A Crash Course in Conversion Optimization, Part I

As a social and behavioral scientist in B2B marketing, I am constantly looking for ways scientific testing can help us understand human buying behavior. So when WhichTestWon.com (a site that experiments with various ways to present messages in online marketing) promoted a training series on MarketMotive.com, a website specializing in internet marketing certification courses, I knew I had to sign up.

The entire class series was more than 16 hours long, so suffice it to say I will not blog about everything I learned, but I wanted to devote my next few blog entries to some key takeaways I think are useful to anyone in B2B marketing. The first is what Bryan Eisenberg, one of the presenters of the training classes and chair conversion department, called “The Conversion Trinity”: Relevance, Value and Call to Action. The Conversion Trinity is a useful approach to converting your online prospects into partners or sales.  

Relevance
Visitors must be able to easily find what you have promised. For example, did your PPC ad say you offer a certain product or service? If so, your landing page better clearly tie up with that. Link to a page that is most relevant to what you promised, or else your visitors will leave; they won’t waste their time searching for what you claimed to offer if it isn’t clearly there.

Value
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: If you don’t make it clear that what you offer is better than the competition, what’s the prospect’s incentive to stay? Do you have testimonials or quantifiable results from other customers? State these clearly, because again, they will not waste their time searching for it.

Call to Action
How do visitors to your site take the next step, such as contacting you? Make this information clear and conspicuous so they can find it. And be sure to limit load time, pop-ups and other intrusions.  

The underlying theme to The Conversion Trinity is that people are not going to waste their time searching for what you claim to offer if you don’t make it clear and obvious to them. Instead, they will simply leave your site. So to convert your online visitors from prospects into sales, make it easier for them to learn more, understand why they should do business with you in particular, and how to act next.

Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.  

 

 

 

 

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