Information Marketing Conversations

The home page of your website is the most important page. When you look at the traffic statistics of pretty much any website, the home page gets more traffic than any other page. Your home page also has the best chance to rank high in the search engines since most people link to your home page (as do your internal pages). So better make it good.

Here’s how to go about designing a home page that converts.

This is the process I’m using when evaluating or designing home pages.

1. Map out buyer personas
2. Craft a value proposition
3. Build a connection
4. Use proper visuals
5. Define most wanted action
6. Create call to action
7. Write user oriented copy
8. Add trust elements
9. Test length
10. Check load speed

I’ll touch upon all of these points below.

Let’s start with the obvious stuff

Logo

People expect to see your logo in the top left corner. Clicking on the logo takes you to the home page from every internal page. Don’t mess with it.

You don’t need to hire an expensive logo designer. Text logos are just as good, only with 1% of the cost.

You can create a beautiful logo by using text. Pick a beautiful font and a background color you like – and voilà! A designer from Edicy took just 15 minutes to create this logo for an imaginary company:

Image credit: Tajo Oja

Navigation

People are used to 2 kinds of menus: horizontal and vertical. Don’t innovate here – familiar layouts work best.

Remember people spend most of their time on OTHER websites. People don’t need to see a menu to know where the ‘contact’ link is at – by default they look for it as the last link in a horizontal menu or the bottom link in a vertical one. Ensure they find it there.

Keep it simple and obvious:

The Personal MBA menu:

All is clear, right? No surprises here.

Now let’s look at a menu gone wrong. Clever innovation? Not! They make you move your mouse onto a number to reveal what link it is. Not many will have the patience:

Footer

People expect to find your contact information in the footer. Make sure it’s there.

Mapping buyer personas

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are essentially a specific group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.

Optimizing your site for buyer personas gets you away from an egotistical point of view and gets you to talk to users about their needs and wants. What people care about are themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success.

Why use them?

Essentially it’s about knowing who you are selling to, what is their situation, what are they thinking, their needs and hesitations. If you’d know the exact person you’re selling to and the problems they have, you’d be in a much better position to sell them. RightNow Technologies increased their conversions 4x by building a persona focused site.

How to build them?

The truth is that most companies have only the faintest idea what lies behind the buying decision. We presume an awful lot. The buyer persona is a tool that can help you see deeper  into the buyer’s thinking.

Use interviews with existing customers to map out different personas. To get more information on this read The Buyer Persona Manifesto (free pdf). Here’s a free webinar recording on buyer personas I recommend checking out.

When personas fail you

Ideally the value proposition and everything else you present on your home page (and other pages) come from the buyer personas. That being said, some products are better defined by the job they do than the customers they serve.

Here’s Clay Christensen explaining job based marketing:

Value proposition

This is the most important part of your home page. Your value proposition is a concise chunk of text (headline, sub-headline and and maybe a few bullets points) that should address these questions:

• What is this site about?
• What can I do here?
• How is it useful to me?
• Why should I buy from you instead of the competition?

People’s attention span and patience are extremely limited. The world suffers from attention-deficit disorder. If they don’t get the answers from your home page within seconds, they will leave. Nobody will TRY to understand what you’re about nor read long pages of text. If you haven’t captivated them on your home page, you’ve lost them.

There are several ways to craft and present your value proposition.

Campaign Monitor:


What I like about this value proposition

• Bold headline – stating what it is and who is it for
• A specific, benefit-oriented paragraph underneath describing the service
• Big visual to support the text

What I’d improve

• Clarify how is it different from the competition

300 milligrams:

What I like about this value proposition

• Big, clear headline you cannot miss
• A specific, benefit-oriented paragraph underneath describing the service
• Visual to support the text

What I’d improve

• Increase the font size of the descriptive text and remove the company name from it (needless waste of space). I’d make the first sentence user focused like the second one.
• Make the visual more clear, add descriptive arrows and texts perhaps

Dowce.com changed the wording of their headline and added bullet points to improve their value proposition, resulting in 24. 5% improvement in conversions.

Build a connection

Let’s do an exercise. I won’t ask you to write anything down, but make a mental note.

How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Where do you normally walk (city streets, gravel etc)?

Now let’s say I’m selling shoes and you need a pair. You have 2 options. The first pair is designed for everyone. The second one is designed exactly for people your height and weight, and for walking on terrains you normally walk on. The price is the same. Which pair will you buy? No doubt about it, right?

This is why you have to state who your product or service is for, and it has to be true. If you’re trying to sell to everybody, you will lose (unless you have a gazillion dollars to spend). Talking to everybody in your copy works for almost nobody.

Look again at the above example of Campaign Monitor. They have included the target group in their value proposition.

Stripe:

There’s no doubt who this service is designed for, is there?

If your current offering is NOT catered to a specific customer group, I recommend you re-think your strategy.

Most wanted action

Remember paradox of choice: the more choice you give somebody, the easier it is to choose nothing. Choice paralyzes. If you think people will invest time to figure out where to click next, think again.

Thinking is hard, and you should not make your customers think. Instead, clearly indicate the next action you want them to take. In one experiment they changed the home page to focus on a single action, and saw the users doing exactly what they wanted them to do. It works.

Before you can do that, you need to figure out what that action should be!

If you ask for the purchase or sign-up too soon, you will lose them. In most cases it’s a good idea to direct them to reading more about your service or checking out a demo before asking for a commitment (signup, purchase etc).

Making the button bigger is not gonna help – in most cases they just don’t care yet! It’s about focusing on what people really want, in the order that they want it. You don’t ask somebody to marry you on your first date.

Look at the screenshots above, all of them make this mistake (Campaign Monitor does offer View Features button too). People are not ready to commit after just reading a few sentences, so don’t force them. You can of course have a buy/sign-up button, but try making it less prominent and put the focus on a different step.

Try to think of the questions that are going through your customer’s mind while they’re on your homepage and whether the content on the page does a great job of answering them. Guide them to the next logical step in their usage lifecycle.

Joshua Porter makes a good case for burying your signup or buy button, I recommend reading it. One company removed the sign up call to action from the top of the homepage, and sign-ups increased 350%.

Trying the product without signing up

I love how Codacademy is doing this:

They pull you right in and make you use their service without asking for a signup or anything. The friction is usually high for any kind of signup – free or not – and here they have completely eliminated that.

While they do have a “Get Started” button, it only sets focus to the console:

So how do they get people to sign up? After playing around a bit, they offer you to create an account so you could save your work. By this time you’ve toyed around with it and fallen in love.

Call to action

Call to action wording matters a lot. I yet have to see a case study where a wording containing the word ‘buy’ converted the best. In e-commerce, add to cart always kicks buy now‘s butt.

In this split test they changed “Buy SMS Credits” to “View SMS prices”, and saw an uplift in conversions. This change along with minor added trust elements resulted in overall conversion rate improvement of 37.6%.

In another test they achieved a 83.4% improvement after changing the wording of their button from “Play right now!” to “Instant demo!”. Test your call to action.

I recommend making the calls to action benefit-oriented and indicating what happens when they click. Avoid empty words like ‘submit’.

Scrapblog:

Icondock:

Web Copy

Copywriting is super important and a huge topic on it’s own. Here’s one tip.

Most people on your website know what they are looking for in a product or service. If they find something that looks similar to what they want, they will follow it (read more, buy etc).

Consequently, having relevant information with the exact wording your customers would use is very important. Talk to your customers and see what language and exact phrases they’re using when talking about your products. Use it on your website.

When I’m looking for a project management software that has features like task assigning, time tracking and client management built in, those are they keywords I’m after when browsing different sites.

More on copywriting: what the science of persuasion says and 7 tips for effective sales copy.

Above the fold and below the fold

Above the fold is the part of a page that’s visible without scrolling. People do scroll and are not afraid of it, but make sure the most important elements are visible without scrolling:

• Value proposition,
• Some visual,
• Call to action.

Ideally the part above the fold answers the most important questions the visitor has, and the rest is supplemental reading.

How long the part below the fold should be largely depends on your business. Guys over at Pipedrive told me that when they shrunk their home page, their conversions tripled.

Make the contact information visible

Easy to find contact information is one of the key things to making your website more trustworthy. Display your email, phone and live chat options on every page.

LessAccounting saw a 1.8% increase in conversions after placing a phone number on their site. Flowr added a phone number to their site – and also observed a slight increase in conversions.

Leave room for text

Ignoring search engines is not wise. As I mentioned it the beginning, your home page has the best chance among all the pages on your site to rank high in search engines.

This, however, won’t happen unless there is substantial amount of text on the page (500+ words). Use the room below the fold also for SEO – write useful stuff about your products, services and address questions your users have, but make sure the text it optimized.

No text, no ranking.

Visuals

Thousand words and all that. Neuroscience tells us that people “get” images hundreds of times faster than from text (our reptile brain doesn’t even know how to read).

I firmly believe that using images is a powerful way to boost up any value proposition. Imagine this website without the large image:

Blu Homes sells prefab homes, and nobody is going to buy one without seeing it. How many words would you need to describe the picture above? Too many – nobody would read that.

Even if you sell less tangible goods like software, people want to get an idea what it’s like.

Project Bubble gives you an overview of their software via short video. I think video is great for more complex products, because watching a 1:30 minute video is less hassle for the user than reading a whole bunch of text.

Using video can provide an uplift. Dropbox boosted their conversions after adding a video to the home page. Not all the videos are same - video thumbnails can make a huge difference. Yobongo got a 70.9% conversion uplift after changing their video thumbnail.

Read more on how to increase conversions with video and how to boost conversions with images.

Trust and security

People don’t buy from you if they don’t trust you. In addition to showing off your contact information, it’s a good idea to use trust marks to reduce friction.

Here’s what Ice.com put in their footer:

Notice the mention of money-back guarantee, “trusted since 1999″ and 2 trust logos.

Don’t ignore load speed

Speed matters. Slow sites cause frustration and make people leave, thus obviously hurting conversions. Speeding up sites increases conversions.  Google knows it and has included site speed as one of the ranking factors.

Google’s own nifty Page Speed Online tool is terrific for providing you insights into your site speed and what you can do to make it faster. If you use Google Analytics, their Site Speed report will help you learn which of your pages are underperforming, so you can address this potential barrier to your conversions.

If you’re not terrified by technical discussions, read how to optimize your site with HTTP caching.

It’s never done

Your home page should be living and breathing organism, always evolving. Keep on testing different hypotheses and see what makes the difference. In the end, testing is not just about converting more customers, but learning. Make it your goal to understand why a change made a difference and what can you learn from this that you can apply elsewhere in your business.

Growing your mailing list and generating leads should be one of your focus points of your marketing efforts. If Groupon didn’t have over 115 million or Appsumo 500 000 email subscribers, they wouldn’t have a business.

Too many businesses don’t give it enough attention, and just throw something together (then complain that online lead generation doesn’t work). This post is about building email and sign-up forms that convert. 

1. Less is more (Few fields = more conversions)

Every field you ask them to fill increases friction. The best thing you can do to improve conversions is to get rid of as many fields as possible. In most cases you don’t need to ask for anything but the email address.

In one study an 11-field version of a contact form was replaced with a 4-field version, resulting in a 160% increase in the number of forms submitted and a 120% increase in conversion while the quality of submissions stayed the same.

In another test 5-field form outperformed 9-field form by 34%. Again, they didn’t complain about the data quality as people lie in long forms anyway.

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind after seeing this type of form:

If you’re like me, you physically feel the brain damage happening. Suffix? Really!?

It seems to be a lead generation form for a web design company. What they should ask instead is name, email / phone and maybe the website URL. Now the salesperson at the company can get in touch with the prospect and figure out all the other questions over the phone or followup emails. The goal is to get the lead!

Start with getting rid of all the optional fields

An eye tracking study showed that people might not look at the “required fields” note on forms, and therefore think that they’d have to fill every single field.

Think about it this way: every additional fields makes you lose a number of prospects. Is the additional information you gain from the field WORTH losing those people? Do you lose anything if you don’t get all the data right away?

The numbers of fields you can have in a form is also dependent upon the perceived reputation of the company. Well-known and trusted brands can get away with more, but even they can’t go overboard. I’ve heard the New York Times subscription form used to be 18 pages long(!) when they first launch their online presence. Times have changed (pun not intended).

Do you really need it?

Do you really need people’s phone, fax or address? If you aren’t gonna ship them anything, people won’t be interested in sharing it. Only ask what’s relevant. Expedia removed the “Company” field from their booking form and saw an increase of $12 million a year in profit.

