Sunshine.co.uk are a UK-based travel agency offering cheap holidays. Within six months of working with Conversion Rate Experts, their conversion rate almost doubled.

This was achieved despite the fact that the rest of the UK travel industry was in crisis: the country was in the grips of a recession, airlines were collapsing, and the number of holidays booked was falling at its highest rate since records began. In fact, during this period, the travel industry lost over £2.1 billion in profit. So, during this tough time, how did sunshine.co.uk double their revenue?

Conversion rate optimization, of course. (You had guessed that already, hadn’t you?). In this article, we’ll show you how we did it…

How we did it

Surveying your customers is the bedrock of a successful campaign

Everyone knows that they should survey their customers, but few companies do it regularly. And even fewer survey their customers well. With sunshine.co.uk, surveying was the foundation for the massive increases in conversion.

“Surveying our customers with SurveyMonkey was mind blowing. Normally, the main customer contact we have is when the customer has an issue with a booking. With the survey, we found that the silent majority loved us.” Chris Clarkson, Marketing Director of sunshine.co.uk

That’s not all. The survey also helped us understand the reasons why the customers loved sunshine.co.uk—which we could then emphasize on the website.

Here are our top three tips for surveying your customers:

1. Try making your surveys more qualitative—If you stick to multiple-choice questions, it’s easier to process the data for hundreds or thousands of customers. However, it won’t be anywhere near as valuable as if you asked questions with open-text field responses.

Don’t get us wrong, multiple-choice questions have their uses, but we find open-text fields to be much more useful for conversion rate improvement.

2. Give customers an incentive to fill out the survey—The more people complete your surveys, the more valuable they’ll be. sunshine.co.uk decided to offer everyone who filled out the survey the chance to win the cost of their last holiday—which could be as much as several thousand pounds. This investment paid off quickly when we started to implement and test the ideas generated by the survey’s feedback.

3. The covering email is just as important as the survey and incentive—It’s essential to get the email right, to ensure that as many people as possible fill out the survey. This is what we did to ensure sunshine.co.uk’s email would be read:

• In the subject line, emphasize the benefit to the customer. That’s why we used “Get your holiday free” instead of “Can you fill out our survey?”
• Sell the survey like you’d sell your products or services. So we emphasized that it was easy to fill out (“it only takes about 3 minutes”) and added the incentive (“win back the cost of your last holiday”).
• Emails should be personal. The more personal the email, the more likely people are to respond. That’s why we included the customer’s name in the email, as well as signing it from a person, rather than from a nameless marketing department. We emphasized this further by including a photo of sunshine.co.uk’s managing director Chris Brown (and Pluto!).

sunshine.co.uk’s email was carefully written to maximize responses.

In addition to using Survey Monkey, we also recommend KISSinsights for surveys. KISSinsights provides an incredibly quick way of adding a short survey (usually just one or two questions) to a particular page. You can create and launch a survey in less than a minute (we timed it ourselves, and it took 55 seconds), which completely changes your approach to surveying.

Usability testing will make you rich

We started usability testing quickly and easily with remote testers from usertesting.com and whatusersdo.com. While some testers were able to book a holiday easily—including flights, hotels, transfers and parking—others struggled.

“Usability testing was easily the biggest ‘wow’ and ‘facepalm’ moment.” Chris Clarkson of sunshine.co.uk

Here are our top three tips for usability testing:

• Don’t just test your site—test your competitors’ too. By comparing sunshine.co.uk against the competition, we were quickly able to see what they were doing right—and what we could do better.
• Do it often. We carried out usability tests on every major redesign of the homepage, resort and hotel pages, and the booking process. This way, we could make sure that the site was as user-friendly as possible before and after testing.
• Do it now. This is the most important point—a lot of people think usability testing is a good idea, but put it off indefinitely. Don’t! You can get started in less than 10 minutes.

Know your analytics

Each type of research tool or technology gives you a slightly different view of your current business. Web analytics software such as Google Analytics or Omniture SiteCatalyst doesn’t give as much rich information about what’s going on in your visitors’ heads, but it does reveal loads of quantitative detail about the flows of users through your website. It’s particularly useful for helping you decide which pages to work on first.

sunshine.co.uk use Google Analytics for their web analytics. They have also used Crazy Egg, which provides simple visual heatmaps that show where your visitors are clicking on a given page.

Regular split-testing is essential

Split testing with Google Website Optimizer became a built-in part of sunshine.co.uk’s development process: nothing was changed on the website without being tested first. That way, we could see exactly which changes were increasing the conversion rate, and which had no impact—or even lowered the conversion rate.

It took just six split tests to almost double sunshine.co.uk’s annual revenue. But we actually did ten split tests in total. The advantage of CRO is that you can’t go backwards. If a test increases the conversion rate, you switch to the new version and increase revenue immediately. And if it doesn’t increase the conversion rate, you just stick with the original.

What we changed

Make it clear why you rock

When we started working on sunshine.co.uk, it wasn’t immediately clear why a visitor should use them rather than use one of their competitors.

To find out, we spoke with two of sunshine.co.uk’s founders, Chris Clarkson and Alan Gilmour. They had the inside knowledge of the travel industry, and could tell us how they were different from the competition.

We also studied the data from the customer survey. We wanted to find out what customers liked about sunshine.co.uk and how they’d describe the company to a friend.

This word cloud was produced from the responses to the question, “How would you describe sunshine.co.uk to a friend?” We created it with wordle.net.

