When it comes to page design, I’m fond of saying that we don’t need a designer as much as a draftsman. Their job is less about making things attractive and more about getting a visitor’s eyes to the right parts of a webpage.
What do I mean by “right parts?”
I mean that a visitor must know how to digest a page. They must know that they are in the right place, and why. This is the job of the headline and sub-headline.
They must know what choice they are being asked to make. Should they continue on in their journey? Buy something? Get the hell out?
They must know where to find answers to burning questions.
Designers are playing a game of tilt-ball, where the visitor’s attention must be carefully guided around obstacles and pitfalls. Literal pits to fall into.
Using visual cues, designers are playing tilt-ball with a visitor’s eyes.
Designing a Web page is like a game of tilt-ball.
If the ball is a visitor’s eye, then visual cues provide the “gravity” that move the ball along the board.
This column is not for designers. It is for managers and marketers who are tasked with ensuring that the designs they get for their landing pages, ecommerce sites and home pages are competently designed to perform.
Need help making your landing pages perform better? Our Conversion Scientists® have a bank of 20,000+ test ideas proven to boost results. Learn more about our turn-key conversion optimization services and book a consultation to see how we can help you.
Pitfalls: Where the eyes get stuck
When someone says a page looks “cluttered”, the culprit is probably poor use of visual cues. Many of the pages we design have the job of “Help me choose.” This means that they must help the visitors choose a next step, a product, whether to sign up or not, or whether to leave.
1. Bridges to Nowhere
Two of the greatest visual cues you an employ are photos and arrows. Our love of images comes from big glossy spreads in magazines, where the images may be all that is seen as readers browse idly under their hair dryers.
Web readers are in a very different context.
Images and arrows are used gratuitously, to fill space or the “break up” a page. These elements will always draw the eye, but are they drawing the eye to a dead end?
What’s the Point?
Arrows are powerful sources of visual gravity. But they lose their power when they point to things that aren’t exciting, or are only exciting to the owner of the website.
This visual cue, an arrow, deadends at a weak call to action.
The arrow promises something important. The button text breaks that promise.
This creates a visual bridge to nowhere.
Visually, arrows point to the most pertinent part of the page. If that doesn’t excite the reader, then the rest of the page seems unimportant.
If you’re going to use an arrow, make it point to something exciting for the visitor. The arrow below points at something a bit more exciting:
The arrow points to the way to get the offer. Source
Arrows don’t have to point to extraordinary offers. They can be used as simple guides to increase scrolling, as long as they are working in the interest of the reader.
This arrow serves the visitor, letting them know that more follows.
Arrows come in many forms. Here a simple chevron increased booking in this AB test.
Adding a simple chevron arrow increased scrolling and conversions. Source.
Even words can be used as pointing devices.
Words can be used as visual cues to guide the eye. Source
Helpful tip: Point to something that is exciting to the reader, not just something you want them to see. Or better yet, make what you want them to see the most exciting thing on the page.
2. Faces of Death
Images of people will suck attention away from almost any important text on a page. This is why so many designers’ use of images works against the business.
Faces are visualy attractive to humans. Source Tobii Technology
Faces draw our eyes. If someone attractive is looking at us, we look back.
We’ve written before about how stock photography and other forms of “business porn” are both a wasted opportunity on a page. Images will powerfully advance the value proposition of any page.
Images are also powerful visual cues when used correctly, yet too often, they’re dead ends.
This human face draws the eye, but doesn’t do anything with it.
This image succeeds in enticing visitors to look away from the primary call to action.
Adding a caption indicating that this is a real person adds credibility.
With a caption, this image becomes a credibility builder and explains the “Watch Video” offer.
Consider adding calls to action in your captions and in-image copy.
The direction of the eyes can be used as a visual cue. In the following image, the model guides the visitor toward the site’s navigation, but away from the primary call to action. Her body directs our gaze away from the copy as well. This is probably not an effective visual cue.
The gaze and body position are visual cues that, in this case, direct attention away from the copy.
In the following page, the model is looking generally in the direction of the call to action. This image needs a caption below or overlaid on it to make it an effective visual cue.
The eyes draw attention to the offer, but this image needs a caption.
Bryan Eisenberg uses an image to direct attention to the main offer on his website. Notice the subtle finger pointing downward in the following image.
Bryan Eisenberg uses his hero image to draw attention to the subscription offer on his home page.
Repeat your offers in and near images for maximum impact.
The visual cue is an image and the in-image messaging calls the reader to action.
3. Motion for Motion’s Sake
Probably the most powerful visual cue is motion, any kind of motion. Like images, moving things can draw the visitors into a hole from which they never escape.
The most common source of motion on business websites today is the image carousel. This is a staple of the web because marketers can’t make hard decisions, or because politics require that everyone get a piece of limited home page real estate.
In our AB tests, we often find that removing rotating carousel images improves conversion rates. In situations where carousels win, the major contributor is the first slide. The second contributor to a winning carousel is a slow fade transition.
In other words, make the carousel look like a static image.
The reasons that a carousel might underperforms is threefold.
- Constant motion diverts the visitors’ eyes keeping them from getting into the page’s message.
- The burden of multiple large images increases page load time so much that it affects conversion rates.
- Technical issues prevent the carousel from displaying properly in certain browsers, devices and screen sizes.
There is a lot to lose with this kind of visual cue.
Rotating carousels of images have proven to be negative visual cues.
Carousels are also used to rotate customer logos, to slide through customer testimonials and to reveal products.
Carousels are all signs of indecision on the part of the business that owns the website.
While the rotating carousel does appear to be on the way out, it has been replaced with an even worse motion –based visual cue: full-size video animation.
The video in this animation is 1.5MBytes, a massive hit to load time. And it’s blurred out. What does this communicate?
Motion without purpose can have a chilling affect on conversion rate. Source
Designers justify this with unsupported statements like these:
Stunning video or animation in the background can easily make people stop and stare, then examine it, increasing the time they spend on the site, and hopefully lead to more interaction with the contents [sic] on the site.
The argument is that, if visitors stop and stare, it increases time on page. This, the errant thought continues, results in more interaction with the page. Here’s the punch line. The motion reduces engagement with everything else on the page, but only if the visitor is around long enough for it to load.
Businesses seem to be buying this.
Walking people. A factory. Big buildings. Was this background image really necessary?
The same thinking is used to justify parallax animations – that a more interesting page increases engagement. Our testing experience is that engagement often increases as conversion rate decreases. As it turns out, engagement is also a measure of how confused a visitor is.
The proper use of motion as a visual cue is to draw attention to something important.
If you don’t think that this sentence is important, then you are not human.
Nonetheless, if you’re going to use motion, use it to draw attention to something valuable.
In the animatiTest-na-anskioznost.gifon below, you can see how the popup “shakes” to indicate that the visitor made an error in entering data. This is actually helpful to the visitor.
Here, motion is used in the service of the visitor.
Motion is SUCH a strong visual cue, that it can quickly overwhelm a visitor.
Unnecessary entrance animations prevent the reader from focusing.
This parallax implementation only serves to hide content, making the page look blank at one point.
There is no gain in hiding content just so you can add motion to its reveal.
In affect, many of today’s parallax designs end up looking like this to the visitor.
This entire page is a collection of visual cues, rendering all of them ineffective.
4. Gestalt Principles and Poor Grouping
The human mind likes to group things. When things can’t be grouped, the visitor has to work too hard to comprehend and prioritize a page. This is what we typically call “clutter”.
Grouping of things is another important visual cue. It is a combination of Gestalt Principles used in design, and can entail similarity, proximity, and enclosure.
Two places where grouping is an important visual cue are ecommerce category pages and SaaS pricing pages.
Visually, this category page is hard to group correctly. Green boxes denote some possible visual groupings.
Adding some visual cues creates enclosures, communicating what objects are grouped.
Adding grid lines helps group items on a page. Green boxes indicate visual grouping.
In the following example, the enclosure leaves out the product pricing, description and star rating, but the white space creates enough separation.
The enclosure strategy here excludes the titles, pricing and star rating.
The enclosure here doesn’t serve the reader.
Without visual cues, we group things in unexpected ways. Green boxes indicate visual groupings.
With the addition of white space, we can influence the way visitors group things visually.
The introduction of space here causes items to be grouped into rows. This is easier for the brain to parse.
5. Product Pages & Limited Information
This page uses visual cues to prevent grouping.
This pricing page uses visual cues to help the visitor choose. Source
First, the arrow points to a call to action, “Try it free!” The hand-written script makes the offer stand out. That is, visitors don’t group it with the rest of the text.
Next, the “Plus” column is highlighted in a different color and labeled “Most Popular” in red. This is important, because we would otherwise group all four together. This visually anchors the decision to the top higher-tier options. The choice goes from “Choose the best” to “Choose between Plus and the others.”
When we don’t provide visual cues, our visitors may not feel they have enough information to make a choice.
This pricing page offers no visual cues to “Help me choose.”
Pricing pages often rely on lists of features to differentiate. Unfortunately, they don’t realize that they are creating arbitrary groupings simply with the text they choose.
Here’s a list with inadvertent groupings.
Blue and black boxes denote visual grouping by text length.
The visitor will read the first item in the group. If it doesn’t interest them, they move to the next group, not the next item. We can see this behavior in heat map reports and session recordings.
Mangers should always ask, “Have we used visual cues to help our visitors choose?”
Content is the Best Visual Cue
From the visitor’s point of view, the best visual is the content that she is looking for, right? So visual cues should not be used in place of content. BH may have transformed Foundr Magazine, but there is more missing on this page than an “e”. This page relies on an arrow to indicate where the visitor can find the menu for the site. What would be a better visual cue than an arrow?
A menu.
This implementation relies on a small visual cue to reveal key information.
As conversion optimizers, we are not fans of content hidden simply for the sake of design. Progressive reveal is rarely beneficial and only works in specific use cases.
Managers should say, “No” to hiding important content from decision makers.
Shape as a Visual Cue
We all know that we should click on buttons. But what is a button. In the image below, there are three buttons. Which is clickable?
The three call to action buttons on this page perform differently as visual cues.
One is a white border around a menu item. One is a white rectangle with a call to action. The other is the classic arrow indicating video is available. Of the three, the video arrow is the most recognizable as a button, something you can click on.
With the advent of flat design, shape and shading are used less and less to indicate clickable elements. However, designers are returning to some of the shapes that made things look clickable.
