As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. And it couldn’t be more true for anyone selling products online. Online merchants are often challenged by a consumer’s inability to physically handle the product—to touch, to feel, to turn the product around and look it over in person—before deciding to make a purchase. It’s one advantage traditional brick and mortar establishments continue to hold over e-commerce. To help close the gap, be sure to use product images that show the product in its best light and that highlight its best features. Use only professional, high quality images. Make them big, make them zoom-able and show the details. Offer views from different angles and show any alternative variations. It can also help to show the product in context to demonstrate size, how it’s used, or to help your customers imagining themselves using it.
General Online Marketing
Create a sense of urgency
People often think too hard, wait too long, procrastinate, or simply don’t respond when presented with a call to action. As a result, many of these potential leads or customers don’t end up converting at all. By creating a sense of urgency, you can persuade your users to react more quickly, reducing some of the mental friction created by offering too much time to make a decision. Experiment with incorporating techniques such as scarcity, countdowns or loss-aversion into your sales copy to improve conversion rates.
Encapsulate your form or call to action
If your webpage contains a form, it’s likely that your primary goal is getting users to fill it out. To make sure your form is the focal point of your page, use a container to highlight what’s inside. Encapsulating your form or call to action can be as simple as adding an outline or box around it. Avoid allowing form fields to float with the rest of your content and risking them getting lost with other page elements. By framing in your form, you can help constrain your users’ point of interest to your primary objective.
Ask people to share, like or rate your content
If you want more people to like your posts, share your content, or rate your product, just ask. Direct calls to action for social engagement can often be the nudge your audience needs to react the way you want them to. It’s not uncommon for studies to show triple digit percentage increases in engagement when users are simply asked to like, share or follow a page. A call to action is one of the most important pieces to your marketing campaign and including one in your social strategy should be no exception.
Personalize your content
Nurture your users by personalizing the content they see. If you have it, pull information such as name, location, referral source, etc. from your database or link appends, and dynamically insert it into your page or email copy. For example, let’s imagine we have a job board with a headline that reads, “Companies are hiring people like you:”. If we know where they’re searching, we can personalize the headline with dynamic fields. It then becomes, “Companies in Cleveland are hiring people like you”. This adds to the user experience by speaking more specifically to each user’s needs. Of course, you might not always have the information to dynamically insert for every user, so always be sure to set a default entry, such as “in your area”, or word the content in a way so that the dynamic fields can simply be left out, as we did in the example above.
Add trust logos or badges
Trust logos or badges can help you add an element of trust to your website or landing page, boosting your overall conversion rate. If you’re a member of a business organization, were the recipient of an award, a stellar rating, or hold other accolades, show them off by including the logos or badges on your page. Examples include anything from Rotary membership badges or Better Business Bureau ratings to the logos of well known clients who have trusted your work. Try including them in close proximity to known anxiety-producing elements, such as lead forms or transactional buttons. By displaying trust badges, you can help reassure your users of your good reputation and that they won’t be cheated or scammed.
Let your users know what to expect next
Leave out the guesswork. Set expectations. Being vague won’t get people to click on your button or call to action. People like to be in control. Don’t leave them guessing what the next step will be. Show your users where they stand in lengthy processes. Incorporate progress bars. Be clear about what will happen once they complete a lead form or place an order. Clicking submit without knowing exactly what to expect next creates uncertainty. Uncertainty creates friction—and friction can kill the success rate of your page.
Add an actionable icon like an arrow to your primary button.
Experiment with adding some strategic iconography to your primary button. Choose actionable icons, such as forward-facing arrows, that suggest to the user that something expected is about to happen next as a result of clicking on it. For downloads, you might test out a down-facing arrow or even file type icons, such as the Adobe pdf icon. Actionable icons can reinforce anticipation, or even set expectations and can help persuade your visitors to take the next step.
Add a directional cue or arrow
A strong hierarchy is important to any goal-driven webpage design. While there are many ways to develop a strong hierarchy, directional cues are a great way to help you reinforce it. Directional cues are visual elements that direct visitors’ attention to certain areas of your page. They can be explicit, like lines or arrows that point in the direction of your goal—or suggestive, like a photo of a person gazing, pointing or making a gesture toward your goal. Experiment with different ways to direct visitors toward your goal.
Align what you’re requesting of the user with the benefit being offered
Whether you’re utilizing some kind of link bait to drive email signups or campaigning for large scale initiatives, always make sure that what you’re requesting of the user aligns with the benefit being offered. As an extreme example, requiring users’ Social Security numbers might be completely acceptable for a college application. The benefit of obtaining a college degree outweighs any risk of providing personally identifiable information. On the other hand, if you were to require Social Security numbers in return for a flimsy pdf download, then you’d likely have a lot of trouble obtaining leads! But, it may not always be this obvious. Even more common fields, such as a phone number or street address, could have the potential to negatively effect your form completion rates, depending on the benefit being offered. Take a look not only at your form fields, but at any hoops your users are being required to jump through in order to get to what they’re looking for.