M-Commerce – The Mobile Market, Web Design and Conversion

The unstoppable invasion of mobile computing and how it has woven itself into our daily routines is undeniable. A life without the Internet, free WiFi, and our handheld devices is almost unimaginable and web designers have heard and heeded this lifestyle change, hence, the birth of responsive, fluid, and liquid design trends. Mashable has even named 2013 “The Year of Responsive Design”. However, we are still in the early stages of understanding this mobile demographic to yet see tangible and consistent conversion results from the marriage of Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) and Web Design for handheld and mobile devices. Responsive design does not necessarily equate to actual conversion, whether in sales, subscriptions, or networking.

According to a report by Litmus.com,

“More email is read Mobile than on a desktop email client or via webmail. Stats say 36% of email is now opened on a mobile device, with 33% for desktop and 31% for webmail.” – Litmus –”Has your audience gone Mobile” (June 2012)

As of September 2012:

We’ve seen some major changes in mobile email opens in the past year and a half. As of September 2012, 38% of all opens were on a mobile device, compared to only 17% eighteen months ago—that’s a 123% increase in mobile opens!

Diving deeper into specific mobile operating systems, the majority of these opens are being made on iOS (iPhone and iPad – 80.34%) and Android (18. 93%) devices:

The next question is, Does Mobile Traffic Convert into Leads?

Not necessarily so. There are several factors that lead to actual traffic conversion and there is no hard and fast rule on it but website owners can make educated guesses based on actual data and stat results gathered from their own website traffic trends.

Three ways to reach your target mobile traffic:

Run a native mobile app

  • Needs to be downloaded by the user
  • Restricted amount of content and functionality

A mobile website or M-Dot (a dedicated scaled down mobile version of the main website)

  • Advantage – faster loading time and optimization
  • Disadvantage – two bodies of content to manage

Responsive web design

  • Uses responsive, fluid, liquid layouts, media queries, and flexible images to adapt to various devices and resolutions
  • More future friendly
  • One body of content to manage
  • Consistent brand experience
  • Social media friendly

Among all three, responsive web design appears to be the most feasible way of reaching your target market. But is responsive web design enough to address the problem of conversion?

Here are some strategies to consider to maximize your web design and marketing optimization efforts to improve your conversion rates on your website:

Create a mobile optimized landing page

  • Make sure that your landing page is displayed properly on all screen sizes (portrait and landscape)
  • The need for speed – achieve fast loading time (5 seconds or less) by using optimized media content (images, video, and audio) and scripts.
  • User friendly – Prospects don’t have to type anything just click a button. If possible, must be clickable by the thumb.
  • Content must be simple, readable and easily navigable. Call to action buttons must be prominently but strategically located.

Create a mobile optimized order form

  • Redirect users from the landing page to your mobile optimized order form.
  • Form fields should be easy to read and fill out on any mobile device. Longer forms lead to boredom and lower conversion rates.
  • Remove all sidebar content so the form fits perfectly on the viewable window of the mobile device

Create several versions of your landing pages and order forms and test which ones convert the most. Improving User Experience and establishing a User Friendly Interface all contribute to an enjoyable browsing experience for your mobile visitors which will eventually boost your conversion results.

Conversion Hacks: Increasing Opt-In Rates

How many of you have tried several email campaigns but have wondered why they aren’t so effective? How many of you are actually clueless as to how to maximize the power of email marketing and how you can use it to your advantage? Let’s take at the look at the ways you can increase your email list using these tips and tricks on increasing your Opt-In rates. Check out these terms – Opt-In, Confirmed Opt-In, Double Opt-In, and Opt-Out:

Opt-in:

Sometimes referred to as “single opt-in,” basically means that people are only added to an email list if they actually fill out a registration form. They are given the “option” to receive email with their permission. Otherwise, the unsolicited email is referred to as spam.

Confirmed Opt-in:

This is similar to the opt-in method, but after someone signs up for your email list, you’d send them a “thank you” confirmation email that contains a link to unsubscribe from your list (just in case they were signed up by someone else without their permission).

Double Opt-in:

Someone signs up for your email list. You send a confirmation email with a link that they must click before they’re added to your list. If they don’t click the link, they don’t get added to the list. When users confirm that they want on your list, you should store their IP address, and confirmation date and time in your records. Some say this is the best way to handle your email list.

Opt-out:

This is an old-fashioned way of building your email list where you’d typically have some form for people to fill out but with a hidden or not so obvious pre-checked box at the bottom, with something like, “Yes, please sign me up for your email newsletter!”

