The man walked onto the stage in a colorful robe. He was holding a small oar. He claimed he was wearing a magician’s robe and that the oar was his magic wand and that he was going to do something magical with us.
This was seven years ago at Conversion Conference 2012. I still remember this keynote — and I’ve forgotten many.
The magic he performed was to teach us an important model for changing behaviors. Before the hour was over, he had asked us to teach the person next to us what he had shared: his behavioral model.
I live by the belief that, “The best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else.” Indeed, his model was one I never forgot having taught it to someone else.
So, when BJ Fogg announced that he was finally releasing a new book, I invited him to be on the Intended Consequences podcast. With few changes, what he taught us seven years earlier had changed little. His new book, “Tiny Habits” has turned those business management lessons into a program for individual behavioral change.
My mindmap notes from his Conversion Conference session are available below.
No time to listen? Download the Summary of this Interview
Real time behavioral design
At one point in our conversation, BJ visualized how to apply his behavioral model to the problem of conversion. I animated this part of the conversation for you.
Click to hear an explanation of BJ Fogg’s Behavioral Design Framework
BJ knows behavioral design and clearly applies it in his life. BJ teaches at Standford. He founded the Behavioral Design Lab there to study human behavior. Each year, his course tackles issues big and small. Like peace. And connecting to nature.
Anyone involved in marketing is involved in what he calls “Behavioral Design”. Listen to how this science can change your behaviors and your marketing effectiveness.
Habits make time for themselves.
When you get back to the office…
Let’s see if we can develop a tiny habit around experimenting. The habit we want to get into is considering data when we begin any creative project. As BJ told us, it doesn’t have to be big. In fact we should make it very small.
So the Prompt or Trigger is this: you sit down to write copy, to design an ad, to layout a webpage. I recommend that your tiny behavior be this: log into analytics. You don’t have to look at any reports. You don’t have to do any analysis. Just log in. Then you can log out and begin your project.
I’m trusting the process here, but according to Tiny Habits, you’ll begin to think about data more often. And then something will begin to change.
When BJ Fogg announced that he was finally releasing a new book, I invited him to be on the Intended Consequences podcast. With few changes, what he taught us seven years earlier had changed little. His new book, Tiny Habits has turned those business management lessons into a program for individual behavior change. BJ knows behavioral design, and he clearly applies it in his life. He teaches at Stanford and he founded the Behavior Design Lab there to study human behavior. Each year, his course tackles issues big and small like peace and connecting to nature. Anyone involved in marketing is involved in what he calls behavioral design. Listen to how the science can change your behaviors and your marketing effectiveness. BJ, I’m always interested in what gets people to where they are. What is it that makes you so interested in behavioral science?
BJ Fogg:
I think it goes back a long, long time.
Brian Massey:
It usually does.
BJ Fogg:
Just training and just a sense of responsibility for helping others, serving other people. I grew up in a religious tradition.
Brian Massey:
That’s interesting.
BJ Fogg:
That really was the point. I mean, we’re here on this earth to serve. Even though I’m not part of that religious tradition, that upbringing certainly is part of who I am or that sense of things.
Brian Massey:
This is really a way of helping people as much as a curiosity about the science behind all of this.
BJ Fogg:
Yeah, for sure.
Brian Massey:
Your new book is Tiny Habits. As we were talking about, seven years ago I saw the things that are in the book in an earlier form, but they’re remarkably similar. There were two things that stuck out for me seven years ago and that was a very simple model. You did something during your presentation. You had us teach the person sitting next to us that model. I want to explore this teaching as learning thing because it seems to run through at least seven years ago to today, it seems to run through it because it is part of the book. Why don’t you start off though and give us the top level view of how we change our lives using this Tiny Habits methodology?
BJ Fogg:
Okay. There’s two different paths we can go. One is down the behavior design path and talk about the behavior model, which is wow, it’s hard to believe that was seven years ago, which is what we did at the conference. The other path is this specific method that I call Tiny Habits. Tiny Habits works like this. It’s basically three hacks that you do so you can create habits easily and quickly. Number one, you take the new habit you want and you scale it way back. Say you want to drink more water. You scale it way back maybe to just pouring a glass of water. Here I’m picking up a glass of water that I poured this morning as my habit. It’s not even drink the water. It might just be pour it. Or if you want to do pushups, like I do a lot of, it’s not 20 pushups. It’s two. You can make it really, really tiny. That’s hack one. Hack two is you find where does this fit naturally in the course of my day and you’re looking for what it comes after.
You’re looking for a routine you already do reliably. In Tiny Habits, we call that an anchor. You attach the new habit to the anchor. In the case of pouring a glass of water, I think or the two, when I put my breakfast plate on the counter and thank my partner for breakfast. After that I pour water. The third hack is what wires in the habit. What causes habits to form is not repetition unlike so many people keep saying, and it’s not accurate. What creates habit is emotions. In Tiny Habits, you deliberately fire off a positive emotion and we call that a celebration. You do that effectively, that habit will substantially wire into your brain. That is a part of Tiny Habits sometimes people disregard. I mean, it’s important because that’s the thing that actually wires the habit in. I know it sounds really weird and it’s odd because I’ve taught thousands and thousands of people this method so I know that some people resist the celebration piece. They’re missing the point.
Brian Massey:
I don’t think that this crowd is going to be that strange because we’ve got gaming concepts where we’re trying to reward our visitors for micro conversions or little things that they’re doing. Mailchimp famously released components on their interface that whenever you sent an email or accomplished something, it would give you an animated high five sort of thing. I don’t think this is that strange.
BJ Fogg:
Well, good. Brian, those are great examples. Once you get clear that it’s the emotions that create habits, you will see this all around you in successful systems. I mean, anything that’s created habit in you is doing this in some form. Yes, you’ll see it everywhere and then it’s really hard to believe that we’ve missed this point for, well, forever until I basically published the book and I have a chapter on it. Yes, I’ve been teaching it in Tiny Habits since 2011 but the book is, in my book is really the first time I’ve written about it in depth and explained it. I think that will be the reference for this concept.
Brian Massey:
Now, how do you do the research on this sort of thing? I assume that you’re doing experiments to tease out these and support the premise. Is this students coming into your lab or are there other ways that you do this?
BJ Fogg:
No, on the celebration piece, at first it was just stumbling across in my own life like, oh my gosh. When I say victory after I floss one tooth, they have it, why is it? At first, it’s just like a lot of research. You have a sense of something that’s like, what’s going on here? Then next step was teaching a whole bunch of people. I mean, thousands of people. Then qualitative feedback like, oh my gosh, the celebration piece really works, I did it, which is not an experiment. Then later it’s running a true experiment. In the Tiny Habits platform where people do a five day program, it’s really easy to split people out into two groups. Within a week’s time I can run a true experiment. There’s the non celebration condition, there’s the celebration condition, and the results are very clear that the people that were instructed and encouraged to celebrate did much better than those who did not. Now, that’s not a direct measure of emotion. I’m measuring the technique of celebration. There’s some inferences there. There’s some leaps there.
Brian Massey:
We know that celebration improves things. Our hypothesis is that it’s because it adds emotion.
BJ Fogg:
Yeah, that would be the dynamic, right, or the mechanism behind it.
Brian Massey:
Yeah. Got it. Got it. That was one path that you talked about. What was the second path that you wanted to talk about?
BJ Fogg:
The behavior model. One path is Tiny Habits and the book is titled Tiny Habits. For the first time I pulled together that specific method in depth. But Brian, what I’m so happy about, the book is really about behavior design which is my broader… The term that we use at Stanford for the broader umbrella of some new models of behavior change, including the Fogg behavior model and new methods. I was really glad I could expand the scope of the book to include that. Early on I talked about the Fogg behavior model, which goes like this, behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment. There’s motivation to do the behavior, there’s ability to do the behavior, and there are prompt. If any one of those is missing, the behavior won’t happen. If you want a behavior to happen, you have to make sure all three of those things are present at the same moment.
Brian Massey:
This is what you had us teach each other at the keynote.
BJ Fogg:
Yeah. What’s great about the behavior model, which the pieces came together finally for me in 2007 on that model is it becomes the cornerstone for a foundation of understanding behavior. Then I could build on the foundation. Since 2012, there’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve done. It’s just that I got the foundation laid and then I could go further and look at pretty much any type of behavior challenge once the foundation was right. That’s what I’ve done since 2012 besides write the book.
Brian Massey:
Got it. There are a couple of exercises in here. One of them I referenced where you go out and you teach something to someone in order to instill the habit. Exercise one in the book. I thought it was interesting. I want you to explain a little bit to me. Write down three habits that you’d like to stop. You want to be very specific. Then for each habit, think of ways you might remove or avoid the prompts. Think of ways that you might make it harder to do. Think of the ways that you might reduce your motivation. Tell me why I’m focusing on making it harder rather than making it easy.
BJ Fogg:
What a good question. Early on in the book I introduced the behavior model, like I said, and what I want people to do is understand that you can use that model to do lots of things with your behavior including stopping a behavior. This book will be very, very helpful for professionals, but it’s actually written for everyday people. When you do connect with everyday people and what they want to do with their behavior, first and foremost, there’s a habit they want to stop. People working in conversion, of course, they don’t want to stop the behavior. They want to get it to happen. But for the reader of this book-
Brian Massey:
We want to stop abandonment for sure.
BJ Fogg:
Well, that’s a funny question because it’s almost like a double negative. You want people to actually continue, but I guess the quick answer to wrap up my answer, Brian is just one, give people a really quick application of the behavior model and do it in a domain that most readers care about a lot. How do I stop snacking? How do I stop getting mad at my kids? How do I stop using Facebook so much? If you remove the prompt or make it really hard to do or move the motivation, any one of those three things will help you succeed.
Brian Massey:
Yeah, you’ll see a version of this. What I loved about this being the geek nerd that I am was the graph that you used that made it very clear, the relationship between motivation and ability and where those prompts lie or at the time that I took the notes you were calling them triggers, and where you’re going to fail on the graph and where you’re not going to fail. This can be applied of course to changing my life. It can also be applied to increasing the motivation, increasing the ability of people to work with our websites, people to buy our products, people to sign up and become leads. In my notes, there’ll be a version of that and perhaps you’ll let me replicate that on the website as well.
BJ Fogg:
Yeah, but they wouldn’t let me do Brian, I’m talking my editors on Tiny Habits is include a business chapter or have a really strong business thread through the book, which I really wanted to do because I teach business people all the time behavior design. It’s super helpful and practical. In the business chapter, which people can get, it’s like a bonus outside the book. If you think of my behavior model with the curve line, and then you draw a circle over the curve line. Let’s say 40% of the area of the circle is above the action line, 60% is below. That’s how you might visualize any one, say step in your conversion funnel. Let’s say you want people to sign up for a newsletter and you send out, people land on the page let’s say miraculous by some miracle, 40% are signing up. That’s the 40% of the circle above the action line. What you can do, man, I wish people are with me and I’d be drawing it out on the whiteboard.
That discussion is okay, here’s our population, 40% are converting like we want them to, whereas this other 60% are below the action line. They’re either lacking motivation or they’re lacking ability. Then you could run a test to, well, let’s make it easier to do and see how much increase in conversion we get. Okay. I’ll make it more motivating and see how much increase we get. In the book and elsewhere, I’ve really talked about the behavior model as an individual person, but you can with the circle and it really would be a scatterplot, it wouldn’t be a circle. At least you could convey that here’s our market and 40% are doing what we want and how do we increase from 40% to I think about the top is about 70%. That seems to be a ceiling for most things.
Brian Massey:
Well, I think that if we were getting 40% conversion rates on almost any business, that would be amazing.
BJ Fogg:
What I’ll do is I’ll try to capture this in the show notes so that folks can go in and check that out. A lot of the language in the book, especially things like look at your behavior or the way a scientist looks at what’s growing in a Petri dish. You are inviting people to look at this a bit more scientific way. I also learned a new verb, scrolling. One of your examples, someone was, I’m going to stop my scrolling, and by scrolling you mean checking Facebook and scrolling through. That’s become a new verb of the week. The point is scrolling in bed.
Brian Massey:
Yes.
BJ Fogg:
There’s a woman, very successful executive. I’d tell her story in the book where she wanted to stop scrolling in bed. It turns out, I mean, I don’t have… That’s not my habit, but it turns out a lot of people have that habit. She figures out how to stop it using my behavior model.
Brian Massey:
The motivation is it keeps you awake. It interferes with your sleep because of the blue light and all of that. What else do we need to know about tiny behaviors? We see, I think we’ve got the two larger models that you talk about.
BJ Fogg:
Let me give the two broadest statements from my book. I call them maxims. There are two things. One is to help people do what they already want to do. Two is to help people feel successful. Those two maxims map to Tiny Habits, that’s what the method does. It also maps to other kinds of engagement and so on. I think those maxims are really, really relevant to the listeners here. That’s what you have to do for any winning product or service. It’s those two things. If you fail on either of those two things, you don’t make it. It’s helped people do what they already want to do. You’re aligning whatever behavior you want them to do with something that they want, of course. Then if you want ongoing engagement, and I know in some cases with conversion, it’s not, it’s like a one and done, but for most products and services and most ventures you want ongoing engagement.
To create the habit and to create engagement and get people to like you and advocate for you and so on, all these great things happen from helping people feel successful. We’re going back in the Tiny Habits, the way you do that is you do the celebration like you pointed out in video games and even practical software, thumbs up, the high five, they’re celebrating, they’re affirming that you’re succeeding. As they do that in video games or on your systems like survey software, it’s not just random and it’s not just to be nice, it serves a purpose. That is to, one, wire in the habit. Two, motivate you to do more with that product or service or brand.
Brian Massey:
Always I’m mapping these things onto how I’m communicating and engaging with my audience, the people that are coming to my website, into my client’s websites, is it the things like sending an email or a note that says congratulations and kind of celebrating with them? Is it something that’s going to be something more meaningful?
BJ Fogg:
Yeah. Surprisingly, no. Okay. Everybody, be patient. I’m going to share something really, really important.
Brian Massey:
Awesome.
BJ Fogg:
I do not use the word reward in behavior design and I only use it in the book to say, don’t use this word, it’s a messy word. Reward, if you rewind decades, it’s a good technical term but the use of it today has at least two meanings. One meaning is when somebody does something, let’s say you achieved some level in a video game and you hear sounds and you see animations and you get points. That’s a type of reward. That is the kind of reward that creates habit. It happens instantly in that moment and your brain associates whatever behavior did with that positive feeling. The reward only works if it creates a feeling and then the habit. That’s one use of the word reward and it’s the right technical use or it’s one of the right technical uses.
The wrong use is, oh, meditate for 30 days and then we’re going to give you the reward of this trophy you can put on LinkedIn. That’s not a reward because, at least not the way I see it from a technical perspective, that doesn’t wire in the habit, that’s like an incentive or a prize that comes at the end of a 30 day journey. People use the word reward for both of those things. If there is a distance in time between the behavior and that thing that’s supposed to make people feel great, it’s not going to wire in the habit and it’s technically not a reward.
Brian Massey:
Amazon could say, thank you very much for your order, but it’s really when that package shows up on your doorstep that you get that dopamine squirt or that emotional reward that, oh, I have something here for myself now to open.
BJ Fogg:
Well, possibly. I mean, that will make you love Amazon. I have such mixed feelings. The box shows up and I just feel dread like what have I just done to the environment by having this box come and I have a tiny little marker. No, it’s really in the moment. The moment I pushed either add to cart or I pushed the buy now button, that’s the habit Amazon wants to wire in, is like add things to your cart and click buy now. The proximity and time needs to be right when the behavior happens, that’s when you need to help people feel successful and certainly not unsuccessful. If I clicked a button and said buy now, and I didn’t get any confirmation that the purchase went through, then I would be confused. The reward, the reinforcer, the thing that creates shine, that happy feeling, I’m using those as synonyms.
It needs to happen right there but it doesn’t have to be hugely dramatic. It can just affirm that somebody has succeeded, oh, I pushed the buy button and then immediately I get a screen that said, great, your order is done. It’s on its way. That’s confirming, that’s giving me the feeling of success and it’s wiring in the habit of using that system. It has to be immediate and it doesn’t have to be confetti falling from my computer screen. It can simply be a way to affirm that I’ve succeeded.
Brian Massey:
Maybe it’ll help to pull this into maybe some of the examples from your book, like for our scrolling friend, what did she do to celebrate those nights when she didn’t pick her phone up and checkout Facebook?
BJ Fogg:
Yeah, we’re talking almost two opposite things here. One is the buy button is like, let’s create the habit of people pushing buy on our website. What Katie was doing was trying to stop a behavior. One is about, for most people listening to this, they want people to do a behavior. In the example with Katie, it was how does she get herself to stop scrolling. What ultimately worked for her was to put her phone in the kitchen to charge, not on her nightstand. In that way, when she woke up in the morning, she couldn’t just reach over and grab her phone because it wasn’t there on the nightstand. She’d have to go out to the kitchen and then she wouldn’t go back and get in bed. For her to stop that behavior, the key was to make the behavior harder to do and just charge in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom.
Brian Massey:
I see. I see. Are there examples of celebrations, way we can celebrate just in the context of if we’re trying to change a habit?
BJ Fogg:
Oh yeah. A lot. Oh my gosh. Yes. So much on this, Brian. If we’re talking about personal change and you’re trying to wire a habit into your own life, when you do a behavior that you want to become a new habit, and I really encourage people to use the Tiny Habits. Make it really tiny, find where it fits in your life. As you do the behavior immediately after, do something that makes you feel happy and successful and positive. For some people, it’s a fist pump, think Tiger Woods. Other people it’s like, they just say the word awesome. Other people raise their hands over the head. Other people just smile. Some people like doing a little dance that makes them feel happy. Anything that brings up a positive emotion and signal you have succeeded, and it’s different for different people. This is part of the skill of change is figuring out what for you is that thing you can do that fires off a positive emotion so you can wire habits in on demand.
