What You Have to Know About Conversion Optimization
6. Calm their concerns. Incentives are a great way to counter FUDs and reduce friction
7. Test, Test, Test.
and test them and improve their performance.
C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a
This is not a lesson in physics, but a conversion formula developed by Marketing Experiments.
Luckily you don’t need to solve the formula above, it’s actually a helpful tool to keep at arms length (like print it out and stick on your cubicle office wall). This is what the characters mean:
C = Probability of conversion m = Motivation of user (when)
v = Clarity of the value proposition (why) i = Incentive to take action
f = Friction elements of process
a = Anxiety about entering information
Translation: The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now – friction) – anxiety. The numbers next to characters signify the importance of it.
Friction is defined as a psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Anxiety is a psychological concern stimulated by a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Reduce these as much as possible and do what you can to increase the users’ motivation and incentive and clarify the value position.
LIFT
An interesting framework for analyzing landing pages is LIFT, developed by WiderFunnel:
This framework has value proposition as vehicle that provides the potential for the conversion rate. It’s the basis of it all. Relevance and clarity boost conversions, while anxiety and distraction kill it. Urgency is what propels people to take action right away.
Ingredients of a successful test
Not all tests are equal. Here’s what you need for successful conversion testing:
A hypothesis: testing is not there to prove an idea works, but to assess whether it works.
Don’t test your site by showing a different version at different time periods (e.g. one week one design, second week another design), the results will NOT be accurate.
Don’t be afraid to fail: In testing & optimization, failure is success. Too many times, I have seen the uglier, poorer cousins convert better.
If you don’t have huge amounts of traffic, don’t test too many variations at once. Also, if you do A/B testing, it’s worth testing one change at a time—otherwise you won’t know which thing made the difference.
Don’t end the test too soon, make sure results are statistically significant.
Avoid “meek tweaking”—in other words, making changes that are never likely to have a significant effect. (See below)
Testing should never end. Decide what to test, test it, make a change and test again.
What are the most important things to test?
We could test everything, but let’s test the 20% that makes 80% of the difference.
Now let’s look at each area separately. I’ll showcase some cool recent experiments you
Value Proposition
Value proposition is the main reason a prospect should buy from you.
(If you’re struggling with yours, here’s a worksheet (pdf) to guide you through the process of effectively communicating your value proposition.)
Can you find a value proposition here?
Didn’t think so. Stating your company name as the first thing and throwing around superlatives like “finest quality” don’t convince much.
What about here?
This makeover version brought 145% increase in conversions.
Marketing Experiments recommends you test your value proposition via PPC ads first, and only then test the winning versions on your landing page:
Images from Marketing Experiments
Headline
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit.”
—David Ogilvy, ad guru
A good headline can make the difference. It’s kind of nice when just changing the wording of your headline increases your results by 127%.
A headline is the first thing a visitors sees and reads on your website or landing page. It’s the very first thing you say about you. If you start out with “Welcome!”, you’ve already lost.
message from the ad; utilize persuasive momentum.
If you’re split testing article headlines or email subject lines, remember the 65 character rule. Google only displays 65 characters in its search results, email clients such as Gmail will truncate long subject lines and Twitter doesn’t allow too much for tweeting your headline.
CityCliq: 88.9% improvement
The winning headline is the one on the right.
Offer
A confused mind always says ‘no’, goes the old direct marketing adage.
The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Make it clear and concise. Nobody will try hard to understand what is it that you’re offering.
The offer is not a “call to action,” that comes later.
Call to Action buttons
The most important part about CTA buttons is that they’re clearly visible, above the fold and there’s ideally just one per page. The more choice you give, the harder it is to decide.
People’s attention span is limited. They don’t want to figure out what buttons that say
“submit” actually do. Buttons without the word ‘submit’ convert better, tests show. Steve Krug was right: “don’t make me think.”
The word ‘free’ on the other hand seems to be quite magical. For instance Firefox improved their conversions by 3.6% (over 500 more downloads per test) when they changed their button text from “Try Firefox 3″ to “Download Now—Free.”
What about the color of the button? Big orange buttons are all the rage these days (think Amazon), but there are still some other colors in the world. In this test red kicked greens
butt and converted 21% better (orange was not tested):
Image: Hubspot
Larger sized buttons usually do better. Hubspot found that a good button size is around 225px wide and 45px high.
Oh yeah, never ever have a “reset fields” button. Nobody fills a form to clear the field in the end. If they do, they won’t bother to start over.
Friction
Whenever there’s somebody asking for a sale, there’s friction! Reducing friction produces a disproportionately high return on invested effort.
Friction consists of two components:
Length: fatigue, irritation, or aggravation caused by forms or processes that ask for more time or information than feels reasonable
and
Difficulty: poor usability, asking questions people don’t know the answers to, insufficient product information, etc.
Absence of trust is also friction—a visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you.
MarketingExperiments brings this case study. The original page with 3 calls to action:
This was the treatment:
The optimized form requires only one choice, and the call-to-action is simply a
“Confirmation,” thereby minimizing difficulty-oriented friction.