What will you do with their name? If it’s to mention their name in mass e-mail (“Hello [name]“!), the forget about it. True personalization happens through personalized content. Everybody knows that the name field is filled in by an email software robot, nobody thinks it’s a personal email to them. It used to work really well a few years ago, but now the effectiveness is in fast decline.

The best signup form is short

Barack Obama:

Milk:

2. Sell the email signup

Getting people to give you their email (sign up to your list) is a transaction. You want them to give you their email address (and maybe other data), they want something in return. Generally speaking you should ask for as little as possible on the signup form, and give the user as much as possible in return.

People who are motivated are extremely likely to fill out a form that is reasonable in length. Instead of asking can people fill out our sign-up form, ask if people are motivated enough to care? Creating the motivation is up to you, learn to create great microcopy.

There’s also a service you can integrate to your sign-up forms to provide rewards for signing up (e.g. “Fill Out This Signup Form For A Free $5 Gift Card”). They claim this increases sign-up conversions, but I haven’t tested them myself.

In short, don’t just ask for the sign-up, sell it.

The worst kind of form for enticing newsletter sign-ups.

• No reason given to join
• Ridiculous amount of fields

I bet they get no sign ups whatsoever.

Also bad:

While it’s short, it doesn’t provide any reasons for signing up.

The good kind

• Short
• There’s a clear value proposition
• Privacy policy mentioned

The One Question:

This one converts at 35% which is pretty high. The reason it works so well is that most traffic to the page comes via Google search, and the search terms match the offer of the form. When your offer matches user motivation, you get high conversions.

NB! Test your lead magnet

It is very important to test your lead magnet (what you offer in return for their email). The offer itself usually makes the biggest difference in your conversion rate. Everything else is just supporting it.

3. Show social proof

Nobody wants to be the only idiot filling your stupid sign-up form. Show them tons of people have done it.

Basecamp:

Finerminds:

Mixergy adds testimonials and mentions companies people know:

Social proof is very effective.

4. Tell them what happens next

People like to be in control. Submitting the form without knowing what exactly is going to happen creates uncertainty. Uncertainty causes friction.

The worst thing your submit button can say is ‘submit’. The best way is to make the submit button say what’s going to happen.

Pipedrive:

Tumblr:

Utopic:

5. Form design matters

People trust beautiful design more than the alternative.

This guy doubled his opt-ins with better graphics, showing the virtual cover of his e-book. I realize it’s still a poor design, but progress is visible:

Appsumo grew fast to 500 000 email subscribers:

6. Single column, please

This eye tracking study showed that single column forms work better. Traindom‘s sign-up form:

7. Try a Mad Libs style form

Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game where one player prompts another for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, usually with funny results.

Vast.com did A/B testing comparing a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. The Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%. Before and after views:

Image source

8. Communicate errors clearly

If they fail to fill in a mandatory field or do something wrong, be very clear about it.

Meetup does this well. In this case I didn’t enter the zip code:

If they did fill the form incorrectly and you need to show an error message, make sure the fields are populated with the data they entered. If they have to start from scratch, it causes frustration and they might not do it.

9. Don’t be picky

When asking for information. There is nothing more annoying than a form that requires information to be entered in a very specific format.

For example, if you’re asking for a date, accept the year as in 11 and 2011 both. Let them use either slash (/) or dot (.) in between the numbers. When you ask for a phone number, don’t require spaces, brackets or anything else – let the user enter their phone number as they please.

If you need the data in a specific format, make it clear, or better yet have it converted by a script. You can also design the interface in a way they don’t have a choice. In the case of dates for example, you can have them choose it from a calendar.

10. Don’t ask for the password twice

The more fields you ask people to fill in, the less will. Having two fields for passwords is stupid.

Most people do it as “everybody is doing it”, but for no good reason. The idea is that entering it twice makes sure that there’s no typo in it. Well, a better way to do that is to give the option to see what they typed.

Vimeo doesn’t do it:

Traindom has a “check your password” checkbox you can tick to show the password instead of *********. A much better way to verify whether there are any typos:

11. Drop-down lists, radio buttons and auto-complete fields

You’ve probably seen those huge drop down lists for selecting categories, countries or citis. If there are tons choices, drop-down list is not convenient. This is bad:

Instead, use auto-fill fields such as this one (give it a try, it works):

Here’s a great article on redesigning the country selector.  Get the country selector script from here.

