Digital Marketing Optimization - Neal Cole

Hey, I'm Neal and I improve revenues and conversion rates for websites using psychology, web analytics, customer insight & design best practice. See a link to my Free digital marketing toolbox at the bottom of this post. If you want to contact me please email me at [email protected]

[nealcole]

My Blog Has Moved!

Hi Everyone,

In case you had been wondering why I’ve not posted anything new on Tumblr recently, my blog is now on Wordpress and can be accessed via www.conversion-uplift.co.uk

Please subscribe on my new site to get notifications of my latest posts on digital marketing, website optimization, buyer psychology, market research and more.

Many thanks

Neal

[nealcole]

Does Usability Research Reflect Real Human Behavioiur?

Good navigation and the ease with which users can find relevant content on a website is critical for a good customer experience. Card sorting and other usability tools can assist in this process by providing input from users to improve our chances of making good decisions in designing choice architecture.

Are We Measuring Reality?

However, we should acknowledge that when we give a person a task to complete as part of a usability study we are directing their behaviour and in some instance we may have taken them out their natural environment. This will inevitably influence their response. Behavioural scientists have found that many of our decision are made automatically by our unconscious brain, and that the context and our underlying emotions heavily influence the choices we make. We also behave differently when we are aware that we are being observed. 

Asking respondents direct questions is especially problematic as people over-think issues because they switch to their slow, rational brain when encountering a mentally demanding task. Unfortunately most of the time when we are browsing a website we rely on our fast, intuitive, unconscious brain to make decisions without really engaging our conscious thought processes.  The implication here is that we cannot even access the rationale behind much of our behaviour when interacting with a website and so there is no point asking us to explain ourselves. 

“People don’t have reliable insight into their mental processes, so there is no point asking them what they want.” Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow.

Source: UserZoom:

How do we deal with these limitations of usability research?

Context is important:

Avoid taking people away from their natural environment if at all possible. Certainly don’t use focus groups as this is about far away of a normal browsing behaviour as you can get. How often do you search the web with a group of people you have never met and discuss your likes and dislikes of the site, with full knowledge that someone is observing you behind the mirror?

This is why remote user testing methods have an advantage over some face-to-face methods. Participants can be in their normal environment, with their normal distractions and so their behaviour is less likely to be influenced by the testing process. Don’t get me wrong, there will still be some bias as a result of the testing method, but it may be substantially less than techniques which take the user out of their normal browsing environment. 

source: Remote user testing -  UserZoom:

Observe and listen rather than ask:

You will get more meaningful insights from simply observing and listening to your users during a usability test as past behaviour is a more reliable indicator of future behaviour. Try to avoid verbal interventions as much as possible because people don’t like to admit when they do something wrong and you are likely to influence how they then behave in any future tasks. If you do want some verbal feedback, just ask your testers to say what they are doing as they go through the task.

But always keep in the back of your mind that usability testing is about informing your judgement, and not to prove or disprove someone’s opinions. It is also an iterative process that should begin early on in the development of a design and go through to after it has been implemented. 

Source: UsabilityHub:

Implicit Research Methods:

As I have already mentioned, most of our daily choices are made by our fast, intuitive brain which means we don’t have time to rationalise why we are making those decisions. New implicit research techniques such as functional MRI, EEG, biometrics, eye tracking, facial decoding and implicit reaction time studies (IRTs) are allowing marketers to access the sub-conscious part of the brain to better understand how we respond to communications and designs.

Eye tracking research helps identify which specific elements of a page or message attract our attention, but also the communication hierarchy of messages. Heatmaps allows us to display this data to reveal the proportion of visitors who noticed each of the key elements on a page, plus the frequency and duration of gaze on each element. 

Click and mouse movement heatmaps from visual analytics solutions such as Hotjar and Decibel Insights can provide similar insights for existing pages. For true eye tracking research though solutions from  Attensee and Gazehawk allow for you to evaluate both new and existing web page designs.

Source: Click Tale:

 A/B Test Usability Testing Results:

In the final analysis the only way you will ever know for sure if a change identified through usability testing improved agreed success metrics is to conduct an online controlled experiment or A/B testing as we refer to them. It is only when visitors are acting on their own impulses without any intervention from other parties and with their own money that you will see how they behave in reality on a website or app. 

Prioritise the insights you get from usability testing to decide which are worthy of testing and which should just be implemented as they are either no-brainers or unlikely to have a large impact on your success metrics.  A/B testing will give you the evidence to show exactly how much difference your usability testing has had on your conversion success metrics. 

Wow, you have got the end of my post - congratulations! If you found this post useful please share using the social media icons on this page.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

Are Images of Beautiful Women on Websites a Distraction?

Are Men Influenced by Images of Attractive Women?

Images of beautiful models are often used on websites to get attention and sell product. This is probably because sex is one of our strongest and most basic instincts. We sometimes make decisions on the possibility of having sex, having more sex or being more sexually attractive. However, brand guardians sometimes challenge the use of pictures of attractive women as distracting and not consistent with the brand.

Women and the game of chess:

If used inappropriately images of glamorous women can certainly be counter productive and reduce conversion. But what does the evidence show regarding the power of beautiful women on men? Let’s take chess, one of the most rational and strategic games that one can play. Should the physical characteristics of an opponent you play at Chess affect your performance?

Source: FreeImages.com

As heterosexual men tend to produce more testosterone when in the presence of a beautiful woman, researchers wanted to understand if this would induce them to take more risk when playing chess against a woman they find physically attractive. To test this hypothesis they got a group of adults to rate the attractiveness of accomplished chess players aged between twenty-five and thirty-four using official competition head shots.  They then analysed data from hundreds of chess games between 1997 and 2007 to see how male players perform when drawn against a physically attractive female competitor.

The study used two indicators of riskiness during a chess match.  Firstly, the riskiness of each player’s opening moves.  Statistics shown that certain opening moves are much more risky than others. Secondly, whether the game ended in a draw. Draws are risk-averse because two experienced chess players can easily steer a game towards a draw with little chance of losing or winning the match.

The research results confirmed that male chess players who were drawn against attractive female competitor tended to use riskier opening moves and were much less likely to draw their matches. Their risky game play also meant that the male competitors lost more matches compared to their counterparts who were playing members of their same sex or less attractive females.

 Evolutionary behaviour:

Statistics show that men are more than three and half times more likely to suffer a fatal accident than women. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that this is a direct result of men taking more risks to impress women. Researchers in Australia decided to put this to the test in a Brisbane skate boarding park.  

They asked almost a hundred skateboarders to complete a number of easy and difficult tricks whilst being monitored by an experimenter. As the more difficult tricks have a higher chance of injury skateboarders are normally more likely to abort these moves to avoid injury.

Source: Free Images.com

The researchers recorded how many tricks were successfully completed, but also how often the skateboarders aborted the more difficult routines. Initially a male researcher monitored the performance of the skateboarders, but later on he was replaced by an attractive 18 year-old female experimenter. The ability of the skateboarders to complete the easy tricks was not affected by the sex of the experimenter. However, for the more difficult routines the presence of the female researcher led to the skateboarders to fail more tricks and abort a lot less often.

They also measured the testosterone levels of the skateboarder immediately after they completed their tricks by taking a sample of their saliva. As expected the testosterone levels of the participants in the study who performed in front of the female experimenter were significantly higher. The research findings confirmed that mating instincts were triggered by the attractive female experimenter and this led them to abort fewer tricks that were doomed to fail.

 Are women a distraction?

 However, is this type of behaviour due to sexual arousal or simply distraction? To answer the question three psychologists decided to study the earning power of eighteen topless models who worked at an Albuquerque lap-dancing club. As lap dancers earn most of their money comes from tips the researchers wanted to understand if men tipped models purely because of their attractiveness or were evolutionary motivations relating to the ability to bear children also at play.

The analysis demonstrated that men were subconsciously giving more generous tips to models who were fertile, but not taking the contraceptive pill and so had the ability to conceive. The average income of models who were not taking the pill peaked at $355 during the fertile oestrus phase, compared to $260 during the infertile luteal phase and only $185 when they were menstruating.  These large differences in earnings were not present for those women who were taking the pill.

The researcher findings concluded that men were responding to subtle “leaked cues” when women were in their fertile phase. Men appear to be more pretentious and likely to flaunt their wealth when in the presence of a women who is biologically able to conceive.

 Can men predict their behaviour when aroused?

 In 2001 researchers at Berkeley collaborated with the behavioural economist Dan Ariely to explore how well men are at predicting how they respond when aroused. Students were asked to indicate what their sexual and moral decisions would be in a variety of somewhat odd sexual activities.  

Participants were asked the same questions when they were in a normal unaroused state, and also again when in a state of high sexually arousal. The researchers found that respondents predicted that their willingness to participate in a range of more risky and odd sexual behaviours increased by around three quarters (72% higher).

Ariely’s study concluded that when men are unaroused they are in-capable of accurately predicting their desire to engage in different sexual activities. Once they are aroused though conservatism, morality, prevention and protection appear to completely disappear from their thoughts.

 Source: This is Tiffany

Are Men more Impulsive When Shown Images of Attractive Women?

Further, research by psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly found that when men are shown images of attractive women they become more impatient and prone to impulsive decisions. The images put men in a mating frame of mind which causes them to discount future rewards more and seek instant gratification. 

Source: William Hill

Discounting is the process where we reduce the value of benefits we could receive in the future against what we can get now.  Men generally have a higher discount rate than women (i.e. men are more short-term focused). The psychologists hypothesized that men have evolved a higher discount rate than women because successful reproduction requires much greater and prolonged investment by women.

 Implications for digital marketing:

When appropriate images of beautiful women can help improve engagement and sell product.  Men are more likely to act impulsively and take risks when shown such images. This is ideal for products and services which offer the potential for instant gratification such as music and movie download sites, online games, casinos, loans and credit cards.

Source: Barclaycard

People relate to other people and we have a tendency to associate attractive people with intelligence and honesty. Use images of attractive people to convey relevant emotions and context to your product or service. 

Source: Netfiix

Although we like to think of ourselves as rational, logical thinkers, in reality we are not. Sure we are driven by explicit goals (e.g. we need a cold drink), but our brand choice is driven by implicit or  psychological goals (e.g.  adventure, enjoyment, safety etc - see Decode goal map below),  what we think other people are doing, context (i.e. what we are doing & our environment) and our emotions. Use images to create positive context and emotions for your brand by communicating how it will help them meet important psychological goals.  

Source: Decoded by Phil Barden

A/B test different models to see which ones resonate most with your audience.  Adore Me, a lingerie website, discovered through testing that blonde models reduce conversion, props are a distraction, but couches are fine. The model can be more important than price as even a $10 price cut won’t encourage a customer to buy if an item is worn by a model they don’t like.

Through their A/B testing results  they also found that popular models can help sell more expensive versions of the same item which can potentially add millions to the revenues.

Source: Adore Me

Where your target audience is men and you want to discourage risky behaviour avoid using beautiful models to arouse visitors. For example where your product requires using current disposable income to put money aside for future gain, such as pensions and long-term investments, using images of attractive women could be counter productive. 

So, attractive women do influence behaviour, whether we are male or female. The evidence is fairly conclusive and suggests that we can improve conversion by using appropriate images of beautiful women on websites to engage visitors and convey relevant contextual and emotional cues.  When you can though A/B test images as if you use the wrong image this can have a detrimental impact on conversion. 

Thank you for reading my post and I hope you found it useful.  If you did find my post of value please click on the social media icons at the bottom of the page to show your appreciation.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

Image Optimization Tools To Improve Load Speed & Conversion

14 Resources to Optimize Website Images:

Pictures are important for websites because studies indicate that a relevant image improves engagement and views of a page. Images grab our attention and can trigger emotions much more quickly than text. Our brains process images almost instantly, but it takes much longer to read copy.

This has a cost though as it increases the weight of a page and consequentially the page often takes longer to load. According to the latest HTTP Archive Report which collects technical data from half a million of the web’s most popular websites, the average page now weighs 2,262 KB, up by 16% during 2015. The average webpage has grown by 221% since 2010 and well over half (64%) of the weight (1,443 KB) is comprised of images.

To keep pages to a manageable weight it is important that images are optimised to avoid slow load speed which can be damaging to conversion.   Google penalises sites with slow load speeds and visitors are more likely to abandon a site the longer it takes to load. 

Research by Akamai and Gomez.com discovered that almost a half of users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and many will leave a site if it hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds.  Etsy found that 160KB of additional images resulted in a 12% increase in the bounce rate on mobile devices.

 To help alleviate these problems here  are 14 resources, many of which are free, to optimize your images.

 1. CompressNow. A Free online tool that supports GIF, JPG, and PNG. Upload an image up to 9MB, select compression level, and view.

2. FILEminimizer Pictures. Offers Free software to reduce the size of your images, photos and pictures by up to 95%. Compress your JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG, and EMF images and pictures. Compress whole digital photo albums at once. Choose from four different compression levels. FILEminimizer also comes in a premium suite that integrates with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, and Lotus Notes. 

3. FileOptimizer. A Free lossless file size optimizer for Windows that supports over 100 different formats. FileOptimizer has a simple interface that’s easy to automate. All processed files are copied to the recycle bin, so you can easily restore them. FileOptimizer is an open source application. 

4. ImageOptim. This is a Free application for Mac that optimizes PNG, JPG, and GIF images. To do so, ImageOptim integrates a batch of tools, including PNGOUT, Pngcrush, Zopfli, JpegOptim, and Gifsicle. ImageOptim finds best compression parameters and removes unnecessary comments and colour profiles.

5. Image Optimizer. A Free tool that’s available online or as a download. Change image dimensions, quality, or file size. Choose an image or compress images in bulk.

6. JPEGMini.  A photo compression application that reduces (up to 80 percent) the size of photographs, while preserving their full resolution and quality. JPEGmini Pro supports photos up to 50 megapixels and includes a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. Lite is Free. 

7. Kraken.io. Designed with the purpose of being a single, easy-to-use tool to optimise images. Offers multiple methods for resizing and cropping images, lossless and lossy options, and has a WordPress plugin. You can store optimised images directly in Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace Cloud Files. 

8. PNGOUTWin. An application for Windows that uses its own proprietary algorithms for compression. Convert and compress to PNG from TIFF, GIF, BMP, and other formats, or optimize your existing PNG files. Compress one or more files, and drag and drop multiple files on the main window.  

9. PNGGauntlet. A Free PNG shrinking application for Windows. It combines PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and DeflOpt to create the small lossless PNGs. PNGGauntlet converts JPG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP files to PNG.

10. PNGOptimizer. A Free small Windows program that cleans and reduces PNG files. It also converts other lossless image formats (BMP, GIF, and TGA) into PNG. PNGOptimizer has a simple drag-and-drop interface and creates easily available PNG screenshots.

11. PunyPNG. A Free online tool that supports JPG, GIF and PNG. Compress up to 20 files, with a max of 500KB each. The Pro plan offers higher compression and optional “lossy” (e.g. slight quality reductions) optimizations, with a 1MB max file size for 5,000 images per month. 

12. RIOT.  (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is a Free image optimisation programme for Windows to visually adjust compression parameters while retaining minimum file size. Compare the original image next to the optimised image in real-time and instantly see the new file size. Its features include batch support for multiple files, image adjustment tool, and colour reduction.

13. TinyPNG. A Free online tool that provides lossy compression to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. TinyPNG also offers a plugin for Photoshop, for Windows and Mac. 

14. Trimage. This is a Free cross-platform tool for optimizing PNG and JPG files. Trimage uses OptiPNG, Pngcrush, AdvanceCOMP, and Jpegoptim, depending on the file type. All images are compressed on the highest available lossless-compression levels. Available for Linux and other Unix systems. 

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it useful please share it using the social media button below.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

How Important is Social Media to a Brand?

Over 50 tools to help you optimize your social media activity:

Social Networks Influence Behaviour:

Humans are super social animals and we thrive best when connecting with other people. New ideas, products and behaviour spread through our social networks. Consequentially social media has massive potential if used to connect with the right individuals at the right time. 

Research by PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) of over 20,000 consumers worldwide found that almost half (45%) of digital buyers indicated reading reviews, comments and feedback on social media influenced their digital shopping behaviour. The influence of social media is probably much greater than this for because many of the interactions happen via word of mouth or are so subtle that they are difficult to identify and measure.  

Indeed, research suggests that we often copy other people without being consciously aware of our behaviour. This is because we have developed an almost automatic ability to replicate the behaviour of those who we admire or aspire to be like. As a result the potential power of social networks  should not be underestimated. Indeed, online social networks continue to grow rapidly.

 To help you in this important area of marketing I have summarised below over 50 tools that you can employ to get the most out of your social media activity. A number are free or have free trials available, so check them out if you think they could assist your social media planning and implementation.  

 Analytics for Social Media:

 1. 33Across: This tool allows you to integrate social media analytics with your marketing efforts. 33Across offers traffic building and monetization tools for content publishers. SiteCTRL provides real-time insights on how people consumer and share your content. This includes Copy&Paste which monitors on-site copy and paste activity and auto-inserts the page URL to create organic back-links which improve search rankings.

