A great reason to try segmentation on your landing pages

Last week Seth Godin had a great blog post about the customers you don’t know you lost. Seth says

It’s extremely difficult to figure out why people walk out of your store, throw out your brochure, leave your site… but in fact, this is fertile territory for dramatically increasing sales. 

When it comes to a web page: Why do people bounce away when they land? Who are they? What were they looking for? Some of them are likely in the wrong place—those people aren’t going to dramatically increase sales because they aren’t going to buy (or convert) no matter. But what about the ones who do belong there? How many more leads could you be generating if you knew who they were and what they were looking for?

Try some traffic segmentation on the landing page to find out. Give users simple choices that let them put themselves into a bucket. With segmentation you can ask “who are you?” and “what are you looking for?”, and you can use this knowledge to dramatically increase conversions (sales, leads…whatever it is you want more of).  Here are some blog posts that will inspire you to try some segmentation on your pages.

Post-click segmentation and the MECE principle

Crafting a narrative on your landing page

The powerful effect of limited choice

Choices: why 4 is better than 5, 3 is better than 4 and 2 is better than 3

7 Ways to Help Your Customers Feel Ownership

This is a guest post by Naomi Niles. Naomi talks about conversion rate optimization and about how companies can connect better with their customers over at her site. She also runs a custom web design and development studio with her husband over at Intuitive Designs. We like how Naomi thinks about conversion, and we hope you enjoy this post from her as much as we did!

One of the biggest problems with purchasing online is that your customers can’t actually feel or physically see what they’re buying like in real life. This is especially apparent when you take into account the research done by Suzanne Shu and Joann Peck: Customers who psychically touch items while shopping reported statistically significant higher  of perceived ownership and were willing to pay more for the items they had just touched.

Although you can’t provide the exact same experience for your customers online as you would in real life, there are certain things that you can still do to help them make their purchasing decision easier and help them claim ownership.

1. Make those photos bigger! This is one of the main reasons people abandon a site without buying. They can’t see what they want to buy. If your site has a feature that allows people to click on a thumbnail graphic to make it bigger to view the product in more detail, make sure that photo really is big enough to see the small details. Test it if you can.
   
   Provide multiple photos showing different angles of the product and have versions of all the photos in large sizes. Zappos does a good job of this with the photos of its shoes from different angles.
   
   You may also want to think about implementing flash or javascript that allows customers to hover over the photo and see small details. This is especially important if you sell things like clothing, shoes, and handbags. People want to see the quality of these items before they buy. Don’t force them to go to Google to find better photos!
    
2. Show product variations. If you sell different versions of a product, make it easy for customers to see all of the different versions right on the same page. Again, you don’t want people to have to search elsewhere to make a decision. The easier you can make it for your customers, the better.
   
   Speaking of variations; If you sell a product that has different color variations, please don’t use the same photo and Photoshop it to change the product color. I can tell you from first hand experience that if I see variations of the same photo in different colors, there’s no way I’ll be able to trust that the color in the photo is accurate. I want to be confident that the color in the photo is the one I’ll get.
    
3. Use videos. Use real videos of your products highlighting your product features and showing a 360 degree view so that your customers can see it from all sides and angles. Or, if your company provides B2B services, show a video of the best person to represent your company. Allow people to have a feel for who they’re working with.
   
   
4. Have photos and videos of customers actually using your products. Recent neuroscience research shows that we have “mirror neurons” that allow us to learn complex behaviors from others. Instead of doing something ourselves, we can learn just by observing others. Now, since we are able to learn just by observing, doesn’t it also make sense that seeing photos and videos of people using products helps us “feel” like the product is our own in an empathetic way too?
    
5. Provide demos. Provide demos of your products, especially if you are selling software. And if you can, allow people to use the demo freely without needing to sign-up for an account or mailing list. This will allow people ample time to decide if your solution is right for them beyond what simple features and benefits lists can do. 
    
6. Craft compelling stories and messages. Through the use of rich copy and descriptions, you can help your customer envision in their own mind how it would be to own your product. Spread your story or message in a way that helps them connect with your brand on a human level. Leave enough information to pique their interest and intrigue the customer, but not so much that you leave in unnecessary details that take away from the experience.
   
   As an aside: I have no idea what the conversion rates are for woot.com (I’m guessing very good since they only sell one product at a time and have an extremely loyal customer base, not to mention great deals), but I love the little anecdotal stories they tell along with each product. I know that the stories rarely have anything to do with the product in a logical sense and the stories are not even real and are there solely for entertainment purposes. But, I love how I feel connected with their brand and culture through their stories.
    
7. Provide the right atmosphere. Through your design, you can make the “atmosphere” of your site or landing page warm and comfortable or exciting and fresh, among other things. Take a high-end furniture store, for example. How does it normally feel when you walk in? It has soft lighting, warm colors, and lots of textures, right? You can recreate some of those things on your website too in order to help make the experience more inviting for your customer.

As with many other things, in order to provide a compelling experience for your customers, you must first put yourself in the shoes of your customer. What do you often wish could be better from your own online shopping experiences?

5 Things you can do with call tracking to help your conversion rate

This is a guest post by Kathleen Colan, director of marketing and content for Mongoose Metrics (www.mongoosemetrics.com), an enterprise-level call tracking and conversion analytics provider based in Cleveland, Ohio.  

