Consider the ease of simply clicking a button within an attractive user interface, following the vehicle as it comes to your door and enjoying a smooth ride. For all the talk about their technology, their business model and their strategy, experience is what ensures customers continue to use the service. This idea has brought me to the concept of UX as strategy. It’s the idea that today, more than anything else, your UX will determine the success or failure of your software and your business.

A killer UX creates deeper customer engagement and loyalty.

A powerful and engaging UX doesn’t just make your product easier to use — it helps you engage more deeply with your customers, ensuring they stay loyal to you rather than looking to your competition. It builds brand loyalty and increases the chances that your customers will become your most effective advocates. Your UX also plays a key role in enrichment, ensuring your customers purchase additional products and services.

Your UX now forms the heart of your competitive differentiation.

I don’t believe I’m writing anything new in highlighting the importance of UX for software and applications. What is new, however, is how your UX can form the basis of your competitive differentiation. Building long-term, sustainable, competitive differentiation is one of the toughest objectives that executives face. In today’s digital world, the UX of your products and services plays a fundamental role. People engage with brands and companies via their software, and thus via their UX.

It is your brand, plus highly satisfied customers and fans, that will result not just in your business growing, but in building competitive differentiation. For example, it’s incredibly hard for other companies to match the loyalty of people who love Apple’s products and services. Even when other manufacturers build products that can compete on a technical and functional level, and that may even sell at lower price points, people remain loyal to the brand. Apple has been at the forefront of blending the concept of a brand with people’s identity, their image of who they are as individuals. Apple’s UX is at the very heart of this.

Making UX Your Strategy

At a high level, I recommend the following actions as you make UX your business strategy:

• Link your design metrics to your business metrics.

Those individuals responsible for the design of your software are now at the heart of the success of your business. As a result, we also need to ensure that their success, and that of your design, becomes linked to your business’s key performance indicators.

• Use the latest technology to build hyperpersonalized services.

Increasingly, in order to build these powerful experiences, organizations will need to use the latest technologies, from automation to machine learning. Customers now consider such personalization the norm, part of the overall experience of using your software. Airbnb’s personalized travel recommendations after you book a trip, such as offering a tour of Boston’s live music scene just after you reserve a stay in the city, is one such example.

• Build design systems.

Leading organizations such as Adobe and Salesforce have increasingly spoken about the need to create “design systems” to build these powerful user experiences. These are the systems and processes that enable them to scale their design best practices, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Forrester analyst Gina Bhawalkar points out that they also play a key role in linking your design team to your development team. She mentions that design systems should “also include the reusable code behind those design elements, and for this reason they should be created as a partnership between design and development teams.”

• Foster a product-centric culture and mindset.

If you listen to any of the founders of the UX-centric companies I’ve mentioned before, you will realize that they obsess about their products and the experiences their customers have with them. I would argue that if it’s not their top priority, it probably ranks very high. This is something easy to achieve as a startup, but much harder when you are, for example, a large financial institution that is used to thinking that your “product” is a checking account or a home loan, instead of the app or website your customers use to buy and manage those financial solutions. I often wonder whether the top executives at large firms even use their software products because some of them are so bad.

The democratization of technology helps drive better UX.

Ultimately, this is all part of what many people have referred to as the “democratization of technology.” This is because, fueled by cloud computing and new open-source technologies, it’s not just large companies or tech giants that can create these compelling user experiences.

So while effective UX design is one of the hardest aspects of product development, new technologies, tools and approaches are making it possible even for startup teams on a budget to build these compelling digital experiences. We’re seeing organizations take advantage of this to move nimbly and build light, attractive, mobile-first experiences. This is what it means to make UX your strategy, and in 2019, I believe it is the only way your organization will achieve success.

Written by: Alex Robbio (Co-founder of Belatrix Software and Member of Forbes Technology Council)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post User Experience (UX) Is Now Your Business Strategy appeared first on CueCamp.

With the right tools, and an intelligent strategy, any business can develop market research from the information found across social media sites. Continue reading to learn about using social media as a tool for getting to know customers to a whole new extent.

Define the Marketing Goals

The first step for any type of market research is to determine exactly what is trying to be learned. That could mean looking for insights into things like consumer behavior, marketplace sentiment, product research, brand awareness, and more.

A brand also has to determine whether to go looking for information that is qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative research is essentially the hard numbers: The number of followers on a specific platform or social media mentions. Qualitative research is more associated with feelings: whether people have positive or negative feelings about something.

As an example, a business might find that it has 500 mentions on a specific platform. That would be quantitative information. With a deeper look at the numbers, it may be found that 91 percent of those mentions rate as positive. That would be qualitative information. They can decide which will be the focus of a research strategy in order to gain the specific customer insights.

Choose a Platform

Once a goal has been defined and the type of information determined as to what’s being sought after, a marketer can select a social media platform to mine for information. Depending on the goals or the group of consumers that they are trying to learn more about, some social networks might hold more research value.

Due to the ubiquitous nature of Facebook, it is the social network that offers value for the broadest range of goals, but other social media sites might be able to offer unique insights for specific groups. As an example, Snapchat advertising offers the greatest access to the millenial demographic, and is noteworthy for its high engagement levels.

Use the Right Tools

When it comes to extracting data from social media, digital marketers have an array of different tools at their disposal. These analytics platforms mine information like mentions, likes, and shares to provide businesses with insights into the behaviors and feelings of social media users.

When a brand is looking for an analytics platform, they want to find one that has the ability to extract the information that is relevant to their consumer insight research. They must consider the type of information that the service provides, and look at the different ways that it allows them to collect, manage, and clean data.

Using the Data

The point of market research is to obtain information that a business can turn into action. They might be able to use it for marketing, product development, customer service or any number of other business goals. Marketers shouldn’t just gather this information and sit on it – they should take action and make decisions that can refine the brand and maximize their ROI.

A company that offers a software-as-a-service product might find that customers are unsatisfied with a specific feature, or they might find that a competitor offers a feature that is particularly popular with consumers. This information can then be used to refine the product going forward.

Things like surveys and focus groups still have their place in market research, but social media can provide customer insights that are not available through traditional methods. Marketers can get information from a much larger group, and research can be performed much more quickly and for a lower cost. That means it offers a better return on investment, and the immediacy of the information makes it more useful and more actionable.

Written by: Rae Steinbach, Taktical Digital (via Website Magazine)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How to Use Social Media to Know What Customers Want appeared first on CueCamp.

Engagement is, without question, a complicated subject matter – and practice – thanks in part to the variety of definitions that could be, and often are, applied to it. By creating unique and memorable digital experiences, however, it is possible to develop productive and profitable relationships with customers.