 SpeedShare enables and tracks sharing of your content across multiple social networks. The analytics tool helps you to understand how your users share your content in the public domain and privately.  

RevCTRL generates insights into the best places where you should focus your marketing efforts and allows for better placement and more relevant ads for users. Select customized ad signals including social, search, contextual and more. As a result RevCTRL aims to provide higher CPMs and more revenue with fewer ads on your site.  

2. Brandwatch: Supports 27 languages and is an ideal tool for international organisations that require a multi-language solution. It is able to monitor conversations across the vast majority of social networks and offers highly targeted searches with industry leading queries powered by 22 Boolean operators. Using an advanced algorithm it offers spam-free data from millions of online sources.  

 3. Circloscope: A circle management tool for Google+ It allows you to analyse a Google+ post and filter by the amount of engagement and then add those people who re-shared it to a circle. You can also drop in a link to an event and filter for attendees so that you can add them to a circle.

 4. Crowdbooster:  A social media strategy tool that gathers data from your Facebook and Twitter feeds. It allows you to analyse impressions, total reach and engagement and can inform you when people are most likely to view your latest blog post or video upload. This will help you adjust your strategy by understanding what is working and what is not. It also provides you with alerts about new Twitter members who may find your content or brand of interest. 

 5. Facebook Audience Insights: A Free tool from Facebook that allows you to better understand the audience you plan to target before you begin any campaigns.

  6. Leadin App (from Hubspot): This is a Free inbound marketing tool which can tell you who is visiting your site and what content they are engaging with. When a visitor signs up to your site the app automatically identifies the social networks they are on and adds those details to their profile information. The app also allows you to set up contact and lead capture forms on your website, or synchronise your existing forms to your Leadin database.

  7. LikeAlyzer: For Facebook growth this tool allows you to keep up-to-date with Facebook stats. LikeAlyzer weekly provides information on your Facebook page such as the number of posts per day, Likes, comments and shares per post, timing and length of posts.

 8. Moz Analytics: Provides you with a single dashboard to browse your social media performance and other marketing efforts. As Moz is an SEO tool as well it will show you how your social media activity is affecting your SEO standing. 

 9. Qualia Media: The company has developed an Intent Quality Decision Engine to measure a person’s propensity to purchase. The engine identifies intent across screens and digital journeys by collecting and analysing signals of intent and selects your ideal consumers to deliver highly targeted ads.   

 10. Social Analytics: This is a Chrome extension that allows you to track real-time social engagement of any website to understand how popular a page or post is on various social networks. This helps you understand how content on a site is shared and where you might focus social engagement.

 11. SocialFlow: Employs an optimisation algorithm that analyses your Twitter and Facebook data to ensure your content is sent at the optimum time. The tool uses three key criteria to determine when to post content. Message relevance, which of your messages in most likely to connect, your audience (who is currently online), and timing (when is the best moment to post this content).

 12. Socialmention: A popular Free monitoring and listening tool. This covers over 100 social media networks and measures metrics such as sentiment, strength, passion and reach. Combined with an easy to use interface and the ability to export the data into an Excel sheet if required this is a highly useful tool that does not have any subscription to pay.

 13. Sysmos: A suite of social monitoring tools that help you collect and analyse relevant data within a framework that you can define to identify insights on what matters to you. It incorporates a workflow system that enables you to process large volumes of mentions to allow you to make data-driven decisions.

 14. ubervu: Powered by Hootsuite, this is a popular real-time social media analytics tool that gives you access to primary data on social media activity which provides insights to improve your social media marketing activity. 

 Content discovery and creation:

1. Anews: An iOS app that allows you read all the news, blogs and social networks on topics that interest you in one place. The app also enables you to share any articles with your social networks.  

2. Atomicreach: This tool analyses the emotional appeal of your content and evaluates whether your articles are written appropriately for the kind of people that read your content.  The app uses advanced data analytics to uncover how writing patterns impact your audience and machine learning to identify when they are interacting with your content.  

3. EMV Headline Analzser: The Emotional Value Headline Analyzer is provided by the Advanced Marketing Institute for evaluating how emotional a headline is to provide an indication of the chances of it being shared.

 4. Nuzzel: A social discovery tool that aggregates the stories and posts that your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are sharing and then sorts them by the number of friends who share an individual piece of content or by most recent. It also allows you view other friends’ feeds to see what their friends are sharing with them to identify what is important to your immediate network, your friends’ networks and your friends-of-friends’ networks.

 5. Pocket: This is a content curation tool that allows you to store articles, videos or other content for when you need it. It allows you to tag posts for easy sorting and filter by video, image or article.

 6. Portent Idea Generator: If you ever need a bit of help with what to write about a certain subject this tool provides instant headline suggestions to build an article around.

 7. RebelMouse: A social networking aggregation tool that allows you to use flexible, dynamic rules to auto-publish content from social platforms and gather content from RSS feeds and APIs. It also offers a CMS and mobile app platform which allows you to choose from a variety customisable designs.

 8. RefreshBox: Is a social curation and email marketing solution. The app allows you to package and send five links via email each week. There is a Chrome extension which will capture the title of any post you’re read and add it to your list which is automatically sent to your subscribers every Friday.

  Content Management:

 1. Buffer: Offers a Free account manager for one Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn account with up to 10 updates in each of your buffers (account schedule).  You can also have a 7 day trial to include Pinterest in your account. 

This a great tool to optimize and automate the times when you post on social media. Further, it provides detailed analytics of the number of clicks, favourites, shares, comments and the potential reach of individual posts. The browser plugin for the tool means that you don’t need to access the Buffer website to schedule or share content. 

You can go Awesome for $10 a month to manager 12 social profiles, with unlimited posts in your buffer, and have two users to manage the account. This allows you to decide on whether to send posts out of one account or multiple accounts across different social networks simultaneously.  

2. CoSchedule: A Wordpress plugin that allows you to plan, schedule and promote your blog content across multiple social media channels. CoSchedule integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Buffer. You can also track post links though Bit.ly or Google tracking tags.  You can manage all your content creation calendar and social media sharing schedule from the backend of your WordPress website or blog. The tool will also monitor social media engagement from your posts and produce an activity report which ranks posts based upon the level of engagement.  

3. Edgar: Automatically adds your new posts to a library which allows you to recycle all your social media posts so that you end up with a never-ending queue of content. You can determine what to post and when it goes out.

 4. Everypost: A Free social media app that allows you to manage all your posts onto the major social networks in one place. The app enables you to send updates simultaneously to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest and also allows you to post via email. For Twitter it has a text shortener that automatically shortens updates to keep them under 140 characters.

 5.  Hootsuite: This one of the most well-known and popular social media tools that helps you manage multiple social media accounts by monitoring, posting and delegating tasks within your team. This includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, WordPress, Foursquare, Instagram and many more.  

 In addition Hootsuite offers customised analytics, including scheduled reports, and they have partnered with Brandwatch to further enhance analytical capabilities.  

Other features of the tool include the ability to collaborate as a team (e.g. delegate replies, Tweets, track messages etc.), RSS integration (post updates from an RSS feed) and mobile apps.

 6. IFTTT: This app allows you to connect many of your favourite apps to create automatic actions from one app to another when you complete a set task. These automated actions are called recipes and there are many to choose from. 

Recipes include Tweeting your Facebook updates, share your Instagrams to Facebook, forward emails to save attachments to Dropbox, posting Vimeo videos you like to Tumblr, saving new texts you receive in Google Spreadsheet, copying any Instagram pictures you take to Google Drive, adding your latest iPhone screenshots to a Dropbox folder and saving articles saved for later in Feedly in Pocket too.

  7. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The Digital Marketing Platform enables you to monitor and engage with customers across every channel, including email, social and mobile, automate and manage campaigns, publish content, analyse the results and optimize as you go. 

 8. SocialOomph: This tool allows you to schedule tweets in advance and auto-follow your new followers. The dashboard enables you to combine Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plurk and your blog into one place to schedule posts and monitor social media activity. 

 9. Spredfast:  This is a social media management, listening, analytics, sponsorship and content marketing tool.   It is particularly good for gathering data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr on audience reach and engagement.  You can assess engagement and campaign performance with unified social media dashboards. 

It also includes a calendar feature which informs you of the optimal times to send updates. The tool integrates with digital analytics solutions such as Omniture, Google Analytics, Brandwatch, Crimson, Hexagon and more. 

10. Sprout Social: A management and engagement platform for social business.  You can manage, post, monitor, and analyse multiple social media accounts from the tool. It allows you to post updates simultaneously across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. 

Monitor your messages across social networks through on streaming inbox and their ViralPost algorithm analyses your followers’ engagement patterns to identify the best time to publish content. Their analytics reporting allows you to customize social media reporting across networks and profiles. Offers a 30 day Free trail.

 11. Tagboard: This is a social search and display platform which allows you to get a snap shot of sentiment surrounding your hashtag. This allows you to identify where most engagement was generated so that you prioritise effort in the right social networks. In addition Tagboard allows you to reply to people from the snapshot page, which works well for conferences and generating conversations in real-time.

 12. Tailwind: An app for saving you time with managing your Pinterest account. It allows you to schedule pins in advance, schedule re-pins, easily pin any visual content from any website using the Tailwind hover button, obtain easy to understand analytics and get reminders about boards that you need to optimize.

The app also allows you to organise your Instagram photos based on likes, comments or most recent photos. Further, it allows you to post Instagram photos on Pinterest and connect with Pinterest users on Instagram.

 Design and presentations:

1. Canva: A free web-based design tool that has some of the best elements of Photoshop and a range of designer templates. A very easy to use tool which offers an excellent range of design templates, fonts and layouts. There are also free tutorials that show you how to produce better graphics. A great tool if you wish to customize images to post on social media.

2. Haiku Deck: A web-based and iPad app for creating awesome looking presentations and with   the additional benefit of integrating with SlideShare. A great tool for reinventing content as you can choose from a range of stylish fonts, layouts and image filters to create a really polished looking presentation.

3.  LeadPages: Offers you the ability to create landing pages to encourage desired conversations from your social media activity. It provides a powerful (WYGIWYG) visual editor to design and launch landing pages within minutes.

 4. Markr: Is an app for creating visual hashtags for photos and videos.  Connect your Facebook or Twitter account to capture trending hashtags or you can create your own hashtags, You can then add an appropriate hashtag directly to an image or video to help it stand out from the crowd.

 5. Studio: A useful app that you can use with Instagram for image design. Studio is a photo-based social network that allows you to easily add text-based designs and layers to your photos. It also allows you to remix designs that you come across and share it as one of your own photos.

 6. Word Swag: This is an iPhone app that allows you add awesome text effects to your photos to create professional-quality posts and photo-quotes.

  Hangouts for Google+

 1. Hangout Toolbox: This is an extension for Google+ that offers several apps to enhance your Google+ Hangout experience. This includes Lower Third which allows you to display a graphical bar with your name on it or custom overlays. Volume Control enables you to manage the volume of each participant in a hangout or mute everyone in the hangout. Comment Tracker allows you to monitor what your audience is saying about content in different places, whether its YouTube or Google+.

  Outreach:

1. Discover.ly: This is a Free Chrome extension that shows you the social networks that your email connections use and you can even cross-reference other social networks as you browse on individual social sites. This allows you to identify if you have the potential to connect with individual people across multiple social networks or how you might connect with someone new through a mutual connection.

 2. Little Bird: A tool for identifying, targeting and engaging with the most influential people on the social web. It uses the collective discovery of other relevant people to find influencers and maps influencer networks to focus your social media strategy on the people that matter. .

  3. Zoho SalesIQ: This is platform for tracking website visitors that enables you to connect and engage with your users in real-time. It includes a language translator, integration with Zoho CRM and advanced triggers to segment visitors by how long they’ve been on your website, pages visited, type of visitor and many more classifications and responses.

   Planning:

 1. Chase’s Calendar of Events: A platform that monitors events, holidays, landmarks, anniversaries, birthdays and many more items in the social calendar. The online calendar will plug you into the theme of the day and provide you with ideas for topical and interesting content or conversations.

2. Process Street: A free process and work flow management solution that also provides downloadable, step-by-step checklists for your articles to make your content more engaging. The tool also allows you to add images, videos and other files to your checklist.

  3. Todoist: A useful tool to manage your daily task list. It also allows you capture ideas via mobile device, browser, email or desktop. You can then prioritise, schedule and add actions against each item on your list. It keeps individual project separate by using folders and labels and everyday it notifies you the day’s actions.

  Podcasts:

 1. RINGR: Is an iOS and Android app that allows you to connect with someone you want to interview remotely and record the entire conversation over the phone. They simply have to install the app, enter an invite code and begin the recording.

 2. Smart Podcast Player: A WordPress plugin for podcasters that is compatible with any podcast RSS feed from any podcasting hosting service, including Libsyn and SoundCloud.

The design of the Smart Podcast Player allows you to display your podcast artwork, customise the colour of the adio track bar and adjust the colour of the full player between a light or dark coloured theme.

  Share Content & Grow Traffic:

1. Bitly: A Free service that provides link shortening to post your content on social media accounts, together with real-time analytics, bookmarking your favourite sites and  allows you to track clicks.

2. Snip.ly: This is an awesome URL link shortener that when clicked shows a customised call-to-action snippet at the bottom of the page. This is a fantastic way of driving traffic back to your own website by sharing great content from others. Snip.ly also has a Chrome browser plug-in that automatically snips links you share or create when used with Bit.ly. All your Bit.ly links will then automatically add the Snip.ly messages to your updates on social media.

3. SumoMe: This offers a suite of 11 free tools to help you grow the traffic to your site. The visitor heatmap tool allows you to see what your visitors are clicking on so that you can make more informed decisions about improving the design of individual web pages. 

The Scroll Box allows you to ask visitors to submit their email addresses as they finish reading your latest post or learning about your product. Smart Bar is positioned at the top of your website to remind your visitors to join your email list, read your latest blog post, or whatever else you want them to do.

 Social Selling:

 1. PeopleLinx: This is a tool for driving social selling behaviour using gamification Users are allocated to a team so that you can view activity across teams and at an individual level. It allows team managers to set up profile “optimizations” and “to-do’s” that get assigned to people in each team. Automated alerts are then sent to team members to take action.

 Twitter Analytics and Account Management:

 1. Followerwonk: A great tool to analyse Twitter profiles. 30 day Free trial is available.

  2. Tweepi: A useful tool for managing your Twitter account as it allows you to remove unfollowers, clean up inactive followers, reciprocate by following new followers and follow accounts that may be of interest.

  3. Twitalyzer: A comprehensive Twitter analytics platform that combines basic Twitter measures with demographic data, commonly used metrics such as Klout, and their own proprietary scores.  

 4. Twitonomy: A dedicated Twitter account management and  analytics tool that will give you insights on the people you follow and those that follow you. It allows you to see who you follow, but do not follow you back, and those that follow you, but you don’t follow. 

  Video:

 1. Overvideo: This is an iPhone app that creates visual calls to action when you share video content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The app allows you to create and customize the call to action or link in the video and you can even select the moment you want a graphic or message to display in the video.

  Wow, you’ve done fantastic to get to the end of this long post. If you have found my post useful please share using the social media icons at the bottom of the page. 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

How Can Poker Help Boost Your Conversion Rate?

Warning - This post could seriously damage your wealth:

Source: 888 Poker

As I am responsible for trying to improve the performance of a major poker website and app I decided I needed to get under the skin of the average player. One of the ways I did this was by learning to play poker and joining competitor sites to compare the experience.

As I have become more experienced at the game I realised that there are many lessons that conversion specialists can learn from the game of poker. I have avoided mentioning any of the sites owned by my employer to minimise any conflict of interest and bias. Plus, this is more about insights than the user experience of individual apps.

 Understand the basic rules:

If you don’t know the hand rankings for poker you are going to make a lot of bad decisions and lose money quickly.

Similarly for conversion you need to understand basic web conventions and have a clear process for optimisation and testing. This will help ensure that you can spot obvious problems with your site and you have a systematic approach to improving the performance of your sites. This will you avoid random testing and improve your chances of making the best decisions to increase conversion.  If you want to read up on this subject check out my post on the optimisation process and some awesome books to read.

 Source: PokerStars

Don’t be overly aggressive with your approach:

Many good poker players can be very aggressive at times. This can unsettle their opponents. However, it can also put off novice players and make them abandon the game and try another table or website. 

With conversion most of your new visitors are novice players. If you are overly aggressive you may win over some brave souls, but you will probably scare off the majority of your  new customers.  People don’t like feeling they are being pushed into making a snap decision.  Pop-ups are almost universally employed on poker websites in an attempt to get visitors to take action. but these can often just annoy visitors. Conversion should be a pleasurable experience for the visitor and we should avoid over reliance on any single approach. 