Use smart defaults where appropriate. For example, if most of your users come from the UK, it might be a good idea to default the country to ‘UK’.

If there’s anywhere between 7 and 15 options, a drop-down list is usually a really good fit. If there are only a few choices (2 – 6), go for the radio button:

12. Submit button width = field width

Call to action is the most important part of your form. A small button has weak affordance and can make users feel uncertain about using it. Make it as wide as the input fields (and join our email list while you’re at it):

13. Avoid clear fields button

Nobody who fills in your form wants to clear the fields. If they don’t want to fill it in, they can just leave.

If they fill the form and accidentally clear the fields, there’s a good chance they won’t start over.

14. Don’t use captchas on forms

Captchas are those anti-spam things:

One study done over 6 months found that when forms use captchas, the company could lose out on 3.2% of all their conversions. Another study found that up to 30% of the captchas could be failed/incorrectly answered by people as they’re too hard to figure out.

Animoto used to have captchas on their sign-up form, then removed it, and thereby boosted their conversion rate from 48% to 64%. That’s an uplift of 33.3%!

So instead, what do you do?

If it’s an email list signup form, just use double opt-in.

If it’s a quote request or another type of form, you can use the “Honeypot” captcha technique. It involves using CSS to hide a form field that is supposed to be left blank. Every time the form is submitted you check the field and see if it’s blank, if not, mark it as spam but not delete it.

If you’re still keen on using captchas, this is the best captcha in the world.

Online video keeps getting more and more popular. This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw huge growth in in video views with major retailers.

Treepodia says video is one of the few strategies that seems to work well regardless of the category in which it is deployed. The following chart shows the conversion rate increases that were witnessed for shoppers who watched product videos:

Even if there wouldn’t be any proof, I would believe instinctively that video increases conversions. Using just the right images boosts your conversion rate, but a video is so much better than a photo. It’s the closest you can get to seeing the product in person.

If the product is complicated, using video to explain how it works causes less friction than reading a bunch of text. You can present a ton of information with just a 30 second video – equivalent of half a page of text, if not more.

Videos don’t need to be directly about increasing conversions. HSN features a lot of educational videos on their site. Emery Skolfield, HSN.com director of digital content:

Videos can be educational and build trust in our brand. If they do they add value and give the sense that HSN.com can help a consumer even after she’s made her purchase.

Educational videos have another advantage – people actually want to watch them. More content = more engagement. When I look at YouTube Insights data for my own videos, I can see a clear trend: content videos are watched WAY longer than commercials / product pitches. Most don’t watch the latter past the few first seconds.

Put a video on your home page

Dropbox put a video on their home page and conversions went up. Vidyard increased conversions by 100% by using video on their home page.

What should the video be about? Perhaps a short overview works best. Last year Think Vitamin replaced an example tutorial video (5:50) on the homepage with a 50-second overview of the service - and increased conversions by 24.4%.

InDinero spent two months split testing between a more traditional landing page design and a page with basically just a big video and a simple signup form. The page with just a large video has increased inDinero’s signups by almost double from 6.8% to a whopping 11.2%.

Buy Real Twitter Followers produced a case study after experimenting with a small video explaining their service on the homepage. This little change helped them increase their sales by 216% against control, but the new version of their home page is again without video. Go figure.

No best practice is guaranteed to work on your site. Always split test.

Use videos on your product pages

Video on product pages is getting more popular. According to the etailing group’s “13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study,” usage of online video on product pages among the 100 leading retailers studied increased by 18 percentage points between Q4 2009 and Q4 2010.

Voted the best jewelry e-commerce site of 2011, Ice.com has product videos for every product. Zappos is killing it with video.

Putting videos on product pages is just a smart business decision. When a consumer sees how a product works, she is much more likely to convert. Sometimes already offering the option to play video will increase the conversion rate (even if they don’t actually watch it!).

In the fourth quarter the conversion rate for consumers who watched a video on eParty Unlimited - online-only party supplies retailer - was 8.3%, 43.1% higher than the 5.8% conversion rate for other consumers.

Living Direct added video to its product pages of household items ranging from tankless water heaters and wine refrigerators to solar-powered cell phone chargers, and has seen conversions increase for those products. The same has been confirmed by Stacks and Stacks and Swimwear Boutique.