One enterprise, for example, might define engagement as repeat visits with purchase amounts over a certain level, while another might be laser-focused on those moments along the user’s journey when activity reaches a certain level – X number of pages viewed, Y number of items shared on social or Z number of friends referred as the indicator of a genuine level of engagement. In each of these instances it is easy to see how deeper connections and greater revenue can be achieved from engagement.

Essentially, Web businesses (all businesses really) will measure engagement in different ways based on enterprise objectives. Regardless of how an enterprise defines and plans to increase engagement among its users, however, one thing should be certain – it is essential to success.

Customer Engagement Today Starts with Tech

While an incredible amount of investment (time and financial resources) is required to achieve true improvements to the state of user engagement, there are plenty of technologies and techniques that can be leveraged to get enterprises where they need to be.

Authentication solution LogMeIn, for example, recently acquired Nanorep, a company that provides a self-service chatbot and virtual assistant. The Nanorep products use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to create solutions (bots) that make self-service more engaging and intuitive (see image). Brands including Intuit, FedEx, Toys“R”Us and Vodafone are just a few of the companies currently using Nanorep for some of their key customer service initiatives.

LogMeIn also recently released a new customer relationship (or engagement) management platform, Bold360, and many will see the Nanorep acquisition as another opportunity to deliver more human, more personalized and more intelligent customer engagement solutions. LogMeIn seems to be headed toward developing digital experiences that enable them to establish better ’Net relationships with consumers, but what about you?

The reason that engagement is such a tricky subject to discuss (besides the fact that it can be defined in so many different ways) is that the factors and elements we are dealing with here (emotions and data) are so wildly different for each user.

The Secret to Customer Engagement

When users feel a connection with a brand, a bond or rapport with the experience that has been presented, what ultimately ensues is familiarity (the precursor to customer engagement).

The secret to engaging users therefore is actually quite simple: know the user.

Knowing users’ wants, desires and ultimately their emotions provides an opportunity to spark their interest. Engagement only grows when users are confident that businesses actually care about their well-being and meet their expectations – or, at least to care more than taking their money alone.

Despite loads of evidence that personalized digital experiences outperform those that are not tailored to a person’s history, behaviors and attributes, Web retailers have been relatively slow to adopt technology to make it happen. Omnichannel commerce platform Kibo and Astound Commerce have released a joint study that assessed the current personalization and omnichannel sophistication of retailers testing metrics across desktop, mobile and in-store buying touchpoints; and the results are disheartening to say the least.

Seventy percent of personalization experiences on an e-commerce site, for example, only happened when the shopper was logged into an account. What is even worse is that just 4 in 10 retailers did not send an email following an abandoned cart on a website. Of those retailers that did send an email, zero offered an incentive to purchase. And here is another: 4 in 10 retailers did not even display recently visited items on a website upon a consumer’s return visit.

How can e-commerce merchants, or any ’Net professional, expect to develop a productive relationship with that level of effort?

The point is there is more that can be done to improve the experience of users and truly engage them – which can only be achieved by creating unique,dynamic and interesting experiences.

Creating & Crafting Experiences

Now that the secret to customer engagement is known (remember, it is to have an emotional connection with the user) – enterprises are ready to create and craft experiences that truly engage users.

Step 1: Identify why users are not engaging currently If current rates of conversion and rates of interaction are known, enterprises can compare participation levels among audience groups and content categories to position their products and offers in a way that delivers an experience that is in-demand. Analytics help track and collect data about user profiles, which is the only sound way to develop an engagement strategy.

Step 2: Foster collaboration People have some weird, human and internal need to share their stories, struggles, victories and losses. They also love to talk about themselves and will “love” businesses that provide them an opportunity to do that. When users are able to send messages to one another, post videos/images, share their opinions and expertise with others, they will be delighted by the opportunity and the chance of return increases dramatically.

Step 3: Develop memorable experiences The experiences that brands create must be memorable and lead to some pre-defined performance gain.

Loyalty software provider OfferCraft, for example, defines engagement as “motivation.” In other words, how can brands use digital outreach and digital experiences to incite action?

OfferCraft’s VP of Marketing Dan Grech suggested it comes down to getting people to do what it is the enterprise wants them to do. And how do they do that exactly?

Enterprises may want to consider approaching that question through the prism of science (specifically behavioral economics and decision theory).

“One of the ways we do that is through games,” said Grech. “Games are tremendously motivating to people. If you take any promotion and you gamify it, you accelerate it – you get more people to do what you want them to do.”

In practice, OfferCraft teamed up with Swinomish Casino & Lodge in Anacortes, Washington, to launch weekly gamified offers that customers can play on the new website SwinBig.com, in email and via social media. And each week, the Swinomish Team offers a live look at each game on Facebook.

The games, themed around a movie series, summer holidays, and casino amenities and anniversaries, have been received enthusiastically by more than 10,000 people, and the prizes have driven hundreds of players each week to visit the property. Since initially launching in May 2017, the weekly gamified offers have driven 6.97 times the number of redemptions compared to similar offers on Facebook and email made a year earlier.

Promotions using Facebook Live videos and SwinBig.com have led to a 15 percentage point increase (from 10 percent to 25 percent) in the reward redemption rate in the 2017 summer movie campaigns compared to 2016.

Understanding the barrier to engagement, fostering community and collaboration among users, and making the experience memorable and enjoyable are all important to the success of engagement initiatives, but there are many other elements that must be considered as well.

The Role of Design in Engagement

It cannot be said enough; everything impacts the level of engagement that consumers will experience. And that everything, of course, includes digital design.

Unfortunately for many enterprises, design can have a deeply negative affect on their consumers’ experience. How often, for example, are the long-term ramifications of digital design decisions made at your company (recently or long in the past) considered in relation to levels of engagement?

Design trends emerge routinely and they often immediately capture the attention of everyone involved in the digital experience, but it is difficult – even among the most data-driven and industry experienced – to understand the result and broader impact of implementing specific elements or leveraging entirely new styles. Such is the case, it appears, with the trend of flat design.

Some research made available recently from nngroup revealed that flat interfaces often use weak signifiers. The eye tracking experiment compared different kinds of clickability clues, and found that user interfaces with weak signifiers require more user effort than strong ones. Essentially, flat user interface (UI) elements attract less attention and cause greater uncertainty – and that is obviously not the ideal scenario.

nngroup investigated how strong clickability signifiers (traditional UI design clues such as underlined, blue text or a glossy 3-D button) and weak or absent signifiers (for example, linked text styled as static text or a ghost button) impact the ways users process and understand Web pages. The results, as you might imagine, are anything but encouraging. The average amount of time was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong signifier versions. On average, participants spent 22 percent more time (which means slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers.

What’s more, the average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 percent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers. nngroup suggested that since their experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page is not good.

