Do online reviews really matter, and do they make a difference to your business? The answer is yes, they absolutely do.
Consumers increasingly use reviews left by other consumers as part of their pre-purchase research efforts, and a bad review can have serious effects on your sales.
Herd shopping psychology plays an ever effect on consumers’ behavior online. Groupon is a wonderful example of that, with deals kicking in only if a certain amount of people pay for them. Research shows that the more people have already opted in on a deal, the likelier it is new visitors will commit to it.
User reviews are not so far removed from this phenomenon.
Over 80% of people said that positive reviews would encourage them to purchase a product. The same number of people changed their minds about purchasing after reading as little as one or two negative reviews.
Fake & Negative Reviews
Unfortunately, fake reviews exist, and they exist in a massive abundance. Competitors have been known to leave bad reviews on products posing as disgruntled customers, That is why more needs to be done to help consumers identify a fake review.
You are bound to get a negative review at some point during your business career. That’s simply the reality and nature of the world. It can be devastating for a business, but most people recognize that everyone makes mistakes. A couple of bad reviews aren’t going to put the nail in your coffin and close your business down.
Here are just some of the facts why online reviews are not to be ignored:
68% of millennials trust online reviews, with positive ones producing an 18% average uplift in sales
Consumer reviews are more trusted than descriptions that come from other manufacturers, nearly 12 times more.
90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business which means these decisions being made are made quickly, without much hesitation.
The top five industries to be affected negatively by online reviews are restaurants, hotels, doctor’s offices, hospitals and hair salons.
Negative reviews aren’t all bad; these have been known to create a buzz around your business and increase its exposure, unlike fake reviews that have been so outlandishly obviously fake and ridiculous that they go viral.
Want to learn more about how online reviews can make or break your business? Check out our infographic.
User Reviews are the King
About the Author
Josh Wardini, Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at websitebuilder.org. With a preliminary background in communication and expertise in community development, Josh works day-to-day to reshape the human resource management of digitally based companies.
When you think of the machine that is your online business, what do you picture? Do you see something organic? Something mechanical?
I think it’s helpful to pick a vision. The marketing and sales functions are too complex. The tools and channels are changing faster today than at any time in history. Thanks, internet.
Vizualize your marketing machine to make good decisions about where to invest.
Visualizing the process helps us focus on the pieces one at a time, instead of being overwhelmed by the mass of moving parts that feed our pipes, funnels and drips. When we work with clients, we tend to talk about knobs.
Here’s what I mean.
Our Marketing Machine Looks Like A Scientific Instrument
The most powerful metric for an online marketing ecosystem is acquisition cost.
The lower your acquisition cost, the higher your profit.
The lower your acquisition cost, the cheaper all of your advertising becomes.
The lower your acquisition cost, the more places you can afford to advertise.
But acquisition cost isn’t a dial you set. It’s the product of several dials.
The Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer
We control acquisition costs using a device called the “Acquisition Cost Spectrophotometer” (ACS). This powerful device has two dials.
1. Traffic cost
2. Conversions — Typically leads or online transactions
We plug the ACS into any incoming channel — search engines, email, referrals, social media and so on. Then we begin to play with the knobs.
If we increase the traffic costs, but the conversions stay the same, we increase our acquisition cost, and the little red warning light turns on. If we dial down the traffic costs and keep the conversions the same, acquisition costs go down, and the red warning light goes off.
So, if we can increase conversions without increasing traffic costs, we get all the benefits of a lower acquisition cost. And for the paid search channel, we can actually lower the traffic costs by raising the conversion rate because Google rewards ads with effective landing pages by placing them higher on the search results pages.
Mathematically, the acquisition cost is calculated as:
Total Traffic Cost/Conversions
OR
Total Traffic Cost * Conversion Rate
If we put our metaphor down for a moment, we know that each of these “knobs” actually involves an entire process. Our “Traffic Cost” knob is controlled by an advertising and media team focused on getting the highest quality clicks for the fewest dollars.
Our “Conversions” knob is a metaphor for a team of data scientists, developers, designers and test techs focused on delivering the right experience to entice action.
All the marketer needs to do is determine if they should be investing in traffic or conversions, then fund the teams accordingly.
Vectron Conversion Analyzer
These are the primary knobs you turn when optimizing for conversion.
The Vectron Conversion Analyzer doesn’t actually exist, but we can visualize ourselve adjusting the knobs as we optimize our site.
When focused on optimizing a website for a given traffic channel, there are a number of knobs we control. I visualize a “Vectron Conversion Analyzer” as a metaphor for our process.
This amazing device allows us to control a number of “ingredients” that can lead to more conversions for any given traffic source. If you read this column, you’ll be familiar with most of the knobs on this little gem.
Value Proposition
The headlines, text, and images that spell out the value being offered by your company and products. Answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”
Layout and User Experience
The way the design draws a visitor’s eye to the important parts of each page and the cues that move them step-by-step along their exploratory journey.
Should important information be moved above the fold? Is there a visual hierarchy that tells the visitor what is important?
Credibility And Authority
A site design’s first job is to make the site seem credible. It should communicate that the company and products represent an authority in the solution space that it occupies.
Trust And Security
The visual cues that tell a visitor that the site will treat any information exchanged with care and veracity.
Social Proof
What do others like me think about this company, site and products?
Splitting The Signal
The Vectron machine splits the traffic up, allowing us to test different settings at one time. This is how we determine two very important things:
1. What is lacking from the site that visitors expect.
2. By how much each change increases the site’s performance.
AB Testing gives you the feedback on your conversion optimization work.
Visualizations That Help You Prioritize
We rarely have the budgets to invest in every part of our marketing machine. Having a metaphor by which you can visualize the pieces working together offers a powerful way to decide how to invest over time.
Using the visualization at the top of this page, you may not have any luck seeding your brand clouds with advertising until you’ve built brand awareness. When it rains, you should invest in the downspouts that drive leads into the soil of marketing.
If your sales close ratios aren’t flowering, you may need to look at the quality delivered by ads and conversion together. Once you have a low acquisition cost, you can again invest in more expensive advertising channels to seed your brand’s rain clouds and bring the rain.
A poor conversion rate will pick your pocket day after day. That’s why you’ll love these 7 conversion copywriting hacks. They’re quick and easy. And you can start using them today.
REPEAT YOUR CUSTOMERS/PROSPECTS
You may have heard that you should write like your customers speak. It builds rapport and credibility. Readers are more likely to think to themselves, “This company gets me and my issue.”
But rather than just guess what your target audience would say, use their actual words.
That’s what Sarah Peterson did when promoting her Etsy course.
The highlighted phrase stood out among responses to a survey she sent to prospects.
A key phrase from survey response
She used that exact phrase to resonate with prospects in her sales email.
The key phrase inserted into marketing email
There are several ways you can do this same thing.
Speak with your customers and prospects. Pick up the phone and have a quick chat. Do more listening than speaking, and write down what they say. Or, if the person gives you permission, record it so you can transcribe it later.
Survey your audience. This could even be as simple as a one question survey that you put on your website. Make sure that it’s open-ended.
Search reviews and forums. See what people are saying not just about your offering, but your competitors as well. This can be a great way to uncover pain points.
SWAP YOUR HEADLINE AND SUBHEAD
It’s amazing how many times I see a landing page where the subhead is stronger than the headline. Maybe the writer is trying to be clever or creative. Perhaps they think the headline shouldn’t be more than a few words long.
Whatever the reason, it’s killing conversions. If it’s not immediately clear what you’re offering me, why should I read on?
Fortunately, the subheads usually have this information. So an easy fix is to just make the subhead your headline.
Here’s a good example:
The subheading is the value proposition
A stronger converting headline
See how much clearer this page is when the subhead and headline are switched?
CUT YOUR FIRST PARAGRAPH
This is a hack that goes back to the heyday of direct mail. It’s designed to help you get right to the point.
Getting to the point quickly sounds pretty obvious. But you’d be surprised how many marketing pieces waste words trying to introduce themselves or state the obvious.
People don’t care about that. They care about themselves. What is it your offer is going to do for them? Tell them right away why they should care.
If your first paragraph doesn’t do this, scrap it and start with the next one.
ADD ASSUMPTIVE PHRASING
Here’s a nifty little psychological hack.
Write your copy as if the conversion is a foregone conclusion.
Simply look through your copy and add phasing like this to some of your statements:
“When you start your trial…”
“You’ll love how…”
“As you’ll see…”
The power of this hack lies with the endowment effect, a phenomenon where we value what we already own more than something we never had. By writing as if your prospect already owns what you’re selling, he or she imagines that situation.
Presuppositions are another type of assumptive phrasing you can use to add persuasive power to your copy. These statements infer something else is true. For instance, if I ask, “Which of these copywriting hacks are you going to use first?” that infers that you are indeed going to use them.
You must accept the inference to be true in order to avoid incongruence within the sentence. We’re wired to avoid incongruence because it requires more brain power.
Use this to your advantage by creating presuppositions with words such as:
Finally. “You can finally get in shape without spending hours in the gym.” (Presupposes that you had to spend hours in the gym to get in shape.)
Start. “Start earning the income you deserve.” (Presupposes that you aren’t currently earning what you deserve.)
Stop. “Stop wasting time on diets that don’t work.” (Presupposes that you are wasting your time.)