By including the offer price on the landing page (which also removed one page in the order process) and minimizing friction by reducing the level of decision making difficulty on the order form, free-trial-signup conversion rose by 65%.
Another one:
Simply reducing the number of fields and dramatically reducing the perceived page
Here are some things that reduce friction:
Testimonials and/or customer reviews, Case studies of previous customers,
Third-party references such as media mentions or reviews, Easy to find company contact info, employee photos and bios,
Trust marks that communicate your site is secure and that confidential data is handled with care,
Short forms (whenever you add an input field to your form, ask yourself, “Is this additional information worth losing sales?”),
Clarity: focus on what the user gets and needs to do to get it,
Distraction removal: the offer page doesn’t contain anything not related to converting the user,
Use language that is familiar to your target audience—avoid jargon and corporate speak,
Guarantee: offer a guarantee on their purchase such as a 90-day risk-free trial; 100%
money-back guarantee; or a 100% satisfaction guarantee,
Beautiful design: websites that are more attractive create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.
Unfortunately you cannot eliminate friction 100%—it is a natural part of selling. If you want to people to buy something, you must eventually ask for a credit card number, address, and other information.
Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab’s web credibility guidelines is a must-read for all.
Price
The right pricing can really help you boost your conversions.
Read our article on pricing experiments.
Radical change
This is when you go beyond testing one element to create an all together new and different version.
Great examples (click on the links of each case study to read the specifics):
SEOMoz: 52% improvement in sales and $1 million dollars increase in revenue
Image: Conversion Rate Experts How they did it:
created a web page long enough to tell the story
infused the headline with curiosity rather than overt “buy me” language explained precisely what customers would get at each level (plan)
showcased things customers cared about but SEOmoz had taken for granted augmented the message with video
lowered the risk by offering free subscribers a 30-day full-featured membership for just $1
Highrise: 2 radical changes, 37.5% and 102.5% improvement in conversions Image: 37Signals
What they learned:
You really need to test: A long form page had a 37.5% increase in net signups compared to the original. The “person design” converted better than the original.
Then they added more info under the person design page, and it converted worse.
Big photos of smiling customers work (but the specific person didn’t quite matter) Performance Based Design book: 131.2% improvement on landing page
What they learned:
Engaging visitors through appropriate copy improved sign ups by 100%+
Sometimes you can overthink. The winning design was thrown together very, very quickly, yet outperformed the more formally ‘designed’ landing page with more than double the conversions.
Conversion optimization tools
There are quite a lot of tools available, WhichTestWon.com lists 39. I’m going to skip expensive enterprise tools and list some of my favorites that are easy to use and easy on the wallet.
Google Website Optimizer—The best part of GWO is that it’s free. Most people can do most testing with it, but it requires you to be somewhat tech savvy. Google does
provide handy video tutorials that help, but they’re somewhat outdated, and the sound quality on some is plain horrible.
Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely. Great services for entrepreneurs—both easy to use. VWO’s cheapest plan ($49) comes out to $0.0049 per visitor. Optimizely’s cheapest plan ($19) comes out to $0.0095 per visitor. Here’s how they compare to each other.
ConversionDoubler seems to be in the same ballpark, but I haven’t used it myself.
Zentester has a forever free plan, but the catch is that your test results are public.
MaxA/B is an easy to use WordPress plugin for A/B testing. I’ve had some issues with it in the past, but for the most part seems to do the job.
What worked for them, won’t necessarily work for you
Just because something worked on somebody’s site, doesn’t mean it will work on yours.
For instance take this case where reducing the size of call to action and removing urgency elements actually increased the conversion rate.
No website is the same and no users are the same. The trick is to understand your users and target them in the most appropriate manner. Customers are influenced by a range of activities before they convert; website content, website usability, online and offline advertising all play a role in whether or not the consumer will make a purchase. You have to test.
Excellent libaries of case studies
There are several good conversion optimization case study resources.
WhichTestWon claims to have the world’s biggest library of A/B & multivariate testing case studies (164 at the moment of this writing). Offers paid membership for in-depth information on them.
MarketingExperiments blog has a ton of case studies. Not all of the posts in the link are case studies, but a lot of them are.
Visual Website Optimizer has a user-friendly database of case studies. Free.
ABtests.com. All kinds of tests. Upload your own test results.
WiderFunnel case studies. 30 or so.
If you run an online store, you’re always trying to boost your sales. Here’s how to increase the conversion rate of your ecommerce site.
What’s the conversion rate I can be happy with?
Don’t worry about “average” rates. A good conversion rate to strive for is better than the one you have right now.
There are just too many variables that affect conversions, so it’s very difficult to have apples to apples comparisons between different sites. Quality of the traffic is a major contributor.
Rates around 1 percent and 2 percent are fairly common.
Quality Product images
If I’d have to pick one single thing that would sell a product online, it’s images.
You could technically have an e-commerce site with just images, and no product descriptions (I don’t recommend it). It wouldn’t work vice versa.
People want to see what they’re getting. The grandfather of boosting e-commerce
conversion rates is having high quality photos of your product. The more the better. Show the products from different angles, in context, make them zoomable.
Ties.com gets it right: