8 Marketing and UX Conversion Secrets

8 marketing and UX conversion optimization secrets from an industry insider

The eight little known and often forgotten secrets of successful marketing and UX conversion optimization from an industry insider.

8 marketing ux conversion secretsAs a long time online marketing and user experience optimizer I’ve been lucky enough to work for both Agencies and client-side firms. I’ve acquired a lot of experience over the years that companies gladly pay money for when they need expertise in how to improve their marketing or UX conversion. But in the spirit of giving back to the community I wanted to share these secrets with you.

You may find many of these don’t feel like secrets at all, yet the vast majority of firms I have worked with seldom execute these, or if they do execute them, do not execute them well. Just remember, these tips are general and work for most firms, meaning test first to ensure these secrets will work for you.

1. Define your marketing or UX goals first!

Amazingly I find the majority of firms out there typically start marketing or UX projects based on loose or almost non-existent sets of goals. Have you ever heard, “We need a marketing campaign to attract more awareness (or leads, or engagements, or what have you)?” Have you heard those words uttered without exact numbers to define what success is? I have, plenty of times.

So prior to engaging in any new marketing or UX project, make sure you have clear goals that you can measure success against. Your goals should have a solid before and after number, and a solid time span. You may have heard these referred to as SMART goals:

  • S = Specific
  • M = Measurable
  • A = Attainable
  • R = Relevant
  • T = Time Bound

If your marketing or UX project cannot address each one of the above SMART goals criteria then stop! Do not move forward until you have them! Knowing your clearly defined goals from the outset makes all the rest of the project that much easier to define. Having these goals in place makes defining your strategy and tactics much more powerful and exact, which greatly aids in conversion optimization. Just this one secret alone can dramatically improve conversion performance of any marketing or UX project.

2. Research prospects or users by spending time with Telequal or customer service teams

Assuming you have SMART goals for your marketing or UX project, the next secret is to understand whom you are targeting, and what their needs are. Many companies use Personas (fictional representations of the most common prospects or users), and marketing types are fond of their Economic Buyer, Technical Buyer and or User/Operational Buyers, but beware!  I’ve found that typically these types of Personas are either a bit stale, meaning they were compiled months or years ago and may not reflect current reality, or are full of holes or assumptions made by internal stakeholders without being vetted by third party resources. Sadly, many companies I’ve come across don’t even use Personas.

In all cases, do some research by spending time monitoring conversations with your telequal team, sales team or customer support team. It may not be easy, it may not be simple, but spending the time listening in to real conversations with real prospects or users will significantly help you better target your messaging or applications. You’ll find listening in to conversations for a half day or so to be absolutely enlightening. You’ll also start seeing conversations of patterns that will allow you to better define whom you are targeting, what their needs are, and how to communicate back to them.

3. Create marketing or UX personas

As mentioned above, many firms sadly lack real or meaningful Personas. If the Personas do not exist, do your utmost to create them. This is not always easy to do, especially for firms that typically deal with marketing or UX via the Ready! Fire! Aim! approach.  But make them you must, otherwise your marketing and UX projects will be created based on guesswork as to what prospects or users need and how to communicate most effectively with them. Guessing is never as accurate in conversion optimization as knowing.

4. Cleanse and append your Marketing or UX Personas

Assuming your firm already has Personas, the odds are they were created through some sort of committee process, or were created long ago enough that they do not reflect today’s reality.

Committee processes are subject to the people that made up the committee. I’ve typically found there is usually one boisterous member of the committee that pushes his or her viewpoints on the rest, often times with a few false or imperfect assumptions thrown in. Cleansing and appending Personas can typically help to reduce or nullify any potential blemishes in a Persona in which some false or imperfect assumptions were accepted based on a members input.

As to the age of a Persona, how long ago is too long? In most cases, if your Personas are older than a year, then it is likely they may need to be cleansed and appended.

Persona cleansing and appending means reviewing your Personas against the world today. Are your Personas still using the same tools, are they still having the same problems, are they still accessing your information or applications in the same environment? Questions like these should be addressed to ensure that when you are targeting your marketing and UX projects to a set of Personas you are targeting the most accurate and up to date version of same.

