“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital,” said Aaron Levenstein, a former professor of business administration at Baruch College. [Tweet it!]
The same is true of your data in Google Analytics. Most of what you spend your time looking at (and re-looking at) is merely suggestive.
Writing copy that converts is a lot like boxing.
Your shots need to flow, and you need to be 3-4 steps ahead of your opponent. You have to predict their counters, slips and movement patterns before they even think of doing them.
Similarly, to craft high-converting copy, your sentences have to flow. And you have to anticipate your reader’s objections and be mindful of each word, sentence, and paragraph that enters their brain.
Sites that don’t work, don’t convert.
Website quality assurance (QA) is the process of checking that a site works as intended before bugs, broken tracking, accessibility problems, performance regressions, or technical SEO issues reach users.
That means more than opening the page in Chrome and checking that it looks right. A proper QA process tests critical journeys, forms, links, content, tracking, performance, accessibility, browsers, devices, integrations, and the technical signals that affect how search engines access the site.
A study by Google had two key findings:
Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites—those with layouts commonly associated with sites of their category—that also had a simple website design were rated the most beautiful.
In other words, the study found that the simpler the design, the better.
Back in 1984, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini wrote a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This posited six principles of persuasion and explained how to use them. Since then, it’s been widely hailed as a seminal book on marketing—something everyone in conversion optimization should read.
In 2016, he published another key book, called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. This added a seventh principle of persuasion to the list, and provided new inspiration to a whole new generation of marketers. Robert Cialdini’s influence on the field of marketing has been immeasurable.
What if there were a method—even a process—that you could apply to increase website sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is.
I’ve turned it into a checklist.
User flow is the path a user follows through your website interface to complete a task—make a reservation, purchase a product, subscribe to something. It’s also called a user journey.
And it has a massive impact on conversions.
To maximize your conversions, you have to get the user flow right on your site. Do it by building a user flow that matches user’s needs.
You’ve read about color psychology, system one and two, emotional persuasion, etc. I know you have because it’s everywhere. It’s on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., HelpScout, HubSpot… you name it. Hell, we’ve covered some of these topics ourselves.
Why? Well, because many psychological triggers do, in fact work.
But there’s another side to using psychology online that almost no one is talking about: backfiring.
Psychology isn’t a magic formula that can be applied to optimization seamlessly in all scenarios, despite what many self-identified experts are preaching today. [Tweet It!]
How you design a survey can change the answers you get. Question wording, question order, response labels, the number of response options, and whether you include a midpoint can all influence how respondents answer.
Customer journey mapping is a widely used and impactful technique that can help you improve your product, marketing, UX, and merchandising decisions.
However, like other UX research techniques (including user personas), there’s some vagueness and obscurity around how to actually create user journey maps.