When designing the landing page for CXL Institute, we conducted an experiment regarding our explainer video.
We wanted to find out how “trustworthy” and “attractive” different voices were perceived. In this CXL Institute study, we tested four different voices, which differed by gender and whether they were professional voice actors or not.
Question is, did it make a different in how people perceived our video content? Yes, and the results were somewhat surprising.
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If you’ve worked in marketing, sales, conversion optimization – any role that has to do with strategic communications/persuasion – you’re likely familiar with the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini and his principles of persuasion.
Since his last book, Influence, came out 30 some years ago, his work has done nothing but influence new generations of those of us in the strategic/persuasive communications space. Even if you haven’t read the book, you’ve probably heard of his 6 persuasion principles.
However, with Cialdini’s new book, Pre-Suasion, comes one new persuasion principle.
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When shopping online, you can’t hold the product, test it out, or talk to a salesperson about how different brands compare to one another. For these scenarios, social proof is frequently used to guide shoppers towards the best product choice.
Which brings us to the real question: Which social proof techniques are most effective? Are some of them totally ineffective?
This study from CXL Institute explores how different forms of social proof are perceived (with eye-tracking), and then how they are recalled (with post-task survey questions).
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As an optimizer, you might be thinking that user interviews fall outside your role. Or, perhaps, that they are a “nice to have” on the qualitative conversion research checklist. Worse, you might not be asking good survey questions because you’re rolling with an “I’ll just wing it” mindset.
User interviews are more complex and important than most optimizers realize.
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As marketers, we’re all trying to improve the customer experience and increase conversions. We have these things in common.
However, some marketers are much better at understanding their customer personas and doing the right kind of research than others.
What is comes down to is that delivering a single message to your entire customer base is an inherently flawed strategy. High-value customers, frequent browsers, seldom purchasers, brand enthusiasts and first-time visitors are all differently characterized and must be engaged uniquely.
This is where customer micro-segmentation comes into play.
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I have been part of some the best conversion optimization teams in the world, and they seem to have an intuitive sense on how to run the best experiments. People that are involved in these teams share a similar mindset.
I wanted to try to make this a process, one that could teach any organization how to run better experiments. I wanted to try to make this mindset more explicit in a way that is fun to use.
There’s no rocket science that follows, but this framework may well help your team drive a more efficient optimization culture.
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Product page copy is something that, generally, gets ignored.
Not just the content, but how it is formatted.
In this 3 part study from CXL Institute on eCommerce product pages (part 1 here, and part 2 here), we wanted to explore how elements of a product page affect users’ visual and value perceptions.
This experiment looks at how users view a page and read product text descriptions when the text format changes.
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You can divide SEO tactics into two general categories: the black hat and the white hat.
I believe we can do a similar classification with conversion optimization. If we had two categories worth distinction they would be:
- BS CRO
- Intelligent CRO
Perhaps using the same concept of Black Hat and White Hat for conversion optimization is a step too far.
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The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right?
That’s the mentality of comparison shoppers. If they look hard and long enough, they will find a better value. If they don’t look around, they’ll miss out on greener grasses.
Today, the term “comparison shopper” describes the majority of consumers, especially those online. If you’re running an eCommerce or SaaS company, you absolutely must be optimizing for comparison shoppers.
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Do a quick Google search for “A/B testing mistakes,” and you’ll find a good amount of articles.
Common on those lists is the oft-repeated advice that you should “not make more than one change per test.”
As it turns out, like much of the advice in the conversion optimization world, it’s not so simple.
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