Rose wasn’t wrong. We now have over a million apps that allow us to take pictures, watch movies, read books, play games, go shopping and conduct business all on one device. In 2012, mobile platforms generated $30 billion dollars worldwide. This includes revenue earned from paid apps, microtransactions, and advertisements served in-app.

Mobile apps as a standalone venture

Do most apps succeed? As a standalone business, the answer is undoubtedly, “No.” Google and Apple give their own in-house apps the highest amount of exposure in their respective marketplaces. For everyone else, it’s a zero-sum game. For example, if someone is willing to pay for one fitness app, they’re unlikely to pay for its competitor as well. Meanwhile, the top ten independent apps earn millions of dollars for its developers. However, the majority of second tier apps earn some money, (thought not enough to sustain a business), and the rest leave their developers high and dry.

Mainstream media outlets often tout headline stories like 17 year old wunderkind Nick D’Aloisio selling his Summly app  to Yahoo for an estimated $30 million and Finnish game publisher Supercell generating millions of dollars everyday through its mobile games.

But for every success story there are thousands of entrepreneurs who crash and burn with their mobile offerings. Additionally, independent software developers are at the mercy of app marketplaces like the App Store and Google Play who require their stamp of approval on every app before allowing it in their mobile stores. Adding injury to insult, Apple and Google don’t hesitate to pull “problematic” apps from their platforms, often for arbitrary reasons, which effectively kills any chance these apps may have had for success.

If an app somehow manages to earn a spot into one of these stores, it’s competing with thousands of competitors who offer their apps for little to no charge. Of course, if the app manages to climb to the top of the lists and users start downloading paid versions, there’s always the 30 percent commission to shell out to the hosts for each paid download or in-app purchase.

In short, the proceeds from a standalone app are rarely worth the time necessary to develop and bring it to market.

Mobile apps as a supplemental offering

It’s different for companies that already produce a viable on-premise or SaaS solution. Mobile apps are not their core offering and therefore are not a make-it or break-it proposition. But smartphone and tablet adoption is growing significantly in both mature and emerging markets, especially with younger demographics. Because of this evolution, mobile apps can play an important role in advancing a company’s value today and tomorrow.

In order to capitalize on the mobile market, software vendors must understand their target audience. It’s clear that users like free apps. And that’s okay. Companies can use free apps to increase exposure and grow their user base.

Some apps have a broad appeal and can be used to generate profit. With strategic marketing, these apps can be priced low because they will attract a large following willing to submit payment for them.

Then there are the premium niche apps. These won’t attract a large following, so they must occupy a higher price point in order to generate profitable revenue.

There are three main ways for vendors to extract monetary value from their apps:

• Paid downloads
• In-app purchases like virtual goods or additional features
• Serving ads

However, none of this factors in the costs of creating, marketing, and sustaining an app. The Forrester graphic below illustrates the hidden, but primary issues that accompany mobile app development, the least of which is designing the app.

Source: Forrester Research, February 2013 “2013 Mobile Trends For eBusiness Professionals”

Mobile app vs mobile site

There is another way to tap into the mobile market. After Grooveshark was removed from the Android market for the umpteenth time, they decided to stop trying to win at someone else’s game. Like Captain Kirk with the Kobayashi Maru, Grooveshark decided to change the rules. Instead of offering a third-party app on someone else’s platform, they built an HTML5 site that mimicked the functionality of their original Android app. Now users can still enjoy access to this software on their mobile devices just by pointing their browser to html5.grooveshark.com.

HTML5 Grooveshark

For software companies that don’t want to depend on the approval process or the fees associated with selling apps through the App Store or Google Play (or Amazon Appstore or Windows Phone Store) an HTML5 site might be the right direction to go in. Since access to the software doesn’t reside on the mobile hardware itself, users can simply bookmark the site on their browsers or create a shortcut on their interface.

The Life stages of the software industry

Here are the life stages of the software industry: On-premise software is a mature technology. SaaS is in its adolescent stage. Mobile is an infant and wearable is incubating. Focusing on mobile, when smartphones and tablets began to proliferate, the experts said that mobile computing was good for consumption but not for production. In other words, you couldn’t get any work done from your iPhone. As technology evolves so does the business case for mobile apps, even for enterprise software. Just make sure to proceed with an understanding of the costs involved.

Keystone: Combined with an on-premise or SaaS product, a mobile app could differentiate you from your competitors, create a unique value for your customers, generate more users and revenue and reduce customer churn.