Again. “This car makes driving fun again.” (Presupposes that you once enjoyed driving but now find it to be a chore.)
Anymore. “Getting your kids to do their homework won’t be a battle anymore.” (Presupposes that getting your kids to do their homework is a battle.)
How will you use assumptive language in your marketing? (See what I did there?)
USE THE WORD “BECAUSE”
We like to think that we’re rational. That’s why we like to have a reason for doing things people ask of us. But here’s the interesting part. Simply having a reason is often more important than the reason itself.
Consider this famous social experiment:
In 1978, researchers approached people in line for the copier machine and asked to cut in front. They tested the effectiveness of three different phrases.
“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” was successful 60% of the time
“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” was successful 94% of the time
“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” was successful 93% of the time
It’s not surprising that people let the researchers cut in line more often when a reason was given. What is surprising is that whether that reason was valid or bogus had no significant impact.
Look at that third phrasing again. Of course, they had to make copies. So did everyone else in line. That’s what a copier is for.
So why did that excuse work?
Often with small requests, we take a mental shortcut. Instead of processing the actual request and reason, we recognize that a reason was given, and we comply.
It’s important to note that the reason for the request becomes more important as the request gets larger.
When the researchers repeated the experiment with 20 pages instead of 5, giving a bogus reason had the same effect as giving no reason. Both were successful only 24% of the time compared to 42% when a valid reason was given.
To use this in your marketing, look for areas where you want the reader to do something and add a “because.”
“Act now because this offer expires in 10 days.”
“Because you’re the type of person who…”
“We’re giving away free samples because we want you to see for yourself.”
USE PATTERN INTERRUPTS
Attention spans are short these days. Even if your copy is great, most readers will start to lose interest if you don’t shake things up a bit. Pattern Interrupts are a great way to do just that.
Pattern Interrupts are a neuro-linguistic programming technique designed to break the expected pattern of thoughts or behaviors. There are a couple of ways to use it in your marketing.
The first is to keep readers engaged. In a long-form piece of marketing, the reader expects paragraphs to follow paragraphs and on. This familiar pattern allows the brain to go on autopilot. You don’t want this. You want readers’ attention.
Break the pattern by adding testimonials, sidebars, callouts and other devices that temporarily interrupt the narrative of your text. Take a look at these examples.
Interrupting the pattern and flow
Interrupting the pattern and flow
You can also use a Pattern Interrupt to disarm readers or refocus their attention. People don’t like to be sold to. As a result, they reflexively put their guards up when they expect a sales pitch.
But what if your copy doesn’t start off as expected?
Use a Pattern Interrupt to disarm readers or refocus their attention.
Readers expecting a typical sales pitch will probably have a different mindset when they read something like this:
Shift the mindset
REMIND READERS OF THEIR FREE WILL
A team in France first proved how effective the “But You Are Free (BYOF)” technique is with this social experiment.
One of the experimenters would stop people in a mall and ask for change to ride the bus. In half of the instances, he or she added the phrase, “But you are free to accept or to refuse.”
Significantly more people gave money when the BYOF technique was used. Not only that, but the amount they gave was twice as much.
Follow-up studies have proved BYOF effective in requests for donations to a tsunami relief fund, participation in a survey, and many other situations.
It works by combating something called psychological reactance. Wikipedia describes it this way:
“Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away his or her choices or limiting the range of alternatives.
Reactances can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion.
With this one simple phrase, you remove reactance and open your prospect’s mind to your persuasion. “
Note: The specific wording doesn’t matter as much as the sentiment. You can also use variations such as:
The choice is yours
It’s completely up to you
You may do as you wish
But obviously do not feel obliged
When you see how well these techniques work you’ll wish you started using them sooner.
Download the full ebook for all 21 copywriting hacks.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
How do you decide which elements of your site to test? This question is at the heart of website optimization.
A better question is, “How do you determine what NOT to test?”
It’s relatively easy to come up with ideas that might increase your conversion rate. We typically come up with 50, 75, 100 or more ideas for each of our client sites. Filtering through this list is the hard part.
Here’s the approach we take at Conversion Sciences (my employer).
Step One: Look For Evidence
You should never test anything if you don’t have some evidence that it is a problem. These ideas are called hypotheses for a reason. A hypothesis is an educated guess, an informed fabrication, a data-based brain fart.
So you need to educate, inform and find data on your ideas, or they don’t qualify as hypotheses. They’re just happy thoughts.
The first benefit of looking for evidence is that you might be able to eliminate a hypothesis. You might find evidence that it’s NOT a problem.
Here’s an example hypothesis for the product page of an e-commerce site: “If we put an ‘Add to Cart’ button at the bottom of the page, more visitors will add an item to their cart.”
Sounds reasonable. Yet, if few people are scrolling down the page, this hypothesis won’t hold water.
We can look at attention data, or “heat map” data generated by click-tracking and scroll-tracking software such as CrazyEgg. This will tell us how far visitors are scrolling on the product pages of the site.
If they aren’t scrolling far, then we may save this hypothesis for another time.
When we’re identifying what to test, we give each hypothesis a rating from 1 to 5 for how much evidence there is.
A rating of “1” means there’s no evidence, that the hypothesis is just an idea. A rating of “5” tells us that there is overwhelming evidence that there is a problem this hypothesis could address.
I’ve written and talked about the sources of data that are available to help you with this.
Step Two: Rate The Traffic
We want to avoid optimizing the wrong parts of the site. Our hypothesis list should have ideas for site-wide improvement, as well as page-specific enhancements.
Changing the order of the site’s navigation, for example, is a site-wide change. Adding trust symbols to the checkout page is page-specific. If we were to rate the value of the traffic on a scale of 1 to 5 again, what would we give these two scenarios? They both might get a 5.
A site-wide change, such as adjusting the navigation, has an impact on 100% of the visitors. That’s a 5 in my book. Accordingly, changing a page that is only seen by 20% of visitors or less gets a 1.
Visitors to the checkout page often account for a small percentage of viewers. Why give them a 5? Because what this traffic lacks in volume it makes up for in opportunity.
Visitors who are checking out have demonstrated significant buying intent. These visitors are very valuable to us.
Other pages may not get much attention. The “About Us” and “FAQ” pages may not be so interesting to us. They might get a 2 or 3.
Favor hypotheses that have an impact on the most, or most interesting, visitors.
Step Three: How Hard Is It To Test?
For each of our hypotheses, we want to understand what the level of effort might be. It’s easy to change the text of a guarantee or offer. It’s much more difficult to add live chat to a site.
If we use our 1-to-5 scale again, we might give the change in the copy a 1 or a 2. Adding live chat requires hiring a live chat vendor, doing integration and staffing for our chatty visitors. This is a 5 in my book.
You don’t want to favor simple tests for simplicity’s sake. Don’t rush off and test button color just because it’s a 1 on your level-of-effort scale.
Likewise, hold off on swinging for the fences until the low-hanging fruit has been found. Leave your 5s for another time.
Step Four: What Does Experience Tell You?
Finally, gauge the impact you think this hypothesis will have. This is based on your knowledge of your prospects. It is based on what you’ve learned from previous tests you’ve done.
It is based on your experience as an online marketing team. It is based on research you’ve done, such as reading this column.
How about a scale from 1 to 5 again? If you rate a hypothesis as a 1, you’re saying that this is an arbitrary idea. If it has a big impact, that will be a surprise.
If you rate your hypothesis as a 5, you’re saying you believe this change will have a significant impact on the visitors and the site. You’re expecting a big win.
Our intuition can often lead us astray. You will find yourself rating hypotheses higher on this impact scale, not because of your experience, but because you want to try them. Or you might favor one because you like the idea.
These kinds of sentiments don’t belong in a scientific environment like the one we create. However, we cannot ignore the intuition of experienced business people.
This is only one of the four factors we weigh, the others being proof, traffic value, and level of effort. A high impact score may tip a hypothesis into the top 10, but only if it has good ratings in other categories.
Once a hypothesis has been proven or disproved, there is no more role for intuition. When the data is there, we favor the data. However, when deciding what to test, we like to mix in a little gut.
Step Five: Bucket The Winners
Once we have ratings for each of the five areas, we can weight a hypothesis. We simply add together the values for Proof, Impact and Visits/Buyer Affected. Then subtract the level of effort (LOE). Here’s what part of a hypothesis list may look like:
The top 10 hypotheses reveal an interesting pattern when you bucket them.
We take one more step and put each of our top hypotheses into one of five buckets:
User Experience: For hypotheses that would alter the layout, design or other user interface and user experience issues.
Credibility and Authority: For hypotheses that address trust and credibility issues of the business and the site.
Social Proof: For hypotheses that build trust by showing others’ experiences.
Value Proposition: For hypotheses that address the overall messaging and value proposition. Quality, availability, pricing, shipping, business experience, etc.
Risk Reversal: For hypotheses involving warranties, guarantees and other assurances of safety.
It’s important to have these buckets because when we look at the top ten hypotheses shown in the figure, we see that six out of the ten are “User Experience” issues. This gives us a hint about the overall challenge with the site. It’s not well-designed for conversion.
We may spend our initial efforts finding out what kind of user experience these visitors want since our analysis says that the site doesn’t seem to be giving them what they want.
