Ever since Wal-Mart began offering nearly every product known to man, the prevailing thought in retail has been that more is better. More products mean more opportunities for sales.
If someone isn’t interested in one product, they may be interested in option two or three. Whatever the case, you need to give customers more choices.
140 characters. Sometimes that’s all you need to get a point across, tell a story or state an amazing fact. And when it comes to conversion optimization, there are a lot of individuals and companies making very good use of those 140 characters.
Here are 30 conversion rate experts to check out on Twitter:
1. Brian Massey
Brian runs the Conversion Scientist and writes over at Search Engine Land. His stream is very CRO focused so if you are looking for good articles to read or stats to take in, go check it out.
2. Oli Gardner
Oli is one of the co-founders of Unbounce and is largely responsible for the awesome Unbounce blog and social media presence. His personal Twitter account follows suit and is a great mix of personality and business.
3. Bryan Eisenberg
We featured Bryan in our 12 Killer Blogs for CRO post and to be honest, if you’re in the industry and don’t know who he is, you might’ve been hiding under a rock for a long time. His Twitter feed is very marketing oriented but also includes a lot of interaction.
4. Chris Goward
Chris is the Founder and President of Wider Funnel, a conversion rate optimization company. His feed focuses a lot on the stuff coming out of Wider Funnel but it’s still great and definitely worth following.
5. Angie Schottmuller
Anyone listing themselves as an ‘interactive jedi’ has to be pretty awesome right? A columnist over at Search Engine Watch, Angie’s feed focuses a lot on marketing and SEO but also on CRO. Certainly worth following.
6. Optimizely
Optimizely is an A/B testing tool so while their feed offers some customer support and company news, it also provides some good tweets on statistics and articles around conversion.
7. Wingify
The company behind Visual Website Optimizer, the Wingify feed tweets a LOT of great articles about A/B testing and landing page optimization.
8. Scott Brinker
Responsible for Chief Marketing Technology (a must-read blog if you haven’t seen it), Scott is pretty well known in the CRO industry. His feed encompasses articles on online marketing, social media and of course, conversion rates. Want to stay up to date on what’s happening in the marketing technology space? Follow Scott.
9. Craig Sullivan
His handle is @OptimiseorDie so you know he’s serious. Craigs been in the industry a while and knows a lot about multivariate testing and CRO. One could pretty much only follow Craig and get a ton of awesome CRO content each day.
10. Tim Ash
Tim is the CTO of SiteTuners, a CRO company and the author of the book on Landing Page Optimization; not a bad combination. His feed is heavily CRO focused with a lot of interaction.
11. Jeffrey Eisenberg
If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘wait, isn’t there already an Eisenberg on this list?’, you aren’t mistaken. Jeffrey is the brother of Bryan and another big player in the marketing optimization industry. He’s an author, a speaker and his Twitter feed is both enjoyable and knowledgeable.
12. Kelly Cutler
We featured one of Kelly’s presentations in 5 CRO Presentations You Don’t Want to Miss last week so it only made sense to have her on here. Kelly works at Marcel Media and her feed is fun, smart and gives some great info.
13. WhichTestWon
WhichTestWon is a cool site that showcases A/B tests and even better, lets you try and guess the winner…plus they show you the results. Their feed does a lot of ‘welcoming’ to their premium members but in between, there’s some good info around testing and events.
14. Hiten Shah
The CEO and co-founder of KissMetrics, most people in the online marketing industry know who Hiten Shah is. His Twitter feed offers quite a bit around startup news and info about optimization and testing.
15. GetElastic
The Twitter feed for Elastic Path is run by Linda Bustos and is a great resource for CRO related content (and tons more). Find everything from checkout optimization to SEO to events to infographics.
16. Unbounce
The official account of the landing page optimization platform, they do a kick-ass job of interacting, pushing out information from their site and providing good articles from around the web. With almost 25k followers, they are doing something right.
17. David Kirkpatrick
David is a writer for MarketingSherpa, one of the top blogs out there when it comes to online marketing and research. His feed offers a nice mix of online marketing news and tactics but when it comes to optimization and testing, you’ll find quite a bit of stuff on there around email.