We took all of this data and distilled it into four main benefits:

• Lowest-price guarantee—sunshine.co.uk have incredibly low prices for holidays, so we backed this up with this compelling guarantee: if you can find a holiday cheaper, we’ll refund the difference—and give you a fiver on top.
• Peace of mind—Prospects were understandably anxious about the turmoil in the travel industry. sunshine.co.uk recognised this objection and emphasised a guarantee that allayed the prospects’ concerns: if a supplier ceases trading, you can claim your money back from us.
• ABTA-bonded—sunshine.co.uk are bonded by ABTA, the UK travel trade association. This reassures visitors even more that their booking and holiday are secure.
• No hidden charges—When booking a holiday, most customers are used to having baggage fees, taxes and fuel surcharges added on. Not with sunshine.co.uk, who include all of these from the start. They even include supplier failure cover for free (which most competitors charge extra for).

sunshine.co.uk made it absolutely clear why they were different from the competition.

These were sunshine.co.uk’s main benefits—not just based on vague opinion, but verified by customer research. By clearly communicating these benefits, we were able to increase the conversion rate.

Uncovering—and overcoming—common objections and misunderstandings

Improving conversion isn’t just about expressing benefits; it’s about overcoming all the major objections.

Here’s one objection we identified: sunshine.co.uk’s prices are so low, they’re often unbelievable. (At the moment, you can get a trip to the Algarve including flights and accommodation for just £91 per person for a whole week!)

In our usability tests, we discovered that there was often confusion over the prices. Visitors weren’t sure if the figures were per person, per night, or whether flights and hotels were included. Ironically, the prices were so low that they were harming the conversion rate.

By clarifying the pricing, and what it included, we increased the conversion rate by 19%, adding an amazing £4 million to their annual revenue.

Clarifying the prices increased sunshine.co.uk’s conversion rate by 19%.

Turn negatives into positives

Visitors and usability testers often commented that there wasn’t a phone number displayed on the site. This is deliberate—sunshine.co.uk keep their costs down by only accepting bookings online.

But it can look odd if there isn’t a phone number. As one usability tester commented, “You make the website really friendly, but you also make it hard for people to call you.”

So instead of brushing over the fact that there was no phone number, we promoted the fact that they didn’t have one.

sunshine.co.uk’s missing phone number was turned into a benefit. To get a free PDF containing advanced tips for conversion, subscribe to our free newsletter.

Now at the top right of every page—where you’d normally expect to see the phone number—it says, “Where’s our phone number?” Clicking the text opens a pop-up that contains the following text:

“We don’t have expensive call centres, so we can pass on these savings to you—making our holidays incredibly good value!”

The negative was turned into a positive—and this feature is now commented on regularly by visitors to sunshine.co.uk.

What all this meant

Here’s a short video interview, in which Chris Clarkson from sunshine.co.uk discusses his experience of working with us:

“It’s the best money we’ve ever spent”—Chris Clarkson, Marketing Director of sunshine.co.uk talking about this project. Chris has also commented that “Within 6–8 weeks, Conversion Rate Experts had paid for themselves and more.”

Annual revenue increased to £31 million

In 2009 sunshine.co.uk’s sales were £17 million; in 2010 they’re on target to hit £31 million—and we’re still carrying out tests. That’s a huge £14 million a year extra, as a direct result of their work on conversion rate optimization.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because the conversion rate almost doubled, it also meant that…

Travel affiliates could double their commission by working with sunshine.co.uk

sunshine.co.uk already had a successful affiliate program. And when their conversion rate increased, it wasn’t long before affiliates started to notice—making the program even more successful.

sunshine.co.uk’s biggest affiliate noticed that the pay-per-click (PPC) traffic he sent to sunshine.co.uk was converting twice as highly as the traffic he sent to competitors—so his earnings doubled.

We expect that sunshine.co.uk’s revenue will increase even further, as more affiliates discover their super-high conversion rate.

PPC offered huge potential for growth

PPC had previously been too expensive for sunshine.co.uk to consider. But with the higher conversion rate, huge volumes of traffic were suddenly available to them.

As a result of working with Conversion Rate Experts, sunshine.co.uk could afford to increase their bids on PPC profitably—knowing that their higher conversion rate would mean they’d still make a strong profit.

As a result, PPC is becoming one of sunshine.co.uk’s biggest growth areas. It’s likely to be a huge source of traffic, which will allow them to increase their market share rapidly.

What next?

It doesn’t stop here … sunshine.co.uk and Conversion Rate Experts are now focusing on the next phase of development: aggressively developing and testing the website, together with email marketing and advertising.

Thanks to sunshine.co.uk

We’d like to thank Chris, Alan and the rest of sunshine.co.uk for their hard work during this project—and for allowing us to share this case study with you. We’d also like to thank Michelle from Caboodle Design. Without all of their help, none of the successes above would have been possible.

Our gift to you: a free PDF of conversion tips

If you’d like a PDF of some advanced conversion tips, just sign up to our free newsletter. All of these tips are currently being used by sunshine.co.uk, but they’re applicable to almost any type of website. We’ll send you a copy of the PDF straight away. It’s a quick two-page guide of advice that’ll help you boost your conversion rate.

Our newsletter goes out fairly infrequently, it contains truly valuable information, and you can easily unsubscribe whenever you wish (though few people ever do). You can get it here.

(If you’re already signed up to receive our email newsletter, you don’t need to sign up again to receive the free PDF; we included a link to it when we emailed you about this article.)

To get a free PDF containing advanced tips for conversion, subscribe to our free newsletter.

Want more case studies like this?

If you would like to see more of our clients’ results, you can find a long list on our buzz page.

We’ll be publishing detailed case studies on more of them soon. If you’d like to be notified as they become available, join our free newsletter.

Want us to work on your business?

If you would rather find out right away how we might help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.

Eyetracking was number nine in our list of 108 tips for conversion rate optimization. It was perhaps the most expensive of the tips.