The following infographic comes from Sample Forms. It deals with optimizing form data in a way that encourages visitors to fill in registration forms, which improves submission and conversion rates. It focuses on the mindset of the majority of visitors, the optimal form length and design, use of social media logins and other miscellaneous improvements.

Some facts to consider:

• Registration forms interrupt the checkout process and lead to cart abandonment
• Customers are weary of creating more passwords
• Reducing the amount of fields in a registration form increases conversions

Sample Forms

We also noted that mobile use will be a huge factor in e-commerce for the coming year. As B2B buyers increasingly become mobile shoppers, B2B software companies find themselves facing another optimization challenge.

The problem of immediacy and convenience in a mobile setting leads 52% of users to say that a bad mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company.

Putting these two trends together, creative agency Scott Design made the following infographic, showing how business customers use mobile for their business needs.

B2B Mobile Use via Hot Design

There are three key takeaways for vendors of B2B software:

1. It’s important to keep an eye toward the future. Within the next few years, mobile Internet use for business will grow exponentially from 4% to 16%. The time to test and optimize is now.

2. Over 30% of US decision makers read B2B content on mobile devices. Again, the time to test and optimize is now.

3. When a site is optimized for mobile users, those users are 67% more likely to buy the product or service.

Most people want the Internet experience on their mobile devices to mirror the ease and efficiency they experience on their desktop or laptop. This is especially true in e-commerce. If you sell software online, you have to be thinking about the best ways to structure and guide the mobile experience for your audience.

Tell us what you think the key takeaways are in the comment section.

However, by providing customers with certain key resources and crucial pieces of information, businesses can prevent the problems that cause customers to contact support teams in the first place, thereby reducing contact rates and increasing customer satisfaction.

Sofa vs. Software

If I buy a sofa at Overstock.com, I’ll need information that allows me to track the delivery of the product, but I won’t need any instruction on how to access or use the product: It goes in the living room and I sit on it.

Digital products are different. They are delivered immediately to the buyer, but download and installation processes are often complex, even overwhelming, to some users. The order confirmation page is the perfect place to address these concerns and others.

9 Critical Elements of a Confirmation Page

1. Order completed- As a former customer service representative, I can personally attest to the fact that many customers who arrive on a confirmation page and are uncertain whether or not there is anything else they have to do to complete the order. But on it’s most basic level, a confirmation page’s entire purpose is to do just that. A good example of a confirmation page that clearly shows the order is completed is from ashampoo, who use breadcrumbs at the top of the page.

ashampoo confirmation page

2. Say thank you – Your mother taught you this when you were young: When someone does you a favor, you say, “Thank you.” In a sense, every paying customer is doing you a favor – they’re allowing you stay in business, and that favor should be acknowledged. It would take too long to explain the psychology behind the power of these two little words, but suffice to say,”thank-you’s” go a long way in maintaining relationships. Subscription companies especially, who depend on reducing churn rate, need to make sure the confirmation page is the first (though not the last) place in which they thank customers for their business. Uniblue is one of the many companies who include a thank-you at the top of the confirmation page.

Uniblue Confirmation Page

3. Browsers close, but an email is forever – The confirmation page is first displayed in the customer’s web browser. For many reasons, the customer will need to refer to the confirmation page at a future time, well after the browser has been closed: Maybe they aren’t ready to download and install the product just yet, or maybe they need the receipt for later on. It’s a best practice therefore, to send an email version of the confirmation page. However, sending an email isn’t helpful if the customer can’t find it. That is why it is also necessary to remind the customer to white-list your company’s domain name and to check their spam filters in the event they cannot find the confirmation email. Here is an example from Malwarebytes:

Malwarebytes confirmation page

4. Contact methods - No matter how many precautions you take, some customers are going to need more care than others. It’s why every business has a customer support team. The key here is not to make customers hunt around your website for contact information. Provide a toll-free number and an email address that the customer can use to contact you about the order. If you’ve got live chat capabilites, make sure its known right off the bat, like Zeobit does. And, of course, always include a reference number the customer can use when asking questions about their order.

ZeoBIT Confirmation Page

5. Product Information & Payment Method – The confirmation page needs to confirm which product was bought and how it was paid for. These two should be obvious, but they go on the list because they’re an absolute necessity. Also make sure to include a downloadable PDF version of a receipt, as some customers may require this. And just in case your customers are not as tech savvy as the rest of us, provide a link to download a free PDF reader like Adobe.