18. Anna Talerico
Anna writes over at Ion Interactive, a landing page optimization company, and her feed is chock full of articles and data on conversion optimization. She finds some seriously good articles so be sure to get your reader ready.
19. Marketing Experiments
Run by the same company who runs Sherpa, this Twitter feed basically pushes out articles around CRO and testing from their network of blogs. Typically we wouldn’t suggest following a feed who uses this strategy, but in this case, they are providing some good info.
20. Usertesting
A tool for running remote usability tests, the Usertesting feed does a great job balancing company info with industry news and articles. They tend to cover mostly web design and usability, which makes sense.
21. Carlos Del Rio
Another member of the Unbounce team, Carlos offers a really great balance of CRO information and personality. You’ll also find some info on conversion rate optimization, social and random facts. You gotta love that.
22. Joanna Wiebe
Joanna is the purveyor of an awesome site called Copy Hackers. She helps people improve their most important CRO tool: copywriting. I’ve downloaded, read, and re-read Joanna’s ebooks and I’d recommend them to anyone interested in improving their copy.
23. Dan Siroker
Dan is the co-founder of Optimizely and also the Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Dan offers some great info along the lines of testing. While you’ll see quite a few check ins and personal tweets, it’s cool to see a nice mixture of personal and business.
24. & 25. eSearchVision & SearchEngineLand
Because both of these focus more on overall search vs strictly conversion optimization, we wanted to put these together. In both, you’ll find a nice mixture of online marketing news, stars and articles, including testing data and info on CRO.
26. Rick Perreault
CEO of Unbounce, Rick is definitely a must-follow. His feed is very focused on optimization and marketing but also very personable and funny. This team really knows what they’re doing.
27. WiderFunnel
A landing page optimization service, the WiderFunnel company feed provides a TON of tweets around general conversion optimization, landing page tips and they even offer a daily tip tweet.
28. Ion Interactive
Another company that we enjoy, the Ion Interactive feed focuses primarily on landing page optimization. You’ll definitely find some great articles from around the web plus they tell you what’s new at the company. Bonus: We always like to see companies interacting with customers.
29. Daniel Gonzalez
Daniel Gonzalez is a CRO at Conversionlove.com. One thing that I love about Daniel’s twitter stream is that he only shares the best content. If there’s a great read about SEO, customer development, or conversion rate optimization, Daniel’s tweeting it.
30. KISSMetrics
Leaving this until the end certainly wasn’t our intention but hey, leave them wanting more right? KISSMetrics absolutely destroys when it comes to testing and CRO. Their feed is mainly their own articles but the fact of the matter is, you should be reading them.
31. Peep Laja
Peep Laja runs Conversion XL, based in Austin, TX. Every CRO should subscribe to their blog and Peep’s Twitter feed is chock full of great stuff about the psychology of conversion rate optimization.
Who else would you like to see on this list? Let us know and we’ll happily add them!
In the age where customers want responses and they want them now, it’s pretty damn important you give them the ability to talk to you. The nice thing is there are a ton of amazing tools out there right now that are making this much easier. Even better? These tools let you communicate with customers AND can help you improve your product and marketing efforts.
8 tools to talk to customers…Go!
1. KISS Insights
KISS Insights lets you get real-time feedback from customers without any extra resources on your end (bonus!). Wondering why people aren’t signing up? Ask em. Another nice thing about KISS Insights (and some of these other tools) is they aren’t obtrusive so they don’t ruin your site’s user experience.
2. oLark
There are a few live chat tools out there but oLark seems to be killing it. It’s easy to implement on your site, you can customize it visually, it works within your IM client and it keeps all that feedback you get from folks. Did you know live chat can improve conversion rates?
3. UserTesting.com
Want to learn what works on your site and what doesn’t without messing stuff up? UserTesting lets you give live usability tests for a pretty low cost. The only real downfall is that the people you’re testing with may not be your exact target audience.
