7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.
This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert. Among other things, we cover A/B testing, footnotes, testimonials, feature lists, the sign-up process and typography.

1. A/B Testing

There is no reason to stop developing your website once you’ve come up with a design that you’re happy with and that you think best sells your product. Practice often differs from theory, and every market is different. Things you believe should work may not actually perform well in your context. This doesn’t mean your implementation was completely wrong; perhaps it just needs a little tweaking to achieve its full potential.
You can tweak your website using what’s called A/B testing (also known as split testing). Basically, this test pits design A against design B and determines which performs better. This simple test helps you figure out things like, Which headline works better, or Where should you place the “Buy now” button?

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool you can use to perform A/B testing, as well as multivariate testing (testing many combinations of variables), on your website. It’s relatively simple to use: all you need to do is provide Google Website Optimizer with the different assets you want to test, and it will randomly load them for your visitors and track which ones lead to better conversions.

2. Footnotes: The Good and the Bad Ones

Sometimes, when writing a description of your service or a product feature, you may need to disclose additional information about things like availability and price. This extra information can usually be placed in a footnote at the bottom of the page.
This is logical because you want to keep the copy on your main page as slim as possible to ensure people actually read it. If the copy has any extra information that is not relevant to the pitch, then it may break the flow and add needless weight. To add a footnote, just insert a reference number in the main text (using the sup-tag), and then place the accompanying explanation at the bottom of the page (the larger the font size, the better).

A typical feature description on Apple’s website. The little asterisk in the first line under the heading “Built for Time Machine” indicates that a technical description is in the footnote.

However, some companies use footnotes for another purpose: instead of hiding superflous technical details, they trick customers into buying something, offering services “for free” and referring with footnotes or asterisks to details of the deal. These details are almost always unreadable – because of the font size and the font color – and almost always result in misunderstandings and problems. If you or your company use footnotes for this purpose, you are definitely doing something wrong. Once your users lost trust for your company (for instance, because they purchased something that they didn’t want to buy), it will be damn hard for you to win it back.

The German company T-Mobile offers the iPhone for a sensational price: 1 Euro. Of course, the customer needs to pay attention to little footnotes that explain further costs. This is hidden marketing and disrespectful behavior towards customers.

Price details in the footnotes: unreadable blocks of unscannable chunks of text with numerous numbers and traps for customers. That’s not how footnotes should be used.

Conclusion: if you care about your customers and aim to build a solid, long-term relationship with them, you better make sure you communicate with them honestly and directly – and use footnotes properly.

3. Testimonials

Testimonials are great because they tell your visitors that other people use your product and would go as far as recommend it. Testimonials help relieve some of the risk associated with purchasing a new product or service. You have little way of telling whether something is good or not until you try it, and knowing that others have tried it and liked it helps a lot in breaking down this risk barrier.
There are some formatting tricks you can use to make your testimonials more effective. For example, read the following three testimonials:

1. I found Product X to be incredibly useful in my daily workflow.
2. “I found Product X to be incredibly useful in my daily workflow.”
3. “I found Product X to be incredibly useful in my daily workflow.” John Smith, ACME Corp, New York

The first testimonial doesn’t have anything attached to it — it’s just a sentence and so doesn’t look very believable. The third one on the other hand has speech marks around it and attribution to the source. Just adding speech marks already makes a testimonial look better. For best testimonials though make sure to add a source.

Business Catalyst formats their testimonials perfectly, with a picture of each client next to their quote.

Quotes from publications on The Resumator site follow the same rules.

It’s also a good idea to provide readers with case-studies that describe the process of your work and explain how customers liked it, what were the problems and how the service can be useful to solve tasks from the daily routine.

4. Scannable Feature Lists

Your visitors don’t have a lot of patience. Why? They’re spending their time browsing your website, time that could be spent doing a myriad of other things. Time is money, and people are investing it when they navigate around your website. This means you’ve got to offer something valuable in return. You must grab their attention and not let go. If they get bored or don’t like what you offer, then they will click away and likely be gone forever.

Rapidweaver makes its feature list scannable by using white space, headings and images.