Players are emotional creatures:

To make the best decisions in poker it is essential to be calm, logical and to consider the probabilities of hand strength and the likelihood of other cards being revealed at each stage of the game. However, in reality many players struggle with the maths and let their emotions drive their decision making. 

The behaviour of website visitors is no different to poker players. Visitors are are heavily influenced by their emotional state, their environment, what they think other people are doing and this all influences how they interpret content and functionality on your site. People are more concerned about potential losses than gains and so use money-back guarantees or free trials to reduce the perceived risk of making a poor decision. 

We are generally poor at doing mental maths, so spell out discounts or offers in simple terms so that users don’t have to work anything out. Use emotional hooks in your content to engage visitors at a non-rational level as this is often more important and influential than the purely logical reasons why we buy. This quote I recently came across sums up what we are dealing with:

“Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.” Dale Carnegie

Source: PokerStars

Predictable reduces cognitive strain :

A good poker player changes their tactics on a regular basis to avoid being too predictable. This works because people dislike having to deal with constant and random behaviour as it creates uncertainty which humans try to avoid at all costs. It also makes people impatient and prone to making irrational decisions. 

For conversion it is also important to get a balance. Ensure you don’t have too many surprises on your website that may distract or disrupt the user flow. Follow standard web-conventions when appropriate and don’t distract visitors with too much content that can ring mental alarm bells and lead to more cautious user behaviour.

 Have a clear strategy and be disciplined:

To be a successful poker player you must have a game plan as otherwise you will constantly be changing your approach in response to other players.  Only play when your starting hand meets certain criteria and don’t bet unless your hand is strong enough to justify it. Review the probability of getting a winning hand at each stage of the game and know when to fold. 

Conversion also requires that you have a clear strategy to formulate hypothesis and prioritise money according to the chances and value of success.  There must to be a potential for a significant ROI for any A/B test as otherwise why are you bothering?

Ensure you don’t waste effort on trying to improve conversion on poorly performing pages that don’t have the traffic or potential to justify the resource. Know when to cut your loses and move onto a more promising opportunity. Sometimes it is more profitable to to focus on your better performing pages that don’t require a large up-lift to give a handsome ROI. Prioritisation is key to your success as you will never have enough time or resource to test everything.

 Source: PokerStrategy

Competitor analysis can give you an advantage:

Respect your opponents as in a majority of cases at least one competitor will have a better hand than you. Take time to observe your competitors to see what you can learn from them and copy or adapt their better ideas.  

It is naïve to suggest you should never copy your competitors because it won’t work on your site. Sure, not everything will work, but if you are selective and use ideas in the right context they may enhance your user experience and improve conversion. Also look outside of your competitors for inspiration as most new features are likely to be adopted in other sectors first before they get to your small area of the web. You should then apply A/B testing when appropriate to validate whether an idea will benefit your site. 

Don’t treat all visitors the same:

There are many different kinds of poker players and to get the best result you need to understand their tactics and behaviour. Good players will adjust their behaviour accordingly. 

To improve conversion you also need to segment your customers to tailor and personalise the user experience. If you treat everyone the same you can expect average conversion. Employ customer research, web analytics, and analyse your data warehouse to better understand and segment your visitors to develop more relevant and personalised user journeys.

  Use game mechanics to engage visitors:

Poker is one of the most difficult games to master because it requires a good deal of skill, an understanding of human behaviour and a large amount of luck. However, we love games and mastery is one of our strongest motivations.

We should think about how we can apply gamification on our websites to improve the user experience and conversion. Why not use gamification of steps in your user journey to engage visitors and to create interest to nudge visitors towards your conversion goals. This can be as simple as providing regular and positive feedback or prizes (e.g. badges or loyalty points) to recognise task completion and reward behaviour that leads towards your conversion goals. Make your website fun and interesting when appropriate and visitors may want to return more often. 

Remember the importance of the user experience:

Poker sites bombard visitors with welcome bonus offers and tournaments with big prizes for the winners. However, for the vast majority of players who won’t be making a fortune out of poker the user experience is what matters.

This means having a strong value proposition supported by a user journey that is relevant and provides clear visual cues on how to interact within the game mechanics. Further, the application should minimise friction by avoiding distractions and anxiety. When appropriate urgency can be communicated to ensure players act quickly when required.

Source: Widerfunnel

The whole user experience needs to be pleasurable and aligned with customer expectations if you want to encourage visitors to return to your site or app. This is the same for any online business and is often forgotten in the rush to get short-term sales.  The danger is that too much attention is given to fancy new product enhancements and website changes when the basic game experience may also need some attention. Don’t forget why people come to your site.

 Source: Full Tilt

Ensure challenges are realistically achievable:

Poker sites have in the past been notorious for offering bonuses that require levels of game play that are totally unrealistic for the average user to attain. Pokerstars, 888 and Full Tilt have responded to these concerns and now offer instant release bonuses that are not linked to game play.

Source: Full Tilt

Other companies, such as Betfair, continue to promote offers that are highly complex and difficult to release.  Making a task too difficult to achieve for your average customer creates disappointment and resentment which will inevitably adversely affect customer retention.

 Winning involves luck:

Poker involves a fair amount of luck as even the strongest starting hand can turn to nothing when new cards are revealed that link to what another player has in his or her hand. Conversion also requires a reasonable amount of luck.

As individuals we are also poor at predicting which new designs will perform better than an existing page design or user journey. For this reason companies like Google and Netflix, who are in the mature phase of testing, often have test failure rates of 80% to 90%. Scale matters when you can’t rely on low-hanging fruit and so it is important to ramp up the number of tests you run to generate a few big wins.  The more tests you run the greater the likelihood you will get lucky.    

For a customer to buy at any moment in time requires that they are ready, able and motivated to act. If your proposition is not perceived to have the highest chance of helping them meet a current goal they are likely to go elsewhere. If a visitor gets distracted by a more urgent and pressing goal you will also probably lose them. Competitors are also constantly trying to move the goal posts in their favour so don’t be surprised if your conversion rate is in a constant state of flux.

Thank you for reading my post. If you have found it useful please share using the social media icons below or at the top of this post.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a Conversion Manager for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

Insights For Website Optimisation

My notes from the 2015 London Conversion Conference:

So what did I take away from attending the London Conversion Conference on 29th October? Well, to keep it simple here are my top insights and key take-outs from the conference.

Psychology is our guide:

Behaviour drives preferences. The consistency bias means that we if we begin engaging with a website we soon convince ourselves that we must like it.

Although we might not like pop-up windows, they work. Use them to collect email address with the offer of special offers to engage visitors who are not ready to buy or sign up to your product.

Use emotional hooks to motivate visitors at the beginning of the funnel as behaviour is largely driven by our unconscious brain when we begin our search on a website. However, when it comes to making a payment we definitely use our conscious brain. Make people feel competent by asking them an easy question at first as this helps to encourage the consistency effect.

It’s not just about A/B testing:

Conversion rate optimisation is much more than just A/B testing. We should be trying to better understand visitors through Voice of Customer research, use customer journey analysis to identify potential problems with the customer experience, fix bugs, conduct usability testing and lots of other activities that help reduce friction and improve the customer journey.

 Design with care:

Visual cues are important. Flat designs may be trendy, but strong visual cues help guide users and reduce cognitive load by making the desired journey easier to follow.

 Responsive design is a characteristic and not a solution:

Responsive design can create many problems that are hidden unless you analyse visitor behaviour and conversion rates by device. Mobile and tablet users often have different goals form those using a desktop computer.  Further, many responsive sites have not been designed with the mobile user in mind and so prove frustrating and poorly designed for the non-desktop user.

 Voice of Customer:

Use online Voice of Customer tools on your website to find out what visitors are looking for and what they couldn’t find. This can be invaluable in providing insights for developing hypothesis and for just fixing stuff.

Ensure you analyse VoC responses by device on responsive sites as the experience and problems will vary according to the size of the screen and browser. Responsive design is a characteristic, not a solution.

Copy when you find a good idea:

Some experts claim you shouldn’t copy your competitors or best in class websites. It may not work on your website and your site will look just like your competitors’ sites. However, if you are selective and A/B test before you implement this can be a very fruitful approach. Sometimes it won’t work, but there will also be occasions when it does.  Our ability to copy good ideas is one of the reasons for the amazing success of the human race, so don’t knock it.

 Scale is important in A/B testing:

Estimates of the proportion of A/B tests that fail range from between 60% and 80%. This means that you need to build your testing roadmap to get a sufficiently high number of tests in the pipelines to give you a reasonable return on investment.

Run tests in parallel:

Have multiple testing streams to optimise the number of tests you can run in parallel.  Provided tests are not on the same section of a page and have different hypothesis you may be able to run tests simultaneously.  You can also create cohorts if you have concerns, but most of the evidence suggests that interaction between tests if often no higher than 5% or 10%.

Create a testing culture:

Sharing test results can be difficult. To make this more interesting share surprising results to engage your audience. Try to develop a ‘prove your-self wrong’ culture to make failure more acceptable as this is how we learn. Innovation often relies on failure to generate those new ways of thinking that break the mould. Involve people from all areas of your organisation and have regular workshops or presentations on how testing is being utilised to improve the performance of your business.

 Speak with your fellow delegates and speakers:

I always find that engaging with other delegates and speakers is very valuable. Last year I found out about Hotjar through talking to one of the speakers and that saved my organisation over £1000,000 a year. This time I spoke with ex-colleague and author Colin McFarland about why you should run tests in parallel and his innovative approach to testing at Skyscanner.   

Thank you for reading my post. If you have found it useful please share using the social media icons below or at the top of this post.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a Conversion Manager for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

Why Does Low-Contrast Text Kill Your Conversion Rate?

Why Low Contrast Designs Suck!

Much of the information we glean from a website is in the form of letters, words, sentences and paragraphs carefully crafted to communicate how the site can help visitors complete a task or achieve a goal. This is normally assisted by the use of high contrast fonts and typefaces that make the text clear and legible.  However, sometimes for various reasons designers use more complex and/or dark backgrounds with non-white fonts which are more difficult to read. Low contrast designs are certainly popular in certain sectors such as gaming.

Disrupts User Flow:

Psychologists have noticed that making copy more difficult to read disrupts the mental flow that characterizes most of our thinking.  To understand if this affects how people think and behave the psychologist Daniel Kahneman conducted an experiment using brain teasers that form the Cognitive Reflection Test.  The questions are designed to encourage an immediate but incorrect answer that appeals to our fast, intuitive brain that we rely on for most of our daily decisions.

One of the questions is the bat and ball question below. Don’t try and calculate the answer, just say what first comes to mind.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball? How much does the ball cost?

The intuitive answer that the majority of people respond with is 10 cents, but this is wrong as that would make the total cost $1.20, not $1.10 as outlined in the question. The correct answer is 5 cents, but a majority of us arrive at 10 cents because we use our fast, intuitive brain most of the time as this conserves mental resources for more complex and difficult decisions.  Indeed, over 50% of students at MIT, Princeton and other top US universities also incorrectly answered the question with 5 cents as their response.

What Kahneman found was that when the questions were printed in a less fluent small, italicised, and grey font only a third of people got at least one question wrong compared to 90% of those who were given the test paper in a normal fluent print. The psychologist Adam Alter replicated these findings and found the same affect with complex logic problems. People were again more likely to accurately answer logic questions when they were printed in a disfluent font.

“Complex fonts that populate modern environments function like an alarm, signalling that we need to recruit additional mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty.”  Adam Alter. Assistant Professor of Marketing and Psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business

Alarm Bells Ring:

As well as making us think more deeply, less fluent copy leads to more conservative behaviour as it warns our brain that the environment is potentially risky and dangerous.  This conclusion was supported by analysis of posts submitted to the website Grouphug.us. The site allows visitors to share anonymous confessions with people and obtain feedback from other visitors to the site.

Up to August 2008 the website was quite disfluent with grey text and a dark saturated background. However, in August 2008 a decision was made to change the colour scheme of the site to the more fluent black text on a white background.  Cognitive psychologist Danny Oppenheimer and Adam Alter discovered that following the change visitors were submitting increasingly more frank and revealing confessions. 

Other studies that Alter has undertaken have confirmed the same phenomenon. What this suggests is that the same cognitive alarms that dissuade people from being honest about past transgressions also raise concerns about immorality. People are more judgemental and critical of offensive or immoral behaviour when communicated using disfluent formats. When identical behaviour was described using fluent copy people rated such incidents as much less morally offensive.

User Experience:

Usability research supports these findings as they have demonstrated that people don’t read they scan text on websites. To scan quickly people rely on recognising word and character shapes rather than consciously processing each letter and the order in which it appears. Low contrast text disrupts this strategy and creates cognitive strain by forcing people to slow down and analyse each letter as the shape may not be instantly recognisable. Low contrasts sites therefore suffer because:

Legibility is sub-optimal: Visitors experience eye strain as they try to process the words and as we have already discovered people are less trusting of copy that is hard to read. You can test your website for contrast using a Google plug-in.

Try reading this promotional page on the PokerStars.com app and it will give you a headache. 

Source: PokerStars.com mobile app.

Conversion suffers: If an asset is difficult to see, especially if it is positioned in an unconventional location on the page, users are going to struggle to notice it and therefore will not interact with the element. This is a known conversion killer.

Confidence suffers: When people struggle to notice or read text on a website this can reduce their confidence about the site and hinder their chances of completing tasks they set out to achieve. Lack of confidence in a site though will increase the chance that a user will abandon your site and go to a competitor’s site instead.  

Accessibility is reduced: Poor contrast text severely affects visitors with low vision or cognitive impairments. Our vision declines with age and many people have some kind of vision impairment. Further, cognitive conditions that affect short-term memory (e.g. dyslexia) and our ability to focus our attention (e.g. ADHD) also make low contrast text very difficult to process.

Mobile visitors get frustrated: When a user is on the move even high-contrast text can be difficult to read on a mobile device when the sun is shining, but with low contrast-text it can become practically impossible. Here is a page from the Betfairpoker  app which has a progress indicator that has such poor contrast it is difficult to tell whether it is working or if no progress has been made.

Source: betfair.com 

Increasing cognitive strain: When we are unsure about how to interpret a web page this creates uncertainty and anxiety which slows down decision making. As inactive features are by convention greyed out or dimmed, low-contrast colour schemes can give users the wrong message about the availability of a feature.

Don’t let low contrast designs kill conversion:

The evidence is pretty conclusive, low contrast environments may create a mysterious and   dark atmosphere, but they also interfere with the brain’s natural processing strategies and influence our behaviour to the detriment of many website’s goals. If you have inherited a low-contrast site try A/B testing high-contrast designs to see if engagement and conversion improves. Challenge inane excuses such as ‘it conforms to our brand values’ and use evidence instead to improve the user experience and conversion. Don’t accept the status-quo as all too often it has no scientific basis and is frequently the result of copying the competition.

Thank you for reading my post. If you have found it useful please share using the social media icons below or at the top of this post. 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

6 Ecommerce Rating & Review Platforms To Build Trust & Credibility

The Importance Of Word of Mouth:

Research suggests that Word of mouth (WoM) is the main driver for between 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions. There is no reason to believe online WoM is any less important than offline WoM. Due to our social nature people are heavily influenced by the behaviour and opinions of others.

This is especially the case when faced with uncertainty, such as when buying something for the first time. This is why displaying ratings for products or services can be so powerful. A large number of ratings helps build trust and credibility of your site and provides guidance for customers on which products people are most satisfied with. This helps to reduce anxiety about your site and the products you sell.

Here are six commonly used product rating and review platforms to help build trust and credibility on your site. 

1. Bazaarvoice: 

Offers a suite of applications via a cloud based user generated content engine that  helps you capture, manage and respond to customer input to grow your business. This covers 5 core products;

Conversations encourages customers to review products, ask questions, give answers and share stories.

Connections manages responses to shopper questions & reviews across their network of retail sites.

Local makes authentic customer reviews available on your website and on the sites of local providers that carry your brand.

Curations pull authentic, moderated social media content into your buying experience by displaying it on your website.

Media engages active shoppers online and in-store via their ad targeting technology.

Bazaarvoice claim their clients see an average 65% lift in revenue per visit and 52% uplift in conversion on product pages with ratings and reviews. They also see a 98% average conversion uplift when shoppers engage in Q&A on major retail sites.  Has over 3,500 clients.

2. Feefo: 

A rating and reviews service that provides qualified reviews from real customers who have made a purchase from your organisation. Every review can be shared across social platforms and with the Feefo Facebook app you can automatically position reviews into the heart of your social engagement strategy.

As a Google Licensed Content Partner, Feefo submits ratings and reviews on behalf of merchants to be included in to Google’s listings.  Offers a Free trial period to try out the service.

3. Powerreviews: 

Provides a consumer engagements engine for over 1,000 brands to collect customer reviews and answer questions from consumers.

The consumer engagement engine powers ratings and reviews and Q&A solutions that have resulted in more than 22 million reviews.

Their syndication network distributes reviews to all major retailers and search engines.

