Category: conversion rate strategies

Pre-career, I had a few different jobs, from working in the video store after school rewinding the weekend’s videotapes to merchandising greeting cards for one of the giants in the industry.

When I look back, the job that taught me the very most that applies to what I do today is the 5 years I spent working in supermarkets over high school and college. The two stores I worked at couldn’t have been more different, but let me tell you, it was an education in customer service, human behavior and, most of all, psychology.

And I don’t mean the occasional verbal assault from an unruly customer who was behaving badly, or the woman who so kindly told me I was throwing away my life when little did she know I was in school full-time and working at the store 30 hours a week. (The joke’s on you lady – ha!)

The Supermarket Schools Us On Website Goals and Intentions

While I was a cashier, I loved nothing more than when I got to work in the back on displays, merchandising, stocking and more. Because nothing is left to chance in a supermarket. Which is the exact way our websites should be – we want to be intentional and guide people to the right place so they behave in a certain way.

Before you have a moment and think “Um, isn’t this manipulative?”, yes it is, but you can choose to be smart about your website or you can leave it all up to chance and see what results you get. Every retailer, corporation and business is doing it, so if you want to compete, you’re going to have to play ball.

(That’s not to say you need to turn into a sleaze ball either. You can be thoughtful and apply these ideas while still coming from place of service and ethics.)

Simeon Scamell-Katz, global consumer analyst and author of The Art of Shopping: How We Shop and Why We Buy, cites one of the biggest challenges for supermarkets is the fact that “Shopping is so ritualized that we walk around like zombies. We’re incredibly patterned in what we do.”

Sounds pretty much like the last time you lost yourself on Facebook or watching cat videos on YouTube, doesn’t it?

While Scamell-Katz’s tools of choice are brain scans, footage of volunteer’s eyeballs, live bird’s-eye views of the supermarket and more, on websites we use heatmaps, conversion rates, split tests, A/B tests and Google Analytics to get our data.

Here are a few of the lessons we can learn from supermarket psychology secrets for our own websites.

#1 Range Reduction

We’ve got more choices than ever before, but too much choice is a bad thing. This article shares that the average household uses only 300 products in a year, but a large supermarket stocks over 80,000 products.

An increasing number of brands and stores are dropping the number of products in their line in an effort to simplify. Danone cut their product line by 40% and their sales went up 20%. And in early 2015, UK supermarket giant Tesco announced they were cutting their range by 30% across the board in an bid to simplify the experience for shoppers. After all, do we really need to choose from 98 different brands of rice?

If you think about your site, how many products or services are you offering? Are you providing too much choice? It may be time for you to cull the herd and focus only on your top sellers. While less may seem like you’re going to cut into sales, more focus and simplicity will benefit both you and your potential buyers.

Start by looking at your revenue. It may have the answer of what product or service you may need to eliminate for the sake of a simpler, streamlined experience.

[Tweet “What items do you need to eliminate on your website? @magspatterson breaks it down in this new blog post.”]

#2 Signpost Brands

I’m willing to bet that you frequent the same supermarket week after week and you run off a mental map as you go through and pick things up. As shoppers, studies show that we disregard signage that tells us what’s in an aisle, favoring signpost brands. We concentrate towards the middle of an aisle and look for the recognizable brands, such as Coca-Cola or Nescafé to tell us where we are.

The positioning of signpost brands makes a significant impact on how we shop and have been shown to increase sales of all products in the category. In a study by Scamell-Katz, he advised a firm to place 4ft cardboard Guinness pint glasses at either end of the stout shelves. Overnight sales of all drinks in the category increased by 23%.

Why? It’s simple: People were being guided. Having a clear marker told them exactly where to go. So while we don’t necessarily have signpost brands for our websites, we need to look at how we can tap into the fact that people have a certain set of expectations for a website. Just like in the supermarket, our visitors are looking for the familiar and need to be guided. If you have a site that doesn’t follow a particular format or have a clear path to get them from A to B, you risk losing them. This is why clear will always trump clever, as people don’t want things to be that hard.

#3 Traffic Builder

You’ve probably heard that most supermarkets place essentials like bread and milk at the back of the store to help entice us to buy more along the way.

New studies have shown that these distraction tactics can be a major problem, as forcing the shopper to deviate from their plan can result in negative feelings. One study showed that placing quick-buy items close to the front door made people more apt to return to the store for their weekly shopping.

The message for our websites is clear: don’t make it hard to shop or try to be overly clever. Distracting us along the way means we’re less likely to return and it’s harder to build that know-like-trust factor. When you force your visitor to work too hard for what they want – it’s not creating a positive experience with your brand. And on the web, people have so many choices that in a click of a button your relationship is done and done.

There are so many secrets lurking in the supermarket and anywhere in our day-to-day lives that give us some serious clues about how to tap into the psychology of our visitors and give them what they want.

Just because we’re on the web doesn’t mean we should sacrifice common sense for creativity or a profitable website for something pretty. With the right planning and focus on user experience, we can have both. The key is understanding the psychological principles at play and assuming nothing. (Speaking of assumptions, check out how testing mine turned out in the latest lab report.)

[Tweet “Lessons from the supermarket and why common sense shouldn’t be sacrificed for creativity with @magspatterson”]

Here we go – the very first of my lab reports. Back in March I shared that I was going to start giving you some behind-the-scenes scoop about my business.

My approach to business – even after 10 years – is that it’s all a test. We need to be willing to boldly experiment if we’re going to succeed. Which is my true goal with these lab reports: to share what’s working and what’s not so you can take it and run with it.

Before we go any further, I think we should stop to note that I nearly failed math in high school (more than once) and had multiple mishaps in chemistry class with the bunsen burner. Just remember, I am first and foremost a creative, a writer, a marketer…and then an analytics geek, because I love that knowing this stuff lets me get back to the creative stuff.

So right now, apologies to all the science types. This lab report takes some liberties with format and, ahem, word choice. (I’m sure my grade 11 chem teacher would give me an F for this!)

April’s big experiments focused on figuring out what was really happening on my website. I had some ideas, but I wanted to run some tests to figure it out.

Statement of Problem

After attending a two-day course on digital psychology, I was extremely curious about what was happening on my website with an eye on fine-tuning things to drive a higher number of conversions. Then I had a one-on-one conversation with Sally Hogshead from How to Fascinate, who made some very specific branding and marketing suggestions about my site. Time to dig in and see what was happening and what changes I really needed (and not just what I thought I needed to make).

Hypothesis

My initial thought was that removing the three feature boxes from the bottom of the home page will streamline decision making. Also, I thought that more emphasis should be placed on moving people to the about page from home, as it’s traditionally been the most visited page on the site.

Tools

• WordPress-based Website
• Crazy Egg
• Google Analytics
• Patience
• One copywriter + one designer

Procedure

To make data-based decisions, I started by looking at my Google Analytics. I wanted to see what my bounce rate was for the home page.

Bounce rate is a way of measuring how many people visit your home page and leave, which is a sign there may possibly be an issue with the copy or design of your home page.

With that out of the way, I then added a heatmap to my website. Heatmaps are a great way to see – visually – where the action is on your website. With a heatmap, you can follow visitor’s journey through the site and see where they are clicking, scrolling, mousing over and much more.

To prepare for the experiment in March, I first used a free plug-in heatmap for WordPress. I then switched to Crazy Egg’s heatmapping tool for more sophisticated data.

[Tweet “Do you really know what’s happening on your website? @magspatterson shares what she learned about hers.”]

Results

On April 1st, I quickly determined my bounce rate for the past 30 days was very good, running at 13.09% and with an average of 3.80 pages being viewed on each visit. At month’s end, my bounce rate had risen to 32.11% with 3.35 pages per visit.

Looking at my referral traffic for April, my traffic coming from organic search rose from 15% to 24% of my total traffic, so this likely impacted my bounce rate. This is good news, but I will monitor bounce rate actively. While the current number is acceptable, if it continues to trend upwards, I may need to intervene.

Heatmaps

Lots of great insight thanks to the heatmap. The first key learning is that people actually do use the three boxes towards the bottom of my home page to route them to other pages on my site.

However, the click through rates for the boxes were averaging around 1-2%, so I looked closely at them and realized the calls to action were weaker than I’d like, so they were changed. As you can see in the image below, they were blue, meaning they were getting some traffic but there was lots of room for improvement.

We’ll see how the new calls to action for these three feature boxes work moving ahead, but early testing is positive.

From there, I started to look at where the real action was in my navigation bar, and it was all about services. Services received 16% of clicks on the page, with the blog receiving 13% and my about page 12%.

This prompted me to switch gears from examining my about page to my services landing page, so I promptly put a heatmap on it. Because holy shiznit – services pages are critical to my business. How could I not know exactly what was going on??? I knew business was “good,” but I wanted to know what was really happening when they hit that page.

Here’s how clicks on the services landing page breaks down:

• 13.3% on The Story Distillery
• 18.2% on Copywriting
• 10.2% on Ongoing Services
• 8.6% on Guest Posting

(And yes, I know that’s not 100, but I’ll take 50.3% clicks on services to learn more. And those other 49.7% of clicks are totally random, but interestingly, 5% of them are to my praise page.)

This accurately echoes pretty much how my services break down in terms of revenue split, and it’s no surprise that copywriting is my lead service. With that in mind, I audited the copywriting landing page and subpages with a careful eye, as that group of pages is where a good chunk of my traffic is going, so I want to do everything I can to convert them.

Working with my designer, we made a series of minor tweaks to the copywriting services page, including clearer and more prominent call to action buttons and making the invite to book a consult more visually enticing. You can see the results of those tweaks here.

We’re also fine-tuning the other services pages in an effort to improve conversions for each page and will be setting up a goal for each page  in Google Analytics so we can see how we’re doing. Right now, all post-purchase thank you pages are hosted by Infusionsoft. We’ll be moving those back to WordPress so we can track them as soon as design/development changes are completed for those pages later this month.

If you want to learn more on how to set up a goal in Google Analytics, you can view the process right here:

Conclusions

My gut was totally wrong about what was happening on my home page and seeing the numbers first hand made a significant difference in the actions we took. Instead of enacting major changes, we kept what was working and started to fine tune.

Each of these changes will continue to be tracked via Google Analytics and heatmaps  in the coming months, and the use of Google Analytics goals on each thank you page will let us see how many people go from landing on the site to ultimately purchasing.

Taking Action on the Lab Report

The point of the lab report is for you to get into action and take some of the testing and experimenting used here to see how you can start to use more data and facts to help you shape your marketing.

Here are a few things for you to dig into:

1. What’s your bounce rate?
2. What could your heatmap tell you about what visitors are doing?
3. Do you know what’s happening on your services pages?
4. Where can you use a goal in Google Analytics?

It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t have to have massive amounts of traffic to start digging into what’s happening. In fact, if you can figure out what’s happening now, you’ll be ready to capitalize on traffic as it rises over time. Because there’s nothing worse than traffic that you aren’t ready to actually convert into action.

That’s it. Lots learned this month about my website and what people are really doing, as well as what we need to change with an eye on improving conversion rates.

From here on out, lab reports will drop early each month and I’ve got some fun experiments planned, including:

• Can Maggie grow her Pinterest following the same way she did for a crafting business?
• Your Facebook ads cost what? Breaking down the real cost per lead.
• Adventures in list building leading up to a launch.
• And much more…

[Tweet “The first monthly lab report from @magspatterson: breaking down bounce rate and heatmaps”]

If you build it, they will come. (Insert other tired clichés here.)

When it comes to the web, that’s sooooo not the case. For some reason, even in 2015, we’re conditioned to think that you launch your site and ta-da! The world will be SO excited and you’ll be drowning in traffic.

Nothing could be further from the truth. To have traffic (aka visitors) to your site, you’re going to need to hustle. From blogging to social media to guest posting to whatever else you decide to do, you’ll need to put time in to getting them to your little slice of Internet.

And once you’ve done the hard work of getting them to your site, the even harder part starts…keeping them there.

Unfortunately, this is where so many websites (especially in our online entrepreneurial world) fail. Epically. Massively. Disastrously.

There’s countless reasons this happens, but the bottom line is that if you have visitors coming to your site and you’re not converting them, all of your efforts are a bloody waste.

If that seems dramatic, hold on to your hat – because it comes down to simple math:

Let’s say you get 100 visitors to your site, but only 2 convert into a sale, which gives you a 2% conversion. If you want to make more sales and more money, do you try to double the number of visitors to your site?

Or do you improve your site so you can get 6 or 10 of the visitors to buy from you? By improving your conversions, you’ll get 3x or 5x the sales from people already visiting your site.

So in classic sales speak, do you serve the people you already have or do you work to acquire more leads?

As someone who literally built the foundation of my business on referrals, I know exactly what I’m going to do in this situation. I’d focus on ensuring that the people already coming to me are getting what they need to improve my conversion rate, instead of hustling and grinding to get more and more and more traffic.

The answer isn’t more traffic, it’s more conversions on your site. If you want to reach your business goals, you need to give a flying fig about this conversion rate stuff. (Even if you’re a creative and math makes you all stabby, because this is the stuff that impacts your bottom line and very likely your sanity.)

So, why, then, are so many sites failing when it comes to creating the connection with visitors and closing the sale?

[Tweet “Your website doesn’t have a traffic problem. It has a conversions problem, says @magspatterson #conversionschallenge”]

Here are just a few of the reasons it happens:

#1. Pretty Over Practical

Have you ever arrived on a stunning website and thought, “Okay, this is so cool. Wait, WTF am I supposed to do now?” Me too, and way more often than I care to admit.

While we can all make fun of the web 1.0 sites out there from the Internet marketing dudes that are red, black and yellow, I’ll tell you one thing, those sites often convert like gangbusters. They work because they are extremely well thought out and use proven principles to move people into action.

Does this mean you need an ugly site from 1999 to convert visitors? No. Hell no. But it does mean you need to get much more intentional about what you want your visitors to actually do when they land on your home page. You need a plan that takes them from home to the place where you want them: a place where they feel comfortable enough to opt-in, buy, or get in touch.What’s the plan that gets them from home to the ultimate place where you want them to opt-in, buy or take action?

It’s way too easy to be caught up in the cool design, groundbreaking images or funky navigation. But if your visitors don’t get it, it doesn’t matter.

When you’re assessing designers, you want to look for someone who speaks the language of conversion and digital strategy. Pretty is great, but if your site isn’t doing its job, it’s not going to give you the ROI you need. In a world where User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are critical (thanks, Apple), you can’t afford not to have a clear plan for how people interact with your site.

#2 Copy That’s Clever, But Not Clear

Way back in the day, when I was studying writing for the web, we had a catchy way of assessing our writing, and we were marked against this filter. Meet the 4Cs: – clear, correct, complete and concise.

If your copy can’t pass that test, you may have a conversion problem.

Clever, cute, quippy, whatever you want your copy to be, you can’t sacrifice clarity. Because without clarity, no one – and I mean no one – is going to be able to decipher what you’re really saying. And that means they’re they are not going to stick around to sign up for your list or read more about your products or services.

Truth is, as attached as you may be to your words, cut that by about 95%, because that’s about how much your reader really cares. Yes, you need to connect with them and address their problem, but they also want you to do it in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they’re a Ph.D. candidate or that they need a dictionary to understand.

If you want your copy to convert, you need to answer your customer’s most burning the question: “What’s in it for me?” and then make sure that you’re speaking your reader’s language. And if you really want to have copy that gets results, please don’t confuse conversion-boosting copy with the breed of personality-driven, fluffy copy that’s all style and no substance.

#3 You’re Making it Too Damn Hard

Nothing, and I mean nothing, kills conversions like making it too damn hard for a visitor to do business with you.

If you really want people to convert, you need to make things dead easy for them to follow through. From clear pricing to answering questions upfront to having calls to action that make sense, your job is to reduce the number of decisions they need to make.

It’s called Decision Paradox. And if you’ve ever been to the Cheesecake Factory, you know exactly what that’s all about. When we have too many decisions, we tend to over analyze things. So the fewer decisions you can offer up for your visitors, the better.

A great example of where many online businesses make it too hard is with pricing. If you make it hard for your visitor to figure out what something costs and how to do business with you, you’ve just created friction. With every second they spend doing math or figuring out what happens if they do press buy, you’re giving them time to reconsider.

Same thing with your call to action buttons. You need to make it so crazy simple that they can take action on autopilot and feel like they’re making the right choice. Asking for too much info, making them click one too many times, or being unclear means more decisions. And with every decision, they become more apt to abort their mission.

Life is hard enough, so if you make it hard for visitors to get the information, purchase or subscribe, you’re not building trust, and you’re less likely to convert them into action.

Think about your favorite stores or brands. I’m willing to bet they’re the ones that make things simple. Their merchandising, their pricing and the overall experience is relaxing and makes it easy for you to give them your money.

Your website should do the exact same thing. Less is more, especially if you’re talking conversions.

[Tweet “Are you making it HARD to do business with you? @magspatterson breaks down common problems”]