It’s not the same for everybody. What works for me may not work for you, and what works for my sister may not work for listeners. The part of what I do in Tiny Habits and the chapter about is chapter five, emotions create habits is I guide people through a process so they can figure out what can you do to create this positive emotion inside of you on demand. That’s a really, in some ways, Brian, that is the most important skill that someone can have to create habits in their own life.
Brian Massey:
I get it. I get it. I want to drill down that because I think this celebration piece is really the hardest piece. We know that motivation is hard as you say in the book, setting up anchors can be done behaviors. This celebration piece, it seems to me because it is emotional it’s going to cement some things in our minds and our brains. It isn’t easy. It isn’t easy, especially when you’re at the arm’s length across a digital connection with your visitors like we are to celebrate with them. Those of you that are listening, I’ll be very interested to hear your input on any celebrations, digital celebrations that have worked for you.
BJ Fogg:
Well, but just look and look at systems that are working with the lens of what are they doing to affirm or confirm success. Those examples are out there. Now, there’s an industry, the supplements industry like vitamins and supplements and so on. That’s an industry where it’s like, okay, I take this vitamin, I’m not getting the results right away. They call it a faith-based industry, but I knew there were ways to help their customers feel successful, to have this feeling to wire in the habit. I did a special webinar series for that industry and I said, hey, in pitching the series, I said, hey, we’ll come up with six different ways to help your customers feel shine. We found at least 12. There are ways to do this, but for most people listening to this, you’re not in the faith-based industry like taking vitamins and supplements.
You can test stuff. You can go out and look at who really has a really a good system that’s converting very well, but watch and see what that does to a firm that people have succeeded again. Like I said before, it can be a simplest thing. Good job, you placed the order, or yep, you’re done now. It can simply be a confirmation screen that’s very clear that they got done what they were trying to get done.
Brian Massey:
I’m already trying to figure out who I’m going to go and test some of this stuff with, which of our clients we’re going to go put this on the list for. The book, when is it going to launch?
BJ Fogg:
January 1st.
Brian Massey:
What better time to change habits than when you’re setting up all of these new year’s resolutions that you’re inevitably going to be failing.
BJ Fogg:
Yeah, that was the plan two years ago. It was like, okay, when is this book going to come out? It was like January 2020. I was like, oh my gosh, that long. This is going to drive me crazy. I was like, no, let’s do it faster. They’re like, that’s what this kind of publishing takes. I’ve had to be very patient and yes, but now, yes, it’s [inaudible].
Brian Massey:
Where can we, so we’ll be able to I assume find it on Amazon. Where can we find out more about you between now and the first if we want to learn more?
BJ Fogg:
I have too many websites, but the best ones to go to are bjfogg.com and tinyhabits.com. There’s a whole bunch of buying options. Yes, Amazon is one. If you go to tinyhabits.com/book, there’s other buying options. Brian, what we’ve done with my team is we’ve pulled together a toolkit for Tiny Habits that if people pre-ordered, they can get the toolkit right away. Yes, that was a pre-order incentive, but it was also a way for me to start sharing and helping people right away and not to say, hey, you’ve got to wait months for the book. Now it’s not that far away, but the toolkit is still really good. People can go get that immediately.
Brian Massey:
That comes back to how we opened appropriately, that it takes two years to get a book out. Let’s get something out where we can start helping people right away. That touches me really. Well, thank you for joining us. I took notes during BJ’s conversion conference session. My mind map notes are available on the Intended Consequences website and intendedconsequencespodcast.com. At one point in our conversation, BJ visualized for us, how to apply his behavioral model to the problem of conversion. I went ahead and animated this part of the conversation for you. It can also be found on the Intended Consequences website and intendedconsequencespodcast.com. When you get back to the office, let’s see if we can develop some tiny habits around experimenting. The habit we want to change is considering data when we begin any creative project.
As BJ told us, it doesn’t have to be a big change. In fact, we should make this change very small. The prompt or trigger in this should be you sit down to write copy, you sit down to design an ad, you sit down to design a web page. I recommend that your tiny behavior be this, log into analytics. You don’t have to look at any reports. You don’t have to do any analysis, just log in. Then you can log out and begin your project. I’m trusting the process here, but according to Tiny Habits, you’ll begin to think about data more often, and then something will begin to change. Now, go behave like a scientist.
On the first day of CROstmas my website gave to me
An increase in RPV.
Image courtesy fangol on sxc.hu
On the second day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the third day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Three fresh sales, Two split tests and An increase in RPV.
On the fourth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the fifth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the sixth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the seventh day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the eighth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the ninth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the tenth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the eleventh day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Eleven cards a-clearing, Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the twelfth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Twelve pages landing, Eleven cards a-clearing, Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bouncers staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests
And an increase in RPV.
Hope you enjoyed and sang along the 12 days of CROstmas!
May Your Holiday Hypotheses All Come True
How do you create a warm, joyful feeling from ordinary paper?
Children, puppies and heart-felt copy: these are the hallmarks of a card that can convert even the biggest scrooge into a quivering pool of good cheer.
What are you sending to your clients and prospects? Is your card working to get them to open what is inevitably only one of hundreds of cards they will receive?
How long should your emails be? Do people read long emails? Do short emails convert better? These questions have been debated for a long time. My guest has the data and this is one question she answers for us.
There’s nothing better than getting another shot at a conversion. Sometimes, people aren’t ready to buy. I get that. I’m fine with that.
But I always want another shot. Maybe when the time is better.
Because it took a lot to get that person to the site.
Email makes more website visits valuable
The search engines are getting ever pickier at the kind of content they consider authoritative. You’ve got to work for it.
Social media requires so much time to do right, and most of the activity stays on the social media apps.
Every online advertising source has gotten steadily more expensive, prohibitively expensive. It was Google. Then Facebook. Then “the Gram”. Competition has driven up the cost of each of these in turn.
And what do I have to show for it? A landing page bounce or a full shopping cart left abandoned on one of my digital aisles.
No, I want another shot.
I’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to catching a wayward visitor. Exit overlays, live chat and the BB8 equivalent, chatbots. I can try to get you to agree to push notifications. I can give you a discount in exchange for permission to send you a Facebook message. I can pout, I can cry, I can beg.
But after almost four decades, the best choice is still that quaint old communication medium email.
“So a lot of experts nowadays will tell you that you need to write really short emails because there’s a statistic out there that says that our attention spans are that of a goldfish. I hate that.”
What the Data Says: Email, Podcasts, & Lead Conversion
What does the data tell us about effective email, podcasts and converting leads to sales? It's in here.
* Biggest misunderstandings
* Important metrics
* Applying the data
39 page PDF
Fits on your phone
Email is the new email
It’s the original social media platform.
Every year, we hear about the demise of email. And every year email is the new email.
Email still can’t be beat for rich content, for conversations that feel one-to-one, and for getting another shot at a future customer. While everyone was fawning over the sexy new kid, social media, good ole email kept my readers close. Despite these new channels, the money is still in the list. And no algorithm change is going to take your list away from you.
People reply to my emails and tell me a little about themselves. Because they can. And I write back. And it can make my day.
Because that means I’m going to get another shot at making them a customer. Customers are some of my favorite people.
“Only 10.9 percent of e-mail experts send emails with subject lines of 20 characters or less.”
Yes, we may have abused our email privilege, but not by sending too much email. It’s something else.
To explore this, I’ve invited Liz Whillits to join me. Liz is Senior Content Marketing Specialist at AWeber, one of the OG email services. She is a self-proclaimed marketing nerd, and that makes her our kind of crazy.
“46 percent of emails are opened on mobile devices. Most mobile devices will cut off your subject line at somewhere between 30 and 40 characters. So anything over 40 characters is definitely getting cut off for your mobile readers.”
Liz doesn’t think you’re sending too much email, and she’s got the data to prove it. If we’re not sending too much email, then what’s keeping our email from being more productive?
When you get back to the office…
Our inbox has become our task master. If we want to know what’s going on with our team, communicate with our clients and agencies, or handle that return, it’s still done through email.
Email used to be the place we turned when we needed to take a break from creating that report, from polishing that design, or from meeting with the team. It used to be email to which we turned for a distraction.
“If you don’t clean your list, your emails are less likely to reach the inbox. So you could be putting all of this work into your email marketing strategy only to have your emails not reach the inbox.”
Today, the inbox drives our daily to-do list. This is true of veterans like me, as well as the younger members of the Slack generation. This is where it gets its power.
But instead of suggesting that you review your autoresponder, I’d like to invite you to make your everyday emails a little more personal. Add a bit of wit when you acknowledge receipt of that spreadsheet. Drop a meme to that terse, business-like reply you’ve just banged out.
Do something… anything that will make your coworkers glad to get email from you. In the long run, I think this will change the way you write for your prospects and clients.
I’m going to start doing this today.
Now, go science something with that personal flair.
Would you like to know why your mobile visitors don’t buy from your ecommerce site? Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist®, unveils the mystery – and tells you what to do about it.
If you are like most ecommerce sites, you’re getting more mobile visitors, but the conversion rates are significantly lower than your desktop and tablet visitors – a lot lower.
Find out how to reverse this trend, increase your sales, and learn to love the small screen.
Understand your mobile ecommerce website visitors
Let’s take stock of your mobile visitors. What are they really like? This will require some analytics work. Even if you aren’t yet comfortable with analytics, get a Google Analytics login and follow along.
Are tablet visitors mobile or non-mobile?
Tablet visitors are generally happy with a desktop-like experience because they have large screens. However, tablet visitors are often in a “lean back” context, browsing for entertainment rather than to accomplish a goal. If your tablet visitors have conversion rates and average order values similar to your desktop visitors, you can regard them as, what I call, “non-mobile” or “big screen” visitors.
Look at your mobile visitors and non-mobile (desktop plus tablet) visitors separately.
Why your mobile visitors don’t buy from your ecommerce site: Questions to ask
To fully understand why your mobile visitors don’t buy from your ecommerce site, answer each of the following questions. There are no right or wrong answers.
1. Is your mobile traffic growing?
Look at the total number of visits (or sessions) for mobile and all visitors over time. Then look at the last month. Google Analytics has a report (Audience -> Mobile -> Overview) that will show you the percentage of these visitors to your site.
Figure 1: The Mobile Overview report shows mobile traffic (green line) is clearly trending up as a percentage of all traffic (blue line).
Has the percentage of mobile visitors changed over time? Is this percentage bigger or smaller in more recent months?
2. Does your mobile traffic convert lower than your desktop traffic?
How much do you make from each mobile visitor? Look at the revenue per visit or session value for mobile visitors and compare this to non-mobile visitors. You’ll find this by clicking the Ecommerce tab in the Mobile Overview report.
Choose the Ecommerce view to see average session value reports.
If your mobile visitors are converting less or spending less per transaction, you will see it in these metrics.
Figure 2: In this example, the average order value for mobile visitors is only $0.20 compared to $3.75 for desktop visitors.
You may want to analyze a longer period of time if you have seasonality in your ecommerce business.
3. Do your mobile visitors convert in other ways?
Look at non-ecommerce conversions, including email, subscriptions, registrations, phone calls, and social messenger permissions. Compare these conversion rates to your big-screen or desktop conversion rates.
Figure 3: Looking at Goal Set 1, we see that mobile visitors have a lower Registration rate (last column) than desktop visitors.
4. Do your mobile visitors buy as much their desktop counterpart on the first transaction?
Look at your average transaction size, or average order value. Is it larger or smaller for mobile visitors? In Figure 2, we can see that the average order value for this online store is considerably smaller for mobile visitors ($46.60) than for desktop visitors ($160.43).
5. What channels make up your mobile traffic?
Do you have more mobile customers coming from email and social media?
Figure 4: While more visitors from YouTube are coming on desktop, the opposite is true for Facebook visitors.
6. What is your ecommerce cart abandonment rate?
This is the number of visitors who add to cart, but don’t check out.
This is the number of visitors who start to check out, but don’t complete the process.
COAR = Transactions / Sessions with clicks on Checkout
Answering these questions will help you determine the particular behavior of your small-screen visitors. When you are campaigning for resources, you need to be able to tell the story of your mobile visitors.
Report showing mobile visitors have higher abandonment rates than desktop.
In the example above, we see that mobile visitors have much higher Cart Abandonment (75.66%) and Check-Out Abandonment (68.88%) rates than desktop visitors (52.43% and 37.62% respectively).
This is an indication that this mobile checkout process may have some issues.
The reasons your mobile visitors aren’t buying from your ecommerce site
It costs more to buy on a small-screen mobile device because it takes longer and it extracts a psychological price. There are three major reasons your conversion rate is lower for smartphone users.
Your mobile visitors are coming with a lower level of urgency. They are standing in line, waiting for a table, or checking out of a group conversation.
Your responsive website template assumes a mobile site is just a small desktop site. It’s just too hard to checkout.
Your website is too slow. Mobile visitors have to wait much longer for a slow site because their connections have lower bandwidth.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tips: Mobile visitors aren’t here to buy. Don’t fight it
Mobile users are likely to have a “lean back” attitude compared with your big-screen visitors. For a portion of your visitors, their shopping experience is less urgent, driven more by opportunity than by purpose.
Mobile visits are more often sourced by interruptions than by intent-driven search advertising. They are clicking through, based on a recommendation on Instagram, clicking on your Facebook ad, or coming from your abandoned cart email. In these cases, they are responding to an interruption. They may have a need for your product, but they weren’t shopping intentionally. They were interrupted.
Visitors coming from a search engine are intentional. They are signaling that they are actively trying to solve a problem.
Your mobile traffic is more likely to come from interrupt-driven sources: email and social media websites. Accept this, and move on.
“If you are investing more in the cheap clicks of social media, you are going to attract more “lean back” mobile visitors.”
Start a conversation instead
If you have a large percentage of mobile visitors coming from interrupt-driven campaigns and they are not converting, don’t focus on the sale. Focus on getting an email address or permission to communicate via a social messaging app, like Facebook Messenger.
What call to action would a mobile visitor respond to?
Content: Offer sizing guides, buyers guides, style guides, installation, and how-to videos in exchange for an email address.
Save my work: Offer to store the items they’ve added to their cart in exchange for an email. We call this a “screen hopper”. They may be more willing to buy later when they are checking emails on their computer at work. Offer to send them a link to their wish list via Facebook Messenger. Just know that their return visit will probably be on their smartphone.
Join our community: Offer to make your more passionate mobile visitors a part of an exclusive community.
Discounts. Offer a future discount in exchange for their email address or permission to send them a message.
Don’t redo the whole site. Land mobile visitors on specially designed pages in your online store.
Focus on getting the second visit.
It’s hard to complete forms on a smartphone
Forms are frustrating. They take the joy out of the purchase. No one likes entering their address once, let alone twice. And we tend to make more mistakes on a mobile keyboard. It’s not hard to track form errors in analytics. If you do, you will likely find more errors from mobile visitors.
The reason mobile is harder is the input method: 2 thumbs vs. 10 fingers for a keyboard. And on-screen keyboards aren’t tactile. There’s no feedback. Mistakes happen more often, extracting a psychological price.
Your clue that you have a user-experience problem is a high checkout abandonment rate (see above). If so, you should help your mobile visitors out.
Watch some screen captures
The recommendations I give here may or may not be affecting your visitors. Before you begin making changes to your site based on my rantings, find out which issues are affecting you.
The best way to do this is by watching screen recordings. I KNOW IT’S BORING. But it will take you less time to watch 100 of your visitors interact with your checkout than to make all of my recommended changes.
Screen recordings are pretty easy to get these days. Look at tools such as CrazyEgg, Sessioncam, Mouseflow, and Hotjar.
I recommend watching 50 to 100 visits that include a checkout or an abandonment. The best tools will let you search for these particular recordings. As you watch, tally the number of visitors who struggle, and notice which fields trip them. Star the visits that result in an abandonment. You’ll want to play these for your development team later.
Reduce the form fields
It may seem obvious that you need a credit card billing address, expiration date and CVV number. But, do you really?
Can you get this information from PayPal, Apple Pay, Visa Checkout, or some other service?
Use the right mobile keyboards
There is no good reason to make me enter sixteen numbers using a QWERTY keyboard. The number targets are tiny. Give me the numeric keypad.
The same goes for entering a phone number, CVV, expiration date, PIN, and US postal codes. Use the numeric keypad please.
Figure 5: Use the numeric keyboard for numeric fields.
If you want my email address, please use the email keyboard. It doesn’t require me to do anything special to enter “@”, “.” or “.com”.
Eliminate the endless drop-downs
How many countries are there in the world? If you are choosing your country on a mobile device, you know there is a lot, about two minutes worth of scrolling through a dropdown. I’m from the United States. I have to scroll to the bottom of a long list of countries to find “United States”.
If you don’t ship to Mars and Venus, they shouldn’t be on the list.
Your mobile visitors know the abbreviation for their country. Let them enter “USA” or “Canada” or “UK”.
Also, I’m from Texas, which means I scroll through 40 states. I hate your state dropdown, but not as much as those poor souls from Wyoming.
Avoid fancy fields on mobile forms
There’s been a trend toward auto-formatting fields. Phone numbers magically get parentheses around the city code. Dashes magically appear.
Fancy fields fail too often on mobile devices. If you have the resources to continuously QA all of the new browsers on all of the new devices coming out, you’re probably okay.
Cover the exits
Use exit-triggered, or exit-intent popups to make a final pitch to your mobile visitors. These popups appear when your mobile visitor tries to leave the site. This is a great place to offer to continue the conversation, save the cart, or provide a discount.