Which element below is clickable, the “Enterprise” button or the “Sign Up” button?
Which of these blue elements is clearly a button?
The blue area containing “Enterprise” is a title. It is not clickable. The blue shape with the rounded ends is clickable, and is shaped like a button to indicate that.
Which is clickable here?
Six styles of buttons, from most to least visually clear.
In general, the shape with rounded edges and shading indicating a physical button will give the visitor a clearer message that an they can take action.
Text as Visual Cue
The way you create text can be a visual cue. The myriad opportunities to maximize this ROI are often wasted. Some designers espouse a minimalist approach, minimizing the amount of information that is encapsulated on a page. Others evangelize a more comprehensive style. These two approaches are neither right nor wrong. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that fifty-two percent of screen space was completely wasted in 2013, more than in 2001.
We Are Now In Control Of Your Eyes
Jakob Nielsen says that in 2013, half of all screen space above the fold was wasted.
Based on what you’ve read, can you tell me specifically how much screen space is wasted according the study by Jakob Nielsen?
A. 50% of the screen space
B. 52% of the screen space
The most accurate answer is B, or 52%. If you chose A, don’t be sad. It was by design.
You should have answered A, because I hid the more accurate answer in the opening paragraph of this section. The first line is uninteresting, just repeating the heading. Then comes a 34-word sentence with many multisyllabic words (See what I did there?). The important stat was written out because numbers jump off the page.
This paragraph is a visual pitfall.
To support the more general, less accurate answer, I used an unexpected heading, “We are now in control of your eyes.” I highlighted that “Half” of the screen space is wasted using a pull quote and linked text. These are visual cues.
The scanning eye will tend to land on textual cues.
- Headings and subheadings.
- Highlighted text, Bold, Italicized, or Colored.
- Bullets or numbered text. Like this.
- Short paragraphs.
- Shorter lines.
It’s not that people don’t read, it’s that they favor text that is easier to read.
It’s Easy When You Know What You Want
None of this is a result of my training in UX, psychology or persuasive writing. I knew that there was one thing that I wanted you to see, and another that I did not.
You might start by looking first at what doesn’t work for you.
Rethink filler images or remove them. Consider if branding images need to be so large. Rewrite headings to tell scanners what’s on the page. Eliminate long paragraphs, long sentences and business speak.
Then see where you are. Odds are that your page will have improved immensely, as measured by your accountant.
Understanding what’s important on any page and then applying some tricks to focus your visitors’ attention is a great way to get what you want and to help them find what they are looking for.
4 Accessible Growth Hacking Techniques: What To Do When Growth Starts Stalling
Conversion OptimizationStagnation can be scary.
You took the business from 0 users to 500, 2000, 5000… then growth starts stalling. Existing users are leaving. New ones are barely signing up. And you know ‘no growth’ is quite tantamount to ‘dying’. What do you do? Do you need a new marketing strategy? Is there a problem with the product? Did you suddenly drop in the SERPs?
Growth stalls can occur for a number of different reasons. It could be:
But regardless of why your growth has stagnated, what’s most important is how you bounce back, and that’s why today, we’ll be looking at 4 accessible growth hacking techniques you can use to kickstart your business out of a funk.
1. Check For New “Wow” Factors In Your Industry
New entrants or existing competitors often come up with new features your products don’t have. And many times these features become the “wow factors” in your industry. But many companies ignore these factors and fall prey to growth stalls.
A study on the growth experiences of a number of top organizations reveals that a cycle of disdain, denial and rationalization keeps many teams from responding meaningfully to market changes.
But instead of ignoring these competitor-induced changes, adjusting your product ASAP may be your best bet to sustaining growth in any industry. That is, you look at those “wow factors” and learn from them. That’s what your prospects want. If you don’t give them what they want, they will move on to wherever they can get it, and your business will plateau.
Take Windows PC vendors, for example. They enjoyed the vast majority of market share for many years. From 2006 to 2013, Lenovo, HP, Acer, Dell, Asus, and Toshiba kept occupied the top 5 spots for personal computer sales.
PC sales market share – Image source
Apple was barely even in the picture during those years, and the all of sudden, they snatched the 5th spot in 2014 and have held the spot ever since. Why? They identified two wow factors in their space – design and simplicity – and leveraged those factors to quickly gain market share.
Competitors caught on and adapted, and now you can find many different PC vendors offering products with Mac-inspired designs and features.
Mac-inspired design – Image source
See how they all look like Macbooks?
Image source
Describing HP’s strategy to keep its growth and market share amidst all the improvements in Macbooks, the team at Trefis — a financial advisory firm — said “…we believe HP has taken some prudent steps such as the launch of new advanced thin clients at lower prices, to ensure that it maintains its market share.”
But obviously, HP isn’t the only PC brand protecting its share of the market from Apple. Other PC manufacturers that have withstood the test of time understand that looking out for wow factors and adapting to market changes keeps them relevant and in business.
If you are experiencing stagnation in your business, it might be time to adjust. Look at the fastest growing business in your space, and see what you can learn from them.
2. Try Something Different
Growth doesn’t always come from genius. Sometimes all it takes is common sense. If you’ve been doing the exact same thing, but it’s stopped working, it might be time to simply try something new.
For example, PPC agency KlientBoost had spent over a year investing heavily in content marketing. They had pulled in some of the most prolific authors in the marketing space and were churning out well-received articles on a regular basis, but at the end of the day, their strategy wasn’t bringing in leads.
They decided to change things up and doubled the length of all their content, producing 3,000-4,000 word blog posts instead of the usual 1,500-2,000, and over the next year, the company ballooned from $100k MRR to $300k MRR.
You don’t always know if a new strategy will pan out. But guess what? You know EXACTLY how your current strategy is performing. If it’s not working, try something new.
3. Maximize Every Available Resource
Is there anything available to you that you aren’t taking advantage of?
Does your friend have a column on Entrepreneur.com, but you’ve never taken the time to work out a post featuring your business?
Does your quarterly webinar perform well, but you just haven’t bothered to invest in setting up more webinars?
Do you know Facebooks ads work really well in your industry, but you just haven’t gotten around to setting up a campaign yet?
These types of available resources are fine to ignore when business is growing and other strategies are working, but when growth is stagnating, it’s time to maximize these resources before you even consider looking elsewhere.
One example of this in action comes from Benji Hyam of Grow & Convert, who took notice of how poorly Airbnb was utilizing its blog:
These same posts could have been used as a tool to drive brand awareness and growth for Airbnb — if they were on topics that would attract new Airbnb users. But they weren’t. However, Airbnb now seems to have recognized the value their blog can bring and have more recently begun publishing the types of content Benji suggested.
This is an example of a company maximizing an available resource.
Look around. What resources are you currently failing to fully utilize? What has worked for you in the past but you never followed up?
4. Entertain EVERYONE’S Ideas
When growth is stagnating, it’s time to start listening to the people you don’t normally listen to – the people who AREN’T driving your current marketing direction.
Different people in your company bring different skills to the table. Engineers understand your product. Salespeople understand persuasion. Customer services reps know exactly what’s on your customers’ minds.
Instead of hunkering down on the same-old, same-old, look to bring in new perspectives and insights. Listen to everyone willing to offer feedback. Creativity is not exclusive to the field of marketing or growth hacking.
Navalent Ron Carucci puts it this way: “Too often, we think of creativity as an individual pursuit. However, the Latin roots of the word “creative” — which describe a social, communal experience — reveal a fundamental truth: Creativity is founded upon collaboration.”
Collaboration is one of the best possible ways to kickstart growth.
Growth Stagnation Doesn’t Have To Be Permanent
Stagnating growth is nearly impossible to avoid, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. As your marketing strategies begin to decline in ROI, use these 4 simple growth hacking techniques to kickstart growth and resume your climb.
Victor Ijidola is a content marketer and freelance business writer (for hire). 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.
5 Essential Qualities of a High-Converting Promotional Video
Conversion OptimizationWhat’s the first thing visitors see when they come to your site?
If the answer isn’t a promotional video, you are probably missing out on a sizable chunk of conversions.
In addition the broad trend of increased video consumption – that reached 80% of all web traffic by 2019 – promotional videos in particular are having a significant impact on conversion rates across multiple industries. The addition of promo videos has led to 300% conversion increases in email blasts, 80% boosts on landing pages, and 20% improvements on ads.
But most importantly, users are 64% more likely, on average, to purchase a product after watching a related video.
Of course, not all promotional videos are created equal, so today, we’ll be looking at 5 essential qualities the highest converting videos tend to have in common.
1. They Get Straight to The Point
For most new website visitors, you only have one chance to make a killer first impression. In fact, Diode Digital discovered that 60% of visitors will watch your pomo video before reading any site text and will even share their experience when you present them with a “share this video” button. Even more encouraging, Invodo reports that 92% of mobile video viewers share video. So not only will a solid promo video help with conversions, it can benefit your inbound marketing efforts as well.
This suggest that users are likely to begin watching your promo video, but for how long?
Studies on internet browsing show that the average attention span of browsers in 2015 was 8.25 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000. Another study done by Vidyard concluded that if you didn’t gain your audience’s attention in the first 10 seconds, you would lose 20-25% of your viewers.
What this means for you is that the first 10 seconds of your video are critical. You can’t waste time setting up a payoff. You need to get straight to the point.
And this urgency doesn’t just apply to the first few seconds. You can’t afford to waste time at any point in your promo video. According to Wistia, optimal video length is around 2 minutes. Beyond two minutes, there is a significant drop-off in engagement.
Wistia graph on video engagement over time
If for some reason 2 minutes just isn’t going to cut it, you can go up to 12 minutes without seeing the next dropoff in engagement. The most important thing here is the video itself. If you’re holding people’s attention, you can go longer without losing as many viewers. If your video sucks, keeping it to two minutes isn’t going to magically make it effective.
2. They Have Higher Production Quality
With shorter attention spans and a rising volume of videos being made, companies need to make sure that their videos meet a competitive level of production quality.
We have all seen low production quality videos. They sound like garbage. The camerawork is shaky. The editing (if there is any) is about the quality you’d expect from home movies. To increase conversions you have to capture your audience’s attention and nothing says “don’t buy from me” like a low quality promo video.
So what can you do to increase video production quality?
Obviously, the camera you use is important, but with the quality of smartphone cameras these days, virtually everyone has access to a camera that meets the cut for video quality. For our purposes, we are going to focus more on three areas that are often overlooked.
