericsson, Discovery Channel, etc., then they are doing something right.
• A Good User Experience – Want to optimize your entire site? A landing page? Or find out where your site needs help? In a clean design with lots of whitespace, links to the information visitors want most are clearly presented with icons, simple text and a “read more” call to action.
• Clear Call to Action – You don’t have to look for to find out how to get in touch with Invesp.

Surfing the web to get conversion tips gives you access to the biggest marketers on the planet – and their conversion tactics.

As one of the world’s top brands, Apple.com doesn’t have to get its visitors over the hurdle of trust and credibility. So what do they do instead?

• Features Seasonal Content  – This might be obvious, but notice that Apple doesn’t just decorate their site with some graphics and highlight sale items. From the headline on down, they appeal to the emotions of the season. The word “Love” appears twice above the fold. And family and children are prominent, not just in the image, but in the “Hour of Code” CTA.
• Fulfills the Customer’s Path to Purpose – Consumers increasingly want to identify with and buy from brands who are in line with their personal purposes and passions. In addition to the overtones of family, Apple invites visitors to join them in the fight against Aids.
• Uses Simple Navigation – Regardless of all the other elements at play, you can quickly find what you want

Walmart is doing to ecommerce what it did to bricks and mortar – becoming dominant. While they’re not yet in top spot, number three isn’t bad. So what does their homepage tell us about conversion?

• Shows Customer Ratings – Word-of-mouth is a prime influencer of all retail sales. Online, word-of-mouth can be expressed through testimonials, user-generated content and/or customer ratings. Notice that Walmart includes average user ratings on every one of its Featured Products.
• Uses Co-Op Advertising – Here’s one you don’t see too often. In almost the dead center of their homepage above the fold, Walmart sports a labelled “advertisement” that is co-sponsored by P&G. It’s smart to get your suppliers to help you offer the discounts your customers seek.

And Now for Something a Little Different

All of the sites we’ve reviewed so far use a variety of conversion tactics. But check out CrazyEgg.com, where the homepage has, by comparison, just one conversion tactic.

CrazyEgg uses a Google-style of web design – and conversion technique. Ever since it first hit the web, you could really only do one thing at Google.com – enter a search term.

It’s a case of “we do one thing and one thing really well”. By focusing the entire page on a single conversion goal, and offering a clear benefit of taking the call to action, the visitors are left with just two choices, leave or take the call. (Yes, there is a second “Tell Me More” CTA – more on that in a minute.)

It could be argued that CrazyEgg has created a page where they have a 50% chance of the customer taking the CTA. But is putting all your (crazy) eggs in one basket worth the risk? While there is the secondary “Tell Me More” CTA, CrazyEgg really would like you to try their heat map. Even if you want to leave, when you mouse-over the back button or search engine URL window, the following pop-up appears before you’re allowed to go.

We’re barely scratching the surface here. The overall takeaway is that any time you spend on the web can be another step in your conversion rate optimization learning curve. There’s lot to see and discover, especially on the websites of large businesses like Walmart and Apple, where little or nothing is left to chance and every element has a purpose: to guide the customer along the path to conversion.

The post Want to Become a Conversion Rate Optimization ( CRO ) Specialist ? Just Surf the Web appeared first on Invesp.

It doesn’t matter now. Whether or not you’re ready for Black Friday and the holiday sales season, it’s upon us.

If you’ve been working all year to get ready for this year’s blitz, the overall retail sales predictions are mostly favorable. And even the negative stuff isn’t too bad.

• Inc.com quoted a Deloitte-authored sales forecast that calls for total retail sales of $965 billion this year, up about 4% from 2014. But the more pessimistic analysts will take that as somewhat negative news because it falls short of last year’ 5.2% increase in sales.
• Taking data from forecasts done exclusively for them, Reuters offers one of the gloomier predictions, saying that sales growth will be the slowest since 2009. But there will still be growth: 2.8% to 3.4% according to their predictions
• The National Retail Federation, the eternally optimistic standard bearer for the retail sector calls for “healthy sales gains” of 3.7% this season.

Fortunately, even if if you’ve done absolutely nothing to prepare for holiday sales, all’s not lost. Ecommerce and online shopping continues to grow at a healthier pace than overall retail sales and it gives all retailers the opportunity to capitalize on “last minute” promotional opportunities.

While Black Friday and Super Saturday have been traditional big sales days for bricks and mortar retailers, ecommerce seems to spawn more landmark sales days every year.

MarketingLand.com lists five important online shopping days that digital marketers should pay attention to, beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

1. Cyber Sunday, November 29th – Sales are increasing on the day before Cyber Monday as more retailers give shoppers an online preview of Cyber Monday deals.
2. Green Monday, December 7th – Second only to Cyber Monday for single-day holiday sales totals, Green Monday is your chance to ensure that gifts will arrive before Christmas.
3. Small Business Saturday, November 28th – While intended to boost sales at small, local bricks and mortar retailers, digital marketing tools like geo-targeting helps to boost sales online and offline.
4. Free-Shipping Deadline Day – Whether it’s Green Monday or you want to take advantage of shorter shipping times, one promotion every online retailer can run is a countdown to the last day on which shoppers can have purchases delivered for free before Christmas.
5. Last-Minute Shoppers – There’s always someone on your list that you miss until the very last minute. Digital gift cards are a great solution and retailers can promote them right up to … the very last minute.

“Black Friday isn’t Dead” – What Ecommerce Retailers Can Do This Season to Help Next Year’s Sales

When the NRF writes that “We know that Black Friday isn’t dead”, regardless of the context, it should make any retailer, ecommerce or bricks and mortar, stop and ponder.

What do they mean Black Friday isn’t dead? Who said anything about Black Friday’s demise? Black Friday is now an international retail sales sensation, with Canada, Brazil and UK retailers, among many others, promoting it heavily, even though it’s just a name in those markets, without a basis in the calendar.

But the truth is, after peaking at $59.1 billion in 2012, Black Friday sales have decreased steadily ever since. And they’re expected to sink below $50 billion this year – an over 20% total drop in just three years. All while overall retail sales and ecommerce sales have steadily increased in the same time period.

So, while claims that it’s dead are coming mainly from “click-bait” headlines, Black Friday is definitely changing.

And that change is largely due to online shopping and ecommerce trends.

This Holiday Season Look for Emerging Ecommerce Trends

If you do nothing else this holiday sales season, it is important to watch for emerging online shopping trends. Retail and shopping habits are evolving rapidly and staying ahead of the wave means keeping abreast with changes. And the waning of Black Friday as a monolithic high-retail-sales day is just one.

1. Why Black Friday Sales are Slipping – Digital marketing is the reason Black Friday has become a big sales day in markets where the day doesn’t actually exist. The splash of U.S. Black Friday promotions spilled over on the web and shoppers in other markets began demanding similar deals.