Use trust and proof in your mobile ecommerce checkout
You can’t make mobile visitors wait
I often hear that web visitors have the attention span of a goldfish. Mobile visitors could have the patience of a redwood tree and still abandon your page because it doesn’t appear to load.
Your mobile site is slow. This is because no one has a 4G connection to the internet, even if they’re standing right under the cell tower. Have you tested your website with the WiFi turned off? Probably not.
Your mobile site must be snappy. Google considers a mobile page speed slow if it takes more than 2.5 seconds to load over a 4G connection. There is nothing more painful than having to wait for the information needed right there and then when on a smartphone. Even a goldfish won’t hang around if you’re not responding quickly.
Barriers to Sales in Mobile Ecommerce Websites: Someone else designed my shopping cart
You will run into some barriers in optimizing your mobile checkout.
We’ve all been told to think “out of the box.” But “out of the box” shopping carts do not let us customize for our mobile visitors.
Third party services such as Shopify and BigCommerce do their best to give you a strong starting point. But you’ll need resources to customize their default experience for mobile.
Integration with third-party payment options requires work. Services like PayPal and Stripe need to balance security with integration that looks seamless. This is just the first step toward mobile-optimized checkouts.
Your mobile website isn’t a mini desktop site
Google successfully convinced most online businesses to go to a responsive web template with its Mobilegeddon threat. As I said in “Is Google Using Mobilegeddon to Lead You Astray?”, a responsive desktop website only gets you part of the way there.
Mobile visitors want more than a mini-me of your desktop site. They want:
Smaller forms.
Faster load times. Have you tried using your mobile site outside of your corporate WiFi network?
Thumb-driven content. Sliders and carousels work on mobile.
Custom keyboards for numbers, email addresses and text.
Location-based content, like maps.
Mobile visitors want something fundamentally different. Give it to them. Expect to make changes to the way your responsive template works. After a period of testing, your mobile site will evolve away from your big-screen site. That’s as it should be, and it’s the only way to get your mobile site converting as high as your desktop site.
Are Chief Marketing Officers — CMOs — losing their relevance in the C-suite? And if so, can data and experimentation turn things around for them? Laura Patterson offers her opinion on the changing role of the CMO on the Intended Consequences Podcast
I was having coffee with an old colleague, Laura Patterson, here in Austin.
Laura advises businesses on all aspects of their marketing functions. Here at Conversion Sciences, we focus on only one piece of the puzzle, the digital channel. So, I have a lot of respect for her ability to bring together all of the pieces that make up a modern marketing effort.
Advertising. Brick and mortar retail. Online retail. Branding. Merchandising. Customer experience. Digital technologies. Messaging.
When I talk to her, I get a new appreciation of just how much CMOs have on their plates. If anybody’s going to know what’s going on with CMOs, it’s Laura.
Then she said something about CMOs that stopped me in my tracks.
Laura Patterson is the founder of VisionEdge Marketing. Like me, Laura has been focused on performance marketing and the proper use of data since before it was “cool.”
So I was left speechless when she said, “CMOs are abdicating their strategic position in their businesses.”
Laura Patterson on the Fall of the CMO
Laura is not the kind of person to jump to conclusions, so I had to take notice on the changing role of the CMO.
A few weeks later, I was on a panel with friend and fellow marketer Janet Driscoll Miller. She reminded the audience — and me — of a Fornaise Marketing Group study of 1200 CEOs that found 80% of them did not trust and were not impressed by the work done by traditional Marketers. By comparison, 90% of them trusted their CIOs and CFOs. There’s a link in the show notes.
I did some additional research and found more incriminating news. Forrester recently reported that “dozens” of major brands had eliminated the Chief Marketing Officer position altogether, brands like Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Taco Bell, and Netflix.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this. Were we part of the problem, or was data going to save the CMO? I invited Laura to join me here in the offices of Conversion Sciences and tell us what she knows.
So, why does Laura believe CMOs are losing their seat at the table in the C-suite?
Today’s CMO has New Titles
“Why are we seeing the emergence of some of these really interesting titles like Chief Customer Officer, like Chief Growth Officer?
Because we are seeing those titles beginning to emerge. And it concerns me that many times when you read the job descriptions, these are job descriptions that reflect the kinds of things that marketing leaders used to perform.”
“Companies that have a long sales cycle, that’s a consultative sell. They have a variety of people in the decision making process. That’s a B2B kind of process.
Walking through the checkout lane and trying to make a decision about whether I should get a candy bar, that’s B2C.
It might be that I have to do an extra run, but I’m not gonna get fired for that. But we do have B2B buying processes that occur in the consumer world, like buying a house.”
Advice for CMOs: Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
“I would say that the number one thing that any CMO can do right now that would signal that they are taking a more strategic stance and want to be more of a strategic partner is how they frame the marketing plan.
Many people are being asked right now to give a budget. Didn’t even have a plan yet, but they’re talking about money.
End of year budget planning and budget planning for a lot of people means they’re going to open up whatever document they used last year for their planning and their budget.
They’re going to make some decisions off the cuff about what they’re going to do next year in terms of events or campaigns. Maybe they’ll look at some data. They’re going to put a number on it.
They’re going to do some finagling and they’re going to submit a budget. That’s not a plan. It’s a budget, it’s a budget.”
Strategic Focus: The Critical Role of Customer Engagement
“Many of these marketing people may or may not even know yet what the three to five things are that the company has to do next year in order to win.
They may have some general idea they want to grow, but we don’t market to buckets of revenue and we can’t just say grow. We need to be very clear.”
The First Question: Show me the Business Growth
“My first question to any CMO is, “What are the beachheads?”
That’s a great question. And if I don’t know that and they don’t know that, how can we put a plan together?”
Signs You’re Chief Marketing Officer is in Trouble
“The signs that you’re in trouble: [the CEO and board] starts just relegating you to running programs.
“Random acts of marketing.” If you’re if you’re doing random acts of marketing, you’re probably going to see some red flags around that.”
When you get back to the office…
I’ve always seen data as a tool of empowerment, a way to level the playing field and a way to truly understand those crazy people we call customers. And who’s in a better position to access this data than the CMO?
But data doesn’t change cultures on its own. It needs a fertile soil of experimentation to take root in. Otherwise, it is just numbers that can be used when they’re going up and to the right, and discounted if they tell the wrong story.
A culture of experimentation can be pushed from the top, from the CMO down. It can also be nurtured from the bottom, from you.
It’s time for marketers to put the data we have to use. For you, it all starts with your next experiment or research. It starts the next time you log into analytics, and click beyond the dashboard report, deep into the souls of your prospects and customers.
Because, if not Marketing, then who will do this?
Experience fast revenue growth, month after month, year after year.
Sales and marketing. Two functions critical to a business’s success. They work tightly, arm-in-arm to build awareness, engage prospects and help them choose the best solution for their problem. They have common goals and cooperate closely to achieve them. The mutual respect and gratitude they have for one another is palpable.
If you’re wondering what planet I’m on, you’re not alone.
From the first time something was sold, sales and marketing have worked together.
God created desire by positioning the fruit as forbidden. The serpent closed the deal.
Marketers created the gold rush. Salespeople sold the picks and shovels.
Sears wrote the catalog. Roebuck shipped the merchandise.
Yet, not all is well in sales and marketing land.
“Marketing needs to generate more leads,” says sales.
“Sales needs to follow up on the leads we’re sending them,” says marketing.
“The leads marketing is sending aren’t qualified,” says sales.
“Sales isn’t selling the right products,” says marketing.
We are usually hired by marketing to optimize a website. We learn a lot from salespeople when we interview them.
Yet, we often don’t have access to the CRM — the Customer Relationship Management system — because “it belongs to sales.”
This gulf, this canyon, this gaping sinkhole between sales and marketing has been around for as long as I’ve been in the business. That’s why I invited Chris Wallace to be on the podcast. He is the Co-founder and President of Innerview, an agency that is totally focused on this problem.
I was skeptical at first. This problem also exists with the customer support teams and the training teams. By the time we were done talking, I knew his solution was perfect.
Find out how he convinced me.
Sales vs. Marketing
“The biggest reason organizations struggle with this is information typically moves in one direction. Information flows from the top down. And the marketers are really the ones developing the go to market strategy and developing the products. And then that gets, for lack of a better word, thrown over the wall or pushed down the funnel toward the sales organization.”
The Face of our Brand
“And what we’re finding to be the best way to sort of bridge that gap is to disrupt that one way flow and really increase the two way dialog and collaboration and really helping marketers look at their their sales teams, their front line, Iraqi sales, customer service, even technicians and even non selling roles, not revenue generating roles. And looking at those folks really as the face of their brand and an audience that they need to engage in and really win over looking at them as if we can really win their hearts and mind that tell them what to do but win their hearts and minds the way we’re out there trying to win customers hearts and minds every day. We know we can. We can. Like you said, we can build that bridge. We can we can close that gap in a significant way.”
Sales/Customer support is a channel that needs to be optimized!
Should marketing look at [sales] as another channel to get its message out? And be optimizing that channel the same way would be a Facebook advertising campaign or search engine optimization program or a paid search advertising campaign?
“We run it like a marketing campaign. We treat that like any channel that “talks” to the customers. We segment them based on how they talk to the customers and we measure how aligned they are to their brand story.”
Metrics for Marketing to Employees
“How well is your brand message — your brand story — transferring from your your corporate marketing department down to each one of these customer-facing channels? Its internal market research. So everything that we do is led by gathering the attitudes and opinions and perceptions about product service, brand positioning — all those things — and using the data that we have to target those audiences with new campaigns, new messages, in an effort to really win them over. Or fill the gap.
Don’t Tell Sales. Ask!
“They’re focusing so much of their time — and their effort and their resources — telling sales what it is that they need to do, and not enough time asking them what they think. And it doesn’t mean that you’re going to completely change a product. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go back and completely redo your campaign.”
“But if you’re asking somebody what they think, if you understand thier starting point, if you want to get them from point A to point B, if you are constantly guessing at what message is going to resonate with them, to move them from point A to point B, and you spend all your time, effort, energy blasting that message at them. In this case, it could be product trainings or product manuals or whatever the case may be. If you spend all your time guessing and pushing messages out, you’re actually pushing your “audience” further away.”
Timing is Really Important
“The timing of this is really important. The sales team feels like you’re out in market with it before they’re even prepared to talk about it. Right. The phone start ringing before before they’re even prepared. That happens a lot. We see it all the time. But the timing is really important. But really that that the answer is ask versus tell.”
Put down the Saleshose
“Don’t try to make them experts right way, try to help them build momentum, try to get them comfortable with something. Don’t try to get them to swallow the entire thing whole. So when you talk about trying to keep it top of mind, a great way to keep things top of mind is to feed them interesting little nuggets. Bit by bit by bit over a period of time, rather than attaching the firehose to their face. Almost every organization that we come across goes with the firehose approach.”
Deliver Content like a Marketer
“We’re developing anything from webisode concepts where organizations are creating content. And I’m not talking about corporate videos, somebody sitting behind a desk telling you how important something is. I’m talking about creating content that looks more like what people are watching on YouTube and Netflix and distributing that to their frontline teams. Having themes that really engage them.”
Get Creative like a Marketer
“Instead of doing your typical product trainings, we’re developing escape room concepts. We’re working with virtual reality companies — VR. It has a tremendous application for employee engagement in front line readiness.”
Be Dynamic like a Marketer
“The way that you’re able to engage with your your customers is more dynamic — a marketer — now than it ever has been. And we look at that and say, ‘Take a lesson from that.’ Look at all those different drips and those different nuggets and channels that you’re distributing small pieces of information through and find different vehicles to get that information out to your own people.
Employees Act like Consumers
“Most people don’t look at themselves as an employee one minute and a consumer the next minute. Those habits are very similar. So take what we know about the customer and let’s leverage that for the employees.”
When you get back to the office…
Instead of using sales to learn more about your customers, learn to see sales AS your customers.
When marketers get fresh data about their market, it’s like their birthday. You need to find that same excitement learning about the sales, training and customer support teams you work with. Think about the next thing you have coming up, that you need to get right. What percentage of your sales team are women vs. men? What percentage are humanists, who build relationships vs. methodicals who persuade with logic? How do you construct the “Whats in it for me” arguments that will grab their attention and make your campaign a success? How do you equip sales and support to be successful with your product?
You may have to start working on a budget that includes this new marketing channel: the one inside your company.
A must-read guide to increase your Shopify store conversion rate – better yet, conversion optimization rates – with step by step instructions. Check it out.
There is no denying that increasing your Shopify store conversion rate will lead to a growth in sales and revenue, assuming your traffic remains constant. That is why we crafted this complete guide for those Shopify store owners or marketers that want to take their ecommerce site to the next level.
Let’s cover a few of the basics first and then we can dive into how to increase your Shopify store conversion rate steps.
Enabling Google Analytics for your Shopify store
You can’t improve your conversion rate unless you enable measurement. Fortunately, Shopify has you covered.
You’ll need this to track the metrics you’re interested in. For example, the “Google Analytics Ecommerce / Shopping Behavior” report tells you your abandonment rates.
Out-of-the-box Shopify Google Analytics integration calculates your abandonment rates for you.
What Is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate For a Shopify Store?
Every ecommerce business on Shopify sells a unique product to a unique audience. There really are no industry benchmarks that you can rely on.
Besides, your Shopify store has more than a single conversion rate. You can have conversion rates for different types of visitors, customers, traffic sources, devices, geos, and customer journey paths.
Any improvement to any of these conversion rates will help you increase your Shopify store conversion rate.
But if your sitewide conversion rate is below one percent, you will struggle to make advertising profitable. At two percent to three percent, you can say that you’ve found a solid mix of traffic and shopping experience for your audience.
To get above this level – to reach the five to ten percent sitewide conversion rate – you have to get good at selling to return visitors. This includes those who have bought from you before, as well as those who have visited but haven’t bought yet.
Ultimately, the best conversion rate for your ecommerce business is one that is better than last year at this time. We are going to tell you how to optimize your Shopify store for higher conversion rates.
How to Increase Your Shopify Store Conversion Rate
As we mentioned earlier, your ecommerce site doesn’t have just one conversion rate. It has several, each depending on the source of the traffic and where they land.
For example, look at the difference between your New Visitors and your Returning Visitors. For most Shopify stores, your returning visitors will have a much higher conversion rate than your new visitors.
This makes sense.
And this is why your Shopify dashboard has the “Return customer rate” metric. Return visitors mean repeat purchasers. Return visitors may also be new customers who are more ready to buy.
You want more return visitors.
So, there are some key realizations that every high-converting Shopify site owner must understand to improve the overall business.
Realization #1: You can’t increase your conversion rate unless you decrease your abandonment rate.
The Abandonment rate of your site is about the opposite of your Conversion Rate. It tells you how many potential shoppers came to your online retail store, but didn’t purchase. Basically, you cannot increase your conversion rate without decreasing your abandonment rate.
Your sitewide abandonment rate is calculated by the number of visitors who leave your site divided by the total number of visitors to your site.
Abandonment = Visitors who don’t buy / All visitors to your site
To make this more interesting, you can consider only non-bounce sessions.
What is the difference between bounce rate and abandonment rate?
The bounce rate tells you how many people left your site immediately after arriving. Abandonment tells you how many people left your site without buying or subscribing.
Bounce rate is a good measure of your traffic qualify and your landing page experience. Abandonment rate is a good measure of your entire shopping and buying experience.
There are two additional ways to calculate your abandonment rate that are very helpful for Shopify ecommerce store owners: Cart Abandonment and Checkout Abandonment.
Cart Abandonment = Visitors who added something to their cart but did not buy / All visitors that added something to their cart
Checkout Abandonment = Visitors who started to checkout but did not buy / All visitors who started checkout
Cart abandonment includes checkout abandoners, but each tells a different story about your Shopify site.
Visitors often add items to their Shopify cart in order to calculate the total cost of their purchase. Cart abandonment is often simply a part of their shopping process.
On the other hand, those who abandon the checkout process are sending a different signal altogether. They started the purchase process and got spooked for some reason. We can treat each of these visitors differently.
It’s important to understand the difference between your cart abandonment rate and your checkout abandonment rate. Each of these abandoners are called segments of your visitors and they have to be treated differently to be able to boost your Shopify store conversion rate.
Realization #2: Email (and its cousins) is critical to ecommerce success, no matter what generation your visitors are.
If return visitors are so important to the success of your Shopify store, how can you get more of your visitors to return? Get their email address. Every Shopify store owner must be good at email and at building an email list. The stand-out businesses gets email right.
Email has a couple of cousins. These are pixels and text messages.
Pixels set a cookie on your visitors’ browsers, allowing you to target ads at them elsewhere on the web.
Text messages are like email, but with a 90% open rate (as opposed to email, whose open rates often below 30%). None yet has the ROI of email, however.
All of these play a role in getting visitors back to your Shopify store for another shot at a purchase. There are three segments of visitors you’ll want to target with these strategies: customers, abandoners and mobile visitors.
Upspringbaby uses a discount to get remarketing email addresses.
How to Increase Shopify Purchases for Customers
Promotional email may not seem sexy, but it is a proven way to increase the long-term value of customers by getting them to buy more, or offering them other products they may be interested in.
Like brand advertising, email has a direct measurable effect and an indirect effect. The direct effect is when recipients click on the email and buy. The indirect effect is to keep top of mind with your brand. They may come to you through search when they are ready to buy, but thought of you because of the email.
If you have some chops with analytics, take a look at a segment of return visitors who came through organic search or through branded search ads. You can call these awareness-influenced visitors.
Email services like Klaviyo have tight integrations with Shopify. If no direct integration exists (hello, Mailchimp), there is probably an app that will integrate with your email service provider.