I’ve conducted dozens of Persona cleansing and augmentation projects and it is amazing how significantly the updated Personas can influence marketing and UX targeting and performance.

5. Build or dust off your content marketing matrix

For marketers, knowing the needs and pain points of a Persona is only half the equation. The other half of the equation is to ensure your content accurately addresses each need and pain point, in a manner and language your prospects or users expect and are comfortable with.

I typically create a content marketing matrix that matches the Persona, their need, pain point and related information to existing content (online, downloadable, print, etc.). In completing this matrix, you simply check off and link to content that directly matches each need. If content is missing, or needs to be edited, this becomes readily apparent almost immediately.

The content matrix is a critical tool for defining where you need to augment or edit existing content. Adding the correct content typically helps with conversion very quickly.

6. A/B test your content

A/B testing and optimizing content is a very simple but extremely effective way to improve conversion, but oddly enough is typically overlooked by many marketers or UX teams.

A/B testing typically is thought of in online situations, with landing pages or forms. But A/B testing your content (be it email, web, mobile, whatever) is a great way to optimize your conversion directly at the point most important to your prospect or user, and thus to you!  In determining what content to test, you can refer back to your content matrix or Personas to establish what communications may work better to touch on prospect or user needs, and how your solution can help.

7. A/B test your forms (always)

A/B testing of forms is a natural, and many online marketers and UX practitioners swear by it. Interestingly however, I’ve found that firms seem to stop testing forms after a couple of tries at it. Perhaps this is because of a perception that “this is as good as it gets” or “we don’t have anything else to test.”

Continuously testing forms by evaluating data at all stages (abandonment rates by page, by field, etc.) and A/B testing iterations can be another easy way to heavily increase conversion. The only issue with forms is ensuring what you are testing will work with your back-end databases. I’ve seen examples where great tests were run, only to find out sales or eCommerce teams suddenly were lacking critical information! Be careful what you add or remove when conducting A/B testing of forms.

8. Simplify your reporting

At the end of the day, your executives need to know what you and your team have done to achieve their goals. Remember, their goals are not to “improve open rates” or “increase interaction rates” or any of those other metrics you may be tracking. Instead, their goals are about increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. Your reporting needs to explain how you are helping to accomplish their goals. Consider using dashboards of key revenue or expense saving data for the executives. Save the more detailed metrics and reporting for the teams that need that detail, typically your marketing or UX teams.

Telling your story of success using the words and care-abouts of your executives will help them understand how your efforts are helping them achieve their goals, which if done effectively can help you obtain additional resources and thus improve conversion.

Another benefit of simplifying your reporting is enabling you to focus on the metrics that matter, especially trend data. By identifying where and when changes were made, and examining specifically just the metrics that identify if optimization occurred, you will be in a better position to quickly evaluate if your change helped your conversion, and if so by how much. Reports and metrics can be overwhelming, focus on what’s critical and you should be in a better position to monitor your conversion optimization.

8 Marketing and UX Conversion Secrets conclusion

So these eight marketing and UX conversion secrets I hope you’ll agree are simple, powerful and fairly easy to execute. These often forgotten optimization tips if done correctly will help you optimize your conversion. Now you know the secrets, so go out and apply them to achieve your success!

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Amazon versus Walmart Usability Testing Results

Amazon versus Walmart and the usability testing results

Comparing Amazon and Walmart with simple but critical usability testing tasks: finding and buying an iPad, who won?

Amazon and Walmart are kings of eCommerce. But how do they compare in usability? To answer this, I created a simple but useful usability test: something thousands of users were trying to do this holiday season, finding and buying an iPad.

The usability testing protocol I created was simple, but not meant to be exhaustive in terms of comparing the user experience of both sites. Rather, the test was a quick evaluation of how easy or difficult it was for users to find an iPad with the best possible features for the price (the value of which had to be less than $550) and then buy it.

Here’s the usability testing protocol I set up for the test. It’s simple, quick, but importantly meant to be directional only. I used usertesting.com as my tool for this test.

usertesting.comAmazon versus Walmart Usability Testing Protocol

Introduction: You are buying an iPad as a gift for a family member. You only have a total of $550. You want to buy the best one you can for the price in terms of functionality and features.