There is no reason to forgo design modifications because of concerns over what might happen to engagement, but it is something to monitor closely. As always, a marketer using his or her best digital judgment is always a good decision. When all else fails, they should follow their digital heart.

Emotional Intelligence & Engagement

It turns out that a high-level of emotional intelligence could greatly benefit brands – particularly those that primarily service the millennial generation.

According to recent consumer research from Klarna UK, millennials experience higher levels of anxiety, impulsiveness and impatience than their older counterparts. The research indicates that two thirds (68 percent) of millennials reported feeling excitement when adding items to their online basket, compared to less than a quarter (24 percent) of people over 55. Other highlights of the study include:

+ 20 percent of millennials would feel less guilty if they were offered deferred payment options, and 1 in 5 would be more likely to complete a purchase if they knew they could spread the cost over time.

+ 89 percent of millennials use the basket as a tool to review costs, while more than three quarters often use their basket as a wish list, compared with only 29 percent of over 55s. Meanwhile, nearly three quarters (74 percent) admit to indulging in ‘buzz browsing’ – adding items to a basket with no clear intention to buy.

+ 58 percent of millennials are more likely to complete a purchase if an online offer is going to expire, so tapping into this fear of missing out by offering time-bound incentives and educating shoppers about pay after delivery or consumer finance options can encourage customers to complete their purchase.

At the core of every data-driven engagement strategy is the ability to target individual customers with precision, in real-time. Knowing how often customers interact with a brand, where they encounter a brand and how much they spend across all channels allows marketers to drive intelligent interactions based on data, not conjecture.

Website owners need to target users with customer lifetime value (CLV) in mind and there is no shortage of solutions emerging to help them do just that.

Customer engagement platform SessionM, for example, recently launched an interesting enhancement to its Audiences Module to enable marketers to go beyond the traditional method of defining and creating customer segments using generic demographics or attribute data filters and target using more specific data such as which items were purchased, spend thresholds, etc.

The update also enables marketers to calculate RFM (recency of purchase, frequency of purchases, monetary value of purchases) data about each customer, which can be aligned with guidance from SessionM’s product recommendation engine to deliver the next-best offer based on individuals’ preferences and past purchasing behaviors.

In (Constant) Pursuit of Customer Engagement

There is no one way to define engagement and no one engaging experience that will apply to every brand. Many elements and processes must be in place to establish genuine connections with consumers and motivate them to take the action desired by the enterprise. Only by focusing on creating technology-driven, unique and memorable digital experiences is it possible to win the hearts, minds and wallets of today’s consumers.

Written by: Peter Prestipino, via Website Magazine
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Customer Engagement, Relationships, and Unique Experiences Matter appeared first on CueCamp.

Inbound Marketing begins with establishing social media profiles on various platforms that will work for your type of business – in order to start engagement with potential customers.

What happens after you make contact with a new potential customer? Typically your social media initiatives will help drive new traffic to your website. All of the traffic that you drum up from your social media platforms will hopefully drive people to learn more about your company, offerings, and services.

Once you have established traffic to your site you can then start making direct contact with your potential customers and then create a sale.

A useful way to use the sales funnel concept is to figure out which social media platform sites will work best for your type of business. As a general guideline for our clients, we start out with a Facebook company fan page. Facebook is a powerful tool to increase visibility in your target market and engage in a relationship with your customers. With over 1.23 billion active users, Facebook is a great place to begin.

There are many different ways to start engaging potential customers by using Facebook. Our team at CueCamp helps businesses to figure out what to post, and when to post, in order to help attract new customers. Every business is different, which is why we tailor every marketing plan to fit clients’ specific needs. A solid Facebook company fan page is an excellent way to begin.

CueCamp is now offering free custom Facebook fan pages. Our marketing team will help generate more potential customers talking about your business with a custom designed and professionally marketed Facebook page. Our social media experts do it all for you by creating a page that best represents your business and its offerings, and then builds your fan base to get the conversation going.

If you don’t have a Facebook fan page or are not happy with what you have now, our team will build a page that gets you a following. Next, we will professionally market your new Facebook page to get you likes, targeting people who will be interested in your business. Finally, we will keep these new fans interested and talking about your business by frequently updating your content and creating new marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in a free custom Facebook fan page, contact us.

How can you retain traffic and turn those visitors into paying customers? Check back next week to learn about the next step in the sales funnel: your website.

Written / posted by: CueCamp

The post Inbound Marketing with Social Media appeared first on CueCamp.

The scarcity principle is a well-documented social-psychology phenomenon that causes people to assign high value to things they perceive as being less available. In real life, Black Friday is a good example of scarcity: a sale that occurs on only one day of the year (the day after Thanksgiving in the United States) and consists of a limited number of products offered at discounted prices. In the case of Black Friday, the mobs of eager customers are most often a good thing for retailers…until the mob turns violent.

Scarcity Interface Pattern Examples

Limited Time and Quantity

Limited Inclusion

Limited Information

Background of the Scarcity Principle

The Scarcity Principle is 1 of 6 influencing principles coined by Dr. Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University famous for his 1984 book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” Cialdini’s book is a study of the psychology of compliance. As a psychology professor, he and his students conducted numerous research studies to identify and prove the 6 influencing principles discussed in his book.

Scarcity is largely effective because of a cognitive bias known as loss aversion, first demonstrated in research conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Kahneman and Tversky determined that people put more subjective value on loss than on gain and thus strongly prefer to avoid losses instead of acquiring gains. In other words, the pain of losing $100 is perceived as bigger (in fact, twice as big according to Kahneman and Tversky) than the satisfaction of gaining $100.

The strong tendency to avoid losses explains why scarcity is so effective: we feel that if we don’t act upon the scarce product or information, we lose it. For example, if a person is shopping for airline tickets and finds a flight that meets her criteria, but the description indicates this is the last ticket at that price, the person might buy the ticket for fear of losing out even if she wasn’t quite ready to book yet. (The agony of losing the current $100 discount will only be overcome if the user could save $200 on some future deal, and that’s sufficiently unlikely to happen that many users prefer to act to lock in the savings.)

Scarcity is a particularly effective persuasion tool because what, specifically, is scarce can take several forms: quantity, time, or information. Knishinsky ran an experiment that proved the additive effects of these factors upon persuasion. In his study, salesmen were able to double order sizes when they told wholesale beef buyers that the supply would be scarce in upcoming months. The most incredible finding of this study is that they were able to increase order sizes 6 times when they altered their pitch to not only indicate scarcity of supply, but that this information was a secret and only being divulged to the buyer. The double-scarcity pitch (low supply, secret information) was 3 times more compelling than the single-scarcity pitch (low supply)!