So, start crafting those promotional emails to increase your Shopify store conversion rate amongst your customer base.
How to Increase Shopify Conversions for Abandoners
There are two strategies you can put in place for catching visitors who abandon your website: keep them from abandoning and get permission to communicate with them after they leave.
Implement Shopify Permission Marketing
Abandonment remarketing is one of the first strategies every Shopify store manager should implement. This involves collecting a visitor’s email address or setting a cookie on their browser. Or both.
Both of these strategies require you to be good at getting abandoners back to your store. One uses advertising, the other uses email.
First, pixel all of your visitors. The most popular pixels are Google Ads and Facebook. However, you may also find your visual shoppers on sites like Pinterest and Instagram if your products are in the fashion, decor, or food industries. These pixels gives you the ability to craft remarketing ad campaigns to help these visitors see your products again on those social media networks or while they are performing online searches.
Next, select an email service provider that has abandonment remarketing features. This has two parts.
A popup app to get an email address.
A series of emails that gets visitors back to your site.
We have a client that uses the Justuno app to generate popups. They integrate with email service provider Klaviyo, which delivers a series of emails enticing abandoners to return.
How to Keep your Visitors from Abandoning your Shopify Store
What reasons would you give a visitor to give you their email address? Here are some strategies.
Offer a discount
When a visitor arrives to your site offer a discount in exchange for their email address. This is one of the most popular ways to prime your site to support abandonment emails.
NOTE: Offering discounts may seem like an easy way to overcome buyer objections, but you may want to focus on building value on your site with copy and images before offering discounts.
Offer to save their cart
Throw up an exit-intent popup in your cart and checkout process that offers to save their cart and send a link, so they can come back and finish. Yes, your cart is persistent, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sell this as a benefit.
Pacific Coast offers to let you save your cart.
Offer content
Offer a buyer’s guide or how-to guide to help in their search for products and solutions. Someone who is leaving your site is often comparing you to other solutions. Be the one that helps them choose. Solid and complete product descriptions, measuring charts, and guides can help your shoppers take the desired add to cart action.
How to Increase your Shopify Store Conversion Rate for Mobile Visitors
If you look at your Shopify store results for mobile visitors, you’ll realize two very disturbing things: They have much lower conversion rates and they are more than half of your visits.
And if you are successful with email and Facebook ads most of these visitors will come to your site on smartphones. Disturbing.
Mobile visitors don’t buy for two main reasons: They aren’t in a situation where it’s easy to buy or they find it too difficult to purchase on their mobile devices.
We recommend that you focus on different conversions for small screen visitors. Feature click-to-call or chat for those that will, and focus on getting an email address or permission to send a message.
Cheapstairparts presents a phone number in a sticky header.
The goal of click-to-call should be obvious. They have a phone app built into their handset. For those who won’t call, we need to get another chance to invite them back when they are in a better place to buy. That’s the role of email, Facebook Messenger messages and text messages.
You may cause buyers to take the easy way out, but the positive effect of getting more of your mobile visitors back can outweigh the negative impact.
As always, test these strategies on your Shopify store and see which ones improve your mobile conversion rate.
How to Increase Shopify Store Conversion Rate on Your Landing Pages
Your Shopify store conversion rate is a function of two main factors: the type of visitors you are driving to your site and the shopping experience they have once they land on your ecommerce shop.
If you are using paid ad campaigns to attract new visitors, or to draw abandoners, give thought to where you bring them. Choose the right landing pages for your ads as this can help you increase your Shopify store conversion rate.
The best decision depends on the visitor’s source and the promise made.
Should your Shopify Homepage be the Landing Page?
This is one of the most common landing pages on your site, but makes the visitor work the hardest. The home page is designed for every kind of visitor, and as such serves none of them perfectly.
A Shopify Product Page as a Landing Page
If you are investing in Google Shopping Ads, this is the destination where visitors will have the best shopping experience. For people clicking on specific products, it is an ideal place to land. They can add to cart without a lot of effort.
Conversion Rate Optimization advice: Use product pages as landing pages for any product-specific ads to increase your add to cart conversion rate.
Using a Collection or Search Results page as a Landing Page
This is often a poor substitute for a dedicated landing page. If you are having a special on a class of product, you can drive traffic to these pages. However, they require the visitor to do a lot of work to choose with confidence. The more specific your offer, the less appealing these pages are and the lower your conversion rate.
When to Create a Custom Landing Page on Shopify
Use Shopify pages as dedicated landing pages when you have specific offers in your ads. For example, if you have a discount on a certain brand or category of product, don’t send the visitor to a collections page. Bring them to a page that reinforces the ad and lists the products that are discounted.
Leverage the Shopify Blog to Increase Store Conversions
Blog pages can be great sources of organic search traffic. Don’t forget to advertise your products on these pages! In the content, beside the content, and in overlays. Choose the products relevant to the blog post topic.
Your Cart as a Landing Page
If you are bringing abandoners back to your site, their cart may be the best place to bring them. You may try to persuade them to checkout by offering free shipping or a discount. But beware of some choices that can hurt your conversion rate when setting up your Shopify store. Here is one of them.
Don’t CAPTCHA your customers
Shopify gives you the option of using Google reCaptcha on your store. This may reduce some of the spam you receive. But it is putting the burden of managing your spam problem on your customers.
Shopify allows you to setup RECAPTCHA but this is not recommended.
And it is one more step in your process. One more potential mistake that can convert buyers to abandoners.
Shopify Apps that Can Help Lift your Store’s Conversion
There are plenty of ecommerce business apps in the Shopify’s App Store for you to try and test to see if they can help you get a boost in conversions, sales and revenues.
Some very well known examples are Yotpo for rating and reviews, Chatty People, Swatchify, natural language processing site search apps like InstantSearch+, among others. Look for some that leverage AI and personalization to easily deliver targeted shopping experiences.
We are currently working on an article to cover these Shopify Apps in more detail. Sign up for our newsletter to be amongst the first ones to be notified.
Too Many Shopify Apps can Slow Down your Store and Lower your Revenues
Each app that you add to your Shopify store slows your store’s page load time. This is just unavoidable. Slow load times often mean lower conversion rates, especially for your mobile visitors who access your ecommerce website over 3G or 4G.
If you can configure your site using your theme or a tag manager, choose that before adding another application. For example, you can add one of many pixel apps to your site from the Shopify app store. But a better way is to using the Online Store -> Preferences page in Shopify. Don’t get drawn into an app by features you may never use.
Whenever you add a new app, I recommend running several pages of your site through the free website site speed analyzer from Google. You will see an overall speed classification, compare with your competitors, and your potential revenue if you improved your Shopify store’s page load speed.
You’re also going to have to focus on elements that optimize conversion rates in any type of online retail shop. Feel free to read and download our Complete 110-Point Ecommerce Optimization Checklist. It will help you increase your Shopify store conversion rate.
We like funnels. We like them because they provide us with some sense of progress in our marketing efforts.
We have advertising programs to get people’s attention.
We use copy to build interest.
We use testimonials and case studies to build desire.
We have calls to action everywhere.
This is the classic AIDA funnel. Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a direct marketing approach that falls down in the long sales cycle reality of B2B marketing.
The demise of the funnel has been discussed for some time now. However, the discussion of what comes next has been unsatisfying to me.
The solutions that purport to step into the funnel’s place come with their own baggage. Hubspot offers up the Flywheel and customer delight. Lead scoring attempts to add value to the interactions someone has had with us. The more interactions, the more likely they are to be a prospect. But this approach treats the funnel more like a swarm of flies. People seem to swarm around our content until, finally, and unpredictably, they qualify for a call.
Carman Pirie believes there’s something better than a funnel or a swarm, and his agency delivers that something better. Kula Partners focuses on manufacturers all of whom have this long-cycle B2B sales challenge. Carman the Co-founder and he’s happy to put another nail in the coffin of the funnel. My question for him is, what comes next?
“The funnel is leading a lot of marketers — who function within a complex B2B sales environment — down a lot of really wrong paths. It’s making them think about attracting people into the universe in the wrong way. It makes them think about how to deal with people once they get into the universe in the wrong way. And it and it makes them think about how sales ought to engage with those people, I think, in a fundamentally flawed way.”
Our conversation around this question was interesting and enlightening. If digital marketing is more like a swarm, how is a swarm of bees different than a swarm of flies?
“You know that the frameworks that we use to think about our work really shape the work that we create.”
Replacing the B2B Marketing Funnel
Maybe you should develop a Firmographic profile. What kinds of companies would actually buy your product? What are the titles of the people who research and influence solutions like yours? Who else in the company are weighing in on the decision.
Then, take a few of your internal experts to lunch. Some of them would love to help you create some content that makes your prospects better buyers of your product or service.
If you’re selling tools or expertise, you’ll need to understand where your prospects are in their relation to time, interest, and expertise. Find out how my guest addresses these issues for his prospects.
I consider myself a software guy.
Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.
I wrote my own analytics package in 2003, which was thankfully replaced by Google Analytics in 2005.
I still write scripts for my data analysis.
In the tech world, we distinguish the software guys and gals from the hardware guys and gals. Mark Zuckerberg is a software guy. Apple’s Steve Wozniak is a hardware guy. Yes, I know Steve has written a lot of code in his day, but he’s undoubtedly a hardware guy.
When there’s something that needs to be done around the house — or to my car — my first thought is, “I’m a software guy. THIS is a hardware problem.”
My father, on the other hand, is clearly a hardware guy. Handy. Fixes things. Builds things.
So, when it came time to change the kitchen faucet in my house, I called Dad. Because, as a software guy, I would just start trying things to understand the obstacles. This can be an expensive approach for a hardware problem.
Hang in there. There’s a point to this.
So I called Dad and he came over. He told me what I should do to change the faucet, but I pretty much already knew all of that. However, Dad handed me a tool that I could never have imagined existed. It’s called a Basin Wrench, and it made all the difference.
There is no way, squeezed under that sink, that I ever would have gotten the old encrusted bolts off of the old faucet without the Basin Wrench. The YouTube videos I watched didn’t mention it. Imagine a raptor claw attached to the end of a long rod with a handle at the bottom.
I had to Google “faucet tool” to even find out what it was called.
I’m certain that I would have given up without it.
The moral of the story? Tools+Experience.
Now, I get pitched marketing tools all the time. Popup tools, data tools, visualization tools, email tools, analysis tools… you name it. How can I know which tools are the indispensable basin wrenches in all of this?
That is the question I had in mind when I invited Josh Thomas onto my podcast. Josh is with Outbound Engine. They sell the basin wrench of digital marketing for small businesses. They sell both the tools and done-for-you services to the kind of people who use basin wrenches daily.
Most of us see our products and services as basin wrenches. But only to those people who have a proverbial faucet to change.
So how does Outbound Engine convince hardware guys and gals to invest in a soft problem like digital marketing?
Budget and Culture
How you spend your money is also how you’re focused in terms of your time and where you want your team’s time to be spent.
High-quality content
Because we do see so many different iterations, we can see what engagement, what campaigns or content are driving engagements. We can make sure that we’re taking those lessons learned and incorporating them more and more over time. It gives us just more and more opportunities for us to learn and see what works best.
Prospecting Customers: Evaluating time, interest and expertise
Time. Expertise. Interest. I like this simple model.
These are the things that influence whether your customers will solve a problem themselves or buy a solution to fix it, a solution like yours.
Imagine mapping your opportunities onto a time/interest/expertise graph. Like this.
Rate your prospects on a scale from 1 to 5 for time, interest and expertise.
When time is tight (rated 1 or 2), prospects gravitate to those problems in which they have expertise, where they have confidence. Things are done the way they’ve always done them, and thus done quickly.
When time loosens, our prospects can gravitate to tasks that feed their interest or expertise. These are problems that need solving now that time is available.
Those with expertise but little interest are looking for tools to make things easier. The ROI is what they are looking for.
May be looking for tools.
Those with interest and little expertise are looking for experts. They are looking for expertise and tools.
May be looking for expertise and tools.
Someone with interest, expertise and time are likely to do it themselves, to solve the problem internally.
They are going to do it themselves.
Those with none of these probably don’t even know they have a problem. This is a tough sell.
They don’t even know they have a problem.
How do your clients map onto the TIE triangle? What are you doing to feed interest or expertise? To demonstrate ROI to experts and demonstrate competence to those who are interested? The two are quite different.
Here are fourteen persuasive writing techniques that will trigger a response from your visitors and withstand the test of time.
Have you ever wondered why nobody is responding to your offers?
Why do people read your landing pages and then leave?
Why do people see your ads and keep scrolling?
You have a great product. You are offering an in-demand service. So why does nobody seem to be interested?
The answer boils down to psychology. Simply put, you aren’t being persuasive.
You aren’t managing to trigger that little thing in your visitors’ brains that snaps them to attention, gets the heart rate pumping, and compels them to keep reading. And persuasive writing will make a point and convince readers to take action. These timeless persuasive writing techniques will help you craft the perfect copy to convince and convert by triggering a response.
14 Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response
Today, we’re giving you a handful of tools that we use in our Conversion Rate Optimization Agency to captivate audiences and compel a response.
1. Focus on resonating with emotional problems
Everyone has problems, and your product or service is designed to help people solve one or more of those problems.
A lot of businesses simply dive into explaining their solutions. One of the most powerful persuasion techniques, however, is to start by resonating with your readers around the emotional problems they are facing. When people see someone describing something “painful” they are experiencing, it pulls them in and prepares them to buy into the solution.
Another word for this is “empathy”. People want to feel like you empathize with their problems and that it drives the mission of your business.
US President Barack Obama once said this about empathy:
“You know, there’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this – when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”
That’s how empathy works. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes and let them know you understand what they are going through, they’ll be more inclined to listen to you. When you resonate with them on their problems, they will resonate with you on your solutions.
For instance, let’s say you want to write copy to sell a tool that solves the problem of content managers having to host their marketing tools on several different platforms. You could make your copy all about that problem and then introduce your tool in the end.
Here’s a great example.
Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response: Focus on resonating with emotional problems.
In this example from Entrepreneur Alliance, the product is a monthly subscription to a group where real entrepreneurs help each other out. As you can see in the copy above, which appears just below the fold, the company quickly addresses some of the common pain points many new entrepreneurs experience when trying to get started. They also address the frustration people feel when they are constantly assaulted by new people trying to sell them something.
If you are reading this copy and you too have experienced this frustration, than you are far more likely to be intrigued and even compelled by the solution that the Entrepreneur Alliance then proposes to you.
Of course, in order to legitimately resonate with your audience’s pain points, you have to first understand your audience.
Understanding Your Audience
Michael Port offers the FESP model for understanding an audience that you will perform for or write for:
How does the world look to your audience Financially?
How does the world look to your audience Emotionally?
How does the world look to your audience Spiritually?
How does the world look to your audience Physically?
In our example above, the marketing person may see the world like this:
Financially, she’s spending too much on multiple tools.
Emotionally, she’s struggling to manage a “Mississippi of tasks.”
Spiritually, she feels obligated to deliver value from these expensive tools.
Physically, she struggles with the stress of managing content effectively.
This FESP copy should speak to her needs right out of the gate.
In the context of a landing page, it’s usually best to dive into these needs and problems using your value proposition or immediately following your value proposition.
2. Incorporate facts, data, and other analytical information
While point #1 is very emotionally driven, selling isn’t all about emotion.
Certain segments of your audience might be more analytical.
Certain products or services aren’t geared towards emotional problems.
Even when you can utilize emotion, backing it with hard data strengthens the pitch.
One of the best ways to sell is to demonstrate “irrefutable” evidence that your solution is the best possible option for the prospective customer.
Legendary advertising creative director William Bernbach once said, “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” In the digital age, “truth” looks like facts, statistics, case studies, etc.
We employ this in our own marketing here at Conversion Sciences. We can talk about our experience and expertise all day long and even resonate with the problems our clients have dealt with, but at the end of the day, what prospective clients really want to know is:
Have you had success with past clients?
Aka do you have the track record to prove you will succeed with my business?
Since we drive an average conversion lift of 15 to 25% with our clients and have a 90% retention rate, we like to include that information in our copy whenever possible.
Persuasive writing techniques to boost conversions: The Conversion Catalyst
This is about as soft as it gets in terms of analytics, but since it is true, it serves as a powerful signal to clients considering our services, demonstrating that we aren’t just talking about AB testing. We are actually getting results.
Do the same in your own copy as often as possible.
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
In other words, monkey see, monkey do.
When we are making a decision, we want to know that other people consider it to be the right decision. Who are these “other” people?
Specific people we respect
People who are in a similar situation to us
Large quantities of random strangers
In 2017, social proof often takes the form of influencer recommendations, customer testimonials, and social share count.
For example, CoSchedule asks visitors to click TRY IT FOR FREEon their homepage. Visitors are then taken to a page that contains a testimonial and highlights the company’s most recognizable customers.
Demonstrate social proof at key junctures.
Be specific in your case studies and testimonials
Customer stories and testimonials have been shown to improve sales online. Customer stories work best when they are specific. See how Unbounce does it on of their pages:
Testimonials are more compelling with details.
The best customer stories and testimonials will offer the customer name, company, title and a picture. When appropriate, add the city and state of the speaker as well. Also consider things like age when appropriate.
Favor testimonials that avoid judgments, like, “We loved working with this company!” Instead, focus on a specific result. The more specific your numbers are, the more believable they are.
These stories answer the question, “What did people like me experience?”
4. Use tone to add emotion and keep things interesting
What does it mean to use one’s tone in writing? Basically, it means writing like you would talk in real life. Your tone can breathe life into your copy. It can make your writing a lot less boring for prospects to read.
David Ogilvy once said “Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.”