This is a simplified version of our process. If you’d like a copy of the “ROI Prioritized Hypothesis List” spreadsheet we use daily, send me an email at TheLab@ConversionSciences.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and author of Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist. Conversion Sciences specializes in A/B Testing of websites. Follow Brian on Twitter @bmassey
With a limited amount of money in your marketing budget, spend it on things which are going to give you the best return on investment. These email marketing facts tell you why email remains a great way to spend your money.
Unfortunately, many people wrongly think that this type of marketing is dead. The amount of emails I get in my inbox each day says otherwise. Here are some facts about email marketing to prove my point:
205 billion emails are sent each day. This is expected to rise to 246 billion by the end of 2019.
Email is still one of the most widely used methods of communication despite the wide range of platforms and apps available.
Although Facebook is an important tool for marketing, email marketing is the most direct and personal way to reach and interact with your target audience. People are more likely to sign up for your email list than they are to interact with you on Facebook. In fact, companies still employ third-party email marketing services to assist them with this aspect of eCommerce.
Your customers want updates. Don’t just settle for one sale per customer, you want multiple sales. Your customers want to hear from you and want email updates about your brand. Don’t let them forget about you, give them what they want!
Emails have a larger ROI. For every $1 spent on email marketing, an average $38 is returned – this is very important if you have a limited budget.
Want to learn more about email marketing? Check out our infographic below.
Dennis van der Heijden has researched the implications of GDPR compliance on a variety of tools that we use everyday to optimize websites. He covers conversion rate optimzation (CRO) tools that include workflow, digital analytics, form analytics, heatmap, session recording, on-site surveys, QA, performance optimization, and A/B testing tools. Sure, GDPR is complicated—but here’s one thing that is clear: GDPR affects you. (Assuming, that is, you collect any personal data, from any EU citizen, at any point, ever). The General Data Protection Regulation is ambitious. It expands the scope of what counts as “personal data.” It creates new standards for how we ask for “consent” to process personal data. And it remaps who are held to these new rules. These things taken together mean: if you collect EU email addresses, or have cookies on your site tracking EU web visitors, or use any tools that hold on to any personal data, of any EU citizen—you now should be complying with GDPR. And so should every piece of data processing software you rely on. It sounds overwhelming. But it’s more manageable than you think. Here we’ll break down the common types of CRO tools you may be using—and how to ensure they’re ready for GDPR’s May 25th enstate-date.
A quick note on personal data
Personal data is intuitive–but it might not mean what you think it means. You may be familiar with PII (Personally Identifiable Information), the North American standard for data that identifies a person, and requires special consideration. GDPR’s definition of Personal Data includes quite a few things that PII doesn’t cover. Here’s a full breakdown:
Personal Identifiable Data (PII)
Personal Data
Full name (if not common)
Home address
Email address
National identification number
Passport number
Vehicle registration plate number
Driver’s license number
Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
Credit card numbers
Digital identity
Date of birth
Birthplace
Genetic information
Telephone number
Login name, screen name, nickname, or handle
Full name (if not common)
Home address
Email address
National identification number
Passport number
Vehicle registration plate number
Driver’s license number
Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
Credit card numbers
Digital identity
Date of birth
Birthplace
Genetic information
Telephone number
Login name, screen name, nickname, or handle +
IP-address
Unique identifiers like Device IDs, UserID, TransactionID, CookieID
Pseudonymous data (that’s unrecognizable data + key on different spot to make it readable again)
The big shocks here, if you’re used to the scope of PII, are cookies, and IP-addresses: both of which a readily collected by a number of our favorite marketing tools. As we start to walk through the programs in your standard, marketing toolkit, we suggest you look at how your marketing software, gets you the information it collects, and whether or not, in doing so, it collects personal data.
Moving personal data outside of Europe
Transferring EU personal data, outside of the EU, can be a mess. It’s easiest done when it’s transferred to a country that the EU has deemed have an “adequate” level of personal data protection. That list is here. It is short. And the US is not on it. Except, for entities that have participated in the Privacy Shield agreement. Basically, a Privacy Shield company is a company that meets EU standards for adequate data protection. If you’re dealing with a company that is Privacy Shield compliant, facilitating data transfers is no problem. But if you’re not, you have a few (exhausting) options: model contracts, and binding corporate rules. It’s too much to go into here, but the ICO has a great overview of what that looks like. All this is to say: if you store any of the above mentioned personal data, in any of the tools you use for your CRO program, make sure the program is Privacy Shield Certified, hosted in Europe, or hosted in an “adequately” protected country. Otherwise, you’re transferring data out of EU borders, and have to be ready to contend with some lengthy, bureaucratic headaches. You can find a list of Privacy Shield countries here. And a list of marketing tools we’ve vetted based on GDPR compliance here.
Conversion Process Workflow Tools
Workflow tools like Podio and Asana, and the more specialized tools like Effective Experiments and Growthhackers Northstar may contain personal data that is covered under GDPR compliance. For example, your European employees’ details can be stored there, which, in and of itself, is personal data. But also, you’d be amazed by how easily companies can store customer data in their workflow tools without realizing it. It’s recommended to use links to your CRM when talking about customers in your workflow tools. Don’t use full names and email addresses. you might need to erase everything stored in there now that would be considered personal data, as all comments might not be editable. Most of the workflow tools specifically designed with CRO in mind have an integration with A/B testing tools. Keep integrations like this in mind when you pull in any data that may contain personal data (like IP’s and orderID’s). Whenever you store user information—you need a legal basis for doing so. Your customer data might be alright, as long as you have a well written privacy policy. If your customers have opted into that privacy policy when they completed a transaction, they’ve opted into a contract, which can give you the legal grounds for storing their personal data. Data like IP’s, and orderID’s, on the other hand, cannot be stored unless the website visitor gave consent. Or, your privacy policy states why legitimate interest was chosen as a legal basis. In addition, check where the servers are located, depending on the country the tool might need a Privacy Shield certification.
Digital (Web) or Mobile Analytics
We’ve got amazing tools out there that analyze, and even predict what user might do. They automatically profile, categorize, and store a massive amount of data. And that’s how we tend to use them. We store as much as we can about our user’s behavior—since we never know what segments, we, or our machine learning tools, will find to be profitable. This is a problem. GDPR compliance mandates data minimization, meaning that processed data is “adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary“ to fulfill a data subjects purpose (Article 5). Processes that automatically profile, and make decisions, are explicitly mentioned in the law. You should be storing only the data you need to fulfill your audience’s purposes, or you should find a legal basis for which to store it (like consent). For example, if your site’s sells clothes, and your visitors come to your site to buy clothes, combining their browsing patterns with third-party data to create consumer profiles doesn’t help them fulfill their purpose. It just adds to your data stockpile. This means, you require a legal basis—most commonly, asking for consent—in order to use those tools. You should also make sure that automated profiling and decision making does not discriminate European users from seeing and receiving the same opportunities as others. Tools like Google Analytics can be made compliant. We documented the process here. However, massive analytics storage tools like Heap, or predictive analytics tools will need a very close look over. If you’re going to continue to use them, it’s best to hire a legal professional to analyze your setup and its use.
Form Analytics
Form analytics are useful. They’re key to discovering the optimal number of forms, and the order of form fields. They also can expose and store personal data. For GDPR compliance, set your form analytics tools to mask all content and make sure you don’t store and analyze niche segments. Here’s why niche segments can be a problem: if, when you combine all the data you collect, you have enough data to identify an individual—you are storing personal data. Country data isn’t necessarily personal data. Neither is a company name. But if you’ve isolated the fact that I’m a team member of the company Convert, and you’ve stored my country, you’ve stored personal data. I’m the only one in the company working from Spain. If you don’t setup these tools correctly, you might lose then from your toolbox with European sites. You will also want to make sure that all scripts and data are stored and loaded from Europe, or you are transferring data outside Europe and the tool needs a data transfer agreement.
GDPR Compliance and ePrivacy
Let me interrupt discussion of the tools for a moment and share a little bureaucracy with you. GDPR is the law everyone writes about, and that is the one that actually becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018. But there’s another law that works with it, hand in hand. It’s called the ePrivacy Directive, it’s a bit more specialized, it deals with all things digital (like cookies) and it’s already in place in Europe. Most tools used in CRO and installed on your website are subject to the laws spelled out in the ePrivacy Directive. Their cookie use is regulated and, generally, the rules follow “opt-out” requirements. Basically, you should let your users know you’re tracking cookies, so they can decide to restrict it. The problems we face as CRO experts are that GDPR changes these standards. Cookie identifiers and IP’s are now personal data (according to GDPR) and therefore require a legal basis to process, like consent, or legitimate interest. So the ePrivacy Directive says cookies are opt-out and GDPR says they require a legal processing basis. To make things even more complicated, new ePrivacy Regulations are coming, to replace the ePrivacy directive. These new regulations were supposed to be in place by May 25th as well but got delayed, and it may be a year or two before they get instantiated. For now, there’s the draft legislation, which clarifies that cookie identifiers and IP’s need a legal basis. There are, however, exceptions, like analytics tools. You can install these without consent and as long as they’re mentioned in the cookie notice or privacy policy. So when you see vendors of CRO tools trying to tell you analytics tools are exempt from GDPR, they may be referring to a law that’s not in place yet (ePrivacy Regulations), or by using the existing “opt-out” precedent set in the ePrivacy Directive. But know that when GDPR and ePrivacy Regulations are both in place this gap in clarity will be sorted.
