Let’s suppose you have taken a few marketing courses and have created a fundamentally sound webpage with all the bells and whistles . . . clear headline, natural eyepath, low friction, credibility indicators, etc.

And let’s suppose with 2% conversion, your sales are at an all-time high. Should you accept this as the best you can do or is it possible to achieve 10% conversion?

Think of it this way, if only 2 people out of 100 who entered a retail store actually made a purchase, we would naturally assume something is categorically wrong. Whether it be the products, customer service, or overall appearance, this store will be going out of business soon.

So why are online marketers content with such relatively lower standards? The answer to this question is complex and far reaching. But I can say with confidence that the buyer’s motivation and trust play an important role.

Someone who spends time driving to a store is usually much more motivated than a person who simply types in a search term and clicks a mouse a few times. It’s also much easier to click an exit button than it is to leave a store and navigate back through traffic.

Not only does physically being in a store signify a high buyer motivation, but it also makes it much easier for a customer to trust the merchant. Holding a shirt in your hands, trying it on, and knowing there will be an immediate exchange of ownership effectively makes trust a non-issue. Whereas when you order a shirt online, you can never be sure it will fit, if it will be delivered to you, or if it is even there at all.

As marketers, we unfortunately cannot control a buyer’s motivation. But we can effectively use incentives to keep visitors from leaving our store. To learn more about using incentives, take a look at our research brief “Creating Effective Incentives.”

Unlike motivation, we can control a buyer’s trust by using credibility indicators, testimonials, guarantees, and other anxiety reducing techniques. To learn more about reducing anxiety, take a look at our research brief “Optimizing Site Design.”

HTML vs. Plain Text has long been among the most hotly debated email-oriented topics. HTML format offers a visually pleasing design that 1) affects readers’ ability to process and benefit from the information and 2) provides marketers with the ability to track the effectiveness of emails.
Two of the most recent MEC email tests provide significant insight into this debate. Test One was Lite HTML email format Vs. Plain Text email format. Lite HTML outperformed Plain Text by 55% in click-through rate. Test 2 was Heavy HTML (Ad style) email vs. Plain Text email. Plain Text outperformed Heavy HTML by 34%.
I believe HTML format will continue to reach more readers because of its pleasing appearance and functionalities. No one likes to read boring messages, especially today’s readers who are getting more and more sophisticated with new ways to interact. The ability to tinker with fonts and font color and to do other things such as italicize appeals to many people. With that said, we also need to constantly remind ourselves to respect our readers with every marketing effort we make. With the same respectful content in both emails, a Lite HTML email looks like a nicely layed out letter and Heavy HTML email looks like advertising material. I suspect most people would prefer a nicely layed out letter.

With HTML format, it might be possible to track the effectiveness of emails and provide readers with “what really works” insights of how such email campaigns perform from the beginning to end. However, if it is done wrong, HTML format can face the danger of being blocked by email services and irritate readers with such things as improperly embedded images or aggressive advertising.

The important thing to remember is to test until you become convinced about what really works best for you—and then continue to test periodically.

Maria Hendricks
Research Analyst

We recently received an appreciative note from a professional certification course graduate that makes us feel that our efforts in providing the latest in education about online efficacy helps people discover what really works across an ever-growing spectrum of e-commerce.

Thank you for these courses, they’re just fabulous, so informative and presented in a way that makes absolute sense to my brain!

Melanie Marsh
Bank of America

The certification courses are a complement to the free online MarketingExperiments journal. Anyone who has not availed themselves of these dynamic courses ought to consider taking a look.

Click here to see our course listings

Eric Stockton, VP of Education at MarketingExperiments, recently flew down to sunny Miami to teach Affiliate Summit attendees how to apply and optimize subtle changes to their landing pages.

The Power of Small Changes Tested was excerpted from research case studies that you can access here.

The session spelled out our conversion index formula and illustrated through case study how important it is to pay CLOSE attention to the key details of each of your landing pages.

The questions from audience members illustrated that many marketers have not yet tapped into the true power of online testing and the feedback was very positive.

Affiliate managers, publishers, advertisers alike that were in attendance expressed a very real interest in improving landing pages, email campaigns, and paid search ads. This simply cannot be done effectively without a fundamental knowledge of how to test for what really works.

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward put together a wonderful program and the show was a big success. Congratulations to them both. We look forward to seeing you at one of these great events soon.

Herb Jones
Executive Manager of Training and Education
MarketingExperiments.com LLC
herb.j@marketingexperiments.com

Monitoring conversion rate for your subscription products is as important as monitoring the subscription path itself. There are two key metrics to use when analyzing your subscription path: unique visitors and click-through rates.

Funnel analysis will help you identify which steps of your subscription path need the most attention. The figure to the right shows an illustration of what we call “Funnel Analysis.” In this example, the major drop occurs in the first step (Landing page to Registration). Usually, landing pages are the biggest obstacle. It is important that the landing page states a clear value proposition and visible call to action. Also, remember to use testimonials and third party certification, when applicable. If this does not help, you might want to consider offering an incentive.

Other interesting tests for your subscription path are:

• Reduce number of steps: sometimes just by combining two steps in one, you can gain a lot in overall conversion.
• Reduce the number of fields required: request only the minimum information necessary. The more information you ask the more likely visitors are going to drop.
• Check for leaks: visitors might not be dropping completely but they are going on other routes; for instance, corporate links, help section, privacy policy, etc.

You might want to check out some of our briefs relevant to Landing Page Optimization and Testing Incentives.

The most underused and powerful incentive is free shipping. People hate to pay shipping and always think you’re making money on those costs. Our upcoming brief on incentives shows you the science, the math, and the art of using incentives. You will find it most helpful and full of downright amazing results in discovering what really works.

We’re all familiar with friction as the force that tends to slow down moving objects. The amount of friction an object experiences is a factor of the medium through which it is moving. Well, we can think of the movement of visitors through the purchase process of our websites in much the same way.

As a visitor moves through the buy process of a commercial website, the experience can be characterized by anything from a smooth and seemingly effortless progression from offer to “Thank you,” to that of a frustrating, confusing and exhausting death march ending in order abandonment. The difference lies in Sales Process “Friction.”

Friction, in this sense, does not exist on the webpage, but rather in the mind of the consumer, and is defined as Psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process. Of course the greater the Friction experienced by the visitors, the lower the probability of conversion.

The good news is that, among the factors that determine conversion probability, Friction is among the easiest and cheapest to fix. And efforts to reduce Friction often pay off with a disproportionately high return in conversion rate increase.

There are two primary types or components of Friction and for each there are some simple and inexpensive methods you can use to make them as small as possible for your product and your sales process.

In the recent MarketinExperiments research brief “Landing Page Optimization Tested: Big Conversion Gains from a Little Scissors & Grease”, we explored the nature and principles of Sales Process Friction in detail, using case studies with four different companies across different industries, and revealed specific ways that you can apply those principles to increase conversion for your own web pages.

Then, to see how Friction fits into the big picture of website conversion, you can visit the MarketingExperiments Journal website and explore the full Site Conversion collection of research briefs (categories in the left navigation bar), or consider taking either of the Landing Page Optimization professional certification courses for the most structured, in-depth and comprehensive coverage available.