In that vein, allow me to explain why Batman is better than Superman, and how putting this knowledge to work could increase your leads and sales.

The way I see it, there are three main reasons:

1. Batman actually has to try

One of the most annoying things about Superman is how overpowered he is. I mean, it’s bad enough that he’s indestructible, can fly to alternate dimensions at will, and that his sneeze will destroy an entire solar system.

But it’s even more annoying that, despite his ability to hear every conversation on the planet, multitask at speeds where common mortals appear motionless, assimilate complex books in seconds, freeze or melt most materials, see through anything except lead, move well in excess of 5,000 feet per second, and let’s not forget fly…not only has he been completely unsuccessful at eliminating crime worldwide, but he can’t even get it under control in a single city.

This implies that he is not merely dimwitted and incompetent, but also incredibly lazy. Even a determined moron—or an indolent genius—with these sorts of powers would still have solved the problem by now. If you gave Batman those powers, the world would be a very different place. Yet Batman manages to keep Gotham under control with nothing but a good brain, a buff (but super-powerless) physique, and a few billion dollars’ worth of custom technology.

How this could improve your conversions

I know. This is all extremely interesting, and you probably had a great rebuttal ready for that snarky comment about indolence (because, if nothing else, All Star Superman established beyond doubt that Superman is a genius)—but what in the blue blazes does it have to do with increasing leads and sales?

Just this: when you’re deciding how you want to position your brand—how you want your customers to perceive you—it’s very tempting to take on the role of Superman. You’d like to think you’re their flawless savior, flying in to the rescue with nary an effort.

The trouble is, customers aren’t looking for a Superman, because Superman is silly. They’re looking for a Batman—someone who can achieve great things, not because he was born that way, but because he has paid his dues in the School of Hard Knocks. Someone who doesn’t pretend he can give them the world when he can’t; but who can give them what they want, because he has developed that ability through skill and determination. While Superman breezes through any challenge (or would, if he remembered to use all his powers), Batman has to face adversity and overcome it. That makes him more relatable, and subsequently more trustworthy.

Simply put, Batman is believable, and Superman isn’t. So when you’re formulating your brand story, where believability is crucial, keep that in mind.

2. Batman has skin in the game

Clark Kent was raised by good, honest parents to be a good, honest, rose-tinted farm boy. Bruce Wayne was also raised by good, honest parents—until a tender age, when they were brutally gunned down before his very eyes by Joe Chill, a petty criminal.

This gives us a certain sense that Batman has real skin in the game when it comes to crime fighting, while Superman is just doing it to please his parents. That isn’t to say his belief in Truth, Justice and the American Way is wrong…just that it rings kinda hollow when, as we’ve already established, he is really doing the bare minimum. When you’re basically a god, but you spend a sizable portion of your time pretending to be a nerdy reporter instead of using your powers to save the world (something you claim to strongly believe in)…well, it just comes across as a bit like you’re going through a superhero phase, as opposed to actually being a superhero.

Batman, by contrast, spends his off hours either running his company, or finding ways to relax (you know what I’m talking about). Both these things are of the utmost necessity to maintaining his role as Batman; which is financially, physically, and emotionally stressful.

The upshot is that Batman puts everything into a cause he has vowed to uphold since childhood, while Superman just seems to be coasting along, putting a bit of time in because he knows he should. Batman really seems to stand for justice and freedom; Superman just pays lip service to them.

How this could improve your conversions

Customers want a vendor who stands for something. Not someone who will fight for them just because he happens to be there and it’s really no trouble, but someone who will put everything he has into getting the job done, no matter the cost—because that is his cause. The more fiercely you stand for something your customers care about—whether it’s beautiful technology that just works, a la Apple, or “free as in freedom” a la Linux—the more fiercely they will support you.

3. Batman has serious flaws

This might sound like a strange reason to think Supes is inferior, but bear with me. Superman, as everyone knows, is a bit of a goody two-shoes. A big blue boy scout. That’s probably for the best, since we only have to look to titles like Irredeemable or The Boys to know what would happen if he were less stable upstairs. Batman, by contrast, tends to brood a lot, and is known for being dangerously obsessive about fighting crime. Simply put, he’s kind of damaged.

Incidentally, the same is true of Iron Man, who garners a great deal more interest (and movies) than Captain America. There’s something going on there, psychologically speaking.

How this could help your conversions

By now you’re probably picking up on how this works, but let me explain it anyway.