If you don’t do a good job in these three areas, even a $5,000 camera won’t be enough to save your video.
Sound Quality
For recording videos where a subject will be speaking to the camera, you should purchase a lapel microphone. Lapel mics attach directly to the subject’s clothing, making it an ideal choice for recording interview-style footage. These mics will help make the audio more crisp and focused while also reducing sound interference from unwanted sources.
lapel mics don’t have to be expensive
As you can see, these types of mics can be required relatively cheaply, but you’ll want to do your research to find out what you need for your shoot.
Lighting
Proper lighting is another essential component of making high quality promo videos. You don’t want your footage to be under or over exposed, so setting up lights will eliminate any unwanted shadows. Even the most basic lighting set up in a production will make a huge difference on set. The three point lighting technique (shown below) is well known in the video production world and is probably the most versatile lighting technique.
3 point lighting technique
Lighting is one of the biggest differentiators between professional and amateur videos, so even just using this basic technique of three point lighting will improve your video production’s quality immensely.
Video Framing
The rule of thirds is a critical building block to the rules of high quality video composition. It is a simple technique to apply to your video setup that will make a big difference with no extra effort.
To apply this technique, mentally draw a tic-tac-toe board across your screen, like you see below.
The rule of thirds
Now try to keep the subject and other points of attention along those lines. The positioning is pleasing to the eye and allows the viewer to observe the background as well. Like lighting, it’s something you might not be aware of unless you’re looking for it, but if you compare a professional video and an amateur video side by side, it will immediately jump out at you.
3. They Make Your Brand Likeable
Written communication is extremely limited. With video, you have a chance to tap into the non-verbals that are so important to communication.
That can be both a blessing and a curse, however, as it means you must be aware of the more subtle vibes you are sending out in your videos. The buying process, as you know, is not always a rational process. At the end of the day, people trust and buy from people and brands they like. And while it’s difficult to put a metric to likability, in most cases, you still need to achieve it.
Fortunately, the likeability standard doesn’t require rocket science to achieve. Sometimes all it takes is a genuine smile. A split test conducted by Wishpond showed a 10.7% increase in profits when their ad showed someone smiling versus someone not smiling. That’s a huge increase for such a small change. While natural smiles are not always easy to pull off, especially if you are trying to make videos with non-actors, having the participants relax and watch funny videos pre-shoot can help.
Everybody loves a smile
4. They Explain The Product & It’s Value
Educating potential visitors through video is one of the best conversion techniques out there. In fact, 98% of users say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.That is why 45% of businesses who use video marketing said that they have an explainer video on their home page. Of those businesses, 83% said that their home page explainer video was effective.
When making an explainer video, try to follow this structure:
5. They End With A Clear CTA
The video is over and your viewer watched the entire thing, congratulations!
Now what?
This is where you prompt the viewer to take action. They have demonstrated a clear interest in the video (otherwise they would have bounced after 15 seconds) so now you need to give a clear call-to-action (CTA). A recent study by Quick Sprout showed that conversion rates increased by 144% when you showed a CTA after the video.
Since they are already on your website, you likely want to get them to either purchase or opt-in so you can place them into a funnel. This process should be as simple and straightforward as possible.
One way to add a CTA is to prominently display it outside the video. The key here is that it needs to be be obvious and clearly connected with the video itself.
CTA to the side of the video.
Another option is to actually overlay the CTA on the video itself.
CTA overlay
Summary
A promotional video can be a huge asset to your business, and if you haven’t considered making one before, you should definitely re-evaluate.
Remember that you can always outsource various pieces of the process if fully outsourcing is too expensive, but you don’t feel capable of doing everything yourself. Remember to invest in a competitive level of production quality, be authentic, get to the point, try to be likeable, and add a clear call to action that is simple for your viewers to follow. That recipe alone will put you light years ahead of your competition.
Have you tried running a promo video before? Tell us about your results in the comments.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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Facebook Ads Guide Simplified: If You Aren’t Cooking With Tofu, You’re Losing Money
Advertising CRO, Conversion OptimizationFacebook advertising has become the premier B2C online sales platform.
The numbers don’t lie—Facebook raked in $27 billion (with a “b”) in ad revenue just a few years ago. And it’s not hard to see why people are flocking to the platform for their B2C marketing needs—it has vast consumer data through the Open Graph, innovative ad units, and a user-friendly DIY ad creation interface. The platform allows for incredibly sophisticated consumer advertising campaigns.
But you know this, so what’s holding you back? Why is clicking that money-draining “Boost Post” button the furthest that most businesses have ever gone with Facebook advertising?
Friction.
Maybe you opened up the Ad Manager, took one look and thought… “nope” (been there, done that). Maybe you tried to launch a campaign and ran into a bug. Maybe you succeeded in actually getting an ad campaign in motion but didn’t see an ROI (my first three campaigns).
What you probably don’t realize is that the most universally successful way to use Facebook is also one of the absolute simplest ways.
It’s called Tofu, and it’s what I’m going to be teaching you today:
Facebook Ads guide – Simplified.
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to cook Facebook-style Tofu and you’ll finally understand how to turn Facebook ads into a profitable marketing channel for your business.
But before I get into the juicy details, there’s a key concept we need to understand.
Facebook Push Marketing vs. Google Ads Pull Marketing
When somebody conducts a Google search and clicks on one of the ads at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), that’s considered pull marketing. Since the user has already established his intent with the search query, the ad he receives is highly relevant to what he’s looking for. He ‘pulled’ the ad to himself.
Facebook ads, on the other hand, are push marketing. This means that when he sees a Facebook ad in his Newsfeed, it’s actually interrupting what he’s doing—’Liking’ family photos, posting food pictures, getting into political arguments, etc. He’s not on Facebook with the specific intent to buy (or even research) anything.
When it comes to push marketing in the Internet Age, people don’t like to be sold to during their first interaction with your brand—especially on Facebook. They need to develop some form of relationship with the brand first.
Facebook Ads Guide – Simplified
As you already know, content marketing is one of the best ways to develop a relationship with your target market. With content marketing, you are creating and delivering a significant value at the top of your funnel. This Top-of-Funnel… or Tofu… content allows you to develop a trust-based relationships with your target consumers.
The Facebook funnel is ridiculously simple:
This basic sequence is how thousands of businesses right now are driving insane revenue with Facebook ads. And it’s stupid easy to get up and running.
The first step is setting up your Facebook Pixel.
The Facebook Pixel
If you don’t have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website, please do so now. Seriously, I’ll wait. Go on—here’s what it is and how to implement it.
Why you need to install the Facebook Pixel?
For our purposes, the Facebook Pixel allows your Facebook ads to talk back and forth to you website—who clicked which ad, who visited which page, who filled out a form, etc. This is all incredibly useful to your advertising campaigns and reporting.
It’s a really simple 2-step process. Here’s how it works:
Step 1. Use the “Traffic” Objective to Season Your Pixel
Find one of your best top-of-funnel (ToFu) assets in terms of engagement or traffic. These are usually blog posts or publicly viewable resources that offer objective value without attempting to specifically promote your business.
Got the URL? Great.
First, head over to the Audiences tab of Facebook Ads Manager:
Facebook Ads Manager.
Next, click Audiences:
Audience tab of Facebook Ads Manager.
Then select Create Audience > Custom Audience:
Facebook Ads Manager How to create lookalike Audiences.
Select Website Traffic and then enter the URL of your Tofu content:
FB Ads Manager: Use website traffic.
Name your audience, add notes, adjust as necessary, and then click Create Audience:
Ads Manager enter blog post URL.
Now, anybody who visits that blog post (regardless if they came in from a Facebook ad or not) will be tracked by Facebook. Cool.
Next, send some traffic to that blog post!
What you’re looking for at this point is to get the cheapest clicks possible. This will come down to a few more complex factors:
OK, so we’re generating quality traffic efficiently—but where is the money and/or leads?!
Keep reading…
Step 2. Retarget Tofu Visitors With an Offer
If the Tofu asset you sent the traffic to is any good, you’ll have accomplished the following with your target consumers:
You let them read your content and walk away without shoving a sales message at them. Now it’s time to bring them back to you.
Create a new Facebook ad campaign, but this time, instead of using “Traffic” as the Objective, use “Conversions.”
When setting up your audience targeting, instead of using demographic/psychographic data like you did last time, just click Custom Audiences and choose the one you set up earlier. Remember? It’s the one recording people who visit your blog post.
Create a new Facebook ad campaign, but this time, instead of using “Traffic” as the Objective, use “Conversions.”
Now, instead of sending these retargeted users to another blog post, send them to a piece of conversion-oriented content. For advanced marketers, this will likely be a lead magnet, which trades premium content for an email address. From there, they’ll attempt to close the lead or create the sale through email nurturing programs.
If you don’t have a lead magnet and the corresponding email automation system in place, this is the time to use your ecommerce, sales or landing page.
Just make sure that the conversion-oriented asset you send the retargeted traffic to is related to the original ToFu asset! That’s what got them to click in the first place, so stay on topic.
Facebook Ads Guide: Facebook Conversions
Lastly, make sure that you’re using the proper Facebook Standard Events on the conversion page. Standard Events are little extra bits of code that help your website communicate with the Facebook Ads Manager reporting interface.
This is hugely important for the ability to accurately record conversions.
More about Standard Events here.
If you implement your Standard Events properly, you can do a lot of really cool things.
For example, your website can dynamically pass revenue data to Facebook so that you can have your ROI calculations done for you automatically! Pretty nifty for ecommerce stores with a variety of products and price points.
Optionally, if you don’t want to use Standard Events, you can use Custom Conversions to record conversions.
Basically, you tell Facebook that if somebody loads a certain URL (like store.com/umbrella/thank-you) to record a conversion. You’ll miss out on some of the more advanced features, but it’s a good place to start if you don’t have access to the technical skills required to implement Standard Events.
Facebook Ads Guide Bonus Round: Create Lookalike Audiences
You want to hear something embarrassing about me?
I’ve spent countless hours on cold targeting and retargeting strategies for various clients. I like to think I’m kinda good at it.
But roughly 75% of the time, when I let Facebook do the targeting for me, its campaigns out-perform mine!
You might be wondering what I mean by “let Facebook do the targeting for me.”
I’m referring to Lookalike audiences, which are a vastly underutilized tool of the Facebook ads platform.
