Yes, you read it right. I have the opportunity to offer 2 or 3 websites the opportunity to increase your conversion rate. A couple of weeks ago, I started teaching a Certification course in Conversion Rate and Landing Page Optimization course. It has been going great as one of my students just sent me this note: Thanks for teaching the course. It is simply fantastic. I have to admit that I was very skeptical when I first signed up but I couldn’t…
This is not very digital, but even a stopped clock is correct two times a day. My first ClickZ column, “Marketing is NOT Sales” was written exactly nine years ago today I wrote this column. Soon after the dot-com crash, I wrote: “For all that’s being written about various marketing strategies, success in e-business, as in any business, isn’t about marketing or about design; it’s about sales… Ultimately, it’s about the conversion rate: the percentage of visitors your site can…
Advertising guru, Roy Williams likes to say “Advertising only accelerates the inevitable” today I would add that “Social media only accelerates the inevitable.” The point is simple, if you have a good business, with strong values, a great product/service, that takes good care of employees and customers, advertising will help amplify your great story and your results. If you have a lousy product, treat customers and employees without respect, with advertising you’ll soon be out of business (although some airlines and banks…
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…
What was the winning combination of media and message for Barack Obama’s ’08 campaign e-mail sign up page? For this exercise, first pick your choices of media and messages from the examples laid out in my last column, “Obama’s ’08 Campaign: Using Data to Win” and then come back here to find out the results. It’s ok. I’ll wait. Dan Siroker, former deputy new media director, Obama Presidential Transition and founder of CarrotSticks and Spreadly, did a fabulous job in…
At several conferences that last few months and in several emails, there is one question that keeps popping up, what is the critical skill for marketers to have today. Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist recently said that the “…sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians…The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it.” I agree with Mr. Varian completely. However, I’d like…
Next week I’ll be traveling to Chicago to join hundreds of fellow marketers at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, where I’ll be doing a couple of sessions. There are many new and interesting sessions. I’m looking forward to attending the keynote by Dan Siroker, who led the analytics team for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and is a former Google employee as well. The title of his presentation is, “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election.” I’ve read about it,…
Yesterday, my aunt Arlene called me in a panic. She had an appointment to run to and an online shopping cart full of gifts for her grand-children and great nieces and nephews and couldn’t figure out how to ship them to their multiple addresses. Amazon.com does a pretty good job at letting you put multiple addresses in your address book but when it came time to selecting which products go to which addresses a simple 8 characters could have made…