In simple terms, conversion marketing is a group of tactics to encourage visitors to take a certain desired action. Let’s understand this concept a bit better and you will see why you need it NOW.
You’ve probably heard “conversion marketing” tossed around a lot , especially if you sell online via an ecommerce, subscription or a lead generation site. But, what is conversion marketing? How is it different or relates to conversion rates, conversion rate optimization, or cost-per-conversion — maybe even to the famous “content that converts” offered by many copywriters?
If only a single visitor converts, you don’t need more visitors. You need more conversions.
For many business owners and even for experienced digital marketers, it can be easy for all these terms to blur together. Let’s take a closer look at conversion marketing and how it can positively impact your online revenue?
What Is Conversion Marketing
Most online marketing strategies have the same goal: generating revenue. This revenue could be derived from sales, subscriptions or leads, depending on your product or service.
Whereas many marketers focus on gaining website traffic to increase revenues, conversion marketing works to make your existing traffic more valuable.
Why? Because conversion marketing is designed to draw value from each visit.
Conversion marketing aims to increase leads and sales by focusing on the visitor’s experience to persuade them to convert. This “conversion” could be any action or actions that you want a user to perform on your website. From making a purchase, to signing up for an email list, completing a form, subscribing or clicking a “call now” button. Every time a user takes that action, you’ve made a conversion.
Same traffic. More revenue.
Since the goal is to increase your conversion rate by moving a visitor closer to becoming a paying customer, you can see why conversion marketing or conversion rate optimization is crucial.
If you’re struggling to convert, you don’t need more visitors. You need more conversions.
This approach uses behavioral research, persuasion science, and data to determine how best to make your website a vehicle for success.
Understanding what your current and potential customers need is important in all aspects of marketing. But understanding how we can change the behavior of site visitors is of vital importance to conversion marketing. Whether it’s designing, writing, or developing creative website content, the focus is on getting more leads, increasing the number of transactions, increasing order value, etc.
The Key Reasons Why you Need Conversion Marketing right NOW
We just saw how conversion marketing, when properly implemented, can improve conversions and positively impact your profits. And if you are not focused on conversions and profits, what is the goal of your website?
If increasing conversions is not enough, then consider these reasons:
Looking for a conversion optimization marketing partner? We’ll help you build, measure and earn. Image via Unsplash.
Improve the Quality of your Conversions: Bigger shopping carts, returning customers, better quality leads, lower cart abandonment rates.
Don’t let your hard earned (or paid for) traffic go to waste. Make every visitor count. You vested time and money on your social media channels, paid ad campaigns and organic efforts. Convert each and every one of these prospects/opportunities.
Increase Profit Margins by lowering cost per acquisition.
Let Conversion Marketing Metrics be your alarm system. Quickly identify issues to discover and implement a solution.
Identify the low hanging fruit (where you will get the most bang for your buck) by measuring conversions or truly know your customer and leverage personalization strategies that convert.
Looking For a Conversion Marketing Partner?
Did this article get your juices flowing? Are you anxious to start boosting your online profits? We are just a phone call away.
Hiring your very own team of conversion optimization experts guarantees that you hit the ground running. Faster. Bigger. Better. And 100% unbiased.
How Conversion Marketing Drives Sales and Revenue Growth
One could argue that “impacting the bottom line” is the whole point of conversion optimization. The approach is powerful for ecommerce shops, and is used by subscription business models and lead generation sites to bring in more and better leads.
There are four major ways conversion marketing drives sales and revenue growth:
Let the data guide you
Your visitors are speaking to you, but you may not hear them. They are speaking with their visits, their clicks, their scrolls and other actions. They speak to you through web analytics.
Through research and analysis, you have a higher chance of creating effective online experiences. This means launching fewer duds and having a website that delivers what your visitors want. You’ll reduce your lead acquisition cost and increase the value of every visitor.
Get another chance to convert: Lead Nurturing & Repeat Customers
Studies show that nurturing existing subscribers, leads, and customers is five times more cost-effective than going after new ones. Whether your goal is to cross-sell, upsell, or bring leads back to the pipeline through remarketing, conversion marketing provides strategies to do just that.
Optimize for Your Audience(s)
Every customer is different — paid search versus organic visitors, new visitors, returning site visitors, desktop visitors, mobile — and these groups should not be treated the same. You can improve the conversion path for one group, only to annoy another. They can cancel each other out. With a conversion marketing approach, you gain detailed understanding of the specific users that come to your site and can optimize your marketing for each of them.
Quickly Fix What’s Not Working
The faster you learn where your marketing process falls short, the faster you can change it. Conversion marketing uses a variety of strategies to help you pinpoint barriers to conversion, whether it’s a confusing message, a clunky form or some other friction point.
Conversion Marketing Tactics
Lead generation and ecommerce businesses benefit from a range of optimization tactics. Here are some of our favorites.
Here are fourteen persuasive writing techniques that will trigger a response from your visitors and withstand the test of time.
Have you ever wondered why nobody is responding to your offers?
Why do people read your landing pages and then leave?
Why do people see your ads and keep scrolling?
You have a great product. You are offering an in-demand service. So why does nobody seem to be interested?
The answer boils down to psychology. Simply put, you aren’t being persuasive.
You aren’t managing to trigger that little thing in your visitors’ brains that snaps them to attention, gets the heart rate pumping, and compels them to keep reading. And persuasive writing will make a point and convince readers to take action. These timeless persuasive writing techniques will help you craft the perfect copy to convince and convert by triggering a response.
14 Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response
Today, we’re giving you a handful of tools that we use in our Conversion Rate Optimization Agency to captivate audiences and compel a response.
1. Focus on resonating with emotional problems
Everyone has problems, and your product or service is designed to help people solve one or more of those problems.
A lot of businesses simply dive into explaining their solutions. One of the most powerful persuasion techniques, however, is to start by resonating with your readers around the emotional problems they are facing. When people see someone describing something “painful” they are experiencing, it pulls them in and prepares them to buy into the solution.
Another word for this is “empathy”. People want to feel like you empathize with their problems and that it drives the mission of your business.
US President Barack Obama once said this about empathy:
“You know, there’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this – when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”
That’s how empathy works. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes and let them know you understand what they are going through, they’ll be more inclined to listen to you. When you resonate with them on their problems, they will resonate with you on your solutions.
For instance, let’s say you want to write copy to sell a tool that solves the problem of content managers having to host their marketing tools on several different platforms. You could make your copy all about that problem and then introduce your tool in the end.
Here’s a great example.
Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response: Focus on resonating with emotional problems.
In this example from Entrepreneur Alliance, the product is a monthly subscription to a group where real entrepreneurs help each other out. As you can see in the copy above, which appears just below the fold, the company quickly addresses some of the common pain points many new entrepreneurs experience when trying to get started. They also address the frustration people feel when they are constantly assaulted by new people trying to sell them something.
If you are reading this copy and you too have experienced this frustration, than you are far more likely to be intrigued and even compelled by the solution that the Entrepreneur Alliance then proposes to you.
Of course, in order to legitimately resonate with your audience’s pain points, you have to first understand your audience.
Understanding Your Audience
Michael Port offers the FESP model for understanding an audience that you will perform for or write for:
How does the world look to your audience Financially?
How does the world look to your audience Emotionally?
How does the world look to your audience Spiritually?
How does the world look to your audience Physically?
In our example above, the marketing person may see the world like this:
Financially, she’s spending too much on multiple tools.
Emotionally, she’s struggling to manage a “Mississippi of tasks.”
Spiritually, she feels obligated to deliver value from these expensive tools.
Physically, she struggles with the stress of managing content effectively.
This FESP copy should speak to her needs right out of the gate.
In the context of a landing page, it’s usually best to dive into these needs and problems using your value proposition or immediately following your value proposition.
2. Incorporate facts, data, and other analytical information
While point #1 is very emotionally driven, selling isn’t all about emotion.
Certain segments of your audience might be more analytical.
Certain products or services aren’t geared towards emotional problems.
Even when you can utilize emotion, backing it with hard data strengthens the pitch.
One of the best ways to sell is to demonstrate “irrefutable” evidence that your solution is the best possible option for the prospective customer.
Legendary advertising creative director William Bernbach once said, “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” In the digital age, “truth” looks like facts, statistics, case studies, etc.
We employ this in our own marketing here at Conversion Sciences. We can talk about our experience and expertise all day long and even resonate with the problems our clients have dealt with, but at the end of the day, what prospective clients really want to know is:
Have you had success with past clients?
Aka do you have the track record to prove you will succeed with my business?
Since we drive an average conversion lift of 15 to 25% with our clients and have a 90% retention rate, we like to include that information in our copy whenever possible.
Persuasive writing techniques to boost conversions: The Conversion Catalyst
This is about as soft as it gets in terms of analytics, but since it is true, it serves as a powerful signal to clients considering our services, demonstrating that we aren’t just talking about AB testing. We are actually getting results.
Do the same in your own copy as often as possible.
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
In other words, monkey see, monkey do.
When we are making a decision, we want to know that other people consider it to be the right decision. Who are these “other” people?
Specific people we respect
People who are in a similar situation to us
Large quantities of random strangers
In 2017, social proof often takes the form of influencer recommendations, customer testimonials, and social share count.
For example, CoSchedule asks visitors to click TRY IT FOR FREEon their homepage. Visitors are then taken to a page that contains a testimonial and highlights the company’s most recognizable customers.
Demonstrate social proof at key junctures.
Be specific in your case studies and testimonials
Customer stories and testimonials have been shown to improve sales online. Customer stories work best when they are specific. See how Unbounce does it on of their pages:
Testimonials are more compelling with details.
The best customer stories and testimonials will offer the customer name, company, title and a picture. When appropriate, add the city and state of the speaker as well. Also consider things like age when appropriate.
Favor testimonials that avoid judgments, like, “We loved working with this company!” Instead, focus on a specific result. The more specific your numbers are, the more believable they are.
These stories answer the question, “What did people like me experience?”
4. Use tone to add emotion and keep things interesting
What does it mean to use one’s tone in writing? Basically, it means writing like you would talk in real life. Your tone can breathe life into your copy. It can make your writing a lot less boring for prospects to read.
David Ogilvy once said “Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.”
When I asked Sam Hurley (founder of OPTIM-EYEZ) to share his number one advice on persuasive writing techniques, he said, “It has to be tone. A sentence that equates to the same meaning can be written in 10 different ways…Each variation will evoke 10 unique reactions — and the difference can ultimately mean conversion or exit.”
In other words, you can rewrite a sentence in several different ways using your tone to effectively pass your message across to prospects and make it sink in their minds.
Derek used three different sentences to ask just one question: “Do people read long sales pages?” Why? He wanted to sound like a normal person in his tone; not a company trying to sell something.
If he was going to ask the same question in a real life setting, he wouldn’t just ask Do people read long pages?, would he?