Yesterday, a budget-priced eyetracking service, called GazeHawk, was launched. GazeHawk is like UserTesting.com (our review of which is here) but with real eyetracking reports.

GazeHawk’s normal charge is $49 per user test, which is about one-tenth of the price of traditional eyetracking. It can afford do so because its technology uses ordinary webcams, rather than expensive custom hardware. If that wasn’t cheap enough, its founders have offered a special deal to Conversion Rate Experts’ readers: you can get half-price tests by using this code: CRE10. You can order tests from GazeHawk.com.

(In case you’re wondering, this is an unbiased recommendation. We don’t accept payments from vendors for recommending technology.)

Because GazeHawk only launched yesterday, we haven’t had a chance to get results back from it yet. If you have tried it out, let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

To hear about new tools as we discover them, make sure you get our free and incredibly sporadic newsletter.

Have you used KISSinsights yet? It’s a fantastic new tool from the people who created Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. It lets you easily add smart-looking surveys to the bottom corner of your website. Here are some of its features:

• Choose what type of response you want: you can have radio buttons, multiple-answer checkboxes, or open text fields.
• Choose whom you want to participate in the survey. For example, “Only show the survey to returning visitors who have been viewing the page for more than 50 seconds.”
• Ask several questions in one go.
• Receive email notifications of responses.
• Once the code has been added to your website, you can create and launch surveys entirely from within KISSinsights’ control panel, so you don’t require any further support from your web developers.

However, its best feature is that it’s intelligently designed, and is easy to use. It just works. We started using it a few weeks ago, and we’re hooked.

There’s a free version, so give KISSinsights a try, and let us know what you think.

(By the way, that’s not an affiliate link. We’re vendor neutral, and we don’t profit from recommending technology.)

KISSinsights is so good, we’ve added it to our illustrious list of 14 (now 15) tools for understanding why your website’s visitors aren’t converting.

Have you seen our new video yet?

People often ask us why we don’t blog more often.

We founded Conversion Rate Experts with a belief that if we focus on getting great results, the rest of the business will look after itself. So we choose to spend almost all of our time working on growing our clients’ businesses, which leaves us with little time for blogging.

Our new video shows you what we’ve been doing “behind the scenes”. If you’ve been tempted to ask us to work on your business, you must see this video.

A short video about how we grow businesses.

If you’d like to find out how we could help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business. Visit our Services page for details.

Get paid to learn everything we know about web marketing

Are you a conversion superstar? Or do you know any?

If so, we want you to join our team. (For obvious reasons, if you work for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider you, unfortunately.)

We’re putting together a super-team of the world’s top conversion rate experts. We figure that most of the best conversion rate experts are already subscribed to our blog. Maybe it’s you.

So wherever you live, whatever your current situation, whatever your earnings requirements…if you’re capable of becoming the best in the world, we’d like to speak with you.

See this blog post for details.

If this job isn’t for you, maybe you know someone we should be considering. If so, please could you forward this page to them?

We’re putting together a super-team of the world’s top conversion rate experts. Wherever you live, whatever your current situation, whatever your earnings requirements…

…if you’re capable of becoming the best in the world, we’d like to speak with you.

(Note that, for obvious reasons, if you work for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider you, unfortunately.)

Nine great reasons to join us

• Work anywhere you choose. We are looking for the best people in the world, so we won’t be restricted by geographic location.
• Learn to be one of the world’s best conversion rate experts. We’ll reveal every secret we’ve ever discovered about growing web businesses.
• Really, really good money—with even greater incentives when you “deliver the goods”.
• Prestigious clients: Lead projects for some of our great clients, like Google, Sony, Vodafone, 888, SEO Book, SEOmoz and many exciting less-well-known businesses.
• Great colleagues. Our goal is to build and grow the world’s number one team of conversion rate experts. We also work with many of the world’s most respected marketers. So you’ll be in exciting and stimulating company.
• Join our private mastermind group. You’ll have access to our mastermind group in which we discuss the latest techniques we’ve developed, and the results they’ve generated.
• Opportunities to develop. You’ll be encouraged (and expected) to develop yourself. You’ll have freedom to utilize the latest technology, and to access the most advanced training programs. And you’ll have the budget to work with the best vendors in the world.
• Avoid all the nasty and boring stuff. You’ll only be required to work on the fun stuff: helping our clients to grow their businesses. We’ll take care of all the admin, paperwork, negotiating, invoicing and marketing, which leaves you free to concentrate on the activities that make you money (getting results!)
• Entrepreneurial, but without risk. Your monthly salary will be a combination of guaranteed income and performance-based bonuses. You’ll receive regular training designed to optimize your performance, your time and your income.

What you’ll be doing

As a CRO® Consultant, you’ll be joining our highly experienced team of experts who are responsible for providing one-on-one consulting to deliver amazing (and measurable) results for our clients.

You’ll be using…

• your personal expertise
• our proven CRO® System
• our internal CRO® mastermind group

You’ll provide our clients with…

• content and ideas to measurably grow their businesses
• strategic advice and unbiased technology recommendations
• highly professional project management and leadership

Here’s the type of person we’re looking for

We’re looking for smart, passionate and ambitious web marketers with a proven track record of growing online businesses using conversion rate optimization.

You’ll have expertise in most of the following:

• Web analytics, SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing and offline marketing
• “Real world” sales and direct response marketing
• Understanding the psychology of a website’s visitors
• Usability and design of high-converting webpages and sales funnels
• Carrying out split tests and multivariate tests on websites
• Project management, motivating teams, and mentoring others

Note: We’ve never met anyone who has all of these skills. As long as you have most of them—and you’re willing to learn quickly—that’s fine.