When I asked Sam Hurley (founder of OPTIM-EYEZ) to share his number one advice on persuasive writing techniques, he said, “It has to be tone. A sentence that equates to the same meaning can be written in 10 different ways…Each variation will evoke 10 unique reactions — and the difference can ultimately mean conversion or exit.”
In other words, you can rewrite a sentence in several different ways using your tone to effectively pass your message across to prospects and make it sink in their minds.
Derek used three different sentences to ask just one question: “Do people read long sales pages?” Why? He wanted to sound like a normal person in his tone; not a company trying to sell something.
If he was going to ask the same question in a real life setting, he wouldn’t just ask Do people read long pages?, would he?
No, he’d naturally ask follow-up questions just like he did in the example above. And those (follow-up) questions will mean the same thing as the original query. But they’ll make his message sink in his readers’ minds.
Your tone is important. It helps you talk like a fellow human being, not a business trying to make sales. It helps you build trust. And because your readers are also humans, they can very well relate with your tone when they see it in your copy.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”― Robert Frost
In other words, people react according to what they see in your copy. If they see you shedding tears, they’d be moved to tears. If you crack jokes, they’ll laugh (or at least give you a smile). And so forth. That’s how it works.
Be careful with your tone
Can anyone actually insult their prospects (or readers) deliberately? I’d love to answer that question with a no, but it happens. I recently found this while doing research for one of my clients:
Does it really pay to call your prospects mediocre?
This is form saying I’m a mediocre content marketer if I don’t sign up for the whitepaper. Is that true?
But does that slur really convert better than being polite? Did it get me converted? Heck, no! I actually got pissed off! I don’t know about you, but I cringe when I see Calls to Action like this.
There are several polite words that you can use to persuade people to do something. This CTA, for example, got Career Advice 261 sign-ups within 24 hours from a single guest post on The Muse:
This button copy is probably too safe. “Submit” is a tone-def word.
Yet, it contains no word that could potentially insult anyone.
5. Take time to bring up and cover objections
You should never begin writing copy with a pre-determined word count. It doesn’t matter if your copy ends at 400 or 3000 words. What matters is that you say everything that needs to be said.
More specifically, what matters is that you cover all the key objections.
An objection is an argument that tends to come up from the customer’s end to justify saying “No” to your pitch.
For example:
If you are selling me a productivity app and I say, “Well, I don’t think I need an app to be productive,” that’s an objection. If I ask, “Why would I pay for an app when there are 30 other productivity apps that are free?” that’s an objection.
In an interpersonal sales meeting, the power of the objection goes to whoever brings it up first. If I ask you about all the free apps and then you respond, it tends to sound like you’re justifying a problem. Since I brought up the objection, and I think I’m pretty smart, I give it more weight than your response.
On the other hand, if you bring up the objection first, you win. If you introduce the cost and then immediately begin talking about how free productivity apps either utilize distracting advertising or have a low budget and thus numerous technical problems, both of which defeat the purpose of a productivity app, suddenly that potential objection has now become a selling point.
With online copy, the customer never speaks, so you have time to address as many objections as you feel is necessary. There may be just a few or there may be numerous objections that need to be covered. The important thing is that you give yourself time to cover them all.
6. Draw attention to your points with rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions draw attention. They’re not meant to be answered, which means that they shouldn’t have an answer. If your question can easily answered with a “yes” or “no”, it won’t invite the visitor to read on.
Instead, pose questions that make the reader think, “What does this mean?” or, “How will you do that?”
What if we had one single solution that can perform all these functions?
Life would become extremely easy for content marketers, right?
We had a significant increase in leads for one of our addiction center clients using the rhetorical question, “Are you ready to stop lying? We can help.”
Of course, I didn’t expect answers to them. But if you’re a content marketer, you were probably answering those questions in your mind, agreeing to my point of view that an all-in-one tool is the best option for content marketers.
That’s how rhetorical questions work. They pull attention, get readers’ attention and lure them to keep reading your copy.
7. Use hyperbole to communicate value
Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration to make your point to readers. Hyperbole should be used carefully. If you claim to be the biggest, best, or leader, your persuasive copy must deliver proof very quickly.
Really? Does the world’s best content marketing actually run on Contently?
There are certainly other companies out there that get more ROI from content marketing than Contently’s customers. But, their exaggeration is immediately backed up with the logos of some of the biggest companies in the world, the implication being that they use Contently to run their content marketing.
Another example here is Campaign Monitor’s “Send email your customers can’t ignore”.
The headline makes us ask, “How do you do that?”
In this case, the hyperbolic claim makes the reader ask, “How do you do that?” Will all customers read your emails just because you sent them using Campaign Monitor? Probably not.
Unfortunately, the hyperbole isn’t backed up by proof. Only more claims are offered. This page goes on to invite the visitor to watch a video to get the proof.
The link between the hyperbolic claim and the proof is stretched thin, requiring the visitor to watch a demo.
The longer the distance between your hyperbole and the proof, the more tenuous your persuasive argument becomes.
But you get the message they’re trying to pass across, right? Campaign Monitor helps you send emails that get opened and replied.
8. Open your first paragraph with a hook
Once readers move past your headline, the next phase they’ll be meeting with is your opening paragraph. It tells them if they should keep reading your copy or head out to somewhere else.
There are a couple of ways to create a hook in your copy. You could start with a question like this one:
Open your first paragraph with a hook.
That very first line (After all, that’s the dream, right?) will spring up a question in the mind of most readers. They’ll start wondering what the dream might be. And they know they have to keep reading to find out. That’s the hook right there.
Another way to create a hook would be starting out with an eye-catching phrase. This could be anything that has the potential of making your readers pay attention. For example:
Starting out with an eye-catching phrase.
9. Start small and utilize escalating agreements
Avoid hitting the nail on the head at first––especially when you’re writing on a complex topic or for an audience that’s pretty tough to persuade. Begin by beating about the bush a little and give your readers simple valid points to agree on before they get to the complex parts of your copy.
This will help you persuade them to read your copy with ease no matter how complex the topic is and have them nodding their heads in agreement as they read on.
For example, calculating the Net Present Value of a sum of money is mostly a complex topics for folks who aren’t finance-savvy. I mean, it was pretty much a really tough topic for me in my first year studying finance in school. But see how the guys at Maths Is Fun made it look so simple by implementing escalating agreements:
See how they start their exegesis with a set of simple, valid opening sentences that virtually anyone would agree with? Notice that when readers agree that money now is more valuable than money later on, they’ll mostly move to the next line because they agreed with the previous sentence? That’s escalating agreements work. And that’s how to use it to persuade readers.
10. It’s OK to use technical details
Part of resonating with an audience is speaking in their language. When you use relevant jargon or communicate in technical terms only your target segment understands, you help position yourself as an authority in your space and build a community of people who use the same terminologies as you.
So how do you write with simplicity and still use jargon to show that you are a guru?
See how Apple uses a mix of both waffles and plainness in their copy for iPhone 7:
“iPhone 7 dramatically improves the most important aspects of the iPhone experience. It introduces advanced new camera systems. The best performance and battery life ever in an iPhone. Immersive stereo speakers. The brightest, most colorful iPhone display. Splash and water resistance. And it looks every bit as powerful as it is. This is iPhone 7.”
Notice how all that contains no single jargon even though the copy is about a technical product? Yes, that’s simplicity. Virtually anyone would understand it.
Now see how they used technical terminology on the same page––after enticing readers with jargon-less copy:
Apple’s use of jargon to build credibility.
Now some readers might not know what an optical image or f/1.8 aperture means. That’s certain. But they’re most likely going to stay with the copy because it’s interesting to read and not stuffed with too much technical mumbo jumbo.
Veteran copywriter Robert Bly said the following in a recent newsletter:
“…almost without exception, virtually everysuccessful direct response promotion is written in clear,concise, conversational copy.It’s the style used by John Forde … Clayton Makepeace … RichardArmstrong…Ivan Levison…Paul Hollingshead …Steve Slaunwhite…and just about every top six- and seven-figure copywriter I know.Why? Because it is plain English that virtually always gets thebest response — proving that when it comes to communicating,simple writing is the best writing.”
11. Use short and to-the-point statements
Short, concise statements can be memorable, fun and persuasive. They help to reduce cognitive overload, the need for an excessive amount of mental effort to understand things.
See how the folks at Fiftythree do it on their jobs page:
It’s difficult to condense messages into persuasive bites, but it can be very rewarding.
Copy doesn’t have to be wordy all the time. Just straight to the point and you’d have passed your message across in a split second.
12. Focus your headline on the biggest benefit you’re offering
Irrespective of how many benefits your offerings can provide, you need to figure out what your biggest benefit is and make your headline focus on. Too many websites “bury the lead.” This means that the most powerful point of the page is relegated to a subhead or the body of the copy.
A typical example here would be SumoMe. They offer several tools but the biggest benefit they provide is traffic and customers:
SumoMe doesn’t “bury the lead.”
Traffic and customers are what SumoMe’s prospects care about the most, so they put that in their homepage headline. David Ogilvy once said this about headlines:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.”
13. Tell stories
There has been a great deal written about stories. This is because they are proving to be so effective. Stories suck people’s attention into your copy. They make even the busiest people pay attention to whatever you’ve got to say or sell.
As an example, see how MAG International uses the art of storytelling to describe the havoc that landmines wreck:
Stories quickly help the reader relate to a situation.
Stories are most effective when:
Readers don’t know about the problem.
Readers may know about the problem, but haven’t considered finding a solution.
Stories may not be effective for readers that are frequent buyers or are very familiar with your solution to their problem.
14. Flaunt your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Of all these persuasive writing techniques, this one is the most effective in our tests. Your unique selling proposition (USP), could be anything that entices visitors to stay and read. It can be that you have low prices, superior quality or anything helps your readers rationalize reading on. For an eCommerce company, the USP includes your positioning, return policy, shipping policy and guarantees.
First, your selling proposition often doesn’t necessarily need to be unique. It just needs to be communicated. Rug Perfection offers hand-made rugs made of natural materials. They offer free shipping and pay shipping for returns as well. Would you know that from the copy on their website?
Rug perfection doesn’t flaunt its amazing story or its fantastic shipping and return policy.
Your USP doesn’t have to be complex. Persuasive writers are able to summarize your place in the market in just a few words. This is true of Kissmetrics.
Kissmetrics clearly defines their unique position in the market by referencing Google Analytics.
If calling out your competitor like Kissmetrics seems a little too aggressive for you, you can simply flaunt your unique value without mentioning any rival’s name. See how GoDaddy displays their unique 1-month free trial on their homepage:
The free trial is unique to the hosting industry.
There’s virtually no other web host provider that allows a month free trial. So that’s a USP for GoDaddy.
People are getting smarter year-by-year. Each time we want to shop for anything online, we mostly prefer to check out a number of options and choose who we’d like to do business with.
Whether you are doing growth and optimization work in-house or hiring a 3rd party top perform fully managed onversion optimization services for you, persuasion simply must be a core component of everything you do.
So a smart move you can (and should) make now is to ensure your web copy and content is focused on enticing, engaging and ultimately persuading prospects to pay attention to your brand and offerings.
Co-authored by Victor Ijidola
Victor Ijidola is a content marketer and freelance business writer. He runs Premium Content Shop where he offers premium writing services that drive leads, and has been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, Kissmetrics and many more.
A Behavioral Design Framework for You and Your Website
Persuasion ScienceAll Episodes
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The man walked onto the stage in a colorful robe. He was holding a small oar. He claimed he was wearing a magician’s robe and that the oar was his magic wand and that he was going to do something magical with us.
This was seven years ago at Conversion Conference 2012. I still remember this keynote — and I’ve forgotten many.
The magic he performed was to teach us an important model for changing behaviors. Before the hour was over, he had asked us to teach the person next to us what he had shared: his behavioral model.
I live by the belief that, “The best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else.” Indeed, his model was one I never forgot having taught it to someone else.
So, when BJ Fogg announced that he was finally releasing a new book, I invited him to be on the Intended Consequences podcast. With few changes, what he taught us seven years earlier had changed little. His new book, “Tiny Habits” has turned those business management lessons into a program for individual behavioral change.
My mindmap notes from his Conversion Conference session are available below.
No time to listen? Download the Summary of this Interview
Real time behavioral design
At one point in our conversation, BJ visualized how to apply his behavioral model to the problem of conversion. I animated this part of the conversation for you.
Click to hear an explanation of BJ Fogg’s Behavioral Design FrameworkBJ knows behavioral design and clearly applies it in his life. BJ teaches at Standford. He founded the Behavioral Design Lab there to study human behavior. Each year, his course tackles issues big and small. Like peace. And connecting to nature.
Anyone involved in marketing is involved in what he calls “Behavioral Design”. Listen to how this science can change your behaviors and your marketing effectiveness.
Habits make time for themselves.
When you get back to the office…
Let’s see if we can develop a tiny habit around experimenting. The habit we want to get into is considering data when we begin any creative project. As BJ told us, it doesn’t have to be big. In fact we should make it very small.
So the Prompt or Trigger is this: you sit down to write copy, to design an ad, to layout a webpage. I recommend that your tiny behavior be this: log into analytics. You don’t have to look at any reports. You don’t have to do any analysis. Just log in. Then you can log out and begin your project.
I’m trusting the process here, but according to Tiny Habits, you’ll begin to think about data more often. And then something will begin to change.
Now go behave like a scientist.
Resources and Links
BJ Fogg Conversion Conference 2012 Notes
Transcript of BJ Fogg Interview
The 12 Days of CROstmas
Conversion OptimizationOn the first day of CROstmas my website gave to me
An increase in RPV.
Image courtesy fangol on sxc.hu
On the second day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the third day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Three fresh sales, Two split tests and An increase in RPV.
On the fourth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the fifth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the sixth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the seventh day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the eighth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the ninth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the tenth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the eleventh day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Eleven cards a-clearing, Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bounces staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests and an increase in RPV.
On the twelfth day of CROstmas my website gave to me
Twelve pages landing, Eleven cards a-clearing, Ten forms completing, Nine tweeters tweeting, Eight maids emailing, Seven Testers testing, Six bouncers staying
Five Add to Carts
Four calling leads, Three fresh sales, Two split tests
And an increase in RPV.
Hope you enjoyed and sang along the 12 days of CROstmas!
May Your Holiday Hypotheses All Come True
How do you create a warm, joyful feeling from ordinary paper?
Children, puppies and heart-felt copy: these are the hallmarks of a card that can convert even the biggest scrooge into a quivering pool of good cheer.
What are you sending to your clients and prospects? Is your card working to get them to open what is inevitably only one of hundreds of cards they will receive?
In classic Conversion Scientist style, our Holiday Wishes come with a bit of education. Join the Conversion Scientist as he shows you how to choose and create holiday cards that appeal to the widest audience.
Wishing you the warmest of Holidays from all of us at Conversion Sciences.
How long should your emails be? What the data tells us.
Conversion OptimizationSubscribe to the Podcast
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There’s nothing better than getting another shot at a conversion. Sometimes, people aren’t ready to buy. I get that. I’m fine with that.
But I always want another shot. Maybe when the time is better.
Because it took a lot to get that person to the site.
Email makes more website visits valuable
The search engines are getting ever pickier at the kind of content they consider authoritative. You’ve got to work for it.
Social media requires so much time to do right, and most of the activity stays on the social media apps.
Every online advertising source has gotten steadily more expensive, prohibitively expensive. It was Google. Then Facebook. Then “the Gram”. Competition has driven up the cost of each of these in turn.
And what do I have to show for it? A landing page bounce or a full shopping cart left abandoned on one of my digital aisles.
No, I want another shot.
I’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to catching a wayward visitor. Exit overlays, live chat and the BB8 equivalent, chatbots. I can try to get you to agree to push notifications. I can give you a discount in exchange for permission to send you a Facebook message. I can pout, I can cry, I can beg.
But after almost four decades, the best choice is still that quaint old communication medium email.
What the Data Says: Email, Podcasts, & Lead Conversion
What does the data tell us about effective email, podcasts and converting leads to sales? It's in here.
- * Biggest misunderstandings
- * Important metrics
- * Applying the data
39 page PDF Fits on your phoneEmail is the new email
It’s the original social media platform.
Every year, we hear about the demise of email. And every year email is the new email.
Email still can’t be beat for rich content, for conversations that feel one-to-one, and for getting another shot at a future customer. While everyone was fawning over the sexy new kid, social media, good ole email kept my readers close. Despite these new channels, the money is still in the list. And no algorithm change is going to take your list away from you.
People reply to my emails and tell me a little about themselves. Because they can. And I write back. And it can make my day.
Because that means I’m going to get another shot at making them a customer. Customers are some of my favorite people.
Yes, we may have abused our email privilege, but not by sending too much email. It’s something else.
To explore this, I’ve invited Liz Whillits to join me. Liz is Senior Content Marketing Specialist at AWeber, one of the OG email services. She is a self-proclaimed marketing nerd, and that makes her our kind of crazy.
Liz doesn’t think you’re sending too much email, and she’s got the data to prove it. If we’re not sending too much email, then what’s keeping our email from being more productive?
When you get back to the office…
Our inbox has become our task master. If we want to know what’s going on with our team, communicate with our clients and agencies, or handle that return, it’s still done through email.
Email used to be the place we turned when we needed to take a break from creating that report, from polishing that design, or from meeting with the team. It used to be email to which we turned for a distraction.
Today, the inbox drives our daily to-do list. This is true of veterans like me, as well as the younger members of the Slack generation. This is where it gets its power.
But instead of suggesting that you review your autoresponder, I’d like to invite you to make your everyday emails a little more personal. Add a bit of wit when you acknowledge receipt of that spreadsheet. Drop a meme to that terse, business-like reply you’ve just banged out.
Do something… anything that will make your coworkers glad to get email from you. In the long run, I think this will change the way you write for your prospects and clients.
