Best practices for online form data capture

Lead capture forms need to minimise data collection, but of course you do need profiling info to qualify the lead so you can follow-up with relevant content or contacts. So it's difficult to get the balance right between sign-ups vs data collection for lead generation. Often this balance isn't right as analytics shows campaign targets are not attained with bounce rates too high.

The Marketing Ninja from Singlehop has produced what we think is a useful infographic summarising the issues to boost form conversion which collates different advice on best practice for increasing form conversion including how to test your form, which buttons to use and more.

 

To make this post more useful, we asked The Marketing Ninja for details of resources for form best practices so you can follow-up on…

What’s wrong with endless button colour testing?

Disclosure: We DO test buttons. Size, prominence, copy, positioning and very occasionally, colour. However, in many cases there are higher value tests that we could be running. There will almost always be constraints that limit the number of tests that you can run, based on design & developer effort, a limited number of conversions, limitations of your tools, etc. Therefore prioritising your tests is absolutely crucial. Where can you get the most bang for your buck? In this post I will share the most important things to consider when choosing what to test.

Selecting What to Test

If you've been working on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) projects for any length of time you'll know that there is a huge range of ways to capture insights on user behaviour. No matter which tools/techniques you use, here are the three…

New research shows effectiveness and best practices for CRO across 7 key CRO techniques

Do you know the RedEye annual Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) report? It has now been produced for 5 years in conjunction with Econsultancy. Since the name was changed it has been instrumental in encouraging adoption of CRO and highlighting best practices. The latest practices in CRO are shown by the infographic below which summarises the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO techniques. Use it to review your approach. Ask... 1. Does your company have someone responsible for CRO? Encouragingly, 79% of businesses do? 2. Is there a structured programme of testing and improvements? This is poor, only 26% of companies do suggesting defined responsibility doesn't mean there is a programme in place. 3. Are you using A/B testing? This is the most popular method of structured testing with prioritisation of tests important to success. 4. Should we run usability tests? It's rated as highly valuable by 55%,…

"The true price of free and cheap in A/B and Multivariate testing"

In this infographic, Maxymiser.com as a provider of a paid service are looking to educate marketers about the benefits of paid-for outsourced services for AB testing compared to Google's free Content Experiments tool (formerly Google Website Optimizer) or similar. It's an example of using an infographic to help position a service. We're including it since weighing up the costs-benefits of these services is an issue across these types of services listed at WhichMVT.com.

Their infographic shares advice on how to choose the right tool/software and compares managing MVT in-house vs managed services where experiments are designed and managed by the service provider. It also suggests the hidden costs if you manage a free or low-cost solution in-house.

'Clients using managed services or enterprise graded solutions, have experienced 6x more uplift in conversion than those using DIY testing programs'

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Blending personas and personalities to increase conversions in email marketing [Part 1]

It’s a well-known fact that some of the greatest results can be gained by combining personalisation and persuasive architecture to deliver what the customer wants. In this 2 part post I will look at approaches to leverage 2 types of buyer personas to use to increase conversions within your email marketing programme. When combining both of these buyer persona styles we’re ensuring that we deliver not only the copy, TOV, and offers/merchandise that our buyer wants and expects from us but we’re also delivering the experience that will enable them to convert according to their temperament. So let’s look at the two different types of Buyer Personas. For clarity's sake, I’m labelling them differently to how they’re labelled elsewhere: Persona: This addresses the motivation (i.e. what the buyer needs, what are their challenges and goals, what motivates them  etc) Personality: This addresses their temperament (i.e…

Some little-known tools and techniques we’ve used to grow our own business

When we began Conversion Rate Experts, we used a Prerequisite Tree like this to plan the stages of our growth. The technique was invaluable, and we have used it ever since. This blog post is a mix of great resources we’ve recently shared with each other (using Diigo) plus some tools and techniques that have been invaluable in helping us to grow our own business. We’ve been meaning to share them with you for a while. We hope you like them. A one-minute introduction to Scrum development (video) by Axosoft. We use Scrum, and find it very useful. You’ll probably find it useful too. If you can’t spare 10 minutes, just watch the final…

Culture and conversion Part 1 : 5 tips for designing for the culture of site visitors from different countries

Ever wondered why your baskets are bulging in Belgium but spring a leak in Spain? Why your checkouts are chock-a-block in Chile, but empty in Egypt?

Whether you are B2C or B2B business, cultural preferences play a big part in how people respond to your web design. This blog looks at how culture affects your online performance and what you can do to effectively manage an online presence globally.

'Just as nine-tenths of the iceberg is out of sight and below the water line, so is nine-tenths of culture out of conscious awareness. The out of awareness part of culture has been termed deep-culture.' – Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture

Managing Global web design assets

Managing global web design assets is not an easy task. No matter…

Examples of easily avoidable design mistakes which damage conversion

As grabbing the attention of customers online gets increasingly harder with so much distraction, competition and so many forms of communication on the internet alone, you may be left wondering how to develop your landing page into that gateway which will attract customers. Creating a landing page that boosts your conversion is vital, especially when you consider the fact it costs your business every time someone lands on the page - your main aim should be to overwrite that cost. If your landing page converts it should successfully engage your visitor and convince them to call-to-action, making them to do just one thing, and one thing only I always see a lot of advice online advising me what I should do to develop a lucrative landing page, but I barely ever see guidelines on what to avoid. With this in mind I have summarised what…

How Betfair used Persuasion Principles to increase conversions by 7%

The limited-choice days of consumers are long gone. Just a few clicks and you can have retailers lined up at your doorstep to deliver the product or offer the service you want. Such intense competition is probably the reason phrases like, 'persuasion tactics' are reiterated by people all around. But those who know how to put these theoretical 'tactics' into practice the right way are the real winners of the game. Our current case study also talks about one such winner. Betfair claims to be the world’s leading online betting exchange platform. Their business model is to allow bettors to set odds among themselves, which eliminates the need to have a traditional bookie. The site also offers a range of sports betting products, like poker and casino games, and much more. Business need? Attract traffic through various paid channels, like…

What is holding digital marketers back?

Did you know that Facebook got a massive 40% increase in ad sales worldwide with just a small change in wording. Instead of a call to action button 'advertise' they simply changed it to 'create an ad'. This was discovered by accident.

In France Facebook’s Translators had translated 'advertise' as 'créer un ad' or 'create an ad'. Sadly too much online testing is accidental rather than the result of rigorous testing.

Improving marketing with off-line and on-line testing

Offline and online testing is the best way to improve marketing results. And what marketer does not want to improve results?

Well, I would suggest that many online organisations are not taking testing seriously enough. For example, a recent survey of Digital Marketers by Adobe found that 49% of respondents said testing was not a priority and most companies spend less than 5% of their marketing budgets on testing…