Convert Every Click E-Book

Benji Rabhan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A holistic approach to conversion rate optimization that encompasses an entire business—online and offline—to drive more sales and referrals, and increase bottom-line profits

In order for your business to survive, you must convert anonymous traffic into sales. The better you do that, the more money you make. The science of tweaking and testing webpages to convert the maximum number of people is known as conversion rate optimization (CRO). Convert Every Click introduces an expanded vision of CRO that the author, Benji Rabhan, calls "holistic conversion rate optimization." Internet technology and innovation have changed the way you should be optimizing your business, your marketing, and your websites. The book looks at the psychology behind this new way of optimizing an entire business for more profits. It examines how your website plays a role in your overall business strategy, and details how to use CRO psychology and strategies to increase profits.

• Teaches proven strategies for increasing conversions across your entire business
• Details various split testing and data gathering methods and when to use each one
• Unveils a holistic approach to conversion rate optimization, using technology to create a more customer-centric experience that not only increases conversions, but also improves customer engagement and satisfaction

With guidance from Convert Every Click, you'll learn how to boost conversions and consumption across your entire business by maximizing every bit of your hard-earned traffic before, during, and after a sale.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One: What Is Holistic Conversion Rate Optimization?

Let’s Start at the Beginning

What Is Conversion, Anyway?

Conversion Rate Optimization Is Not the Same as Usability

Different Types of Conversion Points

Smaller Steps May Be Necessary

Bottom Line Conversion Is What Counts

What Is Holistic CRO?

Holistic Conversion Pyramid

Chapter Two: Designing Your Funnel

What Is a Funnel?

Aim for a Lean Funnel

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building Funnels

Chapter Three: Information Capture and Defining the Ideal Conversion Point

What Is Information Capture?

Types of Information to Capture

How Do You Capture Information?

What Information Do You Need to Capture?

Types of Web Forms for Information Capture

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Information Capture

Chapter Four: Split-Testing Strategies

Here’s How It Works

What Is A/B Testing?

What Is Multivariate Testing?

The Best Testing Tools Currently Available

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Split Testing

Chapter Five: How to Gather Data

Why Bother with Data Gathering?

Traditional Data Gathering Methods

Website and Traffic Analytics

Behavioral Analytics

Test before You Test Method

Data Buying, Renting, and Modeling

E-mail Marketing Data

Video Analytics

Traffic Analytics

What Do You Do with All the Data?

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Data Gathering

Chapter Six: Conversion-Centric Design

Universal Conversion Logic

Where Do You Start?

Visitors Evaluate Your Page in a Fraction of a Second

How Important Is Branding for Conversion?

Using Colors and Contrast

Using the Eye-Blur Technique to Evaluate Element Weights

How Page Layout Affects Conversions

Using Eyelines to Create Clarity, Direction, and Focus

Consider Treating Each Foldpage Like a Separate Page

Responsive Design

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Graphic Design

Chapter Seven: Conversion-Centric Copywriting

Customer-Centric Copy

How to Use The Get Principle to Write More Customer-Centric Copy

How to Make Your Copy Hyperrelevant

Increasing Relevance and Credibility of Links

Eight Keys to Writing an Enticing Offer

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Copywriting

Chapter Eight: Video Conversion Strategies

Conversion Rates with and without Video

Video Works When You Keep People Engaged

Video Marketing

Driving Direct Conversion with Video

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Video

Chapter Nine: Landing Page Strategies

Short or Long Landing Pages

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Landing Pages

Chapter Ten: Standard Website Strategies

Your Navigation Should Reflect Your Funnel Design

Building a Strong Page Structure

Define an Exit Strategy for Each Page

Remember the Fold

What about Responsive Design?

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Standard Websites

Chapter Eleven: Shopping Cart Website Strategies

Navigation

Associated Products and Upsells

Shopping Cart Abandonment

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Shopping Cart Websites

Chapter Twelve: Mobile Website Strategies

How Usability Plays a Role in Mobile Conversion

Make the Goal Easy to Find—Really Easy

Do You Really Need a Mobile Website?

