Advanced Techniques for Web Success, Prt I

Split Testing

Split testing is one way to achieve a marketing advantage since it helps fine-tune your website and improve how your website is received or accepted by visitors. This process allows you to make tweaks to your site, resulting in a site that is more appealing. It's amazing how subtle changes can make a big difference in a website's success.

What is Split Testing?

Essentially, split testing involves making minor variations to your website, and then testing those changes against the original to see if the changes foster a better response from visitors. Essentially, you compare one version against the other. You can change various aspects of your site, such as—

• Color

• Headings

• Text

• Images

• Specific Offers

• and more!

By making changes to these elements and then running tests, you can determine what works best for your target market and change your approach accordingly.

Why is Split Testing Important?

The reason split testing is critical to a website's ultimate success is that it provides a huge competitive advantage. “Split Testing is honestly what separates the big boys of internet marketing with the beginners. The guys that make a lot of money simply know how to split test properly to make more and more sales,” according to a post at the website How to Split Test. This site offers a quick overview of several software packages you can use to split test, including a free site. According to a blog published by Conversion Rate Experts, Google also offers a tool called the “Website Optimizer Tool” that is “amazing.” It is a free tool that allows you to instantaneously check variations of text, colors, offers, and other elements of your website, but they call it “multivariate” testing since you are testing multiple variables. You can see this tool in action at Google. It is simple to use, consisting of just a few easy-to-follow steps.

Hit Web Design offers tools as well to facilitate testing of your website's effectiveness. For additional information contact us at Hit Web Design or call 1-866-211-0743.

Testing Your Site's Effectiveness

Conversions can help you gauge the effectiveness of your website. If you have a lot of visitors to your site but few conversions then maybe it is time to change the content. There are several things you can change to test how they affect your conversion rate.

• Try changing the text or headings on your site

• Change the pictures on your site

• Reword your call to action

• Try a different layout by organizing the text, pictures, and call to action in different ways

• Any change, even a little one, could affect your conversion rate

With every change you make you should see how it affects your conversion rate. If it improves, then consider making that change permanent. Also consider only testing one thing at a time, this way you can discover specifically what it is that may be preventing higher conversion rates. You can always change things back if they have a negative impact on your conversion rate.

* Changing the text and pictures on your site can lead to a higher conversion rates.

* Test out different layout of the content on your site to see how it affects your conversion rate.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Improve Conversions Using Web Analytics

The purpose of almost all websites is to market a product, service, or idea. Getting someone to come to your site is only half the battle, turning them into a customer or a recurring visitor is where the fight really begins—this process is known as conversion. More conversions means more profits.

Know Your Website Visitors

To improve your websites conversion rate there are several things you must know. You need to know what keywords people are searching for to find your website. Once they get to your site you need to know what they are doing on your site and what pages they are and are not viewing. To determine this information you need to use some sort of analytics with your website.

Analytics can help you understand quite a bit about your customers and visitors to your website.

Analytics can tell you:

• How many people are coming to your site

• What keyword phrases they searched for to find your site

• Where your customers are searching from, geo-specific information

• What pages of your website they viewed

• Current number of conversions

• Much more statistical data

By comparing the number of people that come to your site with the number of conversions you receive you can judge the effectiveness of your website. Conversions are affected by many things such as the effectiveness of your call to action, the quality of your websites content, and even the placement of all the elements on the pages of your website.

Once you know how your website is performing you can begin to make the necessary changes to improve your conversion rate.

* Any serious website owner who wants to improve their conversion rate should be using web analytics.

* Is your website not bringing in as much money as you would like? Find out how to improve your site's conversion rate.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

If You Have a Good Business Idea, Start a Website

They Key to Starting Your Business is Market

Building a website can give you the platform to promote yourself to a potentially limitless audience. But, just as important as building your website, you must maintain it and market it, or it will get lost in the sea of millions of other sites out there.

Make Your Website Relevant

Let's face it—there is a lot of, shall we say, pointless information on the Web. Your goal should be to rise above that to offer visitors something they can really use and enjoy. That means...

1. Building a site that is visually pleasing and easy to use.

2. Filling the site with quality content.

3. Providing a service, or informing of a service, that people really need.

Of course, that's easier said than done. For most, becoming an expert in design and marketing writing is simply not an option. You know what you want your website to accomplish, but you don't know how to get it to do so.

This is the first in a series of articles that describe good ways to create a site that gets people's attention, and gains their trust.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Start the New Year with a New Website

As the new year rolls in, it's time once again to make resolutions. But, if you're like most people, your resolve on December 31 might fizzle soon after January 1 rolls around.

Start the New Year by Upgrading Your Business

Whether you're already in business or thinking of starting a new venture, it's time to think about how the business environment is changing. Depending on where you are with your website, here are some important steps you can take this year:

1. Put your business online

2. Upgrade your online presence

3. Plan to accommodate future developments

Put Your Business Online

If you're a business owner or plan to become one, the Internet should be a top priority. A website can be an effective marketing tool to increase traffic to your physical location, or it can act as a separate storefront, giving you access to a potentially limitless new customer base.

• Why you should do it

More people are shopping online. According to comScore.com, a leading analyst in online shopping, 2009 saw a 4-percent increase in online sales from 2008. That might not seem like much, but when you consider the trends in technology and consumer habits, positioning yourself online now might pay off big down the road.

