Conversion Gold

I break conversion optimization into two parts: Pre-checkout: meant to deliver important information at the proper time in order to encourage a conversion event. Checkout: where the rubber meets the road, the actual intended action. You can do all of the work in the world to make sure that your pre-checkout information (homepage, product pages, marketing collateral, etc) is absolutely outstanding, yet still, you’ll often suffer from poorer results than your site is capable of....

If you abstract out and take a look, you’ll see that there are really just two colors in this content section: black text and a white background. I’ve also played a little with bolding and increasing the font size of the headlines. There are no buttons, no accordion menus, no add to cart or checkout functionality — it’s a pretty simple piece of content from a utility standpoint. If you’re reading this, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re reading it linearly....

Based on the hint above, you might begin thinking about which type of context I’m talking about. The answer is, of course, all of the contexts. Here, I’ll enumerate a few for you: What is the context of the users visit? If I’m arriving at your site from an email newsletter you’ve sent me, does it make sense to show me a newsletter signup popup that I have to dismiss before I can complete my task?...

I’ve always been a storyteller. If I find a new product that I like, I’ll weave the origin story, enumerate the benefits, and give the hard sell to everyone I know. I’ve always been this way — I don’t know if that’s something I learned along the way or something I was born with. I guess then that it’s logical that I became a marketer. As a marketer, I get to discover the story behind products and relay it to people who want to hear it....