Category: Brain Host

2011 Conversion Conference Recap

Today we’ve got a special blog post from Alison, our Media Management Director. Alison recently attended the 2011 Conversion Conference in NYC.

Optimizing your website and web presence is no longer just a game of keywords and traffic, but now a challenge in usability, user friendly design, and conversions. This year, we were pleased to represent Brain Host as a company at Conversion Conference in New York City, a conference focused exclusively on improving website conversions through strategies and tactics on the following: optimizing headline, copy and graphics, split and multivariate testing, landing page principles, personalization, ecommerce and lead generation, using Google Website Optimizer, optimizing social and mobile and design and usability mistakes.

Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners.com and Conversion Conference Chairperson, made a promise at the beginning of conference that we were going to learn so much our ‘heads were going to explode,’ and after two full days of taking in all we could, we think that promise was fulfilled.

Here’s a summary of some of the key points from some of the sessions we attended at Conversion Conference:

• Tim Ash provided the Opening Keynote: Conversion in a Social World. He provided the top five strategies to increase conversion rates in an era of likes, tweets and plus ones. Ash first states the Rule of 150: With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior is based on personal loyalties and direct contacts.
  • Strategy #1: Make sharing easy – put hot triggers in front of motivated people.
  • Strategy #2: Humanize the computer experience – make your site user friendly and more natural.
  • Strategy #3: Demonstrate social proof – people only care about their own cultural/social tribes.
  • Strategy #4: Analytics is extremely powerful – “Go wide and deep and measure everything.”
  • Strategy #5: Fight massive filtering with content domination – content is king. (Facebook filters out 99.2% of the content in your stream – you only see 0.8% of wall events of the people you follow.)

• The Science Behind Abandonment Recovery
  • Ben Jesson, of Conversion Rate Experts, and Charles Nicholls, of SeeWhy, dove into why users may abandon a conversion path and how to nurture those prospects to recover those users who abandoned in the buying cycle. Jesson and Nicholls state that 71% of shoppers say the abandon because of price or that they weren’t ready to make the purchase. If you do not apply remarketing tactics it is likely that 8% of those prospects will return to buy, but with remarketing in place 26% will return. In a typical ‘starter’ campaign (in the email sense), you should remind (immediately), reassure (within 23 hours), and promote (in 6 days and 23 hours).

• Optimizing the Purchase Process
  • Glenn Eldermann, of Wine Enthusiast, Raquel Hirsch, of WiderFunnel, and Joe Weller, of RealNetworks, discussed how to decide what to test on a site, how to develop test plans and creating a user experience that makes it easy for visitors to do business with you. One of the first recommendations was to always start with A/B split testing before multivariate testing – the wireframe of your landing page will ultimately have more impact than testing 7,832 colors of your call to action button. You should also make sure your website provides relevance and clarity for your user and not anxiety or distraction.

• Monetizing Your Traffic
  • John Lawson, of 3^rd Power, Inc, and Mike Volpe, of Hubspot, discussed how blogging, social media and SEO can feed your inbound marketing machine helping to generate more leads, build loyalty and eventually turn fans and followers into buyers. They explained that social media isn’t anything new – we have always had society so social media has always existed. It’s become a low cost solution with high end technology. But most companies jump into social media without a plan when you need a plan and strategy like any other marketing efforts.

• Tactics from the Trenches
  • Tom Funk and Reid Greenberg, of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, dove into a series of small, quick, time-tested changes that can make an immediate impact on sales. Some of those tactics including utilizing clear messaging through the check out process – eliminate friction and utilizing “Social Chiclets” – such as the Facebook ‘Like’, Twitter ‘Tweet’, Google ‘+1’.

• Getting Started with Landing Page Testing
  • Neil Patel, of KISSmetrics, and Eric J. Hansen, of SiteSpect, discussed  common landing page blunders and traps many people fall into when testing new pages including: improper factoring – poor or no isolation of changes in the test, and not being tactical or thinking ahead.

• Amy Africa, of Eight by Eight, provided the second day’s Keynote: Websites for Lizards – Online Selling to the Reptilian Brain. Africa provided twenty five facts about us as humans, human behavior and how it relates to marketing. A few of these facts include:
  • You are self centered – you care about you and are worried about protecting yourself.
  • You like contrast – our brains like things that we can easily see and make decisions on.
  • You are visual – our brains process images 40x faster than anything else.
  • You respond to emotion – our memories are separated by emotion.
  • You are predictable – you panic when we do something wrong.

• Social Success in a Social Eco-System
  • Ric dragon, of DragonSearch, and Justin Rondeau, of Template Zone, presented on the difference between appealing to an audience through a search engine versus a social media platform. Roughly 17% of time spent online is spent on Facebook, but social media is not just Facebook and Twitter, it also includes blogs, forums, and news aggregators. There are three factors that you should always remember when creating a social media strategy: people want to be recognized, people want to be liked and people want to feel safe.

• Integrating Conversion Optimization
  • Todd Barrs, of Webroot Software, and Brian Jones, of Dealer.com, discussed that conversion optimization is a team effort where strategic planning and coordination is crucial to success. Conversion optimization cannot operate in isolation so performance metrics must be aligned across an entire organization. Also presented was the CRO process: crawling phase, walking phase and running phase:
  • Crawling Phase – quick actions and small tests showing micro conversions
  • Walking Phase – project becomes timeline based with results based on definable ROI
  • Running Phase – long term commitment with dedicated resources and sophisticated tool set.

• What Gets Measured Gets Done
  • Joe Megibow, of Expedia, and Jennifer Veesenmeyer, of Stratigent, shared insights on how they utilize analytics to improve their sites and drive conversions. Megibow explained the split testing is taken very seriously at Expedia they launch three tests per week, utilize two testing platforms, and have an eight member test team. Three takeaways would be to always define test lengths upfront, define the KPI and distribute widely and consistently, and review results and aggregate.

• The last two sessions included Live Site Reviews with Tim Ash, SiteTuners, Byron White, IdeaLauch, Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy, and Steve Krug, Author, Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy, along with the closing Keynote. A few notable quotes from these sessions include:
  • “Squeeze the bottom of the funnel until the money comes out.” – Tim Ash
  • “Don’t over estimate peoples’ capacity for stupidity.” – Tim Ash
  • “Turn browsers into believers.” – Conversion Rate Optimizer Mantra

Overall the conference provided a great opportunity to gain more knowledge about conversion optimization and finding out how other companies are handling their testing and measuring. If there was one key thing to walk away with, it would be: ABT – Always Be Testing!