Mouse Tracking / Heatmaps and Session Recording Tools
I think by now you can start guessing what I’m about to say. I don’t want to send the CRO market back to the middle ages because of compliance issues. But, in 2018, privacy matters, and you need to consider it as a CRO expert. The easiest tools in this stack to make compliant are heatmaps and mouse tracking. Make sure you don’t track the mouse details or have your scroll depth set to one person. Don’t combine data from other sources to zoom into one user. I don’t expect your mouse tracking to store personal data, but understand what is being used to track visitors, and double check the table on top of this article. Session recording tools make me a bit more nervous. It feels more invasive—but if it’s being done without IP address, country data, or user data—you might be okay. Check the tools you are using and a legal professional. Here’s why I’m doubtful, and I suggest you’d get consent before you use session recording. It’s literally storing individual, personal, actions online. Trying to explain to an authority that “it’s not personal data” seems like a bit of a stretch. It’s scary to admit, but this data may require opt-ins to use. Being fined for lack of GDPR compliance is a scary, too.
This isn’t Just About GDPR. This is About Your Brand.
What if you don’t ask for consent for some of these tools? Let’s say that you find a legal way to rely on the legitimate interests condition. And you hide this data usage in your privacy policy. What if you’re hacked? How do you explain to your customers, your users, or a journalist that individuals have their session recordings published online. And that technically, sure. It’s in the policy. People should’ve expected that. Then replace “session recordings” with any of the other tools and see how you feel. I’m not saying you couldn’t defend it in court, or with the privacy authorities. But ask yourself this: can you defend it in public? GDPR says you need to report breaches of personal data affecting users within 72 hours. So your contingency plan here should include the idea of defending this breach on TechCrunch. It’s a great idea to apply this gut feeling and TechCrunch check when selecting the tools you use. We killed a lead generation method that we found hard-to-defend because of this check.
Quality Assurance Tools
You shouldn’t really face any roadblocks to improving customer satisfaction. Once someone is a customer, they’ve likely signed a contract with you . They’ve acknowledged your terms and your privacy policy. So they should already have given you the legal basis you need to process their data. Just make sure you add your tools, and your purpose for using them, in your privacy policy—so when customers opt-in, and begin a relationship with you, it’s clear what they’re getting into.
Qualitative surveys and polling tools after GDPR
If you use pop-up surveys which ask random people a few questions about your site, we don’t anticipate there being any compliance problems. But if you survey people based on IPs, or country information, or more specific audience filtering, then your tool here might be storing personal data. It may even fall under audience profiling. So when you use personal data to select who you will poll or survey, you’d need a legal basis first, before your survey ever pops up. You can’t just ask for consent with your pop up. That would be too late. For customers, a simple NPS question can fall under the legal basis of a contract. You might be able to get away with using the legitimate interests condition, for people on the payment page who have already (legally) given you their personal data. In contrast, you would have a hard time defending “legitimate interest” as a legal processing basis for a web visitor that browsed, say, five pages, over a three-day period. Here, you’d have dropped a cookie (personal data), stored a country (personal data), or an IP address (personal data), and held onto their browsing data — potentially, in conjunction with this other information, personal data. Here, asking for consent to survey, is best.
Site Speed Analysis
Since these tools look from the outside to your website, there should no personal data (but your own) stored in the speed analytics tool. It shouldn’t cause a problem for your website visitors. When, however, you have a system that stores website visitor, country, state, city, and device type—or maybe things like device ID, or multiple locations of the same device—then again we start talking about personal data, and you need to consider your legal processing basis.
Testing Tools
This is my bread and butter. To be transparent: I’m the CEO of Convert.com. We make A/B testing software and have been investing pretty heavily in GDPR compliance. So I know more than a little on how tools like this need to adjust to comply with the law. A/B testing tools can fall under “profiling” and automated decision making, for which GDPR compliance requires a legal basis. This fits the bill when you use third-party cookies to determine what pages users visited, or connect to services that share personal interest from other websites (for example: “person lives in rich zip code area”). If you’re using your A/B testing platform this way, you are definitely going to need consent. And you need to make sure the consent was given at the time of the third-party data collection. So keep this in mind if you’re using testing and personalization enriched with third-party interest data. When your A/B testing tools collect IP addresses, or zip codes, or city level data, and stores that data with the record of the visitor, you need consent. If you use segmentation or universal user IDs across sessions, and for a long period of time (months), I would suggest you get consent. Accounting for this, we’ve made a lot of adjustments at Convert. If you’re A/B testing with another provider, ask them if they can answer “yes” to these questions. Can you use the tool in the default settings without requiring consent? At Convert, we’ve stripped out all the personal data from our tool. We made everything work without transactionIDs, orderIDs, IPs, or modified cookies, so that anything GDPR would call a unique identifier, wouldn’t be stored. Do they bucket data? At Convert, when a web a visitor enters an experiment, it is placed in the bucket “123”, which stands for variation A, of experiment 101, on a Chrome browser. The buckets have a benefit that they pass the “gut feeling and brand damage” check. If a customer database were to end up in public, all that is accessible are buckets with visitor counts, never full visitor flows and visible paths. Are their servers located in the right place? All of Convert’s servers are located in Europe, so we don’t have to worry about data flow outside of the EU. Does the tool warn users if they want to segment based on the personal data mentioned above (IP addresses, or zip codes, cities, etc)? Convert will warn that these features require consent. It took six months of development effort, but we’ve ensured customers can rely on legitimate interest and can use our tool in the default setting, without requiring consent. With Convert, you can still capture 100% of your traffic for testing. When you have to ask for consent to A/B test, that percentage can drop dramatically. A recent study from PageFair showed that, when consent is required, only 21% of users would opt-in to tracking. So unless you can afford to test only a fifth of your traffic, we suggest you have a serious chat with your experiment software providers. We’ve yet to see another company make the necessary changes, which would allow for use under the legitimate interests condition.
In Short
Any CRO tool can be redesigned to strip out all possibilities of storing personal data. Couple this with the mention of legitimate interests in your privacy policy, and you should be able to keep your traffic intact for testing, without breaking the trust of your web visitors. If the CRO tools you select only place a temporary cookie, you store NOTHING of personal data, the legitimate interest basis might be an option for you. If you then verify where all data is stored—and in the case of the U.S., check Privacy Shield certification—only then you can feel safe. Now in case you’re wondering if the European Privacy Authorities will really come after you, I suspect yes, if you are collecting large volumes of data and/or you are a well-known brand. As the law is fighting to get itself taken seriously, there are bound to be companies used to set an example. If you’re a small website, I don’t think that, come May 25th, you’ll be the first on the stack of on investigator’s desk. But I do think trust is something that you can optimize for. If you’re working in the European market, as CRO professionals, there is no excuse to be sloppy with your tool stack.
Your website visitors need value propositions because, given too many options, most people’s decision making process shuts down and they default to making no choice at all.
Out on the internet, consumers have a million choices. And most of the time, all of the choices look the same to consumers.
This drives people crazy. How are they supposed to know which choice to make?
They try to figure it out, but doing so often leads to analysis paralysis which then leads them to not make any choice at all.
Have you ever had one of those nights where dinnertime was fast approaching and a unanimous decision had to be made on what to choose for carryout…. only nobody could decide what to get?
You might hear a lot of ….”just not burgers again”. Or…” please not pizza”. Everybody has something that they’ve just had too much of and they don’t want the same old thing…again.
Everyone is looking for that something….that oomph for dinner…that dish that just makes you feel good. Something different. Because a good meal can change a bad day.
And then all it takes is for one person to mention Chinese and the thought of trying to eat rice and wontons with chopsticks while drinking piping hot tea and cracking open a fortune cookie to find out your fate afterward seals the deal.
Now we know that for most of us, eating with chopsticks is almost impossible. But c’mon, it is kind of fun. And not all of us drink hot tea with dinner. And we know that those strips of paper inside our fortune cookie aren’t really going to predict our future. But it’s kind of fun, right?
It’s so simple and yet so genius. It probably doesn’t cost more than 30 cents for the chopsticks, fortune cookie and tea combined – but it adds a unique value to your eating experience.
For decades Domino’s pizza offered one of the best value propositions around. Get your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free.
It’s probably the only time you’ve wished your pizza would get there a couple minutes late so you could eat for free. It’s a little like playing pizza lottery. One too many red lights and heavy traffic means 31 minutes and you win.
What Is a Unique Value Proposition?
A unique value proposition is something that you offer that stands out from your competitors.
When consumers hear the same offerings over and over and over, they begin to tune them out. If it requires a lot of thought to choose one over the other with not a lot of differentiation, they tend to experience cognitive overload. They begin to shut down.
Until a product or service enters the picture that makes their ears perk up again.
Something uniquely refreshing, adds value and doesn’t make them think too hard.
When visitors arrive on your website and they are greeted by a strong unique value proposition, it stops them in their tracks and keeps them from immediately clicking over to your competitor’s website.
It also helps them to commit to engaging further with your website.
Visitor motivation is always going to be the number one driver in consumer decisions. If they’re not hungry – they’re not going to eat at your restaurants. If they don’t want to be followed every moment of the day with emails, text and social media – they’re not going to buy your smartphone.