No, he’d naturally ask follow-up questions just like he did in the example above. And those (follow-up) questions will mean the same thing as the original query. But they’ll make his message sink in his readers’ minds.
Your tone is important. It helps you talk like a fellow human being, not a business trying to make sales. It helps you build trust. And because your readers are also humans, they can very well relate with your tone when they see it in your copy.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”― Robert Frost
In other words, people react according to what they see in your copy. If they see you shedding tears, they’d be moved to tears. If you crack jokes, they’ll laugh (or at least give you a smile). And so forth. That’s how it works.
Be careful with your tone
Can anyone actually insult their prospects (or readers) deliberately? I’d love to answer that question with a no, but it happens. I recently found this while doing research for one of my clients:
Does it really pay to call your prospects mediocre?
This form saying I’m a mediocre content marketer if I don’t sign up for the whitepaper. It that true?
But does that slur really convert better than being polite? Did it get me converted? Heck, no! I actually got pissed off! I don’t know about you, but I cringe when I see Calls to Action like this.
There are several polite words that you can use to persuade people to do something. This CTA, for example, got Career Advice 261 sign-ups within 24 hours from a single guest post on The Muse:
This button copy is probably too safe. “Submit” is a tone-def word.
Yet, it contains no word that could potentially insult anyone.
5. Take time to bring up and cover objections
You should never begin writing copy with a pre-determined word count. It doesn’t matter if your copy ends at 400 or 3000 words. What matters is that you say everything that needs to be said.
More specifically, what matters is that you cover all the key objections.
An objection is an argument that tends to come up from the customer’s end to justify saying “No” to your pitch.
For example:
If you are selling me a productivity app and I say, “Well, I don’t think I need an app to be productive,” that’s an objection. If I ask, “Why would I pay for an app when there are 30 other productivity apps that are free?” that’s an objection.
In an interpersonal sales meeting, the power of the objection goes to whoever brings it up first. If I ask you about all the free apps and then you respond, it tends to sound like you’re justifying a problem. Since I brought up the objection, and I think I’m pretty smart, I give it more weight than your response.
On the other hand, if you bring up the objection first, you win. If you introduce the cost and then immediately begin talking about how free productivity apps either utilize distracting advertising or have a low budget and thus numerous technical problems, both of which defeat the purpose of a productivity app, suddenly that potential objection has now become a selling point.
With online copy, the customer never speaks, so you have time to address as many objections as you feel is necessary. There may be just a few or there may be numerous objections that need to be covered. The important thing is that you give yourself time to cover them all.
6. Draw attention to your points with rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions draw attention. They’re not meant to be answered, which means that they shouldn’t have an answer. If your question can easily answered with a “yes” or “no”, it won’t invite the visitor to read on.
Instead, pose questions that make the reader think, “What does this mean?” or, “How will you do that?”
What if we had one single solution that can perform all these functions?
Life would become extremely easy for content marketers, right?
We had a significant increase in leads for one of our addiction center clients using the rhetorical question, “Are you ready to stop lying? We can help.”
Of course, I didn’t expect answers to them. But if you’re a content marketer, you were probably answering those questions in your mind, agreeing to my point of view that an all-in-one tool is the best option for content marketers.
That’s how rhetorical questions work. They pull attention, get readers’ attention and lure them to keep reading your copy.
7. Use hyperbole to communicate value
Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration to make your point to readers. Hyperbole should be used carefully. If you claim to be the biggest, best, or leader, your persuasive copy must deliver proof very quickly.
Really? Does the world’s best content marketing actually run on Contently?
There are certainly other companies out there that get more ROI from content marketing than Contently’s customers. But, their exaggeration is immediately backed up with the logos of some of the biggest companies in the world, the implication being that they use Contently to run their content marketing.
Another example here is Campaign Monitor’s “Send email your customers can’t ignore”.
The headline makes us ask, “How do you do that?”
In this case, the hyperbolic claim makes the reader ask, “How do you do that?” Will all customers read your emails just because you sent them using Campaign Monitor? Probably not.
Unfortunately, the hyperbole isn’t backed up by proof. Only more claims are offered. This page goes on to invite the visitor to watch a video to get the proof.
The link between the hyperbolic claim and the proof is stretched thin, requiring the visitor to watch a demo.
The longer the distance between your hyperbole and the proof, the more tenuous your persuasive argument becomes.
But you get the message they’re trying to pass across, right? Campaign Monitor helps you send emails that get opened and replied.
8. Open your first paragraph with a hook
Once readers move past your headline, the next phase they’ll be meeting with is your opening paragraph. It tells them if they should keep reading your copy or head out to somewhere else.
There are a couple of ways to create a hook in your copy. You could start with a question like this one:
Open your first paragraph with a hook.
That very first line (After all, that’s the dream, right?) will spring up a question in the mind of most readers. They’ll start wondering what the dream might be. And they know they have to keep reading to find out. That’s the hook right there.
Another way to create a hook would be starting out with an eye-catching phrase. This could be anything that has the potential of making your readers pay attention. For example:
Starting out with an eye-catching phrase.
9. Start small and utilize escalating agreements
Avoid hitting the nail on the at once––especially when you’re writing on a complex topic or for an audience that’s pretty tough to persuade. Begin by beating about the bush a little and give your readers simple valid points to agree on before they get to the complex parts of your copy.
This will help you persuade them to read your copy with ease no matter how complex the topic is and have them nodding their heads in agreement as they read on.
For example, calculating the Net Present Value of a sum of money is mostly a complex topics for folks who aren’t finance-savvy. I mean, it was pretty much a really tough topic for me in my first year studying finance in University. But see how the guys at Maths Is Fun made it look so simple by implementing escalating agreements:
See how they start their exegesis with a set of simple, valid opening sentences that virtually anyone would agree with? Notice that when readers agree that money now is more valuable than money later on, they’ll mostly move to the next line because they agreed with the previous sentence? That’s escalating agreements work. And that’s how to use it to persuade readers.
10. It’s OK to use technical details
Part of resonating with an audience is speaking in their language. When you use relevant jargon or communicate in technical terms only your target segment understands, you help position yourself as an authority in your space and build a community of people who use the same terminologies as you.
So how do you write with simplicity and still use jargon to show that you are a guru?
See how Apple uses a mix of both waffles and plainness in their copy for iPhone 7:
“iPhone 7 dramatically improves the most important aspects of the iPhone experience. It introduces advanced new camera systems. The best performance and battery life ever in an iPhone. Immersive stereo speakers. The brightest, most colorful iPhone display. Splash and water resistance. And it looks every bit as powerful as it is. This is iPhone 7.”
Notice how all that contains no single jargon even though the copy is about a technical product? Yes, that’s simplicity. Virtually anyone would understand it.
Now see how they used technical terminology on the same page––after enticing readers with jargon-less copy:
Apple’s use of jargon to build credibility.
Now some readers might not know what an optical image or f/1.8 aperture means. That’s certain. But they’re most likely going to stay with the copy because it’s interesting to read and not stuffed with too much technical mumbo jumbo.
Veteran copywriter Robert Bly said the following in a recent newsletter:
“…almost without exception, virtually everysuccessful direct response promotion is written in clear,concise, conversational copy.It’s the style used by John Forde … Clayton Makepeace … RichardArmstrong…Ivan Levison…Paul Hollingshead …Steve Slaunwhite…and just about every top six- and seven-figure copywriter I know.Why? Because it is plain English that virtually always gets thebest response — proving that when it comes to communicating,simple writing is the best writing.”
11. Use short and to-the-point statements
Short, concise statements can be memorable, fun and persuasive. They help to reduce cognitive overload, the need for an excessive amount of mental effort to understand things.
See how the folks at Fiftythree do it on their jobs page:
It’s difficult to condense messages into persuasive bites, but it can be very rewarding.
Copy doesn’t have to be wordy all the time. Just straight to the point and you’d have passed your message across in a split second.
12. Focus your headline on the biggest benefit you’re offering
Irrespective of how many benefits your offerings can provide, you need to figure out what your biggest benefit is and make your headline focus on. Too many websites “bury the lead.” This means that the most powerful point of the page is relegated to a subhead or the body of the copy.
A typical example here would be SumoMe. They offer several tools but the biggest benefit they provide is traffic and customers:
SumoMe doesn’t “bury the lead.”
Traffic and customers are what SumoMe’s prospects care about the most, so they put that in their homepage headline. David Ogilvy once said this about headlines:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.”
13. Tell stories
There has been a great deal written about stories. This is because they are proving to be so effective. Stories suck people’s attention into your copy. They make even the busiest people pay attention to whatever you’ve got to say or sell.
As an example, see how MAG International uses the art of storytelling to describe the havoc that landmines wreck:
Stories quickly help the reader relate to a situation.
Stories are most effective when:
Readers don’t know about the problem.
Readers may know about the problem, but haven’t considered finding a solution.
Stories may not be effective for readers that are frequent buyers or are very familiar with your solution to their problem.
14. Flaunt your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Of all these persuasive writing techniques, this one is the most effective in our tests. Your unique selling proposition (USP), could be anything that entices visitors to stay and read. It can be that you have low prices, superior quality or anything helps your readers rationalize reading on. For an eCommerce company, the USP includes your positioning, return policy, shipping policy and guarantees.
First, your selling proposition often doesn’t necessarily need to be unique. It just needs to be communicated. Rug Perfection offers hand-made rugs made of natural materials. They offer free shipping and pay shipping for returns as well. Would you know that from the copy on their website?
Rug perfection doesn’t flaunt its amazing story or its fantastic shipping and return policy.
Your USP doesn’t have to be complex. Persuasive writers are able to summarize your place in the market in just a few words. This is true of Kissmetrics.
Kissmetrics clearly defines their unique position in the market by referencing Google Analytics.
If calling out your competitor like Kissmetrics seems a little too aggressive for you, you can simply flaunt your unique value without mentioning any rival’s name. See how GoDaddy displays their unique 1-month free trial on their homepage:
The free trial is unique to the hosting industry.
There’s virtually no other web host provider that allows a month free trial. So that’s a USP for GoDaddy.
People are getting smarter year-by-year. Each time we want to shop for anything online, we mostly prefer to check out a number of options and choose who we’d like to do business with.
Whether you are doing growth and optimization work in-house or hiring a 3rd party top perform fully managed onversion optimization services for you, persuasion simply must be a core component of everything you do.
So a smart move you can (and should) make now is to ensure your web copy and content is focused on enticing, engaging and ultimately persuading prospects to pay attention to your brand and offerings.
Co-authored by Victor Ijidola
Victor Ijidola is a content marketer and freelance business writer. He runs Premium Content Shop where he offers premium writing services that drive leads, and has been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, Kissmetrics and many more.
Check out these click-worthy examples of persuasive copy for online ads. Discover why they work and how to test for persuasive ad copy.