But if digital gave Black Friday an international appeal, digital is also reducing its prominence as an exceptional sales day. Online retailers don’t have to wait for any particular day to offer a deal. In the hyper competition for sales that began in 2008, ecommerce sites looked for any and every way to capture shoppers’ imaginations and sales.

This year, Best Buy, itself suffering some sales issues, began promoting holiday sales online on October 6th.

2. Smartphone Users Shopping in Micro-Moments – Google has identified an online holiday shopping trend trend that shows shoppers are forgoing Black Friday lineups and day-long mall marathons in favor shopping in micro-moments on their smartphones.

Google’s numbers show that 54% of all online holiday shoppers (browsers and buyers) say they plan to shop on their smartphones during spare moments throughout the day, like when they are in a lineup, or on the bus. And Google predicts this trend to be spread throughout the holiday season, not on any one day.

Google points to a 7% drop in the time spent in mobile sessions, coupled with a 64% increase in smartphone’s share of ecommerce purchases in the past year, as evidence of the trend.

3. Mobile’s Pull Will Affect Other Landmark Shopping Days – Black Friday won’t be the only victim of the “every day is a sales day” potential of mobile commerce. in 2014, Google noted a shift of prominent search spikes for “gifts and presents” from Black Friday and Cyber Monday to a more steady interest throughout the season.

What Do These Trends Mean for Your Ecommerce Sales: If you do not already have a mobile-optimized site, get one. If you are already mobile, optimize your site for loading speed and conversions. Start thinking about your digital marketing tactics, like email and paid advertising, in terms that might better suit smartphone shopping in micro-moments.

Theses are just the trends predicted for this year. Who knows what trends will emerge. But the more you pay attention to them, the more you’ll be able to optimize for them and take advantage in the new year.

The post Online Holiday Retail Sales – 6 Effective Ways to Boost Your E-commerce Sales This Holiday Season appeared first on Invesp.

Imagine that you could personally greet every potential customer; get a deep understanding of what she’s looking for, and why, and present her with the perfect solution – at the right price. Imagine the great referrals you’d get. Imagine how simple and easy it would be to grow your business. Imagine the awesome sales charts!

OK, let’s get back to reality.

While having the perfect solution to every client’s need may be a dream, digital marketing lets you get closer to it than any other marketing media. Landing pages are your opportunity to tailor your offer to increasingly thinner, more precise market segments.You can’t optimize a landing page for each customer, but you should do so for as many different segments and conversion paths as your resources allow. Here are a few tips to show you how:

1. Start with Espionage – Perhaps the most difficult hurdle on the road to landing page optimization is finding the starting point. It’s a good idea to research blog posts and case studies from across the web, but don’t use your findings as the exclusive indicator of where to begin. They tend to be general in their advice, and tailoring your landing pages is more than having an orange call-to-action button.

Chances are that your competitors are on the road to optimization, too. There’s nothing wrong with spying to find out what works and what doesn’t, specific to your marketplace.

With a thorough competitor analysis, you can discover your competitors’ lead generation practices, landing page optimization tactics, pricing policies, and more.

And don’t forget to “spy” on your customers too. Social media analysis shows you where they congregate and what their interests are so you can add segment-specific context to your landing page content.

2. Use Best Practices – Incredibly, there still exists entire industry sectors that use relatively undeveloped web marketing techniques. It means that even a good competitor analysis might not reveal the best way to optimize your pages.

Fortunately, there’s a wealth of information online that points to a variety of best landing page practices. Here are just a few:

• One Page, One Purpose – As Oli Gardner at Unbounce advises, “Your landing page isn’t Wikipedia. Focus on the task at hand and on making it the simplest experience it can possibly be. If you have any extra links on your page, cut them down with a giant scythe.”
• Contextual Headlines – Your customer arrives at your page from a particular place with a particular goal in mind. The first piece of content she consumes is the page’s headline. If it isn’t in context to her path to purchase, confirming that she is on the right track, she’s very likely to leave.
• Deliver it Pronto – How long do you wait for a web page to load? A University of Nebraska study found that “the tolerable waiting time for information retrieval is approximately 2 seconds.” If your webpage takes longer than that to display fully, it’s optimized for no one.

3. To Each Path Its Own Landing Page – We just mentioned that different customers land on your page from different places. Those traffic sources can also reveal the customer’s place in their buying cycle, and you can tailor your page to it.

Let’s look at quick examples using our favorite (due to its simplicity) awareness, interest, desire, action (AIDA) conversion path.

• Traffic from search engines – If a prospect clicks your link on a search engine results page, there’s a good chance that she’s early in the buying cycle and developing awareness of the options available to her.
• Traffic from social media – Using Facebook as an example, if someone clicks a link on your FB Page, she is likely familiar with its content and wants to visit your site to pursue the interest the that content triggered.
• Traffic from other media – If you add a landing page link to a brochure, or radio spot, or newspaper ad, the customer arrives on the page stoked with the information gleaned from the other media, and ready to move on to the next stage of the buying cycle. 

4. Show Your Visitors a Reflection of Themselves – Regardless of how unique and individual each of us feels ourselves to be, we yearn to be part of a tribe or tribes. We really like to know that we’re not alone in making certain decisions. Especially purchase decisions.

Think about it. Let’s say you found what looked like the perfect solution for your needs – with free delivery and all. But then you found out that you’re the only person interested in the product. Suddenly the solution doesn’t seem so perfect. There must be something wrong with it if no one else found it desirable.

We all have concerns about exchanging our hard-earned cash for a product or service, regardless of how much we want it. But when we couple that desire with the knowledge that others, like us, have found value in the offer, it wipes out most of the concerns.

Your customers want to know that people just like them, who have the same problem, have chosen the solution in which they are interested. It’s called social proof and you can provide it on your landing page through testimonials, social sharing stats and user generated content.

5. It Ain’t Over ‘Til it’s Over and it Ain’t Ever Over – If there is one cliché that simply doesn’t apply to landing page optimization, it is “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is to spend buckets of cash – spying on the competition, applying best practices, creating different landing pages and developing social proof – and then sit on your butt to wait for things to happen.

None of the points listed in this post are one-time propositions. Your competitive espionage must be an ongoing campaign, not a single mission. Make it a habit to continue to segment your markets and put more relevant landing pages in their paths. Keep researching and cultivating positive customer feedback and content.

And test it all. If you take nothing else away from this post, make AB or multivariate testing an integral part of optimizing your tailored landing pages. Every landing page you develop, and every change you make to them, is part of an ongoing learning curve of how to increase conversion rates. Testing tells you which lessons are the most valuable.
Source:
http://www.kompyte.com/4-landing-page-optimization-hacks-courtesy-of-your-competitors/

The post Be a Spy & 4 More Useful Tips to Make Your Landing Pages More Customer-Centric appeared first on Invesp.