I’m going to start doing this today.
Now, go science something with that personal flair.
How Long Should you Emails Be Show Notes
Connect with Liz
30-day Trial of AWeber
AWeber Smart Designer
GA Certification
Ann Handley Newsletter
Brian Dean-Backlinko
Read the Interview with Liz Willits
Double-click on the text to listen.
Why your Mobile Visitors Don’t Buy from Your Ecommerce Site
Conversion Optimization, Conversion-Centered Design, Ecommerce CROIf you are like most ecommerce sites, you’re getting more mobile visitors, but the conversion rates are significantly lower than your desktop and tablet visitors – a lot lower.
Find out how to reverse this trend, increase your sales, and learn to love the small screen.
Understand your mobile ecommerce website visitors
Let’s take stock of your mobile visitors. What are they really like? This will require some analytics work. Even if you aren’t yet comfortable with analytics, get a Google Analytics login and follow along.
Are tablet visitors mobile or non-mobile?
Tablet visitors are generally happy with a desktop-like experience because they have large screens. However, tablet visitors are often in a “lean back” context, browsing for entertainment rather than to accomplish a goal. If your tablet visitors have conversion rates and average order values similar to your desktop visitors, you can regard them as, what I call, “non-mobile” or “big screen” visitors.
Look at your mobile visitors and non-mobile (desktop plus tablet) visitors separately.
Why your mobile visitors don’t buy from your ecommerce site: Questions to ask
To fully understand why your mobile visitors don’t buy from your ecommerce site, answer each of the following questions. There are no right or wrong answers.
1. Is your mobile traffic growing?
Look at the total number of visits (or sessions) for mobile and all visitors over time. Then look at the last month. Google Analytics has a report (Audience -> Mobile -> Overview) that will show you the percentage of these visitors to your site.
Figure 1: The Mobile Overview report shows mobile traffic (green line) is clearly trending up as a percentage of all traffic (blue line).
Has the percentage of mobile visitors changed over time? Is this percentage bigger or smaller in more recent months?
2. Does your mobile traffic convert lower than your desktop traffic?
How much do you make from each mobile visitor? Look at the revenue per visit or session value for mobile visitors and compare this to non-mobile visitors. You’ll find this by clicking the Ecommerce tab in the Mobile Overview report.
Choose the Ecommerce view to see average session value reports.
If your mobile visitors are converting less or spending less per transaction, you will see it in these metrics.
Figure 2: In this example, the average order value for mobile visitors is only $0.20 compared to $3.75 for desktop visitors.
You may want to analyze a longer period of time if you have seasonality in your ecommerce business.
3. Do your mobile visitors convert in other ways?
Look at non-ecommerce conversions, including email, subscriptions, registrations, phone calls, and social messenger permissions. Compare these conversion rates to your big-screen or desktop conversion rates.
Figure 3: Looking at Goal Set 1, we see that mobile visitors have a lower Registration rate (last column) than desktop visitors.
4. Do your mobile visitors buy as much their desktop counterpart on the first transaction?
Look at your average transaction size, or average order value. Is it larger or smaller for mobile visitors? In Figure 2, we can see that the average order value for this online store is considerably smaller for mobile visitors ($46.60) than for desktop visitors ($160.43).
5. What channels make up your mobile traffic?
Do you have more mobile customers coming from email and social media?
Figure 4: While more visitors from YouTube are coming on desktop, the opposite is true for Facebook visitors.
6. What is your ecommerce cart abandonment rate?
This is the number of visitors who add to cart, but don’t check out.
CAR = Transactions / Sessions with Add to Cart
Related Reading: Mobile Call-to-Action Buttons: Best Guidelines for Placement, Copy, and Design
7. What is your mobile checkout abandonment rate?
This is the number of visitors who start to check out, but don’t complete the process.
COAR = Transactions / Sessions with clicks on Checkout
Answering these questions will help you determine the particular behavior of your small-screen visitors. When you are campaigning for resources, you need to be able to tell the story of your mobile visitors.
Report showing mobile visitors have higher abandonment rates than desktop.
In the example above, we see that mobile visitors have much higher Cart Abandonment (75.66%) and Check-Out Abandonment (68.88%) rates than desktop visitors (52.43% and 37.62% respectively).
This is an indication that this mobile checkout process may have some issues.
The reasons your mobile visitors aren’t buying from your ecommerce site
It costs more to buy on a small-screen mobile device because it takes longer and it extracts a psychological price. There are three major reasons your conversion rate is lower for smartphone users.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tips: Mobile visitors aren’t here to buy. Don’t fight it
Mobile users are likely to have a “lean back” attitude compared with your big-screen visitors. For a portion of your visitors, their shopping experience is less urgent, driven more by opportunity than by purpose.
Mobile visits are more often sourced by interruptions than by intent-driven search advertising. They are clicking through, based on a recommendation on Instagram, clicking on your Facebook ad, or coming from your abandoned cart email. In these cases, they are responding to an interruption. They may have a need for your product, but they weren’t shopping intentionally. They were interrupted.
Visitors coming from a search engine are intentional. They are signaling that they are actively trying to solve a problem.
Your mobile traffic is more likely to come from interrupt-driven sources: email and social media websites. Accept this, and move on.
Start a conversation instead
If you have a large percentage of mobile visitors coming from interrupt-driven campaigns and they are not converting, don’t focus on the sale. Focus on getting an email address or permission to communicate via a social messaging app, like Facebook Messenger.
What call to action would a mobile visitor respond to?
Content: Offer sizing guides, buyers guides, style guides, installation, and how-to videos in exchange for an email address.
Save my work: Offer to store the items they’ve added to their cart in exchange for an email. We call this a “screen hopper”. They may be more willing to buy later when they are checking emails on their computer at work. Offer to send them a link to their wish list via Facebook Messenger. Just know that their return visit will probably be on their smartphone.
Join our community: Offer to make your more passionate mobile visitors a part of an exclusive community.
Discounts. Offer a future discount in exchange for their email address or permission to send them a message.
Don’t redo the whole site. Land mobile visitors on specially designed pages in your online store.
Focus on getting the second visit.
It’s hard to complete forms on a smartphone
Forms are frustrating. They take the joy out of the purchase. No one likes entering their address once, let alone twice. And we tend to make more mistakes on a mobile keyboard. It’s not hard to track form errors in analytics. If you do, you will likely find more errors from mobile visitors.
The reason mobile is harder is the input method: 2 thumbs vs. 10 fingers for a keyboard. And on-screen keyboards aren’t tactile. There’s no feedback. Mistakes happen more often, extracting a psychological price.
Your clue that you have a user-experience problem is a high checkout abandonment rate (see above). If so, you should help your mobile visitors out.
Watch some screen captures
The recommendations I give here may or may not be affecting your visitors. Before you begin making changes to your site based on my rantings, find out which issues are affecting you.
The best way to do this is by watching screen recordings. I KNOW IT’S BORING. But it will take you less time to watch 100 of your visitors interact with your checkout than to make all of my recommended changes.
Screen recordings are pretty easy to get these days. Look at tools such as CrazyEgg, Sessioncam, Mouseflow, and Hotjar.
I recommend watching 50 to 100 visits that include a checkout or an abandonment. The best tools will let you search for these particular recordings. As you watch, tally the number of visitors who struggle, and notice which fields trip them. Star the visits that result in an abandonment. You’ll want to play these for your development team later.
Reduce the form fields
It may seem obvious that you need a credit card billing address, expiration date and CVV number. But, do you really?
Can you get this information from PayPal, Apple Pay, Visa Checkout, or some other service?
Use the right mobile keyboards
There is no good reason to make me enter sixteen numbers using a QWERTY keyboard. The number targets are tiny. Give me the numeric keypad.
The same goes for entering a phone number, CVV, expiration date, PIN, and US postal codes. Use the numeric keypad please.
Figure 5: Use the numeric keyboard for numeric fields.
If you want my email address, please use the email keyboard. It doesn’t require me to do anything special to enter “@”, “.” or “.com”.
Eliminate the endless drop-downs
How many countries are there in the world? If you are choosing your country on a mobile device, you know there is a lot, about two minutes worth of scrolling through a dropdown. I’m from the United States. I have to scroll to the bottom of a long list of countries to find “United States”.
If you don’t ship to Mars and Venus, they shouldn’t be on the list.
Your mobile visitors know the abbreviation for their country. Let them enter “USA” or “Canada” or “UK”.
Also, I’m from Texas, which means I scroll through 40 states. I hate your state dropdown, but not as much as those poor souls from Wyoming.
Avoid fancy fields on mobile forms
There’s been a trend toward auto-formatting fields. Phone numbers magically get parentheses around the city code. Dashes magically appear.
Fancy fields fail too often on mobile devices. If you have the resources to continuously QA all of the new browsers on all of the new devices coming out, you’re probably okay.
Cover the exits
Use exit-triggered, or exit-intent popups to make a final pitch to your mobile visitors. These popups appear when your mobile visitor tries to leave the site. This is a great place to offer to continue the conversation, save the cart, or provide a discount.
Use trust and proof in your mobile ecommerce checkout
You can’t make mobile visitors wait
I often hear that web visitors have the attention span of a goldfish. Mobile visitors could have the patience of a redwood tree and still abandon your page because it doesn’t appear to load.
Your mobile site is slow. This is because no one has a 4G connection to the internet, even if they’re standing right under the cell tower. Have you tested your website with the WiFi turned off? Probably not.
Your mobile site must be snappy. Google considers a mobile page speed slow if it takes more than 2.5 seconds to load over a 4G connection. There is nothing more painful than having to wait for the information needed right there and then when on a smartphone. Even a goldfish won’t hang around if you’re not responding quickly.
Barriers to Sales in Mobile Ecommerce Websites: Someone else designed my shopping cart
You will run into some barriers in optimizing your mobile checkout.
We’ve all been told to think “out of the box.” But “out of the box” shopping carts do not let us customize for our mobile visitors.
Third party services such as Shopify and BigCommerce do their best to give you a strong starting point. But you’ll need resources to customize their default experience for mobile.
Integration with third-party payment options requires work. Services like PayPal and Stripe need to balance security with integration that looks seamless. This is just the first step toward mobile-optimized checkouts.
Your mobile website isn’t a mini desktop site
Google successfully convinced most online businesses to go to a responsive web template with its Mobilegeddon threat. As I said in “Is Google Using Mobilegeddon to Lead You Astray?”, a responsive desktop website only gets you part of the way there.
Mobile visitors want something fundamentally different. Give it to them. Expect to make changes to the way your responsive template works. After a period of testing, your mobile site will evolve away from your big-screen site. That’s as it should be, and it’s the only way to get your mobile site converting as high as your desktop site.
Related Reading:
Who’s Replacing Chief Marketing Officers and Why?
Conversion Marketing StrategyI was having coffee with an old colleague, Laura Patterson, here in Austin.
Laura advises businesses on all aspects of their marketing functions. Here at Conversion Sciences, we focus on only one piece of the puzzle, the digital channel. So, I have a lot of respect for her ability to bring together all of the pieces that make up a modern marketing effort.
Advertising. Brick and mortar retail. Online retail. Branding. Merchandising. Customer experience. Digital technologies. Messaging.
When I talk to her, I get a new appreciation of just how much CMOs have on their plates. If anybody’s going to know what’s going on with CMOs, it’s Laura.
Then she said something about CMOs that stopped me in my tracks.
Laura Patterson is the founder of VisionEdge Marketing. Like me, Laura has been focused on performance marketing and the proper use of data since before it was “cool.”
So I was left speechless when she said, “CMOs are abdicating their strategic position in their businesses.”
Laura Patterson on the Fall of the CMO
Laura is not the kind of person to jump to conclusions, so I had to take notice on the changing role of the CMO.
A few weeks later, I was on a panel with friend and fellow marketer Janet Driscoll Miller. She reminded the audience — and me — of a Fornaise Marketing Group study of 1200 CEOs that found 80% of them did not trust and were not impressed by the work done by traditional Marketers. By comparison, 90% of them trusted their CIOs and CFOs. There’s a link in the show notes.
I did some additional research and found more incriminating news. Forrester recently reported that “dozens” of major brands had eliminated the Chief Marketing Officer position altogether, brands like Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Taco Bell, and Netflix.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this. Were we part of the problem, or was data going to save the CMO? I invited Laura to join me here in the offices of Conversion Sciences and tell us what she knows.
So, why does Laura believe CMOs are losing their seat at the table in the C-suite?
Today’s CMO has New Titles
“Why are we seeing the emergence of some of these really interesting titles like Chief Customer Officer, like Chief Growth Officer?
Because we are seeing those titles beginning to emerge. And it concerns me that many times when you read the job descriptions, these are job descriptions that reflect the kinds of things that marketing leaders used to perform.”
The Changing Role of the CMO: B2B vs. B2C
“Companies that have a long sales cycle, that’s a consultative sell. They have a variety of people in the decision making process. That’s a B2B kind of process.
Walking through the checkout lane and trying to make a decision about whether I should get a candy bar, that’s B2C.
It might be that I have to do an extra run, but I’m not gonna get fired for that. But we do have B2B buying processes that occur in the consumer world, like buying a house.”
Advice for CMOs: Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
“I would say that the number one thing that any CMO can do right now that would signal that they are taking a more strategic stance and want to be more of a strategic partner is how they frame the marketing plan.
Many people are being asked right now to give a budget. Didn’t even have a plan yet, but they’re talking about money.
End of year budget planning and budget planning for a lot of people means they’re going to open up whatever document they used last year for their planning and their budget.
They’re going to make some decisions off the cuff about what they’re going to do next year in terms of events or campaigns. Maybe they’ll look at some data. They’re going to put a number on it.
They’re going to do some finagling and they’re going to submit a budget. That’s not a plan. It’s a budget, it’s a budget.”
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Strategic Focus: The Critical Role of Customer Engagement
“Many of these marketing people may or may not even know yet what the three to five things are that the company has to do next year in order to win.
They may have some general idea they want to grow, but we don’t market to buckets of revenue and we can’t just say grow. We need to be very clear.”
The First Question: Show me the Business Growth
That’s a great question. And if I don’t know that and they don’t know that, how can we put a plan together?”
Signs You’re Chief Marketing Officer is in Trouble
“The signs that you’re in trouble: [the CEO and board] starts just relegating you to running programs.
“Random acts of marketing.” If you’re if you’re doing random acts of marketing, you’re probably going to see some red flags around that.”
When you get back to the office…
I’ve always seen data as a tool of empowerment, a way to level the playing field and a way to truly understand those crazy people we call customers. And who’s in a better position to access this data than the CMO?
But data doesn’t change cultures on its own. It needs a fertile soil of experimentation to take root in. Otherwise, it is just numbers that can be used when they’re going up and to the right, and discounted if they tell the wrong story.
A culture of experimentation can be pushed from the top, from the CMO down. It can also be nurtured from the bottom, from you.
It’s time for marketers to put the data we have to use. For you, it all starts with your next experiment or research. It starts the next time you log into analytics, and click beyond the dashboard report, deep into the souls of your prospects and customers.
Because, if not Marketing, then who will do this?
Experience fast revenue growth, month after month, year after year.
Who’s Replacing Chief Marketing Officers and Why? Show Notes
CMOs are in a ‘desperate fight for survival,’ Forrester says.
Mark Gooding of Neustar recap of their study about Marketing needing to improve alignment
PwC 22nd Global CEO Study
Accenture Global CMO study
SpencerStuart 2019 CMO study
Gartner CMO 2019-2020 study
Terms: Changing Role of the CMO
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The Gulf Between Marketing and Sales Solved (and it’s not what you think)
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Sales and marketing. Two functions critical to a business’s success. They work tightly, arm-in-arm to build awareness, engage prospects and help them choose the best solution for their problem. They have common goals and cooperate closely to achieve them. The mutual respect and gratitude they have for one another is palpable.
If you’re wondering what planet I’m on, you’re not alone.
From the first time something was sold, sales and marketing have worked together.
Yet, not all is well in sales and marketing land.
“Marketing needs to generate more leads,” says sales.
“Sales needs to follow up on the leads we’re sending them,” says marketing.
“The leads marketing is sending aren’t qualified,” says sales.
“Sales isn’t selling the right products,” says marketing.
We are usually hired by marketing to optimize a website. We learn a lot from salespeople when we interview them.
Yet, we often don’t have access to the CRM — the Customer Relationship Management system — because “it belongs to sales.”
This gulf, this canyon, this gaping sinkhole between sales and marketing has been around for as long as I’ve been in the business. That’s why I invited Chris Wallace to be on the podcast. He is the Co-founder and President of Innerview, an agency that is totally focused on this problem.
I was skeptical at first. This problem also exists with the customer support teams and the training teams. By the time we were done talking, I knew his solution was perfect.
Find out how he convinced me.
Sales vs. Marketing
“The biggest reason organizations struggle with this is information typically moves in one direction. Information flows from the top down. And the marketers are really the ones developing the go to market strategy and developing the products. And then that gets, for lack of a better word, thrown over the wall or pushed down the funnel toward the sales organization.”
The Face of our Brand
“And what we’re finding to be the best way to sort of bridge that gap is to disrupt that one way flow and really increase the two way dialog and collaboration and really helping marketers look at their their sales teams, their front line, Iraqi sales, customer service, even technicians and even non selling roles, not revenue generating roles. And looking at those folks really as the face of their brand and an audience that they need to engage in and really win over looking at them as if we can really win their hearts and mind that tell them what to do but win their hearts and minds the way we’re out there trying to win customers hearts and minds every day. We know we can. We can. Like you said, we can build that bridge. We can we can close that gap in a significant way.”
Sales/Customer support is a channel that needs to be optimized!
Should marketing look at [sales] as another channel to get its message out? And be optimizing that channel the same way would be a Facebook advertising campaign or search engine optimization program or a paid search advertising campaign?