The world of digital marketing makes it super easy for you to reach your target audience. But you have to whip up a mighty persuasive online ad if you want your prospects to click on yours. Persuasion is one of our CRO Agency secret weapons. It is layered into so much of what we do and is often the difference between beginners and conversion optimization experts.
In this post, we’ll review the definition of persuasive copy, how to make sure it works, and show you compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
Appeal to logic emotion and credibility all in one. Check out these click worthy examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
What is Persuasive Copy
Persuasive copy can be defined as an argument that elicits a desired action from a relevant audience. Easier said than done, right?
Aristotle explained what constitutes persuasive copy best in his rhetorical appeals or ‘modes for persuasion’. Let’s keep in mind that his goal was to make his oratory (his presentations) more persuasive. And in doing so, he identified three types of persuasion appeals that are as valid today as they were back then.
the appeal to reason, logic or logos
the appeal to emotion or pathos
and the appeal to one’s character, credibility or ethos
Not everybody makes a decision about a specific product or service based on the same argument. Purchasing a lipstick could be more of an impulse buy and an appeal to pathos or emotion may be the right call. Adding an appeal to reason such as “Free Shipping” may seal the deal and get you the click you desperately want.
An example of emotionally persuasive copy in this Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs.”
Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection. The copy reads: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs”. Why is this a prime example of persuasive copy in advertising? The famous Prince Charming in other countries, like Brazil and Italy, is called the “Blue Prince” — royal blue blood and all. So, until the blue one shows up, have fun with the rest of the colors. Clever emotional argument to leave the guilt behind and have fun now. If the shoe fits. ;)
Fortunately for most of us, developing persuasive copy is not an art but a data driven process. And as such, it can be tested.
How to Test Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
As investment in digital advertising increases, it becomes essential to figure out what really works. Ad copy testing can be executed pre-campaign launch or while the campaign is live.
Some methods for online ad copy pre-testing may include focus groups, projective techniques, and recall tests. Performing these pre-tests ensures less spend is lost when it comes to activation.
Running an online ad campaign is costly. This is a different version of the Paypal for Business ad used to test the level of persuasiveness in the copy. What appeal has been dropped? Let us know in the comments section at the end of the post.
But the proof is in the pudding and nothing beats solid AB Testing to provide you with the metrics you need to define what’s really working. If you are looking to learn about testing persuasive copy, our blog is packed with articles that explain how to do this in detail. Check them out:
Or you can take our CRO Course and become a conversion specialist. Or if you’d rather have an experienced conversion agency power boost your online marketing spend and turn more of your ad clicks into revenue, check out our CRO for Advertising solutions.
And as we promised an article about compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising, let’s dive into them!
Why Is Persuasive Copy Crucial to Online Ads
Let’s assume you have the right ad placement, defined the perfect audience, and have properly identified what your audience responds to. After all, persuasive ad copy in and of itself is not the only factor that weighs in on a campaign’s success.
Is your ad copy missing the mark? Has your click through rate hit a new low?
We all want our online ads to influence our audience in such a way that they are inclined to click to call or click to buy from our website. But, what makes copy this convincing? Sometimes, actual examples of persuasive copy can guide us in crafting our own click-worthy online ads.
Compelling Examples of Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
A genius way to apply emotion to a SaaS service on a Facebook ad for Litmus & dotmailer.
Examples of persuasive copy in online advertising help illustrate the concept.
Appeal to logic or logos works quite nicely for the auto insurance industry. I wonder what would happen to these click-through rates (CTRs) if they added some emotional arguments to the ad copy.
Auto insurance appeal to logic examples. They all look alike. Which one would you click on?
Finding examples of persuasive copy in advertising is simple if there is a Google Guarantee available. Not an easy addition to your online ads but worth every penny. All the credibility you want in a single line.
Building credibility through the Google Guarantee.
Ethos and logos appeal for this Facebook ad campaign.
Ethos appeal.
Lower the guilt with a logical argument. Less fat and less calories than your biggest competitor: McDonald’s french fries. How is that for an attention-getting example of persuasive copy?
Burger King fries ad copy. Stop clicking the button and keep reading!
Of course #FOMO is an emotion! This compelling example of persuasive copy in online advertising proves it! Almost depleted iPhone battery coupled with “Last Chance to Buy T&C Tickets” An example from a Digital Marketer Facebook ads campaign.
Appeal to emotion iPhone battery Facebook Ad example from Digital Marketer.
Searching for click-worthy examples of persuasive copy for your Facebook lead generation campaign? A winner. Hands-down. No big emotional commitment. Only 8 hours for $500 and you get rid of those pesky projects.
Lead generation ad example targeting homeowners looking to start projects.
IBM Watson understands that their audience responds to reason. And that some may be ready to buy. The free trial is a highly persuasive method to get them to click on their ad.
IBM Watson “free trial” a persuasive element of their offer.
This online ad for WD40 is all about persuading through pathos. You will need some WD40 to unstuck that scroll bar.
Humor, sex and curiosity are all emotional appeals.
Every once in a while, you run across an ad that you just can’t forget. Trident’s Facebook ad that appeals to emotions or pathos through some quirky logic as I am sure deodorant won’t taste like spearmint either.
Example of emotional and logical appeal in persuasive copy for Trident’s online ads.
Although they usually resort to logic and ethos – 4 out of 5 dentists recommend – to craft persuasive copy.
Trident Coupons: Save money, prevent stains.
Sandwich delivery ads leverage a mix of ethos or credibility (reviews, how many served), logical (pricing and selection) and emotional (fresh, good, smells, comfort) elements. Definitely great examples of persuasive copy in PPC ads.
Sandwich delivery ads.
Pizza delivery examples of persuasive copy for Google Ads. One relies on logical and ethos vs emotional appeal.
Logical and ethos vs emotional appeal for pizza delivery Google Ads.
Nike sneakers Google Ads: These are not Nike stores, so they lack the brand’s built in credibility. Therefore, they use pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews and the on time delivery percentage.
Pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews that give credibility and the ontime delivery percentage.
The Nike Official store, is all about logical persuasion of product availability with some additional credibility elements as message support.
Nike official store Google ad.
PPC ad copywriting for a mobile ad with emotional appeal. Click to call the luxury location of your choice.
PPC ad for best NYC hotels. Luxury, of course.
So many persuasive reasons for that mileage traveler in you. Capital One Venture card uses ethos on their youtube and tv ads but not on their Google Ads. Here it’s all facts.
Capital One Venture card uses logos or logical appeal to persuade to click on this PPC ad.
Looking for proven ways to optimize your pricing page? I invite you to read these sure-fire 10 tips to increase conversions fast.
“Yes, I’m very interested in purchasing your product, and I just clicked the button taking me to your pricing page.”
What does that mean?
It means the $50 you invested in finding me and getting me to your landing page paid off. It means the $1,500 you invested in creating a high-converting landing page did its job.
Most importantly, it means I’m a very warm prospect evaluating your pricing plans and very likely considering an immediate purchase.
Aaaaaand I’m gone…
Before Diving into the 10 Proven Ways To Immediately Optimize Your Pricing Page
There are a lot of places you can lose someone in your funnel, but the pricing and checkout pages are where it hurts the most. The people who arrive here are the most primed to purchase, and while re-targeting campaigns can help mitigate the damage, ultimately, we want to maximize the rate at which these warm prospects become immediate customers.
In fact, after analyzing 89 successful SaaS startups, one angel investor cited time invested in optimizing the pricing page as the #1 indicator of conversion rate.
Yet unlike checkout pages, the pricing page rarely gets the focus it deserves.
Today, we are going to shine a big fat spotlight on the pricing page and teach you how to optimize your pricing page to create a high-converting edition on the first try.
1. Offer a Money-Back Guarantee or a Free Trial
One of the biggest friction points that prevents prospective buyers from purchasing is trust. This type of doubt can be multifaceted and is often referred to as FUD (fears, uncertainties, and doubts). It can be expressed as questions like:
What if I don’t like it?
What if it’s difficult to learn?
What if it isn’t suitable for my purposes?
What if I pick the wrong pricing plan?
Can I trust this brand to deliver on their promises?
Can I trust that my transaction will be secure?
Can I trust that my investment won’t be a waste?
One of the easiest ways to alleviate these trust-based fears is to offer a money-back guarantee or a free trial. These types of offers make the customer feel like their risk is significantly reduced, and their actions follow suit.
Ways to optimize your pricing page: add a money back guarantee.
Marketer Neil Patel ran a number of different pricing page offers and found that adding a money-back guarantee increased sales by 21% and total revenue by 6.4%. Adding a free trial performed even better, doubling signups and resulting in 15% additional revenue.
Of course, it’s possible that a company could promise a refund and then fail to deliver, but this type of behavior is much more easily sniffed out via due diligence, and most consumers generally tend to trust that if a company promises a refund, they will deliver.
If your brand is not well known in your industry, you will have to break through some trust issues. Trust symbols give your visitors a visual signal that your site is safe and that your business is legitimate.
Some examples of trust symbols are:
2. Display Transaction Security Badges
While money back guarantees and free trials make the customer feel less at risk from the company, that’s not the only point of concern.
The Nilson Report estimated that last year total credit card fraud worldwide topped $24.71 billion and Experian reported that e-commerce alone saw a 33% spike in credit card fraud. This upward trend has buyers extra cautious when it comes to doing business online and has forced sites to put in extra effort to alleviate security concerns.
As a result, displaying security badges can give potential customers confidence that the checkout process will be safe and secure. A study done by Atcore, a Danish digital marketing agency, found that adding trust symbols to their ecommerce site improved conversions 32%.
Not all security badges are create equal, however. A survey performed by the Baymard Institute found that Norton led the pack in customer recognition and feelings of safety when it comes to paying online.
Norton leads the pack.
3. Display Social Proof
In many ways, the same things that enhance your landing pages will optimize your pricing page as well. Just like social proof can help motivate that first click, it can also motivate each subsequent click throughout your conversion funnel.
This continues on that thread of building trust. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. When you include things like testimonials, reviews, and other forms of social proof, it’s like having a friend sitting next to your prospect and saying stuff like, “Oh yeah, this is what you’re looking for,” and “This is totally going to solve that problem you’ve been having,” at every step of the conversion journey.
Leadpages’s pricing page offers a solid look at this principle in action. Their page displays real customer reviews that highlight different pain points their potential customers might be experiencing such as pricing concerns, product effectiveness, and conversion rates.
Pricing page with social proof from Leadpages.
GetResponse’s pricing page does a great job of weaving in several different forms of social proof, including influencer testimonials, brands of well-known customers, and the total number of users.
10 ways to optimize your pricing page.
Conversion Sciences has already covered social proof thoroughly in their landing page best practices, so I won’t belabor the point, but suffice it to say that what improves conversions on your landing pages will often improve conversions on your pricing page as well, and for many of the same reasons.
A study performed by ConversionXL found that when you place the more expensive options on the left, participants tended to spend more time analyzing the features and benefits of the leftmost plan and less time doing so on the rightmost plan. The results showed a 6% increase in conversions when the most expensive plan was leftmost and a 10% increase when the second most expensive option was placed first.
10% increase when the second most expensive option was placed first.
5. Highlight a “Recommended” Option
Suggesting a price point that satisfies the bulk of your visitors can boost conversions by helping reduce the paradox of choice.
A study performed on pricing preference versus layout designs for the site Surveygizmo concluded that site visitors focus more quickly and longer on a highlighted plan. The research also found that in a scenario where the most expensive plan was ordered first, and the recommended plan was highlighted in the second position that the recommended plan (shown below as the Pro plan) was chosen more often than in any other scenario.
Highlight a Recommended Option
To make the most out of this strategy, make sure that your recommended plan offers a superior value-to-cost ratio over lesser plans. It should entice people who would prefer to pay for the lesser plan to purchase it because it is such an obviously better value.
6. Utilize Charm Pricing
“Charm pricing” is pricing that ends in digits that are non-zero such as 9, 7, or 5.
An analysis of price point and product being sold on Gumroad’s massive creator marketplace discovered that charm pricing resulted in considerably higher conversion rates for the exact same product.
Utilize charm pricing to increase pricing page conversions.
From a psychological point of view, Gumroad’s team theorizes that since we read left to right, we tend to process the first number in a price and tend to block out the rest of the price. They also mention studies that correlate charm pricing with consumers believing they are receiving a discount.
Simply put, charm pricing is a fairly universal practice for a reason, and if you’d decided to buck the trend and just be “straightforward”, you might want to reconsider.
7. Write Strategic Pricing Plan Names
How much time did you spend thinking about the names for your pricing plans?
The main goal of a pricing plan name is to help communicate who its intended for and make the customer who selects it feel like they are making the right choice. You want customers to instantly know which plan is designed for them.
There are upsides and downsides to choosing standard names versus more original and fun names, but one way to have the best of both worlds is to use more standard, descriptive names while incorporating fun illustrations that highlight your business’ personality.
Mailchimp shows us a decent example of this in action below.
Mailchimp pricing plan names.
8. Write less and use more white space
In everything you do online, simplicity and clarity should be your core values. Visually complex websites don’t perform well in most cases. In order to help users process the info on our page, we want LESS clutter. Less text. Less options. Less distracting design features. The only thing we want more of is white space.
The following should be our target in most cases:
Minimal text that is benefit driven
Bullet points to focus attention and allow for scanning
An above-the-fold design highlighting important points and CTA’s
A layout that makes it easy to compare options
Grasshopper offers a great example of our target design aesthetic. It’s simple, clean, clear, and allows readers to quickly process the presented information without feeling confused or overwhelmed.
Pricing page design tips.
Another great example comes from Typeform. Rather than coming off sales-y, their pricing page comes off as helpful with useful one-liners describing their plans such as “Get to know Typeform,” “More power & personalization,” and “Advanced features for brands.” Each plan builds upon the last, the layout makes it easy to compare, and the entire presentation is simple and visually appealing.
Design ideas for pricing pages.
9. Offer fewer options to reduce analysis paralysis
There was a fairly famous study done on the detrimental effect more choices can have. The study was conducted by a pair of Columbia and Stanford University professors on the subject of jam. This research duo concluded that people purchased more jam when fewer options were made available to them. In fact, conversions shot up 10x when choices of jam offered to shoppers were reduced from 26 varieties to only 6.
Offer fewer options to reduce analysis paralysis.
The same dynamic has been seen in a number of pricing page studies, and it’s one of the reasons you rarely see more than 4 options being presented on a pricing page. Some companies have even taken this element to the extreme with great success. MeetEdgar, for example, has offered only one plan on their journey to $4 million ARR.
Test pricing page designs.
The sweet spot for most business seems to be 3 pricing options, but like everything, you’ll need to test in order to know what works best for your unique business.
10. For international audiences, provide automatic currency conversion
The internet has expanded the once limited reach of local business owners to encompass the entire global market. As such, you are likely missing out on some key conversions if you aren’t offering some sort of exchange rate calculator or alternative pricing page design for other countries.
Take this survey performed by Y Combinator into consideration. They asked, “Would you buy a service that bills only in € (euros)?
72 people said “€ is OK”
65 people said “€ is OK but I would really prefer $ if possible”
19 people said “€ is not OK at all”
6 people said “I would not buy in $, but only in €”
Out of 159 possible votes, 84 (roughly 53%) would rather pay in dollars instead of Euros. If your audience deals in more than one currency, adding those options to your pricing page can enhance your conversion rate.
A great example of this in action comes from Australian company Quad Lock which lets users select from 6 different countries/unions and will change the site’s currency to match.
Automatic currency conversion for international websites.
Summary: 10 Proven Ways To Immediately Optimize Your Pricing Page
If you have a pricing page, it’s a core piece of your conversion funnel.
Today, we’ve highlight some ways to immediately optimize this page, but at the end of the day, there no such thing as a perfect pricing page. Some of these tips may work for your business and some may not. The most important thing to remember is to test early and test often.
We would love to get your feedback as well, what changes have you made to boost conversions on your pricing page? Tell us in the comments below.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist shares what are user personas and how to create them. He also unveils the reason your visitors are ignoring you as illustrated by Brad Pitt.
Your visitors are ignoring you because you are not talking to them.
Do you know who you are selling to?
Do you really know?
Lately, there has been a pretty intense debate over the importance of user personas, with many in the CRO community saying they are misleading or even unimportant.
In my experience, user personas can be incredibly powerful, but only when they are used in the correct manner.
A user persona is a way to summarize and communicate everything you know about a specific customer segment in a way that allows you to make good design and copy decisions.
Personas are built from market research, directly observed data, and behavioral data. A persona will typically be depicted as a fictional individual who is described like a real person in an attempt to communicate the essence of the segment they represent.
Segments, on the other hand, are more frequently defined by their demographics: their age, income, gender, and geographic location. This is of little value when you want to create messages and experiences that persuade and convert.
When we can turn an intangible customer segment into something tangible, like a person, our team will tie our marketing and optimization efforts together to hit the mark.
The writers write for the same person. The design team designs for the same person. Fewer choices are made based on their personal preferences.
User personas are often presented as a one-page document, but it’s important to understand that like the fictional person embodying the persona, the document itself really doesn’t matter. What matters is our understanding of the segment.
User personas help the entire team work toward a similar goal and deliver a uniform user experience.
So why are user personas popular in the first place? What are the benefits?
Help us identify and understand their problem
Help us identify and understand their behavior
Help us use the right messaging
Help us increase customer lifetime value (LTV)
User personas are primarily about understanding them during a visit to your website or mobile app.
We aren’t trying to understand them as a person. We want to understand them in the context of their visit to our site.
If we have a better picture of the challenges our prospects are dealing with and the pain they are experiencing, we can better inform, educate, and direct their attention to your brand’s solutions.
User personas are also about identifying and understanding behavior. As you collect data on your target audience and start segmenting it into groups, you begin to develop a better understanding of how and where each segment spends its time online.
This understanding allows for better targeting of marketing efforts like ads or content, and allows you to run significantly more efficient and effective marketing campaigns.
Speaking to a segment we aren’t a part of is challenging… if not impossible. We see missteps online every week, where “out of touch” agencies create ads that serve to actually alienate the group of users they’re trying to reach.
User personas help us speak the language that will resonate with the segments we are after, or to sometimes, hire copywriters from those segments who can create the right messaging when we can’t.
Finally, personas can hep us set up our expectations of and strategies for LTV. Defining user personas helps us better understand how to increase LTV for certain segments, but it also helps us identify which segments will tend to naturally have a higher LTV.
That all seems pretty great, so where do businesses go wrong with user personas?
The Brad Pitt Shuffle: How User Personas Save Us
The Brad Pitt Shuffle: we’d all like to think that our target market is pretty sexy. It’s good looking, it has money, it has style.
If you’d like to keep up this charade because it makes you feel better, by all means. But if you’re ready to figure out why your marketing campaign isn’t working, it’s time to remove yourself from this little dance and turn yourself into the Digital Dr. Frankenstein you really are.
Use all of the resources you have at your disposal to create the ideal fake customer – those archetypical users. You’ll realize that you can target users with your campaign in a way you didn’t think possible. Listen to Brian’s keynote summary to get an idea of what we mean.
When we design for everyone, we design for nobody. As we craft our copy and our ux design, we start off laser focused with targeted, effective messages. Then, our message becomes less specific, less targeted, less about anyone in particular.
Here’s how it happens.
When a business starts thinking user personas, they have an ideal customer in mind. I like to call this persona their Brad Pitt.
We imagine our visitors as perfect, like Brad Pitt.
Brad is attractive. He’s young. He’s got lots of money. He’s going to come to our website and buy! We love this guy!
So we begin targeting Brad with our messaging.
“Because handsome is a choice.”
We hope our messaging will speak to our ideal customer segment.
“I can choose handsome by buying your clothes!”
But then something happens. The writers ask, “Are we ignoring females?” Based on the persona, the answer is, “Yes.” But the sales manager begins to think about women giving gifts.
Strong positions get watered down when we don’t follow our personas.
Then the designer says, “All of our images are of warm places. Won’t some of our customers live in colder places?” The guidance of our persona says our products won’t appeal to cold weather.
But the Marketing Manager thinks, “People could be going to warmer places. Go ahead and design both for those living in the cold and those living in warm places.”
Our imagery gets diluted.
What if we want to speak specifically to a segment in a warmer climate?
The picture we keep in our heads of our buyers becomes muddled.
Basically, the target persona keeps expanding, and businesses keep attempting to try and speak to everyone at once, resulting in the mess you see above.
This is the big mistake.
Businesses are still trying to find Brad instead of realizing that there is no single Brad. There are multiple Brads.
Segmentation Is The Key To Successful User Personas
Just like the roles Brad plays, user persona Brad isn’t one person. Our job is to break this persona down into segments – aka real user personas – and market to each individually.
Is your website is designed for one mashup customer segment that doesn’t exist at all?
User Personas vs. Buyer Personas
Personas are a common part of most mature web design processes. However, “buyer personas” seek to understand prospects as they are.
User personas seek to understand a visitor to a website. They are personas addressing a specific time in a prospect’s life.
Here’s why this is important. The same person will come to your website with different personalities.
Take Jennifer, for example, a persona for a plumbing company. She is 35 years old and is remodeling her bathroom. She is in a high-income bracket and prefers modern design for her home. She works part time teaching painting at the local community college. She likes wine, live music and art galleries.
When researching plumbers for her remodel, she will be very methodical. She’ll want to understand the plumbing companies past successes, professionalism and their insurance coverage. She’ll want to know if they’ve done work for any of her neighbors. She’ll want to know if they work with the tile she ordered.
Now, take the same woman, Jennifer. She’s 35 years old and her sink is leaking, threatening her new wood floors. When researching plumbers to save her investment, she only needs to know two things: how quick can they come and what is their number.
