You have two options really:

You can guess and hope for the best.

Or …

You can test variables in your user interfaces (UIs) and make data-driven business decisions.

Obviously, one of those choices is better than the other (if you’re not sure which is which, we have bigger problems to discuss).The problem is that many well-meaning and ambitious organizations are hampered by in-house or third-party solutions that don’t allow them to test their UIs for maximum performance. Even if your current payment and billing solutions have some testing capabilities, those solutions aren’t very efficient, and they don’t let you make changes on the fly.

Optimizing Customer Experiences Requires a Flexible Solution

It would be so much easier if we could speak a machine and say, “Hey Robot! Optimize this UI for maximum performance,” and the machine would just automate the process of testing and updating your web pages while you sit back and watch your revenue grow.

But that’s not the reality we live in quite yet. Testing your billing and payment UIs requires proactive decision making. And making data driven decisions about optimizing your UIs is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. You have to check in on it daily.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions available for making data-driven optimizations more efficient than what you’re doing today. If you want to optimize your UIs to improve conversion rates and grow online revenue, you need to a flexible solutions that helps you:

1. Test many different variables
2. Make changes quickly and easily based on data analysis
3. Create consistent user experiences efficiently

Okay, so practically speaking, what UI elements do you have to focus on?

If you want to maximize conversion rates and average order values, it’s important to focus on common elements you’ll find in billing and payment UIs, like product and shopping cart pages. That includes things like:

• Pricing and payments
• Promotions
• Design elements
• Branding and messaging

Pricing and Payments

What if you could increase orders by pre-selecting relevant payment methods for different regions? Or conduct user tests to discover the optimal price of your product in the Japanese market?

Raising revenue through these kinds of tests depends on your ability to make consistent changes to your various UIs efficiently and effectively.

Offering Promotions

Offering a seasonal promotion takes a lot of coordinating between different UIs. If you want to offer a Black Friday promotion, for example, you will have to update your homepage, various landing pages, and other marketing material to create a consistent experience. And then when the promotion ends, you’ll need to revert those pages to their original content.

If you’re investing a ton of manual effort into displaying these promotions, it can cost you time and money.

Design Elements

Does using a breadcrumb navigation in your checkout process leads to higher conversion rates?

Maybe you want to split test your shopping cart page to see if a blue buy button converts more visitors than a red button.

The easier it is to swap out these elements in your UI, the more quickly you can make lucrative business decisions.

Consistent Branding and Messaging

When your checkout process UI is not consistent with the rest of your brand, it interrupts your customer and increases cart abandonment.

If your ecommerce solution only offers a generic looking third-party UI for your end-user that is not consistent with the rest of your brand, you are leaving money on the table.

Keystone

If you’re hosting your checkout pages in-house or cobbling several ecommerce and payment point solutions together, the user experience may not be seamless, and you won’t have the flexibility to maximize your business opportunities.

But your success depends on providing the best possible customer experience. That means not just knowing what to do, but being able to execute quickly.

Make sure that your payment and billing infrastructure is flexible enough to optimize user experiences effectively and efficiently, and implement a solution that lets you test important UI variables quickly to see what converts best.

Stephanie Milovic contributed much insight to this blog post.

The post 3 Platform Capabilities for Creating Better Customer Experiences appeared first on cleverbridge.

New Opportunity

Traditionally, the C-suite has viewed software piracy as an unsolvable problem and has accepted it as a cost of doing business similar to “shrinkage” in retail businesses. In fact, software piracy can be a significant source of revenue once you are able to reach, educate and convert these “unpaid users.”

You may think that pirates will never pay for software and are not worth pursuing, but you are only partly right. Research from Microsoft and Adobe has identified three different types of pirate users and their behaviors may surprise you:

1. “Pirate-inclined” users think all software should be free and are highly unlikely to pay, so it doesn’t make sense to focus conversion efforts on this segment.
2. “Opportunistic” pirates are bargain hunters looking for the best deal and are willing to take some chances with less well-known online stores, leading them to unknowingly buy pirated software.
3. “Legally-inclined” pirates have no idea they are using pirated software – they may work for a large company that has installed more licenses than they’re entitled to or they could be a home user who gets their software from a “helpful” friend or relative.