Tips and Tricks:

The headline, call to action (CTA) and opt-in box must have good headline. Write 100 headlines and pick the best one.

If you’re using a photo of a person in your landing page, have person looking at opt-in area

Simple plain flat book cover or graphic + opt-in box converts well

Other things that can make a big impact:

  • Have live chat on your site. You can outsource for approximately $300. 1 in 3 chatters buy. Set up a special follow up series for chatters because they are engaged prospects
  • Your best affiliate is your customer service. They know the your customers the best. Turn customer service people into sales people. Give customer service reps affiliate link. Create an email signature for customer service emails with what you’re promoting.
  • Use an Upsell formula
  • Make a “bucket offer”. Offer them more of what they bought at a greatly discounted price. (ex. Buying an apple for $1, then being offer 10 apples for $3)
  • Don’t worry about profit. Try to break even.
  • Send buyers additional offers via Direct mailing buyers additional offers. If someone buys from you but doesn’t buy upsell, direct mail a sales letter for the upsell
  • Telephone follow-up – Calling webinar attendees after webinar can increase your sales if you call your webinar attendees and ask them why they didn’t buy.
  • Ditching the progress bar on checkout process can cut cart abandonments in half

Keep testing your landing pages and keep tab of people’s responses to your marketing strategies to find out which method works best for your company. As you continue to understand your target market’s behavior the better you will be able increase your Opt-in rates and eventually your sales.

More Traffic And Conversion Tips

Nobody wants to get stuck in traffic. People hate traffic unless it’s the kind of traffic that you get on your website. The fundamental objective of every business online is to grow and maintain their business. That’s why directing traffic to their website and building a large subscriber list of people who will eventually become loyal paying customers should be the main focus point in order to earn money online successfully.

Here are some more tips to help you achieve that:

Solo Ad Traffic:

  • There are 2 types of paid traffic: fixed cost and performance based. If you are doing fixed cost, make sure you get as much out the ad spend as possible.
  • If you have a landing page, create a curiosity headline to generate interest.
  • Buy other people’s exit pop traffic.
  • Put Solo Ad in other people’s follow up series.
  • When sending email, change the “From” line from the name the subscriber list normally expects to a new name. Be creative.

Viral Traffic:

  • Best traffic is endorsed traffic
  • Incentivized viral promotion – give something away for free, then offer them incentives (cash or kind) to give it away to their friends.
  • Viral poster

Guerilla Traffic

  • Use Facebook promoted posts
  • Test ads to find the best headlines
  • Before/after posts are great marketing tools. They should have the same offer or social proof for people to see.
  • Landing pages that are funny work.
  • Add “Report spam” / “Unsubscribe” link to the top of your emails. This gets complainers off your email listing fast.
  • If you are sending daily emails, give your subscribers the option to send them a weekly digest.

We hope you find these tips useful and that you would put them to use on your websites. If you do, let us know. We’d love to hear your success stories.

Traffic Hacks using Facebook

If you could show your product or your business to approximately 1.06 billion users, would you? What if you could direct these 1.06 billion users to your website, would you do it? Whatever your thoughts are about Facebook, undeniably, it is obviously a huge dam of cheap, targeted, and more profitable potential traffic that your business could greatly benefit from.

Here are some tips and tricks shared during the last Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 that you can use to start tapping into Facebook’s traffic potential.

Identify Your Goals and Targets

  • Do you want to get more fans?
  • Do you want to send users to your website?
  • Are you promoting an event or an activity? Where – on Facebook or on your website?

Get a Facebook Page for Yourself or Product

Setting up a Facebook page is free, easy and you can create as many pages as you need for yourself and for your business.

Use Page Post Ads, not Promoted Post

  • 90 characters of ad copy, then link to any landing page on or off FB.
  • Highlighted links- direct to landing page.
  • Add an image, link or video to stand out.

Use Facebook Offer Ads

  • These are like Groupon offers.
  • They are very specific offers and promotions that attract more qualified prospects.
  • This type of ads are perfect for live events and webinars.
  • You get free news feed activity when an offer is claimed.
  • International ads are cheap to run.

Promote to Custom Audiences.

  • You can upload your email list (or mobile phone list) and your ads will be shown to those people. It is easier to sell to those who you already know.
  • Tailor the creative to each segment of your list.