The purpose of a Lookalike audience is to use a given parameter and let Facebook use the data in its Open Graph to find people who are just like that parameter.
For example, you can ask Facebook to send your ads to people who are similar to your Facebook Page’s audience, an email list you have, or better yet, people who have already bought from you.
Seriously, does it get any better than that? “Hey Facebook—here are a bunch of people who bought my widgets or became leads. Can you send my ads to people who are similar to them?”
To set up a Lookalike audience for people who have bought or converted from you, follow these steps:
To set up a Lookalike audience for people who have bought or converted from you, follow these steps.
Now that you’ve created the audience, choose to target it when you create your next ad campaign (instead of cold targeting or retargeting).
Choose Lookalike Audience.
Test the Lookalike campaign against your other campaigns and see which performs better.
You’ll never actually know exactly what is similar about your conversions and your Lookalike audiences — Facebook keeps that data semi-private. This isn’t ideal, but hey—if you’re getting conversions and making money, it could be worse.
Conclusion: Tofu Is Your Friend
Facebook doesn’t need to be complicated. You can get some truly incredible results with simple Tofu campaigns.
If you follow these steps, you will create a Facebook ad campaign that uses customer experience and natural buyer behavior to drive conversions.
A Comprehensive Guide To Increasing Conversions With User Reviews
Ecommerce CROYou already know that online reviews are a big deal.
But what you may not realize is that you have a TON of available options for taking control of your user review profile. There are some insanely effective ways to acquire and harness user reviews in 2017, and the businesses that are utilizing these strategies are achieving absolutely insane growth.
Today, we are going to cover some of the best strategies for acquiring user reviews and harnessing them to increase site conversion and growth.
But first, let’s look at the data.
What The Data Says About User Reviews
Sometimes different metrics reveal conflicting truths about a given subject. That’s not the case with user reviews. They make a significant impact from any angle we look.
Some of the more revealing statistics include:
If there is any question on the importance of harnessing reviews, this infographic from WebsiteBuilder.org should definitively put it to rest:
Types of User Reviews
When you think about what a review is, you might picture an Amazon product listing, with a star rating out of 5 followed by a few paragraphs of text.
That’s certainly a common version of user reviews in action, but it’s not the only one. In order to understand how many strategies we have available to us for utilizing online reviews, we need to first understand just how many different types of reviews exist.
Here are a few common types of user reviews:
Testimonials
A testimonial is a review written specifically to highlight the upsides of a product and encourage those considering it to make the purchase. A testimonial is given by someone who has actually used the product, but is not intended to be an objective, pro/con analysis of the item. The goal of a testimonial is always to promote the product in question.
Testimonials can be written, recorded as audio, or captured in video and often need to be actively solicited.
Endorsements
Endorsements are essentially the same as testimonials, but instead of being given by an average user, they are given by someone with influence in the business’ niche. That influence can be as widespread as an international celebrity or as targeted as a niche blog.
When an endorsement is given, the endorser’s influence is being intentionally channeled in order to encourage more people to purchase the product. In order to receive an endorsement for your product or service, you will typically need to have provided some level of value to the endorser (through your product/service or in the form of direct payment) or have an existing relationship.
Endorsements for Aaron Orendorff
On-Page Reviews
An on-page review system allows users to publish their reviews of your product, good or bad, directly for public viewing. On-page reviews tend to be more trusted by consumers, as they are theoretically more objective than testimonials solicited by the business.
Businesses that host on-page reviews for their products are taking the risk that negative user feedback will paint their product as a dud for prospective buyers. The upside is that having a positive on-page review profile can communicate significantly more value to potential buyers than hand-picked testimonials.
On-page review for ByJodi.com
Social Media Page Reviews
Certain social media platforms now allow businesses to open up their social pages for user reviews. Similar to on-page reviews, social page reviews can be either positive or negative and offers a risk/reward scenario for business.
On sites like Facebook, reviews are prominently displayed and easily accessible. Business also have the option of disabling reviews on their page for any reason, which lowers risk in the event a page receives too many negative reviews for the owner’s liking.
3rd Party Review Platforms
3rd party review platforms allow users to rate any business in a given category. They tend to be very popular with consumers, as 3rd party control of the site limits chances for businesses to manipulate their review profiles. Businesses are rated on these sites whether they wish to be or not, so the best course of action is usually to claim your listing, ensure listing information is accurate, and then respond to reviews.
3rd party review site listing for Close.io
Blog Post Reviews
The most thorough type of review you can receive is a full blog post dedicated to breaking down your product. These take some serious investment on the part of the user, and thus, typically only happen if their is something in it for the reviewer.
If your product receives a decent amount of search queries, that can be enough to prompt blog post reviewers. Affiliate programs and direct sponsored posts can also result in these types of reviews. If your product makes enough of a splash to be considered one of the top 10 or so on the market, you will probably also find yourself the subject of comparison/contrast reviews and “top _____” lists.
Conversion Sciences review of top A/B testing tools
Youtube Reviews
Similar to blog posts, Youtube has become a popular destination for video reviews on a wide variety of projects. While visual items tend to perform best, anything that can be reviewed via a written post can be reviewed via video.
And just like blog posts, the best way to encourage Youtube reviews is to provide incentives for Youtube reviewers.
Youtube review of Freshbooks.com
There’s More You Can Do Than Sit And Wait
So we know without a doubt that reviews can be a powerful force in our business, and we’ve seen the variety of review types you can use.
The question then becomes, how can we capitalize on these reviews instead of just passively waiting for positive reviews to roll in? Or if we are actively encouraging reviews, what more can we do to harness those reviews versus just hoping they catch people’s attention?
There are two primary objectives at play here:
We’ll look at each objective separately.
4 Ways To Collect A Larger Number of Quality User Reviews
The first step to harnessing user reviews is collecting them in the first place. Here are 4 great ways to do that.
1. Ask customers for reviews during the follow up process.
The easiest and most consistent way to get reviews is simply to ask for them. Give customers some time to experience your product and then include a review request in your follow up process.
The timing is very important here. Yotpo estimates 8.1% of customers will respond to review requests on average, but that number can be significantly increased by optimizing the timing of your requests. While Yotpo uses machine learning to optimize send times, you can optimize open rates to a lesser extent by split testing.
Since email is the preferred method for post-sale follow up, the subject lines will make a big difference as well. Be sure you are using subject line best practices:
Remember that not all reviews are created equal. If your Google My Business profile, for example, is at 3 stars, it might be more helpful to ask that users review that listing as opposed to your Facebook page. On the other hand, if very few people find your business through your GMB listing, it might be more effective to direct users to your on-page review section. It’s up to you to identify where reviews are most important and direct users there.
Here’s a simple follow-up template you can use, courtesy of Grade.us – click here for 6 additional templates.
[su_note note_color=”#7aed8d” text_color=”#000000″ radius=”10″]Hi Jan,
Thanks for choosing [your business]. I wanted to reach out personally and ask about your experience.
What was your experience like? (e.g. amazing, terrible, etc.)
We want to be better. Your feedback helps us accomplish that. If you’re willing, it only takes a minute or two.
Share your review here [link]
Thanks for your trust,
Andrew[/su_note]
It’s also important that your user experience is low-friction for those who choose to click-through and leave you a review. For written reviews, you could use a plugin like Rich Reviews, or if you are interested in capturing video testimonials, you could use an app like VocalReferences.
2. Provide incentives for customers to review.
One option for increasing your review count is to offer incentives for reviewers. By offering a discount, giveaway, upgrade, etc. you can encourage users who wouldn’t normally review to submit their feedback.
You’ll need to be up to speed on local and national laws if you go this direction, and even then, you can only really use this strategy for your own on-page reviews or internal feedback. Trying this strategy to encourage reviews on 3rd party review sites is the quickest way to incur big-time penalties with those types of sites.
As you can see in the JCPenney example below, largest businesses often use sweepstakes entry as their reward system, since this ensures a user’s individual commentary doesn’t in any way affect their chance of winning the reward.
JCPenney review incentive
Another great incentive that doesn’t really feel like an incentive is to hold a contest, where users compete with their own user-generated content. This works particular well with visual products or creative audiences, but it can work for a wide variety of businesses. Contests tend to work best when driven by social media marketing.
3. Send free stuff to reviewers and influencers.
The best, most thorough reviews you can get come in the form of blog posts, but like I mentioned earlier, in-depth, blog-post-length reviews take a lot of work, and simply asking someone to review your product in this manner isn’t typically going to cut it.
In most cases, you’ll need to compensate the reviewer, at minimum, with a free copy of your product. Some reviewers or publications that include reviews will do sponsored posts, but the best, most trusted reviewers won’t go further than accepting a copy of the product and will attempt to provide an unbiased review, for better or for worse.
Sponsored review of YOKO
Unless you are a big brand with an anticipated product release, you probably won’t be able to get the top reviewers in your niche. Instead, you’ll want to focus on finding influencers with small but highly engaged audiences.
Youtube and Instagram are both notably powerful platforms for getting these types of reviews, and Social Media Examiner has a great guide on running influencer campaigns in just this way:
This approach is very targeted, and while it can scale, if you are looking to scale from the start, there is a better option.
4. Setup an affiliate program.
Creating an affiliate program is the easiest way to incentivize every single blogger in your niche at the same time. Everyone has equal opportunity to cash in on your company’s buzz by writing reviews and adding affiliate links.
Unlike sponsored posts, bloggers don’t have to explicitly state that they are writing the article with that incentive in mind. All they are legally required to do is acknowledge somewhere on their site that they include affiliate links on their site. Since affiliate marketing is so commonplace, most readers won’t interpret the presence of affiliate links as a suggestion that the review is biased, which is less the case with sponsored posts.
In other words, if you can get people active in your affiliate program, you end up getting the best of both worlds.
This model is particularly effective for services that require month-to-month payment. For example, ConvertKit chose from the get-go to put it’s growth stock on the affiliate train. They offered 30% recurring affiliate revenue (more than any of their competitors) and then got some big time affiliate marketers on board. If you search for reviews, you will find page after page of blog posts promoting their product.
ConvertKit has a LOT of blog post reviews
These reviews were instrumental in driving ConvertKit from a failing company at the beginning of 2015 to $518,000 MRR to close out 2016.