Task 1: Please show me how you would find an iPad or iPads that are equal to or less than your price range?

Task 2: Let’s assume you’ve decided to purchase one of the iPads, please show me what you would do to buy it. Please go through all the steps without actually purchasing it.

Tester Age: 18 to 65+

Tester Household Income: $40k to $150k+

Gender: Any

Web Expertise: Any

Country: United States

Number of Testers: Six total (3 for Amazon and a different 3 for Walmart)

Testing Dates: December 6-17, 2012

Usability Testing Results of Amazon versus Walmart

The results of the usability tests are revealing and point to several areas where both Walmart and Amazon may need to explore further usability optimization. And even though this test was simple, quick and used a rather small amount of testers (3 for Walmart and a separate 3 for Amazon), it clearly shows how even minor amounts of usability testing can reveal important places where the user experience can be potentially improved. For eCommerce, this also means improving revenue!

Let’s look first at the results for Amazon and Walmart in terms of how they performed for several key tasks, including:

  1. Finding an iPad
  2. Filtering product search results to find the price range that fits our tester’s budget
  3. Being offered the opportunity to purchase a protection plan (something that no doubt is high on the Walmart and Amazon team’s radar as it is a good source of incremental revenue per shopping cart)
  4. Purchasing the item

We also look at several other errors that seem to be obvious things that can be fixed, or at least evaluated.

And now, on with the results!

1. Amazon versus Walmart Usability Test Task, Finding an iPad

Winner Walmart

Amazon and Walmart take different approaches to displaying and filtering product search results. So a true apples to apples comparison is not possible. However, we can compare the overall ease of use of each system based on the task of asking a tester to “find an iPad in the $550 or less range,” a real world scenario.

Based on the results of this test, the advantage goes to Walmart. This is primarily due to the displayed list of results after the user enters iPad into the search tool. All our testers were able to easily navigate the results, and take the next step promptly, which was to use filtering to find the product in the right price range.

Amazon did not do as well in this test as it could have. The search results are critical to helping our testers to sift through the hundreds of thousands of products Amazon sells to find an iPad in the $550 or less range. Even here at the very start of searching there were potential usability issues.

One of our testers almost immediately became confused when he noticed that the top result for the search term “iPad” was an iPad 2 Second Generation, which caused him to spin off in a different direction spending larger amounts of time trying to find the newer models (as of the writing of this article the iPad Fourth Generation is the newest iPad). Interestingly, all testers mentioned that “typically the best product is at the top” even though this clearly was not the case, and all of our testers had to do a fair amount of searching by scrolling up and down, or clicking on various links, to find the newer iPad models that fit their $550 price limit.

I am guessing Amazon has a usability team so I’m hoping they can evaluate this test result, to determine if there’s a need to find a better way to put the newer (aka “hotter”) products at the top of their search results display. I’m thinking perhaps some Search algorithm testing is in order.

For Walmart, things went well for testers who used the search bar, but the one tester who did not use the test bar had a much harder time of finding iPads. Lesson for Walmart? Consider making your search bar bigger, to attract more attention and cause fewer users to try to navigate through a more difficult process.

Amazon versus Walmart usability test task 1Click to Play the Amazon Highlight Reel

Amazon versus Walmart usability testing results and WalmartClick to Play the Walmart Highlight Video

2. Amazon versus Walmart Usability Test Task, Finding an iPad Using Filters

Winner Walmart

A critical element of eCommerce is using filter tools to narrow search results, which both Amazon and Walmart do, but using vastly different methods. For Amazon, there’s not a specific filter tool that’s readily apparent such as with Walmart, however users do have the ability to filter results, IF they know where to look.

Screen shot of Amazon filter controlsWalmart filter controlsInterestingly, the testers using Amazon had a more difficult time finding the iPad that fit our parameters, in this case a model that gave the most performance and features at a cost of $550 or less, than did the Walmart testers. This was specifically because the Walmart filter tool enables users to easily filter based on price. Not that our testers found the Walmart tool without problems (which they did).

