Is your corporate metabolism a bit sluggish? Are you dragged down by the weight of meeting-itis? Do you need more energy and resources to respond to the ever-increasing demands of your customers?

Well I wish I could tell you about the next magical black box, with the persuasive infomercial that promises you miraculous gains without any of the hard work required. If you bought any of these gimmicks before and are tired of their sugar-coated promises and lackluster results, then maybe you are ready to get on the marketing optimization fitness plan.

Here are four exercises that should help you on your way. Don’t worry if you don’t execute perfectly on the first try; the key to this plan is to continuously improve day after day.

Exercise 1: Tweet VP

In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your unique value proposition or unique campaign proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you do a good job of this, you could lower your bounce rates by putting this on every landing page.

You should revisit this regularly and try to improve the power behind each word.

Exercise 2: Reflexive Response Time

Choose one of the following:

A.) If you are an e-commerce retailer, take 10 mystery shoppers and time how long it takes from customer order to fulfillment. Then have each of them contact customer service via e-mail, phone, and Twitter/FaceBook and time how long it takes for them to get a resolution. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

B.) If you are a lead generation business, take 10 mystery shoppers and have them complete your lead generation forms. How long until they got their first real response – not an automated one from an e-mail auto-responder? Keep in mind that a lead loses its effectiveness by six times in the first hour. Now have these “leads” well-prepared to respond to a sales person’s questions. How long does it take for them to get a real price for your product or service? Then have these leads break into groups and ask tough questions by phone, e-mail, and Twitter or Facebook. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

C.) If you are a publisher – pick a unique story line. How long does it take for your article to be researched and published? How long does it take until they get promoted and socialized on each of the social sites that you participate on? Have some pretty specific new information or corrected information to the article ready and ask your team to revise their article. How long does it take for it to be revised? Have “subscribers” ask a question each by phone, e-mail, and Twitter/Facebook. How long did it take to respond? How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

Exercise 3: 25 Interesting Things About You/Your Customers

You may have seen this pass-along on Facebook a while back as people started to list 25 interesting things about themselves. Do the same thing for your business and have several people involved in your business do the same. Then find the most interesting ones and use them on your about us page. This will enhance your credibility by adding transparency into your company.

Exercise 4: Metrics Madness

Have each of your team leads in a meeting room with you as you open up your marketing dashboard with your KPIs (key performance indicators). Go through each one and ask them what the team’s plan and role is as each one of those metrics changes by 20 percent up and by 20 percent down. Do they have clear action items? How long would it take for them to respond? Do you have too many KPIs or are your KPIs not clear enough? Can they prioritize these changes effectively?

There are plenty of other exercises you could perform on your way to becoming a marketing optimization fitness fan. Living the lifestyle that performs under pressure, responds to changes rapidly, and serves your customers and business in real-time fashion is just one way to improve your corporate metabolism fitness levels.

What else are you doing to stay fit?

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising?

Many sites offering “free” white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn’t treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won’t either.

The problem starts by thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information, you need to show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange: valuable information for valuable information.

1. Your white paper needs an interesting title: Would you rather read a white paper titled “Mobile Analytics” or “Why 90% of Your Mobile Visitors Aren’t Being Tracked and What You Can Do About It?” The same technique that works for selling books, getting people to read blog posts, and even to attend webinars can significantly increase your white paper downloads. But don’t go for such an interesting name that no one knows what the paper is about. For borderline cases, a strong subtitle can bridge between interesting and descriptive.
2. Every white paper needs a cover: Instead of just giving the white paper a title alone, merchandise it the way you would a book. No plain vanilla covers; make it engaging. Keep in mind, many people prefer to download and print white papers before they read them. Which is more likely to catch someone’s attention on a busy, cluttered desk: a white paper with no cover or one with an engaging cover design?
   