When to Use the Technique on the Web

Expediting Desirable Actions: If you find that most people who convert on your site visit your site more times than you think should be necessary before converting, you might try using scarcity to reduce that time lag

Increasing Perceived Value: Indicating that an item has low availability or using photographs that show limited quantity can impact end-users valuation of the object. For example, in fine dining, small portions on large plates can imply that the ingredients are rare and, therefore, should be more expensive.

Testing the Scarcity Principle

The most significant risk with using scarcity is decreased trust and credibility. If your users suspect that the presented scarcity isn’t real, they could go elsewhere. That’s why it’s important to test scarcity as a motivational device before fully embracing it. Here are some questions that you should aim to answer, together with techniques that you can use to do so:

Conclusion

Scarcity, used in moderation and with true information, can encourage users to move more swiftly toward converting on your site. However, the technique has been adopted by so many sites, that its impact may be decreasing. Therefore, we do encourage design teams to test pages and flows with and without scarcity-based elements to determine how the technique impacts conversions, perceptions, and long-term business goals.

References

Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice. Pearson Education Inc., 2009.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Vol. 106, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 1039-1061.

Knishinsky, A. The effects of scarcity of material and exclusivity of information on industrial buyer perceived risk in provoking a purchase decision. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University, Tempe, 1982.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.

Written by: Jennifer Cardello, Nielsen-Norman Group
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Scarcity Principle: Making Users Click RIGHT NOW or Lose Out appeared first on CueCamp.

So it was really great to read Paul Olyslager’s recent post on the “9 Common misconceptions about users.”  One or two of them are common knowledge, but they are all spot on.  I want to share a few of the really good ones and perhaps add a few cents of value of my own.

His first one is perhaps the best.  Users want choices.  One of the primary motivations that drive human behavior is the need for perceived autonomy (see my gamification posts for more on that). We crave feeling in control of our lives and our decisions. Having options is a salient signal to ourselves that we are in control.  In fact a recent TED talk by Alex Wissner-Gross makes the (a little too far reaching) claim that the best measure of intelligence is the ability to keep your options open.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.  Designers make a huge mistake by taking this as a maxim and giving users tons of choices.  This leads to many negative outcomes.  Because users also hate cognitive load.  If making a decision among all of these options feels like a lot of work we absolutely hate it.  That is not perceived autonomy, that is perceived helplessness.  Sheena Iyengar (about whom I have blogged before) calls this choice paralysis.

There is also the strong likelihood of loss aversion.  While making decisions we worry that we might make the wrong decision.  And we HATE that because it reduces perceived competence (another one of those fundamental motivations).  Then after decisions we are susceptible to post-decision regret, also known as buyer’s remorse.  The only thing worse than being forced into an option is being forced to live with that outcome afterwards, always wondering (or knowing for sure) that another option would have been better.  Some of us have this more than others (who Barry Schwartz calls “maximizers” in the fantastic book (and TEDtalk of the same name) the Paradox of Choice), but most of us have it to some extent.

And all of this just in his first misconception.  Thanks for the great post Paul.

Written by: Marc Resnick, Human Factors
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Users Like Options, But Hate Making Decisions appeared first on CueCamp.

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites – those with layouts commonly associated with sites of it’s category – with simple visual design were rated as the most beautiful across the board.

In other words, the study found the simpler the design, the better.

But why?

In this article, we’ll examine why things like cognitive fluency and visual information processing theory can play a critical role in simplifying your web design & how a simpler design could lead to more conversions.

We’ll also look at a few case studies of sites that simplified their design, and how it improved their conversion rate, as well as give a few pointers to simplify your own design.

What is a Prototypical Website?

If I said “furniture” what image pops up in your mind?  If you’re like 95% of people, you think of a chair. If I ask what color represents “boy” you think “blue”, girl = pink, car = sedan, bird = robin, etc.

Prototypicality is the basic mental image your brain creates to categorize everything you interact with. From furniture to websites, your brain has created a template for how things should look and feel.

Online, prototypicality breaks down into smaller categories. You have a different, but specific mental image for social networks, e-commerce sites, and blogs – and if any of those particular websites are missing something from your mental image,  you reject the site on conscious and subconscious levels.

If I said “Online clothing store for trendy 20-somethings” you might envision something like this:

image credit

This follows the “online clothing store” prototype so closely, that it shares many attributes with the wireframe for an online clothing store that sells hip-hop clothing.

image credit

Neither  lacks originality, and it’s unlikely they “stole” from each other. Instead they’re playing into what your basic expectations are of what an e-commerce site should be.

What do you Mean By Cognitive Fluency?

The basic idea behind cognitive fluency is that the brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about.

That’s why you prefer visiting sites where you instinctively know where everything is at, and you know what actions you’re supposed to take.

“Fluency guides our thinking in situations where we have no idea that it is at work, and it affects us in any situation where we weigh information.” – Uxmatters.com

Cognitive fluency is an stems from another area of behavior known as The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more times you’re exposed to a stimulus, the more you prefer it.

image source

Again, the rules are the same online.

It’s “familiar” for blogs to have opt-ins on the right sidebar, or e-commerce sites to feature a large hi-resolution image with an attention grabbing headline & the company logo on the top left hand side of the screen.

If your visitors are conditioned to certain characteristics being the standard for a particular category of site, deviating from that could subconsciously put you in the “less beautiful” category.

Here are a handful of e-commerce sites. See if you notice any similarities.

Warning: Whatever you do, for the love of GOD, don’t take what I’m saying as “do what everyone else is doing.”  If you’re not careful, you could really hurt yourself that way.

It’s important to know what design choices are prototypical for a site in your category, but it’s more important to find evidence that supports those design choices resulting in some sort of lift.

A lot of designers make bad choices. Without doing the research, you could make them too.  For example, many e-commerce sites use automatic image sliders to display products, but study after study shows that automatic sliders tank conversions.

What Happens When You Meet Basic Expectations? – A Case Study

In the three images above, everything you’d expect from an ecommerce site is exactly where it’s supposed to be. Even if you’ve never been to the site, there’s inherent “credibility” to the design.

With a high level of fluency, a site will feel familiar enough that visitors don’t need spend mental effort scrutinizing and can instead focus on why they’re on your site in the first place.

When the experience is dis-fluent however, you feel it immediately. Take online tie retailer, Skinnyties.com, who didn’t really look like an e-commerce site until their redesign in October 2012.

Before:

After:

A few key changes that lead to huge results:

• Follows prototypical e-commerce layout themes
• Much more “open” with whitespace.
• Images feature a single product with high-resolution pictures & contrasting colors.

Check out the full case study on this particular redesign, as it shows what is truly possible when updating a site to “fit in” with current prototypical standards.

