Knock on the Side of the Head Website Testing Ideas

Ideas for testing your website that will increase leads and sales

Who first came up with the idea of mixing baking soda and vinegar to create a volcano-sized reaction? We may never know, but one thing’s for sure: that’s a test that produced big results

Website  testing  can produce big results too, but only if you’re willing to think outside the box.

You’ve probably read plenty of articles on testing your headline, call to action, navigation, and more.

Now it’s time to move beyond the obvious and test a few not-so-intuitive ideas. Start with these, and let them get your own creative genius in gear as you design your ecommerce conversion testing strategy:

What Questions Can Usability Testing Answer?

The Conversionator V3 N39: Weekly Insights and Ideas

Teaching Website Conversion

Max The Conversionator

This week’s edition includes tips to increase the ROI of your Thank You page, web based tools you can use for competitive business intelligence, questions to ask when conduction usability testing, user experience points to keep in mind, and guidelines for using images on your website:

Scoring Email Marketing Conversions

Are you getting the results you want from your email marketing campaign?

Even if you’re like me and think that email takes up too much time every day,  there are some emails that are not technically work related that you regularly read, and some you read if you’ve got the time or they look interesting.

And if you’re like me, the rest you delete.  Yes I should unsubscribe – but somehow it just seems faster & easier to delete them en masse.

To get your emails into the “keeper” group, you’ve got to spend some time optimizing your email campaign for conversion.

Here’s some ideas to get you started:

Does Your Site Pass It's Initial Conversion Test?

Does your site pass the 5 second test?

It takes many mini-conversions to move a person through your website to the contact page or the shopping cart.

One of the most important is making a good first impression – that first 5 seconds when a visitor decides whether to stay or leave your site. We think of it as your initial conversion point.

5 seconds is not enough time to do any serious reading, browsing, or processing. It’s just enough time to form a basic impression about the usefulness of your website.

Let’s take a look at five  elements that will make or break your first impression:

How Important Are Reviews?

The Conversionator V3 N38: Weekly Insights and Ideas

SuperMax Conversionator

SuperMax The Conversionator

This week’s edition includes an overview on how reviews and social media content impacts shopper purchase,  steps to take for fast website indexing, user experience pitfalls to avoid, a customer pain-point checklist, and tips for accelerating your SEO:

It’s the responsibility of a marketer to make the consumer ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) more social and more memorable. Convince & Convert explains how and why in The Impact of Reviews and Other Social Media Content on Shopper Purchase 

–  Business 2 Community contributor Yasir Khan’s A Step-by-Step Guide to Fast Website Indexing  outlines the top link building steps you can follow so search engine spiders will crawl and index your website fast

– You may lose sales due to numerous factors that are out of your control but there are several user experience annoyances that you can control. In 9 User Experience Pitfalls That Repel Website Visitors  Kissmetircs shares some things that send users away from your website, all of which are within your power to reverse

Are You Making It Hard For Customers To Buy From You?, the third in a series on customer complaints and problems from Fast Company contributor Don Peppers, shares a customer pain-point checklist designed to minimize obstacles encountered during the buying process

  By implementing effective SEO strategies and giving your audience what they came for, you can quickly become the master of your domain. To help you get the most out of your site, 12 Most contributor Matt Beswick put together 12 Most Effective Ways to Accelerate Your SEO 

That will cover it for this week and I’ll leave you with a quick reminder to request one free conversion idea for your website as well as to signup for our blog updates and conversion tips newsletter. If you have any tips, suggestions, or resources you’d like to share please leave us a comment below and please feel free to suggest topics that you would like to see covered in future Conversionator posts.

Donna has been in the Marketing and Research fields for over 20 years working with a wide array of industries and contributes The Conversionator weekly roundup post to the Diamond Website Conversion blog.

6 Landing Page Questions your Visitors Want Answered

What I want to know is...It’s easy to get so caught up in the design elements of a landing page – the call to action button, the form and the hero shot – that you forget about the words.

Your copy matters. Words still move people to action and convert your visitors into leads. So what are your visitors looking for as they read your copy?

Here’s six questions that your visitors want answered on your landing pages:

"Because it's so Easy to Use!"

Is this what people say about your site?
Why do so many people buy from Amazon? One reason we hear again and again  is “ it’s so easy to use.”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lead generation website, ecommerce website, or a blog – providing your visitors with an easy to use experience will increase your sales and leads.

Usability requires a healthy dose of common sense as well as an understanding of the typical web user’s approach to online content.

If you haven’t looked at your website’s landing pages from the customer’s point of view, you may be missing some  issues that routinely trip up your visitors and reduce your conversion rate.

How User-Friendly is Your Navigation?

The Conversionator V3 N37: Weekly Insights and Ideas

Teaching Website Conversion

Max The Conversionator

This week’s edition includes suggestions for using Markerly to build brand awareness, insights into behavioral economics’ relation to conversion optimization, key components for user-friendly website navigation, site content areas to improve upon to increase ROI and conversions, and ideas for improving your PPC campaign conversions:

– To help ensure your website navigation offers a positive experience from a usability perspective, HubSpot outlines The Key Components of a User-Friendly Website Navigation  in order to design your navigation in a way that makes sense to website users

Analytics in Action: Examining Your Exit Rate

When you look at your Google Analytics report, you’ll see a metric both for bounce rate and exit rate.

Questions often arise as to how exactly these two metrics differ and what exit rate can tell us about the efficiency of a given page or the site as a whole.

In this post, let’s take a look at some of the most commonly asked questions and what they mean for your conversion rates.

What You Must Do Before the Call to Action

Call to Action

Call to Action

 

The call to action on your landing page is only as good as the elements that lead up to it.

In other words, you can work hard to get the wording just right, design a great Buy Now button, etc., but there are some significant landmarks you have to pass before your CTA will have any chance to produce results.