6. Download Link  – As we explained above, digital products are delivered a little differently than a sofa, for example. The confirmation page not only confirms the customer’s purchase, it provides access to the product itself. The download link is important because A.) You should not assume the customer already downloaded the product through a trial version, and B.) The customer might need to download the product onto a different machine later on.

7. Entitlement – This is the license or activation key. It should be accompanied by very clear instructions on how to properly activate the product. Don’t forget the copy and paste instructions – I can’t tell you how many customers I have encountered who are unfamiliar with this process. It is also helpful to supply a link to a knowledge-base on your site that includes some common issues faced by your customers during the installation. Parallels is a company that provides this type of important information on the confirmation page.

Parallels Confirmation Page

8. Refund policies - Whether you have liberal or conservative refund policies, making those policies clear in the confirmation page can prevent a lot of customer and employee frustration in the long run. If customers are allowed to request a refund at any time, let them know it. If they only have 30 days to do so, let them know that as well.

ashampoo Confirmation Page

9. Subscriptions & Cancellation Options – Customers can become upset if their credit cards are unexpectedly charged, and rightfully so. For subscription products, the confirmation page should make it clear at what intervals and for what amount the customer will be charge by subscribing to the product. Make it as easy as possible for customers to cancel if they need to.

Uniblue Confirmation Page

Preventive Care

It is useful to think of the confirmation page as preventive care, the things a patient should know and do to avoid a visit to the doctor’s office. All the above best practices should be in place in order to prevent customer contacts. Not because you don’t value your customers and don’t want to hear from them. Rather, these elements are in place precisely because you care for your customers and want them to have the smoothest experience possible with your company.

Keystone: Confirmation pages are an excellent way to effectively assist customers with minimal effort. The payoff of a well-designed confirmation page is reduced contact rates and more satisfied customers.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Tell us your critical confirmation page elements in the comment section. We’d love to hear your input.

HTML5 provides many benefits to web designers. For example, the canvas tag lets you create dynamic graphics with a scripting language. The video and audio tags make it easier to integrate rich media onto your site, removing the need for users to download third party software like Flash, Windows Media Player or QuickTime in order to see videos or listen to audio. Furthermore, HTML5 is free where Adobe’s Flash development kit costs several hundreds of dollars.

Another major benefit of HTML5 functionality is that it can collect data from WiFi towers and GPS for geolocation, an important step in displaying international pricing to regional customers. It also caches a site’s files locally, providing access to content even when there is no internet connection. This functionality gives developers more control over how applications behave offline and speeds up load times in subsequent visits.

However, the current state of affairs isn’t all puppy dogs and sweet smelling roses, and you don’t want to fall prey to the ease of development. While HTML5 makes fancy web development a whole lot easier than in the past, browser support is not quite there. As the infographic shows, not one of the major browsers provide full support for all of the HTML5 capabilities.

Therefore, you’ll still need to support legacy browsers based on your typical site visitor’s profile. If your product targets iPhone and iPad users, HTML5 is the way to go. If the majority of your traffic is stuck using IE6, you’ll have to design with those users in mind. The ability to create slick, interactive design elements and deploy them quickly is offset by the fact that only a small portion of your traffic can view those elements.

The key here, as it often is, is to know your audience.

Connect with Elan:

We asked you to imagine this sort of behavior happening at your local grocery store. What if visitors spent 20 minutes shopping in the aisles of a store, placing items in their cart, lining up for the checkout and then suddenly run out the door, abandoning the cart in the middle of the checkout line? What scared them away?

This week’s E-commerce Eye Candy continues our exploration into shopping cart abandonment with an infographic called Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics by the Website Optimization company Invesp.

Here are the notables:

How is the average cart performing?

Conversion rates for all online traffic are a tiny bit above 2%. Cart abandonment rate hovers just around 66%, while the average online order is $116.58. It’s important to keep in mind that a B2C company’s average cart value may be much lower, but their customers will have a shorter buy cycle, which means a greater amount of total orders. A B2B cart may typically have a higher cart value, but the buy cycle is longer and orders may be fewer relative to the B2C cart.

Why do online shoppers change their minds and abandon cart?

