Hi, I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on ebooks, blogs, newsletters, etc. on optimizing your post-click conversion-rates and increasing the usability on your site. I've read this book called Call to Action that sort of goes over this stuff, and from what I've read the authors are the foremost people in the field. But personally I thought the book was terrible, and I got little (if anything) out of it. So any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
1) classic marketing books. not ebooks, books. some parts of marketing remain the same. you need to learn how to look at the material from a new perspective, but it can be very insightful 2) look at your own habits. when you buy something online, what helped you make that decision? put yourself in your potential customers shoes. why might they not make the purchase? fix the answers. 3) look at the pages of people who you know convert well. a lot of seo / get rich on the net books are done this way; find them and study them. 4) make the page sparse. in other words, have as few links on the page that lead to somewhere other than buying the product as possible. fewer options means better conversions. 5) get more targetted traffic.
6) Test. Test. Test again. You have to try and try and try and find what works best. Every audience and website is unique, there is no 1 magic formula that will definitely will work for your site. So you have to test. And for that to work you have to record as much data as technically possible. Click path's, funneling etc/ Google Analytics has some good data but even that's not complete. You need to know where they go, how long they stay where, what they read, what they click, how they behave and test and test and test again.
Yeah, definitely trying to do that, thanks for the tips! My analytics have gotten a little better from when I started, so I think I'm ready to do some on-site testing and make it worthwhile. Problem for me is that testing changes on the actual site seems to be the most expensive A/B testing I can do, unfortunately. Doing A/B Testing on Adwords is easy, but w/o being a coder I was hoping to get some sort of "known" tricks for webstores, etc. to know I'm going on the right path before making the investment. Thanks again guys.
I run a shop too. Just buy something on Amazon and keep your eyes open. You'll notice how all navigation disappears once you're in the checkout. There's only one route and that is to the "thank you" page. You have to make buying it dead-simple. Buy button, checkout button etc. all need to be visible and standing out the moment they got something in their basket.