Posted by Gareth Davies on 05 December 2011
Over two days in London’s Business Design Center, some of the world’s foremost consultants and speakers on conversion rate optimization gathered for the first major event of its kind in the UK. Gareth Davies was on hand to cover the event and he took away 63 top conversion tips.
Mobile
1) Optimize your site speed because speed is critical for mobile pages. A mobile shopper will not wait 15 seconds like a standard site user. Streamline your mobile pages to around 50k in file size as a maximum where possible.
Amy Africa, AmyAfrica.com
2) Navigation determines about 40-60% of the success of a standard website, but on mobile websites this figure increases to around 65-90%.
Amy Africa
3) You should really only have one goal for a mobile page, and that should be either to get the user’s email address, or
their telephone number.
Amy Africa
4) Track where your users are coming from. They will behave differently depending on which referrer got them there. If
someone comes to your website from Twitter, there may be a zero chance they will convert to a sale on mobile. However Twitter traffic can convert well on the phone, so the aim should be to squeeze their phone number.
Amy Africa
5) Mobilize your design, don't miniaturize! You can’t just reduce the size of content from your main website and squish
things smaller. Design your forms and checkout so they can work well on mobile and make important call to action buttons big.
Amy Africa
SEO and conversions
6) The battle to convert people on a website into buyers starts with getting coverage, and this is SEO’s job.
Richard Baxter, SEOGadget.co.uk
7) Google has added to its freshness algo. Some queries (searches) are deemed to deserve fresh results. Check to see if Google is showing fresh listings for key phrases relevant to your product and service. If so can you do something that is time specific to get listed?
Richard Baxter
8) There are three major ways to increase conversion with SEO:
i. Increase the relevancy of keywords.
ii. Get more visits.
iii. Attract users at multiple stages of the buying cycle.
Patrick Altoft, Branded3.com
9) Create landing pages for your SEO campaign and assign multiple keywords to them so that you can implement a
manageable link building campaign to a limited number of pages. Whilst the pages may be few in number they can often target lots of keywords. For one Branded3 client, seven landing pages covered 95% of the keywords that could bring search volume.
Patrick Altoft
10) If you build lots of inbound links with exactly the same anchor text then it could mean your links get devalued. Vary the anchor text in your inbound links to target a wider variation of keywords.
Patrick Altoft
11) 2011 has been the year of brands. The Google Panda update has resulted in lots of price comparison sites losing 90% of their traffic and the big brands have been ‘hoovering up’ people's lost traffic.
Patrick Altoft
Psychology and persuasion
12) Most websites don’t have a massive traffic problem, however every website in the world has a conversion problem.
Bryan Eisenberg, Bryaneisenberg.com
13) When it comes to marketing and conversions there is a 92:1 ratio where companies spend $92 to bring customers to their website, but only $1 to convert them.
Bryan Eisenberg
14) "I know that half my ad dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half."
John Wanamaker
15) If you’re a marketer and you are too focused on the sexiness of advertising and you are not focusing on conversions, then you have a problem.
Bryan Eisenberg
16) The headline on a page is very important when it comes to conversion, as too are the headines on forms that your users fill up. Removing ‘company’ as a field can increase conversions on form submissions by 20%.
Bryan Eisenberg
17) Ask yourself: is the page relevant? Does it show value and is the user confident to take action?
Bryan Eisenberg
18) Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
David Ogilvy
19) Changing the wording on a button from ‘Learn more’ to ‘Help me choose’ resulted in millions of dollars in uplift for Dell.
Bryan Eisenberg
20) Your current sales situation can be emblematic of the media you are using and the channels you are implementing.
Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy.com
21) We like to think a major effect needs a major input, but this is not always true. Trivial things can have massive effects.
Rory Sutherland
22) A minor irritation in the now can affect consumers more in their decision making process than the long term consequence of the action.
Rory Sutherland
23) Many sales are based on the buzz people get from buying itself. Women’s shoes are a good example of this and if there had to be a wait of 48 hours before purchasing shoes, the shoe industry would virtually collapse.
Rory Sutherland
24) The lost science of Praxeology is an old name for behavioral economics. It is the study of human action and decision-making.
Rory Sutherland
Video and rich media
25) Showing people’s faces in visual design and especially their eyes can be effective and engaging online. This is because our natural reaction is to look into people’s eyes.
Scott Harmes, google.com/doubleclick
26) Virgin have seen a 30% uplift in bookings for premium and first class flights by using video on their website.
Susan Hallam, Hallaminternet.com
28) The Marks & Spencer online ‘TV’ campaign produced ‘how to’ type videos that are not obvious adverts. The content helped M&S create a ‘back story’ that gives away tips before showing the viewer items featured in the video that they can then buy.
Susan Hallam
29) With Marks & Spencer TV, the company created around 500 videos. The result was a 23% increase in basket value on the shopping website.
