In an ear­lier blog post, I talked about the fact that lately I’ve been lean­ing a lot more towards test­ing the reduc­tion in bottlenecks.

Some of the results are staggering!

In short, the more I increase the sense of secu­rity and trust, bet­ter the flow and ease of order­ing, and project a more con­gru­ent and pro­fes­sional image, the more sales I make.

Since that post, some read­ers have asked me for some exam­ples. I pre­fer not to reveal mine as they are pro­pri­etary. But I can say this…

One of the things that I’m start­ing to really like are ecom­merce sites that are less “saleslet­ter­ish” — i.e., less long-​​scrolling copy in a direct-​​mail for­mat, and more clus­tered lay­outs that are reader-​​focused, commerce-​​centric, and action-​​driven.

They still use com­pelling copy and a solid response mech­a­nism. If the user needs more details, a “more info” link then sends them to a typ­i­cal, long copy saleslet­ter. But these sites’ front-​​end are more action-​​oriented than they are scrolling-​​oriented.

I’ve decided to test this with our main web­site at Suc­cess Chef. I still use long copy. But I’ve con­verted the front-​​end into an ecom­merce, multi-​​product, catalog-​​like format.

And the results are in…

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A recent study found that 65% of online shop­pers are “win­dow shop­pers,” and take on aver­age up to 33 hours to make a pur­chase — often over secu­rity concerns.

Some inter­est­ing find­ings show that most peo­ple who aban­don their shop­ping carts don’t do so permanently.

They tend to return within the first day to com­plete their pur­chase, likely after they had a chance to shop around, review their secu­rity, or prac­tice some due diligence.

Accord­ing to WebProNews who reported on the study, “65% of all shop­pers will wait a day or more to com­plete a pur­chase.” The most notable find­ing was the idea that just increas­ing secu­rity and buyer con­fi­dence can increase con­ver­sion by 11%.

Inter­est­ing, yes. But far from surprising.

In fact, I often tell my clients and stu­dents that, in order to boost sales, you should be a “con­ver­sion con­trar­ian.” In other words, don’t focus on increas­ing con­ver­sions. Not at first, any­way. Instead, you should focus on decreas­ing some­thing else…

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The other day I was asked, “How do I moti­vate a poten­tial joint ven­ture part­ner to bite? When you have a great idea and you’ve located the per­fect part­ner, how do you moti­vate them to do busi­ness with you?”

In my last post, I talked about the power of a USP and how to define one. Being unique, or hav­ing an inter­est­ing twist or hook, will def­i­nitely up your chances of get­ting noticed.

But regard­less of how you approach your prospec­tive part­ner, whether it’s through an email, fax, or phone call, or by snail mail or FedEx, it is impor­tant to craft the offer in a man­ner that shows the ben­e­fits to your joint-​​venture partner.

How­ever, there are a few extra tricks to moti­vate a poten­tial partner.

Here are some of them…

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In today’s Inter­net, con­ver­sa­tions are crop­ping up all over the place. Peo­ple are talk­ing. They are talk­ing about prod­ucts. They are talk­ing about busi­nesses. And they are cer­tainly talk­ing about their expe­ri­ences.

When you look at how blogs, forums and social net­work­ing sites have exploded in the last few years, you can see how pow­er­ful word-​​of-​​mouth is. But the ques­tion is, is it all really impor­tant? Can it really help your business?

Yes.

And I’m not talk­ing about traf­fic. And you don’t need to be con­tro­ver­sial, either. I’m talk­ing cre­at­ing sys­tems to lever­age, man­age and profit from the “buzz.”

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So what exactly is Web 2.0? I’m not an ana­lyst or some dot­com pun­dit. But being online since 1991 (or since 1982 if you con­sider bul­letin board ser­vices), I’ve wit­nessed enough to have a good grasp of what’s going on.

So here’s my perspective.

At the dawn of the Inter­net the web was pri­mar­ily a uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way com­mu­ni­ca­tions process. The web was com­prised mostly of sta­tic web pages, filled with hyper­text and links. It was akin to the direct mail indus­try, only this time it was served up on a com­puter mon­i­tor rather than on a piece of paper.

In fact, web pages that worked the best, espe­cially in a direct mar­ket­ing con­text, were ads and saleslet­ters that closely mim­ic­ked the long-​​copy print saleslet­ters we often get in the mail.

For many years and until recently, this was true.

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Long, scrolling saleslet­ters are dying. It’s a fact. There are two main rea­sons for this. Remem­ber, I said an evo­lu­tion and a rev­o­lu­tion are cur­rently tak­ing place. And both of these are con­tribut­ing to the death of the salesletter.

The evo­lu­tion is this: users are demand­ing for bet­ter qual­ity, more con­tent, more proof, less has­sles and greater inter­ac­tiv­ity. New tech­nolo­gies there­fore help to enable that expe­ri­ence. And really, that’s what it’s all about:

It’s about the expe­ri­ence.

As more and more peo­ple enter the web, get broad­band, and gain access to groups of peo­ple who they can con­nect and inter­act with, as well as with the pre­pon­der­ance of appli­ca­tions that fight for that person’s atten­tion and inter­ac­tion, the long-​​scrolling saleslet­ter no longer works as effec­tively as it used to.

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