We’ve railed on at length in this blog about paltry online conversion rates. It seems like they are stuck in quicksand. Try as we might, we just can’t pull them out of the single-digit mud.

Perhaps even more frustrating is the lack of reasoning about why the rates are so poor. A Google search for “why are online conversion rates so low” produces only three results that actually talk about low rates, and two of those are really a “reverse psychology” approach to telling you how to improve rates.

The one remaining result, from econsultancy.com, echoes what we have maintained here on the Invesp blog as a major cause of low rates: digital marketers do not devote enough of their resources specifically to improving conversions.

Media Take Time to Mature

In the entire scheme of things, the ways and means of digital marketing are still in their infancy.

The history of media shows that as each new medium emerges, it mimics the media that preceded it. When the first radio broadcasts hit the airwaves, they were full of voices reading the news or written stories. Only later did we fully develop radio’s ability to entertain and appeal to our senses.

Many early television broadcasts were really just radio programs with a camera turned on them. Even “Mr. Television”, Milton Berle, took his radio program, and many of the same cast members, directly to TV. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that television content evolved fully into something unique to the medium.

And we used the same “mimic-what-we-did-before” plan when we started selling on the world wide web. The misguided approach is clear even in the title of this article published in 1998: “Internet Shopping Network: The Malling of Cyberspace”. Interestingly, an excerpt from that article supports the idea that new media imitate the old:

“More than ever, a visit to the opening screens of America Online or CompuServe indicates just how tightly the biggest on- line services are interwoven with the nation’s largest TV networks, weekly magazines, daily papers, wire services and the like. The medium of the Internet is new, but its main “content providers” are mostly providing the same old content.”

Content in Context – Finding Digital Media’s Unique Value Proposition

Think of a hobby or interest that you pursue. Have you ever used the internet to learn more about it, to find like-minded people or even make a purchase related to your pursuit? Of course you have and, if you haven’t, you’re not using the web in the way that gives it its unique value as a medium.

Digital media are the first that can be used with a personal purpose: to make your life more meaningful.

Let’s say you enjoyed restoring old bicycles. Television and radio, even with thousands of channels, hold nothing for you; not a stitch of content. But on the web you can find bike restoration blogs, forums, websites, Instagram accounts, videos, products to buy – and you can even create your own content.

What Does This Have to Do With Improving Your Conversion Rates?

Increasingly, digital marketers are seeing a new consumer model where buyers align themselves with brands – and make purchase decisions – that are in line with the personal purposes for which they use the web.

The Path to Purpose Leads to the Path to Conversion

Google partnered with global marketing research company TNS and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather to find the answer to “what can brands do to connect with these new consumers?”

Over a six-month period, they surveyed 2,458 purchasers of automobiles, beauty products and smartphones. Here are some of the conclusions they made:

• Deluged by content, consumers are filtering it to get to content that is relevant to their personal purposes and passions
• They are increasingly shopping with the same purpose that they consume digital content
• Expressing a brand purpose can help digital marketers breakthrough the content clutter

But it’s not until we look at the numbers that begat those conclusions that we can see the potential to finally break the logjam that keeps conversion rates stuck in the mud:

• Consumers choose brands that engage their passions and interests 42% more often than brands that simply advertise to them
• Purpose-driven consumers are 70% more likely to have made an online purchase in the last month (versus consumers who use the web for traditional entertainment or to simply connect with friends and family)
• They are 1.6 times more likely to rate a product online at least once a week (versus those who use the web for entertainment/connection)

Brands that Engage Purpose-Driven Consumers – And Brands that Don’t

From the use of child labor and collapsing sweatshops in Bangladesh, to the drain on natural resources caused by textile manufacturing, the fashion industry has felt consumer backlash to unacceptable practices more than most sectors. And perhaps that’s why they seem to be in tune with what lies in their customers’ hearts.

The homepage of Swedish fashion retailer H&M features a tiny, one-word link in its footer menu: “Sustainability”. But click that link and you go through the looking glass to a broad spectrum of content devoted to addressing consumers’ concerns about using more sustainable materials, conserving fresh water, ensuring fair wages and working conditions, animal welfare, recycling – and aligning with a brand that puts sustainability at the core of its business concept.

Canadian fashion brand Joe Fresh, who themselves felt the sting of involvement in a collapsed garment factory, appeals to the desire of Canadian shoppers to support their fledgling homegrown fashion industry.

A Sector that Misses on Appealing to Purpose-Driven Customers

The effect of poor indoor air quality, especially in our homes, is of increasing concern. We regularly learn more about the negative health effects of allergens, asthma triggers, mould spores and pests attracted to the dust and dirt in our homes.

So it would seem a natural for vacuum cleaner manufacturers to engage buyers in ways that touch on their desire to live healthier lives, especially when it involves their families.

But a look at the websites of Dyson, Eureka and Samsung – among the top search engine results – shows no sign of content related to living a healthier life. Indeed there is no apparent content devoted to anything that could be called a buyer’s “purpose” or “passion”. Unless that purpose is to own a more powerful vacuum cleaner – then they all claim to meet the purpose – which means they all fail in a golden opportunity to stand out from their competition.

Curiously, a recent post to Dyson’s Twitter account asks: “have you ever wondered how a firework works?”. While it can be argued that the tweet is in line with customer interest in fireworks and/or Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K., it’s still a fail. The appeal does not tie into the brand and fails to strike an emotional chord. It’s purely informational – like something you might hear on the radio or read in a book.

What can your brand do to find the path to your customers’ purpose – and put them on the path to conversion?

The post Conversion Path Optimization – How Your Customer’s Path to Purpose Can Lead to Your Path to Conversion appeared first on Invesp.

As we have gone through each post so far in this blog series, including Part 1 – Creating Awareness, Part 2 – Building Interest, Part 3 – Coaxing Desire, it’s clear that every step in optimizing your conversion funnel, and thereby optimizing conversion rates, is critical. Remove any one step and those that come before it are futile, and those that follow can’t happen.

But getting your prospects to take action is where all your funnel optimization pays off. And that’s perhaps what makes it the most important – and frustrating – step in the funnel. All that potential built up throughout the funnel produces, on average, only single-digit conversion rates.

The Story So Far

Throughout this series we have used the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) conversion funnel as a model to show that you must optimize your entire funnel to optimize conversion rates.

• Your conversion funnel is a seamless process with each stage blending into the next – you must start at the Awareness stage to improve rates at the Action stage.
• Creating awareness isn’t just about numbers of visitors, “likes” and followers.
• Content, delivered in the right context for your market segments, is king when it comes to building interest in your offer.
• Interested prospects have an existing, emotion-driven desire for your product that you must coax from them.

Why Don’t Online Shoppers Take Action?

While there are no definitive overall numbers for offline and online conversion rates, our research shows that, on average, offline rates are in the order of 400% or 500% higher than online rates.

We can discuss a multitude of reasons for the huge difference, but there is one overriding symptom of how we market and sell online that continues to plague and minimize conversion rates: we do not prioritize conversions.

The proof isn’t difficult to find. According to the Adobe Digital Index’s 2015 Digital Marketing Survey, of the 81% of marketers who do not “make specific plans to mature” their digital marketing:

• Only 22% of marketers are increasing their optimization budgets
• Only 15% use A/B testing and fewer than 5% use multivariate testing – both of which are staple tactics to improve conversion optimization
• Over 25% are increasing their mobile, content and social media marketing

In a Hubshout survey to find the most “in demand” digital marketing services for 2015, “conversion optimization” didn’t rank in the top ten and “website analytics”, another basic tool to improve conversion rates, is the eighth highest ranked service, mentioned by only 10% of the survey’s respondents.

How to Optimize the Action Stage of your Conversion Funnel

Considering the statistics above outlining the dearth of attention paid to conversion optimization, the first step is clear;

1. Prioritize Conversions

If less than 5% of your web visitors take your call-to-action, and a relatively small part of your marketing budget is specifically devoted to correcting that, then you need to take control of the situation.

• Add structure to to your approach. Create a specific conversion rate optimization plan, set goals and analyze results. Conversion optimization is an ongoing process, not simply an “is it up or down?” number on a report.
• Give someone the responsibility of improving conversion rates.
• If your digital marketing is in-house, give one of the team incentives to produce higher rates.
• If you use an agency, make sure they don’t over-emphasize traffic numbers to prove the value of their service. Make conversion statistics and analysis at least as large a part of their reporting as traffic and ranking.
• Always be testing. A/B and multivariate testing that is.

2. Focus on Conversions Well Before the Call-to-Action 

We’ve talked before about the importance of shipping options for ecommerce customers. The lack of them is the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment.

Adobe CMO found that, while 83% of shoppers are generally satisfied with ecommerce sites, the numbers quickly drop below 50% when consumers find there’s a question of choosing delivery dates, delivery times, flexibility in re-routeing packages and green shipping options.

If your customers have an overriding concern, like shipping options, start addressing that concern ASAP in your funnel, like Paypal does in their email marketing.

Lead generation and B2B sites can start improving conversions in the Interest stage of the funnel by segmenting their markets, developing personas and creating contextual content for them all.

3. Build Trust

As we mentioned previously, on-street shoppers are more prepared to buy when they walk into a store than online shoppers who land on an ecommerce site. Street-shoppers wouldn’t take the time to visit a store if they hadn’t already developed a certain level of trust in doing business there.

It’s not as easy online to conquer the fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUDs) that stand between you and the customer’s trust. You can build trust in a number of ways, from showing social proof and client testimonials, to outlining your privacy policy and assuring security of information. Every step you take to instill trust increases the likelihood of conversion.

4. Use Action Triggers

If you look at the entire process of converting a customer, from awareness to action, you are really guiding them along a path to conversion. Every step they take is the result of something they learned that encouraged them to take that step.

But, regardless of how successful you are at getting the customer to take all the steps that lead to the end of the path, there’s no guarantee that they will take the final step: take action.

Action triggers are the final boost your customers need to take your call-to-action. Among others, action triggers can include:

• Create a sense of urgency. Customers will take action now if they see the benefit of doing so now – like taking advantage of a limited-time offer.
• Use benefit-driven copy on call-to-action buttons, like “Get Your Free Newsletter” instead of “Subscribe”
• Be specific about what the customer gets from clicking on your call to action. Instead of simply “Learn More”, try “Learn More About Calls-to-Action”

5. Market to Existing Customers

There exists a segment of your market who, if all the studies are to be believed, will boost your conversion rates to extraordinary heights. But few digital marketers make that segment a priority.

A 1875% Improvement in Ecommerce Conversion Rates: Let’s just look at some numbers that tell the tale of how marketing to your already-converted customers can literally spike your conversion rates:

• 13% – The highest conversion rate we found for Amazon’s regular shoppers
• 74% – The conversion rate of Amazon Prime members
• 569% – The increase in conversion rates between regular Amazon shoppers and Prime members
• 3.2% – Overall ecommerce conversion rate (marketingsherpa.com)
• 60% – Average conversion rates for return ecommerce customers (Marketing Metrics via sweettoothrewards.com)
• 1875% – The increase in conversion rates between the overall ecommerce conversion rate and the conversion rate for repeat ecommerce customers

Time for you to take action. While your existing customers are a small fraction of your overall markets, the numbers above prove that they deserve more attention than the vast majority of digital marketers give them.

In Closing…

Despite the fact that we have discussed conversion funnel optimization through four blog posts in this series, we have barely scratched the surface. If you take away nothing else, hopefully at least these points will stick:

• Conversion rate optimization must be the focus of your entire sales funnel
• Market segmentation and context are key to optimizing every stage of your funnel
• Your existing customers are gold

The post 5 Surefire Ways To Get Prospects To Take Action And To Optimize Your Conversion Funnel appeared first on Invesp.

It may not be as exciting as “Orange is the New Black”, but we’ve enjoyed a good ride so far through this blog series. In “Part 1- Creating Awareness” and “Part 2 – Building Interest” we learned:

• It is inevitable that your conversion rates will improve if you optimize your conversion funnel. We use an AIDA-based (awareness, interest, desire, action) funnel as an example throughout the blog series.
• Creating awareness of your business and/or products isn’t the numbers game so many make it out to be. Instead, you need to find your target markets and share your unique value.
• Your content does the heavy lifting of interest building. Digital marketing gives you the unique ability to segment your markets and focus your content.
• The stages of your funnel are not absolutely distinct, but each one has varying degrees of one or more of the other stages.

“Desire is the Key to Motivation”
Mario Andretti

If you want to sell, you must induce in your customer the desire to buy. So once again, as we’ve seen previously in this series, you must focus on your customer if you are to optimize your funnel and conversions.

Why do we say “induce” desire? Because you can’t “create” desire. Desire lies dormant in the hearts and minds of your customers, waiting to be stirred. Your job is to channel those desires – for a better life; for acceptance; to be fulfilled – whatever they may be – onto your your product.

Here’s a simple example of how to induce desire to increase conversions. Everyone wants to be happy and most of us feel we could be happier. If you convince web visitors that they will be happier when they have your product, you greatly increase the chance of them acting on their desires and taking your call-to-action.

Three Basics of Coaxing Desire

Before we look at ways to induce desire in your prospects, let’s look at some basic principles to help guide you in the process:

• Desire is Emotional – In Part 2 – Building Interest, we talked about creating personas to help appeal to prospects who have different personalities – and desires.The conventional wisdom is that some people are emotional and some are logical. But the truth is we are all emotional and we are all logical; it’s just that those traits, among others, exist in varying levels in each of us.Something that seems entirely logical, like trying to find the lowest price on a product we want to buy, is actually an emotional pursuit too. Saving money appeals to our desire for security (keeping our money) and fulfills our sense of self worth (you work hard for your money and you’re not going to just give it away).
  
