On the Online Dialogue Thursday which will be held for the first time next Sept. 9 (On our birthday!), the 2nd part of this knowledge event will consist of a “conversion clinic.” Around us, people began to wonder what to expect at this. Here is the explanation with examples.

From Site Clinic to Conversion Clinic

We adopted the phenomenon from the search marketing world where the “site clinic” has been taking place at conferences for some time. A number of search engine marketing specialists sit behind their laptops on a podium and a host or lady guides the communication between the audience and the experts. A URL is called out from the audience (usually one's own website) and after a short briefing by the host or lady about the search engine marketing problems at hand, the experts get to work on what they see immediately and provide solutions to the problems.

Multidisciplinary team

From Online Dialogue's way of working, we translated it into a conversion clinic. We believe that designing and optimizing the online channel for visitor satisfaction and business profitability works best when a multidisciplinary team of specialists works on it. To properly design the dialogue between company and visitor you need different areas of expertise from content to interaction design and from visual design to economic psychology. We have these areas of expertise available at partner level and in our executive expert network. What could be more fun to work with such a team of specialists over a fixed period of time to assess a website for positive points and points for improvement?

1st Conversion Clinic at the 2010 Webanalytics Congress

So it happened. The baptism of fire of the conversion clinic took place at the Webanalytics Congress 2010 last July, where for 90 minutes during the parallel sessions we reviewed a new website every 10 to 15 minutes. Panel leader Bart Schutz asked about the strategy and goals and in a team with Aartjan van Erkel (content), Aaron Peters (technology), Anna Botsvine (visual), Anouschka Scholten (interaction) and yours truly (dialogue/conversion) we went wild on the websites. The entire session was rated 8+ by visitors, making it 1 of the highlights of the conference according to the numbers.

Examples from a conversion clinic

To give an example of what we then manage to report “out of the blue” about a website, I have listed the clinic insights from Rijksoverheid.nl and Wehkamp.nl. Check out the slideshare presentation below or download the PDF of the conversion clinic examples here.

Clinic at the Online Dialogue Thursday

On September 9, in the last hour of Online Dialogue Thursday, we will present the conversion clinic in another improved version. We have grown in our view to a “dialogue clinic”. To what extent does the website properly help the visitor fill in his visit goal. Is this dialogue that should be designed from the company beforehand correct. Is the dialogue correct in terms of content, interaction and also outside the own website. How can it be improved so that more return and visitor satisfaction follows and what are recommendations from the website in question for the public? Bart Schutz as strategist is once again the host. The panel this time consists of Anouschka Scholten (user experience), Charlotte Snel (content), Maurice Beerthuyzen (social media) and yours truly (dialogue).

We will be covering 5 websites for exactly 10 minutes each based on room input and hope to have interesting discussions with all the knowledge in the room as well. Do you want to be there on September 9? There are still a few places available which we will raffle off.Register now for the waiting list!