We’ve all been there:

On the endless hamster wheel.

You spend many long days and sleepless nights fighting tooth and nail to get more people to your site.

– You work on your SEO endlessly,

– You spend a big chunk of your revenue on ads.

– You hustle on social media just like Gary V told you to.

It seems the only way to make more money is to keep on increasing your site’s traffic.

Same hustle, day in and day out.

But that really isn’t the only way:

You can work on your conversion rates and it will open the floodgates to more revenue.

With the same traffic, you can make 30 to 100% or more money compared what you’re making now, using a little conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

With even just a single winning test, you’ll immediately see a boost to your income. Sometimes possible with just one simple tweak to your page. And all you need to do is apply some CRO techniques to find these magical tweaks.

That’s not all.

This is a system that is scalable, repeatable and most importantly, data-driven.

It’s one-time work that will continue to grow your revenue into the future, at no further cost or effort to you.

What could be better than that?

Take, for example, one of our clients,

JustThrive.

Just Thrive is a health company based in Illinois, USA.

They sell supplements that are non-GMO, gluten, dairy and nut-free.

Most of their traffic comes from search and costly paid ads.

When they approached us, they wanted to increase conversions on their auto-ship subscriptions and get a better return on their ad spend.

In less than 3 months, we not only achieved these targets for them, but increased their revenue by over 100%.

Imagine what that would look like for your business.

You don’t have to get any more traffic. Yet you significantly boost your income.

Today, I’ll show you exactly what we did to increase Just Thrive’s revenue. I’ll also dish out some marketing truths that play a big part in how I approach conversion rate optimization experiments.

I hope this helps you go beyond quick fixes like changing button colors, to understanding why people will buy from you and not your competitor. Because this knowledge helps you create winning conversion increasing campaigns no matter what niche or site you work on.

But before we talk results, let’s talk about the birth of every CRO test

“CRO is all about data, and that is the only information you should rely on. No matter how many years of experience your web developer or UI designer might have, they can’t always know what’s going to work with your audience.” — Hubspot–

I couldn’t agree more. And not understanding that is exactly why many people fail in CRO:

What works for one site or audience is not guaranteed to work with another.

Data is the foundation of good CRO practice. But equally important is an analytical mind.

And at the start of a CRO campaign, you need to do ask some strategic scientific questions to guide your actions.

Here are some questions that can help you with this:

1. What’s the one goal of the page?
2. Does the page answer the visitor’s intent and clearly show the path that leads to a conversion?
3. Do all the important elements from the image, to the copy, to the layout, seamlessly work together to support the one goal?
4. Does the page build trust and lessen anxiety or confusion?

Be brutal and honest when answering these questions. I know your site is your baby. But this is how you find the “flaws” that may be limiting your conversions. Sometimes you’ve seen your own site so many times you can no longer view it objectively. In these situations it can be very valuable to have an outsider audit your site.

I follow the same process every time I audit a site.

And when I looked at Just Thrive’s product pages, I knew there were two big things we needed to address moving forward:

1) The customers: This niche has customers with high buying motivations. They have problems they want to get rid of yesterday. But, many of them may have been burnt in the past by companies who underdeliver. Plus news of vitamin and supplement scams online doesn’t help. So they’re a bit wary. This meant that they probably land on the site holding their trust tightly in their fist.

2) On Selling Multiple Products: Just Thrive’s product pages have a myriad of product choices. This creates friction. When a customer has to make a choice at the moment of purchase, it can stop them in their tracks and postpone the decision. The good thing was that Just Thrive wanted more auto-ship subscriptions. So the goal was to steer the visitor to choose that over the other two options on the page.

With these things in consideration, the Convertica team got down to the nitty-gritty:

• We went over their analytics with a fine-tooth comb.
• We got a heatmaps going to see where the users were clicking, or trying to click.
• We referred to our long list of proven tests and hypothesis relevant to this niche that we’ve run before..
• And from this, we put together a first hypothesis.

Yes, a hypothesis.

We may have done thousands of tests, and we may sometimes think that we know exactly what to do to increase conversions — but all that means nothing until the analytics show us the real data.

Just because something worked on one site, doesn’t mean it’s going to work on another — even in the same niche. There are too many things that could affect the results of your experiment.

Sure, the more conversion expertise you have, the more often your hypothesis will be big winners from the get-go. But that doesn’t mean CRO experts get to not test their hypotheses. Any conversion service that offers to implement changes on your site without explicitly testing and showing you the data, is simply cutting corners.

So, as I was saying,

We start with a carefully formed hypothesis. And we wait for what the data tells us. We try, hard as it is, not to let our ego get in the way.

After our initial deliberations, our experienced development team got to work and built this new design ready for a split-test.

These are the things we changed:

1. We minimized visual clutter by changing the image and putting more white space around it
2. Since trust is something of importance here, we changed the social icons to trust signals
3. Because we wanted to push the auto-ship subscription, we made this more prominent in the layout

Here is what the original layout looked like.

Desktop version

Mobile version

Here is what our first winning variation looked like.

Desktop version

Mobile version

We deployed this campaign on the 7th of December. After a little over a month, on the 15th of January, our assumptions proved to be correct.

Here are the results of the first test with 98% significance.

Our first winning variation increased total conversion rate increased by 25.4% over the control.

Auto-ship subscriptions increased by 41.5 %.

……and the revenue went up by 30.4%.

We were quite pleased with the increase in auto-ship subscriptions, because that was, after all, our main goal.

Now here’s the thing…

That’s only the very first test. One test. Over a 6 month campaign we can complete up to 12 tests with significant wins almost every time.

We were just getting warmed up.

In CRO, you should never stop after just one test.

You glean some insights from one test and then you try and push that further with another test.

And push we did.

We went back to the drawing board and formed a new hypothesis. With more specific data learned from the first test, it was time to take it to the next stage.

Here’s the second variation.

You may have noticed that we changed a few different elements here. The main thing here to take note of was that we set the auto-ship product variation to default.

Most of the time, our rule is to change as few elements as possible. However, we wanted quick results here so we opted to simultaneously test the optimizations based on what worked in the past from our thousands of tests. If this didn’t test well, we would have scaled back on the changes then tested again.

We released this new variation on the 15th of February against our first improved variation.

On the 24th of March, we had the results.

That’s an 85.19% increase in auto-ship subscriptions.

53.73% increase in the total number of orders.

And a 54.77% increase in revenue. Compared to the already improved 2nd version.

How about that, huh?

This 54.77% increase was against our first test variant that already produced a 30.4% increase, meaning the cumulative revenue increase for these two split tests is 101.82%! (1.5477 x 1.304).

Not to mention the bigger win here being the cumulative increase of 162% in recurring revenue.

By now you’re probably wondering…

“That’s all great, Kurt. But where do I start if I want to increase conversions on my own site?”

Well, keep reading.

I’m about to share some lessons I’ve learned running thousands of tests so you can optimize your product pages as we did with JustThrive.

But first, a warning.

This isn’t about the best words for your call to action button or the perfect image to use. I’ve already got a post about that here.

Instead, this is about your mindset and the mental shift that needs to take place if you want to become a CRO master.

We good?

You see, CRO is not about changing elements on the page and doing psychological hocus-pocus to lure visitors to buy your goods. It’s a scientific process.

At the very heart of it is understanding what influences your customers to buy from you.

And to understand your customers, there are some realities to reconcile yourself to.

1. Your product page is not just a product page

Your product page is not just a showcase for your amazing gadget.

It’s the place where your customer’s dreams come true. So don’t ask questions like:

• How can we make this page look cool?
• How can we win the Webby Awards with this design?

Instead, ask these questions:

• When my potential customer lands on this page, does he know he’s at the right place within the first 2 seconds?
• Are all the images crisp and clear so that he knows exactly what this page is about just by scanning it?
• Is the description specific and complete, so that the visitor has all the information he needs to make the decision right there and then?
• Is the content easy to understand? Does it answer every objection and question he may have?
• Is it clear what makes you better than others?
• Does it lessen your customer’s fear of buying online?

Always ask these questions when you build your product page, and you’ll have done a lot more than many eCommerce stores.

2. You’re guilty until proven innocent

People hate to let go of their hard-earned money. They hate marketers even more.

Add to this the many stories of fraud, lies and scams that they hear about online.

And you’ve got a customer who starts a relationship with you with a very low level of trust.

And if you think that’s bad. It doesn’t stop there.

You’ve got a customer who’s bombarded with options.

He’s fickle and knows he can go somewhere else with the click of the back button or a quick google search.

When he looks at your product page, he has 3 other tabs open — all of them your competitors.

And the product page that breaks that barrier and radiates trustworthiness will get that person’s business.

This means that your page from the copy, to the tone, to the flow, to the design should overcome this initial prejudice.

As Flint McGlaughlin from MarketingExperiments says,

“..your copy needs to give me a sense of certainty not only that this is the right product but that you are the right guy.”

He further adds that your page has to answer this question:

“Why should I stay here rather than consider another option? What makes you so special? If I am your ideal customer, why should I purchase from you instead of any of your other competitors? Help me as a visitor to understand this is the place to look for my solution”

3. Your visitors owe you nothing

Tbh, product pages are great fun to optimize.

Why?

Because most visitors are already aware of what you’re selling.

But just because they’re ready to buy doesn’t mean they’ll buy it from you.

Just because they landed on your page doesn’t mean they’ll read every word on it.

As Steve Krug in his book, “Don’t Make Me Think,” says,

“Most web users tend to act like sharks. They have to keep moving, or they’ll die. We just don’t have the time to read more than necessary.”

So what do you do?

Easy.

1. Know your customer. Know the motivations that got him to your page. Know his questions. Know his objections. Know the exact words he uses to explain his pains and wishes.
2. Make it clear as soon as he lands on the page that he’s in the right place.
3. Make sure that your page answers the persistent question that hangs over every visitor’s head, “What’s in it for me?”

Keep these three things in mind when you build your product page. When you do, you can easily join in the conversation that goes on inside your visitor’s head.

Are you still with me?

Now that you know…

…that your product page is for meeting your customer’s needs.

…that your visitor comes to your page full of distrust

…and that your visitor feels no obligation to buy from you…

You can start to optimize your page.

And when you do, here’s a good rule of thumb.

Assume you know nothing about your customers

Whaaat?

Yes, that’s right. Harvest all the research you need about your customers.

But.

Once you start the test, shelve it in the corner.

Why?

Because all that research can’t tell you how your visitors will behave when they land on your page.

All that research will help you meet them halfway when you write the copy and design the layout.

But once they interact with your page, you never know what they will do.

You just have to test it in the field and test the validity of your assumptions.

Then and only then will you know if your visitors would do what you thought they would do.

Your assumptions are just assumptions until the data tell you otherwise.

TL;DR

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” — Sun Tzu

Quick fixes and best practices can get you so far.

But if you want to become a CRO master, you need to operate beyond that and understand the motivations and pains that led your customer to your page.

You need to know that

• your product page is not about you, but your customers
• visitors to your page don’t trust you at first, and it’s your job to convince them
• visitors will always want to know what’s in it for them whenever they visit your page.

When you put all these into consideration, knowing which elements to tweak on your page becomes a smoother and easier endeavor.

16 seconds.

That’s how quickly the $1800 Supreme x Rimowa 82L luggage sold out.

It was an unlikely collaboration between a luxury brand and a streetwear company.

There were no fancy ads or elaborate marketing campaigns.

There was only a post on Instagram signaling to its fan base that the limited edition luggage was out.

16 seconds later, the luggage was all gone.

This is the power of scarcity marketing.

And if you run an eCommerce business, it’s one to keep close to your heart.

The Psychology behind the scarcity principle

…….No!

Two letters.

But it’s more than enough to trigger your brain into panic mode.

Your right brain takes the driver’s seat and your emotions take control.

