Category : ROI – Conversion Planning
What is A/B Testing – Multivariate Testing for Websites
A/B testing—or multivariate testing—is an experiment that you can use to increase the productivity of your website. A/B testing shows visitors alternate versions of the same web page simultaneously and randomly, to help the website owner find out what elements of the page need to be fixed.
Although A/B testing can be applied to any website, it is most often used for testing e-commerce websites, because you can directly track conversions, and see just how certain elements of a page are limiting or increasing sales.
E-Commerce Website Testing
You can test just about everything on an e-commerce website, but it isn’t necessary or feasible to test everything at once. There are three key areas that get tested the most often, and are usually the most important parts of an e-commerce site. These are the call to action buttons, the product placement and the shopping cart.
A/B Testing E-Commerce Call to Action Buttons
The call to action button is probably the most A/B tested aspect of an e-commerce website. You can analyze the results of different colors, fonts, sizes and more through A/B testing. The different options will show up for different visitors, and you can test their reactions through conversions. The call to action button that does the best can be placed permanently on the site, and we can continue on to test a different aspect.
A/B Testing Product Placement
How do the products on your website invite a customer to click through and purchase? You can A/B test products by putting them in a different placement on the page, making images larger or smaller, or even renaming some of the products.
A/B Testing the Shopping Cart
They’ve followed your product placement, clicked your call-to-action, but then they abandon your shopping car. Why? There are a number of reasons that people abandon their shopping carts online, and we list a few below:
- Login
No one wants to remember another password! A/B test giving them the option of just checking in as a guest, against having to set up an account.
- Asking for too much information
You don’t need to know their birthday in order to sell them a product! Try A/B testing an option where they only have to fill in the essentials, against the option where they have to fill in everything.
- Using a trustmark
If the customer doesn’t trust you—they won’t buy from you. Try A/B testing with a McAfee trustmark, and see if your customers respond well.
A/B testing is a great tool to see what works and what doesn’t on your website, and it’s a feature that Smart Solutions offers to all of our customers. Get the most out of your website, and let us know if you want to try out some A/B testing on your site.
If you don’t currently have an e-commerce website, but are considering one, we’d love to help you convert your site to e-commerce! Give us a call or send us an email, and we’ll set up a meeting to discuss it.
How Mind Mapping Helps Smart Solutions’ Clients
For awhile now, our team has utilized Mind Mapping, from the tools from a great client, Mindjet. Mind Mapping has assisted in organizing client’s site architecture while easily and quickly highlighting areas of weaknesses for content structure. Recently, KM World Magazine interviewed Smart Solutions and posted an article, titled Enriching Web Sites and Engage Customers Better.
Excerpt:
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Firms that rely on advanced Internet services for their marketing, customer relations and other business processes are turning to knowledge management solutions that measure customer response to Web sites, in order to improve traffic and to identify customer preferences so they can retain them and boost sales.
Smart Solutions, a software and Web development company, was working with a local nonprofit firm that wanted to redevelop its Web site to gain new members and achieve higher attendance at events, many of them fundraisers.
“The non-profit wanted to drive traffic to the site, then have visitors engaged in a meaningful way,” says Smart Solutions President Mark Knowles. Smart Solutions was using MindManager 8 from Mindjet for meetings and to collect relevant information from the Internet and other resources. A feature of the software enabled Knowles to map the existing structure of the nonprofit organization’s Web site.
“By exporting the navigation structure of the site into MindManager, we were able to see the relationships between different [pages and elements],” Knowles says. MindManager displayed the navigation structure as different branches from the same tree, and it was easy to see that some branches weren’t grouped together properly, according to Knowles. That meant that it was difficult for users to navigate.
“The site was static. That tends to happen because Web sites are built organically, a page at a time. After a while, they become disorganized,” he says. “People would come there, but they would leave quickly.”
That’s if they found the site at all. According to Knowles, part of the organization’s problem was branding. People could find the site if they knew what to look for, but they would likely miss it if their search was less specific.
Google, Yahoo and similar services use site navigation as part of their search parameters, according to Knowles. “That’s part of the SEO [search engine optimization] puzzle,” he says.