These are the results of the redesign are staggering for only 2.5 weeks after the launch:

The redesign itself, while pretty, isn’t doing anything groundbreaking. It plays exactly into the expectations of what a modern online clothing retailer should be. It’s “open”, responsive, and has a consistent design language across all of the product pages.

But when contrasted with the old site, it’s very clear that the lack of these common elements were preventing buyers from making purchases on the site.

What Visual Information Processing Has To Do With Site Complexity

In this joint study by Harvard, University of Michigan, and University of Colorado, researchers found strong mathematical correlations for “aesthetically pleasing” between different demographics – For example, participants with PhD’s did not like high colorful websites – but there were no guidelines that emerged for universal appeal.

The only thing that was universal was that the more visually complex a website was, the lower it’s visual appeal.

(Sidebar: if you wish to take the test, you can do it here)

Why Simple is Scientifically Easier To Process

The reason less “visually complex” websites are considered more beautiful is partly because low complexity websites don’t require the eyes and brain to physically work as hard to decode, store and process the information.

Watch this quick video about how the eye sends information to the brain for that to make more sense.

Basically, your retina converts visual information from the real world into electrical impulses. Those impulses are then routed through the appropriate photoreceptor cells to transmit the color and light information to the brain.

The more color and light variations on the page (visual complexity) the more work the eye has to do to send information to the brain.

“…the eye receives visual information and codes information into electric neural activity which is fed back to the brain where it is “stored” and “coded”. This information can be used by other parts of the brain relating to mental activities such as memory, perception and attention.” – Simplypsychology.org

Every Element Communicates Subtle Information

image source

This is why it’s important when designing a website to remember every element –typeography, logo, and color selection – communicates subtle information about the brand.

When these elements don’t do their job, the webmaster often compensates by adding unnecessary copy and/or images, thus adding to the visual complexity of the website, and detracting from the overall aesthetic.

Optimizing a page for visual information processing – specifically simplifying information’s journey from eye to brain – is about communicating as much as you can in as few elements as possible.

While that’s an article all on it’s own, consider MailChimp’s logo redesign as food for thought.

When they decided make the brand grow up, they didn’t add the usual “we’ve been doing email since 2001, 3 million people trust us, here’s why we’re awesome, blah blah blah”

Instead, they tightened up the writing, simplified the website – the top headline simply reads “Send Better Email” – and added an even simpler explainer animation of the core product.

Even though this was part of a bigger growth strategy, the results are still impressive, over a million new users have been added since June, when the new logo was first debuted.

 ”Working Memory” & The Holy Grail of Conversion

What all this simplicity is leading to is what happens once visual information finds it’s way to the brain.

According to the famous research of psychologist George A Miller of Princeton, the average adult brain is able to store between 5-9 “chunks” of information within in the short term, working memory.

Working memory is the part of your brain that temporarily stores and processes information in the course of a few seconds. It’s what allows you to focus attention, resist distractions, and most importantly, guides your decision making.

image source

Everything we’ve been talking about up to this point is to reduce the amount of “noise” that makes it’s way into the working memory.

On a “low complexity, highly prototypical website”, the 5-9 “chunks”  the working memory tries to process are things like guarantees, product descriptions, prices or offers. When the working memory can stay focused on fixing the problem, it will try and solve the problem as quickly as possible.

Deviation Causes Disengagement

When you deviate from a person’s  expectations – the price was higher than expected, the color scheme and symmetry were off, the site didn’t load fast enough, the photos weren’t high enough resolution – the working memory processes those disfluent “chunks” instead of what matters.

That’s because the working memory calls the long term memory to use what it already knows to perform the task. When the long term memory can’t aid in processing the information, flow is broken & the working memory disengages and moves on.

That’s why it’s vital you understand your visitor’s level of exposure – not just for sites in your category, but to websites in general -If you want to “hack” their working memory with design.

The blogs they read, the sites they shop on, their browser, age, gender & physical location, all hint at how  will impact their level of familiarity on first impression.

Conclusion

If the visitor can’t rely on their previous experience, they’re not thinking about how innovative your site is. They’re just left wondering why things aren’t where it’s “supposed to be.” Not the best frame of mind if you want them to buy stuff.

Bonus: 7 Things To Do When Planning A Simpler Site.

1. Research your audience and the sites they visit the most. Look for case studies on design changes from said sites & how those resulted in improvement is key areas.
2. Create a mashup of all those “working” components for your own site.
3. Obey the rules of cognitive fluency when you lay out your design. Put things where your visitors have grown accustomed to finding them.
4. Rely on your own colors, logo, and typeface to communicate clearly and subtly. Don’t add copy and/or images unless it communicates something your visitor actually cares about.
5. Keep it as simple as possible – one large image vs a bunch of little ones, one column, instead of three – utilize as much white space as possible.
6. Double check to make sure your site fits the public expectation in pricing, aesthetics, speed, etc.
7. Remember that “prototypical” doesn’t mean that every aspect of your site should fit that mold.

Don’t think of your site as some unique snowflake piece of art. Instead make it a composite of all the best stuff.

Your visitors will love you for it.

Written by: Tommy Walker, ConversionXL
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Better appeared first on CueCamp.

For newer SEOs, the process can be overwhelming.

To simplify this process, I created this SEO blueprint. It’s meant as a framework for newer SEOs to build their own work on top of. This basic blueprint has helped, in one form or another, 100s of pages and dozens of sites to gain higher rankings.

Think of it as an intermediate SEO instruction manual, for beginners.

Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Timeframe: 2 to 10 Weeks

What you need to know: The blueprint assumes you have basic SEO knowledge: you’re not scared of title tags, can implement a rel=canonical, and you’ve built a link or two. (If this is your first time to the rodeo, we suggest reading the Beginners Guide to SEO and browsing our Learn SEO section.)

Keyword Research

1. Working Smarter, Not Harder

Keyword research can be simple or hard, but it should always be fun. For the sake of the Blueprint, let’s do keyword research the easy way.

The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:

1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
2. Keywords with too much competition
3. Keywords without enough traffic
4. Keywords that don’t convert
5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

The biggest mistake people make is trying to rank for a single keyword at a time. This is the hard way. It’s much easier, and much more profitable, to rank for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the same piece of content.

Instead of ranking for a single keyword, let’s aim our project around a keyword theme.

2. Dream Your Keyword Theme

Using keyword themes solves a whole lot of problems. Instead of ranking for one Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for SEO with lots of keywords focused around a single idea. Done right, the results are amazing.

I assume you know enough about your business to understand what type of visitor you’re seeking and whether you’re looking for traffic, conversions, or both. Regardless, one simple rule holds true: the more specific you define your theme, the easier it is to rank.

This is basic stuff, but it bears repeating. If your topic is the football, you’ll find it hard to rank for  “Super Bowl,” but slightly easier to rank for “Super Bowl 2014” – and easier yet to rank for “Best Super Bowl Recipes of 2014.”