When someone tells you that resources are limited…

When someone tells you that you can’t have something…

When someone tells you that you’ll lose your chance to get the thing you really like if you don’t click the buy button in the next 2 hours…

Your brain shifts to a different level of thinking.

Now the game changes.

Utility drops in importance. And the desire to own it becomes the goal.

As psychologist Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, says “a product becomes more attractive when their perceived availability is limited.”

Sure. Other concerns like price still float in the back of your mind, but their importance dims in comparison to your desire to own the product.

This is the modus operandi of the human psyche and it’s one to keep in mind when you run an online shop.

How can you make the best of this in your eCommerce store?

Scarcity is an effective marketing strategy. But it isn’t magic.

It doesn’t just happen when you slap countdown timers and write only one stock left on the page.

But it works like a charm when there’s a synergy between perceived value, good branding and scarcity messages.

What does this mean?

This means that for it to work, you should have hungry buyers who are already sold on what you’re selling.

Scarcity is simply a little nudge to get them to click the buy button quicker.

But you’re probably wondering, “Why do I have to nudge them? If they like what I’m selling, they’re gonna buy it anyway!”

And my answer is this:

Just because they want to buy an item doesn’t mean they’ll buy it now or that they’ll buy it from you.

There are a million and one things competing against you for their attention.

It could be another site that sells the same things as you…

It could be Twitter…

It could be a cat video.

But show them a tantalizing offer and add a time limit to it —

Then you get their attention.

You stop them in their tracks.

And chances are they’ll buy from you and not your competition.

So how do you start to implement this?

Let’s start with words

The exact words you use are crucial when you advertise scarcity online.

There are two types of words that come in handy here: words that show scarcity of time (there’s an end date to the offer) and words that show scarcity of the product (stocks are limited).

Words for time scarcity

• Deal ends today
• Only 12 hours left
• Prices go up in 1 day
• Today only
• Offer expires today

Words for stock scarcity

• First 50 people get a free coaching call
• Nearly sold out
• Limited edition
• Only available to members
• Get them while they last

For more words like these, check out Buffer’s, 189 powerful words that convert

Real-time countdown timers

A countdown timer laser-focuses your train of thought.

See, we count down for a lot of momentous events.

We count down on New Year’s Eve…

We count down when launching a rocket…

We count down the days for the next John Wick.

You may not realize it but timers like these spark a visceral response that influences your mental functions.

It feeds your emotions and keeps you in that hyped state of mind.

When it’s on a website, it’s a visual representation of urgency that reminds the brain what it’s dealing with.

In short, it keeps the right brain on the driver’s seat.

The trick is to put it on pages where a person is already considering making a purchase like your product pages.

You can also use a countdown timer:

1. In the cart
2. As a floating bar
3. As a pop up especially during flash sales
4. In Emails
5. In social media posts

Where do scarcity and urgency make sense?

Think of it like this:

Scarcity guides your customers to get to the buying decision quicker.

You’re not pushing them. You’re guiding the way.

You limit their choices and you keep them focused so they get to the buy button without any hiccups.

You get inside the conversation that’s going on in their heads. So they don’t wander and do other things like watch another cat video.

Here’s the deal.

Don’t limit scarcity and urgency messages during special days like Black Friday. On eCommerce sites, it’s good practice to have it as an ever-present part of your copy.

Now I’m not suggesting that you be that schmuck who insults his customers’ intelligence by using scarcity signals to trick them to buy.

I’m talking about using the scarcity principle as a beacon that guides your visitors as they shop on your site.

Let me give you some examples:

Amazon has lots of urgency signals.

Here’s one that tells you the time you have left on a lightning deal that’s in your cart. Now that’s good information to know. If I were buying this item, I would like to know exactly how much time I have left before it gets taken out of my cart.

source

Here’s another one by Etsy.

And whoa! If you really want this pillow cover, you better buy it right now because there’s only 1 left and 2 people have it in their carts. Now it’s a race to see which of you three can whip out your credit card faster!

source

And lastly, here’s one by Secret Sales.

This is unique and one that I haven’t seen done on other sites. Imagine if you really wanted this jacket. It’s going to be the longest 12 minutes of your life.

source

Be warned:

There’s a fine line between guiding your visitors and annoying them so use this with a lot of thought and restraint.

Looking for inspiration? Here are some scarcity marketing examples

1. Apple

Remember what I said that scarcity works best when combined with other marketing strategies? There’s no company that does this better than Apple.

They hit the right emotions at the right time. So when they launch a new product, there’s no other thing on their customers’ minds but to buy the new tech gadget right now

As Robin Lewis says in his Forbes article, How Apple Neurologically Hooked its Customers,:

The buzz begins building, first with dropped hints, then with escalating stagecraft, until the anticipation is palpable. As demand accelerates, Apple warns of scarcity, which further heightens demand and drives an enormous volume of preorders. All in all, before the product is even released, consumers’ minds are filled with Apple, leaving no space for thoughts about competitive brands.

2. Hermés Birkin Bags

If you want to see the combined powers of perceived value and scarcity fueling each other, look no further than Hermés.

They have taken scarcity to a point that Birkin bags may as well be unicorns.

You go to any one of their shops and you’re told there’s none available.

You ask when they’ll have it and they tell you they don’t know.

And oh! There’s a waiting list as long as your arm.

And when you do get on this list, you wait for months before you’re given the bag.

Now, do you think all these jumping through hoops stop people from buying a $10,000 bag?

No!

Quite the opposite. It fuels their desire for it.

3. Gmail’s invite-only origins

In 2004, Google made Gmail.

It was a venture into a new market, and the engineers were concerned they would not be able to cope with tremendous demand.

They had one solution: make Gmail invite-only.

So they invited a select group of people who could send invites if they liked the product.

And invite they did.

Before long, people were talking about this great email service that was only available to a chosen few.

You know what that is?

Scarcity and exclusivity. And when these two work together, they take the world by storm.

People wanted it so badly that Gmail accounts were selling for as much as a hundred dollars on eBay.

4. The Share-a-coke campaign

It was 2011.

A study in Australia showed that 50% of teens and adults hadn’t tasted a coke.

In response to this, their marketing team cooked up a plan to get people to drink their first coke.

They printed the most common Australian names in coke bottles with the words: Share a coke with (person’s name).

What a rare sight to see one’s name on a soda bottle! It was innovative and unusual that it went viral.

And what a success it was!

source

5. AppSumo Deals

Go to the appSumo website and this is the entry pop-up that greets you

source

“Friends don’t let friends pay at full price.”

Boom! They already have you on a string.

You’ve just arrived in their world and they already call you friend!

That’s exclusivity at first base.

But that’s not all.

Their business model relies on scarcity and urgency. It also doesn’t hurt that many deals are a steal!

I know because I’m their friend. And I may have taken out my credit card once or twice for them.

6. Siteground’s Black Friday deals

Or any Black Friday deals for that matter.

Why do people sleep in tents outside department stores the night before the big day? Why do people wait for lightning deals with bated breath?

One reason: they don’t want to lose out on a deal. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

7. Yeezy Turtledove Sneakers

Kanye West now says that “everybody who wants Yeezys will get a Yeezy.”

But when the Kanye-Adidas collaboration first started with the Turtledove sneakers, they used the power of scarcity with a lot of success.

What did they do?

They limited production to 9000. They could have made more considering the buzz around it. But they didn’t.

And if you’re one of those people who wanted one and you knew there were only 9000 pairs, you would be clamoring for it by the time it’s released. Which was exactly what happened.

8. Cabbage Patch Kids

“It was the country’s first instance of total consumer anarchy.” Stephanie Buck writes

And all that was because of a doll people thought was ugly.

The secret? Each of the dolls was one of a kind. They also came with birth certificates and adoption papers. So that’s the rare aspect which was already a big selling point.

Now mix that with stores that couldn’t stock enough of it and you had a match made in heaven.

Parents became so desperate to get one that a store manager had to arm himself with a baseball bat against all the rioting parents!

9. The:5th

The:5th sells limited watch designs every month.

Check out their homepage. It’s got scarcity, urgency and exclusivity cleverly added into their copy without looking tacky or pushy.

source

10. Back-alley bacon and other secret restaurants

These aren’t eCommerce sites.

But secret restaurants use scarcity and curiosity in a very clever way that they deserve to be on this list.

Let’s take Back Alley Bacon for example.

No one knows a lot about this pop-up restaurant. No one knows the chef. No one knows who owns it. Even the man who hands out the meal wears a pig mask.

To know when a meal is available, you have to follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

Then every Wednesday, they post the information you need to buy a meal. This includes what it is, how much it costs, when it’s available and of course, a password.

That’s it.

And people love it.

source

11. De Beers and its diamonds

We can’t write about scarcity without talking about diamonds.

Here’s the deal: diamonds are not rare. But in 1888, a group of major diamond investors called De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. put all their resources together and controlled the production of diamonds.

This created a sense of scarcity. Mix that with a well thought out marketing campaign and we still think of diamonds as rarer than other metals and precious stones.

12. McDonald’s

Even big establishments like McDonald’s use scarcity because it works.

McDonald’s regularly makes limited edition items like the McRibs.

Not too long ago, they even made a limited release of the McDonald’s Szechuan sauce after it was mentioned in a Rick & Morty episode. That campaign was so successful that Thrillist writer James Chrisman says, “The response was apocalyptic. Put simply, there wasn’t enough sauce. People freaked out.”

McDonald’s does this not so much to make money. But it’s used as a promotional and branding strategy. Every now and then when these limited-edition items come out, it keeps us talking about the brand. What a clever way to keep themselves relevant!

13. Booking.com

When it comes to travel sites, booking.com leads the way in scarcity and urgency marketing.

As soon as you start searching for a room, there’s a constant reminder that if you don’t act fast enough, you will lose the room. And no one wants to lose a room they really want, right?

14. Alibaba singles day

For one day only, on the 11th of November, Alibaba holds the biggest eCommerce event in the world. If you want to save up to 50% on your purchases, you’ll be lining up to buy some products too!

One day site-wide sales are becoming very common in eCommerce websites. There’s Singles Day for Alibaba, Prime Day for Amazon, the 17th of every month for Burberry.

What’s yours?

source

15. Supreme

Supreme’s business model runs on scarcity.

They play hard to get.

They ask for your email but they hardly send any emails your way.

They only sell limited editions like the collaboration with Rimowa luggage.

They release items only once a week.

Their products have very high perceived scarcity that a very loyal group of fans wait with mouths watering for every item they release. And almost always, their products sell out in less than a day — many of them only in minutes.

Check out their website and see how it looks like they’re not even trying!

source

16. Amazon Prime day

Amazon doesn’t just want you to buy from them. They want you to be a Prime member.

So what do they do? They invented Prime day. Just one day when prime members get special discounts, deals and free shipping.

And if you regularly buy from Amazon and you find a good offer on this day, it would be wise to get a Prime membership.

17. Kylie Cosmetics Limited Editions

Say what you want about the Kardashians. But you can’t deny that they have business sense.

The way Kylie Jenner promotes her limited edition beauty products is an eCommerce story worth telling. She uses a combination of different marketing strategies that get people in a buying frenzy.

Let’s see.

She’s got a good brand. Even when she’s not selling anything, she engages with her fans. When she does have a product to promote, she builds up the tension weeks before the launch.

She talks about it.

Shows pictures and videos of it.

Teases people with it.

When launch day finally comes, fans know that with the demand there isn’t going to be enough for everyone.

The fans are so hyped-up, the only thing that matters on launch day is to click that buy button.

You may not like her. But that is genius marketing.

Don’t go yet. Here’s something important

Scarcity is an effective strategy to convert website visitors to buyers.

It’s a powerful marketing tool.

But it’s also very fragile.

Consumers know about the scarcity strategy. And they often have their wary antennas on when it is presented in front of them.

So when your website says there are only 2 items left. There should be only 2 left.

