I hope you were able to join us for yesterday's Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce websites. It was a lively, actionable session and we were sifting through attendee comments all morning.

(NOTE: Subscribe to our free MarketingExperiments Journal and you'll be notified by email when our Web Clinic content is posted online.)

Our optimization experts -- Flint McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis and Aaron Rosenthal -- plowed through a series of research-tested concepts, best practices and pitfalls to avoid with eCommerce sites and landing pages. They also performed a rapid-fire review and critique of five eCommerce websites submitted by our Journal subscribers.

We'll break out some of those sites and the specific recommendations in future blog posts. And if those sites apply the ideas, perhaps we'll get some new success stories.

Meanwhile, one key takeaway was the idea that eCommerce site visitors fall into two main categories: Hunters and Browsers.

Hunters already know what they want, and are looking for a quick, safe transaction, while Browsers need more convincing and a different approach to prompt them to make a purchase.

To be most effective, an eCommerce site must address the motivations and thought processes of both audiences, and take them both into account when developing pages, site paths and conversion funnels. That's the foundation that should be in place before the real fun starts with page elements and design using weighted objectives.

Keeping those two audiences in mind, here are five questions that will help to frame optimization efforts for eCommerce site pages:

1. Which type of visitor -- Hunter or Browser -- is this page trying to serve? (Consider the channels and traffic sources.)
   
2. What are the weighted objectives of this page?
   
3. How does this page stop the visitor and connect with them?
   
4. Does this page instantly communicate my Business Value Proposition to visitors?
   
5. How does this page attract my visitor deeper into my product mix as it relates to the weighted objectives?

When a site or page has these fundamentals locked in, it's much easier to determine a baseline for success, test changes to increase conversions -- and measure the results. Try these questions with your own eCommerce page and let us know what you think.

Want to have your website or landing pages optimized by our experts? Just sign up for the MarketingExperiments Journal. You'll stay apprised of all our upcoming Web Clinics and have the chance to submit your site for a live optimization.

(See optimized version, right, and earlier version, below.)

"Giving your suggestions a chance to show results, I waited sixty days since rebuilding the site following your webinar participants' helpful comments," Eric said. "Conversion rate rose from 3.9% to 6.6% (30-day results)."

"I should also point out that we took the opportunity to target our paid-click advertising on those keywords which were more relevant -- and cut out those which were not productive. That reduced our ad spend by 60% yet increased conversion 200%.

"In conclusion, design and delivery of the message is foremost and many websites would benefit from your work -- I highly recommend you for that."

You can click here to read our brief containing the recommendations Eric received. It also includes the extensive guidance five other sites received at the same clinic.

You're also welcome to join our next free Web Clinic on May 7. Our optimization experts will be reviewing eCommerce websites, making specific recommendations, and answering audience questions. If you haven't participated in one of our live optimization clinics yet, what are you waiting for?

You don't want to pass up the chance for a double-digit increase in conversions, do you?

Did you catch our free Web Clinic on Wednesday? The topic was Measuring What Matters: How simplifying your metrics can increase Marketing ROI by up to 75% — and if you joined us, chances are you're already implementing new ideas and tools to improve your analytics.

If you couldn't make it, you can view the presentation here and download our free MarketingExperiments Essential Metrics Tool here (Excel file).

Metrics isn't the sexiest topic, yet it's one that most marketers have been grappling with for years and still don't have many concrete answers. In our live poll, 74% of the marketers characterized their experience level with Web analytics as moderate to novice.

There's a lot more to cover with metrics than our one-hour session allowed: Different tools, the type of website and levels of data, your depth of experience with analytics, to name just a few.

Many attendees told us the big takeaway was our blueprint for distilling several data points into just four key measurements — and using that to get beyond numbers and into your customers' mindset.

To paraphrase Dr. McGlaughlin, too often the focus with analytics is on us: the actions we're trying to force or entice, the conversion rates we want to see, the transactions and revenue we desperately need to achieve. Those are valid measures, but they obscure the intentions of our prospects and customers when they visit our sites.

The trick is taking all those raw numbers and using them to create a snapshot of what your site visitors are thinking, as well as what they're doing. That's what really helps us adapt our processes and content and improve ROI dramatically.

Several attendees requested another Clinic on this topic, so we'll likely revisit metrics with a new session in the months ahead. In the meantime, please enjoy the complete Clinic and try our Essential Metrics Tool with our compliments.

