Thank Your Visitors Every Day of the Year

Over the past few days I’ve received many “thank yous” from companies I have either purchased from or subscribed to throughout the year. But end of the year customer appreciation while “nice”— is not enough. Why not thank your visitors every day of the year? 

3 Quick tips for creating a valuable and thankful post-conversion experience on your landing pages

1. Create next steps. They converted, now what? Positioning relevant post- conversion content is important. Consider a “what to expect” or an arsenal of tools to keep them engaged with your brand once they’ve completed the call- to-action.
2. Guide the post-conversion experience. Don’t leave a new lead hanging, guide them. Far too often, we expect a lead to come to us, wait for them to bubble to the top, or compel themselves toward the sale. The reality is that if you can seduce them to engage, keep them engaged with a relevant and meaningful experience that takes them from visitor to deal.  
3. In addition to providing additional, supporting information and resources to continue engagement with your brand, dynamic content insertion allows you to add post-conversion personalization. In this example, iomega uses my first name and company name to customize my thank you page.

As we all learned early in life, “thank you” is one of the most important phrases in the human vocabulary. In the new year resolve why not resolve to thank your visitors every day of the year?

Joy to the Progressive Conversion!

Some of my favorite landing experiences from 2012 are what we call “progressive” — think multi-step forms, wizards, microsites, microconversion experiences and romance pages. Progressive conversion recognizes that often people need multiple interactions with you, either in a single visit or across multiple sessions, before they’re ready to convert.

My all-time favorite progressive experience is one I found while curating examples for my R.E.A.D.Y blog series. SimpleSite.com does a fanastic job of gently guiding the user through several steps before asking for lead information. Their approach is logical; step-by-step “guidance” is key to establishing trust, building commitment and earning the end-goal conversion action.

• Steps 1-2 engage visitors in the creation process

• Steps 3-4 ask for lead information on individual pages

• Once login is created, users get an immediate pay off…the site is “ready”!

As we move into the new year, think progressive. Remember how importatnt it is to give all visitors a good experience, because as Scott said best, “today’s non-converter may be tomorrow’s conversion win.”

Interactive Content: Best Gift Under the Tree this Year

Great content is key to boosting conversion. Interactive content gives a marketer the opportunity to deliver that great content in a variety of ways, all designed to better engage the user. Interactive content can be video, lightboxes, tabbed content, sliders and many others. Here are four things to consider as you get ready to give and receive the “gift” of interactive content:

1. Keep it short. Whether you include a video or provide addtional information via tabs or in a lightbox, less is more. Make sure your content is easily digestable and beneficial to the user.
    
2. Test different types. Do your visitors like video? Are they more likely to click on an image rotator? The only way to know is to test. The ability to quickly test and implement different interactive content elements based on performance, is key to success. Remember you can deliver the same content across different platforms…it’s all about learning what format best engages your visitor.
    
3. Allow for easy sharing. You have someone engaged — make sure they can easily share with friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via an old fashioned email. There is no denying that people love to share in this digital age and there is no better endorsement for your content.
    
4. Make it great. Visitors expect a lot these days. Make sure your interactive content is not just content, but valuable content.

If interactive content is on your wish list, consider the above as you are planning for 2013. Plan ahead so you can test lots of ways to deliver content. Focus on finding out what works best for your visitors — and you are sure to have many successful campaigns in the new year!

Attention holiday shoppers...there's a monkey on the loose

3 tips to understand user behavior and improve engagement

Recently in the news was the story of a little monkey who was discovered wandering aimlessly around an Ikea wearing an adorable shearling winter coat. The monkey had somehow gotten loose, and was meandering outside the store parking lot, hopelessly lost. As a user experience designer, this story vividly brings to mind a phrase I often think about called ‘monkey mind’. 

‘Monkey mind’ is a Zen term that describes the unsettled, and generally restless mental state we humans unconsciously maintain in our daily lives. Even before smartphones and Twitter, early Zen teachers observed that our minds are constantly jumping from one thought to the next like wild monkeys swinging in trees.

It’s easy to see how ‘monkey mind’ applies to how we engage with content on the Internet, especially with search-based marketing. We are curious creatures by nature, always unsettled, always searching and very easily distracted. We hop from one website to another, and if something doesn’t hold our attention, we’re off again into the jungle in seconds. Here’s my advice:

1) Don’t fight the monkey

Since ‘monkey mind’ is the general default state of humans, there is no use for marketers or designers to fight it. Instead, we need to work with it by keeping pages incredibly simple. Ruthlessly remove all clutter and distractions and create the most scannable interactive experiences possible. Limit your content to only the most enticing pieces so that every nanosecond on the page counts.

2) Show the monkey the banana

The incentive needs to be designed into your pages as a visual hotspot. Your incentive should radiate like a fiery beacon that makes it impossible for your ‘monkey minded’ visitor to look away from or ignore. Show the monkey the banana. The strength and relevancy of the incentive will determine if the visitor takes action and/or takes the banana.

3) Know your monkey

Like Jane Goodall, through methodical research you’ll be able to observe unique behaviors in your audience. Over time, with A/B and MVT testing, your audience’s distinct traits, expectations and preferences will be vividly exposed. What you uncover will help you craft better, more relevant pages and dramatically improve your bounce rates and results.

‘Monkey mind’ never stops so neither should your testing
Regardless of how much you learn about your audience, the restless ‘monkey mind’ never ceases. You should always be testing. As a result your pages will undoubtably evolve with the ever-shifting needs and interests of your audience.

Although this advice seems simple, just look around and you’ll notice how few simple, targeted experiences exist. Most of what we see live on the web are compromises, a mash-up strung together by different departments with competing needs within organizations.

It’s wise to remember that every decision a user takes on the web, happens in a fraction of a second. Take ‘monkey mind’ into consideration as you build your experiences and follow these tips to ensure that your visitors don’t wander off like our little, coat-wearing friend.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town...with Dynamic Keyword Targeting

It’s mind boggling that Santa is able to deliver all those toys within a single night! We, unfortunately, just aren’t capable of such “magic” when it comes to delivering a relevant landing page experience to every visitor.

With over 100’s of keywords directing visitors to your landing pages, it’s relatively impossible to create unique pages for each keyword. Of course we know we should, but as with many things, it’s easier said than done. Right?

Well then perhaps the best gift I can give is to inform you that you CAN create unique landing pages for each keyword with very little effort on your part. Dynamic keyword targeting is as close to “magic” as we’re going to get.

In these examples, Intuit Payroll provides a customized experience for different, but related, search terms.

 

 

With the right landing page platform you can create one basic template, and then extend it with dynamic headlines, content, and even images to ensure that it is relevant to the audience that lands there. Your visitors will be filled with joy to land on a page that contains similar keywords and messaging as the source that led them there in the first place.