Future Now's Publications

Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?:
Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

A #1 Best Selling Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek and Amazon Best seller.

Download a few sample chapters (1.2 meg PDF) to preview.  

Evolving from the premise that customers have always behaved more like cats than Pavlov’s dogs, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark examines how emerging media have undermined the effectiveness of prevailing mass marketing models and created an unprecedented opportunity for businesses to redefine how they communicate with customers by leveraging the power of increasingly interconnected media channels. The authors don’t simply explain the shift in paradigm; Waiting for Your Cat to Bark introduces Persuasion Architecture® as the synthetic model that provides business with a proven context for rethinking customers and retooling marketers in a rewired market.

Readers will learn:

• Why many marketers are unprepared for today’s increasingly fragmented, in-control, always-on audience who make pin-point relevance mandatory.
• How interactivity has changed the nature of marketing by extending its reach into the world of sales, design, merchandizing, and customer relations.
• How Persuasion Architecture® allows businesses to create powerful, multi-channel persuasive systems that anticipate customer needs.
• How Persuasion Architecture® allows businesses to measure and optimize the return on investment for every discreet piece of that persuasive system

You may order your books from Barnes & Noble.com/bark (special bulk pricing available), Amazon or Booksamillion.

Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results

Call to Action is a New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal best selling book. Do you have the desire and commitment to get phenomenal results from your online efforts? Call to Action will show you how to map the entire online customer experience. It’s a step by step guide that examines planning, structure, momentum, communication, value and accountability. Learn how to define who your customers are (there is no such thing an average user), what they want, how to communicate with them, and how to create persuasive momentum so they take the actions you want them to. Plus learn the essential metrics to accurately measure that performance for maximum results Learn the proven methods for meeting customers goals and your goals. If you’re ready and willing to increase results exponentially, this book is your Call to Action.

I am completely impressed with the book "Call to Action" and it has markedly improved our business. After reading it I purchased six copies and made it mandatory reading for our marketing department in the US. We started making changes to the site based on the information provided in the book. In just *two* weeks we had increased our conversions by 33%. While that number is good we believe that we will far surpass it as we make more and more changes. The bottom line - we have about one million customers showing up at our site per month so the additional conversion is truly impactful even now - "Call to Action" X 7 copies = 33% increased conversion rate = the BEST roi we're ever going to see.

- Mark Seremet CEO,Spreadshirt.com

Which Sells Best: A Quick Start Guide to Testing for Retailers

By Bryan Eisenberg & Anthony Garcia
$14.95 (45 page PDF) to download.

Landing page optimization for retailers is no longer a buzzword it is a requirement.

The rising cost of online traffic means marketers are paying more for less return on their ad dollars. To keep up, online retailers must roll up their sleeves and dive into landing page optimization. Optimizing your landing pages using established testing methods is a proven means of increasing your conversion rates and realizing improved ROI.

Conversion Expert's Workbook: Future Now's Self Service Guide to Website Optimization

By Future Now, Inc.
$295 (244 page o-ring binder).

The Conversion Expert’s Workbook walks you through, step by step, as you score your website on over 50 different categories. You will be guided in realizing where your sales process breaks down by answering key questions about various elements of your website. You will learn about what is missing as well as how to improve existing design, content, structure and functionality.  You will be using materials based on our own internal training manuals. You will also have access to some of the same reference resources used by Future Now’s conversion analysts.

Contact Me or Submit?: A Quick Start Guide to Testing for Lead Generation

By Bryan Eisenberg & Anthony Garcia
$14.95 (52 page PDF) to download.

Landing page optimization for lead-generation is no longer a buzzword it is a requirement.

The rising cost of online traffic means businesses are paying more for less return on their marketing dollars.  To keep up, businesses must roll up their sleeves and dive into landing page optimization. Optimizing your landing pages using established testing methods is a proven means of increasing your conversion rates and realizing improved ROI. 

One of the questions we are most often asked is ‘I want to test, but where do I get started?’  In this 52 page PDF we give you the answer.  The authors don’t simply explain the mechanics of testing; Contact Me or Submit introduces a proven model that has rewarded many of our clients with impressive increases in conversion.  You’ll get tips specific to the challenges faced by lead-gen site. You’ll avoid common mistakes and accelerate your path to testing success by following the practical steps outlined in this short yet comprehensive guide.