And as a user of ConverKit since 2015, I can tell definitively that it’s not the quality of the product or even the marketing that is driving growth. It’s a solid product, but what has ultimately been the key driver in its growth is the exponential effect of a well-run affiliate program.
3 Ways To Harness User Reviews For Increased Conversions
So we have our reviews now. What do we do with them? What can we do with them?
Every business model will work a bit differently, but the following three strategies can be applied to virtually any business.
1. Include positive reviews throughout your funnels.
The easiest way to use reviews is simply to plaster them all over your funnels, and you should absolutely be doing that. There are few better ways to improve site conversions than by adding generous helpings of social proof.
And while you no doubt understand how to add a testimonial or review to a landing page, you might not realize how effective it can be to add these reviews to your checkout pages as well. Neil Patel found that just adding a testimonial to his checkout page increased conversions by 6.38%, without any additional optimization.
Testimonial on checkout page
2. Drive the narrative by responding to good & bad reviews.
People don’t like to be scammed. They don’t like receiving poor quality products. They don’t like bad service.
They also don’t like seeing hard working business owners abused. People understand that there are many consumers out there with unreasonable demands and a penchant for unfairly flaming any business that doesn’t submit to their insane demands.
When you are actively engaged with user reviews, you can help drive the narrative about your business instead of having it swept away by individual consumers. You can thank those who leave positive reviews and invite them to purchase form you again. You can respond graciously or cheekily to the ridiculous reviews. And you can learn from the reasonable negative reviews.
Owner responds to a negative review
This will look different for every review type we’ve discussed. For blog posts reviews, you could thank the reviewer for posting and answers questions from readers in the comments. For reviews on your own site, you could make special offers or engage in other forms of customer appreciation.
By being active with reviews instead of passive, you can help shape the narrative on your brand.
3. Upsell reviewers.
This is perhaps the most overlooked strategy here. When someone positively reviews your brand, they are in a prime position to be upsold.
They have literally gone out of their way to mention how great you are or how positive their experience with your brand has been. Now is the time to move them to the next level in your funnel or simply offer them a refill, additional item, or any other form of upsell.
Having great segmentation is important here. Your upsell pitch needs to be hyper-relevant the the reviewer. And how you attempt to upsell will depend on the nature of the review.
If you are requesting a review via email, you could include an upsell offer directly under the review request.
Yotpo review email with upsell
You could also track reviewers and include them in a separate follow up sequence that attempts to upsell them later.
For blog posts or youtube reviews, you could offer a special discount to viewers. There are a lot of possibilities. The only area you will need to be careful with is 3rd party review sites, as they probably won’t want you using their platforms for upsells.
Don’t Sleep On User Reviews
User reviews are a big deal, and harnessing them can have a major impact on website conversions and overall business growth.
I hope you’ve found our comprehensive overview helpful today, and I’d love to hear if you have any additional review strategies that have worked out for you. Let me know in the comments!
Why The Visual Cues On Your Site Are All Wrong (And How To Fix Them)
Landing Page OptimizationWhen it comes to page design, I’m fond of saying that we don’t need a designer as much as a draftsman. Their job is less about making things attractive and more about getting a visitor’s eyes to the right parts of a webpage.
What do I mean by “right parts?”
I mean that a visitor must know how to digest a page. They must know that they are in the right place, and why. This is the job of the headline and sub-headline.
They must know what choice they are being asked to make. Should they continue on in their journey? Buy something? Get the hell out?
They must know where to find answers to burning questions.
Designers are playing a game of tilt-ball, where the visitor’s attention must be carefully guided around obstacles and pitfalls. Literal pits to fall into.
Using visual cues, designers are playing tilt-ball with a visitor’s eyes.
Designing a Web page is like a game of tilt-ball.
If the ball is a visitor’s eye, then visual cues provide the “gravity” that move the ball along the board.
This column is not for designers. It is for managers and marketers who are tasked with ensuring that the designs they get for their landing pages, ecommerce sites and home pages are competently designed to perform.
Need help making your landing pages perform better? Our Conversion Scientists® have a bank of 20,000+ test ideas proven to boost results. Learn more about our turn-key conversion optimization services and book a consultation to see how we can help you.
Pitfalls: Where the eyes get stuck
When someone says a page looks “cluttered”, the culprit is probably poor use of visual cues. Many of the pages we design have the job of “Help me choose.” This means that they must help the visitors choose a next step, a product, whether to sign up or not, or whether to leave.
1. Bridges to Nowhere
Two of the greatest visual cues you an employ are photos and arrows. Our love of images comes from big glossy spreads in magazines, where the images may be all that is seen as readers browse idly under their hair dryers.
Web readers are in a very different context.
Images and arrows are used gratuitously, to fill space or the “break up” a page. These elements will always draw the eye, but are they drawing the eye to a dead end?
What’s the Point?
Arrows are powerful sources of visual gravity. But they lose their power when they point to things that aren’t exciting, or are only exciting to the owner of the website.
This visual cue, an arrow, deadends at a weak call to action.
The arrow promises something important. The button text breaks that promise.
This creates a visual bridge to nowhere.
Visually, arrows point to the most pertinent part of the page. If that doesn’t excite the reader, then the rest of the page seems unimportant.
If you’re going to use an arrow, make it point to something exciting for the visitor. The arrow below points at something a bit more exciting:
The arrow points to the way to get the offer. Source
Arrows don’t have to point to extraordinary offers. They can be used as simple guides to increase scrolling, as long as they are working in the interest of the reader.
This arrow serves the visitor, letting them know that more follows.
Arrows come in many forms. Here a simple chevron increased booking in this AB test.
Adding a simple chevron arrow increased scrolling and conversions. Source.
Even words can be used as pointing devices.
Words can be used as visual cues to guide the eye. Source
Helpful tip: Point to something that is exciting to the reader, not just something you want them to see. Or better yet, make what you want them to see the most exciting thing on the page.
2. Faces of Death
Images of people will suck attention away from almost any important text on a page. This is why so many designers’ use of images works against the business.
Faces are visualy attractive to humans. Source Tobii Technology
Faces draw our eyes. If someone attractive is looking at us, we look back.
We’ve written before about how stock photography and other forms of “business porn” are both a wasted opportunity on a page. Images will powerfully advance the value proposition of any page.
Images are also powerful visual cues when used correctly, yet too often, they’re dead ends.
This human face draws the eye, but doesn’t do anything with it.
This image succeeds in enticing visitors to look away from the primary call to action.
Adding a caption indicating that this is a real person adds credibility.
With a caption, this image becomes a credibility builder and explains the “Watch Video” offer.
Consider adding calls to action in your captions and in-image copy.
The direction of the eyes can be used as a visual cue. In the following image, the model guides the visitor toward the site’s navigation, but away from the primary call to action. Her body directs our gaze away from the copy as well. This is probably not an effective visual cue.
The gaze and body position are visual cues that, in this case, direct attention away from the copy.
In the following page, the model is looking generally in the direction of the call to action. This image needs a caption below or overlaid on it to make it an effective visual cue.
The eyes draw attention to the offer, but this image needs a caption.
Bryan Eisenberg uses an image to direct attention to the main offer on his website. Notice the subtle finger pointing downward in the following image.
Bryan Eisenberg uses his hero image to draw attention to the subscription offer on his home page.
Repeat your offers in and near images for maximum impact.
The visual cue is an image and the in-image messaging calls the reader to action.
3. Motion for Motion’s Sake
Probably the most powerful visual cue is motion, any kind of motion. Like images, moving things can draw the visitors into a hole from which they never escape.
The most common source of motion on business websites today is the image carousel. This is a staple of the web because marketers can’t make hard decisions, or because politics require that everyone get a piece of limited home page real estate.
In our AB tests, we often find that removing rotating carousel images improves conversion rates. In situations where carousels win, the major contributor is the first slide. The second contributor to a winning carousel is a slow fade transition.
In other words, make the carousel look like a static image.
The reasons that a carousel might underperforms is threefold.
There is a lot to lose with this kind of visual cue.
Rotating carousels of images have proven to be negative visual cues.
Carousels are also used to rotate customer logos, to slide through customer testimonials and to reveal products.
While the rotating carousel does appear to be on the way out, it has been replaced with an even worse motion –based visual cue: full-size video animation.
The video in this animation is 1.5MBytes, a massive hit to load time. And it’s blurred out. What does this communicate?
Motion without purpose can have a chilling affect on conversion rate. Source
Designers justify this with unsupported statements like these:
The argument is that, if visitors stop and stare, it increases time on page. This, the errant thought continues, results in more interaction with the page. Here’s the punch line. The motion reduces engagement with everything else on the page, but only if the visitor is around long enough for it to load.
Businesses seem to be buying this.
Walking people. A factory. Big buildings. Was this background image really necessary?
The same thinking is used to justify parallax animations – that a more interesting page increases engagement. Our testing experience is that engagement often increases as conversion rate decreases. As it turns out, engagement is also a measure of how confused a visitor is.
The proper use of motion as a visual cue is to draw attention to something important.
Nonetheless, if you’re going to use motion, use it to draw attention to something valuable.
In the animatiTest-na-anskioznost.gifon below, you can see how the popup “shakes” to indicate that the visitor made an error in entering data. This is actually helpful to the visitor.
Here, motion is used in the service of the visitor.
Motion is SUCH a strong visual cue, that it can quickly overwhelm a visitor.
Unnecessary entrance animations prevent the reader from focusing.
This parallax implementation only serves to hide content, making the page look blank at one point.
There is no gain in hiding content just so you can add motion to its reveal.
In affect, many of today’s parallax designs end up looking like this to the visitor.
This entire page is a collection of visual cues, rendering all of them ineffective.
4. Gestalt Principles and Poor Grouping
The human mind likes to group things. When things can’t be grouped, the visitor has to work too hard to comprehend and prioritize a page. This is what we typically call “clutter”.
Grouping of things is another important visual cue. It is a combination of Gestalt Principles used in design, and can entail similarity, proximity, and enclosure.
Two places where grouping is an important visual cue are ecommerce category pages and SaaS pricing pages.
Visually, this category page is hard to group correctly. Green boxes denote some possible visual groupings.
Adding some visual cues creates enclosures, communicating what objects are grouped.
Adding grid lines helps group items on a page. Green boxes indicate visual grouping.
In the following example, the enclosure leaves out the product pricing, description and star rating, but the white space creates enough separation.
The enclosure strategy here excludes the titles, pricing and star rating.