Don’t focus on specific words yet – all you need to know is your broad topic. The next step is to find the rightkeyword qualifiers.

3. Get Specific with Qualifiers

Qualifiers are words that add specificity to keywords and define intent. They take many different forms.

• Time/Date: 2001, December, Morning
• Price/Quality: Cheap, Best, Most Popular
• Intent: Buy, Shop, Find
• Location: Houston, Outdoors, Online

The idea is to find as many qualifiers as possible that fit your audience. Here’s where keyword tools enter the picture. You can use any keyword tool you like, but favorites include Wordstream, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, andBing Keyword Tool and Übersuggest.

For speed and real-world insight, Übersuggest is an all-time SEO favorite. Run a simple query and export over 100 suggested keyword based on Google’s own Autocomplete feature – based on actual Google searches.

Did I mention it’s free?

4. Finding Diamonds in the Google Rough

At this point you have a few dozen, or a few hundred keywords to pull into Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Using “Exact” search types and “Local Monthly” search volume, we’re looking for 10-15 closely related keyword phrases with decent search volume, but not too much competition.

5. Get Strategic with the Competition

Now that we have a basic keyword set, you need to find out if you can actually rank for SEO for your phrases. You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:

1. Automated tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool
2. Eyeballing the SERPs

If you have an SEOmoz PRO membership (or even a free trial) the Keyword Difficulty Tool calculates – on a 100 point scale – a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.

Keyword phrases in the 60-70+ range are typically competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.

To get a better idea of your own strengths, take the most competitive keyword you currently rank #1 or #2 for, and run it through the tool.

Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to eyeball the SERPs. Run a search query (non-personalized) for your keywords and ask yourself the following questions:

• Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
• Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
• What’s the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
• Are the first few results authorities on the keyword subject?
• What’s the inbound anchor text?
• Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword?

You don’t actually have to rank #1 for any of your chosen words to earn traffic, but you should be comfortable cracking the top five.

With keyword themes, the magic often happens from keywords you never even thought about.

How can you improve your chances of ranking for more long tail keywords? Let’s talk about content, architecture, on-page optimization and link building.

Content

6. Creating Value

Want to know the truth? I hate the word content. It implies words on a page, a commodity to be produced, separated from the value it creates.

Content without value is spam.

In the Google Algorithm Update example above, we could have simply written 100 articles about Google’s Algorithm and hoped to rank. Instead, the conversation started by asking how we could create a valuable resource for webmasters.

For your keyword theme, ask first how you can create value.

Value is harder to produce than mere words, but value is rewarded 100x more. Value is future proof & algorithm proof. Value builds links by itself. Value creates loyal fans.

Value takes different forms. It’s a mix of:

1. Utility
2. Emotional response
3. Point of view (positive or negative)
4. Perceived value, including fame of the author

Your content doesn’t have to include all 4 of these characteristics, but it should excel in one or more to be successful.

A study of the New York Times found key characteristics of content to be influential in making the Most Emailed list.

Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077

7. Driving Your Content Vehicle

Here’s a preview: the Blueprint requires you create at least one type of link bait, so now is a good time to think about the structure of your content.

What’s the best way to deliver value given your theme? Perhaps it’s an

• Infographic
• Video series
• A new tool
• An interview series
• Slide deck
• How-to guide
• Q&A
• Webinar or simple blog post

Perhaps, it’s all of these combined.

The more ways you find to deliver your content and the more channels you take advantage of, the better off you’ll be.

Not all of your content has to go viral, but you want to create at least one “tent-pole” piece that’s better than anything else out there and you’re proud to hang your hat on.

If you need inspiration, check out Distilled’s guide to Viral Linkbait or QuickSprout’s Templates for Content Creation.

8. Title – Most Important Work Goes Here

Spend two hours, minimum, writing your title.

Sound ridiculous? If you’re an experienced title writer like Rand Fishkin, you can break this rule. For the rest of us, it’s difficult to underplay the value delivered by a finely crafted title.

Write 50 titles or more before choosing one.

Study the successful titles on Inbound.org, Mashable, Wired, or your favorite publication.

Whatever you do, read this fantastic post by Dan Shure and the headline resources at CopyBlogger.

9. Length vs. Depth – Why it Matters

How long should your content be? A better question is: How deep should it be? Word count by itself is a terrible metric to strive for, but depth of content helps you to rank in several ways.

1. Adds uniqueness threshold to avoid duplicate content
2. Deeper topic exploration makes your content “about” more
3. Quality, longer content is correlated with more links and higher rankings

I. Uniqueness

At a minimum, your content needs to meet a minimum uniqueness threshold in order for it to rank. Google reps have gone on record to say a couple sentences is sometimes sufficient, but in reality a couple hundred words is much safer.

II. Long Tail Opportunities

Here’s where the real magic happens. The deeper your content and the more in-depth you can explore a particular topic, the more your content becomes “about.”

The more your content is “about”, the more search queries it can answer well.

The more search queries you can answer well, the more traffic you can earn.

Google’s crawlers continuously read your content to determine how relevant it is to search queries. They evaluate paragraphs, subject headings, photographs and more to try to understand your page. Longer, in-depth content usually send more relevancy signals than a couple short sentences.

III. Depth, Length, and Links

Numerous correlation studies have shown a positive relationship between rankings and number of words in a document.

This could be attributed longer, quality content earning more links. John Doherty examined the relationship between the length of blog posts on SEOmoz and the number of links each post earned, and found a strong relationship.

10. Content Qualities You Can Bank On

If you don’t focus on word count, how do you add quality “depth” to your content?

SEOs have written volumes about how Google might define quality including metrics such as reading level, grammar, spelling, and even Author Rank. Most is speculation, but it’s clear Google does use guidelines to separate good content from bad.

My favorite source for clues comes from the set of questions Google published shortly after the first Panda update. Here are a few of my favorites.

11. LDA, nTopic, and Words on the Page

Google is a machine. It can’t yet understand your page like a human can, but it’s getting close.

Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to model your sentences, paragraphs, blocks, and content sections. Not only do they want to understand your keywords, but also your topic, intent, and expertise as well.

How do you know if your content fits Google’s model of expectations?

For example, if your topic is “Super Bowl Recipes,” Google might expect to see content about grilling, appetizers, and guacamole. Content that addresses these topics will likely rank higher than pages that talk about what color socks you’re wearing today.

Words matter.

SEOs have discovered that using certain words around a topic associated with concepts like LDA and nTopicare correlated with higher rankings.

Virante offers an interesting stand alone keyword suggestion tool called nTopic. The tools analyzes your keywords and suggests related keywords to improve your relevancy scores.