Persuasive Online Copywriting - Updated PDF version

Writing for the web. Web word wizardry. Web writing that works.
What does that mean? Your online copy must persuade - it’s integral to getting your visitors or readers to register, subscribe, qualify as leads, and yes, even buy from you. It’s writing that must earn its keep. And to effectively manage the quality of your online writing, you need to understand what works, why it works and how to make it work better for you. Whether you are the marketer responsible for the bottom line or the writer creating the copy, Persuasive Online Copywriting provides the tools you need to get results. This is the 2007 updated PDF version. The original paperback version is out of print.

Save The Sale: A Quick Start Guide on Shopping Carts

By Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg & Lisa T Davis
$19.95 (32 page PDF) to download.

This guide will provide you practical steps to improve your shopping cart.
This guide tackles the problem of shopping cart abandonment head on. Up front, you get twenty time-tested tactics for decreasing your shopping cart abandonment rates so you can “save the sale.”  These tactics will also give you starting points for testing and optimizing your checkout process.

GrokDotCom Blog and Newsletter

GrokDotCom is our slightly irreverent Online Conversion Rate blog and newsletter. Written from a “Martian perspective,” it covers topics including web design, sales, marketing, copywriting, usability, SEO, relationship marketing and consumer psychology, and much more.

ClickZ's ROI Marketing column

Current efforts in Web site design and development, as well as in other types of e-marketing, are diluted tremendously -- even fatally -- by a lack of understanding about Web site traffic (i.e., customer) conversion and retention. This column has over 200 archived columns written by Bryan Eisenberg will show you precisely what you need to do to increase both your conversion and your retention rates.

Persuasion Architecture® -
A Strategy to MAP the Selling Process to the Buying Process:

This whitepaper presents an overview of Persuasion Architecture® and how the process helps your organization meet the needs of your diverse visitors to convert them into buyers. Persuasion Architecture® is the organization of the buying and selling processes married to the information flow. The focus is persuading your visitors to take action. It's similar to information architecture, which involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully. Whereas the goal of information architecture is to inform and educate, a commercial website should inform and persuade your customer.

Persuasion Architecture® is a patent pending persona-based business process for creating websites that must serve many diverse types of customers, prospects, and visitors. Utilizing Persuasion Architecture®'s proprietary tools and processes a website is designed and optimized for every persona to be persuaded, based on their own needs, without sacrificing the needs of other personas.

Scenario-Based Analytics: the Future of Analysis in a Web 2.0 World

Biannual report by Future Now's Chief Thinking Officer, John Quarto-vonTivadar, outlining how to analyze persuasive customer scenarios and grading the leading analytics vendors' implementation of Persuasion Architecture®. Next release: Q1 2007

Future Now's 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study

Read more about Future Now's Customer Experience study that analyzed over 300 retailers in 69 categories.

2003 Online Retail Study for Customer Focused Excellence

Free Download or read more insights about the study in ClickZ.

Persuasive Online Copywriting

How to Take Your Words to the Bank - (Out of Print. Used copies available occassionaly on Amazon and BN.com)

Writing for the web. Web word wizardry. Web writing that works. What does that mean? Your online copy must persuade - it’s integral to getting your visitors or readers to register, subscribe, qualify as leads, and yes, even buy from you. It’s writing that must earn its keep. And to effectively manage the quality of your online writing, you need to understand what works, why it works and how to make it work better for you.

Whether you are the marketer responsible for the bottom line or the writer creating the copy, Persuasive Online Copywriting provides the tools you need to get results.

The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to E-Metrics

22 benchmarks to understand the major trends, key opportunities, and hidden hazards your web logs uncover. (fulfillment of this 78 page report by CafePress)

What Converts Search Engine Traffic

Understanding Audience, Vehicle, Message and Perspective to Optimize Your ROI with exclusive WebSideStory's StatMarket data. (fulfillment of this 75 page report by CafePress)

Improve Conversion by Measuring the Key Scenarios on Your Web Site

White Paper and Macromedia Breeze Presentation on WebTrends website

Other Services

In addition to providing a range of free resources and offering our Real World Sales Analysis™, Future Now offers a broad range of support services all designed to help you reach your online sales and profit goals.