Same buyer. Two user personas. Two very different design approaches.
Two different scenarios for the same buyer.
In my opinion, buyer personas don’t provide enough information for me to design a persuasive online experience. We all have our own interpretations of them. User personas are designed to limit interpretation.
Here’s a story that illustrates that.
A copywriter is reviewing a buyer persona and reads that this visitor makes $175,000 per year. “Wow,” she thinks. “That is almost three times my salary.” She writes copy for a person that lives in a large house with an immaculate lawn, and drives an expensive car.
The executive who will be reviewing her work also reads the same persona. “Hmmm”, he thinks. “How can anyone own a home if they only make $175,000 per year?”
When the executive got the copywriter’s work, he rewrote it completely because he felt the copy was talking “above” the target buyers. The result did not persuade visitors to convert.
If we focus on some key components of the user persona, we can avoid these mistakes.
The Key Components of a User Persona
The user personas we use at Conversion Sciences are taken from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and Buyer Legends by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. These are the personas that will help us design high converting websites.
Here are the components of our user personas.
1. Demographics
Just a little, and only things that will influence messaging and persuasion. We like to include a name and a picture.
2. Description
The basics of what she does and her situation. Save the details for the Customer Commentary.
User Persona Part One: Basic description and demographics.
3. Mode of Persuasion
What mode of research is this user visiting us in? Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? provides four Modes of Persuasion that define how you should message this user persona.
How to layout a webpage for different modes of persuasion.
Methodical: Will make decisions logically and deliberately on her visits. Needs the details, plans, and fine print.
Spontaneous: Will make decisions emotionally and quickly on his visits. Just needs a reason to act.
Competitive: Will make decisions logically and quickly on his visits. Likes to know what’s in it for him.
Humanist: Will make decisions emotionally and deliberately. Wants to know how she will feel if she takes action.
Here’s an example of the Methodical Mode of Persuasion.
Example of the Methodical Mode of Persuasion
4. Customer Commentary
When I write a customer commentary for one of our clients, they often want to put it right on the website. It is written from the perspective of the user persona, and really builds empathy for the segment.
Note that Buyer Legends recommends writing in third-person.
Example Customer Commentary
Our business runs on relationships, and there’s no better time to build relationships than at our annual “Meitex Meetup”. This is when our employees get to build relationships with partners and customers that will influence the business for the remainder of the year.
This is an important event and my company expects perfection. If I don’t have to twist arms and pull teeth to get that perfection, then all the better.
We are planning a conference, but what we want is an experience. We want our customers and partners to remember the experience, but we don’t want an environment that makes it difficult to talk and build relationships. We’re not considering Disneyland. I intend to provide a structured, professional and comfortable meeting environment with a few planned surprises, and NO unexpected surprises.
Here’s what it will look like:
Customer commentary example.
5. Driving Points
This lists the things that made this user persona visit our website today. It can be anything:
A tip from a friend
A ad click
A search
Direct mail
TV Ad
Email
6. Funnel Points
Where will the visitor land on your website. Typically, this will be the home page, a landing page or blog content page.
7. Points of Resolution
This is where your copywriter and designer will spend their time. It lists the things that this user persona must uncover before she will take action. These are the things that must be on the site for you to persuade them.
As you might guess, this list is longer for the deliberate visitors: Methodicals and Humanists.
For our Methodical Penny Planner, it looks like this:
Example points of resolution for our methodical user persona.
8. Conversion Beacons
How will you call this visitor to take action. Your calls to action will often be content that addresses the above points of resolution.
Map your offers and calls to action, which are called Conversion Beacons.
9. Current Baseline Metrics
It’s often helpful to summarize the current performance of your campaigns and website for this user persona. You can use this to measure the progress you make after you begin to optimize based on your work.
Baseline metrics and recommendations can be drawn from this kind of user persona.
10. Get All This in One Document
Are you Methodical or Humanist
If you are reading this as one of our deliberate decision makers, you just might take advantage of our offer below. If you are a quick decision maker (Spontaneous or Competitive) you probably hate all of this work. You want to get started!
That’s OK. This article is for our Methodicals and Humanists. We have plenty for the rest of you.
Extreme personalization works… but it’s hard work. Get inspired by these great examples of personalization. We share their secret to success.
We know that the more narrowly our marketing is focused, the more likely people are to respond. The most extreme version of this is 1-to-1 marketing, which while effective, is not really scalable.
Through creativity and technology, however, several companies have been able to utilize extreme personalization at scale, and in doing so, redefine their industries. Today, we’ll be looking at these companies and analyzing 5 extreme personalization examples that actually worked.
1. App Personalization Example: Ayogo Gamifies Personal Health
Ayogo app for gamification, social networks, and digital health
The World Health Organization recently observed that more people will benefit if they follow doctor prescriptions seriously rather than focusing on development of new therapies.
In fact, in the North America and the U.S. alone, over $314B is spent on medication non-compliance – more than what is spent on cancer, heart disease, and diabetes put together.
Enter Michael Fergusson, CEO of Ayogo. The company has designed a platform called Empower that focuses on bringing about behavioral changes in patients through gamifications.
The Execution
Ayogo’s objective while designing Empower was to encourage users to take their prescriptions seriously. While patients typically care enough about their health to visit doctors when something is noticeably wrong, that motivation tends to fall off the longer they are removed from their last doctor’s visit.
In attempt to combat this and help lead people towards better health, Ayogo developed games that have successfully prompted behavioral changes in patients, The Empower app lets users create personalized avatars that symbolize their goals and aspirations. Once the patients get their visual avatar up and running, games and virtual coaching services are available.
The Ayogo app provides aspirational avatars.
One of the best features of the app is that it takes into account patient-to-patient networking as part of its gamification process. This has facilitated better health outcomes during various clinical trials.
The Empower™ platform is currently being adapted for patients suffering from type 2 Diabetes, Obesity & Bariatric surgery preparation, insomnia, and illnesses subject to injection fatigue.
The Data
In a 3rd party clinical trial , 60% of patients preparing for Bariatric surgery used the app to engage twice per day for 12 weeks. The app also helped patients easily adjust to life after their Bariatric surgery.
Patients playing one weight loss game lost 17.3 lbs over 12 weeks, vs just 8 lbs by the control group. App users also kept the weight off for a longer period.
Avatars in Apps as Personalization Examples Actionable Advice
Gamification has become a popular and highly effective way to drive engagement, and it’s often most successful in ways you would least expect. If you can find a way to gamify a typically unenjoyable activity for your customers, not only will you improve engagement and conversion rates, but you will also differentiate your brand by leaps and bounds.
2. Best Product Personalization Examples: Coca-Cola Has A Bottle For Everyone
With Australia being one of the world’s more developed markets, growth is tough.
No doubt, Coca Cola has been applying every trick in the book to capture the attention of the audience through campaigns such as “Bottle Blast” and all; however, the company never got the required traction. Partly because the Coke campaign had become extremely predictable and mostly because the Australian youth found it hard to relate to a big and iconic brand like Coca Cola. Australians are egalitarian by nature and they really like to cut people to size if anyone seemed too big for their boots.
Coca Cola “Share a Coke” campaign has a bottle for everyone.
The Execution
A campaign called “Share a Coke” was born that spoke to the Australian youth at eye level. The campaign’s USP was that it swapped Coke’s branding on bottles and cans with the 150 most popular first names in Australia. When customers saw their name on the coke bottles, it created a personalized experience, even though these bottles were still mass produced.
The campaign was a big hit that summer, with Coke selling over 250 million bottles and cans and expanding the campaign into more than 70 countries. Teams in Britain, Turkey and China put their own creative spins on the concept, while preserving the simple invitation to “Share a Coke with (insert name).”
Ad for Coca Cola “Share a Coke” campaign.
Actionable Advice for Product Personalization Campaigns
What makes Coke’s campaign so brilliant is that it combines personalization AND automation. By selecting the top 150 names, they created essentially 1-to-1 connections with millions of customers without actually needing to market 1-to-1. When someone saw a coke with their spouse’s name on it, purchased it, and presented it to that spouse, it made for a personally entertaining moment in a way you’d never expect from a soda product.
Look for innovative ways to create a more personal perception even if you are still running a high volume campaign.
3. Case Study: Zappos Has Extreme Customer Service
Zappos has extreme customer service.
In the interconnected, high-feedback landscape of today’s markets, customer services has become a primary selling point for brands. As per a Walker study report, customer experience is set to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in the next few years.
Zappos, an online shoe and clothing company, has taken advantage of this shifting landscape by turning customer service into an art form.
In 1999, when Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn was scouting for a good pair of shoes in a mall in San Francisco, he failed to find anything he liked. One shop had the right style. Another had the right color. The third had the right fit.
Disappointed, he went home and searched online for shoes. But then again, he found there were no major online retailer selling specialized shoes.
So in 1999, Nick decided to quit his day job and start an online shoe retail business. In June 1999, ShoeSite.com was born, later converted to Zappos (Spanish word for ‘shoes).
The Execution
Zappos, today an Amazon subsidiary, is one company that goes to extremes to please customers. The company not only offers a wide range of shoes, but also offers free shipping both ways. So if a customer has to return shoes, they can do so freely. Some customers will even order 5 or so pairs of shoes, try them all, and then return the ones they don’t like at no charge.
If that weren’t enough, the company also has an unheard of 365-day return policy backed by a full refund.
But Zappos didn’t stop there. In 2004, they relocated from San Francisco to Las Vegas with the goal of building a large, high-caliber team of phone-based customer care specialists. This shift was a little surprising considering that only 5% of the sales happened through the phone.
Justifying the act, in an HBR article, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn said: “We receive thousands of phone calls and e-mails every day, and we view each one as an opportunity to build the Zappos brand into being about the very best customer service.”
Here’s Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s take on the same:
Quote on happiness by Tony Hsieh CEO of Zappos.
Even the company’s website real estate highly focuses on data gathering and reviews. This case study doesn’t exactly reveal how much the company benefited from the above customization policies, but the fact is there are companies that succeed by putting customers at the core of their business.
Here’s Tony Hsieh’s take on his company’s extreme personalization strategies.
Quote on having fun by Tony Hsieh ofZappos.
The Data
With year over year growth fueled by their commitment to customer service, Zappos ended up selling to Amazon in 2009 as part of a nearly Billion dollar buyout.
Personalized Customer Service Example Actionable Advice
Customer attention is incredibly important and criminally under-emphasized. It is FAR easier to retain customers than it is to create new ones, and past customers will buy more from you when you launch new products or services. It’s easy to take customers for granted as you move on to the next sale, but you should be investing as much time (if not more) enhancing the experience for your existing customers as you do on sales or lead generation.
Onboarding is one of the most critical parts of the SaaS business model.
When Popcorn Metrics launched, it offered a low-cost product with a 30-day free trial to drive new users. And while initial signups were strong, very few users were converting at the end of the free trial.