Measures social traffic, engagement and content generation and determine how they drive traffic, conversion and sales.

Provides strategy, implementation, moderation and management services to ensure best practices are established.

4. Reviews.co.uk:  

A single platform for company, product and in-store reviews.

Product and merchant reviews to increase trust online.

Retain control of the process via real-time moderation, reply function and customisable review request emails.

Review booster - delivers star ratings in Google by contacting previous customers to obtain a boost in the amount of reviews you collect.

Social integration - links up to your Twitter account so that you are constantly updating fresh content. Every time you recieve a 4 or 5 star rating it will update your Twitter feed.

Their iOS & Android app allows you to manage and receive email alerts shortly after a customers leaves a 1 or 2 star review to provide the opportunity for an immediate response.

Has over 3,000 customers using their platform.

5. Rezview: 

Is a review and rating system that allows companies to collect, manage and benefit from consumer reviews/feedback. Rezview can be used by anyone with a website who wants to capture, manage and display customer reviews and ratings. Integration only requires you to paste a small JavaScript tag onto your product template to start capturing and displaying consumer reviews.

The system is available in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. Free 30 day trial available.

6. Yotpo:

A  suite of solutions including product reviews that is deeply integrated with social media which means that it is easy to share customer reviews with your business’s Facebook page and Twitter account which drives qualified traffic. The core features cover:

Review generation - Delivers automated, fully-customisable and mobile responsive emails after purchase which includes upsells in all review request to increase lifetime value. A one-step submission process also increases the number of reviews received.

On-site -  Full customization of widgets, with all reviews labelled with a trust badge, the ability to ask buyers questions and includes in-depth information on each reviewer to help buyers qualify relevance.

Retention - Focus on lifetime value of each customer through the use of post-purchase coupons, ability to comment on reviews and community Q&A.

Marketing - Social integration allows you to automatically share your best reviews on Facebook and Twitter to increase their reach.  Yotpo ads and email upsells leverage your reviews to bring quality traffic to your site.

SEO - Increases your SEO visibility by showing your reviews and ratings on Google and offers the ability to display your reviews across Google Shopping and search with product listing ads.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it of interest please share this post by clicking on the social media icons below.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

What You Need To Know About Cross-Cultural Website Optimization.

Culture and Conversion Optimization:

Digital marketing and website optimisation is about getting visitors to take action. But what if your visitors come from a range of different countries and cultures?  Will one strategy work for all of your different site visitors?

The Power of Culture on Conversions:

Culture has a deep and pervasive influence on how people perceive and react to web content. For global brands in particular it is important to consider how people from different cultures interpret and respond to such variants as colour, language,  images  and technology to be able to serve optimal content.

McDonald’s for instance has a separate website and uses different colours for every country it operates in.

    Singapore                                                                            Russia    

                        Germany                                                                             Brazil

The most influential research studies on cultural differences in communication were conducted by the anthropologists  Geert Hofstede while at IBM and Edward T Hall when he taught inter- cultural communications skills at the US State Department.  Their separate research studies are a must for anyone wanting to develop culturally responsive content as they provide many important insights into how people from different cultures process and respond to information and imagery.

A Framework for Understanding Cultural Dimensions:

Professor Geert Hofstede conducted probably the most comprehensive study of how cultural values vary by country between 1967 and 1973. Whilst working for IBM he analysed data from over 70 countries and has since utilised further studies, such as the World Values Survey, to validate and refine his cultural dimensions theory. This identifies 6 cultural dimensions that can be used to explain observed differences between cultures.

Hofstede’s 6 Cultural Dimensions:

Image Source

1. The Power Distance Index – How is power distributed in a culture? The Power Distance Index is the degree to which people accept and expect inequality in a society. Cultures that score low on this dimension seeks to reduce the level of inequality and expect justification for where it does exist.

2. Individualism versus collectivism – Is a person’s self- image defined by “I” or “we”? In Western cultures, we tend to focus on the needs and wants of the individual. Conversely, Eastern cultures place the needs of the collective ahead of individual.

3. Masculinity – Does a culture have a preference for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material rewards? If so, to what degree? In this context, femininity translates to collaboration, modesty, caring and quality of life.  

4. Uncertainty Avoidance – How comfortable does a society feel with uncertainty and ambiguity? A high score indicates a society that has formal rules and policies and are often intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas.

5. Long Term Orientation – This describes a culture’s time orientation - long-term vs short term. Scoring low means a culture favours long-standing norms and is suspicious of societal change. Cultures that score high are pragmatic and take a long-term view of business.

6. Indulgence versus Restraint - Does a culture restrain or indulge in fun and instant gratification? A high score means a culture encourages instant gratification and enjoying life and having fun.  Low scores reflect strict social norms which suppress indulgent behaviour.

Free Resource on Cultural Differences:

Data from over 100 countries has been made available in the Country Comparison tool by the Hofstede Centre - useful if you’re trying to boost conversions in a cross-cultural context.

Image source

For instance, this chart shows us that Japan scores much lower on individualism than the United States. This suggests that web content in Japan needs to focus more on the community and relationships, rather than showing pictures of individuals in isolation. Japanese people don’t like to stand out from the crowd.

Their high score for masculinity reflects their competitive drive for excellence and perfection, together with a strong work ethic. These values should be reflected in web content through both high quality imagery and messaging about how the product quality cannot be beaten.

At 92 Japan is one of the most uncertainty avoiding countries in the World as they like to plan for every eventuality. This means Japanese people usually won’t make a decision until they have reviewed all the facts and figures. Risk assessment and planning tools, as well as detailed and fact based information, could help boost conversions in that cultural context.

6 Dimensions of Culture – Country Comparison

Image source

Cultural Preferences and Facebook

Art preferences are affected by cultural norms and tends. For example, a study of over 400 Western and East Asian portraits found that the subject’s face on average made up around 15% of the total area of the picture in Western art compared to just 4% on average in East Asian portraits.

However, one study that analysed Facebook profile photos found that 12% of Americans’ photos lacked any background - compared to only 1% of photos from the Far East.

Both our art and Facebook profiles reflect our cultural ideals and preoccupations that influence our behaviour in all kinds of ways.

Western culture emphasizes individualistic and independent traits (Image source). People focus on their own face and pay less attention to the background.

  Eastern culture emphasizes communal and interdependent traits Image source. There is more of a tendency to include context (e.g. the background) and other people in their pictures. 

 Low Context vs High Context Cultures:

  Image Source

The anthropologist Edward T Hall identified differences between high and low-context cultures in how they communicate routine messages:

High-context cultures  (e.g. China and Japan) have many ‘unwritten rules’. 

Low-context cultures (e.g. the United States) leave little left to interpretation. “It is what it is.”

 Image source

Low context and high context cultures relate to a number of cultural traits, including commitment, trust, overtness - and even time.

Monochronic vs Polychronic Cultures:

People in low context cultures often have a monochronic perception. This means they see time as tangible and sequential. They follow strict time schedules, focus on one task at a time and set deadlines that they aim to meet at all costs.

High context cultures tend to have a polychronic perception of time where it is more fluid. Punctuality and structure is less important and deadlines are seen as more flexible and people work on multiple tasks at once.

Image source

Monochronic Societies Prefer Simplicity:

So how can we apply this insight to our sites?

Since monochronic societies dislike clutter and fluidity, a simple design with a clear action should work well. Things like:

·         A clear hero image.

·         Short bullet point messaging.

·         Clear focus on the product.

In polychronic cultures, rich context can be displayed using:

·         Multiple graphics, icons, boxes, and animation

·         Animated navigation.

·         Greater complexity.

Check out Chinese e-commerce website Taobao on the left and compare it with the UK’s  John Lewis site.  Both very successful e-commerce sites, but vastly different website design approaches due to the cultural values of the countries they operate in: 

          Taobao - China                                                  John Lewis – UK

Colours of our culture:

Colours have different meaning according to where you are in the world (nope, there’s not a colour that converts best). Yet many organizations insist on consistent brand colours across different markets. It could be that you’re losing conversions by not accounting for cultural variations in the associations of  colours in different countries .

Image source

In his book, Drunk Tank Pink, the American psychologist Adam Alter suggests that colours have meaning partly because they are associated with practically every pleasant and unpleasant object on Earth.  

As a result our interpretation and preference for colours is strongly influenced by factors such as language, climate, gender, age and context.  For example the way languages categorise colours differs (e.g. Russian has two words for blue), and certain colours are also used to express moods and feelings in some languages which inevitably affects how we perceive them.

If you’re curious, you can see which colours mean what here: Colours Across Cultures, Translating colours in interactive marketing communications  by Global Propaganda.

 Colours Mean Different Things to Different Cultures:

In 1999 American researchers investigated how people from 8 countries perceive different colours.

The analysis allowed researchers to generate a colour spectrum of meaning with red at one end and the blue-green-white cluster at the other end.  Red is associated with hot/vibrant and the spectrum gradually moves towards calm/gentle/peaceful that the blue-green-white cluster is associated with.

  Source: Colours across cultures, Global Propaganda. 

 Testing by international search and conversion agency Oban Digital suggests that cultural preferences for particular colours may also be driven by strong national associations and brand identities taken from individual sectors of the economy.  Joe Doveton tested this hypothesis in Germany where brands such as Siemens, Mercedes and Audi are renowned for promoting engineering excellence as an integral part of their USP. In tests for global air charter company Chapman Freeborn, they discovered a strong preference among German visitors for a silver button and a big dislike for a red button. Silver in Germany is synonymous with the Mercedes brand.

            Germany - Silver CTA                               UK - Red CTA

  Use Localised Copy For Personalisation & Conversions:

 Your value proposition is the most important element of your communication. The danger of using  direct translation, especially for keywords, is that you will end up with copy that uses words out of context. The term “mobile” for example is fine in the UK, but people in the United States refer to mobile phones as “cellphones”. In Germany people use a different word again, “handy” and in France “portable”. The same term can also have multiple meanings in a language.  

 Understanding your customers is the best way to craft a great value proposition. However, your customers preferences’ will likely vary according to their culture. This is where you can use qualitative research to learn new insights and validate or challenge your existing ideas on how to improve conversions.  You can then use A/B testing to evaluate different copy and images to identify the best performing messages.

 Pro tip: use loanwords in your copy - they’re often left out of copy that is directly translated.  

  Image Source

 Fonts and Font Sizes:

 Fonts often have visceral connotations behind them, and they often vary culture-to-culture. For example in the United States people relate Helvetica with the US Government and the IRS because it is commonly used on tax forms.

 Another example is how logographic language cultures use smaller, tightly packed text, confusing American readers. That’s because the language itself (e.g. Japanese) communicates a lot of information in just a few characters. Further, as Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters it is more difficult to create a clear visual hierarchy to organize information. So web designers often use decoration or graphic text to create emphasis where required.

  Image source

 For more on font psychology read this post by Alex Bulat.

 Further complicating the issue of conversion across cultures, we have the distinction between bi-culturalism and multi-culturalism.

Bi-Culturalism and Multi-Culturalism:

In the 2010 US Census over 6 percent of the population (over 2 million citizens) associated themselves with two or more ethnic or racial groups. Psychologists have discovered that bi-cultural people engage in frame switching, which means they can perceive the world through a different cultural lens depending upon the context of the situation and whether it reminds them of one culture or another.

Image source

So we can’t assume people coming from a different culture (e.g. Vietnamese  Americans), will retain all the same preferences as individuals still living in their native culture. Web analytics may help you identify potential bi-cultural visitors.

Even across monocultural people there are strong contrasts in values and behaviour. The concept of honour tends to be more strongly associated with East Asia than the West. However, even in the United States honour is known to influence behaviour more in southern and western states than in the northern states. All this goes back to understanding your customers.

Other Cultural Considerations for Conversions:

Technology:  We can’t assume people will all be using the same technology in different geographical markets.  

In Africa, for example, mobile commerce is much more established in certain sectors, (e.g. banking), because of a lack of fixed-line internet infrastructure.

For various reasons, iPhones have failed to establish a large market share in Spain, so Android and other operating systems more relevant to the Spanish mobile user.

Browsers: - Browser usage is also fragmented at an international level.

In large parts of Central Africa, Opera is the dominant browser.

People in China are more reliant on older version of IE than visitors from the West (making cross browser testing important).  

For more detailed information check out data from StatCounter.

Source: Feb 2015, StatCounter: 

Search Engines: - The major search engines use different algorithms for different countries and languages.  

Although Google has increased its penetration in Russia, the local search engine, Yandex, is still an important search engine in the country.  

In China, Google is not used at all, with Baidu being the top search engine with a market share of over 50%.

For more details of search engine market share see an article from extraDigital.

Payment Methods: - There are different payment methods. This means having a single cashier or ecommerce check-out design is unlikely to be optimal for a global audience.

In Europe, credit card penetration is much lower in Germany, Netherlands and Poland.  For cultural reasons many Germans dislike credit and as a result the single most popular payment method (38%)  is (ELV).

In the Netherlands a similar payment option, iDeal, is the preferred method of payment for 55% of online shoppers.  

Security-conscious Russians still like to use cash as a quarter of them use Qiwi to make online payments. This allows people to deposit cash into ATM style machines and then make payments online without having to transmit sensitive bank or credit card numbers over the internet.

Even in Turkey where credit and debit cards are very popular (87% market share) you won’t see Visa or MasterCard on most cards.  

In Islamic countries Sharia law prohibits the acceptance of interest or fees for loans and so potentially limits the use of credit cards and other Western style financial products. The expansion of Islamic banking is making e-commerce more accessible to Muslims, but again adds to the complexity of online payment processes.  

.

Source: Ecommerce news: 

6 Cultural Implications for Website Optimization:

 Websites that attempt to use identical content and colours across all countries and cultures are at a major disadvantage because of the impact diversity of values, norms and other differences have on how we interpret the world. Here are the key takeaways for optimizing a global website:

1. Research competitors: - To obtain a feel for whether your website is out of sync with the local culture conduct a competitor review of sites in the country concerned. This will give you the opportunity to look for similarities across your competitors’ websites that may indicate areas for A/B testing. (Just don’t copy your competitors; they don’t know what they’re doing either).

2. Focus on colours and words: - There is sometimes a tendency to focus on purely transactional matters (e.g. payment methods) when adapting websites for an international audience. This is a mistake and I would recommend paying attention to your website colours and the language you use to ensure the site conforms to local preferences.

3. Use qualitative research to get a local perspective:  - In addition, use local contacts, such as colleagues and suppliers to obtain feedback on your site in different countries. I’m surprised how often I come across websites and apps where it is obvious that a key page or journey has not had input from someone in the targeted country. Don’t fall into this trap as it is dangerous to rely solely on website experts who are not embedded in local culture.

4. Consider cultural dimensions and context: - Utilise the country comparison tool to understand the cultural dimensions of your audience and how contextualised your website needs to be. The more your website can reflect local cultural preferences the more likely your visitors will happily engage and interact with your content. However, use testing to ensure you validate your hypothesis as there needs to be a return on investment as otherwise you may be better spending your money elsewhere.  

4. Serve targeted content: - A/B testing is also ideal for evaluating the use of dynamic content to target images and messages that are responsive to how different cultures see the world.  This allows you to increase conversions by using geo-targeting (i.e. based upon country IP address) or other cultural indicators and let the data guide your website design.

                          Singapore                                                    Chile

Both of these Hertz websites are on the same domain and root directory (Hertz.com), but have different languages, visuals and appropriate text.

5. Analyse customer behaviour: - Cultural targeting has perhaps the greatest potential for your existing customers where you can track and analyse their behaviour over time.  Use your customer database to analyse behaviour by cultural indicators to see if you can identify key cultural drivers to their behaviour. Alternatively try A/B testing personalisation based upon cultural differences to see what impact this has on your KPIs.

6. Multiculturalism: – Due to the increasing influence and spread of cultural preferences across the globe there are likely to be opportunities to segment by cultural indicators even in your home country.  There are strong cultural and racial indicators, such as customer names, that you can utilise to segment your customers by and test the performance of targeted content. 

  Given the complexity of the human psyche and the pervasive power of cultural influences on our behaviour it is dangerous to assume anything when trying to improve website performance. Make A/B and multivariate testing your friend and guide in the multicultural jungle.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found this post of value please share it with your contacts by using the social network icons below or at the top of the page.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

Many thanks to Alex Birkett, Content Strategist at ConversionXL for his help and input in writing this post. 

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

How To Use Online Voice of Customer Tools To Boost Conversions.

Plus 22 VoC Tools For You To Use:

Source: Qualaroo:

When Is It Best To Get Customer Feedback?

Asking people questions hours, days, weeks or even months after a visit to your website is not going to deliver very accurate feedback on your customer experience. Our memories have to be reconstructed every time we recall them and as result they change on each occasion they are retrieved. On-site survey tools though allow you to gather data during the actual experience, allowing customers to express opinions and feelings when or immediately after an event occurs. This provides for much richer and accurate feedback on your site.

How To Use Customer Feedback?

On-line Voice of Customer (VoC) feedback is an important input into the overall website optimization process. It can provide valuable insights to reduce friction and help you develop hypothesis to be validated using A/B and multivariate testing. It can help in a number of areas including:

Why -  What are visitors looking for when they come to your site and is it meeting their expectations? Identify the main use cases – what are people trying to achieve and are they successful?

Barriers - What is preventing users to complete their task? Find out what is preventing visitors from completing everything they set out to do.  

Missing information - Are visitors finding everything they need on a particular webpage? For example, audit your homepage to compare the content with what customers say they are looking for on your website. Segment the data by new and returning visitors as they may have different requirements. This can help identify unnecessary content on your homepage and highlight other information that you should consider replacing it with.

Competitors - Which of your competitors’ sites do your customers use? Digital marketing is a zero-sum game, if you can’t convince your visitors to buy from your website, one of your competitors may be more persuasive. It’s important to identify which other similar sites to your own that visitors are going to as their expectations are influenced by these other sites. If your value proposition and customer experience does not compare favourably with key competitor sites you may struggle to convince visitors to convert.  

Value proposition - What attracted new visitors to your website? Identify what aspects of your value proposition are most appealing to new customers as this may not be the same as what you have on your website. Use this feedback to develop and test different proportion messages to see if this resonates better with customers.

Bugs -   when your site is broken visitors can provide you with the evidence you need to fix it. Some on-line tools (e.g. Bugmuncher) automate this process so that you can get screen shots and technical details sent directly to an inbox for quick and efficient resolution of problems.

Exit surveys -  For those visitors who have decided to leave your site you have nothing to lose by asking them to provide feedback on what they thought of your site. Ask them if they found what they were looking for or what would make them return to your site.

Abandon basket - When someone abandons their basket this is a great opportunity to get their feedback to understand what is behind this behaviour. Has something on your site raised concerns or are they struggling to get the delivery date they require? Any feedback from these customers may help you identify issues that you can seek to resolve to improve your conversion rate.

A word of caution:

Don’t take what your visitors say literally. Customers are often not fully aware of their own motivations as emotions and cognitive short-cuts (e.g. stereotypes and confirmation bias) are often important drivers of our behaviour. This is why people will say one thing and do something completely different. For this reason it is a good idea to validate insights by looking for supporting evidence (e.g. web analytics) and to use A/B and multivariate testing to measure the real impact on behaviour.  

VoC Tools:

Ok, so you now want to begin asking your customers and prospects questions to identify insights that can help you improve conversions. Below I’ve summarised twenty one VOC tools that can be used to give you new insights into customers’ opinions and behaviour.

.

1. Bugmuncher: Enables users to report problem & automatically sends your company screen shots with details of the browser, the operating system, the path they took & even which browser plug-ins they have installed. An ideal solution for any site that has more than its fair share of bugs to fix.  Free trial available. 

 Price: Plans range from $19 a month for a single user (Personal plan) to $99 for the Corporate plan with up to 5 users. For most small to medium sized companies the Start Up plan at $49 per month offers good value as it allows up to 3 users and 400 reports per month.

                                          2. ClickInsightsIO: Sends one-click lifecycle email surveys to your customers based upon what they do or don’t do on your website or in your app. Create surveys with questions with up to 4 clickable answers and when customers click on their answer they will land on a customizable landing page that allows you to ask an open-ended question for more in-depth insights and the ability to include a call to action to read, download or purchase something. 

 Price: Free unlimited 2 week trial. A single subscription plan is available at a cost of $49 per month for unlimited questions and responses, plus instant email notifications.  

   3. Feedbackify: Employs a fully customisable widget on your site to deliver short surveys for your visitors to complete. The Feedback Dashboard allows you to view answers with full context, including which page it was submitted from, your customer’s geographic location, browser, operating system, screen size etc.

 Price: Offers a Free full-featured 15 day trial. A single subscription plan costs just $19 a month.

4. getsatsfaction: Recently acquired by Sprinklr, getsatisfaction is an online community platform that deeply integrates feedback tools into your site to allow customers to connect with your company and other customers. Q&A tools capture, organize and automatically share commonly-asked questions. 

 Crowd-sourcing tools solicit input and feedback on key topics to gather insights, plan and problem-solve. Idea generation/prioritization tools invite customers to contribute new ideas and prioritise them based upon member input and feedback. getsatisfaction also promotes experts and super-users to Champion status to recognise them publicly and give them special privileges, like access to moderation and curation tools. 

The widget is fully customisable and allows customers to ask questions, leave praise, share an idea or raise a problem in 12 different languages. This is available across all devices and screen sizes, and social media integration means that you can view customer community feedback alongside other social content and push content from the community to Twitter or Facebook.

Price: Two plans available, Professional and Enterprise, prices not stated on website.

  5. Hotjar: This is a great new solution that offers a range of visual analytics solutions (e.g. heatmaps, session recordings, & form analytics) together with customer polls, surveys and an on-site usability recruitment tool. The Free basic service offers up to 3 on-site polls, surveys and recruiters for live usability testing each month. The Pro and Business packages both offer unlimited polls, surveys and usability test recruitment. The Business service also allows you to remove Hotjar branding from the feedback widget.

 One limitation of the tool is that it does not support cross-domain sites. However, for most surveys this doesn’t need to be a problem as you can just set up each domain as a separate site.

Price: The Free Basic plan allows you to run up to 3 polls or surveys a month and obtain up to 300 responses. The Pro plan costs just $29 a month and the Business plan costs $89 a month.  

  6. i-Perceptions: A Free pop up that asks three simple questions to website visitors. The three questions could include: “How would you rate your site experience?”, “What describes the primary purpose of visit?” and “Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?” You can use the feedback to understand how people engage with your website and find opportunities for improvement.

 Price: A Free and Enterprise plan. No prices on the website.

   7. Kampyle: Employs a widget on your website with the ability to tailor the feedback form for different parts of your website to ensure it is relevant to your visitors. This includes the ability to intercept visitors who are about to abandon their basket or exit your site to ask them questions to understand the root causes of abandonment. Its ability to integrate with Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics means that you can overlay behavioural data with feedback to evaluate and optimize efficiently. 

If you wish you have the ability to respond directly with a built-in response system and you can set up an automated response system that routes feedback to the appropriate people in your organisation to respond and take action. 

Price: A Free plan offers 1 feedback form and 10 feedback items per month. All annual plans offer a Free 2 month trial. Subscription plans start from $249 per month for Bronze for a single feedback form and up to 200 feedback items per month. The Gold plan ($999 a month) gives you 3 feedback forms, 3 users and up to 1,000 feedback items. There is also an Enterprise plan available for larger organisations.

  8. Opinionlab: Global leader in Voice of Customer feedback innovation and real-time listening solutions. Opinionlab uses the [+] widget on your site to gather visitor feedback. It offers dedicated solutions for desktop and mobile websites to ensure an optimal customer experience. Opinionlab also has the ability to benchmark across sectors and digital and physical touch points using their patented Customer Feedback Index and Functional Mean Ratings solution. 

 Price: No plan costs mentioned on the website. However, from my experience not a cheap solution for websites with large volumes of traffic. 

  9. Proved: A great tool if you simply want almost instant feedback on an idea, prototype or a new product development that you want to check-out before it goes live. Feedback is normally provided within 3 to 4 hours and guaranteed within 24 hours.

  Proved uses crowd sourced feedback to evaluate new product developments. The Starter plan for early stage ideas gets feedback from 20 testers, while the Basic plan for perhaps a prototype gives you 50 testers. Pro allows you to test a fully developed product with 100 testers to reduce uncertainty before launch. Free trial available on request. 

   10. Qualaroo: Offers a customisable widget for desktop and mobile devices. You can target questions to visitors anywhere on your site, and includes exit surveys to capture insights from visitors who are leaving your website. 

 They offer a Free trial and subscription plans start from $63 a month for desktop. The Professional plan costs $199 a month and includes exit surveys and mobile survey add-on.  The Enterprise plan ($499) provides for integration with CRM tools and advanced segmentation.

   11. qualtrics: An enterprise insight software solution that includes Site Interceptor which allows you to survey visitors as they browse your website. A fully flexible offering that includes over 100 different types of questions, drag-and-drop ordering, advanced flow logic, rich text editing, and the ability to include images, videos and audio in surveys. It also allows you to randomize the order of response categories, set quotas and set-up email alerts.  

No pricing information on the site - quotes can be requested by contacting qualtrics. 

12. Survata: A great tool if you have never designed questionnaires before and want some advice to complete the process. The tool finds respondents for your survey who meet your target audience from 17 countries by age, gender, geography and custom attributes. 

 You write your surveys questions, build your questionnaire using their self-service survey tool and an analyst will then review it and suggest edits based upon industry best practice. Survata will then find the respondents for your survey and provide raw data in an Excel spreadsheet and in Statwing, a free partner analysis tool. 

  Price: Plans range from $200 a month for Quick Read for surveys of up to 200 respondents per survey and $2,000 a month for Deep Read which offers up to 2,000 respondents.

 13. SurveyGizmo: A comprehensive survey tool that can be used to create fully-customisable surveys for distribution through email campaigns in HTML and plain text, on Twitter, Facebook and by embedding them on your website using JavaScript or iFrames. 

 For mobile forms SurveyGizmo automatically re-formats questions for the device and only displays one question at a time. Mobile surveys also enable use of their File Upload question to gain access to the respondent’s camera and allowing you to capture photos for the study.

Automated reporting tools offer one-click advanced reports and cross-tabs for full analysis of your data. Export data to other data analysis packages. You can also schedule reports and email results to fully automate the reporting process. 

 Price: Plans range from just $25 a month for Basic which offers over 30 question types and $95 a month for Premier. An Enterprise plan offers multi-user access for an unspecified price.

  14. SurveyMonkey: One of the most well-known and popular online survey tools that enables the creation of most types of surveys, including web, email, mobile, social media, and automated telephone surveys. If you need to find respondents, SurveyMonkey Audience allows you to define your target audience and will then provide you with the feedback you require. 

 Offers 15+ types of questions, customisable logo and branding and the ability to set skip logic by page and question.  Fully integrated with the likes of MailChimp and Eventbrite. Comprehensive real-time reporting available, together with text analysis, SPSS integration, custom reporting, cross-tabs and presentation-ready charts and reports. A Free plan is available for 10 questions and up to 100 responses per survey.

 Price: Subscription plans start from £26 a month (Select) for up to 1,000 responses to £65 a month for Platinum that offers an unlimited number of responses.

    15. Surveypal: Positions itself as an enterprise survey tool that uses an intuitive drag and drop style editor to make it easy to build high quality online and cross-device surveys. You can also choose to edit one of their professionally designed templates if you prefer. 

They also offer customer support via phone, email and built-in live chat to make the process as stress free as possible. All support staff are engineers which means you can expect to receive a high level of technical support to quickly resolve any problems. 

Allows you to set up automated email alerts based upon your own business rules to instantly respond to certain types of customers or responses. A flexible reporting tool which provides automated visual presentations in a variety of formats such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel, SPSS and as an interactive dashboard. 

Surveypal integrates with Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce and many other apps. Their API also allows you to send, receive and track surveys.  A Free plan is available for up to 100 responses. 

 Price: Subscription plans cost $40 a month for Premium for 1,000 responses per month. An Enterprise plan is also available with an unlimited number of responses per month.

   16.Temper: People are emotional creatures and Temper uses smiley faces in its surveys to measure how customer feel about your organisation and the topics you ask them questions about.

It offers three options for delivery of surveys. 

1.       Tab - Shows up at the bottom right of every page you install it on.

2.       Inline - Is positioned within your page anywhere you’d like to get feedback on a specific item or experience.

3.       Email - At the end of an email which is great for gauging how your customer support interactions are performing. 

Price: A 60 day money-back guarantee is available on all plans. Subscription plans range from Hobby at $12 a month to White Label at $199 a month.

  17. Typeform: Positions itself around delighting respondents, keeping them focused on one question at a time and the versatility of their forms. Provides an enterprise survey tool for use across all devices. Offers Free plan (Core) for basic users. 

 Price: The Pro plans costs $20 a month with unlimited typeforms and responses. A Pro+ for teams is currently under development.

    18. UserReport: A Free tool that offers both online surveys and feedback forums.  The online survey tool allows you to ask for feedback about your website and gather visitor demographics in over 60 languages. You can either use the ‘ready-to-go survey or customise with your own logo, colours and questions. Survey results are presented in intuitive reports that can be easily shared and exported as PDF or raw data. 

 The feedback forums give you the opportunity to gather ideas on how to improve your website. It also allows users to report bugs, submit issues, comment on and vote for ideas online. It works across devices and is fully customisable.  

Price: The solution is currently Free.

  19. UsabilityTools: Offers an extensive suite of UX tools which includes the ability to create surveys by adding a widget to your website, emailing links or hiring respondents. The ‘Click test’ allows users to place their mouse click on a given item on the web page to express their preferences and their point of interest.  

 Price: Quotations available on request.

   20. UserEcho: Offers a suite of software solutions for better customer service and engagement. The main customer feedback tool is their Ideas Forum which enables customers to ask questions, share ideas and learn. Customers can vote and you can gather critical feedback of what they like or dislike.  

Users can login via popular social networks which eliminates the need to go through a registration process. In addition, the Knowledge Base will automatically search for answers when a user writes a query, and in the case of a match will display the item to the user. 

UserEcho also enables live chat conversations with visitors on your site. 15 day Free trial. 

 Price: A single plan is available for £15 a month.

   21. Uservoice: Offers an all-in-one product management platform to make it easy to give customers, partners or internal teams a voice with private labelled feedback forums. You can collect customer feedback on web or mobile with a native user experience.

 Uservoice does not require your customers to register which encourages participating. The forums work by visitors raising a ticket and then vote or discuss ideas and possible solutions. The tickets contain useful information on the user including their OS, browser and the page from which the ticket was raised.

 Price: Basic plan costs $499 a month and the Premium is $999 a month. An Enterprise solution is also available with quotations on request.

    22. Voice Polls: Create questions or use existing templates to poll your website visitors by embedding surveys onto your website or blog. If you agree to sponsored polls behind your own polls you will earn revenue for every sponsored opinion collected from your site. You can browse trending polls from other users add those to your website to see if they improve engagement with your site.

 Voice Polls are a Free tool for online publishers. They can help you grow your traffic, engage your reader, learn from them, discover who they are and bring some interactivity on your pages.

 Price: For non-publishers each question is priced at $12.50 and $0.05 per completed survey.

    23. WebEngage: Offers online surveys, feedback forms and in-depth information (including screen grabs) to obtain and resolve customer problems and notification to display messages to specific audiences (e.g. shopping cart drop-off). 

Survey:  Collect insights from visitors. Target questionnaires at specific audiences using rule builder. Get real-time analytics and reports.

Feedback: Add context to your feedback form with custom fields and automatic screen grab features. 

Notification: A push messaging tool which lets you display offers, discount codes, product launch announcements etc. to visitors with real-time statistics. 

  Price: Plans range from $49 for Basic to $949 per month for the Enterprise Lite solution.

 Why not start today?

Many of these companies provide free trials and some of these tools have free plans so there is no reason not to give online VoC tools a go. Further, using such tools can also help encourage a more customer centric approach to optimization and website development. People are naturally curious about what potential and actual customers think about their ideas and designs so assist this process by giving your colleagues the opportunity to capture such feedback. 

Thank you for reading my post and if you found it of value please share it with your contacts by using the social network icons below or at the top of the page. 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here. 

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

How To Create An Awesome Explainer Video

Why Should You Use Explainer Videos?

So you think you want an explainer video on your website? Well, there are plenty of reasons why you should be seriously considering this option to improve your conversion rate on key pages.

People are 174% more likely to buy after watching a product video

Videos are typically shared  around 12 times more than links and text posts combined.

Posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than those without video.

90% of the information received by our brain is visually processed. You can communicate much more information in the same amount of time using visuals.

Visitors spend around double the amount of time on pages with videos on them.

Videos can be great for a number of purposes:

Business – Get your visitor’s attention by explaining your product or service is less than two minutes

Crowdfunders – Having a video as part of a funding campaign often helps raise double the money than if you don’t have a video to explain your proposition and business plan.

Authors – Can benefit from having an engaging and entertaining book trailer.

Marketers – Communicate your latest service or content using rich media.

Contests - Grab attention for promotions or contests using a short video.

You can then use your video on your website and drive more traffic to your website by uploading it to YouTube and sharing it on social media. Crazy Egg has a video on their homepage and they estimate it generates an additional $21,000 a month in new income.

 Types of Explainer Videos:

1. Live Action Video:  

A non-animated video can be good if you are selling a tangible product or a people-oriented service, such as a design agency or consultancy. People love to see what a product looks like in context and having the people who your customers would interact with in a video may help establish an emotional connection. 

 However, live-action videos do restrict you to the real world and so special effects are limited and unless you have a large budget your location is also going to be local.