Premiere Game Tables saw a significant jump in conversion rates: it went from 1.2% to 4% when a product video was watched.

E-retailers can use vendors like Treepedia or Inovo to produce product videos, and pay $300 to $500 per video + monthly bandwidth. This is out of reach for small businesses, but given the access to digital video cameras these days any etailer can make their own videos and host them free on video sharing sites.

Online gemstone jewelry company Wild Gems produces their own videos and hosts them on YouTube for free (has access to video analytics via YouTube Insights). It’s hard to show off the sparkle of gemstones via photos, so for them video actually helps them to present their products better. See this moonstone ring:

Male or female narrator?

This is something you have to test for your site, but online eyewear retailer EyeBuyDirect.com discovered that consumers prefer a male voice for the video’s narration.

The retailer tested the effect of a change in narrator for two product videos running approximately 30 seconds each that feature the type of chunky black frames.

In this case, the male-narrated product video produced more sales. That video achieved a 9.28% conversion rate, compared with a 2.78% conversion rate for the female-narrated video. Quite a huge difference!

Video thumbnail matters

We doubled the number of video plays on Traindom’s home page just by changing the video thumbnail.

The thumbnail used to look like this, and around 10% of the visitors watched it.

The new thumbnail contained the text ‘Watch this video because it’s only 2:18 long’. I thought to mention the duration of the video, so people wouldn’t worry about it taking too long. The word ‘because’ was used as it triggers an automatic compliance response (as per Cialdini). The new thumbnail looked like this:

Twice the amount of people watched the video now. Test your video thumbnails.

Video can reduce return rates

After adding product videos to their ecommerce site, Diamond Jewelry Limited realised a 60% reduction in returns, which significantly increased their revenues and margins.

Video can show product more accurately and hence people are less likely to buy stuff under false assumptions.

Try a video-only landing page

Fitness trainer Carl Juneau managed to increase his conversions by 46% by switching to video-only landing page. He tried a long-form sales letter underneath the video, but conversions were much lower.

Why did video-only work so well? Carl’s best guess:

I’m guessing visitors were intrigued by the sales video and clicked through to the price/guarantee page to get more info. They may have been turned off by the long salesletter when I added it to the video and lost the excitement created by the short, punchy video.

He also tested a landing page without a video, but a with a call to action mentioning video:

This produced a 14.18% improvement over control. He’s not the only one boosting conversions with mentioning video in the call to action.

Mention video in your call to action

A split test on this landing page was trying 2 different call to action buttons. One said “Free Instant Access” and one said “Watch The Video”. See images below:

Version A: Get Instant Access (11.9% conversion rate)

Version B: Watch the Video (15.3% conversion rate)

‘Watch the video‘ button increased conversions from 11.9% to 15.3%. A total increase of 28%!

Image source

Use video testimonials

Testimonials reduce friction like nothing else. People trust other consumers and social proof is powerful. When the testimonials are believable, that is.

Few will believe testimonials when just the first name or initials are mentioned. Full name and photograph is the minimum, but even that can be faked (I’ve seen an abundance of stock photos served as actual people). What’s really hard to fake is video. Therefore video testimonials are powerful.

Justin Nassiri from VideoGenie says video testimonials get watched for 100 seconds on average. That’s pretty good.

See how video testimonials are used by Intuit, Priceline and Shoedazzle.

How to get more views for the video?

Research conducted by Invodo says that videos get more views when

• they are placed above the fold,
• the video player is fairly large (480x720px sized player got more views than 250x140px),
• there is a text call to action (e.g. “click to play”).

Treepodia says you should embed the video rather than just provide a link to it. If you add a simple link to video from any given product page, you can expect something between a 5%-15% video view rate, while a video player embedded on the same page will deliver a view rate ranging from 10%-35%.

Most viewers will NOT watch the video to the end. An average 2 minute video gets watched half way. What does that mean for you?

• Make your videos nice and short – 30 seconds if you can, but definitely shoot for under 2 minutes.
• Present the most important information first, leave additional details for later.

Here’s a useful infographic on increasing your video viewership.

Measure video

I don’t mean split testing (but you definitely have to test video vs no video), but video analytics. How long are they playing the videos for? Are they watching them to the end or just the first seconds?