Susan Hallam
30) Prudential have been able to increase email open rates by 15% with their live pension surgery video feed which featured money expert Alvin Hall.
Susan Hallam
Commerce
31) Help website conversions by providing transparency, trust and confidence. In addition to this show visitors your key value proposition (USP).
Paul Rouke, Prwd.co.uk
32) Understand what your users are looking for and provide images to support this.
Paul Rouke
33) Use social proof. Make customer ratings prominent. Consider placing them under page headlines or product titles.
Paul Rouke
34) Try and show supporting information such as, delivery, returns and detailed product information in a way that can keep users on the page. Many top UK eCommerce sites are adopting a tabbed system, which can effectively achieve this.
Paul Rouke
35) Mine your analytics package and get to know it intimately
Stephen Pavlovich, Conversionfactory.com
36) Look at the sales funnel in Google Analytics. Find out what pages visitors are entering the site from. Find out what percentage arrive on the home page and then consider what sales messages are being shown on your home page.
Stephen Pavlovich
37) Not all browsers convert at a similar rate. Internet Explorer in particular can convert badly due to the way it renders some web pages. Check your analytics to see if your website has serious conversion problems with specific browsers and then look to fix them.
Stephen Pavlovich
38) Talk to visitors and customers to find out what is stopping them from buying from you. Survey them and ask them a simple question like: "What is the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?"
Stephen Pavlovich
39) When design teams are working on web page designs, make sure they show you how it looks at 1024 x 768 resolution and that it still works well.
Michael Summers, Trueaction.com
40) Pop up windows from grid pages or section pages don’t tend to work that well. Make sure grid pages are easy to use and scan.
Michael Summers
41) Remember that the eye works faster than the UI.
Michael Summers
42) When it comes to using websites, users often don’t understand as much as we assume they do.
Michael Summers
43) Image zoom is not always useful and can have negative effects on usability. Instead use good stills.
Michael Summers
44) Don't ask people to sign up before the checkout process. All checkouts should be guest checkouts.
Michael Summers
45) Creating an account when shopping online creates stress. It’s a painful interruption to the shopping process. Removing the sign-in for one client increased sales by $2m in two months.
Michael Summers
46) The feeling of time passing fast is something you want on a website. Use progress bars for the checkout process because when people are waiting or an event in the future, and they don’t know when it will occur, it feels longer to them.
Jim Hudson, Paypal.com
PPC and landing pages
47) Repeat the search phrase in the headline, expand the keywords with benefits, have customer ratings and use site links.
Kai Radanitsch, www.Landingpageguru.de
48) Lay out text content with a skim, scan, read approach.
Kai Radanitsch
49) Establish your primary and secondary goal. A primary goal is usually for a site visitor to buy, a secondary goal can be for them to share the page or product on Facebook.
Kai Radanitsch
50) Keep social requests and social calls to action to the thank-you page. Your customers will be most receptive there.
Kai Radanitsch
51) Don't just think keywords and landing pages, think people and personas.
Guy Levine, Returnondigital.co.uk
52) When you have identified the personas of the people who buy from you, it's possible to use images of people who represent them to create a channel to segment users on the website.
Guy Levine
53) Be efficient. Do big tests first and then undertake the smaller tests second. So make a drastic change first, and pick the best converting page to make subtle changes to.
Guy Levine
54) With a PPC campaign you want a tight correlation between keyword and ad copy.
Guy Levine
55) A/B testing can work better for smaller websites than complex multi-variant testing.
Guy Levine
56) In some sectors in the UK, green call to action buttons can out perform red buttons.
Guy Levine
57) Three key things to convey on a website are: We are the experts; this is why you should buy from us; then please buy from us.
Guy Levine
Email newsletters
58) It’s a common mistake that the first transactional email a customer receives isn’t usually part of the marketing process. In addition to this it’s a good opportunity to encourage customers to add your email to a safe senders list, cross-promote or mention up and coming event or sales.
John Ekmann
59) When people give their email but do not necessarily buy from you, use a series of welcome emails. This can include a welcome, then a reminder if they haven’t purchased. This can be followed by things like a free shipping offer, and a reminder of that offer too.
John Ekmann
60) Two major things that can cause problems with email conversions are lame subject lines and non-persuasive copy.
John Ekmann
61) Be specific with your subject lines where possible. Avoid vague and meaningless copy.
John Ekmann
62) Newsletters should be fresh, and contain news. Avoid repeating the same layout and subject lines in your newsletters.
John Ekmann
63) Don’t ignore what your email looks like in a user's inbox preview pane. Use alt tags for images that may not show, and ensure that there are text links to back up image links.
John Ekmann
You can read more great conversion rate tips in our quick-start guide to conversion rate optimization. And please share your own conversion tips below, including any you picked up from Conversion Conference London.
