Converting Visitors into Buyers
Wed. April 11, 2007, 1:30pm Moderator: Alan Dick (AD), Gen. Mgr Vintage Tub and Bath
Speakers: Bryan Eisenberg (BE), Future Now Michael Sack (MS), Idearc Media Corp
AD: Introduces BE
BE: Fiddles with mike. Asks how many have read Call to Action. 7 tips to boost conversation rates. Overstock.com was doing 1/2 billion a year. One page was costing them 7000 a day. 91.8% abandonment page, number visited page. Changed image and overnight, increased 5% sales. Must understand why and what you test. Once you do SEO, then what? Then you move them through funnel. Ave 2.4% conversation rates. No change, despite changes in procedures.
Is it functional. Is it accessible? Is it user friendly? Is it intuitive? Does it feel natural? Doesn't make me think? Do people really want and understand what they are buying? Persuasion.
How many of you would love a high performance site? How many of you work for companies that are overstaffed? There's a difference between what we want and what we have. It's never about what but why. A computer can never tell you how much you could have sold. It tells you how the last dime you made.
Who are we trying to persuade to take action? What action, what page to test, knows your profiles, and how does they buy, understand their motivations: methodical, spontaneous, humanistic, and competitive. Create pages ppc ads emails and ads that drive prospects to your pages. Do A/B split testing. Before and after.
Test using a link or a button. Test your top 5 high bounce rate, Top five high exit rate. Products tell a story. Shows examples of imges that tell a story. Downloads - shows examples of how many ways show it and test which converts.
Shows pics of beans. Ordered beans converts best for methodical people. Scattered beans no. Test headlines. Test fractions. Test asking questions. Test "We: language. Try the WeWe calculator at FutureNow. (audience laughs) Test call to action buttons. Get them to click. Shows examples of different ways of doing buttons. Don't copy from others without testing your versions. Learn more changed to Help me is an example of better convert label. Little things have a huge impact. Let them know you value privacy. Shopping cart? Show privacy policy when they add to add. Sometimes increasing the font size of a phone number can increase convert.
How many of you like "Submit"? (aud laughs) Be careful of the words you use. Don't waste people's time. Create low bandwidth images for fast load time. Does your site stink? Are you providing relevant scent? They need a "smell" to know they are coming to the right place. Jared Spool studied effectiveness of trigger words. Move forward until found rule. Most traffic drops off by page 3 of a website. Did they find what they were looking for? They are losing scent.
4 types of people. People have different motivations. You can't market to them the same way. Shows an example of someone looking for product, finds it but it is not within any context to base a buying decision on. It takes a long time to find product that finally has information about the product to help her buy. Lesson is don't just present the product.
Test outside your environment. Not in-house or developers. Find users or get outside help. When planning a test, test on page and off page factors.
What is the action we want someone to take? What does that person need to feel confident?
MS:
Gives history of company. Two sides of lifting conversations. We can always do a better job. We should be looking at 8-10 % conversion rates but we are not. Two sides: first side is outside-in. You can’t convert them if they don't come. Keywords, site side optimization, other marketing vehicles. Inside - in is homepage on in. What do you now that they are here? Conversions enhancements. Targeted delivery. Prepare your site target, traffic ,track and learn fix your cart. Do not force 19 steps to purchase.
Prepare your site. Go out and look at best sites in industry. Emulate practices. Identify conversion points but make sure you measure ALL conversions. What makes their site convert? Find benchmarks.
Get your customers to see your site content. Control the experience. Why is milk always in the back of the supermarket? Retail industry has 37% conversion rate. (offline world). Can we apply offline to online? Milk is always far away. Why? Because consultants tell us to put it there. Based on studies and behaviors. Your experience is being controlled. Why is perfume the first thing you find in some stores? There's a lot of testing. They are trying to enhance the buyer’s experience. We all have different intent, so marketing is lowest common denominator.
Homepages can be overkill. Too many links. Shows a page with 50 links - too many. Confusing navigation. This design is not good for users. It's a good directory structure. Shows K-mart site. Amazing number of links to click on. 100 plus links on the homepage, some of them redundant. Users need a fast path to what they want.
Marketers Dream. If you know Mike is walking in the store and you know milk is aisle six then you put it into aisle six. But you don't know who Mike is. How can you move the milk to where he wants it? The web is dynamic. As soon as you know who user is, you deliver what and where they want it. You need to know what door they walk in. He creates "virtual doorways" by testing landing pages. It's like testing where you put the milk. He describes behaviors in groups and how we make decisions based on this. Think about how they start at search and where they land.
Good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self id, good search -elements of good homepage. Content optimized for spiders. Make a site fit searches.
Virtual Doorways are more specific search phrases. More specific key phrases mean higher conversions and better ROI. The keywords that are more important to you may not mean as important to users. Pay attention to the behavior of your keywords during different points of the day. Calls this the "Bidding Zone". If you can plot this and understand you can improve conversions by driving traffic in at those times of days. You can decrease bidding and increase bidding at different times of the day. You can plot it. Use heat maps. Create graphs.
Target landing uniquely. Direct traffic to specific destinations. Implement test-analyze-adjust cycles. Determine best click paths. Connect search phrases to conversions. Drive people to best paths to search. He calls "Scent", "intent". You can control the intent. Use different terms like model number, compare products, and just product name. Different variations - test them. Test A/B/C. Showed a product page with 3 versions. The one with more images of product was tested to convert best.
Some landing pages can increase conversions by 200%. Keep testing and track results. Google Analytics is a free tool to try. Must be able to track keywords. Be able to see click-thru from search to conversion. Be able to track direct and deferred conversions. Associate cost per click with transaction. Track offline sales. Search stack and attribution is the converting search stack and how it converts. Sometimes there several searches needed to narrow down.
Elements of a good cart Speed. Make the cart fast. Few steps. Privacy. Make sure people know where they are in the process.
Inventory and shipping - accurate inventory, and shipping avail, tell people where they are going to get it, no hidden charges, let them safe carts. Make cart a gift for other people. Capture email address prevents - can we save the cart for you, how to get them back? Be nice. Handle errors gracefully. NO RED. No surprises.
Bought a headset for $12.99 plus 9.00 ship plus 5.95 handling fee. Cause for abandonment because fees were more than the price of the product.