44% of web buyers who abandon cart do so because of high shipping costs. This might be less of an issue for software merchants, as most digital products are delivered electronically through email or, in the case of SaaS products, accessed through the cloud. But if you cross-sell a physical product like a backup CD, consider incorporating shipping costs into the price of the cross-sell and highlight an offer for free shipping. SaaS companies may find difficulty in incorporating physical cross-sells, though some digital games companies like Zynga have been able to do so. As always, take advantage of multi-variate testing to ensure that your price points and marketing message are optimized.

What is one thing I can change to optimize my checkout process?

This piece of advice applies to most checkouts, even those with just one or two steps: Make sure to display the visitor’s progress along the way. Letting the customer know how many steps are involved at each stage of the checkout process creates a sense of certainty for the customer which makes the process clearer and smoother.

Enjoy the rest of the infographic, and let us know about your interest in shopping cart abandonment in the comment section below

Infographic by – Website Optimization Company Invesp

I learned that many companies violate usability best practices in terms of:

• The length of their checkout process
• Account registrations
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Address validations

I noticed that most of the websites in this report sold physical products and the only pure software companies featured in the report were Symantec (which offers a traditional on-premise software) and Ancestry.com (which offers a SaaS product). This blog post shows the report’s highlights and extrapolates lessons for the software world.

Is your checkout process too long?

Beach Body LLC uses a one-step checkout process that includes product information, price, payment information, access to account information and shipping address on one page. Apple on the other hand, has all this information laid out for customers in seven separate pages.

What is the optimal length of a checkout process? Beach Body thrives on a short checkout process while Apple thrives on a longer one.

If you currently use a multiple-step checkout processes and you need to bump up conversions, I suggest performing multivariate tests with simpler checkout processes and vice versa – if you use a single or two-step checkout process maybe customers find your cart too cluttered and busy. Try testing out a longer, but clearer path to conversion.

Customer confusion is the one thing you absolutely want to avoid. Many B2C customers are not as cyber savvy as someone who lives and breathes technology, so “clarity” should always trump “cool.”

B2B customers may need additional support, and the experience of being guided through an important purchase with a step-by-step approach is more appropriate for them.

If you want to find out what really works for your customers, don’t be afraid to perform multivariate tests on your checkout process.

Do you require account registration?

Consider this: If I lived in a neighborhood with two malls close to my house, one which required me to become a member before I could buy anything and one which let me enter and buy without becoming a member, I would likely choose the latter.

But what if the first mall had better quality products and cheaper prices, and the only barrier to membership was my name and contact information? The first mall’s membership policy is no longer too cumbersome. The second mall’s laissez-faire entrance policy is also not advantageous enough to outweigh the benefit of the better selection and prices of the first mall. Think Walmart vs. Sam’s Club.

An account creates a central location for every customer’s order and product information, and is beneficial to them. Without accounts, customers would have to manage their own data. For consumers, it’s a relief to know that the merchant is handling the storing and organization of their information.

But online shoppers shop at many stores, and keeping track of every account is difficult. The experience of trying to recall this information on demand can lead to confusion, frustration and ultimately cart abandonment.

Don’t make customers create an account or login before purchasing. Rather, use customer information from the checkout process to create an account on the customer’s behalf. The account information can be presented on the customers confirmation page, thus providing them a useful account without disrupting their shopping experience.

If you already have an extensive customer account section, be sure that your e-commerce system is tied tightly via single sign-on technology.

Is your newsletter opt-in or opt-out?

One important finding from Baymard’s usability tests is that users often equate newsletters with spam. Despite your marketing department’s best efforts, shoppers sometimes do not care for the content created on their behalf.

Yet, according to the Ecommerce Blog by Shopify, newsletters can be useful for:

• Capturing new leads
• Communicating with current customers
• Positioning yourself as an industry expert
• Nurturing leads until they become customers

If you are going to offer newsletters, it is important to test the efficacy of offering opt-in and opt-out.

First measure how well your newsletters are performing against the goals you’ve set. Then route half your visitors to a cart where your newsletter is opt-out and and half your visitors to a cart where your newsletter is opt-in.

Whichever cart performs better is the right way to go.

Is your address validation confusing buyers?

Software companies seem to have little reason to worry about address verification. After all, most of your products are delivered electronically.

However, even software companies ship physical products in the form of backup CDs. Further, banks and card issuers will offer fee reductions to companies that collect important pieces of data like ZIP codes, which goes a long way toward fraud prevention.

These are only several reasons why it is important to make sure your customers are providing correct information. The only caveat to this practice is that it is equally important not to prevent customers from completing an order if they insist they are providing correct shipping information.