Most importantly, you’ll be obsessed with conversion and will already be getting amazing results.

Though this is a full-time position, we understand you may already have clients and/or projects of your own, so please mention this in your application form, (the details of which are at the bottom of this page), and we’ll explore whether we can come to some kind of compromise.

Not for the faint-hearted

This position is extremely demanding, and requires exceptional technical and communication skills. It’s not a job for your average marketer; after all, not many marketers are brave enough to insist that their clients test their advice.

Here’s what our consultants say…

Interested? Here’s what to do next. (Hurry, the deadline is August 6th 2010.)

1. Read our About Us page, to see if you share our values and beliefs. Also, read our free reports to see if you’re excited by the work we do.

2. Complete our online application form, giving us evidence that you have most of the skills we’re looking for. Please note, it’s pretty rigorous; though we’re sure you’ll appreciate that with a results-based business like ours, we have to be.

Deadline: Applications must be completed no later than August 6th 2010.

Please note: we’re no longer accepting applications… to get instant notification next time we’re recruiting sign-up to our newsletter.

Note that, for obvious reasons, if you work for one of our clients—or for a company actively considering using our services—we can’t consider you, unfortunately.

If this job isn’t for you, maybe you know someone we should be considering. If so, please forward this page to them.

SEOmoz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools for search engine optimization (SEO). The company was already highly successful, having a list of Fortune 500 clients as long as your arm. It had also conducted many split tests on its site. In fact, previous SEOmoz split tests were the subject of 14 pages in an industry “best practices” guide for landing page optimization.

Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for SEOmoz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales. (It’s important to note that “we” refers to a team effort between Conversion Rate Experts with our proven system and SEOmoz with their solid products and a bias toward action.)

Within the first four months of work, we increased annual revenues by $1 million.

How we got those improvements

We’ve all heard the business principle of “listen to your customer”. In analyzing the SEOmoz business, we took that principle much further: We not only listened to paying customers, but also to free-trial customers who hadn’t yet decided to subscribe to the paid service, and to customers who had canceled their subscriptions.

After all, it takes time, effort, and money to bring visitors to a website. It’s worth the effort to determine just what is going through the heads of buyers, non-buyers, and former buyers. We knew what actions people took—now we had to discover why they took them.

Here are some of the methods we used to analyze SEOmoz’s visitors:

• We asked paying members what they liked most about the SEOmoz service, what ultimately convinced them to sign up, and how they would describe the service to a friend (among many other questions).
• Next we asked non-paying (free trial) members many questions, including what would make them sign up for the service, which tools they liked the most and least, and what were their most time-consuming SEO tasks.
• Then we talked with paying members who had canceled, asking them the obvious question: “Why did you cancel?” We also wanted to know what was the one thing that would bring them back.
• We learned from face-to-face selling. Rand Fishkin, the founder of SEOmoz, could easily sell the service face-to-face at conferences, but commented that he wished his website could be as effective. We therefore asked Rand to pretend we were the prospect while we recorded his approach. We then compared what was on the current website with the details Rand used to sell SEOmoz face-to-face. That enabled us to identify what was missing from the website.
• We became the customer, which is a great way to see first-hand the good and not-so-good aspects of the actual customer experience.
• Next, we incorporated our findings into revised “wireframe” pages. A wireframe is a quick rendering of a proposed page, which allows you to prototype quickly without bogging down programmers or designers. We then recruited people from the SEOmoz Twitter feed to participate in usability tests of those wireframes. We wanted to know what they liked and didn’t like on a big-picture basis.

A wireframe of the page. To get a free annotated PDF of the winning SEOmoz page, subscribe to our free newsletter.

Through an iterative process of usability testing, modifying the page, and repeating, we eventually arrived at a version that we were confident would outperform the current one. We ran a split test to see how visitors would react to it. Using a statistically significant sample of more than 5,000 visitors, we achieved a 52% increase in sales of SEOmoz’s PRO membership.

The results of the split test. The new page generated 52% more sales.

Some of the proven techniques we used

1. We created a web page long enough to tell the story

There’s a popular myth among web marketers that “long web pages don’t sell”. These people believe that it’s much better to have short pages that don’t require scrolling.

What we’ve discovered from many client consultations around the world is this: What counts is not how long your page is, but how engaging it is.

In our analysis of Rand’s effective face-to-face presentation we noticed that he needed at least five minutes to make the case for SEOmoz PRO. Yet the existing web page was more like a one-minute summary. Once we added the key elements of Rand’s presentation, the page became much longer:

Who says long pages don’t work? Our page was six times longer than the control. To get a free annotated PDF of the winning SEOmoz page, subscribe to our free newsletter.

It’s interesting to note that Amazon.com, which is known for its relentless testing, tends to have extremely long product pages. Just see the page for its Kindle reader. (None of the links on this page are affiliate links, by the way.) Amazon realizes that buyers are engaged and want to know what they’re getting into. (If you want to know how far people scroll down your own web pages, one good tool is ClickTale.)

2. We infused the headline with curiosity rather than overt “buy me” language

Too many marketers rush into a sale right in the headline, before they’ve generated sufficient interest on the part of readers.

The original SEOmoz headline wasn’t bad:

The old headline.

We designed our new headline not to sell anything, but to make visitors stop and pay attention. Here’s the new one:

The new headline.

This headline not only utilizes the social proof of how some of the biggest companies on the planet rely on SEOmoz, but it also incites curiosity by indicating that the readers will gain value just from reading the page.

3. We explained precisely what customers would get at each level

Our analysis of customer emails and surveys made us realize that some customers weren’t aware of the impressive array of tools they’d get with a paid membership. In addition, they seemed to be confused about which tool was available at which membership level.