Responsive Design Is Becoming More Common

Some Basics to Consider When Building Your Mobile Website

How to Use Call Buttons Effectively

Web Forms Need to Be Simpler, Too

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Mobile Websites

Chapter Thirteen: How to Optimize Traffic for Conversion

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Traffic

Pay-per-View (PPV) Traffic

Display Networks

Video Advertising

Social Media Advertising

Real-Time Bidding or Demand-Side Platforms

Organic (“Free”) Search Traffic

Big Data Analysis

Other Sources of Traffic

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Traffic

Chapter Fourteen: Follow-Up Marketing Strategies

Using E-mail Marketing for Follow-Up

Segmenting Your List

My E-mail Marketing Formula

Types of E-mail Marketing

Using Dynamic E-mail for Advanced E-mail Marketing

How to Split Test E-mail

Remarketing Strategies

Common Mistakes to Avoid with E-Mail Marketing

Chapter Fifteen: Advanced Strategies from Benji’s Conversion Vault

Advanced Strategies 1–3: Three Ways to Use Animation

Advanced Strategy 4: Using Instant Chat and Instigated (Proactive) Chat

Advanced Strategy 5: The Foot in the Door Technique

Advanced Strategy 6: Creating Urgency with Countdown Timers

Advanced Strategy 7: Discount Remarketing

Advanced Strategy 8: The Smooth Capture Methodology

Conclusion

Index

Cover image: Paul McCarthy

Cover design: iStockphoto.com (Mouse: © Materio/Money: © DNY59)

Copyright © 2013 by MorrisCore. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with the respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.

For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

ISBN: 978-1-118-75967-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-75974-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-75970-7 (ebk)

For Jenna,

thanks for putting up with my many long hours during the writing of this book.

For my parents, Joe and Bebe,

thank you for being early adopters and buying that first computer.

And Dad, thanks for making me try new things, even when I didn’t want to.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Julie, Pat, Kevin, Adrianna, Brian, Lauren, Susan, Josh, and the rest of my team members for helping with this book.

Preface

Think about all the clicks on your web pages, on your e-mail, on your banner ads, on your social media posts, on all your online marketing. Now imagine each one of those clicks converted into cash in your pocket. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? It might also sound like an impossible dream, or some hyped-up sales pitch. But it’s not; “converting every click” is what companies that do business online can strive for. Can you truly convert every single click into cash? Let’s think about it for a moment. If we give each person who comes in contact with your company exactly what they want, exactly how they want it, exactly when they want it—then, theoretically, they should buy. In other words, if we give each person an individualized experience that’s customized to their wants, needs, and preferences, then theoretically they should always choose to buy from you. This might sound like a practical impossibility; but in theory, the idea is sound. When you combine the data gathering and testing technology that currently exists with a strong knowledge of psychology and human behavior, you can move closer and closer to customizing experiences for the individual. That brings you closer and closer to the goal of converting every click.

But is this really possible? Let’s look at how far we’ve come in a relatively short time. First there was the Internet. And it was good. Smart businesses put up websites, mostly ugly ones, but any website was good enough. These were the early days of Web 1.0 when the Internet was basically a collection of online brochures. Websites were almost exclusively company-centric or creator-centric. Everything on the site revolved around what that company or creator wanted to say. In fact, the term brochure website was coined to mean a company-centric informational site.

Over time, technology and people’s comfort with interacting online led to a desire for users to interact with their online experience a little. The dawn of Web 2.0 saw user-generated content, such as blog commenting, product reviews, and eventually more sophisticated social media websites. Although this era gave users the ability to contribute to the web experience, the site owners were primarily delivering information and one-size-fits-all content. In fact, most of the web still operates this way.

Right now, we’re entering a new age of the customer-centric web. I like to call it Web 3.0. It’s an age of a learning web, where websites are customized for the individual user as much as possible. Every experience is unique to the user. The websites actually change based on who is looking at them.

Think about it for a moment, and you’ll see this is already happening. Google uses data it knows about you, such as where you’re located, your preferences, what you’re searching for, and other factors, to make a customized experience that’s more relevant to you. Amazon does something similar by offering individual recommendations for you based on what you’ve searched for in the past, what you’ve bought in the past, and other related metrics. Every Facebook News Feed is completely unique, based on you, your friends, and your preferences.

It may sound scary to people when they learn how much data can be collected and how a website can be altered to appeal to them individually. It all sounds a bit Big Brother to many people. However, the world is heading this way whether we like it or not. If your company (or the company you work for) doesn’t adapt to this new age centered on the individual user, you won’t be on the cutting edge. And you risk falling behind competitors.

Until recently, leveraging the power of the customer-centric web was only truly accessible to huge corporations like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. But even these companies now allow advertisers to reach users using similar data to target people that their products or services are the most relevant to. Web 3.0 is here, and the technology gives businesses the power to use data to come closer to converting every click into a lead or a customer. For example, as a Facebook advertiser, you can target users down to an extremely granular level.

