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Discovering a Better Call To Action

Web professionals must always be concerned with achieving multiple objectives - that will never change. Drawing people towards a website and keeping them coming back are often what dominates the headlines, but driving consumers through a website and down the conversion funnel is where many should be spending their time instead. Effective calls to actions are of paramount importance in this process, so let’s look at how to discover and develop “better” calls to action.

A call to action is defined as any action which visitors can take to complete your selling process. In a perfect marketing world, calls to action would be so perfectly crafted that users have no choice but to do exactly what you tell them. The problem is most never reach that marketing nirvana. They remain mired in tradition ("buy now," "add to cart") or are not specific enough ("click here to order") to motivate a user to do anything out of the ordinary. When consumers are provided with information, they're able to make better buying decisions. So, why not give them the information they need to make better buying decisions, and buying from you ... right now!

So how does a Web professional accomplish that? The calls to action that consumers encounter online should couple an imperative verb with an implied benefit. For example, “buy now” contains no reference to the benefit consumers will receive by doing so, and neither does "add to cart." A better call to action alternative might be one of the following:

* Buy Now & Save on Shipping
* Add to Cart – Save 10% Today

The question to ask when looking at your existing calls to action include:

* whether the call to action is present at all;
* if it is placed within the active window;
* whether text calls are used along with image calls

There are some basic ways to review the effectiveness of the calls to action currently deployed on your website. While there is no substitute for testing different variations of landing pages and the specific calls to action for your own offers, taking even a cursory look could reveal where improvements are possible.

Here are a few different items to test with your calls to action:

* Test the wording of both the button image and the text link, and ask what or where the implied benefit works best – in the image or the text?
* Also test the combination of words and phrasing (verbs and benefits) to determine what works best for your specific business niche.
* If not using an image, or not using text, test the addition of one of these elements and measure the response.
* Also test the size, shape and font of the images and text.
* Analyze how placement of the call to action and the actual prominence of the call to action affects conversion rate. While above the fold is better for the life insurance industry, perhaps it’s not for home and garden websites. The only way to know for sure is to test out various combinations.

Social Media Leads the Future of Online Marketing and Brand Engagement

Obama, Nike, and Zappos.com get Social Media Marketing (SMM). Analyzing their strategy can teach brands how to engage target audiences

I joined Facebook back in 2006 to understand the growing phenomenon called social media. Someone sent me an invite to join a Facebook group called “One Million Strong for Obama.” At that point I had no idea that this non-affiliated supporters group would be one of the increasing number of user driven social media tactics that would help build ‘brand Obama’ and eventually get Barack Obama the most coveted job on the planet Earth. Today the group has 929,529 members and over 62,000 discussion topics.

Obamanomics: Social media and building brand “Obama”
The 2008 presidential election will go down in history as the first election where SMM strategy started to play an influential role in politics. Blogs and other web initiatives have been used in past elections. However, use of these new media channels had been limited to information dissemination rather than to engage supporters for a common mission.

Obama’s campaign team seamlessly integrated traditional marketing and PR strategy with SMM to create the symphony that helped orchestrate ‘brand Obama.’ The campaign team realized the key for winning the social media marketing battle was enabling the supporters to create a dialogue online. Obama’s “no rules” content strategy encouraged the supporters to harness the possibilities of social media tools (social networks, blogs, video and picture sharing, etc) to broadcast their thoughts around the campaign and initiate conversations.

The impact of SMM isn’t limited to the digital political landscape. Commercial brands that continue to understand customer motivations and how they want to be engaged online have equally benefited from SMM strategy.

Nike integrates technology with traditional marketing for brand engagement
Nike is one of the few traditional brands that have shown staying power in understanding the needs of its customer and in developing relevant SMM strategy that solves customer problems while engaging them. Nike is all about sports wear. The more people it can motivate to work-out or adore sports in general, the better it is for Nike’s top line revenue.

Nike has focused its online strategy to engage various active sports lovers, the core of its target audience. “Nike+” is an innovative strategy that integrates marketing with technology to encourage runners. This strategy is built on the age-old factor that motivates runners: a challenge. Nike developed an electronic device that stores running data of runners (works best with Nike running shoes) and allows them to share this data with a global community of runners, online at nikeplus.com.

Nike+ Brand impact: This effective strategy of fusing marketing with technology in convergence with the influence of social network framework has created myriads of life-long Nike fans.

Nike+ Business impact: SportsOneSource, a Princeton (N.J.) market research firm, says Nike accounted for 48% of all running-shoe sales in the U.S in 2006. Today, its share is 61%.

Zappos.com twitters its way to brand following
While we celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S., Mumbai was attacked by terrorists. Citizen journalism on Twitter helped folks such as me to stay abreast of the crisis as it unfolded hour by hour. This is another example that demonstrates the use of social media technologies for communication and news distribution.