Upgrade You Online Presence

If you already have a website, you might consider upgrading if you haven't yet. Among other things, you will want to prepare for smartphones and mobile devices. They are quickly becoming the common way to access the Internet, and anything you can do to make mobile users' experience easier will put you at an advantage.

Plan to Accommodate Future Developments

Things change quickly on the Web. Utilizing a website is not a passive experience, and you will need to stay up-to-date on the latest trends in technology and Internet usage. As you do so, you might even become an expert yourself. As social media plays a more prevalent role in online marketing, consider using software that helps you keep track of your newsletter and Twitter campaigns.

Google's 71% Monopoly Too Big for Small Businesses to Ignore

If you're wondering just how much your website marketing strategy should revolve around Google, here's the answer:

It matters more than ever.

Experian Hitwise, a (Internet intelligence company) released findings that show Google increased its wide monopoly in the search-engine industry, facilitating 71 percent of all U.S. Internet searches.

Google's closest competitor, Yahoo!, took on 15 percent of U.S. Search traffic and Bing took on 9 percent. Ask.com, No. 4, took on 2.6 percent.

And, while the last several months may have been a bumpy ride for some search engines, it doesn't mean fewer people are using them to get where they want online.

In fact, it's the other way around, according to Experian.

“Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories,” Experian said in a Dec. 9 press release. “Comparing November 2009 with November 2008, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, and Sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.”

Small businesses that want visibility online are still going to have to gear their websites to be noticed by Google and other search engines. Additionally, they are going to have to evolve with the technology that brings people online, gearing their websites for an increasing amount of mobile device users and building their social media presence.

E-mail Marketing Tips, Part IV

Get More Clicks

Newsletters Should Encourage Clicks

In the world of Internet e-mail marketing, the more clicks the better. Clicks mean your message is getting across, and someone is interested in finding out more. Once someone opens your newsletter, the next step is for them to dig deeper and follow your call to action. This means they will ultimately click on the links in your newsletter and end up on your website's homepage—or, in Internet marketing terminology, end up being “captured.” If they buy, fill out your subscription invitation, or in some other way fulfill the purpose of your newsletter campaign, they are then “converted.”

A “click” is the act of someone responding to a link. The “click through rate” (commonly referred to as CTR) and how it is determined depends on whether your e-mail is text only, HTML only, or a combination of both. By using a combination of both, you can make sure your message is attractive graphically and also accessible to those recipients whose e-mail may not handle HTML messages—a customer with a portable device, for instance. Also, e-mails designed with HTML have more sophisticated tracking abilities.

The formula for an HTML, or text and HTML, click through rate is—

(total # of clicks / total # of newsletters sent)*100

For example, if you send out 500 newsletters and of those that open the e-mail, 75 people actually go to the next step and click on the link or links in the open newsletter itself, then your click through rate is 15%.

(75 clicks / 500 newsletters)*100=15%

Ways to Get More Clicks

By increasing the number of clicks, you can improve your chances of getting conversions. In the book Sign Me Up! written by Matt Blumberg, Tami Monahan Forman, and Stephanie A. Miller, the following suggestions are offered to improve your click rate. (See pp. 37, 39)

Keep Actionable Items in View: The field of view varies depending on the browser in which your e-mail is opened. On top of that, people naturally ready from the top left, downward and across the middle, to the bottom right of the screen. Therefore, if you want to catch your reader's attention, the call to action should be in that field of view. If it is at the bottom of your newsletter and the viewer must scroll down to see it, the chances are they won't do it, and your opened newsletter will lose its value. To help in the design of your newsletter, Google recently released a tool called the “Browser Size Tool.” This tool will allow you to compare how different browsers will display your content. It will be the subject of a future article from HIT Web Design, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can read about the tool at Browser Size.

Offer Other Avenues to Convert: Suppose someone reads your newsletter, but then can't get back to the computer to act on it. To help in this situation, give your subscriber some other way to contact you. For example, offer a toll-free number, a fax number, or a physical address to visit . Also, prominently provide a memorable e-mail address so that if your subscriber is on an airplane or somewhere that they can compose an e-mail on a portable device, they can take advantage of your offer.

Use Some Marketing Savvy: Do some marketing research on your target market, and make offers accordingly. Take into account buyer preferences, expressed interests, as well as lifestyle, behavior, income, and other demographic information. You might also consider breaking up your campaign by geographical area.

Give Stuff Away: Let's face it, everyone loves to get stuff for free. As the authors of Sign Me Up! put it, “Tell your readers about something they can't resist and require that they come to your site to retrieve it. Maybe it's a coupon, music download, cool game, or a hot new screen saver. Whatever it is, let them know why they must have it and why they need to click through to get it.”

Provide Mini Reviews of Other Content on Your Site: One way to get people to your site is to give a glimpse of what it has to offer in the newsletter, a teaser, so to speak, so that the interest of the reader is piqued and they want to see more. One idea is to write a newsletter about a particular subject, and then have that story link to your website for more information.

The clicked through rate for your e-mail campaign is a critical metric that translates into results. Careful attention to increasing your clicks will ultimately net higher fulfillment of your website's purpose.

HIT Web Design offers an effective tool to create and manage e-mail newsletter campaigns called Stay-N-Touch. For more information, see Stay-N-Touch.

• Newsletters Should Prominently Display Calls to Action for Optimal Click Rates

• Increasing Your Click Rate Translates into More Conversions

• Giving Alternative Ways to Act On Your Call to Action Helps Boost Conversions

• Use HIT Web Design's Stay-N-Touch marketing tool to create effective newsletter campaigns.