Diamond Website Conversion’s Comments (group member since Mar 18, 2010)

Diamond Website Conversion’s comments from the Conversations on Website Conversion group.

When was the last time you really looked at the call to action buttons on your website? How about your content?

Do you view it as “filler” or do you use it to help you make a sale by catering to the needs and desires of various types of site visitors?

Successful websites test even the smallest elements of each web page to ensure that they utilize the most effective presentation techniques. As you consider your calls to action and their point-of-action assurances, what changes could you make to encourage your customers to take that next step?

As you read your content, how could you alter the copywriting style to answer the unasked questions brought to the table by each of the four customer persona types?

The answers to these questions will determine whether your site communicates confidence and desirability to your customers by relating to the way they buy or whether it confuses them, ultimately driving them into the arms of your competitors.

In the aftermath of Black Friday, we’re all looking for ways to push forward with sales until the maniacal holiday shopping season culminates with a few hours rest on Christmas Day, and then starting over for a new year.

For online stores, it can be more difficult than ever to keep people on your web page as they chase sales and hunt for bargains.

But paying attention to customer needs and providing great customer service still earns trust better than too-good-to-be-true deals, so in the midst of all the holiday hustle and bustle, it’s still important to focus on key issues such as those presented in this week’s chapters: credibility, product presentation, site navigation, and cross-selling/up-selling.

As an online retailer, what are some ways you can focus on fulfilling customer desires and needs even during the busiest shopping season of the year?

As we continue to learn more about how to optimize our websites for greatest customer satisfaction and increased conversion rates, it’s important to remember that every decision made should provide optimal customer usability.

Every change should highlight what’s in it for the customer, and when done correctly, the sales process will benefit by increasing customer satisfaction throughout the buying process.

While technicalities and business-oriented language might seem to make sense from the company’s point of view, remember that the customer is more concerned about what he can gain from each element of your website than he is about what a wonderful company you are.

In his mind, you will only be a wonderful company if you meet his needs the way he wants them to be met. Websites that seek to conform to the customer’s needs will always perform better than those that try to force the customer to conform to their operational model.

With this underlying philosophy in place, it’s easier to look at the four chapters we read this week and consider how we can make changes to product presentation, load time, the AIDAS process, and our security/privacy function and indicators in order to put the customer in the place of highest priority.

This week’s chapters on purchasing, tools, error prevention, and browser compatibility remind us once again that great websites are about making the buying process as easy as possible for each consumer and giving them options while still keeping them focused on the task at hand.

Each element of your website should move the customer forward to the end goal while making them feel in charge of the process through options such as various payment methods and different ways of learning about your products.

There are many more tools and options available online than any one website can utilize effectively. However it’s helpful to know what’s out there so you can determine if your current system is the best way to accomplish your goals.

Did you take the time to do the exercises presented in the chapters? If so, what did you learn about the way your site functions and presents information as compared to the way your competitors do?

This week’s reading covers a broad range of topics, each of which could take up a lot more space than they receive in the book. However, I think the goal of the authors was not so much to provide a comprehensive discussion of usability, look and feel, searchability, and layout, but rather to ask some probing questions that will spur us to take a more knowledgeable look at some elements of our websites that we might take for granted.

Does your search function really contribute value to your website, or does it add to user frustration by returning low-value results?

Can customers see where they need to go immediately, or do they have to hover over a particular link in order to see its label (meaning most users will never find it at all)?

Is the most important information on your website really the most visible according to eye tracking and layout studies?

Do those dancing monkeys support your intended professional image?

These are just a few of the questions that could be asked in order to create ideas for testing and improvement. What are some additional ways you could test the user interaction functions of your website in order to find out whether your site makes it easy and desirable for shoppers to become buyers?

Chapter 15 discusses the many ways you can categorize the various items on your site in order to make them easier for customers to find. Often, it’s a good idea to list items under multiple categories since you don’t know whether someone will search for a black suit under “suits,” “business attire,” or “evening wear.”
As you’re walking through these questions on your own website, remember that it’s never enough to make a guess regarding what will keep your customers happy. Instead, it’s vital to test, test, test before you make permanent changes in order to determine what will work best for the group of people shopping at your online store.

Chapter 14 explores different stages in the process of buying.

Not every potential customer who visits your site will be on the verge of making a purchase. Some will be comparison shopping, some will be browsing, and others will have found your website while searching for something else.

You need to provide answers to the questions each type of shopper is asking, and you need to put them where they can easily be found. If, for instance, I am browsing through camcorders on your site, and I suddenly wonder whether a particular model has a warranty, how difficult is it for me to find that information?

You can encourage shoppers to continue browsing by answering their questions at the point of action rather than making them dig.

This week’s reading covers a broad range of topics, each of which could take up a lot more space than they receive in the book.

However, I think the goal of the authors was not so much to provide a comprehensive discussion of usability, look and feel, searchability, and layout, but rather to ask some probing questions that will spur us to take a more knowledgeable look at some elements of our websites that we might take for granted.

Does your search function really contribute value to your website, or does it add to user frustration by returning low-value results?

Can customers see where they need to go immediately, or do they have to hover over a particular link in order to see its label (meaning most users will never find it at all)?

Is the most important information on your website really the most visible according to eye tracking and layout studies?

Do those dancing monkeys support your intended professional image? These are just a few of the questions that could be asked in order to create ideas for testing and improvement.

What are some additional ways you could test the user interaction functions of your website in order to find out whether your site makes it easy and desirable for shoppers to become buyers?

Chapter 15 reminds us that our customers don’t always know as much about our products as we do. For this reason, we must categorize our products with the customer in mind, making navigation as easy as possible and ensuring that each customer understands what the categories represent. Consider listing items in multiple categories in order to reach the greatest number of viewers. And as always, test each change before you make random guesses as to what will work best for your site.

Chapter 14 of Always Be Testing raises some excellent questions regarding how easy or difficult it is for your customers to find the information they’re looking for. Since they won’t always ask the same questions you would, it’s important to consider your website from a variety of viewpoints and to provide answers to questions that might be asked by shoppers at all different stages in the buying process. In addition, make sure your website addresses various levels of knowledge and that you have considered how great your customers’ need for your particular products might be.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that you must address each buying modality on every page of your site. It is vital, however, that no matter what page a visitor lands on, he can immediately understand what your business does and why you are the best company for him to do business with. Known as your unique value proposition, or UVP, this idea should be communicated in a concise, direct statement that enables customers who have never heard of you to recognize immediately what the purpose of your business is. Chapter 13 offers ideas about how to determine your UVP and how to communicate this idea clearly on your landing page.

Relatively few web users wander randomly to your site by accident. Instead, they’ve come there looking for an answer to a question, or perhaps a group of questions. Whether they landed on your site through a Google site, a PPC ad, or a link from another website, they clicked on your site because they thought you had something to offer them.

The question you must ask yourself then, is do you?
Do you have something to offer each and every visitor that comes to your site, or do you cater only to one type of buyer?

Chapter 12 thoroughly discusses the various buying modalities and personas. Buyer types (which correspond roughly to the psychological theory of the four temperaments) approach shopping and purchasing differently, meaning that you must offer something for each type of buyer on your website in order to capture the attention of the greatest number of visitors.

As you read through this recap of the testing cycle presented in Part One, what points stood out to you as having the greatest impact on your current view of testing as opposed to how you viewed the process in the past?

My greatest shift in thinking was understanding that all tests can be valuable, even if the results don’t show me an increase in conversions. The goal is not necessarily to achieve positive results every time, but rather to learn something about my customers and the way they interact with my website, thereby propelling me forward to finding a better way to meet their needs and keep them coming back.

Also, I appreciated the timely reminder to compare apples to apples, enabling test results to show meaningful results that pinpoint precisely what changes will bring about the greatest improvement in overall conversion.

One of the greatest things learned by Jigsaw, the company involved in chapter 10’s case study, is that effective web design speaks to viewers emotionally.

This realization enabled them to make changes that would capture the attention of readers and to implement changes designed to propel the viewer forward to action.

As you prepare to implement a testing strategy, this idea can help you develop workable strategies for various testing elements, as well as helping you understand how your visitors use your site.

You can use this information sitewide to increase performance and to effectively manage your testing process and results.

Rather than spending hours discussing which plans might work based on guesses, wouldn’t it be better to know up front what your goals are and how to achieve those goals? That’s what testing can do for you.

How can you cater to the emotional needs of your audience as you begin to implement a culture of testing for your online business

Once you’ve set aside a portion of your budget for testing, how do you determine where to allocate those resources so that you get the greatest return on investment?

The authors provide a hierarchy pyramid to help you determine where your goals fall in order of potential impact.

You can approach the pyramid in several ways. You can start with needs at the bottom of the pyramid and work your way up, thereby making sure all basic functions operate correctly before moving on to issues of persuasion; you can approach problems in order of effort involved, starting with low effort changes and working toward more complex ones; or you can start with the top of the pyramid, since the persuasion items there will have the greatest impact on your conversion rates.

What are the pros and cons of each method, and which do you think would yield the greatest results for your business?

In this chapter, the authors discuss in detail the four buying modalities demonstrated by customers visiting your site.

The Competitive, the Spontaneous, the Humanistic, and the Methodical each want different things from your website and from their buying experiences. The most successful websites will cater to each of the four modalities, but it’s important to remember that if your off-site marketing campaign targets any one of the four, the scent trail you create later should support that advertising theme, enabling customers to easily follow the scent from the ad to your landing page and ultimately to the conversion page.

Scent plays a large role in customer satisfaction, but before you can create an effective scent trail, you must know who your target customer is. You can get to know your target customer by creating a persona based on one of your audience segments, generally aligning with the various buying modalities.

How can a better understanding of scent and the role it plays in delivering target customers to your website help shape your testing goals?

Will A/B or multivariate testing be more effective in optimizing your website?

While there are plenty of proponents on both sides of the fence, this really isn’t the right question to ask. It displays a misunderstanding of the nature of testing by pitting tools designed to accomplish different tasks against each other.

A better question might be “Given the goals of my website optimization strategy, which tool will help me accomplish those goals most effectively?”

While the difference is subtle, it’s important to realize that the two types of testing are not diametrically opposed to one another. Instead, they are tools designed to perform different jobs.

Neither one can be 100% effective in every situation. Your choice of tools will depend on what your optimization goals are, what you know and don’t know, and what information you need to propel you forward. How should this shift in thinking affect the way your marketing team approaches website optimization and the testing options discussed in this chapter?

The Chapter Six case study provides an excellent sample strategy for taking your online marketing to the next level.

By setting aside assumptions, you can move your business forward, continually optimizing in order to meet the changing demands of your varied audience.

Have your optimization efforts reached a plateau because you’ve been focusing on linear processes only rather than asking bigger questions? How can you find out what’s missing from your website and capitalize on the knowledge to draw more people in?

Have you swallowed the Average Person Myth? If so, then it’s time to start asking some of the bigger questions presented in Chapter Five in order to meet your optimization goals.

Bigger questions allow you to accommodate the unique variety of customer types that visit your website, while still enabling you to meet the challenges presented when marketing to an online audience.

Two concepts captured my attention as I read this chapter. First, Eisenberg discusses the Curse of Knowledge, first described by Chip and Dan Heath.

Rarely do people consider the fact that knowledge brings with it a limitation. When we understand that limitation, however, we can take steps to overcome it—steps such as testing to find out what our customers really think and what will help them the most.

The second concept I parked on was that of scent. My little pom-a-poo is no hunter, but even he would be confused if he were following a scent trail that suddenly changed to something else entirely. Our customers are no different. When we entice them to our page with a certain idea, but greet them with something totally different when they arrive, they become disoriented.

As you consider these ideas this week, how would a better understanding of the Curse of Knowledge and scent change your view of website testing and conversion?