Zappos.com has sold over a billion dollars worth of shoes online and has been building a great online retail brand, next only to Amazon. Zappos clearly understands that Twitter is a communication platform not a sales lead tool online. Unlike other companies Zappos doesn’t put product promotional posts on Twitter. Rather, Tony Hseih, the CEO of Zappos and other Zappos employees (on Twitter) endeavor to build relationship with their followers (Twitter friends). Now this is refreshingly different from GM, Starbucks, and Home Depot’s use of Twitter.

A silver bullet for marketers during a recession?
SMM is about engaging consumers online and having conversations in a fun, rewarding manner. In an economy hit by recession, I’ve observed increasing interest in SMM by marketers to engage their target audience from a new perspective. The assumption is SMM is a silver bullet that can improve marketing ROI. The operative words are, “improve ROI” but not substitute for traditional marketing initiatives. SMM strategy when integrated with traditional marketing will improve overall marketing ROI but shouldn’t be considered a silver bullet.

In order to reach the digital consumer today marketers need to know “where” the SMM battles have to be fought and “how” to effectively fight it. The answer for “where” comes from understanding customers’ motivations and their social media hang-out of choice (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Yelp, YouTube, Flickr, specific blogs, etc). The answer for “how” revolves around solving a user problem and enabling users to initiate brand conversations.

Vivek Chaudhuri is the director of internet marketing strategy at ScreenMatter, an internet marketing agency based in Ardmore, PA (screenmatter.com).

Logo Design

Unless you have the talent, there is no substitute for professional-quality design. You get what you pay for. Otherwise and any other solution will say "unprofessional".

Look at the big boys: Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Amazon, etc. Clean, professional logos that stand out and are instantly recognizable.

Skimp out on a good, high-quality logo, skimp out on a good first impression and serious bank. (ie: sales)

Facebook vs. MySpace

While most marketers are gaga over Facebook these days, you may not want to rule out MySpace just yet. While the Web media didn't miss a beat on Facebook matching MySpace in terms of unique traffic last week, MySpace was touting its own achievement - namely, "significant spikes in time spent and page views," according to January Comscore numbers.

These user engagement metrics include all time highs in the "minutes per visitor" and "total minutes" categories. Page views also jumped to the highest level the company has recorded in more than one year. Those are important metrics and should not be ignored.

The average MySpace user spends 266 minutes (4.4 hours) on the site every month—a +15% increase over last month and a +31% increase year over year. January is the highest level of minutes-per-visitor MySpace has ever seen. Page views on MySpace have reached an all time high of 44 billion—more than double that of the company’s nearest competitor.

Email Segmentation for Higher ROI

Many Web marketers and digital merchants are content sending bulk emails to their entire list simultaneously, hoping they hit the mark with a portion of their audience. But implementing even a little bit of segmenting provides — in no uncertain terms — a higher return on investment (ROI.)

Forrester Research and the National Retail Foundation’s Shop.org found the average cost per order from an email marketing campaign was $6.85, compared with $12.27 for affiliate marketing and $19.32 for paid search. This lower cost, resulting in a higher ROI, is what drives merchants to email marketing. But while 92 percent of retailers use email marketing, only 58 percent of Internet retailers segment based on customer purchase history and stated customer preferences — in spite of 67 percent considering the practice “very effective.”

Even in light of higher open rates, order values, click-through rates and conversions, email marketers are still not tapping the full potential of segmentation and list filtering. The reason might be because of the complexity of the task, and rightfully so. Behavior-based segmentation, trigger based segmentation and lifecycle segmentation are all time-consuming and financial and resource intensive projects. Even the mere concepts of these practices can scare away many merchants. But the reward of using even the most basic segmentation is very high.

How Social Media Can Benefit Your Firm

While you have undoubtedly heard the names (Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) you may not understand what social media really is or how to leverage its marketing capacity.

Basically, social media is permission-based, interactive online conversations between individuals who share common interests. While countless folks have leveraged platforms such as mySpace to promote their favorite films, books, movies, politics, etc., companies can tap the medium's unfiltered environs to promote their organizations.

Unlike more traditional media (websites, print material, advertising, etc.) the messaging cannot be overtly promotional. It must be personal, engaging and provide value.

The Marketing Executives Networking Group has identified the top 10 advantages of social media:
1. Customer engagement
2. Direct customer communication
3. Speed of feedback/results
4. Learning customer preferences
5. Low cost
6. Brand building
7. Market research
8. Credibility of the "crowd"
9. Reach
10. Great lead generation
If your firm is looking for help in tapping social media or you're looking for a speaker on the subject, we can help.

Blog entries will be posted here soon.