COURTLAND BROOKS - Mar 5 - I'm covering the Conversion Conference in San Francisco. Here's a the highlights of the takeaways from Jared Spool, Tim Ash and other gods of usability, from Day 1.
- Think of order abandonment as a buying signal and part of the buying process. Remarket via email immediately with title 'Oops, was there a problem with your membership.' Follow up exactly 24 hours later reminding them of the original deal, and exactly 7 days later with a new offer. Link back to the order so they can complete it.
- Don't use your standard templates for remarketing. Personalize and use a different template for best results.
- Don't mention price in your first and second remarketing emails.
- Consider signing up for one of Professor BJ Fogg's (of Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab) persuasion camps or just buy his book on Persuasive Technology.
- Use the free BTBuckets (or Omniture's paid tool Test and Target) for better behavioral targeting. Also Tynt for tracking copy-paste content sharing (still the vast majority of sharing).
- Use AddThis or ShareThis for social sharing of your content and make sure to link to BTBuckets.
- Use UTM.to shortened links to track links as it works in unison with Google Analytics.
- Nielsen Homescan is the best service for social segmentation.
- Use auto-play videos carefully. They're generally a bad idea as they're intrusive. Best to embed with clear pop-up to an overlay video.
- Video spokespeople (a la Talking Heads) work well for conversions. Keep it short.
- Use Brightcove, Wistia or Oculu for video hosting on your web page so you don't lose traffic to Youtube/Vimeo.
- Blip.tv, Viddler and Tubemogul offer video syndication.
- If you must use a promo codes box in your sign up box, also include a 'want a promo code?' link and allow people to reference a promo code. See Macys.com for example of this new best practice.
- Keep your nav menus to 4 items.
- When using images of people, have them look at the area on the web page, i.e. your call-to-acton, where you want users to focus. Smiling people staring at the user will hammer conversions.
- Use Optimizely.com or Google Optimizer for AB testing.
- Rotating offers suck for conversions.
- People will only use your navigation if the content on the page fails.
- Put social proof in the right bar of your pages. i.e. 14k happy users, 144k fans, etc.
- Try the 6ft call to action test. Stand back from the screen 6ft and see if you can still see the call to action.
- The colors you use for your call-to-actions should be unique to those buttons.
- Use pics of women. Men prefer women, and women prefer women.
- Don't mess with conventions, be conventional with your designs.
- Clearly separate your call-to-action from your other buttons.
- If you use testimonials, just pick a couple, and bold out keywords to make them scannable, and link out to more testimonials.
- Remember Sturgeon's law. '90% of everything if crap.' Don't design crap.
- Experience is about the gap between activities.
- Consider the Kano Model. Features that Generate Excitement and delight, eventually become Basic Expectations, and you'll need to come up with new Excitement Generators.
- Don't bother with satisfaction surveys. Do delight surveys. Satisfaction won't help you get word-of-mouth.
- Jared Spool's 3 questions to identify if you have a great design culture.
- Vision - “Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now?”
- Feedback – “In the last 6 weeks have you spent 2 hours watching someone use your, or a competitors design?”
- Culture – “In the last 6 weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design error.” - Risk averse organizations produce crap.
I'll add more notes tomorrow. This is a killer conference. I'm so glad I'm here to learn and share with you.
The next Conversion Conferences are in Chicago, Florida, Dusseldorf and London, later this year.