Still, Amazon’s filtering (or lack thereof) of product results based on pricing parameters was something that all our testers struggled with. All testers resorted to scrolling through pages of results, some gave up early and selected a product because it was listed near the top and seemed to fit the test parameters. In the real world, I’m betting this behavior happens more often than may be realized, I’m not sure always to the benefit of Amazon or Amazon users.

Several times, testers became lost in their search due to scrolling through so many results and had to “reset” themselves by going back to the starting results page. The inclusion of peripherals spread in what seems random fashion in the results did not help matters, as it made hunting in the results for the latest model iPad even more difficult.

Because of the extra cognitive load Amazon puts on users, we give the nod to Walmart for this part of the test.

Amazon versus Walmart usability test and Amazon test results of filteringClick to Play the Amazon Highlight Reel

It would be interesting to see what the usability test results for Amazon would be if they were to offer their users a filtering set of tools along the lines of the Walmart tool, versus what Amazon users currently have available.

Walmart Filtering Tools are Good, but not Great

Walmart has one advantage over Amazon in terms of our test of finding an iPad in our price range, and that is the filter tools on the left side. Interestingly, all of the testers used this tool, and all of them were able to reduce what was a much larger list of products down to those they felt met their parameters by using the tool. That’s not to say the tool didn’t cause issues. Several found the refresh that happens without warning rather disconcerting, and one mentioned that slides were preferred, as that way the exact pricing parameters they wanted could be entered.

Screen shot of Walmart usability testing highlight reelClick to Play Walmart Filtering Highlight Reel

3. Amazon versus Walmart Usability Test Task, Product Protection Plan Offering

Winner Amazon

A critical element of eCommerce success is adding in additional SKUs to a shopping cart, in this case a protection plan. Typically this is good for the company, as it is an incremental source of revenue. But it can be a good idea for the shopper too. Reminding them to buy additional items or a protection plan they (if they are anything like my family) will end up using when something bad happens to their product is not a bad idea.

In terms of the offers, both Amazon and Walmart pop-up the protection plan, but that is where the similarities end. Notice the critical difference, Amazon has the “Add Coverage” button the bright, yellow, some would almost say Default button. Because of this, people evaluating adding the extra coverage may have more of a tendency to click the highlighted button, all other things being equal. In essence, the default is YES.

But with WalMart, note the choice is “I prefer not to add coverage.” Ouch. The default here is NO. Also, note that with Amazon you only have to click one button to make your selection, Walmart requires two clicks, one on the radio choice button, and then one way down at the bottom of the pop-up for “Continue.” My guess is WalMart is losing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of incremental dollars with their current protection plan offering user experience. Perhaps the WalMart usability or metrics team may disagree with me, but I would test a much more Amazon like user experience here, just to see if there’s a difference (I am betting lunch with the entire WalMart usability team that there is, if you know any of them forward them that message from me).

Amazon pop up with the protection plan offerThe Amazon pop up with the Protection Plan offer has a single button to buy the product

 

Walmart protection plan offering pop up

The Walmart pop up with the Protection Plan offer requires two clicks, and does not highlight the YES choice

And just to provide an additional data point, it’s interesting that the only tester to choose the protection plan was an Amazon tester, although there was a Walmart tester that was tempted.

Amazon usability testing results of protection plan offeringClick to Play Amazon Protection Plan Highlight Reel

Walmart usability test results protection plan offeringClick to Play Walmart Protection Plan Highlight Reel

4. Amazon versus Walmart Usability Test Task, Purchasing

Winner Amazon

In fact, both Amazon and Walmart are about equal in terms of the ease of moving through the buy-flow. Both have what can be described as best in class user experiences in terms of the shopping cart to purchase task flow. That said, Amazon has a slight edge with their ability to move users through the process with a bit less cognitive load, as witnessed by the several errors that occurred for our Walmart testers that did not happen for our Amazon testers.

Since so much went right for both purchase flows, let us focus on the errors we picked up, both in the buy-flow as well as in other places. Amazon more than once tripped our testers up with offers to buy a product at a price that seemed to disappear when they actually went to the results pages to find the product at that price. Walmart had several avoidable user errors in their buy-flow, mostly caused by simple things like not labeling required fields or hiding critical choices in the middle of a rather busy purchase page. Simple usability and A/B testing could easily improve all these easy to fix errors.