But visitor motivation is not something we can control. We can harness and steer it. But we can’t control it. That’s in our visitor’s hands.
However, a unique value proposition is something that we can control. That’s why it’s imperative that you invest in drilling down, uncovering and revealing a really good one.
Identifying Your Strongest Value Proposition
Not every value proposition is created equal. And as you’re about to find out, just being “different” or “unique” isn’t enough.
First, dig deep and write down every possible way in which your business and offering is unique. Every possible way. Don’t leave anything out. Just like no question is a dumb question – the same holds true for brainstorming for value props. Include them all. You just might have a hidden gem and don’t even know it.
It’s been a long held belief that if you just come up with something really unique and different then that is enough to define a unique value proposition.
But what if nobody wants it?
A toy that teaches kids the nutritional value of eating broccoli is great for parents. But if the kids still don’t want to eat their greens – it’s useless.
So when you nail down your UVP, make sure that it’s something that your audience really wants.
Secondary Differentiators
Once you’ve identified your strongest value proposition, don’t stop there.
Also, identify secondary differentiators. These secondary differentiators will help support your unique value proposition. It will help to strengthen it when it comes to visitors making a choice whether or not to choose you.
These secondary differentiators can be things like free shipping, membership rewards – anything that provides added value.
Display Your Unique Value Proposition Prominently
Sometimes businesses have already have a pretty cool value proposition but it’s hidden from the world. I was analyzing a website recently and didn’t discover their unique value proposition until I was reading their About us page.
It was awesome. But it shouldn’t be hidden only on their About Us page. Only a certain percentage of visitors will read that page.
It should be smack dab on the Home page.
Most people aren’t willing to invest 5 minutes on 10 different websites to see if they have a unique offering. Their time is too valuable and to spend 50 minutes total browsing websites only to find out at the end that nobody provided anything with unique value is too much of an investment.
They’re likely to only spend a few seconds before deciding if they should stay.
So make sure you convey your unique value proposition immediately.
Other Ways To Differentiate Value
Having a unique value proposition that sets your business and your offering apart from your competitors is a crucial first step. But there’s also other areas where you need to highlight your value props.
When you provide different services and products to your prospects those services and products need to be differentiated by their unique value. Why? Because it helps them to better understand which one they should choose. Remember, if they don’t know or can’t make a choice, they might not choose anything.
Not only will you be differentiating your products and services from each other so prospects can make a choice. But you’ll also be specifically differentiating them from your competitor’s specific products and services as well.
And what about your About Us page? Are you differentiating the value of your team? Your team members are like no other team. Make sure that you are highlighting their very unique value too.
Delivering a Strong Value Proposition
I hope you have a little bit better of an understanding as to why a value proposition is so valuable. Not only does it give you an advantage over your competition, it also helps your visitors to sort through all the marketing messages they receive. Without it, it can be very hard for them to make a choice.
Value proposition’s are effective in that they stop visitors and grab their attention. Once they see something they like, they are now more willing to commit to reading more of your message and delving deeper into your site.
So take the time to identify your strongest unique value proposition. Add on secondary differentiators to support it and make it stronger. And remember to find the unique value in each and every one of your products and services – or in any other area when you can.
It may not seem intuitive business to business brands to implement live chat for B2B conversion optimization. But live chat is no longer only reserved for B2C brands. While Live Chat hasn’t become popular with B2B decision maker just yet, more organizations are adopting this rich media tool to support their conversion optimation efforts.
Live chat can not only assist with customer service, but it can help with customer acquisition and retention. In fact, studies show that live chat can increase conversions by up to 20%. Source: Bold Software LLC, a live chat software vendor.
Furthermore, customers who live chat are three times more likely to make a purchase. When it comes to customer service, live chat shows higher rates of consumer satisfaction when compared to all other customer service touchpoints.
With the uses of live chat for conversion optimization clearly established, it’s time for a complete how-to guide. Here is all you need to know to make live chat work for you in 2018.
Don’t Skimp on Security
For live chat for B2B conversion optimization to be productive, your audience must be assured that their data will be kept private. A full two-thirds of brands promise security to their live chat customers. Doing the same would be wise, and an overall great move on your part. Source: AMA.
Put Experts at the Helm
Customers using live chat want instant answers to their questions, which means that proper and thorough training, as well as modern communication, are the orders of the day.
Integrate Add-On Solutions
Live chat can be effective all on its own, but you can enhance your efforts by adding click-to-call functionality and screen sharing solutions, for instance. Both of these technologies will make engaging with customers easier.
Add Live Chat Data into the CRM
Your live chat agents should be trained to enter all consumer interactions into the CRM to ensure all data is up-to-date. Better yet, you can integrate live chat with your CRM to ensure data is transferred automatically.
Live Chat integrated with Infusionsoft, for example, allows your agents to recognize your customers instantly, making the interaction more personal and efficient.
Live Chat integrated with Infusionsoft
Use Preset Responses Appropriately
It’s common for your agents to field the same questions day in and day out, and pre-set responses can help to break the monotony. However, ensure that staff is trained to use preset responses so that customers always know they’re talking to a person instead of a robot.
Instead of
“I am going to put you on hold for a moment.”
you can be more relaxed, such as,
“I’m going to place you on a brief hold while I look up this answer. I’ll return in a moment.”
While still canned, it’s a bit more personal and could reasonably have been typed live by your agent before hunting for the customer’s query response.
It is important to note that a preset response used inappropriately or at the wrong time can make the consumer feel ignored and frustrated, which should be avoided at all costs.
It’s Not About You or the Agent
Your live chat representatives should be trained to focus on the person they are interacting with and their needs. All organizational and personal agendas should be kept at bay until the consumer’s problem is resolved.
Pass on Information Quickly
If the person on the other end of live chat needs to open a support ticket or wants a call back from the head of IT, then that information needs to be passed on right then and there and followed up with.
Consumers should be able to feel confident that live chat agents always have their best interests at heart, and will fulfill all promises made.
Test Live Chat Often
Don’t just set live chat on your website and then forget about it.
Every so often, test the functionality of your live chat integration, and determine if anything can be improved upon, such as the colors, language used, training of your staff, preset responses, or the add-ons that can only improve enhance this amazing consumer-facing channel.
Make it Personal
Agents should be trained to ask for a customer’s name straight away. Using the person’s name and other identifiable information, such as their birth order, job title, and even location, can help to build rapport, and that’s always great for business.
Take SnapEngage, for example. The brand tells web visitors precisely which experts they’ll be chatting with, making the interaction helpful and personal.
Tell visitors who they’ll be talking to
Use the Best Software
In 2017, the best rated Live Chat software options included Live Chat, Capterra, and HelpCrunch. Olark, Smartsupp, and GetSiteControl were some other honorable mentions. They were chosen for their ease of use, availability of convenient add-on options, and ultimate reliability.
Arm Agents with the Proper Collateral
Your Live Chat staff should be trained to disseminate marketing materials depending on which stage the consumer happens to be at along the buyer’s journey.
From awareness to the consideration stage, presenting solutions to consumers in the form of marketing collateral helps to build trust, with 77% of chat users reporting that Live Chat helped to improve their perceptions of the companies they interact with.
Training Should Include Consumer Education
While assisting customers, Live Chat agents should be aware of any opportunities to inform and educate. B2B sales cycles are on the longer side, and the more education your agents can provide the better.
All that education will successfully sway the customer in your favor when it comes to deciding between your organization and the other guys.
Collect Data
While not the focus of any Live Chat interaction, there is no hard and fast rule that you can’t mine your customers for relevant and valuable information.
For example, just before the Live Chat session ends, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask the person if the website performed to their needs. Did they find your content to be of the highest quality? Were their pain points addressed? Did they find the navigation to be intuitive or way too difficult to figure out?
Don’t take up too much of the person’s time, but at the same time, you should never let a customer interaction go to waste.
Action-Specific Chat
You don’t always have to use Live Chat to sell a first-time customer or provide customer service. Virgin Airlines, for example, only uses live chat to upsell customers who have already made a purchase. Crazy Egg reports that brands that use live chat for upselling report a 15% higher additional order value.
Go Responsive
40% of respondents said that they would be willing to connect with a brand via live chat on a mobile device if such an option were offered. The lesson is clear. Go responsive or get left behind.
LeadForensics makes Live Chat available on desktop and mobile for ease-of-use no matter which device you’re using.
Make Live Chat available on desktop and mobile
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three
"*" indicates required fields
Give a Rundown
If you want to be extra helpful, provide your customers with a copy of the live chat transcript. That will keep your brand and the conversation fresh on their mind, which can contribute to lead generation and brand loyalty.
Don’t Be Intrusive
While it is acceptable to have a LiveChat box pop up after the visitor has remained on a page for a certain duration of time, you should not bombard the visitor with popups, noises, or anything else. Live Chat should be available when needed without harming the user experience.
Take pet insurance brand PetPlan, for instance. The Live Chat tag is out of the way and unassuming until it’s needed. That’s how web visitors prefer it.
Live Chat tag is out of the way and unassuming until it’s needed
Add Chat to Email
Inserting a “Chat with an Agent” in your emails to give your customers instant access to a help agent anywhere they happen to be.
Analyze Customer Behavior
Agents should be aware of how your customer has interacted with your site leading up to visiting live chat. This insight into the actions of your consumer can help your agent further provide targeted assistance, leading to a more satisfying interaction overall.