“We run it like a marketing campaign. We treat that like any channel that “talks” to the customers. We segment them based on how they talk to the customers and we measure how aligned they are to their brand story.”
Metrics for Marketing to Employees
“How well is your brand message — your brand story — transferring from your your corporate marketing department down to each one of these customer-facing channels? Its internal market research. So everything that we do is led by gathering the attitudes and opinions and perceptions about product service, brand positioning — all those things — and using the data that we have to target those audiences with new campaigns, new messages, in an effort to really win them over. Or fill the gap.
Don’t Tell Sales. Ask!
“They’re focusing so much of their time — and their effort and their resources — telling sales what it is that they need to do, and not enough time asking them what they think. And it doesn’t mean that you’re going to completely change a product. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go back and completely redo your campaign.”
“But if you’re asking somebody what they think, if you understand thier starting point, if you want to get them from point A to point B, if you are constantly guessing at what message is going to resonate with them, to move them from point A to point B, and you spend all your time, effort, energy blasting that message at them. In this case, it could be product trainings or product manuals or whatever the case may be. If you spend all your time guessing and pushing messages out, you’re actually pushing your “audience” further away.”
Timing is Really Important
“The timing of this is really important. The sales team feels like you’re out in market with it before they’re even prepared to talk about it. Right. The phone start ringing before before they’re even prepared. That happens a lot. We see it all the time. But the timing is really important. But really that that the answer is ask versus tell.”
Put down the Saleshose
“Don’t try to make them experts right way, try to help them build momentum, try to get them comfortable with something. Don’t try to get them to swallow the entire thing whole. So when you talk about trying to keep it top of mind, a great way to keep things top of mind is to feed them interesting little nuggets. Bit by bit by bit over a period of time, rather than attaching the firehose to their face. Almost every organization that we come across goes with the firehose approach.”
Deliver Content like a Marketer
“We’re developing anything from webisode concepts where organizations are creating content. And I’m not talking about corporate videos, somebody sitting behind a desk telling you how important something is. I’m talking about creating content that looks more like what people are watching on YouTube and Netflix and distributing that to their frontline teams. Having themes that really engage them.”
Get Creative like a Marketer
“Instead of doing your typical product trainings, we’re developing escape room concepts. We’re working with virtual reality companies — VR. It has a tremendous application for employee engagement in front line readiness.”
Be Dynamic like a Marketer
“The way that you’re able to engage with your your customers is more dynamic — a marketer — now than it ever has been. And we look at that and say, ‘Take a lesson from that.’ Look at all those different drips and those different nuggets and channels that you’re distributing small pieces of information through and find different vehicles to get that information out to your own people.
Employees Act like Consumers
“Most people don’t look at themselves as an employee one minute and a consumer the next minute. Those habits are very similar. So take what we know about the customer and let’s leverage that for the employees.”
When you get back to the office…
Instead of using sales to learn more about your customers, learn to see sales AS your customers.
When marketers get fresh data about their market, it’s like their birthday. You need to find that same excitement learning about the sales, training and customer support teams you work with. Think about the next thing you have coming up, that you need to get right. What percentage of your sales team are women vs. men? What percentage are humanists, who build relationships vs. methodicals who persuade with logic? How do you construct the “Whats in it for me” arguments that will grab their attention and make your campaign a success? How do you equip sales and support to be successful with your product?
You may have to start working on a budget that includes this new marketing channel: the one inside your company.
Now go science something.
Links and Resources
Terms
Brand Transfer Score
How to Increase your Shopify Store Conversion Rate
Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce CROThere is no denying that increasing your Shopify store conversion rate will lead to a growth in sales and revenue, assuming your traffic remains constant. That is why we crafted this complete guide for those Shopify store owners or marketers that want to take their ecommerce site to the next level.
Let’s cover a few of the basics first and then we can dive into how to increase your Shopify store conversion rate steps.
Enabling Google Analytics for your Shopify store
You can’t improve your conversion rate unless you enable measurement. Fortunately, Shopify has you covered.
Shopify offers a satisfactory implementation of Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking. This tracks visitors as they view items in your store, add things to their cart, remove items, and go through checkout.
You’ll need this to track the metrics you’re interested in. For example, the “Google Analytics Ecommerce / Shopping Behavior” report tells you your abandonment rates.
Out-of-the-box Shopify Google Analytics integration calculates your abandonment rates for you.
What Is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate For a Shopify Store?
Every ecommerce business on Shopify sells a unique product to a unique audience. There really are no industry benchmarks that you can rely on.
Besides, your Shopify store has more than a single conversion rate. You can have conversion rates for different types of visitors, customers, traffic sources, devices, geos, and customer journey paths.
Any improvement to any of these conversion rates will help you increase your Shopify store conversion rate.
To get above this level – to reach the five to ten percent sitewide conversion rate – you have to get good at selling to return visitors. This includes those who have bought from you before, as well as those who have visited but haven’t bought yet.
Ultimately, the best conversion rate for your ecommerce business is one that is better than last year at this time. We are going to tell you how to optimize your Shopify store for higher conversion rates.
How to Increase Your Shopify Store Conversion Rate
As we mentioned earlier, your ecommerce site doesn’t have just one conversion rate. It has several, each depending on the source of the traffic and where they land.
For example, look at the difference between your New Visitors and your Returning Visitors. For most Shopify stores, your returning visitors will have a much higher conversion rate than your new visitors.
This makes sense.
And this is why your Shopify dashboard has the “Return customer rate” metric. Return visitors mean repeat purchasers. Return visitors may also be new customers who are more ready to buy.
You want more return visitors.
So, there are some key realizations that every high-converting Shopify site owner must understand to improve the overall business.
Realization #1: You can’t increase your conversion rate unless you decrease your abandonment rate.
The Abandonment rate of your site is about the opposite of your Conversion Rate. It tells you how many potential shoppers came to your online retail store, but didn’t purchase. Basically, you cannot increase your conversion rate without decreasing your abandonment rate.
Your sitewide abandonment rate is calculated by the number of visitors who leave your site divided by the total number of visitors to your site.
Abandonment = Visitors who don’t buy / All visitors to your site
To make this more interesting, you can consider only non-bounce sessions.
What is the difference between bounce rate and abandonment rate?
The bounce rate tells you how many people left your site immediately after arriving. Abandonment tells you how many people left your site without buying or subscribing.
Bounce rate is a good measure of your traffic qualify and your landing page experience. Abandonment rate is a good measure of your entire shopping and buying experience.
There are two additional ways to calculate your abandonment rate that are very helpful for Shopify ecommerce store owners: Cart Abandonment and Checkout Abandonment.
Cart abandonment includes checkout abandoners, but each tells a different story about your Shopify site.
Visitors often add items to their Shopify cart in order to calculate the total cost of their purchase. Cart abandonment is often simply a part of their shopping process.
On the other hand, those who abandon the checkout process are sending a different signal altogether. They started the purchase process and got spooked for some reason. We can treat each of these visitors differently.
It’s important to understand the difference between your cart abandonment rate and your checkout abandonment rate. Each of these abandoners are called segments of your visitors and they have to be treated differently to be able to boost your Shopify store conversion rate.
Realization #2: Email (and its cousins) is critical to ecommerce success, no matter what generation your visitors are.
If return visitors are so important to the success of your Shopify store, how can you get more of your visitors to return? Get their email address. Every Shopify store owner must be good at email and at building an email list. The stand-out businesses gets email right.
Email has a couple of cousins. These are pixels and text messages.
Pixels set a cookie on your visitors’ browsers, allowing you to target ads at them elsewhere on the web.
Text messages are like email, but with a 90% open rate (as opposed to email, whose open rates often below 30%). None yet has the ROI of email, however.
All of these play a role in getting visitors back to your Shopify store for another shot at a purchase. There are three segments of visitors you’ll want to target with these strategies: customers, abandoners and mobile visitors.
Upspringbaby uses a discount to get remarketing email addresses.
How to Increase Shopify Purchases for Customers
Promotional email may not seem sexy, but it is a proven way to increase the long-term value of customers by getting them to buy more, or offering them other products they may be interested in.
Like brand advertising, email has a direct measurable effect and an indirect effect. The direct effect is when recipients click on the email and buy. The indirect effect is to keep top of mind with your brand. They may come to you through search when they are ready to buy, but thought of you because of the email.
If you have some chops with analytics, take a look at a segment of return visitors who came through organic search or through branded search ads. You can call these awareness-influenced visitors.
Email services like Klaviyo have tight integrations with Shopify. If no direct integration exists (hello, Mailchimp), there is probably an app that will integrate with your email service provider.
So, start crafting those promotional emails to increase your Shopify store conversion rate amongst your customer base.
How to Increase Shopify Conversions for Abandoners
There are two strategies you can put in place for catching visitors who abandon your website: keep them from abandoning and get permission to communicate with them after they leave.
Implement Shopify Permission Marketing
Abandonment remarketing is one of the first strategies every Shopify store manager should implement. This involves collecting a visitor’s email address or setting a cookie on their browser. Or both.
Both of these strategies require you to be good at getting abandoners back to your store. One uses advertising, the other uses email.
First, pixel all of your visitors. The most popular pixels are Google Ads and Facebook. However, you may also find your visual shoppers on sites like Pinterest and Instagram if your products are in the fashion, decor, or food industries. These pixels gives you the ability to craft remarketing ad campaigns to help these visitors see your products again on those social media networks or while they are performing online searches.
Next, select an email service provider that has abandonment remarketing features. This has two parts.
We have a client that uses the Justuno app to generate popups. They integrate with email service provider Klaviyo, which delivers a series of emails enticing abandoners to return.
How to Keep your Visitors from Abandoning your Shopify Store
What reasons would you give a visitor to give you their email address? Here are some strategies.
Offer a discount
When a visitor arrives to your site offer a discount in exchange for their email address. This is one of the most popular ways to prime your site to support abandonment emails.
NOTE: Offering discounts may seem like an easy way to overcome buyer objections, but you may want to focus on building value on your site with copy and images before offering discounts.
Offer to save their cart
Throw up an exit-intent popup in your cart and checkout process that offers to save their cart and send a link, so they can come back and finish. Yes, your cart is persistent, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sell this as a benefit.
Pacific Coast offers to let you save your cart.
Offer content
Offer a buyer’s guide or how-to guide to help in their search for products and solutions. Someone who is leaving your site is often comparing you to other solutions. Be the one that helps them choose. Solid and complete product descriptions, measuring charts, and guides can help your shoppers take the desired add to cart action.
How to Increase your Shopify Store Conversion Rate for Mobile Visitors
If you look at your Shopify store results for mobile visitors, you’ll realize two very disturbing things: They have much lower conversion rates and they are more than half of your visits.
And if you are successful with email and Facebook ads most of these visitors will come to your site on smartphones. Disturbing.
Mobile visitors don’t buy for two main reasons: They aren’t in a situation where it’s easy to buy or they find it too difficult to purchase on their mobile devices.
We recommend that you focus on different conversions for small screen visitors. Feature click-to-call or chat for those that will, and focus on getting an email address or permission to send a message.
Cheapstairparts presents a phone number in a sticky header.
The goal of click-to-call should be obvious. They have a phone app built into their handset. For those who won’t call, we need to get another chance to invite them back when they are in a better place to buy. That’s the role of email, Facebook Messenger messages and text messages.
You may cause buyers to take the easy way out, but the positive effect of getting more of your mobile visitors back can outweigh the negative impact.
As always, test these strategies on your Shopify store and see which ones improve your mobile conversion rate.
How to Increase Shopify Store Conversion Rate on Your Landing Pages
Your Shopify store conversion rate is a function of two main factors: the type of visitors you are driving to your site and the shopping experience they have once they land on your ecommerce shop.
If you are using paid ad campaigns to attract new visitors, or to draw abandoners, give thought to where you bring them. Choose the right landing pages for your ads as this can help you increase your Shopify store conversion rate.
The best decision depends on the visitor’s source and the promise made.
Should your Shopify Homepage be the Landing Page?
This is one of the most common landing pages on your site, but makes the visitor work the hardest. The home page is designed for every kind of visitor, and as such serves none of them perfectly.
A Shopify Product Page as a Landing Page
If you are investing in Google Shopping Ads, this is the destination where visitors will have the best shopping experience. For people clicking on specific products, it is an ideal place to land. They can add to cart without a lot of effort.
Using a Collection or Search Results page as a Landing Page
This is often a poor substitute for a dedicated landing page. If you are having a special on a class of product, you can drive traffic to these pages. However, they require the visitor to do a lot of work to choose with confidence. The more specific your offer, the less appealing these pages are and the lower your conversion rate.
When to Create a Custom Landing Page on Shopify
Use Shopify pages as dedicated landing pages when you have specific offers in your ads. For example, if you have a discount on a certain brand or category of product, don’t send the visitor to a collections page. Bring them to a page that reinforces the ad and lists the products that are discounted.
Leverage the Shopify Blog to Increase Store Conversions
Blog pages can be great sources of organic search traffic. Don’t forget to advertise your products on these pages! In the content, beside the content, and in overlays. Choose the products relevant to the blog post topic.
Your Cart as a Landing Page
If you are bringing abandoners back to your site, their cart may be the best place to bring them. You may try to persuade them to checkout by offering free shipping or a discount. But beware of some choices that can hurt your conversion rate when setting up your Shopify store. Here is one of them.
Don’t CAPTCHA your customers
Shopify gives you the option of using Google reCaptcha on your store. This may reduce some of the spam you receive. But it is putting the burden of managing your spam problem on your customers.
Shopify allows you to setup RECAPTCHA but this is not recommended.
And it is one more step in your process. One more potential mistake that can convert buyers to abandoners.
Shopify Apps that Can Help Lift your Store’s Conversion
There are plenty of ecommerce business apps in the Shopify’s App Store for you to try and test to see if they can help you get a boost in conversions, sales and revenues.
Some very well known examples are Yotpo for rating and reviews, Chatty People, Swatchify, natural language processing site search apps like InstantSearch+, among others. Look for some that leverage AI and personalization to easily deliver targeted shopping experiences.
We are currently working on an article to cover these Shopify Apps in more detail. Sign up for our newsletter to be amongst the first ones to be notified.
Too Many Shopify Apps can Slow Down your Store and Lower your Revenues
Each app that you add to your Shopify store slows your store’s page load time. This is just unavoidable. Slow load times often mean lower conversion rates, especially for your mobile visitors who access your ecommerce website over 3G or 4G.
If you can configure your site using your theme or a tag manager, choose that before adding another application. For example, you can add one of many pixel apps to your site from the Shopify app store. But a better way is to using the Online Store -> Preferences page in Shopify. Don’t get drawn into an app by features you may never use.
Whenever you add a new app, I recommend running several pages of your site through the free website site speed analyzer from Google. You will see an overall speed classification, compare with your competitors, and your potential revenue if you improved your Shopify store’s page load speed.
The Obituary of the B2B Marketing Funnel
Conversion Marketing StrategySubscribe to the Podcast
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We like funnels. We like them because they provide us with some sense of progress in our marketing efforts.
We have advertising programs to get people’s attention.
We use copy to build interest.
We use testimonials and case studies to build desire.
We have calls to action everywhere.
This is the classic AIDA funnel. Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a direct marketing approach that falls down in the long sales cycle reality of B2B marketing.
The demise of the funnel has been discussed for some time now. However, the discussion of what comes next has been unsatisfying to me.
The solutions that purport to step into the funnel’s place come with their own baggage. Hubspot offers up the Flywheel and customer delight. Lead scoring attempts to add value to the interactions someone has had with us. The more interactions, the more likely they are to be a prospect. But this approach treats the funnel more like a swarm of flies. People seem to swarm around our content until, finally, and unpredictably, they qualify for a call.
Carman Pirie believes there’s something better than a funnel or a swarm, and his agency delivers that something better. Kula Partners focuses on manufacturers all of whom have this long-cycle B2B sales challenge. Carman the Co-founder and he’s happy to put another nail in the coffin of the funnel. My question for him is, what comes next?
Our conversation around this question was interesting and enlightening. If digital marketing is more like a swarm, how is a swarm of bees different than a swarm of flies?
Replacing the B2B Marketing Funnel
Maybe you should develop a Firmographic profile. What kinds of companies would actually buy your product? What are the titles of the people who research and influence solutions like yours? Who else in the company are weighing in on the decision.
Then, take a few of your internal experts to lunch. Some of them would love to help you create some content that makes your prospects better buyers of your product or service.
Now go science something.
Resources and links
Understanding Marketing Through Time, Interest, and Expertise
Conversion Marketing StrategyI consider myself a software guy.
Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.
I wrote my own analytics package in 2003, which was thankfully replaced by Google Analytics in 2005.
I still write scripts for my data analysis.
In the tech world, we distinguish the software guys and gals from the hardware guys and gals. Mark Zuckerberg is a software guy. Apple’s Steve Wozniak is a hardware guy. Yes, I know Steve has written a lot of code in his day, but he’s undoubtedly a hardware guy.
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When there’s something that needs to be done around the house — or to my car — my first thought is, “I’m a software guy. THIS is a hardware problem.”
My father, on the other hand, is clearly a hardware guy. Handy. Fixes things. Builds things.
So, when it came time to change the kitchen faucet in my house, I called Dad. Because, as a software guy, I would just start trying things to understand the obstacles. This can be an expensive approach for a hardware problem.
Hang in there. There’s a point to this.
So I called Dad and he came over. He told me what I should do to change the faucet, but I pretty much already knew all of that. However, Dad handed me a tool that I could never have imagined existed. It’s called a Basin Wrench, and it made all the difference.