Avoidable errors uncovered in the Amazon versus Walmart usability testClick to Play the Highlight Reel

Summary of Amazon versus Walmart in Usability, Who Won?

So in summary, based on this simple usability test we performed, it would appear that Amazon and Walmart are about equal in terms of the usability of finding and purchasing an iPad, with Amazon winning two categories and Walmart winning two.

However, I actually believe that based on this test Walmart has the edge in usability. The primary reason? I believe Walmart provides an overall easier and faster user experience in the searching, filtering and vetting process associated with seeking out and purchasing a product.

The primary advantage Walmart has over Amazon is the availability of filters on the left side of the products search results pages. This filter set enables users to very easily target products that meet their parameters, to find the best product possible for the given budget range.

Posted in eCommerce, Methodology, Usability Tools | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Dave Garr Interview

Interview with Dave Garr, Co-founder of UserTesting.com

Dave Garr photo, co-founder of usertesting.com

Dave Garr, co-founder of Usertesting.com

My friend Dave Garr is probably one of the most non-famous Famous usability and UX thought-leaders around. If you’ve never heard his name, you very well may have heard of his creation: UserTesting.com. As a co-founder of UserTesting.com way back in the dark days of 2007, Dave and his team have made a major impact for all usability practitioners; a fast, low-cost and useful usability testing service that provides results in a day versus what used to take weeks. When he’s not re-inventing usability testing, Dave loves writing and performing song parodies. While at Apple, he recorded these videos: “I Think We’re a Clone Now” and “Killing My Software with Windows

If not busy enough completely re-creating remote unmoderated usability testing for the entire world, Dave won a Webby for his marriage proposal.

What’s your background?

My first brush with technology came during a summer job in college with a software company who developed EasyWriter, the first word processor for IBM’s PC. Fortunately, when I went through the interview process, no one asked me if I’d ever used a computer before.

I graduated from Cal Berkeley in Marketing, and I’ve overseen websites for several companies, such as Intuit, HP, and Apple.

I live in Palo Alto, California with my wife Elizabeth who encouraged me to pursue my startup dream, and my two young daughters who don’t seem to be even remotely interested in usability testing.

How did you get into the usability field?

I was managing Apple.com and I found myself drawn to watching Apple’s user experience labs. I was fascinated with how hard they worked to improve the out-of-box experience, or to decide on the use of color in the Mac OS, for example.

Then I read Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” It’s fantastic, particularly his chapter “Usability testing on 10 cents a day.” He makes it so simple: “Watch some people while they try to use [your site] and note where they run into trouble. Then fix it, and test it again.” That resonated with me. Since then, Steve has been kind enough to be a mentor to me.

What is it about your job that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

That’s easy. It’s when we release a new capability on UserTesting.com and a customer tweets or blogs about how it’s improved their life. Like one guy tweeted: “I nominate usertesting.com for a Nobel Peace Prize for preventing warfare between designers and developers. Don’t fight, test it and see.”

What is UserTesting.com and why should someone use it?

We like to think of it as usability testing without the hassle. You create the test, and we handle everything else, including getting the testers. We record the testers using your site, so you can virtually peek over their shoulders to discover your site’s problems. It’s $39 per tester and you get the results in about an hour.

Companies commonly test:

  • Their own website and landing pages
  • Competitors’ sites
  • Semi-functional prototypes and staging sites
  • Facebook games
  • Mobile apps

What was your motivation for creating UserTesting.com?

I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in usability labs, and I was frustrated with how expensive and time-consuming it was. So I started doing a lot of quick and dirty usability testing with my family, coworkers, friends, neighbors, and — in those rare times that I could get up the guts–captive audiences at train stations.

So UserTesting.com solved a pain point that I had. And fortunately it’s a pain point that others have.

What have you learned while running UserTesting.com?

