7 Steps to Conversion Gains, Part 1 of 2

While multichannel merchants shouldn’t overlook the value of customer acquisition, particularly search and affiliate marketing, they should heed the real measure of a campaign’s success — its conversion rate. In a recent whitepaper from the online business optimization software provider Omniture, Best Practices for Conversion: The New Engagement Funnel in 7 Steps, the conversion process is broken down into seven steps, all with one common objective — to increase relevancy.

This week in part one of a two-part series chronicling the whitepaper’s seven-step process, we offer up steps one through four. Next week, we’ll examine steps five through seven.

1. Identify conversion goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Measure three conversion-related KPIs, the whitepaper says: leads or customers; sales; and costs. Apply each of these metrics to specific parts of the engagement funnel — ad impressions, unique visitor or ad clicks, cart entrants — to measure each step as it relates to overall conversion. This allows you to determine the KPI for whichever metric you choose by simply adding the leads (customers), sales and costs together and dividing by the metric you wish to determine, be it KPI per ad impression, KPI per shopping cart entry, KPI per lead, etc.

2. Develop profile funnels and apply a 40/40/20 rule. Use demographic (name, age, gender, address, occupation), psychographic (personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles) and behavioral (actions, activities) data to develop profile funnels of your customers.

Response-oriented marketing success depends 40 percent on audience targeting, 40 percent on the offer or proposition, and 20 percent on creative execution, the whitepaper notes. Determine what motivates your prospects to click on your ads and what prompts them to visit your Web site and ultimately become customers or leads by providing contact and other qualifying information.

Consumer offers include giveaways, free trials, no-risk or money-back guarantees, discounts, sales, and other types of promotions. B-to-B offers include how-to guides, reports, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, among others.

3. Organize and optimize site structure. The whitepaper identifies some best practices to optimize your homepage or landing page’s effectiveness.

* Pages should load within eight seconds. If your page is too heavy with imagery or has a poorly developed code base and takes more than eight seconds to load, you’ll lose a lot of visitors.

* Make your site both visually appealing and functional. How does it compare to your competitors?

* Place “critical elements” in the upper 300 pixels of the page.

* Use one column for landing pages and three columns for homepages. And where applicable, combine them. On your homepage, use the left column for primary or secondary navigation, the center column for promotional messaging and imagery, and the right column for calls to action for leads or purchases.

* Use margins to enhance reading comprehension; leave them out to increase reading speed.

* Use common Web usability standards such as underlining links.

* Limit navigation within landing pages to drive prospects to the lead form or shopping cart.

4. Develop a compelling message and make it readable. Organize copy with a compelling headline, followed with body copy that summarizes key benefits with a bulleted list. Then close with a call to action, the whitepaper advises. Here are some of the whitepaper’s tips for composing a message.

* Cascade font sizes with headlines, or page titles, at 14- to 18-point fonts and body copy between 10- and 14-point fonts in readable sans-serif fonts such as Verdana, Helvetica and Arial.

* Clearly title all pages other than your landing pages.

* Use color and bold fonts to highlight information.

* Make redirects readable; capitalize distinct words in URL.

* Limit copy to 60 characters across.

* Limit your first paragraph to two lines.

* Alter paragraph lengths, but none should run more than four to five lines.

* Design pages with this in mind: Users prefer to scroll on a page rather than clicking to a new page.

* Test both short- and long-form copy pages.

Access research that identifies the interests, attitudes and opinions of prospective leads and customers to understand the motivations of multiple target profiles, the whitepaper says. Also keep in mind that most people are motivated by love, fear and pain — physical, mental or emotional.

With this information, follow these guidelines:

* Talk about customer “pain” and address it with your solution and benefits.

* Create a sense of urgency with deadline-sensitive promotions and time-sensitive words such as “now.”

* Use customer testimonials.

* Finally, make it relevant by developing unique messages to each profile segment within your audience.

To read the entire whitepaper, go to www.omniture.com/downloads/06_datasheet_7Steps.pdf