Courtesy: http://www.wordtracker.com
Over two days in London’s Business Design Center, some of the world’s foremost consultants and speakers on conversion rate optimization gathered for the first major event of its kind in the UK. Gareth Davies was on hand to cover the event and he took away 63 top conversion tips.
Mobile
1) Optimize your site speed because speed is critical for mobile pages. A mobile shopper will not wait 15 seconds like a standard site user. Streamline your mobile pages to around 50k in file size as a maximum where possible.
Amy Africa, AmyAfrica.com
2) Navigation determines about 40-60% of the success of a standard website, but on mobile websites this figure increases to around 65-90%.
Amy Africa
3) You should really only have one goal for a mobile page, and that should be either to get the user’s email address, or
their telephone number.
Amy Africa
4) Track where your users are coming from. They will behave differently depending on which referrer got them there. If
someone comes to your website from Twitter, there may be a zero chance they will convert to a sale on mobile. However Twitter traffic can convert well on the phone, so the aim should be to squeeze their phone number.
Amy Africa
5) Mobilize your design, don't miniaturize! You can’t just reduce the size of content from your main website and squish
things smaller. Design your forms and checkout so they can work well on mobile and make important call to action buttons big.
Amy Africa
SEO and conversions
6) The battle to convert people on a website into buyers starts with getting coverage, and this is SEO’s job.
Richard Baxter, SEOGadget.co.uk
7) Google has added to its freshness algo. Some queries (searches) are deemed to deserve fresh results. Check to see if Google is showing fresh listings for key phrases relevant to your product and service. If so can you do something that is time specific to get listed?
Richard Baxter
8) There are three major ways to increase conversion with SEO:
i. Increase the relevancy of keywords.
ii. Get more visits.
iii. Attract users at multiple stages of the buying cycle.
Patrick Altoft, Branded3.com
9) Create landing pages for your SEO campaign and assign multiple keywords to them so that you can implement a
manageable link building campaign to a limited number of pages. Whilst the pages may be few in number they can often target lots of keywords. For one Branded3 client, seven landing pages covered 95% of the keywords that could bring search volume.
Patrick Altoft
10) If you build lots of inbound links with exactly the same anchor text then it could mean your links get devalued. Vary the anchor text in your inbound links to target a wider variation of keywords.
Patrick Altoft
11) 2011 has been the year of brands. The Google Panda update has resulted in lots of price comparison sites losing 90% of their traffic and the big brands have been ‘hoovering up’ people's lost traffic.
Patrick Altoft
Psychology and persuasion
12) Most websites don’t have a massive traffic problem, however every website in the world has a conversion problem.
Bryan Eisenberg, Bryaneisenberg.com
13) When it comes to marketing and conversions there is a 92:1 ratio where companies spend $92 to bring customers to their website, but only $1 to convert them.
Bryan Eisenberg
14) "I know that half my ad dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half."
John Wanamaker
15) If you’re a marketer and you are too focused on the sexiness of advertising and you are not focusing on conversions, then you have a problem.
Bryan Eisenberg
16) The headline on a page is very important when it comes to conversion, as too are the headines on forms that your users fill up. Removing ‘company’ as a field can increase conversions on form submissions by 20%.
Bryan Eisenberg
17) Ask yourself: is the page relevant? Does it show value and is the user confident to take action?
Bryan Eisenberg
18) Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
David Ogilvy
19) Changing the wording on a button from ‘Learn more’ to ‘Help me choose’ resulted in millions of dollars in uplift for Dell.
Bryan Eisenberg
20) Your current sales situation can be emblematic of the media you are using and the channels you are implementing.
Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy.com
21) We like to think a major effect needs a major input, but this is not always true. Trivial things can have massive effects.
Rory Sutherland
22) A minor irritation in the now can affect consumers more in their decision making process than the long term consequence of the action.
Rory Sutherland
23) Many sales are based on the buzz people get from buying itself. Women’s shoes are a good example of this and if there had to be a wait of 48 hours before purchasing shoes, the shoe industry would virtually collapse.
Rory Sutherland
24) The lost science of Praxeology is an old name for behavioral economics. It is the study of human action and decision-making.
Rory Sutherland
Video and rich media
25) Showing people’s faces in visual design and especially their eyes can be effective and engaging online. This is because our natural reaction is to look into people’s eyes.
Scott Harmes, google.com/doubleclick
26) Virgin have seen a 30% uplift in bookings for premium and first class flights by using video on their website.
Susan Hallam, Hallaminternet.com
28) The Marks & Spencer online ‘TV’ campaign produced ‘how to’ type videos that are not obvious adverts. The content helped M&S create a ‘back story’ that gives away tips before showing the viewer items featured in the video that they can then buy.
Susan Hallam
29) With Marks & Spencer TV, the company created around 500 videos. The result was a 23% increase in basket value on the shopping website.