12. Better than LDA – Poor Man’s Topic Modeling

Since we don’t have access to Google’s computers for topic modeling, there’s a far simpler way to structure your content that I find far superior to worrying about individual words:

Use the keyword themes you created at the beginning of this blueprint.

You’ve already done the research using Google’s keyword tool to find closely related keyword groups. Incorporating these topics into your content may help increase your relevancy to your given topic.

Example: Using the Google Algorithm project cited above, we found during keyword research that certain keywords related to our theme show up repeatedly, time and time again. If we conducted this research today, we would find phrases like “Penguin SEO” and “Panda Updates” frequently in our results.

Google suggests these terms via the keyword tool because they consider them closely related. So any content that explored “Google Algorithm Change” might likely include a discussion of these ideas.

Note: This isn’t real LDA, simply a way of adding relevant topics to your content that Google might associate with your subject matter.

13. Design Is 50% of the Battle

If you have any money in your budget, spend it on design. A small investment with a designer typically pays outsized dividends down the road. Good design can:

• Lower bounce rate
• Increase page views
• Increase time on site
• Earn more links
• Establish trust

… All of which can help earn higher rankings.

“Design doesn’t just matter, it’s 50% of the battle.”
-Rand Fishkin

Dribbble.com is one of our favorite source of design inspiration.

Architecture

Here’s the special secret of the SEO Blueprint: you’re not making a single page to rank; you’re making several.

14. Content Hubs

Very few successful websites consist of a single page. Google determines context and relevancy not only by what’s on your page, but also by the pages around it and linking to it.

The truth is, it’s far easier to rank when you create Content Hubs exploring several topics in depth focused around a central theme.

Using our “Super Bowl Recipes” example, we might create a complete section of pages, each exploring a different recipe in depth.

15. Linking the Hub Together

Because your pages now explore different aspects of the same broad topic, it makes sense to link them together.

• Your page about guacamole relates to your page about nachos.
• Your page about link building relates to your page about infographics.
• Your page about Winston Churchill relates to major figures of World War II.

It also helps them to rank by distributing PageRank, anchor text, and other relevancy signals.

16. Find Your Center

Content Hubs work best with a “hub” or center. Think of the center as the master document that acts as an overview or gateway to all of your individual content pages.

The hub is the authority page. Often, the hub is a link bait page or a category level page. It’s typically the page with the most inbound links and often as a landing page for other sections of your site.

For great example of Hub Pages, check out:

• CopyBloggers Magnetic Headlines
• SEOmoz’s Learn SEO
• Amazon’s author pages (this one about Stephen King)

On-Page Optimization

17. Master the Basics

You could write an entire book about on-page optimization. If you’re new to SEO, one of the best ways to learn is by using SEOmoz’s On-page Report Card (free, registration required) The tool grades 36 separate on-page SEO elements, gives you a report and suggestions on how to fix each element. Working your way through these issues is an excellent way to learn (and often used by agencies and companies as a way to teach SEO principals)

Beyond the basics, let’s address a few slightly more advanced tactics to take advantage of your unique keyword themes and hub pages, in addition to areas where beginners often make mistakes.

18. Linking Internally for the Reasonable Surfer

Not all links are created equal (One of the greatest SEO blog posts ever written!) So, when you interlink your internal pages within your content hub together, keep in mind a few important points.

1. Links from inside unique content pass more value than navigation links.
2. Links higher up the page pass more value than links further down.
3. Links in HTML text pass more weight than image links.

When interlinking your content, it’s best to keep links prominent and “editorial” – naturally link to your most important content pages higher up in the HTML text.

19. Diversify Your Anchor Text – Naturally

If Google’s Penguin update taught us anything, it’s that over-thinking anchor text is bound to get us in trouble.

When you link naturally and editorially to other places on the web, you naturally diversify your anchor text. The same should hold true when you link internally.

Don’t choose your anchor text to fit your keywords; choose your anchor text to fit the content around it.

Practically speaking, this means linking internally with a mix of partial match keyword and related phrases. Don’t be scared to link occasionally without good keywords in the anchor – the link can still pass relevancy signals. When it comes to linking, it’s safer to under-do it than over-do it.

Source: Google’s SEO Starter Guide

20. Title Tags – Two Quick Tips

We assume you know how to write a compelling title tag. Even today, keyword usage in the title tag is one of the most highly correlated on-page ranking factors that we know.

That said, Google is getting strict about over-optimizing title tags, and appears to be further cracking down on titles “written for SEO.” Keep this in mind when crafting your title tags

I. Avoid Boilerplates

It used to be common to tack on your business phrase or main keywords to the end of every title tag, like so:

• Plumbing Supplies – Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
• Pipes & Fittings – Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
• Toilet Seat Covers – Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures

While we don’t have much solid data, many SEOs are now asserting that “boilerplate” titles tacked on to the end of every tag are no longer a good idea. Brand names and unique descriptive information is okay, but making every title as unique as possible is the rule of the day.

II. Avoid Unnecessary Repetition

Google also appears (at least to many SEOs) to be cracking down on what’s considered the lower threshold of “keyword stuffing.”

In years past it was a common rule of thumb never to repeat your keyword more than twice in the title. Today, to be on the safe side, you might be best to consider not repeating your keywords more than once.

21. Over-Optimization: Titles, URLs, and Links

Writing for humans not only gets you more clicks (which can lead to higher rankings), but hardly ever gets you in trouble with search engines.

As SEOs we’re often tempted to get a “perfect score” which means exactly matching our title tags, URLs, inbound anchor text, and more. unfortunately, this isn’t natural in the real world, and Google recognizes this.

Diversify. Don’t over-optimize.

22. Structured Data

Short and simple: Make structured data part of every webpage. While structured data hasn’t yet proven to be a large ranking factor, it’s future-facing value can be seen today in rich snippet SERPs and social media sharing. In some verticals, it’s an absolute necessity.

There’s no rule of thumb about what structured data to include, but the essentials are:

• Facebook Open Graph tags
• Twitter Cards
• Authorship
• Publisher
• Business information
• Reviews
• Events

To be honest, if you’re not creating pages with structured data, you’re probably behind the times.

For an excellent guide about Micro Data and Schema.org, check out this fantastic resource from SEOGadget.

Building Links

23. The 90/10 Rule of Link Building

This blueprint contains 25 steps to rank your content, but only the last three address link building. Why so few? Because 90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.

If you have a hard time building links, it may be because you have these numbers reversed.

Creating great content first solves a ton of problems down the line:

1. Good content makes link building easier
2. Attracts higher quality links in less time
3. Builds links on its own even when sleeping or on vacation

If you’re new to marketing or relatively unknown, you may need to spend more than 10% of your time building relationships, but don’t let that distract you from crafting the type of content that folks find so valuable they link to you without you even asking.