2. Animated Explainer Videos: 

This type of videos allows for much more creativity in your visual story and they are easier to edit or refresh if you need to adapt them at a future date.  Animated videos are particularly good for explaining services and intangible products, such as digital tools or software.  

If you don’t have a physical product or object to show you can use an animated video to construct a compelling narrative about how your solution will be the answer to your customer’s problem.

3. Whiteboard Explainer Videos: 

 This is where the animation is hand drawn and erased using a whiteboard. It is popular because of its simplicity and the low cost of producing such a video. However, they can be very compelling and powerful at telling your story.

4. Kickstarter Videos: 

 Almost every Kickstarter project has an explainer video because it’s a great way to sell an idea and persuade people to part with their money. They do tend to be longer than your average explainer video, but Kickstarter does give you easy access to lots of examples of explainer videos.

 Ok, if you are convinced you want to use explainer videos it is important that you have a reliable process to create a video. Outlined below are six steps people normally follow to produce an awesome explainer video. 

Step 1: Get Script Right First.

The main determinant of whether your video will improve conversion or revenue is how good the script is.  The audio script needs to engage and persuade viewers that what you are communicating is relevant to them and worth staying with until the end of the video. You are likely to be better at understanding your product or service than a video studio or freelancer. So a draft script should be generated from within your organization to capitalise on this knowledge.

The aim of the video should be to answer any important questions that your potential customers may have within two minutes.  If you can’t do this within the time you should review the amount of detail that you are going into or the scope of the video.

 Step 2: Understand Customer Goals and Concerns:

It is important that you take a step back at this point and assess how well you understand your potential customers or reader’s needs.  Your visitors come to your site to complete a task or achieve a goal. To allow you to structure your script you need to be able to answer some or all of the following questions about your visitors by conducting some research:

What tasks are they looking to complete by coming to the site?

If they didn’t complete their main tasks, what prevented them from doing so?

What information is missing from the page?

What is their biggest concern about the product or the site?

What, if anything, is unclear or confusing on the page?

What is their number 1 reason for wanting to buy the product?

You can use tools such as SurveyMonkey or Qualaroo to ask your website visitors questions, with more providers in my digital marketing toolbox.  This should help you identify the main barriers to customers purchasing and what questions you could seek to answer in the video.  By better understanding the topic from your customer’s perspective you are more likely to press the right buttons and deal with potential objections.

 Step 3:The Script:

To keep your video to within two minutes it necessary to plan your script carefully so that you deal with the most important customer objections and effectively communicate why your product/service will meet their needs.

Introductory slide: This should communicate what your organisation does or the product/service that you are promoting. Ensure it states a clear and important benefit.

Introduce the problem: Outline the problem that potential customers have using the language expressed in your visitor research.  

Explain your solution:  Answer the problem with how your product or service provides a solution and again try to use some of the language customers used in your Voice Of the Customer research. 

Focus on important features:  Make sure you communicate how some of your product’s features solve specific and important problems.

Call to action: Ensure you include a clear and compelling call to action at the end of the video so that people are clear what to do next.

Build trust: Demonstrate why customers can have confidence in your organisation by displaying trust signals. This should be evidence such as well-known clients or partners, awards or other independently verified seals of approval. A free trial offer can also reduce the perceived risk from the customer’s perspective of making a wrong decision.

To retain viewer interest you should aim to have a video of 90 seconds or less.  As a script of between 110 to 140 words should translate into a minute of video, you may want to aim for around 165 to 210 words in total. Other things to consider are:

Communicate your most important message and value proposition in the first 30 seconds

Use 2nd person language, using words such as “you”, “your” and “yours”

Avoid jargon and technical words to keep the language simple and easy to understand.

The tone of voice should be appropriate for the subject and your audience. This usually means that people choose a casual, conversational tone of voice.

 Step 4: Choose A Narrator.

You can find your own voice-over, perhaps you have a brand ambassador or local celebrity, who has done adverts for you before. Alternatively you can ask your video studio or freelance to suggest someone for you. Either way they need to have clear diction and a tone of voice that aligns with the subject matter and your audience.

  Step 5: Create Your Video.

Here you have a number of options from leaving it all to a professional studio to producing your own animated video using a do-it-yourself website. However, given that it is good practice to A/B test your video and you are unlikely to produce the optimal video on your first attempt, I suggest you keep the cost to the minimum. You are likely to have to tweak or even make new videos as part of the optimization process. Further, if your product changes fairly frequently you may be forced to make new videos on a regular basis.  

The main options are:

1. Professional Studios:  

A studio will be more expensive than a freelancer or DIY option, but they do have the advantage that they can often also help with such tasks as choosing a narrator and background music. You will find over 100 explainer video studios in near the bottom of this post.

The list includes Explainify  who have produced videos for Nestle and Walmart, while PlanetNutshell have been used by Google and Microsoft .  Demo Duck   on the other hand have worked for Netflix and Crazy Egg.

 2. Freelancer:

 This option tends to be cheaper as freelancers have to be more competitive to get the business and don’t have the high overheads of a digital studio. You can either search the internet for a freelancer or use a crowd source website, such as Video Brewery, who will arrange for a handful of quotes from their network of professional freelancers. This makes the whole proposal process a lot easier for you.

 3. Do It Yourself:

If you have the time and inclination you can create your own animated videos. Websites such as GoAnimate, Videoscribe and PowToon provide you with easy to use solutions and advice on how to go about this process.

 Step 6. A/B Testing Video:

It is always wise to A/B test your video for a number of reasons. A great video can certainly engage visitors and improve conversion, but a video that is on the wrong page, is too long, has a poor script or lacks a compelling call to action can in some cases reduce conversion.  So you may have to test more than one video to find one that improves conversion and then you should continue to adjust the video to test different versions or calls to action to optimise the video.  

Check that you have analytics tracking for your video. If you use video players such as Sproutvideo and Vimeo they provide analytics to allow monitoring of how many unique impressions and plays your video receives. These video players can also tell you the location of viewers and the type of device that visitors are using.  This can help you with deciding how to amend your video to further improve your conversion rate.

Finally:

For your video to be successful it is important to follow a clear process and set an appropriate budget for creating your explainer video.  By following the steps outlined above you will increase the chance that your video will be both relevant and engaging for your website visitors. You will also have allowed for A/B testing to further optimize your video content and be flexible enough to respond to product changes.

Here are some great examples of different templates of business explainer videos that you may find useful.

 Here is a list of 111 studios and video production companies for you to choose from. I have checked every link personally to ensure they are relevant to explainer videos. 

#1ExplainerVideo: A studio for creative animated explainer videos. Clients: Google, XBox360, Personality Plus, Ion Digital

1/29 Films: Inspiring brand loyalty and love. Clients: Intel, BrightCove, Adobe

Advids: Online studio for explainer videos on-demand. Clients: Mercedes Benz, Valmont,  holidog.com

AmodFilms: Animated video production studio using video to explain & promote. Clients: Hasbro, iimyjobs.com, iBluebottle

Animated Video: Studio for explainer & promotional videos. Western Union, The World Bank,  AAPT

AnimationB2B: Animated explainer video. Clients: Reebok, Zenith Optimedia,  Hashi-Tashi,  Socializer S.A.

Animotus: Amsterdam-based animated explainer videos. Clients: Juniper Networks, Westcon, Amsterdam RAI

AppVideos: Explainer videos for mobile apps and software. Clients: Flockthere, Vito Technology, Quickoffice

Barq Video:  Animated explainer video production. Clients:

BWD: Johannesburg based digital marketing agency. Clients: NEDBANK, T Systems, BOSUN

Blink Tower: Animated explainer videos. Clients: National Academy of Engineering,  Mozilla, Vodacom

Brandlovevideos: Animated explainer videos to help sell your site. Clients: moviebuddy, VirtualDoctor, inFeedo

Brandepix: Make kick ass videos that focus on the bottom line. Clients: HP, Infosys, ORACLE, Makemytrip.com

Breadnbeyond: Offers Free guide on animated explainer videos. Clients: AskForTask, Pinterest, BetterBoo, Wealth Dragons

Broadcast2world: Hand crafted videos for your business. Clients: ebay, Nokia, Johnson & Johnson, RICOH

Cartoon Media: Awesome explainer videos built to achieve your profit goals - Premium Whiteboard Videos & explainer videos. Clients: Mazuma Mobile, HILTI, Wrexham Council

Coat of Arms Post Production: - Unique explainers & original post production services. Clients: Land Rover, Undercover Cupid, Marriott

Common Craft: Hand crafted media for explainers.

Corporate Video Sharks: Animated video production

Creamy Animation: Explainer and whiteboard videos. Clients: Microtek Corporation, Unstoppable, Pure Mortgage

Creative Theory: A Canadian based creative and business services agency that operates in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Offers video production services.

Cullin Collective: Explainer and explanation videos. Clients: basho, Zopim, onit,  AES International

Daily Planet: A full service design and production studio. Clients: Subway, Nationwide Insurance, CocaCola, AT&T, Capital One  

Demo Duck: Make little videos that get big results - Clients:  Netflix & Crazy Egg  

DemoFlick: Customer explainer videos

DemoNinja: Explainer video, tour video and app demo video

Easy Explain Video: explain, educate, entertain - explainer videos

EdmanTV: Freelance producer and motion graphics designer specialising in website videos

Epipheo Studios: A digital video studio that creates video content for large enterprises and small businesses alike.

Explainers.in: Your story, explained in video

Explania: Animated explanations, interactive tutorials and instructional videos. Free to embed existing videos on your own website

Explainify:  It’s about awakening your best story. Showing people what your brand is all about. Clients: Walmart, Coca Cola & Expedia Engaging. Instigating. Converting.

Explain It Videos: Animated explainer videos for your mobile apps.

Explanimate: Corporate animation company based in Brisbane, Australia

Flikli: Create top-notch animated videos faster and more affordably than ever before to make your brand truly shine

Flock of Pixels: Vimeo animation, motion design and post production. Clients:  Amex

Fueled: Award winning mobile design & development. Clients: Porsche, Ducati, P&G

FunnerVids: Make fun, inexpensive, animated business explainer videos that will wow your customers.  Clients: Micro Strategies, Convince & Convert.

Fire Starter Videos: America’s number 1 animated video company.  Free e-book about explainer videos. Whiteboard, cartoon, demo and explainer videos. Clients: MasterCard, Volvo, unicef, The World Bank

Gisteo: Creates one-of-a-kind  marketing videos built to engage, entice & convert. Clients: ORACLE, Intel, KPMG, CITRIX

GoAnimate & GoAnimate for schools: Make professional animated videos. Easy learning curve,low budget, simple do-it-yourself tools. Clients: CNN, WIRED, Mashable,  The Wall Street Journal

Green Iguana: Video production company, cartoons & animation, customer live action & stock videos, motion graphics & 3D. Clients: pci Security Standards Council, Virtual, Spirit Telecom

Grumo Media: Product demo videos. Clients: Microsoft, Walmart, Fidelity Investments, Halifax, Recket Benckiser

Howcast: The best how-to videos on the web. Clients: Next, Adobe, Virgin Media

How It Works Media: Animated explainer videos.

Idea Rocket: Put your message into orbit with animated videos. Clients: Bank of America, Alcatel Lucent,  Verizon, Electronic Arts

Illustrate It: Digital media agency who create compelling videos for companies.  Clients: Uber Media, P&G, Microsoft, Call Fire

In 60 Seconds:   Develops creative concepts, infographics, video productions and animations. Clients: Philips, eon, Oxfam Novib.

Instruxion: Digital agency who specialise in conceptual design, development and distribution of high-impact digital content to achieve your business objectives. Clients: Sony, Bayer, IKEA

Kasra Design: Premium animated explainer video, corporate video and anything in between. Clients: Panasonic, HTC, Dell

Kicker Inc: Emmy award winning video production. Clients: Nike Golf, ATB Financial, Share Vault

Kukuzoo: Canadian based animated explainer video production company. Clients: South Dade Toyota, Western University Canada

Less Films: Create videos that turn web traffic into customers - Free case study. Clients: Salesforce, Dashlane, Grasshopper

Legwork Studio: Digital agency which delivery app design & development, ecommerce and explainer videos.  

LooseKeys: Chicago based video production company who don’t just make videos, but tell stories. Clients: Cars.com, nakedwine.com

Lumeo: Affordable explainer videos. Clients: Accenture, Plexus, Professionals Australia

Mable Animation:  Mable Animation is a passionate illustration and animation studio located in Adelaide, South Australia

Media Whale: Explainer animation video production company. Clients: Appsee

MKShft: Creative company based in San Francisco. Clients:  Saatchi & Saatchi, Twitter, HTC, Velocidi PR, Bloomberg

MindBug Studios: Your ideas explained in short, fun, animated video. Clients: Rent Hackr, NOPSEC

Mypromovideos: We make your message sell. Clients: Ogilvy, Flipkart.com

Motion Crafter:  Explainer video production company. Clients: HP, Rackspace, Allstate

Panda Motion: We make explainer videos. Clients:  Squarespace.com, Quipster

Paper Krane:  Portland-based  studio that makes engaging & affordable animated marketing videos. Clients: Adidas, Clean Water Services, SkyLift

Picturelab: A team of creative folk who are passionate about visual storytelling and everything web and tech. Clients: Google, eSignal

Piehole: Create kick ass video to explain what you do. Clients: Zapper, Agent Converter,  Smartvault.com

Planet Nutshell: We make videos called Nutshells that explain alien concepts to everyday people. Clients: Microsoft, Google, cpb

RapidFire Consulting & Video: Explainer videos to help tell your story.

Revolution Productions: Authentic Marketing Videos & Animated Video Production. Clients:  Lexis Nexis, John Deere, The World Bank

RocketWheel: Ignite your sales with video on mobile & desktop.  Clients: Amazon, Symantec, Dell, Bloomberg BNA

Sandwich Video: Make videos and TV commercials, mostly for neat tech  products. Clients: Groupon, OSMO, Slack

Say it Visually: We explain complex ideas for clients. Clients:  Amazon, Chevron, Met Life

Sean Duran Studios: A freelancer who creates live action and animated videos. Clients: Panasonic, Coachd, Metalab Flow

Seed Well: Social video champions. Clients: YouTube, Microsoft, Google

Simple Story Videos: We create video for brands that’d rather make history than repeat it. Clients:  CocaCola, Shopify,  Citrix  

simpleshow: Hand-crafted explainer video production. Clients: Adobe, BMW. ebay, Audi, Swiss Re

Simplifilm: Enterprise grade product demo videos. Clients: Seth Godin

Splainers: Videos that get results.  Clients: Microsoft, Pepsico, MasterCard, NFL

Sprinkle Lab: We make and distribute delicious videos. Clients: Levi’s, IBM, Microsoft

Sundstedt Animation: We make hand-crafted explainer videos. Clients: Pushdigital, VMS, Onyx Health

Startup Video: Animated explainer videos. Clients: Standpoint, ABP

Studio Pigeon: Even the best ideas needs explanation. Clients: farmerfinder, StudioPress, Snip2Code

StudioTale: Creative videos. Clients: Scootr, Marbles App, Gotogether

Switch Video: Corporate video production &  animated video production. Clients: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Bayer

Tadapix: Animated video studio. Clients: Del Monte,  Zooztunes

The Video Animation Company: Explain your business with video animation. Clients: Mashable, ebay, The New York Times

The Explainers: Digital communications studio  focused on explainer videos, infographics, and content strategy. Clients: National Broadband Network, National Australia Bank

Think Mojo: Smart videos that get results. Clients: ebay, LinkedIn, Western Union

Think Video: Web video specialists with a knack for explanation.

Topic Simple:  Great animated videos for your product, idea, business, or startup. Clients: MSN, Springboard

Topline Comms: Digital agency that covers  technology PR, content marketing, search marketing, video production and B2B PR. Clients: Sony DADC, Barclays,  ABN AMRO

Transvideo Studios: The largest  video production company and studio complex in Silicon Valley. Clients: Mint.com, esignal

UserFarm: Content creators - Connecting you with the world’s largest community of film makers. A global crowd of 100,000 classified filmmakers, backed up by a team of awesome professionals. Clients: Fiat 500, Smeg Factory, Santal, Rio Mare

Veedme: Any video task. Clients: Google, MOSCOT, WAZE

Veracity Colab: A video agency  driven by strategy, story and design. Clients: Lenovo, Google, Adobe

Video Brewery: Video crowd-sourcing website connects you with freelancers to provide competitive quotes for your explainer video. Clients: UPSIDE, BusBank, Vero

Video Explainers: We tell great stories about your business. Clients: Bright Promotions, SDG, Tune Gigs

Video Igniter: Turnkey animated video production for agencies, businesses and marketers. Clients: LinkedIn, RICOH, ALTIMETER

Video Sales Lab: Videos that will increase your conversions, guaranteed. Clients: AffiliateDotCom

Vismo Media: Ideas into motion. 2D/3D animations. Clients: Thompson Reuters, Allstate, WSO.com

Vjsual: Explainer videos to improve the way you communicate. Clients: Commerzbank, Groupon

Vungle: Provides the infrastructure for app monetization through video ads. More than 200 million people worldwide see a Vungle ad each month.