One handy chart solved both of those problems at a glance. Plus, visitors could hover over any element of the chart to reveal more details.

The table we created to show what you get at each level of membership.

We also recognized that paid customers loved the “Q&A” feature but the existing site did not mention it. It’s where members could ask detailed questions and get customized, personalized answers from the SEOmoz team of experts. We made the Q&A service prominent in the new chart, and we also created a separate section for it.

We added some examples of the Q&A service, to illustrate the depth of expertise in the answers.

4. We showcased things customers cared about but SEOmoz had taken for granted

Almost every company takes some of its most impressive “persuasion assets” for granted. SEOmoz was no exception; for example, they were so accustomed to dealing with major firms as clients that they were somewhat “ho hum” about that fact.

We greatly increased the logo display of SEOmoz’s well-known clients because it included so many world-famous brands.

We also added a long section of testimonials from professional SEO specialists. Sometimes comments from one’s peers—other professional SEOs—can be more influential than even endorsements from brand-name clients.

5. We augmented the message with video

Some people are most influenced by text while others find audio or video to be more helpful.

Because we had videotaped Rand’s live presentation earlier, it was a simple matter to add highlights of his points to a short video on the page.

The video of SEOmoz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, which we embedded in the page.

So that’s how we achieved the 52% improvement with the landing page. Next, we turned our attention to the offer.

Phase II—testing the offer

Our improved page did indeed tell the SEOmoz story more completely, so it was now time to be brave with a call-to-action that could not be ignored.

6. We lowered the “risk bar”, to make it easier for customers to try the service

We knew from customer research that people were impressed with the tools but sometimes were just not sure if they would work in their own situations.

To overcome this objection, we made a special offer to SEOmoz’s free subscribers: we offered them a 30-day full-featured membership for just $1.

7. We asked non-subscribers to tell us why they didn’t even want a $1 membership

We could hardly lower the risk bar any further, so we really wanted to know what was on the minds of those visitors who refused even the $1 offer. And how do you read people’s minds? By asking them questions! In the first promotional email, we asked, “IF YOU DECIDE YOU DON’T WANT TO CLAIM THIS SPECIAL $1 OFFER … then please send a reply to this email with a brief explanation of why you aren’t interested.”

It turned out that about 500 of them had the same concern—did our $1 trial contain a hidden catch that committed them to a long-term contract?

The answer was no, and this bit of feedback prompted us to send a follow-up email explaining that nothing was hidden—and that they could use the entire site for 30 days and cancel even on the last day with no commitment and no hard feelings.

Once we had identified the main objection, we created an email that overcame it.

That email resulted in another subscription boost.

Phases I and II succeeded in getting people comfortable with SEOmoz and persuading them to try out the PRO service. We had one remaining task:

Phase III—strategies for improving lifetime customer value (LCV) and retention

We of course knew that a $1 offer would boost subscriptions but the real goal was to keep these users active beyond the trial period. There are many retention strategies available in a marketer’s toolbox, and we used several with SEOmoz.

One of the most widely applicable types of strategy is “involvement devices”. Involvement devices are mechanisms that help your customer or prospect to derive value from your service quickly and easily. Here’s how we used this strategy with SEOmoz:

8. We created a quick-start guide so customers could get quick wins

We had 30 days to impress our new subscribers. The key was to get them to use the service and experience some quick wins with all the SEOmoz tools.

We therefore stayed close to our subscribers with a series of 10 quick and easy things they could do to boost their search engine rankings within the first 30 days.

One of the emails we sent to new subscribers to make it easy for them to get started using the service (to make them more likely to continue using the service beyond the trial period).

These three phases helped SEOmoz to not only achieve a conversion increase of around 170% over four months, but to generate more than $1 million in additional revenue.

Handy lessons

• Lots of businesses assume they know what their customers think and want, but very few businesses ever take the time to find out for sure. Put your own ideas aside and get as much customer feedback about your website and products as you can. You simply cannot overdo this activity.
• Compile a list of objections and, for each one, create a counter-objection. When visitors don’t buy, it’s for a reason—perhaps the price is too high, the product description is too vague, the site contains insufficient proof to back up the claims, or any of a hundred other objections. Take the most-common objections and methodically address each one through testimonials, case histories, examples, screen shots, and any other proof you can muster.
• Be bold in your tests but conservative in your exposure. We ran a $1 offer but did not advertise it to the world. Only existing subscribers saw it, and we carefully monitored the volume of signups. You can afford to go for big, bold tests when you manage your downside.
• Use as much text as you need to fully explain your product or service and back up your claims with proof. There’s no such thing as a too-long web page—only a too-boring one.
• Remember that when you sell face-to-face you only need to answer one person’s objections. When you sell on the web, you must anticipate and address all the major objections, so don’t handicap yourself for the sake of some old myth about page length.
• Separate yourself from your competitors by offering something of value right away. Perhaps offer a truly valuable special report, or a full-featured trial membership. When you “give before you get”, you put visitors at ease by proving your value and avoiding the hype.

Some of the tools we used

• Omniture Test&Target was used to carry out split tests.
• IndexTools (now known as Yahoo! Site Analytics) was used to understand the types of visitors coming to the website and how they behaved once there.
• Adobe Illustrator was used to create the wireframes. These days, we’re fairly smitten with Balsamiq, which takes about three milliseconds to learn to use.
• Twitter was used to recruit usability testers.
• Survey Monkey was used to conduct surveys of buyers, non-buyers, and former buyers—though we’d highly recommend SurveyGizmo too.
• The video was hosted with Vimeo.

The importance of having a great product

We were impressed by SEOmoz from the very beginning. Though many companies build tools in order to sell them, SEOmoz took a different approach: It built SEO tools for the express purpose of using them internally in its consulting practice with Fortune 500 companies and other major clients. These tools were not built to sell—they were built to work.

Later SEOmoz realized that other businesses could benefit from the same tools and thus its membership site was born.

SEOmoz’s thoughts on the CRO process

Here’s a short video from SEOmoz’s CEO:

A video of SEOmoz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, describing the project.

Will these techniques work on your website?

The results we achieved for SEOmoz were extreme; not all projects yield the same spectacular results. (To get an idea of the results we get, see our buzz page.)

Of course your business is unique. It’s for that reason that you should avoid adopting recommendations from web “gurus” who suggest you can install a magic button or other website gimmick and enjoy tremendous results.

Conversion rate optimization is not about gimmicks; it’s not even about tools. It’s about getting inside the heads of your visitors, understanding them, and then aligning your offerings with their interests.

If you do that—no matter what your business is—we think you’ll be amazed at the results.

Our gift to you: a free annotated PDF of the winning SEOmoz page

If you’d like a screenshot of SEOmoz’s winning page, with loads of “tooltips” explaining, in detail, the persuasion techniques behind each page element, just sign up to our free newsletter. We’ll send you a copy of the PDF straight away. We reckon it’s going to be an eye-opener for you, revealing persuasive techniques you might otherwise have overlooked. Our newsletter goes out fairly infrequently, it contains truly valuable information, and you can easily unsubscribe whenever you wish (though few people ever do). You can get it here.

To get a free annotated PDF of the winning SEOmoz page, subscribe to our free newsletter.

Want more case studies like this?

If you would like to see more of our clients’ results, you can find a long list at our buzz page.

We plan to publish detailed case studies on several of them soon. If you’d like to be notified as they become available, join our free newsletter.

If you would rather find out right away how we might help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.

Thanks to SEOmoz

We’d like to thank Rand for allowing us to discuss the details of this project. We’d also like to thank the great SEOmoz staff who worked with us on this project: Scott Willoughby, Sarah Bird, Jeff Pollard, Matt Heilman, Sam Niccolls and Adam Feldstein. SEOmoz is highly successful for several reasons: They’re committed to creating a great product, they have a close relationship with their customers, they’re brave, and are willing to take action through experiments to improve not only their products but also their website.

If you think you could benefit from SEOmoz’s industrial-strength suite of SEO tools—or if you just want to see the winning page we developed for them—visit the SEOmoz PRO page.

The music industry can teach web marketers a valuable lesson about how to maximize conversions. If you’re looking at buying multivariate testing software, this article will help you put things into perspective.

As you probably already know, multivariate testing software (such as Google Website Optimizer) is software that tells you which version of your page generates the most conversions. There’s a two-step process:

Step 1—the Content Creator: Someone creates different versions of a page (or page element).

Step 2—the Scorekeeper: Multivariate testing software keeps score of which version generates the most conversions—and declares a winner once there’s enough data.

The software is an extremely valuable part of the process. Without a scorekeeper, you’d never know which version of the page to keep. However, some newcomers appear to be under the illusion that the software is almost magical—that it can create winning pages out of thin air. It’s not true.

To understand this point, think of how the music industry works:

Step 1—the Content Creator: The artist (such as Radiohead, Coldplay or Madonna) records and promotes a song.

Step 2—the Scorekeeper: A company (such as Billboard, Gallup or iTunes) keeps score of which songs have sold the most copies—then declares the winners (by publishing the pop charts).

Now, if you were a record label looking to create a hit song, you wouldn’t just ask the guy next door to record thousands of tunes, then throw them all at the charts, hoping for a winner. You’d be much better off relying on a fantastic recording artist. That’s because the first step—creating the content—is by far the most important step. That’s presumably why Polydor Records signed a £130m (US$204m) deal with U2.

The same principle applies to your web business: you’ll only get fantastic increases in profits if you make the right changes to your webpages.

Amazon.com agrees…

In other words, what matters is what you test.

Please don’t misunderstand us: we think multivariate testing software is essential for a web business. And there are some great solutions on the market—that’s why we created a free resource, Which Multivariate?, which makes it easy for you to choose which multivariate testing software is best for your needs.

Just don’t expect the software to be more than a highly sophisticated scorekeeper.

If you want help creating amazing content, you could do a lot worse than read our free reports.

Which should you use: the free Google Website Optimizer or a $50,000 alternative?

We’ve just launched a website that you’ll find really useful. It’s a comparison site for split testing software (like Google Website Optimizer). It allows you to…

• see the differences between 15 different multivariate testing software solutions (including Google Website Optimizer).
• read reviews from existing users (happy ones and unhappy ones), so you can see the truth behind the sales pitches.
• get a better understanding of what you’re missing out on.

So if you’d like to know which multivariate testing software is best for you, then hurry to … rabba dabba dabba dabba tish* …

Which Multivariate?

* That was supposed to be a drum roll.

Oh, and please don’t forget to come back here and leave your comments.

P.S. If you know anyone else who’d find this valuable, please could you spread the word?

At the start of 2009, Voices.com, one of the leading marketplaces for voice-over talent, began working with Conversion Rate Experts. The result? Their conversion rate increased by over 400%—from less than 5% to 22%.