The enclosure here doesn’t serve the reader.
Without visual cues, we group things in unexpected ways. Green boxes indicate visual groupings.
With the addition of white space, we can influence the way visitors group things visually.
The introduction of space here causes items to be grouped into rows. This is easier for the brain to parse.
5. Product Pages & Limited Information
This page uses visual cues to prevent grouping.
This pricing page uses visual cues to help the visitor choose. Source
First, the arrow points to a call to action, “Try it free!” The hand-written script makes the offer stand out. That is, visitors don’t group it with the rest of the text.
Next, the “Plus” column is highlighted in a different color and labeled “Most Popular” in red. This is important, because we would otherwise group all four together. This visually anchors the decision to the top higher-tier options. The choice goes from “Choose the best” to “Choose between Plus and the others.”
When we don’t provide visual cues, our visitors may not feel they have enough information to make a choice.
This pricing page offers no visual cues to “Help me choose.”
Pricing pages often rely on lists of features to differentiate. Unfortunately, they don’t realize that they are creating arbitrary groupings simply with the text they choose.
Here’s a list with inadvertent groupings.
Blue and black boxes denote visual grouping by text length.
The visitor will read the first item in the group. If it doesn’t interest them, they move to the next group, not the next item. We can see this behavior in heat map reports and session recordings.
Mangers should always ask, “Have we used visual cues to help our visitors choose?”
Content is the Best Visual Cue
From the visitor’s point of view, the best visual is the content that she is looking for, right? So visual cues should not be used in place of content. BH may have transformed Foundr Magazine, but there is more missing on this page than an “e”. This page relies on an arrow to indicate where the visitor can find the menu for the site. What would be a better visual cue than an arrow?
A menu.
This implementation relies on a small visual cue to reveal key information.
As conversion optimizers, we are not fans of content hidden simply for the sake of design. Progressive reveal is rarely beneficial and only works in specific use cases.
Managers should say, “No” to hiding important content from decision makers.
Shape as a Visual Cue
We all know that we should click on buttons. But what is a button. In the image below, there are three buttons. Which is clickable?
The three call to action buttons on this page perform differently as visual cues.
One is a white border around a menu item. One is a white rectangle with a call to action. The other is the classic arrow indicating video is available. Of the three, the video arrow is the most recognizable as a button, something you can click on.
With the advent of flat design, shape and shading are used less and less to indicate clickable elements. However, designers are returning to some of the shapes that made things look clickable.
Which element below is clickable, the “Enterprise” button or the “Sign Up” button?
Which of these blue elements is clearly a button?
The blue area containing “Enterprise” is a title. It is not clickable. The blue shape with the rounded ends is clickable, and is shaped like a button to indicate that.
Which is clickable here?
Six styles of buttons, from most to least visually clear.
In general, the shape with rounded edges and shading indicating a physical button will give the visitor a clearer message that an they can take action.
Text as Visual Cue
The way you create text can be a visual cue. The myriad opportunities to maximize this ROI are often wasted. Some designers espouse a minimalist approach, minimizing the amount of information that is encapsulated on a page. Others evangelize a more comprehensive style. These two approaches are neither right nor wrong. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that fifty-two percent of screen space was completely wasted in 2013, more than in 2001.
We Are Now In Control Of Your Eyes
Jakob Nielsen says that in 2013, half of all screen space above the fold was wasted.
Based on what you’ve read, can you tell me specifically how much screen space is wasted according the study by Jakob Nielsen?
A. 50% of the screen space
B. 52% of the screen space
The most accurate answer is B, or 52%. If you chose A, don’t be sad. It was by design.
You should have answered A, because I hid the more accurate answer in the opening paragraph of this section. The first line is uninteresting, just repeating the heading. Then comes a 34-word sentence with many multisyllabic words (See what I did there?). The important stat was written out because numbers jump off the page.
This paragraph is a visual pitfall.
To support the more general, less accurate answer, I used an unexpected heading, “We are now in control of your eyes.” I highlighted that “Half” of the screen space is wasted using a pull quote and linked text. These are visual cues.
The scanning eye will tend to land on textual cues.
It’s not that people don’t read, it’s that they favor text that is easier to read.
It’s Easy When You Know What You Want
None of this is a result of my training in UX, psychology or persuasive writing. I knew that there was one thing that I wanted you to see, and another that I did not.
You might start by looking first at what doesn’t work for you.
Rethink filler images or remove them. Consider if branding images need to be so large. Rewrite headings to tell scanners what’s on the page. Eliminate long paragraphs, long sentences and business speak.
Then see where you are. Odds are that your page will have improved immensely, as measured by your accountant.
Understanding what’s important on any page and then applying some tricks to focus your visitors’ attention is a great way to get what you want and to help them find what they are looking for.
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8 Proven Strategies For Increasing PPC Campaign Conversion
Lead GenerationWhat if I invited you to go on a trip to nowhere?
Sounds absurd doesn’t it?
Without knowing the ultimate destination, you can’t just pack your bags and leave.
The same is true with PPC.
The ultimate destination of a PPC campaign is the conversion, and when it comes to getting new users in your conversion funnel, few marketing strategies are as effective as pay-per-click advertising.
While a typical PPC campaign is reasonably easy to implement, getting real ROI tends to be a challenge for those who aren’t educated on paid advertising. Initial results are often disappointing and a poorly run campaign can lose a lot of money in a very short amount of time.
As I alluded to above, finding success with PPC ads is all about knowing where you are taking prospective customers and then optimizing the journey in such a way that the maximum number of people convert in the end.
Today, we’ll be looking at 8 proven strategies for optimizing our PPC campaigns to maximize conversions. We’ll start out with the basics, for anyone who isn’t caught up, and then we’ll move on to some more advanced techniques.
1. Make Sure Your Ads Are Consistent With Their Respective Landing Pages
This first point is simple but often overlooked. Your ads should match the landing pages they lead to.
According to iSpionage, PPC ads account for 64.6% of clicks for keyword searches that imply high commercial intent. This means that when users see your ads and click on them, they often have immediate buying intent.
If the landing page’s copy and images don’t match the ad, it can throw ready customers off and cause you to lose the sale.
For optimal results, it’s important that the PPC campaign ad:
PPC ad for Guitar
…. match the landing page users see when they click through:
PPC landing page for guitar
Go through you ads and make sure they match. Make sure the copy and images are consistent and that users see what they expect to see when they click-through to your landing page.
2. A/B Test Your The Landing Pages
This one’s an obvious inclusion on this blog, and instead of trying to summarize a complex subject, I’ll simply say that split testing your landing pages is a mandatory step in optimizing a PPC campaign.
Here are some of Conversion Sciences’ numerous resources on the subject.
Remember that testing is an ongoing process. No matter how good your initial results are, you can always improve.
3. Turn On Retargeting Ads
The remarketing cycle
Most people that come in contact with your brand don’t follow a straight and orderly path to purchase. First time visitors often need more exposure to your brand before they feel comfortable pulling out their credit card.
Retargeting is a form of advertising that allows brands to “retarget” website visitors by placing a retargeting cookie on the visitor’s browser. This allows the brand to display ads to visitors after they leave the site and continue on to other sites like Google, Facebook, or the Weather Channel.
At its core, retargeting ads work based on a social psychology phenomenon known as the familiarity principle, which states that people develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them. Thanks to this effect, retargeting ads have become one of the most effective tools in marketing, resulting in 24% visitor return rate and a 1046% rise in branded searches
To learn how to run your own retargeting ads, check out this in-depth guide from WPCurve.
4. Choose Keywords Wisely & Employ On-Page Optimization
Keywords are very important when running a PPC campaign with Adwords.
Google’s #1 goal is for users to find what they are looking for, whether they click on organic results or paid ads. Accordingly, Google will rate your PPC landing page for relevance to your target keyphrases, similar to how it rates organic landing pages.
The less relevant your page is to the keyphrases you are targeting, the more expensive your bid price will be. The more relevant your landing page is, the more favorable your bid rate will be.
This is why selecting the right keyphrases and then building optimized landing pages around those keyphrases is so important. You’ll want to treat your landing page as though you are attempting to rank it organically
It can also be helpful to use keyword groupings, which can increase your CTR and Quality Score while lowering your CPA. And of course, don’t forget to incorporate long tail keyword targeting as well.
For a more in-depth look at keyword selection in PPC, check out this guide from WordStream.
5. Be Sure To Specify Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are your friend
When setting up a PPC campaign, you will come across a field that gives you the option to select negative keywords.
Negative keywords are words that have no relevancy to your product or offer. For example, if you are an online retailer of clothing, but you don’t sell children’s clothing, you can use negative keywords to filter out any search with the words “children” or “kids” in them. This way when people are searching for kids clothing, your ad will not show up.
Negative keywords can have a huge impact on the success of your PPC campaign. They will not only cut wasted ad spend but also eliminate unqualified traffic from seeing your ads. This will result in an increased in Click Through Rate (CTR) and a reduced Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), saving you tons of money over the course of your campaign.
To be even more effective, use broad or phrase match types when choosing negative keywords. Also be sure to add the plural form of the negative keyword you have selected also to cover all your bases
6. Optimize Your Ads By Device
Users behave very differently across each device, yet many advertisers today haven’t caught up to that reality. Optimizing ads by device type is mandatory in 2017, which is why Google introduced device level bidding in AdWords last year, allowing advertisers to have greater control over how they display ads.
How you utilize desktop versus mobile channels will depend on your product or service. If you’re selling a product online you likely are seeing a trend towards more mobile purchases. According to a CMS Report the average smartphone conversion rate is up 64% compared to the average desktop conversion rate. Service based businesses are also reaping the benefit of mobile with 88% of consumers visiting or calling a business they found through search within 24 hours according to a Google Mobile Movement Study.
For more on optimizing across device, check out some of Google’s resources and walkthroughs.
7. Make the Sign Up and Check Out Process Easy
Simple conversions are usually best
When possible try to make the next step for your visitors simple and straightforward. One way to do so is to reduce the number of fields on your sign up form. A study conducted by Quicksprout showed that by limiting the number of form fields to only 3 can result in up to a 25% conversion rate. While 3-5 fields falls to 20% and greater than 6 fields can result in less than a 15% conversion rate.
Again A/B testing is required here; test different signup forms and use the one that gets the best result.
Moving forward you should disclose the next steps to ease the anxiety of the buyer.