WeblyGuys: Explainer video production studio.  "We create marketing systems that convert your visitors & prospects into buyers, followers and fans!"

We Can Explain: Animated explainer video production. Clients: EasyAzon, Rightmove, Zoopla

What Now? Exactly! Explainer video production. Clients: Fidelity National Financial, Global Heart Network Foundation

Whiteboard Explainers: High Quality & Animated Whiteboard Explainer Videos at Affordable Prices. Clients: NSCAA,  NAPA, CASK

Wienot Films: Explainer videos, whiteboard animation, editing and production.

Wooshii: Find an animator or video-maker for your explainer or demo video. Free e-book.  Clients: Google, ebay, Unilever

Wyzowl: Create animated explainer videos with and without characters, website or web app walk-through using screen recordings, mobile app walk-through and video graphics based around statistics. Clients:  UserReport, Heebo.com,  Postify

Ydraw: What’s your story. Explainer video production company. Clients: BlueSafe, Magic Sock,

Your-60-seconds: Custom video productions for your website and App.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it of interest please share this post by clicking on the social media icons below.

Here is a great infographic on explainer videos from Hubspot.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here. This includes a section on explainer videos which has links to over 100 animated video production companies and freelancers. 

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

Are Icons Without Labels Conversion Killers?

Are you annoying visitors by having icons without labels?

Labels are helpful right? Without labels we are unable to categorise products, services, websites, cars, even people and many other things. So WTF  - I keep coming across websites and apps that use icons with no labels. Are they completely mad or do they think it is cool to create uncertainty and confusion among their visitors?

Here are the latest navigation icons from Tumblr. I use Tumblr a few times a week but I still can’t remember what all the icons stand for. Inventing new icons and not giving them clear labels just creates ambiguity, confusion and ultimately frustration from a user perspective. Many of us have tested the infamous hamburger button and found it inferior to a simple “Menu” label. 

Ok, so labels can have negative associations if they are misleading or inappropriate for the situation. But if you are unsure what the best label is then A/B test them to confirm which is most effective. Labels can also work to your advantage as vivid descriptive labels can help to create images in our mind that grab out attention and encourage a positive response. Buffer has the “Awesome” plan for their more active customers. Why use a boring term when you can inspire people. 

Labels are immensely powerful as they frame how we perceive a situation or event. For instance people are psychologically more driven to avoid a loss than a potential gain. We can use this to our advantage by framing an action from the perspective of a potential  loss. VWO use a label on their alternative CTA that reinforces what a visitor will miss out on if they don’t click on the primary CTA. This makes it psychologically uncomfortable for the visitor to click on the alternative CTA. This in turn makes the primary CTA appear even more appealing.  

Avoid confusing simplicity with a minimalistic approach:

One of the reasons why icons are used without labels appears to be that simplicity is confused with having a minimalistic approach. This often leads to over-simplicity which risks creating more friction and cognitive load because key navigation elements are either hidden or sit behind meaningless icons that new visitors cannot be expected to decode. Sure, try for a simple design, but think very carefully before you remove anything in case it assists the user journey. 

Zeebox is a case in point where they thought their app would benefit from removing the top navigation buttons by introducing a side-menu activated by the now derided hamburger button. They thought this would de-clutter their app and give more prominence to their content. 

However, after they implemented the new design they found that engagement time halved. They had to rush out an update to undo the damage and decided to A/B test it next time. When they did A/B test a new version of the side-menu it was again a disaster. Needless to say they did not implement a side-menu.  

Navigation is crucial to an app or website’s success and so make sure you A/B test new architecture before implementing it. Just because Facebook is testing something new don’t assume it will work on your site. Even Facebook have added labels to their persistent bottom navigation. So, please stop annoying your visitors by using icons without labels.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it useful please share it using the social media icons below. 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile

[nealcole]

How To Optimize Your Website’s Performance Using A/B Testing

Designing Websites For Higher Conversions:

When people talk about A/B testing they often refer to call to action button changes and landing page tests.  They also sometimes talk about only changing one element on a page at a time to ensure you can tell exactly what generated the difference between the two experiences. This last point of view can be quite misleading and could hold back your optimization progress.

You need to base your testing programme on a best practice and systematic process of discovery, evidence and prioritisation. But once you have that in place you also need to consider how to build a test plan for each of your key pages or journeys. 

This brings us to the question of what are the main types of tests that you should be including in your testing roadmap. I’ve outlined below six testing approaches to consider and you should be employing all of them to optimize your site and improve conversions.

1. Innovation Tests:

Unless you happen to work for Google or some other mega website you have to change more than one element at a time if you are to make quick progress in your optimization journey.  An innovation or re-direct test allows you to experiment with something completely different. This gives you the opportunity to ensure the new page is more aligned to your business goals. The idea is that you can leave all the baggage of the existing page behind and design a radical new experience that will allow you to leapfrog to a much higher conversion rate.

Find an important web page, one with lots of traffic and a conversion rate that you believe can be significantly improved upon. You can then use a heuristic evaluation of the page to identify areas for improvement and use the other stages of the optimization process to gather further insights to help you construct your new innovative design. 

As the design is radically different from your existing page you may want to manage the risk that it actually reduces conversion by starting it on a relatively low proportion of traffic. However, after a week or so, if you are not seeing a big drop in conversion you can increase the proportion of traffic that sees the new page to reduce the time it will take for the test to complete.

2. Multivariate Tests:

Once you have found a new innovative design that performs better than you existing page you should look to dissect it to understand how you can further enhance its effectiveness. Provided you have sufficient traffic multivariate testing (MVT) is ideally suited for this purpose.

Unlike A/B testing MVT allows you to change content within multiple sections of the same page and compare all the possible combinations against each other. For example if you wanted to test changing two sections on a page and have two variables for each section that would generate 8 combinations.

2 x 2 x 2 = 8

However, adding just one more variable in a single section increases the test combinations from 8 to 12.

2 x 2 x 3  = 12

MVT’s have the advantage that they allow you to isolate many small page elements to understand their individual impact on conversion.  You can also evaluate interaction effects between multiple independent elements to find compound effects.  This can save you time as you don’t have to create and test many different variations for a page element that might not even have much impact upon your conversion rate.

On the downside MVTs require more traffic to achieve statistical confidence than an A/B test. If you don’t have the traffic to support a complex MVT limit the number of combinations by either reducing the number of sections or variables in the test. You must also ensure that all variations within each section make sense together. Once the MVT has identified which page elements contribute most to conversion you should validate the winning combination using an A/B test to check that they deliver the promised uplift.

 3. Real Estate Tests:

Although you may now have a high performing page, how do you know that all the elements on the page are in the best location? Some of the elements on the page could be poorly performing from a conversion perspective because they are in a sub-optimal location. Perhaps your main call to action is too far down the page or testimonials are taking prime real estate above the fold and they would be equally as effective further down the page, just above the fold.

Never assume that elements are in the best locations.  Your analytical tools, such as click and mouse movement heatmaps  should provide evidence that certain elements are not getting the attention you might expect, but to confirm this you will need to work with your web designers to develop tests that challenge the existing location of key assets on the page.  Try moving elements to different locations on the page but ensure that the page flow still works as otherwise that could influence the test result.

4. Inclusion/Exclusion Test:

Is that auto-rotating carousel really improving conversion? This is the stage in your page optimization process where you start turning off elements on your page to identify the conversion influencers. If you remove your carousel from your homepage and you see a positive impact on conversion this tells you that you either have a poorly designed carousel or that you could use that prime real-estate for other types of assets that might increase conversion.

This type of test is ideal for pages like your homepage that have many different elements on them and could benefit from being de-cluttered. Having unnecessary assets on a page can be distracting and reduce engagement at an important stage in the user journey.  If an element is removed and there is no impact on conversion this could also be considered for removal or it could be moved to a less important page or location.

When removing an asset has a negative impact on conversion you know to retain it as showing it clearly improves conversion. However, you should then do follow-up A/B tests on this element to determine the best design for this type of asset.  Be cautious about removing assets that when removed show a positive impact on conversion if the element relates to specific use cases or conversion goals. Maybe the element has been poorly designed or is difficult to understand. If you have any evidence that this might be the case A/B test different variants before deciding to remove from the page.

 5. Segment and Target Your Tests:

If you treat all your visitors the same you can only expect to have an average conversion rate. By definition some of your test variations will better meet the needs of certain visitor segments and as a result they may convert significantly higher for that group, but less well for other types of visitors. To further improve your conversion rate you should evaluate how you can segment and target your tests to create experiences designed to better satisfy the needs of individual customer groups.

This approach will also boost your conversion rate because it leads to a much more dynamic website that responds to the needs of different user segments.  Set up key visitor segments (e.g. new and returning customers) in your analytics that you want to analyse and target with different content. This allows you to analyse your test results to identify customer segments that performed significantly better than your average conversion uplift. You can then serve your winning test experience to all those visitor types that are more responsive to your new content.

Content automation is increasingly encroaching into this space and although it is a great tool, it is not a silver bullet. You can only automate the content you have and if this is not optimal and engaging your learnings will be limited if you try automating it. You should use A/B testing first to help create relevant content and understand how individual visitor segments respond to different user experiences. This will improve your chances of producing content that benefits from automation and is responsive to customer needs.

 6. Test Iteration:

To avoid random and ad-hoc testing you should always base your tests on insights gleaned from previous tests or test additional assets following-on from an initial test.  Testing is a continuous process that enables your website to evolve gradually to better satisfy your customer needs and provide new insights to enhance your content marketing. A test and learn process is a much more scientific approach to website improvement than completely redesigning your website from scratch.  

In Conclusion:

By using these strategies to create a systematic plan for optimising key pages on your site you are more likely to deliver substantial and sustainable uplifts in conversion.  Each type of test is designed to provide specific insights and allow you to further enhance your conversion rate. However, never assume you have come to the end of your journey as your competitors will look to respond to your optimization strategy and disruptive technologies may change customer behaviour.  You will need to continue the optimization process if you want to respond to changing visitor needs.  

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it of interest please share this post by clicking on the social media icons below.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

9 Awesome Books To Help You Optimize Your Website

9 Must Read Books For website optimization:

Here are nine brilliant books that will give you a good grounding in how to optimize websites and some of the psychology behind visitor behaviour. These are excellent for helping you defining your strategy and identify insights to develop hypothesis for website and landing page optimization.  

The first three books are specifically on website optimization. You might think that I would suggest just one of these books to read, but I can honestly say that each brings a different perspective to the subject and I would highly recommend that you read all three.  

1. Website Optimization – An hour A Day - Rich Page.

When I received this book in the post I thought it looked a bit dry and basic for my needs. It sat on my shelf for a few months and when I got around to reading it I decided to dip into it for specific topics of interest. However, the more I dipped into it and read whole chapters I realised that this is a gold mine for anyone wanting to really appreciate how to optimize a website.

It is crammed full of ideas on what you should be testing, but more importantly it is especially good for outlining a systematic process for optimization. This is essential for your success as without a consistent and data driven approach to optimization you will struggle to maintain focus and you will certainly not achieve an optimal return on investment (RIO) from you’re A/B and Multivariate Testing (MVT) tools.  Rich explains everything from investigating your analytics, and choosing tools, to putting together a testing plan for a page or journey.

As well as being great for understanding the process of optimization there is a lot of detail on the specifics of what to test. You can tell that Rich has a massive amount of experience on the subject of testing and he holds nothing back to help you identify areas and approaches to testing. I found this book particularly good for developing check lists of how and what to test.

  2. You Should Test That! Conversion Optimization for more leads, sales & profit or the Art and Science of improving websites – Chris Goward.

Chris Goward founded the website optimization specialists Widerfunnel and he shares their approach to optimization in this highly readable and fascinating book.  Despite it being a fairly thick book I found I struggled to stop reading it. You can tell Chris is well read as he brings insights from a wide range of sources and has a more holistic approach to the process than many of his peers.

This is probably the most strategic book on website optimization that I have read. It has a brilliant chapter on persuasion and models of human behaviour that is a must read. The Lift Model that Widerfunnel employ has been widely adopted as best practice in the industry and is fully explained in the book with great examples of how to use it in practice.

Chris’ book is also brilliant for dealing with objections to testing and how to engage people in the process of optimization. There are also a huge number of examples of tests and many vivid images to illustrate the nature of these experiments. I found Chris is particularly good at advising how to develop strong hypothesis before you go ahead with an experiment. A weak hypothesis is often the cause of many unsuccessful tests. Although we learn from our failures you do need a regular stream of successful tests to convince your stakeholders to maintain their support.    

  3. Landing Page Optimization – The Definitive Guide To Testing and Tuning for Conversions - Tim Ash, Rich Page and Maura Ginty.

For the digital marketers among us this is an essential read. Landing pages are the bread and butter of our trade and this book is a comprehensive guide on how to optimize the beginning of your funnel. However, as Tim points out in his book, visitors can land on a multitude of pages and it is important to seek to optimize all pages, including your homepage, where user first arrive on your site.

Many people think that landing pages are simple to design and optimize. When you read the book though you will get a better appreciation of how complex this process is and the importance of understanding how such pages fit into the overall customer journey. Tim and his co-authors take you thorough and systematic process of optimization.

This book is much more than landing page optimization. Sure, it covers the seven deadly sins of landing page design, but it also outlines Tim’s conversion Ninja toolbox to help you diagnose problems, identifying psychological mismatches with your visitors and fixing site problems. Other chapters include the strategy of what to test and the mechanics of testing. The book gives you a broad understanding of optimization and testing, but it also has many practical examples and ideas for your testing roadmap.

4. Brainfluence – 100 Ways To Persuade and Convince Consumers With Neuromarketing - Roger Dooley.

It is estimated that 95% of our thoughts, emotions and learning occur in our subconscious mind.  Research suggests that our subconscious mind has often made a decision well before we become consciously aware of our intentions and factors such as our emotional state, the environment, what we perceive other people are doing or thinking and social norms are much more powerful drivers of our behaviour than we appreciate.

Roger uses a broad definition of neuromarketing to include behavioural science and behavioural-based strategies to help us understand how our brain works and how to translate this into improving our marketing and our products. Roger has carefully extracted and summarised the insights from hundreds of interesting pieces of research to provide a stream of practical recommendations on how to influence people using key behavioural drivers.

Each of the fourteen chapters is broken up into lots of short sub-sections which makes the book very easy to digest and allows you to find specific topics of interest very quickly. This is a great book for marketers who want a short-cut to understanding what can influence our brain and how this can be translated into marketing strategies.

  5.How to Get People to Do Stuff - Susan Weinschenk.  Recommended by Roger Dooley.

Roger recommended this book to me over Twitter and I must say this is one of my most referred to books on persuasion and motivation.  The book is structured around seven drivers of behaviour:

1.       The need to belong

2.       Habits

3.       The power of stories

4.       Carrots and sticks

5.       Instincts

6.       The desire for mastery

7.       Tricks of the mind

It’s one of those books that you find difficult to put down as it’s packed full of interesting and useful insights. It’s also easy to dip into to find a particular topic as each chapter is divided up into short sub-sections using informative headings. In addition, after each insight has been explained there is short summary of the related strategy. This assists you in digesting the important learning from each sub-section and makes it easy for you to pinpoint relevant content if you want to return at a later date. It total Susan outlines 114 helpful persuasive strategies.

  6. Don’t Make Me Think – A common Sense Approach to Web Usability – Steve Krug

The title in itself is a great way of framing website usability and how we should set out to design user journeys. This is a must read for anyone involved in optimizing or designing websites as it is one of the most practical books you will come across. It is short book on purpose to make it easily digestible and more likely to be used by the people who build websites.  Steve’s mantra is about keeping it simple and focus on a few key things that everyone involved in designing or evaluating websites should know.

The book begins by setting out a few guiding principles of web usability, including “Don’t make me think” which is as simple as; “it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory”.  This might appear basic advice, but it is amazing how often such simple principles are forgotten in the heat of discussions about new web designs. Importantly much of the advice is based upon an excellent understanding of how people browse the web and how they interact with content and navigation elements.

An important aim of the book to make the reader understand that usability testing does not need to be complicated and that you can do it yourself with a little bit of preparation. Steve is a great believer is doing-it-yourself and that one usability test is 100% better than none. He also makes a critical point that “Focus groups are not usability tests”.  Focus groups are a potentially misleading method of research at the best of times, but they are totally inappropriate for evaluating the usability of a web page or user journey.

If you are time poor, and struggle to read books, this is one book that I would definitely invest in today.

 7. Designing with the Mind in Mind – Simple guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules – Jeff Johnson

I’m no designer, and have no intention of becoming one either, but this is an excellent book for you to grasp they key principles of how and why people interact with user interfaces the way they do.  The book has been well researched as it is packed full of useful statistics and insights that support the design rules outlined.