Use Live Chat for B2B Conversion Optimization on Important Product Pages
Mark Tuchscherer, co-founder, and President of Geeks Chicago recommends using live chat on those pages where you tend to have a lot of drop-offs. Live chat can help to overcome hurdles and objections, and that can sometimes be all it takes to earn the deal.
Live chat can help to overcome hurdles and objections
Conclusion
Live chat for B2B conversion optimization can be used to assist customers, generate leads, qualify leads, entice conversions, and foster loyalty. To accomplish all of this, all of the above points about live chat could be condensed to the simple advice of: Be immediate with your audience, be helpful, be knowledgeable, and always pass of information accurately and on time. That’s a helpful live chat agent, which is precisely what customers should expect from your world-class brand.
It can be dangerous to delay asking for the sale on your website. Optimizing for buyer intent helps you ask at the right time.
You should hire me. I’m good at what I do, have helped some pretty awesome companies achieve killer results, and I reckon I could help you achieve similar levels of success. If you’ve got copywriting or PPC optimization needs, I’m your man. Click here to pay your deposit now and secure my revenue increasing services!
Crappy pitch, right? Even overlooking the dreadfully generic benefit, poor copy, and woeful CTA there’s still something important missing.
An omission which would stop you from reaching out and laying down that deposit I so desperately want.
That something is your complete lack of knowledge and trust in me.
99% of the people who read this will never have heard of me. They’ll have no idea who I am, only a vague idea of what I do, and absolutely no inkling as to whether or not I’m good at it (save for my poorly worded benefit brag).
This is first contact for you and I. And for a first contact, that pitch is far too aggressive.
Unfortunately, this is the exact approach I see countless brands across the globe making day after day. They think all they need is a hard pitch, a well optimised landing page, and some relevant traffic.
But that’s not how sales are made.
No one makes big purchase decisions based on impulse. It might work for low cost items, but for big-ticket products or high end services you’ve got to foster a little trust before a pitch will be effective.
You’ve got to establish yourself as an authority; a provider of the highest quality. Only then will a hard pitch for high-priced products work.
This is the element missing from so many campaigns. It’s the element that not only makes the sale, but keeps your customers coming back to you time and time again.
It’s a shame that more business don’t focus on building relationships. And if I had to hazard a guess why, it’s because very few understand that…
Not all your Leads are Ready to Purchase
In fact, very few are at the point where they’re ready to open their wallet.
If you’ve spent any time in marketing and sales you’ll have heard the statistics. It takes anywhere between 6 and 12 touchpoints with customers to make a sale. You’ve probably also seen countless images like the below.
There’s an element of truth to these beliefs. The view of a wholly linear sales funnel might be outdated, but the principle stands.
People don’t trust you enough to purchase after a single interaction.
Check the modern consumer’s browsing habits and you’ll see what I mean. Modern users jump from site-to-site, they use various devices, abandon, reengage, and complete purchase journeys at completely random times.
It’s honestly a bit of a mess. But figuring out how to make the most of the modern consumers scatterbrained approach to online purchases doesn’t have to be. And it all begins with…
Ignore the Concept of Touchpoints
When you follow the old linear journey and the belief that you must have X touchpoint for the sale it blinkers your focus.
The thought of there being a set number of touchpoints to make users purchase is absolute bullshit. I don’t walk into a store 6 times and on the 7th feel as though I must buy something simply because I’ve hit my touchpoint limit.
The same is true for the online purchase journey. People don’t buy based on the number of touchpoints alone. They purchase based on value.
Let’s put this in real terms, I recently assisted a client in optimising their PPC campaigns. When I took over, all campaigns targeted industry related keywords before directing users to the primary landing page.
If we imagine the client was in the real estate space, that meant searches like the below all directed to the same page:
What are the house sale processes in [area]
the best real estate broker in [area]
what’s in [neighborhood] for [kids/elderly/students]
The client believed that if customers stopped by his site often enough, they were eventually bound to hire him. He thought this repeated hard pitch was guaranteed to wear his customers down until they bent to his will.
It didn’t work well for him because, whilst he had a frequently visited site, it offered no value.
If he had instead offered something of value related to the user’s search, then people would have remembered him. Something like:
An eBook/guide explaining the house sale process
A sales page explaining why he was the best
A neighborhood guide that detailed all relevant areas
Taking this approach gives people what they want. It offers the value they’re searching for and would raise him in their estimation.
You have to shift focus to the customer. You have to examine the reason the user comes to your page/site, understand the problem they’re facing, and optimize to address that problem.
Keep the promise made in the ad, email or link that brings visitors to the page. We call this the Offer.
Get the visitor to take action on the offer.
The offer is what I want to bring attention to here. People at different stages of the customer journey need different things from you.
Your traffic generation makes a promise that attracts them, your pages need to reflect and deliver on that promise.
So the first step is to stop directing users with different needs to a single hard sales page. You first need to optimize each page for buyer intent.
What Do I Mean Buyer Intent?
I’m sure you’re aware of the different stages of awareness and how they impact the length and detail of your landing pages.
If you’re not, I’ll offer a very quick explanation. Basically, the less aware someone is of your brand, the longer your landing page usually is.
Someone who’s having their first contact with your brand will need more information before they take any action.
On the other hand, someone who knows your brand well, understands the products you offer, the benefits, and maybe has bought something from you before won’t need as much information. All they need is the bare essentials of the product and offer.
It’s some killer advice. But, it’s excluded something something the marketing community has generally overlooked.
Buyer Intent
Length of page is great when considering the stages of awareness, but it doesn’t take buyer intent into consideration. Not all people buy products for the same reason.
Some products and services are indeed universal and customers from all walks of life purchase for the same reason. In those cases, you only have to consider the stage of awareness.
The above would resonate with all people suffering from substance abuse. It’s a perfectly optimized page for those seeking help because intent, in this case, wouldn’t deviate between different people.
But in cases where buyer intent will differ, you have to consider what the user’s intent is and optimize accordingly.
I’ve chosen an extremely obvious example to highlight this in Upwork. Upwork is a great place to hire cheap freelance work (and a terrible place to offer freelance services).
The site ranks well for all terms relating to freelancing on both the client and freelancer side.
However, they have two distinct sides to the site. One is optimised for those who are looking to hire a freelancer, the other is for those looking for work.
Upwork optimized each of these pages for different buyer intent.
Both are optimized for different intent. They’re focused on a service which overlaps, but are completely different in their approach because they’re trying to convert two distinct groups of people.
I know this example is something of a copout because, whilst the services overlap, they have very different demographics with different goals.
However, it proves the point that the same service can have different pages targeting different buyer intent. Each one is aimed at providing a high level of value to its respective audience.
Optimizing for buyer intent in this way should be a common practice in every business’s marketing.
For example, eCommerce product pages should be optimised not just for the product, but also for who might be shopping. A woman shopping for jewelry herself will need different information than her partner who’s buying it as a gift.
Unbounce have good examples of this. They’ve built campaigns (from the look of it both PPC and SEO campaigns) that direct users to pages that mirror explicit needs and the search terms users are using.
For example, a search for “consulting landing page builder” directs to the below page which is set up to sell their consulting specific landing page templates.
This page is targeted specifically to consultanta building landing pages
Pop in a similar search for “SaaS landing pages” and you get the below.
This page is similar to the previous, but targeted at SaaS businesses.
Both are specific to the search term and offer the answer the user is looking for.
The service wouldn’t change as the end goal is still to get the user to sign up for an Unbounce account where, if I’m not mistaken, they’d get access to all of the free templates outlined on both pages.
The difference is simply in focusing on the need of the customer. If you want to implement something similar to the above, here’s what you need to do.
Focus on the Immediate Value
I’m a huge proponent of the one page, one purpose rule.
Whatever you’re selling, your landing page should only have one purpose. Anything more and you’ll just end up confusing yourself, and your customers.
However, buyer intent will dictate that immediate conversion goal. Let’s again imagine that my goal is to understand landing pages and that I’m a complete newbie to marketing.
My first search might be “what is a landing page?”, with that search I’d find the below ads.
There is one ad for “What is a landing page?” on the results page.
Thsi page does not tell the reader what a landing page is.
The intent for me was to educate myself on the basics of landing pages. Does this page do that?
No (the dictionary response did a better job)! Again, it’s focused only on the sale and getting people to sign up.
It tells me that I can try a free landing page and create a stunning site, but doesn’t answer the question I asked. If I were truly seeking for information on landing pages, I’d bounce almost immediately and forget Wix within minutes.
What they should have done was provide something that educated me on the basics of landing pages.
That could be a comprehensive beginner’s guide blog post or even an eBook/guide behind an email gate.
The value for people at the highest level of awareness is not being answered here. And there’s a huge gap that could be filled.
What about those later in the purchase journey for landing page services searching “how to create a highly optimised landing page”
Search results for “how to create a highly optimised landing page”
There’s a couple of potentials in here. The WordStream result is the highest relevant result so we’ll use that in this example. If I click though, I find the below.
This page is highly relevant to the search term “how to create a highly optimised landing page”
Does this answer the question I asked and is it targeted at those with an intent to learn more about the perfect landing page?
Hells yeah it is.