3. Make it easy to digest: How often have you downloaded a white paper for it only to be pages after pages of block text? No headlines, sub-headline, or bullet points. No graphics, charts, or screenshots. People are busy. It’s fine to make a long white paper if the topic deserves it, but make it reader-friendly.
4. Tell them what they are going to get: Write persuasive copy that not only informs people what they’ll learn from the download, but also what they can do with the information. Make sure this copy is crisp, simple to read, and formatted for online readers. You may want to offer key takeaways, a table of contents, or even an example chart to show them how valuable the paper is going to be.
5. Give them download details: Let them know how many pages it is, how big the file is, what format the paper is in (PDF, DOC), etc.
6. Give them an excerpt: Very few people like reading poorly written, monotonous sounding, corporate gobbledygook. By providing an excerpt, you can help prove how well-written, easy to understand, and valuable your white paper is.
7. Prove other people like it: Like endorsements on a book cover, “credible testimonials” on the download page of your white paper can help sell the value of the content and improve conversion.
8. Don’t ask for too much information: Make sure your forms are optimized to ask only what you really need. And please don’t ask people to “submit to you.”
9. Let them know what will happen with their personal information: Provide them with point of action assurances around their privacy.
10. Make it easy for people to share: Give people an easy mechanism for them to share your white paper via social media, e-mail, or pass along. Do it on the offer/landing page as well as on the thank you page. Visitors are most engaged when they are already downloading the white paper, so a suggestion for them to share it often helps. Don’t forget to add shareable links within the white paper itself.
11. Have a follow-up program: Let’s face it, you created your white paper and offered it for download in order to get leads. That means the white paper has to generate a response or conversation. Making your white paper interesting, actionable, and readable will help, but you’ll be far more successful getting responses if you initiate the post-download interactions and follow-up conversations through a well-planned lead nurturing campaign.
12. Offer contact information: Some people actually prefer to contact you immediately upon finding the white paper, so make sure your contact information is on the download page. Others prefer to contact you as they are reading the white paper, so make sure your contact information is found there as well. I like adding simple contact information in the footer of my white papers. Others just feel a sense of confidence knowing you are providing your full contact information and not trying to remain anonymous while asking for their personal information. In simple terms, make it easy for them to find your contact information everywhere.

What other techniques have you tried to increase leads from white paper requests?

When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms. What you’ll typically see is that the the forms ask for too much information and that can hinder conversions from visitor to lead.

Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.

The Consequences of “Low Quality” Leads

In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.

Five Steps to Solving the “Lead Qualification” Problem

1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.

2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.

3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process.

4. Improve your method of distributing leads. Often times the delay in getting form submissions responded to is your internal process of routing leads to the appropriate sales person. This should never be a manual process considering you lose a leads effectiveness with in the first few minutes. Think about it, the last time you submitted a form on a site, when did you want the response to your inquiry. Now! So do your prospects. Use a platform that will automatically distribute leads based on the profile of the customer you have collected through their visit(s). Distribution is often based on geographic region, company size, product/service they are interested in, etc. Either you can have the prospect fill this out in a form or most of this information can be collected and gleaned by web activity.

5. Improve your lead response time. When marketing aligns with sales using effective content planning, integrating the customer buying process with the company’s sales process, distributing leads that have not been turned off by your processes (and horrendous forms), providing sales people with details that matter to them about the prospect’s interests and motivations and then distribute those leads effectively, their isn’t a salesperson who wouldn’t want to respond to that kind of “qualified” prospect right away.

Confused about conversion optimization? You should be with all the experts sharing their opinions. After all, everyone is entitled to their own spin on the measure, test, analyze, and repeat optimization cycle.

When Jeffrey Eisenberg, my brother and business partner, recently spoke at a WAA conference, he said that you should be able to predict the direction of your tests better than 50 percent of the time. Imagine that, we’ve arrived at the point where we believe that conversion optimization should be less predictive than a coin toss – how sad!

With all the noise, the signal is hard to detect; oversimplification and overcomplication are leaving businesses confused about how to take optimization past the first few tests. The conversion optimization process is simple but not easy; the devil is in the details. The details involve a continuous improvement process that takes into account the realities of your organization and those of the real-time marketplace.

Only the most basic testing is about what variation(s) beat the control, because then all you know is what won. Testing needs to be about why something won. In order to learn, duplicate, and evolve, you need to understand your customers within their context and become more efficient at the real-time marketing tactics that today’s competitive marketplace demands.

Let’s start by better-defining conversion rate so that you’ll realize why the typical two to 10 tests in a month are not good enough and why you should be running dozens of tests a month.

Conversion rate = The number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have intended to take that action.

Not everyone will convert. Nevertheless, with the exception of bad traffic, everyone has some intention to convert. Our job is to offer every visitor an experience that fulfills their needs and leaves us a measurable conversion, even if it’s not a macro-conversion.

Please follow these steps:

Step 1 – Let’s Understand “Number of People”

Your conversion rate is influenced by how effective you are at attracting the right traffic and then helping them engage with your “funnel” to convert.