Most video platforms provide analytics these days, even YouTube. YouTube Insights shows you the general statistics, attention span (how long are they watching for), location and even demographics of the viewers.

I recommend you also do a split test of 2 videos and measure the video analytics – which video actually gets watched and which video helps to produce more leads or sales.

Any good case studies that you know of? I’m also curious if anyone has published data on how video decreases conversions. I couldn’t find any myself. 

I read more than most people, on average 2-3 business books per month. That adds up to a lot of books over the years.

I am very picky. Before deciding to read a book, I do a ton of research, review reading and other due diligence. I don’t read cheesy business motivational books. My last years favorite was Rework (if you haven’t read it yet, do it).

Out of all the business books I’ve read in 2011, these are the best ones:

The best business book of 2011

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

It’s not just for startups, but for pretty much all companies and entrepreneurs trying to start or grow their businesses.

It’s rare to come by books these days that really make you go “wow”, that make you stop and think – especially if you’ve been around some.

Highly intelligent book and totally changes the way businesses are built. A must-read. A game changer.

The best quick read of 2011

We Are All Weird by Seth Godin

Seth is becoming a cliche, but I truly enjoyed this book. It’s thought-provoking, interesting and lays out a future that I believe in.

We really are weird, and getting weirder, and we should celebrate it and use it.

This is a quick read, and the book gets extra brownie points for that. Some books just go on and on to fill the pages, this one doesn’t.

The best social media book of 2011

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

There were a ton published, and I enjoyed this one the most.

Granted, I like Gary V and some of you might not, but I like the notion of becoming more personal, developing an old school small town we-know-all-the-customers-by-name mindset.

Thanking people is a serious business.

The best service business book of 2011

The Consulting Bible by Alan Weiss

Among many business ventures that I run, I have a web marketing company. We build websites that convert and are 100% geared at achieving the business goals of the clients. There aren’t many good books written for these type of consultancy / service type of businesses, but this one is excellent.

From mindset to client expectation setting to value based pricing, this book has it all. While it’s written mostly for solo consultants, I gained several great new ideas from it and changed my mind about quite a few things. It’s rare that a book does that.

Other amazing books I read this year (that were published before 2011)

My second best read of the year was this:

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value by William Poundstone

Pricing has always intrigued me and this book was both fascinating and highly useful. It inspired me to do further research and write a blog post on pricing.

Everybody struggles with getting the pricing right. Read this book for great insights.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder

More tool than a book, this was amazing. Most business books you read only once, but this one you go back to and really use as a reference to enhance and develop your business model. Totally changed how I look at businesses. A fantastic workbook for teams.

Which books that came out in 2011 impressed you the most? What are the must-reads?

Disclaimer: Amazon affiliate links.

People hardly buy anything without seeing it. Usually they also want to touch it, hold it and take it for a spin. You really can’t do those things online (unless it’s web based software). So to compensate for all of that, you need to work twice as hard to make your products come alive via excellent photography and graphics.

I know of a guy selling construction hardware online. He added images to all the screws he’s selling, and the sales of screws went up.

Schwan’s (home delivered food service) has one of the highest conversion rates among e-commerce sites, and when you go to their site you can sense that it’s based on their juicy images.

High quality images

This should go without saying, but too many websites try to sell products with low quality images.

Made.com is a site that caught my attention recently with their beautiful images that let their products shine. Screenshot:

Another great one is Best Made Company. Screenshot:

Always do what they do: pick a default image that is shown in full size and display clickable thumbnails (that produce enlarged images).

Alternate & detailed views

Don’t just show a single image, show as many as you can – from different angles.

Let’s take that same axe above. You can see all of these views on its product page:

Much better than just a single photo of an axe, isn’t it? You get a feel of it. They’ve also managed to take those photos in a way that show character and carry a brand. Well done indeed.

Context

Context matters. Don’t just show the product, show it in context. Let me imagine using it.

Remember the photo of the couch above? They also show a person using it:

Sell earrings? Show me what it looks when I’ll be wearing it. This is how Wild Gems does it:

“It’s so easy to use, even the kids can do it.” Even better to communicate that via contextual image:

Zoom

Zooming in / using a digital loupe can be a nifty feature if your product has ornate details your customers might want to look at. Like in the case of this $1400 leather case for your iPad:

No PC-handshakes, please.

