Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13428 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
The most comprehensive book of its kind, "Call to Action" presents an overview of the principles and tactics of conversion rate marketing. "New York Times" best-selling authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg bring their years of experience to this step-by-step, how-to manual, based on their Persuasion Architecture and proven conversion rate optimisation techniques.

Customer Reviews

Lots of why but little how
The purpose of this book is to increase your conversion rate, in other words sales on your site using a multitude of different methods. It tries to cover all bases everything from usability issues, writing effective persuasive copy, web analytics, understanding your customers etc. It bashes on about the what's and the why's but often avoids the how's (especially on web analytics) which lets the book down.

If you're new to all this and want an overview then this might be the book you're looking for, the reason I say might is that the book is so repetitive that it could easily have been a third of the size and would still have covered everything it did, this is rather annoying as they could have spent more time digging deeper into topics than just fleeting over them and it made me feel a little cheated.

Don't get me wrong though, there is a lot of good stuff in here but it still falls short of an in depth study (which it promised to be) and does feel a little disjointed; it's a shame they wasted so many pages repeating themselves.

Oh and one last think you should be aware of would be acronym overload. These boys love their acronyms!

Call to wasting money
I gotta tell you, this book was absolute cr*p !

Talk about promising you the world and delivering nothing.

Blah, blah, blah, it goes on for ever, but somehow never manages to give you any practical advice that can benefit you in any way whatsoever.

I don't usually bother writing these reviews, but in this case I have made an exception. Don't be fooled by the positive review that is very long and almost certainly written by the author.

I'm having a bonfire this evening, and this book should start it off nicely.

Making websites work. E-Commerce book of the year 2005?
Why do website conversion rates remain at a gloomy 2-5 per cent?

"Call for Action" focuses on how we can improve the conversion rates. Not from a technical or academic or conceptual standpoint. Instead it takes a rare PRACTICAL and down-to-earth approach on how to improve conversion rates to improve sales and thus profits.

What is CONVERSION? Virtually all websites have a persuasive purpose; to get someone to subscribe, to register, to inquire or to buy something. And if all we get is 2-5 per cent conversion, we ought to review our website. Do we offer a product or service that could meet the needs of more than 2-5 per cent of the market? Can visitors find that, solution on the website? Do they understand our offer's value? Was it made at the right time? Are we sure they're coming back?

NAVIGATION is the biggest challenge websites face, the authors argue. The issues are: What to do with the traffic once it lands on the website? How to get visitors to take the first action and click deeper? And once there, how to induce visitors to click to the next step, and the next, and the next?

The fundamental idea is that a PERSUASIVE ARCHITECTURE links a visitor's buying experience to our company's sales process. It bridges the buy/sell process in a measurable way. If you can influence visitor behaviour and empathize with visitor motivations, you can influence results to provide a better experience and more frequent, effective conversions.

The book is filled with illustrative screen dumps of websites (before and after a change). This is a great benefit of such a how-to field book on e-commerce improvements. In my opinion, most e-commerce sites can recover the book's cost price in a few days just by following one or two of the practical suggestions in the many diverse case studies.

The primary focus of this book is e-Commerce. The key messages on conversion, however, are important to anyone running a large website.

This is a rare book. I've been involved in e-commerce since 1997 and read many interesting books on this topic. But I've never found such a practical approach to optimising e-commerce web sites as this one.

The brothers Eisenberg call themselves "wizards of web". I agree and hope my existing and future competitors don't read and act on this book. These secret formulas to improve online results are very effective, indeed.

If you're looking for a conceptual e-commerce theory, please look somewhere else. This is about the nuts and bolts about making money with an e-commerce web site. If you don't have or don`t plan to have such a website; forget about this book. Then it's a waste of time.

I also recommend Jakob Nielsen's books on web usability and Steve Krug's easy-to-read "Don't make me think".

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business