Highlights of the Conversion Conference in San Francisco:

On day one, Sandra Niehaus and Sara Sturtevant from Closed Loop Marketing conducted a session entitled, “Designing from Inside the User’s Head,” featuring some great tips on how to do just that. They trimmed it down to three methods:

1. Get Real – The idea is to ask the people who are your prospects/customers. Who better to get information from on what works/doesn’t work, right?

2. Big Picture – This method is about understanding how what you are doing will affect the whole. If you’re testing a landing page, that’s great, but don’t forget to think about how it relates to your entire site. Narrowing in on your testing is great, but never forget how the parts relate to the whole.

3. Triangulate and Iterate – Use many methods to test, and then make changes and test again.  Use several to double and triple check your results. This help make your tests and changes that much more valuable.

The two ladies from Closed Loop Marketing laid out a great three part plan to testing and optimizing your sites. Great advice.

Dan Siroker from Optimizely.com -if you haven’t checked out this A/B testing solution, do it. You can also see the reference from my last M-Line blog post. Dan’s testing tool is so easy and cool, I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it until the conference. Do yourself a favor and check it out!

Steve Krug, the usability testing guru (www.sensible.com), started off the second day of the conference sharing his insights on the benefits of usability testing. I’ve read both of Steve’s books, “Don’t Make Me Think” and “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” and if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to do usability testing, read these books and do what he says.

Steve explained the importance of asking real users to test your site. All of the tools listed below are fantastic, but usability tests where you are watching people use your site and talking to them in person opens up a whole new world of understanding how people use your site. It’s a must! I always thought that usability testing was difficult, expensive and took a long time … not true! You can do usability testing with as little as three test subjects and conduct your tests and see actionable results in one morning! Read both of Steve Krug’s books, you’ll see what I mean.

And finally, here’s a list of great tools that can help you optimize your sites for maximum conversion. Please share any others you know of. I love to learn about new stuff! Thanks for reading.

 Helpful User Testing Tools:

Attentionwizard.com - this is a heat map tool that provides you with a simulated view of what users will see within the first five seconds of using your site. Tell Attentionwizard.com what page you want to test, and it will run an algorithm and show you a heat map of what users see within the first five seconds of their visit.

Clicktale.com - heat maps, mouse tracking and conversion tools with recorded user sessions.

Crazyegg.com - in-page website analytics featuring heat maps, click confetti, link click overlays and scroll maps. Find out where users are clicking and looking. It’s a great set of tools for website optimization to maximize conversion.

Crossbrowsertesting.com – test your designs in over 100 different desktop and mobile browsers.

Fivesecondtest.com – upload your wireframes, sketches or a fully designed page and find out what users see/remember/understand in the first five seconds of seeing it. We live in the era of short attention spans, this is a great tool to find out what people are getting out of your designs.

Loop 11 - user testing tool. If you have a live site, you input your URL and the task(s) that you want people to test out, and then invite people via email to test. They run through your tasks and you get real time results. It’s a little pricey, but worth it if you have the budget.

Mockflow, Balsamiq, Mockingbird - wireframing tools that have preset design elements that you can drag and drop making it much faster to put together wireframes for websites and apps. You can even share with your team/clients.

Optimizely.com – awesome A/B testing tool. Get real time results and tweak copy/images on the fly. Very cool.

Usertesting.com - usability testing for only $39 a pop. Real people performing the tasks you ask them to do on your website, and you get video/audio test results in about an hour. It’s hard to beat that!

If you have more great testing tools to add to the list, please let me know. We’ve got plenty of work to do ourselves, so I look forward to testing my brains out! Cheers.

My favorite highlight of the day had to be Dan Siroker who showed how his A/B website testing tool, Optimizely can lead to higher conversion rates. After installing a small snippet of code on the pages you want to test, you can make changes on the fly and have actionable test results within hours. The product has a slick dashboard that allows you to click on tabs to access multiple variations allowing for quick updates and retesting. Very cool.

Ok, that’s it for now. I’ll do a write up on the whole thing later this week, but for now, check out the Conversion Conference website to  follow along.

Cheers.

Be excellent to each other!

What exactly does that mean? Well, remember the last time you went into a store, someone held the door for you, greeted you with a smile and asked if they could help you? Not in a pushy salesperson kinda way, but in a “hey buddy how’s it going?” kinda way. It made you feel pretty good right? You were put in a calm state of mind and thus more willing to make a purchase.

On Monday I walked into the deli down the street, the woman behind the counter greeted me with a smile and a friendly, “hello”, we had a brief conversation about the specials and next thing you know, I purchased a lunch that was $3 more than what I usually get. She made me feel comfortable and I willinging spent more money.

This experience can be mimicked on your website. Thank your visitors for being there and comfortably lead them down the sales path using easy to read, easy to understand copy/links and assure them that they’re making the right choice in purchasing from you as they go through the process(e.g. you add a green dress to your shopping cart and a message pops up that tells you that you’ll look great in that and then shows you accessories that match your new dress and how great you’ll look with them all together).

I’ll admit, this is all very high-level stuff (yes, I know marketing is more than just being nice), but the fact is …

being positive and friendly has become a rarity, and thus can easily differentiate your business from your competitors.

(See this great article by Brian Solis on how Zappos did just that.)

