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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Table of Contents
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Marketing
I.
Marketing With No Budget: Things That Work What You Need To Know About Marketing and Strategy How To Set Internet Marketing Goals and Objectives 3 Ways to Increase Online Sales The Key to Customer Loyalty How and When to Use Sex to Sell More
II.
Conversion Optimization 101 What You Have to Know About Conversion Optimization The Ultimate Guide to Increasing E-Commerce Conversion Rates Ridiculously Effective Technique for Online Lead Generation How To Increase Sales Online: The Checklist How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate How to Use Video to Increase Conversions How To Build A High Converting Landing Page 3 Hard Truths About A/B Testing 53 Ways to Increase Conversion Rate
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
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Design
III.
Design Like Jagger Eight Universal Web Design Principles You Should Know First Impressions Matter: The Importance of Great Visual Design How To Design A Homepage That Converts Website Credibility Checklist Factors How To Design User Flow Intuitive Web Design: How To Make Your Website Intuitive To Use
Understanding Users
IV.
How To Use Behavioral Design For Boosting Converstions Using the Fogg Behavior Model People Comparison Shop, Stupid 10 Useful Findings About How People View Websites Mobile Internet Users And Their Shopping Behavior Why You Shouldn’t Assume How Users Feel About Your Site Great User Experience UX Leads to Conversions How To Identify Your Online Target Audience and Sell More Are You Providing Answers to Magic Questions?
V.
Email Marketing How To Creative Effectvive Email Drip Campaigns How To Generate More Sales From Your Email Marketing Campaigns 7 Mistakes That Hurt Your Email Relationship Building Efforts Lead Magnets: Email List Building On Steroids
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Writing Copy
VI.
Writing Homepage Headlines For The Modern World:3 Formulas That Work How To Get People To Believe What You Write What To Call Your Call To Action Value Proposition Examples 7 Principles of Effective Sales Copy Copywriting Based on the Science of Persuasion Click Fear and How to Avoid It
VII.
Pricing 10 Principles of Effective Pricing Pages Invent A New Category, Charge More Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know But Can Learn From Product Pricing Strategies and Techniques
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Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
I.
Marketing
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Marketing With No Budget: Things That Work Marketing with no budget—a familiar story for most small businesses and startups. When there’s no money, there’s usually time. Time is unfortunately also limited, so the question is—how to convert that time into money most effectively (get the biggest bang for the hour)? You could come up with hundreds of free online marketing ideas, but in order to get results, you should focus on the few that really make a difference. Note that these methods ain’t quick fixes, but will make a significant impact if you stick with it. Blog Blogging is one of the most effective marketing tools out there. It won’t do much in the short-term, but you’re probably in it for the long run. A great blog builds an audience that is looking forward to your messages, and that is invaluable. A year from now you’ll wish you had started today. If your website does not have any content besides your product information pages, you will never have large amount of free traffic via search engines. The more content you have on your blog, the more natural traffic you get. A large amount of the people who get to your blog via search are your target market. That’s pull marketing at work. A study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126 percent more than those who don’t. Search engine optimized posts Your blog can be your most effective SEO provider. In order to make your posts rank on Google and Bing, make sure to do these three things: The title of your post has to be worded in a way someone might use while doing a search. Do your research first on Google Keyword Tool.
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Mention the same phrase as you have in your title one or two times in the body copy, too—depending on the length of the post. Have clean URLs: “http://bla.com/title-of-your-post” is better than “http://bla.com? id=123”. What to blog about? “Instead of trying to out-spend, out-sell, or out-sponsor competitors, try to out-teach them," say the guys over at 37Signals (see the video here), and they’re right. This captures the essence—use your blog to teach and educate your prospects and customers. Use a casual tone in your blog. Nobody wants to read boring academic texts. If there’s a sentence you wouldn’t say while talking to your friend, don’t use it. Goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway—there is no substitution to great content and writing, so make it good. Further reading: 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Outstanding. Getting success through a blog takes time, so make sure you have persistence and patience. A great way to speed things up is guest blogging on popular blogs. Check out a few insightful videos about guest blogging on guestblogging.com. Any post you write, submit them on social bookmarking/news sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Sphinn, or Hacker News. Where to submit depends on your field and target audience. Create an online tool You might not have money, but perhaps you have programmers in your company or your best friend can code. If that’s the case you can create a useful or fun tool to drive traffic and generate leads. Hubspot, an internet marketing company, created a free tool that assesses your website. The tool claims to have assessed close to three million sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops. Now that’s a pretty cool tool, and it’s free. It has gotten Hubspot a ton of fame, inbound links, and leads. Online tests are tools, too You don’t necessarily need to create a sophisticated tool. It can be as simple as a test— and people love tests.
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The One Question, a website helping people find their purpose has created a simple life purpose test, which helps people reflect. They get around 100 people per day joining their mailing list through that test. Gemstone Shoppers has created a test where people find out what their gemstone is. Once they get their result, they can embed a banner with their personal gemstone onto their blog or website. The banner links back to the shopgemstones.com website and so the test serves also as a link building tool. Note: Make sure your tool can capture users’ emails or generate leads in some way, don’t waste the traffic. So think—what useful tool can you create that would benefit your prospects? Participate in relevant forums It’s likely that people in your target audience are already talking about your field in some sort of forums. It might be an old school bulletin board or a group on some social media network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Your job is to join in on the conversation and start adding value. This will help you build relationships and show off your expertise and position yourself as an authority in the field. Don’t ever spam your product or trash the competition—that’s the quickest way to turn the community against you. You have to become a member of your community, and you can do that by acting like one. What goes around, comes around. You can have a link to your website in your profile and signature, but don’t go around posting your link on random forums. If you’re a hosting company, you might want to participate in Web Hosting Talk. Sell infoproducts? Check out WarriorForum. Go to Google now and find all the relevant forums and discussion groups. Join Twitter and/or Facebook Get on the social media bandwagon. Create your Facebook page and sign up for Twitter. Depending on your field, LinkedIn and YouTube might be great matches, too. Remember—social media is for building relationships, not selling. You should only rarely shout “buy my product” on Twitter or Facebook (unless it’s a special campaign and it’s between a lot of great content). Make friends, follow great people (your prospects), and re-tweet their stuff. This helps to boost the relationship.
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Relationship bank account If you ever read Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People," you might remember the term “emotional bank account”—similar to a bank account, you can make deposits or withdrawals from each of your relationships. This principle applies on social media, too. I called it the ‘relationship bank account,’ and it’s the key principle to understand if you’re ever to get success on social media. Every time you share something useful, entertaining, or in other ways value-adding on Twitter or Facebook, you make a deposit on to your relationship with the followers. Every time you ask for a sale or issue any other kind of self-oriented request, you withdraw from the relationship. Make sure you deposit enough before making a withdrawal: share useful content (can be links to your blog), link to great articles out there, give tips on how to use your products. It’s okay to ask for a sale every now and then, but share at least 10 pieces of great content for every time you ask for something. Nobody wants to talk to people who only want to sell them something. How to market on social media? There’s a ton of great content out there. Check Social Media Examiner as one of the best resources out there. Pitch your story If you have a great product unlike any other (or slightly different), you can try to pitch it to the media and popular blogs/websites. I’ve compiled a list of more than 36 places you can submit your startup for some coverage. There are also online press release distributors such as prlog.org, www.247pressrelease.com, www.1888pressrelease.com, and many others like that—but these won’t actually get anyone to read your press release. They are useful for link building though. What you can do is try to identify journalists that write on the field of your product and shoot them an e-mail. Don’t pitch your product, but the story of why it matters. Have an affiliate program Help others help you. Somebody might come across your product and see that it’s a perfect for their audience (blog readers, newsletter subscribers, existing clients, etc).
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They might recommend it anyway, but they’ll push it harder if there’s something in it for them. Hence it’s a good idea to have an affiliate program where you pay commission per every client referred. Don’t be stingy—if it’s a digital product, a commission under 30 percent isn’t gonna cut it. Have it at least 50 percent—most likely your margins will allow this. It’s money you wouldn’t otherwise earn at all—better half than nothing. Think long term—how much money you might make off of a client in the long run. The hardest sale is always the first one. So there you have it—if you were looking for a silver bullet, sorry to disappoint you. You better hear it from me—it doesn’t exist. There are no shortcuts and there is no substitute for hard work (and some luck).
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
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What You Need To Know About Marketing and Strategy Anyone can create a product. That is not the hard part. The hard part is selling the product. It is imperative that you understand key concepts of marketing before you start to market your product, or before you even start creating your product. The way you market it needs to be integrated to the product itself—it sets the tone for the whole thing. The business world is full of competition. There’s a good chance that the market you want to enter already has some players in it, and you need to take that into account. Here are the most important things you need to know about marketing and strategy. Understand Your Customer Success starts with understanding who your clients are and what they need. This is crucial for two main reasons: 1. In order to create a product that truly delivers, it needs to address the needs of the buyer. 2. To sell your product successfully, you need to know your client demographics, their values, aspirations, and reflections of themselves. When you know who your customers are, you will be able to better leverage your time, energy, and resources to pursuing the right customers. You can focus your advertising efforts. Especially if you are a one-person business owner, you need to reevaluate your customer relationships and make choices about how to maximize and effectively use your limited time and resources. To cater better to the needs of your clients, ask yourself the following questions: 1. What does your client need and want? This is the basis of everything. Your product needs to really address the needs and wants of the customer. If the needs are not met, everything else is meaningless.
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2. Why does your customer buy from you? It is important that you know what customers consider most valuable about your products or services. Ask and talk to your customers to find out. Once you have a list, ask them again if you are indeed delivering what they want. These two questions—what does the customer value with regards to your products and services; and how well do you provide that value—will determine the relationship that you will have with the customer. 3. What does the customer expect after the sale? The hardest part of the sale is after the sale is made. It is the make or break period: the customer’s expectations will either be realized or failed. It is the time where you will know whether the level of activity, delivery, customer service, and commitment to promises made all supported the sales effort. Do you know what is the emotional value they are looking for? What is the emotion in them when they are using your product? When people buy a Volvo, they buy safety. When people buy Versace, they buy glamour and wealth. Ask yourself what is the emotional need your clients seek, and communicate that in your sales copy and advertising messages. Another thing is that you need to understand their demographics. If your buyers are women between ages of 20 and 30, it would be a very bad idea to show pictures of old men on your website. Show a picture of a person that is representative your of desired customer, and it helps others customers to connect with your business. People in different stages in their lives have different needs. Men and women have different needs. You might think that as you know a lot about your business, you know the needs and motivation of your clients anyway, and you don’t need to ask. But here’s the thing: all people make decisions differently from one another. And the thing that persuades you is unlikely to be the thing that persuades the next guy. Our personal outlook is a lousy indicator of what works for anyone else. When thinking of what your clients want, here are things you can count on: They want you to really listen to them and not go on and on about yourself or your product. They want to know you really care about helping them solve their problems. They want you to be a knowledgeable resource so you can guide them through the
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They want you to be a knowledgeable resource so you can guide them through the process. They want to know you will charge a fair price for a product. They want to know you will stand behind what you sell. They want to know you won’t fade away as soon as they’ve made the purchase. More than anything else, prospects and customers watch what you do more than they listen to what you say. Offer a unique high value product You want your product to stand out from the crowd, and you want people to really benefit from what you’re doing. If you can’t do it, save your time and don’t go into business. The best things you can do for yourself is to create something that is both of high value to customers and that few others are doing. Let’s look at this graph below. It’s a matrix, with two parameters: value to the customer and uniqueness. This will teach you the most important things about marketing and product design.
Your business can be in one of the four quadrants. Let’s start in the bottom left corner: this is when you provide a product or service that offers very low value, and there’s a ton of other companies doing the same stuff. The quadrant in the bottom right corner is when you provide something of great value to the customer, but so are 10 other companies. When there is almost nothing different about you and your competitors, or the differences are very subtle, you always compete
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on the price. Customers will usually buy the cheapest product. The upper left corner is a place you will most definitely want to avoid. It’s where you provide something totally unique, but it offers no value to the customer and thus nobody wants it. You are the only one doing this pointless thing, and soon there won’t be any as you’ll go bankrupt. The place you want to be is in the top right corner, where you provide a unique product that delivers great value to the Customer. Now that sounds easier than it really is—so many businesses fail to do that. The uniqueness can be a multitude of things: features, design, price, location, business model, you name it. Figuring this out might not be easy, but it sure as hell is worth your time investment. Be remarkable and worth recommending When you look at most of the internet businesses out there, then it seems that almost everybody’s strategy is to be a little bit better than the other guy… while being mostly the same. Sameness is the predominant strategy. And that’s stupid. Mediocre things will not get you anywhere, but will crush your business instead. Create products that people will want to buy by building the marketing into the product experience itself, not by trying to come up with marketing after the product is done. If you fail to do so, you will struggle to find the time or money it takes to make your offering successful. If you make average products, you’re going to fail. The most reliable way to succeed today is to stay away from the average and the mediocre. Your product should raise eyebrows and get people talking about it (which is what being remarkable is). You want it to be so different in some way, that it will make people want to tell their friends about it. This is the best way you can do advertising for yourself as the time of conventional advertising is over. People are becoming more and more resistant to advertising. Unless you’re Coca-Cola or Procter and Gamble, who can throw a gazillion dollars at advertising, this is not the game you want to play. So how to build this remarkability into your product? A good way is to go to the extreme with an aspect of your product. Cost. Give everything you know away for free. And charge for support or live
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seminars. Prince—the singer—gave his new albums away for free. Every concert that followed sold out to the max for a very high price. Or do the opposite: price is so much higher than anything else on the market that it will intrigue people. Design. Make it look ultracool, or go out of your way to have no design at all. Being just average or good enough won’t cut it. Service. Go out of your way to provide excellent service to your customer. Or treat the VIP customers significantly better than others, so that the desire to become one increases. Go beyond core features. Whatever your product does, it has a set of core features. These are things people expect a product to do. What if you would do much more? A training company could offer personalized coaching for participants. Change your target customer. Repackage your product/service and target a nonconventional target group. Handbags for men. A chiropractor who offers his services to companies instead of individuals. Construction tools for women. If you can figure out a way to make your business so unusual, different, and unexpected that people can’t help but say something (good or bad, doesn’t matter!), you have made it and saved yourself so much money. You’re either remarkable or invisible.
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How To Set Internet Marketing Goals and Objectives One of the hardest things for any internet marketer is to figure out what to focus on. Marketing is overwhelmingly broad, and you could pretty much do 10,000 different things. How to set internet marketing goals and objectives? What’s most important? Answer: building marketing assets. What are marketing assets? The terminology was created by Seth Godin, who talks about marketing assets here. In his words: “For a marketer, an asset is a tool or a platform, something you can use over and over without using it up. In fact, it’s something that gets better the more you invest. Running an ad is an expense. Building a brand people trust is an asset. Buying a trade show booth is an expense. Having a permission-based marketing list of people who want to get anticipated, personal, and relevant emails from you is an asset.” The answer is right there. Your marketing goals and objectives should focus on building the following: building your reputation and brand, building your (permission-based) mailing list and building the relationship with the people on that list, building your blog/Twitter/Facebook/etc. audience, both in quality and quantity. Now every time you ask, “what should I be doing?", you can take action based on whether an activity helps you build a marketing asset or not.
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3 Ways to Increase Online Sales There are three ways to grow sales—online and offline both. Only three. However, most companies focus only on one—and are missing out on revenue opportunities. So what are these 3 ways to increase online sales? increase the number of customers, increase the average order size, increase the number of repeat purchases. #1: Increase the number of customers This is what most businesses do and try to get better at. You do this by solving a real problem, being remarkable, driving relevant traffic (free and paid), boosting conversions, using referral programs and so on. It’s the most expensive part of increasing sales. #2: Increase the average order size They say the most profitable question of all times is “Would you like fries with that?” And that captures the essence of this point. When you get people to that stage when they’re ready to buy from you—you can ask them to buy more things, and there’s much less friction. The reason being that getting customers to that buying point is the hardest part of the sales process. They need to trust you and believe in the value they’re getting, they need to convince themselves they need or want it, and that it’s the right thing to buy at this moment. Once they’ve reached that step and made a conscious decision to give you money— they’re also giving you their trust. So in that moment you are able to sell them more. Upsell a product that costs ~60% less Question: When somebody buys a shirt, should you upsell them a tie, or the whole suit? The right answer is “tie”—it’s (usually) cheaper and hence seems like a small thing to
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The right answer is “tie”—it’s (usually) cheaper and hence seems like a small thing to add. If you’d try to upsell something more expensive, you’d counter the same kind of friction as you did with the initial product (doesn’t mean it can’t work, it’s just harder). The time-tested 60×60 rule says that your customers will buy an upsell 60 percent of the time for up to 60% of the original purchase price. Any upsell you offer must be congruent with the original purchase. This means that when they buy shoes, you offer to buy shoe care products, not a key chain. Ever registered a domain name through GoDaddy? Let’s see how many things they’ll try to upsell you:
Here’s the list: 1. different extensions (.net, .info etc), 2. domains you searched previously, 3. “variations you might consider”, 4. premium domains, 5. country/region specific domains, 6. “add 5 more domains and get bulk pricing” 7. popup banner with “get 3″ or “get 5″ additional extensions for a deal,
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8. email plan. Yes, that’s 8 attempts to upsell you! I agree that GoDaddy is excessive, but it’s been working for them. You should at least try to upsell 1 thing. Quantity discount Buy more, save more! Vistaprint does this:
Offer an upgrade Remind people that for just a little more $$$ they can get a fancier product. Most people won’t need more than 16 GB in their iPad, but “just in case” and “it’s just $100 more” helps Apple make more money.
Bundling Offering something to go with the initial product for a special price is a great way of increasing the average order size. Amazon frequently recommends you get a bundle:
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Notice how in addition to offering the bundle, they’re also pitching the Amazon credit card (upsell!). I throw marketing seminars each time I go to Europe—and whenever I offer an online marketing course to go with the seminar fee (for some extra $$$—but a very good deal), around half the people take the offer. Bundling ftw! Complementary product “Do you need batteries?” Sometimes you can get the extra sale by reminding them of a new need they will have because of buying the product they have already decided on. This can be an easy sale because it is rational, “makes sense.” This is how the Phoenix Pendant does it, on the page that appears after the customer has clicked the buy button:
One interesting thing they do here is tell you not to buy it if you don’t need it. This can reduce friction—if a customer is expecting to go straight to checkout and then they get smacked with an upsell suggestion, it’s nice to word it in a way that makes them feel
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under less pressure and more in control. The people at the Phoenix Pendant tell me that 60% of customers take the upsell. Longer commitment Charge monthly? Get them to sign up for a longer time period. GetResponse lures with a 18% annual discount:
Extended warranty If you’ve ever bought a gadget, you’ve been probably offer an extended warranty for a price. Even though statistically speaking it’s a bad deal for the buyer, it provides peace of mind. Amazon example:
Add-on services Ever go to Chipotle? You can get a good burrito for a decent price, but they offer to add tasty guacamole (right in front of your eyes) for $1.80 more. Get customers to add small things to their order for a small fee. They might just add up if you know what I mean.
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Here’s how PSD2HTML does it:
Expedited delivery If you sell physical products or do custom work (be it software development or engraving jewelry), you can get people to pay more for faster service. HP ships your purchases faster if you pony up additional $39:
#3: Increase the number of repeat purchases It’s much easier to sell to an existing customer than to get a new one. You’re spending a ton to acquire them—it’s much cheaper to keep them than to go off finding new ones all the time. You don’t want to keep all of them—just the profitable ones. So you need to be able to identify which ones are costing you, and which ones are bringing you bacon. (Some you might want to offload because of the emotional cost of servicing them, i.e. difficult customers that you spend a lot of support hours on). Here are some ways to keep the existing customer buying:
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Offering promotions and reminding customers of what you offer Send targeted follow-up emails to customers offering them a related product or service (you can do this automatically with a good email autoresponder and shopping cart). Notifying them of deals is also great. Wine Library is constantly sending me wine offers over emails (’cause I’ve bought before). Every now and then I’ll take it:
Companies do this with email marketing, but also all social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)—get customers to follow you on one of these and offer special deals for just the followers. Here’s an example from Modcloth Facebook page:
Free shiping for a year (locking customers in) Do you use Amazon Prime? It’s when you pay a fee to get free 2-day shipping for a year
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(+ some other benefits). Free 2-day delivery is nice, and so are free streaming movies. Appearently more people used the 2-day shipping now than their free Super Saver Shipping. People like it. However, by giving you this deal they’re essentially locking you in. Why buy from anyone else if Amazon ships it for free (get it in 2 days)? Wine.com does the same thing:
If your customers buy frequently the kind of products you sell, come up with an incentive to keep buying only from you. Offer coupons with the order Do you know what’s the open rate of transactional emails? Three times higher than commercial email! According to Experian’s Transactional Email Benchmark Report The average revenue per transactional email is 2-5 times higher than standard bulk mail Transaction rates are 8x higher than bulk mailings for order confirmations and 4x higher for shipping and returns/exchanges Customers tend to open transactional emails repeatedly So when customers place an order with you and receive the “Thank you for your purchase” email—make sure you include some marketing in that email, such as a coupon code. They just completed an order, so they probably won’t buy immediately—hence a coupon
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code with an expiry date is a better idea than offering an additional product (you should have offered that as an upsell before completing the purchase). I bought a gift for a friend, and the confirmation email had a coupon in it:
Save credit card details I shop on Amazon all the time. The few times when I don’t buy something from Amazon is when I’m after something specific and Amazon doesn’t have it. Of all the reasons I prefer Amazon, the biggest one for me is that my credit card details are already stored there. If I’d go buy from an online store I’ve never visited, I’d have to enter all the payment and shipping details—all over again! No, thank you—Amazon it is! No it is not just me talking—data shows a sharp jump in per account spending (and the trend is upward):
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(Note: don’t copy Amazon blindly. What works for them, will not necessarily work for you. They can get away with a lot of crap.) People are inherently lazy. Your job is to make buying from you as easy and convenient as possible. Customer experience People remember experiences. If the experience your website provided sucked, they won’t come back. Investment in user experience pays off. Somebody on Quora suggests that play.com provides a great experience. I did a search on Twitter and it could be true: Service is the new selling This is directly related to the last point. Once you get the customers in, provide a superior support and service experience. You can always impress people with excellent service since the average is very low. Once you provide excellent service, people not only recruit new customers for you, but they’ll be sure to repeat the experience. Release a new, better model every year iPhone, anyone? Conclusion When trying to increase your online sales, don’t forget the other two ways besides getting new customers. Optimize for all three ways and enjoy growth thanks to untapped
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opportunities.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
The Key to Customer Loyalty If you want to double your results, you can either double the number of visitors (very expensive), double the conversion rate (possible, but increasingly harder as there’s a max limit to your conversion rate) or double repeat purchases—loyalty. Jakob Nielsen has mentioned that 2010–2020 will be the loyalty decade. Investing in loyalty is as important as investing in usability and conversion optimization. If you plan to be around with your business, you have to plan for loyalty. Shared values before interactions A common narrative shared online is that you build loyalty by interacting with customers (sending them emails, social media, etc). It is only true when a critical criteria has been met first: shared values. If you don’t form relationships, your customers will just want discounts. If consumers share values with your brand, you can spend less on messaging, less on discounting, and you’re less affected by the turbulent economy. In a study of 7,000 consumers in the U.S., the UK, and Australia those who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. That’s by far the largest driver. Do you stand for something? In order to have shared values with your customers, they need to know what your values are. If you’re running a vanilla company trying to please everybody, you’re not touching anyone’s heart. In 1983, Harley-Davidson was almost going out of business. By 2008 the company was valued at $7.8 billion, being one of the top brands in the world. Central to the company’s turnaround and success was Harley’s commitment to building a brand that stands for something. Its customers organize around the lifestyle, activities, and ethos of the brand. Shared values lead to loyalty
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
What are consumers really loyal to? People at Corporate Executive Board were looking into this for over a year. Long story short, what they found out was that people are not loyal to companies. They’re loyal to what the companies stand for. We saw that emotional attachments to brands certainly do exist, but that connection typically starts with a “shared value” that consumers believe they hold in common with the brand. —Aaron Lotton Real thing, not stick-on emotions If you’re successful and/or original, your products, prices, and marketing messages will be copied. Those things are not your unique competitive advantage, nor will they create loyalty. The companies who focus on values, community building, and relationships are building assets that can’t be easily replicated. The best and most sustainable way to create emotion and build relationships: mean it. You show hot women in your ads or feature happy families on your website, but those are merely stick-on emotions. The real thing is something intrinsic about your business. A great example: Toms Shoes. You buy a pair of shoes, they give a pair to a child in need. The company has been around only a few years, but has become a known brand people love—because they’re the real thing. Patagonia has a following. As does Harley-Davidson and Whole Foods. They stand for something real. Here’s a good article on the real thing vs stick-on emotions. People will buy from you if who you are aligns with who they are. So make it known who you are and what you stand for.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How and When to Use Sex to Sell More Sex sells—everybody knows. Or does it? A fifth of all ads use sex According to the book Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal, around 20% of all ads use sex (a good collection here). Of course you already knew this. Open any magazine and sexy ladies (and men) will sell you anything from shampoo to chainsaws. Some say that fitness marketing is almost soft porn these days. Most big companies have used sex to advertise. Even Apple—even though it doesn’t allow sexual apps on their appstore. Why are there so many ads using sex? Is it cause it’s really boosting sales? Here’s the real explanation for this. “If you look at most of the Fortune 500 companies, who are they run by? Men. So, you’re their advertising agency and you’re pitching these ideas to these men. Well, men have a very specific idea of what’s beautiful.” —University of Florida advertising professor Robyn Goodman (source) Perhaps sex doesn’t sell, after all According to one study an overwhelming 61 percent of the respondents say that sexual imagery in a product’s ad makes them less likely to buy it. Interestingly, 53 percent of respondents surveyed said they are more likely to buy a product that is advertised using the imagery of love. Another study made by AdWeek and Harris poll showed that more than half of Americans (56%) say they are bothered by sexual imagery in ads they are exposed to, a quarter are very bothered and the rest are somewhat bothered. Of course, these surveys were asking people how they would behave. People rarely know.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
Sex doesn’t sell movies A study on sex in the movies—that examined more than 900 films released between 2001 and 2005—concluded that nudity and explicit sex scenes don’t translate to success for major motion pictures. Contrary to popular belief, sex and nudity failed to positively affect a film’s popularity among viewers or critics and did not guarantee big box office receipts. The top-grossing films in the study contained mostly minor to mild sex and/or nudity. Women turned off by sexual ads? There are these two studies which show that women are bored by ads using sex—even when they were made for and appeared in fashion magazines aimed specifically and uniquely at female consumers, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Allure. The studies don’t reveal exactly what the women don’t like about these ads. When I shared the study about women disliking sexy ads in magazines with a lady friend, she suggested it might be because of envy. The goal of those ads in those magazines is not to make people relate to them, in fact the opposite is true. They’re aspirational. Sex reduces brand recall MediaAnalyzer Software & Research explored how men and women look at sexually themed ads and what effect that visual behavior might have on the ads’ effectiveness. Long story short, men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones. An average of 19.8 percent recalled the correct brand/product for the nonsexual ads; for the sexual ads, 9.8 percent did. Strong, sexual visuals reduced the attention a brand was getting by 50%. Men liked the sexual ads, but couldn’t really remember what company was advertised. Women did not like the sexual ads, and interestingly their brand recall was more than 50% worse.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
I think Reebok Easytone is a good example where sex is being sold way more than the product itself. The shoes are completely overshadowed by ass. In the end, you want sex, not the shoes. And it’s not just about the brand recall, it’s about noticing the brand to begin with. A viewing observation study revealed that men hardly pay any attention to the ad copy or products on sexy ads. So when does sex sell? Sex has a proven track record. The Wonderbra ‘Hello Boys’ campaign is a great example. Its billboards stopped traffic and aroused the attentions of men, but it put women in the driving seat. Seven units were sold every second in its 1994 heyday—1.6m in that year alone.
An interesting tidbit: 73% of sexual ads in magazines contain a sex-related brand benefit. Common themes follow the “Buy this, get this” formula. If you buy our product: (1) You’ll be more sexually attractive, (2) have more or better sex, or (3) just feel sexier for your own sake. Axe and Old Spice body sprays make a lot of money, and they’re positioned as sexualattractant enhancers. For over 30 years, sex in one form or another has been a mainstay in Calvin Klein ads. Their annual revenue in 2010 was $2.5 billion, up from $1 billion in 2005. Ads continue to be as edgy as ever. Victoria’s Secret is all about sex. The company has grown from three boutiques in San Francisco to the most successful intimates brand in the world. So clearly, being all about sex can be good business. So I’d suggest you use sex in your branding if your brand is about sex. It seems to work. Sex makes us impulsive and focus on the short-term
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
Scientists claim they have discovered exactly why sex sells. Researchers found seeing an attractive man or woman in an advert excites the areas of the brain that make us buy on impulse, bypassing the sections which control rational thought. “These results suggest that the lower levels of brain activity from ads employing NI (nonrational influence) images could lead to less behavioral inhibition, which could translate to less restraint when it comes to buying products depicted in the NI advertisements.” —Dr. Ian Cook, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA Basically this means that seducing consumers can be a more effective way to sell products than persuading consumers. Even better, combine both. Similar findings were confirmed by other studies. Belgian researchers conducted a series of tests on 358 young men, showing some of them sexual images or objects, and showing the others non-sexual images or objects. The sexy imagery did not work on all men all the time, but as a group, men with sex on their brains were more impulsive and valued immediate gratification more than the controls. “I observed in my studies that men are more likely to pick a smaller immediate reward over a larger later reward. Hence I do think that men might spend money on something they might otherwise not purchase. Men would become more impulsive in any domain after exposure to sexual cues.” —Bram van den Bergh, the study’s lead author Another study received similar results. They found that men who viewed photos of women judged to be attractive became more attracted by short-term rewards. Add here the research by George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University and Dan Ariely of MIT, who found that sexually aroused men would do all sorts of things they might not otherwise do. When aroused, more men (compared to non-aroused) found women’s shoes sexy and wanted to take part in a threesome. Aroused men narrow their view of the world. When they’re thinking about sex, that’s all they think about and that leads to impulsive, irrational behavior. So what does this all mean?
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
If you want your customers to think short-term and go for immediate satisfaction (impulse purchases), using sexual imagery is a good idea. I would think a time-related scarcity would boost any sexy offer even more—taking advantage of their irrationality while they’re turned on. Using sex to sell more online Offline advertising is one thing (even though a racy ad can be a fantastic link building tool), what about using sex online—banners ads, landing pages, websites and so on? (I’m talking about non-adult industries). There was a successful auction on eBay where a guitar was sold using sex. Unfortunately we won’t know what the result would have been without the sexy photo. And Shoemoney conducted an experiment on Facebook and discovered that ads with boobs get the most clicks (and lower CPC thanks to higher CTR) and they even convert. This was his winning image:
Of course, you have to be careful when using such imagery—it will surely attract tons of clicks (and more cost) from people who have no intention of buying your stuff. Virtual cleavage works (for men) How would you increase conversions when targeting hardcore social gamers, male, ages 18-40? With breasts, of course. Ion Interactive was testing a landing page for a video game. Two variations of a female vampire image were be tested to determine whether a head shot or body shot is more effective at driving game sign ups.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
Image source Results: Version C kicked butt! For PPC traffic, landing page C resulted in a 95% increase in sign ups over landing page A and a 35% increase in sign ups over landing page B. For Affiliate Marketing traffic, landing page C resulted in a 39% increase in sign ups over landing page A and a 30% increase in sign ups over landing page B. However, this doesn’t mean that sex sells more video games. In fact, less sex sells better. Some say it’s because there are more women playing video games than ever. Even Lara Croft has been reduced to more anatomically feasible proportions; her breasts and lips have shrunk in recent years. Newer versions of the game have sold better than the earlier ones. Untapped potential The truth is that there’s little data available on using sex to boost online conversions. It seems that it’s not a widely used approach. I would think that there’s some untapped potential here and some people will make good money using it. Can sex work when selling to women?
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Marketing
Researchers followed up on earlier research that has demonstrated that women exhibit negative reactions to explicit sexual content in advertising. Their hypothesis was that women’s attitudes toward sexually oriented advertising would improve if ads reflected devotion and commitment. “Findings from our initial experiments were supportive of this hypothesis. Experiment one illustrated that commitment-related cues in the ad itself (for example, positioning the product as a gift to a woman from a man) boosted women’s attitudes.” So if you want to appeal to women, show love and commitment instead of purely recreational sex. Maybe you’re already selling sex, you just don’t know it That smartphone in your pocket? That’s for sex. So is the car you drive and the clothes you wear. Everything you own is about sex and attracting more of it. This is what evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller says in his book Spent. Pretty much every purchase decision and acquisition of personal goods is motivated by the primal desire for procreation, pleasure or both—he claims. If that’s true and you can figure out how your product or service can help buyers get more sex, maybe it is a good idea to test using sex in your ads and website. Just bear in mind that including sexuality in your advertising and/or web visuals will almost certainly alienate some of your audience (but that might be okay).
Become a Hyperink reader. Get a special surprise. Like the book? Support our author and leave a comment!
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
II.
Conversion Optimization 101
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
What You Have to Know About Conversion Optimization This section will make you money. It will teach you about conversion optimization—how exactly to do it, based on all the best research and experiments. Why do conversion optimization? It is the cheapest, quickest way to increase sales online. Think about this: if you’re currently converting at 1% (1% of your visitors buy your stuff), but can increase that to a mere 2%, you’ve doubled your sales. Conversion optimization is the method of tuning websites or landing pages with the goal of converting more visitors into customers. The higher the conversion rate (%), the more sales (sign ups, subscriptions, etc) you get. Conversion optimization is about testing. Most companies are not happy with their online conversion rate, says Econsultancy. Companies who were happy with their conversion rates did on average 40% more tests than those companies who were dissatisfied. Why don’t you test? 3 likely reasons: You don’t really know what conversion optimization is or how to do it, You think it’s too complicated, You figure it takes too much time. It’s not that complicated nor that time-consuming. Your business exists to make money, conversion optimization makes your business more money. If that’s not worth your time, I’m not really sure you got your priorities straight. How do you know if your conversion rate is high enough? It depends. It depends on what action you want people to take, how much your product costs, where the people are coming from and so on.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Send spam to 100,000 people with your offer and you conversion rate will be 0%. Send an email to your in-house email list that has been nurtured for years, and you might sell to more than 10%. The average conversion rate for purchases is commonly believed to be 2%, but don’t get stuck on that. If you’re doing more than 2%, it doesn’t mean you’ve reached Nirvana and should stop optimizing. A good conversion rate is the one that’s better than your current one! Note: Bear in mind that overwhelming majority of people will NOT buy anything on their first visit to your site. Hence, don’t try to sell to everybody right away. Instead “sell” them the idea of coming back—ask them to join your email list, subscribe to your rss feed, follow you in Twitter, and so on. A quick refresher on testing methods Create multiple versions of a web page (such as home page, product page, landing page, etc) or even a part of a web page (such as headline wording, call to action button size, email capture box location, etc) and see which version converts better—which version gets more people to do what you want them to do. Customers often behave unexpectedly. This is one reason we need to test. The second reason is that you are not your customer, hence thinking customers use your site like you do will leave you in the dark. You don’t know what works until you test it. A/B testing There are 2 ways to test. A/B testing (or ‘split testing’) is when you create two versions of a page (page A and page B). 50% of the traffic is showed page A, and the other 50% is taken to page B. This division is done automatically by software (see the end of the article). If a user lands on page A, a cookie is placed on her computer, so that when she comes back later, she will always see version A. This ensures that people won’t really notice that you’re conducting any testing on your website.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Technically you could also do A/B/C/D etc testing, but the more versions you test at the same time, the more time it takes for you to know which one is the best. You need statistical significance. There’s a significance calculator spreadsheet in Excel you can use. Google recommends at least 100 conversions per page before deciding which version is best. The exact amount actually needed is a matter of debate. I say sometimes 25 conversions is enough to spot a winner (exact conversion rate requires more time). If you test more than two pages against each other, it will take you much more time to find the winner. Speed of testing is also important, so I say skip the Cs and Ds. Multivariate testing Multivariate testing enables you to test more than 2 combinations at the same time, and the combination of different combinations. Let me explain.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Let’s say you’re testing 2 versions of a headline, 2 versions of a call to action text on a button and 3 different images of the page at the same time (as on the picture above). So the winning combination could be: headline 1, button 2, image 1 headline 2, button 1, image 3 headline 1, button 1, image 2 … etc, etc. Lots of possibilities, and you’d need a lot of traffic to find the winning combination. Only do this if you have a ton of traffic. Low modest traffic websites should stick to A/B testing. Structured approach According to the conversion optimization report , companies that have a structured approach to conversion are twice as likely to have seen a large increase in sales. So don’t just throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks; have a “structured approach.” Let’s go over some frameworks you can use for your conversion optimization. Structured Approach by RedEye
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
You can download a white paper on the structured approach advocated by RedEye and Econsultancy (who conducted the conversion study mentioned above). The approach they recommend is a 4-step loop (Measure-Analyze-Test-Optimize): 1. Measure. You can only improve what you can measure, so measure everything. Be clear on your business goals, benchmark your competition for ideas, dig in your web analytics data, conduct customer surveys, analyze search behavior on your site. 2. Analysis. Once you know your goals, it’s time to figure out what’s working well, what’s not and why. Analyze your content for relevancy and clarity, figure out if it matches user needs, do usability testing and analyze user paths/journeys on your site. 3. Test. A/B and multivariate testing are the two most valuable methods for companies to improve conversion. Prioritize tests by potential value and cost. 4. Optimize. After conducting tests, implement successful design and content changes. I suggest you download the white paper and read the whole thing. Invesp Conversion Framework Invesp has 8 principles in their conversion framework. 1. Build buyer personas and focus on a few select personas when designing your layout, writing copy, and so on. 2. Build user confidence, make them trust you by using all kinds of trust elements. 3. Engagement. Entice visitors to spend a longer time, come back to visit, bookmark it, and/or refer others to it. 4. Understand the impact of buying stages. Not everybody will buy something on their first visit, so build appropriate sales funnels and capture leads instead, and sell them later. 5. Deal with fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDs). Address user concerns, hesitations, doubts. 6. Calm their concerns. Incentives are a great way to counter FUDs and reduce friction. 7. Test, Test, Test. 8. Implement in an iterative manner. Build smaller blocks, make smaller changes,
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
and test them and improve their performance. C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a This is not a lesson in physics, but a conversion formula developed by Marketing Experiments.
Luckily you don’t need to solve the formula above, it’s actually a helpful tool to keep at arms length (like print it out and stick on your cubicle office wall). This is what the characters mean: C = Probability of conversion m = Motivation of user (when) v = Clarity of the value proposition (why) i = Incentive to take action f = Friction elements of process a = Anxiety about entering information Translation: The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now – friction) – anxiety. The numbers next to characters signify the importance of it. Friction is defined as a psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Anxiety is a psychological concern stimulated by a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Reduce these as much as possible and do what you can to increase the users’ motivation and incentive and clarify the value position. LIFT An interesting framework for analyzing landing pages is LIFT, developed by WiderFunnel:
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
This framework has value proposition as vehicle that provides the potential for the conversion rate. It’s the basis of it all. Relevance and clarity boost conversions, while anxiety and distraction kill it. Urgency is what propels people to take action right away. Ingredients of a successful test Not all tests are equal. Here’s what you need for successful conversion testing: A hypothesis: testing is not there to prove an idea works, but to assess whether it works. Don’t test your site by showing a different version at different time periods (e.g. one week one design, second week another design), the results will NOT be accurate. Don’t be afraid to fail: In testing & optimization, failure is success. Too many times, I have seen the uglier, poorer cousins convert better. If you don’t have huge amounts of traffic, don’t test too many variations at once. Also, if you do A/B testing, it’s worth testing one change at a time—otherwise you won’t know which thing made the difference. Don’t end the test too soon, make sure results are statistically significant. Avoid “meek tweaking”—in other words, making changes that are never likely to have a significant effect. (See below) Testing should never end. Decide what to test, test it, make a change and test again. What are the most important things to test? We could test everything, but let’s test the 20% that makes 80% of the difference. Now let’s look at each area separately. I’ll showcase some cool recent experiments you can learn from.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Value Proposition Value proposition is the main reason a prospect should buy from you. (If you’re struggling with yours, here’s a worksheet (pdf) to guide you through the process of effectively communicating your value proposition.) Can you find a value proposition here?
Didn’t think so. Stating your company name as the first thing and throwing around superlatives like “finest quality” don’t convince much. What about here?