• You must appeal to existing desires. Even those who can “sell coals to Newcastle” convert their customers by appealing to existing desires and motivations.Fortunately, the vast majority of marketers already do this. (Anyone out there selling weed killer to desert nomads?) But we can do more to appeal directly to the emotional basis of desire. Homeowners might want better plumbing, but they more likely want a soothing, warm bath.
• Desire is Not Enough – Many of us have a desire to travel somewhere in the world that we haven’t already visited. Who wouldn’t want to sit at the foot of the Pyramids of Giza and look up in wonder and awe? So why don’t we go? From costs and finding the time, to concerns about safe travel and personal security, the reasons are many.

As you consider how to coax desire, remember that even if you are successful, you still must eliminate the hurdles that lie between desire and action.

How to Coax Desire

Appealing to your prospect’s desires can be relatively easy. Put a baby in a tire, like Michelin did, and you’re done. But like anything emotional, activating desire can also be complex. Imagine the levels of disbelief that Michelin’s ad agency (DDB) had to cut though to convince their client of the power of a baby to sell tires.

While it’s impossible in a simple blog post to discuss the virtually limitless complexities of sparking desire in your prospects, here are a few guidelines to help you that will hopefully spark your desire to learn more.

Be Specific – Think about the times you have tried to explain to customers why they should buy your product. Sometimes all you get back are objections and reasons to not buy. But other times, seemingly miraculously, the customer immediately understands your proposition and responds positively. It’s a great feeling. You’ve connected. You’ve been understood.

Your customer wants to be understood too. When you show each customer that you understand their problem and you present a specific solution, they feel that you “get” them. And then you get the sale.

Take a look at how Quicksprout makes analyzing your website almost irresistible.

As we mentioned in Part 2 – Building Interest, the great advantage of digital marketing over other marketing media is the incredible flexibility that digital gives you to address your prospects’ different personas, stages of the buying cycle and desires. Not taking advantage of those opportunities is like using a single, static, silent image for a television commercial.

Set Yourself Apart – Unfortunately, your competitors, and all businesses, have similar abilities to appeal to emotions and unleash desire. Take a look at the top ten of Forbes’ list of The World’s Most Valuable Brands. While they all appeal to emotions in one way or another, even a neophyte can recite, off the top of his head, the desire triggers from Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Samsung, Toyota and General Electric.

You need to set yourself apart from the herd by pointing out the unique value of your offer. The only real mechanism prospects have for choosing you over your competition is by finding something in your offer that they don’t find elsewhere.

Eliminate the Hurdles – Just like the objections your face-to-face customers have, your online prospects have objections too – even after you successfully get them to desire your product. Imagine in the example above, where objections, concerns and questions get in the way of acting on a desire, if you offered a free trip to the Pyramids of Giza. Suddenly, faced with incredible value, the objections vanish.

While that’s an unrealistic example, it’s a good one to highlight the benefits of making it easier for your prospects to fulfill their desires.

The Pii A/B Testing Engine is a powerful and versatile tool for optimizing websites and landing pages. Check out how Invesp makes it a no-brainer for any digital marketer to give it a try.

We are almost through the entire sales funnel. In Part 4 we’ll look at optimizing the Action stage of the funnel to get more people to reach your conversion goal.

The post How To Use Desire To Drive Online Sales And Increase Conversions appeared first on Invesp.

Hopefully you’ve arrived here after reading Optimize Your Conversion Funnel – Part 1. In addition to being a fascinating read, Part 1 outlined the following points, among others:

• We generally focus online conversion optimization on the point of sale, but conversion-killing elements higher up in the conversion funnel are often the culprits.
• It helps to “brand” your conversion funnel to create a seamless path for the customer by focusing on her needs at every step, and communicating with a consistent voice throughout.
• It’s a mistake to hinge the success of the “Awareness” stage of the funnel exclusively on numbers like followers, “reach” and clicks. Instead, use the awareness stage too spread your unique selling proposition, discover where your target markets congregate and test to find the right awareness channels and technology.

Here in Optimize Your Conversion Funnel – Part 2 we will look at the “interest” stage of the conversion funnel, based on the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action) model.

The Transition From Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action

If there’s one thing that helps more than others to understand conversion funnel optimization, it is to stop thinking of your marketing model – whether it’s AIDA or another – as having distinct “steps” or “stages” (even though that’s how we’ve referred to them here.)

An optimized funnel isn’t a series of steps, but an evolutionary process with smaller, sometimes imperceptible progressions from one section to another. Like a spectrum of color, you can identify the primary colors (the main stages in your marketing model), but you can’t point to any single shade and say that’s where red turns to blue – or, in your model, where interest suddenly becomes desire.

In other words, the majority of elements in an optimized funnel have more than a single task. Some may be focused on building interest, but in so doing, they can’t help enticing a little desire out of the visitor.

Building Interest

We live in a golden age of awareness building. Not so long ago, making yourself known in your markets meant assembling a stable of often expensive marketing, advertising and public relations specialists. Today, especially for online sales and lead generation, you can get similar results with a comparatively cheap in-house effort towards good content, social media, SEO and paid advertising.

So the crucial work of funnel optimization starts with generating interest.

If content is king, its ability to evolve awareness into interest is its crowning achievement.

The ways in which you can generate interest are too many to list here, but here are a few examples:

Red Bull

If you think more content means more blog posts, take a look at RedBull.com. In what can only be described as a new chapter in the marketing and content development handbook, the company stages events around the world, and on the edges of space, and uses the results to create riveting content that makes it the most interesting player in its market.

Tentree

Tentree is an example of creating interest by using a USP throughout your content including an interactive map to show the locations of their tree-planting initiatives.

Mill Street Brewery

Check out how a local Toronto brewery puts its Instagram content to work in capitalizing on the rabid interest the city has in the Blue Jays playoff run.

The Gift of Tailoring Content to Your Target’s Interests

If there is one facet of digital content that marketers under-utilize, it is the ability to tailor it for exponentially thinner slices of their target demographics.

Typically we cast a wide net with keyword-driven content hoping to catch those who happen to search for us using similar terms. It works, but it’s a sad waste of the power you have to create more relevant content aimed at your “micro” markets.

How do we tap that power? Segment your markets using tactics like the following, among others:

1. Create personas – Applying the demographical data you have to create fictional personality profiles, or personas, of typical customers helps you understand to whom you communicate with your content.
2. Use geo-targeting – Content based on a visitor’s location not only speaks more directly to them and many of their interests, it allows for more sophisticated measurement of how they consume your content.
3. Put media influence before media usage – This is a huge topic that we briefly mention here because it can exponentially improve your digital marketing ROI. Our addiction to numbers, including traffic and followers, forces us to flock to the most popular media. But, as Google found out, media usage does not equal media influence. Instead, as consumers seek more meaningful interactions with the brands they use, you must consider those media that better meet their purposes.
   

