2010 October | Fruition Interactive :: toronto interactive strategy, web design and development, online marketing

15 Ways To Increase Your Conversion Online

October 26, 2010 By Mitch Fanning 5 Comments

Recently, I wrote an article called Is Your Website Converting Leads into Gold? In it, I discussed the importance of optimizing your website or landing page for lead conversion.

With that in mind, here are 15 additional ways to increase your conversion online:

1. Keep your most important sales elements “above the fold” (ideally on your home page, without scrolling). This usually means putting your most interesting content with a convincing call-to-action and perhaps even a photo of you (to build trust and rapport). Tip: Tools like CrazyEgg can help reveal your most important content that should be at the top left side of your page.

2. Are you using a standard and up-to-date web design or blog theme? Navigation should be immediately understandable. Is there a lot of distracting navigation leading your customers away? Remove it.

3. Let prospects know they’re buying from a human being. Keep the copy personal, friendly, and (for most markets) informal. Sound like a person, not a robot.

4. Simplify your content.

5. Do your headline and subheads tell an intriguing story if you read them without any of the rest of the copy?

6. Make the first paragraph easy to read.

7. What’s the experience of using your service? Could you make that more vivid with a testimonial video or a great case study? (we’re currently in the process of doing this for ourselves)

8. Got testimonials? Use them.

9. Is your message confusing? Can a bright ten-year old read your sales copy and figure out why they should use your service. You might be an expert in your industry, but your prospects aren’t.

10. How often are you using the word “You”? Can it be increased?

11. Have you made yourself an authority in your market?

12. Throw in some more proof that what you’re saying is true. Proof can come from statistics, testimonials, case studies, even news stories or current events that illustrate the ideas your product or service is based on.

13. If you demand a pretty penny for your services make sure your web design and content is congruent? If your average client brings in $15,000 annually, make sure you own your own domain and its not a site your nephew built (unless they’re really that good).

14. Cut all long paragraphs into shorter ones. Make sure there are enough subheads so you have at least one per screen. If copy looks daunting to read, it doesn’t get read.

15. Increase your font size.

Did I miss any?

About the Author:

Mitch Fanning is VP of Strategy & Business Development for Fruition Interactive (Toronto, Canada), a professional member of Social Media Club, and founding member of Social Media Club Niagara. He’s spent 10 plus years working with businesses of all sizes, from global brands – to mid-sized B2B companies – to some of Canada’s fastest growing Internet start-ups ranked in the PROFIT 100. Follow Mitch on his adventures in new media at [mitchellfanning.com].

Did you like this article? Check out additional articles on optimizing conversion here.

Filed Under: Branding, Interactive Strategy, User Experience Tagged With: conversion, conversion strategies, web design

Your Web site’s got traffic. Now what?

October 20, 2010 By Kent Wakely 1 Comment

So you’ve taken the plunge. You’ve invested your time, money or both in creating new traffic for your Web site. Maybe you’ve done some Search Engine Optimization on your site, started a Google Adwords campaign or been effective at using Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media to drive traffic to you and increase your visibility.

Now what?

What do you want all those new visitors to do?

If you’re in business you probably want those new visitors to become your customers (and if you’re a non-profit you want them to become your donors, your volunteers or your advocates). You want them to convert.

And the key to converting your visitors into customers is having a strong and effective Call To Action on your site.

What’s a Call To Action? It’s an invitation to your site’s visitors to take the next step towards becoming your customers (what that step is is going to depend on your business and your sales process).

So what makes a strong and effective Call To Action?

What You Can Learn From the “Cake Boss”

October 15, 2010 By Mitch Fanning 1 Comment

Cake Boss is a show about Carlo’s Bake Shop in Hoboken, New Jersey. The show, which premiered on TLC in 2009, stars Buddy Valastro, the shop’s owner — and his family — and depicts their everyday lives running the bakery.

Due to the popularity of the show, business for Carlo’s Bake Shop — as well as tourism to the Hoboken area — has skyrocketed. Anyone who lives in the Hoboken, New Jersey area instinctively knows that if they need a wedding or specialty cake, Carlo’s Bake Shop is the place to go.

So what does a reality television show have to do with your business?

Why you NEED to be using rich media online

October 14, 2010 By Kent Wakely 1 Comment

When I first started working in interactive media — over 15 years ago now — the Web was all about text. Sure, there have always been images on the Web and video’s been around for a long time, too — I produced a live video Webcast back in 1996, even. But that stuff was hard and had kind of a lousy user experience — dial-up Internet speeds made image and video downloads painfully slow, software for audio and video required special software that was often buggy or that installed all kinds of spyware and other stuff you didn’t want on your computer.

Those days are long gone now, though. Audio and video online are easy now — nearly 70% of all adults online have watched a video online and nearly 20% of them watch video online every day.

And, what’s more, online video is becoming key in helping businesses connect with their customers and potential customers. There’s a growing body of research that video online drives a number of important business results, including awareness, engagement and actual conversions.

Does your Web site talk the way your customers think?

October 7, 2010 By Kent Wakely 1 Comment

We’ve all seen the Web sites that read like a jargon competition. You know, sites with paragraphs like:

Our company provides enterprise-wide, real-time software solutions that deliver sustainable ROI through non-disruptive business transformation. These solutions are used by 1,000 clients, including more than 75 of the world’s top 100 banks, to deliver control to the business lifecycle. Using our range of software solutions, clients can tackle barriers and create more efficient, customer-focused, cost-effective, compliant operations.

You’d never do this, right? RIGHT?

And yet I took this example from a real live Web site — and I had dozens of similar quotes to choose from — so SOMEBODY’s doing it. (And, honestly, I think OUR first Web site read something like that, too).