Businesses are finally figuring out they need a combination of things to be successful online. They need a professional-looking website. They need traffic, preferably from a wide variety of sources, and they need results that help them make money. These results are what we broadly call conversion. At the end of the day, businesses need to convert the traffic coming to their website into money.

The goals are no different in the off-line world of brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether you operate a bank, a bakery, a clothing boutique, or whatever—the goal is to turn casual browsers into customers. You do that by making the shopping experience easy and enjoyable. You put signs in the right places, make up displays to attract the eye, suggest accessories and add-ons, and make sure the pathways direct people where you want them to go. However, even though you’re optimizing the experience to make more sales, each person who walks in the door will get the same experience.

Because the online world is digital, you can theoretically customize the experience to the individual user. If one person doesn’t qualify to use a certain product line, that person doesn’t even need to see that section of your website. You can further customize your online storefront so that it advertises items in many different ways, depending on who’s looking at it. The more you customize your marketing for the individual, the higher your conversions will be. Changing the experience for every individual customer was just not feasible before the Internet.

But it is feasible today. Even now, the overwhelming majority of online businesses have no idea how much money they’re leaving on the table by not moving toward a more customer-centric experience.

It’s no longer good enough to have a pretty website or loads of traffic. Whether you run an Internet-based company or a brick-and-mortar store trying to boost sales with a website, for your business to survive online, you must be able to convert those anonymous browsers into buyers. But where do you start?

Well, most people start by taking a stab in the dark. They hire a web designer to build a website. They tell the developer what they want, but what they want isn’t necessarily what they need. What they want is usually a beautiful site. What they need goes beyond beauty and incorporates systems and functions that convert visitors to customers.

If things don’t go as well as they hoped, they start making random changes all over the place, hoping something will help boost their profits. If they’re unsure what to do, they might change the entire website or redo their branding. If they’re a little more experienced with online marketing, they might rewrite their sales scripts or pour more money into advertising. Sometimes these things help; sometimes they make matters worse. The big problem is they aren’t making changes scientifically. They’re going about it randomly and not tracking the results correctly—or at all.

A better, safer way to go about turning more browsers into buyers (or anonymous visitors into qualified leads) is using what are known as conversion rate optimization techniques to lead you toward a higher converting website. Traditionally, conversion rate optimization is the science of tweaking and improving a website to convert the maximum number of people possible into paying customers or leads.

You may have heard that unless you are converting at 100 percent (meaning “converting every click” as the title of this book suggests), there’s always room for improvement. Hopefully you realize that’s like the expression reaching for the moon. You don’t literally mean to reach for the moon, your arms are too short. Unfortunately, many people do take it too literally, and it sends them into too granular a direction for too long.

Sometimes it might be better for your company if you go back to the drawing board for that page you’ve been working on, or maybe turn your focus to another step in the sales process. I do this a lot with my clients because our goal is to put their time and money where it’s going to give them the best return on their investment.

Let’s get a little perspective. Say a hypothetical sales website has a conversion rate of around 1 to 2 percent. That might be pretty good for that industry, but that means 98 percent of browsers on the site are not converting. In theory, that means there’s a lot of potential revenue going down the drain. One solution is to pour more money into traffic generation, which is a common Internet marketing practice. Get more people, you make more money, even with a 1 percent conversion rate, right?

But what if you could lift that rate to 3 or 4 percent without increasing your budget? Suddenly, you’re making way more money from your existing traffic. Regardless of your actual current conversion rates, even a tiny lift in overall conversions can mean huge improvements to your bottom line. You didn’t have to buy more advertising. You just needed to make the right tweaks. Now, conversion rates don’t always transfer directly to your bottom line. For now, just realize that you can work with what you’ve got, make improvements, and wind up with more money at the end of the day.

Conversion rate optimization is becoming a new buzzword in online marketing for a good reason. More and more people are looking for ways to maximize the sales and number of leads they get from the visitors coming to their websites. The sooner you start optimizing your conversions, the better.

For the past decade and a half, the Internet has been like the Wild West—a gold mine for those who figured it out, largely free and unregulated. Things have evolved a lot since then. Web traffic is becoming more and more competitive to buy, and it will only continue to move in that direction. Free traffic is also getting more competitive and, therefore, less free.

The best way to stand out and thrive online, now and in the future, is to make the most out of every ounce of traffic you get. Every visitor, every click, and every lead should be measured and cataloged, and a relationship should be established with as many of those leads as possible. Once you know a lot about your visitors, you can focus your efforts on creating a customer-centric environment where more of them will convert.

