When my CEO suggested a free trip to Vancouver attending the Unbounce Call-to-Action Conference 2016, I quickly emphasized how valuable this would be. It had been more than 15 years since I had been to Vancouver and, truth be told, any excuse to get back would work. Luckily, it turns out the conference was awesome! Below are a few personal takeaways I found valuable and wanted to share for anyone interested in conversion optimization or digital marketing.
1) Behind every click is a human being.
Often times we marketers are so caught up in the weeds of conversion metrics, data trends, ranking signals, traffic volume… etc. that it gets really easy to forget this basic truth – humans are behind all clicks. There are many paths to choose when implementing a digital strategy and lots of shiny flashy bells and whistles that might work in the short-term. It’s hard to go wrong in the long run when you stay focused on providing value to humans and not just bots or algorithms.
2) Jargon litters the internet like plastic litters our oceans.
Loved this Unbounce Dejargonator Chrome Extension and fun and useful way to detect lame copy too many companies use far too often. Even our agency is guilty in this regard on a few pages, and it was a good reminder to streamline our copy and keep it 100.
3) Try Twitter Cards.
Maybe the social media specialists out there were aware of this, and I definitely needed a refresher. Twitter Cards seem like an easy thing to setup for any client using Twitter. More on Twitter cards can be found here.
4) Raise User Motivation to help conversion.
Personally, my favorite speaker at the conference was André Morys both in form and substance. I can’t do justice to the depth of what he touched on, but the takeaway is that raising user motivation is really undervalued in terms of improving conversion/performance. Like many marketers, I tend to get caught up in removing obstacles, improving design, and driving more traffic or exposure, etc. Sometimes the “carrot-on-a-stick” approach to motivating a user is just as – or even more – effective. This is a very undervalued area of focus in digital marketing, in my opinion.
5) Actionable data doesn’t care about your opinions.
This is the bane of my professional existence in countless situations – internally and client facing – and something I’ve wrestled with since I first started working in the web world. Data never lies. If you have the right data you don’t need to convince anybody how good your idea is or isn’t – let the data do it. The challenge naturally is setting up your data collection correctly and being able to trust that what you are collecting is accurate. (I was lucky enough to meet Annie Cushing at the conference, so check out her site if you want to learn how to collect and analyze data the right way.) I can’t even count how many times things are done because someone thinks it is a good idea or looks they way they want. I always go back to the old saying here – an ugly website that performs well is better than a pretty website that nobody uses.
Unbounce Conference Summary:
Unbounce makes a really cool (and technically rock solid) product for conversion optimization and testing. We’re working to grow and expand the way our agency uses this tool on behalf of clients and the CTA Conference 2016 was a great place to learn more about industry best practices in this space and just have some fun. I look forward to talking my boss into another paid vacation attending the Unbounce CTA Conference 2017.
About the Author:
Travis Melvin works and writes for Van West Media (VWM) in New York City. VWM has been using Unbounce for the past year with a few clients in different ways and has been really impressed so far. This was our first Unbounce CTA Conference, but we’re already looking forward to next year.