How we got those improvements

The most important part of any project is the exploratory work that occurs at the beginning; in FORTUNE’s article about us, they described this stage as the “detective work.” (One of our consultants describes it, rather unglamorously, as “dumpster-diving for details.”) Our in-depth analysis of Voices.com included the following:

• We studied Voices.com’s analytics account to understand which components of the sales funnel contained the biggest opportunities for improvement.
• We analyzed 510 visitor surveys to understand the mindset of those who arrived at the Voices.com site but didn’t ultimately subscribe.
• We studied all of Voices.com’s sales literature, and interviewed the company’s CEO in an effort to identify all of the company’s “persuasion assets.” This is a term we use to describe those assets of a company that would be likely to impress the prospect. Persuasion assets can come in many forms, and we’ve discovered valuable overlooked persuasion assets in the businesses of every client we’ve ever worked with.
• We analyzed Voices.com’s competitors’ websites to understand the strategies they were using, and what the opportunities were for positioning Voices.com against them.

Once we understood the prospects’ main objections, and what could be done to overcome them, we created new test pages.

Here are a few things that gave us quick wins

The 400% increase was obtained from a total of eleven experiments, which we carried out at five different stages of the conversion funnel. Some of the changes we made were very specific to Voices.com’s business, but others tend to work for most businesses. Here are the ones that are likely to be applicable to your business, regardless of what type of business you have:

1. Finding and communicating proof

Adding proof to the homepage had a significant effect: Voices.com had some impressive “claims to fame” that could really influence prospective customers, but which weren’t clearly communicated on the website. For example, it transpired that Voices.com’s customers included many household names:

2. Segmenting (by visitor type or by visitor intention)

The site had two distinct types of visitor: (i) voice-over artists, and (ii) companies looking for voice-over artists. There was a great benefit from immediately and clearly segmenting these types of visitor into separate conversion funnels.

3. Demonstration videos

Often, the biggest obstacle facing a prospect is that they don’t understand what they are about to sign up for. Voices.com overcame this obstacle by adding clearly communicated demonstration videos.

4. Hidden opportunities in the sales funnel

Once you’ve increased the conversion rate of one section of your sales funnel, it’s important that you take a “50,000 ft view” of the business, to look for new opportunities that have arisen as a result of the improvement.

Many clients expect us to work only on their landing pages, and are surprised that we analyze the whole customer journey—from the initial ads to the retention of long-term customers—in order to identify opportunities. For one client, we identified an opportunity for offline marketing, and devised a hugely successful direct mail campaign; for another, we identified an opportunity for viral growth, and implemented a tell-a-friend program that became one of their top sources of business.

Once we had increased the conversion rate of Voices.com’s sales funnel, we identified that there was a big opportunity for email marketing. We then designed a hugely successful email marketing campaign for increasing their lifetime customer value.

Handy lessons

• Find out why customers aren’t converting; don’t just guess. If you don’t know what their objections are, your chances of overcoming them are very slim.
• Don’t “hide your light under a bushel.” If your company is the best at something—and if you have proof—make certain the proof is prominently placed on your website.
• Consider segmenting your visitors. How do you know whether to segment visitors? If your most common “visitor intentions” can’t be addressed with the same message, you should segment them. Similarly, if you have more than one type of visitor, and they can’t all be served by the same message, you’ll probably have to segment them. Beware that segmentation can create a lot of extra work, so only do it if you absolutely have to.
• People don’t buy what they don’t understand. Clearly explain your service, so the prospect is more likely to feel in control and take action.
• Sometimes video is the best medium for explaining things—and for providing proof. Web video needn’t cost a lot, as we’ll reveal soon (subscribe to our newsletter to receive details). Screen capture videos can easily be carried out using Camtasia (for PC) or Screenflow (which is our preferred option for Mac).

Some of the tools we used

• For running split tests and multivariate tests, we used Google Website Optimizer.
• To better understand how users interacted with the website, we used Crazy Egg.
• We identified user experience issues by commissioning usability tests from UserTesting.com.
• The videos were hosted with YouTube. (Here’s a great guide for advanced YouTube techniques.)
• We analyzed survey feedback to understand visitor intent and to identify common questions and objections. We use many survey tools, including Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo (We’d highly recommend Survey Gizmo.)

Have you tested audio yet?

We were customers of Voices.com three years before they became a client of ours. In 2006, we managed to get a double-digit increase in conversion for one of our clients by adding an auto-playing audio message, which was recorded by a voice-over artist we discovered from Voices.com. Good voice-over artists are like good graphic designers—they make your company seem extremely professional. They can be particularly useful for tutorial videos, for auto-playing audio messages, or even for automated telephone systems (IVRs).

If you haven’t already used Voices.com, it’s one of the most pleasant tasks you’ll ever carry out as web marketer. You just paste your text into Voices.com’s window, then, within hours, you’ll receive loads of audition recordings from voice-over artists. You then play the role of Simon Cowell, deciding which of the voice-overs is the best. (To get in character, you might even decide to pull your trousers up to your rib cage.)

You can host the audio easily using Xiosoft Audio.

Learn more

David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.com, described the process as being a “fascinating and profitable experience.” Watch this video to learn more…

A video of Voices.com CEO, David Ciccarelli, describing the project.

We’d like to thank David for sharing this case study. If you think you’d benefit from adding nicely-spoken audio to your website, visit Voices.com.

Will these techniques work on your website?

A 400% increase is extreme; not all experiments yield the same spectacular results. However, we’re using these techniques every day, and we’d expect at least some of them to be valuable to your business.

Want more case studies like this?

If you want to see more of our clients’ results, our buzz page contains a big list of them. We’ll be publishing detailed case studies of some of them soon. If you want to be notified when they’re ready, join our mailing list.

If you’d like to hear how we can help your company to increase its conversion rate, get in touch with us.

How do you persuade your prospects of the quality of your product? Use this strategy: Show the work that went into creating the product.