When your website says the offer will be gone in 3 hours. Stop the deal after 3 hours.

When your website says something is only for premium members, don’t offer it anywhere else.

Consumers do not suffer fools gladly and they demand nothing but the truth.

Break their trust and your credibility will suffer. You’ll lose customers faster than you can say, “Bob’s your uncle”.

And as this study finds, people hold a grudge after bad customer experience. Once you’ve broken a customer’s trust, it’s very difficult to get it back.

And finally,

If you want this strategy to really work in your favor, work on your branding and perceived value.

Create that feeling of trust in your brand and desire for your products.

Then, add a sprinkling of social proof and exclusivity on your pages.

If you’ve got these in place, you’ll see scarcity working on your eCommerce store like a hot knife through butter.

Let’s see how good your visual perception is.

Look at the two images below.

Which of the lines in image 2 is the same length as the line in image 1?

Easy, right?

Now imagine there are 9 other people with you in the room.

I ask them the same question. All 9 first give their answers before you.

They all answer B.

When it’s time for you to give the answer, what do you say?

Do you say C which you know is correct? Or would you answer B as the rest of the group have done?

This is actually an experiment by Solomon Asch to study group conformity.

In his study, a majority of the participants in the experiment changed the answer they knew was correct and publicly gave the wrong answer.

This experiment shows the power of social proof on our behavior.

And it happens to be a very important concept in online marketing.

What is social proof and why is it important in digital marketing?

Robert Cialdini in his seminal book, Influence — the Psychology of Persuasion, first coined the term social proof. It’s when we look at other people to guide our behavior.

This is often true when making decisions. When we don’t have a lot of information about a situation, we tend to listen to what the group says, and match our decision based on what they say.

This could not be more relevant than in digital marketing.

Think about it this way.

When we buy things online, there’s a significant degree of uncertainty. It’s not like going into a store where we can touch, feel and even test a product.

Sure. A good website will have all the benefits and features laid out for you.

But we don’t really trust marketers, do we?

It’s one thing for a company to say they’re selling the best product. It’s another to have many people who bought it say that it is.

That’s social proof. And it’s something we seek out online.

Look:

68% of consumers don’t trust brands.

You’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops before they trust the words that come out of your mouth.

But get a third party to vouch for you and you slip into their circle of trust without a hassle.

In fact, 82% of internet users read reviews before they make an online purchase. And 50% of Americans believe that reviews help them feel confident in their purchases. (source)

As you can see, social proof is part and parcel of any company that wants to survive online.

So what types of social proof do you need?

There are 6 main types of social proof that you can use in digital marketing.

Let the experts do the talking

Experts carry a lot of weight when vouching for your credibility.

We listen to Cesar Millan for anything dog-related, to Matt Diggity for SEO, and to Brian Cox for Quantum Physics. Because they’re experts in their respective fields, we think there’s a very good chance that they know more about it than we do. So we take their opinions seriously.

It’s the same with selling online. When an expert in a related field vouches for your product or your company, a buyer thinks, “If Mr. expert believes/likes this company, then it must be good.”

See how Kano computer kits use this on their product page. I love how they get a prominent name in the Tech field (Director of OpenNews) to write a review based on what his 9-year-old thinks (it is, after all, a kit for kids).

Get celebrity endorsements

Celebrities used to mean only famous people like actors or athletes. But this now extends to influencers and micro-influencers online.

Whenever you use celebrities to endorse a product, pick the celebrity wisely. This isn’t just about choosing a famous person or an influencer with a lot of followers.

Pick someone who the people in your industry know about and respect. She should also really like your brand and use your product.

Why?

This plays a major part in the success of your campaign. As Silvera and Austad finds in this study, advertising is most effective when consumers believe that the endorser truly likes the product.

Also, you wouldn’t want to end up in a thread like this one where celebrities were caught using an Apple device despite being sponsored by a competitor. This is how bad sentiments and distrust in celebrity endorsements begin. And just see all the unhappy people in the comments section!

Make it count using people just like them

Deep in the unconscious recesses of our brain is our natural attraction to people, places or things that resemble ourselves.

In fact, we make many of our major and minor life decisions based on what Psychologists call implicit egotism. For example, many studies have shown that people are likely to live in places that are akin to their name. So there are a disproportionately large number of Louis who live in St. Louis. And people with Cal in their name are likely to live in guess where?

But what has this got to do with digital marketing?

Here’s the thing:

It’s true that we value our thoughts and opinions. But we equally value the opinion of family, friends, and groups of people we associate ourselves with.

You see, making the decision to buy something can be stressful and exhausting to the brain.

So we often take the short cut. How? By turning to people we trust. The people we know who are just like us and have the same motivations as we do. We easily take their opinions as valid and reliable.

And the stats confirm this, too. Here’s what a Nielsen study showed on the type of advertising people trust. Friend recommendations (people I know) is first on the list.

Show off certifications, awards and trust badges

A certification or award from an established and trustworthy organization can tip credibility in your favor.

This is also the easiest one you can use when you don’t have any reviews or testimonials yet.

For example, you can use a credible organization to prove the quality of your products. If you’re “FDA-approved”, “ASTM-certified” or “IFOAM accredited organic produce”, then show that on your product pages.

You can also use certifications like Microsoft certified professional or Google Analytics certification.

For trust badges, use McAfee secure, Paypal certified or BBB accredited business.

Make use of any certifications you have that resonate with your audience.

What the Users Say

Many consumers seek-out user-generated content.

It’s a way for people to gauge how the product works in the wild.

With social media, this is much easier to do. This is why unboxing videos are very popular. It’s a way for a potential buyer to see and experience the product before buying something.

As I’ve said earlier, when you buy online, you can’t feel and touch a product like you can when you go to a store. The closest thing you have are the reviews of others who’ve already got it.

With this in mind, make user generated content part of your marketing strategy. It’s a powerful tool that generates 6.9x more engagement than brand generated content.

You can’t go wrong with the power of the crowd

Remember that Asch experiment above?

The people who gave the wrong answer were asked afterward why they did it. Many of them said they knew it was wrong but they didn’t want to be the one to stand out from the crowd.

This may seem foolish in hindsight but the itch to follow the crowd is embedded in our psyche. It’s part of our survival instinct. The one who separates from the herd could easily become a Dire Wolf’s dinner. So we tend to go with a group’s opinion and put value in its collective wisdom.

When buying online, we like to see what the “crowd” says about a product. We make decisions based on what they say. If most of them say it’s worth buying, we tend to agree with them too.

And you know why this is? Blame your brain.

A study from the FC Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Netherlands carried out brain scans on volunteers who were asked to judge the attractiveness of a series of faces.

As they chose which one was attractive they were also being actively swayed by group opinion. As this went on, the brain scan showed that every time the person’s opinion is different from the group, it triggered a neuronal response similar to a prediction error signal.

Yep, that’s right. Every time your opinion is different from the group, your brain tells you you’ve just made the wrong decision.

Where and how to get social proof

So now you know the different types of social proof that influence buying decisions.

But how do you get them? Here are 5 things you can start doing now.

Spy on what your customers say about you on social media

It’s easier than ever to get hold of what customers say about you on social media. Keep on top of things and you might just read a good review to use in your marketing campaigns.

Use Google Alerts to track any social media mentions of your brand, site or product.

Do this regularly. And you might even get lucky and have a celebrity tweet about you just like when Elon Musk tweeted this.

Always ask for a review or testimonial from users or clients

Asking for reviews should be an integral part of your business.

Monitor the temperature of the crowd daily and find a review that you can use in your marketing materials.

How do you ask for reviews?

Many of your buyers, especially when they’re happy about the purchase, are not that motivated to leave a good review. So you need to be proactive. And like a lot of things online, making it as easy as possible for users to leave a review is key. Here’s what you can do.

1. Send a request for a review about a week after purchase. Accdg. To Yotpo, these types of emails are the number 1 way to get user generated content.
2. If a customer sends you an email or says something nice about one of your products or your brand, ask permission to use the comment in your marketing materials.
3. If you’re new and you don’t have any testimonials yet, here’s something you can do. Give your services or products for free in exchange for a real review. The key word is REAL. Don’t force them into giving you a positive review. If they don’t have a good experience, find out what they were not happy about. Then improve your processes if the complaint is legitimate and move on to another person.

Get on the radar of experts and influencers

Find influencers to work with. Use sites like Klout, Buzzsumo or Tweetdeck to find the influencers in your niche.

Another thing you can do is to get on the radar of experts. If you have a good product or service, sooner or later, they will notice you.

There’s one important thing to consider here. Experts and influencers are very busy. You need to be mindful of their time.

So how do you get their attention? Here are some ideas

1. Enroll in their course and send them a review. You can also write a case study on how the course helped your business.
2. Offer them something of value. For example, you can find a popular post on their site. Then repurpose that article. You can make it into a PDF checklist, a slideshow, a video — whatever you’re good at. Then give it to them for free.
3. Is there a Youtuber or Instagram influencer you’ve got your eyes on? Send them a free sample of your product and ask if they can make a post or video on it. Some will eagerly do this. To increase your chances, target micro-influencers. They may have fewer followers but they usually have better engagement.

Make use of reviews from third party sites

Third party sites like Yelp, Facebook reviews, and Tripadvisor may be a bit intimidating.

But many consumers go there first before they buy from you, so it’s best to always monitor and respond to these sites. Think of them as an important part of your business. Positive reviews are great but when you get a negative one, make it a point to answer with decency and finesse.

Get real-time social proof

You don’t always have to depend on reviews for social proof. Sometimes, just showing that people are interested in your product is enough proof that you’re legit. Within your site, you can add information like;

• How many people are reading the page
• How many have subscribed
• How many have bought your products

For example, when searching accommodations at Bookings.org, the page shows you how many people are currently looking at the accommodation. This creates a sense of urgency and scarcity, and also the social proof that other people are interested in the hotel.

Another way you can do this is by using small pop-up notifications that show recent interactions on your site.

These could include how many people have recently subscribed to your newsletter, who bought what in the last 2 hours, or who just signed up for a free trial.

A highly-rated tool for this is FOMO social proof.

Here’s what it looks like in action.

The best ways to show social proof

So now you have lots of social proof. But how do you use it?

First of all, don’t hide them. Don’t limit reviews and testimonials to the sales page.

You can use it on your homepage. Like we do in Convertica.

On your emails to encourage more engagement.

Near a call to action button to reduce anxiety or add more value.

On an exit pop-up to encourage sign ups.

In short, put reviews in every part of the customer journey.

Here are some things to consider when designing your site with social proof in mind.

1. Reviews with an image convert more than those without. This tells the visitor the review isn’t fake.
2. Design/add social proof for conversions. Put a review at the point where you want a user to take action like near your call to action button, for example.
3. Don’t be scared of negative reviews. Studies show that perfect 5-star reviews across the board do not increase sales. This study concludes that the probability of purchase increases with rating of about 4.2–4.5 stars, but then decreases after that.
4. Don’t fake social proof.
5. A verified buyer converts more than one who isn’t. Amazon does this well. Check out how Crate & Barrel does it on their site.

Conclusion

There’s no denying that social proof such as customer reviews and other third party recommendations are good for your online business.

Their words can convince your potential customers more than your marketing materials ever could.

So make it a priority in your digital marketing strategy. But remember, you can only have convincing and positive reviews when you actually have an awesome product worth raving about.

So start with perfecting your product or service and then let all your happy customers do the selling for you.

A lighthouse.

That’s what your call-to-action (CTA) button is.

It stops people in their tracks and leads them into a new course of action.

But there’s one difference.

When a ship captain sees a lighthouse, there’s only one certainty. There’s only one course of action — turn that wheel and miss land.

But many calls-to-action are not as straightforward.

In fact, it’s on the other end of the spectrum for most people.

Why?