Avoid cheesy stock photos

Usability tests by Jakob Nielsen show that people always pay a lot of attention to images. When it comes to people, real people get a lot of attention while stock photo people are largely ignored. Don’t use cheesy stock photos.

I won’t go on a rant, but if you’re using shiny people and suits shaking hands, you’re stupid and you think your customers are too.

Most phones have decent cameras today, most any random picture will be better.

Draw attention to products

Images can be used to draw attention to your product or copy, as this well-known eyetracking study says:

Here’s another post with great examples that prove the same.

Men are pervs, women are gold diggers

Miratech conducted an eye tracking study to measure how men and women look at the photo of a sexy young woman.

Image source

Conclusion: the men look at the woman’s chest and the women look at her ring.

Also, people in different countries act differently. For instance French women stared at the chest more than 2.7 times more than British women! Men who looked at the breasts the longest were also from France (and Denmark). Some cliches seem to hold water.

Try 360° rotating images

DueMaternity.com, an online retailer of items for pregnant women and new mothers, boosted their conversion rate by 27% thanks to 360° rotating images. In the past they used conventional two-dimensional images on their website, such as the front and back of a model wearing a maternity dress.

After adding 360-degree spin to the images that rotate automatically when shoppers visit a particular merchandising page, the conversion rate on products sold on those pages is about 27% higher than for standard two-dimensional images.

Golfsmith.com claims that products with the special spin feature have conversion rates at least 10% and sometimes as much as 30% to 40% higher than products without it.

360 degree rotating images are usually created by taking a series of pictures (“frames”) with a product, or any object, on a computer controlled turntable. Here’s a more technical blog post of how one guy did it, but there are also service providers around (such as this or this).

Product images in site search window boosts conversions

After online retailer BrickHouse Security added an automated drop-down menu of textual results that appear when shoppers enter terms into its site search window, it boosted conversion rates.

“With the product images in the site search drop-down window, we get a 100% lift in conversion rate among shoppers who use site search”

About 8% of buyers use search on their site , and about 25% of that group click among the new image-based search results in the automated drop-down list instead of completing the entry of a search term and clicking the search button. This results in a 15% lift in the overall site search conversion rate.

Human photos on a landing page increase sales and conversions

Medalia Art sells Brazilian and Caribbean art online and using photos of artists on their homepage increased conversions by 95%. They had these painints of artists:

When they replaced the painting with actual photos almost doubled the conversion rate (conversion in this case was clickthrough, not sales):Image source

This article tells a story of how adding photos of real people to their customer service phone number increased visitor-to-call rates by 21%:

37Signals started to use photos of their customers on their landing pages, and conversions went up:

Image source

Will any photo of people boost conversions? GetElastic mentions a split test where using a photo decreased conversions, but the they used cheesy-to-the-maximum stock photo, so that explains it.

I recommend always starting out with a photo of real people and never using cheesy shiny stock people. In case you have to use models (e.g. to show off merchandise), Flint McGlaughlin from MarketingExperiments said this:

A strong face as the primary means of greeting visitors gets a strong reaction that polarizes conversion rates. Never put up a face photo that hasn’t been thoroughly tested. It needs to be the right face.

This was the image in question (screenshot of narscosmetics.com):

Want more CTR on your Facebook ads? Beer helps

One Facebook advertiser, who was not in the business of selling beer, observed that an ad containing a picture of beer delivered its best CTR. In fact, it performed 57% better than any other ad tried:

Another company tried to replicate that and found the similar success with CTRs, but alas the traffic did not convert. In fact, only one of those 1,250 clicks actually produced a conversion. Ouch.

Their business is selling merchant accounts, so it’s extremely specific customer they’re after. My guess is that a consumer good with broader appeal might be able to convert that beer traffic.

Images on blog posts

I couldn’t find any conversion research on this, but I am sure of it: using quality images in your blog posts makes you sell more of your stuff. Why?

Images improve readability and general user experience (breaks patterns, catches attention, eye candy, worth 1000 words etc). Posts without images are boring, and lead to less reading.

The more people read your stuff, the more they like you, the more they develop a relationship with you, the more they trust you and that all moves them further along in your sales funnel (doesn’t even matter what the funnel is like).

My advice: always use images in your blog posts.