Customer Reviews

Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Why do website conversion rates remain at a gloomy 2-5 per cent?

"Call for Action" focuses on how we can improve the conversion rates. Not from a technical or academic or conceptual standpoint. Instead it takes a rare PRACTICAL and down-to-earth approach on how to improve conversion rates to improve sales and thus profits.

What is CONVERSION? Virtually all websites have a persuasive purpose; to get someone to subscribe, to register, to inquire or to buy something. And if all we get is 2-5 per cent conversion, we ought to review our website. Do we offer a product or service that could meet the needs of more than 2-5 per cent of the market? Can visitors find that, solution on the website? Do they understand our offer's value? Was it made at the right time? Are we sure they're coming back?

NAVIGATION is the biggest challenge websites face, the authors argue. The issues are: What to do with the traffic once it lands on the website? How to get visitors to take the first action and click deeper? And once there, how to induce visitors to click to the next step, and the next, and the next?

The fundamental idea is that a PERSUASIVE ARCHITECTURE links a visitor's buying experience to our company's sales process. It bridges the buy/sell process in a measurable way. If you can influence visitor behaviour and empathize with visitor motivations, you can influence results to provide a better experience and more frequent, effective conversions.

The book is filled with illustrative screen dumps of websites (before and after a change). This is a great benefit of such a how-to field book on e-commerce improvements. In my opinion, most e-commerce sites can recover the book's cost price in a few days just by following one or two of the practical suggestions in the many diverse case studies.

The primary focus of this book is e-Commerce. The key messages on conversion, however, are important to anyone running a large website.

This is a rare book. I've been involved in e-commerce since 1997 and read many interesting books on this topic. But I've never found such a practical approach to optimising e-commerce web sites as this one.

The brothers Eisenberg call themselves "wizards of web". I agree and hope my existing and future competitors don't read and act on this book. These secret formulas to improve online results are very effective, indeed.

If you're looking for a conceptual e-commerce theory, please look somewhere else. This is about the nuts and bolts about making money with an e-commerce web site. If you don't have or don`t plan to have such a website; forget about this book. Then it's a waste of time.

I also recommend Jakob Nielsen's books on web usability and Steve Krug's easy-to-read "Don't make me think".

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

Despite buying four copies of 'Call to Action' for my development team, reading it through twice and making copious notes - I can't recommend that you read it. It's not that it's bad - it's just not that good and I have to believe there are better books out there.

'Call to Action' describes itself as 'both a step-by-step, how-to manual and a treatise on the true nature of conversion'. In my opinion, it fails to deliver on either count.

There's no doubt the authors know what they're talking about but, ironically, in a book dedicated to the process of communication, they fail to communicate either a cohesive overview or a detailed 'how-to' of the subject.

There's a facade of structure and some whizzy acronyms like 'AIDAS' and 'MAP' but very little flesh is laid on those sketchy bones. The introduction identifies the main cause of the problem - the book started life as a collection of disparate web articles interspersed by 'top-tips' from marketers 'in the trenches'.

The articles themselves give the sense of having been shoe-horned into a structure simply for the sake of it. The 'top-tips', more often than not, are completely irrelevant to the theme of the article they're paired with. As a reader looking for greater understanding of the subject and some concrete next-steps, this discordant content yields as much confusion as clarity.

On top of this, the numerous typos, misquotes, repeated quotes and printing errors confirm that insufficient care has been taken in the preparation of this book. It hasn't even been professionally proof-read, let alone purposefully written.

So how come I purchased four copies? The first half of the book does contain some exciting ideas such as developing content based on the persona of the visitor and planning precise conversion scenarios from the home page to the conversion point for each type of visitor.

The second half of the book is mostly padding and pointless repetition of the ideas in the first half. I purchased the other copies of the book after reading the first half and expecting the second half to follow in a similar vein.

All things taken into consideration, the book reads like a series of adverts for the authors' consulting services rather than as a 'how-to' or a treatise on the subject. Other authors quoted in this book are: Roy H. Williams, Jared Spool, Tamara Adlin and Jim Sterne, and I'll be checking out their writings in my continued search for genuine 'how-to' content.

The Eisenbergs could have made this book more effective and much simpler. They chose not to write for their audience and, to my mind, that makes them guilty of the same sin they condemn online marketers of - focusing on themselves instead of on their customers.

The Eisenbergs make the point that content created for offline advertising rarely translates directly to the web. This book is proof that the reverse is also true.

The main purpose of the book is to help businesses increase their conversion rates. Conversion, and there isn't a better word to describe it, means action that leads to the results you want. It could be increased product sales, more newsletter subscriptions, contacting the business, or more registered users. CALL FOR ACTION is about improving the rates of what you want users to do.

Many books covering Web design address usability and making it easier for the user. But no book that I know of shows how to get your users to take the action you want. A usable site doesn't guarantee action. CALL FOR ACTION moves beyond helping users find things easily and focuses on persuasion so your business can see an increase in its bottom line. Overstock.com experienced a five percent conversion increase by fixing one thing based on the authors' advice.

The categories that make up persuasion design include planning, structure, momentum, communication and value. The book begins with an overview of the entire process and then digs in to each category along with its perspectives, strategies, examples, and conversion tips from experts in search engine optimization, online marketing, and usability.