The good news is that opportunistic and legally-inclined pirates are unintentionally using pirated software. Based on research conducted by Microsoft, Adobe and Disney (and V.i. Labs’ experience converting unpaid use globally), 83 percent of all pirates in mature markets are opportunistic and legally-inclined and will pay for software.

Reach

So how do you identify these pirate users? Adding software intelligence capabilities to your applications provides a steady stream of data and insight into who is using your applications and how they are using it. Vendors with piracy detection capabilities can use this intelligence to drive programs to convert these well-intentioned victims of piracy into paying customers. Once they have identified these pirate victims, they can target them for conversion campaigns through in-application messaging.

Educate

In-application messaging is an essential tool to convert, nurture and retain customers. But in this context, it is important to recognize that these users likely do not view themselves as pirates and should be addressed using a customer focused tone. Leading off with a statement that “you may be the victim of piracy” or “your copy of this product may not be genuine” can go a long way to building a positive, long-term customer relationship. Each message should include a call-to-action link that directs the user to the vendor’s website where they can learn more about their status and purchase a license. Adobe does a great job tying together the in-application message with education on its site:

It is important to establish trust with the user at the point when they are informed that their software may not be genuine, and then make it easy to resolve the matter.

Vendors should also trigger in-application messaging based on geography, frequency of application usage, types of functions used, and other factors to better tailor their messaging to different user segments. For example, if usage data indicates elevated piracy rates in Eastern Europe, vendors can develop a regional communications messaging plan with localized content for unpaid licenses for that segment of users.

Additionally, vendors should create a communication escalation plan (similar to an email nurturing campaign) if conversion does not occur after the first message. Drive the user to conversion through logical steps that add urgency with each step, and customize the timing of the escalation based on the usage data. Track behavior and assess trends that indicate high use to reinforce the value of a paid license in subsequent messaging. The goal is to drive the user to the vendor’s website where they can purchase a license and become a customer.

Convert

Once the user is on your website, you can fully leverage your investment and expertise in digital marketing.

You might not realize it, but your marketing team has likely already established a sound foundation for converting pirates. Leveraging your pre-existing investment in digital marketing and the teams’ expertise with trial conversion techniques is the basis for a cost-effective piracy conversion initiative.

Think of opportunistic and legally-inclined pirates as highly qualified sales leads and a new segment of prospects. They are already using your software and are deriving value from it. By customizing your trial conversion messaging, your marketers can establish a conversation with the pirate that explains the value of a paid license. From there, they can use A/B testing techniques to experiment on the best approach to convert these prospects to paying customers yielding a ROI with revenue growth.

Keystone

There is an old expression that, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” In other words, take something sour and make it sweet. Most software vendors already have the main ingredients – software piracy and an investment in digital marketing – to not only make lemonade, but to sell it. The other ingredient – software intelligence – is easily added to their applications. Given the constant demand to grow revenue and expand addressable markets, software vendors can easily leverage existing investments and conditions to convert pirates to paying customers.

Michael Goff is Director of Marketing for V.i. Labs. Mike Schramm is the founder of Michael Schramm Consulting – Global eCommerce Channel Strategy. You can read about their recent collaboration here. To learn more about combating software piracy, be sure to download their new playbook, Making Software Pirates Pay. 

The post Software Pirates — Your Most Qualified Sales Leads appeared first on cleverbridge.

via GIPHY

This post from HubSpot details seven last minute Black Friday tips to prepare your website. Their tips run the gamut, especially looking at whether your site can stand up to the notorious Black Friday traffic. Author Jeffrey Vocell says, “One of the big concerns for marketers and respective IT folks around this time is a surge in traffic. Many websites can see multiple-times the traffic that is standard during other times of the year, and it all happens over the course of a few days.”

