OPW - Mar 5 - I'm covering the Conversion Conference in San Francisco. Here's a smattering of 13 takeaways from Jared Spool, Tim Ash and other gods of usability, from Day 1.
For a longer list, of 30 takeaways, see the full post at the Courtland Brooks blog.
- Think of order abandonment as a buying signal and part of the buying process. Remarket via email immediately with title 'Oops, was there a problem with your membership.' Follow up exactly 24 hours later reminding them of the original deal, and exactly 7 days later with a new offer. Link back to the order so they can complete it.
- Video spokespeople (a la Talking Heads) work well for conversions. Keep it short.
- Use Brightcove, Wistia or Oculu for video hosting on your web page so you don't lose traffic to Youtube/Vimeo.
- Blip.tv, Viddler and Tubemogul offer video syndication.
- If you must use a promo codes box in your sign up box, also include a 'want a promo code?' link and allow people to reference a promo code. See Macys.com for example of this new best practice.
- Keep your nav menus to 4 items.
- When using images of people, have them look at the area on the web page, i.e. your call-to-acton, where you want users to focus. Smiling people staring at the user will hammer conversions.
- Use Optimizely.com or Google Optimizer for AB testing.
- People will only use your navigation if the content on the page fails.
- Put social proof in the right bar of your pages. i.e. 14k happy users, 144k fans, etc.
- Try the 6ft call to action test. Stand back from the screen 6ft and see if you can still see the call to action.
- Use pics of women. Men prefer women, and women prefer women.
- If you use testimonials, just pick a couple, and bold out keywords to make them scannable, and link out to more testimonials.
I'll add more notes tomorrow. This is a killer conference. I'm so glad I'm here to learn and share with you.
The next Conversion Conferences are in Chicago, Florida, Dusseldorf and London, later this year.