There’s a lot of uncertainty when someone sees a CTA button on a webpage.

“What happens when I click this button? Will my life get better or worse?”

“Will my credit card be charged right away when I click it?”

“Why should I even click this button? Is this really going to help me with my problem?”

“Wooah… Slow down, hot shot! I’m not ready for a commitment. I’ve only just met you.”

These questions bog a person down when he sees a call-to-action button.

But here’s the thing:

Your CTA button is one of the most important elements on your page.

Your website’s visitor is only a visitor up to the point he clicks it. It’s only when he clicks a call-to-action that a relationship with you starts. He’s no longer a passive reader but an active and engaged stranger. A stranger who stopped all other noise that was going on in his head. And is now giving your offer his precious time.

But:

That’s not an easy feat.

You’re competing with a lot of other noise online.

You’re competing with preconceived ideas, past experiences, and fears of the unknown.

That’s why when you put a CTA button on a webpage, you need to think about all these things and address them accordingly.

How do you do this?

Let me show you how.

I’ll walk you through the whole process, so you’ll know exactly how to create high-converting call-to-action buttons.

This is a long one but jam-packed with actionable tips that you can immediately use for your A/B tests.

So, let’s jump right in and start with the most important lesson you need to learn today:

Your call-to-action (CTA) button does not exist in a vacuum

The call-to-action only works if the other elements on the page do a good job of priming the visitor to click and take your offer.

If the page design is difficult to navigate…

If the perceived value is not clear…

If there’s not enough social proof to cement your claims…

Then the call-to-action button will have to work so hard to get a person to click.

And that usually results in low conversion rates.

Contrary to what some may tell you, a great converting call-to-action is not just bright colors and big buttons.

Instead, it’s one that understands the thought process of the customer and gets her to engage at the right time with the right ask.

For this reason, there’s no one CTA button that works across the board.

Different niches, different ages, and different cultures respond to buttons differently.

But there are some guidelines you can refer to as a starting point when you do A/B tests.

Let’s start with a question I often get asked:

“What’s the best highest-converting color for a call-to-action button?”

Well, it depends.

You knew I would say that.

But.

There are button colors that are popular on the web. Amasty looked at the top 100 sites and found that these colors are: red, green, blue and orange.

Source

Here’s the thing:

If you dig online case studies, you’ll find that these colors behave differently on different sites. One may skyrocket conversions on one page but plummets the conversions on another.

You see, it’s not really about what color to use.

It’s this:

Make the button pop.

Remember the lighthouse?

The first job of a button is to get noticed. And that should be your first priority when designing it.

Look at the row of houses below.

Notice how your eyes get drawn to the door with a different color?

This is what your calls-to-action should be.

Make the button different from the rest of the page so that it stands out.

How do you do this?

1. Use a color that’s different from the ones that are already used on the page.
2. Use a color that contrasts with the background.
3. Use bright colors.

You can also make a button pop this way

Don’t stop at using a contrasting color. You can do more to lead your reader’s eyes to the button.

For example, you can make the button bigger.

Below you can see a banner ad that we use to advertise our CRO academy. The orange button looks bigger than the other elements. With a quick glance at the ad, you know exactly where the button is.

Don’t make it too big, though. That’s like screaming. Or trying a bit too hard. The button wants attention but not so much that it looks tacky.

White space is a button’s friend

Space gives your button more emphasis than the rest of the elements on the page.

Conversion designer Rafal Tomal, says

“Using white space is a great way you can make something more prominent without adding more noise to your design. By simply creating more space around something, you separate it from the rest of the content. That separation and a clear layout break can quickly draw the user’s eye.”

He further illustrates it with this image. Look at the third wireframe and notice how the white space above and below the call-to-action make it prominent on the page.

The placement of the call-to-action matters

A CTA button is most successful when you put it right where the customer is ready for it.

Don’t ask for too much, too early. And don’t ask too late when the interest has waned.

Where on the page to do this is a subject of many debates. So the best way for you to find out is to test it.

A call to action above the fold is generally the accepted best practice. After all, 80% of the visitors to your site stay on top of the fold.

This is what we’ve done with our gamified homepage.

But, a CTA button at the middle or at the bottom of the page also works.

It’s true that studies show that only 20% of your visitors scroll down the page.

But as Tony Haille concludes in this Chartbeat study, the people who do scroll spend a longer time on the page — which means they’re more engaged.

Why does this matter?

Because, then, you have more time to convince them.

Which means they’ll probably convert more.

On our services page, this is exactly what we do. We wait until the bottom of the page when we’ve already conveyed the benefits of working with us. Then we make the ask and put our CTA Button.

A compromise on many sales pages is to put one on top of the fold and another one further down the page. This doesn’t always mean better conversions.

But it’s worth testing to see how it works for your niche.

Colors don’t make people click. Here’s what does

The button color and its’ placement on the page attract a reader to your offer.

But it’s the button text or copy that talks to him and convinces him to click.

Each word or phrase creates a different picture in the customer’s mind. And if the words speak to where your customer’s mind is at that point in time…

He clicks the button.

Joanna Wiebe says that you should think of the button as a closed door.

Look at it this way:

Your potential customer stands outside this door. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side.

Do you know what that’s like? Not knowing what’s behind a closed door?

There could be a lion. The devil himself. Or a crazy ex-girlfriend.

You know how your mind conjures the worst things when there’s so much uncertainty.

Just look at this guy.

That’s why you have a button text.

The text acts as the personable attendant at the door who talks to the visitor and tells him what’s behind it and what’s going to happen when he opens it.

When the text effectively conveys that opening the door will make his life better…

Then he will click the button with enthusiasm and hope.

But herein lies our dilemma:

It’s one thing to have a person at the door talking to your visitor.

It’s another when you’re only allowed a few words and a computer screen to deliver it for you.

Now it becomes challenging.

What words do you use?

How do you know what words resonate with your visitor?

I don’t know.

You have to test it.

But.

You can start by using common words and phrases that have converted for others.

And then as you do your A/B tests, you can refine it.

So what are these words that are better than submit?

Here are some call-to-action phrases you can use. You can download this for future reference.

Some best practices when writing copy for your calls-to-action:

1. Start with an action verb.
2. Be specific.
3. Use words that tell a person what he’s going to get when he clicks the button. For example, use “Download 50+ CTA Phrases” instead of just “Download”
4. Make sure the words on your button text make sense in relation to the copy on the page.
5. Add icons like a checkmark or a cart before the text. Or a forward icon after it.
6. Change the determiner from you to my.

Reduce Anxiety & Boost Trust

This is where you address the FUDS — Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts.

Your visitor doesn’t know what’s behind the shut door. And you can tell her all you want what’s behind it.

But she may not believe you still.

If she thinks you’re talking B.S. or you don’t make any sense, she’s not gonna’ click that button, mate!

So what do you do to lessen the anxiety?

Get help.

Yes.

Get help from the copy surrounding the button.

As I’ve said, the CTA button does not exist in a vacuum. The other elements on the page all help to get it clicked.

And at the point where anxiety is highest on the page i.e. clicking a button, using copy that solidifies any claims you have will go a long way to decrease your customer’s fear of “opening the shut door.”

Like so:

Here are some more examples of how you can do this.

Add scarcity and urgency signals using words like:

• Now
• Today
• Limited Supply
• While Supplies Last
• Last Chance
• Hurry
• Today Only
• FREE Today
• Only X days left
• Last Chance
• Offer Ends On (date)
• Hurry
• Immediately

Use positive click-boosting words like:

• You
• Easy
• Guaranteed
• Save
• New
• Proven

Boost Trust & security signals with these words:

• Refund guarantee
• (x) Day Refund Guarantee
• Recommended by _____
• No-Risk Involve
• Satisfaction guaranteed
• No hassle returns policy
• Full-year warranty
• Feel free to cancel anytime

You can also use numbers:

• Trusted by (number out of number) doctors
• Join (number) subscribers

Add social proof like reviews, testimonials or celebrity endorsements

Find inspiration from these calls-to-action examples

1. Pipedrive

The green call to action button immediately stands out on Pipedrive’s homepage. They’re consistent with using the text Try it free on all their pages. Special points to the minimal layout that gives the visitor only 2 options. This is great for stopping analysis paralysis. It’s also in line with its company tenet that power comes from simplicity.

2. Monday.com

Not many use yellow for a button. But Monday.com does it well here on this popup box. The goal is to get free trial sign-ups. They make this offer inviting by adding social proof such as the testimonial and the number of teams passionate about monday.com”.

3. The Hustle

This one by Hustle goes against standard practices. There is no social proof or long copy. Even the button only has an icon. But bear in mind that this homepage has only one goal which is to get email addresses. So it’s pretty straightforward. This works best with sites that already have a following or depend on word of mouth.

4. Backlinko

Backlinko uses an orange button on a lime green background and a lot of negative space. Plus Brian Dean himself in a black shirt. The combination of all these colors make the page clean and crisp and the button very easy to see. If you scroll down the rest of the page, you’ll see that there’s another button at the bottom which has a different goal. My guess is that the CTA above the fold is for people who already know about him. And the one at the bottom is for those who want to know more about his case studies and get them into his blog.

5. Digital Commerce Academy

Digital Commerce Academy completely foregoes a CTA button on top of the fold. Instead. it uses one of two buttons halfway down the page. The page is so clean and has lots of white space so that the button is easily visible even when you’re quickly scrolling down the page. It’s got a long CTA text, but that’s not a problem here because there’s a lot of white space around it.

6. Trunk Club

The yellow button color contrasts with the background on Trunk Club’s homepage. You’d ideally want only one button on a page, but on eCommerce sites like this one, this is a great way to segment your visitors.

7. Satchel & Page

Satchel and Page are going for the subdued luxury design here. In fact, black, grey and brown are common CTA button colors for luxury brands.

8. Apple

Here’s Apple and its classic blue call to action button. Look at how it uses Continue as the text for the button. This is because this is what the buyer is going to have to do. There are two more customizations needed before the item is added to the cart. Lesson: Don’t use the text Add to Cart when that’s not what the person is doing yet. Also, notice how even one of the biggest brands in the world still makes an effort to decrease anxiety around the CTA button by adding shipping info and return guarantees.

9. Sportsdirect

SportsDirect already uses a lot of bold colors on their design — which can be a problem with getting a button to pop. But their use of a big green button, in this case, does the job of making it clear exactly where it is on the page.

10. Rebel Circus

This is a pop-up page on Rebel Circus’ site. It’s big and loud and fits well with its brand. You may have noticed a lot of pop-ups like this with two buttons to choose from. That’s because studies show that two CTA buttons like this convert more than when there’s only one.

And it all adds up to this…

You don’t always know which call-to-action buttons increase conversions 100% of the time.

What I’ve shown you here are different ideas on what works for some sites.

They may work on yours.

Or not.

You will never know until you test.

Do you want to know which part of the page works best for your call-to-action?

Test it.

Do you want to know which words your customers respond to the most?

Test it.

Do you want to know which phrases and support elements lessen your customers’ anxiety?

Test it.

Then when you get a winning test, tweak it again.

And again. And again.

This is how you exponentially increase your website’s conversion rates.

Now go and make it happen.

Get this: Trust is one of the most powerful elements of your online business.

Get people to trust you and conversions will skyrocket.

If they trust you, they’ll listen to every word you say.

If they trust you, they’ll buy what you sell.

If they trust you, they’ll tell others about your brand.

But trust is not an easy thing to build online. People tend to reserve their trust for only a chosen few.

And who can blame them?

Without the luxury of physical interaction, it’s not easy to gauge if a business is worthy of one’s trust.

So how do you get past this technological barrier?

Well, there are many things you can do.

But today, let’s talk about an effective Psychological technique that can do wonders for getting people to trust you and your business.

And the good news?

You don’t have to force them to do it.

You don’t have to drag them shouting and screaming towards your purchase button.