Read the whole article to see HubSpot’s last minute recommendations for how best to manage your site traffic, your site speed, your site security, your return policy or other consumer information, promotions and site SEO for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Of course, your work doesn’t end when your customers place their orders. Be sure your ecommerce marketing remains on track through the rest of the year with HubSpot’s handy Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Calendar 2015. If you’re selling physical products, for instance, they provide this helpful list of shipping deadlines, reproduced below.

Want more? Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today. 

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Last Minute Black Friday Tips appeared first on cleverbridge.

Visual Website Optimizer, who brought us many gems of content like the ecommerce survey, now bring us this infographic about the perfect checkout page. It lists the four strategic areas addressed by the perfect checkout process: functionality, usability, security and design. They are explored in helpful detail and accompanied by tactical suggestions.

For example, do your customers have to create an account if they want to complete a purchase? You better think twice about this requirement. You can harm conversion rates by adding a few extra buttons to click or forms to complete.

Did you know that 30 percent of card declines can be saved by offering additional payment methods in your checkout page? Do not leave your customers hanging there with their pockets out. Include regional alternative payment methods to capture even more customers.

Do not underestimate the impact a confirmation page has on usability. It is an essential reference guide for your customers, so make sure it goes to the right email address, and include contact information in case your customer needs to get in touch.

This infographic also comes with excellent sources listed at the bottom. Dig through them to find useful information about conversion optimization from reputable sources like the esteemed Baymard Institute and conversion rate optimization expert Justin Rondeau.

What have you done lately to create the perfect checkout page? Share your tips in the comment section below.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Anatomy of a Perfect Checkout Page [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Let’s set the stage. You see an email from one of your favorite stores with a discount in the subject line. The discount is reiterated in the headline and body of the email. It is accessed with a click on a link in the email. The page that loads next is the landing page.

But landing pages are not found only after emails. They appear after clicking on paid search advertisements and organic search results too. Woe to the company that doesn’t take you on a seamless journey all the way from the subject line, to the email, to the landing page, and then through to the payment page.

This leads us straight to the infographic’s first tip: Make the purpose of your site clear. When you strive for clarity, you don’t send an email announcing a new product and then use your home page as the landing page. And you make sure that the keywords you bid on in a PPC campaign are found in the content of the ad’s landing page and in its meta descriptions.

Another noteworthy aspect of this infogrpahic is the fourth tip, in that it agrees with what we said in our earlier post that CTAs and content are the keys to better landing pages.

The sixth tip is part of our dogma: Test, test again, and then keep testing.

Also, responsive emails and pages are key as well. In fact, if the pages of your website that appear on SERPs need to be mobile friendly lest you incur the wrath of Google, and they penalize your site for poor UX. You can try out this nifty tool to help you get on board the mobile-friendly train.

Tell us about your landing page tips in the comment section.

Brought to you by GetResponse Email Marketing

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Eight UX Tips to Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rate [infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

• Take time to create effective calls-to-action (CTA)
• Keep CTAs above the fold
• Improve forms on landing pages
• Understand that content is key
• Use landing pages for your paid search campaigns

To get a better sense of how these techniques are used in the real world, browse websites from different industries. Be on the look out for interesting landing pages and how they are used to facilitate conversions at various stages of the buying process.

Landing Page Optimization Tip #1

Take time to create effective CTAs

Your CTA is one of the most important parts of the landing page. Without one, visitors may wonder what they are doing on your site.

CTAs are things like Buy Now buttons, Download Here links or whatever it may be that you want your visitors to click through to. Having a strong CTA will reinforce their desire to purchase whatever you are offering. Make sure your CTA is visible and clear to see by stepping back from your screen and seeing if it jumps out at you.

Taking time to create effective CTAs also means testing the colors, wording and placement of the CTA. Run A/B tests to see which option performs best. Remember to have fun with this, because the results can be interesting, and a small change can go a long way in improving conversion rates.

Landing Page Optimization Tip #2

Keep CTAs above the fold

Scrolling is useful for homepages or longer content marketing assets like white papers and infographics. But a long, scrolling landing page with a CTA at the end of the page is not best for promoting offers of services and products. You want that promotional information to stand out at first glance in order to have visitors do as little as possible. Therefore, keep your primary messaging and CTA above the fold. If your content runs long, the CTA can be repeated further down at the bottom of the page.