4. Argyle Social
It’s no secret that you need to monitor your online reputation. The thing is there’s a lot that goes into that! What types of things do you monitor? How do you monitor everything? A cool tool for this is Argyle Social. Set up campaigns, monitor specific sites, get alerts, schedule updates and be able to act quickly should something arise.
5. Grasshopper
Even if you don’t get a ton of calls, you probably should have a phone number. Why? Because at some point, a customer may want to pick up the phone and talk to you. Grasshopper has 800 numbers and local numbers that you can just forward to your cell phone.
6. Ethnio
Interested in user testing? Ethnio lets you recruit customers/potential customers from your site and manages the incentive process. Pretty good way to find qualified users.
7. HootSuite
Another way to manage and monitor your social profiles and online presence, HootSuite is a good alternative to something like TweetDeck. They have some nice features like location targeting, mobile monitoring and of course tracking.
8. Help Scout
A help desk tool that specializes in empowering you to manage email support, Help Scout is pretty sweet. Help Scout is awesome if you have multiple people who use one email inbox to manage support. For example, Rejoiner uses help@rejoiner.com as it’s primary support mechanism. We love that it doesn’t have all of the heavy features of other help desks and focuses on being the best at one thing: email support.
Go check out some of these tools and let us know what you think.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks since our last update and we’ve got some exciting news to share.
Techstars
We reached a very important milestone last week and finished up our application for Techstars Boston. We sent off our written app, product video, team video, and demo just in time for the early deadline on November 1st.
Marketing Site
In conjunction with our Techstars application, we launched a new marketing site as well. In tandem with the new site, we put together an animated explainer video (below) to demonstrate what Rejoiner is all about. We’d love to hear your feedback on the site and on the video. We’re working on a longer post on how to script, design, and produce a similar video for your business.
Mentorship
We were also SUPER excited to have been matched up with a mentor through the Founder Mentors program. Brian Balfour, who has co-founded several technology companies here in Boston, is going to be helping us plot the course over the next few months. We can’t wait to start working with him.
Product
From a product standpoint, we’re cranking on everything email. Today, we’ve got some rock solid technology for tracking the folks who abandon your forms. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature that will allow you to build, schedule, and manage customized email campaigns to recover those folks who abandon. The best part is that you’ll be able to build these campaigns from within Rejoiner, and you don’t have to worry about signing up for yet another email service. We’ll also be helping you track and monitor how many of those emails are driving real conversions.
We’re moving as fast as we can on new product features and we think Rejoiner merchants will be really excited about we’ve got coming next.
This is the first part in what will hopefully be a weekly series of blog posts, letting our users know what’s been happening at Rejoiner, what things we are working on, and progress we are making.
This has been an awesome week for us at Rejoiner, especially on the technology side of things. Early in the week, we were notified by Rackspace Startups that we were invited to participate in their program for at least the next 6 months! I must say I am super grateful to Rackspace for selecting us and am looking forward to moving our applications off of the hosting platform they are on now and on to the Rackspace cloud. Check out our post from earlier this week on why this is so important for us and for our merchants.
In addition to getting the process started of migrating our applications over to Rackspace, we made some great progress on our automated recovery email feature. This is a huge feature in the making and we’ve got most of the complex pieces built out. Yesterday I successfully tested the email scheduling piece and will be moving on to adding analytics like click-throughs and conversions in the near future.
Additionally, we’ve made great progress on our new marketing site. We should be launching the site very soon and are really looking forward to it. Nick and Mike have put a lot of time into it and we’re excited about how it has turned out. I think we should be putting it up live next week sometime.
I’ve been involved with many projects where scaling was an issue because it hadn’t been considered early enough in the game. Painful app rewrites result, time is spent on infrastructure instead of new features, and it’s just not fun. However, in startup mode you are trying to move very quickly and spend time building out features, validating/invalidating assumptions, etc. So, where is the line between building “good enough” solutions and building the “right” solution?