We'd appreciate any feedback you have on the metrics Cinic or Tool, and invite you to post any other metrics-related comments you'd like to share.

We received a nice note last week from Eric Stevenson, who runs AXcess News. Eric submitted his co-brandnews.com Landing Page for live optimization at our last Webinar on Feb. 6th, and immediately began implementing our suggestions:

“Attached is the screenshot of the new http://co-brandnews.com site – totally rebuilt to follow the wonderful suggestions we were given in the last webinar:

We hope to have this online within two days in replacement of the old site and would be delighted if they could squeeze it in next week Wednesday – if not – I would be grateful to make the next window and have them discuss the ‘before and after’ look per those suggestions, such as putting the sign up form on the landing page and adding testimonials (which you can’t see on this screenshot; they’re below the area shown).”

Though Eric hasn’t posted his new site design yet, we’ve asked him to send us his test data after it’s been up for awhile. You know we love those numbers.

Dr. McGlaughlin and company will complete Part 2 of our live Landing Page optimization analysis tomorrow at 4:00PM EST. It’s always free and it’s always interesting, so sign up here and join us.

There was a TV ad that ran years ago. Though the product being flogged has been lost in the sands of time (the sands in my mind, anyway), the tag line was “Always buy the best and you’ll never be disappointed.”

Research published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences certainly backs up the premise that if you think it’s expensive, it certainly tastes better.

I would venture that things perceived as expensive look, sound, smell, and feel better, too.

The California Institute of Technology study used 21 volunteers to sample wines in a blind taste test. The researchers ran the test 15 times, putting five bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon wine in a random order, asking the volunteers to rank them in order of preference.

The volunteers were given two of the wines twice; once with the real price, once with a fake price. A $90 bottle was passed off as a $10 bottle, and a $5 bottle was passed off as a $45 one.

The participants also had their brains scanned for activity related to pleasure.

It comes as no surprise to me that the “expensive” wines both produced more activity in the pleasure centers of the subjects’ brains and also resulted in higher ratings.

"If you believe that the experience is better…the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better." said team leader Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at CIT.

The bottom line? Enjoyment increased in direct proportion to price.

So don’t short your customers' experience. Test for your ideal price point, and you might increase your joy and theirs.

The Landing Page optimization advice in our next free brief is too good to save till Monday's email, so I’m going to give you a couple of thousand dollars worth today. Jimmy Ellis’s, Aaron Rosenthal’s, and Flint McGlaughlin’s analysis of the Landing Pages that our subscribers sent in for evaluation at the Feb. 6 Clinic resulted in recommendations anyone can use to get an immediate bump in conversion rates and total revenue.

Here’s just a taste:
• Write a headline that quantifies key metrics. The goal of a headline is not to sell a product. The goal of the headline is get a visitor to read the first sentence of the next paragraph, getting them into the body copy.
• Don’t offer a multitude of products on one Landing Page. Drive visitors to a place where there is not so much unsupervised thinking. Don’t ask them to make choices between many options when they are still not sure they want you at all.
• Take all of the specific elements that help a customer figure out if this is the right product for them and move them closer to the image: price; free shipping; warranty; guarantees. If there is a product specific testimonial, put it right there.
• Customer ratings for products can have a huge impact on conversion. You absolutely need a product rating close to the image so visitors can see what other people are saying.

If readers of MarketingExperiments want to meet Flint, Jimmy, and Aaron (and me) in person, then the place to be is in Miami from Feb. 24-26. So pack your spring break togs and come on down to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. The MarketingExperiments Optimization Team will be doing live Landing Page analysis for attendees, among other duties. I hope to see you there!

I was really impressed by both the number of attendees and the quality of the questions and professional opinions we received from our audience yesterday at the “Optimizing Your Landing Pages” Webinar. We had over 1,200 marketers register to hear Dr. McGlaughlin, Jimmy Ellis, and Aaron Rosenthal analyze Landing Pages that subscribers submitted in advance of the Clinic.

I know a lot of subscribers wish we could spend more than one hour every two weeks doing live website optimization for our members or sharing our latest research findings, but if we expanded it we’d probably have to start charging to attend the Clinic and distributing the MarketingExperiments journal brief that comes out of it, and we don’t want to do that. We really want to keep it free.