There is no way, squeezed under that sink, that I ever would have gotten the old encrusted bolts off of the old faucet without the Basin Wrench. The YouTube videos I watched didn’t mention it. Imagine a raptor claw attached to the end of a long rod with a handle at the bottom.
Basin Wrench. Courtesy Wikipedia
I had to Google “faucet tool” to even find out what it was called.
I’m certain that I would have given up without it.
The moral of the story? Tools+Experience.
Now, I get pitched marketing tools all the time. Popup tools, data tools, visualization tools, email tools, analysis tools… you name it. How can I know which tools are the indispensable basin wrenches in all of this?
That is the question I had in mind when I invited Josh Thomas onto my podcast. Josh is with Outbound Engine. They sell the basin wrench of digital marketing for small businesses. They sell both the tools and done-for-you services to the kind of people who use basin wrenches daily.
Most of us see our products and services as basin wrenches. But only to those people who have a proverbial faucet to change.
So how does Outbound Engine convince hardware guys and gals to invest in a soft problem like digital marketing?
Budget and Culture
High-quality content
Prospecting Customers: Evaluating time, interest and expertise
Time. Expertise. Interest. I like this simple model.
These are the things that influence whether your customers will solve a problem themselves or buy a solution to fix it, a solution like yours.
Imagine mapping your opportunities onto a time/interest/expertise graph. Like this.
Rate your prospects on a scale from 1 to 5 for time, interest and expertise.
When time is tight (rated 1 or 2), prospects gravitate to those problems in which they have expertise, where they have confidence. Things are done the way they’ve always done them, and thus done quickly.
When time loosens, our prospects can gravitate to tasks that feed their interest or expertise. These are problems that need solving now that time is available.
Those with expertise but little interest are looking for tools to make things easier. The ROI is what they are looking for.
May be looking for tools.
Those with interest and little expertise are looking for experts. They are looking for expertise and tools.
May be looking for expertise and tools.
Someone with interest, expertise and time are likely to do it themselves, to solve the problem internally.
They are going to do it themselves.
Those with none of these probably don’t even know they have a problem. This is a tough sell.
They don’t even know they have a problem.
How do your clients map onto the TIE triangle? What are you doing to feed interest or expertise? To demonstrate ROI to experts and demonstrate competence to those who are interested? The two are quite different.
Now go science something.
Resources and links discussed:
Related Articles:
8 Advanced Tactics For Increasing Your B2B Telephone Sales
How Heatmaps Helped Increase Prospective Student Inquiries with Hotjar
14 Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response
Persuasion ScienceHave you ever wondered why nobody is responding to your offers?
Why do people read your landing pages and then leave?
Why do people see your ads and keep scrolling?
You have a great product. You are offering an in-demand service. So why does nobody seem to be interested?
You aren’t managing to trigger that little thing in your visitors’ brains that snaps them to attention, gets the heart rate pumping, and compels them to keep reading. And persuasive writing will make a point and convince readers to take action. These timeless persuasive writing techniques will help you craft the perfect copy to convince and convert by triggering a response.
14 Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response
Today, we’re giving you a handful of tools that we use in our Conversion Rate Optimization Agency to captivate audiences and compel a response.
1. Focus on resonating with emotional problems
Everyone has problems, and your product or service is designed to help people solve one or more of those problems.
A lot of businesses simply dive into explaining their solutions. One of the most powerful persuasion techniques, however, is to start by resonating with your readers around the emotional problems they are facing. When people see someone describing something “painful” they are experiencing, it pulls them in and prepares them to buy into the solution.
Another word for this is “empathy”. People want to feel like you empathize with their problems and that it drives the mission of your business.
US President Barack Obama once said this about empathy:
“You know, there’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this – when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”
That’s how empathy works. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes and let them know you understand what they are going through, they’ll be more inclined to listen to you. When you resonate with them on their problems, they will resonate with you on your solutions.
For instance, let’s say you want to write copy to sell a tool that solves the problem of content managers having to host their marketing tools on several different platforms. You could make your copy all about that problem and then introduce your tool in the end.
Here’s a great example.
Persuasive Writing Techniques That Trigger A Response: Focus on resonating with emotional problems.
In this example from Entrepreneur Alliance, the product is a monthly subscription to a group where real entrepreneurs help each other out. As you can see in the copy above, which appears just below the fold, the company quickly addresses some of the common pain points many new entrepreneurs experience when trying to get started. They also address the frustration people feel when they are constantly assaulted by new people trying to sell them something.
If you are reading this copy and you too have experienced this frustration, than you are far more likely to be intrigued and even compelled by the solution that the Entrepreneur Alliance then proposes to you.
Of course, in order to legitimately resonate with your audience’s pain points, you have to first understand your audience.
Understanding Your Audience
Michael Port offers the FESP model for understanding an audience that you will perform for or write for:
In our example above, the marketing person may see the world like this:
This FESP copy should speak to her needs right out of the gate.
In the context of a landing page, it’s usually best to dive into these needs and problems using your value proposition or immediately following your value proposition.
2. Incorporate facts, data, and other analytical information
While point #1 is very emotionally driven, selling isn’t all about emotion.
One of the best ways to sell is to demonstrate “irrefutable” evidence that your solution is the best possible option for the prospective customer.
Legendary advertising creative director William Bernbach once said, “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” In the digital age, “truth” looks like facts, statistics, case studies, etc.
We employ this in our own marketing here at Conversion Sciences. We can talk about our experience and expertise all day long and even resonate with the problems our clients have dealt with, but at the end of the day, what prospective clients really want to know is:
Since we drive an average conversion lift of 15 to 25% with our clients and have a 90% retention rate, we like to include that information in our copy whenever possible.
Persuasive writing techniques to boost conversions: The Conversion Catalyst
This is about as soft as it gets in terms of analytics, but since it is true, it serves as a powerful signal to clients considering our services, demonstrating that we aren’t just talking about AB testing. We are actually getting results.
Do the same in your own copy as often as possible.
3. Demonstrate social proof at key junctures
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
In other words, monkey see, monkey do.
When we are making a decision, we want to know that other people consider it to be the right decision. Who are these “other” people?
In 2017, social proof often takes the form of influencer recommendations, customer testimonials, and social share count.
For example, CoSchedule asks visitors to click TRY IT FOR FREE on their homepage. Visitors are then taken to a page that contains a testimonial and highlights the company’s most recognizable customers.
Demonstrate social proof at key junctures.
Be specific in your case studies and testimonials
Customer stories and testimonials have been shown to improve sales online. Customer stories work best when they are specific. See how Unbounce does it on of their pages:
Testimonials are more compelling with details.
The best customer stories and testimonials will offer the customer name, company, title and a picture. When appropriate, add the city and state of the speaker as well. Also consider things like age when appropriate.
Favor testimonials that avoid judgments, like, “We loved working with this company!” Instead, focus on a specific result. The more specific your numbers are, the more believable they are.
These stories answer the question, “What did people like me experience?”
4. Use tone to add emotion and keep things interesting
What does it mean to use one’s tone in writing? Basically, it means writing like you would talk in real life. Your tone can breathe life into your copy. It can make your writing a lot less boring for prospects to read.
David Ogilvy once said “Tell the truth but make truth fascinating. You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.”
When I asked Sam Hurley (founder of OPTIM-EYEZ) to share his number one advice on persuasive writing techniques, he said, “It has to be tone. A sentence that equates to the same meaning can be written in 10 different ways…Each variation will evoke 10 unique reactions — and the difference can ultimately mean conversion or exit.”
Take this post from Derek Halpern, for instance:
Tone is as important as meaning.
See what he did there?
Derek used three different sentences to ask just one question: “Do people read long sales pages?” Why? He wanted to sound like a normal person in his tone; not a company trying to sell something.
If he was going to ask the same question in a real life setting, he wouldn’t just ask Do people read long pages?, would he?
No, he’d naturally ask follow-up questions just like he did in the example above. And those (follow-up) questions will mean the same thing as the original query. But they’ll make his message sink in his readers’ minds.
Your tone is important. It helps you talk like a fellow human being, not a business trying to make sales. It helps you build trust. And because your readers are also humans, they can very well relate with your tone when they see it in your copy.
In other words, people react according to what they see in your copy. If they see you shedding tears, they’d be moved to tears. If you crack jokes, they’ll laugh (or at least give you a smile). And so forth. That’s how it works.
Be careful with your tone
Can anyone actually insult their prospects (or readers) deliberately? I’d love to answer that question with a no, but it happens. I recently found this while doing research for one of my clients:
Does it really pay to call your prospects mediocre?
This is form saying I’m a mediocre content marketer if I don’t sign up for the whitepaper. Is that true?
But does that slur really convert better than being polite? Did it get me converted? Heck, no! I actually got pissed off! I don’t know about you, but I cringe when I see Calls to Action like this.
There are several polite words that you can use to persuade people to do something. This CTA, for example, got Career Advice 261 sign-ups within 24 hours from a single guest post on The Muse:
This button copy is probably too safe. “Submit” is a tone-def word.
Yet, it contains no word that could potentially insult anyone.
5. Take time to bring up and cover objections
You should never begin writing copy with a pre-determined word count. It doesn’t matter if your copy ends at 400 or 3000 words. What matters is that you say everything that needs to be said.
More specifically, what matters is that you cover all the key objections.
An objection is an argument that tends to come up from the customer’s end to justify saying “No” to your pitch.
For example:
If you are selling me a productivity app and I say, “Well, I don’t think I need an app to be productive,” that’s an objection. If I ask, “Why would I pay for an app when there are 30 other productivity apps that are free?” that’s an objection.
In an interpersonal sales meeting, the power of the objection goes to whoever brings it up first. If I ask you about all the free apps and then you respond, it tends to sound like you’re justifying a problem. Since I brought up the objection, and I think I’m pretty smart, I give it more weight than your response.
On the other hand, if you bring up the objection first, you win. If you introduce the cost and then immediately begin talking about how free productivity apps either utilize distracting advertising or have a low budget and thus numerous technical problems, both of which defeat the purpose of a productivity app, suddenly that potential objection has now become a selling point.
With online copy, the customer never speaks, so you have time to address as many objections as you feel is necessary. There may be just a few or there may be numerous objections that need to be covered. The important thing is that you give yourself time to cover them all.
6. Draw attention to your points with rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions draw attention. They’re not meant to be answered, which means that they shouldn’t have an answer. If your question can easily answered with a “yes” or “no”, it won’t invite the visitor to read on.
Instead, pose questions that make the reader think, “What does this mean?” or, “How will you do that?”
What if we had one single solution that can perform all these functions?
Life would become extremely easy for content marketers, right?
Of course, I didn’t expect answers to them. But if you’re a content marketer, you were probably answering those questions in your mind, agreeing to my point of view that an all-in-one tool is the best option for content marketers.
That’s how rhetorical questions work. They pull attention, get readers’ attention and lure them to keep reading your copy.
7. Use hyperbole to communicate value
Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration to make your point to readers. Hyperbole should be used carefully. If you claim to be the biggest, best, or leader, your persuasive copy must deliver proof very quickly.
For example, take Contently:
Really? Does the world’s best content marketing actually run on Contently?
There are certainly other companies out there that get more ROI from content marketing than Contently’s customers. But, their exaggeration is immediately backed up with the logos of some of the biggest companies in the world, the implication being that they use Contently to run their content marketing.
Another example here is Campaign Monitor’s “Send email your customers can’t ignore”.
The headline makes us ask, “How do you do that?”
In this case, the hyperbolic claim makes the reader ask, “How do you do that?” Will all customers read your emails just because you sent them using Campaign Monitor? Probably not.
Unfortunately, the hyperbole isn’t backed up by proof. Only more claims are offered. This page goes on to invite the visitor to watch a video to get the proof.
The link between the hyperbolic claim and the proof is stretched thin, requiring the visitor to watch a demo.
The longer the distance between your hyperbole and the proof, the more tenuous your persuasive argument becomes.
But you get the message they’re trying to pass across, right? Campaign Monitor helps you send emails that get opened and replied.
8. Open your first paragraph with a hook
Once readers move past your headline, the next phase they’ll be meeting with is your opening paragraph. It tells them if they should keep reading your copy or head out to somewhere else.
There are a couple of ways to create a hook in your copy. You could start with a question like this one:
Open your first paragraph with a hook.
That very first line (After all, that’s the dream, right?) will spring up a question in the mind of most readers. They’ll start wondering what the dream might be. And they know they have to keep reading to find out. That’s the hook right there.
Another way to create a hook would be starting out with an eye-catching phrase. This could be anything that has the potential of making your readers pay attention. For example:
Starting out with an eye-catching phrase.
9. Start small and utilize escalating agreements
Avoid hitting the nail on the head at first––especially when you’re writing on a complex topic or for an audience that’s pretty tough to persuade. Begin by beating about the bush a little and give your readers simple valid points to agree on before they get to the complex parts of your copy.
This will help you persuade them to read your copy with ease no matter how complex the topic is and have them nodding their heads in agreement as they read on.
For example, calculating the Net Present Value of a sum of money is mostly a complex topics for folks who aren’t finance-savvy. I mean, it was pretty much a really tough topic for me in my first year studying finance in school. But see how the guys at Maths Is Fun made it look so simple by implementing escalating agreements:
Persuasion technique: utilize escalating agreements.
See how they start their exegesis with a set of simple, valid opening sentences that virtually anyone would agree with? Notice that when readers agree that money now is more valuable than money later on, they’ll mostly move to the next line because they agreed with the previous sentence? That’s escalating agreements work. And that’s how to use it to persuade readers.
10. It’s OK to use technical details
Part of resonating with an audience is speaking in their language. When you use relevant jargon or communicate in technical terms only your target segment understands, you help position yourself as an authority in your space and build a community of people who use the same terminologies as you.
So how do you write with simplicity and still use jargon to show that you are a guru?
See how Apple uses a mix of both waffles and plainness in their copy for iPhone 7:
“iPhone 7 dramatically improves the most important aspects of the iPhone experience. It introduces advanced new camera systems. The best performance and battery life ever in an iPhone. Immersive stereo speakers. The brightest, most colorful iPhone display. Splash and water resistance. And it looks every bit as powerful as it is. This is iPhone 7.”
Notice how all that contains no single jargon even though the copy is about a technical product? Yes, that’s simplicity. Virtually anyone would understand it.
Now see how they used technical terminology on the same page––after enticing readers with jargon-less copy:
Apple’s use of jargon to build credibility.
Now some readers might not know what an optical image or f/1.8 aperture means. That’s certain. But they’re most likely going to stay with the copy because it’s interesting to read and not stuffed with too much technical mumbo jumbo.
Veteran copywriter Robert Bly said the following in a recent newsletter:
11. Use short and to-the-point statements
Short, concise statements can be memorable, fun and persuasive. They help to reduce cognitive overload, the need for an excessive amount of mental effort to understand things.
See how the folks at Fiftythree do it on their jobs page:
It’s difficult to condense messages into persuasive bites, but it can be very rewarding.
Copy doesn’t have to be wordy all the time. Just straight to the point and you’d have passed your message across in a split second.
12. Focus your headline on the biggest benefit you’re offering
Irrespective of how many benefits your offerings can provide, you need to figure out what your biggest benefit is and make your headline focus on. Too many websites “bury the lead.” This means that the most powerful point of the page is relegated to a subhead or the body of the copy.
A typical example here would be SumoMe. They offer several tools but the biggest benefit they provide is traffic and customers:
SumoMe doesn’t “bury the lead.”
Traffic and customers are what SumoMe’s prospects care about the most, so they put that in their homepage headline. David Ogilvy once said this about headlines:
13. Tell stories
There has been a great deal written about stories. This is because they are proving to be so effective. Stories suck people’s attention into your copy. They make even the busiest people pay attention to whatever you’ve got to say or sell.
As an example, see how MAG International uses the art of storytelling to describe the havoc that landmines wreck:
Stories quickly help the reader relate to a situation.
Stories are most effective when:
Stories may not be effective for readers that are frequent buyers or are very familiar with your solution to their problem.
14. Flaunt your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Of all these persuasive writing techniques, this one is the most effective in our tests. Your unique selling proposition (USP), could be anything that entices visitors to stay and read. It can be that you have low prices, superior quality or anything helps your readers rationalize reading on. For an eCommerce company, the USP includes your positioning, return policy, shipping policy and guarantees.
First, your selling proposition often doesn’t necessarily need to be unique. It just needs to be communicated. Rug Perfection offers hand-made rugs made of natural materials. They offer free shipping and pay shipping for returns as well. Would you know that from the copy on their website?
Rug perfection doesn’t flaunt its amazing story or its fantastic shipping and return policy.
Your USP doesn’t have to be complex. Persuasive writers are able to summarize your place in the market in just a few words. This is true of Kissmetrics.
Kissmetrics clearly defines their unique position in the market by referencing Google Analytics.
If calling out your competitor like Kissmetrics seems a little too aggressive for you, you can simply flaunt your unique value without mentioning any rival’s name. See how GoDaddy displays their unique 1-month free trial on their homepage:
The free trial is unique to the hosting industry.
There’s virtually no other web host provider that allows a month free trial. So that’s a USP for GoDaddy.
Check out more value proposition examples here.
Start Using These Persuasive Writing Techniques
People are getting smarter year-by-year. Each time we want to shop for anything online, we mostly prefer to check out a number of options and choose who we’d like to do business with.
Whether you are doing growth and optimization work in-house or hiring a 3rd party top perform fully managed onversion optimization services for you, persuasion simply must be a core component of everything you do.
So a smart move you can (and should) make now is to ensure your web copy and content is focused on enticing, engaging and ultimately persuading prospects to pay attention to your brand and offerings.
Co-authored by Victor Ijidola
Victor Ijidola is a content marketer and freelance business writer. He runs Premium Content Shop where he offers premium writing services that drive leads, and has been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, Kissmetrics and many more.