The first chapter is appropriately entitled “We Perceive What We Expect” and begins with how perception is biased by experience, current context and goals.  Jeff explains how our brain filters our perceptions accordingly and the importance of considering mental processing when designing a user interface.

Other topics covered in the book include how our vision is optimized to see structure, reading is unnatural, peripheral vision is poor, limits on attention shape our thoughts and actions, learning from experience and performing learned actions are easy, but problem solving and calculations are hard. Insights such as people focus on goals and pay little attention to their tools, reminds us about what matters in designing new experiences for our visitors and to stop putting barriers in place that prevent customers achieving their goals.

  8. Drunk Tank Pink – The Subconscious Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel And Behave – Adam Alter.

If you are interested in understanding the psychology of how human decision making is subconsciously influenced by such factors as our names, labels, symbols, culture, colours and our environment this is a brilliant book to read. You will be shocked by how our behaviour and perceptions are affected in obscure and surprising ways.  

However, Adam provides some fascinating and useful insights that can be used to challenge design thinking and develop hypothesis for A/B testing new customer experiences. All too often we assume that most people view the world in the same way that we do, but this book explodes that myth and shows how even subtle changes to the design of images and messages can drive different behaviours.

 9. Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini

The 6 principles of persuasion are now widely adopted by many marketers and there are a constant flow of articles based upon these psychological weapons.  Reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity have become synonymous with Cialdini and persuasion.  

However, the book is still worth reading as Cialdini uses compelling narrative and detailed research to explain some ordinary and some extraordinary cases of persuasion.  Each individual principle is a complex construct that Cialdini carefully unwraps and provides great insights into the different approaches used by people seeking to persuade.

You will be shocked by the nature of some of the behaviour Cialdini uncovers as being influenced by common psychological weaknesses.  Many famous and infamous events are dissected and explained using Cialdini’s deep understanding of human psychology. However, the book is useful for both generating ideas on how to make content more persuasive, but also how to avoid falling foul of people who are trying to manipulate you for their own personal gain.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it of interest please share this post by clicking on the social media icons below.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile.

[nealcole]

How To Use The Power Of Names To Boost Conversion

How Names Influence Our Behaviour

Names and the psychological associations they hold are so deeply rooted in our psyche that we are magnetically drawn towards the concepts they embody. These associations are so strong that they can result in behaviour that is automatic and totally irrational. As a result names can be used for good effect on websites to engage and motivate people to act in a way that can improve conversion. 

Who are we?

As people from separate socio-economic and educational backgrounds have different social connections and cultural influences they form very distinctive preferences for names to give to their children. This inevitably means that as we grow up we notice these differences and develop strong and lasting associations between names and important demographic and social characteristics.

As a result names become linked to demographic characteristics such as age, gender and race. So much so that insurance companies use the historical popularity of different names as a proxy for age in their direct marketing campaigns to improve their effectiveness. Names make it easy for us to categorise people almost automatically because of the associations we build up over time.

Letters that form our name:

People are so strongly emotionally attached to their names that they display a preference for letters that form their name.  Surprisingly this can significantly affect our responsiveness to requests for action. Researchers analysed the initials of people donating money for a number of Atlantic Ocean hurricanes that hit the U.S.A between 1998 and 2005. They discovered that people had a significantly higher propensity to donate more frequently and were more generous if the name of the hurricane shared the same initial as their own name.

The last name effect:

Our names also shape our view of the world which creates habits that can drive specific behaviours.  For instance school teachers have a tendency to ask students questions based upon the first letter of their surname and usually follow the order of the alphabet.  For teachers this seems sensible as it also correlates with the class register.

However, this means that children with surnames that begin with a letter that is not near the beginning of the alphabet are progressively less likely to be asked to call out an answer by their teacher.  As a consequence psychologists found that the further down the alphabet a person’s surname appears the quicker they were to respond to a limited offer of free basketball tickets.

Fluency of names halo effect:

Another affect that psychologists have discovered is that people have an inbuilt preference for fluent names of people, companies and objects.  Names that are difficult to pronounce can create negative attention and outcomes compared to people with fluent names.

An aid to your career?

Researchers at the University of Melbourne analysed the career paths of 500 lawyers. Lawyers with fluent names appeared to be significantly more likely to rise up the hierarchy.  The effect was most pronounced among mid-career lawyers (4 to 8 years) suggesting that it did not help lawyers with limited experience or those who had over 15 years in the profession.

Stock market investors:

For investors the fluency of a company’s name appears to create a sense of comfort and familiarity that partly counteracts the perception that any company can go bankrupt. Psychologists Danny Oppenheimer and Adam Alter found that the share price of fledgling financial stocks was more likely to rise after floating if their names were easy to pronounce. 

This was not related to the stock being foreign owned as they repeated the analysis for American only shares  and found the same relationship with fluent named stocks, especially for the first week after floating.  The researchers found the relationship also held true for stock tickers which against suggests that it is not related to the name sounding foreign or having some other association that causes people to prefer fluent names.

Implications for website optimization:

Ensure you capture customer names when appropriate and test dynamically inserting their name into relevant content at key points in the customer journey. However, be careful not to overuse a customer’s name as people obviously take the use of their name very personally. Always test first to understand if it is beneficial to use a customer’s name.

When using videos in email marketing include the customer’s  name in the video to improve conversions. Zumba Fitness personalised a video to encourage instructors to register for its annual conference. It embedded a personalised mockup of the recipients’ convention badge with their name displayed on it. Open and click through rates increased significantly as a result. 

If you want to get feedback from customers or wish to engage with them via Live Chat, try adding the customer’s name to the chat window. 

If you only hold the name of your visitor you can use it as an indicator of their age and social class. This should allow you to deliver a more personalised experience. 

Try recommending new products or games that begin with the same letters as customer initials to see if they are more responsive to such suggestions.  

See if customers sometimes prefer personalised content with their initials rather than their full name. Try testing adding the customer’s initials to product pages or images/videos of a product. This could be especially relevant for e-commerce sites that sell clothing items as people like the idea of having their initials on some fashion items.

Consider using and testing more fluent product and brand names to benefit from the tendency of people to prefer names that they can easily spell and pronounce.  I notice that some companies like to use exotic sounding names for new games or product offerings, but this should be avoided if it results in names that are difficult to pronounce.

Target customers with surnames towards the end of the alphabet with personalised time-sensitive or limited offers to see if they are more responsive due to the last name effect. Be careful to avoid using married women’s last names as unless their maiden name happened to also be towards the back of the alphabet they may not be as impatient as those born with such a name.  

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it useful please share it using the social media icons below.  You can see my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

 To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

Recommended reading:

Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter. 

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile

[nealcole]

How To Do Keyword Research & 18 Awesome Tools To Use.

6 Steps To Follow For Your Keyword Research

Keywords remain an essential part of SEO strategy for both organic and paid traffic optimisation. With the Hummingbird update long-tail keywords became more important to SEO. As a result keyword research needs to consider optimising a website on a semantic level to inform a site’s architecture and segment site topics into thematic areas. 

This has made keyword research more complex but it is still an important element of SEO strategy. Below are 18 of the more popular keyword tools that are often recommended by SEO experts. But first here is a 6 step guide to how to do keyword research:

1. Identify important topics to your business.

Draw up a list of all the important and relevant topics that relate to your business. Start with general topics (e.g. landing page optimization & web analytics).

2. Produce a list of keywords for general topic.

These should be keyword phrases that you consider it will be important to rank on in SERPs (search engine results pages). These key hear is to capture all your ideas as this won’t be the final list of keywords. Remember to use your web analytics to identify what keywords your site is already getting found for.

3. Examine related search terms.

Go to Google and start typing one of your phrases and see what related search terms are suggested by Google. These suggestions may generate more ideas for new keywords that you hadn’t previously considered. You can also take them a step further by typing some of the related search terms into Google to see what their related search terms are.

4. A mix of head terms & long-tail keywords.

Head terms are short keyword phrases, usually one to three words. Long-tail keywords tend to contain three or more words.  People generally search using head terms more frequently and so they tend to be more competitive and harder to rank compared to long-tail terms. On the other hand long-tail terms are more specific and give you a better understanding of what people are really looking for. For this reason you need a good mix of both types of terms.

5. How do your competitors rank on keywords?

Understanding what keywords your competitors are targeting is useful from two perspectives. It can provide ideas for reviewing your own list of keywords. Additionally, where you are both targeting the same keyword it means that you may have to work harder to improve your own ranking.  

However, don’t just copy the keywords that your competitors target, they may not always be relevant and it will also make it more difficult to improve your rankings. By targeting keywords that your competitors are ignoring may give you a quick win by allowing you establish high ranking for these terms due to a lack of competition.  Use tools like SEMrush and others outlined below to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking on.

6. Keyword list reduction.

Use tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner to reduce the number of terms in your list. This will help to ensure you are focussed on terms that have reasonable number of searches (i.e. neither too little or too much). Use Google Trends to find out their trend history and forecasts so that you don’t remove terms that have potential in the future.

18 Awesome Keyword Research Tools:

1. AuthorityLabs: Track historical rankings and view graphical representation of how a keyword is ranking over time. Allows you to automate your SEO monitoring, track local rankings and recover (not provided) keywords.

30 day Free trail available. The Basic plan is priced at $24 a month and offers 100 keywords and up to10 domains. The Plus plan costs $49 a month for up to 250 keywords and 50 domains. The Pro, their most popular plan costs  $99 a month for 1,000 keywords and 100 domains. The Enterprise plan starts at $450 a month for 5,000 + keywords and unlimited domains.  

2. Bing Keyword Research Tool: All data is based on organic searchers over the last 6 months and provides ideas and suggestions for your content. Just sign up for  Bing Webmaster Tools to access the keyword research resource.

3. Blog Post Headline Analyzer: This Free tool is from CoSchedule and will analyse headlines for length, how powerful or emotionally engaging the words are, how uncommon the words are and provide recommendations to improve your headline.

4. ContentForest Pro: This is an SEO-led content marketing tool that analyses your content and provides on-page optimization recommendations to update and prioritise your keyword list for an efficient content creation strategy. It will give you an overview of which keywords you are already ranking so you don’t end up duplicating effort. 

ContentForest also has an excellent suite of Free SEO tools, including KeywordKiwi which allows you to find long tail keywords based upon what people are searching for on Google. For blogs, ContentIdeator generates anywhere from 10 to 100 blog post title suggestions when you input a keyword. There are also a pagerank, social share, and broken link checker to name just a few.  

5. Google Adwords Keyword Planner: A Free Adwords Tool that allows you to search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical data, see how a list of keywords might perform and set up a new keyword list by multiplying several keywords together.

6. Google Keyword Suggest Tool: An easy to use tool from SEOChat.com  for identifying longer and more specific phrases to narrow targeting. Enter a term and it will generate a list of the most popular keyword phrases that all begin with the base word - using Google, Amazon, YouTube and Bing “suggest” data bases. The tool generates phrases for every letter of the alphabet. Choose a phrase and then move to the next step to generate more phrases.

7. Google Trends: Is a Free tool that allows you to view what people have been searching for with Google. It graphs how often a term is used over time and how this varies geographically. It allows you to generate predictions of how search volumes are changing. You can also compare more than one term to view their relative popularity.  

8. iSpionage: Provides insights into competitors’ effective keywords, ad copy and budget. A highly recommended tool for finding out what your competitors are up to. 

Free trial available for all plans. For keyword research the Silver plan costs $69 a month with unlimited searches and 10,000 data exports a day. The Gold plan comes in at $99 a month for unlimited searches, 50,000 data exports a day and 10 competitor alerts. For additional services such as daily landing page and web page monitoring, the Campaign plans costs $129 (Pro)  and $299  (Premier) a month.  

9. Keywordcompetitor: Gets your competitors’ paid keywords, ads and landing pages.  It can also provide daily updates on ads, keyword positions and landing pages. 

30 day Free trial available on all plans. There are 5 plans in total. The Basic Research plan costs $29 a month for up to 10 reports and up to 20 specific keywords per report. At £129 the Research Professional plan offers up to 150 reports a month and 250 specific keywords per report. At the top of the range the Elite Research plan costs $499 a month and provides unlimited reports and unlimited specific keywords  per report. 

10. Keyword Discovery Tool: One of the most popular keyword tools that provides keyword search statistics from all the major search engines. It will provide the search phrases that people use to find a product or service. It should help you identify the search terms driving traffic to your competitors.  

The Standard plan is currently at a special discount price of $29.95 per month for up to 3 domain research results and 20 projects. The Professional plan costs $199.95 per month for up to 100 domains and unlimited number of projects. Both plans allow up to 1,500 searches a day, with 1,000 results displayed and 10,000 terms per project. 

11. KeywordTool.io: The Free version is excellent for finding out what people are looking for as it produces around 750 suggestions for each keyword. The suggestions generated depend on the specific Google domain and language that you select.

The Pro plans start from $48 a month and offer:

Up to 1,440+ keywords from Google and YouTube, 1,875+ from Bing, 3,750+ from App Store returned for a single search. On average 2x more keywords than in free version

Google search volume

Level of competition on Google AdWords

Suggested bid on Google AdWords

Ability to export all the data to a CSV file

Ability to sort keywords by any parameter

The Pro Lite plan ($48 a month) offers 2 times more keywords than the free plan and the ability to export data in CSV.  The Pro Basic ($68 a month) also gives you search volumes to understand how popular a keyword is. In addition Pro Plus ($88 a month) provides CPC and competition on AdWords.

12. searchmetrics: Essentials is their standard keyword research tool. The suggest function will show you where the specified domain ranks for a particular keyword, plus you can add and tag keywords using the tool.

The Essentials plan costs $69 a month for limited access to their database,   $2,000, up to 1 year of visibility history, up to 3 countries, up to 10,000 rankings per report and current historic keyword rankings. 

The Suite Business ($2,000 a month) is an integrated SEO solution built for smaller brands and beginners. This provides complete visibility history,  all countries, up to 20,000 rankings per report and historic keyword rankings for the last 6 months. Additionally this provides content and site structure optimization, extensive backlink analysis and other services. 

Prices for their Suite Enterprise and Suite Ultimate plans can be obtained by request. 

13. SEMRUSH: The industry standard keyword research tool identifies your main competitors based upon the keywords you plan to target. Click on your competitors and it will show you what other keywords they target ad to and the ad copy they use. Highly recommended for seeing who your top paid and organic competitors are for the keywords you plan to use.

It allows you to easily combine and visualise SEMrush data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty. For projects it enables you to launch global campaigns and view all the key metrics regarding competitors, keyword rankings, and on-page health in once place. 

Plans start from $69.95 per month for Pro which offers 10,000 results per report, 3,000 reports per day, 5 projects and the ability to track 500 keywords. The Guru plan which costs $149.95 per month provides up to 30,000 results per report, 5,000 reports a day, up to 50 projects and the ability to track 1,500 keywords.

Finally, the Business plan comes in at $549.95 per month and delivers up to 50,000 results per report, 10,000 reports per day (for each of 4 users), unlimited projects and resources for tracking up to 6,000 keywords.

14. SerpStat: A Free keyword tool which filters results to show only the questions that people enter into the search box. It provides you with popular keywords and their various forms used by people who are searching for interesting products, services or information. It collects and aggregates search suggestions, providing them with the ability to download in a TXT file. It is very good for giving you the how-to content and frequently asked questions.

15.Soovle: A very easy to use and Free keyword tool which generates a list of the best keywords by analysing search engines Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers.com, YouTube, Bing and Yahoo!

16. Spyfu: A great tool for identifying all the places where your competitors show up on Google. It will show you all their keywords and the ad variations they have employed. Excellent for understanding your competitors’ most profitable keywords.

The Basic plan costs $79 a month with unlimited keyword and domain results, track up to 400 keywords, over 9 years of AdWords and organic history,  and 250 sales leads and domain contacts. Professional costs $139 per month, and offers everything in the Basic plan in addition to rank tracking of up to 800 keywords and access to their API. 

Lastly the Agency plan is priced at $999 per month and delivers unlimited custom reporting and keyword rank tracking. Further, you can search monthly data which allows you to track a domain’s weekly rank updates on keywords that you select. You can save up to 47% on the cost of a plan by choosing an annual subscription. 

17. Ubersuggest: A simple and Free keyword suggestion tool that begins to pull in keyword suggestions from Google and other sources the second you start to type. Often used for PPC and SEO keyword research.

18. WordStream’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool: A Free tool that allows you to run a limited number of searches in its massive keyword database.  A fast tool which holds over 1 trillion keywords in its database. Excellent for long-tail keyword suggestions.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found this post useful please feel free to share it using the social network icons below or at the top of this post. 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

I have over 20 years’ experience of working in customer insight and website optimization for some of the UK’s largest financial services providers, online retailers and gaming companies. I am based near Chester, and currently work in London as a conversion specialist for a large online gaming group. I also have posts published on the theGreenBook Blog market research website and Usabilla.com . You can follow me on Twitter @northresearch and view my LinkedIn profile