Check out how your different folds appear on various screen sizes at:

Where Is the Fold

Landing Page Optimization Tip #3

Improve forms on landing pages

You want to increase conversions on your landing pages? Improve your landing page forms! Only ask for information you need, like a first name and email address. Many marketers, especially in the B2B software space, ask for way too much information in their landing page forms. When designing a web form, ask yourself what information you need from the user, and what information you personally are comfortable sharing with other web sites. You will find that generally after six fields you are asking for a lot of information. In general, the more form fields you have, the more conversion rates fall.

Landing Page Optimization Tip #4

Sprinkle links within content for organic search traffic

Frequently updating your website with relevant, high-quality content positively impacts its position in search engine rankings. So it is important to understand that the content that brings in this organic search traffic also function as landing pages. But these landing pages don’t have to lead directly to Buy Now buttons.

Instead, you can use links within the content piece to guide visitors to other areas of the website that will incorporate micro-conversions. Experiment with different media types such as explanatory videos or screencasts that give a walkthrough of your product. Aside from a clear and visible CTA, educational and informative content is the way to engage with your visitors. It provides them the expert knowledge to help them make a good purchasing decision.

Landing Page Optimization Tip #5

Use landing pages for your paid search campaigns

Those of you with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns need to drive more sales and raise your quality score. Since you can’t just send visitors from a paid search ad to your home page, the goal of PPC landing page optimization is to generate more conversions, lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and raise the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

If you mention a product in your ads, mention them again on the landing page. Also, make sure that there is no discrepancy between the ad and landing page in terms of prices or discounts.

Keystone

Optimizing your landing pages can really increase conversions and sales. Planning is key and continual testing allows you to see what works and what does not work. A small tweak in your design can return large results. Keep your messaging consistent and relevant with interesting content that is focused on your target audience.

Amy Carabini is an Affiliate Marketing Manager at cleverbridge.

Want to learn more on how to optimize your affiliate website? Contact our Affiliate Management team at am@clevebridge.com.

The post Five Tips for Increasing Conversions From Landing Pages appeared first on cleverbridge.

This infographic, courtesy of vouchercloud, highlights some of the reasons customers abandon carts, and shows how you can influence visitors to convert at a higher rate. It makes the case that merchants should pay special attention to things like site speed, web design, product video and customer reviews to facilitate conversions.

Other abandonment issues include length of checkout process, fees and charges tacked on to the end of the checkout process and registration requirements. Additionally, make sure things like newsletter or email signups are double-opt-in instead of pre-checking them.

For more information on reducing cart abandonment, facilitating conversions and raising average order values, check out our guides to ecommerce essentials.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – The Psychology of Online Checkout [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

It is important to understand the difference in the experience customers has in a brick-and-mortar store and the one they have online. When shopping online, words and images are all we have to persuade customers to buy our products. It’s easier to sell to customers in a physical store because, in addition to words and images, we can use our tone of voice and body language to influence purchasing decisions. In the physical store, we can also adapt our message based on our customers’ reactions to what we are saying.

Customer feedback and online reviews help bridge that gap. Other shoppers trust these messages because it puts them in the mindset of those who have made similar purchases in the past. Among the benefits of customer reviews, both positive and negative ones, are an increase in conversions and better results on search engines.

Increase the Trust Factor

According to an article from Econsultancy about the effectiveness of consumer reviews:

• A product with 50 or more reviews will get a 4.6 percent uptick in conversions
• Web visitors who interact with reviews are 105 percent more likely to make a purchase and spend 11 percent more than those who don’t.
• Product reviews, on average, increase sales 18 percent.

Show Negative Reviews and Increase Conversions

One hundred five star reviews are far less valuable than 93 good or great reviews and seven negative ones. Sounds counterintuitive, right? But if something is too good to be true, it probably is.

According to, Blog, Blogger, and the Firm: Can Negative Posts by Employees Lead to Positive Outcomes?, “In contrast to the popular perception, our results reveal a potential positive aspect of negative posts.” While that research is about employees blogging negatively about the companies they work for, the results can be extrapolated to consumer reviews about the products they buy.