We launched our minimum viable product (MVP) four years ago. After every order, we emailed customers asking them “What can we improve?” We’ve received a lot of feedback because — believe me –our MVP had a lot of room for improvement. The request that we heard most often was this: “I want the participants to be my exact target market and not people on your panel.” So that’s the area we dedicated the most resources to build. Now participants don’t just have to come from our panel — they can also come from any of these places:

  • Live visitors on your website who’ve been intercepted
  • Your own customer list
  • Participants from third-party panels

Another thing we’ve learned: website owners care a lot about their competitors’ websites. As Steve Krug says, “Someone has gone to the trouble of building a full-scale working prototype of a design approach to the same problems you’re trying to solve, and then they’ve left it lying around for you to use.” In particular, our clients want to know what their competitors are doing right, so they can “borrow” it.

What advice do you have for other start-ups that wish to create an online service, whether usability related or otherwise?

If you only take away one thing from this interview, then by far and away, my biggest recommendation is: come work for us! We’re growing and want to hire more people who are passionate about rescuing the world from hard to use products.

But if you insist on doing your own thing, then here are some thoughts…

Do what you love. Since I’ve had to immerse myself in the topic of usability testing for four years, it was good that I was very interested in that topic. It would be hard for me to spend so much time every day thinking about a topic that I wasn’t passionate about.

Work with people you love. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to work with someone that you really enjoy. My co-founder, Darrell Benatar, had previously been a friend and co-worker, so I knew how well we got along.

Love your customers, even if a few take advantage of you. I’ve learned that providing great customer support is crucial. We’re trying to mimic Zappos on this one. We’ll give customers a refund, no matter what. Even if they ran tests years ago, combined the best clips into a highlight reel, and shared that highlight reel with hundreds of people; if they ask for a refund, we give it. Our customers don’t abuse our return policy–less than 1% of our customers request a refund. Best of all, by having great phone, chat, and email support, we get tons of feedback from customers about how we can improve our product.

What’s in the future for UserTesting.com? What changes or improvements are you working on?

Okay, I’ll tell you…as long as you promise to keep it a secret (laughs).

Probably my hardest job is deciding which feature to add next. We’ve learned from ConversionRateExperts.com to rate each feature (on a scale of 1-10) according to “How easy is it to implement?” and “How important is it to customers?” We multiply these two figures together to give an estimated return on investment. Next we build the feature that has the highest estimated ROI and then A/B test it.

Our DNA is about listening to customers. When a lot of customers ask for the same thing, we usually do it. The biggest things they’re asking for now are:

  • Improve our user testing of mobile devices. We’ve developed a mobile version of our platform, and making it better is a key focus of our product development for the foreseeable future.
  • Expand globally beyond the US, Canada, and UK.
  • UserTesting.com has made it easy for you to get feedback on your live website. However, as you know, the earlier in the development cycle you test, the easier it is to make changes. But we haven’t made it easy to test concepts. Shame on me for not doing a better job on that. So we’re going to try to make it easier to use UserTesting.com to get feedback in the ideation phase of the dev process.
  • Consulting services for our enterprise customers. We create the test plan, make clips of the places where testers got stuck, and recommend how to fix the biggest problems found.

What do you think the next few years will bring for usability?

Computing is moving from one screen — a computer accessing the web — to four screens: a computer, a tablet, a phone, and a smart TV.

Let me quote a usability expert named Craig Tomlin! You’ve talked about the next big UX trend is understanding that “user experience” does not mean just “web site experience” or “mobile experience” or “phone experience” or “store experience. ”

Companies will stop designing each experience in a vacuum. They’ll start putting together the holistic understanding of the entire “user experience.”

You used the example of how someone buys a car. She may go to several websites to evaluate car brands. She may use her mobile phone to schedule test drives. She may ask friends on Facebook or other social sites about their opinions. She may build and configure her ideal car on her iPad. Eventually she goes to the car lot and negotiates with the dealer. Given that she has interactions that transcend any single experience, why would car companies design the user experience she has with the website without considering the other critical interactions she’ll have during the car buying process?

What’s next for you and your career in the next year or two, what would you like to focus on?

Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is software that mines text for meaning and insight. It’s often used to extract opinions and emotions from social media to help companies determine how people feel about their products.

Sentiment analysis is an extremely difficult problem, but it’s a problem that will eventually be solved. When the problem is solved, it’ll cull through a massive amount of text and automatically call attention to the biggest, most frequently mentioned issues. This will increase the value of qualitative tools like open-ended survey questions and transcripts of user testing.

Thank you Dave!

 

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