Explain what is going to happen
Try showing the checkout page in stages so you don’t overwhelm them all at once with dozens of form fields. Set expectations for shipping prices and times early so they don’t feel deceived when they reach the final checkout screen. The more transparent and straightforward you are about the purchase process the more the client will trust your brand. Which means a higher conversion rate and in all likelihood you’ll creating a recurring customer.
Symbols near sign up forms and placed in the checkout section of your site can have a profound effect on conversion rates. Including a privacy policy will increase signup form rates and will aid in eliminating all their doubts about getting spam or junk mail.
Add trust indicators
Show trust seals to confirm to the buyer that your system is secure and their personal information is safe.
More trust indicators
Accept different modes of payment to make it more convenient for the users to buy. And lastly do not forget to have a good confirmation page to ensure the customer about the order being placed. Make it clear the order went through and use the opportunity to add some personality to your brand. Humanize the experience by adding some humor or sharing a funny gif or picture. A great example of this was used by CDBaby.com where they created a visual of the journey your newly purchased CD would look like from the warehouse to your front door.
8. Highlight Special Offers In Your Ads
Highlight your special discount in the ad itself
Offering special offers and discounts to your customers is a great way to quickly draw visitors to your site.The key to special offers is using the right words to motivate potential customers to navigate to your page and learn more. Words like Sale, Off, Now, Best Sellers, and New will grab your potential customers attention and entice them to click through.
If you are giving discounts for a limited time period, don’t forget to mention it because people are more likely to rush in when the offer is for a limited period. Words like Act Now or Limited-Time Offer pack a punch and encourage customers to act fast.
Make your offer worthwhile and drive home the benefits of shopping with your website. Make it clear if you have free shipping and your ship times are 2-3 days. Give them a sizeable discount (20% or more). A/B testing different discounts and offers are highly advisable as well.
Don’t forget the matching landing page
Conclusion
PPC is one of the most reliable channels available to marketers, but there’s not a lot of room for error.
In order to get real ROI, you have to really dial in your campaigns, and that can only be accomplished with consistent optimization and testing.
If you’ve been thinking about getting started with PPC or unsatisfied with your PPC performance, hopefully I’ve been able to give you some helpful pointers today.
Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are on these tips and if you have any of your own to add.
9 Lessons On Home Page Optimization From A Multiple Choice Test
Landing Page OptimizationWhen my daughter was choosing colleges to apply to, two of the key drivers in her decision were here scores on the SAT and ACT. These aptitude tests, in part, determined two things:
I was interested in the psychology of this staple of standardized testing: the multiple-choice test. As it turns out, my curiosity was rewarded, because the psychology of the multiple-choice question can be applied to your website home page.
Stay curious, marketers!
The goal of a multiple-choice question should be the opposite of the goal for a home page. The best home pages are designed to steer you towards one correct answer. The test question is designed to catch the person who is guessing and steer them toward multiple wrong answers.
The components of a multiple-choice question
Unfortunately, when we evaluate our clients’ home pages, we often find that they are testing their visitors, too. These pages seem designed to punish visitors for guessing wrong.
Is your home page secretly trying to test your visitors?
Lesson #1: The Job Of The Home Page
The job of the home page is thus: “Help me choose.” Its primary goal is to get the visitor into the site and on the right path — not to distract or confuse.
Too often, the home page is just a place for billboards. It is treated like a truck stop on the side of a highway, yet neon lights are rarely required.
If your website is not well-designed, a visitor will find your home page despite your greatest efforts — for if you had done well, they would have landed somewhere more specific to their needs. The homepage is the default, the easy find, the quick hit. It’s best to get visitors off of it and into your site as quickly as possible.
Most home pages are fraught with political intrigue. Every department wants a piece of it. This is why home pages come to resemble the walls of a subway station, plastered with ads and handbills.
If your website can’t decide which answers to present, does it make sense to present them this way?
Now rotating banners don’t seem so smart.
If your home page is designed to help visitors find the right answer out of multiple potentially correct ones, then it should follow the form, but not the function of a multiple choice question.
Lesson #2: Why Did You Visit Our Website Today?
Ultimately, your home page answers the question, “Why did you visit our website today?” What you have to decide is which answers you want to provide links for.
Any answer that makes sense is considered the “right” answer. Any answer that doesn’t is considered a distractor.
Few visitors would claim that they came to your site so they could add it to their Facebook news feed. We consider social media links distractors. However, many home pages place them in a prominent position.
Clearly, this is a desired action for an e-commerce site. This is a “right” answer.
Identify the stem, the answers, and the distractors on your home page and you will find opportunities to optimize.
What Else Can We Learn From Multiple Choice Tests?
I found a checklist on the Scholastic website for designing multiple-choice tests. Let’s select some of the principles from the list to see if your home page is — for better or worse — designed like a multiple-choice test.
3. Use Answer Choices That Are Believable Or Could Make Sense
It is important that the links, images and navigation are believable and make sense. This is self-evident. There is a caveat to the phrase “make sense,” and that is this: The choices must make sense to your visitors, not just to you. Navigation choices and calls-to-action should be written in the voice of the visitor for best results.
Use proof to enhance believability. Bold claims and hyperbole may sound impressive, but left by themselves, they don’t make for believable choices.
4. Always Write The Correct Answer First
The home page corollary is to “put answers to immediate questions above the fold.” Someone who is coming to repurchase a product shouldn’t have to scroll down before they can login. Those visitors coming for a sale should see a link to the sale page at the top.
Visitors ready to take action should see options immediately. Visitors who are browsing or looking for education on your product or service (top of the funnel) are more likely to scroll down.
5. Always Have A Minimum Of Three Answer Choices, But No More Than Five
On a home page, it’s hard to know how many options to offer. However, if you could narrow your choices to less than five, you’d be doing very well.
If a multiple choice question was a home page, it might look something like this:
What if your home page was laid out like a multiple choice question?
Oli Gardner of Unbounce uses the metric “Attention Ratio,” which is the ratio of total possible actions (links) to desired actions. It shouldn’t be hard to calculate this for your home page.
If a home page looked like a typical multiple-choice question, it might look like JShoes.com.
J Shoes has a relatively low Attention Ratio. A typical homepage has an Attention Ratio of 40:1 or greater. © 2015 JSHOES.COM
The J Shoes home page gets pretty close to “five or less” choices. Unfortunately, the big graphic in the center isn’t clickable. The little arrows in the upper right of the hero shot don’t work in Chrome.
6. Vary The Position Of The Correct Answer
On your home page, don’t vary the position of the correct answer. For returning visitors, predictability is important. For new visitors, familiarity is helpful. Your site should function similar to other sites like it.
Familiarity will help your visitors choose.
FinishLine.com completely changed the look and feel of their website. They lost $3 million in sales in just weeks and restored the old site to their perplexed visitors.
FinishLine.com completely changed their website in 2013 with disastrous results. © 2014 The Finish Line, Inc.
If you visit FinishLine.com today, though, you’ll see that they have significantly reduced their attention ratio (as compared to the “Before” picture above).
7. Avoid Using Distractors With Minute Differences
Your site needs a “visual hierarchy” in which the “right” answers are more prominent than distractors. The top questions your site will answer should be the most visually conspicuous items on the page.
Anything else is a distractor.
If your web design firm recommends something like a parallax design, recommend them to your competitors. Any design the doesn’t contribute to the visual hierarchy is counter-productive. How do moving stars support the home page message for Alquimia WRG?
The stars move with the cursor. Can you tell what this site sells?
Over-developed websites are slow to load. This directly impacts conversion rates. No matter how cute the treatment, if your home page requires a “Loading” message, you’re probably in trouble.
Making your “Loading” message cute won’t make it less irritating to impatient visitors. © 2013 PSCU.
8. Avoid Using Answers That State All Of The Above, None Of The Above, Or A And B
One of the important jobs of interactive design is to come up with a logical grouping of pages. If you try to do everything on your home page, you are probably going to confuse your visitors.
GreenMan.net has an effective top navigation, but the body of the home page tries to do everything. © 2014 Potplant Limited.
Don’t ask your home page to do more than it should, or visitors will never find what they are looking for.
9. Organize The Answers In A Logical Order, I.E., Alphabetical, Numerical, Shortest To Longest
Logic is a good idea, but only for a portion of your visitors. In broad terms, there are deliberate decision-makers and quick decision-makers coming to your home page. You need to have answers for both.
A logical navigation and categorization structure is key for deliberate visitors. Linked pictures, search boxes and other tools that allow the visitor to jump into the site are key for spontaneous visitors.
In general, we want the answers for quick decision makers to be near the top, but can put information for the deliberate decision makers lower on the page and deeper in the site.
Don’t ask your quick decision makers to hunt for what they are looking for. They can only stand so many distractors before they bolt.
The Helpful Multiple Choice Home Page
To design a home page that gets visitors into your site, start by identifying your key questions (stems), identify the answers your visitors are looking for, and eliminate distractors.
How To Persuade People Without Trying: 8 Ways To Be Naturally Influential
Persuasion ScienceWe 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.
Let’s get started.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Let me know in the comments!
Why Great Lead Magnets Work (And Why Yours Aren’t Performing)
Conversion OptimizationThe other day, I was working with a client who had well over 30,000 email subscribers. I initially anticipated that any campaigns we sent would receive a decent amount of traffic, yet when I looked at his send history, I discovered his click-through rates were abysmally small. On average, barely half a percent of his subscribers were clicking on his emails, netting just 150 clicks per send and a sale every few emails.
A similar client, on the other hand, was getting 500+ clicks and 2-3 sales per email with only a 5,000 subscriber list.
What was the difference?
Why was the smaller list performing so much better?
There are, of course, many factors that go into email marketing, but today, I want to discuss the one that tends to be the most misunderstood.
The lead magnet.
Your lead magnet determines who subscribes to your list and sets the tone for their experience with your brand. When you get it right, you position yourself for purchases down the road. When you get it wrong, the leads might as well not even be there.
In this article, we’ll look at why great lead magnets work so well, and by extension, we’ll shed some light on why others (possibly including yours) fail to perform.
What Is A Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is anything offered for free in exchange for the recipient’s email address.
The immediate goal of a lead magnet is to get email subscribers. There are only so many people who will like your content SO much that they’ll just subscribe to your list in order to receive emails from you. A lot of people will simply read a bit and then leave, and a lead magnet is designed to incentive some portion of those people to give you their contact information for later follow up.