It’s all about abandondment.

The average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce sites is around 66%. That means 66% of the people who found your product and decided to buy it experienced a sudden change of heart during the checkout process.

Imagine if this sort of behavior happened at your local grocery store. What if visitors spent 20 minutes shopping in the aisles of a store, placing items in their cart, lining up for the checkout and then suddenly run out the door, abandoning the cart in the middle of the line.

Keystone: A clear, well-designed checkout process is crucial to your conversion rate. Perform testing to determine which elements are leading to success and which elements are leading to abandonment.

We learned in our interview with Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization, that landing pages are the testing ground for conversion rate optimziation (CRO).

Landing pages are where customers decide whether they have any interest in becoming a user of your product, and they require important decisions about layout and calls-to-action (CTA). Because it’s hard to hit the bull’s eye on the first try, landing pages require planning, experimentation and testing to prove their efficiency.

Pardot: The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages

This Pardot infographic, titled The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages, breaks down the successful B2B landing page into four complex elements:

1. The design of the page – Important components of a well designed landing page include color and style consistency. Companies should also reduce options to navigate away from the page as much as possible.
2. The design of the form the visitor fills out – Fields should be reduced to essentials, and redirects to other webpages should be avoided. Focus on capturing emails instead, because emails are better for relationship building than simple redirects.
3. Provide value – Make sure the visitor feels rewarded for supplying personal information.
4. Analyze & revise – In other words, know what you want to accomplish with your landing page. For B2C companies, your goal might be a quick cart conversion. For many B2B companies, the sales cycle is inherently longer and a landing page might be the first step in a long relationship.

We would love to hear you tell us about your own personal “Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages.”

Use the comment section to tell us your success stories or any cautionary tales you have about landing page optimization.

The image below is the complete infographic from Pardot.

This is the second, and final part of our conversation with Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

In this part, we learn about global scalibility, conversion optimization for SaaS/subscription products and what it means to be a recovering technologist.

BK: Software and digital goods lend themselves to a global scale. What do companies need to be aware of regarding optimization when they’re selling in multiple countries, in multiple languages, with multiple currencies and design styles?

Tim: You have to look to see if each market is big enough, and you need to treat them completely separate. Ideally, you can do all this on a single platform, but you can’t just carbon copy what you do in one country and expect it to work in another. Even with payment methods; people don’t use credit cards in certain countries, they pay with direct debit. Or they’re uncomfortable sending payments online at all and so you have to have alternative payment methods.

There are also cultural differences in terms of color preferences and how cluttered websites can be and still be effective. There are also very specific messaging differences. George Bernard Shaw once joked about England and America as two countries dividing by a common language. There are a lot of Englishisms, Australianisms or New Zealandisms, that don’t make sense in the US and vice versa. So you have to have somebody who has cultural competence write the copy. Don’t rely on direct translation from one to the other.

BK: How would a company with a global audience proceed? What advice would you give to people who want to make sure that all of their different microsites and shopping carts are aligned with different kinds of regions?

Tim: No. Try one country and establish the beachhead, get it right. You might start essentially with a copy of what you have in your home country and test different language messaging and calls-to-action. The testing is important because we try to make things easier on ourselves by making a lot of assumptions. We don’t even realize those assumptions are built into our cultures, but they’re there nevertheless.

BK:  We work a lot with SaaS and subscription products and  feel more and more software developers are moving in that direction. As companies are focusing less on that initial conversion rate and more on reducing churn rate, what should a SaaS company be doing differently than a company that relies on a one-time sale?

Tim: There are a couple things. You have to make it really easy for me to pay. The highest level of permission in Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” book is called “i.v. permission” where you can put a tube in my bank account and suck money out at will. Sometimes you have situational permission and other lower forms of permission.

But the power of that subscription model is that once you get the right to ding my credit card so often, customers stop thinking about it. It becomes “out of sight out of mind”. They may not be thinking about the value they get every day as long as the pain threshold of how much money that’s taken is low enough, so you can extract a lot more than on a single sale.

I want to shout-out to Anne Holland (editor of WhichTestWon.com) for putting together a great site called Subscription Site Insider, which is there to help companies optimize their subscription best practices. We work with them on the conversion part of that. It’s a great way to get more money than a single sale.

The problems of course come in mostly around billing. Should you do it monthly? Annually? What happens to expiring cards? How do you reactivate people?