24. All Link Building is Relationships – Good & Bad

This blueprint doesn’t go into link building specifics, as there are 100’s of ways to build quality links to every good project. That said, a few of my must have link building resources:

1. Jon Cooper’s Complete List of Link Building Strategies
2. StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
3. Citation Labs
4. Promoted Tweets
5. Ontolo
6. eReleases – Press releases not for links, but for exposer
7. BuzzStream
8. Paddy Moogan’s excellent Link Building Book

These resources give you the basic tools and tactics for a successful link building campaign, but keep in mind that all good link building is relationship building.

Successful link builders understand this and foster each relationship and connection. Even a simple outreach letter can be elevated to an advanced form of relationship building with a little effort, as this Whiteboard Friday by Rand so graciously illustrates.

25. Tier Your Link Building… Forever

The truth is, for professionals, link building never ends. Each content and link building campaign layers on top of previous content and the web as a whole like layers of fine Greek baklava.

For example, this post could be considered linkbait for SEOmoz, but it also links generously to several other content pieces within the Moz family and externally as well; spreading both the link love and the relationship building as far as possible at the same time.

SEOmoz links generously to other sites: the link building experience is not just about search engines, but the people experience, as well. We link to great resources and build links for the best user experience possible. When done right, the search engines reward exactly this type of experience with higher rankings.

For an excellent explanation as to why you should link out to external sites when warranted, read AJ Kohns excellent work, Time to Long Click.

One of my favorite posts on SEOmoz was 10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock. Not only was the first link on the page directed to our own SEO tools, but we linked and praised our competitors as well.

Linkbait at its finest.

Written by: Cyrus Shepard, SEOMoz
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How to Rank for SEO: 25 Step Master Blueprint appeared first on CueCamp.

According to research firm Score, Inc., the 2011 holiday season saw a 15% increase in web sales over 2010, for a total of $35.5 billion in online sales (while overall holiday spending was up just 3.8% from 2010).

The holiday season is not just about selling products to your customers. It also involves keeping those that come for the first time, and keeping them there. As said by Jakob Nielsen, “It’s an old lesson: It’s much easier to close additional sales with existing customers than to acquire new customers. People who’ve proven willing to give you money will often give you more. This is true for all sales channels, but it’s particularly crucial for e-commerce because the first order proves your credibility if you effectively handle follow-up and delivery.”

The following statistics about shopping carts highlight how website usability problems can impact sales:

21% of buyers said they “decided not to shop at any given site because of security concerns.” (Jan Riley)

1 second delay in page response = 7% reduction in conversion (Sean Work)

54% of U.S. consumers believe companies are more interested in selling products and services (Michael Fisher)

According to Aaron Marcus, Staples.com® in applying usability in their website found:

• 67% more repeat customers
• 31-45% reduced drop-off rates
• 10% better shopping experience
• 80% increased traffic

½ of your potential sales are GONE if customers can’t find merchandise on your e-commerce site

“At HomePortfolio.com we monitored site traffic, observed consumers in usability studies and worked with internal business groups. This helped us make changes that made the site’s purpose clearer and increased transaction rates measurably. The change increased the traffic up 129% the week we put it up.” (Interaction Design, Inc., 2001)

Some issues to consider that cause shopping cart abandonment:
(Charles Nicholls) & (Roger McGershen)

• Customers abandon their shopping carts when the ratio of the shipping cost to the value of the cart approaches 100 percent. Would you buy a $19.99 item if it costs an additional $14.95 to ship?
• Customers are sensitive to perceived price points. $9.99 seems cheaper than a $10.00 item. The same idea goes for shipping costs and how many items are in a cart. One study found that a $99 minimum order to get free shipping encouraged people to add more items to their carts.
• Not able to find contact information (22% abandonment rate): trust is lost if a person has no way, or difficulty in finding, how to contact you.

Nine ways to improve shopping cart retention and visitor experience:

1. Disclose shipping costs in advance.
2. Show security icons.
3. Create trust: Communicate your online store’s trustworthiness by having clear guarantees and contact information. Display company phone numbers on every page, along with hours of business, and place your guarantee and return policies prominently.
4. Easy shopping cart return: make it easy for customers to return to the shopping cart without having to go back through the purchase process.
5. Offer comparison shopping directly from your site.
6. Offer coupons and discounts.
7. Encourage user reviews and reward those customers who give them.
8. Do not have a graphic heavy page.
9. Make contact information prominent throughout your site.

When going over the final numbers of your holiday sales, consider the facts presented in this article. Consider how your potential customers view and interact with your e-commerce website. Review your weblogs and customer comments. Work with your hosting company and see how many shopping carts were abandoned. Most importantly, review the usability of your website.

As Jakob Nielsen said, “Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.”

If you would like some assistance with reviewing your website’s usability, please contact CueCamp.

Written and Posted by: CueCamp

The post Did Your Shopping Cart Survive the Holiday Season? appeared first on CueCamp.

• Ends up costing you more because the site will need to be redone
• Ends up wasting your time trying to find someone else who can fix their mistake
• At some point you will realize that the traffic to your site is limited and that the site is not helping bring in business at all. If anything it is reflecting business onto other companies in your industry

What to look for when trying to find a web developer? Make sure that you check out their website first. Check for:

• Functionality: Look to make sure all their links work; look for photos that take too long to load; look for the overall feel of the site (are the colors hard to view the site, is the text hard to read, etc.)
• Professional: Look to make sure that the site is professional and exceptional. A web design company should always make every effort to impress clients on their own website. Look for: photos are clean with no pixilation problems, text is easy to read (not blurry), content makes sense (no spelling errors), pertinent information is listed on their site (not too wordy)
• Past Clients: Make sure that past clients are listed somewhere on their site. Take the time to look over the client’s websites; this is a representation of their work. Do the client’s examples meet the above criteria? Call up the clients and ask about their experience with the company.
• Call past clients: You want to get a feel for what this company is like to work with. Ask questions like:
  – Did the company complete the website by the deadline as promised?
  – Was there a contract involved?
  – Was the company contacting you all of the time with questions?
  – Did the company get a good feel for what you were looking for the first time or did it take several meetings before they got it?
  – Were you happy with the product?
  – How is the company with revisions after the site is done?
  – Would you recommend this company?

Make sure to obtain a contract with a web design company before starting a project. You need to make sure that you agree with everything in the contract. If you have a question about anything ask, you do not want to find out later on when it might cost you a lot.

By following these few tips, you will ensure your company’s web site will be a great representation of what you have to offer the public. There are many more tips to follow that can help you choose a marketing company. Reach out if you have questions on how to pick the best web design and marketing company for your business.

Written By: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted By: CueCamp

The post Tips: What to Look for in a Web Developer appeared first on CueCamp.