7 Takeaways From Optimization Summit 2011
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Freshly back from the Marketing Sherpa / Marketing Experiments Optimization Summit 2011 on conversion testing in steamy Atlanta, I felt compelled to share the juiciest takeaways with you readers. Many of these look like common sense – or stuff we learned long ago in school. But sometimes a list helps us focus on the essentials for creating compelling, and converting, website content.
Know your value proposition
Your unique value proposition is what persuades prospects, not copy. The impact of a value proposition can be measured by 3 elements:
- Appeal – How much is the offer desired?
- Exclusivity – Is this offer, or a better one, available elsewhere?
- Credibility – How believable are my claims?
A true value proposition states clearly and succinctly why your ideal prospect should buy from your company rather than a competitor. Every page element and step in the buying process should either state or support the value proposition. Testing your value proposition is essential to find what resonates best with target customers.
Mint.com personal financial services do a nice job of articulating why you would want to sign up with them, and then proceed to validate their claims:
Be clear about your goals
In his 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report, Boris Grinkot of Marketing Sherpa calls landing page optimization “web design with an agenda”. And that agenda is to achieve a specific objective whether that’s generating leads, growing sales or maximizing email sign-ups.
Figuring out what the objective of a particulate page or flow is shouldn’t be too hard. As Boris says, you just have to do it explicitly (write it down!) or you could end up shuffling things around on a page without any useful results.
Imagine you’re talking to prospects face-to-face
People buy from people, not websites. To craft the right copy and page layout, imagine you’re talking to your prospects face-to-face. Your page headline starts the conversation. Then the 2 or 3 sentences that follow continue the conversation with your prospects. By engaging in conversation rather than making boastful marketing claims, you can slowly build trust and gently lead visitors to where they want to go (and you want them to go).
Keep things simple
As Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABS taught us, you can minimize visitor resistance to taking a desired action by keep things short (usually, but not always) and simple. View your pages from your visitors’ perspective to see where they might meet resistance.
If you don’t absolutely need them to fill in 50 fields then don’t put 50 fields on the page. If one desired action is much more important to your company than others, don’t confront your prospect with three equally weighted calls to action. Your visitors are short on time and attention; don’t rely on Flash to make the sale.
There is only one place to click on this page from McAfee:
What does IEEE Software want the prospect to do most here?
Overcome resistance with incentives
At each step in the website conversion process, your prospects will weigh up the expected reward against the potential risk and effort. Make it worth their while to take action by adding an incentive. The ideal incentive is one with a high perceived value and a low actual cost to provide.
In a lot of cases companies just try a single incentive and then quit if it doesn’t work or appears to work ok. But like everything else, incentives must be tested. You’ll know you’ve found the right incentive when it gives your conversions a major lift.
Zappos add the text ‘In Stock and Ready to Ship!’ next to the Add to Shopping Cart button, along with a line about how they’ll pay for your shipping both ways:
Be wary of “best practices”
The term “best practices” implies that we actually know the best way of doing something when a lot of times we really don’t. Often we’ve just copied what our competitors have done, which might work for them (if they haven’t blindly copied someone else) but less so for us.
The right design depends on your target audience and the context of the element in question. Amazon might find that a Buy Now button drives more sales, whereas Dell might prefer a Customize button. A/B and multivariate testing, as well as usability testing, can help determine the layout and copy best suited to you and your marketing situation.
Test, test, test until you find a winner
To find the best version of page, you need to test your layout and copy variations with enough test subjects to get statistically significant results. How many is enough? Well, a lot of factors impact the sample size you’ll need, including the current conversion rate of your page, the number of variations you’re testing and how confident you need to be in the results (commonly 95%). If you need to be extremely confident in your results because the risks of being wrong are too high, extend the duration of your test until you reach a higher level of confidence (97.5% or even 99%).
While your test is running, look out for weird data like sudden changes in performance or traffic distribution between variations which can indicate troubles with your test (more on validation threats coming up in our next blog post). And after the test is over, carefully analyze your data. Sometimes you’ll find that one variation worked well for one audience, while another worked better for a different group.
Looking for help with A/B and multivariate testing? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting[at]elasticpath.com to learn how our conversion optimization services can improve your business results.
Source http://www.getelastic.com/?p=11606Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:06:11 GMT
Tags: Conversion Optimization, Site Testing, Web Design and Usability,
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