Researching and understanding the customers plays a vital role in this process. An example of this: you create a profile of three customers who have similar demographics, but come to the site for different reasons. After arriving on the Web site, these three customers go to a different part of the site. The challenge is to address the needs of all three on the landing page and then help them along to the next step through "scent of information" (leading the user to where he wants to go based on his persona).

You won't find theories in the book. Instead, expect practical advice on online marketing so you can make the most of your users' time on your site. While most of the concepts are practical, it has heavy-duty stuff, too. Those more experienced with e-commerce will appreciate it. If you skip the more challenging concepts, the book quickly pays for itself with the implementation of an idea or two. I like the case studies, especially the before and after examples for both design and content. People who learn from examples will appreciate the diversity of examples covered in the book.

CALL FOR ACTION thoroughly covers many concepts proving a challenge to provide you with an overview of what it's about. Anything you can think of having to do with online marketing and Web design is likely included. Rather than treating Web design and marketing as two entities, the two work together as one and it leads to better results. Marketers, designers, search engine experts and information architects will definitely benefit from this book. The Eisenbergs are among the few who focus on what the business needs to do to reach its goals with its customers in mind.

The price of the book is a great deal considering it's a hardcover.

This book is a compilation of articles written over the years and it shows. There is no narrative structure, typos are frequent and some sections seem forced. Concrete samples are lacking and the few screen shots they have contain no clear captions or indications of what I should be focusing on. If the authors would have written this book with the same focus and discipline as they give their clients websites, it would have been an amazing book...rather than mearly decent.

PS. The type in the book is microscopic. For those of us pushing 40, this is a tad annoying.

Having made a living on the Internet for the past 7 years basically flying by the "seat of my pants", I found Bryan's book a absolute goldmine of information. Call to Action is a straight forward, no nonsense, no "fluff" book covering the do's and don't's of website design and marketing. The book is written to be easily understood. I have already adopted many of Bryan's points into my own website design and have seen almost immediate results. I doubt if there is a better book on the subject.

I find that when I really like something I can sum up my thoughts in very few words. On the other hand, when I really hate something I can wax eloquent for days. My review of Call to Action can be summed up in a single word: Wow!

Seriously, Wow!.

Dictionary.com defines Wow as: Used to express wonder, amazement, or great pleasure.

That says it all.

I found that I was unable to read more than a few pages a day in order to allow the information to settle in my head. No where else have I found a single collection of more useful information for marketing a website.

I picked up Call to Action at just the right time. I'm in the middle of re-imaging (I love that word!) my web site for better performance and usability. Reading Call to Action brought all the things I already know to the forefront while also providing me new insight and understanding to the total process of making my web site sell. I often found myself putting the book down, firing up the laptop and start making website edits based on what I had just read.

This book is a must-have for anybody who is selling a product or service on the web. I guarantee you'll wear out at least one highlighter in the process.

The book is for commercial website developers. It offers numerous suggestions on improving sales on your site. Mostly, it deals with B2C sites targeting a mass audience. Though the authors also say that it applies to more complex B2B sites.

Perhaps the best advice is simply to methodically deconstruct your visitors' pathways through your site. When you change a page or series of steps, it is imperative to quantify this effect on a sample of visitors. eBay and Amazon are justly renowned for this experimentally rigorous approach. So too should you aspire. It gives you a tangible feedback loop within which you can test hypotheses.

The authors also have other useful guidelines. Notably, and simply, to write well the text of your web pages. Hard to argue with that. But testing is the most important idea of the book.

I heard about the book in a recent usability conference and bought it immediately. Conversion rates are probably the most important issues for anyone involved in managing a website and I expected to find lots of best-case examples and useful tips. Unfortunately the book does not have them. With more than 300 pages only 30 of them have examples of screenshots, not only that, half of them are of just one site: Cafepress. Too much text to state the obvious and few real life examples.
Oh, and the cover picture is just horrendous.

This book has made me realize there is more to a website than content and usability: Return On Investment. And even though a consider myself to be an experienced website-maker, I have learned a great deal from reading it.

However, for 2 reasons I decided not to rate 5 stars:
1) I found it difficult to discern any stucture. It was as though all chapters where so much related that their order seemed irrelevant.
2) A picture says more than a thousand words. Unfortunately you won't find many pictures in this book. Those that you do find, hardly make the point any clearer. Most have no caption, others have one that's pretty useless ('Change #4 Before'); you need to search the surrounding text to find out what the image is about.

Having said that, I highly recommend this book to anyone running a commercial website.

It's hard to be much more disappointed with a book than I was with this one. Though in all fairness, perhaps I went in with unreasonably high expectations, given how many good things I'd heard about it.

I was expecting more of a how-to-raise-your-conversion-rates type of book with lots of actionable suggestions. This was much of a "how to think about conversion" type of book. Up until the last chapter (the first time web analytics were discussed in any real detail) there were disappointingly few concrete suggestions of ways to improve my site.

The other problem I had with the book was its startling lack of organization. There didn't seem to be any one coherent point that the book was making, no glue that held it all together. There were numerous points at which the authors would simply end a chapter or section abruptly and pick up with a new (mostly) unrelated topic. Perhaps if the same information had been presented in a more logical/intuitive order, it would have been possible to get a little bit more out of the book.