Check the images relating to the Toronto Blue Jays in the Mill Street Brewery example above. They appeal to viewers’ interest in the Blue Jays and meets their purpose to identify with the team.

Focus Your Landing Pages

There’s no better example that illustrates how the stages of the conversion funnel can be blended together, versus existing distinctly, than the emergence of “Buy Now” buttons on a variety of social media, including Facebook and Instagram.

Especially when compared to the early days of ecommerce, where numerous steps existed between awareness and action, buyers now more than ever can travel throughout the entire funnel on a single page.

But the phenomenon is generally limited to consumer fashion, accessories and the like – items with which the consumer is highly familiar and that they purchase repeatedly. Few will buy a digital camera, or choose a warehousing service, solely from an image on Instagram.

Landing pages give you a remarkable opportunity to appeal to your market segments, no matter how thin you slice them. Unbounce describes a landing page as “a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single, focused objective”.

That focus on the objective can be razor-sharp. For different personas, in different locations, with different interests, and any number of other criteria, versioning of your landing pages gives you an unprecedented chance to addresses each one, and infinite combinations, to tailor a specific message that is more likely to appeal to and heighten your visitor’s interest.

Check out how Unbounce uses some recent blog posts to speak directly to different market segments, including entrepreneurs, content marketers, web designers and marketing agencies.

Stay tuned to the Invesp blog for “A Surefire Way to Optimize Conversion Rates: Optimize Your Conversion Funnel – Part 3” where we’ll look at creating desire for your product and the call-to-action.\

Sources:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-optimizing-funnels/

The post A Surefire Way to Optimize Conversion Rates: Optimize Your Conversion Funnel – Part 2 – Building Interest appeared first on Invesp.

Talk to anyone about conversion rate optimization and there’s a damn fine chance that the “call-to-action” button will pop up in the conversation. Or the sign-up form. Or that you should be testing both. Many of our conversion optimization programs have a myopic focus on the point of sale.

But, as we learn more about the customer journey, omnichannel marketing and the overall convergence of marketing and commerce, it’s clear that customer experiences long before the call-to-action button, higher up in the ‘conversion funnel’, hold as much sway over the customer’s ultimate decision to convert as anything.

Yes, You Have a Conversion Funnel

Every business has a conversion funnel. While Wikipedia says that they are part of “ecommerce operations”, the idea of a conversion funnel also lends itself to lead generation and offline sales.

The imagery of a funnel comes from the diminishing numbers at each stage of the conversion process. Simply put, a certain number of people become aware of your offer. Fewer take an interest in it. Of the interested, some develop a desire for it, and fewer still actually take action and buy or become a sales lead.

So whether you’re trying to sell or get leads, or whether your business is online or off, you have a conversion funnel.

And you are so very lucky that you do. Conversion funnels make your life easy. Want to increase conversions? Optimize your conversion funnel.

Think about it. If you’re not getting the sales you expect, the fault lies somewhere or everywhere along the funnel. Perhaps you’re not creating enough awareness at the top of the funnel to get enough qualified sales on the bottom. Or maybe you’re doing everything right, but spooking the customers when it comes time to buy.

In any case, by analyzing and improving each stage of your conversion funnel, instead of just at the point of sale, you will improve your conversion rates. Let’s look at how:

1. Brand Your Conversion Funnel – Before you start to look at each step of the funnel, think about its entirety. And think about “branding” it.

This isn’t the “slap a logo on everything” sort of branding. Instead, the “brand” of your funnel is a focus on the customers and delivering to them a consistent and rewarding experience throughout the funnel.

One of the major faults of any conversion funnel is the destabilizing, conversion-killing disjointedness that usually exists between each stage. We tend to take a modular approach to each step, dealing with each one individually

1. You hand off your paid advertising and SEO to a company that promises to drive lots of traffic.
2. Your uniquely branded landing pages are created by a web designer.
3. The customer ends up on a catalogue page built on a groovy, feature-rich ecommerce platform, but it looks like every other catalogue page on the web.
4. Everything’s cool because your “Add to Cart” button is the most obvious element on the page.

It’s all about your customer and her journey. Yes, it’s marketing-speak, but your customer really is on a journey of discovery in relation to your business and/or its products. When she sets out, she doesn’t know that your offering is her best option.

Like any journey, the more familiar the traveller becomes with the path, the easier it is to follow. Integrating your funnel into a more seamless and friction-free route makes it an easier path to take.

Here’s a quick test: think about the answers to the questions below. Awareness is one of the funnel steps we’ll look at below. Some of the more popular ways of creating awareness online are social media, search engine optimization and paid advertising.

• Are your awareness channels developed from the same creative direction as the elements in the rest of the funnel?
• Do you use the same voice across your social media, landing pages and web site?
• Is your message focused the customer and her needs?

Forbes lists Apple as the world’s most valuable brand. When you look each marketing and sales touch point Apple has with its customers, they are remarkably consistent.

Apple’s tweets use the same benefit-driven language as their website. The same language Tim Cook uses in his keynotes.

Is it a coincidence that the facade of many Apple stores looks a lot like a website? The only thing missing is the navbar.

It’s completely unfair to compare Apple to the average ecommerce site. They’re not even an ecommerce company. But the seamlessness throughout Apple’s conversion funnel is no accident.

2. Awareness – Here we go. The top of the funnel. Anything you do in the awareness stage could be the very first experience a prospect has of your business. And you know what they say about first impressions.

As we mentioned, some of the common channels for creating awareness online include social media, SEO and paid advertising. But this isn’t about contracting an SEO company to to move your landing pages up the ranks. Or finding a hip agency to tweet for you.

The problem with the awareness stage of most funnels is that its success is too often judged by the numbers. Even some of the savviest social media marketers are unduly swayed by counts of followers and likes. They’re important but they are by no means a measure of success.