In fact, when you use this technique, people will buy from you with a smile of satisfaction on their faces.

“What is this technique?” you ask.

Let me introduce you to the foot-in-the-door technique (FITD)

Here’s a lesson for you, young ones.

Not a long time ago, salesmen used to go door-to-door to hawk their goods. One of the things they would do was to put one foot in the door to stop people from shutting it on them.

This is the inspiration for the foot-in-the-door technique.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be as obnoxious as stopping a person from shutting his own door when using it online.

This is how it works:

You first make a small request. Make it something easy to agree to.

It shouldn’t need a lot of mental or physical investment from the person.

If they agree to it, you can then later ask for a bigger request.

The FITD technique says that when you approach customers this way, they’re more inclined to agree to the bigger request than if you didn’t make the small request first.

This Psychological phenomenon was first studied by Freedman & Fraser in 1966.

Here’s what they did.

In a small town in Palo Alto California, researchers knocked on homeowners’ houses and asked to put a big billboard on their front yard with a message for drivers to drive safely. Only 17% of homeowners said yes.

They then did the same experiment with an improved strategy. First, they asked the homeowners to stick a small 3-inch sticker on their window with the same message. But here’s the kicker. A week later, they returned to the same houses. This time, they asked if they could stick the bigger billboard on their front yard.

Guess how many agreed to it?

76%!

A small similar request first, followed by the bigger ask increased the conversions of the latter by more than 400%.

And you might think that’s an isolated case.

But you see this used in a lot of situations in our daily lives.

Think about the food samples in supermarkets to get you to buy the whole leg of ham!

Think about the people who volunteer first intending to get a permanent job in the future.

Think about a love affair that starts at first base to get to fourth base! 😛

It’s so prevalent in our daily lives that it will serve you well not only as an internet marketer but also as a parent, a husband/wife or a friend.

Foot-in-the-door technique examples: applying it online

1. Convertica’s form to get leads

Let’s start with one that we use on the Convertica site.

This is many levels of a small request leading to a big ask.

Let’s have a look at our homepage. Check out the content above the fold.

And have a look at the form aimed to qualify leads.

It’s not just any form. It’s a gamified form that takes the person’s details in a few short steps.

It starts with the segmentation. Small ask.

Person clicks. Then info about the business revenue.

Person clicks Next. Then the site address.

Person clicks Next. Then we ask for the name, email and Skype info. Bigger request.

It’s short. It’s quick. It’s sweet.

Every time the person clicks, he’s doing a micro-behavior. He starts to invest in the whole process.

And you know what’s true about human Psychology?

We generally like consistency.

It gives structure and meaning to our lives.

Every time a person clicks Next. The Psychology of consistency becomes more established.

2. Asking for people’s emails

Asking for people’s email address is the FITD technique in action.

When you sell something online, asking for an email is a relatively small ask in the whole scheme of things.

What you’re doing is getting them used to interacting with you.

Undeniably, there are a lot of nuances involved in making email marketing thrive.

But part of why it works is that by asking them to send you their email, your target customer becomes primed to treat engaging with you as part of their behavior.

Want to give this even more power?

After they’ve subscribed, don’t just leave it at that.

Send them a personal email with another ask (like a question). If they respond, great! You’ve just multiplied the possibility of them responding to another bigger request later.

3. Beardbrand and user-generated content on social media

Have a company hashtag and ask your followers to use it when applicable.

Ask your website visitors to share your blog post on social media.

Even better, hold a contest on social media that your target customers will be excited to join.

What you’re doing is starting the small ask. A small change in behavior.

No biggie.

And guess what? Keep doing this and their attitude and behavior towards your brand will change positively in your favor, too.

So that when you ask for a bigger favor later, like Buy Your New Product, they’re more likely to say yes to you.

This is what Beardbrand did to increase email sign-ups and sales in only a month.

During the month of Movember, Beardbrand ran a social media contest. Every day for 7 days, they gave away over $560 worth of their products to one lucky winner each day.

It’s a small ask to get them to send their emails for the chance to win something.

And it turned out to be a success for Beardbrand. They not only doubled their email list but also had their largest sales day ever.

See my point?

A contest may seem like a trivial marketing strategy. But, it’s one way to modify your target customers’ behavior. It’s a way for them to associate positive emotions with your brand.

This not only helped the company spread its reach but also initiated the FITD technique.

So that when the bigger ask came, their customers were more open to taking their credit cards out and handing them their money.

This is the type of customer you want in your business.

4. Amazon Prime

Amazon Prime Trial.

You sign up for free and you get 30 days of special prices and free delivery.

This is classic FITD technique in action. You get something for free and the chance of you subscribing for a Prime account after 30 days goes up.

Boy! I would love to have a peek into Amazon’s conversion rates and see how much these trials increase Prime subscriptions.

As you may notice, this is a popular strategy among many online companies.

Like basecamp…

Or TakeLessons

5. Pottery Barn and its 3d Room View

Pottery Barn has a 3d -Room View App.

The concept is simple.

Want to see if a Pottery Barn furniture fits well in a space in your room? Simply use the app and you’ll see. Right there on your mobile phone.

It’s easy to use. It’s a big help to the customer.

And what else does it do? It encourages the customer to become invested in the product.

And late, getting them to buy it will be an easier sell.

By asking them to do a small thing first before the bigger ask, the conversions go up.

6. Influencing the influencer with the FITD technique
If you’ve done outreach marketing before, you know what I mean.

Find an influencer you’d really like to be besties with. 🙂

He’s busy. You’ve got time on your hands.

How do you get his attention?

How do you get him to share the next big article you’re launching when he doesn’t know squat about you?

Start small.

Simply say hi on social media. Or better yet, regularly promote his work.

If he says hi back, or retweets your tweet (a small behavioral investment) you’ve started your FITD strategy.

Then send him an email. A simple introduction. Nothing fancy.

You could then ask (nicely) for a quote from him for that next big article you’re writing. This is a bigger request. But if you did your small request correctly at the start, chances are he’ll agree to this, too.

And guess what?

If you cement this relationship well. And your article is awesome. He will likely share the article to his followers when you publish it.

That’s foot in the door technique in action.

Now imagine how that story ends if you skip all the small requests. What would happen if you jumped right in and asked him to share your article the first time you sent him an email?

It is extremely unlikely he’d even respond to say “No”.

Why does the foot-in-the-door technique work?
Our actions are often influenced by previous experiences.

Hanna Perfecto et. al in their research study, Rejecting a Bad Option Feels Like Choosing a Good One, argues that when a person makes a decision that’s consistent with past behavior, he’s more confident in the choice that he makes.

Why?

Because we’ve evolved to have high regards for consistency.

Encyclopedia.com says that

“…people are motivated to seek coherent attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, values, behaviors, and feelings. If these are inconsistent, they will produce a “tension state” in the individual, and motivate the individual to reduce this tension. Individuals reduce this tension,…by making their relevant cognitions consistent.”

So what it boils down to is this:

When our actions are inconsistent, we feel uncomfortable.

That’s why change is often a struggle. It takes too much mental power and Psychological fuel.

And herein lies the power of the foot-in-the-door technique.

Think about that first small request. Remember it’s small enough that the person doesn’t expend a lot of brainpower agreeing to it.

When you later approach him with a bigger ask, the brain does a mental calculation of past behaviors to look for consistencies.

And If he had previously said “Yes” to you. Chances are high that he’ll say “Yes” again.

What you’re doing is making it easy for your customer to make a decision.

But like a lot of things, there are some principles to follow to ensure its high chance of success.

Here are my top tips:

• Make it public. As Robert Cialdini says in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, when there is a witness present, a person becomes even more inclined to be consistent with subsequent behavior.
• Make the small request consistent with the bigger request.
• Don’t make the first request trivial. The person should have clarity as to why she’s doing it. So that the behavior becomes part of her self-belief. Why? As M. Burger & E. Guadagno finds in a recent study, when a person has low-clarity on the initial request, they are less likely to agree with the bigger request.

A Word of Caution

The FITD technique doesn’t work 100% of the time.

People with personalities that prefer change and unpredictability will not respond to this.

Also, if you have a rubbish product or bad customer support, you have to fix that first before you can get this to work.

You can, however, make this work wonderfully, when you combine it with other persuasion techniques like social proof and scarcity.

Have all the spokes in your marketing wheel in place and you’ll find the FITD technique works wonders in your conversions.

Conclusion

Use this technique with integrity.

Use it to form a relationship with your site visitors.

Use it to introduce your customers to the awesome products you sell that they don’t know about yet.

Don’t use it to control behavior.

It’s true. Some people abuse this technique.

Don’t.

Not only will you not sleep at night. There are also forms of the FITD technique (like a survey about the environment when you plan to sell them solar panels) that are illegal in some places.

What I’m saying is to use your power for good.

Do that.

And you’ll be greatly rewarded with an impressive increase in conversions.

Try it. And tell me about it. I would love to know how it works for you.

Your target customer lands on your site overwhelmed with many concerns.

He’s plagued with distractions.

A crying toddler. Hard day at work. Hangover. Slow computer. Dog demanding a walk.

Because of this, he has limited energy to spend on your site.

Psychologists call this cognitive load.

And if you want to master conversion rate optimization, it will benefit you to know all about it.

Factor it into every CRO campaign and your customers will be more receptive to your offers.

What Is Cognitive Load?

Wikipedia defines cognitive load as the used amount of working memory resources.

I like to think of it as how much of your brain is being used at any given time.

It’s an amazing part of your mental construct that draws from what you already know based on past experiences and what you’re dealing with in the present.

It influences what you learn, how you react to situations and how you make decisions daily.

But there’s one small catch:

Our cognitive load has a limit. Every little thing you drop on it adds to the load.

The more work you give it, the more processing it has to do. If you swamp it with tasks, it slows down or clams up.

It’s like a computer. The more programs you open, the slower it becomes.

And sometimes, it’s like a circuit breaker. Give it a surge of electricity, and it shuts everything else down completely.

But the question is — -

What does cognitive load have to do with your conversion rates?

Quick. Without using a calculator.

What’s 38747532 divided by 237.

I’m waiting….

Still waiting…

Ok. Who am I kidding? You’re not doing it, are you?

But indulge me for a moment.

What went through your head when I asked you to do the Mathematical equation?

Did you think: “Why should I do it?”, “Why bother?”, “No way I’m doing this!”?

Did you feel like it was unnecessary and a waste of time?

Hold on to that feeling.

Got it?

That feeling — -

…is how visitors to your website feel when you make them do more work than necessary.

…it’s how they feel when they arrive hoping for one thing but reading something else.

…it’s how they feel when you make it difficult for them to choose something.

Why?

Because when they have to figure things out themselves, you’re adding to their cognitive load.

And what happens when you give the brain too much information for it to process?

Oh. Only a lot of things that you don’t want your customer to feel.

He gets frustrated

You may not be asking him to do a Mathematical equation. But something like a block of text without white space, images or headings adds to cognitive load.

This means he’ll struggle to scan the page. He now has to work to find what interests him on that page. This extra workload slows his brain down. And nobody’s got time for that. So he leaves as quickly as he arrives.

He postpones the decision for another time

We love having a lot of choice. But time and time again, research shows that this only stops us from picking an option.

Why? Cognitive load.

With a lot more choice, our brain has to do more mental analysis to find which option is the best. We get paralyzed and postpone the decision for another day when we’ve “given it some more thought.”

And do you think this visitor who can’t make up his mind will come back? Doubt it. He’ll probably just go to another site that makes his job easier.

The person trusts you less

A study on the effects of cognitive load on trusting behavior shows that the more cognitive load a person has, the less trusting he is.

And you know how important trust is online. When there’s trust, your customer is more willing to give you his time (and his money).

If there’s little trust, he’s less willing to do what you want him to do. So you can forget getting him to click that buy button.

So what do you do instead?

How do you reduce cognitive load so you don’t overburden your visitor’s mental processes?

Make it easy.

Think about what he needs to know when he lands on your site and give it to him.

As Steve Krug says don’t make him think. Make every page of your site intuitive so that your visitor gets it right away without even thinking about it.

What this means is this:

Once your customer starts to ask questions like:

I wonder how long delivery takes?
If I click this button will they charge me right away?
Which of these buttons take me away from this page?

Then you’re adding to his cognitive load.

It’s your job to think about the possible questions and fears your customer has.

Because when you know this, you build a page that already has the answers to these questions and assurance for his fears. So he never has to wonder and think about them.

The truth of the matter is that it’s impossible to aim for zero cognitive load. But you can keep it at a level that’s tolerable.

How do you do this?

Here’s how:

1. Make web forms a breeze by doing this

We all hate filling out forms.

Writing the same information that we’ve done so many times before feels like a sheer waste of time.

How many times have you not purchased something you liked or stopped sending an inquiry because the form looked too daunting?

Your site visitor is no different.

So make it easy for him.

Check this out:

This form requires a person to recall information.

Now see the changes that we made.

This new form lessens the cognitive load. This is easier on the brain. All he has to do is click. He doesn’t have to do the taxing task of digging through his memory to recall something. And then type it.

Do you know what else makes this form a breeze?

The sequence map.

This gives the person a bird’s eye view of exactly where he is in the process. He doesn’t have to think and wonder “How much longer do I have to do this?”

Just by making these small changes was very powerful in this campaign. It was so effective that it increased conversions on Empire Flipper’s lead capture page by 40.16% in two weeks!

Pretty cool, huh?

That’s what you can expect when you factor in cognitive load when designing your website forms.

2. Take advantage of what your customer already knows and expects to see

“We must understand that our goal is not simply to give prospects more options or products. But to LEAD them to the one option that is most relevant, important and urgent to them.” — Austin McCraw -

Have you ever gone to your favorite store, gone straight to the aisle where you know the bacon is (or tofu for you vegetarians!) and found it no longer there?

You realized instantly that they’ve changed their arrangement once again.

You thought this was an in and out job. Uh uh. Not today.

So you get annoyed. You search around for a bit. You begin to get frazzled. If you really need the bacon, you might keep looking with steam coming out of your ears. If you’re in the mood to talk to somebody, you might gingerly approach a staff (customer support) for directions.

But then again.

You might also decide it’s not worth the hassle and leave.

This is what happens when you break a person’s expectation of how something is supposed to pan out.

This is what happens when you force him to learn something new to perform a task.

The fact of the matter is your customer already has a mental model of how things “should” be based on past experiences.

For example,

…he expects a holiday booking site to have a search bar for place, dates and number of people.

…he knows what a link looks like.

…he knows where to go for navigation.

And your job is simple.

Stick to things he already knows.

That’s your shortcut to making it easy for your customers.

Innovation is good. But often when what you want is a conversion, you stick to what your visitors already know.

Then they don’t have to think.

They know exactly what to do. And they’re not stuck on the page wondering,

“Hmmm… how do I buy this thing?”

You might think that’s basic marketing strategy. But even the internet’s eCommerce giant makes this mistake.

This is the page where you’re about to click and pay.

And yet, they make it difficult for the person to do that.

When my friend did this, it took him a few seconds to find the other link that takes him to the sale.

He didn’t want to subscribe to Amazon Prime.

He just wanted to pay.

And what’s your preconceived idea of what a pay button looks like?

A button!

But there’s only one button on this page and it’s not the one he wants (I know they’re doing this to push Amazon Prime subscriptions but it’s bad UX practice, methinks!)

You could almost hear his brain screaming, “I don’t want a freakin’ subscription! Where the f*@k is the buy button?”

Now, this is Amazon. A buyer might have a higher level of tolerance for it. And he might work a little longer to find that button.

But if you don’t have the same brand power, you can be certain that your visitor will leave before he finds the link that seals the deal.

My point is this:

It’s easy to forget your customer when you build your website pages.

Sometimes, we think that because we spend so much time poring over every single thing on our product pages, our customers will do the same.

That is not the case. A lot of people don’t convert because their expectations were not met. And they were left to figure things out by themselves.

As Steve Jobs used to instruct his designers every day:

“See your product through the eyes of the new customer. The one that has fears and possible frustrations and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product could work straight away for them…So make it faster, easier and seamless for the new customer.”

Your customer already has a mental model of what the experience is going to be based on past experience.

Take advantage of that.

3. Limit options already

I know you know this. I’ve said it so many times before.

But.

Why do you continue to cram your comparison tables with so many products? Why do you put a newsletter subscription on your product page? Why oh why do you insist on using sidebars on pages where your goal is to get some leads?

These are common mistakes. And they affect your conversions.

Hicks Law states, “The more stimuli (choices) users face, the longer it will take them to make a decision.”

And when it takes a long time, the person becomes less confident with his choice. So what does he do? He abandons the task.

So how can you design your page to limit choice?

Here’s how:

When there are multiple choices on a product page, highlight the most popular one.
Allow users to sort or filter available options
Know the one goal of every page on your site and be intentional with the way you direct your customer to that goal
Make a default choice in search results or web forms. For example, if 80% of users are from the US, use that as a default country when filling out forms. Or if navy blue is the most popular color, default the search results to show that shirt. As Paul Boag says, “Good defaults can reduce cognitive load on users, while not taking away the choices available to them. That is a powerful tool for overcoming choice paralysis.

4. Reduce cognitive load at the point of purchase

Want to know a Convertica SOP?

When we first work on a site, we almost always work on the part of the page where the buying decision is about to be made.

This could be the comparison table for affiliate sites.

The Add to cart section for eCommerce sites.

Or the form for lead generation.

You know why?

Because on many sites, these page elements present too much unnecessary friction for the customer.

Which means it imposes a lot of cognitive load.

Let’s say you’ve convinced the customer that yours is the right product for his needs.

Then he gets to that crucial part of the page where he’s about to sign on the dotted line, so to speak.

He’s almost there. But then he stops. And hesitates.

If you were sitting next to him you could ask him what the problem was and guide him through it.

But you can’t. For obvious reasons.

Now the burden is on your customer to figure out why he hesitated.

But here’s the thing.

He doesn’t have to hesitate.

It doesn’t have to come to that.

There are many things you can do to steer your visitor away from this land of hesitation.

There are precautions you can take. So that his questions are answered before he asks them. So that he doesn’t doubt his decision. So that he doesn’t end up being distracted by a Reddit post, breaking news or cute animal videos.

Distractions. Remember? You’re always competing with one.

So how do you get your visitor to click that buy now button and slide down the funnel to complete the purchase?

Simple.

Lessen the cognitive load to tip the odds in your favor.

Minimize friction. Don’t just convince him that this is the product he needs. But also make it clear that he has to buy it now. And that your site is the right place to buy it from.

Here are some things you can do to make sure this happens.

• Add as much social proof as possible
• Make intuitive call to actions
• Add trust signals such as return guarantees, customer recommendations and company memberships

So what are you waiting for?

Now that you know all about cognitive load, I have a challenge for you.

Go to a page on your site. Preferably the one that brings in the most money.

Now go through it as if you’d never seen it before.

Imagine you’re a first-time visitor with a problem that you want solved.

You also have a lot of other things on your mind.

As you go through the page, list down the questions that pop in your head.

List down any doubts or uncomfortable feelings you may have as you scroll down the page.

What’s stopping you from clicking the buy button?

Finished?

Now redo your page to address those fears.

And when your conversions go up, come back here to tell me all about it!

Understanding Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an important metric.

There’s only one problem.

It’s largely, and highly misunderstood.

See.

People immediately associate a high bounce rate as an SEO problem. Which leads to agitation.

But in fact, it’s mostly a CRO issue. And it isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity for growth.

If you could reply to me now, you’d probably be giving me a long fully-researched response refuting my case, right?

But hear me out.

I’m not discounting SEO. I’m saying this is a space where CRO and SEO should work closely together. With CRO leading the way.

Optimize the page for conversions and the other SEO metrics that Google cares about will ride this wave of success.

Now isn’t that a more constructive way to look at the issue than all the bounce rate brouhaha many get themselves into?

You with me?

Then let me show you how you can apply CRO to your pages with the goal of decreasing bounce rate. I’ll show you:

• What the problem with bounce rate is
• Why a low bounce rate is not always a good thing
• How to do a bounce rate audit
• How to decrease bounce rate?

What’s the problem with bounce rate?

The problem is that it’s been reduced to a metric that you either have to increase or decrease. It’s become a number that you have to optimize no matter the circumstance.

When you look at this way, you miss the whole point. You lose its purpose.

It’s not a number to fix.

Instead, figure out what it’s telling you about your site’s pages and the people you’re attracting.

Here’s the thing:

The visitors who bounce have a reason. Figure out what this is. Find out what the friction and anxiety is that’s stopping them from engaging with the page.

Understanding this will help you make your site better. You’ll be able to find a way to answer the needs of those you serve. And your bounce rate will naturally go down.

Another problem with bounce rate is that it’s flawed.

It’s supposed to measure engagement. It’s supposed to measure if a visitor interacts with your site. It’s supposed to measure how much the page satisfies user intent.

But guess what?

That standard Google Analytics(GA) code that you copied and pasted can not track these interactions.

It’s great for eCommerce sites where engagement usually means moving between pages, checking different offers and categories.

But if you have a blog, affiliate, or lead generation site, where engagement manifests itself in other ways, that standard GA code just doesn’t work.

So what should you do?

First, let’s talk about what not to do.

Don’t simply think of a high bounce rate as a number to fix.

Why?

Because a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing and a low bounce rate isn’t always a good thing.

There are pages where a high bounce rate is good. It can mean that you satisfied user intent and the person didn’t need to interact with the site any further. This is especially true with a daily blog or an information site.

On the other end of the spectrum, a very low bounce rate isn’t optimal either.

Don’t rejoice thinking people are partying all over your site moving from one page to another without bouncing off.

It usually means you’ve set up your google analytics incorrectly.

So yeah, don’t just look at it as high or low.

With that out of the way, what should you do instead?

First, know the benchmarks for bounce rates in your niche/industry. These can greatly vary so it’s worth knowing.

For example, the average bounce rate for eCommerce sites is 30–40% but landing pages hover at around 70–90%.

Want to know the average bounce rate in your industry? Start with this infographic by Hubspot.

Source

Now that you have a benchmark, it’s time to do a bounce rate audit

Don’t make the mistake of attempting to optimize your site’s overall bounce rate.

Optimize the bounce rate of individual pages, instead.

Different types of pages should have different rates. Your contact page will have a higher bounce rate than a product page, for example.

I like the way lovesdata puts it:

A site-wide bounce rate is an average that hides the detail. Focusing on the overall bounce rate would be a little like planning a trip to Russia based on the average temperature for the year. If you pack your suitcase based on an overall average of 15 degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit), then you will be in for a bit of a shock if you arrive in December! The same applies to bounce rate; you need to look at individual pages or sections of your website, instead of the bounce rate for your whole website.

This may seem a daunting task, especially if your site has a lot of pages.

But you don’t have to optimize all the pages right away.

Like any CRO optimizations that I preach, start with the 80/20.

That is, work first on the 20% of your site that brings the most revenue or has the highest traffic.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Go to Google analytics
2. Find the bounce rates for all pages on the site — Behavior>site content>all pages.
3. Find the 5 -10 pages with the highest bounce rates. Then decide if they’re worth optimizing. You’ll need your critical thinking hat on here and familiarity with the pages on your site. For example, here’s a top traffic page that has a very high bounce rate. I wouldn’t worry so much about this right now. It’s an affiliate page and the high bounce rate could mean that people are clicking straight to the Amazon page which is what the goal of the page is.

1. Then here’s another one. It looks great at 60% bounce rate. But it’s the home page with the goal of getting visitors to click on to the other pages of the site. So I’d quite like that 60% to be lower.

1. See what I mean?
2. Here are a couple of questions to help you decide which pages you should work on first.

• What type of page is it? A landing page with a high bounce rate is ok. But a pillar content with the goal of leading visitors to other pages on the site should have a low bounce rate.
• What’s the source of traffic? For example, social media traffic tends to bounce more than search engine traffic

1. Once you’ve decided which pages you’re going to optimize first, it’s time to get to know them intimately. Look at them as separate pages and put yourself in the shoes of your visitors.What is it about the page that repels a visitor? Forget about yourself. Think about the person on the other side of the screen. What scares him away. What stops him from interacting with the page?

Here are some things that may be causing the problem:

1. The page does not answer the query
2. The page is attracting the wrong audience
3. The UX design needs improvement
4. Google analytics is set up incorrectly

Got that?

Great.

Now learn how to decrease bounce rate

There are two main things you can do to reduce bounce rate:

1. Improve your page
2. Tweak Google analytics

You get these two down pat and you’ll see an improvement in your bounce rate stats.

Improve the page

This is when you put into use your CRO knowledge and expertise. For now, let’s talk about working on the site’s UX, satisfying user intent and improving site speed.

Meet the user halfway
Or the art and science of satisfying user intent

There’s a Psychology driving every visit a person makes to your site. It’s your job to figure out what that is.

The more precise and on-target your page is to the person’s motive, the more they will interact with you.

What does he need? What does he want? Why is he there? Get out of your own head and jump into that of your visitor’s.

Only then will you make a page that is tailored for him and understands him.

Understand why a person is on your site. Value his time and give him what he wants, and you will be rewarded greatly.

Not just with a lower bounce rate but also with better conversions and SEO rankings.

Easier said than done, I know. It’s the perennial CRO dilemma.

So how do you answer user intent?

First start by evaluating the page:

1. Go to your analytics and find the keywords the page is ranking for.
2. Identify the motivation behind that search. Think about why the person used these keywords. What was going on in his head? What did he want to find out? What was the struggle that set him on this journey to find your site?On which part of the buyer journey is he? Which of the 4 micro-moments is he in? Go? Know? Buy? Do?
3. Go to Google and look at the pages that are ranking on the first page for that keyword. As you look at all of them, you’ll find a pattern in the way they answer the query. Does your page answer it in the same way?

After you’ve evaluated the page, it’s easier to rebuild it so that it answers user intent. Here’s what you can do:

1. Rewrite the page to fit the query more accurately. Matt has written a great article here on the topic.
2. Improve the page’s UX. Make it clear to the first time visitor that he’s landed on the right page. Make headlines clear. Add subheadlines. Write short paragraphs.
3. Add images and videos. Design the layout of the page so that it’s easy to read. This means using short paragraphs, clear headlines, and engaging images and videos
4. Better match the meta title and description to the query. Having a good meta title is a given in SEO. And it’s just as important to improving conversions and reducing bounce rate.Why does this matter?
5. Imagine that you’re searching for Samsung mobile phones. You click the top search on Google results and you end up on a page that sells iPhones.Your immediate reaction would be confusion.“Wait. I thought I was going to a page on Samsung phones,” as you furrow your brows in annoyance.If you have the time or patience, you might browse a little bit.But most likely, you’ll leave.It’s that dreaded Pogo sticking SEO’s keep away from.Failing to do this not only increases bounce rate. It’s also detrimental to your ranking.
6. So really. You can’t take meta titles and descriptions for granted. Make sure that you write it in a way that clearly shows what the visitor is going to find on the page.

Know the page’s goal

You’ve done the hard task of getting a person to visit your site. You’ve answered his query.

Here’s the next step:

Decide what you want the person to do next.

A lot of times with the many websites I’ve worked on, the pages leave too much work for the user.

The bad news:

Most visitors don’t want to do the work. They may want a service that you offer but if it’s not easy to find on your site, they won’t waste time looking for it.

Don’t expect them to land on one page and have the motivation to visit all the other pages on your site without your prodding.

Be the Ikea of websites.

Invite them in and get them to go through all the different nooks and crannies on your site.

You can do this if you make it clear what the next step is.

How do you do this?

1. Make the call-to-action clear. Here’s our guide on how to do that
2. Design the page so that it’s easy for the person to navigate the site
3. Add links to related pages. But don’t just add it at the end of the page. Instead, reference them within the article. Don’t be shy about it by hiding the link in some obscure keyword.

Improve page speed

We’ve been talking about improving page speed for many years now.

And yet, this continues to be one of the most basic shortcomings that I see on sites.

Which is a big problem.

People bounce off slow pages as quickly as a hare runs away from a fox.

And apart from increasing bounce rates, it also massively affects conversions.

Tweak Google Analytics

Bounce rate in the standard Google Analytics code is faulty.

If you simply copied and pasted the code from Google Analytics to your site, that’s standard off-the-shelf code.

And you’re doing yourself a great disservice if you use it as it is.

It’s like getting a Ferrari and using it in the slow-moving streets of Ha Noi.

There’s so much it can do. But you’re limiting its potential.

Here’s why:

1. It doesn’t measure how long the person stayed on the site. Why is this important? Because theoretically, the longer a person stays on a page, the more engaged he is. But since off-the-shelf GA code doesn’t consider this, then it’s counted as a bounce when he leaves.
2. If a person watches a video, that’s an engaged visitor. Again, the code doesn’t track this.
3. If a person clicks an external link on an affiliate page (which is the goal of the page), the code disregards that.

You get my drift.

So what do you do?

If you’re serious about improving bounce rates, then there’s no way around it:

Learn how to customize Google analytics.

When you customize GA, you begin to have more control into how it evaluates what a bounce is.

How can you customize it? There are a few things you can do:

Adjusted bounce rate

The standard Google analytics code does not put dwell time into consideration.

So if a person stays on your site for 5 minutes to read the whole page and then leaves, that’s a bounce. The same is true if he leaves after 2 seconds.

But these are obviously two very different visitors. It’s safe to assume that the first one is more engaged (read the article, watched a video, etc) than the one who leaves after 2 seconds.

Enter Adjusted bounce rate (ABR).

A feature so powerful yet so under-used.

ABR gives you control of how long a person stays on the site before it’s considered a bounce.

So you can set it at 15 seconds for example. That is, if a visitor stays for more than 15 seconds and then leaves, that is NOT considered a bounce .

Pretty nifty, huh?

How do you do this?

Easy. Google’s got it for you on a silver platter.

Here’s the modified GA code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXXXX-1‘]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
setTimeout(“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘15_seconds’, ‘read’])”,15000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

You can change the number of seconds to whatever number you feel an engaged visitor stays on your pages. It’s set at 15, 15000 in the code above.

Track other behavior on the page

What about instances when a person clicks an affiliate link? For money pages, this is the engagement you want from the visitor, right? That’s the goal of the page.

You should be happy. But for the standard GA, that’s a bounce.

But did you know that you can track this action so that when a person clicks it, it’s not considered a bounce?

Yes, Padawan. This is possible. You can have control.

With a little Google analytics tweaking, you can lower bounce rate by tracking actions such as

• Watching a video
• Clicking an external image or link
• Clicking a video’s play, stop or pause button
• Scrolling the page
• Sharing on social media
• File downloads
• Filling up a form

So that when a visitor does any one of these, it will no longer be counted as a bounce when he leaves.

Hallelujah!

So how do you track these events? I’ll be honest with you. It’s not as easy as copying and pasting the standard GA code. Get your developer to do it for you if you’re not comfortable with code. I’ll try and make another post on this in the future.

But if you want to get down and dirty now, OptimizeSmart has a detailed beginner’s guide to tracking events in Google analytics.

So that’s all for today folks

I hope this has opened your eyes to how you can use bounce rate to your advantage. It is a powerful metric but it’s also widely misunderstood. But once you see what a gem it is. Once you consider it as a window into your visitor’s behavior, you’ll find ways to make your pages better able to serve your target customers’ needs.

And you know what that means? Not only will your bounce rate go down. Your conversions will, too. And since you’ve worked on improving the quality of your pages, increase in search engine rankings will follow.

Now how about that for hitting three birds with one stone?

10Beasts: A Unique Affiliate Site Case Study

In November 2018, I did a presentation at the Chiang Mai SEO conference.

I used 10Beasts as an example and discussed tweaks I would do to the website to increase its conversion rates. If we were to potentially work with them, that is. I also wanted to show how even well-known authority sites were not always the ones to copy as they don’t have perfect layouts, nor are they always optimised for conversions, as much as one may think.

Speaking at the CMSEO2018 conference on CRO.

As luck would have it, someone who worked for 10Beasts was in the room.

Then, In December 2018, we took 10Beasts on board as a client.

This is the CRO story of 10beasts

And here’s my promise:

I’ll show you the whole process no-holds-barred.

I’ll take you down into the depths of conversion rate optimization.

I’ll show you the highs and lows. The banging-the-head-against-the-wall moments.

And the finally-we-nailed-it celebrations.

This is what a CRO campaign looks like.

Buckle your seatbelts. It’s gonna be a fun ride.

The Rise of 10Beasts.com

10Beasts came into prominence when Glen Allsopp featured it on Gaps.

The site had only 8 pages. Yet it was ranking for thousands of highly-competitive keywords. On its 5th month online, it had already generated $80,000 in commissions.

Then at the end of 2017, Luqman Khan, the owner, sold the site for over half-a-million dollars.

But the story doesn’t stop there.

Less than a month after the sale, the site got penalized and lost a lot of its rankings.

You’d think that was the end of it.

But in only 5 days, they got all the rankings back after disavowing many of its .edu links.

By the time we took on 10Beasts as a client in 2018, the site was getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a month

The start of the CRO Journey

A site with this much traffic is a delight to work on. The more traffic, the faster and better we can split-test. Based on the thousands of tests we’ve done on similar sites, we were confident we could get results as quickly as within two weeks.

It looked like it was going to be a straightforward run-of-the-mill CRO test.

Boy, were we wrong.

The first step: site audit and evaluation

I talk a lot about the 80/20 when deciding which pages to work on first.

This means choosing the top pages that make the most revenue.

By this time, 10Beasts already had about 50 pages.

So we chose the top 10 that was making the most money.

Why start with this?

It’s the best way to take advantage of low-hanging fruit:

You want to see an increase in affiliate commissions right away. And working on pages that are making you money now is how to do that.

But how do you know which pages generate the most money?

Guess.

Just kidding.

But seriously, that’s what many affiliate site owners do. They have one tracking ID for all affiliate pages and make a rough guess at which pages are generating most of the revenue.

This guessing game, more often than not, will give you false data. Not to mention — that’s a terrible way to start a conversion optimisation campaign.

And you miss a lot of valuable insights about your business when you don’t track the individual performance of each of the pages.

So if you don’t do this already, then let it be the first thing you do after you read this article.

Here’s how to set-up individual tracking IDs:

1. Go to your Amazon associates dashboard
2. Hover on your account name on the top right corner and click Manage tracking IDs

3. Click Add tracking ID and make a new ID.

4. Make a different ID for each of your money pages.

5. Change the links on your site using the tracking ID you made for that page.

After you’ve changed the links, wait a month or two, depending on your traffic. After this, you should get a clear idea which of your pages generate the most money.

The second step: deciding what to test

With affiliate sites, we almost always work on the comparison tables first. From our experience, this is where sites can get the most revenue booster .

So it was only natural that we looked at 10Beasts’ tables to guide our first test.

The original table on their money pages looked like this:

Looking at it, the one thing that stood out to us was the lack of images.

Images are important when buying online. When you can’t touch or feel a product like you can in a store, you have to show them what it looks like.

It creates an emotional connection with the product — which is vital in making the decision to buy.

But that’s not the only thing we felt needed changing.

Think about it.

A comparison table is not just a visual representation of the products on your page.

It has an even more important purpose:

To get inside the mind of the buyer, meet him where he’s at and answer his questions. The table gets him pumped to buy the product before he even reaches Amazon.

Your comparison table educates him. So that when he clicks over to the store you’re promoting, he’s already primed with one purpose: to click the buy button.

That’s how important your table is. So don’t take this advice lightly.

You made that page to sell, right?

Then stop using an I-don’t-want-it-to-look-salesy mentality.

And dammit’, sell your goods.

With this in mind, what should be on the table to make it effective?

Here’s what:

Target different demographics
The people who land on your money page have different motivations and intentions. There are going to be people who buy on a budget and people who want the higher end product. There are going to be people who are minimalists and people who want all the bells and whistles. So you need to address these different desires.There are different ways to do this- but for our first test, which you’ll see below, we target each demographic by using a ribbon across the top corner of the image.

Have a clear call-to-action that pops on the page
I’ve already written an article on how to make call-to-action buttons that get the clicks. Read it here if you want to learn how to do that. For Amazon affiliate sites, you can use CTA texts such as:

• Check on Amazon
• Check price on Amazon
• Check price here
• Add to cart
• Buy now at Amazon
• Buy now

Choose any one text from above or come up with your own (as long as it’s allowed by Amazon TOS) and test which one works best on your site, for your audience.

Include benefits and features
This is part of educating your visitors which I mentioned earlier.

With all that in consideration, our developers went to work and made this table:

Notice the difference?

It looks cleaner and easier to navigate. Each image targets different market segments and helps the visitor identify which product to focus his attention to.

By breaking the table down this way, more people will buy because they are now more educated in a much better way.

The third step: deployment & the first win

So now, we have our shiny new toy, err comparison table, ready for the test.

We set up a split test on VWO. And started testing.

This is a waiting game

We started our first test on the 21st of December. Then it reached statistical significance on the 4th of January.

Here’s what happened:

For 6 of the pages, conversions increased.

But for 4 of the pages, conversions decreased.

Stop. Right. Now.

And read what I just wrote again.

I need you to grasp the lesson that every CRO person should tattoo on his chest.

Sometimes, your hypothesis works on some pages and not on others.

On. The. Same. Site.

Can you imagine what this means when you use that very same table on another site?

What am I trying to say?

You can’t just copy someone’s winning A/B test and think it will work wonders for you, too.

You’ve got to test it.

Clear?

Now back to our results:

4 of the pages tests may have failed.

But look at the massive gains for the pages that increased revenue.

One page is up by 677%!

With this data, we further calculated what this meant for the overall revenue for all 10 pages.

Here’s what we saw:

The final commission increase was 55.1% when we roll out just the winners.

Notice how we’ve increased the products ordered by 30% even though there was only a small increase in clicks.

What to take away from the results:

Have a look at the data again.

Look at the number of clicks.

There’s only a 6.8% increase. That’s not a lot.

But look at the increase in orders.

That’s 30% more which resulted in a 55.1% increase in Ad Fees.

See what’s happening here?

The table didn’t make a big impact on the click-through-rate.

But it did something else — which is the ultimate goal of CRO.

It sufficiently educated the buyer.

It entered the conversation that was going on inside the visitor’s head. It filled the gaps in his knowledge. It answered the questions he had before he landed on that page.

And because of this, when he clicks the CTA and gets to Amazon, he arrives with the intent to buy.

Listen up.

This is an insight to really wrap your head around.

It’s not only about increasing click-through rates.

It’s also having a money page that sufficiently educates your visitor before he goes to Amazon.

Sure. Amazon already has high conversion rates.

But you can make it even higher if you have a page that puts the visitor into a buying frame of mind even before he clicks and goes there.

Get it?

Just as we were doing our second test to work on the pages that failed, a hiccup stopped us in our tracks.

We had to cancel the test.

Which was a bummer for us.

But it’s good news for you:

Because of this, we’re going to show you exactly how you can analyze your Amazon traffic and earnings. So you’ll know how to optimize your money pages for more revenue.

Ready?

Here’s what happened:

Our first test increased 10Beasts Ad Fees by 55.1%.

But after we declared this a win, the client had a big question that needed answering:

Look at their Google analytics comparing traffic between January 2018 and January 2019.

As you can see, the traffic doubled in 2019 compared to the same period the year before.

But here’s the catch:

This increase in traffic didn’t translate to an increase in revenue.

Since their traffic had doubled, shouldn’t that also mean their revenue should increase by a lot, too?

But it didn’t.

WTF was happening there?

It’s a perfectly logical question.

But it was beyond the scope of the test that we did.

See. We split test.

We split test the performance of an original page (i.e the one that you’re using NOW) against an optimized one which we make.

In these campaigns, we don’t split test between the performance of the pages from last year to the performance of the page this year.

Why?

There are too many factors that affect conversion rates at different periods in time.

For example, we may be doing the test during a different season. We may have arrived when the product was no longer that hot. Or perhaps, your current visitors have gotten so used to your page they now have ad blindness.

So when the client asked us this question, we assumed that the quality of the traffic had changed.

But you know what happens when you assume!

So we got ourselves into sleuthing mode to understand what was happening here.

We dug deep. And analyzed a whole year’s stats.

We looked at their Amazon earnings and Google analytics.

And this is what we found:

Most of the increase in traffic in the past year was for the Smartwatches page.

In 2018, this page was 1.24% of its traffic.

In 2019, this same page accounted for 44.47% of the site’s traffic.

All good, so far, right?

Who doesn’t want more visitors to their site?

But here’s the rub:

Looking at their Amazon earnings, this page was converting at only 1–2 %. That’s very low.

This meant there was something about the page that hindered conversions.

We needed to look at every element including the copy, the list of products and the layout.

We had to find out why the revenue, from the end of 2017 to the time we started the test in December, didn’t increase in proportion to the increase in traffic.

Here’s what we found for the smartwatches page:

1. People didn’t buy the best product that was recommended. There wasn’t even a single sale.
2. One of the recommended products links to a page on Amazon which was sold only by 3rd party sellers. Like this:

1. There was another recommended product that was selling well, but it had a high return rate.
2. The first 2 featured products on the table got a lot of clicks. But not a single piece was sold.

Now we were beginning to see why the page had a low conversion rate.

And this was just for the Smartwatches.

We had a few more pages to do.

This explains why the revenue didn’t increase much even with the rise in traffic.

Here’s a lesson to take away from this:

You can make the fanciest table. In our case, a table that has worked wonderfully on many sites.

But if there’s something else on the page that stops people from buying, then you’ve got to fix that first.

The products that you recommend can massively affect your conversion rates and, by association, your monthly earnings.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier.

And allow me to say it again because it’s that important.

Your money page has to sufficiently educate the visitor. It has to answer all his questions about the products and fill the knowledge gaps in his head. That’s the way you prime more visitors to buy the item within that 24-hour period Amazon gives you as an affiliate.

As you can imagine, our findings were useful for the site’s direction moving forward.

Even the client agreed.

Time to pivot and make some changes

With these new insights, we changed the course of our CRO strategy.

There were more pressing optimization issues that we had to address, first. We needed to:

1. Update the list of recommended products, so that all outdated ones would no longer be on the list.
2. Rearrange the order of the products putting either premium or popular items on the top
3. Add features and benefits to the table to further educate the buyer

Ok.

I see you and I hear you

You’re asking, “How do you find all these things out? Which products do you add or get rid of?”

Well, get ready, I’m about to show you exactly how we do it. So you too can optimize your money pages to make more sales.

I’ll show you how to find products to recommend and how to display them on your comparison table. I’ll also give you some ideas for CRO tests that you can do based on data that is available for you.

Ready?

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of Amazon reports.

“That’s all it is?” You ask incredulously.

But listen.

I’ve done CRO on a lot of affiliate sites. And I can tell you this.

Many affiliate SEOs have not once downloaded their sales reports to analyze it. Or they simply don’t know how to extract the most useful data from these reports.

But using this data is what separates the men from the boys.

It holds a lot of insights. And you’ll get loads of ideas on what to do to increase your ad fees.

Here’s what you need to do first: To implement this process, make sure you install unique tags on your top 10 pages. Collect the data for a month or two, depending on your traffic. Then, it’s time to analyze the data.

Here’s what you do:

1. Download the Amazon reports data for that particular tag and head over to the “Fee Earnings tab.”
2. The next step in this process is to: Sort either by “Name” or “ASIN” column of the data that you downloaded. It’s recommended to sort by Name if the product has multiple variations like color, size, etc.
3. Group the same products by color so that you know which products are sold the most.

So what do you do with all this data?

Here are some hypotheses that you can test.

Hypothesis 1: When you see that the second or third product you recommend is getting more sales than the first product, you can test this:

👉Run a simple split test by rearranging the products in the table.

Hypothesis 2: When you see premium products (the ones which pay the most Ad Fees ) get sold the most, you can test this:

👉Split test the old version against a new table with the premium product as the first one on the table. This could increase your overall Ad Fees because the #1 product usually gets the most clicks.

⚠ Note: Don’t recommend a premium product just because you expect it to increase your commissions. Do this only when you have the data to back it up.

Hypothesis 3: When a product which is not reviewed on the page sells well, You can test this:

👉 You can either add them to the table and add a new review section when you update the content.

👉Or If you are concerned about any SEO issues, add the new product to the table alone and add a “Read Review” link on the table. This link then leads to a page with a more exhaustive review of the product.

Got all of that?

I hope you have. It will benefit you a lot.

Testing the new hypothesis

On the 20th of March, we started the new test on 6 further money pages.

This time, we optimized the tables by using the insights we got from Amazon reports.

Here’s an example of what the table looked like with the changes we made.

We stopped the test on the 18th of April.

And the results showed a win for 4 of the 6 pages we tested.

And when we added only the winners, here are the results:

Overall, there was a decrease in clicks.

But the orders increased by 23.4%

The revenue by 61.4 %

And the Ad fees went up by 66.3%!

A simple table and product change and the difference in results were night and day.

We were quite pleased.

Conclusion

Looking back, this was a long and eventful campaign. As always in the real world, it’s never plain sailing and we certainly hit a few speed-bumps along the way.

Ordinarily, with traffic like this, we would reach this increase in ad fees within 1–2 months for all pages.

But this is the reality of CRO.

You walk in. You expect things to go as normal.

But then sometimes, there are roadblocks where you have to pause and evaluate.

Where you have to dig into the data, find a new hypothesis and pivot strategy. And hopefully we’ve shown you how despite all the hurdles you can systematically improve your site’s conversion rate with the right strategy and logic.

And it’s not about how long the process took.

It’s all about the ultimate gains and the lessons learned.

It may have taken 4 months. But the insights gleaned from all these tests are ones that will continue to benefit them (and hopefully you) for a long time.

TL;DR

Thinking of doing this on your own sites? Here are the steps again.

👉 Do a site audit and evaluate which pages you want to do a CRO test on

1. Work on the 80/20 i.e. work on the top 20% of your pages that make the most money
2. Don’t know which pages are making you the most revenue? Track it using tracking IDS and wait for a couple of weeks to a month

👉 Decide what to test

1. We recommend testing the comparison table first
2. Include an image
3. Target different demographics
4. Have a clear call-to-action
5. Include benefits and features

👉 Start A/B test

👉 Stop the test when it reaches statistical significance

👉 How to use Amazon reports data to find the best products for higher ad fees

1. List popular or premium products first on the comparison table
2. Add products which people buy but are not on the list
3. If an item gets a lot of returns, exclude it from the list
4. Don’t want to add additional content on the page’s review section for SEO purposes? Simply add a Read Review link on the table and link it to another page on your site with a detailed review of the product.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.