If your Web site IS full of content like this, you’re hurting yourself more than you know.

So, yeah, you’re confusing the heck out of your prospective clients — they’re coming to your Web site, they’re reading your Web site and they have NO idea whether they want or need what you’re selling. That’s a problem for sure. But, worse, you’re keeping your prospective clients from ever finding out about you in the first place.

I can guarantee you that nobody in the history of the Internet has EVER done a search for “real-time software solutions that deliver sustainable ROI through non-disruptive business transformation” (except maybe me, now, looking for anti-examples to use). And that means that when people ARE searching for things that you offer, using words that reflect the ways that they DO think about your products or services, there’s a good chance they’re not finding you on the major search engines.

That’s bad. And it gets worse.

Branding your WHOLE Web site to inspire action

October 5, 2010 By Kent Wakely 1 Comment

It’s more than just a logo

I hear a lot of business people — and a lot of branding specialist, who should know better — talk about branding as if it were just a logo, or just a visual identity for an organization. But a brand is so much more than that. It’s about the total experience of your business and how that experience connects with and appeals to your customers.

Take Apple, for instance. They don’t have a great brand because they have a great logo. They have a great brand because they offer simple, elegant experiences that work like magic. The logo is just a symbol of that experience.

A great visual identity can be an effective short-hand for a promise of a great experience. But a great brand experience can inspire people to take action. And a key element of your brand’s experience is your Web site.

3 elements of an experience

In order for your brand experience — and your Web site — to be effective it needs to connect with your customer on 3 different dimensions:

Aesthetic – this is the sensual dimension of the brand: how it tastes, what it smells like, what it looks like.
Meaning – this is the social impact dimension of the brand. For instance, fair trade coffee has a meaning above and beyond what the coffee tastes like or how effectively it perks you up. This can speak to people’s aspirations of who they want to be, as well.
Benefit – this is the “what’s in it for me” dimension. How does your product or service tangibly make life easier for your customers.

So how do you get your Web site to connect with your customers? You’ve got 3 main tools:

content (perhaps the most overlooked of the 3)
design
navigation.

Each of those elements has to reflect

the sensual experience your customers want — is it fun? is it staid? is it dependable? is it innovative?
the aspirational aspects your customers want — how does it make people or the world better or different?
the logical, tangible immediate benefits your business can bring

If they don’t, or if they’re pulling in different directions, you’re missing an opportunity to influence and inspire and to get the full benefit your site can bring.

Filed Under: Branding, User Experience Tagged With: Branding, content marketing, conversion, digital marketing, logo, online marketing, web design

What Buddha Can Teach You About Online Marketing

October 1, 2010 By Mitch Fanning 2 Comments

When Buddha was asked to sum up his teachings in a single word, he said, “awareness.”

According to Buddha, to find happiness, one must become aware of reality. This awareness of reality – as a Whole – is accessible to anyone who pays attention to actual experience.

However, many people (including yours truly) get so wrapped up in thought they sometimes cannot “see” reality as a Whole. Funny enough, it’s our own thoughts that keep us from becoming “aware.”

The same can be said about online marketing.

I’m not a Zen Master, but when it comes to online marketing, the same basic dilemma exists. People are confused and mystified about the subject. Especially, when it comes to making it work for their business.

As a result, they deal with this confusion the same way they would in their personal lives. They “think” they need (or want) the latest shiny tool, tactic, or superficial outcome. “If only we had more traffic coming to our site, more fans/followers, more newsletter subscribers, more…something.”

The reality many businesses forget is online marketing is not just about having more of something or better web design, twitter account, or SEO. It’s the combination of content, search engine optimization, and social media that creates results – becoming “aware” of (and using) all three in a unified manner is the Zen of Online Marketing.

Effective online marketing starts with educational content.

As long as there are long sales cycles, there will be a need for education. Content that attracts readers through search and social media channels can do its job of teaching and motivating your target audience to act (i.e. click-through, re-tweet, share, comment, reply, contact, sign-up). Remember, without content, Google wouldn’t exist and social communities would have little to share with each other.

Start here - While SEO and Social Media are important, organizations needs to get clear on what their content is (and then create some!) before spending time optimizing these areas. Having educational content (and a home for it) is required to create an effective SEO and Social presence.

Once upon a time, there was something called SEO copywriting.

By placing the right keywords in just the right places and densities one could achieve top rankings in search engines. That’s all you needed, or at least that’s what the “SEO experts” advertised.

Here’s the deal…

Much of what determines the ranking of any page is due to what happens off the page, in the form of links from other sites. Simply put, if your content isn’t good enough to attract authoritative, natural links, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” the content is. That’s why we always start with good educational content (for your target audience).

When it’s good, each piece of content – with it’s unique URL or web address – can be optimized to create a destination for other websites to link to with a clear entry point for search engines and searching.

On its own, SEO, can provide a lift in rankings and traffic, but when combined with educational content and social media marketing it’s like putting rocket fuel in your car.

Attracting links with social media

Getting links naturally has become the hardest part of SEO, which is why we’ve seen the mainstream emergence of social media marketing as a way to attract links with educational content.

Links from social networks and other authoritative websites and blogs can serve as a signal for search engines to decide how to rank your content in the search results. Links from within social networks can send potential clients directly to specific product or services pages.

True, your company may not be ready for social media, but it’s likely that your clients and competitors are already there.

Become a Zen master (of online marketing)

Sure, at first, it might be more exciting to experiment with individual tactics and tools, but to be successful, take a step back and become “aware” of how content, SEO, and social media can work together – as a Whole – in a coordinated effort.

As a buyer of business services, are you influenced by educational content you find online via search and social?