This article was written by Matthew Niederberger and previously appeared on Marketingfacts.co.uk. Marketingfacts is exclusive media partner of the Online Dialogue Thursday.

Last Thursday, September 9, 2010, marked the start of the first Online Dialogue Thursday. A 2 monthly seminar from the people of expert network Online Dialogue. This free event is aimed at people responsible for online customer satisfaction and online service and sales targets. The focus is digital design and (conversion) optimization. As a company, Online Dialogue specializes in, as the name suggests, engaging the dialogue from the company to the online customer. We are still talking about online optimization, but in the broadest sense of the word.

After a brief introduction by Anouschka Scholten about Online Dialogue Bart Schutz began his expert session on ‘How to Make People Buy Online. In his presentation, Bart explained that online relates to two components:

1. enable visitors to buy
2. convince visitors to buy (persuasion)

Enabling visitors to be able to buy online is what is commonly considered eCommerce today. Within eCommerce, according to Bart, conventions already exist that help visitors buy products and services. These conventions apply as basic rules to accommodate visitors so that they can proceed to purchase without (too many) obstacles. Consider design, accessibility, interaction, form and content aspects of a Web site.

Schutz goes further in his presentation, beyond the basic rules, and takes us toward the phenomenon of persuasion. Persuasion is not new. There are numerous books on the subject by writers such as Robert Cialdini and Susan Weinschenk. Schutz discussed with us the 12 ‘golden tips’ of persuasion. These golden tips were very insightful and provided ‘food for thought’ for most visitors. These are Bart's 12 ‘golden tips’:

1. Reciprocity
2. Make the virtual reality
3. Call to action
4. Commitment & consistency
5. Social proof
6. Liking
7. Authority
8. Scarcity
9. The ‘yes’ flow
10. Perceptual contrast
11. Priming & framing
12. Choice paralysis

After Bart, it was Ton Wesseling's turn. During his session, Wesseling discussed a practical case of A/B testing at the Van Der Valk Hotels Valk.com website. Van der Valk wanted to increase online conversion especially with the sale of hotel room bookings. The big question that had to be answered beforehand was ‘How to determine where to start’? During initial discussions with Valk.com, 3 essential questions were asked, which can actually be asked with any similar project:

1. What are the capabilities of the organization?
2. What dialogues are not successful now?
3. Do you already know what influences customer behavior?

After answering these questions, Wesseling was able to determine where and on which page to test. In the case of Valk.com, 3 hypotheses were set up for a single page:

1. The page is unclear, there should be a clear hotel room book action button in the picture, this leads to more conversion.
2. Additional promotion of last-minutes, deals and packages leads to more unique visitors buying something.
3. We need to convince the customer to book with us, and we do that by highlighting the free cup of coffee and free Wi-Fi.

A total of 5 page variations were tested that incorporated the above hypotheses in different ways. Upon completion, only 1 of the 3 hypotheses could be proven. Placing a clear action button resulted in a conversion uplift of a whopping 13.6%. Showing promotions and offers was counterproductive and mentioning interesting USPs such as that of free WiFi did not prove significant in convincing, persuading, the visitors. In addition to this conversion test, Wesseling also covered testing filter options on the results page of the internal search engine and including a frequently asked questions module with the booking form.

Taco Potze joined us after Wesseling to talk with us about AboutAnalytics. AboutAnalytics conducted a thorough survey last summer among web analysts in the Netherlands about, what else, web analytics packages. Taco presented some results from the survey and also elaborated on the new functionality of AboutAnalytics' website.

Last on the agenda was a conversion clinic. Bart Schutz led the clinic in which Ton Wesseling, Anouschka Scholten, Maurice Beerthuyzen and Charlotte Snel formed the panel. During the conversion clinic, at the request of participants in the audience, 4 websites were scrutinized by the experts from the panel. We saw in mini sessions, of 10 minutes per website, Arkefly, VGZ, Aegonbank and Ziggo past. Constructive criticism was offered on topics such as persuasion, social media, texts and interaction.

The next Online Dialogue Thursday is scheduled for November 11, 2010 between 3pm and 5pm at Seats2Meet. You can register for this session via onlinedialogue.co.uk/Thursday where you can also download the slideshare presentations included here as PDFs. Here is a video impression of the afternoon.

Source: Marketingfacts.co.uk