Conversion Conference 2014: Best Tips from Day 2

If you liked our previous post and enjoyed our interviews with some of the best CRO experts, you’ll love this last post about Lander at Conversion Conference San Francisco. We just couldn't fathom even finishing this coverage without an amazing post that showed you the best of  #Convocon day 2. With the best tips and pointers of some of the presentation, we've been able to put together a great summary of each different presentation. Let’s get started!

#Convcon 2014 Day Two

The Wheel of Persuasion: 200 Techniques for Winning Customers by Bart Schutz, Online Dialogue

The day started out early with Bart Schutz and his keynote presentation titled “Wheel of Persuasion: 200 Techniques for Winning Customers”. It was hard to get up early after Tim Ash’s party on Monday night, but we pulled it together and hit the ground running!

Bart did a fantastic job of explaining to the listeners how emotions influence conversions, because the way he understands and interprets it, the customer is really a brain.

You’re probably like, what? Well, our customers behavior is controlled by this 1,5 kilo of cortical proteins and fats. Every decision is made and brought about by over 100 billion brain cells and 1.000 billion glial cells that interact via a 1.000 times a 1.000 billion synapses (it’s just a little bit complicated, isn’t it?).

We are influenced by our needs and motivations, our attention and perception of things, as well as by our emotions and even irrationalities.

To explain how customers interact and respond to our offers Bart used Netherlands’ king and queen as examples. King William would be what Bart calls a “Slow” customer and queen Maxima would be a “Fast” customer. So, to get a better idea of what he means, check out the breakdown below.

This is how he described these two types of visitors or customers:

The most important part of this is to understand that different emotional states require different persuasion techniques. Even the same person may have differing competing emotions depending on the day of the week (that’s why you shouldn't test your pages based only on a few days worth of data instead of full complete weeks).

Below are some of the best tips and highlights Bart shared with us during his keynote:

• Let your customer think he’s free in his choices.
• Von Restorff Effect: We automatically pay more attention to things that are significantly different.
• Use visual cueing, our attention is very easily influenced.
• Offer a slightly uglier option, to increase sales on the more beautiful option.

Charlie Claxton, “Everything I know about CRO I learned from Raising Children”

After Bart’s keynote presentation up next was Charlie Claxton, Chief Creative Strategist at UpTop, on his session called “Everything I know about CRO I Learned from Raising Children”. For me personally, I thought that this was a great title for a discussion on conversion optimization.

Using real life examples and even using his kids’ photos during the presentation, Charlie gave the audience some great tips for their sites...and also for their kids.

To begin with, he made a concerted effort to get rid of the idea that there are only 3, 5 or 10 steps to success regarding conversion optimization. In line with Bart Schutz, in the previous discussion, he showed us a list of innumerable regarding decision making, behavioral and social biases.

Speaking with regards to our brain, Charlie went on to explain some processes that influence our decisions.

Processes such as the following:

• The need for social proof.

• The halo effect (a cognitive bias in which an observer's overall impression of a person or brand influences the observer's feelings and thoughts about that person or company).

• How building authority and trust could make things much easier.

• Loss aversion (people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains).

• Framing (the inevitable process of selective influence over the individual's perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases)

Also, Charlie explained how many companies today don’t even really know who their target audience is and offered explanations on different ways to find out. He discussed some important points with regards to this subject such as Buyer Personas, Focus Groups, Contextual Inquiries or Card Sorting.

Charles Nicholls, “Remarketing Master Class”

In his Master Class, Charles Nicholls, founder at SeeWhy a real time remarketing company gave some good advice on how to conduct retargeting the right way, and avoid spending money on useless clicks. During his speaking session he covered: when to retarget, what and how to measure, allocating retargeted ad budgets to max ROI, pitfalls to watch out for and how to combine email and ads.

Below are some great tips that he shared with the audience during his session:

• Visitors take 5 visits across 1.5 channels on average to convert. The probability of conversion rises exponentially with returns deep into the funnel.

• Many people ask “Why 97% don’t buy when browsing” and the answer is that most of them are not ready to buy yet, and in average 52% are considering a potential future purchase (so, be patient).

• To get maximum ROI you should coordinate remarketing campaigns across Browse and Shopping cart recovery via email and retargeted ads, that way you’ll get a better customer experience, cost efficiency will be better and you’ll have a significantly higher ROI.

• Asked about the best timing for remarketing, his answer is astonishing: ”After 12 hours 72% of the opportunity is gone”

• Finding visitors FAST is critical. Multiple impressions immediately after abandon is optimal.

• For email use a service tone, make the product the hero, send in real time.

“50% of the money you’re spending on retargeted advertising is wasted. The challenge is knowing which half” Adapted from John Wanamaker’s famous quote

Optimizing Email: From Forms to Follow-Ups by Hunter Boyle, AWeber

Finally at the end of day two, I had the opportunity to listen to Hunter Boyle who did an amazing job showing us how to improve our Email Marketing strategies.

One of the main things he remarked was about respecting Inboxes. We need to understand that people are not anxious to be part of our email list, and we’re never getting those leads through our sales funnel, unless we put into practice his advice below:

• Listen to your audience

• Stop creating crappy content

• Staying relevant and useful

He showed us an easy step by step process to creating an Email Optimization Plan.