To address this, present your information in a way that is easiest and quickest to digest. You’ve got to slice up your marketing pitch into bite-sized chunks that are fast to read and simple to understand. You may want to give each chunk a heading or highlight areas of the text to stand out. You can also add images, such as an icon next to each chunk of text. All of this makes the text scannable. People are then able to look over the text, pick out headings and read more detailed blurbs about the elements they like.

…and so does MyFonts.

5. Streamline The Sign-Up Process

Selling has a lot to do with breaking down barriers. These barriers are mainly the objections people imagine to buying your product, but these barriers can also be physical; for example, the sign-up form on your website. Users have to fill in forms, and that means a little work on their part. To ensure you don’t lose conversions at this stage, you can do a few things.
First of all, ensure the sign-up form is as short as possible. If a field is optional, it doesn’t have to be there. Users can always fill in optional fields later on their settings page. Don’t make potential customers do more work than they have to; keep the form nice and short and easy to fill in.

Posterous, a blog host, doesn’t even ask you to sign up to start using it: just email your first post to its address.

Secondly, to ensure users don’t make any mistakes and have to re-fill information, you can validate fields live using AJAX. You could, for example, display a green tick next to each filled-in field when it validates, or display a red cross along with a short error message if some error occurs (such as if a required field is left empty or a user name that is already taken is chosen). This allows people to see any errors as they’re filling in the form and fix them before clicking the “Submit” button.

The Veritocracy sign-up form isn’t even a separate page; it’s a form that pops up as a modal window and requires only four fields to be filled in.

Lastly, you can simplify the page layout of the sign-up form by removing any irrelevant navigation elements. Your objective here is to get the visitor to sign up rather than navigate to other sections of the website, so you can remove any extra navigation to help the user focus on the task at hand.

6. White Space Is Not Lost Space

Have you ever seen those cheap ad booklets one gets in the post, all full of bright colors, big text and pictures, every millimeter used to display a latest offer or new deal. The designers try to fit everything they’ve got into the booklet and make sure no space is wasted. Cramming everything you’ve got into a limited amount of space isn’t always the best approach, though, and in most cases it’s the wrong approach online.

Perfect use of spacing and white space in a magazine-layout on Good.is. The space makes the content look clean, attractive and readable.

White space, the empty space around and between various pieces of content, is important. It gives your design air to breathe by separating elements. This separation is valuable because it allows people to focus their attention on individual areas of the page, be it the navigation, a feature description or the website’s description.
When everything is stuck together, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between its components and thus more difficult to focus on and thus less scannable.

7. Set your type properly

The way you set your type has an effect on how well your copy performs. Good typography can give your copy the punch it needs. Use large font sizes to make headings stand out. If you’re selling to an older demographic, ensure all font sizes are large enough to read easily. Small fonts may look great, but if they’re difficult to read, they will turn people off.
Also, ensure the text and its background color have enough contrast. Black on white is a good start. Inverted color schemes (light text on dark background) do not work so well in most cases, especially if your audience is used to more traditional media (e.g. newspapers), where black on white is the standard.

The redesigned 37signals website features eye-catching typography that takes advantage of big font sizes, varying colors and high contrast.

To focus people’s attention on certain elements, you can decrease the contrast of surrounding elements by using something like dark gray on white (instead of black on white) to fade them out a little. Use stronger contrast for the stuff you want people to notice. One good technique is to use the highest contrast for a feature heading or brief description, and then a lower contrast for the detailed blurb below. The aim here is to make the page scannable: let people glance over it and settle their gaze on the text that’s most important and quickest to digest.

To Conclude

Design definitely has a role to play in selling the product or service on your website, though it’s more of a support than a lead role. Design should reinforce the copy: help it stand out and be readable. Choose images that send the message you want. Ask yourself what purpose each image on your website has. If it has no purpose, why is it there? Use white space and typography to give your copy punch. At the end of the day, though, you have to make sure your content actually works, because a great design alone won’t be enough to close the sale.

Use Conversions To Generate More Conversions

If you’ve managed to sell a product to a customer, use this opporunity to present further attractive offers to the customer. The topic “behavioral targeting”, a technique that uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that customers. Many advertisers believe that this technique can dramatically help to boost the conversion rate.
Behavioral targeting is probably currently the most discussed advertising strategy. However, it is not clear if it possible to derive some meaningful customers’ preferences and future behavior out of the earlier purchasing history. Wrong adjustments – based upon the browsing history – can significantly decrease the conversion rate as well.
Since you are the owner of an online-store, it’s much easier for you: you don’t have to try to decrypt some general user’s behavior – you can use the concrete data that you’ve collected so far instead. After a purchase your customer has clearly stated his preferences and you have collected some data about him and his interests. And, more importantly, if the delivery of the item didn’t cause any problems, you have gained his or her trust. You can use this advantage to better bind your customers to your company. And this is where personalization becomes important.

Personalization Without “Big Brother”: Keep The Requirements As Low As Possible

If you are not able to convince your users to buy your store items immediately, you need some tools that would develop what marketers call “stickiness”. The latter sees users returning to you within a short period of time and favoring your store over others. Again it’s all about increasing relevancy.
While behavioral targeting works indirectly, lots of other personalization methods work more directly in their attempt to better understand customers’ needs and interests. An easy way to do this is to implement a shopping cart that would store user sessions. Configurations could also be stored, as could previous product comparisons. Being able to print these personalized data sheets might also be beneficial; people who are simply researching products may have different needs than those ready to make a purchase.

Shopcomposition.com allows its visitors to put items in the shopping cart without registration. Not all online-stores have the “no-registration-necessary”-policy. It’s not clear why, because most customers do not need to sign up before going into a local store, do they?

Whatever you do, keep the requirements as low as possible. Tell visitors that their preferences have been saved in a browser cookie, but perhaps don’t go quite so far as to restore an abandoned shopping cart. It would be very important for families to be aware of this lack of privacy. For example, two adults buying Christmas presents for each other might use the same PC. Privacy doesn’t just mean PC privacy; it means personal privacy.

Not only allows Perfectorder.jp its visitors to add items to the shopping cart, they can also send an inquiry or ask the customers support for additional information – of course, no registration is necessary. That’s user-friendly.

Any form of personalization starts with a basic registration, that is with an email address and password. That is learned behavior and doesn’t do much harm. Intelligent systems use this first conversion to immediately trigger a second conversion. They could use it to send out a discount coupon that customers may only be able to redeem by revealing more personal information.

Make Use Of The Neglected Thank-You Page

As mentioned above, the time after a conversion is the best time for the next one. If a user finally made a decision to buy an item and finished the checkout process, he or she already agreed with your payment and delivery methods. This is why this is the perfect time to prepare the customer for the next purchase.
You have already collected important data from the user and earned the user’s trust. It is truly interesting that not many online stores use a proper thank-you page, the page that users are redirected to upon checking out. Thank-you-page is the perfect place to advertise a newsletter. Advertising is the key: tell your customers what value they can get by disclosing their email address.
You can also use this opportunity to trigger an attractive marketing trick. How about a countdown, let’s say 60 minutes, and promising free shipping for all orders completed within that time frame (read also the article Free Shipping increases trust)? You could provide the readers with a peek at next weeks’ hot sales or suggest some special offers or sales. You could mention products that other customers have bought in addition to the one just purchased. You could offer a coupon for an upcoming sale. You could lead customers to the members area, inviting them to store their shipping address so that their next purchase is easier.

Good Service Is The Best Viral Marketing

Of course, you need to offer your products at a convenient, yet competitive price, otherwise your shop-optimization won’t do any good in the first place. However, if you do have reasonable prices, the principles and guidelines listed in the last three articles are very likely to improve customers’ user experience and boost your conversion rates.
To improve your position against your competitors, you need to make sure that you provide a good product description or offer a better fulfillment-service. The first one depends on the branding and the quality of the products that you offer; the latter one has an enormous impact on the reputation of your store.
If you are providing a good service for a long period of time, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of the so-called “cognitive relief” – the latter describes the phenomenon when a user, being a loyal and satisfied customer for a more-or-less long period of time, starts to ignore alternative choices and returns to your store over and over again, believing that she found the right one – the one that perfectly fits their needs and provides a really good service. It is very likely that these users also spread or initiate the word of mouth advertising which brings you even more customers in a long run.
Bottom line: whatever optimization methods you are using, you should never compromise your quality of service and the performance of your store. The more responsive you are, the less reasons your customers will have to switch retailers. If you need a reason for Amazon’s success, this is it.
Make sure your customers know exactly what stage they’re at in the purchasing process. Allow them to track their order. Encourage them to rate your store, leave a testimonial (perhaps rewarding them with a coupon) or recommend the store to their friends. Oh, and of course don’t forget the social media. There is no better viral marketing technique than a plain ol’ good quality service.

Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert

As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. For that, you need to introduce the element of marketing.

1. Subliminal Suggestion

Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others. The cap embodied the concept of sharing and giving in their minds, and exposure to it primed them for regarding sharing more positively. The same study also exposed kids to a “Toys ‘R’ Us” logo, which had the opposite effect of the Santa Claus cap, making them less likely to share their candy.

LegacyLocker features a photo of a happy family on its landing page, presumably to evoke in visitors a warm feeling for its product and a desire to care for their loved ones.

When choosing images for your website, think carefully about the message you’re trying to send. Pick images that are meaningful and that embody that message or feeling. Don’t put graphics on your website for their own sake — if they’re not doing a job, they don’t have to be there. Clichéd and overused imagery and stock photos are also dangerous because it may not send the right message in the given context, so select images that get the effect you’re after.

2. Prevent Choice Paralysis

There is a phenomenon in marketing known as “choice paralysis.” Choice paralysis happens when the user is given too many options. Choice is great, but when your customers are presented with too many options, they may be confused about where to go. Nobody wants buyer’s remorse (where a person chooses an item and decides later it’s not right for them), so many people spend more time than they should on the selection process: they become paralyzed.
In fact, according to Barry Schwatz, when customers have too many options to consider, they end up avoiding a specific service or the task in general (Paradox of Choice) – and this is exactly what we as designers need to carefully consider in our designs.

The Highrise pricing list shows a set of monthly payment plans. The most popular one stands out visually to help you make a choice.

To remedy choice paralysis, make it easier for people to find the right product or service for them. Tell them what each option is great for, and then suggest the one they should choose. You can even use visuals to highlight the most popular product and steer potential customers towards it. If the product is not right for them, they’ll pick another, but if they’re confused, a “default” choice helps prevent choice paralysis.

3. Show The Product

When you visit a physical store, perhaps a grocery, you can look at, examine and sometimes even taste the products on sale. You make your purchasing decision based on the information you gather there. Are the tomatoes ripe enough? Are those strawberries red enough? What about the look and smell of that freshly baked bread?
When you sell services or Web apps online, you should do exactly the same thing: show the product. It’s surprising how many websites that sell software don’t actually show screenshots of their applications. Sure, these are intangible goods, digital goods that you can’t touch or smell, but they’re still goods you can see.

Dashboard puts large screenshots of its lead-tracking app right on the front page.

People make judgments based on what products look like. Why? Because appearance is an indicator, rightly or wrongly, of a product’s usability. This is known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

Xtorrent, a torrent download client for OS X, has a product screenshot right at the top of its minimalist landing page.

If people see a complicated and cluttered interface or, in some cases, even just an unattractive interface, they may assume it is not very usable or is hard to learn. On the other hand, if people see an attractive and simple-looking interface, they may start figuring out how it works right then and will want to give it a try. Get people to imagine using your software, and you’ll get closer to closing the sale.

4. Let People Try It

Once you start using a product, you become involved in it. Once you start entering data into it, you begin to make it your own. Every second a user spends trying out features is a second of their time invested in learning and using your product.
When that user is then presented with the question of whether to purchase or subscribe to the product or service, they will more likely say “yes” because they are already involved and have invested time in it. Of course, if the product is bad, then it may turn people off, but then your priority should really be to improve the product until it reaches a level people are happy with.

MailChimp, an email marketing service, allows you to start using the service for free with your first 100 subscribers.

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of the “freemium” business model. A freemium service allows people to use a portion of it free of charge, but requires a purchase to use all of its features. It gives people a taste of the full product but doesn’t limit them to a trial period. This lets them use the product for free without monetary commitment and then upgrade if they like it.
It’s a great model for many online Software-as-a-Service businesses because once somebody begins using your product, they get sucked in. They start to rely on it, and when they rely on it to do business or manage their life, they will very likely need the premium features down the line and will be happy to upgrade because they already know your service well.
Stories are very important in sales because they get potential customers to imagine what it would be like to use your product. Letting people actually try your product for free goes even further. They don’t have to imagine because they can begin using it right away at no cost. Letting people try out your product, whether through a demo, a trial period or a freemium model, is an excellent way to win customers. Now, this isn’t really a “design” element but is important to mention here because of its potential to drive conversions.

5. AIDA

AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.
Then, once they’re interested, generate a desire in them for your product. For example, a story about how this product has helped someone like your visitor can help them imagine what this product would do for them, and especially what benefits it would bring. Indeed, the benefit part is key here because benefits, not features, sell products.
Finally, you need to get people to act. This means purchasing the product or signing up for the service. If people want your product, all they may need is a button to check out. If they are interested but not yet sure, you could use a few methods to motivate them further; for example, creating a sense of urgency with a limited-time offer or limited supply.

Yokaboo features large, eye-catching graphics. You’re likely to first read the short description on the left. The stats on the t-shirt then help build trust. Finally, you are presented with a call to action on the right.

Now, the AIDA approach applies more to copy — the actual marketing text on the website — than design, so what we need to do on the design side is reinforce that copy, make it stand out and ensure visitors read it. This means making sure the first thing a new visitor sees really grabs their attention. The flow of the page should then direct their focus to the items that achieve the other two goals: interest and desire. Finally, at the end of this flow, we need to convert. So, provide calls to action: “Order now,” “Sign up here.”
It’s important to understand that the design alone won’t sell: you need strong copy in place to do most of that work. The design is there to reinforce and support the copy, rather than the other way around.

Reinvigorate captures your attention with three large words at the top: “measure. analyze. evolve.” You’re then led to a more descriptive bit of text below and a call to action link.

This means you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead, think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that. If a delivery truck breaks down, then the package does not arrive, but if there was no package in the first place, then the delivery wouldn’t matter at all.

6. Guide attention

To benefit from something like AIDA, you have to lead your visitors through your content. You can do this by aligning items in a manner that will flow, and using images that guide the eyes. For example, if you want to focus attention somewhere, use a big arrow. Our eyes will notice the arrow and will naturally want to see where it points to.

Business Catalyst uses an arrow graphic to lead the visitor’s gaze onto the “Watch the video” button.

The content on the Silverback site flows down towards the download button. Additionally, the arrow on that button points towards the purchase link.

Structure your content in a way that will flow towards something. Having a bunch of scattered feature descriptions may confuse and make your visitors lost, unless of course if all of the points end in calls to action. If you want to ensure your visitors don’t miss anything, align everything in a linear structure so that the user scans along it. Make sure to end it with the ultimate call to action: that signup or download link.

7. Always Provide Next Actions

ABC: Always Be Closing. If you’re designing a website to sell something, whether a software application or Web service, you should always be thinking about how you’re closing the deal on each page. This doesn’t mean filling every page with big “Buy now” buttons; it means when the customer is ready to buy, they shouldn’t have to look around for the check-out link.

Notice how each of the three bits of text on the Skype website has a call to action after it, whether it’s a “Learn more” or a purchase link.

Always provide next-action links to keep the flow going and to ensure you don’t lose the attention of potential customers. Next-action links can direct the visitor to a page with more information about the product or to the actual page where they can make the purchase or sign up. These links could read something like: “Ready to order? Click here,” “Learn more,” “Take the tour” or “Shop now.”
Don’t leave a dead end on any page: always suggest to your visitors where they should go next.

8. The Gutenberg rule

The Gutenberg diagram (or the Gutenberg rule) is a concept that maps out something called reading gravity. Reading gravity describes a habit of reading in the western world: left to right, top to bottom. The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the “Primary Optical Area” in top left, the “Strong Fallow Area” in top right, the “Weak Fallow Area” in the bottom left and a “Terminal Area” in bottom right.

The Gutenberg diagram

It suggests that the bottom left area of the page will get least attention as our eyes scan the page from top left to bottom right and that our glance would end up in the lower right portion of the page. How can we utilize this concept? Buttons and calls to action could be placed in bottom right instead of bottom left, as this is the place where the visitor’s glance is likely to alight.

Notice how GoodBarry has the trial signup button placed at the bottom right of the above the fold area of the landing page.

Note that the Gutenberg diagram is more likely to work on pages which have more a balanced distribution of content. If parts of your page have strong highlights through high contrast and bold typography, then those areas would likely attract more attention and so will direct the way a user scans the page.