Test and Monitor Your Results Closely

Keep track of your ad activities to see which ads perform the best that way you can adjust and make changes accordingly making it less likely to waste money and closer to achieving your goals.

Panda Proofing Your Website

If your website has been hit by Panda and like most, you’ve began making improvements and implementing changes to your website immediately after, you might not be able to see the effects right away. It might take a while but it is possible to reverse the fall and recover from Panda.

Eric Lancheres, SEO Guru and sought after speaker, shared, in the recently held Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013, a few tips and tricks on how to Panda Proof your website.

Here are some of them:

  • Include Date Posted and Last Updated when posting articles/content.
  • Have pictures cut right at the fold. Try to tweak landing page pictures at the fold.
  • Plant 2-3 comments to get the ball rolling. Encourage comments from users.
  • Add social media buttons and ask friends to add comments votes and likes.
  • Manually add relevant or recent articles in the sidebars.
  • Improve bounce rate by using Pagination + Table of Contents. More pages lead to more pageviews. Easy to read pages encourage user engagement and interactivity which translates to spending more time on your website. More activity and more action from users translates into high quality perception for Google.
  • Increase visitor engagement by interlinking your articles. A good example of proper internal links execution is Wikipedia.
  • An intuitive dynamic navigation is key to having a high quality score. If supplementary content is not available, you CANNOT have a high quality ranking Sidebar navigation is your supplementary content.
  • Speed improves everything. Site load under 4 seconds load time is acceptable. Server load speed will increase all your metrics by about 1%-5%. Check your page load speed. If it too slow, you need to start optimizing your site. Try resizing your images, or, if necessary, consider moving to a better server.

Implementing all these changes plus improving the quality of your content will help you recover whatever lost ground your website experienced because of Panda. Of course, there will always be a lag in seeing the results of these changes between the time you implement them and the next Google update. Panda is here to stay so you need to work on improving your site including your business model. Keep working at it. Eventually, your traffic will improve, visitors will have a better experience on your website, and you should be able to earn more money than when you started.

Secure Your Interwebs With Sucuri

Malware infestations, blacklistings, Google warnings, malicious software, infected domain, suspicious activity, phishing – not exactly the landing page you want to welcome your visitors with, right? But if you have experienced the dreaded Google warning splash page (just like the dreaded blue screen), it is a cause for concern.

Hackings and other website attacks are becoming more prevalent nowadays. Not that they weren’t before but these malicious activities never went away either. They’ve just become a little bit more sophisticated than before. Government websites, large hosting websites and the more popular and well-known websites seem to be a favorite target but the truth is – no website is immune from these attacks. It is projected that the total number of websites in 2013 will reach 1 Billion and 2 Billion in 2015. (source: toni.org) That’s a lot of www candidates right there. Of course, you can reason away that your website is totally insignificant compared to the 999 million other websites that can be targeted by a malicious attack. On the other hand, yours might just be THE one. Hopefully not.

The impact of a website attack can be devastating especially if it is an eCommerce or a highly monetized site. Not only do you lose a lot in terms of time, lost data, missed sales opportunities and potential business income due to messed up systems and lost traffic, these attacks also affect your site’s credibility and reliability which are the most important currencies any business can have online. Once the public becomes aware of the attack, caution sets in and transactions become paralyzed. The possibility of being blocked or blacklisted becomes a total nightmare. The website owner is now faced with an unnecessary battle of perceptions that could have been prevented in the first place. How can this battle be prevented and how can you, the website owner, protect your peace of mind from potential attacks?

Sucuri Security is a company that offers a security service that detects unauthorized changes to network (cloud) assets, including web sites, DNS, Whois records, SSL certificates and others. It is also heavily used as an early warning system to detect Malware, Spam and other security issues on web sites and DNS hijacking. Sucuri shot into the limelight when GoDaddy hosted sites were attacked and exploited. They were the company that conducted the cleanup operations for them. Sucuri is not a malware protection software to be installed on your site. The company provides a monitoring service to protect your website from any malware, threats of intrusion, infections, and the like. This extra layer of protection is an assurance for both you and your clients or customers that any information exchanged on your website will not be compromised.

You can get a free analysis for your website from Sucuri. Just visit their website and have your website checked anytime. They also have a free plugin that can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins page. This plugin is free but works best in tandem with their security service packages. To learn more about these service packages, check out their website to see which one matches your requirements. The investment you make today to secure your website can save you so much headache in the future.

Visit Sucuri.net to get your free analysis. Download the free plugin from WordPress.

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