Once the site was revamped, it was much more intuitive and easier to use, with the nonprofit organization benefiting as a result. Some wording was changed as well, helping to catch the attention of the search engines.
As a result, the site has seen a 25 percent increase in traffic and a 40 percent increase in conversions (memberships and attendance at events), Knowles says.
Full Article
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Mind Mapping, as well as the other products we use and love, help our team deliver client solutions for increased web traffic and conversions on their web sites.
Twitter Background Design Concepts
So, you’re a business and have taken the leap to setup Twitter account, congratulations! One element that often gets overlooked when using Twitter for business is creating a custom background image that speaks to your business objectives. (See our Smart Solutions Twitter Background…heck, follow us as well!) If you have questions on the information below or would like us to create a Twitter background for you, just give us a call, we’d be happy to assist!
Consistent with your main marketing brand and messages, your Twitter background should include:
1) Your logo/brand mark (typically set vertically)
2) Your tagline/brand message
3) Main contact information
4) Call to Action
5) Visual Image(s) that connect to your brand and are appealing
Image Considerations:
1) The national standard screen resolution is still 1024 x 768 – develop your image to meet that requirement and beyond (we recommend 1600 x 1200 pixels)
2) For a 1024 x 768 resolution, you have approximately 120 pixels on the left to work with your message (otherwise Twitter window will overlay on top).
3) For your avatar, use a 73 x 73 pixel image
4) Twitter limits background image size to 800k (although for speed, you want to stay away from the upper end of that)
How to implement a Twitter Background
5 Steps to Edit Twitter Background
A Reputable Twitter Example….
Zappos CEO on Twitter
Tips For Launching a New Website While Keeping SEO In Mind
We have potential clients call frequently with the intent of retooling their web site. The redesign is brought on typically by a multitude of reasons: “The design is old.”; “We have a new brand.” ; “We want to get found by more prospects.” Businesses and organizations that come with a goal of creating a successful balance of creative, search and content are the ones we know are serious.
Before moving or launching your new site, read the tips below and take note:
1) Define your goals
A redesign should focus on ways to impact your business, not just look pretty. What that means is every decision, from design layout, site architecture and SEO should be focused on your goals. Determine your goals in two ways:
The first is to determine what kind of traffic you would like to drive to your site.
Keyword research applies here.
Second, determine what you would like your visitor to do when they land on your site.
Conversion planning applies here. Conversion planning is a guide to the hierarchy of your site so that you guide your visitor to the conversion point (be it a page to read, a product to purchase, a form filled out, a phone call, etc.) and take them through a preplanned path to meet your goal – more leads coming through the door.
2) SEO Assest Inventory
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in launching a new site is to not protect your previous and current marketing efforts that have brought you awareness and conversions to date. In other words: great content, keywords you’re ranking with, inbound links to designated landing pages (and all important pages), successful conversion paths. This is SOOO important.
Many web design experts miss this when the design focus is more important than internet marketing. Discuss with your web designer and developer a plan to setup 301 redirects from your previous indexed URLs (the pages Google and other engines know about) to your new site structure.
3) Setup your Site Architecture To Match The Needs of Your Audience (both Human and Spider)
I’ve heard the saying that “spiders are like 4 year olds with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).” With the growing statistic, even of your human audience, of having a total of 7 seconds to make your first impression online, you can see that both site visitors need the ability to consume information quickly. A spider needs to see keyword directed content in the HTML of your page (like meta data for each page and content of the page as close to the top as possible, lean-mean code basically) – a human needs to quickly navigate and consume content specific to their interest. Setting up the site to create strategic landing pages, then drill down to topic specific pages through links (i.e. siloing) is a helpful advantage to delivering clean, clear content to both audiences.
4) Plan for an Ongoing Content Strategy
One of the best ways to grow awareness and traffic to your site and convert visitors is to develop a strategy for ongoing development for content. Quality, UNIQUE content (i.e. do not copy/paste from other sites) is king to attracting your audience (both human and engine spider) and keep them coming back for more. Build content, build your business faster.
