How do you define a complex sale? Is it a B2B purchase? Is it planning a family vacation for 2 adults and 3 kids ranging in age from 4-12. Can it be purchasing new pillows for your bed? How about when deciding on an enterprise testing and targeting solution? As marketers we use the term frequently but as I often find people sort of know what it is when they see it, but don’t really define it well. You’ll often…
Last week, my partner and brother, Jeffrey and I were doing an in-house training for a large B2B marketing team. At the end of our training, we had them review a bunch of landing pages across the web to see how they could apply what they learned over the two day training. One source of inspiration for the landing pages they reviewed was this list of 30 beautiful landing pages. There were a few good ones (beautiful isn’t good), but…
Last week in our Conversion Optimization challenge I asked, how would you improve this Quick Tour demo video found on the homepage of UserTesting.com. I won’t tell you any more about them. If you don’t know them it’s because the video should do a better job of “selling” you. Watch the explainer video below and let me know in the comments if a) did this make you want to use UserTesting.com on your website b) what would you do to…
Since we just finished looking at how to optimize ecommerce product or hero images, I thought we should look at how to get the best demo or explainer video to help sell your service or product. There is no question video marketing is hot, but doing it poorly can hurt your chances at converting visitors. What proves to be true is that just like in every other media, you have to capture people in the first 8-12 seconds if you…
Last week we were visited by our client Randy Albert, a change management expert from Level Up System who focuses on helping companies that are no longer in survival mode, not yet in prosperity mode, and still have untapped growth potential. Over lunch he was recalling the story of a former client and the challenge of getting an IT group to respond to business needs. Of course, this doesn’t feel like anything new, but it was interesting when he shared…
There are way too many companies that have set up pricing tables with “packages” for their products without a solid understanding of the psychology behind package design. One of the first e-commerce companies to do this well was Dell. Nevertheless, while often imitated, many companies that offer software or services and offer it in different packages are simply playing monkey see, monkey do. Dan Ariely explains in his excellent book “Predictably Irrational” that, “Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms.…
In my last column, I told you about seven must-test elements on your e-commerce product pages. I left you with less tangible products and services with a promise I’d follow up in this column. So, if you sell a product or service through untraditional e-commerce or software, or even software-as-a-service as your product, then how do you maximize the effectiveness of your product pages? There’s a lot to say, so let me get started. Video Marketing Is Hot Just like…
Our mentor, Roy Williams, described shoppers as operating in either one of two modes: transactional or relational, a few years ago. At that time some of us loafed around virtually, exchanging emails with friends, trying to complete a list of reasons that motivate people to buy things. (Thank you, Tom G. & Brett F.) More recently, we returned to compiling the list with the rest of my colleagues. Trying to understand these types of things is what drives us. It…