This can take two forms:

1. Show the work that went into inventing the product

2. Show the work that goes into creating each individual product.

For example, if you were selling Rolex watches, you could tell the story of how the watch was designed, or you could describe the painstaking process by which each individual watch is manufactured. Or you could do both.

How this technique was used to sell beer 100 years ago

The advertising legend Claude Hopkins used this strategy to revolutionize the sales of Schlitz beer in the early 1900s. He did so simply by being the first to describe how beer was made. He toured Schlitz’s operations and noted down all the aspects of their process that he found interesting. In particular, he highlighted those that supported Schlitz’s main claim, that their beer was pure. The campaign was a huge success. Within a few months, Schlitz went from fifth place to being joint-first in the market.

Even if you’ve heard the story before, you probably haven’t seen any of Hopkins’ ads. Here’s one of them:

Apparently, the techniques he describes in the ad were common to many beers; Hopkins was simply the first to mention them, thereby implying that the techniques were unique to Schlitz.

How Apple is using this technique to sell laptops

Hopkins’ ads now look comically out of date, but the technique is still as fresh as a daisy. Here’s a fantastic modern-day equivalent—the following video shows the work that went into creating the body of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptop:

(You only need to watch the first three minutes of the video.)

If you’re too busy to watch it—and we recommend you do—here’s what happens: Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design passionately describes, and shows, how the body of each MacBook Pro laptop is carved from a single block of metal. According to Apple, this increases the reliability and robustness of the laptop, and allows it to be lighter and smaller. It’s a brilliantly persuasive piece of marketing.

Unlike in the Schlitz example, Apple’s manufacturing techniques do appear to be unique to Apple, which makes the video even more effective.

At Conversion Rate Experts, we have had great success with this technique, having incorporated it into winning webpages for clients in weight loss, B2B products and health supplements, and achieving conversion improvements of 67%, 101% and 114%, respectively.

Why does it work?

This strategy works for several reasons:

1. It adds credibility to your claims. When you describe the work that went into creating a product, you are providing supporting evidence for the product’s features. Many breweries were claiming that their beer was pure, but Schlitz was the first to give justification as to why its beer was pure.

2. It is concrete. People struggle to think in terms of abstract concepts. “Pure” is a vague abstract concept, whereas “beer being dripped over frigid pipes in a plate-glass room” is concrete.

3. It tells a story. People respond well to stories. Stories can be considered to be the “native programming language” of the human brain.

4. It gives you something new to say. In some mature markets, it’s hard to think of anything new that can be said about a product.

5. It gives you something to say when the product’s benefits or features are not easily discernible. If you’re selling bottled water or luxury watches, it’s hard for the prospect to discern the benefits—and the benefits themselves aren’t even particularly interesting. The background story can be the most compelling aspect of the product. This leads us to…

6. It can give “romance” to the product. People love to associate objects with romantic pasts. For example, which guitar player would not like to play Jimi Hendrix’s guitar? Don’t underestimate the power of romance in your copy, particularly if you’re selling something that doesn’t have many logical benefits.

So, how can you use this strategy?

• List the main benefits of your product.
• Presumably, you go to extreme lengths to create these benefits. Would your prospects be impressed if they could see the work that went into creating the product or service?
• Remember, you are likely to underestimate your own achievements. Even if a technique is commonplace, it may still be impressive to your prospects.
• Bring your process to life. Tell the story. Feature the people who worked on it—and show the passion behind it.
• Be highly specific: Lexus is smart to say its Certified Pre-Owned cars go through a “rigorous 161-point checklist,” rather than just saying “a rigorous screening process”.

When will this strategy not work?

Clearly, this strategy will only work to support a particular claim. If Apple’s prospects didn’t care about quality and elegance, the video would have no effect on their behavior. If a particular prospect was a PC user, and their main objection was that they didn’t want to learn a new operating system, the video would not affect conversion.

Do you have other great examples of this strategy?

If you know of any inspirational examples of how this strategy has been used, please add them to the comments fields below.

P.S. If you didn’t read this article out loud, you missed out on saying the word “Schlitz’s”.

Here’s a strange prediction from Google’s Chief Economist: “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.”

That quote came from a recent New York Times article, which is about the rapidly increasing demand for statisticians.

He’s talking about you, conversion fans. You may not think of yourself as being a statistician—you may not have it written on your business card—but if you’re basing your marketing on data, not on whims, you are already one of the new wave.

We may be in the minority now, but someday all marketing will be carried out this way.

Another article, published by Wired magazine earlier this year, describes how Google’s business models have evolved. Here’s a great quote from the Wired article:

“Hal Varian [Google's Chief Economist] believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it’s all about harnessing supply and demand. “What’s ubiquitous and cheap?” Varian asks. “Data.” And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices—decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math.”

Hal is a fantastically insightful guy—and, of course, he has the benefit of sitting at the cutting edge of innovation. So his advice is worth taking.

Here are a few things that any web business can do now to benefit from this approach:

• Start making decisions based on data, not on opinion.
• Get analytics set up well, so you really know which pages, products, acquisition sources, etc, your money is coming from. Knowledge really is power (and profit).
• Start carrying out split tests (A/B tests or multivariate tests) on different aspects of your business.
• Create a culture in which people are rewarded for carrying out tests, and not punished for making mistakes.

This might sound like a lot of work. In fact, it’s really liberating. Imagine being able to end long debates with “let’s test it and see who’s right”. Imagine being able to make business decisions based on insight that your competitors don’t have. And imagine never taking a step wrong, because every decision you make is tested, so you almost-immediately know whether it was the right thing to do or not.

So, that’s today’s word of the day: datarati.

If you missed it when it came out, the Wired magazine article is particularly worth reading: it’s here.