It’s exactly what I’d need at this stage. I’m looking for information on what makes a great landing page, and that’s exactly what I’m being offered. If this were a real search, I’d likely stop my search here to see what this guide is all about.
If they’d linked to the main WordStream page and tried to sell me their service I’d leave because I’m not interested in purchasing just yet. But no, they perfectly answered my question and offered the value I need.
Whether you’re running PPC campaigns or are optimising your SEO to bring in relevant traffic, ask yourself about the user’s intent. Ask yourself what’s the most valuable thing you can offer them right then and there. What’s the offer they won’t be able to refuse?
Stop thinking about the sale, and start thinking about the value.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll create more valuable touchpoint that create a longer lasting positive image of your brand. And once that touchpoint is down, you need to focus on the next step.
Build a Solid Follow Up Based on Previous Action
We all know email as the ROI king. As such, much of the follow-up information out there is focused on how to build relevant email sequences.
It’s all great advice and can really help in driving revenue numbers up. However, it’s also something that’s been covered time and time again.
What I want to cover is a tactic I recently stumbled across from Ezra Firestone of Smart Marketer. It’s a relatively simple idea (as all great ideas are) that details how to offer value through some smart retargeting. A strategy which helped Ezra sell 84,000 units in three months.
There’s that hard sell mentality of “well, they looked at the product so shove it down their throats until they buy”.
But with Ezra’s method you’re focusing on providing a more logical user journey packed full of value.
You can see how the initial video ad kicks things off. Ezra explains that he breaks things down by the engagement.
If they watch less than 25% then they’re not retargeted and tagged as a poor lead.
Between 25-75%, he’ll retarget them with more value building content. Something to establish the brand and product in a favorable light.
Over 75% consumed indicates a highly interested user, and so they’re sent to a long form sales page.
Ezra only pushes the sale on those who are most interested and most likely to convert. For those who aren’t ready, he focuses on the value they need to make an informed purchase decision.
This pre-sell engagement tracking and retargeting is an incredible way to build value with your customers and, for Ezra, led to $18,000,000 in sales form a single page.
It’s also not just a viable method for eCommerce. If we look once again at the WordStream example above we can apply the same processes.
They could track all users to that landing page (which I’m sure they are) and track how many make it through to the “thanks for downloading” page. Those who don’t might benefit from a retargeting campaign that either linked back to that page, or one with more information that offers the same download.
For those that download, you could retarget with the next logical step in their customer journey.
After downloading the basics of landing pages, you could retargeted with an eBook or article on the best landing page services for beginner CROs and copywriters through Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, and of course the follow-up email campaign.
You could also see if user’s are ready for the hard sell at that point.
This multi-touch campaign focuses on value. It provides the user with multiple touchpoints but, unlike most campaigns, doesn’t feed everyone you’ve contacted to your sales page.
Instead, it offers them the next logical step ensuring they take it with your brand. You’re still hitting those multiple touchpoints, but you’re packing each one with value which builds more trust in you and your brand.
Multiple Touchpoints Build Trust, But Only if Optimised into a Comprehensive Customer Journey
Each step you optimize needs to be focused on the immediate value the consumer is most looking for. However, you also need to keep your eye on the overall conversion goal.
As a starting point I’d recommend starting as close to the money as possible. Look at how you can optimize the sale and work backwards. Doing so brings more immediate gains, but it also means that with each subsequent optimization you’re simply adding more fuel to the fire.
You’re not optimising a stage for which there is no logical follow up established.
So stop focusing only on grabbing the sale. Look at the immediate value you can offer and build it into your wider conversion funnel. Do that, and you’ll see more people buying from you and becoming long term advocates of your brand.
Etsy.com is good at selling niche products. Here are 10 ideas you can apply to your ecommerce site.
As of November 2017 the Etsy marketplace had 31 million active product listings, created by 1.9 million unique sellers.
At any given time, there are between 20 to 25 million active buyers on the site, and consumers purchased an incredible $2.64 Billion worth of products from the site in 2016.
While Amazon.com’s mastery of commodity products makes it the undisputed king of ecommerce, Etsy.com is any many ways the queen, having established itself as the go-to marketplace for all things niche, boutique, and custom made.
Today, we’ll be looking at 10 profitable lessons on selling niche products, courtesy of Etsy’s astounding success.
Lesson 1. Cart abandonment emails increased sales by $24 Million.
A lot can happen between the moment a customer adds a product to their shopping cart and they moment they hit “confirm purchase”.
A Baymard Institute study identified the following top reasons behind shopping cart abandonment.
High shipping, tax and other charges (61%)
Required account creation (35%)
Complicated checkout (27%)
There’s various things you can try to decrease shopping cart abandonment:
Offer free shipping
Ad trust symbols
Make the checkout process more streamlined
Add social proof throughout the checkout process
Offer a compelling return guarantee
But one of the best strategies for reducing cart abandonment actually comes after the abandonment takes place. This strategy was used by Etsy to increase sales by $24 Million.
Cart abandonment emails.
A report from Salescycle says that around 30% of the clicks generated on cart abandonment emails result in purchases. In this talk, Etsy’s former CEO explains how conversions improved when they started sending cart abandonment emails 5 days after abandonment.
This tactic alone increased Etsy’s total sales by 1%. And while that may not seem like a large number, at $2.4 Billion in sales in 2015, that’s a $24 Million increase in sales.
For most of us, 5 days is a tad too long to wait. Consumers have short memories, and you might benefit from shortening the followup time and sending your emails sooner. Most of the successful case studies I’ve reviewed send their emails in the 1-3 day range.
Furthermore, the more specific and personalized you can be in your email, the higher your conversion rate will be.
For example, include products that were in the cart, like in this email from Jack Wills:
Personalized abandonment emails
You can also create a sense of urgency like in this example from Google. This is very easy to do if you offer a limited time discount as part of your abandonment email.
Google uses cart abandonment emails, tool.
Finally, don’t throw in the towel after sending one email. Sending multiple emails can mean more clicks. Try a 3 email sequence and see how it performs.
2. Continuous A/B testing increased conversions by 457%
“Experimentation at Etsy comes from a desire to make informed decisions, and ensure that when we launch features for our millions of members, they work. Too often, we had features that took a lot of time and had to be maintained without any proof of their success or any popularity among users. A/B testing allow us to tinker with small pieces and measure if those pieces are moving in the right direction. We can say a feature is worth working on as soon as it’s underway, or even before, having measured the impact of small changes on our buyer and seller experiences.”
The team runs tests in an attempt to improve UX across different verticals be it their mobile app, product interface or anything else.
For example, the team changed the way people experienced Etsy on tablets to closely mimic the user-experience on PCs, both being large-sized screens.
Like desktop like tablet
In another instance, after hearing complaints about the mobile checkout process, they optimized the flow to make it simpler. The design and the development teams work hand-in-hand to roll out these changes which are tested on a big segment of the daily traffic before rolling them out sitewide.
While Etsy hasn’t shared any of their specific data, we can pull some hard numbers from another site.
Over a period of 10 months, digital marketplace Fiverr ran approximately 400 A/B tests, resulting in a conversion increased of 457%.
Testing isn’t a guessing game. With the right framework, you can achieve consistent wins, like we do for our clients here at Conversion Sciences. Click here to download our proven conversion framework that results in an average 20% boost for our clients in the first 3 months.
According to multiple studies, placing videos on product pages is a proven way to increase conversions. Home retailer OrganizeIT found that visitors who watched videos were 144% more likely to purchase a product. Adding product videos to your top selling products could be a great place to start.
You can also go in more of a content marketing direction, as Blitsy does well. They have a prominent section on the site called ‘inspiration’ with video tutorials that feature products available for purchase on the site.
The videos aren’t on product pages, but Blitsy leverages videos to educate visitors who may want to skip the hard work and order something from the site or get inspired to purchase craft supplies from the site. Either option is a win-win.
Video is key to Blitsy’s strategy.
B. Test button copy, messaging and size.
There are a lot of little things you can test on a product page. Just look at the below example.
This product page makes the savings obvious.
Savings is displayed in large and clear font followed by a large add to cart button that’s in stark contrast to everything else. I really like how they introduce the old pricing as “was” and strike it out.
The rule for button color is this: Choose a color that is not in the color palette of the page. In this case the add-to-cart button could be almost any color but pink, black or light blue. Red, green or purple would certainly stand out.
Test and see what works for you.
3. Highly visible reviews increase orders by 10-50%.
User reviews are one of the most powerful tools in your eCommerce arsenal.
Since a large majority of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a recommendation from a friend it makes sense to invest in acquiring and promoting reviews. It also helps that reviews can drive a 10 to 50% increase in orders. Just 15 good reviews is enough to make most people trust the review content, and this threshold results in a noticeable spike in sales.
According to a Harvard study, each additional review star on sites like Yelp results in a 5-9% improvement in product revenue.
Purchases on Etsy are fueled by a 5 star rating system that display review counts and dates for individual stores. You can an example for one Etsy store below:
Prominently displayed reviews with plenty of white space
Notice the bright colors, large font, and plentiful white space. These reviews are meant to be read. They aren’t just there to fulfill an item on a checklist.
Meanwhile, in the example below, the review count is small and monochromatic.
Monochromatic review
Telling you to publish reviews is hardly re-inventing the wheel, but take this is a reminder that not all review displays are created equal.