BK: We read an interview where you described yourself as a recovering technologist. What has had a bigger impact on your perspective of what makes a great website? Is it the experiences you’ve had or what you’ve learned formally? I think both are necessary to internet marketing success. And all my subsequent marketing experience bears that out. The internet’s very quantifiable and you want to have a very nuanced understanding of the numbers and whether something is working and moving the needle.

Tim: That is a tough one to unravel. Looking back on the larger arc of my professional life to date, I came to the University of California San Diego and got a full UC Regents Scholarship and had dual majors. One was cognitive science, studying the brain, and the other was computer engineering. I jokingly called these hardware and wetware.

At the same time, a lot of this stuff cannot be reduced to hard numbers and you need the inspiration for what to do, is going to come from creative sources, so I would say that I was perfectly prepared for my career. It just took me 25 years to realize it.

BK: Is there anything else you would like to share about the book?

Tim: I’d say that books are wonderful and this one contains lot of our distilled experiences as an agency. But if you’d really like to drink from the fire hose, come to one of our upcoming Conversion Conference events. We now have three a year (East, West and Midwest), and two in Europe: Germany and London. It’s a great way to meet your peers, learn from some of the best minds in the industry, and feel part of a community of conversion optimizers.

Tim Ash

Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.

Over the past 15 years, Tim has helped hundreds of US and international brands improve their web-based initiatives, including Canon, Google, Expedia, CBS, Sony Music, Facebook, Nestle, Verizon Wireless, Texas Instruments, Cisco, and Coach. 

Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and the chairperson of Conversion Conference  - a worldwide conference series focused on improving online conversions.  He has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates, and he is the host of the Landing Page Optimization podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

If you missed it, you can read the first part here.

 

 

Tim Ash

If you’re looking for insight and practical advice that will help you improve conversion rates, you’ve landed on the right page. Tim Ash recently published the second edition to his opus, “Landing Page Optimization,” the seminal work on improving website performance.

We had the opportunity to interview Tim, which we have transcribed in two parts.

In part one you will learn about neuromarketing, “ugly babies,” conversion rate optimization for software merchants, and the value of the in-app conversion.

Building Keystones: Can you briefly explain what inspired you to write Landing Page Optimization and what is new in the second edition?

Tim Ash: Sure. Well, Wiley Press, which is a very established 200 year old publisher, came to me and asked me to write the book. It was one of those offers you can’t refuse. This is literally the first book on the subject of landing page optimization. At the time there were general persuasion books, psychology books, marketing books etc., but nothing that spoke to both the art and the science of making websites more efficient.

The second edition was four years in the making. Even though I tried to keep the book focused on durable content, people asked for more specific examples. The book was meant to be more of a strategic guide, but everyone wants those tactical nuggets they can put to work. So there are a lot of updated examples, a lot of very specific best practices for different situations.

BK: What is the biggest change in landing page optimization you have seen in the last four years?

Tim: I realized there was a giant gulf of ignorance out there among online marketers on what constitutes more traditional persuasion techniques, which is not really new stuff. Our brains haven’t changed at all, at least on an evolutionary time scale. But some people think that just because they’re now limited to 140 characters they need a new marketing strategy. It’s really not true. The message is still perceived through our brain and the question is how does one make effective use of new technology to speak to the old “wetware” in our heads?

So in the second book there is a lot more about neuromarketing and the reptilian brain, and the emotional part of your brain. Those are the parts that really make decisions for people. 95% of our decisions are unconscious or pre-conscious.

BK:  So it’s about understanding how the brain perceives things and catering decision making toward landing pages?

Tim: That’s right. The frontier now is neuromarketing and you can get real time imaging of someone’s brain as you show them different kinds of marketing stimuli. People can say one thing with their mouths, but their brain doesn’t lie when it’s showing a different thing altogether.

BK: In your book you talk about websites as “ugly babies” and how companies have difficulty admitting that their baby is ugly. How can landing page optimizers convince a team of executives that their website is that ugly baby?

Tim: It’s hard to tell your boss something like that directly. They need to hear it from somebody else. And you basically have two types of people you can turn to. One type is the objective, unbiased, completely disinterested users of your site. If you ever make executives watch a usability test of their website they’ll be shocked at how dysfunctional it really is.