The Execution
The company decided to overhaul its onboarding process. While the original process was focused on automation and run primarily via automated emails, the new process offered a more personalized experience that included interviews, Skype chats, videos, and tutorials.
The Data
The new onboarding process was an incredibly strong success for the business, increasing total sales by 367% in just 12 weeks time.
Personalized Experience Actionable Advice
User boarding is an important part of the sales funnel, and while automation might be a priority for you, including personal points of connection can significantly increase the way users respond to your offers and engage with your product.
5. Top Content Personalization Examples: Netflix Uses Algorithms To Recommend Videos
Netflix uses algorithms to recommend videos.
Netlflix has always focused on the user experience, and after adding the digital portion of their service, that focus began searching for ways to enhance personalization. With an ever-expanding digital catalog, the company was struggling to display the right content to its 57 million users while simultaneously allowing them to search out and discover new content for themselves.
Agreed, similar problems are faced by news sites, search engines and online stores as well. But then, Netflix had to deal with different sets of problems as well, such as interface constraints and here in this case, it’s about movies and TV as opposed to other media.
The Execution
In addition to creating a specialized algorithm to send personalized content to users, Netflix also created a new dashboard layout that allowed users to scroll left to right to view additional titles within a category, or scroll up and down to browse various categories chosen based on their viewing habits. The new layout gave users greater control in browsing new titles without sacrificing navigational simplicity.
Netflix welcomes individuals by name on their site.
The Data
While we have no way of knowing exactly how influential this improved UI has been to Netflix’s continued growth, their stock has tripled over the last three years, which indicates their overall approach to the customer’s experience is paying off.
Content Personalization Example Actionable Advice
One key takeaway here is that Netflix understands its audience’s different needs. They’ve identified three separate ways users want to engage with the platform, and they’ve found a way to provide intuitive paths for all three purposes using personalization.
Sometimes users want to search for a specific title they’ve heard about. This activity needs to happen fast, and Netflix provides access to their search with just a single button click.
Often, users simply want to resume shows they are in the middle of watching, and Netflix has made this easy by including “My List” front and center when you login.
Finally, sometimes users just want to browse new titles and explore new shows, and Netflix answers this with an intuitive layout and navigation built around personalized content.
Extreme Personalization Examples Conclusion
From the above case studies you would have easily figured out that personalization or extreme personalization is not industry-specific.
You could apply to any industry. The only thing that one needs to keep in mind is to study your target audience inside-out before you go ahead and apply them.
What other extreme personalization case studies you are aware of?
When you know how to persuade people, you gain control of your personal and business destiny. Here are 8 ways to be more influential.
We all want to be influential.
We want our words to carry weight. We want our presence to be felt. We want our existence to be significant.
And we want it to be natural.
We don’t want to be pushy or salesy. We don’t want to be overly self-promotional.
We just want to be persuasive.
Today, we’re going to learn how to persuade people without trying. We’re going to look at 8 ways to be naturally influential no matter who we’re with or what we’re doing.
We’ll be analyzing these both from a personal and a marketing perspective, but at the end of the day, they are highly effective in any sort of interpersonal engagement, from networking, to making new friends, to managing complex family relationships… basically any scenario where there are two or more people involved.
1. Use Mirroring To Establish Subconscious Agreement
One of the quickest and easiest ways to establish a position of influence with an individual is mirroring.
Mirroring is the act of copying a person’s body language, tone, volume, and rate of speech. It’s essentially just reflecting the other person’s behavior back to them, like a mirror reflects an image.
According to studies by Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson and his colleague Dr. Nick Yee, the act of mirroring one’s behavior demonstrated an increase in social influence over the person they were mimicking. In the studies conducted, they found that individuals who mirrored were more persuasive and were rated more positively than those who didn’t mirror.
In the context of typical interpersonal connections, mirroring a person’s behavior tends to put them at ease and can significantly increase the chance of building rapport with the individual. It can put people at ease, break through subconscious resistance, encourage trust, and more.
Like most items we’ll discuss today, mirroring will need to be consciously learned until it become a subconscious part of how you interact with people. The simplest way to begin is to match the person’s stance and conversational tempo. When practicing, a good rule of thumb is to wait 5-10 seconds before attempting to mirror someone’s stance, so as not to be too obvious.
On a note of caution, mirroring can backfire if you are mirroring highly negative postures like crossing both your arms and your legs or turning your upper body away from them.
2. Interweave Pauses & Silences To Dictate Listener Rhythm
Silence makes many people uncomfortable. There is no denying that.
For a lot of people silence is so powerful that they cannot resist filling it. Filling the void for them almost becomes second nature.
Naturally influential people are aware of the effect silence has on people and use it as a persuasive tool in everyday conversation.
From a strategic perspective, they understand that whoever fills the void of silence is more likely to disclose too much information, give clues to the influencer, or even make a mistake that might advantage the listener.
From perhaps a less calculated perspective, people who aren’t afraid of silence – who are deliberate and unhurried in their actions and conversations – elicit a feeling of control and confidence. It can be a bit of chicken and egg situation, but even if you don’t feel confident, you can project confidence by being patient in your discourse.
Additional advantages to silence and pauses include a better ability to listen and process information, a chance to decide on the most articulate and effective way to communicate a thought, the ability to better understand the speaker and make a more personal connection.
The bottom line here is that silence is powerful, and if you want to learn how to persuade people without needing to try, mastering the art of silence should be at the top of your priority list.
3. Surround Yourself With Other Influential People
Who do you spend time with?
Jim Rohn famously said, “You are the average of the five people you most associate with”.
This saying aligns with the law of averages, which is a theory that “the result of any given situation will be the average of all outcomes.”
While on a daily basis we may interact with lots of people, in reality very few of them have a great impact on us. Very few people actually influence our decisions the way we think.
When you surround yourself with the people you aspire to learn from and emulate, you will naturally rise to their level. Spending more time with influential people will put you in a position to absorb their knowledge, mannerisms, and general outlook on life, all of which contributes significantly to their success.
Influential people aren’t afraid to reach out to other influential people for help and for advice. They understand the value of connecting with social influencers, successful entrepreneurs, and connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell on “Are You a Connector”.
We all get to choose who we spend our time with, and one of the best ways to become naturally influential is to spend time around naturally influential people.
4. Encourage People To Talk About Themselves
People love talking about themselves.
Renowned Princeton Psychologist Diana Tamir found in one study that between 30-40% of our speech is focused solely on ourselves. In that same study Tamir noted that when people talked about themselves, their brain scan showed signs of activity in the areas of the brain most closely linked to motivation and value. That same area of the brain associated with talking about oneself is also associated with the thrills of sex, money, food, and drug use.
When you are meeting someone new, the best way to establish rapport is to encourage them to do what they already want to do: talk about themselves.
Start with a bit of small talk but then ask or two meaningful questions and really listen to the answer. Turn the answer into a follow up question that signals to the speaker you find their comments interesting and encourages them to go deeper.
Not only will the speaker feel valued by your attention and inquiries, but they will also give you a broader look into who they are, provide you with numerous opportunities to establish common ground and make a personal connection.
If you want to gauge how well you do this already, think back on a recent conversation and determine what percentage of the time you spent speaking versus listening. The more time you spend listening, the more influence you tend to have on the person involved.
Some people are quiet or passive and let others do the talking because they aren’t confident or simply have nothing to say. This, of course, is NOT what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is intentional and incredibly active. By encouraging others to speak about themselves, you can naturally make them gravitate towards you, regardless of the context.
5. How to Persuade Someone: Give Something Before You Ask For Anything
You’re probably familiar with the concept of reciprocity.
When you give someone something, it encourages them to return the favor and give something to you as well. In the marketing world, the most common example of this in action is the lead magnet:
Conversion Sciences lead magnet example.
But reciprocity isn’t limited to marketing funnels, and it can be used to make you a naturally influential person in every context.
They key is simply to be a generous person. What you are generous with is up to you. It could be your time. It could be your money. It could be your influence. People want to help those who are helpful to them, and regardless of what you give, when you are a giving person, you naturally become an influential person.
Stop right now and think of the most influential people in your life. I guarantee you aren’t thinking of “influencers” you’ve never met. You’re thinking of people have given a lot to you personally, and the reality is that in a world of increasingly “remote” people, the threshold for what constitutes personal generosity gets lower and lower.
If you’re skeptical, run an experiment. Spend a month going out of your way to be generous, and see what types of doors it opens and relationships it builds.
6. Understand the Difference Between Persuasion and Negotiation
Persuasion and negotiation are often thrown into the same category. This is a mistake. Negotiation and persuasion are nearly exact opposites and knowing the difference can naturally make you more persuasive.
Negotiation by design involves getting straight to the point and often includes making concessions to the point where both parties have a similar benefit.
Persuasion on the other hand is slow and subtle. Typically, persuasion makes no concessions and requires a bit of finesse.
Unlike negotiation, you can’t jump right in. When persuading someone you are likely going against core beliefs and values that have been ingrained for many years. Persuasion is playing the long game. The object is to chip away at those footholds and open the other person up to the possibility of being influenced by you.
Unlike persuasion, negotiation can often be done in one sitting, sometimes in less than an hour. One person will typically take the lead and say something like “we need to work this out” or “what would it take to resolve this?”. From there, concessions are usually made until both parties are satisfied.
90% of concession making is done in the last 10% of time spent negotiating.
Typically this happens because of a time constraint on one party.
An example of this might be negotiating with a car salesman at the end of the month. The buyer may not be under pressure to buy today but the salesman may not get his monthly bonus unless he sells you that car today. The best thing the buyer can do in this example is to slow things down. If the buyer is calm, deliberate, and patient, they will likely give you a much greater deal then if they pushed hard immediately.
7. How to Persuade Someone to Buy Something: Use Scarcity To Prompt Immediate Action
Often times you can speed up the persuasion process by adding an element of scarcity to your offer or pitch. Make it crystal clear to everyone that your product is not only valuable but also rare and uncommon.
Marketers know the value of listing not just what their product or service does but also how it benefits the end buyer. Where they tend to fall short is in explaining what the buyer or user stands to lose if they don’t purchase your product or service.
Not only does this help differentiate among everyone else vying for customer attention but it also adds an element of scarcity or #FOMO to the offer.
Some examples of scarcity are:
Black Friday sales. People understand they only have short amount of time to cash in on these uncommonly big discounts on their favorite items.
Displaying a limited amount of stock on your website. Amazon lists “Only 4 left in stock” which lights a fire under the buyer to jump on it now
Black Friday deals are built around scarcity.
Moderation is the key when applying scarcity to your process. If for example you own an eCommerce store and are constantly running “Today Only!” specials than your customers won’t feel compelled to purchase because they know another sale is only right around the corner.
To apply this outside the marketing world, think about the people you know who are super busy and how meaningful it is when they choose to make room for you in their schedule.