Do you know which marketing sources send the most phone calls to your business every day, every week, every year?  Are your pay-per-click keywords making the phone ring? Or could it be the banner campaign you’re running on a content network?  The rumblings you may have heard are true: call tracking reveals granular data – down to the PPC keyword level – about what sources drive phone leads. 

Whether you’re spending $600 a month on marketing or six figures, it’s imperative to know how your online marketing efforts effect your offline sales conversions (phone leads). 

Let’s face it; people still like to use the telephone to do business.  In fact, 46 percent of local online searchers say they contact a business by telephone following their Web research (2009 TMP Directional and comScore study).   

Call tracking is one solution to answer the question: “Where are these calls coming from?” Today’s call tracking software does all the heavy lifting by identifying a valuable cache of data about customer browsing all the way through to the completed sale.  As a result, you’re able to immediately identify high-performing advertising vehicles and scrap the dead weight.

It works simply when a customer calls your business from a dynamic phone number on your website.  Once the call is dialed, the tracking software places a cookie on the caller’s browser enabling you to follow their entire click path from start to finish.  As a result of understanding this data, you’ll be able to modify your marketing spending as well as optimize your existing website marketing to target marketing vehicles with higher conversion rates – whether those conversions come from web forms or from the telephone. 

Five Things You Should Do with Call Tracking:

• Provision local and/or toll-free numbers: Toll-free numbers convey a national presence and local phone numbers speak to hyper-local communities.  A good call tracking provider should offer both. 
• Integrate call tracking data in Google Adwords: Quickly and easily aggregate phone call conversions alongside online conversions for a complete picture of online spending within the Google Adwords Placement Performance Report dashboard. 
• Control the data: Features such as interactive voice response (IVR) and ROI feedback tools let clients enter data related to the phone call for use in later correlation. 
• Investigate international call tracking: If you have an international presence, choose a vendor capable of provisioning phone numbers across the borders. 
• Integrate phone call data with web analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) and bid management systems: Today’s advanced platforms allow you to view call tracking data inside web analytics packages such as Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics as well as CRM software (Sugar, SalesForce and Microsoft CRM along with bid management providers such as Acquisio, Kenshoo and Marin Software.  

To learn more about call tracking analytics and offline conversions, you should follow @Mongoosemetrics on Twitter!

Catch more conversions with direct mail landing pages

Last year ExactTarget did a study on channel preferences, which found that “direct mail influences 76% of Internet users to buy a product or service online.” That’s too big of a number to ignore.

In fact, one of our own customers is consistently seeing a conversion rate of 30-40% from direct mail pieces. They achieve this through dedicated landing pages for their B2C campaigns, and personalized URLs (PURLs) for their B2B campaigns. 

Conversion rates of this magnitude suggest exactly what the ExactTarget study found: offline-to-online integrated marketing campaigns are powerful.

3 tips for creating high-converting direct mail landing pages

1. Match your landing page copy & creative to your mailers. This creates a scent, and reassures the visitor that he or she has landed in the right place. 

2. Pre-populate forms if you can.  If you’re creating PURLs, pre-populate form and page content to increase relevancy and reduce workload for the visitor.

3. Track your conversions. You can do this by using unique URLs for each campaign, or including a promo/coupon/special code that can be tracked.

A campaign landing page can help you catch more conversions from your direct mail pieces.

The ExactTarget study that shows direct mail influences 76% of Internet users to buy online, also demonstrates the value in testing an integrated campaign.

Content distribution channels should live outside of IT

Rob Gardner wrote a great post last week about launching a wide content publishing strategy.  He says, “with the ascension of meaningful social content dissemination across networks… it is now more important than ever for marketers…to strategically refocus their attitudes and philosophies toward content in a big way.”

You can read the great plan of action Rob details out here, so I won’t rehash it in detail. Instead I’d like to add on to it. Rob says,

Plan to develop containers for the asset types that will be promoted (HTML, fees, Web site architecture, etc.). Of course, once the content types are determined, you will need a place to put them. So if you need RSS Feeds, social accounts, video site maps and pages for video display, image galleries, etc. then get with your IT department and start planning for the day that your content is ready to roll out.

When you sit down to determine the content you will create and the containers that will host it, be sure to think in terms of conversion.

Rob hits the nail on the head when he says we MUST determine primary and secondary metrics in the planning process – and these metrics should be bound to our conversion goals. I mean, what’s the point in measuring anything in business if it doesn’t show you how to be more successful? And because data will be reported to you in real time, your containers should live outside of IT control where possible. You’ll be in a better position to increase your conversion rate if you’re able to monitor and make real time changes. 

In fact, empowering yourself to make these immediate changes can be the difference between a ho-hum kind of day and a $45,000 in incremental revenue kind of day, as was the case for American Greetings. 

There is no doubt that having the IT team on your side is important - they can work magic and make dreams come true. However, inundating IT with requests for “small” changes (headline changes, keyword substitution, etc.) will be the last thing on their list to get done. Instead, empower yourself to make these changes with the right tools.

Meaningful social content distribution is huge right now and it will continue to be so. Make sure you don’t eliminate yourself from the game by depending on IT to do everything for you.