Don’t worry if you’ve gotten to this point and have no idea what your conversion rate is. It’s a much more complex metric than commonly thought. Whatever your conversion rate is now, conversion rate optimization will take you to the next level in your profit margin. Demand for information on the topic of conversion rate optimization is growing. It’s a specialized skill set that is rarely taught anywhere online or in the academic world because it’s still fairly new (from an academic perspective, at least). Conversion rate optimization used to be available only to large companies who could afford to pay consultants a fair, but sizeable, fee, as well as building or buying the infrastructure they needed. That’s always bothered me a little. It feels ironic to say that because I am one of those consultants, but I can’t serve everyone. So this book is my way of helping you understand what your visitors are doing and helping you get the most out of your website by leading you toward converting every click using conversion rate optimization. With conversion rate optimization, companies can experience significant growth without added expense.

In the end, when you combine the power of conversion rate optimization and the customer-centric web, everyone wins. It’s the best of both worlds—the user gets the best experience, and the company gets the best conversion rates.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

How to Get the Most out of This Book

This book is designed to be more than just a collection of concepts and abstract ideas. I want you to be able to really use what you learn to grow your business in a meaningful way.

Each chapter will introduce the strategies, techniques, and psychology behind my particular methodology of improving your conversions. Although I will sneak in specific ideas that will help you, my goal with this book is not to give you many hard-and-fast rules because I don’t believe that’s how conversion rate optimization works. Every business is different and every viewer is unique, so hard-and-fast rules and best practices just don’t apply often enough.

If I told you that an orange button will convert better than a blue button or a two-column format will convert better than a magazine layout, I would absolutely be wrong—at least sometimes. As you’re going to learn, I see things from a different perspective than most conversion rate optimization consultants out there. Every business is unique, and every set of circumstances is different. What works for one site may not work for another site. It’s extremely rare to find any conversion rate optimization idea that works on every website. You’re going to learn how to split test to get real results based on actual improvements to your site, not theories based on someone else’s data.

I want you to learn the underlying reasons and psychology behind why certain techniques work better than others for improving conversions. So you’ll hear me talking about what I call Universal Conversion Logic rather than so-called best practices. Once you have an understanding of the foundations and how they play a role in your conversion rates, you can come up with endless ideas, and your success rate will be better.

Speaking of success rates, don’t worry if your ideas don’t result in higher conversion rates every time. That’s normal, and it’s why we test the ideas to make sure we only implement the winners. In the conversion rate industry, it’s often said if 4 out of 10 of your split test ideas win, you’re doing well. When I heard that for the first time, I had already been consulting for a couple of years, and I didn’t realize that most conversion companies had such a low success rate. Our success rates (based on the principles in this book) resulted in an average success rate of over 8 out of 10, meaning 8 out of 10 tests we ran resulted in a success—a higher conversion rate for our clients.

Build Your Skills

Some of the concepts introduced in a chapter will need some practice for you to get good at implementing them in your own business. Also, we can fit only so much information in this book. So I’ve set up a special skills lab on our website where you can practice what you’ve learned in a safe environment. You can sign up for a free account right now by going to www.ConvertEveryClick.com/skillslab. You’ll build your confidence and be able to take the concept from the abstract to practical use. Any time we have a skills lab set up for a chapter, you’ll be shown exactly where to find it online in the Build Your Skills section at the end of each chapter.

Finally, I want to make a quick note about the examples in this book. Whenever possible, I will try to offer real-world illustrations of the concepts we’re discussing. It’s important to know that these are tested and proven strategies, not just theories. Unfortunately, because of the confidential nature of the relationship I have with my clients (especially the larger ones), I had to be careful about what I could share. Fortunately, I was able to use many examples from companies I own without having to be concerned about confidentiality.

I know from experience that most people learn better when they try things for themselves. So while I do my best to include good examples through the book, I strongly encourage you to take notes and jot down ideas as you go. Remember, you’ll never know how powerful an idea can be if you forget it. And you’ll never know for sure if it’s a powerful idea until you test it. (We’ll talk about that more later.)

Chapter One

What Is Holistic Conversion Rate Optimization?

When talking about conversion rate optimization, we often talk about low-hanging fruit in reference to ideas that easily and/or quickly improve conversions. Who wouldn’t want some low-hanging fruit? Easy pickings are often where we find some of the fastest and highest returns.