Blogs have the history for frequently updated content, and spiders know it….a blog on your website is good. Not a blog as your website…I said a blog on your website. (future post)
5) Have Web Analytics In Place; Monitor Results
The only way to know whether you are satisfying your goal (and delivering results to your business to make up for the investment!) is to track and monitor your increase in visitors and conversions. As a general rule, if your end result is too design focused, you’ll see fewer leads; If it’s too search focused, you’ll see fewer conversions. With balance in mind, results you will have…your boss will thank you for it! Read more on Analytics
6) Test, Test and Test
“Oh testing, how we love thee.” What a way to determine what’s working and what’s not? Become friends with Google Website Optimizer. Testing is like a focus group, a controlled science experiment (9th grade science comes to mind). Testing demonstrates whether the influence your agency, design firm, neighbor or web developer offered is good advice. Let your visitors tell you what works best for them…then adapt 
Brand Trust Advice for Start-up E-Commerce Sites
Brand trust is simply defined by the general opinion that people have of your company and whether or not they believe you will deliver a quality product. Having brand trust is vital to the importance of every business. The task of creating brand trust in an online world can be exceptionally challenging because your customers are buying a product that they can’t hold and touch, from a company they can’t see. For this reason, the importance of brand trust is even more crucial when marketing on the web.
Here are three major aspects to consider when creating your brand trust strategy:
For startup websites, the most important factor in establishing brand trust is quality graphic design. Through graphic design, a one man shop can automatically give the impression of a multi-million dollar operation merely by having a website with a professional look. This is a huge advantage in the online world that every start-up should take full advantage of. Have an experienced proficient graphic designer create a dynamic design for your website. It will be well worth the investment.
Note: It can also help conversion rates to have security logos from the BBB or your SSL provider tactfully placed within your design.
The second important aspect to consider is customer service. It is essential to have contact information that is easily accessible and complete on your website. A 1-800 number is a must, as it allows someone to be contacted immediately if the customer has a question. If you do not plan on having someone answer the phone full time, provide an answering machine. Physical addresses, emails, and even contact forms displayed visibly on your website will increase your level of trust with potential buyers. Also, be sure to fulfill orders quickly and update customers with email notifications when their items have been shipped. Failing to complete orders in a timely fashion and allowing delayed product arrival to the customer will encourage them to look elsewhere next time they shop.
Finally, consider your website information. Customer reviews for your products, blogs, articles, and various other forms of content can help communicate information and knowledge about your industry to its consumers. It can also increase your ranking in the search engines and drive traffic to your site. Organizing all of this information in a user-friendly way is imperative so that customers can find what they are looking for. Clutter is bad, so always make sure that your designer is analyzing each page on your site to ensure that the content stays within design guidelines.
Establishing brand trust is not always easy or intuitive, but if it’s done right it can help set the foundation of future online success.
New Design Trends Lend to Better Success Rates
Too often in a prospective client conversation, at the moment when a redesign is discussed, the client is thinking more about all of the information they would like to present instead of how they want to present it. Giving too much user choice as to ‘where to go next’ is a trend that’s dying. No longer are there new sites with multi-level navigation front and center, with an endless plethora of choice.
Smart designers and smart SEOs know better. It’s up to us to guide the client to best understand who’s coming to the site and what they want. Drop down navigation menus are being replaced with two or three call to action buttons, proactively guiding a user through the site…to the ultimate conversion.
Now, each page has a purpose, a placement in a highly organized or siloed structure, a call to action; information combined with a gentle (or not so subtle) push to the next step toward conversion.
Smart sites are designed with the ultimate purpose in mind – which may vary from purchasing product, filling out a lead generation form, calling direct or visiting a particular page. They work backwards internally and create the site around a specific and direct set of keywords and actions they would like to be found for and what products and services they offer.
Recent home page designs are clean and straight-forward, which guide the user to the next step and meets them at the point of their buying process (whether research or purchase driven). Since you have an average of 15 seconds to get your point across and invite a visit to click deeper into your web site, the need for simplicity is imperative.
Does your home page have a purpose? Does your site have a goal or set of goals?
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