Only great businesses know how to deal with negative feedback in a public space. You should make it as simple as possible for a customer to leave feedback, and then, if some of it is negative, show other customers you know how to put things right when they go wrong. Research from Reevoo indicates that the presence of negative reviews increases a websites trust factor, and can contribute to a conversion uptick of 67 percent!

Generate Authentic SEO Value

There are three reasons Google rewards a website that features customer feedback:

• Fresh content – Google loves (even with its constant algorithm changes) fresh content written by real people. Giving users a social authentication login will only further support SEO benefits, increasing the value of the inbound link.
• Real-time customer crafted keyword research – Look at the words your customer are using in their feedback. They might describe your products better than you have. When there’s a noticeable enough difference always adapt in favor of the customers language. This will help potential customers find your store quicker since it will start ranking higher in search results.
• More data for Google – With enough reviews, Google will be able to better piece together and display these data snippets. This will increase click-through rates since customers will have a slightly higher implicit trust factor built into how they think about your website. According to an Econsultancy article about the benefits of customer reviews, research from Distilled shows that reviews that become rich snippet data in search results can result in a 10-20 percent increase in conversions.

Online feedback and reviews can also be used offline — in brochures and other material. Leverage this asset as much as possible. After all, you wouldn’t be getting positive reviews if it wasn’t well earned.

Keystone

Online feedback and reviews are an essential ingredient in the digital marketing mix if you want to increase conversions and revenue for your ecommerce store. Even some negative reviews help provide the reassurance that new customers need to make a purchase, and all reviews contribute to ongoing SEO strategies.

This was a guest post from Benjamin Kerry, CEO of Precise English, an SEO copywriting agency. Find out more here.

The post Increase Conversions With Customer Feedback appeared first on cleverbridge.

Now imagine you set in motion a plan to optimize conversion rates, and you end up increasing them a mere one percent. You’ve generated an extra $13,500 in gross revenue each year. But what if you are able to raise your conversion rates even more?

Conversion rate optimization does not just impact revenue. They also indicate an improvement in the customer experience, which we know to have an important impact on customer loyalty. Because the Internet has increased the power of customers by giving them the ability to choose from a wider range of products, your customer experience is going to play an important part in keeping your customers satisfied.

But it is not easy to get started with your conversion rate optimization tests, especially when it comes to deciding on what element of your site to test. Your options are almost limitless and may encompass pricing, the amount of pages in your checkout process, and calls to action (CTAs) – which include copy, shapes, color and placement on the page.

This week on The Conversion Show, Mike Batko and Justin Rondeau are going to teach you different ways you can optimize your ecommerce shopping cart, including:

• International payment preferences
• Best practices for displaying field forms
• How to identify and remove barriers from your checkout process

Sign up to listen to this webinar, and start turning your data into insight that gives you the power to make good business decisions about your ecommerce.

The post Ecommerce Ear Candy – Five Ecommerce Tricks Your Cart Needs Now appeared first on cleverbridge.

Key Stats (Conversion Optimization and Social Media)

• At 23 percent, having to create a new user account is the second biggest reason for cart abandonment.
• 54 percent of shoppers say they will purchase products they left in their cart if offered again at a discounted price.
• 72 percent of shoppers aged 25-24 are open to retargeting.
• 55 percent of shoppers say reviews help them make a buying decision.
• 55 percent of shoppers are indifferent to personalized offers.
• 53 percent shoppers (ages 18-34) say Facebook keeps them informed about the latest in online shopping.
• Pinterest is the second-most popular social commerce network among women (27 percent); Twitter is the second-most popular among men (23 percent).
• 25 percent of millennials and 16 percent of all age groups will check out a product if their friend shares it on social media.
• 80 percent of shoppers say a low number of social shares does not negatively impact their decision to buy from an online store.

Don’t waste time optimizing processes that might not have any effect on revenue. Get our complimentary white paper to learn new ways to improve your conversion rate.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – State of the Ecommerce Buyer [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.