8. Get Rejected Purposely To Acquire What You Really Want
Calvin’s mom is well versed in the psychology of persuasion.
Getting hung up on or having a door slammed in your face is never fun. However, that failure can be used to leverage an ulterior motive.
This compliance method is aptly named the Door-In-The-Face (DITF) technique and is a well known method used to influence others to get what you really want.
How it works is the persuader will attempt to convince the respondent to get something that they know the respondent will likely say no to (slamming the door in their face). Then the persuader will come right out immediately and ask for something more reasonable. The reasonable request being what they really wanted all along.
This technique works well when followed in this sequence because in isolation the second request (what they really want) has a higher chance of being turned down. But combined with the higher request it seems as though the persuader is making concessions so the respondent will likely feel inclined to do so also.
In a study conducted by Dr. Alexander Pascual, a professor at the University of Bordeaux, several dozen men and women were split into groups at a bar. In one group a female subject asked a male subject to buy her a drink because her boyfriend left without paying the bill.
After the male subject refused, the female subject requested he give her a few coins instead.
A second group had a female subject ask for a few coins without initially asking them to buy her a drink. The results of this study showed a dramatic increase in compliance using the door-in-the-face technique.
Not only did the DITF technique increase compliance but it also increased the average amount of the donation.
How to Persuade People: Conclusion
If you want to learn how to persuade people, you need to understand what makes people influential.
Hopefully, our discussion today has given you some pointers and strategies for become a naturally influential person. It starts at a conscious level, but the more you put these strategies in action, the more they will become part of who you are.
Now it’s your turn to share. Why common traits do you see in influential people, and which ones have you attempted yourself?
Mary Rose Maguire is the managing partner (with her husband) of Maguire Copywriting. Before she began her own copywriting agency, she produced copy in various corporate industries for over 25 years. The bulk of her copywriting experience has been produced for businesses selling to other businesses (B2B).
She found that her clients had a terrible time with contemplating the concept of emotional copy, much less understanding how to use emotional triggers in a way that generated conversions.
“I’ve been trying to tell them that even though they’d like to believe that their buyer is making the purchase based on logic, they (the buyer) are really are making their decision with their heart. Therefore, even B2B copy needs to be emotional on a website.
She went on to detail the specific emotional triggers that have proven successful for her clients’ conversion goals:
“Some of the emotions I’ve slipped in (when I can) are: frustration, fear, greed, and powerlessness. I also used a headline that addressed uncertainty and instilled doubt. These are NOT the emotions that a security administrator wants to experience!
“I did this for my former employer years ago in an email that ended up bringing in four new security projects (our list was small, around 700). Keep in mind that this was a new approach that I took to an email list that in the four years I worked there, never converted.”
Mary Rose concludes that based on her strategy, she successfully found that emotional triggers do work. It was all simply a matter of addressing the pain of the prospective buyer.
Mary Rose’s company website includes flames in the background. This is an emotional trigger that was added on purpose. She wants her prospects to absorb her branding strategy. Specifically, she wants her prospects to know that her copy…sizzles!
Yes, logic might have led your prospects to your website, but make no mistake: Their emotions finalized their decision that led to your conversion. Likewise, you can’t count on your product or service features and benefits with doing the heavy lifting.
Instead, lean on the most effective, most easily-tapped into strategy: Emotion.
As a marketer, you’re launching campaigns of your own. You’ll want to use every reasonable weapon in your arsenal to convert prospects into leads, or sales. It should be no surprise that most purchases actually come from an emotional place. Knowing this, you’ll understand the power that emotional triggers can have on your online revenue?
Let’s take a look at some successful emotional triggers that will allow you to start converting like a military general.
Why Do Emotions Trump Logic On The Road To Conversions?
Hubspot author Emma Snyder quoted Steven Pinker in trying to explain why people ultimately make emotional buying decisions. He goes on to explain what it all comes down to:
“Choosing which to focus on depends on your buyer’s personality (what will resonate most with them?) and your offering (what most closely reflects your value proposition?) Once you’ve determined which emotional lever to pull, use the following tips to create a tear-jerking, heart-stopping, chest-puffing presentation your prospect will never forget.”
Now, let’s take a look at winning conversion campaigns that implemented the use of one or more emotional triggers.
Altruistic/Philanthropic Trigger
Toms Shoes has an altruistic trigger
There will always be consumers who shop consciously. They care about social causes, and they want to ensure that they’re directing their money towards companies who practice social responsibility. One such company is TOMS Shoes.
TOMS Shoes practices social responsibility by donating a pair of shoes to a child in need for every shoe purchase that a consumer makes. We all imagine that there are places in the world where many children lack shoes, and it can feel overwhelming for a first-world consumer to do something significant to address these needs.
This is why TOMS uses the tag-line “One for one” on their websites. In their logo above, you’ll see that they lead with a philanthropic trigger, stating that “It starts with one”. You might notice that they’ve also used the encouragement emotional trigger.
When people feel overwhelmed about an issue, it’s human nature to avoid it altogether. TOMS addresses this conversion obstacle by encouraging prospective consumers to start addressing the issues of children living without shoes by completing one manageable task: Just purchase one pair of shoes.
The implication is that the consumer can certainly purchase one pair of shoes, and yet that single purchase could make all the difference in the daily lifestyle of a severely-impoverished child. When the message is framed this way, the prospect has no choice but to think to themselves, “I can do this! And, maybe I can purchase more than one pair of shoes, too, so that I help out even more children!”
Fashion Forward/Sense Of Belonging Trigger
Old Navy appeals to your sense of belonging by being trendy yet accessible
Old Navy is known to be a family brand of clothing that’s at once fashion-forward, and approachable. It’s the type of casual fashion brand that promises to make families living on Main Street, USA feel that their sense of style can compete with the clothing styles of people living in New York or LA.
This is why Old Navy has approached its fall consumer prospects with the tag-line “Fall’s Favorite Denim”.
The implications are obvious. If the prospective consumer wants to gain a sense of belonging with those who are on point with seasonal fashion trends, then they’ll purchase a pair of trendy-yet-affordable Old Navy jeans.
This is an efficient emotional trigger to use when you clearly understand your brand, who your targets are, and what their inner motivations are.
Inspirational/Self Actualization Trigger
Udemy is a platform where adults can take courses for professional development or personal improvement. The company understands that converting prospective students takes a lot more than presenting them with a catalog listing of course offerings.
They realize that they’ll vastly increase their chances for conversions when they appeal to a prospective student’s aspirations. Notice how they spur the prospect’s actions by addressing their inner thoughts.
Taking a course with Udemy can lead to self-actualization
The copy leads you to an affirmative decision by urging you to “Say yes to success!” You’ll also notice that the logo further impacts the prospect’s emotions by setting the copy on a bright and cheerful yellow background.
The copy and the color scheme on the yellow ad were carefully choreographed to illicit an immediate positive response, but you might also notice a different trigger if you look closely.
There’s the use of shame as an emotional trigger, too.
While the tag-line “Say yes to success!” is at first glance inspiring, it also addresses the reader’s inner insecurities about taking steps to become more successful. If you don’t get started with Udemy, are you saying “No” to success? What type of person chooses to buy a pizza, a tee shirt, or a pet hamster over investing in their future success?
Udemy is betting that the type of prospect who cares about becoming successful would rather invest in a $15 course – and gain a sense of personal pride – than live in the shame of knowing that their usual frivolous purchases were more of a financial priority.
Udemy trends even deeper with the self-actualization angle in another ad.
By now, only someone who has no personal goals or ambitions could say no to these CTAs
Be aware when using shame as a trigger. Shame is best left in the hands of the highly skilled or talented marketer. No one loves being shamed, so we usually avoid shame at all cost. Having prospects avoid your website or your landing page is the opposite of what conversion is all about, so if you must use shame, then apply it with a very gentle hand. It usually goes down better with a heaping dose of encouragement, as Udemy has done.
Pride/Self Actualization Trigger:
L’Oreal’s famous tagline
Anyone who came of age in the 1970s and beyond is familiar with L’Oreal’s now-famous tag-line “Because You’re Worth It”. The phrase was coined in 1973 by a 23 year-old female copywriter who was tasked with capturing the emotional energy of the times.
Specifically, the brand wanted to appeal to the sensibilities of the new woman, the type of woman who took pride in her abilities of juggling career and family. More to the point, the tag-line appealed to women who were finally realizing the ability to earn their own discretionary income instead of asking their husbands or fathers for a spending allowance.
In 2015, women take it for granted that they can self-actualize themselves into the career and lifestyle of their choosing, yet they still struggle with placing the needs of their families, friends, and employers above their own. They still need to be reminded that they’re allowed to spend discretionary income towards their beauty goals simply because they hold intrinsic personal worth.
The message is loud and clear. L’Oreal was and still is a brand for the woman who takes pride in her personal appearance, and her personal brand. This is the cosmetic product of choice for women who want to feel actualized, smart, and proud of themselves.
The product line is the choice for ladies who unapologetically want to look and feel beautiful, on their terms. According to L’Oreal,
“…we know that an astonishing 80% of women recognize and respond to this positive phrase and powerful sentiment.”
Wow! Think of your conversion numbers if 80% of your visitors were able to emotionally identify with your message!
Urgency Trigger
Save the Children’s landing page and CTA promote a sense of urgency
This Save The Children landing page features a boy from a third-world country who is seemingly so overcome with hunger, he can only bury his anguished face in the palm of his hands. Is there anyone who views this photo who could say that they aren’t the slightest bit moved by the image of a young child who has given up all hope of a satisfying meal, let alone a happy, satisfying life?
Certainly, the average person who reads this landing page can’t begin to wrap their mind or emotions around the possibility of a child suffering with hunger on the same level as this child.
As if the image doesn’t do its job of creating urgency, Save The Children goes a step further in it’s verbiage: “Refugee children are frightened, homeless, and many have witnessed unspeakable horrors. You can help them,” (emphasis are mine).
Save The Children informs you of other reasons why this boy is burying his face in his tiny hands. Further, the organization plainly lets you know that there are immediate steps that you can take in order to make the boy’s pain and suffering end, immediately.
But, in case you’re still unclear about what to do, there’s the bright red button that reads: “Donate now.”
Save The Children has operated as a non-profit since 1919. They’ve had almost a century to perfect their strategy of winning over the hearts of their prospective donors. Barring personal poverty, there’s no way that any prospective donor can look at this landing page and not feel the slightest tug of their heart.
There’s a great chance that this sparse yet highly effectivelanding page will convert readers into organizational donors.
Win your prospects heart and minds with emotional triggers, and you’ll find yourself winning marketing campaigns where logical arguments haven’t succeeded.
About the Author
Terri is a five-year content marketing storyteller and editor. She loves writing marketing and entrepreneurship stories during the day while dabbling in culinary and creative arts at night.
You can view her work at terriscott.contently.com, and she’d love to hear from you @Positive_Twist.