Serving rather than selling is the key to marketing success, and Dr. McGlaughlin looks at what we do as a service to the industry as a whole. By freely sharing our best practices and latest scientific findings in Internet marketing—not just Landing Page optimization or email tuning, but charters for customer relations like our own MarketingExperiments’ Creed—he feels we’re on the right track.

Flint, Jimmy, and Aaron did such a deep dive on six of the sites we selected that we ran out of time to do more, so we’ll cover the ones we didn’t get to yesterday at our next Clinic on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4:00 PM EST. Our subscribers should look for the invitation to "Optimizing Your Landing Pages: Part 2," which we’ll send out next week.

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to our free journal, sign up today, confirm the email we send you, and you’ll get that invitation, too. You’ll also receive a free journal brief with all of the Landing Page optimization recommendations for the sites we looked at yesterday. There should be a lot of news everyone can use in the next edition.

If you attended yesterday's Clinic I'd like to get your feedback. I'm also really interested in hearing from those who submitted a site we selected for a free analysis. Let us know if you implement our recommendations and what happens, and I'll share it here.

Yesterday, during one of our most widely attended webclinics ever, Dr. Mcglaughlin passionately talked about marketing to the post-modern consumer in 2008. In it, he stated a problem, puting it in the form of a protest to marketers from today’s average Internet consumer. He then proposed a response, which he put in the form of a creed, that he believes all marketers would be wise to adopt.

During the call and since then, participants and subscribers have been asking for copies of both documents. So, I have the permission and privilege of posting them here.

The Prospect’s Protest (A Problem)

I. I am not a target; I am a person: Don’t market to me, communicate with me.

II. Don’t wear out my name, and don’t call me “friend,” until we know each other.

III. When you say “sell,” I hear “hype.” Clarity trumps persuasion. Don’t sell; say.

IV. I don’t buy from companies; I buy from people. And here’s a clue: I dislike companies for the same reason I dislike people. Stop bragging. It’s disgusting.

V. And why is your marketing “voice” different from your real “voice”? The people I trust don’t patronize me.

VI. In all cases, where the quality of the information is debatable, I will always resort to the quality of the source. My trust is not for sale. You need to earn it.

VII. Dazzle me gradually: Tell me what you can’t do, and I might believe you when you tell me what you can do.

VIII. In case you still don’t “get it,” I don’t trust you. Your copy is arrogant, your motives seem selfish, and your claims sound inflated. If you want to change how I buy, first change how you market.


The MarketingExperiments' Creed (A Response)

ARTICLE ONE: We believe that people buy from people, that people
don’t buy from companies, from stores, or from Websites;
people buy from people. Marketing is not about programs;
it is about relationships.

ARTICLE TWO: We believe that brand is just reputation; marketing is
just conversation, and buying is an act of trust. Trust is earned with
two elements: 1) integrity and 2) effectiveness. Both demand that you put
the interest of the customer first.

ARTICLE THREE: We believe that testing trumps speculation and that
clarity trumps persuasion. Marketers need to base their decisions
on honest data, and customers need to base their decisions
on honest claims.

Copyright ©2008 MarketingExperiments

Here is a video clip of Dr. McGlaughlin presenting the Protest and Creed:

I’m eager, as is Dr. McGlaughlin to know your thoughts and ideas about the Creed...

The latest data are in and it appears to confirm our previous finding: Marketers just don’t do well at all when using intuition to pick what works best when it comes to Web optimization.

Yet the very nature of Web site and email optimization work undoubtedly includes an element of intuition. Where does it fit when identifying the most effective Internet marketing strategy, and how can a business best mitigate the risks that using intuition creates?

MarketingExperiments’ leader, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, led the December 5th Web clinic audience on a fascinating journey through the marketer’s intuition conundrum.

The bottom line? No matter how much a design seems to “make sense” or appeal at a logical or even unconscious level to your intuition, you cannot be sure it will actually perform better under real-world Internet conditions until you test it, and test it, and test it again. And that’s what we’re here for: to discover what really works ℠ when it comes to effective Internet marketing and to help you learn to discover it, too.

If you’re not already a subscriber to MarketingExperiments, the detailed brief of Marketer’s Intuition Revisited containing the complete results will be emailed to you by signing up here. It’s free, and you will automatically get an invitation to participate in all future clinics on Internet marketing testing as well as get the latest MarketingExperiments briefs.