With all the attempts to market through fear (yes, I know there’s plenty of research that says it works, and unfortunately it does), being excellent to each other may be just the thing that takes your business success to the next level. It’s so simple, it pains me that it has to be said.

Check the blog in the coming weeks as I’ll have some write ups on my time at the Conversion Conference.

Cheers.

Sure, everyone understands that businesses should be using social media to reach new prospects and keep in touch with current customers, but what’s the best way to do this when you’re a craft brewery? For starters, take notes on what New Belgium is doing. New Belgium Brewing, guided by their social media agency, Backbone Media, is using Facebook as not only a top-level, national brand channel, but also a regional/local channel to promote their beer directly to consumers where they live. I love this idea! I know how my friends and I love it when brewery reps or brewers themselves get out into our community and talk beer with us, and more often than not, those conversations begin online and end at a brewery or bar (with delicious beer of course!).

New Belgium has created brand reps, or “Rangers” as they call them (a nod to their Ranger India Pale Ale) that manage regional Facebook pages that speak directly to fans in the regions they supply. These Rangers talk about local events and work and live in the communities in which they serve. This local outreach creates an instant connection for those who love New Belgium beer and want to share that love with others nearby.

It’s been said a thousand times, but it’s true that social media is all about building relationships. Create relevant content and conversations that people want to be part of, and over time, they will WANT to become brand ambassadors for you. There’s no need to force marketing or sales in social media, just build relationships. It just makes sense. You’d certainly be more willing to promote or purchase a product from someone you’re friendly with versus a total stranger, right? I know I would. New Belgium gets that point, and you should too.

So, to all the craft brewers out there working on social media, keep it up. Keep an eye on New Belgium and what they’re doing, and use some of their ideas to help boost your own beer businesses. As far as I’m concerned, the more delicious craft beer choices we can have across this nation, the better.

Now, I know New Belgium isn’t the only one having success using social media to sell craft beer. Do you have another craft beer social media success story you’d like to share? Give a shout and let me know. I’d love to hear it!

Prost!

www.sfbeerweek.org

I feel it is my duty to alert readers of this blog that the Bay Area is filled with fantastic breweries and purveyors of craft beer, and they all deserve your undivided attention right now! SF Beer Week kicks off tonight at the Concourse Exhibition Center on Brannan and 8th. 50 breweries will be pouring brews of all sorts and there will be tasty food as well.

Unfortunately for me, I’m battling a sinus infection and have to take antibiotics during Beer Week. Beer Week! AHHH! So, tonight is out for me. I do have tickets to the Brewtruc event tomorrow, so perhaps I can fit in a few beverages then. If not, the pills are done on Wednesday, and I’ve got several more days of fun after that. Hooray!

Anyway, it’s a great time to be in San Francisco, so head on out and support your local brewers and those who pour their beers. Prost!

www.sfbeerweek.org

So, what is the secret to everything? Rolland Todd believes that secret is relationships. I agree. Not exactly sure what I mean? Well, here’s the video to learn for yourself. It’s only a few minutes long, so sit back, turn up the volume and enjoy some simple ideas that may just make your life a little bit better. Enjoy.

He recently released a brand new comedy special, “Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theatre,” and decided to sell it on his own instead of going through a major distributor. If you’re not familiar with releasing albums/videos, it can be tricky to sell them without a good distributor. Nowadays, most artists use iTunes and other digital download sites to promote their work. It takes a great deal of promotional work and buzz to generate enough sales to cover your costs and start earning a profit doing it on your own. In fact, it takes balls to forego the major distro route.

The folks at Marketing Pilgrim wrote the post I read this morning about Louis C.K.’s experiment selling his work on his own. I’ve been a fan of Louis C.K. for years now, and I think this move is fantastic. Coming from the world of indie music and being someone who has been deeply entrenched in DIY promotions, it’s great to see someone of his stature doing this. As the Marketing Pilgrim article points out, this is a chance to think about how you can market your own products and services DIY. You’ve heard of Duct Tape Marketing and Guerilla Marketing, and consider this move by Louis C.K. as following some of their ideas and making them work. Sure, DIY takes some extra effort, but the rewards are that much more meaningful.

At the very least, I hope reading this post and the linked article  spark the old noggin to start thinking about what you can do differently for your clients and your company that others may not be willing to try. Be a rebel … at least think about it.

I hope you enjoy the read.

Cheers.

Not only is this important in our personal relationships, it is critical in our professional ones as well. I happened upon this fantastic short Ted Talk by Julian Treasure, an expert on sound.

He offers 5 tips on how we can all listen better. Just imagine how things would be if everyone actually listened to each other? The world would be a very different, and I wager a much better place. Understanding each other leads to less conflict and more solutions. Here’s the video. Enjoy.

Anyway, I felt it necessary to post about his piece because it really makes sense. To the folks at Yahoo, I truly hope you listen to his wise words, because some of us remember the glory days when Yahoo was known for much more than just a fading light up sign at the west side entrance to the Bay Bridge.

Here’s the link to an appropriately titled article, “Win Back My Love, Yahoo.”

Enjoy.

Give us a call or email if interested. We’ll let ya know when the move is done and what the new address is. Website, phone and email will all be staying the same, so no worries there.

Till next time …