Say you’re user-testing an e-commerce site. You see people fumbling around with the checkout processes or finding a product in the first place. You just watch them stumble around and the first time you go, “Oh. The users are making an obvious mistake.” And the second time somebody makes that mistake, “Two idiots in a row. How is that possible?” And the third time somebody makes the same mistake, “Well, maybe I’m the idiot because I didn’t design it well.”

Definitely listen to the voice of the customer with feedback and surveys. Record user sessions and user tests. There’s technology from companies like ClickTale and CrazyEgg that allows you to record a lot of detail on what users are doing on your site, even on mobile platforms recently.

The other way to influence your boss is turn to outside experts who have seen a lot of these problems before and can give you a quick diagnosis. They can have an interactive discussion about it with you. We have an inexpensive and hard-hitting service at SiteTuners called an Express Review. We record via online meeting an interactive session of us conducting a structured critique of a website or a landing page. And that can be shared with the rest of the team.

The situation is now some consultant telling the bosses that they’re doing something wrong, instead of you telling your boss that they’re doing something wrong.  And we’ve found that to be an effective way of saying the emperor has no clothes. It’s a structured review and we provide specifics to take back and say, “This is why it doesn’t work.”

BK: We talk primarily to an audience of software merchants. Do you think software or any kind of good delivered electronically should have a different strategy regarding landing page optimization versus physical goods.

Tim: Let me be clear on what I mean by “landing page optimization”. It’s an unfortunate term from the early days, and implies a stand-alone direct response page. The more common term you hear now is “conversion rate optimization”. I have a pretty broad definition in the book about what a landing page is. It’s not always necessarily just a stand-alone page. It could be a micro-site or a page on your corporate site, your homepage or a product page deeper on the site. Essentially, a landing page is any where significant traffic lands on the way to important conversion actions deeper in the site. And all of the pages from the entry point to the actual conversion action deeper in the site are ripe for optimization.

Regarding physical goods and downloadable stuff, I would say there are a lot of differences in the business model and the amount of risk. When someone sells physical goods, the visitors to the site are worried about all kinds of things (like clothing fit or build quality). For example I order a jacket but it’s just too light weight and flimsy when I actually put it on. Can I return it? Will I get charged for returning it? There are all kinds of things in traditional ecommerce that software vendors don’t have to deal with.

I think for the folks that are selling digital goods, especially software, dialing in the correct business model is critical. Is there a trial? How easy is it inside the software application to upsell users to the full version with expanded capabilities?

I think optimization depends on a combination of what happens on the site, the business model, as well as the in-application experience itself. A lot of conversions should be happening because they’re happy and satisfied with the use of your wonderful, intuitive software or package in the first place.

BK: So that in-app experience, do you think that’s different than going to a traditional website shopping cart?

Tim: Yes. There’s one project in particular that we did for a division of Symantec. In that case, conversion optimization depended on coordinating the experience for those who used the software because it was installed on the computer that they bought, those who were visiting the many different parts of the website etc., and all of that has to work in concert.

BJ Fogg keynoted our most recent San Francisco Conversion Conference. He says that in order to be effective, you have to put the right triggers in front of motivated people. So your users must be motivated to buy and have the ability to do so, but companies also need to place a trigger to get them to act. And you have a lot of opportunities to do that inside of a software application.

Users who bump up into certain limits in trial version are ripe for triggers: “Uh-oh! Can’t do that with the trial version! Would you like to upgrade to complete your action?”

Companies need to do that in a context of a user who is in the heat of the moment, when their reptilian brain is the one making decisions. Those nuanced experiences and those opportunities to put in the right triggers are more important than having the right headline on your landing page.

BK: And you consider understanding the user experience in different contexts as a part of optimization.

Tim: Right. So software sellers want to have a flexible environment to do landing page testing, website optimization, but I think that same flexibility needs to be built into the software. It’s so much easier to test and swap things out than with physical products. But if all the testing is tied to a software release cycle, then it’s going to takes several weeks to build something new into the application. Companies place themselves at a big competitive disadvantage because they cannot cycle through things quickly and try new things to improve in-app conversion.

Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.

Over the past 15 years, Tim has helped hundreds of US and international brands improve their web-based initiatives, including Canon, Google, Expedia, CBS, Sony Music, Facebook, Nestle, Verizon Wireless, Texas Instruments, Cisco, and Coach. 

Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and the chairperson of Conversion Conference  - a worldwide conference series focused on improving online conversions.  He has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates, and he is the host of the Landing Page Optimization podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.