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Conversion Rate

  • December 2011

3 unspoken truths of web marketing

Can you visualize any of the visitors that entered your website just now? What about the visitors that are reading your email newsletter or social media updates this very moment?

Visitors, customers, email subscribers, leads, followers, fans all of these terms refer to people, people that you are in a remote relation with.

It’s so easy to forget about it and treat them as pure numbers.

Are they at office, in the bedroom, or in a public space? Are they angry, mad or are they happy and smiling? Do you have their full attention?

Imagine

A MailChimp hack to get the most out of your subscribers

Every email marketer strives for as many subscribers as possible with as much data about them in order to send the most relevant emails possible. Not an easy task, though I think we found a good way around it:

  • ask from subscribers the minimum details that are needed to send regular campaigns
  • do it double opt in
  • hack the double opt in process by asking subscribers for more data
  • segment your email campaigns based on the data you get from subscribers

In this tutorial we assume you use MailChimp as your email service provider and that you have defined optional merge fields within your MailChimp list in order to get more information from your subscribers like birthday, address, phone number, etc.

The (online) Animal Farm: everyday users are not sheep, nor dogs, but cats

Simon’s Cat episodes are great analogy for how online business owners want users to do a certain thing while users simply have a different agenda.

While I love George Orwell, let’s get something straight: users are not animals.

They are, just like you and me, complex human beings with complex needs. However, in understanding user behavior, animal analogies do help.

I know that cats seem to take over the web (they are all over youtube ), but there are at least a couple of online experts (them and them) that believe that we have a lot to learn from cat behavior for when it comes to online visitors behavior.

Why cats and not dogs, sheep or mice?

Because cats only care about their own good. They can’t be told what to do, they don’t care about their owners troubles or success. They just care about getting what interests them: love and food. Stop giving them what they are after, and they’ll leave. Sounds familiar?

How important are landing pages in your strategy?

Guest Author:

Oli Gardner
Director of Marketing
Unbounce

Landing pages can prove to be a very powerful strategy to increase conversion rates, nonetheless a strategy we believe is not used enough by email marketers.  That’s why we invited Oli Gardner, our favorite landing page optimization expert, to share the value that landing pages can bring to optimizing your conversions.

Landing pages and conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process for improving the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities. Landing pages act as the “marketing glue” between your advertising source (e.g. email campaigns, PPC, banners) and the customer interaction with your product.

Google Analytics hack for TOUCH attribution of sales, leads and other conversion goals

In other words: Find out ALL the traffic sources that bring visitors to your website who eventually buy.

Imagine the following scenario: the customer first visited your website by clicking an ad, then visits your website from your newsletter and when he decides to buy he goes to Google, and searches for your site name. By default, Google Analytics considers the referrer of the sale the last source that brought the visitor to your website.

If your Google Analytics eCommerce report attributes many sales to your branding organic searches, the chances are you are loosing a lot of data about the performance of your web marketing efforts.

Understanding the impact of your marketing channels better will help you take better decisions in investing money and resources wisely. SeoMoz has a great article on how to go around it, but I prefer the following 3 step wizard you can use to find out ALL the referrers of your customers before they click the Confirm Order button:

Step 1: Save referrers

Add the following code just after the Google Analytics tracking code. This script will use the Google Analytics cookies to store the referrer of a visitor for each of his visits.


Get more email subscribers and leads from your website.
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