As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been working on building a brand and sales for a client, Cal Smith, who not only is a great client, he is just a fun guy, period. I have been working with him very closely and educating him on how marketing works, especially in the social media sphere.

Now we have been working with some pretty traditional stuff but giving it a whole new twist with Facebook’s ability to mircotarget audiences and drill down to that set of people that will really respond to the marketing message. But now that we have the audience and they are ready to follow the call to action, what do we do with them then?

As I mentioned in the last post, we’re looking for conversions. And in this scenario, the conversion occurs when the user clicks to read an excerpt from Cal’s book. The hope is that the reader will then continue down the funnel and choose to purchase a book. When I started tracking the conversion rates, the numbers were fairly low. We needed a way to get people to perform the call to action.

Enter design and usability!

One of the things that I noticed first was that when users got to the landing page, that they were going straight for the top-level navigation. Under normal circumstances, that would be a good thing, but I wanted them to click a button further down the page. The client didn’t have the budget to build a dedicated landing page, so a page within the site would have to be modified.

Here is the landing page:

One little design element can make all the difference!

You’ve seen this before in my last post. What is new from the other version is the large badge in the bottom right corner of the first read image.

Chances are, the user will be attracted to the image first. Remembering the lessons in usablity from the web, I placed the badge in the lower right corner, where people tend to look for calls to action. The badge tell them “Right here! This is what you’re looking for!”

So far, conversions are up nearly 50% from a 14.29% goal completion rate just last week to a 24.19% goal completion rate today. Just from one little badge.

Sales are up, too. The numbers are still small, yes, but there was a whopping 850% increase in sales from the week before the change to the week after. Can’t argue with those facts. I’ll keep monitoring the stats and report back.

So when you are looking for a creative provider, make sure that they understand those tenets of usability, task-oriented design and the analytic that drive strategic creative decisions.