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
This makeover version brought 145% increase in conversions. Marketing Experiments recommends you test your value proposition via PPC ads first, and only then test the winning versions on your landing page:
Images from Marketing Experiments Headline “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit.” —David Ogilvy, ad guru A good headline can make the difference. It’s kind of nice when just changing the wording of your headline increases your results by 127%. A headline is the first thing a visitors sees and reads on your website or landing page. It’s the very first thing you say about you. If you start out with “Welcome!”, you’ve already lost. If the visitor came through a paid ad, the landing page headline should reinforce the
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
message from the ad; utilize persuasive momentum. If you’re split testing article headlines or email subject lines, remember the 65 character rule. Google only displays 65 characters in its search results, email clients such as Gmail will truncate long subject lines and Twitter doesn’t allow too much for tweeting your headline. CityCliq: 88.9% improvement
The winning headline is the one on the right. Offer A confused mind always says ‘no’, goes the old direct marketing adage. The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Make it clear and concise. Nobody will try hard to understand what is it that you’re offering. The offer is not a “call to action,” that comes later. Call to Action buttons The most important part about CTA buttons is that they’re clearly visible, above the fold and there’s ideally just one per page. The more choice you give, the harder it is to decide. People’s attention span is limited. They don’t want to figure out what buttons that say “submit” actually do. Buttons without the word ‘submit’ convert better, tests show. Steve Krug was right: “don’t make me think.” The word ‘free’ on the other hand seems to be quite magical. For instance Firefox improved their conversions by 3.6% (over 500 more downloads per test) when they changed their button text from “Try Firefox 3″ to “Download Now—Free.” What about the color of the button? Big orange buttons are all the rage these days (think Amazon), but there are still some other colors in the world. In this test red kicked greens
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
butt and converted 21% better (orange was not tested):
Image: Hubspot Larger sized buttons usually do better. Hubspot found that a good button size is around 225px wide and 45px high. Oh yeah, never ever have a “reset fields” button. Nobody fills a form to clear the field in the end. If they do, they won’t bother to start over. Friction Whenever there’s somebody asking for a sale, there’s friction! Reducing friction produces a disproportionately high return on invested effort. Friction consists of two components: Length: fatigue, irritation, or aggravation caused by forms or processes that ask for more time or information than feels reasonable and Difficulty: poor usability, asking questions people don’t know the answers to, insufficient product information, etc. Absence of trust is also friction—a visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. MarketingExperiments brings this case study. The original page with 3 calls to action:
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
This was the treatment:
The optimized form requires only one choice, and the call-to-action is simply a “Confirmation,” thereby minimizing difficulty-oriented friction. By including the offer price on the landing page (which also removed one page in the order process) and minimizing friction by reducing the level of decision making difficulty on the order form, free-trial-signup conversion rose by 65%. Another one:
Simply reducing the number of fields and dramatically reducing the perceived page length through layout increased overall conversion by 77%.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Here are some things that reduce friction: Testimonials and/or customer reviews, Case studies of previous customers, Third-party references such as media mentions or reviews, Easy to find company contact info, employee photos and bios, Trust marks that communicate your site is secure and that confidential data is handled with care, Short forms (whenever you add an input field to your form, ask yourself, “Is this additional information worth losing sales?”), Clarity: focus on what the user gets and needs to do to get it, Distraction removal: the offer page doesn’t contain anything not related to converting the user, Use language that is familiar to your target audience—avoid jargon and corporate speak, Guarantee: offer a guarantee on their purchase such as a 90-day risk-free trial; 100% money-back guarantee; or a 100% satisfaction guarantee, Beautiful design: websites that are more attractive create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers. Unfortunately you cannot eliminate friction 100%—it is a natural part of selling. If you want to people to buy something, you must eventually ask for a credit card number, address, and other information. Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab’s web credibility guidelines is a must-read for all. Price The right pricing can really help you boost your conversions. Read our article on pricing experiments. Radical change
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
This is when you go beyond testing one element to create an all together new and different version. Great examples (click on the links of each case study to read the specifics): SEOMoz: 52% improvement in sales and $1 million dollars increase in revenue
Image: Conversion Rate Experts How they did it: created a web page long enough to tell the story infused the headline with curiosity rather than overt “buy me” language explained precisely what customers would get at each level (plan) showcased things customers cared about but SEOmoz had taken for granted augmented the message with video lowered the risk by offering free subscribers a 30-day full-featured membership for just $1 Highrise: 2 radical changes, 37.5% and 102.5% improvement in conversions Image: 37Signals What they learned:
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
You really need to test: A long form page had a 37.5% increase in net signups compared to the original. The “person design” converted better than the original. Then they added more info under the person design page, and it converted worse. Big photos of smiling customers work (but the specific person didn’t quite matter) Performance Based Design book: 131.2% improvement on landing page
What they learned: Engaging visitors through appropriate copy improved sign ups by 100%+ Sometimes you can overthink. The winning design was thrown together very, very quickly, yet outperformed the more formally ‘designed’ landing page with more than double the conversions. Conversion optimization tools There are quite a lot of tools available, WhichTestWon.com lists 39. I’m going to skip expensive enterprise tools and list some of my favorites that are easy to use and easy on the wallet. Google Website Optimizer—The best part of GWO is that it’s free. Most people can do most testing with it, but it requires you to be somewhat tech savvy. Google does provide handy video tutorials that help, but they’re somewhat outdated, and the sound quality on some is plain horrible. Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely. Great services for entrepreneurs—both easy to use. VWO’s cheapest plan ($49) comes out to $0.0049 per visitor. Optimizely’s cheapest plan ($19) comes out to $0.0095 per visitor. Here’s how they compare to each other.
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
ConversionDoubler seems to be in the same ballpark, but I haven’t used it myself. Zentester has a forever free plan, but the catch is that your test results are public. MaxA/B is an easy to use WordPress plugin for A/B testing. I’ve had some issues with it in the past, but for the most part seems to do the job. What worked for them, won’t necessarily work for you Just because something worked on somebody’s site, doesn’t mean it will work on yours. For instance take this case where reducing the size of call to action and removing urgency elements actually increased the conversion rate. No website is the same and no users are the same. The trick is to understand your users and target them in the most appropriate manner. Customers are influenced by a range of activities before they convert; website content, website usability, online and offline advertising all play a role in whether or not the consumer will make a purchase. You have to test. Excellent libaries of case studies There are several good conversion optimization case study resources. WhichTestWon claims to have the world’s biggest library of A/B & multivariate testing case studies (164 at the moment of this writing). Offers paid membership for in-depth information on them. MarketingExperiments blog has a ton of case studies. Not all of the posts in the link are case studies, but a lot of them are. Visual Website Optimizer has a user-friendly database of case studies. Free. ABtests.com. All kinds of tests. Upload your own test results. WiderFunnel case studies. 30 or so.
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
The Ultimate Guide to Increasing E-Commerce Conversion Rates If you run an online store, you’re always trying to boost your sales. Here’s how to increase the conversion rate of your ecommerce site. What’s the conversion rate I can be happy with? Don’t worry about “average” rates. A good conversion rate to strive for is better than the one you have right now. There are just too many variables that affect conversions, so it’s very difficult to have apples to apples comparisons between different sites. Quality of the traffic is a major contributor. Rates around 1 percent and 2 percent are fairly common. Quality Product images If I’d have to pick one single thing that would sell a product online, it’s images. You could technically have an e-commerce site with just images, and no product descriptions (I don’t recommend it). It wouldn’t work vice versa. People want to see what they’re getting. The grandfather of boosting e-commerce conversion rates is having high quality photos of your product. The more the better. Show the products from different angles, in context, make them zoomable. Ties.com gets it right:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Extra credit for the “view this in the dressing room” feature. Check it out. Great product copy Product descriptions matter. The role of product copy is to give buyers enough information, so they could convince themselves this is the right product for them. Clarity trumps persuasion. The best sales copy is full, complete information. No hype needed. How long? You should offer both, the concise version and the long version. The shorter version should capture the essence: who’s the product for, what will it do, and why is that good. The longer version should give so much information that the user will not have a single question left. If they read the whole thing and still have questions or doubts, then you have a problem. If they’re convinced only half way through, they can just skip and continue to checkout. Let’s look at the same product on Home Depot and Amazon. The Home Depot version sucks:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
They cram the text inside a stupid iframe, only provide you with three sentences of information and a bunch of technical info in bullet points. The Amazon version has proper text for humans, turns features into benefits and even provides a comparison table. Technical info is provided too.
If you sell stuff you don’t make, don’t just repeat the manufacturer’s canned descriptions. Add your personal touch and recommendations—tell the customer why you personally recommend this product and how it will help them. Recommended reading: E-Commerce Copywriting: The Guide to Selling More Product videos Images are good, but everything indicates that video is the future. Photos have their limitations; video is the next step before actually touching and feeling the product. If you’re not doing product videos yet, do them for at least part of the inventory and see if it makes a difference.
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Zappos has videos for almost all of their products, such as this:
Customization creates ownership People like to customize stuff. It’s fun, has a game-like element to it and creates a feeling of ownership. Once you’ve spent minutes configuring a product, it feels like your own. Back in 2008, I needed a new laptop and went to dell.com. I played around for like 30 minutes customizing my laptop. At the end, of course, I bought it. It ended up being much more expensive than any of their standard sets. If your business is up for it, you can do mass customization, like Dell or Timbuk2—using efficient manufacturing (the labor contents of every Trimbuk2 bag is only 30 minutes). Here what Timbuk2 bag customization looks like:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Does customization make money? Gemvara lets women customize jewelry (“I designed it myself!”), and they’re making millions. So yeah. Charging for shipping is a conversion killer Do you know how many merchants offer free shipping? Half of them! Some offer always free, some have conditions. Amazon and JCPenney offer free shipping, if you buy for at least $25 or $50 respectively. Nordstrom offers free shipping for all purchases. All of this has gotten people used to the idea of free shipping. An e-tailing group study revealed that unconditional free shipping is number one criteria for making a purchase (73 percent listed it as “critical”). In another study, 93 percent of respondents indicated that free shipping on orders would encourage them to purchase more products. High shipping costs were rated as the number one reason why consumers were not satisfied with their online shopping experience. In fact, shipping costs are the main reason why people prefer brick and mortar to online. People want free shipping, no surprise there. But how attractive is it? In fact, orders with free shipping average around 30 percent higher in value those that charge a few bucks for transport. Makes business sense. When 2BigFeet introduced free shipping for orders over $100, their conversions went up 50 percent. “For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
“For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10.” —David Bell, Wharton If you’re afraid that offering free shipping will erode most of the profit in the order, watch this video for a useful strategy to use. What about charging very little instead of free? In the book “Free,” author Chris Anderson shares the case of Amazon. Once Amazon implemented the free shipping offer, sales went up in each country except for one— France. Why? France charged 20 cents instead of free. While 20 cents IS almost free, it sure didn’t seem that way to people. Once they changed it to free, sales went up also in France. Moral of the story: free is in a league of it’s own. The difference between cheap and free is huge. If you charge for shipping If you decide to still charge for shipping, you have to do this one thing: mention shipping costs up front. If you can, charge a flat fee (simple pricing is best) instead of per item. Nothing kills conversions like a surprise shipping fee revealed at the very end. According to this study, 47 percent of people indicated they would abandon a purchase if they got to checkout and found that free shipping was not included. Have a section for sales and specials The above mentioned e-tailing group study conducted at the end of 2011 found that 47 percent of online buyers would only buy discounted products, except under exceptional circumstances. 62 percent said they are looking for a section that identifies sales and specials. Endless sales, Groupon, and its clones have trained people to shop cheap. Discount seeking behavior is set to continue, so thinking about having a dedicated “sales” section on your site. Naturally do what’s right for your brand, but it might be something worth experimenting with. Suggestion: make it clear where people can see stuff on sale. Steve Madden has several calls to action for stuff on sale:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
While the rotating offers banner is usually not a good idea, they have the exact same offer on each banner—so it works out. Tackle shopping cart abandonment Shopping cart abandonment means the loss of a customer who is going through the check-out process of an online store. It’s widespread. In 2011, the shopping cart abandonment rate reached all-time high of 72 percent. It’s believed that this rate will continue climbing. A Forrester study found that 89 percent of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Researchers attributed that high rate to user sophistication: as shoppers become more experienced online, they are more likely to comparison shop even as they move toward checkout. Other industry experts offer this explanation: shoppers are shocked at high shipping costs. Top reasons why people abandon shopping carts (and what to do about it): High price. If your product is the same or similar to what the competitors offer, people will choose based on the price. If your price is the best, say it (must be true, or lose all
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
credibility). If it’s not the best, you have to communicate your added value. You charge for shipping? Stop. Figure out how to offer free shipping. Hassle: you ask for too much data/forced registration. Doubt: Will it fit me? Can I return it? Use live chat to address buyers’ concerns and answer their questions. Your site is too slow. Speed up your site. Follow up A very effective way to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates is following up by email (263 percent improvement in the linked test). Another company got 500 percent ROI with shopping cart abandonment campaign. SmileyCookie recaptured even 29 percent of the abandoned carts. How many companies do this? Listrak shopped Top 1000 retailer sites, added items to a shopping cart, began the checkout process by adding first and last name, e-mail address and phone number, and then abandoned the carts before completing a purchase. They then tracked whether retailers responded with e-mails and analyzed the contents of any follow-up e-mails retailers sent. Only 14.6 percent of the top web retailers used e-mail campaigns as a way to retarget shoppers. So what do you do? Collect email address first—so you are able to send follow-up emails if they do not complete their orders.This is the screen people are taken to on Amazon when they’re ready to check out:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Make sure the first follow-up email goes out ASAP. If they complete the purchase somewhere else, it’s over. If the purchase take place, send one or two more followup emails (might include a coupon). Track the effectiveness of those emails (open, clickthrough, and conversion rates). Many ecommerce platforms such as Magento, 3DCart, and Volusion offer integrated cart abandonment solutions. There are also several add-on software providers out there that can do this. Here are two to start with: Rejoiner SeeWhy Persistent shopping cart People comparison shop. A common behavior is that they add products to cart on a site, so they could return later. If upon their return they discover that the contents of the shopping cart have expired, they will not start from scratch (too much hassle). The solution: persistent shopping cart. Done with a persistent cookie, this shopping cart will be right there even a day or a week later. Save the cart An alternative to this is the option to save the shopping cart contents, so the user can retrieve it later after they’re done with comparison shopping.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Giving the option to send the cart contents to email (later retrievable through a link) is a smart way of staying on the shopper’s mind. Show contact info, offer live chat It’s a small thing, but known to boost conversions—especially important for small, less known stores. It’s a trust thing—making your email and phone number clearly visible shows you’re a real business. Icon Direct shows a real person and a prominent phone number:
Offer a live chat option for answering quick questions. 77 percent of e-retailers that use live chat considered it a critical communication method, according to the results of a survey. Apple is doing it:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
A live chat service I’ve used myself and can strongly recommend is Olark. Clear progress indicators People like to be in control and to be in the know. Are we there yet? We want to know how much longer something is going to take. This is why numbered lists are better than unordered lists and why you should have clear progress indicators on your site. Crutchfield has it in the top right corner, but I think it’s too small and will go unnoticed by many:
The way Crate&Barrel is doing it is better, the steps are more prominent:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Address uncertainty Is this safe? Can I do returns? When will I get my stuff? If the visitor has never ordered from you, he will have several uncertainties you have to deal with. Make a list of the most common objections and doubts, and address them on product pages and in the shopping cart. Asos has a tabbed box detailing shipping and returns info right on the product page:
Ace Hardware puts their phone number, privacy policy, security guarantee and returns info on their shopping cart page.
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
I like how Groupon is dealing with this (look at the sidebar):
Offer multiple payment options Options are good. Two reasons: Given the scandals about credit card information theft, some people are wary of using credit cards for online payments (especially on a site they’ve never used before). A 2009 survey of 2,000 online British adults found that 50 percent of those who regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method is not available, they will cancel the purchase.
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
These people are not the majority, but adding payment options like PayPal or Amazon Payments to credit card payments will help you win over some customers you would lose otherwise. Here’s how Altrec offers two options:
Communicate your value proposition Too many ecommerce sites forget about value propositions. When new people arrive on your site, they have to figure out what your site is about in a matter of seconds. Yes, they can see that you sell stuff, but how are you better or different? For instance, I’ve never heard of this store:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
They don’t say ANYTHING interesting about themselves. This is costing them sales. Here’s a different example. While it’s far from perfect, they state what they do under the logo and list key reasons for buying from them:
If you don’t communicate your value proposition, you will lose a lot of potential buyers. People won’t invest time to figure it out.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Better search Search is crucial to e-commerce. People need to find products, and quick. Around half of the visitors navigate ecommerce sites using search. For search-centric sites like Amazon, the number is probably way higher. Use auto-suggest search that shows products as you type. After online retailer BrickHouse Security added an automated drop-down menu of textual results that appear when shoppers enter terms into its site search window, it boosted conversion rates. Wild Gems example:
There’s a really good article on e-commerce search on Smashing Magazine, read it. More choice requires better filters The more choice you give people, the harder it is to choose something. The way to combat paradox of choice is by filters. The more choice you offer, the better filters you need to provide. Ever been to a wine store? It’s one of those places where the selection knocks you unconscious and you feel like grabbing beer instead. Retail stores don’t have good filters (usually it’s the salesperson). Online, you can have great filters. The role of the filter is to make finding most suitable products easy. Winelibrary‘s filters do a good job:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
All of the filters don’t fit on this screenshot, there are more. The order of the filters is by popularity: more common options like country and variety first, bottle size and closure at the bottom as they don’t matter to most. Wiltshire Farm Foods have filters right on the home page, starting with the top selling categories which account for the vast majority of sales:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Short forms Eventually, people will add some stuff to the cart, and they’re ready to check out. Your success in leading them through this depends a lot on the forms. The more fields they have to fill in, the more friction there is. This is the very reason people prefer to buy from Amazon. Their shipping and credit card information is already there, so they will save themselves from the hassle of filling in forms. They’re even ready to pay a higher price just to save a couple of minutes (I know I am!). I’ve seen stores ask for shipping address for digital downloads. Ugh! No fax, no salutation. Just stick with the essentials. A must-have feature: people need to be able to check the box “shipping address same as the billing address.”
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Bottom line: do not ask for information you don’t absolutely need. Decode the credit card data People from all walks of life shop online, and some are not very savvy. Some people don’t know what the CVV code is, some are even having a hard time figuring out their credit card number. Your job is to make it as clear as possible what data you’re asking for. For instance, Target is making it difficult:
Why on earth would you ask the type of a credit card! I bet tons of people are spending
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
minutes figuring out what card they have, and another group constantly chooses the wrong card type. This is very bad design. Your job is to make the customers’ life easy, not yours. Another thing: sec. code. That’s not clear and easy to understand. Yes, there’s a question mark there, but it could be done so much better. This also ask for card type (#fail), but at least explains where to find the 3 digits.
Promote shopping cart contents Many marketers assume that once the customers click “add to cart,” they will make it through the entire checkout process. Nope. You’ve still got work to do. Even when they add a product to the shopping cart, it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy it. You have to keep selling it to them. The best solution is perpetual shopping cart—displaying the contents of their cart at all times while they browse. Onlineshoes.com has it in the right sidebar:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
The key is to show the subtotal, items in the cart and photos: a constant reminder what they’re about to buy. Best Buy only shows “2 items." People will forget in two minutes what they added and how much that was.
Marketing Sherpa reported that 64 percent of retailers believe perpetual shopping carts are “very effective” at improving conversions. Account registration in the background Surely you know the $300 million dollar button story. Don’t force people to register. Instead, offer the option to register if they want, but create an account anyway for those who opt for guest checkout. They will enter their email and name anyway. You just have to generate a password and email it to them once they complete their order. Sock Dreams plays nice and offers guest checkout:
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Conversion Optimization 101
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Product reviews People use reviews, a lot. Even while they’re shopping in brick and mortar stores they read online reviews. Probably you’re doing it too. I know I am. Nearly 60 percent of online shoppers consult reviews prior to purchasing consumer electronics and 40 percent of online shoppers claimed that they would not even buy electronics without seeking reviews about the product online first. Bottom line: Start gathering and showcasing reviews on your site. If you sell commodity products and can’t get users to write many reviews, you might want to look into pulling reviews from an external site to have more of them. Don’t delete negative reviews—they actually help sales if there are only a few of them. Upsell, but watch where Upselling and cross-selling will boost your average order size. Apple knows this and immediately after adding an iPad to your cart, it tries to upsell you:
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
The rule of upselling is this: you only offer related products (Apple offers Smart Cover for iPad, and doesn’t try to sell you an iPod), and the offer must be at least 60 percent cheaper than the product they just added to their shopping cart. So if they’re buying pants, upsell a belt. Brick and mortar supermarkets will try to upsell you while you’re checking out (grab a candy bar while you wait). Online, don’t do it. Focus on getting them to check out. Amazon gets it and never tries to upsell you during checkout. Placing the order is just one click away, now is not the time to distract me:
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
Clear, big calls to action The user experience in your store needs to be smooth. Smooth in the sense that they should never have to look for something. It should always be obvious how things work. If people need to look for “add to cart” or “checkout” buttons, you’re failing miserably. Those two are the most important buttons in your store. You want them big, bold and prominent. Avoid text links. Patagonia’s “add to cart” button stands clearly out from the rest:
The wording and color of the button also matter, but you need to test it. Bigger buttons are better. The North Face has buttons that stand out in the checkout screen, but I think they’re creating some confusion there. You must have hierarchy. The checkout button is more important than the “continue shopping” button, hence I’d make it bigger and make it first.
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Offer back-ordering Item out of stock? Too bad, no sale. If you plan to re-stock the item within a predictable time or can have it custom made/ordered, offer a backorder option. Wild Gems does this successfully:
Don’t copy Amazon (or other big brands) What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to an ox.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
Conversion Optimization 101
The big guys have a huge advantage over you—they’re known. They don’t have to wrestle with trust and security issues like most small online stores. People are super confident that Amazon or Target will deliver the goods (and on time), have stuff in stock, accept returns and what not. You still need to win customers’ trust. Don’t copy the big guys blindly. (10 more reasons why not). Do user testing Usability is your best friend. I strongly recommend you conduct user testing on your ecommerce site to find problems with your interface you might not be aware of. Give people some tasks (e.g. find X, and buy it), and have them comment out loud while they’re browsing your site. You either watch over their shoulder or watch the screen recording of it. 15 people will already discover 99 percent of the problems. Even testing one target user is better than testing none at all. Usertesting.com and YouEye are some of the tools you can use for it. Test this stuff Take my advice. Then do your own testing.
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
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Ridiculously Effective Technique for Online Lead Generation An average website has a sales conversion of 1 percent to 2 percent. So it’d be fair to say that on most sites more than 95 percent of visitors don’t buy anything (especially on their first visit). So instead of trying to sell them right away, we should capture leads (emails) instead. I firmly believe that the best way to sell something is to avoid it at first. You need to let people know you first, earn their trust, and then you might try to sell to them. Sure, this somewhat depends on the industry, but it’s true for most businesses. The formula This is not the focus of this article, but in a nutshell the formula for making tons of sales online is this: 1. Capture emails 2. Build and develop relationships via regular communication 3. Add tons of value (way before asking for anything in return) 4. Repeat step 3 as much as possible 5. Sell great products The technique Nobody just wants to give you their email address. Everything starts with an attractive value proposition, and you need to get your signup forms right. However there’s one online lead generation technique that has produced far better results for me than anything else: tests and quizzes. There’s something magnetic about tests, and people are almost drawn to them. Some people are even willing to pay a fee in order to take a personality quiz.
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I think it has to do with how people like themselves. Or maybe it’s nostalgia (thinking back to the teenage years and taking silly tests in magazines). Or maybe it’s a subconscious hope to discover something magical. Whatever the case, it works ridiculously well. Examples T1Q T1Q is a site for people who have no idea what to do with their lives. When I launched the site back in 2008, it had a typical email capture form on the site:
It got around five people per day to join the list, out of around 500 daily visitors. 1 percent conversion rate. A couple of years later, I split tested it against an invite to take a test (both forms were on the home page):
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How to Build Websites that Sell:...
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The results: Now I got around a hundred people per day joining the list. Overnight. That’s a huge difference (+1,900 percent). Today’s version is converting even better. Why it works so well Besides being a free test and having therefore innate attractiveness, it does one key thing: it solves a problem the visitors have (or to be exact, offers a promise to solve it). Most visitors come via search and they are googling variations of “find life purpose” or “what should I do with my life." The keywords told me the problem they had, and this free test was built exactly to address these questions. The lesson here is: don’t just build a random quiz. Your business/website solves a real problem. The test should, too. If you don’t know what problems your customers need help solving, you’re not doing it right :) Talking to users should be one of the two key activities in your business. Relevant to your product I could have also built “Do women find you sexy” quiz—and I’m pretty sure it would have been popular—but it wouldn’t attract my ideal customers. So I’d end up with a bunch of useless emails. Ideally your test would only be attractive to people who are also the target group for your products. In T1Q’s case, it’s e-books, courses, and coaching programs related to finding your purpose and passion. ShopGemstones ShopGemstones is a gemstone information site. One of the best in the world. Their goal: build up an email list of gem nerds (my words, not theirs). Gemstone people are often somewhat esoteric and believe in the healing properties of gems and so on. So a test was designed to attract these people:
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11 questions in total, and email asked at the end.
We did something else that was clever—we turned the test into a link building machine. Once they got their results, we showed them this among other things:
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Hundreds of test takers added this to the sidebar of their blog. Once one person did it, her friends saw it on her blog, took the test and put their results onto their blogs. ShopGemstones got hundreds of links thanks to this. Should I Quit This “Should I Quit My Job?” test is technically a funnel to get people to sign up to courses like Live Off My Passion. It targets a specific user and plays on the natural curiosity (“are you one of them?”) of people.
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They ask for the email at the end. A score is given right away, but for the explanation you need to confirm your email (double opt-in).
I’m not in a position to disclose exact figures, but I can tell you that this went live early April and has gotten thousands of opt-ins plus nice sales down the funnel. Can’t build a test? Build a tool In B2B settings it’s more difficult to come up with a good idea for a test, but a tool could be easy (although harder to put together).
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HubSpot is killing it with MarketingGrader. Every business owner is interested in how their website is doing, how they stack up against the competition, and giving your email for useful insights seems a small price to pay.
TweetCharts does something similar, only it lets you dig into Twitter data:
The main idea is the same: help your prospects solve a problem, and ask for their email. Email up front or later? There’s two ways of thinking here. Ask for the email before the test. Users see the test value proposition and they want the benefits. There is no other way to get to the goodies, but to give your email. So they do it. Also, a significant amount of users do not actually complete tests—so if they don’t reach the end, you also lost their email. Ask for the email at the end. Less friction up front—it’e easier to get going. At the end you state that they will get the results by email (can reveal partial results right away), so they’re motivated to give it to you.
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You have to choose which scenario is more likely to work in your case. Better yet, test it!
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How To Increase Sales Online: The Checklist What if there was a method—a process—that you could apply to (pretty much) any website to increase sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is. This method works across all categories, it doesn’t really matter what business you’re in. I’ve turned it into a checklist. So the way to use it is you take your website, compare it to any item on the list, make improvements, and your online sales will increase. Start with measurable goals Before we get started on the checklist, make sure you have actual, measurable goals in place (e.g. sell boots, get subscribers). If you don’t have a single focus for your site, it’s very difficult to achieve results You cannot systematically improve what you cannot measure (or won’t notice when it happens) So start with specific goals and make sure your web analytics software is tracking those goals. Personal opinions do not matter (much) There’s no shortage of opinions in this world. Sadly, most of them are misguided and even incompetent. People see the world as they are, and think everybody else is like then. “But I never click on ads!," “Nobody shares their email!," ”I think it should be blue” and so on. You are not the world. You are not your customer. Hence you cannot make conclusions about user behavior based on your personal preferences. It’s very natural to want to, but try to resist. Instead, focus on evidence based marketing. The internet is not in its infancy anymore. We (humankind) have had many, many years
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to test, try and see what works online. There are all kind of frameworks out there that explain where conversions come from. There’s research. There’s testing. The following checklist is a summary of key elements that help you get more sales (or whatever you’re after). Increasing sales online: the checklist Here it is: Create buyer personas Drive relevant traffic and create relevant messages (for personas) Make your design good Create compelling value propositions Understand buying phases Reduce friction Focus on clarity Eliminate noise and distraction Engage visitors Add urgency Follow usability standards Now let’s look at each item individually. 1. Buyer personas The more people feel that an offer is right for them, the more likely they are to take it. Let me prove it to you. Let’s say you want to buy new running shoes. First, answer these questions: Your gender? Age? Weight?
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Where do you normally run? Now, would you rather buy running shoes that are suitable for all or the one that is specifically designed for your gender, age group, weight and type of use? That’s a no brainer. Your goal is to identify main types of customer groups—their needs, wants, requirements, and use cases. Buyer personas are essentially a specific group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach. Optimizing your site for buyer personas gets you away from an egotistical point of view and gets you to talk to users about their needs and wants. What people care about are themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success. Essentially it’s about knowing who you are selling to, what is their situation, what are they thinking, their needs and hesitations. If you’d know the exact person you’re selling to and the problems they have, you’d be in a much better position to sell them. RightNow Technologies increased their conversions 4x by building a persona focused site. How to build them? The truth is that most companies have only the faintest idea what lies behind the buying decision. We presume an awful lot. The buyer persona is a tool that can help you see deeper into the buyer’s thinking. Use interviews with existing customers to map out different personas. To get more information on this, read The Buyer Persona Manifesto (free pdf). Here’s a free webinar recording on buyer personas I recommend checking out. Your personas should dictate every word and every image on your site. Your website layout, navigation and general user flow should come from personas. 2. Relevancy and motivation This is about 2 things: targeting the right people, communicating the right message. It’s not really possible to sell people things they don’t need or want. If you sell laptops and
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somehow get me to your site—I won’t buy one because I already have one. What you offer is not relevant to me at this moment. A key ingredient of high conversions is relevant traffic. If you stop driving irrelevant traffic to your site, your conversions will go up. As a marketer, one of your constant jobs is to find the right marketing mix: the right media (where to advertise / promote—free or paid), the right message (what do you say?), the right offer (how much $$$ for what). If you get the media right and the traffic is relevant (e.g. people are genuinely interested in what you have to offer), you’re instantly doing better. Now you have to figure out which value proposition works best for this audience. This is where you go back to step one and customer personas. Understand why people need your product, what problems it solves for them and reflect it back to them. When people (your target group) feel understood, magic happens. Additional reading: What to call your call to action (pay attention to the trigger words part) How to design user flow 3. Design and visual hierarchy In a nutshell: beautiful design sells better than ugly design. Beautiful does not mean it’s full of bells and whistles. Beautiful design is also effective. BMW, Apple, or Nike are not throwing millions of dollars at design just for fun. They know it sells better. In fact, design (not just how it looks, but how it works too) is the key reason why people buy them. How do you know if your site is ugly? If you built your site yourself—and you’re not a designer—it sucks. Get a new one. If you use cheesy stock photography—like customer service people with headsets or suits shaking hands—it’s likely the rest of your site sucks too. Don’t use the “women laughing alone with salad” style:
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If you had a freelancer build it who charged you $2 an hour, it sucks. Quality craftsmanship always comes at a fair price—no matter what country they’re from. The more you know about something, the better you’re able to tell the difference Have you seen “The Devil Wears Prada”? There’s this scene (starts around one minute into the video) where Anne Hathaway's character mocks the fashion people who think two identical belts look “so different.” Be it dogs, fashion, or web design—you have to spend years analyzing them to be able to separate the good from the bad, and know exactly why. I’ve seen too many butt-ugly websites that their respective owners thought looked great. Yes, to an extent beauty is in the eye of the beholder—but mostly not. Your site is either ugly or it isn’t. Sure, there are exceptions like Craigslist, but those are outliers. First of all, Craigslist started when butt-ugly was the standard, and later it successfully made barebones design its “thing." If they’d start today looking like they do, nobody would use it. Visual hierarchy and user guidance Your website’s design carries another important role—it communicates what’s important and what the user should do next. Every page on your site should have a most wanted action, or the number one thing you want people to do on those pages. This is where visual hierarchy comes in.
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Look at this website:
Now think what was your eye movement order? What did you notice first, second, last? Probably the first two were the headline (It’s your money…) and the image, followed by the the explanatory paragraph and call to action (Free! Get started). It is not a coincidence. They wanted you to see those thing in that order. And what’s equally important is what you DIDN’T notice—the navigation, all the other secondary information that is not really important at first. Additional reading: 8 universal web design principles you should know Design like jagger 10 useful findings about how people view websites 8 things that grab and hold website visitor’s attention 4. Value propositions
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A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the main reason a prospect should buy from you (and not from the competition). In a nutshell, value proposition is a clear statement that: explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy) delivers specific benefits (quantified value) tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation). You have to present your value proposition as the first thing the visitors see on your home page, but should be visible in all major entry points of the site. If your main landing pages (home page, product page etc) don’t have a value proposition or they don’t understand it, you are losing sales. I’ve written an extensive post on creating value propositions along with a bunch of examples. You should read it. Design Boost does it well. What is it: learn app design. Tools and know-how for building and selling apps End-benefit: become over-employed Who’s it for: people who want to build apps like the pros
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5. Understanding buying phases Let’s say you surf the web and come across this site:
What stands out is that they go straight for the sale—asking to register right away. The only thing people know about them at this point is: “Create attractive articles. Quick. Easy. Profitable.”—which says absolutely nothing. It’s like when you see a pretty girl/handsome boy walk by, approach him/her with a meaningless sentence, and then go for the kiss. What would be the success rate of that? Zero. We know this, yet people do it all the time online.
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Understanding buying phases is all about understanding how people work. Largely, customers fall into three groups: People who have a problem/need, but they don’t know it People who are researching different options, comparison shopping People who have made the decision Depending on your industry there might be a few additional groups. Use customer interviews to learn about the different phases your buyers are in. You have to sell differently to each group. The first group is pretty much hopeless and it’s very difficult to sell them anything, since you need to sell the problem first. Researchers In most niches, these people form the majority. The main question you need to answer for them is, “why should I buy from you?” If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, you’re going to lose. If you don’t make it clear how you’re better or different from the competition, you’re going to lose— especially if you’re not the cheapest. Humans don’t like to think. They like to compare products by looking at a couple of simple parameters like price and maybe something else (e.g. in case of web hosting, disk space). If people can’t understand the differences between your product and that of your competitor, they’re going to choose based on the price. “If it’s all the same, why pay more!?” Do this: State your advantages and differences on your home page and on product pages If you sell mass market products (e.g. Sony TVs, Dell laptops, Gucci perfumes) and you’re not the cheapest, you need to clearly communicate the added value of your higher price. Researchers are looking for information that will help them decide. Your job is to provide them with as much info as possible to make a positive purchasing decision.
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If you rush the sale—ask for a sign-up before they have enough information, you will scare them away. Here’s a good case for burying your signup or buy button. One company removed the sign up call to action from the top of the homepage, and sign-ups increased 350 percent. People who have decided Some people, after they’ve conducted their research, will come back to you for the transaction. They’re looking for clearly visible call to action buttons (add to cart) or links with trigger words (sign up). Your job is to make sure that’s easy to find. Conduct ‘think out loud’ usability testing to test it. 6. Reduce friction Whenever you ask people to do something or commit to something, there’s friction. It’s impossible to remove friction completely in a business transaction, you can only minimize it. Friction is all the doubts, hesitations and second thoughts people have about giving you money for a product. Is it really worth the money? Will it break? Can I trust this guy? Will it work? What if it doesn’t fit? Is this a scam? Is it the right choice for me? Will she like it? The way to convert an infidel to a believer is to address all of their doubts and give them full information, so they are able to convince themselves. The usual suspects—elements that add friction: Long and/or complicated process. This is “get a quote” forms with 10 fields, 3-page applications, etc Websites with horrible usability where people don’t understand how to buy or can’t find any contact info. Anonymous site: no names, photos, phone numbers or physical address published. If it seems you’re trying to hide, you must have something to hide. If you don’t publish photos of yourself, is it that you don’t want your customers to recognize you? Ugly, amateur website
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Insufficient evidence. This is where you make a bunch of claims, but don’t back them up. Insufficient information. A chair, two feet tall, black, $5,000. There are thousands of sites that hardly provide any information about the products they sell. Research says 50 percent of purchases are not completed due to lack of information. FUDs: fears, uncertainties, doubts. Much like the list of questions above, every person has some doubts in a form of a question. The way to overcome these is to address those FUDs in your sales copy. Interview your customers to find out what they are. The classical way to boost credibility is to use testimonials:
Credible testimonials are with full name and photo, from both celebrities and people like your buyers. Anonymous testimonials are not believable. Fitness site Bodyhack combated arguments that their results page photos are Photoshopped. “No one can achieve those results in three months,” they heard. They added a ton of evidence, like videos, to overcome these concerns.
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Make a list of all the FUDs your target group have, and address them with evidence. Social proof is powerful. Show impressive numbers, like how many happy customers you’ve got. Nobody wants to be the only idiot buying your stupid product.
7. Clarity
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People won’t buy what they don’t understand. In fact, people fear what they don’t understand. Racism, xenophobia and all that comes from the fear of the unknown. Whatever you’re selling, the buyer is a human. Doesn’t matter if it’s your granny or a top exec from PwC. They’re all humans. If the text (or video) on your site is easy to understand and in a compelling language, your conversions will go up. A friend of mine blogged about an email he received. I think it’s a good example of what NOT to do. Hi Deniss, My name is [...], Senior Director of Feedback Management at [..]. I wanted to let you know about some information that could impact on your role at [...]. A recent [...] study, “Customer Feedback Management: Leveraging the Voice of the Customer to Amplify Business Results,” revealed that companies successfully leveraging Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs accomplish quantifiable year-over-year performance gains including increased annual revenue and higher customer satisfaction ratings. [...] I will be hosting a webinar, based on the study’s findings [...] I hope you’ll be able to join us for what is sure to be an informative webinar that will yield valuable take-aways for your organization! You can always avoid this kind of jargon by using the “friend” test. Read the text on your website out loud and imagine it’s a conversation with your friend. If there’s a word or a sentence you wouldn’t use, re-word it. What does this company do?
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Pretty clear, isn’t it. No fancy schmancy stuff. You don’t need big words. You need to be clear. If the text on your website is not fun to read and takes effort to understand, you’re doing it wrong. Same goes for video. A good example of a clear presentation is by Nest:
Watch: Nest ad on YouTube It’s a thermostat! This could be the most boring technical video of all times. But it’s not. 8. Noise and distraction There’s an adage for outdoor billboard design—it’s ready when there’s nothing left to remove. In a way this also applies for websites. The more choice you give to people, the harder it is to choose anything. When there are too many options to choose from, it’s easiest to choose nothing at all. There’s tons of research to confirm this. In addition, greater choice makes us unhappy. If you have a ton of products, you have to provide great filters to help people narrow down the choice. Noise and distraction is not just about how many products you have. It’s how busy your layout is, how many competing design elements there are, all asking for attention. Rule of noise: The closer you get to closing the sale, the less things you should have on your screen. Once they get to checkout screen, you shouldn’t have ANYTHING on the
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page that doesn’t directly contribute to conversion. Look at Amazon checkout screen. No sidebar, no menu, no related products. They just really want you to click the “Place your order” button.
Have a single most wanted action for each screen, and make sure the important stuff stands out. Don’t have anything in the layout that isn’t absolutely necessary. Simple works. 9. Engagement What’s your conversion rate? One percent? Three percent? Even if it’s a high five percent, that’d mean that 95 percent of the visitors don’t buy anything. They came to your site (maybe even through paid advertising), bought nothing and left… now what? Have you lost them for good? Not necessarily. In a lot of cases the best way to increase sales is to avoid one at first. Remember buying phases? Instead of asking for money, try to engage them in some way and ideally collect their email address so you can keep talking to them. General rule: the more expensive and/or complicated the product, the more time people need to make a decision. If you’re selling cars or computers, it’s highly unlikely that someone will buy one online on their first visit. This is why you should get their email first, add value, prove your expertise, get them to like you, etc. BEFORE you ask for the sale. Think Traffic wants to sell you different infoproducts. But much, much later. They go for the email first:
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While email is the best way to go, you might also go for social media follow (Twitter, Facebook etc). some sort of test or quiz, immediate tryout of your product, sweepstakes—enter to win. Optimizely lets you just enter any URL to see their product in action:
Appsumo is using a lot of sweepstakes to build their list:
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Additional reading: 14 Steps to Building Sign-up Forms That Convert Lead Magnets: Email List Building on Steroids How to Get Subscribers to Actually Consume Your Content 10. Urgency Urgency is a powerful motivator, if done well. Most of us have seen something like this:
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Act now or you miss this super deal! There are three ways to create urgency: Quantity limitations (Only three tickets left at this price) Time limitations (Discounted tickets until July 1st) Contextual limitations (Father’s Day is coming, get a gift now) As long as the reason for the urgency is believable, it will work. Too many marketers abuse it and try to add urgency to everything. It’s not just possible. But when it makes sense to use it, it will produce a ton of results. 11. Usability If your site is difficult to use, people won’t use it. Nobody will bother to figure out stuff. The best websites provide a seamless experience—everything seems intuitive and people don’t have to think. Luckily it’s not the 90′s or early 2000′s anymore when usability was just plain awful. In 2010 the average failure rate was 22 percent. Check out these fantastic usability checklists for different sections of your website. Compare your site against all of them and make necessary corrections.
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If you’re in it for the long run, focus on loyalty What does the future hold? Jakob Nielsen proposed the following formula a while back: B=V×C×L B—business results V—visitors / traffic C—conversion L—loyalty If you want to double your results, you can either double the number of unique visitors (very expensive), double the conversion rate (possible, but increasingly harder as there’s a max limit to your conversion rate), or double repeat purchases. “Whereas we might aptly call the period 2000–2010 the conversion decade for website usability professionals, 2010–2020 will be the loyalty decade.”—Jakob Nielsen If you want to increase sales right now, focus on conversions or (relevant) traffic. If you want to increase sales online in the long run, focus on loyalty.
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How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate People hardly buy anything without seeing it. Usually they also want to touch it, hold it, and take it for a spin. You really can’t do those things online (unless it’s web based software). So to compensate for all of that, you need to work twice as hard to make your products come alive via excellent photography and graphics. I know of a guy selling construction hardware online. He added images to all the screws he’s selling, and the sales of screws went up. Schwan’s (home delivered food service) has one of the highest conversion rates among e-commerce sites, and when you go to their site you can sense that it’s based on their juicy images. High quality images This should go without saying, but too many websites try to sell products with low quality images. Made.com is a site that caught my attention recently with their beautiful images that let their products shine. Screenshot:
Another great one is Best Made Company. Screenshot:
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Always do what they do: pick a default image that is shown in full size and display clickable thumbnails (that produce enlarged images). Alternate & detailed views Don’t just show a single image, show as many as you can—from different angles. Let’s take that same axe above. You can see all of these views on its product page:
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Much better than just a single photo of an axe, isn’t it? You get a feel of it. They’ve also managed to take those photos in a way that show character and carry a brand. Well done indeed. Context Context matters. Don’t just show the product, show it in context. Let me imagine using it. Remember the photo of the couch above? They also show a person using it:
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Sell earrings? Show me what it looks when I’ll be wearing it. This is how Wild Gems does it:
“It’s so easy to use, even the kids can do it.” Even better to communicate that via contextual image:
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Zoom Zooming in / using a digital loupe can be a nifty feature if your product has ornate details your customers might want to look at. Like in the case of this $1,400 leather case for your iPad:
Avoid cheesy stock photos
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Usability tests by Jakob Nielsen show that people always pay a lot of attention to images. When it comes to people, real people get a lot of attention while stock photo people are largely ignored. Don’t use cheesy stock photos. I won’t go on a rant, but if you’re using shiny people and suits shaking hands, you’re stupid and you think your customers are too. Most phones have decent cameras today, almost any random picture will be better. Draw attention to products Images can be used to draw attention to your product or copy, as this well-known eyetracking study says:
Here’s another post with great examples that prove the same. Men are pervs, women are gold diggers Miratech conducted an eye tracking study to measure how men and women look at the photo of a sexy young woman.
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Source Conclusion: the men look at the woman’s chest and the women look at her ring. Also, people in different countries act differently. For instance French women stared at the chest more than 2.7 times more than British women! Men who looked at the breasts the longest were also from France (and Denmark). Some cliches seem to hold water. Try 360° rotating images
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DueMaternity.com, an online retailer of items for pregnant women and new mothers, boosted their conversion rate by 27 percent thanks to 360° rotating images. In the past they used conventional two-dimensional images on their website, such as the front and back of a model wearing a maternity dress. After adding 360-degree spin to the images that rotate automatically when shoppers visit a particular merchandising page, the conversion rate on products sold on those pages is about 27 percent higher than for standard two-dimensional images. Golfsmith.com claims that products with the special spin feature have conversion rates at least 10 percent and sometimes as much as 30 percent to 40 percent higher than products without it. 360 degree rotating images are usually created by taking a series of pictures (“frames”) with a product, or any object, on a computer controlled turntable. Here’s a more technical blog post of how one guy did it, but there are also service providers around (such as this or this). Product images in site search window boosts conversions After online retailer BrickHouse Security added an automated drop-down menu of textual results that appear when shoppers enter terms into its site search window, it boosted conversion rates.
“With the product images in the site search drop-down window, we get a 100 percent lift in conversion rate among shoppers who use site search.” About 8 percent of buyers use search on their site , and about 25 percent of that group click among the new image-based search results in the automated drop-down list instead of completing the entry of a search term and clicking the search button. This results in a
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15 percent lift in the overall site search conversion rate. Human photos on a landing page increase sales and conversions Medalia Art sells Brazilian and Caribbean art online and using photos of artists on their homepage increased conversions by 95 percent. They had these paintings of artists:
When they replaced the painting with actual photos almost doubled the conversion rate (conversion in this case was clickthrough, not sales):
Source This article tells a story of how adding photos of real people to their customer service phone number increased visitor-to-call rates by 21 percent:
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37Signals started to use photos of their customers on their landing pages, and conversions went up:
Source Will any photo of people boost conversions? GetElastic mentions a split test where using a photo decreased conversions, but the they used cheesy-to-the-maximum stock photo, so that explains it. I recommend always starting out with a photo of real people and never using cheesy shiny stock people. In case you have to use models (e.g. to show off merchandise), Flint McGlaughlin from MarketingExperiments said this: A strong face as the primary means of greeting visitors gets a strong reaction that polarizes conversion rates. Never put up a face photo that hasn’t been thoroughly tested. It needs to be the right face. This was the image in question (screenshot of narscosmetics.com):
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Want more CTR on your Facebook ads? Beer helps. One Facebook advertiser, who was not in the business of selling beer, observed that an ad containing a picture of beer delivered its best CTR. In fact, it performed 57 percent better than any other ad tried:
Another company tried to replicate that and found the similar success with CTRs, but alas the traffic did not convert. In fact, only one of those 1,250 clicks actually produced a conversion. Ouch. Their business is selling merchant accounts, so it’s extremely specific customer they’re after. My guess is that a consumer good with broader appeal might be able to convert that beer traffic. Images on blog posts I couldn’t find any conversion research on this, but I am sure of it: using quality images in your blog posts makes you sell more of your stuff. Why? Images improve readability and general user experience (breaks patterns, catches
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attention, eye candy, worth a thousand words etc). Posts without images are boring, and lead to less reading. The more people read your stuff, the more they like you, the more they develop a relationship with you, the more they trust you and that all moves them further along in your sales funnel (doesn’t even matter what the funnel is like). My advice: always use images in your blog posts.
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How to Use Video to Increase Conversions Online video keeps getting more and more popular. This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw huge growth in in video views with major retailers. Treepodia says video is one of the few strategies that seems to work well regardless of the category in which it is deployed. The following chart shows the conversion rate increases that were witnessed for shoppers who watched product videos:
Even if there wouldn’t be any proof, I would believe instinctively that video increases conversions. Using just the right images boosts your conversion rate, but a video is so much better than a photo. It’s the closest you can get to seeing the product in person. If the product is complicated, using video to explain how it works causes less friction than reading a bunch of text. You can present a ton of information with just a 30 second video —equivalent of half a page of text, if not more. Videos don’t need to be directly about increasing conversions. HSN features a lot of educational videos on their site. Emery Skolfield, HSN.com director of digital content: Videos can be educational and build trust in our brand. If they do they add value and give the sense that HSN.com can help a consumer even after she’s made her purchase.
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Educational videos have another advantage—people actually want to watch them. More content = more engagement. When I look at YouTube Insights data for my own videos, I can see a clear trend: content videos are watched WAY longer than commercials / product pitches. Most don’t watch the latter past the few first seconds. Put a video on your home page Dropbox put a video on their home page and conversions went up. Vidyard increased conversions by 100% by using video on their home page. What should the video be about? Perhaps a short overview works best. Last year Think Vitamin replaced an example tutorial video (5:50) on the homepage with a 50-second overview of the service—and increased conversions by 24.4%.
InDinero spent two months split testing between a more traditional landing page design and a page with basically just a big video and a simple signup form. The page with just a large video has increased inDinero’s signups by almost double from 6.8% to a whopping 11.2%. Buy Real Twitter Followers produced a case study after experimenting with a small video explaining their service on the homepage. This little change helped them increase their sales by 216% against control, but the new version of their home page is again without video. Go figure. No best practice is guaranteed to work on your site. Always split test. Use videos on your product pages Video on product pages is getting more popular. According to the etailing group’s “13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study,” usage of online video on product pages among the 100 leading retailers studied increased by 18 percentage points between Q4 2009 and Q4 2010. Voted the best jewelry e-commerce site of 2011, Ice.com has product videos for every
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product. Zappos is killing it with video. Putting videos on product pages is just a smart business decision. When a consumer sees how a product works, she is much more likely to convert. Sometimes already offering the option to play video will increase the conversion rate (even if they don’t actually watch it!). In the fourth quarter the conversion rate for consumers who watched a video on eParty Unlimited—online-only party supplies retailer—was 8.3%, 43.1% higher than the 5.8% conversion rate for other consumers. Living Direct added video to its product pages of household items ranging from tankless water heaters and wine refrigerators to solar-powered cell phone chargers, and has seen conversions increase for those products. The same has been confirmed by Stacks and Stacks and Swimwear Boutique. Premiere Game Tables saw a significant jump in conversion rates: it went from 1.2% to 4% when a product video was watched. E-retailers can use vendors like Treepedia or Inovo to produce product videos, and pay $300 to $500 per video + monthly bandwidth. This is out of reach for small businesses, but given the access to digital video cameras these days any etailer can make their own videos and host them free on video sharing sites. Online gemstone jewelry company Wild Gems produces their own videos and hosts them on YouTube for free (has access to video analytics via YouTube Insights). It’s hard to show off the sparkle of gemstones via photos, so for them video actually helps them to present their products better. Male or female narrator? This is something you have to test for your site, but online eyewear retailer EyeBuyDirect.com discovered that consumers prefer a male voice for the video’s narration. The retailer tested the effect of a change in narrator for two product videos running approximately 30 seconds each that feature the type of chunky black frames. In this case, the male-narrated product video produced more sales. That video achieved a 9.28% conversion rate, compared with a 2.78% conversion rate for the femalenarrated video. Quite a huge difference!
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Video thumbnail matters We doubled the number of video plays on Traindom’s home page just by changing the video thumbnail. The thumbnail used to look like this, and around 10% of the visitors watched it.
The new thumbnail contained the text ‘Watch this video because it’s only 2:18 long’. I thought to mention the duration of the video, so people wouldn’t worry about it taking too long. The word ‘because’ was used as it triggers an automatic compliance response (as per Cialdini). The new thumbnail looked like this:
Twice the amount of people watched the video now. Test your video thumbnails. Video can reduce return rates
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After adding product videos to their ecommerce site, Diamond Jewelry Limited realised a 60% reduction in returns, which significantly increased their revenues and margins. Video can show product more accurately and hence people are less likely to buy stuff under false assumptions. Try a video-only landing page Fitness trainer Carl Juneau managed to increase his conversions by 46% by switching to video-only landing page. He tried a long-form sales letter underneath the video, but conversions were much lower. Why did video-only work so well? Carl’s best guess: I’m guessing visitors were intrigued by the sales video and clicked through to the price/guarantee page to get more info. They may have been turned off by the long salesletter when I added it to the video and lost the excitement created by the short, punchy video. He also tested a landing page without a video, but a with a call to action mentioning video:
This produced a 14.18% improvement over control. He’s not the only one boosting conversions with mentioning video in the call to action. Mention video in your call to action A split test on this landing page was trying 2 different call to action buttons. One said “Free Instant Access” and one said “Watch The Video”. See images below: Version A: Get Instant Access (11.9% conversion rate)
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Version B: Watch the Video (15.3% conversion rate)
‘Watch the video‘ button increased conversions from 11.9% to 15.3%. A total increase of 28%! Image source Use video testimonials Testimonials reduce friction like nothing else. People trust other consumers and social proof is powerful. When the testimonials are believable, that is. Few will believe testimonials when just the first name or initials are mentioned. Full name and photograph is the minimum, but even that can be faked (I’ve seen an abundance of stock photos served as actual people). What’s really hard to fake is video. Therefore video testimonials are powerful. Justin Nassiri from VideoGenie says video testimonials get watched for 100 seconds on average. That’s pretty good. See how video testimonials are used by Intuit, Priceline and Shoedazzle. How to get more views for the video? Research conducted by Invodo says that videos get more views when they are placed above the fold, the video player is fairly large (480x720px sized player got more views than 250x140px), there is a text call to action (e.g. “click to play”). Treepodia says you should embed the video rather than just provide a link to it. If you add a simple link to video from any given product page, you can expect something between a 5%-15% video view rate, while a video player embedded on the same page will deliver a view rate ranging from 10%-35%. Most viewers will NOT watch the video to the end. An average 2 minute video gets watched half way. What does that mean for you? Make your videos nice and short—30 seconds if you can, but definitely shoot for under 2 minutes.
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Present the most important information first, leave additional details for later. Here’s a useful infographic on increasing your video viewership. Measure video I don’t mean split testing (but you definitely have to test video vs no video), but video analytics. How long are they playing the videos for? Are they watching them to the end or just the first seconds? Most video platforms provide analytics these days, even YouTube. YouTube Insights shows you the general statistics, attention span (how long are they watching for), location and even demographics of the viewers. I recommend you also do a split test of 2 videos and measure the video analytics—which video actually gets watched and which video helps to produce more leads or sales.
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How To Build A High Converting Landing Page A landing page is the first page that visitors see after clicking on your banner ad, PPC ad, or promotional email. It can be a specific page on your website or a separate page created exclusively for search engines. A landing page is designed to direct visitors to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, completing a registration, or subscribing to your mailing list. Your landing page pretty much determines the success of your ad campaign. Good landing page = good ROI. Crappy landing page and you have just (needlessly) wasted your money. Three rules you don’t want to break: Rule 1: Never send traffic from an ad to your home page You should never drive traffic from your promotional campaigns—whatever they are— onto your website’s home page. Home pages are usually cluttered with information, there are many possible actions a visitor can take, and the most important one might be missed. Hence you want to drive traffic from your promotional campaigns to a page that is aimed at only one thing—getting them to take the action that is the goal of your campaign. An effective landing page is a crucial component to helping you convert browsers into buyers. Rule 2: Clarity and relevancy will make it or break it Visitors spend just seconds looking at a landing page before determining its usefulness and relevance to their needs. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, or if your site has functional or usability problems, they will abandon the page. Rather than let that happen, make the few seconds you have their attention count and answer the questions that are on their mind:
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Does this place have what I am looking for? Is there enough information? Can I trust this site? How long will this all take? Your landing page must entice visitors to stay and complete the desired action for conversion, whether it’s filling out a subscription form or buying a product. Rule 3: Good landing page follows a certain structure 1. A benefit oriented headline The headline is the most important part. If the visitors came by clicking on an ad, it must correspond to the ad text that triggered the page. If your banner or PPC ad said “Breakthrough meditation system,” then this phrase should also be included in the headline of your landing page. 2. Relevant and short copy Make it clear, relevant, concise. Don’t put too much text on the page, as the visitor has to be able to read it quickly. Use bullet points to drive the main points home. Make sure the language in the ad is also present in the copy of the landing page. Content relevancy to ads is now a more important factor in Google AdWords. 3. The focus is on getting visitors to take one specific action. There should be only ONE possible action for the visitor to take—be it subscribing to something, making a purchase or something else. Don’t offer options or the conversions will suffer. 4. There are no distracting navigational links. Remove all extra clutter—links, menus, buttons—that have nothing to do with the particular ad/campaign. The point is that the visitor cannot ignore your message by navigating away, and therefore focuses on only that page. 5. There is a prominent subscription form or checkout option. The one action you want the visitor to take has to be big and obvious. Put a large sign-up form on the right side of the landing page, make it stand out. If the landing page is long enough for scrolling, duplicate the form or button in the very bottom of the page.
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6. Maintain your brand. Don’t make your landing page look different from your overall website and brand. Keep the same colors, font—the overall look and feel of your main site. This helps to enforce the brand awareness. A good landing page also loads fast. People just don’t have the patience with slow pages. Use Google Page Speed to measure the speed of yours. It will also give you recommendations for improving page speed. Four step process to start designing your landing page Before you talk to your designer to create the landing page, draw one on the paper. Follow these four steps to get it right. And make sure the designer works with the actual copy, not lorem ipsum. So write the copy first. 1: Identify your audience Make sure the landing page talks to a specific audience. Know the problem, the need and want your target audience has. Write the copy with a specific person in mind. If you drive traffic to the landing page via advertising and run many different ads, then create many different landing pages. They can mostly be the same, but with a different headline and tweaks in the copy. 2: Define your most wanted action (MWA) MWA is the one action people should take on the landing page. What that is depends purely on your product and strategy. Generally speaking if your product is somewhat expensive and complicated, it is better to just get their e-mail address and to start forming a relationship with them via email. If you are selling cheaper and/or more straightforward products like wine or newspaper subscription, it makes more sense to go directly for the sell. If your product is software, I recommend offering a free trial version. 3: Define your Message You know the audience, the problem they have and the solution you can offer. Now craft that into an easy to understand message. There’s no way to know for sure in advance
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what will work, so create a few hypothesis’s and split test them. “Clarity trumps persuasion” is a good maxim to go go by. 4: Design Your Landing Page You have your most wanted action in place, you understand your target audience and have a hypothesis as to which offer will appeal to them. How do you design a landing page that will motivate them to take action? The first thing to do is to make a list of all the elements you need to have on your landing page. What You Need to Include a headline that speaks to the target audience your company logo a quick explanation of your offer above the fold (the fold is the portion of the screen that can be seen without the average user having to scroll down) a longer explanation of the offer below the fold if needed (depends on the complexity of your offer and product) an image of the product being offered a simple form, with ideally just one to three fields (usually just name and e-mail, but do you actually need the name?). a buy button or signup button depending on your pre-defined most wanted responsea link to your privacy policy (to keep people on the page, this should open up in a pop-up window and not load a new page) Remember, the more fields you ask the visitor to fill in, the more friction you create and therefore the less people will fill out the form. What You Should Leave Out a navigation menu—remember to focus only on your offer links to other parts of your sites such as “about”
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any pictures or images that don’t relate to the offer; these will only serve as distractions hard to read text, anything less than 12 px is bad any links along the lines of “click here to subscribe” or “click here to read more.” If you can’t cram all your content into the upper fold of your landing page, just let the user scroll down. Scrolling is almost always better than clicking to the next page. scary forms with unnecessary fields such as “title” or “fax” “clear fields” button There are always exceptions and you usually can’t copy best practices to use on your site, but this advice given here should be your starting point. Get the essentials in place first, and tweak from there. 5: Putting it All Together Once you’ve created your page layout and the copy, the next step is to put it all together and upload it to your site. We recommend using simple URLs that users can easily recognize. Sometimes it’s a good idea to register a whole new domain for your landing page all together—exact keyword domains get more PPC traffic. If your landing page is about job offers to work on an oil rig, your URL could be either www.OilRigJobOffers.com or www.somesite.com/oilrigjoboffers. Such URLs often generate better than normal click through rates on targeted Google PPC ads. A searcher who types ‘oil rig job offers’ is more likely to click on an ad with a keyword URL. Length of a landing page Long or short? There is no “one size fits all” answer. In most cases when the offering is free, a short copy works better and if you ask for money, longer copy performs better. The more money, the longer the copy. As per Bob Kemper from Marketing Experiments there are three factors affecting the efficacy of body copy length on a landing page: Nature of visitor motivation Initial level of Anxiety about product/company
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Level of cost/commitment associated with conversion. So in a nutshell short copy performs better when the offer is free, very cheap or in some other way not intimidating. Also, when it’s an impulse buy or gives an emotional satisfaction (concert tickets, candy, something beautiful). Long copy is more suitable for expensive or complex product. When rational thinking and analysis are factors for purchasing something, longer copy helps you make a more compelling case by adding explanations, proof, testimonials. Products where more information can help people make up their mind. Many people avoid using long form copy as they associate it with hype, spam and cheesy get-rich-quick type of landing pages. Don’t hate the length, hate the content. In a case study by Conversion Rate Experts where they tremendously improved the conversions of SEOMoz landing page, one of the key changes they made was the length of the copy. They’re not the only ones, of course. Take a look at product pages on Amazon—the copy for Kindle is VERY long. Amazon is known to test everything. There are some long form landing pages for free offers that convert well, but the one in the example is a rather complex product, so that’s why a longer copy could work better here. When using long copy, make sure it’s obvious that people can and should scroll down –encourage them to do so. You can use CrazyEgg or Clicktale to see a scrollmap that shows how far down the page people are scrolling. Test, test, test Once everything is up and running, make sure you test the effectiveness of the landing page based on your pre-determined most wanted response. You should always create at least 2 alternative versions of the landing page, test them, measure and improve. Read our article on conversion optimization to learn how to do it all. Landing page critique I just googled a bunch of keywords and clicked on some ads to find different landing pages. I couldn’t find a truly perfect landing page during my limited search, but that’s life. I skipped the totally awful landing pages.
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Here they are, along with what they have done well and what I’d recommend changing. University of Phoenix
What they have done well An emotional headline and image Easy and clear call to action Clear branding What I would change or test I would decrease the orange area and make the form more prominent Increase headline and form font size White text on orange is difficult to read. I understand the branding part, but still. Too much information, the important stuff is not emphasized—which means I won’t read any Unless that link to program disclosure is required by law, I’d remove it. Zoho
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What they have done well Benefit oriented headline Social proof Hero shot of the product Key benefits listed Clear call to action Clear branding What I would change or test Remove the pricing link—I think that’s distracting. Sign them up for a free plan and they have the option to upgrade later. It’s important to get the customer in right away. Put privacy info into a popup or a folding text box on the same page, don’t link out Reduce the number of checked items to 3, make the font darker A different call to action text on the button—indicate what happens after they click CreateSpace
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What they have done well Concise, key benefits brought out Call to action evident Clear branding What I would change or test Design. This looks like a noob created it with FrontPage The headline sucks, lacks a value proposition. No point using the brand in the headline. The “Request a Free Consultation” button takes to a page with the same form as on the right. Why duplicate? Request a Free Consultation—on what? Instead of selling me the consultation, they try to lure me in with a free booklet on promotion. But I am on this page because I’m interested in publishing! The form is too long
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I would try a whole new call to action / offer all together, something more related to publishing. Consultation causes too much friction, I’d be afraid of high pressure sales situation. Allstate Auto Insurance
What they have done well Brand reinforcement Plays on the key issue: saving money on car insurance Clear and totally friction-free call to action What I would change or test Cheesy and badly photoshoped stock photo. Try a more real image. I would test a different wording on the image. (The “important to you” part along with a photo of a car bothers me, and I’m sure I’m not alone.) Text Link Ads
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What they have done well Clear branding 2 key benefits outlined Most important call to action emphasized A screenshot that gives an idea of how it works What I would change or test What does it exactly do? Should be explained in a paragraph on the page. Get rid of the menu on the landing page Remove additional calls to action and links Try a more conventional layout: this one looks cool but is complicated and requires visitors to think. It’s doesn’t play to natural eye movement on the site. Separate landing page for different audiences (publishers and advertisers) Add (social) proof. When it’s about advertising, people are worried about ROI. Tools for building landing pages There are many great tools for building landing pages. Check out these options: Unbounce. Most powerful. Here’s a Landing Page Design Kit you can use with Unbounce.
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InstaPage. They do automatic A/B testing for you. KickoffLabs. Viral landing pages. LaunchRock is for “launching soon” type of landing pages. For WordPress landing pages check out Premise and MaxLanding. Any other good ones you can point out? Post in the comments. Getting visitors to subscribe is just the first step. Getting a customer to subscribe to your offer/newsletter is not enough. After a customer subscribes, you must sell her on actually consuming your content. A large part of your visitors that complete signup forms WILL NOT actively consume your offer.
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3 Hard Truths About A/B Testing Sometimes A/B testing is made to seem like some magical tool that will fix all problems at once. Conversions low? Well run a test and increase your conversions by 12433%! It’s easy! Setting up and running tests is indeed easy (if you’re using the right tools), but doing it right requires thought and care. 1. Most A/B tests won’t produce huge gains (and that’s okay) I’ve read the same A/B testing case studies as you have. Probably more. One huge gain after another—or so it seems. The truth is that vast majority of tests are never published. Like most people who try to make it in Hollywood are people you won’t ever hear about, you don’t know about most A/B tests. Most split test “fail” in the sense that they won’t result in a lift in conversions (new variations produce either no change or perform poorer). Appsumo founder Noah Kagan has said this about their experience: Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change. It’s a good expectation to have. If you’re expecting every test to be a home run, you’re setting yourself up for some unhappy times. Think of it as process of continuous improvement Conversion optimization is a process. And improving conversions is like getting better at anything—you have to do it again and again. It often takes many tests to gain valuable insights about what works and what doesn’t. Every product and audience is different, and even the best research will only take us so far. Ultimately we need to test our hypothesis in the real world and gain new insights from the test results. It’s about incremental gains A realistic expectation to have is that you’ll achieve a 10% gain here and 7% gain there. In the end all of these improvements will add up. “Failed” experiments are for learning
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I’ve had a ton of cases where I came up with a killer hypothesis, re-wrote the copy and made the page much more awesome—only to see it perform WORSE than the control. Probably you’ve experienced the same. Unless you missed some critical insights in the process, you can usually turn “failed” experiments into wins. I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work. —Thomas Alva Edison, inventor The real goal of A/B tests is not a lift in conversions (that’s a nice side effect), but learning something about your target audience. You can take those insights about your users and use it across your marketing efferts—PPC ads, email subject lines, sales copy and so on. Whenever you test variations against the control, you need to have a hypothesis as to what might work. Now when you observe variations win or lose, you will be able to identify which elements really make a difference. When a test fails, you need to evaluate the hypotheses, look at the heat map / click map data to assess user behavior on the site, pay attention to any engagement data—even if users didn’t take your most wanted action, did they do anything else (higher clickthroughs, more time on site etc). Here’s a case study on how they turned a losing variation around by analyzing what exactly doesn’t work on it. 2. There’s a lot of waiting (until statistical confidence) A friend of mine was split testing his new landing page. He kept emailing me his results and findings. I was happy he performed so many tests, but he started to have “results” way too often. At one point I asked him “How long do you run a test for?” His answer: “until one of the variations seems to be winning”. Wrong answer. If you end the test too soon, there’s a high chance you’ll actually get wrong results. You can’t jump to conclusions before you reach statistical confidence. Statistical significance is everything
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Statistical confidence is the probability that a test result is accurate. Noah from 37Signalssaid it well: Running an A/B test without thinking about statistical confidence is worse than not running a test at all—it gives you false confidence that you know what works for your site, when the truth is that you don’t know any better than if you hadn’t run the test. Most researchers use the 95% confidence level before making any conclusions. At 95% confidence level the likelihood of the result being random is very small. Basically we’re saying “this change is not a fluke or caused by chance, it probably happened due to the changes we made”. If the results are not statistically significant, the results might be caused by random factors and there’s no relationship between the changes you made and the test results (this called the null hypothesis). Calculating statistical confidence is too complex for most, so I recommend you use a tool for this. Beware of small sample sizes I started a test for a client. 2 days in, these were the results:
The variation I built was losing bad—by more than 89%. Some tools would already call it and say statistical significance was 100%. The software I used said Variation 1 has 0% chance to beat Control. My client was ready to call it quits. However since the sample size here was too small (only a little over 100 visits per variation) I persisted and this is what it looked like 10 days later:
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That’s right—the variation that had 0% chance of beating control was now winning with 95% confidence. Don’t make conclusions based on a very small sample size. A good ballpark is to aim for at least 1000 page views per variation before looking at statistical confidence (although a smaller sampler might be just fine in some cases). Naturally there’s a proper statistical wayto go about determining the needed samples size, but unless you’re a data geek, use this tool (it will say statistical confidence N/A if proper sample size not achieved). Watch out for A/B testing tools “calling it early”, always double check the numbers. Recently Joanna from Copy Hackers posted about her experience with a tool declaring a winner too soon. Always pay attention to the margin of error and sample size. Patience, my young friend Don’t be discouraged by the sample sizes required—unless you have a very high traffic website, it’s always going to take longer than you’d like. Rather be testing something slowly than to testing nothing at all. Every day without an active test is a day wasted. 3. Trickery doesn’t provide serious lifts, understanding the user does I liked this tweet by Naomi Niles: I couldn’t agree more. This kind of narrative gives people the wrong idea about what testing is about. Yes sure—sometimes the color affects results—especially when it affects visual hierarchy, makes the call to action stand out better and so on. But “green vs orange” is not the essence of A/B testing. It’s about understanding the target audience. Doing research and analysis can be tedious and it’s definitely hard work, but it’s something you need to do. In order to give your conversions a serious lift you need to do conversion research. You need to do the heavy lifting. Serious gains in conversions don’t come from psychological trickery, but from analyzing what your customers really need, the language that resonates with them and how they
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want to buy it. It’s about relevancy and perceived value of the total offer. Conclusion 1. Have realistic expectations about tests. 2. Patience, young grasshopper. 3. A/B testing is about learning. True lifts in conversions come from understanding the user and serving relevant and valuable offers.
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Conversion Optimization 101
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Conversion Optimization 101
53 Ways to Increase Conversion Rate Somebody asked me the other day, what are all the possible ways to increase the conversion rate? Is there a library of all the things that have made the difference? I looked for one, but couldn’t find it. So I decided to put one together myself. Here’s a list of 53 ways to increase conversion rate, along with an example for each case of how somebody did it. In no particular order. 1. Find and communicate proof. Adding proof to the home page contributed a lot to the 400% boost in voices.com conversion rate. 2. Use proactive live chat—initiating live chat with the visitors. Intuit got a 211% boost just by using this tactic. 3. Live chat in general can have a positive impact. Abt Electronics has found that live chat boosts conversion rates—which are 10-20% higher on Abt.com for shoppers who engage live chat, compared to those who don’t. 4. Change the headline of your site. CityCliq got a 90% increase in conversions after changing their positioning. 5. Provide your leads more middle of the funnel content: case studies, eBooks, more email marketing. Content that would push people down the funnel. Diteba Research Laboratories did that and soon they saw a 3x increase in conversion rate. 6. Focus on your key traffic referral source. Quanticate focused on Linkedin, posted more and better content there, used Answers and Groups, and achieved a 10x increase in traffic and a 10x increase in conversion. 7. Add Google Site Search to your site. Waterfilters.net increased their conversion rate by 11% by doing so.
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8. Use a guarantee security seal. OrientalFurniture.com increased their conversions by 7.6% by employing a seal that shows it guarantees the delivery of purchases up to $500, offers up to $10,000 of protection if a consumer’s identity is stolen via the site and ensures that if the retailer drops the price they will pay the difference up to $100. 9. Use red color on your call to action buttons to establish a sense of urgency. BMI, a leading UK airline, increased their conversion rate by 2.5 percent by adding a red background behind their message “Hurry! Only XX seats left”. 10. Design a clear user flow. Zen Windows increased their conversion rate from 0.75% to 2.95% by redesigning the website flow so that it was easier for the user to find what they were looking for. 11. Show product videos on product pages. Ice.com got a 400% lift once they started to do it. 12. Change the color of your button to red. Performable changed it from green to red and got a 21% increase in conversions. 13. Use testimonials. WikiJob added testimonials to their site and improved their conversion rate by 34%. 14. Try a different image. HawkHost multiplied their conversions just by changing the image on the home page. 15. Use a different way of presenting your pricing. BaseKit made their pricing page “Bolder, brighter, clearer, nicer, more obvious” and a 25% increase in conversions was achieved. 16. Add reviews to your site. Figleaves improved their conversion rate by more than 35% by adding reviews to their website. 17. Put a trust seal on the site. Petco.com increased sales by 8.83% after adding the Hacker Safe seal to their site. 18. Change the wording of your call to action button. TextMagic changed their button text from ”Buy SMS Credits” to ”View SMS Prices” and saw an 37.6% improvement in conversions. 19. Simplify your home page. Preceden made their’s simpler and got a 37% uplift. 20. Show a discounted price. The Corkscrew Wine Merchants got a 148.3% improvement on product page after they featured a discount sticker.
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21. Improve the usability of your site. Following a usability “best-practice” (of having a navigation menu) increased conversions by 34% for Slideshop.com 22. Place the call to action with a price within the content area. Nature Air added a contextual call to action within content and witnessed a whooping 591% increase in conversions (from 3% to 19%). Easy-to-find and clear calls to action do work. 23. Reduce the number of fields in your forms. ImageScape reduced the number of form fields from 11 to 4. The number of forms submitted increased 160% and the conversion rate increased 120%. 24. Selling an e-book? Use a 3D virtual cover. Code Monkeyism got 43% more downloads from the page with the 3D image version. 25. Use a stronger command with a literal callout. Dustin Curtis got 173% more clickthroughs for his Twitter link after using a stronger command to invite followers. 26. Improve your value proposition. The Sims 3 website did that and got a 128% increase in game registrations. 27. Have a single page checkout. Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store changed their multi-step checkout into a single page checkout and saw a 21.8% improvement. 28. Use huge customer photos on your homepage. At least it worked for Highrise. 29. Focus on a single action. The Weather Channel watched conversions jump 225%after decluttering their home page and presenting a clear, single action. 30. Have the call to action on the left. Less Accounting test showed that a layout with calls-to-action on the left hand side worked better than a reverse layout. 31. Make the copy action oriented. L’Axelle changed the tone of their copy—“Feel fresh without sweat marks” became “Put an end to sweat marks” and so on. The wording of headline and copy had a huge impact when it came to converting—a take-action feel performed 93% better. 32. Use bullet points to outline benefits. Unionen tested mentioning benefits in a bullet point list vs paragraph of text. Bullet points resulted in a 15.9% improvement. 33. Increase the size of your call to action button. SAP BusinessObjects turned their regular blue link into a big button, and improved conversions by 32.5%.
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34. Make your signup forms a single column. This eye tracking study showed that single column forms work better. 35. Try a Mad Libs style form. Vast.com increased conversion across the board by 25-40% by doing that. 36. Use buyer personas. RightNow Technologies increased their conversions 4x by building a persona focused site. 37. Don’t ask for the sale too soon. One company removed the sign up call to action from the top of the homepage, and sign-ups increased 350%. 38. Add a phone number to your site. LessAccounting saw a 1.8% increase in conversions after placing a phone number on their site. 39. Put a video on your home page. Dropbox boosted their conversions over 10% by doing that. 40. Test a different video thumbnail. Yobongo got a 70.9% conversion uplift after changing their video thumbnail. 41. Make the video short. Think Vitamin replaced an example tutorial video (5:50) on the homepage with a 50-second overview of the service—and increased conversions by 24.4%. 42. Show product images in site search box. After BrickHouse Security added an automated drop-down menu of textual results that appear when shoppers enter terms into its site search window, it boosted conversion rates. 43. Do a radical makeover. This is when you go beyond testing one element to create an all together new and different version. SEOMoz got 52% improvement in sales and $1 million dollars increase in revenue after a radical change. 44. Show product videos. Product videos boosted jewlery site conversions by 247%. 45. Use badging on your products. Sheplers got a 1.63 percent increase in the “add to cart” rate with badging and curation. 46. Add a “Free Trial” button. Email marketing software GetResponse showed a “Free trial” button instead “Buy now” and increased trial signups by 158% (while not decreasing paid signups). 47. Use popup sign-up forms. Popups are known to boost email subscriptions, but
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Visual Website Optimizer got 50% more signups thanks to a popup signup form. 48. Cut some content on your landing page. AssessmentDay cut the amount of content on their landing page, and sales went up by 62%. Don’t cut too much— insufficient information is a conversion killer. 49. Offer next-day shipping. SmileyCookie increased sales by 41% by promoting nextday shipping (Order Today > Ships Next Business Day). 50. Make your links red. Usability studies say that blue link is the best, but Beamax boosted their link clickthroughs by making the links red. 51. Show (real) humans. Using photos of real people (not stock photos) on your landing pages boosts your conversions. 52. Use aspirational imagery and copy. A nutritional supplement company realizes a 50% sales conversion rate lift by including benefit-oriented copy, images reflecting the target market engaged in aspirational activities, and a large call to action button placed visibly above the fold. 53. Beef up on credibility factors. An American Express travel representative got 48% more phone calls after testing a credibility focused version. Note: what worked for them, might not work for you at all. Do your own testing. You should not approach testing by starting to test random ideas. You need to learn about structured approach to conversion optimization, do that here.
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III.
Design
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Design Like Jagger Don’t design your own website. No, really. It will suck. You might think that since WordPress or Weebly are so easy to use, you can design your own killer website. Nope. It will suck. I’ve seen it time and again. You think you will save money by doing it yourself. You might even think the outcome is not so bad. You’re wrong. Let me ask you this: how many hours does one need to drive a car before they’re ready to race? how many games of chess does one need to play before they can kick butt? how many practice sessions on a guitar before one could woo girls with it? A lot. 10 000 hours if you want to be among the best. The thing is that web design is like most skills—it takes a long, long time and a ton of practice before you’re any good. Even if you’re gifted, it will take you many tens of sites, if not hundreds, before you can show off your stuff. I won a web design competition back in 2001, but I still don’t do it (only tiny bits). Why? Cause there are people that can do it much better. I focus on the stuff I’m really good at, and leave design to the pros. When your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic. You need a new roof, you call a roofer. Yet, for some reason a lot of people think they can design their own website. Your website is your #1 marketing tool. Don’t ruin it by designing it yourself. And don’t hire the cheapest provider or your cousin. The site will suck. Can’t afford it? It’s a matter of priorities. You can always find a way to pay for things that are truly important to you. We live in the era of design. Good design sells, bad design doesn’t. There’s lots of researchout there saying that people trust beautiful websites more. Heck, people trust beautiful everything more. Beautiful people make more money, are more successful and
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and justhave it better. We like pretty cars, houses and clothes. The same goes for websites. If the 80s and 90s taught us to take quality for granted, today good design is the barrier of entry. (And no point mentioning Craigslist. First of all it would never take off if it would launch today looking like this, and secondly there are always exceptions). If you build your own site, it will be ugly and it will hurt your business. You will lose money. Every day will be a wasted opportunity. Every week I come across websites that offer something I or my clients might need, but the website is just so ugly I can’t take them seriously, and will look elsewhere. If you designed your own site, this is happening to you all the time—whether you’re aware of it or not. Mick Jagger can move, but he’d probably get somebody else to design his site.
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Eight Universal Web Design Principles You Should Know The design of your website is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement any conversion boosting tactic in the world, but if it looks like crap, it won’t do you much good. Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing. Design is your product and how it works. The more I’ve learned about design, the better results I’ve gotten. Here are eight web design principles you should know and follow. 1.Visual Hierarchy Squeaky wheels get the grease and prominent visuals get the attention. Visual hierarchy is one of the most important principles behind effective web design. It’s the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees. Exercise. Please rank the circles in the order of importance:
Without knowing ANYTHING about these circles, you were easily able to rank them. That’s visual hierarchy. Certain parts of your website are more important than others (forms, calls to action,
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value proposition etc), and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts. If you website menu has 10 items, are all of them equally important? Where do you want the user to click? Make important links more prominent. Hierarchy does not only come from size. Amazon makes the ‘Add to cart’ button more prominent by using color:
Start with the business objective You should rank elements on your website based on your business objective. If you don’t have a specific goal, you can’t know what to prioritize. Here’s an example, it’s a screenshot I took of the Williams Sonoma website. They want to sell outdoor cookware. The biggest eye catcher is the huge piece of meat (make me want it), followed by the headline (say what it is) and call to action button (get it!). Fourth place goes to a paragraph of text under the headline, fifth is the free shipping banner and the top navigation is last. This is visual hierarchy well done.
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Exercise. Surf the web and consciously rank the elements in the visual hierarchy. Then go look at your own site. Is there something important (key information points that visitors are likely seeking) that is not high enough in the hierarchy? Change that. More about visual hierarchy. 2. Divine Proportions Golden ratio is a magical number 1.618 ( ) that makes all things proportioned to it aesthetically pleasing (or so it is believed). Then there is also the Fibonacci sequence where each term is defined as the sum of the two previous terms: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. The interesting thing is that we have two seemingly unrelated topics producing the same exact number. Here’s what the golden ratio looks like:
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Many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio. A famous example is Pantheon built in Ancient Greece:
Can you use it on web design? You betcha. Here’s Twitter:
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Image source Here’s a comment by Twitter’s creative director, @stop: “To anyone curious about #NewTwitter proportions, know that we didn’t leave those ratios to chance. This, of course, only applies to the narrowest version of the UI. If your browser window is wider, your details pane will expand to provide greater utility, throwing off these proportions. But the narrowest width shows where we started, ratio-wise.” So, if your layout width is 960px, divide it by 1.618 (=593px). Now you know that the content area should be 593px and sidebar 367px. If the website height is 760px tall, you can split it into 470px and 290px chunks (760/1.618=~470). Additional reading Here’s a Golden Ratio calculator you can use to apply it to your site. How to apply Golden Ratio to typography 3. Hick’s Law Hick’s law says that with every additional choice increases the time required to take a decision. You’ve experienced this countless times at restaurants. Menus with huge options make it difficult to choose your dinner. If it just offered two options, taking a decision would take much less time. This is similar to Paradox of Choice—the more choice you give people, the easier it is to choose nothing.
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The more options a user has when using your website, the more difficult it will be to use (or won’t be used at all). So in order to provide a more enjoyable experience, we need to eliminate choices. The process of eliminating distracting options has to begin from the get go of the web design and should be carried on throughout the design process. In the era of infinite choice, people need better filters! If you sell a huge amount of products, add better filters for easier decision making. Wine Library sells a huge amount of wine. They do a good job with the filters (on the left):
Learn more about Hick’s Law. 4. Fitt’s Law Fitt’s law stipulates that the time required to move to a target area (e.g. click a button) is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. In other words, the bigger an object and the closer it is to us, the easier it is to use it. Spotify makes it easier to hit ‘Play’ than other buttons:
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They also place it (on the fullscreen Desktop app) in the bottom left corner, which is considered the most valuable real estate since the corners are technically the most accessible. This does not, however, apply to web design (due to scrolling and the way operating systems are). It doesn’t mean that bigger is always better. A button that takes up half the screen is not a good idea, and we don’t need a mathematical study to know this. Even so, Fitts’ law is a binary logarithm. This means that the predicted results of the usability of an object runs along a curve, not a straight line. A tiny button will become much easier to click when given a 20 percent size increase, while a very large object will not share the same benefits in usability when given the same 20 percent boost in size. This is similar to rule of target size. The size of a button should be proportional to its expected frequency of use. You can check your stats for which buttons people use the most, and make popular buttons bigger (easier to hit). Let’s imagine there’s a form you want people to fill. At the end of the form, there are two buttons: “Submit” and “Reset” (clear fields).
99.9999 percent want to hit ‘submit’. Hence the button should be much bigger than ‘reset’. More about Fitt’s Law. 5. Rule of Thirds It’s a good idea to use images in your design. A visual communicates your ideas much faster than any text. The best images follow the rule of thirds: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Using beautiful, big images contributes to design as it is (not withstanding the growth of Pinterest), following this rule will make them more interesting and thus your website
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more appealing. 6. Gestalt Design Laws Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain. Its principle is that the human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts. Here’s what I mean:
Notice how you could see the dog without focusing on each black spot that the dog consists of? The key takeaway here is that people see the whole before they see the parts. People always see the whole of your website first, before they distinguish the header, menu, footer and so on. As one of the founders of gestaltism Kurt Koffka said: the whole exists independently from the parts. There are eight so-called gestalt design laws that allow us to predict how people will perceive something. Here they are: 1. Law of Proximity People group things together that are close together in space. They become a single perceived object. In web design, you need to make sure things that do NOT go together, are not perceived as one. Similarly, you want to group certain design elements together (navigation menu,
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footer etc) to communicate that they form a whole.
Craigslist uses this law to make it easy to understand which sub-categories fall under “for sale”:
2. Law of Similarity We group similar things together. This similarity can occur in the form of shape, colour, shading or other qualities. Here we group black dots into one group and whites into another one, because—well, the black dots look kind of similar to each other.
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Codeschool makes all the testimonial boxes similar, so we see all the testimonials as a single group:
3. Law of Closure We seek completeness. With shapes that aren’t closed, when parts of a whole picture are missing, our perception fills in the visual gap. We see two squares overlaid on four circles even though none of these shapes actually exist in the graphic.
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Without the law of closure, we would just see different lines with different lengths, but with the law of closure, we combine the lines into whole shapes. Using the law of closure can make logos or design elemets more interesting. A good example of this is the World Wide Fund For Nature designed by Sir Peter Scott in 1961:
4. Law of Symmetry The mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point. It is perceptually pleasing to be able to divide objects into an even number of symmetrical parts. When we see two symmetrical elements that are unconnected, the mind perceptually
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connects them to form a coherent shape.
When we look at the image above, we tend to observe three pairs of symmetrical brackets rather than six individual brackets. People prefer symmetric appearances over asymmetric ones. Balanced three columns and the curve add to the enjoyment of BootB web design:
5. Law of Common Fate We tend to perceive objects as lines that move along a path. We group together of objects that have the same trend of motion and are therefore on the same path.
People mentally group together sticks or raised hands pointing somewhere, because they all point in the same direction. You can use this to guide the user’s attention to something (e.g. a signup form, value proposition, etc).
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For example, if there is an array of dots and half the dots are moving upward while the other half are moving downward, we would perceive the upward moving dots and the downward moving dots as two distinct units. 6. Law of Continuity People have a tendency to perceive a line as continuing its established direction. In cases where there is an intersection between objects (e.g. lines), we tend to perceive the two lines as two single uninterrupted entities. Stimuli remains distinct even with overlap.
Fixel uses this to connect faces to bios:
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There are other gestalt laws as well such as Figure and Ground or Law of Good Gestalt (objects tend to be perceptually grouped together if they form a pattern that is regular, simple and orderly—like the Olympic rings), but I think the ones mentioned here are most useful to know. 7. White space and clean design White space (also called “negative space”) is the portion of a page left “empty." It’s the space between graphics, margins, gutters, space between columns, space between lines of type or visuals. It should not be considered merely “blank” space—it is an important element of design. It enables the objects in it to exist at all. White space is all about the use of hierarchy. The hierarchy of information, be it type, colour or images. A page without white space, crammed full of text or graphics, runs the risk of appearing busy, cluttered, and is typically difficult to read (people won’t even bother). Enough white space makes a website look “clean.” While clean design is crucial to communicating a clear message, it doesn’t just mean less content. Clean design means a design that makes the best use of the space it is in. To make a clean design, you have to know how to communicate clearly by using white space wisely. Made.com does white space well:
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The fine use of white space makes it easy to focus on the main message and visuals, and the body copy easy to read. White spaces promotes elegance and sophistication, improves legibility and drives focus. Read more about white space and simplicity. 8. Occam’s Razor Occam’s razor is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect. To put it in the design context, Occam’s Razor states that the simplest solution is usually best. In a post about their Angelpad experience, Pipedrive guys say the following: “The Angelpad team and mentors challenged us in many ways. “You have too many things on your home page” was something we didn’t agree with at first, but we’re happy to test. And it turned out we had been wrong indeed. We removed 80 percent of the content, and left one sign-up button and one Learn More link on the home page. Conversion to sign up increased by 300 percent.”
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It’s not just about the looks, but also about how it works. Some companies—like 37Signals —have turned “simple” into a business model. Here’s a quote from the book “Rework” (written by their founders): “Lots of people hate us because our products do less than the competition’s. They’re insulted when we refuse to include their pet feature. But we’re just as proud of what our products don’t do as we are of what they do. We design them to be simple because we believe most software is too complex: too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion.” Simple, minimal design does not automatically mean the design works, or is effective. But in my experience simple is always better than the opposite—and hence we should strive to simplify. Conclusion Design and art are not the same. You should design for the user and by having a business objective in mind. Using these web design principles you can get to aesthetically and financially rewarding results.
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First Impressions Matter: The Importance of Great Visual Design People make snap judgements. It takes only a tenth of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. This number comes from specific studies. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 milliseconds each. In a follow-up study, they reduced the exposure time to 50 milliseconds. Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 and 500 milliseconds conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more. All the website screenshots below are for illustrative purposes only. Users form design opinions even in 17 milliseconds Recently Google confirmed the 50 milliseconds number in their own research. In fact, according to their study some opinions develop even within 17 milliseconds (though the effect was less pronounced on some design factors). The key findings from their study were that websites with low visual complexity and high prototypicality (how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites) were perceived as highly appealing.
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Key takeaway: Make your web design simple and familiar (follow conventions—e.g. people have a fixed idea what an e-commerce site should be like). If you go for innovative, unconventional layouts—people are less likely to like them. Eyetracking study identifies key elements It takes 2.6 seconds for a user’s eyes to land on that area of a website that most influences their first impression. The researchers monitored students’ eye movements as they scanned the web pages. The researchers then analyzed the eye-tracking data to determine how long it took for the students to focus on specific sections of a page—such as the menu, logo, images and social media icons—before they moved on to another section. They discovered that the better the first impression, the the longer the participants stayed on the page.
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The website sections that drew the most interest from viewers were as follows: The institution’s logo. Users spent about 6.48 seconds focused on this area before moving on. The main navigation menu. Almost as popular as the logo, subjects spent an average of 6.44 seconds viewing the menu. The search box, where users focused for just over 6 seconds. The site’s main image, where users’ eyes fixated for an average of 5.94 seconds. The site’s written content, where users spent about 5.59 seconds. The bottom of a website, where users spent about 5.25 seconds. Key takeaway: Good first impression leads to longer visit duration. Make sure the 6 elements listed here look great. First impressions are 94 percent design related British researchers analyzed how different design and information content factors influence trust of online health sites. The study showed clearly that the look and feel of the website is the main driver of first impressions.
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Of all the feedback the test participants gave, 94 percent was about design (complex, busy layout, lack of navigation aids, noring web design especially use of color, pop up adverts, slow introductions to site, small print, too much text, corporate look and feel, poor search facilities). Only 6 percent of the feedback was about the actual content. Visual appeal and website navigation appeared had by far the biggest influence on people’s first impressions of the site. At the same time, poor interface design was particularly associated with rapid rejection and mistrust of a website. When participants did not like some aspect of the design, the whole website was often not explored further than the homepage and was not considered suitable. Similar results were found in a study research for Consumer WebWatch, conducted by Stanford University credibility experts. They found that what people *say* about how they evaluate trust of a website and how they *really* do it are different. The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1 percent) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and
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color schemes. Key takeaway: Great design gets people to trust you and to stick around. Poor design creates mistrust and makes people leave. Inspiration drives better first impression A study looking into the role of first impressions in tourism websites found that inspiration-related elements had the greatest impact on first-impression formation. This suggests that visually appealing stimuli is a very important tool for getting people to stay longer on the site and thus converting more visitors into buyers.
Usability was the second most significant driver of first impression formation, followed by credibility. All in all this tells us that travelers want to get inspired about a destination (inspiring imagery), they don’t want to waste mental energy on figuring stuff out (usability—don’t make me think) and they want to be sure this travel provider is legit (credibility). Key takeaway: If you’re selling a dream (e.g. the idea of going on a holiday to Fiji), inspiring photography is the leading first impression creator. Positive first impressions lead to higher satisfaction In an experiment conducted to study the effects of product expectations on subjective usability ratings, participants read a positive or a negative product review for a novel mobile device before a usability test, while the control group read nothing.
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The study revealed a surprisingly strong effect of positive expectations on subjective post-experiment ratings: the participants who had read the positive review gave the device significantly better post-experiment ratings than did the negative-prime and noprime groups. This boosting effect of the positive prime held even in the hard task condition where the users failed in most of the tasks. Key takeaway: if they “instantly” like your site, they’re ready to cut you some slack for any hiccups down the line. It only makes sense to assume that this kind of priming works also the other way—negative first impression decreases the overall satisfaction with your site. Visual appeal more important than usability for user perception A study examined the effects of visual appeal and usability on user performance and satisfaction with a website. Users completed different tasks on websites which varied in visual appeal (high and low) and usability (high and low). Results show that first impressions are most influenced by the visual appeal of the site. Users gave high usability and interest ratings to sites with high appeal and low usability and interest ratings to sites with low appeal. User perceptions of a low appeal website were not significantly influenced by the site’s usability even after a successful experience with the site.
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Key takeaway: Invest in design—it’s what matters the most for pulling users in. Funny enough, great visual design will lead to higher usability ratings even. And actual usability will matter much less if the overall visual appeal is low. First impressions can last for years A research by two economists—Barry Staw and Ha Hoang (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1995)—looked into the impact of draft order in NBA. They observed players career over five years after they were drafted. Five years is enough to prove yourself in many ways, so draft order shouldn’t play a role, right? Wrong. According to the study the playing time players get is exactly related to their draft order. Results showed that teams granted more playing time to their most highly drafted players and retained them longer, even after controlling for players’ on-court performance (how well they played matters much less!), injuries, trade status, and position played. Even after controlling for other factors, in a given season every increment in the draft number (e.g., getting drafted ninth instead of eighth) decreased playing time as much as 23 minutes. Incredibly, draft order continued to predict playing time all the way through a player’s fifth year in the NBA, the final year measured in the study. Players drafted in the first round had also longer careers—they played for 3.5 more years than the rest.
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Another study looking into the persistence of first impressions discovered that new experiences that contradict a first impression become “bound” to the context in which they were made, whereas first impressions still dominate in other contexts. Our brain stores expectancy-violating experiences as exceptions-to-the-rule, such that the rule is treated as valid except for the specific context in which it has been violated. Key takeaway: If their first impression is negative, it might cause the user to have prejudice against you for years. Make sure above the fold area rocks Over the years “above the fold” issue has been hotly debated. Today’s research indicates that people have no problem scrolling and in fact prefer it to diving the content into many pages. What’s this got to do with first impressions? Here’s a new dimension of thinking to the “above the fold” issue: it needs to be the best part of your website. First impressions are formed in 0.05 seconds. They’re not going to scroll down in that time. Hence, what they see immediately without scroll is what determines whether they even want to scroll down. Conclusion Visual appeal matters a lot. My best advice: don’t try to save money on design, ever. I’ve seen time and again how a “plain design overhaul” resulted in significant conversion boosts. People form their opinion about your site in milliseconds. The first second on your website might matter more than all other seconds that follow. Make sure that second makes a great first impression.
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How To Design A Homepage That Converts The home page of your website is the most important page. When you look at the traffic statistics of pretty much any website, the home page gets more traffic than any other page. Your home page also has the best chance to rank high in the search engines since most people link to your home page (as do your internal pages). So better make it good. Here’s how to go about designing a home page that converts. This is the process I’m using when evaluating or designing home pages. 1. Map out buyer personas 2. Craft a value proposition 3. Build a connection 4. Use proper visuals 5. Define most wanted action 6. Create call to action 7. Write user oriented copy 8. Add trust elements 9. Test length 10. Check load speed I’ll touch upon all of these points below. Let’s start with the obvious stuff Logo People expect to see your logo in the top left corner. Clicking on the logo takes you to the
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home page from every internal page. Don’t mess with it. You don’t need to hire an expensive logo designer. Text logos are just as good, only with 1 percent of the cost. You can create a beautiful logo by using text. Pick a beautiful font and a background color you like—and voilà! A designer from Edicy took just 15 minutes to create this logo for an imaginary company:
Image credit: Tajo Oja Navigation People are used to two kinds of menus: horizontal and vertical. Don’t innovate here— familiar layouts work best. Remember people spend most of their time on OTHER websites. People don’t need to see a menu to know where the ‘contact’ link is at—by default they look for it as the last link in a horizontal menu or the bottom link in a vertical one. Ensure they find it there. Keep it simple and obvious: The Personal MBA menu:
All is clear, right? No surprises here. Now let’s look at a menu gone wrong. Clever innovation? Not! They make you move your
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mouse onto a number to reveal what link it is. Not many will have the patience:
Footer People expect to find your contact information in the footer. Make sure it’s there. Mapping buyer personas What are buyer personas? Buyer personas are essentially a specific group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach. Optimizing your site for buyer personas gets you away from an egotistical point of view and gets you to talk to users about their needs and wants. What people care about are themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success. Why use them? Essentially it’s about knowing who you are selling to, what is their situation, what are they thinking, their needs and hesitations. If you’d know the exact person you’re selling to and the problems they have, you’d be in a much better position to sell them. RightNow Technologies increased their conversions 4x by building a persona focused site. How to build them? The truth is that most companies have only the faintest idea what lies behind the buying decision. We presume an awful lot. The buyer persona is a tool that can help you see deeper into the buyer’s thinking.
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Use interviews with existing customers to map out different personas. To get more information on this read The Buyer Persona Manifesto (free pdf). Here’s a free webinar recording on buyer personas I recommend checking out. When personas fail you Ideally the value proposition and everything else you present on your home page (and other pages) come from the buyer personas. That being said, some products are betterdefined by the job they do than the customers they serve. Value proposition This is the most important part of your home page. Your value proposition is a concise chunk of text (headline, sub-headline and and maybe a few bullets points) that should address these questions: What is this site about? What can I do here? How is it useful to me? Why should I buy from you instead of the competition? People’s attention span and patience are extremely limited. The world suffers from attention-deficit disorder. If they don’t get the answers from your home page within seconds, they will leave. Nobody will TRY to understand what you’re about nor read long pages of text. If you haven’t captivated them on your home page, you’ve lost them. There are several ways to craft and present your value proposition. Campaign Monitor:
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What I like about this value proposition Bold headline—stating what it is and who is it for A specific, benefit-oriented paragraph underneath describing the service Big visual to support the text What I’d improve Clarify how is it different from the competition 300 milligrams:
What I like about this value proposition Big, clear headline you cannot miss A specific, benefit-oriented paragraph underneath describing the service
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Visual to support the text What I’d improve Increase the font size of the descriptive text and remove the company name from it (needless waste of space). I’d make the first sentence user focused like the second one. Make the visual more clear, add descriptive arrows and texts perhaps Dowce.com changed the wording of their headline and added bullet points to improve their value proposition, resulting in 24. 5 percent improvement in conversions. Build a connection Let’s do an exercise. I won’t ask you to write anything down, but make a mental note. How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Where do you normally walk (city streets, gravel, etc)? Now let’s say I’m selling shoes and you need a pair. You have two options. The first pair is designed for everyone. The second one is designed exactly for people your height and weight, and for walking on terrains you normally walk on. The price is the same. Which pair will you buy? No doubt about it, right? This is why you have to state who your product or service is for, and it has to be true. If you’re trying to sell to everybody, you will lose (unless you have a gazillion dollars to spend). Talking to everybody in your copy works for almost nobody. Look again at the above example of Campaign Monitor. They have included the target group in their value proposition. Stripe:
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There’s no doubt who this service is designed for, is there? If your current offering is NOT catered to a specific customer group, I recommend you re-think your strategy. Most wanted action Remember paradox of choice: the more choice you give somebody, the easier it is to choose nothing. Choice paralyzes. If you think people will invest time to figure out where to click next, think again. Thinking is hard, and you should not make your customers think. Instead, clearly indicate the next action you want them to take. In one experiment they changed the home page to focus on a single action, and saw the users doing exactly what they wanted them to do. It works. Before you can do that, you need to figure out what that action should be! If you ask for the purchase or sign-up too soon, you will lose them. In most cases it’s a good idea to direct them to reading more about your service or checking out a demo before asking for a commitment (signup, purchase etc). Making the button bigger is not gonna help—in most cases they just don’t care yet!I t’s about focusing on what people really want, in the order that they want it. You don’t ask somebody to marry you on your first date. Look at the screenshots above, all of them make this mistake (Campaign Monitor does offer View Features button too). People are not ready to commit after just reading a few sentences, so don’t force them. You can of course have a buy/sign-up button, but try making it less prominent and put the focus on a different step. Try to think of the questions that are going through your customer’s mind while they’re on your homepage and whether the content on the page does a great job of answering them. Guide them to the next logical step in their usage lifecycle. Joshua Porter makes a good case for burying your signup or buy button, I recommend reading it. One company removed the sign up call to action from the top of the homepage, and sign-ups increased 350 percent. Trying the product without signing up I love how Codecademy is doing this:
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They pull you right in and make you use their service without asking for a signup or anything. The friction is usually high for any kind of signup—free or not—and here they have completely eliminated that. While they do have a “Get Started” button, it only sets focus to the console:
So how do they get people to sign up? After playing around a bit, they offer you to create an account so you could save your work. By this time you’ve toyed around with it and fallen in love. Call to action Call to action wording matters a lot. I yet have to see a case study where a wording containing the word ‘buy’ converted the best. In e-commerce, add to cart always kicks buy now‘s butt. In this split test they changed “Buy SMS Credits” to “View SMS prices," and saw an uplift in conversions. This change along with minor added trust elements resulted in overall conversion rate improvement of 37.6 percent. In another test they achieved a 83.4 percent improvement after changing the wording of their button from “Play right now!” to “Instant demo!." Test your call to action. I recommend making the calls to action benefit-oriented and indicating what happens when they click. Avoid empty words like ‘submit’.
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Scrapblog:
Icondock:
Web Copy Copywriting is super important and a huge topic on it’s own. Here’s one tip. Most people on your website know what they are looking for in a product or service. If they find something that looks similar to what they want, they will follow it (read more, buy etc). Consequently, having relevant information with the exact wording your customers would use is very important. Talk to your customers and see what language and exact phrases they’re using when talking about your products. Use it on your website. When I’m looking for a project management software that has features like task assigning, time tracking and client management built in, those are they keywords I’m after when browsing different sites. More on copywriting: what the science of persuasion says and seven tips for effective sales copy. Above the fold and below the fold Above the fold is the part of a page that’s visible without scrolling. People do scroll and are not afraid of it, but make sure the most important elements are visible without scrolling: Value proposition, Some visual, Call to action. Ideally the part above the fold answers the most important questions the visitor has, and the rest is supplemental reading.
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How long the part below the fold should be largely depends on your business. Guys over at Pipedrive told me that when they shrunk their home page, their conversions tripled. Make the contact information visible Easy to find contact information is one of the key things to making your website more trustworthy. Display your email, phone and live chat options on every page. LessAccounting saw a 1.8 percent increase in conversions after placing a phone number on their site. Flowr added a phone number to their site—and also observed a slight increase in conversions. Leave room for text Ignoring search engines is not wise. As I mentioned it the beginning, your home page has the best chance among all the pages on your site to rank high in search engines. This, however, won’t happen unless there is substantial amount of text on the page (500+ words). Use the room below the fold also for SEO—write useful stuff about your products, services and address questions your users have, but make sure the text is optimized. No text, no ranking. Visuals Thousand words and all that. Neuroscience tells us that people “get” images hundreds of times faster than from text (our reptile brain doesn’t even know how to read). I firmly believe that using images is a powerful way to boost up any value proposition. Imagine this website without the large image:
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Blu Homes sells prefab homes, and nobody is going to buy one without seeing it. How many words would you need to describe the picture above? Too many—nobody would read that. Even if you sell less tangible goods, like software, people want to get an idea what it’s like. Project Bubble gives you an overview of their software via short video. I think video is great for more complex products, because watching a 1:30 minute video is less hassle for the user than reading a whole bunch of text.
Using video can provide an uplift. Dropbox boosted their conversions after adding a video to the home page. Not all the videos are same—video thumbnails can make a huge
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difference. Yobongo got a 70.9 percent conversion uplift after changing their video thumbnail. Read more on how to increase conversions with video and how to boost conversions with images. Trust and security People don’t buy from you if they don’t trust you. In addition to showing off your contact information, it’s a good idea to use trust marks to reduce friction. Here’s what Ice.com put in their footer:
Notice the mention of money-back guarantee, “trusted since 1999″ and two trust logos. Don’t ignore load speed Speed matters. Slow sites cause frustration and make people leave, thus obviously hurting conversions. Speeding up sites increases conversions. Google knows it and has included site speed as one of the ranking factors. Google’s own nifty Page Speed Online tool is terrific for providing you insights into your site speed and what you can do to make it faster. If you use Google Analytics, their Site Speed report will help you learn which of your pages are underperforming, so you can address this potential barrier to your conversions. If you’re not terrified by technical discussions, read how to optimize your site with HTTP caching. It’s never done Your home page should be living and breathing organism, always evolving. Keep on testing different hypotheses and see what makes the difference. In the end, testing is not just about converting more customers, but learning.
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Make it your goal to understand why a change made a difference and what can you learn from this that you can apply elsewhere in your business.
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Website Credibility Checklist Factors If you’re Amazon or Apple—congratulations! You don’t have any credibility issues. Most of us aren’t so lucky. Almost all but the biggest companies have an uphill credibility battle ahead of them every time a new visitor lands on their site. What’s website credibility and why is it important? BJ Fogg—the world’s leading researcher on web credibility—has said that web credibility is about making your website in such a way that it comes across as trustworthy and knowledgeable. Your website is often the first point of contact for the customers, responsible for first impressions and of course sources of revenue. Companies that design for credibility have a strategic advantage over competition. Fogg says there are four types of credibility: Presumed credibility—general assumptions (e.g. a brand we’ve heard of is more credible, unknown brand less) Reputed credibility—third party reference (e.g. your wife said it’s good or your friends said service X sucks) Surface credibility—what we find on simple inspection (e.g. the website looks quality or “this seems confusing”) Earned credibility—personal experience (e.g. friendly customer service or text full of typos and factual errors) In this post I’ll focus on what you can do right now to boost the credibility of your site. “Would you like a new iPhone 5—it’s just $20?” Let’s say you’re walking down the street. A twenty-something dude comes up to you —“hey, are you interested in a new iPhone 5? I’ll sell it to you for $20.″ He pulls it out of his pocket and it looks legit. What do you do?
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My guess is that you won’t buy it—even through the price is amazing and you know it’s a good product. Why not? Because of lack of trust. Does it work? Is it stolen? What if it breaks the next day? Why so cheap? You’ll get all these questions in your head and since you don’t know the guy, you’ll probably pass. Same goes for your website. Your goal is to talk about your offer in a way that makes people feel they’re getting iPhone 5 worth of value for just $20 bucks (not by deception, but through communicating the value of your product). If you’re credible, you have yourself a customer. Credibility leads to money. Four in five users say that being able to trust the information on a given website is very important to them. You don’t buy from someone you don’t trust, do you? A credible website makes people, trust what it says, feel comfortable sharing their personal data, confident it’s worth spending their money here. Website Credibility Checklist Go over this list and see which of the following items you could add to your own site to boost credibility. 1. Web design matters. People judge the book by their cover and your website by its design. If you designed your website yourself and you’re not a designer, it sucks. Like many others before him, Dr. Brent Coker studied the impact of attractive websites on human behavior. This is what he said: “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.” Websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers. 2. Make your address and phone number visible at all times. Include it in the footer (a must), but depending on your site also in the header (especially if your business depends on incoming calls) and on the sidebar, in the microcopy. 3. Make it very easy to contact you. “Contact” link should be always in your navigation menu as the very last link.
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4. Message relevance and tailoring. A website that displays relevant information to the visitor is instantly more credible in their eyes. If possible, use content tailoring based on user profile and behavior. 5. Simple language. People don’t trust what they don’t understand. Write like you talk using the same language your customers do. 6. Correct spelling. Broken grammar and incorrect spelling certainly make you seem less credible. It’s more forgivable in blog posts, but unacceptable on your home page, product pages and other more static pages. 7. Link to external websites that reference your organisation. If NY Times, Techcrunch, or OC Weekly has written about you, link to those stories. It doesn’t have to be a well-known outlet necessarily (but it helps), what matters is that somebody other than you has written about you and possible said some good things. 8. Provide staff bios and photos. People don’t trust anonymous websites. If you don’t show your photo, are you hiding something? Is it that you don’t want people to recognize you on the street? People want to look you in the eye, enable it. Always use photos of the actual staff. 9. Show photos of your office. If you have a real office with real people and stuff inside, I’ll believe you more. You don’t need to make yourself appear a bigger company that you are. Avoid stock photos. 10. Avoid cheesy stock photos. Nothing says ‘I’m fake’ like suits shaking hands or smiling customer service people with the headset. 11. Visible return and refund policies. What happens if I’m not happy with your service? People want to know in advance before making a purchase. 12. Email policy. What will you do with my email address once I give it to you? Will you rent it, share it, sell it, spam people? 13. All statements and claims should be backed up by third-party evidence, neutral experts or verified (scientific) studies. List sources. 14. Avoid superlatives. Don’t say you’re the best, no-one is going to believe you anyway. Be specific (“Fastest pizza delivery in town” vs. “We deliver your pizza in 10 minutes”).
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15. Detailed product information. 50 percent of the online purchases are not completed due to insufficient information. Are there enough details for a reasonable conclusion about the information? 16. Show prices. Many companies (and not just B2B) don’t reveal their prices, and make people get in touch instead. People always want to know how much a product or service costs. If your competitors publish their prices, they’re getting the business. 17. Show client list. This is social proof—nobody wants to be the only idiot buying your services. 18. Mention the number of your clients. If you have an impressive number of customers, say it out loud for social proof (“12,457 happy users,” etc). 19. Show a link with a reputable organization. Are you somehow connected to a university, a governmental agency, a research lab, or another reputable organization? Perhaps you’re service provider, reseller, partner, sponsor, advisor or what not. If yes, tell the world. 20. Use testimonials. Testimonials work well if they’re by real people. Real people means that there are photos, full names, what they do, their employer. Well-known people are even better. Video testimonials are the best. 21. Case studies of your work. Use case studies to prove the benefits of your services and to show off your expertise. Both make you more trustworthy. 22. Put customer reviews on your site and elsewhere. People still trust them. It’s the upper hand Amazon has on everyone else. 23. If you take credit cards online, is it safe? Provide the information about your secure channels, 256-bit encryption and what not. 24. Display trust marks. Take credit card payments? Prove me it’s safe (256-bit SSL encryption etc). Use The Verisign Seal or equivalent. Have people opt-in to your email list? Put a TRUSTe privacy seal on your site. And so on. Find out what’s a known trust mark on among your customers, and use it. 25. Maintain a blog or a latest news section. This does two things: 1) it shows your site is constantly updated and 2) provides free information to prove your expertise. A note of caution: if your latest news item was published two years ago (‘We launched a new website!’) or your last blog post was written a year ago, it communicates that you might have gone out of business. So if you can’t regularly update your news or blog, you can do
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one of the two things: 1) not have one, or 2) remove the dates. 26. Get an authority recommendation. When Oprah recommends a website, it’s instantly credible. Get someone your audience knows and trusts to “approve your message." 27. Articles in (online and offline) publications. Credibility is not only what your website is like, it’s also what people read and hear about you *before* they get to your site. If they’ve seen or even read articles by you in different magazines or newspapers, you have more credibility. 28. Guest blog. This is basically the same as the previous point. If your users have come across your posts on blogs they read, you’ve more credible to them. Also, you can mention and link to the blogs that have your posts. 29. A jobs page. You must be a real company if you’re hiring :) 30. Make sure it works. Dead links, non-functional forms and everything else that might seem broken will take away from your credibility. 31. Have a social media outlet. If you have an active Twitter account or Facebook page, it furthermore shows there are real people behind the organization. 32. What does WOT say about you? WOT user community has rated over 36 million websites. Some people might check you out there. 33. Your brand on Google. When they Google you (and they will), what will they find? Besides searching for just your brand, they’ll probably also check ‘[yourbrand] reviews’ and possibly also ‘[yourbrand] sucks’. Make sure you like those search results. 34. No hype, blinking banners nor popups. If your site looks like a Christmas tree, you need to change that. Make sure the copy is hype-free, nothing blinks and just know that people hate all kinds of pop-ups. Don’t use them unless you want to annoy people. 35. Keep ads to a minimum. Too many ads kill the user experience and communicate that the user does not come first. Might also make you seem desperate. If your main income does NOT come from ads, don’t use them at all. 36. Website speed. If your website is slow and seems to takes forever to load (10+ seconds), people will certainly get doubts about you and leave. Use caching or a CDN. I personally use Cloudflare and am very happy with them.
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37. Ranking in Google. If you rank high in Google (say in the top five), you must be there for a reason (Google says so!) 38. Signs of community. If you have an busy forum, lots of comments on your blog posts or any other visible signs of an active community, you’ll come across more credible —“people must be hanging out here for a reason!” 39. Be a good and honest person. If you’re an a** and treat your customers bad, it will come out eventually. Be friendly, generous and honest—always. Sources http://credibility.stanford.edu/ http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/ http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/why-visitors-trust-some-websites-more-thanothers/ http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/5303-e-commerce-trustmarks-do-they-matter http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/prove-it-what-makes-you-trust-a-website/ What makes a website credible? Attack Resistant Trust Metrics Understanding How Internet Users Make Sense of Credibility Personal, hands-on experience Don’t overdo it. Note that you don’t want to overcrowd your pages with credibility elements. It will have the opposite effect. The other day I hired a cleaner from Craigslist. She came over, and her first words after I opened the door were: “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna steal anything." Guess what my first thought was—“Is she gonna steal something?” I wasn’t even thinking about theft, but she planted the thought in my head. Now I started to look for clues to confirm my theory—and her tattoos didn’t help my suspicious mind. The same applies for your website. If you scream “Trust me! I’m not gonna rip you off!”—
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people will get suspicious even (or especially) when they weren’t before. Everything in moderation. What’s the right quantity? Follow BJ Fogg’s maxim for credible design: To increase the credibility impact of a website, find what elements your target audience interprets most favorably and make those elements most prominent. How do you personally determine whether you trust a site or not? Have you given it any conscious thought?
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How To Design User Flow A major factor affecting your conversions is user flow. It’s the path a user follows through your website interface to complete a task (make a reservation, purchase a product, subscribe to something). It’s also called user journey. In order to maximize your conversions, you have to get the user flow right—build one that matches user’s needs. The wrong way to go about designing your site You need to decide what your new website will be like. Two most common ways people approach it: Scenario A You keep everything as it is on your current / old site, but just make it look “better." Scenario B You start with the building blocks. Okay, the logo goes in the top left corner. Lets put the menu to the right. A nice image in the header. Cool. And so on and so on. Both of these are the wrong way to get going. Start with the objectives Your primary aim is to fulfill the business objectives (either your own or the one set by your client). Business objectives might be getting users to sign up for something, getting people to purchase products or join an email list. Just as in real life, quickies are very rare. People don’t just come to your site, and right away do what you want them to do. In most cases, they need to go through a set of steps leading up to the action. Next time you’re thinking about designing a site (note: design is not just how it looks, but
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how it works), start with figuring out what user flows you are trying to create through the website. In order to do this you need to know two things: 1. Your business objectives. It’s the action you want visitors to take on the site. 2. User objectives, the desires or needs that they want to satisfy. So start with being clear about your own goals and identify each user objective to create design flows that meet all of them. Source/medium determines the message Customers don’t arrive on a particular page on your site from nowhere. The first step in a flow is mapping out how they get onto your site. Once they land on your site, they won’t immediately perform the action you want them to. Specific sequences of actions lead visitors through your website as they try to accomplish their tasks. Match users needs with your business objectives Your goal is to map users paths—flows that take users from their entry pages through conversion funnels—toward the final action (signup, purchase etc). The final action needs to provide value both to the user as well as the business—otherwise the conversion won’t happen. If the user wants to clean their car, and your goal is to get the user to order a car cleaning service, you have a meeting of goals and the conversion can take place. On the other hand, if they want their car cleaned (right away), and you want them to join your car-related newsletter, there isn’t a match. Designing user flows In order to come up with the user flows through your site, you need to establish possible entry points, and the flow from there on toward the final goal. Some typical entry points: Organic search. A user comes via Google, after searching for a particular keyword. Often lands on a deep link. Paid advertising. Visitors that come via PPC advertising (AdWords etc), banner ads or
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other kind of promotions. Arrives on your landing page. Social media. A user coming from a friend’s post on Facebook or Twitter, or via social news site like Reddit. Email. A user coming from an email newsletter or a link they saw in an email sent to them. Press or news item. Visitors who come after a mention in the news or a blog post. Direct link. A regular visitor, has been on your site many times and knows the URL by heart. How they end up on your site largely determines their needs, expectations and what they know of your product or even the general category. This means you need to treat different people differently. Sample user flows So what do these user flows look like? Here are three sample flows.
You get the idea. Stacked user flows Sometimes you want them to join the email list on their first visit, but ultimately you want to sell them a product. In those cases, you should map stacked user flows: the first one that is completed by joining the email list, and the second one that starts AFTER the first flow has been completed.
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The user who has already been through the first flow, is much more knowledgeable than a first-time visitor, has some kind of a relationship with you and you should treat her accordingly. The steps in the flow depend on your users and the product In order to design the best possible user flow, you need to understand the visitor and his motivations. Start by answering these questions: What needs or desires do your visitors have? Which problem do they want to solve? Why do they need it? What qualities (about your product or service) are most important to them? What are all the questions they have about the product? What are their doubts or hesitations? What information do they need to take action? What’s their emotional hotspot to propel them towards taking action? In order to answer these questions, you need to talk to your customers (or your clients’, if you’re a service provider). You can’t just pull the answers out of thin air. Yes, you should use buyer personas, but those should be based on actual customers and their needs. Here’s an interesting case study detailing how customer journey maps were used in Boeing. Another article you might want to read is about designing a hotel booking experience. The answers to the questions above determine how things are presented on your website. You have to demote certain things and emphasize others. You cannot be all things to all people, your website cannot be about 10 different actions. You need to build focus into your site.
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Present sufficient information The flow must fill in the gaps of information by providing the user with the information they need at the moment they needed in order to eventually be converted. The mistake a lot of websites make is asking for the sale (signup, etc) too soon. There’s little we people do without the adequate amount of information. Your goal is to keep them moving down the funnel, towards the desired action. Optimize the content on each screen for conversions. In each step, present a clear, benefit-oriented value proposition. Explain how your offer is useful and how it all works. Invite to read more detailed information. Back it up by easy-to-digest proof points (references, testimonials, studies etc). Minimize friction. Ask for the minimum amount of information, reduce the number of fields, extra clicks and page-loading time. Use trust elements. Create clear and attractive calls to action that guide them to the next step Designing users flows does not mean that you forget about all the other conversion stuff,au contraire. State diagrams Flows are made out of individual screens where interactions take place. A screen offers some possibilities and the user chooses one. Then something happens, and the screen changes. It’s an ongoing conversation. In each moment in a flow, their (computer) screen is showing something and the user is reacting to it. A good and understandable way to map steps in the flow is to use state diagrams: what the user sees – what the user does →
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what the user sees next – what the user does next Above the bar is what the user sees. Below the bar is what they do. An arrow connects the user’s action to a new screen with yet another action. These are called state diagrams in computer science. Using these diagrams help you focus on the most wanted action on every screen the users lands on. It’s also very useful when explaining the flow to your colleagues or clients. Example Let’s say it’s a website for a car detailing service. service description – click “book now” → booking form – submit valid data → booking confirmation message Do this for every page on your site. Define the key content you want to present to the user and a most wanted action. The next action from a screen doesn’t have to be just one thing, the flow can break into two or three alternative paths. The important thing is that you plan ahead for each path, and design each screen accordingly. Doing this requires ruthless focus on your part, but the boost in conversions will make it all worth your while. User flow that supports Flow Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly
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Csikszentmihalyi. It’s a state of being that makes an experience genuinely satisfying. Everybody has experienced it. Most people refer to it as being “in the zone” or “in the groove." During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with the task at hand. There’s a book about it. Ideally your user flow helps to nurture the flow experience in your users. Three ingredients for the “flow” experience are challenge of the right level, immediate feedback and a skill that can be mastered. In order to design your site for flow, according to Jim Ramsey, you must: Have clear goals for users that help them understand where they’re going and each step they’ll take to get there. Provide immediate feedback—whether they click on a button, fill a form or navigate from one page to another—tell them how they’re doing, and what’s going on. The messages and copy have a critical role here. Maximize efficiency Once a user becomes familiar with your site, they’ll want to start using it more efficiently. When they’re experiencing flow, users want to work more quickly and want the site to feel more responsive. Heavily use the key features of your site and see if there are any annoying, repetitive tasks. Pay close attention to the feedback you get in your user tests. Think hard about how to turn the experience frictionless. Allow for discovery. Once a user has begun to work with maximum efficiency, there’s a chance that they’ll feel less engaged and grow bored with their experience on the site. In order to avoid this, you should make content and features available for discovery. When the smooth path is interrupted, or something doesn’t seem to fit, users notice and the flow is broken, which means that the experience is also momentarily broken. These small episodes of friction are cumulative. Unfortunately, the breaks in flow weigh more heavily on the experience than the positive, frictionless moments. Experimenting and testing are key to getting it right. Clutter, animation, and surprises may interrupt and be disruptive. Online, people don’t like surprises (especially the kind where they go “now what?," “how do I…” or “what’s that?”). Take out or improve that might cause friction. Less is more: remove visual and
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navigational noise that might seem like clutter to users. I’m an Amazon user and have bought a million things from it. I’m very familiar with their interface and while on it, it’s a flow-like experience for me. Today I was browsing Home Depot website looking for certain things, and it was a pretty bad experience. No flow over there. Examples of sites that have great flow Invest 5 to 10 minutes in each of these sites. You’ll learn something. Tastebuds
Codecademy
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Going through it: creating a sample flow Let’s pretend I have a client, a company that manufactures mini infrared saunas (such as this random one on Alibaba). Business objective: get people to buy those saunas online, or at least get a solid lead. First thing I would do is talk to the client, and learn all I can about their business and their customers. Next, I would compile a list of questions that I would ask from their 20 or so last customers (whose buying experience is fresh). Questions to my client: Tell me about your typical / ideal customer. Who are they, why do they buy, where are they going to use it? What matters to them when they’re looking for a sauna? How do they compare different products? What matters the most? What happens after they buy? Describe the process in detail from the moment they place an order to when the sauna is all set up for use What do your customers say about your products? How is your product better or different from the competition? What kind of praise have you heard? Can you forward me the *exact* wording they used? Questions to their customers: Why did you want to buy an infrared sauna? What were the main questions you had when you were looking for one? What was most important to you? Which parameters did you compare? What kind of doubts or hesitations did you have? What kind of alternatives did you consider?
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What made you decide to buy from us? Now that you have bought it, what do you like the most about it? Based on the answers I get, I would develop follow-up questions and ask even more. The point is to really understand the customer, and their approach to buying this product. We need to know why they want it, how they’re going to use it and the qualities that are most important—the answers they need before making a purchasing decision. Where are the users coming from My client tells me that they’re after SEO traffic and plan to do AdWords advertising. This means I must map user flows from landing pages (PPC traffic), the home page (direct and SEO traffic) and direct from product pages (long tail SEO traffic, direct links and mentions). In the sales process, we’d go for a direct purchase (as opposed getting their email first and then warming up the lead) due to the nature of the product. Here’s the user flow I drew on my whiteboard.
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Now I have established the most wanted action for each page, I know what I want the users to do next on each step and can prioritize and demote content accordingly. The content for each screen is super important and has the biggest impact on conversions. The sales copy to emphasize all the details that are important to potential buyers in the purchasing process, address all their questions and doubts. When deciding what content should go each screen, I also have to look at how they got there and what they already know. The user who arrived on a product page from the home page, is more knowledgeable than the one who came via direct link. Hence, I must make sure that the the direct link people won’t leave due to insufficient information, and I have to re-emphasize the key points from the home page again on product page (especially if the brand is not known and the majority of the visitors are first-timers). Test, test, test Naturally the flow itself, layout and the content—value proposition, product info, calls to
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action etc—need to be tested. I construct the first hypothesis as well as I can, based on the best information available to me, but it’s still a hypothesis. I immediately create alternative value proposition and copy to test. Measure, observe, and improve Which step in the flow does a good job taking users to the next step? In which step do a large part of the users drop out? You can measure this by using goal funnels. If you use Google Analytics, you can easily set up goal funnel tracking (as you can in most web analytics tools) for your user flow steps. Goal funnel report will tell you which step of the flow is performing well, and which is a flow stopper, so you can take action. Also, check out the Visitors Flow view to get another insightful overview. Test how they use it To make your user flow really work for boosting conversions, you must base it on customer personas. Use actual customer behavior and research to determine the tasks that customers want to perform, what matters to them and why. Do what you can to experience a day in the life of a customer. Once you have your first flow done, conduct user testing. Watch people use the website trying to perform a task, and have them comment out loud. Ideally you recruit test subjects who match your ideal customer profile and observe them in person (over their shoulder), but you can also use services like usertesting.com. User testing will help you find bottlenecks and sources of friction, so you can remove those. It will also help you understand the users better, and how they would want to use the site (so you can adjust it accordingly). Even if you put a ton of effort into designing the flow, what you come up with is still a hypothesis and you need to test it. Pay close attention whether it seems you’re missing a step in your flow, or you have one too many. If you get the flow right, focus on optimizing different screens. Resources you should check out Product planner. It has a free gallery of user flows. Web sequence diagrams. Easy way to build user flow diagrams.
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Tools for sketching user experiences A collection of customer journey mapping resources.
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Intuitive Web Design: How To Make Your Website Intuitive To Use The easier your website it is to use, the more people use it. An essential part of “easy to use” is intuitive. Intuitive design means that when a user sees it, they know exactly what to do. The main thing about intuitive design is that it’s invisible. Design is intuitive when users can focus on a task at hand without stopping even for a second. Intuitive designs direct people’s attention to tasks that are important. In the end, an intuitive design focuses on experience. Imagine that you’re at a car rental place and you’re pointed out the car you’re getting. You walk up to it, and want to get in. You arrive to the car, reach out your hand to open the driver’s door—but there’s no handle! How do you get in? This is an example of non-intuitive design. A non-intuitive design steals the focus from the user. He was trying to get in the car, but the process was interrupted by an unfamiliar situation with no obvious solution. The same goes for web design. As long as the users can complete the tasks they want without interruption and thought, it’s all good. Intuitive design is invisible and non-intuitive design is a disruptor. Since intuitive design is invisible, people will not actually appreciate it (since they won’t even notice it)—but they will immediately take notice if it is not there. Unintuitive design forces people to focus on elements not related to their tasks. The problem with designing intuitive interfaces: intuitive for who? Why are there so many websites that make people cringe? Why not make all websites intuitive? That’s what everybody wants, right? The thing is that building intuitive websites is hard—people are different. What’s intuitive to one person is not intuitive to another. The design itself cannot be intuitive—it’s whether the person using it feels it’s intuitive or not.
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I believe most websites are designed with good intentions. They’re meant to be intuitive— but usually for the designer! The average developer or designer doesn’t spend any time watching people use the things they are designing. People see the world as they are, and when they design something, they unconsciously design it for themselves—for people that have the same level of computer skills, experience using this type of interfaces and what not. Getting intuitive design right starts with understanding your users. You need to figure out what’s intuitive for them. An important concept to understand here is current knowledge vs target knowledge. Current knowledge vs Target knowledge People come to your website pre-loaded with existing knowledge (from previous experiences and so on). This is what Jared Pool calls “Current knowledge.” Then there’s “Target knowledge”—it’s how much the user needs to know in order to use your website or application. The difference between the two is called “knowledge gap.” Your job is to build an interface that minimizes the knowledge gap between what the users know prior to coming to your site and what they have know in order to use it properly. What makes this difficult is that you might have all sorts of users. Some are tech savvy computer nerds and some are computer illiterate grannys plus everything in between. The narrower your target group is, the better for you. The wider your audience, the bigger the design challenge. Conceptual models If users have never used your site, it doesn’t mean that their Current Knowledge about it is zero. They have probably used other, similar websites or product before. Some haven’t, but everybody has a conceptual model about it. Let’s say you’ve never shopped online—but you have done it offline millions of times. So I sit you down in front of a computer and show you Amazon.com, telling you that you can buy stuff here. People will now use the conceptual model of offline shopping and will aim to replicate the same experience. Their expectation of what online shopping is like is derived from the
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mental model of offline shopping—the closest experience they’ve got. But let’s say they’ve bought stuff online before, just not from Amazon. Now their conceptual model will be different, as their expectation to shopping on Amazon. If the majority of your users have never used the kind of website or online service that you have, you need to deal with the conceptual model. This is why you have to figure out their closest experience to using your site. If the website doesn’t match the user’s mental model, the user will find the website hard to use, unintuitive. Know thy user (study them!) In order to design websites that our users find intuitive, you need to learn where the current and target knowledge points are. What do users already know and what do they need to know? There are two great ways of finding this out: 1. Field studies. You go to your customers and observe them using the web in their natural habitat. You’ll get an idea of their Current knowledge. 2. Over the shoulder usability tests. Get people to use the site, have them perform a set of tasks and ask them to comment their thought process out loud. This can also be done remotely (over the internet). This will identify the Target Knowledge. In both cases you observe and take notes without interfering. You will quickly identify the main issues. Ten test subjects will normally already reveal over 90 percent of the challenges. From here, proceed to build personas based on what you learned. When is a website intuitive to use? Broadly speaking, that design is intuitive when current knowledge equals target knowledge. Jared wrote that in their research they discovered there are two conditions where users will tell you an interface seems “intuitive” to them: 1. The current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are identical. When the user walks up to the design, they know everything they need to operate it and complete their objective. 2. The current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are separate, but the
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user is completely unaware the design is helping them bridge the gap. The user is being trained, but in a way that seems natural. In other words, you either make it so easy that it doesn’t require any learning, or add instructions, tips and microcopy that is easy to spot and follow. The best example for the first condition is Google search. You can not use it wrong. There’s no learning curve. It’s as obvious as it gets.
A good example for the second condition would be Wufoo. When you log in and start building your first form, the instructions make it easy and the learning process seems natural.
So you have two options for an intuitive design. You can either reduce the target knowledge requirement until it meets current knowledge by simplifying the design. Or move current knowledge to target knowledge through instruction. Or a bit of both. Intuitive navigation (and search) 76 percent of consumers say the most important factor in a website’s design is “the website makes it easy for me to find what I want.” So how do they go about finding the stuff they want? Navigation of course. Here’s where
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it gets tricky: if your site has a ton of content, how do you structure it so it would make sense? A great method for figuring out which content goes under which menu item is card sorting. Card sorting is a great, reliable, inexpensive method for finding patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality. It will also help you with choosing the wording for menu items. It’s important to call your menu items by the right names so people would know what’s behind the link. Use trigger words. The interesting thing is that 50 percent of all users don’t buy because they can’t find what they’re looking for. This is why search is super important. You need to have search on your site, and it has to be easily found. Amazon has a huge inventory and they’ve made search the centerpiece of their site. Can you imagine it any other way? Oh, and make sure you turn ‘Site Search’ tracking ON in Google Analytics. You will also find that users that use search will usually have a higher conversion rate (searchers have intent, they know what they’re looking for). People spend most of their time on other websites. A good thing to bear in mind at all times is that people spent most of their time online on OTHER websites. So they’re used to websites being a certain way (Current Knowledge). If you mess with convention, you’re asking for trouble. Typical convention items: A click on the logo (in the top left corner) should always take back to the home page, The last link in a horizontal navigation menu should be ‘Contact’ (or the bottom one in a vertical menu), You should have contact information in the footer, Strive for consistency: navigation and other important elements will remain in the same location throughout the website, Links should be easily distinguishable from regular text, If users can and should scroll down, the scrollbar has to be visible, Left-aligned text is easier to read than right-aligned (since westerners read from the
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left), Display descriptive help messages and notifications, Use plain language terms throughout the interface that users can understand (e.g. use ‘Contact’ instead of ‘Communication’). Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule—but innovation is difficult and risky. In most cases, don’t re-invent the convention. Have the stuff work like people expect it to work. Be careful about redesigns Luke Wroblewski took notes at a recent An Event Apart conference in Chicago where Jared Spool made this point about redesigning websites: they can mess with the knowledge gap. 20 percent of the users spend 80 percent of the revenue on a site, and it’s those top buyers that are most affected by redesigns. They know how things work, and when you redesign the website, you change it up on them. It’s not that people hate change. They just hate change that takes away their current knowledge. An intuitive design happens when we don’t force our users to attend to change. A major retailer launched a $100 milion redesign and saw conversion drop 20 percent. A law firm had to shut down. Doctor’s offices and airlines experience significant delays. Their site/application was no longer intuitive for their most important users. You need to focus on your most important users buyers. The design needs to be most intuitive for them. Don’t try to please everybody. A good way to go about redesigns is by using the Lean Design methodology—reduce the time it takes to go through the build-measure-learn cycle. Little changes to a site over time are often a better approach than major redesigns. This enables you to measure and thus learn quickly whether a change brings positive or negative results. “We’ll be successful if the day we go live, no one notices.” This applies when you’ve got a large repeat audience. If your site has little traffic and the current design is flawed, don’t hesitate to do a complete overhaul. Conclusion Aim to make your website intuitive for your core users, and you will be rewarded with
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higher conversions and user loyalty. Study your users’ behavior, and always perform user testing on your interfaces.
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IV.
Understanding Users
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How To Use Behavioral Design For Boosting Converstions Using the Fogg Behavior Model Design impacts behavior. If you know how to impact behavior, you can design for behavior. Here’s how to do it. Do you know BJ Fogg? You should. Dr. BJ Fogg founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and has done some amazing research on credibility and behavioral design. Behavioral design is where psychology and technology meet—a systematic way to influence a desired behavior, one step at a time. His model for driving behavioral changes—called The Fogg Behavior Model—explains that three elements must come together at the same time for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability and trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. Bottom line is this: Behavior = motivation x ability x trigger. Before I’ll go into how to apply it for boosting conversions, you need to understand the model itself. (All credit goes to BJ Fogg.) Here’s the model:
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Used with permissions by Persuasive Tech Lab You want to aim top right (high motivation, easy to do, a trigger in place). If you have high motivation and low ability (difficult to do), what you’ll get is frustration. If it’s low motivation, but easy to do (e.g. take out the trash), you get annoyance. Everything starts with defining the specific desired behavior—in our case it’s what we want the user to do, our conversion goal. It might be getting people to buy our product, sign up for our software and so on. Using this model as a guide, we can identify what stops people from taking the desired actions. For example, if users are not requesting quotes on your website, the model helps us evaluate what psychological element is lacking. Let’s look at the elements individually. Motivation Ideally the user is already motivated to do the behavior (which is why he came to your site to begin with), and your role now is about helping people do what they already want to do (see Ability). The more motivated people are to do a behavior, the more likely they will do it (duh). You can increase motivation with an effective sales copy and what not, but if you’re trying to artificially *create* motivation to make a behavior happen, you’re swimming upstream (and the current is strong). Motivation is a term that’s used widely across various fields. BJ Fogg created a framework for motivation that has three core motivators, each with two sides.
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Motivator #1: Pleasure / Pain There are two sides to first motivator: pleasure and pain. How this motivator is different from others is that the result of this motivator is immediate. There’s almost no thinking or anticipating. People are responding to what’s happening in the moment. Pleasure and pain are a primitive responses related to self-preservation: hunger, sex, and other stuff related to keeping the humankind going. Pleasure and pain are powerful motivators. It’s the first thing you should consider when trying to boost levels of motivation. This motivator type may not be the ideal approach, especially pain, but a thorough review of motivation means at least acknowledging these options. Motivator #2: Hope / Fear The second core motivator in the this model is a dimension that has the following two sides: hope and fear. This dimension is characterized by anticipation of an outcome. Hope is the anticipation of something good happening. Fear is the anticipation of something bad, often the anticipation of loss. This dimension can be at times more powerful than pleasure/pain. For example, in some situations, people will accept pain (buying home insurance) in order to overcome fear (anticipation of your house burning down). However bear in mind that there’s no ranking of core motivators, so you should always give it some thought as to which one is the most appropriate to use. Hope and fear have long been powerful motivators in persuasive technology. For example, people are motivated by hope when then joining a dating web site. They are motivated by fear when they update settings in virus software. BJ Fogg himself considers hope as the most ethical and empowering motivator. Motivator #3: Social Acceptance / Rejection The third core motivator has these two sides: social acceptance and social rejection. It impacts everything from the clothes we wear to the language we use. As you probably know well from your own life experiences, people are motivated to do things that win them social acceptance and status. People are especially motivated to avoid any negative consequences like being socially rejected. The roots of this are again deep in the history of human race—we depended on living in
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groups to survive. Regardless of the origin of the social motivator, the power over us is undeniable. We don’t need to look far to see evidence for this—even a simple thing like posting pictures to Facebook is driven significantly by the desire to be socially accepted. Ability Ability is all about whether the task at hand is it easy to do. If you want them to sign up for your product, but it takes filling 10 fields to do so, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Remember the $300 million dollar button story? A classic example of how taking action was made too difficult by forcing buyers to create an account first. Ability is more important than motivation. If I’m committed to eat healthy—my motivation is super high—but there’s no healthy food around when I’m hungry, it’s very difficult to take desired action and I’ll probably grab something unhealthy instead. Motivation alone is not enough. Its easier to increase conversions by making it easier to do, not by increasing motivation. If you have to choose what to optimize for, always choose ability over motivation. Become a master of simplification, not motivation. Have it as your goal to always make taking action as easy as 1-2-3. The more “work” prospects need to do to understand and/or buy what you offer, the higher motivation is needed. Some think they need to teach or train people to use their software to address the ability issue—which is a good idea on paper—however most people don’t want to be taught and trained. They want single click and done behaviors. Also—don’t ask people to do something that’s against their routine. If they put their kids to sleep at 8 P.M., don’t have your webinar at 8pm. Trigger Without an appropriate trigger, behavior will not occur even if both motivation and ability are high. Let’s say you read a blog post on this blog. You find it useful (motivation), and decide to share it with your followers on Twitter (ability—easy to do). Once you hit the “tweet” button, you see this:
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That’s a trigger—urging you to follow me on Twitter. You weren’t thinking about following me, but now it’s right there. You probably have the motivation since you just shared my content, and you definitely have the ability—it just takes one click. Trigger is what prompts you to take action: green light at the intersection, a lady in the supermarket asking you “would you like a sample?” or an email from your spouse saying “Call me right now." A call to action on a website is a trigger. Be careful what the content of the trigger. You need to trigger the right sequence of baby steps. If you’re selling $50,000 cars, the first trigger should not be “buy now." BJ Fogg likens this to the metaphor of swimming. You wouldn’t expect a person to just jump in the water and start swimming. Instead, you need step-by-step instructions and build up. BJ believes this is how we should approach health behavior; providing individuals small steps towards large success. An example of a successful trigger would be getting an email from Facebook saying your friend tagged you on a photo. Who hasn’t responded to being tagged on a Facebook image?
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Obsess about triggers like your business depended on it (since it does) If you want your business to thrive and keep the sales coming in, you need to obsess about triggers! Don’t be afraid to use them—a trigger is not a nag, you’re helping them. You just need to make sure that you focus on triggering people that have the ability or motivation: If you trigger people at the right time, they will thank you. If you trigger then when they lack ability, they’ll get frustrated. If you trigger people when they don’t have motivation (e.g. asking people to shop for Christmas present in September), you’re annoying people. Two kinds of triggers: hot and cold Hot triggers are things you can do right now (e.g. buttons saying “Get immediate access” or “Download now”). Cold triggers are things which one cannot act on right now (e.g. billboard ads for a website you spot while driving). BJ Fogg’s mantra for effective website design is: put “hot triggers” in the path of motivated people. Don’t try to artificially create motivation, but instead tap an existing motivation people already have. It’s very difficult to motivate people to do something they don’t want to already do. Understand what motivation already exists then make it easy to get than done. The importance of drip email campaigns Are you requiring your users and prospects to remember stuff? If so, you’re doing it wrong. Build your trigger mechanisms as if people would never do anything without you asking them to do so. If your business sucks at trigger design, you’re going to fail.
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Almost no behavior happens without trigger. This is why it’s important to send out promotional emails during Christmas and other holidays. They’re not going to just think “I think I’m gonna go to somestore.com and buy stuff!” Unless you’re Amazon and have occupied a large portion of their brain space, it’s not going to happen. You need to trigger their behavior with an email or other media. Understanding behavior types First step is understanding the target behavior. It has to be as specific as possible if you want to boost conversions. Second step: understand target behavior type. BJ Fogg describes 15 ways behavior can change. Each of the 15 behaviors types uses different psychology strategies and persuasive techniques. Types of behaviors: Dot—It happens just once (e.g. they buy your e-book) Span—It happens over a period of time, like for seven days (e.g. they take part of your 7-day course) Path—It happens over and over, from now on. (e.g. they join your social networking site and start hanging out there) There are five sub-types for each three:
Source
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Most online conversions (join email list, sign up, buy product) are either green dot (taking a single action for the first time) or blue dot behaviors (taking a familiar single action). Optimizing for green dot behavior—first time single action Green dot behaviors are often used in the beginning stages of complex behavior inductions. For example, if a company is interested in creating a loyal, repeat customer, they might start off with a small introductory offer. This can then lead to more extensive, prolonged relations and, eventually, habitual purchasing behavior. The main challenge that we face while triggering a Green Dot behavior is a lack of ability. Since Dot behaviors occur only once, the subject must have enough knowledge to successfully complete the action on the first attempt. Otherwise, frustration, and quitting, may occur. Couple the trigger with a motivational or facilitative element. Increase the ability of the subject by explaining the novel behavior in terms of one that is familiar. Increase the motivation of the subject by explicitly highlighting the benefits of the action. Optimizing for blue dot behavior—familiar single action Blue Dot Behaviors are among the easiest to achieve. That’s because the person, by definition, is already familiar with the behavior. They know how to perform it (such as exercise, plant a tree, buy a book). In addition, they already have a sense of the costs and benefits for the behavior. Three core motivators: sensation (pleasure/pain), anticipation (hope/fear), and belonging (acceptance/rejection) Best trigger: tell the visitor person to “do this behavior now.” Conclusion Understand that desired behavior takes place when motivation, ability and trigger converge. In order to boost conversions you need to: help people do what they already want to do,
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tap into the right motivators, understand the types of motivation, make taking action as easy as possible, focus on simplification, put hot triggers on the path of motivated people, and generally obsess about triggers like your business depended on it.
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People Comparison Shop, Stupid If you think people might buy your products or services without checking out the competition first, think again. Research says that on average consumers visit three websites before making a purchase. Another insight by the same study was that the more sites a consumer visits, the more money they are likely to spend. In other words, the more expensive the product, the more time people take to comparison shop. More and more consumers are savvy enough to understand how to compare options, and they look at other places where they can buy the same or similar goods. Even if they want to buy stuff in retail outlets, 83 percent of U.S. consumers go online to research electronics, computers, books, music and movies before buying those items in bricksand-mortar stores. Product category matters. When it comes to people shopping for smart phones for instance, 72 percent of shoppers considered more than cell phone models and 57 percent visited more than five different brand sites before purchasing (either OEM, retailer, or carrier). They also took their time researching, with 60 percent of online shoppers starting their research more than two weeks prior to purchase. A study by the e-tailing group concluded that consumers are invested in finding the lowest price: 94 percent of online shoppers invest time to find the lowest price for commodity products. 36 percent spend more than 30 minutes comparison shopping before making a decision on purchasing a commodity product; 65 percent spend more than 16 minutes doing so. 51 percent visit more than four sites before finalizing a purchase. Efficiency of price comparison and the ability to merely Google it, check Amazon’s prices or visit a few competitors is core to current consumer shopping behavior.
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TCO (total cost including shipping and handling) and product price are the two most important influencers for online purchase decisions. 58 percent would expect all retailers of commodity products to incorporate a kind of onsite comparative pricing tool into their shopping experience. People want better product information A study by Oracle revealed that people want above all more detailed and visual product information (37 percent), better search (29 percent), and easier access to a customer service representative via live help options such as click-to-call or live chat (20 percent). This is especially important if you market to men. A study on gender differences concluded the following: Males and females differ in how they utilize a product page. Males intensely research the page, viewing all the product details and pictures, while women quickly scan the product page and go to the next product they want. Males tend to search by product while females search by brand. Newegg competes in a very difficult market. Their advantage over the competitors is that they don’t solely rely on manufacturer product information, but write their own sales copy for each product. Providing better product information is how they manage to stay in business while competing with giants like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy. Do this: Gain advantage over your competition with better, more thorough product information Compare yourself with the competition before they do. Fact 1: People do their homework before purchasing a product or service. Fact 2: People are lazy. When comparing options, people usually only look at the most obvious things like price and key features. For example when choosing a web host, they look at the server space and monthly fee and that’s it. You—as an expert in your field—know that many other things should be considered and perhaps your advantages are less noticeable at first. In order to combat this you should compare your offering to the competition on your own website, so you can point out the things you feel are your biggest advantages over the alternatives. If your product is more expensive than others, then this is your chance to
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explain why. If some of the specs are lower compared to the competition, point out that maybe your support is way better or you provide personal consulting or its more green or whatever. This is how InMotion Hosting is doing it:
This is how SugarSync does it:
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Won’t the customer now find out my competitors? If you think they don’t already know them, you’re naive. So let’s say you keep on being naive and won’t include the comparison on your site. Then what? They go to your competitor’s website anyway. Now imagine if your competitor is openly comparing your services and making it look like their offer is superior. What will happen? A large number of people will take that competing offer. Research says clearly that people visit on average 3 websites (means some do a lot more) before making a decision. Having a comparison table can keep people from leaving your website. They can already do the comparison on your site, so why leave? It won’t keep all of them on your site, but you’ll definitely win over a good portion of visitors. Service 1 vs. service 2 This is a common way how people compare services—they google it. Bluehost vs Hostmonster. Ducksboard vs Geckoboard. You get the point. If you’re smart like Vzaar, you plan for it and create dedicated pages for these comparisons. If you google “vzaar vs viddler," this is what you’ll see:
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That’s right. The number one result in Google is a page created by Vzaar itself. It looks like this:
If you search for “vzaar vs vimeo," you’ll find a page for that ranks number one again. It looks like this:
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Do this: Figure out which competitors your customers are most often comparing you against (you can do this by typing “[your service] vs ” and seeing what Google offers) or which competitors you want to be compared to, and create a dedicated page for those comparisons. Approach those pages like landing pages for a specific customer persona (comparison shopper). Make sure the on-site SEO rocks, and you should be good to go. Apples to apples or apples to oranges? There are two schools of thought. One says that since customers comparison shop, you should make it easy for them to compare. So you structure your product or pricing page in a similar fashion to the competition. Another school of thought is that you should intentionally make it difficult to compare, so they’d spend more time looking into your product. Here’s an example. Compare these two competing products and tell me which one is
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cheaper (you have five seconds!):
It’s pretty difficult to figure it out, and here’s why: their pricing plans do not match—they compare different number of monthly visitors the last example shows 10 percent off prices by default (which you only get if you pay a year up-front) So what will the user do? A) take our the calculator and calculate cost per 1000 visitors or something, or B) pay more attention to other things besides pricing.
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Do this: Create a page with easy-to-compare plans and a page with difficult-to-compare pricing plans. Test them (of course, the results will not only depend on the competition, but a myriad of other factors). Should you show competitor’s prices on your site? Since everybody always wants to know the prices—perhaps you should, especially if you sell commodities. For things people buy all the time (e.g. batteries, beer, jeans) they already have a pretty good idea what’s a good deal. But not always, and not for things people buy online. A study exploring why exploring why consumers leave websites before buying found that the second most common reason for leaving the site before buying was “I was not sure that the site provides the best price." Parago Shopping Behavior Survey from Q1 2012 said 70 percent of consumers are more price sensitive than they used to (due to economy etc), and 96 percent shop for the best price for things they need. This means that you’re more likely to get the sale if you manage to instill confidence to prospects about your price. You can experiment with ‘best price guarantee’ type of promises, drumming up the value of your product, using urgency, emphasizing the extra value they get if they buy from you (and not the competition), free bonuses / gifts to go with the purchases, or even showing openly how much your competitors charge (most suitable if you’re competing on price). Scan Cafe features prices of their competitors on their site:
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Furthermore, shoppers positively perceive a retailer that shows competitors’ prices on their website—as convenience, complete information, and time savings are important to their online experience. 78 percent would be likely to return to a retailer that shows competitors’ prices on their website. 53 percent of consumers would no longer feel compelled to comparison shop elsewhere if merchant would feature prices of their competitors. People check competitor’s prices even offline—34 percent of in-store consumers compare prices on mobile devices. Another study backs this up and says it’s mostly iPhone users that do so. Listen in on social media Another common way people comparison shop is by asking around in social media. Whats the best software for X? Is there anything better than Y? Has anyone used Z? These types of questions are posed by people seeking validation and insight from their peers. According to a study, 47 percent of respondents look to other social media users when considering a home furnishings purchase, and 25 percent seek advice on social
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networking sites when contemplating an apparel purchase. According to the data, 32 percent of social media users say they have recommended a product/company to a friend through a social networking site. This is a great opportunity for you. Monitor relevant keywords on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or monitor related topics on sites like Focus or Quora to find people who might be looking for what you sell. Once you find them, make a case for your product or just inform them. When I used to work on Traindom, we did that all the time and stole lots of customers from people unhappy with our key competitors. Most of them weren’t even aware that we exist, so it was a great way to market our product. Entrepreneur Magazine has a story of how someone looking for an iPad case sent out a tweet: “Looking @DODOsays iPad cases–and *this close* to pulling the trigger … Any opinions out there?” As it happened, there were. Matt Winslow, co-founder of Dodo competitor Beacon Cases in Raleigh, N.C., fired back a suggestion to check out his product. In a subsequent e-mail, he discussed pros and cons of various cases and particulars of Beacon’s unique “tab and gate design." So have somebody in your team monitor social media real-time, so you could add your product to their comparison. Here’s a list of free social media monitoring tools. What’s the main motivation for people seeking out opinions online? A study looked into it and found that these are the top reasons: reduce the risk of bad purchase they will regret, find the cheapest price, it takes too much time to research, to appear cool and build relationships with peers. Knowing this will help you to plan your angle when you approach people on social media. If there’s no difference, people will choose based on the price Remember: if your product is not unique, you are always going to compete on price. If
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there are no significant differences between your product and competing products, people will choose based on price. If the product is the same, why should they pay more ? That can work to your advantage. The most proven pricing strategy in a competitive market is doing it cheaper than others. People like to get stuff cheap. This is often the best strategy to choose if your product is very similar to the others in the market. Do this: If you sell commodities, see if you can offer the best price on regular basis. If you can’t win price wars (most small businesses can’t), you need to focus on the extra value you add in your offer (store warranty, free shipping, free installation, bonus gifts etc). Reduce barriers to first purchase, make it smooth for future purchases If your business model relies on regular repeat purchases by the same customer (e.g. you’re not selling real estate or pianos), there are two things you must do. 1. Incentivize first purchases. The hardest thing in ecommerce is winning over people who’ve never bought from you. They are unsure about your trustworthiness, the level of service and wary about unexpected hassles. You have a significant disadvantage compared to stores where they have shopped before. In order to overcome this, you need to compensate with extra incentives. You can do it by: offering free shipping (at least for first-time buyers), giving a coupon for first-time buyers, beefing up on credibility elements, minimizing their anxiety and pain by asking as little details (minimal number of form fields) as possible when buying, reducing friction by having an on-page FAQ to address common fears and doubts, making sure your product copy leaves no question unanswered (50 percent of purchases not completed due to insufficient information), not forcing them to sign up (you can create an account for them automatically based
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on their email address + autogenerated password) 2. Make it convenient to do repeat purchases I personally buy more stuff from Amazon than from anywhere else. Besides them having my full trust, the best selection (in most cases), lots of reviews and good prices—it’s about convenience. My credit card (three of them, in fact) data is stored there and buying stuff that I need is easy—I don’t have to type anything.
Here’s how you can make repeat purchases convenient: Keep people logged in so they don’t have to log in each time, use persistent shopping carts (contents of shopping cart never expire or not before 60 days), store their shipping and billing information. Conclusion So what’s a marketer to do? Acknowledge that people compare options, and plan accordingly. State your case as good as possible, provide adequate product information. Help them do the comparison by having comparison tools on your site. Make sure their comparison research will result in them understanding what your advantages are and why they should buy from you.
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10 Useful Findings About How People View Websites Eyetracking and research have studied how people look at websites. Here are 10 useful findings you can use. 1. Top left corner gets the attention first When users land on your site, their eye path starts from the upper left corner, and moves on from there. According to this eyetracking study these areas get the most attention:
Similar findings came from a study by Yahoo. Check your site and see what you have in these zones. Move the value proposition to the top left zone. Yes, there can be exceptions, but use this as a starting point and test from there. Are you familiar with the Gutenberg diagram? It describes a general pattern the eyes move through when looking at (usually text-heavy) content. It fits this zoning conclusion pretty well, with the exception of the bottom right area.
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Source The fourth, bottom right terminal area is where you should place your call to action. Note that this is not some universal truth, but a good starting point. Designers can download a useful Gutenberg Diagram PSD overlay here. 2. People read in F-patterns Most people don’t read, but scan. A 2008 study concluded that on average only 28 percent of the text is read. Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read website content in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. Another study confirmed this.
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This is why you want your value proposition in the top and why your menu should be either top horizontal or on the left, vertical. How to design for F-patterns? Read here. A similar study called this the golden triangle. 3. Use visibly bigger introductory paragraphs for improved attention Make introductory paragraphs in boldface or larger font size. When the test subjects encountered a story with a boldface introductory paragraph, 95 percent of them viewed all or part of it. Every SmashingMagazine article starts with an intro paragraph:
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Keep the paragraph line lengths short and in a single column—that’s how people are used to reading text. The font that you use doesn’t really matter. Oh, and people like links—the number of clicks on the links goes up as you add more links. 4. People won’t look past the first search results If you’re not in the top two or three in Google for a keyword, you’re losing out. In an eyetracking study by Google most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.
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As it’s increasingly harder to get the top spots, using long tail keyword strategy is very important. 5. People do scroll, but put most important content above the fold Web users know how to scroll look below the fold, but not nearly as much as they look above the fold. Make sure the above the fold part contains your value proposition, but don’t try to squeeze everything in there. Scrolling is still better than slicing up lengthy content to several pages—it provides better usability. Just make sure you guide people to scroll down. Wiltshire Farm Foods gives a hint in the bottom right corner:
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Interestingly several studies point that the very bottom of a page also gets a lot of attention. That’s a good place for a call to action. 6. Left side of the page gets more attention that the right With some exceptions, people read from left to right. This is also why the left side of your web page gets more attention. Web users spend 69 percent of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30 percent viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable. Amazon is known for their left side menu:
If you have a vertical menu, put it on the left. Navigation placed at the top of a homepage however performs best (seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration). 7. Use high quality, large images Use large, crisp images—recommends usability guru Jakob Nielsen based on his
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eyetracking studies. Image quality is a significant factor in drawing attention. People in pictures facing forward is more inviting and approachable. Highrise features huge photos of customers, looking at you:
Fuzzy, small images are less inviting as are big glamor shots. Nielsen said the eyetracking study also surfaced a counter-intuitive finding–people who look like models are less likely to draw attention than “normal” people. “A call center ad with model in it on the phone may be a good picture technically, but it will more likely be ignored,” Nielsen said. Images appearing unneeded, at least peripherally, will be tuned out. Avoid cheesy stock photos. 8. Need to show pictures of smartphones? Stick with Apple products. A study by EyeTrackshop that recorded consumers looking at groups of smartphones and tablets discovered that Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2 drew more glances and held people’s attention longer than Google Android devices from Amazon, HTC, Motorola and Samsung. Conduit Mobile:
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The iPhone commanded the greatest amount of attention—2.3 seconds, on average—in its group. Among tablets, the iPad tied with the Amazon Kindle Fire for the lead, at 2.4 seconds each. Full story here. 9. Dominant headlines draw the eye An eyetracking study observed that big headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page—especially when they are in the upper left corner. Present a whole value proposition with the headline. Keep in mind that clarity trumps persuasion. Rekko greets you with a dominant headline:
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When you list a bunch of headlines on a page, most often it’s the left sides of the headlines that get the attention. People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don’t view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on. On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention. This means that the first couple of words of the headline need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to draw attention. 10. First impressions take less than a second When viewing a website, it takes users less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, according to an eye-tracking research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Researchers found that their subjects spent about 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focusing on a particular section. They spent an average of 180 milliseconds focusing, or “fixating,” on one particular section before moving on. The website sections that drew the most interest from viewers were as follows: The institution’s logo. Users spent about 6.48 seconds focused on this area before moving on. The main navigation menu. Almost as popular as the logo, subjects spent an average of 6.44 seconds viewing the menu. The search box, where users focused for just over six seconds. Social networking links to sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Users spent about 5.95 seconds viewing these areas. The site’s main image, where users’ eyes fixated for an average of 5.94 seconds. The site’s written content, where users spent about 5.59 seconds. The bottom of a website, where users spent about 5.25 seconds.
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Mobile Internet Users And Their Shopping Behavior 80 percent never leave home without their phones in hand. They do everything on it, including shopping. Whatever your business is, an ever growing chunk of your target customers are using their mobile devices instead of computers to go online. Here’s what you need to know about mobile internet users and their purchasing behavior. Smartphones are the future By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online, according to Gartner. The number of mobile devices is set to more than double in the next years. Worldwide Smartphone and Media Tablet Shipments, 2010-2015:
Source Most of the cellphones are already smartphones. While Android is the most common platform, and wealthier users prefer iPhones, your website should work equally well on all platforms. Mobile users spend money It is estimated that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012.
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eBay expects customers to buy and sell $8 billion of merchandise (roughly 10 percent of all sales) in 2012 using their mobile (they’ve even seen a house being snapped up by someone using a mobile). PayPal expects to see $7 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012. More than 25 percent of smartphone users are making purchases online, Japan and US leading the pack. The number is almost twice as high for young consumers. Smartphone users buy often According to Google’s “Our Mobile Planet: Global Smartphone Users” study, 20 percent of smartphone users purchase on a daily basis, while 14 percent do so a weekly basis. 60 percent of US smartphone shoppers purchase products or services at least monthly. In fact, a majority of smartphone shoppers across the six countries studied (US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan) purchase on their device at least monthly. As you would expect, wealthier people shop over three times as much. 67 percent of wealthy smartphone users shop on their devices and 63 percent regularly buy goods or services. Half of them make purchases at least monthly, with almost 80 percent spending more than $100 on mobile phone transactions in the past year, and 25 percent spending in excess of $1,000. Event tickets (39 percent), gift cards (29 percent), and food and electronics (both 27 percent) are the top purchase categories. You need a mobile optimized site “80 percent of customers abandon a mobile site if they have a bad user experience.”—Limelight Networks, Inc., 2011 Smartphones and tablets aren’t small desktop computers—they’re new devices being used in entirely new ways. This also means that the mobile version of your website needs to be different. A mobile-friendly site will provide a smooth experience and can increase sales. Although consumers are ready and waiting with their mobile devices, only 20 percent of senior marketing executives in the UK say they have a mobile optimized site, 18 percent had a mobile app. I bet the number is closer to two percent when you take into account all businesses. People will want the mobile websites to load as fast as desktop sites (in three seconds or less)—even though the bulk of mobile users are on a 3G network that’s slower than
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broadband internet. So you need to cut the excess fat. A lot of people use smartphones while waiting (in line to get a dose of Starbucks, supermarket checkout line, etc). They don’t want to wait while waiting. Whether you need a separate mobile version or responsive design is a debate to be had, but I’d say it depends on your business (or more precisely, on your customers and how they buy). Here’s a good list of mobile site best practices: Men are more likely to buy services, women physical goods. Market Strategies interviewed a national sample of 2,000 consumers aged 18 to 85 between October 3 and October 11, 2011. They found that men are more likely than women to make purchases with their smartphone, and they are more likely to buy services. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to buy physical goods. 44 percent of men in the study have made purchases with their smartphones, compared to 37 percent of women. Tablet owners spend more money A new report from Adobe Digital Marketing Insights suggests that tablet users spend over 50 percent more per purchase at online retailers when compared with smartphone visitors, and 20 percent more when compared with traditional laptop and desktop visitors. Another study noticed a similar trend. Tablet visitors were also nearly three times more likely to buy products and services online than smartphone visitors and were nearly as likely to purchase as desktop/laptop visitors. The findings are based on roughly 16.2 billion online transactions from 150 top U.S. retailers in 2011. Why is that? Austin Bankhead, director of Adobe Digital Marketing Insights, suggests that when making purchases, the large tablet screens are easier to use than smartphone screens, and he also noted that the high price point of most tablets means that owners may be more affluent than other visitors. Most tablet owners are men between the ages of 18 and 34. “Outside research indicates that men are often earlier adopters of technology,” Bankhead said.
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While this is significant, the number of tablet owners is still relatively small—just around 54 million consumers, but it’s expected to grow to 90 million by 2014. Tablet users active in local search Tablet owners are the most active local searchers with 64 percent using their devices at least weekly for local searches and 86 percent making a purchase from their most recent tablet-based local search, according to a report from Localeze and 15miles. The reason might be that people are more likely to keep tablets at a fixed location (home) due to bigger size compared to smartphones. How tablet users differ in behavior Smartphone and tablets users are quite similar in their behavior, but not identical. Here’s a graph by Nielsen that summarizes the differences:
Smartphones are our primary shopping companions Haven’t we all done it? We go to a store, see a product we consider purchasing and then
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go online (usually Amazon) to read the reviews? Offline users used to be blind, but thanks to smartphones they can see. If you sell crap products, they will know. In-store salespeople are no match for online reviews and comments. In fact, 67 percent of men and 54 percent of women said they would reach for their mobile phone before asking a salesperson for help. Research says that over 79 percent of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer. Once they’re in the store, what do they do? 33 percent take pictures 32 percent search for better prices 27 percent search for reviews 26 percent scan a barcode 23 percent use a coupon or look for a coupons 20 percent use the store application and 11 percent pay for a purchase at the register. Women are more socially engaged in the in-store shopping experience than men. 78 percent of smartphone owners have visited a brick-and-mortar store with the intent to buy, and instead bought the item online. The reason: inadequate information, overwhelming choice and poor assistance choosing products. On average 37 percent of users end up purchasing online and 32 percent prefer to purchase in-store after having conducted research on a product or service on their smartphones.
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Source So if you run a brick and mortar store, make sure that: your store is on every possible online map out there, people are able to find (positive) reviews about the products you carry, there is ample amount of information on product you sell, you don’t sell crap. Pay attention to these stats:
As you can see from the graph, most of the research is done prior to arriving at the store.
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What golden opportunity does this give us? Offer extra incentives or coupons to mobile users to get them into your store. Different Stores Mean Different Smartphone Shopping Behavior A study by Nielsen indicates that consumers use their smartphones differently depending on the type of store. For more complicated stores people spend more time reading reviews. In case of simpler products like food, they’re more interested in coupons.
Deals trump loyalty Mobile shoppers appreciate a good deal. 82 percent of 25- to 34-year-old shoppers say they would switch brands if they received a mobile offer for a competing product while in a store. According to a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 shoppers, almost all (90 percent) young smartphone users are interested in real-time mobile promotions delivered to their smartphones while shopping in a store. “Given that a majority of shoppers enter stores with only rough shopping lists, they are
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incredibly impressionable when they are in the aisle. As brand marketers look for new ways to feature their products when shoppers are considering the competition, they should look no further than something consumers already have in hand—their smartphones.”—Andrew Paradise, AisleBuyer In-store, shoppers’ purchasing decisions are based on: price/everyday low value (76 percent), promotions/getting the most for their money (58 percent), coupon availability (51 percent). 15 percent of smartphone owners report having redeemed a mobile coupon, with women being more likely than men to do it (18 percent compared to 12 percent). Targeting smartphone users According to this study, email is by far the most effective mobile marketing trigger of purchases. 55 percent of smartphone users have made at least one purchase after receiving a mobile promotional email.
Receiving the message via smartphone doesn’t mean that they’re going to complete the purchase using it. 43 percent of actually did it later via computer. Another 35 percent have done so in person, slightly more than the 34 percent who have done so via smartphone browser. People might prefer completing purchases on a computer due to habits and security concerns. Consumers still think of PCs/laptops as secure devices. Only 11 percent of PC users hesitated to part with money, fill in their personal details and purchase goods online whereas the figure for mobile phone users was 37 percent.
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List building still the key So if you want to send a marketing message out to mobile users, do it via email or text. It still pays to focus on growing your email list, but you might want to take a serious look at getting started with text message marketing. You need to be on the first page of search Search matters on mobile devices too. Mobile users do a lot of research, and 61 percent of smartphone users only look at the first page of search results. This makes SEO even more important, especially local SEO. 89 percent report noticing mobile ads. Conclusion 1. Smartphones and tablets will take over 2. People spend money while surfing on mobile devices 3. You need a mobile optimized (version of the) site 4. Coupons and other in-store incentives work 5. You need to be found and your products need reviews.
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Why You Shouldn’t Assume How Users Feel About Your Site
I wrote this short rant. Isn’t it fun? It’s totally cool! Yes, it’s that easy! It’s annoying when a website (or anyone for that matter) tells you what you should feel. Especially when you’re not feeling the feeling the website is telling you to feel. Don’t do it. You can guide the user, you can make your site easy to use—but you shouldn’t assume how the users feel. If the visitor uses your site and thinks “boy, this is easy!”—great! But YOU shouldn’t make that statement, the user should. Don’t assume how people feel about using your site. Making statements like ‘wasn’t this simple!?‘ doesn’t make them change their mind if it wasn’t (nor happy when it was). You will just look arrogant and presumptuous. You don’t control how users feel about the site People’s feelings and opinions are not up to you. Yes, you can influence both and facilitate them feeling a certain way, but in the end it’s not in your control. Hence, don’t make any assumptions about how they feel. And certainly don’t put it in words on your website. Unfortunately, many websites do this. Make sure yours is not one of them.
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Great User Experience UX Leads to Conversions
What’s user experience got to do with conversions? Everything. Great user experience is a means to an end. You don’t create awesome user experiences just to make somebody happy. You want it to lead to something—be it sticking around on your social networking site or buying your stuff. Whenever users land on your website, they’re having an experience. The quality of their experience has a significant impact on their opinion (“do I like it?”), referral possibility (“do I tweet or talk about it?”) and ultimately, conversions—will people do what we want them to do. “User experience matters a lot. More than most people realize. The best designed user experiences get out of the way and just help people get sh*t done. Less is more. If you have to explain it, you’ve already failed.”—Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO of Fab.com. So is their focus on user experience paying off? Seems to be. In just two years they reached $150 million in annual sales. Here’s a great animated video that explains how UX design delivers ROI: Getting things right: what UX is and what it’s not
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First of all, UI (user interface) is not UX (user experience). A car with all its looks, dashboard and steering wheel is the UI. Driving it is the UX. So the interface directly contributes to the experience (beautiful car interior makes a better experience sitting in one), but is not the experience itself. Here’s a great infographic on the differences between UX, UI and more. Visual beauty is important for websites, but visual design is only one step in the process. A beautiful website might make a great first impression, but if it has terrible usability, users can’t figure out what to do, forms on the site don’t quite work, the error messages are not helpful and the copy on the website is vague, the overall experience will be quite bad. Experience is also personal and subjective—and is greatly affected by our past experiences, personal preferences, mood and a myriad of other things. User experience is not something new that was invented along with the internet. Since the beginning of times great designers have understood the importance of experience (Sistine Chapel, anyone?), and how the object of design was going to used, in what context and for which end-purpose. By using the abbreviation “UX” it just sounds new, but none of it really is. All in all, the user experience is a shared responsibility of all those who contribute and support a product—from the UI designer to customer support people. The user experience honeycomb Peter Morville and friends developed the user experience honeycomb to describe all the facets of UX:
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Here’s what it all means: Useful. Is your product or website useful in any way? The more useful, the better the experience. Usable. Ease of use. If it’s too complicated or confusing to use, you’ve already lost. Usability is necessary (but not sufficient). Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design. Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need. Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10 percent of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law. Credible. Websites need to be credible—know the design elements that influence
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whether users trust and believe what we tell them. Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our end-users. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction. There are three ways to use this honeycomb: 1. It enables you to have a meaningful conversations about improving and creating experiences 2. You can assess your site through a specific lens, and get specific ideas as to what to improve 3. If you can’t improve all of your website due to lack of time or budget, why not do a single-facet makeover? So how do you design a good experience? As per Ryan Singer from 37Signals, you need to cut it down into three steps: 1. Know what is common to all people. Understand how the brain works, how people view websites, what makes people tick, how to boost readability, keep attention, come across as credible and so on. 2. Know what is special about your users. How is your target group different from everybody else? What is it that they are trying to get done by using your site or product? You need to understand their purpose for using your product, how they talk about it, their points of reference and so on. This is called ‘domain knowledge’. If you don’t know this, you need to first identify your audience. 3. Be empathetic to to your users. See it from the user’s perspective. If you know the job they want to get done, you can put yourself in their shoes in order to make the right decisions. Some people say you can’t design “user experiences,” but instead you can only design for user experiences. Bryan from Zurb has this view on it: The designers that work on Amazon.com don’t create the experience—they’re responsible for building the system, product and service that allowed those different experiences to happen. The designers work to understand how the user interacts with the website to create the most desirable and profitable experiences. We call that interaction
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design. I hope we can all agree that user experience is a subjective feeling as people are different. The total experience of the user depends on huge amount of things starting from how their day started to their socio-economic status to personal preferences. So when we talking about designing an experience, first of all we need to be on the same page that design is problem-solving, not “making things pretty." The goal of a design is coming up with a solution aimed at achieving a specific outcome—like getting people to sign up for something or checking availability in a hotel. Experience design is deciding on the experience you want people to have with a website or a product (how someone feels, behaves, thinks as they interact with). Examples of great user experience Let’s look a few sites that provide a really good user experience—and analyze them using the UX honeycomb. #1 Hipmunk “Our main philosophy is that we want you to spend as little time on our site as possible with the least amount of pain.”—Hipmunk cofounder Steve Huffman
Useful? Very much so. The focus is on finding flights, sorted by hassle. Usable? Amazingly easy to use. Desirable? Fun, great design.
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Findable? The core functionality is in your face, can’t look past it. Credible? Their modern and uncluttered design helps to come across credible. No credibility blunders here. Valuable? Tons. #2 Nest: Never before has a thermostat got people so excited. More or less a year has passed since the original Nest Learning Thermostat made its debut, and recently Nest Labs announced the successor to its smart thermostat.
Useful? A smooth flow to complete a purchase Usable? Great usability. Desirable? Looks awesome! The photography and videos make it extremely desirable. Findable? Yes. Credible? High profile mentions in the press right on the home page. Kickass video (seeing is believing). Valuable? Totally builds up the value Nest offers.
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#3 Foodily: The Webby Awards named Foodily the best food and beverage website (won against tough competition like Blenderbox and The New York Times).
Useful? Very. Usable? Really good usability. Desirable? Superb design and photography Findable? Slick and easy to navigate. Credible? Social proof (33k likes) + constantly updated content + great design. Valuable? Very much so. I suggest you browse all these three sites and take notes. There are of course many other sites that have grown really fast due to awesome user experience—Made.com, Pinterest,Airbnb, Stripe just to name a few. How do you measure the effectiveness of user experience? It’s simple. While some of the designers might disagree with me, I say it’s all about achieving the business objective. The user experience is a means to an end—to achieve a goal. The simplest and most objective measure is the conversion rate—whether changes in the experience design will boost or reduce conversions. And the action of conversion
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might be whatever (purchase, signup, quote request, repeat logins etc). Conclusion Great user experiences can lead to great results. However, it’s dangerous to play with the label “UX design” or a position called “UX designer.” This suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers—which is not true at all. In fact, companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat increasing revenue, improving customer service or corporate culture. It’s essential for sustainable success. The success of your company cannot rely on a single designer, it needs to be the mindset and focus of the whole organization. So treat it accordingly—start discussions about the experience your provide every step of the way.
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How To Identify Your Online Target Audience and Sell More What’s more important, traffic or conversions? If you send me 50k people from a classic tractor repair website and 500 from a prominent marketing site, which one is going to be better for my business? Unless you’re in the pageview business, what you should first and foremost care about is conversions. Conversions take place when targeted traffic meets relevant offer. It all starts with knowing who is your target audience and what they need or want. “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”—Peter Drucker, influential business thinker of the 20th century. If you want to increase conversions, you have to figure out who exactly is your primary target audience, what they want, what matters to them and what are the sources of friction for them. If you say your target audience is “pretty much everybody” or “anyone interested in my services," you don’t have much of a chance to boost conversions. Why identifying your target audience matters If you know… who the people are, you know how to get to them (the blogs they read, the sites they visit, the stuff they search in Google etc) how they describe the type of services they offer, you can word the copy on your site to match the conversation in their head (very important!) how they choose and compare products in your category, you know how to structure and prioritize content on your site what they want, your value proposition can state exactly that and the whole site can
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be 98 percent relevant to them what they don’t care about, you can dismiss and cut it from the site how their life is better thanks to your service, you know which end-benefits to communicate … and so on and so forth. It’s all about relevancy—if what you offer and how you present it matches their state of mind, you have gained a customer. If your customer is “everybody," you’re making it extremely difficult for yourself—nobody will identify with “everybody." If you don’t have hard data, start with assumptions If you have no paying customers yet, you’re dealing with assumptions and educated guesses based on your first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence. Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and their needs. The data you need to know depends on the product and whether you have a B2B or B2C business. This approach, however, is not very helpful. Online the location matters much less (if at all). Age is not what it used to be—fifty-year-olds get just as excited about new tech gadgets as twenty-somethings, and 30-year-olds may still be living with their parents. More than demographic data, you want to look at the lifestyle. You want to have answers to these questions: Who are the target customers? Describe their life (or business) situation What do they want? What’s the pain? What are their needs that aren’t being met? In order to have a business case, you of course need to think about market size and disposable income as well. You might have a problem/solution fit, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the money. Talk to people “There are no facts inside your building, so get outside,” is one of the mantras of Steve Blank, the father of customer development and author of The Startup Owner’s Manual. When I talk to people starting a new business and they complain about conversions, the
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first question I ask is “how many customers have you talked to?” Usually the answers is “none." Hmm? Once you have your first customer profile written down, go out and meet these people or businesses. Talk to them, observe them in their natural habitat and learn all you can. Austin-based startup Food On The Table started with a target market assumption, and found a mom who plans meals and uses coupons, and spent three weeks shadowing her as she made lists and pushed her cart around the local supermarket. Her feedback helped create the first version of the website. They reached one million users last spring—talking to your customers pays off. What if you learn that your current business assumptions are wrong? It’s not uncommon at all that a company starts with an assumption of who the target audience is and what they want, and changes course once they learn more about the market. In Lean Startup methodology, it’s called a pivot. Many well-known companies have changed direction, from Paypal to Groupon. Here’s a summary of 10 types of pivots. If you’re just starting out and figuring out how to grow to the next phase, don’t do anything before reading this book. Survey your customers If you have paying customers, the best thing you can do is to survey them. What you want is to get in the heads of your customers, learn why and how they buy. Don’t survey all of your customers, just the last 20 (minimum) to 100 (maximum) who still remember their purchase experience. If you ask somebody who made the purchase 6 months or more ago, they have long forgotten and might feed you with false information. I recommend asking the following questions (adjust the wording as you see fit): Who are you? Get the demographical data and see if there are any trends (e.g. generational). If you’ve got a B2B business, ask about their industry and position in the company (and who makes the decision!) What are you using [your product] for? What problem does it solve for you? Here you want to make sure you understand their problem. You might discover some unintended uses as well.
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How is your life better thanks to it? Which tangible improvements in your life or business have you seen? This will tell you the end-benefit your product provides in the words of your customers. If some say really nice things, hit them up for testimonials or case studies. What do you like about our product the most? Learn what your customers think is the best part of your product, and mention it prominently in your copy Did you consider any alternatives to our product (prior to signing up)? If so, which ones? You want to know who people compare you to. Next step is that you need to build a ‘compare’ page where you compare yourself to the competition and make a case for your advantages What made you sign up for our product? What convinced you that it’s a good decision? Why did you choose us over others? You want to know what’s working for you in your current website + identify some advantages you might want to emphasize more. Which doubts and hesitations did you have before joining? Identify main sources of friction, and address them (or fix them if they’re usability problems). Which questions did you have, but couldn’t find answers to? 50 percent of the purchases are not completed due to insufficient information. This helps you identify some of the missing information your customers want. Anything else you would like to tell us? Leave room for feedback you don’t know to ask. What else would you like to buy from us (if we were smart enough to offer it)? Ideas for new products or services your customers are ready to pay for, Tips for the survey If you can, keep it short: the more questions, the fewer responders and poorer quality responses. Make your questions, then weed them out. Make sure the information you collect is actionable—don’t ask questions just because your curious. Once you have written your questions, go through them and ask yourself: “What am I going to do with this information once I have it?” Make sure each question contributes something unique and is necessary.
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Keep it neutral: try to use language that doesn’t lead the customer any particular way. Imagine that you are taking this survey as a person with a particular set of answers. And then go through again with a different (or opposite) set of responses, and see if the question is easier or harder to answer—then adjust the wording so that it is neutral. Avoid multiple choice Note that all the answers should be free-form, not multiple choice. You want the customers to be able to express themselves without constraints. You don’t know what you don’t know, and multiple choice will never reveal those things. Another thing you want to pay attention to is how they word things. Your website has to speak the same language your customers do. Notice how they describe the problem, the solution, the benefits. Often I copy and use the exact wording from a survey answer in a value proposition or other key part of the website copy—and it works the best. Pressure and incentivize When sending out surveys, remember to put some time pressure on them (“fill this out in the next three days”) to get data faster and reward each and everyone who answers the survey (free product or service, Amazon gift card etc). What you can discover from Google Analytics If you have correctly set up goals and/or e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can get some insightful data. Below are some useful reports that show you stuff like which traffic sources convert the best. Invest more time, money and effort in high-performing traffic senders, ignore low performers. If guest blogging is part of your content marketing strategy, pay attention to which blog send you the best-performing traffic and try to become a regular poster on those blogs.
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Google Analytics custom reports are highly useful. Here are some reports you can plug right into your own analytics profile just by clicking on the links. Best converting traffic sources Where is the traffic that converts coming from? Get the Traffic Report. Best performing content Which content works and what doesn’t? Get a clear overview. Get the Content Efficiency Analysis Report. Best converting keywords Which keywords are your money makers? Aim to rank better for these and similar keywords. Get the Keyword Analysis Report. Best converting landing pages Where is the incoming traffic landing on and does it convert? Get the Best Converting Landing Pages Report. Ecommerce report If you run an e-commerce site, you want to see which channels are performing the best. This GA custom report will show you visits per source along with revenue and visit value data. Get the Ecommerce Traffic Report.
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More great Google Analytics custom reports: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175001/7-Time-Saving-Google-AnalyticsCustom-Reports http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/ http://www.seobook.com/maximizing-google-analytics-insight-seo-custom-reports Test your assumptions Learn qualitatively, test quantitatively. Whatever you learn, your conclusions are still a hypothesis—you need test it in the real world. If your organic traffic is low, you can run a PPC campaign on Adwords or LinkedIn (or wherever is a good way to reach your target audience) to get enough people on the site for statistical confidence. Speed up the time it takes to test assumptions, no reason to waste sales by waiting. Conclusion Remember, conversions take place when targeted traffic meets relevant offer. So your job as a marketer is to find the right sources traffic and to make sure your website is relevant for them. Relevancy leads to sales. Use the findings from talking to people, surveys and analytics data to write the copy on your site and decide on the information architecture. Use it for your product development (and for deciding what to sell in the first place). When your target audience arrives to your site, looks at the content and goes “Hey, this is exactly what I’m looking for," you’ve nailed it.
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Are You Providing Answers to Magic Questions? The best kind of visitor is the one looking to buy. She knows what she wants and has a credit card in her hand. Now it’s your job to seal the deal. If you’re dealing with a motivated customer, you just need to make taking action easy and present a competitive and compelling offer—and answer the magic questions. What are magic questions? Magic questions are the most important questions that prospects wants answers to. If you sell packaged vacations to the Caribbean, the magic questions might be Does the price include airfare? Are the sheets on the bed soft? What activities can I do over there? Does the all-inclusive fee include drinks? How will I get from the airport to the resort? How old will the people be there? Will I fit in? Is it dangerous? If they’re shopping for clothes, the questions might be Does it fit me? What’s the return policy like? Is there free shipping? How would I look in it?
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Will my spouse like it? What’s it made of? Whenever people are about to buy something they haven’t bought before, they have fear. The higher the cost of the product, the bigger the fear—as the price tag is also the cost of a potential mistake. Magic questions are the questions that help people decide that this is really what they’re looking for and help them reassure themselves it’s not going to be a mistake. Figure out your magic questions Nobody can tell you what the magic questions are for your business or product—you need to figure this out by observing your target customers in action and talking to them. Observe your customers in their natural habitat Let’s say you run an ecommerce site selling trendy clothes to hip grandmas. Your goal is to boost conversions. Where do you start? You arrange to go their house / work / etc (wherever they normally shop for clothes) and have them use your site. Tell them to shop on your site AND other similar sites (your competitors), and have them comment everything out loud. Your goal is to understand how they shop, what they look at, in which order and which questions they need answers to when looking at a product or when starting to order. It’s kind of like over-the-shoulder usability, but more than that—you want to understand how your users shop for your category products in general, not just how they use your site. Once you understand the process they use, you can optimize for that process on your website and make sure the copy (and the images!) provide answers to their magic questions. Customer interviews Another way to do it is to conduct interviews—either face-to-face (ideal) or over phone/Skype. The goal of these interviews is to figure out which questions they need answers to when shopping for type of products you sell. How do they compare different options? Are the newbies? Experts? Questions you might want to ask:
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What’s their typical process of shopping for X? What do they like about their current solution/process? What are they doing immediately before and after their current solution/process? Which parameters / features they pay attention to? How important are X, Y and Z? When was the last time they bought X? Have them describe the process and the experience they went through Again, the goal here is to fully understand why and how they buy. More importantly, you want to identify the magic questions—whenever they’re looking to buy X, what information do they want about it? Additional tips for interviews Take notes like crazy, or better yet—record the whole interview. Otherwise you WILL forget Have more than one person do interviews at the same time, you’ll get interesting insights and can follow up with discussion Ask unplanned questions. You can’t plan everything ahead of time. Sometimes the interviewees will say something unexpected and you can follow-up with off script questions. Make it fun—talk to them as if you were having a conversation. Weave the answers into the copy Once you’ve identified the magic questions, you need to write them down—and share with everybody who’s working on your site (your copywriter, designer, wife etc). Next you need to make sure your overall copy or product copy gives answers to them. Take the paper with the magic questions, and use it as a checklist to go over each and every product page on your site. Make note of all the products that have some answers missing, and add them. Furthermore, depending on the product and questions, it might be a good idea to create an on-page FAQ to answer the questions. FAQ is always most effective if the answers are provided at the moment when the questions come up.
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provided at the moment when the questions come up. Start with a relevant value proposition When people arrive on a page, they’re immediately looking for answers to the magic questions. The universal magic questions for your home page or landing page are these: Where am I? (Am I in the right place?) What can I do here? (Can I do what I need?) How is this useful? (What’s the benefit of doing it here?) If people don’t get right away what you’re selling and why that’s good, you’re essentially blocking a huge chunk of people from entering your sales funnel. Focus on clarity above all. Metrics of magic questions There are 2 metrics that you should pay attention here. First is ‘bounce rate’. If the bounce rate is high (over 50% for a non-article), it’s likely that the magic questions are not being answered. It’s of course not as straightforward—there might be other things driving up the bounce rate like false expectation, poor design, terrible overall copy. But if your overall site is more or less ‘okay’, it’s the magic questions that do the trick. Second is conversions itself. If people are considering buying a product, but can’t have their magic questions answered, they’re not gonna buy it. Easy as that. Answering magic questions is an essential part of your copy (and value proposition). Conclusion Magic questions is a simple, yet crucial concept. If you don’t know what your magic questions are, figure them out now. Whenever you’re conducting conversion analysis or trying to understand how to lift conversions on any page, start with checking whether the answers to magic questions are there.
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Email Marketing
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How To Creative Effectvive Email Drip Campaigns
Email drip campaigns can be effective in achieving many things: building a relationship, increasing customer retention and increasing sales—all good things that any smart marketer wants and so should you. In case you don’t know what email drip campaigns are, let me go over that for a moment. An email drip campaign is basically a series of messages that are sent or “dripped” in a predefined order at a predefined internal. So, for example, if someone joins your email list, they receive email #1 on signup, email #2 three days later, email #3 five days after they joined and so on. All of this can be automated via email autoresponder software (i.e. GetResponse, MailChimp, and so on). Each email in the campaign stands on its own but also builds on the emails that have come before it. All of the emails are strategically thought out and sequenced. The goal of such a campaign is to encourage a specific action (start using your product, warm up the lead etc). So how do you go about creating an effective email drip campaign? 1. Figure out your goal First things first. If you don’t know what you want to accomplish, how can you possibly achieve it? You need to decide whether you want to warm up the email leads, get them to buy your product, or something else that serves your overall goals. Be specific when
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talking about the end-goal so that you are able to measure it. 2. What they see in those emails is what matters most Just having an email drip campaign won’t do much. The content of those emails needs to be really good. If you send lousy emails, the result will be lousy as well. If the emails don’t add any value, the effect may actually be the opposite—people will consider it spam and become hostile toward you. Also don’t make the emails too long or people won’t read them. Be aware that most of your users are not “reading” your newsletter as much as they are scanning through the information, so make your information scan-able. 3. What is it that your leads need in order to make a decision? When you start working on creating content for the drip campaign, ask yourself this: what do my prospects need to know in order to take the step I want? So for instance, if your goal is to get them to use your online software, you might want to create emails that explain its best functionality and show case studies of how other people used it with great success. If your goal is to sell them something, you should aim to increase people’s trust in you— build up credibility. You can do this by teaching them something useful, addressing their hesitation (removing friction) and providing proof of how your stuff helps them achieve their goals. 4. Set timing and frequency Once you know what you want to achieve and you have created the emails you want to send out, it is time to set the frequency and timing of the emails. There is no one-size-fitsall rule here. Generally you should start with higher frequency and slow down as time goes on (start with every day, then every few days, then once a week, then once a month and so on). As for the email sending times—check your newsletter statistics and see if any particular times of day produced more open rates. Note that you can also send drip campaigns to people who’ve already been on your list for a long time. Campaigns can be sent daily, weekly, or monthly and can be used to keep your brand on the top of the mind when subscribers are ready to take action. You can set up drip campaigns for white paper delivery, quarterly release updates, specialized holiday campaigns, monthly invoices, annual subscription notices, or anything else that keeps subscribers informed and interested in your stuff.
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5. Segment your campaigns A way to further increase the effectiveness of your campaigns is to segment them. Create several parallel campaigns—most of the content can remain the same—but tailor them as much as possible to the specific segments, addressing their concerns, needs and wants. For instance you can create two different landing pages for two different segments and so that when they join your email list on a particular page, you send them particular drip emails. 6. Measure stuff! Besides the obvious (open rates and clicks), measure the impact on your bottom line and the total clicks on your landing pages. If you want to drive traffic to your sign up page, measure the total traffic you get from the drip campaigns to the desired page and look at the conversions.
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How To Generate More Sales From Your Email Marketing Campaigns Compared to social media and content marketing, email is a mature channel for engaging online consumers. Its longevity is a testament to its ability to convert leads into buyers and buyers into repeat customers. In fact, according to a Forrester report put out on September 24, 2012 email continues to be the top factor in influencing repeat purchases:
Forrester Research report showing email’s positive influence on repeat customers. Regardless of whether your business is in the B2B or B2C space, your email marketing effectiveness can be optimized. Because you read this blog, you already know you should be conducting a/b testing on your landing pages and website to increase conversions, but did you know the same principles apply to your emails? Conduct A/B Testing on Your Emails When it comes to email campaign optimization you can test and optimize many of the
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same components you do on a landing page. For example, it is a good idea to test the call-to-action, offer and layout of the email. However, there are some components unique to email marketing that you should also test. These include: Subject line Sender name Day of the week to send Time of the day to send Subject Line: According to research by Dan Zerella of HubSpot and MailChimp’s Email Genome Project, there are specific words that tend to increase open rates. You should consider these keywords when putting together subject lines to test:
HubSpot chart showing best keywords to use in email subject lines. The graph from Zarella’s presentation on the Science of Email Marketing is a little small, so here are the top five words that affect open rates in a positive manner: posts, jobs, survey, week’s and e-newsletter. According to the same report, the keywords that will get you reported as spam include:
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confirm, features, upgrade, magic and raffle. You can certainly test using these keywords in your subject line, but the research suggests its best to leave them out unless you have built up a list that really trusts you and your brand. Sender Name: Another important aspect to test in your email campaigns is the sender name. The most common sender names include the actual name of a person within your company or the name of the company itself. Test both to see if one increases your open rate. Day of the Week: Next you’ll want to a/b test the best day of the week to send your emails. According to MailChimp’s Email Genome Project more emails are sent on Tuesday and Thursday than any other day of the week. You should test sending emails on one of the other days to see if less competition for inbox space increases your open and click through rates. Research by Zarella at HubSpot suggests that doing so can impact your results pretty drastically:
HubSpot Chart Showing Best Day of Week to Send Email for Max Clickthroughs The team at What Counts decided to test what the best day of the week to send their enewsletter was. Traditionally they would send it on Thursdays; however, they wondered if sending on Tuesdays would be more impactful. When the team ran their test they learned that sending on Tuesdays increased their open rates; however, sending on Thursdays resulted in higher clickthrough and conversion
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rates. If they had simply started sending the e-newsletter on Tuesdays without A/B testing the send day they would have missed out on conversions. Time of Day: The final key aspect for testing and optimizing your email campaigns are send times. According to the Email Genome Project, subscribers are most likely to open email between the hours of 2 P.M. and 5 P.M. I asked the MailChimp team is these hours are time zone specific and was told they are not; the times represent the best times to send in whatever your local area is.
MailChimp Graph Showing Best Time of Day to Send Emails for Max Open Rates That being said, Zarella’s research suggests that while open rates may be highest in the afternoon, click-through rates are highest in the early morning, peaking around the 5 to 7am marker.
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HubSpot chart showing best time of day to send email for max clickthrough rate. To find the best send times for your emails the best thing to do is to run a/b tests. You’ll want to track the email and click through rates of course, but even more important the conversion rate on those emails. Your email marketing software should come equipped with a/b testing capabilities. If it does not I recommend switching to a platform like GetResponse, MailChimp, Aweber orCampaign Monitor. To take your campaigns even a step further you could tailor your send times to each individual recipient based on their history like Mint.com did. Mint’s senior director of marketing worked with her email provider to analyze recipient behavior on a rolling basis and predict the best delivery time for each address on the mailing list. According to MarketingSherpa which put together a case study around Mint’s behavioral targeting: —If recipient A displayed a tendency to open emails at 5 P.M., Mint.com’s campaigns, alerts and triggered messages would be sent at that time. —If a recipient B often opened emails at 3 A.M., all messages would be sent at that time.
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—If recipients started opening the emails at different times of the day, the system adapted and began sending according to this newly exhibited behavior. This approach lead to a seven percent increase in open rates and 13 percent increase in click-through rates. Another company called eBags also took this approach and they saw a 20 percent increase in click-through rates, 65 percent increase in conversion rates and 45 percent increase in average order value. Create a Dedicated Landing Page for Each Email Campaign A/B testing your email marketing campaigns on the email side is really important in your effort to increase revenue. However, it’s also important to think beyond the email to the landing page—the place you link to from the email. There are three typical places you might choose to send your email traffic: Your website homepage A deep link in your website such as a product or features page A dedicated landing page The best option and the one that will convert the highest is the dedicated landing page. MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report showed that dedicated landing pages are highly effective when it comes to email marketing:
MarketingSherpa Chart on landing page optimization effectiveness for email campaigns. Why are dedicated landing pages so effective? The answer has everything to do with visitor expectations, increased relevance and reduced “leakiness” of a page. This means the messaging on the landing page should reflect the messaging in the email,
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the offer should be specific and relevant to the same offer mentioned in the email and the page should have limited or no navigation so that the visitor cannot click-away get lost in a different part of your site. When you send email traffic to your homepage or a deep link in your site you miss out on the opportunity to tailor your message and offer. Additionally, when sending visitors to the homepage you put the burden on the consumer to find the right page on your site to take action on. Doing any of these things will result in reduced conversion rates. The VP of marketing at Tafford Uniforms knew that 1:1 message match between the email offer and the landing page would increase conversions but he didn’t have the resources to create a dedicated landing page. As a quick fix he started creating a banner to add to the top of each product page that reflected the offer mentioned in his email campaign. According to a case study completed by Marketing Experiments this lead to a 10 percent increase in Tafford’s email conversion rates. If the VP of marketing had the resources to create a dedicated landing page with controlled or completely removed navigation his conversion rates would be able to soar even higher. Encourage Social Sharing in Your Email Campaigns Optimizing your emails and their landing pages is important to convert the subscribers you already have—but don’t forget about their friends. Very often the company your customers keep would also make great customers for you. In a study by GetResponse as reported by eConsultancy, email messages that include at least three social share buttons generated 55 percent higher clickthrough rates than messages with no social share buttons. Additionally research conducted by Brightedge Technologies, shows sites with Twitter buttons drive “seven times more link mentions on average than sites that did not have a button.”
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BrightEdge Technologies chart showing social buttons increase online mentions. While you should not use social share buttons on your actual landing page because it introduces a competing call to action, the thank you page presents a great opportunity to increase awareness through social sharing. Conduct A/B Testing on Your Offers—Often In order to continuously push the envelope by learning more about your audience’s desires while simultaneously increasing revenue you need an on-going a/b testing cycle. It’s not enough to conduct one a/b test showcasing two different offers (e.g. free shipping vs. $5 off) in your email campaign and think you’re done. Your first test is only the beginning! You should test different offers and different ways to present those offers over the course of time to truly optimize for maximum conversions! Here are just a few a/b testing ideas for your special offers: Pricing ($30 vs. $29) Placement of the offer on the landing page
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Free shipping vs. percent off Here’s an example of an a/b test inbound marketing software company, HubSpot, ran in an effort to increase the number of people who sign up for their free trial: Version A: Try HubSpot free for 7 days
Version A of a HubSpot A/B Test: 7 day free trial Version B: Try HubSpot free for 30 days
Version B of a HubSpot A/B test: 30 day free trial. The treatment, or version B, in this test increased conversions by 110 percent simply by extending the length of time for the free trial! Would you have guessed that the treatment would have performed so much better? That’s the beauty of testing—you don’t have to guess, you can experiment and know for sure!
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The really important thing to remember is that your email offer must match the offer on the landing page. So, for example people who received an email about a free seven-day trial should be sent to the landing page for the seven-day free trial. When there isn’t clear message match between the email (or ad) and the landing page you lose trust with your visitor and introduce the opportunity for confusion. Cohesiveness in your email campaigns is really, really important. Use Landing Page Segmentation to Qualify Your Email Leads You probably already know that email list segmentation can lead to better results, but did you know that segmentation on the landing page can help you further qualify your leads while increasing email conversions? It’s true. Jessica Collier, Director of Optimization at ion interactive, states there are 4 key ways to segment visitors on the landing page: Segmentation by Audience Segmentation by Place in Buying Cycle Segmentation by Need Segmentation by Business Size Here we see a B2C example of segmentation by need:
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Example of landing page segmentation for B2C. The visitor can select whether he or she is an owner, renter or commercial business and receive highly targeted information based on that simple click. And here is a B2B example of segmentation by business size:
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Example of landing page segmentation for B2B. Segmentation on the landing page not only helps you provide specific information to visitors based on their self-identification, but also allows you to further qualify them. For example, if your business only provides services for small and mid-sized businesses but not enterprise level ones, you can provide targeted information for the audience whose needs you do meet, while politely directly all others out the door. There’s very little value in spending time and money marketing to people who are out of your zone. Instead focus your time on high quality leads. Sharepoint Solutions allows visitors to segment by their experience with Sharepoint (Just Starting, Immediate or Advanced):
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Example of Landing Page Segmentation According to their case study, this segmented landing page converts at 25 percent—well above the PPC conversion rate average of just 3.5 percent. The best way to create these segmented landing pages is to come up with a template. The immediate landing page will have one look and feel but each of the pages that the visitor clicks through to should have the same basic layout—only the copy and images will need to change. Here’s an example from the New England Journal of Medicine:
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Example of landing page segmentation. The visitor lands and self-segments him or herself and the lands on a second page tailored to his or her needs:
Example of the type of page where you would send segmented traffic. You can work from a landing page template purchased on a site like ThemeForest.net and then use a/b testing software like Visual Website Optimizer that allows you to run tests on your own website, or you can use a/b testing software that works off of a templated landing page software system like Lander and Unbounce (small business friendly) orLiveBall (enterprise-level). I recommend Unbounce and Lander because they comes pre-populated with templates that you can edit through a WYSIWIG/HTML editor. This means non-technical people can
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that you can edit through a WYSIWIG/HTML editor. This means non-technical people can get their landing pages set up without hiring a web developer.
A few of Unbounce’s landing page templates. Not only does it allow you to start with a conversion-focused template, but they integrate with other software like GetResponse, MailChimp, AWeber, iContact, Salesforce and more. This is perfect for making sure your email software can talk to your landing page software, so no leads fall through the cracks. Final Thoughts on A/B Testing for Email Campaigns Because email marketing is still such an effective channel for reaching first-time and repeat customers it is really important that your campaigns are optimized. Without conducting a/b testing on both the email and landing page side of the campaign you are leaving leads (and revenue) on the table!
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7 Mistakes That Hurt Your Email Relationship Building Efforts People will not buy your stuff on their first visit. The more expensive and/or complicated the product, the more time they need to think and decide. People like to buy from people and businesses they know and like. This is why it’s a good idea to capture emails and build a relationship before you even ask them to buy anything. This post is about getting the most out of your relationship building efforts with your email list. Mistake #1. You don’t use double opt-in Double opt-in means that after someone subscribes, they get an email with a confirmation link ensuring they want to receive email communications from you. While you do get a little less subscribers, you actually get people you want on your list. People who click the confirmation link are dedicated and interested enough to complete the subscription process. This in turn leads to higher open rates, clickthroughs, better deliverability and much less spam complaints. My own personal experiments have shown that if your lead magnets is attractive enough, you’ll get pretty much the same number of subscribers as compared to single opt-in. When I switched T1Q over to double opt-in, I got maybe five percent less subscribers, but open rates shot up three times. My hypothesis is that by having to work a little bit harder to join the list (one additional intentional click), there’s more engagement and thus you’ll get a larger stake in their mindshare. Mistake #2. You think more interaction is better First off, interactions don’t build relationships unless you have shared values. Talking to somebody you have nothing in common with does not make you closer (in fact, you just get more and more annoyed).
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So it all starts with common interests and shared values. Once this is place, you can proceed to interactions. However, interactions don’t build relationships. Even so, there’s no real correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will become your loyal customer and a brand champion. Still, too many marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That’s why you see many brands sending customers over 300 emails annually (#overkill). What you need to know is that consumers suffer from cognitive overload. They’re bombarded with messages and choices. The best thing you can do to your business is to keep everything simple. Instead of relentlessly bombarding customers with emails and demanding their attention, treat the attention you do win as precious. Don’t waste the attention on a message that doesn’t add value. Before sending out an email, ask yourself whether it’s going to reduce the cognitive overload consumers feel? If not, don’t send it. There is no universally best frequency to send emails to your list. You have to test it. How to figure out the best email frequency The simplest way to test email frequency is this: 1. Set up two email lists (A and B). 2. A/B test your email subscription forms, so that 50 percent of the subscribers are added to list A and the other half to list B. Forms itself can be identical. 3. Now send different amount of emails to each of those lists (e.g. once a month to A and 4 times a month to B). 4. Three months (and/or later) down the line check the stats: compare average open rates, clickthroughs, unsubscribe rates and if you can, most importantly look at the sales figures. Mistake #3: You don’t know why people unsubscribe This has been studied a lot. Long story short, people unsubscribe from email lists for two main reasons: 1. irrelevant or boring content (e.g. mainly sales promos),
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2. too many emails. That’s it. Hence two rules for you to ensure a long email relationship: 1. Email only when you’ve got interesting stuff to say. Don’t send for the sake of sending. 2. Don’t send too often. More than once a week might be too much (with some exceptions). Mistake #4: You think using the subscriber’s name is personalization I’m sure you receive plenty of “Hello, [YOURNAME]” type of emails. Do you feel personally touched? Didn’t think so. Internet is filled with email marketing articles from 2006 saying you should personalize emails with subscriber names. Whoever says that today is just re-hashing the old mantra. According to a new study some 95 percent of customers respond negatively when an email starts off with a greeting that includes their name. The study drew from ten million marketing emails sent to 600,000 customers. That’s a decent sample size. So stop doing it. Not very personal:
Even when every now and then using people’s name in the subject line might boost your open rates, they will be disappointed when they see it was actually not a personal email. People are not idiots. They know the difference between actual personal emails and masspersonalization customization. Don’t try to fake being personal when you’re not. Nobody expects you to email every subscriber manually anyway. True personalization is about relevant content. The more you can segment your list and send tailored emails to each segment, the better. Mistake #5: You follow the rule of seven All over the internet you will find websites stating this in one wording or another: A prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you. It’s referred to as The Rule of Seven. It’s a myth.
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The truth is that there is no research to back this up. It’s a well-spread rumor. It’s an attractive idea and you want it to be true, since it’s a shortcut, a sure thing to do to help you to improve your marketing efforts. It originates from the late internet marketer Corey Rudl who made this observation about his own business, and started to promote it. He even suggested the following schedule: Immediate response 3 day follow up 7 day follow up 2 week follow up 1 month follow up 2 months follow up 3 month follow up It’s outright silly to think this schedule is the holy grail of email marketing, or that a marketing observation from pre-2005 era would carry much weight today or that one size fits all. Do your own testing and don’t assume anything about the magic number seven. Mistake #6: You stop talking to subscribers once they buy Relationship doesn’t end with the purchase, in fact it should be the opposite. Too often businesses focus on building relationships with potential customers, and ignore the existing ones. Since it’s so much easier to sell to existing customers than new ones, I say that’s where your main focus should be at. You won’t build a relationship strong relationship with emails only. You need them to actually use your products and services, and benefit from them. Once they do and you keep adding more value via email, you’re on your way to creating champions. I like how Olark is starting the relationship over email. Once you sign up, you get this email from them: “Hi—I saw you just signed up for olark.com, let me know if there is anything I can do to
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help.—Ben” It’s short and feels personal. Could have been even sent manually, but you never know :) In any case, the very best thing you can do after they sign up / buy is to continue talking to them. Educate them about your product, give them know-how to get the maximum out of it. Further reading: How to Create Effective Email Drip Campaigns How to Get Subscribers to Actually Consume Your Content Mistake #7: Your emails don’t add value There’s no magic sauce to relationship building. Relationships get built over time by adding value to each other, just like in real life. This value can be many things—teaching and educating, entertaining and informing. A guy that works in an email marketing company told me this story. He was reviewing the promo email his client wanted to send out and saw it’s a totally dull offer. “Would you yourself want to buy this?," he asked the client. “Oh… so you mean it should be something people are interested in?” True story, and not very uncommon. What happens is that marketers send out newsletters and promo emails that don’t add value to their subscribers. The results is that they will sooner or later unsubscribe, and that’s that. If I had only one tip for building relationships over email, I’d say be insanely useful/cool/entertaining and you’ll do all right.
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Lead Magnets: Email List Building On Steroids More than 95 percent of your visitors won’t buy anything on their first visit. They’re either just browsing, still in the research phase or not entirely sure yet your offer is what they need. It takes time to build trust, instill confidence and build a relationship. So if we know that the overwhelming majority won’t buy anything on their first visit, why push it? You’re just going to turn them away faster. Instead, you should try to capture their email address and start forming a relationship. Money is in the list, as they say—and they’re right. Having an attractive lead magnet will accelerate your email list building like it’s on steroids. If you’re currently getting five subscribers a day, and you’re able merely increase it to eight per day—the difference in 30 days would be almost a hundred new subscribers (150 vs. 250). If even small improvements like that can make a difference, imagine what a killer magnet can do for your list building. What are lead magnets? A lead magnet is the (free) offer you make to get visitors’ email addresses. Getting their email is a transaction. You want their email, so you have to offer something they want in return. Your job is to sell the idea of subscribing to your list, and you need an attractive offer to do it. If what you offer is something people want and it seems to be worth going through the hassle (typing the email address, worrying about spam etc), you will get their email. The speed of your list building depends mostly on the lead magnet. Lousy, unattractive lead magnet = very few sign-ups. Attractive lead magnet = tons of sign-ups. Yes, the design, location and usability of the email capture form all matter—but the lead magnet is what makes the biggest difference.
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This is NOT a lead magnet:
Nothing magnetic about it. No reason whatsoever given for joining. Probably a good indicator that they don’t take email marketing seriously. This is a lead magnet:
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There’s a clear offer in place and its communicating the value subscriber will receive. It has a somewhat spammy feel to it (a bit much hype), but all in all it’s pretty good. Naturally you need to deliver on your promise of value. Under delivering will result in useless emails—money is not just in the list, but in the relationship with your list. You want to have an impressive start. How to build an attractive lead magnet Your goal is to come up with a magnet that makes them super excited. Ask yourself: what’s the one thing that would be insanely useful to your audience, and that you could even charge money for (but won’t)? The truth is that a lot of websites try to capture leads. Many have a lead magnet in place, and out of those most offer “free reports” or whitepapers. “Me-too” is a terrible strategy and you don’t want to sound like everyone else (“Get seven tips to …”). Be a rebel and a contrarian. See what your competitors are doing, and do something different. Five steps to an attractive magnet Understanding what your ideal customer wants is essential and goes without saying. You want people to go through the lead magnet, and learn something—gain something useful, experience “aha” moments. The bigger the positive impact of your lead magnet, the better push you have given the prospect down your sales funnel. Take your current lead magnet or the new idea that you have for one and check it against this list, and improve it. 1. It has to add as much value as possible. The better the offer, the more people will take it. A free car to every subscriber? That’d be a guaranteed 90+ percent conversion (there are always skeptics that won’t believe a good offer when they see one). As this one is not that targeted and might get a bit expensive, try something less extravagant—but start with the best possible idea and downgrade from there, rather than thinking what’s one notch above “join to get free updates." 2. For free, really!? I want that! That’s the reaction you want them to have when they see it. Emotional reaction is very important.
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3. Be ready to work hard. There are no shortcuts. The more effort you put in, the better the outcome. If you want to create a killer magnet, be ready to sweat. 4. Do not lie or set false expectations. Nothing worse than broken promises. Fool me once, shame on me. And I won’t risk being shamed twice. 5. Is this really the best possible idea? Look at the lead magnet idea you’ve got and ask yourself whether it’s possible to come up with a better one? If yes, go back to 1. Building the best possible magnet takes time. It’s okay to start with something NOT as good as it ideally could be—so you can capture at least some emails while you’re working on the killer magnet. That one will take time, and you’d just be losing the visitors that are coming now if you have nothing while you are working. Temporary solutions have the annoying ability to become permanent ones. Don’t settle for a mediocre magnet. How to structure the offer Start with the hook: why this should be important to them. Craft a benefit-oriented headline. Promise: what they’ll get when they subscribe Connect: why you created this and for whom Key points: issues & solutions, could be in bullets Call to action: what they should do next Don’t ask them to fill in too many fields. In most cases just email is enough. Read this post about the design of the form. Your magnet as a sieve You don’t want the magnet to be attractive to everyone, just your ideal clients. Sure, you could give free movie tickets for anyone who joins your list, but how many of them will want to buy your product? Lead quality is very important and you only want to focus on your target group. Offer something that clearly leads to your product. Make the magnet highly specific to your target clients. Try to come up with ways that it would turn off the rest. Being ultra-specific is the best way to capture a specific audience (e.g. “If you’re a left-handed single woman in Minnesota, you owe it to yourself to watch
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this”). Turning leads into customers Most sites on the internet convert at less than five percent. This means that 95 percent (and more) are not buying your stuff on their first visit. Selling is often about trust and relationship building. The process of relationship building is essential to getting the customer to trust you, to try out your product without the pressure of a tough sell, and to form a marketing relationship that will allow you to later sell to your customers. In order for this to work you need to send them something that adds value and helps subscribers make a positive purchasing decision. And eventually you will ask for the sale. When should you ask for the sale? There is no one right answer. The internet is filled with claims that it takes seven touchpoints (e.g., emails) before they’re ready to buy. This originates from the late internet marketer Corey Rudl (he passed away 2005) who said that he had to connect with a customer at least seven times via email before they were willing to purchase his online marketing courses. That worked for him in his business, which doesn’t mean it will work for you. Above all make sure you’ve added value, proven your expertise and influenced the purchasing decision in a positive way. Consider product complexity and price The more complex and/or expensive the product, the more time and information prospects need before they’re ready to commit. It’s all about risk. If the product is a box of matches, it’s very easy to understand and very cheap. Low risk. People can make a decision immediately. There is no simple formula to figure out the optimal sales cycle (you can hire a bunch of McKinsey consultants, if you like), you have to base it on observations and testing. How to test the length of the sales cycle An easy way to go about it is by split testing. Use the exact same offer to get them to optin, but add them to different lists (or use a different reference code, some identifier).
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Have a different drip email campaign (autoresponder sequence) in place for each, varying the messages and the time before you ask for the sale. You should measure sales conversions within a time period to determine which one works better. Ideas for a lead magnets People often ask me for ideas—what should someone use as a magnet? You can usually create pretty awesome stuff with the essentials and proven angles: root causes for clients’ problems along with solutions, useful findings and research data, personal stories and client case studies. If you want more, here is a short list of suggestions for different categories, so you can get the idea and get the ball rolling. All of the listed items are what you’d give in exchange for an email address. Experts These are coaches, trainers, consultants and everybody else who sells intellectual capital. E-books and whitepapers Minicourses via email Video or video series Audo recording, podcast (Free education in any format) Free course / webinar Assessment or test E-commerce Getting the very first purchase is the biggest challenge. This is especially true for smaller stores that the buyer has never heard of. If their first buying experience is positive, they’re much more likely to repeat it. Free coupon Free shipping
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Free gift with the first order Educational content on how to achieve / build stuff with what you sell Guide to saving money when shopping for X Membership (make prospects feel special, invite them into your VIP group that provides bonuses, advice etc) Educational material related to the need they will solve with your product. Service business Hair salons, vets, plumbers, mechanics and others who trade parts and labor for money. Free coupons Educational content for DIY projects How to be a smart buyer of X Things you need to know before buying Y Free online tools (home decor planner, pet optimal nutrition calculator, car online custom tuning etc) Software Free trial Freemium account Demo Get the user in and doing stuff, ask for the email to save (check out how Codecadamy is doing it) How test a lead magnet ideas (before creating them) I’ve covered this before in another post, but it’s very important to outline again. Way before you come up with a couple of magnet ideas to test on your site, you can do a lot of pre-work. The risk of immediately running with the first ideas is that you might end up putting in a lot of effort to develop the content for the magnets, and in the end nobody wants it. To avoid this possible waste, use this process.
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The process of coming up with attractive lead magnets Before you start, you need to think hard about your customers, their end goals and how you can help them. 1. Start brainstorming ideas on your own. There’s strong some evidencethat group brainstorming results in fewer (and lower quality) ideas. 2. Write the better ideas down, and format them as headlines or value propositions (e.g. “21 ways to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks," “8 things that better leaders do differently”). 3. Scrap the crappy ones, select the best 6 to 10 ideas. Write them down on a single sheet of paper. 4. Next up: survey your ideal customers (the more the better, statistical significance matters). Use face-to-face meetings or Google Docs Forms. The best way to find them is to turn to your existing / former customers. Ask them which option are they most interested in (which article they’d most like to read, which video they’d want to watch etc) from the list. 5. Now you get some winners, and you can actually create those lead magnets (the actual content, tool or whatever it is). Put them up on your site, and split test them against each other. If no idea gets an overwhelmingly warm reception, go back to the drawing board. Killer lead magnet examples Here are some great lead magnet examples to get your creative juices flowing: Quicksprout
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Comments Clear value proposition Emphasis on exclusivity, making the free offer seem limited and valuable Confidence boost via logos Overlays / popups can be highly effective Hubspot Marketing Grader
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Comments People just love tests and assesments. This one grades your website marketing efforts, compares it to the competition and gives you suggestions for improvement. Pretty irresistible. Social proof via social media numbers The One Question
Comments Highly specific, catering to a particular need Again, people love tests Disclaimer: the site is mine. Which is how I know it converts very well (roughly 30 percent) Independent Practice Growth UK
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Comments While this magnet has several problems (design, readability, length, number of fields), I like it because it’s specific: a marketing book for opticians. Nobody but opticians would be interested in it. It’s a physical book. Definitely more attractive than a pdf. Clear value proposition.
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Clear value proposition. Timothy Sykes
Comments Clear value proposition, great layout Strong proof and trust elements General Linguistics
Comments Simple, clear value proposition Specific to the target audience
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Become a Hyperink reader. Get a special surprise. Like the book? Support our author and leave a comment!
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VI.
Writing Copy
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Writing Homepage Headlines For The Modern World:3 Formulas That Work Read any copywriting manual or article and you will learn that the headline is the most important thing in your sales copy. And it’s true. The sad thing is that the advice that follows is often severely outdated and originates from the snail mail sales letter people from the 1950s and beyond. I researched 500 headlines of successful online businesses and figured out which formulas work today. Just so we’re on the same page: which headlines do I mean First of all let’s make clear that I’m NOT referring to blog post or any other type of editorial content headlines. Cosmo-style headlines may work just fine for your personal blog, but it’s not going to sell your products. What I’m talking about is the headline on your website home page or product page. Like here the headline is “Work the way you want to” (which could be better—it’s way too vague):
Or here it’s “Design your Mobile App or Landing Page in 7 Days” (potentially a very good
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headline):
The bad advice you’re usually given Most articles on copywriting tell you to use Cosmo-style headlines (“The $4 Beauty Trick You Need to Steal From Rachel Bilson“) or those age-old “Who else wants to learn killer sales secrets?“ headline formulas. They’re cute, but we’ve evolved past that. Decades of ad bombardment and cheap sales tactics have made people uber-sensitive to anything cheesy and self-important jargon. Here are the kind of headlines you usually get recommended to write: The Secret of Successful Writing (that only successful writers know about) At Last! Scientists Uncover the Secret to Preventing Ugly Wrinkles These are headlines I copied from a copywriting article. Who in the real world would not be thrown off by this? If your target market is uneducated get-rich-quick with-a-click kind of people, it might work for you. If you’re marketing a real business to real people, think twice. “The secret of” type headlines might go down on blogs and newspapers, but don’t use it on your respectable company blog. One of the copywriting blogs—Copyblogger—has tons of articles on writing as “cheesy as it gets” headlines for blog posts, but they themselves use the solid “say what it is” approach:
People yearn authenticity. Our bullshit detectors are always on. The attention span of
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people has significantly gone down with the digital age, people are too impatient to bother figuring stuff out. If your headline sucks, many won’t give you another chance. One of the goals of the headline is to build a rapport between you and the reader. Nobody identifies with a cheesy snake oil salesman pitch. Here’s another headline writing tip I found: “Internet Marketing Exclusive is Pure Genius—Our Sales Have Increased by 40 percent!” Headlines written in the form of a testimonial are very effective, as they instantly begin building trust. Oh really? Instant trust you say? NOT! Sounding like a cheesy fake salesman does not increase, but kill your sales by 40 percent. As Ogilvy said, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.” So my advice is to wake up and realize it’s not 1964 anymore. You can’t rehash that old stuff. Don’t use scandalous blog headlines on your business website if you want conversions. Talk and write like a real person. Two key questions to weed out bad headlines When pondering a headline, see if you can answer ‘yes’ to both of these questions. 1. Imagine your website would be just your headline and a call to action (sign up, learn more, call now etc). Would anyone take action based on the headline? 2. Would you use the exact wording of your headline in a conversation with your friend where you explain the product/service? Yes there are always exceptions, but use this as a guideline to get you on the right path. Three headline formulas that work today I hate the word “formula” as much as the next guy, but I’m gonna call these formulas anyway. How did I come up with these? Not by rehashing age-old formulas or copywriting truths. I actually analyzed more than 500 headlines of successful web companies. Definitions: Web company: companies that get all or most of their business online (so the headline on their website is important)
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Successful: I looked at graduates of top startup incubators (Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 startups) that have achieved commercial success and businesses that made it onto the Inc 5000 list. I avoided looking at companies that are already huge and very successful—like let’s say Google, Amazon or Facebook—those guys operate on totally different terms. I’m not saying all of the companies that I looked at have great headlines. Absolutely not— many have a really sucky headline, or don’t have one at all. A headline does not make or break a business (but it can help a lot if you nail it). What I discovered looking at these headlines were trends—“formulas” that were working for these businesses. Disclaimer: while I did extensive analysis for this, it’s not a scientific method. Also, I did not have their a/b testing data nor con version data available. That being said, I strongly believe the formulas I derived from this will work very well. I use them in my work all the time. Here are the formulas for writing headlines along with three examples for each: Formula #1: Say what it is Brain is a questioning organ. Whenever we see something new, our brain asks ‘what is it?." This formula addresses this fundamental question. Heroku: cloud application platform
Next Big Sound: Analytics & Insights for the Music Industry
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Adroll: #1 Retargeting Platform
Formula #2: Say what you get This formula is a benefit oriented statement that sums up what you get when you sign up. RocketLawyer: Everything you need to make it legal
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Songkick: Be the first to know about concerts
Crazyegg: The Astonishing Power of Eye Tracking Technology…Without the High Costs
Formula #3: Say what you’re able to do (with it) This is where the headline makes it clear what you’re able to accomplish if you use this product or service. Rekko Toolbar: Attention folks, deliver any message, to anyone, on any page
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Airbnb: find a place to stay
Otterbox: Find your perfect case
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Notice how all of the headlines here are reinforced with a supporting image? #smart Important: these headline formulas are merely blueprints to help you craft a good headline. There’s no way to know in advance which headline will work for you—you HAVE TO split test it. Better than headlines: make it a unique value proposition A good headline alone is not enough—it needs help. That’s why you should always use headline as a part of a larger value proposition. Include a sub-headline to boost clarity, an intro paragraph to explain the service and bullet points to emphasize benefits. The sum of all of them will help you deliver a more effective message. Remember—people scan, they don’t read. The structure I just described is extremely scan-friendly and enables to you to quickly deliver your main message to the visitors. Another important point—you don’t want to be a commodity. Google “project management software” and look at the different sites. “Easy project management," “Fast, Easy and Efficient Project Management," “Online project management made simple” and so on. It all sounds the same. People comparison shop. They want to be able to tell different options apart. You have to be different in an obvious way, or you’ll be “like all the others” and your headline will fall flat. I’ve written about value propositions in detail here. Conclusion
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The formulas I’ve outlined here are working for a lot of very successful companies. And they might work for you too (or might not). But they most definitely serve as great starting points for getting your headline split testing going.
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How To Get People To Believe What You Write We live in the age of distrust. Our bullsh*t detectors work at full speed and anything fishy gets caught. Any claim you make without showing proof is destined to fail. We’re all skeptics. Even if you mean well, people find it hard to believe you. Here are a few principles and a three-step sequence you can use to make your writing more believable. Principle #1: Don’t use superlatives, be specific I was delivering a conversion optimization workshop the other day, and one person asked about how to talk yourself up on the website. “Should I say I’m the best?” The answer is no. There’s nothing that makes people more skeptical than hype. Compare these statements, and pick the claim you believe more: “Fastest pizza delivery in town” vs “We deliver your pizza in 10 minutes." “We have the best italian restaurant” vs “Our restaurant has won 6 Golden Spoon awards in the Italian Food category“ “Cheapest web hosting plans” vs “Our monthly plans start from $1.99." “Best tasting coffee, guaranteed” vs “Major competitions have voted Esmeralda the consistent winner five years in a row“ I bet you found the second option more believable in each case. People don’t believe superlatives, they believe specifics. I understand the urge to want to use superlatives, but always translate them into specifics. People are not idiots. They won’t believe you’re the best just because you say so.
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Principle #2: Back up any claim with proof Your restaurant makes the best omelet in town? Says who? When you praise yourself, it’s not very believable. When a neutral third-party says something good about you, you can use that as a reference and instantly make your claim much more believable. This is why you need to use: customer testimonials (full name + photo or video), neutral expert opinions, third-party reviews, verified (scientific) studies to back up any claim you make. Papalote uses tweets and testimonials to praise their food. This makes it much more believable:
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Principle #3: Use simple language Read this: In the present report the results of a series of experiments are described in which wine and beer drinkers were tested to measure their peripheral competency. Did you get that? Me neither. If you want people to believe you, they need to understand you first. Forget jargon and corporate speak. People have a natural tendency to believe people like them. If you speak to them like they speak, you have a far greater chance of success. MailChimp gets it:
Complicated language confuses and frustrates people, and neither one helps your sales. The text on your website is there for people to read and understand—with ease. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing B2C or B2B marketing, there’s always an actual human being reading your stuff, so the text has to connect with that person.
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If you use overly complicated language—it just shows you’re out of touch and don’t really understand yourself what you’re doing. Note: don’t confuse this with using technical language. When a gene technology company talks to professionals in its field, there’s no need to dumb it down. Know your target customer. Do this: Go over the texts on your website and read them out loud. Imagine it’s a conversation with a friend. If there’s a sentence you wouldn’t say to a friend, re-word it. Further reading: Quick course On Effective Website Copywriting (my guest post on Smashing Magazine). Principle #4: Make it about them It’s about your customers. They want to make sure you’re on their side and care about their problems. If the CEO of Goldman Sachs would say: ‘invest all your money with us, you’ll get rich’— how many people would believe he has their best interests in mind? Not too many. People believe you when they can be sure you’re putting them first. In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Obama campaign focused on “we” (Yes we can), Clinton focused on “I” (The Strength and Experience to Make Change Happen). Accoring to this book, one analysis found that Obama used the word “we” 6x more than “I." In Clinton’s case, it was the opposite. We know how that played out. After a public scandal about people overdosing on Tylenol, they had a responsible dosing campaign. It said something like ’if you don’t use our product responsibly, better don’t use it at all’. Lots of people thought the campaign is going to flop—but it didn’t. People felt that Tylenol put people before profits, and they ate it right up. Crisis averted. What’s in it for me? Every visitor on your site cares the most about themselves (and their family). They don’t really care much about you. Hence, avoid language that’s about you and make it solely about them and how they can benefit. The process
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Use this three-step sequence to get people to believe what you write. 1. Engage first When was the last time somebody changed your point of view about something? People rarely do, especially when someone is trying to make them change it. People believe messages that already represent their world view, that validate their beliefs. Politics is the best example. When you hear a party you dislike make a statement, you’re almost certain to disbelieve them. And vice versa. Morgan Stanley screwed up the Facebook IPO—and many people went “I knew the banks were rotten to the core!." They were interpreting the news in a way that validated their beliefs about the huge financial corporations. Since you can’t target everyone anyway, it’s definitely a good idea to target people by their beliefs, by their world view. If you are like your customers, they’re much more likely to do business with you. If you don’t know what their world view is, you better start talking to them to find out. If your target group has various belief systems, the best way to get through to them is to start with engagement. Get them to agree with you first, find common ground before proceeding. Let’s say you want to reform the tax code. People have very different ideas about how it should work. But pretty much everybody can still agree that the tax system should be fair and support economic growth. Once we have established that, we can continue to a constructive discussion. So engage first. LessAccounting draws you in with a statement a lot of people resonate with: All small business accounting software sucks, but they quickly do themselves a disservice by claiming “we suck the least." People don’t believe superlatives (see above).
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2. Get them to agree with the problem It’s difficult to agree on the best way forward if we haven’t agreed on the problem first. Once you have engaged the prospect and drawn them in, the next step is to validate the problem. As neuromarketing research has shown, you have a much better chance of closing the sale when you get people to acknowledge the pain (the greater the pain, the higher the chance of sale). It’s important to know the language your customers use when describing the pain. Conduct user surveys and pay attention to the exact wording they use. Remember, you need to join the conversation in your customers’ mind. 3. Avoid hard sell, help them find the right solution The days when aggressive closing techniques and hard sell prevailed, are pretty much over. Nobody likes to be put under sales pressure—it makes people want to run away, and it boosts their skepticism. The best way to close the sale is to provide neutral, objective information and let the customer decide for themselves. The old school method is to say ‘we are the best’. The new school is to ask “what are your needs?”, to listen, then point out your strenghts and mention all the other suppliers out there along with their advantages. This is the way to win customers’ trust. People want somebody they can trust, not somebody who says ‘trust me’. While your competitors claim they’re the best, the fastest, the cheapest, you can stand out by helping customers make the best choice for them (even if it’s using somebody else’s products).
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Never claim that your solution is the ideal fit for everyone. It’s not and you know it. Instead, listen to them and suggest a solution that is best for their situation. Red Cappi claims to be the best email marketing tool to boost my business. Finally! I was looking for the one that’s best for me—I’ll sign right up! Or on second thought… not gonna happen.
Be honest about your weaknesses One of the best things you can do to build trust is to be honest about your shortcomings. No product in the world is the best for everybody, and the customers know it. Be straightforward about your weaknesses and mention which competitors can offer the value that you can’t. I’m sure you know the famous Listerine ads from the 1970′s that said “the taste you hate, twice a day." When the competing product Scope was touting it’s great taste, Listerine people responded by admitting the terrible taste—and making a point that it’s a necessary trade-off to achieve the superb effectiveness. Or maybe you’ve seen this ad:
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Volkswagen people knew well that the bug was ugly, and they were upfront about it. They mentioned it—making it thereby a non-issue—and focused on it’s mechanical qualities and durability. People know that ideal, perfect products do not exist. They’ve never bought one. So stop saying your’s is. Research confirms that balanced arguments are more persuasive. Bottom line: If you’re honest about your weaknesses, you’re more human and more trustworthy. Be honest, always The best way to come across honest and authentic is—by being honest and authentic. Always and over a long period of time. If you always stick to your word, people will believe you. A great way to build a business is by building an audience who is looking forward to your messages (permission marketing at it’s best). The foundation of this is always being honest. People yearn for authenticity and honesty, and will reward you for that. We hear about corrupt politicians and business executives all the time. There’s an inherent distrust against businesses. The world is flooded with scammy internet marketers that send you fake urgency emails and what not. Don’t be that guy.
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What To Call Your Call To Action Should you say ‘read more’ or ‘product information’ in your product category view? Which is better—‘add to cart’ or ‘buy now’? There’s a lot of information out there on call to action buttons (size, color, location etc), but with this post I want to focus on a single thing about them—the wording. I’m giving you four rules for naming your call to action buttons and links. 1. Use trigger words While people are browsing your site, they’re having a silent conversation in their mind. They’re asking themselves “where is X?” or “how do I do Y?” In most cases, people are looking for a specific wording. Trigger words are the words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking. If the user is looking for “pricing,” and your link says “pricing,” they’re going to click on it. So in this case “pricing” would be the trigger word. Let’s say you want to find pricing information for backup service Crashplan. Where would you click?
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People won’t go for the free trial without knowing what it’s going to cost them after the trial period is over. Don’t do this at home. When people scan your web page and can’t find what they want (either the content or the link to it), you have a problem. Don’t be clever, don’t re-invent the wheel Remember, people spend most of their time on OTHER websites and are used to common wordings like ‘pricing’ or ‘login’. If you try to be original and use ‘see how cheap it is’ and ‘entry’ instead, you’re doing yourself a disservice. So first thing, talk to your user base and try to understand which particular words they are looking for. 2. Call it what it does The web is filled with bad call to actions (CTAs). The reason is that most people don’t think for themselves, but just copy others. Or just don’t know any better. Here are some you will recognize. Submit. Nobody wants to submit. Perhaps they want to subscribe to a newsletter, send a message or post a question—but definitely not ‘submit’. Always call your form CTAs by the specific action they perform. What happens after the users clicks? If they sign up for something, make that the call to action! Read more. About what? Make it specific—what’s there behind the link. Next. What comes next? I don’t know! This causes click fear. Say what comes next. When calling the user to action, instead of the above mentioned vague words, use brief but meaningful link text that explains what the link or button offers. There is one exception—click here (now). I’ve seen many tests where ‘click here’ performs really well. Here’s a MarketingSherpa study that found the same. Also note that this only applies to the call to action. You should not turn ‘click here’ into a link in the general body copy, always use contextual wording. Owen and Fred’s email capture box has ‘subscribe’ as the call to action. I think everybody gets what happens after clicking the button. (But they should work on the value proposition of the form).
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Also, avoid CTAs like ‘click here to discover X’ or ‘learn more about how we got started’. Avoid the click and learn more part, they’re just plain unnecessary—use just ‘discover X’ or ‘how we got started’. Don’t be verbose. Use terms people understand. 3. Don’t rush commitment Most people are commitment-averse. The bigger the commitment that is being asked of us, the less likely we are to go for it. Volunteer at a homeless shelter for a day? Hmm.. well, I guess I could… Volunteer three days a week for one year? No, thanks (some excuse). Following the same principle, don’t ask for a commitment when you can delay it. The best example would be ‘buy now’ vs ‘add to cart’. When ‘buy now’ seems awfully final, ‘add to cart’ seems kind of risk-free and leaves the door open for changing the mind. Seminole Sitters have this call to action on their site. The funny thing is that when you click “pay now,” you actually can’t pay! A clear case where a much better call to action could be made.
When you write your next call to action, evaluate the level of commitment you’re asking and see if you can lessen it.
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4. Add benefits If it’s not just another link, but a call to action on your landing page (or any other important page), you might want to add some punch to it. You should definitely have a great sales copy before the CTA, but since people don’t read, you should communicate some value also next to the call to action itself. Vimeo Pro says ‘Get PRO Now!’ (I like how clear it is, but I’d lose the exclamation mark), and adds that it’s ‘only $199/year!’. Since that really is a good deal for professional video hosting, it adds to the attractiveness of the CTA.
Ganttic addresses customer anxiety by adding “no credit card required” to their call to action:
Conclusion
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Make your call to action link or button texts clear, use trigger words, go easy on the commitment and add some extra motivation to take action.
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Value Proposition Examples Value proposition is the number one thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button. It’s also the main thing you need to test—if you get it right, it will be a huge boost. If I could give you only one piece of conversion advice , “test your value proposition” would be it. The less known your company is, the better value proposition you need. When I reviewed a bunch of websites, the conclusion was that missing or poor value proposition is one of the most common shortcomings. What exactly is a value proposition? A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. In a nutshell, value proposition is a clear statement that explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy), delivers specific benefits (quantified value), tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation). You have to present your value proposition as the first thing the visitors see on your home page, but should be visible in all major entry points of the site. It’s for people to read and understand Value proposition is something real humans are supposed to understand. It’s for people to read. Here’s an example of what a value proposition is NOT supposed to be like: Revenue-focused marketing automation & sales effectiveness solutions unleash collaboration throughout the revenue cycle Would you be able to explain to your friend what the offer is and how they’d benefit? Didn’t think so. Unfortunately it’s no joke. Such meaningless jargon-propositions are
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Didn’t think so. Unfortunately it’s no joke. Such meaningless jargon-propositions are abundant. Avoid blandvertising at all costs. Use the right language Your value proposition needs to be in the language of the customer. It should join the conversation that is already going on in the customer’s mind. In order to do that you need to know the language your customers use to describe your offering and how they benefit from it. You cannot guess what that language is. The way YOU speak about your services is often very different from how your customers describe it . The answers are outside of your office. You have to interview your customers to find it out, or use social media. What the value proposition is NOT It’s not a slogan or a catch phrase. This is not a value proposition: L’Oréal. Because we’re worth it. It’s not a positioning statement. This is not a value proposition: America’s #1 Bandage Brand. Heals the wound fast, heals the hurt faster. Positioning statement is a subset of a value proposition, but it’s not the same thing. What the value proposition consists of The value proposition is usually a block of text (a headline, sub-headline and one paragraph of text) with a visual (photo, hero shot, graphics). There is no one right way to go about it, but I suggest you start with the following formula: Headline. What is the end-benefit you’re offering, in 1 short sentence. Can mention the product and/or the customer. Attention grabber. Sub-headline or a 2-3 sentence paragraph. A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom and why is it useful. 3 bullet points. List the key benefits or features. Visual. Images communicate much faster than words. Show the product, the hero shot or an image reinforcing your main message.
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Evaluate your current value proposition by checking whether it answers the questions below: What product or service is your company selling? What is the end-benefit of using it? Who is your target customer for this product or service? What makes your offering unique and different? Use the headline-paragraph-bullets-visual formula to structure the answers. How to create a winning value proposition? The best value proposition is clear: what is it, for whom and how is it useful? If those questions are answered, you’re on the right path. Always strive for clarity first. If your value proposition makes people go “hmph?," you’re doing it wrong. If they have to read a lot of text to understand your offering, you’re doing it wrong. Yes, sufficient amount of information is crucial for conversions, but you need to draw them in with a clear, compelling value proposition first. Research by MarketingExperiments says that the key challenge companies have is identifying an effective value proposition, followed by communicating it clearly. What makes a good value proposition: Clarity! It’s easy to understand. It communicates the concrete results a customer will get from purchasing and using your products and/or services. It says how it’s different or better than the competitor’s offer. It avoids hype (like ‘never seen before amazing miracle product’), superlatives (‘best’) and business jargon (‘value-added interactions’). It can be read and understood in about 5 seconds. Also, in most cases there is a difference between the value proposition for your company and your product. You must address both. Here’s a value proposition worksheet you might find useful.
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How to craft a unique value proposition A key role for the value proposition is to set you apart from the competition. Most people check out 4-5 different options / service providers before they decide. You want your offering to stand out in this important research phase. So how do you make your offer unique? Often it’s hard to spot anything unique about your offering. It requires deep self-reflection and discussion. If you can’t find anything, you better create something. Of course the unique part needs to be something customers actually care about. No point being unique for the sake of being unique (“the ball bearings inside our bicycles are blue”). All supermarkets are pretty much the same, right? Well, no. Here’s an example from Austin, TX of how a supermarket can be unique. Here are two articles that can help you with finding a “theme” or an angle for your value proposition: Value Propositions That Work The Five Propositions that Help Companies Create Value for their Customers The key thing to remember is that you don’t need to be unique in the whole world, just in the customer’s mind. The closing of a sale takes place in a customer’s mind, not out in the marketplace among the competition. Boosters for your value proposition Sometimes it’s the little things that tip the decision in your favor. If all major things are pretty much the same between your and your competitors’ offer, you can win by offering small value-adds. I call them boosters. These things work well against competitors who do not offer them. Boosters can be things like Free shipping Fast shipping / Next day shipping Free bonus with a purchase Free setup / installation
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No setup fee No long-term contract, cancel any time License for multiple computers (vs 1) (Better than) Money-back guarantee A discounted price (for a product) Customizable You get the idea. Think what small things you could add that wouldn’t cost you much, but could be attractive to some buyers. Make sure the booster is visible with the rest of the value proposition. Example Notice the “free shipping” signs on the left and top right? Those are boosters.
Good value proposition examples It’s tough to find perfect value proposition examples. Probably because it’s hard to create
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a great one. I find flaws or room for improvement with most value propositions I came across. I’m also fully aware that I’m not the ideal customer for many of the examples shown below, and all my critique is, is an educated hypothesis (that should be tested). Here are some good examples along with my comments: CampaignMonitor
Comments Very clear what it is and for whom Specific lead paragraph Key features outlined above the fold A relevant image Features a booster—“100 percent rebrandable” Stripe
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Comments It’s clear what it is and for whom Specific benefit oriented sub-headline Relevant visuals Smooth transition into features and benefits Geekdom
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Comments Clear statement about what it is and for whom List of benefits Relevant image Evernote
Comments A different kind of layout, but well done. It tells a story of ‘what’ and ‘how’ . Easy to
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follow. Key features / benefits listed along with relevant imagery ‘Remember everything’ is a good slogan, but I’d add a specific sub-headline underneath it for improved clarity. Square
Comments Very clear headline Benefit and action oriented sub-headline Key benefits clearly listed Relevant image Missing: comparison with the competition Meetingburner
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Comments The headline is very clear The text paragraph is decent, but shouldn’t start with a call to action Comparison with the competition done (5x faster, free, mention of unique features) I would definitely list the key benefits / features in bullets for improved readability Prey
Comments The headline does communicate an emotional benefit, but its not clear enough and should be better. It’s the first thing people read. Clarity would get an instant boost if the headline would be something like “Keep track of your laptop, phone or tablet. Get it back when it gets stolen or lost. “ The following paragraph does a good job explaining what it is.
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I would use an actual screenshot of the product to better demonstrate what it does. It uses boosters like social media proof and respected logos. Extra note: last week my laptop was stolen. 5 days later I got it back because I had Prey installed on the laptop and I could track its location. I passed the info to the cops, who retrieved it. It’s awesome—install it on all your devices. Poor value proposition examples Some lessons from the department of “don’t do this." Cloudflare:
I use this service myself and think it’s great, but they really need to do a better job. Comments: Don’t rely on just the video to do the job. Your value proposition has to be in words people can read. Video is extra, supplemental information. Awful clarity: “we’ll supercharge your website”? Nobody will understand what that means. Continuum Financial
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Comments No proper value proposition in place at all. The readability is extremely poor. The text is for reading, it should be minimum 14px. Don’t ever waste precious attention on useless headlines like “Welcome to our website." Have you ever seen a website where the visitors are not welcome? The text is all about “them." We are, we offer, we have. It should be about the customer. Jargon! Image is relevant, but kind of cheesy stock photo. Use a more authentic image. Testing value propositions You definitely have to test your value proposition. How? 1. A/B testing The best way is to craft two candidates (or more, if you have tons of traffic) and split test them. Ideally you would measure sales conversions (for most accurate results), but if that is not possible lead conversions or even clickthroughs will do.
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2. Pay per click advertising A fast and cheap way to go about it is using Google AdWords or Facebook ads. Basically you would split test ads with different value propositions, targeting the same customer. The ad with higher CTR (clickthrough rate) is obviously a better attention grabber and interest generator, although it doesn’t necessarily mean higher sales conversions. Send the traffic to a corresponding landing page and test conversions, too.
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7 Principles of Effective Sales Copy Why is it that some books become bestsellers and other can hardly sell a 100 copies? Why is it that some books you read with passion and interest, with some you can’t get past the first 10 pages? What’s the difference. It’s simple: the choice of words. Which words you use in what order make all the difference! It doesn’t matter if it’s books or websites, but words do matter, so pick your words carefully. As Mark Twain said, “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." Here are the principles of writing good sales copy. 1. Who are you talking to? Look at the three pictures below. A skater dude, a busy mom and a backpacker. If you’re writing sales copy for a product, you should always talk to a specific person in mind.
You should talk differently to all of the people below—no brainer, right? Still most people try to write copy that works for everybody. Try to figure out what is the common denominator between all the potential buyers. Create a customer persona, describe this person and give it a name. Imagine what this person is like, how he spends his days and what are the key issues for him. Your sales copy will be much better if you write it with a specific person in mind. 2. You’re writing to your friend (wife, colleague etc) Don’t forget you’re dealing with people. Even if you sell B2B products, there’s always a person with a name and an identity reading your copy and making decisions.
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If you know this, then why are you writing business jargon? Forget buzzwords (social media management system) and nonsense that doesn’t mean anything (flexible solutions). Say it as it is. Use ‘the friend test’. Read your copy and if you spot a sentence you wouldn’t use in a conversation with your friend, change it. “Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favour of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.”—Helena Rubinstein, CEO, www.labgroup.com. 3. Work hard to create a compelling headline People don’t read, they skim. The main thing they DO read is the headline, so make it good. If the headline does not capture their attention and make them interested to read further, the rest of the copy doesn’t matter. “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”—David Ogilvy, ad guru. Questions to think about while coming up with a great headline: What does your prospect care about the most? What her biggest problem? Biggest goal or dream? How can you help her achieve it or solve it? The best headlines communicate a direct benefit. It’s hard to know off the bat which headline will work the best. Test them. 4. Don’t make them think Thinking is hard. Most people don’t want to do it. They look at your copy and want to understand what is it that you’re offering here. If it’s not obvious in first seconds, they will move on. Your main headline might be benefit-oriented, but underneath it describe in 2-3 lines what your product is, does and who is it for. A photo or screenshot of the product is a
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smart idea to add, people “get” images much faster than text. 5. AVOID ALL CAPS AND DON’T USE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! There are no good reasons to put your text in all-capital-letters. Putting a lot of words in all caps or all bold slows down reading, comprehension, and interest. Since there are more shape differences with lower case letters than with capitals, texts in lower case are recognized faster than all caps. Also, using more than one exclamation mark in a row shows you’re 12 years old. Nobody wants your stuff more just because you add exclamation marks. Au contraire. 6. Readability matters If you want people to read your text, make it readable. Even the most interesting copy in the world is not read if the readability is poor. Key things to improve readability: Font size minimum14px, preferably 16px Line height 24px New paragraph every 3-4 lines (empty line between paragraphs) Use sub-headlines as much as you can (at least after every 2 paragraphs) Use images to break text apart. People read more if patterns are broken. Line width max 600 px. If your lines are too long, people won’t read them. Dark text on a light background, ideally black text on white background. 7. Long or short? Tests have shown that 79 percent of people don’t read, they just skim. However, 16 percent read everything. Those 16 percent are your main target group, the most interested people. If people are not interested in what you are selling, it doesn’t matter how long or short your sales copy is. If they are interested, you should give them as much information as possible. A study by IDC showed that 50 percent of the uncompleted purchases were due to lack of information.
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They can always skip parts and click the “buy” button once they have the information they need. But if they read through the whole thing and they’re still not convinced or have questions, then you have a problem.
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Copywriting Based on the Science of Persuasion If you’re ever going to sell anything online, copywriting is a much needed skill. The conventional copywriting wisdom says that you should more or less try stick to the following formula: 1. Tell the reader you understand their need, 2. Tell your prospect why your product is the best solution they can buy, 3. Offer all kinds of proof like testimonials, charts and so on, 4. Explain all the ways the product will benefit the customer, 5. Present the price in a way that makes it sound like a great deal, 6. Give a (better than) money-back guarantee, 7. Add bonus products to really motivate the customer to buy, 8. Make it a limited time or quantity offer, 9. Ask for the sale and tell them exactly what steps to take. Is the exact sequence that persuades people or why should this work? What scientific data is available to use about persuasion? Which research can we rely on to make our writing more persuasive? Here’s a summary of the most prominent books and publications on the matter. The work of Robert Cialdini Mr. Cialdini is undoubtedly the biggest authority on the field. His books are bestsellers and have been in the “must-read” list for marketers and copywriters for years. Cialdini came up with six scientific principles of persuasion that will help guide you to become more effective at getting people do what you want. In case you have no idea
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what those principles are, then here’s the summary: Principle 1: Reciprocity People feel obligated to give back to others who have given to them. How to use it: teach your prospect something useful in your copy, give away free stuff and better yet—add value to your prospects long before you even start to sell them something. Principle 2: Liking We prefer to say “yes” to those we know and like. How to use it: talk/write like a human, connect with the reader, share details about yourself. Blog. Be friendly and cool (like Richard Branson). Principle 3: Social proof People decide what’s appropriate for them to do in a situation by examining and following what others are doing. How to use it: show how many others are already using your product. Show off your numbers. Use testimonials. Link to 3rd-party articles. Principle 4: Authority People rely on those with superior knowledge or perspective for guidance on how to respond AND what decision to make. How to use it: Demonstrate your expertise. Show off your resume and results. Get celebrity (in your niche) endorsements. Principle 5: Consistency Once we make a choice/take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. How to use it: Start small and move up from there. Sell something small first (a nobrainer deal), even if you make no money on it. They now see themselves as your customer, and will be much more likely to return to make a larger purchase. Principle 6: Scarcity Opportunities appear more valuable when they are less available.
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How to use it: Use time or quantity limited bonuses. Limit access to your product. Promote exclusivity. SEOmoz has a great illustrated article on all of these principles. Naturally you can get the full picture of these principles from his book Influence. His other book—Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive—builds on that and adds some practical ideas. See the list of these 50 ways here. Robert Gifford and five elements of an effective message Mr. Gifford is a professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. He is co-author of a relatively recent American Psychological Association reportthat examined the interface between psychology and climate change. He explains what makes people receptive and how to get messages across effectively: It has to have some urgency. It has to have as much certainty as can be mustered with integrity. There can’t be just one message: there must be messages targeted to different groups. Messages should be framed in positive terms. People are less willing to change their behaviour if you tell them they have to make sacrifices. If you tell them they can be in the vanguard, be a hero, be the one that helps—that works. You have to give people the sense that their vote counts and that their effort won’t be in vain. While his work focused on the message of climate change, it will work in your sales copy too. The art of persuasion by Angela Lee and Brian Sternthal Research by Kellogg professors Angela Lee and Brian Sternthal offers insight into effective messaging. In a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Kellogg professors say the key to an effective message is finding the fit between the consumers’ goals and the level of abstraction. The researchers found that when consumers aimed to fulfill aspirations and satisfy achievement goals, more abstract messages—for example, those highlighting the freedom TiVo provides—stimulated favorable brand evaluations. On the other hand,
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consumers who sought to fulfill their responsibilities and satisfy their security goals were more persuaded by concrete messages, such as those emphasizing TiVo’s replay and slow-motion features. So this means that first you have to figure out the emotional vibe of your prospect—or figure out what kind of motivations you’re targeting with your product. If you get it right and the level of abstraction fits the goal, people understand messages better and are more easily persuaded. Messages that stick Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” Isn’t that true? Some stories—especially urban legends, conspiracy theories, and scandals circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people who really try to spread their ideas— businesspeople, scientists, politicians, journalists, and others—struggle to get anyone to remember what they said. Two brothers, Chip Heath (a Stanford Business school professor) and Dan Heath (a corporate education consultant at Duke) found after extensive research that the ideas that ‘stick’ all share the following six principles: 1. Simplicity—Your message has to be simple—stripped down to it’s core intent. You must come up with a profound compact phrase that would summarize your whole premise. 2. Unexpected—In order to capture someone’s attention, you need to break a pattern— in other words to present the unexpected. You need to understand and play with two essential emotions—surprise and interest. Surprise gets our attention and interest keeps our attention. Got a conventional product? Get a new one. 3. Concrete—People won’t remember vague stuff. What helps people understand new concepts is concrete language. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas. Don’t say ‘fast acceleration’, say 0 to 60 mph in 3 seconds. 4. Credible—You need somebody who people trust to confirm your case. The trustworthiness of your source makes all the difference. People need something / someone credible in order to believe you. 5. Emotional—Feelings inspire people to act. If you story does not invoke any emotions,
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you’ve lost. 6. Stories—How do you get people to act on your idea? A credible idea make speople believe. An emotional idea makes people care. Put both of them together into an idea as stories have the amazing dual power to stimulate and to inspire. Remember to read their excellent book ‘Made to Stick.’ Buy buttons in the brain
Research in neuromarketing (put together in this book) reveals interesting things about our brains. As it turns out, we have 3 brains. Well, not really, but the brain does have 3 layers. Each layer has it’s own functions: the “New Brain” thinks, the “Middle Brain” feels and the “Old Brain” decides—it reviews input from the other two brains and controls the decision making process. The ‘Old Brain’ is the part that humans (and it’s predecessors) have had the longest—like 160 million years or so. So the part of the brain that controls decisions is pretty primitive and mostly concerned with survival. We’re usually trying to talk to the ‘New Brain’—the sophisticated one—but it’s the brute that makes all the decisions, so we need to dumb it down. Here’s the formula: Selling probability = Pain x Claim x Gain x (Old Brain)3 First you need to identify the prospect’s pain (the greater the pain, the higher the chance of sale) and make sure they acknowledge the pain before you start to sell them anything. Second, you’ve got to differentiate your claims from your competitors. The strongest claim is the one that eliminates the strongest pain. Next you have to show convincing proof of these claims. The ‘Old Brain’ is resistant to
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new ideas and concepts, so your proof must be very convincing. Show tangible evidence, data, testimonials, case studies. And finally—deliver to the ‘Old brain’. You need to start with a ‘grabber’—something that really gets the attention (‘if you’re selling fire extinguishers, start with fire’, like Ogilvy said). Second—the ‘Old brain’ is visual, hence start with a big picture. Remember—the ‘Old brain’ is concerned with survival. So it only cares about itself and not anyone else. Your message needs to be entirely about the prospect. Get the book to find out about all the other ways to push the right buttons in the brain. Last but not least You can find lots of good stuff from a book that is now freely available (as it was written in 1923)—Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. Here’s the link to the free pdf download.
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Click Fear and How to Avoid It No, it’s not a modern day phobia. It’s when people are not sure what will happen after they click. So in most cases they won’t. If you want to get people to click on your buttons, make them feel in control. It’s the uncertainty that kills the clicks. People like to feel in control People feel much more comfortable when they know exactly what’s going to happen. That’s why most people go to places they’re used to and use things they’re familiar with. People fear the unknown. —Go over there and say ‘hi’ —And then what do I say? This hypothetical conversation between teenage boys is about click fear. If you come across a new situation for the first time, you feel anxious. The way to overcome it is to be prepared—to know ‘what’ will happen and what you can do. One of the chacters in the book The Game told me the #1 benefit that nerds get from learning pickup artistry is confidence of knowing what to do. Knowing ‘what’ makes us feel at ease. People want to know why they are being asked to do something If somebody comes up to you and says “roll your eyes 3 times and then look down”. Are you going to do it? Most people would probably say “why?”. People always want to know the ‘why’. So the best way to combat click fear is through clarity: answer the ‘what’ and ‘why’. Examples of click fear Electricity Wizard:
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They want my name, phone and zip code. Call to action says ‘get a fast quote’. Question: Do you know what will happen after you click? Is it clear? No (= click fear). Many bad things might possibly happen. Anyone who has gotten insurance quotes online knows that all hell might break loose and you might get 20 sales guys calling you the next second. Nobody wants that. If you ARE going to call, it’s also better to say it—it sets the expectation. Now when your salespeople call, they (probably) won’t be hung up on (as fast). When people get someone selling to them over the phone, and they’re not expecting the call, they’re not going to want to listen to it. What they got right is answering the ‘why’ part. CareOne: This is is a landing page for a debt relief service. They ask for sensitive data, and the call to action is extremely vague ‘get solutions now’. They do include the text ‘find out how much you can save’ and ‘no commitment’, but I still don’t get a picture what exactly will happen after I fill the form. Will you show me the answer instantly? Will somebody call me? Email me?
Firebase: “Build a sample app in 5 minutes” is quite descriptive, but I still don’t have a clear picture
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of what’s going to happen when I click. Since no data is asked, I bet they get a lot of click’n'backs (click, then hit back). Suggested improvement: add a line below the call to action to explain what awaits on the other side.
Good examples Polls.io: Click fear is removed by not asking for a click. Instead, they merely ask you to write a poll question.
Once you do it, the form gets extended (‘what’s up’ is what I wrote there):
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Now the call to action says ‘Create this poll’. I’m very clear what will happen—I’m creating the very poll I just wrote a question for! Nest: They use clarity (no doubt what’s going to happen) and low commitment. This is of course a much simpler case compared to asking for a signup.
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Chatenvy: Clear description of what happens after clicking the button. Clear call to action.
Britannica Online: Very clear copy and call to action. Additional fears mitigated with the “risk free” thing.
Conclusion
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Do a quick usability test for each call to action. Ask a stranger (preferably your ideal customer) what they think happens after they click? Do they have any fears, doubts? Make it clear what happens after the click, why they should do it and address any fears.
Become a Hyperink reader. Get a special surprise. Like the book? Support our author and leave a comment!
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VII.
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10 Principles of Effective Pricing Pages If you run a SaaS (software as a service) business or only sell one product (with some options), you probably have a dedicated pricing page for the whole thing. Here’s how to get it right. 1. Simple is best Some fundamental truths: People don’t read, they skim. Nobody likes complicated stuff. Nobody enjoys figuring stuff out. People prefer things that are easy to understand. Conclusion: make your pricing simple, and the pricing page easy to understand. When you start building your pricing page, the #1 question you have to ask yourself is “how can we make this as easy as possible?” LessMeeting improved conversions after simplifying its pricing. Ash Maurya found that simplest pricing sold the best. Can you figure out how much Vimeo Plus costs?
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Simple = #winning. Subway found success with its $5 footlong sandwich campaign. Fiverr probably wouldn’t have become known if it hadn’t had the $5 pricing policy. Apple gets it. The new iPad costs $499. Old one $399. Simple pricing works. Tiered pricing is the standard for SaaS companies, and many follow suit blindly. But maybe you should get rid of it? Assistly (now desk.com) did just that. “Today’s businesses want to buy SaaS services like they buy apps in the Apps Store. We saw an opportunity to simplify our pricing and drive customer satisfaction through the roof.”—Matt Trifiro, senior vice president of marketing. My point is not that you should get rid of tiered pricing, but that you should strive for simplicity—even if it means disrupting the norm. 2. Make it easy to compare People do research, and compare your offer to a couple of alternatives. You want to come out as a winner from these comparisons. Let’s say I’m looking for a social media monitoring service. “I’m an educated buyer, I know what my needs are, so I’m not going to read through the websites, I’m just going to quickly look at the pricing of different options out there.” This is how most users compare options. They will only pay extended amount of attention when the first conditions have been met.
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Plans have another role to play besides getting people to sign up. They’re also there to help people understand what they want. As Dan Ariely put it—”most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.” The options on different plans should communicate what’s possible. Trackur is doing many things well, and some things not so much. The prices are huge—so they get more focus than the features / benefits. If you’re not competing on price, might not be a good idea.
What I like is the how the features are presented—well built for the browsers doing comparison shopping (and +1 for the tooltips). On the negative side, the feature list is kind of long and doesn’t even fit on the same screen with prices. It’s a tough challenge for the designers, I know. They’ve still done much better than some horrible examples. Oh, and lose the exclamation marks. Some companies make it hard to compare on purpose Of course, you could try a radically different approach and make it very difficult to compare. Supermarkets and airlines do just that—on purpose. The cost of flying from point A to point B is not that straightforward.
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point A to point B is not that straightforward. “For most travelers, the air fare is now the starting point rather than the end point in calculating what your trip cost will be,” said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research. “You can’t rely on average airfare data anymore.” There’s the price of the seat, then fees for checked luggage (often different for 1st and 2nd), sometimes even for carry-on bags, food and so on. Why do they do this? Nickel-and-diming you is one, but also so you wouldn’t be (easily) able to compare their offer to the competition, and decide on the price. A common way to confuse people is to see in bulk. We know more or less how much a carton of eggs should cost. What about a bulk offer of 48 eggs? People assume that buying in bulk is cheaper, but often it’s actually more expensive. While it may work for some companies, I advise against it. As simple as possible pricing will work the best for 9 out of 10 companies. 3. Help people choose a plan When you offer a choice of plans, people need to make a choice. The easier it is to understand the differences between plans, the easier it is to choose. I like how Viddler explains who is which plan for:
What they’re doing a lousy job with is communicating the features of each plan. Their competitor Vzaar is using meaningless names for their plans, which is unfortunately
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pretty common. Professional? As in “not amateur”? Blaah.
What Vzaar is doing well is emphasizing one of the plans. It draws the eye and suggests a “safe” option. When in doubt, the user can pick that one. Which plan to emphasize? There is no single best way to go about it. I would test these options: The middle option. It makes sense to suggest the middle plan as most people usually prefer something in the middle anyway. What fits most users the best. From user experience perspective you should suggest the plan that (honestly) fits the majority of the visitors the best. Hopefully you’ve planned your plans well. The most expensive one. Price anchoring! Let’s say your most expensive option is $990/mo. If you emphasize this plan, that’s the first price they will see. Next—they see the middle plan is just $59/mo. Suddenly it looks cheap. Free / Trial. Suggest the plan with the least amount of friction. Get them to sign up and see for themselves that your product is wicked (and it’s worth it to upgrade). 4. Address FUDs FUDs—fears, uncertainties, doubts. Whenever you ask for money, there is friction. You cannot remove friction, but you can minimize it. The best way to overcome objections is to prevent them from happening. First, make a list of all the possible reasons why somebody might NOT want to buy your thing (better
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yet, survey your leads and customers). Identify which FUDs are most common. Second, write an answer to all those fears and doubts. The result might be something like this: What if it’s not what I’m looking for? -> We offer a full 30-day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you don’t like it, you get all your money back. I don’t think it will work in my case. -> Show or link to testimonials / case studies where people like X have used it successfully. … and so on. Now work with your designer to find a place on your pricing page to include this. See how Kajabi is doing it. Notice the guarantee, testimonials and FAQ section right below the pricing plans:
Trust and security Will my credit card data be safe? Am I the only idiot buying this stupid thing?
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These might be subconscious questions, but they’re there for a lot of people—so address it. Sprout Social shows customer logos for social proof (and some testimonials):
5. Offer currency options It’s a global world. If you offer your product in euros, pounds or Canadian dollars to Americans, this will cause some friction. And probably US dollars are difficult for some Europeans. I don’t have exact data on how many people are negatively affected by seeing prices in foreign currencies, but reading this thread on HackerNews (predominantly US audience) gives some idea: Would you buy a service that bills only in €? € is OK—70 votes € is OK but I would really prefer $ if possible—65 votes € is not OK at all—19 votes I would not buy in $, but only in €—5 votes So out of a total of 159 votes 84 (~52.8 percent) would want to pay in dollars instead of euros. Foreign currency is definitely causing some friction. What’s the today’s rate? Do I need to use a calculator? Does my bank take a cut? Since exchange rates change, and
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how much will I get billed each month? People want to know how much they’re really paying! The solution: give the option to see the prices in different currencies. Basekit is a UK company. They show their prices both in pounds and dollars. Notice the currency change icons.
6. Limit choice Too much choice paralyzes. Most popular number of pricing plans offered among SaaS companies seems to be 4. While the linked article says it must be the wisdom of the crowds, I bet most of those companies just decided on four plans on a whim, and never tested it. RingCentral had 4 plans on their pricing page, and they decided to test it. The page that showed three plans increased conversions from the control (four plans) by more than 37 percent. The page that showed two plans decreased conversions. However, when you go to RinCentral pricing page today, it has four plans again (couldn’t find a case study to explain why). They must have conducted new tests and found a new winning page. Do your own testing. You might have heard that choices should always be limited to 7 +/-2. It’s a myth. Three options is definitely safe and not too much. Animoto pricing page:
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7. Incentivize up-front payments Cash is king, and having users pay up front for a longer period (year, 2 years) is good for cash flow. The main goal for the pricing page is to get users to sign up—so don’t be too aggressive with the upsell. Optimizely offers 3 options right above the plans, and defaults to one year (10 percent off). I like how subtle, yet insistent it is.
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GetResponse inserts the up-front payment price right into the plans. The users will focus on the annual price first.
I wonder how many are so bummed when they find out they have to pay more for month-to-month that they leave altogether. Only one way to find out!
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8. Add playfulness People like to play. They like to press buttons, drag stuff, and watch cause-and-effect take place. A great way to increase engagement on the pricing page is to add some playfulness. Here’s Heroku’s pricing page. You can drag the “Web Dynos” and “Worker Dynos” sliders and the price changes before your eyes. Click on the link and go play.
Was it fun? Many people think so. One guy on a HackerNews thread about Heroku’s pricing page: “… I literally spent ~15 minutes just playing with it!” Talk about engagement! How many other pricing pages do you know where people hang out for 15 minutes? We did something similar for Traindom. People can drag the slider to see their hypothetical monthly payment.
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People absolutely love it, and almost every visitor spends some time toying with it. The problem we had is that the numbers we showed were too confusing for some, and live chat was bombarded with clarifying questions. Simplify! (And use live chat for instant feedback). 9. Clear call to action The call to action button design, size and wording matter. The best starting point is to make the CTA buttons big and avoid saying ‘buy now’. I yet have to see a test where ‘buy now’ performed better than the alternatives (‘add to cart’, ‘get started’, ‘choose plan’ etc). Mixergy just uses the names of the plans as calls to action:
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Once you have the fundamentals in place, you can test colors and other minor things. 10. Tell them what happens next People like to feel in control. That’s why the elevators include the “close doors” button. (It doesn’t actually do anything). On the pricing page, they want to know what happens next. Make it clear what are the next steps, what’s going to happen after they pay. Put them in control of over the process. You’re dealing with their hard-earned money, nobody likes surprises in this phase. Awe.sm is getting it right by showing a liner flow of steps above the plans:
What about having the sign-up form on the pricing page? It’s something you have to test, but usually from the user experience point of view you shouldn’t include anything on the page the user doesn’t expect. Remember, people spend most of their time on OTHER websites. Most pricing pages don’t have a form right there, so people are used to expecting a call to action. Seeing a sign-up form right there might seem like a sales pressure, a distraction. It will take away the focus from choosing the right plan (and will cause some people to flee). Do your own testing Don’t just copy and assume stuff. Interview your customers. Try to understand how they
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shop for the things you sell. Simplify.
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Invent A New Category, Charge More Somebody asked me the other day how can they charge more for their product. Like way more than people are used to paying for products in that category. The solution: create a new product category. Many companies have done this successfully. All you have to do is call your product something else and build a different kind of experience around it. People have generally a pretty good idea how much things should cost—mostly because they remember how much they’ve paid for it. If you create a new category, there’s no price reference and people are much more likely to accept any price you name. “I don’t want a coffee, I want iced caramel macchiato” How did Starbucks get away with starting to charge $3 and more for coffee, when most other cafes were charging $1 or so? They changed the experience of buying coffee, so the perception of what people were getting, changed. It was like a different category product. Since the opening, they’ve aimed to become the “Third Place." “We’re in the business of human connection and humanity, creating communities in a third place between home and work“, said Howard Schultz, CEO. The Third Place concept informs the design of Starbucks shops. While coffee takes center stage, the design is meant to make customers comfortable by mixing upholstered chairs and sofas with hard-backed chairs around tables. Cool music in the background. Free electricity and wifi. This is the norm among coffee shops now (as is paying $3-$4 for coffee), but it didn’t used to be. It’s category Starbucks built along with a price tag for it. They also changed the name. Not just coffee, but Pike’s Place brew or Skinny Iced
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Caramel Macchiato. “Can I borrow your writing instrument?” Mont Blanc doesn’t call their product a “pen” in their catalog. They sell “writing instruments." Reason: people will pay $680 for a writing instrument. They can buy a perfectly functional pen at Wal-Mart for a dollar or less. “We don’t sell used cars here…” …. we sell “certified pre-owned vehicles." And that totally changes the game. Vehicle sounds more impressive than car Pre-owned removes the stigma of used and old Certified directly addresses any fears and doubts regarding quality, wear and tear In reality “certified” doesn’t often mean much and you will find forum threads like thiseverywhere, but it sure sounds good. Which one would you want—a used car or a certified pre-owned vehicle? While it’s not a new or changed category, it’s an example of how wording can help. There’s a great book about this kind of stuff, called Words That Work. Verizon LTE 4G Did you see this SNL skit? Avoid this kind of product jargon: This is a lesson that just putting a fancy names on something doesn’t create a new product category, but a whole lot of jargon. Setting up a new successful product category Creating a new category or niche means that, at first, you own it. Market development and associated costs can be high, time horizons long, and you might fail miserably. To be successful, you need a ton of money, the product category needs to be very narrow (think gloves for touchscreen) and perceivably different from anything else in the marketplace. This means you need to choose a product category where there is no-one else (or if there are other players, they are unknown).
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Should you succeed, owning it means high eventual ROI. Once the category is established, your brand will be the dominant one—enjoying high and profitable market share.
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Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know But Can Learn From Lots of entrepreneurs struggle with pricing. How much to charge? It’s clear that the right price can make all the difference—too low and you miss out on profit; too high and you miss out on sales. Don’t ask, can’t tell Asking people what they’d pay for and how much rarely works. For one thing people will tell you what they WANT to pay—which is obviously much less than what your product or service is actually WORTH. Second, what people say and what people do are very different things. When it comes to money, people are unable to predict accurately whether they’d pay or not. It’s much easier to spend hypothetical dollars than real ones. Also it’s worth remembering that people really don’t know how much things are worth, what’s a fair price (which is the reason TV-shows like “The Price is Right” can actually exist). William Poundstone, the author Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value says this: “People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don’t really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility, he says. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are “supposed to cost.” People are weird and irrational, and there’s much we don’t understand. Like why do shoppers moving in a counterclockwise direction spend on average $2.00 more at the supermarket? Why does removing dollar signs from prices (24 instead of $24) increase sales? What will work for you depends on your industry, product and customer. When you try to replicate what Valve did to increase their revenue 40x, it might not work for you, but then
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again, why not give it a try? Here’s a list of pricing experiments and studies you can get ideas from and test on your own business. The Economist and decoy pricing Dan Ariely describes this famous example in his amazing book Predictably Irrational. He came across the following subscription offer from “The Economist,” the magazine (he’s also explaining this in his TED talk here):
Both, the print subscription and Print and web subscription cost the same, $125 dollars. Ariely conducted a study with his 100 bright MIT students. 16 chose option A and 84 option C. Nobody chose the middle option. So if nobody chose the middle option, why have it? He removed it, and gave the subscription offer to another 100 MIT students. This is what they chose now:
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Most people now chose the first option! So the middle option wasn’t useless, but rather helped people make a choice. People have trouble comparing different options, but if 2 of the options given are similar (e.g. same price), it becomes much easier. The same principle was used with travel packages. When people were offered to choose a trip to Paris (option A) vs a trip to Rome (option B), they had a hard time choosing. Both places were great, it was hard to compare them. Now they were offered 3 choices instead of 2: trip to Paris with free breakfast (option A), trip to Paris without breakfast (option A-), trip to Rome with free breakfast (option B). Now overwhelming majority chose option A, trip to Paris with free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Paris than it is to compare Paris and Rome. A graph to describe this:
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So if you add a slightly worse option that is similar to A (call it A-), then it’s easy to see that A is better than A-, hence many people choose that. How you can use it: Add a decoy package or plan to your offer page, next to the offer you really want them to take. The magic of number 9 Go to Wal-Mart and you see prices ending with 9 everywhere. Does it really work? Surely all intelligent people understand that $39 and $40 are basically the same. Well, in eight studies published from 1987 to 2004 charm prices ($49, $79, $1.49 and so on) were reported to boost sales by an average of 24 percent relative to nearby prices (as per Priceless). In one of the experiments done by University of Chicago and MIT, a mail order catalog was printed in 3 different versions. One women’s clothing items tested was sold for $39. In experimental versions of the catalog, the company offered the same item for $34 and $44. Each catalog was sent to an identically sized sample. There were more sales at the charm price of $39 than at either of the other prices, including the cheaper $34. $39 had both greater sales volume and greater profit per sale. People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents. The explanation of why numbers ending with 9 work better has been much debated over the years. Mental rounding alone can’t explain it. Seems that 9 truly is a magic number. Is there anything that can outsell 9? Researches found that sale price markers (with the old price mentioned) were more powerful than mere prices ending with the number nine. In the following split test, the left one won:
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9 not so magical after all? Not so fast! Then they they split tested the winner above with a similar tag, but which had $39 instead of $40:
This had the strongest effect of all. I’m wondering whether the effect of this price tag could be increased by reducing the font size of $39. Say what? Marketing professors at Clark University and The University of Connecticut found that consumers perceive sale prices to be a better value when the price is written in a small font rather than a large, bold typeface. In our minds, physical magnitude is related to numerical magnitude. Oh yeah, when you go to Nordstrom, you don’t see any prices ending with a 9. The subliminal message here is “expect to pay." Anchoring and the contrast principle Do this test at home. Pour water in three bowls. Fill one bowl with cold water, the second with hot water and third one with lukewarm water. Now stick one hand in the cold water
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and the other one in the (not too) hot water. Keep them there for 30 seconds or so. Now put both of your hands into the lukewarm bowl. One hand will feel the water is warm, the other one that it’s cold. It’s about the contrast. The same principle applies to price. Nothing is cheap or expensive by itself, but compared to something. Once you’ve seen a $150 burger on the menu, $50 sounds reasonable for a steak. At Ralph Lauren, that $16,995 bag makes a $98 T-shirt look cheap. What’s the best way to sell a $2,000 wristwatch? Right next to a $12,000 watch. This mental process has a name. It’s called anchoring and adjustment. Anchoring In the 1970s by two psychologists by the names of Tversky and Kahneman theorized that suggesting an initial figure to a test subject caused that subject to use that number as a starting point for estimating unknown quantities. In their study test subjects were told the number 65 and then asked to estimate what percentage of African nations were members of the UN. The average response was 45 percent. They then tested a second group but salted them with the number 10 and their average response was 25 percent. Amazingly the group that was primed with the number 65 estimated nearly twice the true answer (23 percent) while the group primed with the lower number estimated a lower percentage (much more accurately). Anchoring influences prices Poundstone describes an experiment done with real estate prices. The researchers invited real estate experts and undergrad students to appraise a home for sale. All the test subjects were given the information a buyers would normally have, including a list of houses that recently sold, nearby houses currently for sale and so on + what the seller had listed the house for. The subjects were divided into four groups, each given a different listing price, and were then asked to estimate what the home was worth. These were the results:
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Anchoring worked even on real estate pros that had been selling properties in the area for 10+ years. Next time somebody asks you for a rough estimate or a ballpark figure, make sure it’s high! How you can use it: Start throwing out high numbers. Add some very expensive products to the selection (that you don’t even intend to sell). If the final price of your service / product is a result of negotiations, start high. If you’re competing on price, state how much others are charging before revealing your price. Straightforward pricing Ash Maurya, a startup entrepreneur, published an article on VentureHacks describing his pricing experiments with a photo sharing service. He tested a single, straightforward $49/yr offer vs 2 plans ($49/yr and $24/yr) vs 3 plans (added a freemium plan). The result? Surprisingly the single price offer won. Why? His own guess: “It does pay to align pricing with your overall positioning. Our unique value proposition is built around being “hassle-free and simple” and people seemed to expect that in the pricing model as well.” It might also be that in these complex and fast times we live in, people yearn for simplicity. Note: His freemium plan actually converted 12 percent more, but had the lowest retention. Be careful when offering free plans. You might just end up with a ton of free users to support and pay for. How you can use it: Consider your positioning and see if you can align your pricing to it. If you’re offering different plans right now, experiment with a single plan.
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Pay what you wish Pay what you want is a pricing system where buyers pay any desired amount for a given product, or nothing at all. In some cases, a minimum is set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price. Suggested price Suggested price can be a good idea—remember anchoring? Setting a fair suggested price gives the customer a true sense of value. It won’t prevent low offers, but it will keep more buyers in your ballpark. What about counter-offering lowballs? The danger here would be to appear that you’re just toying with them and it’s not really “pay what you wish." GetElastic brings this example: “Coming back with counter-offers is merely e-bargaining. It reveals you have a reserve price, and instead of offering a sale, customers must “guess” how low you’ll go. At worst, customers may feel they are being gamed into pay more than a sale price. Ashampoo Software (that’s not a typo) gets downright insulting when you sink too low below “regular price.” The snarky dialog box reads a condescending “This offer is much too low. Please enter a reasonable price.” Users don’t have time to play guessing games about what is a reasonable offer only to be ridiculed by a script.” Gap tried a variation of this too. They offered customers a one-day opportunity to name their price for certain styles of khaki pants on the www.gapmyprice.com microsite. Lowball offers were returned with slightly higher prices by the Gap, which the customer had one chance to accept or decline. Since they’re not doing anymore, it probably did not go too well. Well-known PWYW examples In October 2007, the British band Radiohead launched their latest album—In Rainbows— on the Internet. The band allowed fans to download the album freely and offer, in retribution, any amount of money they would like. Later they disclosed that the download of their new album generated more profit than the accumulated downloads from all previous albums. Panera Bread Co. used this same idea when it opened its first pay-what-you-want
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restaurant in Clayton, Mo. The company ended up making over $100,000 in revenue in the first month alone. It opened it’s fourth restaurant of this kind in Portland, and said at the time that about 20 percent of the visitors to the cafes leave more than the suggested amount, 20 percent leave less and 60 percent pay what is suggested. But nine months later it’s not doing so well. The Portland café is only making about 60 percent of the revenue of a regular, full-paying location, compared to an 80 percent take in the politer climes of St. Louis and Detroit. Also, the homeless tend to camp out there and stay all day if they aren’t shooed away, so Panera had to hire a bouncer. It’s important to have fair minded customers for this model to work (homeless and hungry people probably care more about being fed, than being fair). Combine “pay what you wish” with charity There’s some research that pay what you wish pricing works best when combined with charity. Ayelet Gneezy, a marketing professor at the University of California-San Diego, conducted a field experiment at a theme park (sample size: over 113,000). Customers were presented four different pricing schemes for souvenir photos: a flat fee of $12.95; a flat fee of $12.95 with half going to charity; pay-what-you-wish; and paywhat-you-wish with half going to charity. At a flat fee of $12.95 per picture, only 0.5 percent of people purchased a photograph; when customers were told that half the $12.95 purchase price would go to charity, a meager 0.59 percent purchased a photo. Under the simple pay-what-you-wish variation, 8.39 percent of people purchased a photo (almost 17 times more than before), but customers paid only $.92 on average. The final option—pay what you wish, with half the purchase price going to charity— generated big results: purchase rates of 4.49 percent and an average purchase price of $5.33, resulting in significant profits for the theme park. This is a substantial result, especially since it came from a real setting. Of course, the anonymity of the Internet removes the social pressure one feels after being served personally by a human being. It’s one thing to have the amount you choose observed and another thing to download stuff without being seen. The book Smart Pricing suggested that successful pay what you want programs are characterized by: A product with low marginal cost
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A fair-minded customer A product that can be sold credibly at a wide range of prices A strong relationship between buyer and seller A very competitive marketplace. If this describes your business, give “pay what you wish” a go. Let us know the results. Offering three options The old truth about offering 3 pricing options holds water. Here’s a pricing experiment in selling beer—again from W. Poundstone’s amazing book “Priceless.” People were offered two kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80 percent chose the more expensive beer. Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80 percent bought the $1.80 beer and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option. Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and arounf 10 percent opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price. You can influence people’s choice by offering different options. Old school sales people also say that offering different price point options will make people choose between your plans, instead of choosing whether to buy your product or not. How to test it: Try offering three packages, and if there is something you really want to sell, make it the middle option. Price perceptions I’m sure you know the classic “pennies-a-day” effect: “it costs less than $1 a day!." NPR stations ask people to donate by joining their dollar-a-day club. Framed in that manner, the donation seems quite reasonable—about the cost of a cup of coffee. Contrast that with what would happen if they asked people to join their “$365 a year” club. Neil Davidson writes this about price perceptions (in his book on software pricing called Don’t Just Roll the Dice):
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“People base their perceived values on reference points. If you’re selling a to-do list application, then people will look around and find another to-do list application. If they search the internet and discover that your competitors sell to-do list applications at $100 then this will set their perception of the right price for all to-do list applications.” If your product is more expensive than the common reference points, you need to change the perception of the category you’re in. How did Starbucks get away with starting to charge $3 and more for coffee, when most other cafes were charging $1 or so? They changed the experience of buying coffee, so the perception of what people were getting, changed. It was like a different category product. They also changed the name. Not just coffee, but Pike’s Place brew or Caramel Macchiato. If you’re creating a new category, there’s no price reference and people are much more likely to accept any price you name. How you can use it: If you want to charge more than the market average, look at the competition: how they package their offering; what’s the user experience like, and change that. If you look like a new category, people are more likely to pay up. On the other hand, if you can profitably sell something much cheaper than the other guys, great. Use their pricing as the reference point and you’ll win. Context sets perception You are stranded on a beach on a sweltering day. Your friend offers to go for your favorite brand of beer, but asks what’s the most you’re ready to pay for the beer? This was the scenario for a pricing experiment conducted by Richard Thaler. They tested two scenarios. In the first one the friend was going to get beer from the only place nearby, a local run-down grocery store. In the second version, he was going to get beer from the bar of a fancy resort hotel. The ambiance of the hotel was irrelevant, as the beer was to be consumed on the beach. Invariably, Thaler found, subjects agreed to pay more if they are told that the beer is being purchased from an exclusive hotel rather than from a rundown grocery. It strikes them as unfair to pay the same. This violates the bedrock principle that one
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Budweiser is worth the same as another, and it suggests that people care as much about being treated fairly as they do about the actual value of what they’re paying for. Thaler considered what his imaginary grocer could do to boost beer sales. He advised “investing in seemingly superfluous luxury or installing a bar." This would raise expectations about what the proper price of beer would be, resulting in more purchases. We happily pay $80 for 6 things in Whole Foods, but would consider that way too much in a regular supermarket. How you can use it: Invest in seemingly superfluous luxury. Use web design or packaging that says “expensive." Can I split test the price? Technically you can, but A/B testing your price is a dangerous territory. A number of companies (Dell, Amazon and others) in the past have been caught and got in trouble for doing just that, showing different price for the same product to different visitors. A better and safer approach is to test the price across objects. Don’t test the same product for $19 vs $39. Rather you should test two different products that essentially do the same thing, but just have a different price tag. Before deciding on your pricing strategy, it’s worthwhile to read Cindy Alvarez’s article where she makes the point that price is not the only cost to consider. When customers consider “what something costs," they’re actually measuring three main drivers: money (cost), time (how long will it take to learn?) and mental energy(how much do I have to think about this?). Take into account the profile of your buyer. Combine research from this article It seems to me that you could combine a lot of the research covered here into a single pricing experiment. How about this: 1. You create three different plans/packages, and intend to sell mainly the middle one. If your product is expensive, make your website look expensive. 2. The first plan is a decoy. It’s similar to the middle plan, but offers visibly less value while costing almost as much. Think of it as A- (as per The Economist example). 3. Second plan, the one you want to sell, offers good value for money. The price ends with 9. Maybe it even shows that it has been reduced from a previously higher price or it’s a sale (either way, it has to be true/ethical).
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4. Third plan is to serve as a contrast to the middle one, it’s role is to anchor in a high figure. Make it much, much more expensive than the middle plan. You don’t actually intend to sell it, but there always the type that wants the most expensive plan—so make sure you can actually deliver on it.
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Product Pricing Strategies and Techniques Product pricing can be one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs. How much to charge? How much is too much? Am I selling myself short? This article gives you some crucial things to know about product pricing strategies and techniques. The basics In product pricing you have to make a decision what kind of a pricing strategy are you going for. The strategy of choice depends quite a lot on your product itself and its competitors. Expensive pricing People generally have a pretty good idea what is cheap and what is expensive. If you’re going for expensive pricing, your product has to feel expensive. Your role here is to increase its perceived value. Do this exercise: think of a few luxury brands, and a few discount brands and write down the characteristics of each. What makes the difference? What do the expensive brands have that the cheap ones don’t? Things that drive up the perceived value of a product: 1) Packaging & Design Every high priced item you buy comes in a fancy box. Your product has to “look” expensive. You can do this also with digital products, just spend time on some high-end products’ websites and take note of what makes that website look expensive. Start with making your website look expensive, and make your product look fancy too. When it comes to information products, then pdf e-books will always seem cheap. Everybody knows how to create a pdf document and know it doesn’t take much. We recommend against it. Online courses, e-learning environments and information products shipped on physical media (DVDs) will always seem more valuable.
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2) Format Product differentiation! Don’t be like most products in your category. Repackage it into a different format, one that no one else is using. For instance if everyone else is selling ebooks on your topic, do your product in video. Video products always look higher class compared to text-only products. 3) Uniqueness Expensive products have to be one of a kind—the only one that does what it does. If your product has no unique differentiating characteristics in a crowded market, you really cannot charge more than the market average. 4) Availability You can charge a higher price is you have a very limited quantity, e.g. a coaching programs that only accepts 25 people. If all these four points are met, choosing an expensive pricing strategy can be very profitable. Things to remember about expensive products: It is one of the three strategies to increase profits (the other two are to sell more products and to sell to more customers), Charging more money for a product makes people instantly think it is better. Example: I bought 2 cars last month. One of them cost $10,000 and the other one $85,000. Which car is better? See—you don’t even need to know anything else to answer that question. Different + expensive = desire. Once you have successfully established your product as an expensive, your income will go up significantly every time you have a sale (but don’t do it too often or you’ll end up pissing off the customers that paid the higher price). Cheap pricing can sometimes be better Remember: if your product is not unique, you are always going to compete on price. If there are no significant differences between your product and competing products, people will choose based on price. That can work to your advantage. The most proven pricing strategy in a competitive market is doing it cheaper than others. People like to get stuff cheap. This is the best strategy to choose if your product is very
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similar to the others in the market. Cheap product pricing does not necessarily mean that you have to be the cheapest in the market. Testing a higher-than-average price for your product is a good thing to do. If you test a higher price and it brings in the same number of responses as the lower price, you immediately increase your profits. Generally higher price should reduce the number of sales. The theory of market elasticity says that the number of sales will go down when the price goes up, and vice versa. The question is: by how much? If its just a modest decrease, you will do better at a higher price becuase you will generate more profit and possibly bring in higher-quality clients that will spend more money later. If you make the price too high, your sales will drop precipitously to a point where you are bringing in too few new customers to maintain cash flow. This is usually easy to notice and fix. When you enter an existing market with a product that is not significantly different or better than the competitive products, the market experience is that you usually find more success when selling the product at a discount. When there is an established price for the same type of products then it is easy for the customers to figure out what is the average price. If you can sell at a significantly cheaper price, you can sometimes enjoy a very strong response. The question you need to answer is whether you can afford to run your business like that. Niche product pricing (when you’re unknown) So how does being a ‘nobody’ relate to pricing? Well one would assume that if you don’t have a big name that you can’t charge a high price. Even better, you can’t charge a high price if you have a small information product. The truth is that you actually can sell your infoproduct for a nice price, even if your readers don’t know who you are. You can also do well regardless of the size of your product. Write down the prices of as many ‘comparable’ information products within your niche. By comparable I mean products that target the same vein of information that you do. Create a list of the top three information products. Those products you feel would be most likely to compete directly with your type of reader.
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Now ask yourself these questions: Does your information product introduce a brand new theory? Is it something that nobody else is teaching? If it’s a product geared towards consumers, charge 20 percent-50 percent more than the highest priced product. If it’s geared towards business people, charge 30 percent-100 percent more than the highest priced product.Does your information product explain a topic differently than your competitors? Charge a median price. The average price between the lowest and highest products. Are you selling an audio or video product, where everybody else is selling a print product? Choose a price between the lowest and medium priced product. If you offer a brand new theory, go higher than the highest price. Online buyers comes from all walks of life. Some people perceive ‘free’ as being poor or inferior quality. Maybe they’ve been misled by free information, so they’re weary of it. Likewise if you price a product too low some buyers get suspicious. Quality = high price in many people’s mind. The rationale I hear from quite often from infoproduct creators is that if you price low, you’ll make it up in volume. Not always. Most people overestimate the number of people they think are going to buy their product. You might guesstimate 1,000. When in actuality you may only have the capacity for 500. That’s a big difference in the bottom line if you’ve decided to sell for $9.95, instead of $22.95. Optimum pricing strategy Before you set your price, you have to gain some insight into how much room you have to maneuver. A good way to start is to get a clear overview of your costs. Costs can be divided into variable and fixed costs. Variable costs are the costs you incur that are directly linked to the product you sell. For example if you sell a instructional video course “How to grow health houseplants” on a DVD, your variable costs per item would include the cost of the DVDs, the rights that you might have to pay per video and the shipping costs. In the online market, you are usually also paying to acquire the customers. If you pay 20 cents per click to Google and you convert every fiftieth visitor into a customer, you’d have to add $10 to your variable costs per product. Fixed costs are the costs you incur to keep your business running. These include employee wages, the rent for your office, telephone costs, utilities and so on.
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Let’s say that in the case above, your fixed costs amount to $1,000 USD a month. Your variable product costs come to $25 USD per DVD. You are expecting to sell 500 videos a month. Fixed costs: $1,000 Variable costs per video = $25 You are expecting to sell 500 videos so your total costs will be: (500* variable costs + fixed costs) 500* 25 + 1,000 = $13,500 To break even, you will have to charge $27 per video. (13,500 / 500 = 27) At this price you are not making or losing any money. This is your lower limit. The highest price you would be able to ask for is the market’s ceiling price. Look at your major competitors to estimate what this price could be. The price you charge for your product has a major impact on sales. Choosing the price, like choosing the media or the product, is fairly easy to do. Start by finding out what the competition is doing. If your competitors are selling their widgets for $195, you should consider selling yours for $195 too. You can safely assume that any product that has been selling well at $195 has been tested at other prices—higher and lower—and that $195 is where the money is. To be successful you will need to find this optimal selling price: a price at which the selling campaign will yield the greatest profits. This optimal price can change during the life cycle of the product—being higher when the product is hot, for example—but it is always important to know. If you deviate from it significantly, you will reduce profits or even create losses where profits should have been. Once you’ve taken stock of your costs, your product’s value and your competitive positioning, it’s time to select a price. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind: Better to charge more than less. A higher price increases the perceived quality of your product. If your price starts on the low side, you’ll meet more resistance from your customers as you try to increase your price than when your product is a little overpriced. If you are a small business don’t compete solely on price. For a smaller ecommerce business it’s normally a better idea to compete on added value than it is to compete on price. In a price fight, larger competitors with deeper pockets and lower operational costs wipe you off the field.
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When marketing to the global market, think about the US market and in US dollars ($USD). Undoubtedly, the US dollar is the currency of the internet; the majority of all transactions on the internet occur in US dollars. With almost 200 million internet users in North America, the US constitutes one third of the worldwide internet market. Price points matter. Never charge $100, charge $99.95 instead! If you want to charge over $100, then don’t go up to $101, go to the next natural bracket such as $109.95. When possible and your product is expensive, offer installments or financing. Many people are short on cash so offering them a special deal can work wonders to motivate sales. Why do you think there are so many retailers that offer “ZERO MONEY DOWN!” Giving customers the option to pay in installments or to receive financing can increase sales. Advanced pricing techniques The contrast principle Do this experiment at home. Fill three bowls with water: one with cold, one with hot and the third one with lukewarm water. Put one of your hands in the cold water and the other one in the hot water. Keep them in there for like 30 seconds. Now put both of the hands in the lukewarm water. One hand feels cold, the other one warm. This is the contrast principle. Nothing is expensive or cheap, it’s what you compare it to. The best way to sell $800 shoes is to place $3000 shoes next to them. This works very well with expensive products as you can make them seem not as expensive compared to other products. Go to any high end retail store and see how this is done effectively. The only reason watch stores carry $50,000 watches is to make the $3000 watch seem like a reasonable price. Decoy pricing Decoy pricing is a method of strategically pricing products so that consumers will choose the one that you most want to sell to them. Dan Ariely in his book ‘Predictably Irrational’ explains this. When people were offered to choose a trip to Paris (option A) vs a trip to Rome (option B), they had a hard time choosing. Both places were great, it was hard to compare them.
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Now they were offered three choices instead of two: trip to Paris with free breakfast (option A), trip to Paris without breakfast (option A-), trip to Rome with free breakfast (option B). Now overwhelming majority chose option A, trip to Paris with free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Rome than it is to compare Paris and Rome. A graph to explain this:
How to use this in pricing? Here comes another example from the book. An ad for an Economist subscription gave three options 1) Print-only for $59 2) Web subscription only access for $125 3) Print and web access for $125 Obviously 3 looks like the best deal. In an experiment Dan ran with this setup, 16 subjects chose option 1, zero chose option 2, and 84 chose option 3. What if we remove option 2 and have people choose between print-only and print and web access, leaving the prices the same? The results should be the same as the prices did not change, right? Instead, the results changed dramatically. 68 chose print-only and 32 chose print and web access. It was only by option 3′s relation to option 2 that made option 3 look so good. Option 2 in the Economist pricing served only as a decoy price and they didn’t even want to sell it. Three packages The old truth about offering three pricing options / packages holds water. Check out this
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Pricing
test they did with selling beer. People were offered only two kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80 percent chose the more expensive beer. Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80 percent bought the $1.80 beer and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option. Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and around 10 percent opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price. Moral of the story: you can influence people’s choice by offering different options. Old school sales people also say that offering different price point options will make people choose between your plans, instead of choosing whether to buy your product or not. Three packages with decoy pricing + the contrast principle Now let’s put all of these options together for maximum effect. Let’s say you want to sell your product for $59. The best way to do it is to add a cheaper decoy price option and a more expensive contrast option. It could look something like this:
The magic number nine It’s true. Prices ending with the number 9 sell better. Test described in the pricing strategy book Priceless said a product was sold for three different prices: $34, $39 and $44 dollars. The highest volume of sales took place when the price was $39. Everybody understands that $39 is basically $40, but in our subconscious mind it still
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Everybody understands that $39 is basically $40, but in our subconscious mind it still seems to be a lower bracket price. Better than nine There is one way of displaying the price that is even more effective than prices ending with 9. It’s the former price—current price technique. When selling the same product with these two price labels, the $40 price will win.
Crossing out the previous price is very effective. Have you noticed how Amazon uses it all the time? Value before price and always explain your price Never publish your prices before communicating the value of your product first. You have to put the price into context. If I say the price for the loaf of bread I’m selling is $50, it seems expensive. If I had communicated first that it was hand-made from fair trade organic wheat and rye by Angelina Jolie herself, the $50 price tag would not seem that steep anymore. Always sell the value before publishing your price.
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About The Author
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
About The Author
About The Author
Peep Laja I’m the face of ConversionXL. My unusual name (to most people) is actually pronounced ‘Pep Laya.’ I am from Estonia, but live mainly in the US these days. I’m an entrepreneur and a conversion optimization junkie. I run a unique conversion optimization marketing agency called Markitekt (we make existing sites better and build new conversion optimized websites) plus several niche internet businesses like T1Q and others. I conduct workshops on conversion optimization and internet marketing, consult for businesses in need, and plan the architecture of websites that sell.
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About The Author
How to Build Websites that Sell:...
About The Author
About the Publisher Hyperink is the easiest way for anyone to publish a beautiful, high-quality book. We work closely with subject matter experts to create each book. We cover topics ranging from higher education to job recruiting, from Android apps marketing to barefoot running. If you have interesting knowledge that people are willing to pay for, especially if you've already produced content on the topic, please reach out to us! There's no writing required and it's a unique opportunity to build your own brand and earn royalties. Hyperink is based in SF and actively hiring people who want to shape publishing's future. Email us if you'd like to meet our team! Note: If you're reading this book in print or on a device that's not web-enabled, please email
[email protected] with the title of this book in the subject line. We'll send you a PDF copy, so you can access all of the great content we've included as clickable links. Get in touch:
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Copyright © 2013-Present. Hyperink Inc. The standard legal stuff: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Hyperink Inc., except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis. Our note: Please don't make copies of this book. We work hard to provide the highest quality content possible - and we share a lot of it for free on our sites - but these books are how we support our authors and the whole enterprise. You're welcome to borrow (reasonable) pieces of it as needed, as long as you give us credit. Thanks! The Hyperink Team Disclaimer This ebook provides information that you read and use at your own risk. This book is not affiliated with or sponsored by any other works, authors, or publishers mentioned in the content. Thanks for understanding. Good luck!
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