Many business owners erroneously believe that gathering information about target markets is enough to build their buyer persona marketing arsenal. Not so! Think of getting to know buyer personas as slicing through a cake- you can’t cut a perfect piece without cutting through all the layers first.

The usual marketing questions don’t suffice when creating buyer personas. Using educated guesses can have your marketing team working overtime and just plain guessing can leave you confounded. While knowing certain descriptors of your target market (age, sex, location) can get you started in the right direction, you’ll need to go that extra mile to get  that information that can help you hit the buyer persona bull’s-eye.

The number of buyer personas that you need to create and understand depends on how many you want to reach and how many you identify. Segmenting your current target market into neat personalities can help you refine your marketing campaign and increase conversion rates, but why stop there? Identifying what personas you want to reach and crafting your marketing campaigns to appeal to them ensures that you’re investing in the future of your company’s profits.
Let there be no misunderstanding.

Continue reading Hit a Buyer Persona Bull’s-eye: Ask Target Markets the Right Questions

Tags: buyer personas, Conversion Optimization, persona
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce

I feel compelled to comment on a new trend perpetuated and identified by other marketing bloggers. Amazingly, there seems to be an anti-buyer persona movement. That’s probably a little dramatic. What’s really happening is that some marketing bloggers have begun to question the effectiveness of using elaborately detailed buyer personas to market and sell products. It just so happens that they’re doing it at the same time and it appears like an avalanche in the marketing blogger world.

Continue reading Don’t Sell Yourself Short by Discounting Buyer Personas

Tags: Conversion Optimization, persona
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing

I am a firm believer in accountable marketing. But who isn’t? If something does not work for your business, why pour more money into it? DJ Waldow mentioned the several social activities they are involved Bronto is involved in recently. Their effort is pretty impressive. But the first thing that came to my mind is ROI. A lot of activities require a lot of money and time. What is the ROI on these activities? If you cannot measure the results of an activity, how can you decide if it were successful or not?

Continue reading Honest discussion: Online marketing and guaranteed results

Tags: Conversion Optimization, guaranteed results, pay per performance
Posted in Business, Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Note from Khalid: This is a guest post from Samantha Gonzales

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway a fence-sitting prospect to the other side with a little charm.

A business website speaks for you and everyone associated it. Though real people aren’t there to greet your prospects when they visit, your landing page can say exactly what you and your employees can’t. It can do the charming, the smiling and the persuading. In the most competitive of markets, your landing page can even be a rallying cry. It can inspire your prospects to heed a call-to-action and buy your product.

Continue reading Turn Your Landing Page’s Call-to-Action Into a Rallying Cry

Tags: Conversion Optimization, Landing-Page, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing

We’d like to share some news with our readers that we’re pretty proud of here at Invesp. During the first 6 months of 2008, our team conducted 7 landing page optimization projects and 4 e-commerce projects. Our average client conversion rate for that period was 9.2%. Our clients reported an average increase of 35% increase in conversion rates during that period, with our best project delivering a 98% improvement in conversion rates.

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that our clients averaged 14.56% in 2007. While it might seem that there is a large drop in clients conversion rates this year, I believe the numbers will adjust very well during the holiday season, since most of our clients usually report large increases during the holidays.

The team has been able to deliver great value to our clients in the last six months and made great improvements in solidifying the conversion framework. At this point, the framework has been tested on over 30 conversion optimization projects and has consistently delivered great results.

Our biggest lesson this year comes from the one project where we could not deliver the results. Investing enough time upfront before starting any conversion optimization is critical. Our client did not have enough traffic to that landing page to notice any real improvement in conversion. The page received less than 200 visitors a month. That is something we should have been aware of prior to starting the project. But as they say: “live and learn” and I believe we have. J

With the economy declining by the day, there is no better time to focus on conversion optimization. If you have been thinking about starting your own conversion optimization project, call our office at 1.800.421.7393, or contact us to get started.

Tags: Conversion Optimization, conversion rate, e-commerce, Invesp
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce

Creating a successful e-commerce operation is no easy task. Take the grueling process of creating a successful company offline and add to it a multitude of complexities from online marketing challenges to technical issues and you have an ecommerce operation. When I reflect back on my experience during the last 12 years in creating ecommerce websites and online portals, it is difficult to contribute the success or the failure of an ecommerce operation to a single issue. It is usually a culmination of several issues that can make or break the company. And I’ve learned from seeing ecommerce sites fail more from seeing ecommerce operations succeed.

