Arun Sivashankaran, Author at FunnelEnvy

The Definitive Guide to Improving Conversion Rates with Trust Signals

TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau recently made headlines with a ten year jail sentence in connection with his “Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About” series of books and infomercials. The case study highlights persuasive techniques used for ill gain, and it’s certainly a cautionary tale on ethics in online marketing and information products. But when I was following the case, it brought to mind another consideration: trust signals are more important than ever, not only to win you customers but to set you apart from from fly-by-night companies in your space. This reality is particularly germane to online businesses.

Against the backdrop of the ever increasing noise of advertising in every sphere of our lives, legitimate businesses must work hard to earn the trust of prospects and customers. It’s not a one step process, but something that is created through an initial connection and builds strategically over time by meeting expectations and over delivering at every point in the customer life cycle. It’s also about constructing a user experience that leverages trust signals – the right trust signals – to help overcome objections and friction points at the moment they develop in the funnel.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:49:46-07:00March 25th, 2014|Conversion Rate Optimization|2 Comments

How to Generate Value from Digital Marketing [Infographic]

Every online business is investing in some way in digital marketing and a look into the Google Trends data suggests that more marketers and organizations are trying to figure out the best ways to realize a return on that investment. In this infographic we’ve pulled together some relevant activities, statistics and trends about Customer Acquisition and Customer Optimization, two sets of activities that marketers need to balance to generate value.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:50:34-07:00March 20th, 2014|Digital Marketing|2 Comments

What Matt Cutts’ Revelation on Social Media Means for CRO

Google’s Matt Cutts is making headlines again, with the release of a new video that challenges some common assumptions about the role of social media in search optimization. Responding a reader question, Cutts addresses a common perception: that social media signals (e.g. number of followers, likes or retweets) play an important role in the SEO process. Yet it turns out that this assumption is completely false. Google’s algorithm currently doesn’t have any factors in it that relate to signals from sites like Facebook or Twitter. This has major potential ramifications for how you think about the relationship between social media, SEO and CRO.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:52:06-07:00March 7th, 2014|Digital Marketing|3 Comments

How Digital Maturity Impacts the CRO Process

In conversations about online marketing, there are often a lot of “you shoulds” and “you musts” that enter the discussion. Yet every recommendation isn’t appropriate for every business. That’s why it’s critical that you test everything to make sure it’s the right fit for your products, audience, and business goals. An operating framework – such as Cialdini’s influence model – can be a great starting point for developing and testing hypotheses. One such framework that offers an important point of reference for organizations developing testing programs is Digital Maturity. Here’s a closer look at the ideas behind Digital Maturity, how it relates to a company’s data culture, and ultimately its impact on your organization’s conversion rate optimization efforts.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:52:28-07:00March 5th, 2014|Strategy|4 Comments

A Simple 5 Step Lead Generation Approach to B2B Email Marketing

Lead generation is the heart and soul of many business models, especially services firms and SaaS providers that rely on a steady flow of new customers for cash flow and growth. The tactics available for lead generation range from using appointment setting firms to hiring outside sales teams to improving your SEO and inbound marketing tactics. But a number of anecdotal experiences suggest that strategic outbound email marketing (and applying similar techniques to networking through platforms like LinkedIn) can help get you in front of the CEO (or your target prospect) quickly and effectively. The advantage of targeted emailing campaigns is that they let you control which companies and contacts you make and attract to your company. Here’s a closer look at one technique I’ve seen in play very successfully, specifically in B2B markets.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:52:41-07:00February 28th, 2014|The Funnel|5 Comments

How to Increase Mobile Website Conversions

You’ve seen the numbers. Mobile browsing is growing at a breathtaking rate and over 1.2 billion people regularly access the web from their mobile devices instead of desktop machines. These numbers mean that you can’t afford to lose such a large potential visitor base due to lagging tech adaptation.

And if you’ve developed a mobile friendly version of your site or are using responsive design, your fundamental goal as an online business will be the same: to maximize your conversion rates. They are at least as important as high traffic numbers and a well optimized conversion rate can make even a site with low numbers of incoming visits into a powerful sales system.

Let’s take a look at some steps you can take to make sure that as many as possible of the people who visit your site from their mobile phones turn into active fans and buyers.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-22T11:08:59-07:00February 26th, 2014|Conversion Rate Optimization|3 Comments

How to Close Your Data Gap with Outsourced Analytics

One recent study asked businesses to highlight which skill was most in demand in the online marketing world. The biggest gap that nearly 40% of companies noted was analytics capabilities. As the most desirable skill, this is an important message to job seekers. But it’s also critical for entrepreneurs and business owners to ask: are you using the analytical capabilities necessary to position your business for success? Do you have access to these insights from a current member of your team, and if not what are you doing about it? One solution that many companies find helpful is working with an outsourced data consultant. Here’s a closer look at what you need to know and how to ensure a successful collaboration.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:53:04-07:00February 21st, 2014|Analytics|4 Comments

Applying Cialdini’s Influence & Persuasion Strategies to CRO

If you read one book on entrepreneurship and the art of persuasion, it should be Cialdini’s classic, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” The core of his argument is simple. There are specific levers that marketers can pull on to build trust, move prospects along the buying funnel, and get them to take action. The framework has been widely adopted in the worlds of direct sales, online marketing, and copywriting. But Cialdini’s influence strategies also play an important role in conversion rate optimization testing. Let’s take a closer look at how the two are related, and what entrepreneurs need to do in order to put this theory into practice in a way that improves conversions and generates real ROI for the business.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:53:19-07:00February 19th, 2014|Strategy|6 Comments

How to Get More Customers through a Complex Subscription Funnel

In the worlds of content marketing and conversion optimization, the buying funnel is a core part of the discussion. Understanding your customers and how they move through your buying process is absolutely critical for creating content, design, and other inputs that get prospects to take action. It’s also the foundation of developing smart strategies for conversion testing programs.

But the concept of a one size fits all approach to mapping the buying funnel misses something important. The standard formulas may be overly simplified for more complex products, such as software as a service (SaaS) products that rely on multiple micro-conversions to make the sale. Here’s an in-depth guide that’s designed to help you successfully map the buying funnel for a SaaS product. It’s also intended to serve as a case study for other marketers, especially those in the business to business (B2B) space that are struggling to understand their buyer’s journeys and convert those into actionable insights.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:53:40-07:00February 13th, 2014|The Funnel|2 Comments

Putting Cross Selling and Upselling to Work in Your Business

If you’re building your sales funnel strictly on a single sale process, you’re missing out on significant profit potential. Cross-selling and upselling can help you quickly maximize one of the most important business key performance indicators (KPIs): your customer’s lifetime value. In other words, a customer isn’t so much valuable because they buy that preliminary $25 product from you. Instead, it’s important to think about how to build a sales experience that carries the $25 eBook customer into your $10,000 group coaching program or your $100 per month subscription product. Here’s a closer look at how techniques such as cross-selling and upselling can dramatically increase the profits in your business.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:54:26-07:00February 6th, 2014|The Funnel|12 Comments

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