Pretty Persuation

March 11th, 2009 Chris Posted in Marketing, Web, Web Site | 2 Comments »

Like many micro-businesses, we use the Internet to add to our prospect base – basically getting people to come to our site through various mechanisms and sign up for our newsletter. Whether it be a referral from a partner, someone reading one of Colleen’s articles or Google Adwords – we take advantage of their visit to try and get them more engaged with the business.

We do this by offering them a free newsletter subscription and a ten day eCourse. That is, ten emails in ten days, each with a great sales tip. All they do is give us their name and email address and we’re off to the races.

The page where we make this sweet offer is often referred to as a squeeze page in that we are trying to squeeze their interactivity down to a specific call to action (and only that call to action). In our case – it’s that Newsletter and eCourse sign-up.

As you may suspect, our goal is to maximize the number of folks that sign-up and so we look at the conversion rate – the percentage of those that visit the page that do indeed sign-up.

And figuring that out is half art and half science. I say half art as, often, the stuff that influences visitors to sign-up is not intuitive. It’s tied to psychology and what motivates us to take action. And it is generally to complicated for me to figure out. That’s where the science comes in.

Just like advertizers that conduct all sorts of market testing, the key to maximizing the conversion rate of a squeeze page is trying different approaches and measuring the results. For example, one thing that we’ve found that improves conversion rates is providing more graphical cues on the page. Here’s an example…

We took that squeeze page for sign-ups and added the following graphics:

To measure the actual impact, a great tool is provided with Google Adwords (although only measuring traffic that comes from Adwords – still very useful). It allows you to measure the effectiveness of different versions of your squeeze pages. It does so by randomly sending Adword clickers to one of your pages and keeping track of the conversion rates of each.

So what did the extra graphics do on the page conversion rate. Lets compare the original page (Original) with the new one (Variation 1):

As you can see, adding the graphics almost doubled the conversion rate from 8% to 16%! That ultimately translates is a halving of customer acquisition costs and doubling of sales! All by adding some graphics…

It’s worth taking a look at where you are asking customers to make decisions on your web site and asking yourself, is it pretty? And then test the heck out of it…

C.