In order to avoid failure, any ecommerce operation must be able to succeed in each of the following:

1.The idea

some ideas are great and innovative. Others are simple and typical. Okay, so maybe you can’t think of any innovative ecommerce ideas. Are there any? Amazon started with a simple idea: sell books in a new and innovative medium (ie, online). Same goes for Ebay. Take a thousand year old concept and put it online. And it seems that most services or products nowadays are sold online, so what new, innovative ideas will ecommerce operation present. Not much.

Continue reading Lessons from 12 Years of Building E-commerce Websites

Tags: Business, Conversion Optimization, e-commerce, marketing, online-marketing, startups
Posted in Business, Ecommerce, SEO, Sales & Marketing, Technology

In the last post of this blog series, I reflected briefly on the homepages of ProFlowers.com and 1800Flowers.com, the two top etailers in the category of gifts and flowers. Remember, the reason I decided to explore this category in the first place was the fact that in June Proflowers.com, 1800Flowers.com, and FTD.com all made it to the top 10 e-tailers sorted by conversion rate as reported by Neilsen Online with over 20% conversion rate each.

Amongst the top 500 retailers, in the vertical of flowers/gifts are two sites that clearly have sizable revenue, but are not doing as well in terms of conversion rate: Gifttree.com at 3.5% and Justflowers.com at 5%. In this post I will reflect briefly on their homepages.

Continue reading Analysis of the Top Converting Online Retailers: Homepages (3)

Tags: Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, gift/flowers vertical, online retailers, top converting
Posted in Ecommerce

Most ecommerce sites give some sort of cross-selling or up-selling recommendations to their site visitor. The most common places to see these recommendations are on the product page, a time when the buyer is closest to adding an item to their shopping cart.

MyBuys.com and RichRelevance.com are two examples of companies that have created a unique recommendation engine that can be implemented with any ecommerce site. MyBuys.com conducted a study of 1,345 online customers and 24 merchants in an effort to understand behaviors, trends, etc. Most consumers expected merchants to offer recommendations on the site, but only 2% felt that the recommendations had any relevance to their likes, dislikes, or search.

MyBuys.com feels that personalized recommendations based on customer shopping behaviors are a lot more effective. In an effort to gain a better understanding about their personalization software and really decide whether or not this is intrusive and taking advantage of the buyer, I conducted an interview with Jeremy Pollock, the Director of Product marketing at MyBuys.com:

Continue reading E-Commerce Personalization Understood: An Interview

Tags: Conversion Optimization, cross-selling, mybuys, personalization, recommendations, up-selling
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce

In my previous blog, I shed light on the category of gifts/flowers that makes up 15 of the top 500 e-commerce sites. Additionally, 3 of the top 500, ProFlowers, FTD, and 1800Flowers.com, have been ranking in the top 10 e-tailers by conversion rate according to MarketingCharts.com for the past few months. So after reviewing some interesting stats, let’s take a look at 5 of the top 15 site’s homepages: ProFlowers, 1800Flowers, FTD, JustFlowers, and GiftTree.

Of course, the first page that pops up after visiting any ecommerce site is the homepage. Its role is crucial in keeping the site visitor interested enough and directing them to their desired destination. ProFlowers, 1800Flowers, and FTD do a great job, clearly, from their outstanding conversion rates. JustFlowers and Gift Tree are not doing so shabby either making it to the top 500 etailers.

Continue reading Analysis of the Top Converting Online Retailers: Best Homepages Part 2

Tags: Conversion Optimization, conversion rates, e-commerce, gifts/flowers, interent retailers
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce

1. Any chump can put a char on a hot dog. Testing a website takes a little more than coming up with hundreds of variables to test on a single page. Use your time to understand what variables would actually make a difference with your site visitors.

2. Slow work days call for DIY optimization work. You don’t have to wait for outside consultants to tell you how to implement small changes in your website. Take some initiative.

3. A tan should be the sum of your summer experience not a bullet point on your to do list. Conversion optimization for ecommerce is an ongoing process. Forget about doing one optimization project and thinking that you are done. There is more room for improvement.

Continue reading New Rules of Ecommerce: Hot Dogs, Tanning and Sex on the Beach

Tags: Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing