Refine your Call to Action

So you have designed a landing page and email campaign for the launch of a new service in your offer. You went to great lengths to come up with detailed and useful product descriptions, offered discounts and produced quality graphics. And then, hidden under the pile of persuasion gold, you placed a little “Get Started” button – your fine call to action. This is not the way to get your visitors to act. Good call to actions tips:

• Go straight to the point – e.g. “Estimate my monthly payment.”
• Don’t order people around and give them a voice instead – e.g. “Sign me up for a newsletter!”
• Stand out – make sure that your call to action is visible and contrasts well with the background, use visuals to expose it better as in the example below:

You can do even better than this. According to Hubspot, smart buttons convert 42% better than regular buttons. What are smart buttons? Those that appear depending on who views the webpage. With software like Hubspot CRM, you can create multiple buttons and show them to people based on how deeply they interacted with your website – those that only viewed some pages may see something like “Start a free trial.” Those who already purchased your product may be more enticed by “Watch our new training video.”

Don’t stop your visitors from converting

Growth hacking expert Neil Patel made a small change to the submission form on his website and saw the conversion rate jump by 26%. What did he do? He removed a single form field, leaving only “Name,” “Email” and “URL.” It’s irrelevant what field he got rid of. What matters is that he erased one of the barriers that prevented visitors from converting.

Shopping-cart abandonment is one of the main reasons why sales don’t take place. SaleCycle’s research estimates the industry average to be 75.6%. So, if you want yours to be lower, make it as easy and painless as possible. Need some guides?

• Make your checkout process focused – no pop-ups, newsletter signups and any other sort of nagging. Ditch everything that disrupts the checkout process.
• Use analytics tools – find out where (on which page) your visitors bounce from your website most often.
• Allow your customers to save the cart content and complete the checkout later.
• Provide inline form validation alerts (in a single line above the form). Nothing frustrates the user as much as what you can see below:

Here you can find more valuable information on shopping cart abandonment rates.

Get yourself brand ambassadors

This particular advice differs a lot from the rest as it’s about using offline resources to help grow your online assets. Brand ambassadors can be a surprisingly cost-effective way of attracting traffic to your online assets, especially for fashion stores. Often all it takes is to give away some of your products for free and convince the ambassadors to talk about your brand in exchange. These conversions can take place offline, but also on other websites, blogs and even in the comment section on your site. Maker’s Row noticed that traffic that came from brand ambassadors was roughly 40% higher than that from other channels.

Make yourself stand out

Chop Chop, the web developer, provides its visitors with a calculator that allows you to estimate the cost of developing static and WordPress sites, as well as email templates. Benefit Cosmetics makes use of user-generated content in the form of real-time Instagram photos from their customers. Long-term growth strategy is essential, but ideas like this may help your business stand out and increase your sales in a short time. Potentially viral and entertaining, ideas like these are the essence of what growth hacking is about.

If it’s repetitive, automate it

MarketsandMarkets predicts that marketing automation software market will be growing at the rate of almost 9% per year at least until the year 2019. It’s one of the signs of how much businesses strive to leverage data to improve their performance. Do you want to improve your conversion by automating repetitive tasks? Then:

• Instead of calling each customer separately with a personalized offering, use inventory management software to provide your customers with personalized product catalogs based on their previous purchases. When you’re on that, allow them to repeat purchases directly from their purchase history.
• Automate the process of sending emails to your leads.

Use the saved time to produce quality content and actually close sales.

1234567 is better than a lot

1. Our product will help you greatly increase your sales.
2. Our product will help you increase your sales by 54.5% in the first 6 weeks of its use.

Which one of those sentences sounds more persuasive? Most of the time, statements such as the latter prove far more effective. Considering the abundance of free web analytics software such as Google Analytics, you can’t make excuses that you lack proper data to show off. Still have doubts? If that’s the case, take a look at the title of the article and try to ask yourself what made you click 🙂

The three seconds that matter most

According to Kissmetrics, the page abandonment rate skyrockets as the page load time increases. When it’s over three seconds, it’s already in the region of 20%. At the same time, the first three seconds are the best time to convince your visitors that they have come to the right place. Use powerful images that resonate well with your target audience. See the image below to learn more about what impact colors may have on your visitors.

It’s a matter of perspective

Do you offer different variants of your products and services? A very interesting study shows that adding an additional product variant to change the way the remaining variants are viewed by your customers can have a tremendous impact on conversion rates. The original pricing consisted of two offers – a monthly offering for $30 and a yearly one for $299. The monthly offering attracted 40% of purchases and the other one the remaining 60%. Trying to further increase the sales of the $299 yearly plan, the business decided to introduce another yearly plan that cost $289, but at the same time included only the core features of the product in it. The monthly plan was also downgraded down to the core features. As a result, the original yearly plan became the offer of choice for 86% of all purchasers while the total conversion rate increased by 233%. The goal of the $289 yearly plan was merely to make the original one look even more attractive.

Can you think of a way to use the same technique on your website?

Do they feel like they miss out on you?

Loss aversion is a very interesting subject often talked about by economists. It refers to a tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. In other words, losing $1000 stands a far greater chance of making you sad than gaining $1000 making you equally happy. There are plenty of ways to leverage this phenomenon to help you increase conversions. Large eCommerce stores do it by providing the buyer with information on how many items are left in stock. If the stock is low, the information is amplified by the use of appropriate colors (red) and exclamation marks. A similar effect can be achieved with countdowns that mark the end of sales.

Don’t try to guess. Test.

Everything you read above is merely the tip of the iceberg, which constitutes your path to great conversions. Just about anything that can be found on your eCommerce website is a potential subject of A/B testing. Your eCommerce platform of choice is most likely equipped with everything you need. Magento users can use free and paid extensions such as Creare AB and A/B Testing. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics, Clicky and Piwik as well as SaaS services such as Kissmetrics and Unbounce will help in conducting A/B tests too. A call for testing is what we started and ended this article with, as without it all the other advice is meaningless. So change and test your site to your heart’s content and never stop searching for new ways to do that.