Where many business make a mistake is in thinking that “some portion” means “as many as possible”, but we’ll get to that later.
Because you are giving away the lead magnet for free, it’s typically important that it costs you little to nothing to create and distribute. This is why ebooks are one of the most commonly used types of lead magnets. As a digital product, once the initial file is created, it costs nothing to copy and give away as many copies as you like.
Here are several different types of leads magnets that are commonly used:
The type of lead magnet you choose will depend on your business. What does your audience want? In what ways do they consume content? What is your team even capable of producing?
But ultimately, a great lead magnet comes down to two simple things:
The Two Primary Objectives of a Great Lead Magnet
A great lead magnet accomplishes two things above all else:
If your lead magnet fails at either of these, it fails period.
Objective #1: Attract The Right People
A common misconception with lead magnets is that more = better. If Lead Magnet #A gets double the subscribers of Lead Magnet #B, it must clearly be the superior choice.
Right?
A 30 second conversation with anyone in sales will tell you otherwise. If option #B is getting highly qualified leads while option #A is getting unqualified leads, it’s not even a contest.
If quantity was all the mattered, we could just do Macbook Pro giveaways all day and get “leads” by the thousands. And barely any of those people would be even remotely interested in purchasing our product.
Quality is even more important than quantity when it comes to evaluating a lead magnet. You want to attract as many of the right people as possible while not appealing to those outside your niche.
A great example of this in action comes from Ulyses Osuna of Influencer Press. Influencer Press is a PR agency that gets people published on popular business blogs like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, etc. Accordingly, their sitewide lead magnet deals specifically with this goal.
A great lead magnet example from Influencer Press
For anyone interested in getting published on a site like Forbes (the target market), an inside look at Ulyses’ email correspondence is a very attractive offer. At the same time, it’s not going to be a must-download for virtually anyone outside the target market.
In other words, it hits the nail right on the head.
When pitching your lead magnet, try to hit on the following four points whenever possible:
Attracting the right people is a big first step, but it’s still only half of the story. We still need to do one more thing…
Objective#2: Position Leads For Purchasing
Your lead magnet’s usefulness doesn’t end when the visitors clicks “subscribe”. In fact, it’s just getting started.
The lead magnet will set the tone for your relationship with the lead, so even if you attract the perfect leads, it won’t mean much if engaging with your lead magnet leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
This is where a lot of businesses and marketers mess up. It’s somewhat easy to think of a lead magnet pitch that will excite your audience and get them to enter their email. It’s a lot harder to deliver the goods with quality that is worthy of the hype.
“Download the 10-step process I used to make $100,000 in 3 months with no prior experience.”
That sounds great. I want to make $100k in 3 months. If you don’t seem like a hack, I’ll probably give you my email on the off chance you can deliver on such an insanely big promise.
And when you inevitably don’t, you will never hear from me again.
That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates how simply getting the email address doesn’t mean you have a legitimate lead. If you don’t deliver the goods, you can kiss that lead goodbye.
But fulfilling your promise is the easy part.
The trickier part of this second objective is actually positioning the lead for purchasing. The goal here isn’t to simply not annoy the lead. They’ve just requested a custom piece of content from you. They have literally asked you to send them a pitch.
Obviously, you can’t give them a pitch disquised as a lead magnet. That fails everything we just talked about. Deliver on the promise first and foremost. But take every opportunity to establish your expertise, demonstrate your past results, highlight your value, and position yourself as a great purchase in their minds.
A great example of this comes from Dave Rogenmoser of Entrepreneur Alliance. Dave’s lead magnet promises to help users create a $10k per month cashflow business, and instead of providing a simple PDF, he directs leads to a lengthy, well-designed HTML page, complete with multiple chapters, real data, and step-by-step instructions. Throughout the guide, he references products he sells, pitches his membership site, and positions the reader to respond to the follow up emails in his autoresponder.
A great lead magnet example from Entrepreneur Alliance
Remember:
You can’t skimp on quality, and you can’t forget to position the lead for purchasing.
Both are essential to your lead magnet’s success.
10 Reasons Lead Magnets Don’t Perform
Now that you know what to aim for, let’s go through some of the reasons that lead magnets don’t perform well. Most of the problems come down to failing our two objectives, but even if you knock those out of the park, there are other factors that can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
While we don’t have time to dive into each one of these mistakes, any one of them can derail your lead magnet’s performance.
Conclusion: Optimize Your Lead Magnet
Creating a great lead magnet that performs well for your business is really not that hard. It’s simply a matter of attracting the right audience and positioning leads for purchasing.
Unfortunately, many businesses create their lead magnets as a sort of afterthought, failing to invest the time and energy required to make something special.
Don’t fall into that trap. If you sort of just threw up your own lead magnet, take this opportunity to re-evaluate and make sure you’re hitting the right objectives.
Confirmation Emails: How To Stop Wasting One Of Email Marketing’s Biggest Goldmines
Conversion Marketing StrategyThere is a moment in time when your lead is in the perfect position to convert.
They have just told you they want to hear from you, and they are actively checking their email inbox for a message from you. The message you send them in this moment has a higher likelihood of being read then any message you will ever send them again.
Confirmation emails are probably the most wasted resource in all of email marketing. Like other transactional emails, they receive significantly higher engagement than typical bulk mailings from the same businesses.
Confirmation email open and click rates
Unlike other transactional emails, however, confirmation emails provide you with ample flexibility to engage the user with your brand. You can invite the user to “confirm” and then engage with your brand in whatever capacity you deem best.
Today, we’re going to help you stop wasting this unparalleled goldmine and start sending confirmation emails that drive conversions for your brand.
What Is A Confirmation Email?
Before we continue, let’s define what we mean by “confirmation email”.
A confirmation email is an automated email triggered by a user action and intended to confirm to the user that their action has been successfully completed. Examples of triggering events include subscriptions, purchases, inquiries, etc.
What makes confirmation emails such a powerful marketing tool is that the user typically expects to receive them and will often actively look for them.
Like with any conversion optimization strategy, the first step to optimizing confirmation emails is to identify your objective. What do you want the user to do when they receive your confirmation email?
While objectives can be as adverse as the businesses targeting them, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on three specific objectives:
Let’s take a closer look at each objective.
1. Immediately Target The Next Conversion
This is the most straightforward objective and probably the best option “on average”. When someone signs up for anything triggering a confirmation email, they have taken a step forward in your conversion funnel and are likely in prime condition to be moved even further forward in that funnel.
The only downside to this objective is that you have little time to build trust between past conversion and new pitch, which will affect how we use it throughout our funnel.
Early Funnel Implementation
If we use this earlier in our funnel, we need to make sure that we aren’t asking for much, since we haven’t had time to build trust in our brand. For example, if the user downloads a free lead magnet, you can pitch a low-cost “tripwire” product in your confirmation email.
Another great example of this concept in action comes from Dollar Shave Club. With their simple business model, you might think there is nowhere further to go once you’ve become a member, but as you can see in the below confirmation email, that’s not the case:
Confirmation email from Dollar Shave Club
As soon as you’ve become a customer, The Dollar Shave Club attempts to move you further in the funnel by making you a referrer. This is a low investment ask on their part. It costs the customer nothing to make referrals and they will be rewarded for doing so, which makes it a great early-funnel strategy.
Late Funnel Implementation
This immediate conversion strategy can also be utilized later in the funnel, where you have already had time to build trust with the user. At this point, you can go for much larger purchases or much higher investment conversions. Offering something exclusive or time-sensitive can be especially effective here.
For example, let’s take a SaaS company offering several pricing tiers. After converting a lead or past customer to their highest priced tier, they might include an exclusive offer for 1-to-1 consulting on implementing or optimizing their service. Alternatively, they could offer a turnkey solution to a problem the software is designed to help solve.
2. Position The Lead For Long-Term Conversion
Attempting to immediately trigger the next conversion won’t work for every business model. Sometimes, getting the lead to take that next step requires a good deal more nurturing than you can deliver in a single email.
In this case, the goal is to utilize the lead’s momentary warmth to position them for long-term conversion. This could look like establishing authority or expertise, identifying additional information for advanced segmentation, setting clear expectations for future emails, or any number of things.
When asked what they’d like to improve, 64% of email marketers said they’d improve personalization, yet split tests have shown that asking for more information from readers tends to result in a lower lead conversion rate. If you ask for that additional information in the confirmation email, however, you can improve personalization without sacrificing lead volume.
This could be as straightforward as including a few extra data entry fields for users to fill out before hitting “confirm”. Or it could be a bit more subtle, like in this example from MailChimp.
Notice the additional optoins under “activate your account”. If a user clicks on any of those options, it will log additional information about them in MailChimp’s database and likely trigger a different followup sequence.
Targeting additional information in the confirmation email is a really easy way to get more information about your leads, setting you up for a higher conversion rate down the road.
3. Engage The Lead With A Personal Connection
The final objective we’ll discuss is in some ways a subset of #2 in that it’s more of a long-term play. At the same time, the focus is a bit different and will really only apply to certain business models, which is why I’m making it’s own category.
Engaging the subscriber with a personal connection is an objective unto itself.
Many people are subscribed to hundreds of email lists, most of which they will never check or read and will probably unsubscribe when they do happen to see one of your emails.
When get them to engage with you on a personal, 1-to-1 level, however, you become more than just another random brand spamming them with emails they’ll never read. You become a person they are interested in connecting with and following.
Brian Dean offers a great example of this:
Confirmation email from Brian Dean
Just like the rules of interpersonal connection dictate, he isn’t focused on himself and asking you to be interested. He is asking about YOU – the subscriber. What are YOU struggling with?
He also does some of the things we talked about in the last section.
And while this doesn’t work with faceless brands, it does work with personalities, especially when the personality is actually willing to engage with you.
I think I’ve sent Brian 4 or 5 emails over the last few years, and he’s responded to 3 or 4 of them, and that’s a big part of why he’s my “go to” resource for SEO, why I reference his work all the time in my articles, and why I frequently recommend his course.
Conclusion: Start Optimizing Your Confirmation Emails
Your confirmations emails can be a major asset in your email marketing funnel.
Don’t waste them.
The ideas we’ve discussed today will get you started, but be willing to run some split tests and dig a bit deeper. There are numerous options we weren’t able to list today, any of which might be a goldmine for your business.
And of course, if you’ve already found some winners, let us know in the comments!