1. Ask Your Audience

2. Prioritize Your Goals

3. Test Strategically

But as if that wasn't enough, he also explain to us where and what to test:

1. Pages and Forms

Proximity: Surround your content

Disruption: Overlays and lightboxes

Incentive: Powerful offers, giveaways and bonuses

2. Email and Automation

Welcome emails/series that build relationships

Deliver actionable, high value content consistently

Make your business stand apart

3. Value Proposition

Will the benefits be obvious to (almost) everyone? Why  will they care?

4. Voice

What sets your content  apart in a crowded field  (and an even more crowded inbox)?

5. Actionable

Can your audience put the content into practice right away?

6.  Inactives and Cancels

Alternatives: Frequency, social updates, other topics

Apply feedback and optimize further

Re-engagement campaigns

Engagement Checklist

At last but not least, Hunter, provided us with a really interesting Engagement Checklist. Take note and keep this checklist on hand with you every time you send out an email marketing campaign.

✓ What’s my primary goal with this page/email?

✓ Will most readers find it relevant and actionable?

✓ What needs does it address? What problems does it solve?

✓ Is the value and WIIFM to readers clearly expressed?

✓ Is it easy for readers to respond and reach me directly?

✓ What’s unique or exceptional about this email?

Best Tips From the Top 10 Sessions of Day 2 at #ConvCon

1. How to Nail the Content and Inspire Visitors to Convert by Barry Feldman, Feldman Creative.

• Hit Your Headline Hard

• Get over yourself

• Get the Nod

• Provide Benefits

• Elicit Feelings

• Offer Some Proof

• Activate With Verbs

• Express Yourself

• Tell Stories

• Be Specific

2. The Benefits of a Strategic Approach to Remarketing by Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy

• Ad budget focused exclusively on anonymous visitors

• Ad spend focused on finding most qualified buyers fast

• Negative lift eliminated

• Measure incremental lift using a control group

3. Reasons to Say “No” to a Test Idea by Brooks Bell.

• The test is not aligned with business goals

• The test won’t help you learn

• The test is not worth the effort

• The test will take too long to get confidence

• Even if the test wins, it will be impossible to implement

4.  Unlocking Mobile Conversions by Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy

Very few actually buy, but most email is read on mobile

• 99.5% of smartphone mobile web sessions do not initially result in a purchase

• BUT 65% of email is usually opened first on mobile  99%

• Mobile sales range anywhere from 1% to upwards of 40%+ of sales for retailers

5. Segmentation Testing - Because One-Size Won't Fit All by Ryan Dahlstrom, Windstream Communications

For Segmentation to be effective, the following is required of your segment:

• Measureable

• Differentiable

• Accessible

• Actionable .

• Substantial

6. Competitive Data for Better Conversion by Pamela Pavliscak, Change Sciences Group

• Look at the top competitor, and (ahem) borrow

• Create a mash-up of several sites

• Do whatever top dog says

• Measure and learn

• Build a prototype and test it

7. Increasing ROI from mobile in Optimizing Your Conversion Engine by Dan Siroker, Optimizely

Deliver the right experience to the right medium. One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to just assume that the functionality on the big screen will work on the little one.

8. Email Optimization Plan Optimizing Email: From Forms to Follow-Ups by Hunter Boyle, AWeber

1. Rethink the Funnel

2. Respect the Inbox

3. Always Be Listening

4. Ooze Value & WIIFM

5. Test Strategically

9. The Wheel of Persuasion: 200 Techniques for Winning Customers by Bart Schutz, Online Dialogue

Decision making is done through two primary systems:

• System #1: Emotional, instinctive, fast, subconscious

• System #2: Logical, Rational, slow, conscious

10. Remarketing Master Class by Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy

What’s the best timing for remarketing? After 12 hours 72% of the opportunity is missed.

Every A/B test SeeWhy has run shows that real time targeting gets:

• Higher customer engagement

• More recovered revenue

Convcon San Francisco 2014 Has Come to an End!

We had such an awesome time this year at Convcon 2014 San Francisco! Also, we didn’t want to end without saying goodbye and without shouting out a great big “thank-you” to all of the amazing people we met there.

We thank them for their time, and especially for all of the amazing knowledge and tips that they shared with us while there . We also want to especially thank Tim Ash for organize this amazing conference! Hope to see you all of you next time!

Books to Give Away!

Don’t forget that we still have 3 CRO books to give away, you can participate to win one of these ebooks by just sharing this post here! We’re gonna reveal the winners this Friday 28th , so stay tuned to know if you were one of the lucky ones.

The 3 books we have to give away are these:

Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash

A/B Testing by Dan Siroker and  Pete Koome (a gift from Optimizely)

Accelerate by Arnie Kuenn.

So What do I Have to do to Win These Amazing Books?

Just leave us a comment on this post saying you want one of the books, or share this post with your friends by clicking here!

That’s all you have to do, we’ll announce the winners though our Social Media Channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and also though our blog. So stay tuned to find out if you were one the lucky ones! Good luck!

<<<Click here to share this post, if you want to participate for one of the books!>>>