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One of my favorite television commercials of all-time is one from FedEx that I believe first aired during the 2002 Super Bowl. In it, a group of workers are sitting around a table brainstorming about potential ways their company could save money. One of them, let's call him Dwight, says, "We could open an account on fedex.com and save 10% on online express shipping." No reaction. Then the boss states the exact same thing, and everyone reacts with "Great idea!", and the like. The bewildered Dwight, says, "You just said the exact same thing I said, but you did this," and Dwight imitates the authoritative hand motion the boss used for extra emphasis. To which the boss replies, "No, I did this," and demonstrates a slightly different hand motion. Once again, the room erupts, "Makes all the difference!", "Bingo!", "Great idea, boss!"

The ad works on a number of levels (to see the ad, click here). For one, it highlights the frustration of inept superiors stealing credit for other people's ideas. But it also highlights how the slightest change in delivery can make a tremendous impact.

This second point, that little things mean a lot, rings particularly true when it comes to webpage design. Through the work we do for our clients, we see time and time again, how sometimes seemingly minor changes in a webpage can have a major influence on response rates. In this month's Customer Spotlight, we highlight a project we did for HouseValues, where we conducted a multivariable test on their search results/registration page. Here is the control version of the page and the winning version of the page:

From a distance, the 2 pages look identical. However, the winning version converted 34.3% better than the control version.

How could two seemingly identical versions perform so differently? Well, if you look closely at the two pages, you'll see that they actually differ in a lot of little ways. The introductory copy is different. The ordering of the page is different. The submit button is different. The layout of the form is different. In the same way that the smallest change in hand motion influenced the workers in the FedEx ad, seemingly tiny changes in webpage design can influence your customers' behavior.

There is a common misconception that to significantly improve a website's performance, you need to conduct an expensive and time-consuming website design overhaul. The good news is that this is simply not true. Look again at the HouseValues example, and you'll see that only one new graphical element was introduced into the winning page (a new submit button). All the other changes involved just wordsmithing or reordering. A nip here, a tuck there.

The reason subtle changes can be so effective relates to another common misconception. Many marketers believe that when someone visits a webpage there is just one decision point: do I continue to the next page or do I abandon? The reality is that when someone visits a webpage, they actually make many mini-decisions. They first might read the headline. This leads to a decision point: does this sound compelling enough to continue evaluating the page or do I abandon? If they decide to continue, they might move on to the instructional text. This leads to the next decision point: does it sound easy?, will this process be quick?, or do I abandon? And so on and so on.

If you think of decision-making in these terms, it becomes apparent that every little element can matter. And to compound this, different people focus on different parts of the page - some will look at the headline, some will look at the product image, some will look at the privacy policy. Therefore, it's imperative that every individual element is optimized.

So if you want to be a hero at your next staff meeting, tell your fellow staffers that you don't need to spend the next 9 months on a colossal website redesign to get significant improvements in your conversion rate. A more surgical approach, using a multivariable testing methodology, will be more effective, and certainly a lot faster. But do remember, when you deliver this information, make darn sure you use an authoritative hand motion.

Few companies in the real estate industry have been able to successfully leverage the power of the Internet like HouseValues.com. The company successfully uses its Web properties to provide advanced lead generation and lead management services for thousands of real estate agents and brokers across the United States.

The company's JustListed.com Web site allows customers to sign up for home listing e-mail alerts based on their specific search criteria. The service requires customers to complete a 2-step registration process. HouseValues brought in Optimost to help maximize the effectiveness of this process and ultimately increase their registration rates.

With its advanced methodology, Optimost was able to design a multivariable test which included 15 variables on the page, over 100 different values (versions of the variables), and generated 12.3 billion permutations of the test page. The test was then conducted on a subset of these possible permutations, and as a result of the test, Optimost identified a winning creative that enabled HouseValues to increase its registration rate by 34%. In addition, HouseValues learned what specific changes made the most impact on their site.

For more details on this success story and other customer success stories, please see http://www.optimost.com/case_studies.phtml.

Search and Website Optimization are perfect partners – search "brings the horse to water" and optimization "makes it drink". Combining successful SEO and SEM efforts with web page optimization is crucial to maximizing your entire ROI on your marketing campaigns – the multiplier of higher search traffic with a higher conversion rate on the web site drives that ROI. Optimost partners include companies focused on maximizing your search efforts, and YourAmigo has a unique and powerful approach to dramatically increase your company's presence in organic search listings.

YourAmigo delivers both organic and paid search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, business intelligence services and web site search. Its Spider Linker^TM solution is YourAmigo's world-leading intelligent, highly-automated search engine optimization technology. Spider Linker^TM is a proven, successful, managed software service which makes web site content that is not visible or accessible to search engine spiders, e.g. Googlebot, available to the spiders through a set of spider-friendly links. When combined with YourAmigo's expert analysis, the solution produces vastly improved rankings in natural search engine listings such as Google.

YourAmigo's SEEC^TM (Search Engine Enhanced Content) solution provides new highly relevant and optimized pages in addition to current web site content for searcher popularity, relevance and click appeal to drive new searchers to web sites. The SEEC solution has the ability to analyze content on any site to identify gaps and deficiencies relative to how search engine's view site pages. While maintaining a client's site look, feel and branding, SEEC creates additional optimized pages to leverage searcher queries and drive incremental traffic and new sales. YourAmigo's SEEC technology has proven extremely effective for many leading companies. For example, YourAmigo's SEEC technology has increased sales by 215% in natural search for Avenue.com in less than 6 months.

For more information about YourAmigo's solutions, please go to www.youramigo.com or contact Joe Herne, joe.herne@youramigo.com (510)813-1355 .

Click here for a complete listing of Optimost Partners.

If you are an Optimost partner and you are interested in either having your company featured in our Partner spotlight or your upcoming events listed in our newsletter, please send an e-mail to