Numbers Are Not the Problem: To get a better idea of the hurdles you need to overcome to improve awareness and start your funnel branding off right, take a look at the following results from a poll by nextforyourbusiness.com that asked marketers “what is your biggest marketing challenge?”:

• 43% – No marketplace distinction
• 38% – Inconsistent material
• 29% – Undefined target audiences
• 29% – Keeping up with technology
• 24% – Ineffective channels

If these are the challenges, then the solutions to increased awareness and a good start to an optimized conversion funnel are clear:

1. No Marketplace Distinction > Set Yourself Apart – If you look, sound and feel like your competition, then what reason does the customer have to choose you; to start progressing through your funnel? Develop your unique selling proposition and use it to create a distinct awareness – and throughout the rest of your funnel.
2. Inconsistent Material > Check the Apple example above. Create a corporate voice and keep the message consistent across all awareness channels and through every step in your funnel.
3. Undefined Target Audience > Huh? Almost one-third of respondents don’t know to whom they speak? That’s a strange state of affairs for generating awareness. Talk to your customers. Ask them how to improve. Create personas. Segment your marketing and funnels, and personalize your messages.
4. Keeping Up With Technology > Test. Yes, it seems like everyday there’s a new channel, research tool or tactic. You need to dip your toe into each one to test the waters. If your audience is there, it’s useful for creating awareness.
5. Ineffective Channels > There Are No Ineffective Channels. There is only ineffective channel selection. What are you doing on Instagram if you are a B2B company that sells floor scrubbers? Maybe there are channels that are not well suited to your target markets, but if you find the ones where your customers congregate, they will all be effective.

Testing and Analysis. As with all your online marketing, the only way to find what works best for optimizing your funnel and conversion rates is to do your research, test your ideas and analyze the data. The ease at which you can do so is the most appealing feature of digital marketing.

In Part 2, we’ll look at another main step in the funnel, building interest.

The post Creating Awareness For Conversion Funnel Optimization And To Increase Conversions appeared first on Invesp.

What’s the first question you ask yourself when you set out to design a landing page? As a loyal reader of the Invesp blog, you’ll know that designing landing pages to optimize conversions starts with … the conversion goal. It’s fairly simple; you want conversions, so start there.

So that first question is: “what action do I want the visitor to take on this page?”

The Clash Between Your Goal and the Customer’s Goal

Tragically, the simplicity of landing page design diminishes exponentially after that first easy step of choosing a conversion goal.

Here’s an example: you decide to set up a lead generation landing page to get more sign-ups for your newsletter. You’ll need a form to collect the data. After that, you need to answer some questions to determine how the page will take shape. Questions like:

• What customer info do you want to get?
• What content, including copy, images and graphics do you want to include?
• While you have them on the page, do you want to let them know about your specials, promotions or any other info?

But, using questions like those as the basis for your landing page design puts your goals on an inescapable collision course with your customer’s goals. And your conversion rates get badly trashed in the crash.

If you want to put the simplicity back into landing page design, and a boost into your conversion rates, the page can’t be built around what you want. You’re already a convert. But your web visitor isn’t. So you need to answer questions like:

• How will the customer perceive the page?
• What do they want in return for their information?
• Will distracting them with other options reduce their chance of converting?

See what happened there? You can’t have a crash of goals if yours are in line with the customers. When you design your landing page through the customer’s eyes, not only do your goals magically align with theirs, you return the simplicity to the page design process. Everything falls into place. You know what information to ask for, what content to develop and what elements to use.

Customer-Centric Guidelines for Higher-Converting Landing Pages

While every visitor is different, you can use some basic guidelines to put your landing page design in the right frame of mind: your customers’.

1. Don’t Design for Design’s Sake – If I had a dollar for every time a client came to me and said he wants his site to look like Apple.com, I’d be writing this post from a villa in Tuscany.

To get the customer to take your call-to-action (CTA) and convert, the entire page must focus on solving the questions and concerns he might have before doing so. The overall look of your page is the first indication your customer gets that he is in the right place. If the graphic design and layout don’t fall in line with his expectations and needs, it can be the first step towards a bounce.

Don’t design for design’s sake; design for your customer’s sake.

Take a look at the two pages below. One is an Apple-inspired mock-up by your design-challenged author, the other an actual webpage that does the job without a fancy design. Which plumber would you choose?

2. Create a Cognitive Progression – Every web searcher is on a journey of discovery. From the moment they begin, they are unsure of what search terms to use, what to expect from the results they get and most often they’re unsure of exactly what they want.

Your customer has either clicked a search result, advertising message or link to land on your page. They have taken the first step in their journey. They have momentum towards conversion.

Starting with its headline, which needs to reflect the search term or advertising copy that got the customer to click on your link, your page must maintain and build on the momentum that started with the customer’s click.

You must keep giving the customer the next logical step in their journey of discovery; the journey that leads to them taking your call to action.

In so doing, you create a natural cognitive progression for the customer that he finds difficult to deny. Check out the recording of this Invesp webinar to find out how attention to cognitive progression paid of with a 90% increase in conversion rates.

3. Will That Be One Goal or Two? The accepted online wisdom is that your landing page must focus on a single conversion goal. It’s based on the well-documented principle that too much choice can cause consumer paralysis and result in no choice at all.

But to blindly accept that every landing page must have a single conversion goal at the exclusion of all others can be a mistake. Depending on where your landing page falls in your customer’s buying cycle, more than one call-to-action could be in order.

The Buying Cycle – You can create different landing pages for customers at different points in the buying cycle. If your page is designed for those who are ready to buy, then it would be foolish to offer them any other option than to buy.

But if they are at the beginning of the buying cycle, where they are interested, but need more information before making a purchase decision, they might want to “Learn More” or “See a Video”.

On the landing page below for Adobe Photoshop, while ‘Buy Now” is the most distinctive call-to-action, the page actually has something for people at every stage of the buying cycle (using the good ol’ AIDA model):

a) Awareness/Interest – The page is actually the “Overview” page for Photoshop
b) Desire – Those already familiar with Photoshop are invited to “See What’s New >”
c) Action – If you’re ready the pull the trigger, you can “Buy Now” or “Choose a Plan”.

But the landing page after you choose “Buy Now” gives you little choice but to buy and all the assistance you need to do so.

4. Create Value-Appropriate Forms – For lead generating pages, the “sign-up” form is a critical element for conversions. If the form doesn’t work, neither will its CTA.

Customers are increasingly jaded by the constant online demands to give away their personal information.

Your forms will convert at a higher rate if the information you ask for corresponds to the value the customer believes he will get by giving it.

It’s tempting to grab all the data you can while you have the customer on the form; but ask too much and you increase the risk of getting nothing.

Take a look at how much information Curves wants just for the privilege of asking them a question. No answer Curves could give would justify sacrificing this much personal information.

Conversely, Kissmetrics uses a simple two field form to sign up for their email list. And they outline lots of benefits that come from filling it in.

The first field asks only for a first name. That seems reasonable and harmless in exchange for “Free Updates” and a chance to get the “latest content first”. The second field asks for an email address – which is only natural if you’re signing up for email updates.

5. The Call To Action – This is it. This is what your entire landing page is all about. It’s where the customer converts.

That burden means you can’t pay too much attention to your CTA or test too many different versions.

To develop your highest converting CTA, start with the following guidelines and take it from there:

a) Make Your CTA Distinct – If the customer can’t quickly identify your call, they can’t be blamed for not taking it.

Checkout the American Eagle page below. While they use a bright red color for some of their CTA buttons, they curiously choose to put them on the red background of the model’s sweater. None of the CTA buttons on this page are any more distinct than many other page elements.

