It’s easy to make decisions centered on these influences, however, it’s not smart because it’s not driven by real data. We know you are in a hurry, but if you take the time to do some A/B testing, you will end up with results that can put you on the road to increased revenue.

With testing you will gather actual real information about your specific issue/problem/change/design, and be able to use that data to make factually based decisions, just like the scientists do.

Be a scientist, not a follower. Check out this amusing infographic from Wingify that will help you determine in which scenarios you should A/B test instead of deciding by other methods.

Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — 14 Times in Business You Should A/B Test [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

That’s right, the holiday season ecommerce bonanza is coming.

For our October Ecommerce Digest we take a closer look at the expected growth for online holiday sales, landing page optimization for the holiday rush, as well as recent news that touches all online retailers: the proliferation of ad blocking software.

Bright Outlook for the Holiday Season

Happy Holiday Season Expected for Retailers | eMarketer

In this analysis by eMarketer, we see that the overall forecast for the holiday shopping season is strong. Ecommerce continues to make up a significant component of holiday shopping. They expect online sales “will hit 9.0% of total retail sales this season, or $79.40 billion, up from 8.3% share last year.”

eMarketer also asserts that mobile ecommerce continues to grow. “We estimate that by the end of 2016, 25.0% of all retail ecommerce sales in the US will take place via mobile devices.”

Their analysis of a recent study by Signal found, “an impressive 60% of respondents intended to increase mobile holiday buying activity.”

Optimizing Your Site for Seasonal Sales

SEO & Black Friday: How Are Brands Preparing Their Landing Pages? | Econsultancy

How carefully do you curate your seasonal webpages? This article from Econsultancy examines different landing page strategies in terms of the strength of their SEO.

One approach, employed by UK retailer Currys, favors leaving your Black Friday landing page up year-round. Author Ben Davis says, “Currys has had one page ranking consistently all year. [Their Black Friday landing page] peaked recently at number one and has been live continuously since Black Friday 2014…Currys page is the only British retailer ranking for a host of Black Friday search terms.”

Keeping their site active, while regularly updating content and linking to other seasonal pages has positioned them well to take excellent advantage of the seasonal rush.

Davis emphasizes that overall web presence may be less important than a well targeted landing page. Amazon’s inconsistent ranking for key seasonal search terms illustrates his point. “Amazon is ranking well, so [they] might not be worried by its blip in the SERPs for the phrase ‘Black Friday 2015’, but it still shows how search performance can be affected if you don’t keep an eye open.”

Speaking of Mobile: Let’s Talk Ad Blocking

Ad Blockers — Friend or Foe? | cleverbridge Ecommerce Blog

We have known for months now that the fall release of Apple’s iOS 9 would support ad blocking on Safari. Its launch brought on a flurry of articles about the implications for online retailers, advertisers and consumers.

Randall Rothenberg at AdvertisingAge points out that “Ad blocking is the latest crisis du jour” for digital marketing, presenting significant challenges to the industry.

Meanwhile, Mark Jones at PerformanceIN highlights the reaction of City A.M., one UK site which has banned traffic from readers using ad blocking technology. City A.M. is currently “informing users that the site ‘relies on advertising to fund its journalism,’ and asking users ‘having trouble seeing adverts on the page’ to deactivate ad blockers if they wish to view the content.”

Even APM’s Marketplace is getting in on the deluge of commentary about ad blocking. In this recent piece, they explore new trends in digital advertising, meant to resonate personally with consumers. Brian Wong, CEO of the digital marketing firm Kiip, makes the point that while traditional advertising strategies attempted to overwhelm viewers with ads, “those laws of physics are different on mobile. In fact, you see a brand many times and you get more annoyed.” Listen to the whole piece to learn about what Kiip and others are doing to market to customers in today’s increasingly ad-hostile atmosphere.

All the tumult ad blocking technology has wrought inspires some self-reflection, as noted in this article from Econsultancy. The trade industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau admitted, “We messed up.” The current backlash has inspired IAB’s senior VP Scott Cunningham to confide, “We were so clever and so good at [digital advertising] that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.”

As we saw in this week’s Ecommerce Eye Candy, not every analyst agrees with the woeful tune sung by most articles on ad blockers. For a more comprehensive look at how ad blocking is affecting the entire industry, be sure to see Signal’s handy infographic below about the rise of ad blockers.

To learn more about strategies for holiday season ecommerce, download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

The post October Ecommerce Digest 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.

What Is Landing Page Optimization?

Technically, any and all of the pages on your site are landing pages if a visitor can see them. But when digital marketers and ecommerce pros refer to landing pages, they mean pages that are focused on a specific conversion goal like completing a transaction or generating a lead. So when someone searches for a certain type of software program on Google, sees your AdWords advertisement, and clicks on the link, the next page that opens is your landing page.

Depending on how effective the design of that landing page is, you may gain either a new customer or create another disinterested visitor, which is why it is so important to test the effectiveness of the different parts that make up your landing page. By creating alternative page elements and testing them against each other, companies can increase conversion rates, generate new leads and revenue, and decrease bounce rates.

The rest of the infographic goes into more detail about the state of affairs in the general landing page testing and optimization industry, especially regarding the readiness of most companies to properly administer conversion rate optimization tests.

Do you have questions about how to optimize your shopping cart? Check out the Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization on our resources page.

Landing Page Optimization by the Numbers | Unbounce

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – Landing Page Optimization by the Numbers [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

You can start by explaining the impact of coming switch to smart-card technology and start preparing for the end of next year by beefing up your fraud prevention strategy.

Or you can learn how to recover (what you thought was) lost revenue from software pirates.

And if you really want to impress your boss take her down a deep dive into the customer service KPIs that separate the experts from the novices.

Or, if you want, browse through these carefully hand-selected articles and reach all your goals with your new found ecommerce know-how.

Global Ecommerce Sales

Global B2C Ecommerce Sales To Hit $1.5 Trillion This Year Driven By Growth In Emerging Markets | Emarketer – In November, Forrester Research published a report that said, “Today, total online retail revenues in just five markets in Asia Pacific are close to the combined figure for online retail in the US and all of Western Europe.” This recent blog post from Emarketer concurs with the Forrester analysis and shows that the APAC region will conclude 2014 with more online retail sales than North America. If you haven’t yet thought about how you can generate some of those sales for your business you had better begin.

B2B Ecommerce KPIs

Leads And Opportunities Are the Primary B2B Marketing Measure, Not Attention | Econsultancy – This is a great post for every B2B marketer to read. It answers the question of how marketers really contribute to the success of a B2B company, and the answer is not simply, “brand awareness.” This post also argues that asset downloads and event registrations do not qualify as leads. The only real opportunities, according to this article, are those that actively, or verbally, confirm their interest. This awareness should take into account the fact that B2B leads take longer to convert into customers. To better manage the difficulty of cultivating prospects make sure to revamp your attribution model to include all touch points of your offering.

Fraud Prevention Strategy

The Target Tipping Point: How Ecommerce Trumped Traditional Retail In Transaction Security | GeekWire – Making sure that your store only processes secure transactions is a major concern for any merchant. The days when online shopping was a novelty and was perceived as less secure than physical stores are history. In fact, thanks in part to a plethora of news stories that exposed the security weaknesses in giant retailers, people in the United States now trust online store security more than brick-and-mortar security. Nevertheless, this article from Christopher Budd of Trend Micro says that the coming shift to smart-card technology in the United States is sure to push a lot of fraudsters who maneuvered in brick-and-mortar stores to try their underhanded techniques against online shoppers. Is your store prepared?

Landing Page Optimization

Seven Landing Page Tips You Probably Never Thought Of | PerformanceIN – If you’ve never considered optimizing your webpage you are missing an opportunity to improve your conversion rates. But if you only rely on the same old tests, test after test, then your are still missing those opportunities. This post on PerformanceIN was written by the people at Clickthroo which is a landing page software platform. The article offers counter-intuitive advice for split-testing your landing pages. For example, while digital marketers are generally told to keep their calls-to-action (CTAs) above the fold, it’s argued here some visitors may want to read some more information before completing the CTA. Digital marketers should try testing a landing page where the CTA follows compelling copy explaining why the visitor should complete the action.

Get ready for more fantastic ecommerce related posts in March. We will feature new content about email marketing, affiliate marketing and the use of Bitcoin in ecommerce.

The post February Ecommerce Digest appeared first on cleverbridge.

If you sell software online then website visits are important contributors to your bottom line. But more visitors to your site does not necessarily mean more revenue for your business. The gap between how many people visit your site and how many people buy a product through your online store (or take some action that signals a sales lead ) widens or narrows with your conversion rate.

Landing page optimization

One way to positively influence conversion rates is to optimize landing pages. Landing pages are the webpages visitors see after clicking on a link that leads to an important destination on your site. Clicks to landing pages often follow an email advertisement, a paid advertisement displayed after an Internet search query or a link hosted by an affiliate program.

This infographic from ion interactive, a digital marketing company, encourages ecommerce pros to optimize their landing pages by customizing them and designing split tests for those pages. The upshot of optimized landing pages according to this infographic is that the more customized your content, the more leads you get and the more sales you bring in.

How to do it

When building custom pages for testing purposes make sure that your landing pages’ content matches the keywords used in emails, PPC ads or affiliate links.

It’s also important to consider mobile users. Pages that are optimized for different screen sizes provide higher conversion rates.

And yet, according to the infographic many companies are not testing their landing pages. The number of companies performing landing page tests is decreasing! 