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Do some search for your products? Do some of those people come from organic search; paid search; e-mails; affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? YouTube? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before? Do you know your customer segments?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? Last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occurring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of flags; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers; etc.)? All of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an “average” person. There is also no “average” marketing campaign. That’s why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but also virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should prioritize each one based on impact and value.

Step 2 – Let’s Understand the “Action You Want Them to Take”

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable and contribute to the bottom line?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now, would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actuallyclick on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s journey.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “Total Number of Potential People Who Could Have Taken That Action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who didn’t convert? Have you asked and answered why they didn’t?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition related to chicken pox. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions, but they weren’t ready to buy? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

First , you need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes, even if it would be the most impactful. That may sound like common sense, but whenever I say it, it seems to catch many companies like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, and ad copy, your customers’ needs are changing. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, and tweaking creative here and there, you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors’ needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in a true continuous improvement process that asks “Why?” as much as “What?”

In December, Amazon (AMZN) invested $175M in LivingSocial. Like Groupon, LivingSocial capitalizes on local advertising by having deals of the day that offer discounts to people who opt in to certain deals. But today, they are offering a $20 Amazon.com gift card for just $10 (get yours today). Brilliant!

It is rare to see 100% redemption for any offer for these companies, but this is a great way for them to add several hundred thousand to a million+ new names to their database as the word of mouth of this great offer gets out. Dozens of my friends have already promoted it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. And even if 100% redeemed it, there could be some breakage in terms of not all the money being spent and of course Amazon has a profit on those purchases as well. So total cost is less than $10 a customer. Can you come up with some creative way to acquire customers that benefit all three parties involved: benefit You, benefit the customer and benefit the company you are offering something from? Please let us know.

Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled conversions based on the advice we gave him. However, he said he had an unbelievable battle to explain and use an obvious technique: leveraging his company’s point-of-action assurances into the shopping cart.

Maybe I can spare you that grief.

What Are Point-of-Action Assurances?

At the point when a visitor is ready to take action, to fill out a form, to click on a button or link, they are at a seductive moment. It’s a delicate place. It’s at that point they could lose confidence in their decision and not take the action you want them to take. That’s why you must provide messaging to bolster trust and confidence.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this can be done.

One of the earliest tests we ran over a decade ago was adding the words “we value your privacy” near newsletter subscriptions boxes on several clients’ websites. We placed those four simple words near the e-mail form field and the button used to submit the subscription form. It often doubled the conversion rate from visitors to subscribers.

If you want to take this to another level, check out what my good friends and screenshotaholic enablers at TechSmith do on their forms with a reaffirming message from their president.

Point-of-action assurances allow you to handle the possible objections or concerns your visitors have just as they are ready to complete an action and without them having to go anywhere else on your website to look for the answer.

Take a look at the download button from Firefox as an example of adding point-of-action assurances on a graphic button. Notice how they tell people how large the file is, what version, etc.? You could do the same thing if you are asking people to download white paper docs, PDFs, or any other type of files.

Amazon used this strategy for years on its “add to cart” buttons. Even though they removed it, we have still used it quite successfully for clients recently. Notice how Amazon used the words “you can always remove it later” on the button and the use of the lock graphic and the additional words “shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.”

You can also use point-of-action assurances to help retail visitors overcome their shopping fears and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Notice the use of the lock and the “Shop with Confidence” messaging alongside the credit card input fields in CafePress.com’s shopping cart? This point-of-action assurance helps visitors feel more secure about entering in their credit card information.

The folks from 37signals use this well-designed strategy quite effectively in order to get their visitors to provide them with credit card information to set up a free trial account for their Basecamp product.

Visitors to retailers often have other questions that should be answered as point-of-action assurances inside the cart, instead of making visitors search your website for answers to your return, shipping, or guarantee policies.

Notice how Shoeline.com spells out its policies from the shopping cart page all the way through the final checkout page? This is how it lets visitors know that all its products are guaranteed and that visitors can return products within 30 days for a refund or exchange.

So You Want More Leads, Huh?

Well, this strategy of providing point-of-action assurances is a must, then!

Keep in mind that, according to studies, a lead loses six times its effectiveness within the first hour of contacting you. So an effective strategy is to set expectations of how you handle your leads, what will happen after they fill out your form, and when and how you will respond. Take a look at what Rad-Direct.com is doing on its Web forms:

First, it sets expectations about what you can speak to a systems engineer about. Then, above and below the form, it lets you know that it will respond to all inquiries within two business hours (it also has the point-of-action assurance about respecting your privacy):

Use this simple and powerful technique of point-of-action assurances that direct marketers have been using in their work for years and watch how your visitors reward you with more actions taking place.