4. Include an estimated or guaranteed ship/arrival date
With custom products, there can be a long time gap from start to finish. Etsy gives an estimate of how long it’d take to create a product and ship it. This lowers cancellation rates and reduces buyer anxiety.
Estimate to build and ship
BHPhotoVideo (quirky name) follows on the same footsteps. The “order now to ship tomorrow”— call to action kills two birds with one stone— playing on urgency and giving a shipping estimate in-tandem.
Order now to ship tomorrow
You can also try a few additional techniques to improve conversions related to shipping.
A. Offer free shipping
The biggest hurdle that 61% people cite to purchasing online is shipping and associated costs. Free shipping makes a large part of the iceberg dissolve.
Probably free shipping is one big reason why Amazon prime members outnumber free members. As of last count there are 63 million people who hold the prime membership.
Blitsy, ensures that free worldwide shipping is the first thing visitors see.
Worldwide shipping is prominent
Throughout the homepage you’ll find instances that highlight free worldwide shipping.
B. Introduce an element of urgency
For instance, here’s what happened when I visited BH again. This time I only had 10 minutes to make the purchase.
A countdown timer that urges the visitor to purchase a product he’s interested in can definitely tilt the scales in your favor.
Another example.
Limited time
5. Utilize geo-targeted messaging.
On Etsy product pages you can always see geo-targeted messaging that mentions the country of the visitor. Example:
Targeted messaging
This is a small example and nowhere near the vast capabilities of geo-targeted messaging on offer today.
Let’s analyze a familiar scenario. Familiar because most of us have experienced the bane of retargeting ads.
For some reason, ads from the site eLabelz have been shadowing me since the past few days.
However, they’re wasting their ad budget.
They don’t ship to where I live. Plus their currency targeting is off.
Missed targeting
Targeting me with some unfamiliar currency, SAR in this case, puts me off as soon as I visit the site.
Changing the currency to match the currency of the country your visitors live in is crucial to get more conversions. It alleviates some of the fears and questions like if they’ll ship to their country or not.
With IP based targeting you can automatically figure in and add shipping costs for the customer to his country and in his currency.
For example, Bed Bath and Beyond targets me with a pop-up as soon as I visit the site that tries to placate most of my fears with international shipping viz— customs duty and shipping costs.
They then proceed to show all products in my currency.
Better targeting
When running geo-targeted campaigns here are few ideas you can use:
Change the language according to the visitor’s country of origin.
Show products on the homepage according to the season in that place. Works really well for clothing stores.
6. Make returns and exchanges easier
Most stores on Etsy outline a return policy which makes buyers confident about their purchase. The freedom to return what they don’t like is a big purchase driver.
Here’s an example.
Returns and exchanges
A Wall Street Journal research reported that a third of all internet transactions are returned.
The trend’s in the upswing because a lot of millennial shoppers now buy stuff to try them out.
And that’s one reason to provide hassle-free returns.
The second reason—despite many shoppers returning purchases, they remain loyal to brands that provide a better experience.
A four-year long study tracked spending habits of buyers at two large online retailers and found that introducing a free return policy increased average spend by $620 on one store and $2500 at the other.
Everything said and done, it won’t be easy to introduce easy returns. You’d have to calculate shipping costs and allocate a part of the marketing spend to factor in for losses. But ultimately easy returns start paying for themselves and the surge in sales would make up for the losses.
Many online craft stores provide easy returns like the example below from Folksy.
Easy return policy
7. Exploit trends as they occur
During early 2000s, indie craft shows mushroomed all over the US— a time when an online marketplace for crafts wasn’t even a distant possibility, but a big need.
Coincidentally, this was a time when to-be Etsy founders were working on a community forum for crafters. Users on the site one after the other were all saying the same thing— they wished for a place where they could sell crafts. The consensus was Ebay “sucked,” and fees were too high.
That was the opportunity.
The founders jumped head-first and created a new avenue for craftsmen. Etsy lists over 30 million items as of today.
You don’t need a crystal ball to identify trends and jump on the bandwagon before anyone else. Google trends, news and forum talk is often enough.
Fugoo capitalized on Bluetooth technology to introduce world’s first waterproof Bluetooth speakers much before stalwarts like Apple or Google could smell the trend. By the time design and product teams get past red tape in corporate, startups like Fugoo can milk on a trend and establish themselves as industry leaders.
It need not always be a trend. It can also be a popular overarching theme.
For instance Nine Line an apparel retailer has a patriotic color to its line of clothing. The site especially espouses veterans.
Exploiting trends
Further down the road, they realized that the patriotic angle was well-received by Americans as a whole and not just veterans.
Patriotism shines through their tees, promotional emails, homepage and product copy and even product packaging.
They also hire only veterans.
With a 3-year growth spurt of 4,402% and $14 million in revenues, anyone can see how solid the strategy is for them.
For custom products, there are a number of avenues for fresh ideas.
For instance, the Craft and Hobby Association runs an annual trade show that packs insights from hundreds of successful craftsmen. That and similar trade-shows can give you a swipe-pack full of ideas enough for a year.
8. Feed personalized suggestions to return customers
Machine learning and customer feedback helps Etsy show personalized listings that make sense to the buyer.
Starting 2013, they began offering personalized recommendations and it immediately improved conversions.
Personalized Suggestions
94% of senior-level executives believe that personalization is the lynchpin of marketing. Online shoppers reflect that sentiment in that 59% of them attribute personalization to the ease of finding relevant products.
Needless to say that a lack of onsite personalization can hamper shopping experience.
Amazon aces on-site personalization on more than one front. Considering how much they upsell and downsell, it’s safe to assume that they generate a lot of sales thanks to their recommendation algos.
Not only is the homepage customized to a shopper’s tastes, showcasing products they’re interested in; there’s also a browsing history they can access to get back to anything they looked at before. On the customer’s shopping cart, price changes and changes in availability are promptly made available.
Consider another example.
The majority of the traffic to Build.com comes from affiliates. People click on the affiliate link and are redirected to Build. But this often left visitors wondering if the coupon had actually been applied. To counter this and improve conversions, Build created personalized CTAs that changed depending on the site that drove the traffic.
Personalized call to action
This step alone helped them lift conversions by 6%.
9. Improving page load speed increased conversions by 27%
There’s more than one reason to come up to speed with regards to your page speed.
If your site doesn’t load fast enough you’re effectively sinking sales. Etsy loads under 1.56s with a low page size of 1.5mb.
Improve load times
AliExpress found that when they reduced load time of their pages by 36%, conversions increased 27%.
Page speed also dents your conversion in other deceptively innocuous ways. A mobile visitor may still scroll the site if takes longer than 4 seconds to load.
But since the elements didn’t load, they’re well likely to miss out on special offers and promos that you’ve on the top. That can hurt.
That’s to say if Michaels (craft deals site) didn’t load their site quick enough, many mobile visitors wouldn’t see their richly done promo deals.
Rich promo deals with fast load time
QuBit’s survey of 60,000 eCommerce consumers found that a slow loading page is a major factor driving them away from the site.
According to their estimates, the number of abandoners who quit due to slow load times alone would result in an annual loss of £1.73 billion GBP.
Using a CDN, optimizing images that you’ve tons of and ensuring you’ve a mobile-friendly version of your store are a few steps in the right direction.
10. Highlight special events, limited time offers, and new arrivals
Be it Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas or any special occasion Etsy includes custom CTAs on the homepage. This boosts sales and something you ought to consider for your store as well.
Highlight events
Hold your horses though.
Etsy isn’t the perfect lead to follow in this case.
Their CTA merges with the color and feel that the rest of the site carries. It doesn’t stand out— which is last thing you want for a CTA.
As such it can be and is easily ignored.
It wouldn’t be an overstatement if I said that they did a piss poor job at crafting CTAs. It feels like since everybody is offering a sale on Cyber Monday they too had to do something.
In contrast, ArtFire’s homepage ticks all conversion optimization boxes.
Example of great conversion optimization
The homepage holiday offer hogs all the spotlight. The messaging is in place and stands in stark contrast to the surrounding dark colored them.
When you click through to the CTA you find an assortment of categories that further leads to products like the ones below.
Click through to categories
And then drop the ball. There’s no attempt to interest me as a potential buyer. Sure, a few items have SALE written next to them but it doesn’t answer how much I am saving.
That’s a potential deal-breaker.
When people click through to the CTA, it would do well to offer discounted set of aggregated deals.
Blitsy does it best. The discount amount is highlighted in bold pink and the sub-headlines call the offers limited time. The font size could be bigger but still that’s an example you can follow.
Blitsy does it best
One more example.
Blitsy does it best
Pay attention to how they highlight the new price by striking out the old price. There are countless occasions, days, and events when you can run special promos.
Or just announce an inventory clearance.
10 Profitable Lessons On Selling Niche Products from Etsy.com Conclusion
As with any technique, it’s important to test and see what works.
Don’t be disappointed if some of your marketing promos fall flat on the face. It’s only when you analyze your failures that you learn.
Try some of the ideas that we have compiled so carefully and let us know how it worked out for you.
Testing isn’t a guessing game. With the right framework, you can achieve consistent wins, like we do for our clients here at Conversion Sciences. Click here to download our proven conversion framework that results in an average 20% boost for our clients in the first 3 months.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
