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Boost Conversions – Segment Your Audience

How to boost Conversions-Ways to segment a market:

One of the major aspects of maximizing conversion rate is to make your marketing campaigns relevant to the audience. However, it should be always taken care that audience comes from numerous sources and a good marketer is always able to distinguish all of these channels or segments separately and designs an appropriate strategy for each segment. In this article we will explore some of the important ways to segment a market.

• By Lead Source:

You should be able to check/detect the source of the visitor/lead, because the person who has attended your Trade show has a different impression than the one who has attended your webinar. Similarly, a prospect visiting a site due to online advertisement is different from the lead as a result of your inbound call. For every set of audience you should have separate landing pages, offers and promotions.

• By Behavior Criteria:

Another way to filter out the leads from online traffic is by examining the visitor behaviors on your site which include Activity on Website i.e. RSS subscription, email opt-in etc. Also you should note that how visitors response to your Online Surveys and Forms and also do not under-estimate the potential traffic from your email marketing campaigns.

• · By Lead Stage:

The buying cycle is not always single stepped or spontaneous(see: understanding sales funnel), customers often make their decisions after repeated visits and email inquiries. So you should cater to the needs of specific audience according to their unique needs, prospects vs existing customers is a common scenario.

• · Contact Type:

Another important segmentation is based upon the relation of visitors to your organization. You should employ a separate lead generation message to various people i.e. partners vs employees and customer vs prospects.

• · Demographics:

It is the most common and obvious segmentation type and should also include Job function, industry, company size etc.

• · Purchase History:

While dealing with existing customers you should keep in touch with their Purchase Histories so that you can make proper propositions for Renewal of licenses, while you plan to  cross-sell/up-sell your existing customers.

Taguchi testing Basics & Comparison of Taguchi testing with A/B testing

Taguchi Testing Method:

Dr. Genichi Taguchi was the founder of Taguchi Testing Method, developed 50 years ago ,it is a statistical method originally used to optimize automobile and other product manufacturing. Recently, The Taguchi Method is being applied to Landing Page Optimization and is often regarded as “Multivariate Testing”

What is special about Taguchi and Multivariate Testing:

Multivariate testing has many different forms, depending on what you are trying to achieve. Taguchi testing is a subset of multivariate and is generally recognised to be the best place to start your calculations.

Usually with traditional A/B split tests you can test two versions of one variable, typical A/B split tests are limited to - headline A vs. headline B - or a price test among $99, $199 and $299 etc. Split testing is testing version A versus version B, if we explain it simply.

With Taguchi test methodology you test not one but many variables and in a relatively short time.e.g. you can test various elements like : three pre-heads, six headlines, three subheads, three salutations (e.g., "Dear Home Builder" vs. "Dear Lumber Buyer" vs. "Dear Wood Trader"), three lead paragraphs, three visuals (e.g., a product photo vs. a photo of the inventor vs. a photo of a happy customer), three guarantees and three calls to action.etc., at once.

Sorting out and pre-planning is what Taguchi testing is all about. Think of Taguchi testing as advanced split testing with many different combinations pre-planned. It was originally designed to test factory production lines. What Taguchi can’t tell you is what relationship all of the variables have to each other outside those preplanned combinations. So essentially, it’s split testing with more versions.

With specialized Taguchi testing software, each unique visitor to the site sees the landing page with a different combination of the elements being tested. Results are measured, tabulated and analyzed. Reports are generated to show which headline pulled best, which lead paragraph pulled best, which visual pulled best and so on.

However, to do Taguchi testing, you need to write complete copy for your landing page along with the elements listed above: the six headlines, three subheads and so on

conversion rises incrementally for each variable: e.g., a 20 percent lift in orders for the best headline, a 17 percent increase in conversion for the best lead and so on. By incorporating the winning versions of all variables tested in the final landing page, Taguchi testing can double, triple, even quadruple the conversion rate of your landing pages.

Traffic Requirements:

Typically, you want at least 1,000 unique visits per test cell. Depending on the number of test cells, you need 12,000 to 20,000 visits for a full test.

Benefits: This means you find out, more quickly, what parts of your sales page are converting- and which aren’t. Knowing how to use and apply the Taguchi method can hours of time and thousands of dollars in testing.

Acknowledgement:

I have benefited from following articles specially, among many others, to prepare this article. I am thankful to the repsective authors.

http://www.louisrburns.com/types-testing-software/

http://www.dmnews.com/Taguchi-testing-can-triple-conversion/article/93753/

.htacess file tutorial – useful tips

For those who are unfamiliar with .htaccess file, here is  the basic info:

.htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of a directory-level configuration file that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration. The .htaccess file is placed inside the web tree, and is able to override a subset of the server's global configuration; the extent of this subset is defined by the web server administrator.The original purpose of .htaccess was to allow per-directory access control (e.g. requiring a password to access the content), hence the name. Nowadays .htaccess can override many other configuration settings, mostly related to content control, e.g. content type and character set, CGI handlers, etc.

Following are some basic tips and uses of .htaccess file, I think every webmaster should at least have an idea of the power and usefulness of .htaccess file.

1. Create a custom error page.

.htaccess makes it easy to create your own custom error pages. Just create your custom error page files and then add this code to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 401 /401.php  
ErrorDocument 403 /403.php  
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php  
ErrorDocument 500 /500.php

(you should replace the “/500.php” or whatever with your own file path and name.)