Hubspot shows how it’s done on a page about Calls-to-Action.

b) Use Benefit Driven Copy – Whether it’s on the CTA button, in close proximity, or both, if you want your customer to do something, like heed your call, it’s best to offer something in return.

Not only does Curves ask for too much information in the form we looked at above, they also don’t offer a benefit for giving the information. The very least they could do is change the button copy to “Get Answers Now! >”

If you can’t outline a peachy benefit, tell them what will happen when they click the button, like Kickstarter does

c) Put Your CTA in the Right Place – Making your “ask” too soon or too late can be fatal for your conversions.

First, your CTA should be visible at some point above the fold. If customers don’t detect a CTA when they first land, you’ll lose those who are prepared to convert, but not ready to look around for how to do so.

But asking too soon, like the optimization subject of Invesp’s webinar on cognitive progression mentioned above, can be equally fruitless. The web designer placed the sign-up form for subscriptions above the subscription options and before the benefits. Again, conversion rates increased 90% after Invesp changed the CTA and its placement.

Remember, these are guidelines; mere starting points for you – and your customers – towards higher landing page conversion rates.

The post 5 Reliable Guidelines for Designing Higher-Converting Landing Pages appeared first on Invesp.

How’s your ecommerce conversion rate doing? Has it improved lately? If you are like the bulk of online retailers, the answers are, in order, “poorly” and “no”.

In May of 2012, Invesp reported average online conversion rates of 2.14% in their “Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics” infographic. Three years later, Monetate analysed almost 8,500,000,000 (yes, eight and a half billion) shopping sessions and found an average conversion rate of 2.25%. It’s up, but if we claim a victory from a tenth of a point uptick in conversion rates over three years, then no one should wonder why conversion rates absolutely suck.

To top it off, that rate increase is not consistent. The same Monetate data shows a decrease in conversion rates between Q1 2014 and Q1 2015.

Conversely, online sales continue to skyrocket as more shoppers turn to mobile and desktop ecommerce sites to make their purchases. According to statista.com, online retail sales in the U.S. grew by 104% between Q2 2010 and Q2 2015. That compares to overall retail sales growth of about 28% in the same period.

So the stunning revelation is that ecommerce sales growth outpaces overall retail sales growth by almost 400% despite measly 2.25% conversion rates – and those rates might be getting measlier.

Why are Conversion Rates So Low?

It’s quickly becoming the eternal question of ecommerce. With bricks and mortar conversion rates well into the double digits, online conversion optimizers continue their search for a responsive chord in the customer.

With years of efforts to improve conversion rates and little to show for it, explanations are difficult to come by. But there are a couple glaring clues:

1. Digital marketers continue to devote a dizzyingly disproportionate share of their budgets to getting people to visit their sites, versus actually converting those who arrive. The best estimates put it at $1 spent on conversion rate optimization (CRO) for every $20 spent on traffic generation.As we pointed out in a recent Invesp post, a study conducted by Unbounce discovered that the highest ROI from a digital marketing budget occurs when 30% of it is devoted to CRO.That means we should be spending 600% more on CRO than we do now.
2. Customer experience is your unique selling proposition. Online shoppers look for something different in a site before they buy from it. If yours looks the same, has similar prices and works the same as your competition’s, then a shopper has no reason to choose you over them.Online, transparency is at an all-time high. The price, product and service differences between you and your competition are in the palm of your customer’s hand and they increasingly exploit that fact.

So what are you going to give them that they can’t get elsewhere, something that will make you stand out, and get the customer to click?

Give A Better Experience

The big picture of online customer experience is way too large to cover in this post. In a nutshell, the better you engage your customer, solve their concerns, answer their questions and give them what they seek, the better their experience. The experience of your company, brand and product begins when they first become aware of you and, hopefully, it never ends.

Conversion Optimization is Experience Optimization: That’s really how it boils down. When your customers perceive a better experience on your site, they are more likely to convert.

Because we can’t cover every point of experience optimization, we’re going to look at one particular element of one particular step. One that is severely neglected.

The “Call-to-Search” on Your Homepage

While you have product pages, landing pages, a blog and many other places for your customer to start their online experience of your brand, your homepage is still the “signature” page of the site. It sets the tone and pace for the rest of the site, regardless of where the customer entered.

To compare homepages, we looked around for “best ecommerce sites” and found one at WeMakewebsites.com titled “60 Best Fashion Ecommerce Sites”. While the sites listed are no doubt intended to show off the WeMakeWebsites platform, we were impressed by the variety and creativity of the homepage designs and layouts. There is no hint of a template here.

A scroll through the 60 sites shows each one to have either a unique look, feel, layout, colour scheme, and/or experience.

With one exception. The “Call-to-Search”.

Is “Search” the New “Submit”?

On all but two of the 60 very distinctive sites, the homepage call-to-search falls into one of the following categories:

1. Non-existent
2. A small magnifying glass icon
3. An entry field with the word “search” in it

The two exceptions? The two sites used wording other than simply “Search”, including:

1. “Search all products…” (really? ALL products? No thanks)
2. “Search entire store here…” (Ditto. No thanks.)

Do you like to be told to “Search”? Not likely. You might do a bit of searching on your own, but in the absence of help, you will probably bounce if you don’t find your quarry soon.

Not one of these highly-designed sites bothers to offer a better or truly different call-to-search. Imagine if just one site thought to say “What are you looking for…” or “Let us help you find what you need…”.

And the story is no different with the traditional big ecommerce players like Amazon and Ebay.

Why We Haven’t Optimized the Call-to-Search

KissMetrics asked 100 shoppers to describe their online ecommerce search behaviours and found the following:

• 60% of the shoppers preferred using the site’s navigation over the search function to find specific products
• Only 30% do “long tail” searches
• Almost 100% considered themselves well-versed online shoppers.

On the surface, digital marketers couldn’t be blamed for marginalizing the call-to-search in their efforts to optimize experience. Why bother if most seasoned shoppers prefer navigating the site on their own?

But is the preference for navigation really due to the poor experience customers have with a function that has yet to be developed past the burdensome invitation to “Search”? Or that the lack of development gives them little faith that a Search will produce any practical results?

One Big Reason You Should Improve Your Invitation to Search

Whether or not you believe that improving your call-to-search will bear any conversion fruit, you should consider it for the following reason: if conversion optimization is ultimately experience optimization, then the more you know about what your customer seeks, the better you will be able to provide it.

By enhancing your call-to-search, using semantic searches and improving your product indexing, customers will come to rely on your search function more often. Each time a customer uses your search function, it is another piece in the puzzle of what they are looking for and how they think.

When you get more into your customers’ minds, you get a better understanding of how to improve their experience. And your conversion rates.

The post The “Call-to-Search” for Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Invesp.