Jen Wojcik and Brian Massey at the Austin AMA

I turn things up a few notches in this open discussion at the American Marketing Association.

I apologize in advance for my language.

Tom Myer herds the cats: Yours Truly, the Conversion Scientist, Tom Hayden of Blue Clover and Jen Wojcik of Pinqued in a panel discussion entitled “Show Me the Money: Make Marketing Work for You.”

Tim was our mobile marketing expert, Jen handled social media. I just played Devil’s Advocate.

I hope you will enjoy the audio of this slide-free discussion.

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What are you afraid of?

The goal of my Ion Interactive presentation “What Can We Learn from the Bad Boys of Marketing?” was to shake things up a bit.

Conversion marketing is about bringing visitors to choice. B2B marketers carry this same burden.

Can marketers in more conservative industries use techniques proven to increase online leads and sales in B2C markets?

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Not only should B2B marketers try everything that B2C businesses are using, they risk irrelevance if they don’t.

In my Ion Interactive webinar, I use two B2B landing pages to illustrate how these B2C techniques can be used: AdwordAdvantage.com and CoverActionPro.com.

• Long copy
• Bold headlines
• Highlighting and bullets
• “Johnson” boxes
• Risk reversal
• Testimonials
• “Act” buttons
• Signatures and postscripts

I go as far in the Webinar to state:

“Business to business copy sucks. It’s horrible to read. There is a need, that when someone recommends a site to their boss that you look professional, but it doesn’t mean you have to write like an idiot.”

Certainly you can deliver a high-converting experience without harming your online brand, like CoverActionPro.

You have to work harder. You can’t ask a committee of executives to review your pages. You have to know how your page is performing and how changes are affecting your results.

You can learn more about analytics and their proper application at my AEN Short Course “Web Analytics: Tools and Best Practices” on June 11, 2010.

Enjoy the Webinar and don’t miss Anna Talerico’s Conversations on Conversion podcast.

Examining a Disaster at PubCon South

We can learn a lot from big disasters.

We can’t help but watch — self-conscious but riveted – when great endeavors come to a disastrous end. Myriad books and movies have been produced round the sinking of the Titanic, and after almost a century it still resonates in our collective memories.

Long Island daily New York Newsday launched a grand ship in their online newspaper at newsday.com. At a reported cost of $4 million they launched a designer’s site and placed their content behind a pay wall. After the passing of three months, they had garnered only 35 paying subscribers. The acquisition cost is staggering.

But it wasn’t a single iceberg that struck the hull of newsday.com. Instead, they got mired in the ice flows off the coast of bad choices.

No disaster is the result of one mistake. It is the culmination of a series of poor decisions with a dose of misfortune.

You’re making the same mistakes on your Web site.

I completed an in-depth review of the newsday.com site last month, but you may prefer my fast-paced presentation from PubCon South 2010, complete with audio and animated slides courtesy of Prezi.com.

These guys test the hell out of landing pages

We call them affiliate marketers, infopreneurs or online goo-roos. They push health care products, supplements, exercise tapes, and get-rich-quick schemes. At their best they are sophisticated landing page optimizers and savvy search engine technicians. At their worst they are spammers, forum trolls and comment leeches. These are the “bad boys” of online sales conversion (and they’re not all boys).

While many of us wouldn’t want to associate the hard-hitting big-promise experience with our brands, there is much to learn from these pages, and I tackled the task of cataloging some of the best techniques in my short presentation for the Uber Advanced PPC Panel at PubCon South 2010 in Dallas.

Don’t be fooled by the panel name. Christine Churchill, David Szetela and Wister Walcott dove deep into PPC topics. My angle was that improving conversion rates means more to spend on PPC.

Listen for yourself.

Enjoy the full audio and video right here, complete with Prezi.com animation.

Either way, I promise you will immediately find some new things to test on your pages.

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Bad Boys Motorcycle Image ©Donna Golden

Anna Talerico Hosts Conversations on Conversion

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“Is 2010 the year of conversion rate optimization?”

2010 is indeed the year. Exciting things are happening. First we have the first ever conversion conference happening in May. Now there are more resources for marketers than ever, including Google analytics and similar programs. The library of books that are now available emphasizing the importance of conversion is steadily growing. These include Avinash Kaushik, Tim Ash, and Brad Geddes are some of the best.

Still we have to remember that Web site optimization is at the top of the conversion stack. First you have truly know your visitor. You have to create a content platform to answer questions. You have to identify the best media strategies and channels to reach your target audience. And most importantly, you have to have the content your customers want. And then you’re ready for optimization.

“What advice do you give marketers who are just getting started with conversion optimization?”

First, consider a content conversion strategy. Educate your customer about different aspect of your product and see what that can do for conversion.

Then look at what I call the “Bad boys of Conversion.” These are the experts that know how to phrase, emphasize, and structure their copy to really draw in visitors. They realize the value of imaginative copy. Study the tricks and tools that they use and apply them yourself.

Take a look at your confirmation pages and notification emails. Each of these are opportunities to get customers back to the site to finalize the purchase or to make another purchase.

“What are the biggest opportunities for conversion optimization that marketers aren’t taking enough advantage of yet?”

Marketers need to remember to test all their communication efforts to see if they are actually effective. Whether its serial testing or split testing.

Celebrate if your favorite page fails a test. Be like the The Cheerios Guy who runs around telling everyone he lowered his cholesteral. Let people know you increased your conversion rate. Be competitive and always try to improve your results.

And finally, don’t depend on IT. Set up a lab on the side utilizing the wealth of free or inexpensive tools available where you can do some basic tests.

Once you’ve proven the usefulness of these preliminary tests, it’ll be amazing how IT’s schedule for bigger testing projects seems to magically open up.

“What are the top 3 reasons optimization programs fail?”

1) Resources to champion and implement the program. You need someone to really focus on optimization.

2) The program doesn’t have momentum. You need to learn from each test, to understand why you got the results you did, and then draw conclusions regarding the next test that needs to be run. And then actually conduct these new tests, and DON”T WAIT to do it. You’ll lose momentum. In other words, use your data to take action.

3) Really emphasize making analytics and conversion as part of company culture.

Tory Tompkins is an Intern at Conversion Sciences and is eager to learn more about online sales conversion. Curiosity is the main requirement to become a Conversion Scientist.