I have been privileged to be on the advisory board for the conference as well as presenting at 2 of the sessions, on e-commerce best practice and rapid fire live page critiques.

Read on to find out more about this 2 day conversion conference.

1) Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser – Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Guru!)

With three best-selling books and more than 15 years of conversion optimisation experience under his belt, Bryan Eisenberg is legendary for his work is persuasion architecture, persona development and conversion rate optimisation. In this tell-all keynote, he reveals the intimate secrets that few insiders ever get to hear.

Glimpse into the history of CRO and understand what will happen to this discipline in the future. Learn from almost two decades of successes and failures — why Bryan thinks most marketers are still in the dark ages in terms of conversion and testing, and how his simple three-step formula has streamlined the testing process for some of the most successful companies on the web.

If time permits, we put Bryan in the hotseat when he opens up the session for a no-holds-barred question and answer period that could transform the way you think about online marketing.

2) Mobile & Realtime Optimisation – Amy Africa (Eight by Eight)

Why is your established online strategy not transferring well to mobile? What are the important factors (and what aren’t) in determining how to increase your mobile conversions? What delivers results, how do you deal with “abandons” and save up to 60% of them? What should you be tracking? For anyone currently active in mobile, or planning to be, this is a keynote session you really cannot afford to miss. You’ll hear why your mobile conversion strategy has to be different and pick up the tips and tricks you need to put it in place.

3) Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science – Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy)

Advertising and communication has changed immeasurably over the last twenty years. But our tools for understanding people and brands remain largely trapped in the 1970s – if that. Can a missing science fill in some of the gaping gaps in our knowledge?

4) E-commerce Best Practices – Paul Rouke (PRWD) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory)

How do you design your ecommerce website to persuade more visitors to convert? What guidelines should be followed when designing product and category pages? Learn guiding principles for making changes to your ecommerce website that will significantly increase your conversion rate.

5) Rapid Fire Landing Page Critiques – Paul Rouke (PRWD), Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory) & Rob Jackson (Conversion Thursday)

Your landing page stinks – it’s just a question of degree. Bring your URL and our experts will give you some quick and actionable tips to immediately improve performance. Guaranteed to be an educational and entertaining session.

6) Plus lots more engaging and insightful sessions

Along with these 5 reasons to attend, take a look at the day 1 and day 2 agenda to see what other sessions are on which may interest you.

Use #ConvCon to follow the conference live

If you are unable to attend you may want to keep any eye on the #ConvCon twitter hashtag which I expect will be getting used extensively during the course of the 2 days.

Further resources on conversion optimisation

If you are looking for more resources on usability and conversion optimisation, view my up-to-date list of articles, case studies and presentations – Conversion Optimisation Resources

What you’ll find here is:

• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for lead generation
• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for e-commerce
• Tools that you can use to monitor & improve your website
• Conversion rate optimisation case studies
• inks to presentations & slides from events & conferences

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at the conference!

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors – using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance – its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving – using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance

Conference Overview

Coping with and emerging from this recession in a stronger and profitable state are quite simply what most businesses wish to achieve. This major How-Do half day conference in Liverpool has drawn together five outstanding speakers whose collective expertise can help companies achieve just that.

In the current challenging economic climate, companies who not only survive, but actually thrive, are those who can develop and utilise a true competitive edge. If you want to guarantee your business the opportunity to implement ideas that will help make it more productive, more pro-active, more competitive and ultimately more profitable, then this conference is for you.

How-Do has brought together an outstanding panel of speakers for this conference at Liverpool Science Park, all of whom are focused on providing the type of insight and information that can make a real difference to the success of your organisation.

Areas Covered

The speakers including myself will be covering five key areas of your business:

• learning first hand from Google on what’s really working online
• how to develop and win new business
• more effective communication and engagement with business media
• improving the performance of your e-platforms
• reviewing and developing your strategy in a crowded marketplace

The Panel Of Speakers Are

• Andrew Barke (Google)
• Paul Rouke (PRWD)
• Bill Gleeson (Liverpool Daily Post)
• John Leach (Winning Pitch)
• Eva Berg-Winters (PricewaterhouseCoopers)

Booking Information

Delegate tickets are £88 + VAT early booking/charity rate (for bookings before 22nd May or whilst tickets last), £118 + VAT thereafter. Places are limited and you can book online to reserve your place. If you have any queries please contact Cathryn O’Grady on 07918 174176, or by e-mail cath@how-do.co.uk.

My presentation slides and further usability resources from the event are also available for reference.

Manchester Digital Introduction and Usability Primer

Usability – Stripped Bear from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

An introduction to Usability: What’s The Use? by Shaun Fensom from Manchester Digital, followed by a short primer to usability by Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD.

No matter how many job titles there are in the usability and user experience field, at least all professionals share 1 common goal…

Usability – The Importance For Internal Business Systems

Usability – The Importance For Internal Business Systems from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, talks about the importance of usability for internal business systems, specifically around staff productivity and process efficiency.

The presentation touches on common barriers to staff productivity, some of the main reasons for these barriers, plus a short video of a manufacturing company who are embracing user-centered design as a way of combating the traditional software development issues on a companies productivity.

The presentation also asks business owners a few key questions, such as do you listen to your staff, do you staff waste valuable company time doing repetitive tasks, and do you know what is the on-going cost to your business if you use un-usable software systems.

Usability – The Importance For Websites and Online Marketing

Usability – The Importance for Customer Facing Websites from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, talks about the importance of usability for businesses communicating with both new and potential customers.

Featuring a case study of how a company improved their revenue-per-employee by 95% over a 2 year period, along with some attendee participation, this 17 minute presentation touches on a wide variety of websites and activities, such as lead generation sites, information portals and search engine marketing campaigns.

Most significantly conversion rates for e-commerce websites are discussed, where usability can have a remarkable affect on a companies bottom line, if the right decisions are made in making improvements.