Archive for November, 2008
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A Salute to Brave eCommerce Retailers
There are brave eCommerce retailers, truly working both hard and smart at making sure the avalanche of bad economic news does not sweep them over.
This morning, AdAge reports a ComScore finding that consumer web spending dropped 4% so far in November versus the same period last year — the first time e-commerce figures have shown a year-to-year drop. “Despite the recent reprieve that plummeting gas prices have given American consumers, the depressed and volatile stock market, declining housing prices, inflation and the weak job market all represent dark clouds hanging over their heads this holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
But there are positive forecasts too: Continue Reading
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How to improve the customer experience
Seth Godin wrote this morning about a terrible user experience calling the KitchenAid IVR service line.
The automated phone system is an easy target and one that many (arguably most) companies do a poor job of. It may be the most blatant customer experiences flaw your company is inflicting, but probably not the only one.
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Why is Selling Testing and Optimization Internally a “Tough Sell”?
In an interesting and timely post entitled Experiment or Die. Five Reasons And Awesome Testing Ideas, Avinash Kaushik declares that “there is a tendency to think experimentation and testing is optional” while he correctly believes that, in reality, that view is fundamentally wrong. Instead, Avinash believes companies’ motto should be “Experiment or die, there is no try.”
As is common on all great blogs, Avinash’s post elicited a lively discussion where the theme of many comments was around the reasons why organizations aren’t wildly embracing testing and optimization as a strategy.
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Is the Drudge Report Beautiful?
You will probably agree with me that beauty is subjective. Some would say that good design is not subjective, but follows set principles. Jason Fried of 37 Signals opines that the Drudge Report (shown below), is an ‘aesthetic masterpiece’.
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Obama’s home page image test
A couple days ago I wrote about how Barack Obama used Conversion Rate Optimization to maximize online donations.
Since then, one of our programmers, Matt Tobey, found more detail on what the home page script I found had been testing posted on schoonzie.com.
Here’s what we’ve found:
Variation A: Family casual black & white
The current page for first time visitors to the site looks like the image below. Since the test is no longer functioning, we can assume that this was the best-performing of the four variations that were tested. Continue Reading -
Obama Used Conversion Rate Optimization to Win
Let me start by giving a big ‘Congratulations!’ to Barack Obama and his team for what will likely be the biggest win of their lives. They ran an incredibly disciplined and sophisticated campaign and deserved to win.
A great web marketing campaign
There have already been plenty of articles written about how well Obama’s online marketing campaign was planned and executed. If you haven’t heard, check out here, here, here, here, here and here.
Obama raised an incredible amount of money in $30 and $50 increments and Conversion Rate Optimization played a part in maximizing their fundraising. Continue Reading
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Does Video Work on Landing Pages?
Online video watching trends have been getting a lot of attention in recent months, and we’re eagerly testing landing page variations to find out the best way to use it for improving landing page conversion rates.
Online video viewership is increasing
Most recently, the New York Times reported on the increasing online video attention span, which a separate Cisco-funded survey supports.
How can marketers use video?