My last two columns focused on evaluating the five dimensions that make the 10 design elements of the anatomy of a landing page convert better. A prominent feature found on many landing pages is a form to complete, or at the end of a retail landing experience, forms required to complete a check-out. I haven’t written about designing forms on ClickZ since 2004 or on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment since 2003. (Sorry, as you can see by the 300+ columns I’ve written here, there are many topics to cover under optimization.)

Today, let’s cover seven factors to consider when designing your forms for maximum conversionability and persuadability:

• Size
• Fields
• Labels
• Benefits
• Prominence
• Call to action
• Confidence building

Size

Size does matter sometimes, if you want to see customers take action! How many actual pixels (height and width) does the form take? I have seen forms that ask for very few fields, but because they look long, they intimidate users into a misconception about the amount of time it might take to complete a form. This is also one of the reasons you seldom want to place form fields horizontally next to each other – it makes the form look scary. For example, you never want to have a check-out with the billing information in the right-hand column and the shipping information in the left column. This is also related to how many fields you ask people to complete as well; the more fields, the bigger the form will be. Don’t make your form look like tax or department of motor vehicle forms.

Fields

The type of questions you ask in your form can also make or break its conversionability. If you start asking for a Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, blood type, what they had for breakfast, etc., you can stop a visitor in their tracks. This is the constant battle that marketing faces with sales about what data they need for a lead, while marketing struggles on the quantity versus quality issues related to leads and form completions. The fields you require should always be tested.

Labels

Now, it isn’t just what you ask but how you ask it. How you label a form field can have a tremendous impact on its ability to persuade a visitor to fill in the information. In fact, I remember asking my friend Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and GM, global marketing and eCommerce for Citrix, about his most surprising test while I was recording podcasts for the launch of my “Always Be Testing” book. He recalled how the label on one field for a Go ToMeeting account had such a surprising impact on conversion.

Benefits

Too many companies present their visitors a form without reminding them of why they should complete the form, what are the benefits of completing the form, and what will be the next steps after they complete the form. Check-out processes should show people what items they are ordering (both in text and visually), when the order will arrive, and the total costs early on. One such example is when we added the beautiful gift box that one of our jewelry clients sent with their products in the check-out process – it had an immediate and direct impact to conversion. In lead generation, you could do similar things especially when promoting a white paper or Webinar; merchandize your B2B offering effectively.

Prominence

Make the form jump off the page. Do you make it obvious that you want people to complete it? Adding a bit of color behind the form and a bit of design around the edges, or a simple graphic or icon is often enough to make it more visually prominent. If you are offering a white paper, possibly include the cover of it by the form and remind them of the benefits.

Call to Action

What do they click on when they complete the form? There are several factors that matter here: text versus graphics, shape variations, colors, style variations, icon variations, size variations, legibility, location variations, and wording. You can read about the details about each one of these in this column, “Calling You to Action.”

Confidence Building

Establishing trust and credibility on a Web site should be its own column. However, there are several general ways to build confidence for your visitors; you can leverage others credibility (known third-party endorsements and reviews, trust marks, customer logos ,etc.), leverage the voice of the customer with reviews and testimonials, use point-of-action assurances to ease concerns, doubts, and fears, and do everything else to provide a quality experience.

Are you showing good form? Test and leverage these seven form factors and boost your conversion rate today!

There is no question that improving the forms on your website can improve your conversion rate. In fact, Gavin Doolan, of the Google analytics team, did a wonderful job explaining the basics concepts needed to improve form conversion rates. However, what do the forms that exist in the “wild” tell your visitors about you?

Does it say you care about your visitor? Your sales team? Your legal department? No one?

This past week one of my MarketMotive conversion optimization students sent me an example of a form she wanted to avoid as soon as she saw it as part of one of her assignments. Take a look at it and think about what issues you see with this form:

Let’s imagine the conversation in your visitor’s head.

“This form is a little hard to read!”

“Are they trying to hide something?

“Why do they need my job title?”

“A community screen name, why do I need one of these? I don’t want to join a community I just want to try out the software.”

“There are different types of accounts, let me think about what I might need.”

What do you think the odds are that this person is going to complete this form?

So what went wrong?

First avoid all light gray type on a white background, especially with a smaller font type. Your designer might think it looks nice, but I am wondering what are you trying to hide. Give them some contrast please!