Susan Hallam
30) Prudential have been able to increase email open rates by 15% with their live pension surgery video feed which featured money expert Alvin Hall.
Susan Hallam
Commerce
31) Help website conversions by providing transparency, trust and confidence. In addition to this show visitors your key value proposition (USP).
Paul Rouke, Prwd.co.uk
32) Understand what your users are looking for and provide images to support this.
Paul Rouke
33) Use social proof. Make customer ratings prominent. Consider placing them under page headlines or product titles.
Paul Rouke
34) Try and show supporting information such as, delivery, returns and detailed product information in a way that can keep users on the page. Many top UK eCommerce sites are adopting a tabbed system, which can effectively achieve this.
Paul Rouke
35) Mine your analytics package and get to know it intimately
Stephen Pavlovich, Conversionfactory.com
36) Look at the sales funnel in Google Analytics. Find out what pages visitors are entering the site from. Find out what percentage arrive on the home page and then consider what sales messages are being shown on your home page.
Stephen Pavlovich
37) Not all browsers convert at a similar rate. Internet Explorer in particular can convert badly due to the way it renders some web pages. Check your analytics to see if your website has serious conversion problems with specific browsers and then look to fix them.
Stephen Pavlovich
38) Talk to visitors and customers to find out what is stopping them from buying from you. Survey them and ask them a simple question like: "What is the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?"
Stephen Pavlovich
39) When design teams are working on web page designs, make sure they show you how it looks at 1024 x 768 resolution and that it still works well.
Michael Summers, Trueaction.com
40) Pop up windows from grid pages or section pages don’t tend to work that well. Make sure grid pages are easy to use and scan.
Michael Summers
41) Remember that the eye works faster than the UI.
Michael Summers
42) When it comes to using websites, users often don’t understand as much as we assume they do.
Michael Summers
43) Image zoom is not always useful and can have negative effects on usability. Instead use good stills.
Michael Summers
44) Don't ask people to sign up before the checkout process. All checkouts should be guest checkouts.
Michael Summers
45) Creating an account when shopping online creates stress. It’s a painful interruption to the shopping process. Removing the sign-in for one client increased sales by $2m in two months.
Michael Summers
46) The feeling of time passing fast is something you want on a website. Use progress bars for the checkout process because when people are waiting or an event in the future, and they don’t know when it will occur, it feels longer to them.
Jim Hudson, Paypal.com
PPC and landing pages
47) Repeat the search phrase in the headline, expand the keywords with benefits, have customer ratings and use site links.
Kai Radanitsch, www.Landingpageguru.de
48) Lay out text content with a skim, scan, read approach.
Kai Radanitsch
49) Establish your primary and secondary goal. A primary goal is usually for a site visitor to buy, a secondary goal can be for them to share the page or product on Facebook.
Kai Radanitsch
50) Keep social requests and social calls to action to the thank-you page. Your customers will be most receptive there.
Kai Radanitsch
51) Don't just think keywords and landing pages, think people and personas.
Guy Levine, Returnondigital.co.uk
52) When you have identified the personas of the people who buy from you, it's possible to use images of people who represent them to create a channel to segment users on the website.
Guy Levine
53) Be efficient. Do big tests first and then undertake the smaller tests second. So make a drastic change first, and pick the best converting page to make subtle changes to.
Guy Levine
54) With a PPC campaign you want a tight correlation between keyword and ad copy.
Guy Levine
55) A/B testing can work better for smaller websites than complex multi-variant testing.
Guy Levine
56) In some sectors in the UK, green call to action buttons can out perform red buttons.
Guy Levine
57) Three key things to convey on a website are: We are the experts; this is why you should buy from us; then please buy from us.
Guy Levine
Email newsletters
58) It’s a common mistake that the first transactional email a customer receives isn’t usually part of the marketing process. In addition to this it’s a good opportunity to encourage customers to add your email to a safe senders list, cross-promote or mention up and coming event or sales.
John Ekmann
59) When people give their email but do not necessarily buy from you, use a series of welcome emails. This can include a welcome, then a reminder if they haven’t purchased. This can be followed by things like a free shipping offer, and a reminder of that offer too.
John Ekmann
60) Two major things that can cause problems with email conversions are lame subject lines and non-persuasive copy.
John Ekmann
61) Be specific with your subject lines where possible. Avoid vague and meaningless copy.
John Ekmann
62) Newsletters should be fresh, and contain news. Avoid repeating the same layout and subject lines in your newsletters.
John Ekmann
63) Don’t ignore what your email looks like in a user's inbox preview pane. Use alt tags for images that may not show, and ensure that there are text links to back up image links.
John Ekmann
You can read more great conversion rate tips in our quick-start guide to conversion rate optimization. And please share your own conversion tips below, including any you picked up from Conversion Conference London.
Courtesy: http://www.wordtracker.com
