Quick question: how much conversion improvement is enough? Would hitting your industry’s average conversion rate convince you to rest on your laurels? If you doubled your old performance, would you stop there? Hopefully not. This case study is an example of why you should never consider your conversion work done, even after impressive gains.

Case Study Summary

Client: Ifbyphone, Inc., a provider of automated telephone applications.

Overall project goal: Increase the quantity and quality of their phone-call and click-to-call leads.

Challenges:

• Complex offering
• Poor prior experiences with landing page optimization
• Wide variety of audiences
• Difficulty in attributing phone calls to a marketing source

Success measurement #1: Percentage of landing page visitors who contact Ifbyphone by phone.

Success measurement #2: Lead quality, as measured by the phone call length (longer calls were correlated with higher close rates).

Results:

… Read the full article on Search Engine Land >

It was a real treat for me to meet Lance Loveday at Shop.org Annual last fall. He’s been a favorite columnist of mine for some time, and getting to know him since then has been a pleasure. Closed-Loop-Marketing specializes in conversion optimization services, and Lance’s team is on the leading edge of fine tuning the shopping experience.

Lance shares our “No Bull” approach to marketing his services and I’m glad to share this Q & A with our readers.

George: How do you know when your site isn’t converting as well as it could?

… (for the complete interview, please visit http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2010/03/10/interview-with-lance-loveday/)

This podcast discussion includes conversion optimization experts Brian Eisenberg, Lance Loveday, Anne Holland, and Chris Goward. Some of the topics discussed:

• Where should someone new to testing begin?
• Does method matter?
• Is suboptimization a risk?
• Can we trust the statistics behind tools?
• What test result has been the most surprising?

To hear the complete podcast, please visit : http://www.webanalysts.info/webanalytics/roundtable-podcast-on-testing/

My next guest’s tweet from yesterday evening says it all:

We just doubled conversion for a longtime client, for whom we’d previously tripled conversion. Thrilled.

And that’s why he’s next in the line up of Conversations on Conversion. If you don’t yet know Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, take a run over to Amazon and pick up a copy of his book, “Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads”. Lance’s twitter bio says he’s: a “CEO - Closed Loop Marketing, Author - Web Design for ROI, speaker, cyclist, husband, father, online advertising freak, usability geek. Not in that order.” I’ll add to that list and tell you he’s a super nice guy, a good conversationalist and a conversion optimization enthusiast to boot. Listen in as Lance and I talk conversions!

Listen to the complete interview here: Conversion Conversations, Episode 2

Time, they say, was invented to keep everything from happening all at once. Whether we’re performers, filmmakers or UX designers, time allows us to organize events and engineer an audience’s experience.

Time is also a conversion lever that can be as powerful as messaging, placement, color or any other user experience factor—and as deserving of its own study and focus. Three areas in particular are, I think, important to test and optimize in regards to time.

1. A need for speed

Some events just can’t happen quickly enough. The end of Lost and the final, complete obliteration of IE6 certainly come to mind. From a conversion perspective, however, the same is true. The faster certain events happen, the more likely your website visitors will convert. This includes:

The least sexy factor: page load time.

Page load time isn’t very sexy or hip, but it’s fundamental. It’s the plain, beige, lace-free foundational garment of your conversion optimization efforts. All other factors being equal, this single lever alone can improve your conversion rate and customer loyalty.

The conceptual keystone here, of course, is the phrase “all other factors being equal.”

… Read the complete article on Search Engine Land >