Companies will typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them. Traffic is only half the solution to a successful online business.
If you’re putting 90% of your effort into driving traffic to your site, and minimal effort into optimizing your site for conversions then you may as well throw off the lab coat right now.
Like any great scientific experiment, you need to include the right elements to create a winning formula. And when it comes to a winning conversion formula, nothing screams “Sale!” more than a good call-to-action (CTA).
On paper the equation looks easy. Create a clear CTA for a product that delivers, and you’ll achieve sales.
So why is it that 47% of websites don’t have a CTA that can be found within 3 seconds or less?
So why is it that 47% of websites don’t have a CTA that can be found within 3 seconds or less? You shouldn’t expect a customer to take action if you haven’t made it abundantly, painfully, overwhelmingly clear what you want them to do. This is one reason many sites are losing the precious visitors they’ve struggle to bring to the site.
Take a look at these smart calls-to-action with tips on how to use them effectively – from the homepage – right through to the sale.
#1. How to get people to sign up for an account: Basecamp
Basecamp’s CTA
Basecamp is a product that has enjoyed amazing online success year after year. Look at the Basecamp homepage and notice where your eyes are drawn first. Yup, it’s the call-to-action. It stands out like a sore thumb.
The minimalist design of the page really makes the sign up button pop. It’s a huge block of color, surrounded by white space. The key here is that the dark color of blue isn’t used anywhere else on the page, so it is the most visually “important” thing on the page.
Your pages should make it visually clear what path the visitor should take in order to move to the next step in their journey to conversion.
#2. How to get people interested in your product: MyOwnBike
CTA to design your bike on MyOwnBike
Smart CTAs even transcend language barriers. You don’t have to speak Germany to understand what it wants you to do.
Again, a minimalist design is centered around the product image with a prominent call-to-action begging the visitor to click. And once clicked, the visitor gets to design their own bike and watch it transform in front of their very eyes – making it fun and engaging.
It’s a no-nonsense approach that relies solely on design to show the visitor what they should do next.
#3. How to push people to the product page: Asos
Shopping option CTAs on Asos
Sometimes, the CTA need only put the visitor on the right path. The CTA on the homepage of Asos does an excellent job of getting the visitor into the right part of the site. Visitors are split into two, males and females. To tackle this problem, Asos features two huge CTAs that lets the visitor pick which gender they would like to shop for.
This is a smart and simple way to move shoppers through to the category pages, where they’ll hopefully refine their search further and find exactly what they’re looking for.
The usual principles of a strong call-to-action apply, of course. The page uses liberal amounts of white space. Branding and navigation elements are black. This ensures the ‘View Women/View Men’ buttons clearly stand out in a vibrant blue color.
#4. How to push people to the checkout: Amazon
Your CTAs shouldn’t compete. One CTA should is ideal, but you often need to add more than one CTA. This is where it becomes a little trickier to refine your CTAs. Competing CTAs cause confusion and friction. A secondary offer on the page may cannibalize conversions from the primary, more desirable offer.
The Amazon product page uses color and position to achieve this on its product pages.
Two examples of Amazon’s primary and secondary CTAs
When a shopper is debating whether to buy they have two options:
Add to bag/basket – the primary CTA
Add to wishlist – the secondary
The clear option is for the shopper to add the product to their basket so they can checkout. But if the visitor is hesitating, the ‘add to wish list’ button gives the visitor a back up option. Rather than losing that visitor to a competitor, Amazon chooses to provide a lower-commitment option.
The color and button size of the primary CTA sends powerful signals about what a visitor should do. And if you look at the contrast between the primary and secondary calls-to-action, you can see how much more attractive the primary option is.
The key here is to use a clear visual hierarchy with your primary and secondary CTAs, to push them towards the sale.
#5. How to make the sale: BarkBox
Once you click ‘get started’ on the BarkBox homepage, the journey from the product to the checkout page is simple, clear and most importantly, engaging.
First, using fun illustrations you select the size of your dog.
Barkbox’s visual tactic leading you to the sale
The call to action here is “Select Dog Size.” It is not presented on a button or link.
The next step asks visitors to select a monthly plan. Notice how the most expensive plan is highlighted as the best value.
Barkbox’s monthly plans
You’re then given the option to treat your dog to a toy. Notice how the ‘Yes Please’ option is highlighted automatically.
Barkbox’s upgrade option offers both a positive and negative call to action.
In general humans are reluctant to say “No,” so the negative call to action, “No, thank you.” may actually reinforce the primary call to action, “Yes, please!”
The site then asks for an email address.
The call to action is “Create Your Account”
By clicking on, “Next,” you’ll be taken to the shipping and payment page. This page is crucial to closing the sale, and as you can see from BarkBox, they really hit the nail on the head. They don’t ask for more details than necessary, and they don’t include any hidden charges – a reason why 70% of shoppers on most sites abandon their carts.
The form asks for minimal information to complete the sale
The key takeaway here is that calls to action rarely stand alone. The process of purchasing is a series of calls to action, each of which may or may not be a button or link.
Top tip for your checkout page: If you need to use a multi-step process then use a visual progress indicator like a progress bar so customers can manage their expectations regarding how long it will take.
Closing Thoughts
As you can see from these powerful examples, the CTA is clear, each standing out clearly on the page, and each having an intended purpose. By using contrasting colors, on a clean and simple web page, you’ll make your CTAs stand out and guide your visitors to the sale.
Bryan Robinson is a Digital Business Analyst in charge of Marketing for the Commerce division at Spark Pay. He specializes in Lead Generation, PPC and SEM, while also overseeing content production for Spark Pay online store. He has also started and flipped his own eCommerce websites for over 10 years.
As content writers, we’re trying to persuade others to see our point of view – to agree with us. Regardless of whether it’s to click on a link or to purchase a product, we want our writing to influence others in a positive manner.
To write in an engaging and persuasive way is an art form – it’s elegant, refined and exercises discernment. And it’s worlds apart from the distasteful, strong-arm tactics employed by spam marketers.
Crafting content that influences isn’t necessarily hard, but it does take a bit of practice. So, without further ado, let’s have a look at five key elements that contribute to successful and persuasive content writing.
1: Be an Expert
Few things are more influential than the opinion of an expert. Why? Because true experts know what they’re talking about. It’s clear in their authenticity and transparency. Experts don’t use fluffy filler material in their persuasive writing, and they don’t try to distract the reader with gimmicks.
If you want to establish yourself as an influencer in your niche, you need to be the premier expert in your field. You don’t need a degree or years of related experience, but you need to demonstrate that you’re a specialist. You want to be so knowledgeable in your particular market that your content is oozing with confidence and certainty.
Note the word specialist.
Experts don’t try to cover all the bases, and they don’t pretend to know everything remotely related to their topic.
They specialize in one particular aspect or angle, and by sharing their knowledge they become an authority. And authority bestows persuasion.
La Carmina, a very successful travel blogger self-describing her approach as “spooky-cute”, embodies this idea to perfection because her success is not the result of trying to be all things to all travelers. Her advice? “Be niche. Don’t be afraid to focus on a specific topic or audience…” Read more of her suggestions for being a specialist on the Huffington Post.
La Carmina Travel Blog specializes in “spooky-cute” travel.
2: List the Most Important Information First
Writing persuasive copy for web pages is similar to that of writing news articles. That is, the most important information comes first – which is quite different from writing an essay or a short story. Journalists refer to this method as writing in an inverted pyramid, and it starts with the most relevant points which are then followed by related details and background information.
In this manner, you have the opportunity right at the start of your post to motivate your readers to continue on to your benefits, features and call to action.
By highlighting the outcomes that you or your products can provide at the beginning, you’ll give them a clear understanding of the big picture. Don’t wait for the conclusion of your piece to deliver the vision they want, because they’ll be long gone.
Gregory Ciotti at Unbounce gives a great example of this idea in his post on how research can affect the way we write copy. He captures the essence of his entire topic in the second sentence, leaving no doubt in the readers’ mind about whether reading the post will be beneficial or not.
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3: Give Your Readers Reasons Why
Written or spoken, few words are more persuasive than the word because.
In her book Mindfulness, social psychologist Ellen Langer clearly demonstrated that people are more likely to comply to a request if they’re given a reason via the word because. Even if the reason is redundant or doesn’t make sense!
Another persuasive word to work into your copy is imagine – asking your readers to imagine their desired outcome is a safe alternative to asking them to take action. It’s make-believe, so their inner gatekeeper (the voice in our head suspicious of others’ motives) won’t be inclined to object. And getting your prospects to imagine themselves in happy situations is a powerful influencer.
At Enchanting Marketing, Henneke shows us how to master this element with the words ‘because’ and ‘picture’ right in the introduction of her post (picture being a synonym of imagine). She first suggests we may be making a mistake in our web writing, then gets us to picture a client clicking where we want them to and finally shows us ‘why’ we’re making the mistake – with the word because.
You can’t help but continue reading, and for web content, that’s a big deal because, as Henneke says, you are writing for people who probably aren’t going to read what you write. People don’t read articles all the way through online like they do in print.
Picture your customers as wild animals when you write copy suggests Henneke Enchanged Marketing
4: Benefits First, Then Features
This point may seem a bit counterintuitive, but only because you know your products or services so well – still, you need to remember that your prospects don’t. Keep in mind that they’re looking for specific outcomes.
It might help to think of the benefits as the outcome they desire, while the features are part of the solution to their problem. For example, “You can look like a supermodel in two weeks with our Magic Pills – no need for diets or exercise!” The benefit is looking like a supermodel in two weeks. The features are no dieting or exercising.
Brian Clark shows us how to successfully highlight benefits, and to differentiate between benefits and features, with the ‘forehead slap test’ in this great post on Copyblogger.
5: Write for Scanners
It’s important to remember that most online consumers are scanners first and readers second. To persuade your prospects actually to read your content, use some of these eye candy elements to draw them into your article:
Headings and subheads, relevant and on topic
Bullet lists to highlight benefits and features
Font variations, bold, italics, and colored links
Short sentences and short paragraphs, each with one idea only
He establishes himself as an expert on writing persuasive content with solid research, and results, to establish his status.
The most important information is listed first. The graph shows us that a headline that includes research received a +40% increase in click throughs.
He gives us the reason ‘why’ in a big way – right there in the first sub-header: “why you should write research-backed content”.
The benefit is shown in a graph demonstrating the increase in click through rates.
The post is easily scanable. Lots of relevant subheads, graphs, images, bold and colored fonts. And the sentences and paragraphs are short and concise, with a memorable caption: “ROI is about the MECHANIC using the tool.”
With a bit of practice in applying these key elements, you’ll be successful at writing persuasive content that your readers will understand and appreciate – and that’s a winning situation for everyone.
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Terri is a five-year content marketing storyteller and editor. She loves writing marketing and entrepreneurship stories during the day while dabbling in culinary and creative arts at night.
