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Claudiu has been optimizing software vendors’ websites and shopping cart conversion rates at Avangate for more than 3 years and is currently a freelance conversion rate optimizer working with Avangate.
He is also the co-founder of PadiCode, that develops tools you can use to segment your audience and increase email leads through behavioral targeting.
You can find him on:
Both 2010 and 2011 have been called Year of Conversion Rate Optimization. And there certainly isn’t any mistake in that, given the burst of both knowledge and tools out there on the topic. And the best part of it is that most online businesses now have access to all they need to increase their sales, newsletter subscribers, followers etc. (and no more excuses if they don’t).
When it comes to selling software online, conversion rate is probably the metric with the highest impact on sales. So, to get you started I want to share with you a list of 5 tools that I have tested both with the Avangate team, as well as during my recent period as software vendor.
Unbounce is a landing page platform that makes creating, publishing and optimizing of landing pages really easy. It’s a great tool for marketing departments as they can roll out landing page after landing page without help from the IT department.
Landing pages often prove decisive when it comes to optimize conversion rates and sales. Different segments of your traffic have different expectations or needs from your website. Greeting each segment of traffic with a specific landing page for their needs can only help that segment of traffic reach the goal faster and in greater numbers. In other words: give a user what he is looking for and he will take it.
Besides the product, the Unbounce blog is a great resource for starting with landing page optimization.
Verify is a great set of remote user testing tools to help you determine how well a design will perform, before publishing it on your website. The tools will make it easy for you to decide what to keep in a design and what to take out or what to change in order to make sure the design will actually increase conversions on your website.
When developing consumer driven products, feedback is crucial. Getting feedback before launching a new page or feature can prove to be a gold mine by not wasting developing resources on things you don’t know if will work or not.
(Disclaimer: I am co-founder of the company)
PadiAct is a neat tool that helps you optimize your email subscription rate. When it comes to increase the number of your email subscribers, there aren’t many methods out there. One method is to ask users to give their email address when they download your software. Jason Cohen shared some tips on how to ask for user information before the trial starts in his 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases. But this method can also be seen as blackmailing: you give me your email address, I give you a trial – definitely not permission marketing.
This tool allows you to define a segment of traffic whom to ask, in a friendly manner, to subscribe to your newsletter. Here is an example you could start with: all new visitors that have already downloaded your product. You accomplish 2 things by using targeting to increase subscription lists:
Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool. These days you can’t really talk about increasing conversion rates and sales without talking about A/B and multivariate testing. There are many tools out there to help put in place a testing strategy, but Visual Website Optimizer makes it so much easier. No IT departments or programming skills needed to get started.
Another cool thing about Visual Website Optimizer is their blog with tons of great info and case studies on A/B testing. Now there’s no excuse for not testing.
For shopping cart testing, you can of course use the A/B testing module from Avangate platform. If you never made a test – share with us your ideas about increasing your shopping cart conversion rates and the most creative ones may be tested in your Avangate account.
KISSinsights gives your customers a way to tell you what they need. It’s an user feedback platform, really easy to integrate on any website. The best thing about it is that it’s contextual. You can ask your users on your pricing page if there is anything they don’t understand about the pricing or you can ask them on your blog if there is anything else they would like you to write about.
What we love most about KISSinsights it’s that it is not intrusive. After starting collecting feedback with it, most users get the “Aha” moment which usually leads to ideas of better optimizing the website, therefore increasing conversion rate and in the end, sales.
See it in action on this blog and on our website. While you are at it, let us know what topics you would like us to cover more. :)
In the end it all comes up to provide better experiences to your online visitors in directing them towards the conversion point. What are you plans for improving your conversion rate in 2011?
It seems the interest for analytics in the software vendors community increases more and more, according to the requests I get by email. I believe in actionable metrics, so I decided to act and publish an updated version of the Analytics miniBible for Software Vendors.
No matter if you got the chance or not to download the first release, here are some changes and highlights in this analytics eBook for software vendors.
When Google Analytics first introduced asynchronous tracking, a lot of people reacted as being one of the biggest improvements in web analytics in ages. The new tracking technology offers better accuracy and affects less (close to zero) the loading time of websites.
The Analytics MiniBible for Software Vendors offers step by step support on how to switch all your tracking needs to the new asynchronous technology.
Unless you’ve been on holiday these past weeks, I’m sure you know by now that we are off to China again. Yep, we loved it so much last time and the feedback was so good, that we’ve decided to re-visit this fascinating culture (one of the oldest in the world!) that just happens to have to offer some of the best dishes on the planet :).
This time we are heading to Shenzhen, an area considered “The Valley” of China. Yep, that’s the center of the Chinese IT & software market.
So on Saturday, 5th of June, I’ll be sharing the conference floor with Tina, Avangate’s finest Asian market sales consultant;) and Andy, our coolest Chinese colleague. What am I saying here… if you are a software vendor from China, you might know these guys probably even better than me.
The debate topic this year: Conversion Rate.
How high is your shopping cart conversion rate? Is it 30 or less? 40? 60? One day a client asked me: what exactly makes a conversion rate to be smaller or higher? Is it the number of steps, the security logos, the product images, adding/removing cross selling? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a secret formula to it. However, we have found that the absence of 3 elements can influence in a negative way your shopping cart conversion rate: trust, confidence and security.
Trust comes from the experience with the shopping cart itself. Most of the users don’t care about technicalities or 3rd parties and so on, but when they find themselves in a cart that doesn’t look like anything on your website, some of them will hesitate to trust it. A feeling that something might be wrong could take over. It’s common sense after all. In all the tests we’ve done, the better the customized cart was (in terms of look and feel), the higher the conversion rate.
Just in case you missed it, we are organizing our first Software Selling Conference in China that will take place on December 5th at the Park Plaza Beijing Science Park.
If until now China was just a very big country or a very fast developing market, now it’s getting personal: I’m going there and join for a couple of days the Avangate Chinese sales team. Well, I should say we are going there, as 3 geeks and one lady are going to play a very serious and challenging role of the host at the event :) We are going to try to make it fun.
For a start I am looking forward to meeting some of our clients I’ve been working closely with on web analytics implementations or a/b testing. Talking about testing, this is going to be the main focus on my presentation: Effective and tested ways to increase conversion rates. I will also try to make things interesting and hold a workshop just after the presentation, analyzing a website from the audience… depends on who will volunteer. Nothing staged there.
For the last couple of months there has been a frenzy here in our web marketing department about A/B testing and Conversion Rates. Why the frenzy? Basically because all elements came into place: we developed a high performance A/B testing module within the eCommerce platform, we finished rolling out Omniture Site Catalyst on the shopping carts and we improved the template editing areas for all the accounts so it’s easier than ever to start testing templates.
We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.
Bob Walsh
Jason Cohen
Neil Davidson
Vinod Nambiar
