On Saturday March 26th of this year, we were lucky enough to be at the Hotel W in Atlanta for an Anne Holland presentation. She was the original founder of MarketingSherpa. I’ve known about her for years -- as any self-respecting person in the marketing field should. She had some real revenue producing tips.
I was lucky enough to talk with Anne after her presentation, and she said that I could quote her in this blog.
At Anne’s new website, she proves what we researchers prove day in and day out – you can’t always pick winners using your gut instincts. In fact, she had some zingers in her presentation where the entire audience was picking the wrong web site design which was costing the web site owners double digit and sometimes triple digit percentages in conversions.
How’d you like to increase your conversion 135%? Remember the formula for website success is traffic first and then conversion – not just traffic and the crap you think is good. Always test those websites with simple tests and statistically sound testing. It may be worth it to consult that consultant or statistician. Do not just test a few schmucks at a trade show that you show your laptop to either. You know who you are.
Here are some of the tips. There is a lot of anxiety over “the call to action.” Tests show that you should have a bigger button above the fold. In one case, Anne shares that they had a 135% increase with a button above the fold that was BIGGER. Can you make your button bigger and increase revenues? Perhaps. They also had 51% higher earnings per click with the specific bigger button tested.
Did you know that people who use “search buttons” are 7% more likely to buy? In one case study featured on Anne’s site you can learn about how using a big green “go” search button outperforms the traditional rectangle “start” search button. In fact, they found there was a 20% search increase (multiply that by the aforementioned 7% more likely to buy – cha-ching).
She also notes that Dustin Curtis had a specific hypertext to have people follow him on twitter – this change resulted in a 75% increase in followers. Tweet- boom! This case study is available on Anne’s website (at the time this was written – see link at the end/below).
She also showed how you can’t just go to her site and copy what’s there on your website. You have to test for your audience. In one case study, she was showing “images along with text” versus “just text alone.” For those of us in the audience, the images were better. However, for the target market of IT decision makers -- there was a 13% increase without the images! IT guys hate anything, images included, which smack of “marketing sugary hype.”
And, what we find in market research is true with website usability testing too. That is, perception is reality. A “bogus security logo” yielded 20% more orders when placed by a shopping cart right by the “place order” button. Fewer cart abandonments too with the right presentation.
So where do you start? Follow Anne’s sage advice and start where the money is and work backwards. Put your effort where the money is first. – Want instant success – she liked the idea of sending a friend a coupon. Hmmm? I wonder if my friends in green energy have tried getting friends to refer friends for their green programs. We know the green “go” button is good – how about we couple it with a coupon or donation to save salmon? Can you do a coop with a sports team and offer some tickets to winners?
Additional sage advice from Anne was to stand six feet from your monitor and make sure you can still tell what’s going on. Perhaps that means no drop downs if you are a “drop down website programming dude.”
For those of you attempting to build a list, you might note that “send my free report” has a 22.9% improvement over “start my free subscription” in Anne’s test. Both were “free” – the best price – but “report” gets more opting in to your information stream than “subscription.”
Note that these tips are available in greater detail at Anne’s new website which is a called: www.whichtestwon.com . Go there and win.