If your company is not testing different landing pages yet, it’s time to digitally disrupt yourself now. According to conversion optimization and landing page testing expert Chris Goward, one way to create a culture of testing in your company is to get senior level approval early on.

Proof That Landing Pages Work [Infographic] from ion interactive

Looking for an ecommerce platform with extensive landing page testing capabilities? Contact cleverbridge today!

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – Landing Pages Work [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Over the next two months, there is an expected growth in ecommerce sales. In what seemed like an opening salvo to begin this surge in online spending, companies like Walmart and Amazon launched Halloween themed marketing campaigns to drive sales for consumer items like candy and costumes.

But what about digital goods manufacturers and online service providers? How can they use Halloween to increase awareness of their brand and make some money too?

It seems that even if a company does not sell consumer packaged goods directly related to a seasonal event, they can still use the popularity of that event to their own business related advantage.

Typically, Halloween themed marketing campaigns for digital goods sellers focus less on generating revenue from transactions and more on engaging customers to create brand loyalty and facilitate micro conversions like registrations or downloads for content marketing.

One channel to focus on during these busy times is email marketing.

“US retail ecommerce sales are expected to reach $262.3 billion in 2013. Nearly a quarter of that spending will happen in the last two months of the year.” – via eMarketer, Retail Roundup

Email Traffic

Emails are a very important source for returning holiday season traffic. You’ll be competing against lots of other companies at this time so make sure to create and implement unique value propositions in your email content.

While they don’t sell candy corn or witch costumes, conversion rate optimization experts SiteTuners offer Halloween themed content marketing in the form of webinars in order to generate more leads for their business.

As this email came from the authors of the landing page optimization book, it was good to see that the corresponding landing page adhered to our principles of landing page optimization:

• It didn’t use the home page as the landing page
• It didn’t give me, the customer, too many choices
• It didn’t hide the call-to-action (CTA)
• It collected user data

Subject line glyphs and email render tests

As always, when you are sending emails the goal is to inform your subscriber of something great that they are missing. But if your subject line is not compelling or if your emails do not render correctly on your subscriber’s screen, your message is hopelessly lost.

Therefore, try to boost open rates by placing glyphs in your email’s subject line and improve click rates by making sure your emails display correctly on all browsers and screen sizes.

Social Media

Another compelling channel for driving traffic are your social networks. For example, Malwarebytes, an anti-malware software company, used LinkedIn to promote a Halloween themed contest to win a lifetime license of their software program.

Alternatively, GetResponse, an email marketing service, used a Halloween themed Tweet and landing page to promote new features of their service.

Avira, makers of an anti-virus software program, used a Halloween themed Facebook post to engage users and focus on them on their value proposition as a provider of PC security.

Do you have any success stories of creating unique marketing promotions for special days? Leave a comment below to share.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – Spooky Scary Halloween Marketing Campaigns appeared first on cleverbridge.

How Do Landing Page Objectives Differ for B2Bs vs B2Cs? | eMarketer

 – Not surprisingly, B2B and B2C ecommerce companies have different goals for their landing pages. While consumer oriented businesses focused their landing pages on turning leads into paying customers, B2B companies geared their landing pages toward turning clicks into leads.

How to Recoup 30% of “Card Declined” Abandonments | Baymard Institute

 – This post sets out to teach ecommerce pros how to handle the irritating “Card declined by processor” event. The danger of losing revenue to mysteriously declined cards is obvious: If the buyer can’t successfully place an order on your site, they’ll likely go somewhere else. The author advises merchants to offer alternative payment processors or payment methods to declined customers. However, he also cautions against over-aggressively trying to authorize declined cards as the decline may point to fraudulent activity.

10 Great Ecommerce Ideas for August 2013 | Practical Ecommerce

 – This article crowdsources a group of professionals from a variety of industries with ecommerce offerings of everything from retail t-shirts to digital B2B services. The main theme tying all these great ecommerce ideas together is that business must have a strong focus on the customer. Whether its through their website design, email campaigns or interactive videos, ecommerce success is very much about understanding your customers’ paths to conversion.

Forget hardware: Winning in Wearable Computing Requires Software and Services | GigaOM

 – This post examines the idea that wearable computers are only as good as the software programs controlling them. The post shows how independent companies are building wearable computers, ostensibly to compete against big players like Google and Apple. However, these independent vendors have a huge obstacle to overcome in trying to compete against the top companies, namely in the form of access to large ecosystems of developers and apps. Neither Apple nor Google will have to start from scratch in building their app stores for wearables, but these independent companies will. Similar to what we said with phone and tablet apps, most developers are in danger of earning little from their efforts due to a lack of exposure and the exorbitant fees from the platform hosts. Ultimately, it’s important to recognize the role software developers will play in the future of software. 

The post August Ecommerce Digest appeared first on cleverbridge.