2. Prevent directory browsing.

If you don’t include an index file in a directory, visitors can browse the directory itself. But preventing that is as easy as adding a single line to your .htaccess file:

Options All –Indexes

3.Block access to your .htaccess file

By adding he following code to your htaccess file will prevent attempts to access your htaccess file. This extra layer of security protects your htaccess file by displaying a 403 error message on the browser.

# secure htaccess file 
<Files .htaccess> 
 order allow,deny 
 deny from all 
</Files>

4. Set the default page of each directory.

If you don’t want to use an index page in each directory, you can set the default page visited when someone reaches (like an about page or a page offering the newest content) that directory by adding this: 

DirectoryIndex news.html

(And of course you’d replace the “news.html” bit with whatever you want to use as the default.)

5.Redirect everyone to different site except few IP

If you want to redirect all the visitors to a different IP. Also give access to certain  few IPs. You can use the code below:

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.youdomain.com
Order deny,allow 
Deny from all 
Allow from 124.34.48.165 
Allow from 102.54.68.123

6.Redirect Visitors While You Update Your Site

Update and test your site while visitors are redirected to the page of your choice:

order deny,allow 
deny from all 
allow from 123.123.123.123

ErrorDocument 403 /page.html

<Files page.html> 
allow from all 
</Files>

Replace 123.123.123.123 with your IP address. Also replace page.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

7.Disguise your file types.

You can disguise all of your file types by making them appear as PHP files. Just insert this snippet in:

ForceType application/x-httpd-php

8.Protect your site from hotlinking.

The last thing you want is for those stealing your content to also be able to embed the images hosted on your server in their posts. It takes up your bandwidth and can quickly get expensive. Here’s a way to block hotlinking within htaccess:

view plaincopy to clipboardprint? 
RewriteEngine On  
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$  
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([ -a-z0-9]  .)?domain.com [NC]  
RewriteRule .(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [F,NC,L]

(Of course you’ll want to replace the domain.com with your own domain name.)

9.Restrict file upload limits for PHP:

You can restrict the maximum file size for uploading in PHP, as well as the maximum execution time. Just add this:

php_value upload_max_filesize 10M  
php_value post_max_size 10M  
php_value max_execution_time 200  
php_value max_input_time 200

Line one specifies the maximum file size for uploading; line two is the maximum size for post data; line three is the maximum time in seconds a script can run before it’s terminated; and line four is the maximum amount of time in seconds a script is allowed to parse input data.

10.Force a file to download with a “Save As” prompt.

If you want to force someone to download a file instead of opening it in their browser, use this code:

AddType application/octet-stream .doc .mov .avi .pdf .xls .mp4

11.Redirect to a secure https connection

If you want to redirect your entire site to a secure https connection, use the following:

view plaincopy to clipboardprint? 
RewriteEngine On  
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on  
RewriteRule (.*)https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

12.Block script execution.

You can stop scripts in certain languages from running with this: 

Options –ExecCGI  
AddHandler cgi-script .pl .py .php .jsp. htm .shtml .sh .asp .cgi

Just replace the types of scripts you want to block.

13.Set up a 301 redirect.

If you move around the structure of your site and need to redirect some old URLs to their new locations, the following bit of code will do so for you:

view plaincopy to clipboardprint? 
Redirect 301 /original/filename.htmlhttp://domain.com/updated/filename.html

Important Note:

1-Be careful of spelling- .htaccess is not forgiving of spelling errors. 
2-htaccess is case sensitive. If something is shown in the examples with a capital letter, make sure it’s capitalized in your htaccess file.

For readers interested in advance knowledge, I will recommend the following guides:

• http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html
• http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

While preparing this article, I have taken benefit from many good tutorials on the web,like:

• http://www.noupe.com/php/htaccess-techniques.html
• http://www.thomsonchemmanoor.com/16-useful-htaccess-tricks-and-hacks-for-web-developers.html
• http://frontdeskapp.com/blog/5-htaccess-tricks-every-webmaster-should-know/

SEO's blog

Twitter Solutions For Joomla-WordPress-Drupal

To find and selecet plugins and Modules to auto tweet the content published on  joomla , wordpress and drupal is usually a headache for many webmasters with their sites on popular CMS like wordpress, joomla ,and drupal etc. Although it is possible that the posts be manually tweeted, but having an automatic option is always handy for such repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time and login-out frustration. I have been using the following plug-ins and modules for some of my sites and found them useful, if you have something more interesting and useful to share, feel free to do so and post it in comments.

Twitter Plugin for Joomla:

• Twitter Status: <

I have used this plugin and it is great and simple tool indeed. This plugin updates Twitter status with article title and URL when published.How does it work?When author of article press Save button on "Add Article" page, plugin will connect to Twitter.com server and send article title. If everything go O.K., you will see article title on your Twitter.com account.As you know, Twitter has length limit on sending text. Sometimes title of article can infringe 140 chars. If it happens, Twitter Status will cut text to 140 signs.You can download it form here:http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/3735/detailsAnd the documentation is here:http://downloads.joomlacode.org/docmanfileversion/3/7/1/37154/Twitter_plugin_doc_1.3.pdfTwitter Plugins for WordPress:

• Auto Tweet

This is a famous plug-in for wordpress, what it does however, it posts on Twitter the first few lines of your post. It does not publish the short url back to your article, so pretty useless for some people.

• Tweet This –Wordpress Plugin

This plug-in adds a "Tweet This Post" link to every post and page. In addition it can add buttons optionally for other popular sites like digg, stumble , red it, yahoo buzz etc.How does it work?

• Tweetly Updater - WordPress Plugin

Twitter Modules For Drupal:

• Twitter module:

• Tweet Module