Measuring the Networked Nonprofit

Excerpted from article:
"If you don’t have a good landing page, it’s like going fishing without a net: you might land a big one on your hook, but you won’t be able to drag it into the boat.

You don’t want people to just visit your page. You want them to take action once they are there. So make it as easy and compelling as possible for them by including these elements found in a landing page that CONVERTS:

C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof

CLEAR CALL TO ACTION:
Whatever it is you’ve decided will move people further along your conversion funnel. That’s what you should be asking them, clearly and temptingly, to do. Don’t distract them with lots of other requests. The best pages accentuate only one CTA.

OFFER:
An offer is anything you give your visitors in exchange for getting them to do what you want. This can mean offers in the traditional sense of coupons or discounts, but it also can mean a free trial, a free version of the product, a whitepaper, or a matching gift.

NARROW FOCUS:
Research has shown that the more choices you offer people, the longer they take to make a decision. So the clearer and simpler you make your page, the more likely you are to get someone to take the action you want.
- Do you really need that navigation bar?
- Do you really need to talk about your company philosophy?
- Do you really need to collect all that information?

VIA: VERY IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTES:
We’ve all heard stories of companies that reserved a catchy URL, put up zero information about what the site was for, and harvested 1 million email addresses before they even launched.
You should assume that’s not going to happen to your company.
Instead, you’re going to have to give visitors some good reasons they should do what you want. Those reasons are the VIA: Very Important Attributes.

EFFECTIVE HEADLINE:
People coming to your site are going to decide in a split second if they want to go back to their game of “Words with Friends” or stay and see what you are all about. A key way to keep them is to tell them in plain language what your site is all about.

RESOLUTION-SAVVY LAYOUT:
Do you know that there are people out there still surfing the web on 800 x 600 monitors?
Keep the most essential parts of your message – logo, headline, call to action, a supporting visual – in the center top of the screen, with supporting messaging lower down on the page.

TIDY VISUALS:
As with the headline, distracting elements can work when you’re trying to get attention. But when people are on your site, you don’t want to sidetrack them with a bunch of visual junk.

SOCIAL PROOF:
As social creatures, humans tend to place greater value on things that other people have already approved. That is why most sites will tend to display evidence of such social validation."

In the original article there are more information about: "Considerations for strategy", "Considerations for design", "The cautionary tale", "Doing it right" and some examples. Check out full interesting article here:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/c-o-n-v-e-r-t-s/

Excerpted from article on KISSmetrics:

"Getting quality traffic on the interwebs is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. We can spam Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn all day. We’ll get a ton of traffic. But that won’t get us anywhere. We might go from 100 visits to 10,000 visits and still have only 2 customers.

Luckily, we have another option…

Get more customers with the traffic we already have:

The key to making this work is the marketing funnel.

Remember, funnels measure the number of people who move through a series of steps in order to become a customer.

...

Funnels help you find the bottleneck in your customer acquisition.

Once you know where people drop off in large batches, you’ll know which part of your business needs the most improvement. And once you fix the problem, you’ll get more customers with the same amount of traffic. That’s the beauty of tracking funnels.

5 Best Practices for Building Funnels

1. Fewer Steps is Better than More Steps:

One of the easiest ways to increase the percentage of people who get through your funnel is to eliminate a step. Yup, just hack it out completely. Even if you have an amazing design, world-class copy, and a perfect product, you’ll still lose people at each step.

I want you to be RUTHLESS with your funnels. Hack and slash every unnecessary click, field, button, and page you can. Have no mercy.

2. Start With a Benchmark:

This applies to ALL your metrics, not just your funnels.

Based on your industry, business model, target market, and the alignment of the stars, you’ll find a huge difference in metrics from one site to the next.

3. Look for Bottlenecks

I already alluded to the best way to prioritize your funnel improvements.

When you’re looking at your entire funnel and trying to decide which step gets your attention first, start with the bottlenecks. In most funnels, there are one or two steps that aren’t really steps. They’re brick walls.

Your mission? Find your bottlenecks and patch them asap.

4. When A/B Testing, Track the Impact on the Entire Funnel

Once you find your bottlenecks, you’ll want to start launching improvements to see if you can fix them. The best way to do this is with an A/B test.

A/B tests typically track only the next step.

As soon as you start testing improvements in your funnel, test your changes on the ENTIRE funnel instead of just the next step. This way, you won’t slow your customer growth by accident. And yes, I’ve seen this happen.

5. Track People

There’s a myth that most marketers automatically believe. As soon as you start to track your funnel, you’ll assume that customers move orderly through it.

This is false.

People bounce around in funnels.

So how do we get around this? Use customer analytics so you can track people. Then you’ll know how many people moved through each step, even if they’re bouncing around beforehand..."

The article is analyzed with more information, examples, and some tools. Read full article here:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/use-conversion-funnels/