If everything is required only highlight any optional fields.

Design the form so that it is in one column not two. It tends to convert visitors better and is a more natural experience.

Wait till later in the process to engage them in discussions they are not ready for like joining a community, or what type of account they may need. You are forcing them to make a decision and process information before they are ready to. Get them through the process as frictionless as possible. It wasn’t in the sales flow before the signup and the first place it showed up was in this first step of the signup process.

There has been some great analysis on how to improve your forms. Follow these guidelines and people might actually think you care about the visitor and your conversion rates may improve:

• Use a simple vertical layout and vertical aligned labels where possible
• If vertical aligned labels are not possible, use bold left-aligned labels
• When more than one field is placed on a line, ensure that they are designed to look like a single piece of information
• Emphasize the headers if you want users to read them
• If optional fields are needed, make them clear instead of using asterisks for mandatory fields
• Use single field for numbers or postcodes, allow input in various forms
• Let users focus on their task and avoid distractions
• Use real time feedback carefully
• If possible, place tips at the side of the relevant fields
• Provide users with a progress indicator showing them the steps involved to complete the form

Here is an example of one of my favorite sign up forms. What does this form tell you about the company you are considering doing business with?

Can you spare an hour this week for what took me the past decade to put together?

This Thursday, January 7, 12pm EST, courtesy of my friends at MarketMotive, you can join me for this free workshop on the 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites.

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing? Bryan Eisenberg, who has been helping companies improve their conversion rates since 1998 will reveal 21 of his most valuable tips that will help you increase your conversion rate. In this fast paced session you’ll find relevant examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. You’ll learn the key principle of GTC – Get the Cash! Guaranteed you’ll never be able to look at a website the same way again.

Why is this webinar free?

1. My good friends from MarketMotive and I want you to kick off 2010 the right way by focusing in on improving your conversion rate. They gave away all their workshops in December, but I pushed them to give this one for free as well.

2. This is my last presentation for MarketMotive before we begin our Certification in Conversion & Landing Page Optimization course on January 11. We want people to see the caliber of information we provide monthly in our workshops, so please invite others to check it out. They may decide that learning internet marketing online from MarketMotive’s esteemed faculty may be just the edge they need in 2010.

3. If you want to find out more about how you can improve your conversion rate after learning the 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites, you can always sign up with MarketMotive to have me be your hands on instructor  for the Conversion & Landing Page Optimization certification, so you can do it yourself or you can reach out to me and I’ll help you find someone to help you in your efforts.

I dislike the term “Demand Generation”, also referred to as “Demand Creation” because it’s misleading.

Surely marketing professionals know better. I hope. You could always look it up on Wikipedia where it’s reasonably explained.

It’s only in several conversations with business owners and C-level executives over the last few months that I realized how misleading the term is.

Think about how the term sounds to non-marketing professionals. I mean really, you get this image of a marketer ripping and tearing peoples clothes off so that clothing would be in demand.  Or perhaps a mafioso showing up and asking you if you might need some fire insurance.

The demand for your product or service should already exist or you wouldn’t have a business, right?

As marketers, we want prospective customers to raise their hands, call, email or pick up the phone and talk to us. We want the opportunity to explain how their demand is met by us supplying our solution. So the objective is to frame our solution, product and/ or service as the answer to the prospective customer’s existing problems, needs or desires.  Therefore the objective is to re-frame the prospective customers questions so that you are answering them. In order to do this you must determine, in advance, what is their angle of approach.

What does that mean for your online marketing? You could have two different prospective customers reading the exact same content with each coming from a different angle of approach.  So that content you created can mean one thing to one person and another thing to the other person. You might convert one into a lead and not the other. The sad part is that both might be demanding exactly what you offer.

If you’re planning a persuasive experience, that’s more than a landing page for complex sales, please remember that people don’t read pages online.  Instead they experience online hyperlink to hyperlink. That’s why you need to plan the persuasive paths of your campaigns, website and lead nurturing material carefully in order to remain relevant and answer the questions they have the way they want them answered; that’s their angle of approach. An early stage buyer and late stage buyer would have different questions and therefore their angle of approach would differ. Plan your content that way, from the persona’s ( please read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?” for a more thorough discussion about personas) point of view, not your point of view and you’ll be successful at re-framing demand. Only once you’ve re-framed the prospective customer’s demand will they be willing to discuss your offering.

I hope that helps.