Truth is that I don’t really know all the time, but I AM certain that scalability needs to be considered day one. This does not mean that all your code need be perfect and that you should try to do everything right the first time. It just means that you should always be coding with large data sets and performance in mind, even if you are early in your startup and don’t have gobs of data and millions of users. I’m pretty sure that none of us builds a company hoping to have very few users, so why do we build solutions that don’t scale? If it takes a little longer to build a solution that can scale vs. a hacked-together solution that will need to be redone later, I try and go with the first option whenever I can.
A recent example of this for me was when I was building site metrics functionality in Rejoiner. We want our customers to see important metrics from the past month on their dashboards as soon as they log in – pretty simple, right? Well, I could have written this in a couple hours and the dashboard page would have loaded very quickly given the size of our database right now. I could have moved on to the next feature and called that one “done”, but I knew that was not going to be a good experience for customers with millions of events. I also knew that we WANT to have customers with millions of events because that means they are likely getting value out of our service. So I decided to bite the bullet and build a simplified data warehouse / reporting database. While I was second-guessing myself a little bit on whether a DW was needed so early in the game, I’m glad I took the time to do it right.
Something that stuck with me was an interview I saw with Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, where he talked about the time when they “pushed the button”, launching their app into the App Store. While scalability was not the focus of the interview, I could not help but think how things would have been different had they had an infrastructure that could not handle the tremendous growth they experienced literally overnight.
It’s tough to make the right call on where to direct your focus in a startup, but don’t make the mistake of putting off scalability concerns. Make it part of your decision-making process early and often, and build your app to handle the growth you want to see.
We had a really exciting day yesterday at Rejoiner. Rackspace let us know that they’ve selected us for their startup program. This is huge for us and our customers for a few different reasons:
Our technology needs to quickly process large amounts of data, and in order to do this effectively, we need robust hardware that can handle the load. Being a bootstrapped startup, we have not been been able to invest in top of the line hosting to date. The good news is that has forced us to code our application for maximum computational efficiency. But moving our app to the Rackspace cloud will make our already highly tuned application even better, riding on top of a stellar platform that we can continue to grow our business on. Additionally, we will be able to take advantage of a number of other features that Rackspace supports like application health monitoring, load balancing, and more robust data backups. All of this equals out to a huge win for our existing users from a reliability standpoint and a rock solid foundation that we can confidently say will scale as we continue to grow.
We (Chris, Nick, & Mike) built a new web app. It’s called Rejoiner and helps SaaS and E-commerce companies recover abandoned orders.
This was a big problem on the last product I worked on. In fact, I’m sure we lost thousands of dollars in potential revenue as a result.
Here’s a little backstory: In order to better understand how people were moving through our signup flow, we set up Mixpanel throughout our marketing site. Mixpanel is an awesome analytics platform that lets you tag key events throughout your site and build funnels based on those events. On our sign up page, we went as far as tagging each form field to see where people dropped off.
What we found was very surprising. We observed an alarmingly large number people who started signing up, got all the way to the end of the process, and just never hit submit. Though Mixpanel clued us into what was happening, it didn’t give us any insight into who these people were. The challenge was that obviously, the form wouldn’t post until the person chose to click “Sign Up.” Mixpanel just wasn’t geared to capture the data from those fields in real-time.
I was always frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t follow up with these people or try to get them to come back and sign up. After all, they were really close to buying from us and many just fell through the cracks.
Turns out a lot of other applications and e-commerce sites have this problem as well. It’s called form abandonment and costs e-commerce companies billions of dollars every year.
This is the problem we hope Rejoiner solves.
With just a couple of simple code snippets, our technology sits on your sign up or checkout page and “listens” for abandoned orders. When a valid email address comes through, Rejoiner quietly captures that data and stores it for our merchants. The most important part is in the follow-up and we help with that too. Our customers can schedule custom drip (auto-responder) campaigns to remarket to those folks who abandon and then track who converts. We think it’s a pretty neat system that could really help merchants build their businesses.
We’re early in the process of building our own business, but we hope you’ll come along for the ride. We’re actively looking for beta testers and would love to hear from you.
Every week, we’ll be sharing lessons learned and great data relative to conversion and remarketing. We’d love for you to subscribe and come along with us.