Superman seems aloof, unrelatable, or just plain bland by being too perfect. Batman, on the other hand, seems genuine. Customers don’t expect flawlessness—indeed, they are automatically suspicious of it, because no one is flawless. And although it seems counterintuitive to us as marketers, one of the ways customers become more loyal is by defending the flaws of the brands they love. They often consider these foibles to be idiosyncratic—part of what sets the brand apart. “It’s a feature, not a bug.”

This is especially important if you’re a one-man band, or you use a single person (or personality) for presenting your brand in your email marketing. But regardless of how big you are, or what you’re selling, it generally increases customer trust and loyalty when you are frank about your shortcomings. Pretending to be perfect has the opposite effect.

Let the flamewar begin

So there you have three reasons to take a Batman approach to marketing. What do you think of my reasoning? Is Batman’s victory decisive, or do you think Superman still has a few things to teach us? Share your insights below.

About the Author: D Bnonn Tennant is the author of the free email micro-course, “5 Sales-Spiking Website Tweaks Gurus & Designers Don’t Know”. It contains no super-heroes, but there are plenty of practical, actionable tips Batman would approve of.

Charge for features no one cares about enough to upgrade, and no one will upgrade. Charge for features essential to user engagement, and no one will stick around long enough to build a relationship with your product and upgrade. Knowing what to charge for is essential and specific to every product.

Fortunately, some patterns have emerged that we can understand and use to improve our own pricing methodology. Let’s look at 3 SaaS products that intelligently aligned user experience and pricing to capture maximum value.

Buffer

Buffer lets you share content to social networks more effectively. The value is both convenience and efficacy. You can share to multiple networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) with a single click.

Moreover, Buffer automatically schedules posts for you and spaces them out. This way, you avoid overwhelming your followers, appear to be active on social media all the time, and most importantly, get higher visibility and click-through rates because Buffer is helping you optimize the timing and distribution of your content.

You can get all of this value without paying a dime. Yet Buffer is on a $1M+ run-rate with more than 10,000 people paying $10 every month for their Awesome Plan. Why? Here are some of the things they do that make people upgrade:

Put a Cap on Core Functionality: More Posts

Suppose I am a social media personality that other people follow for advice on certain topics, like user experience or product management. Or, maybe I am a community management team for a brand that needs to maintain an active presence for our followers. I will be sharing a lot of content. But once I have 10 items in my Buffer, I need to upgrade in order to add more items.

Given that the core behavior of sharing on Buffer is indeed valuable, users who need more posting capacity are likely to pay when they hit the limit. However, it’s important that Buffer allows users to first share up to ten posts in order for them to experience and understand why this sharing is valuable. Paying upfront with no free option would require a pipeline of prospects who know the value of social sharing optimization. In a new market like social sharing optimization, this level of consumer understanding is unlikely.

Identify an action that your best users take. Does that action provide users with value when they take it but cause a little pain if you limit how many times they can take it? If so, it is a feature that could be given some sort of cap among your free user base.

Make Life More Convenient: More Synchronized Accounts

Earlier we pointed out that Buffer is a convenient way to share across networks. It would be annoying to have to post the same content across additional networks instead of just once, seamlessly.

Notably, Buffer lets you sync a couple of accounts for free. (I have my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts connected.) But as soon as it is clear that a customer is, say, a business with a social media presence across multiple LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and so on, then there is a pay wall. Buffer deliberately lets you get a taste with a couple of free synced accounts without giving away the entire sync system.

If users could get away with syncing unlimited accounts and there was a cap on only the number of posts, I would guess that fewer people would upgrade, and those people would just cope with slightly slower content pipelines.

Can your product do something automatically that is mindless for someone to have to do on their own? Making it clear you can do it for them, but requiring an upgrade to unlock the convenience, often tempts people past the free plan.

WebEx

WebEx is a conferencing solution that allows users to start for free, but they must pay for premium features, such as including more participants and a dial-in number.

Help People Avoid Looking Unprofessional: Add Participants

WebEx charges if you want to add more than just two participants to a call. Sure, you could just forward the invitation to as many people as you want, but they won’t be on the meeting invitation formally.

Meetings tend to be defined by the attendees. If you leave people off of the invitation, so they don’t receive a formal meeting invitation, they may feel unwelcome or think you behaved unprofessionally (if they even attend!).

There’s a certain standard expectation for invitations that come from systems – either Google Calendar, Outlook, or a conferencing system like WebEx. Receiving a two-liner from a vendor with some jotted-down call information may not seem quite legitimate.

If you are serious about your conference call, WebEx makes the cap on invitees so low that upgrading is required to appear professional.

When your audience is in a professional setting, giving them the tools to appear up to snuff can be a chance to charge.

Reduce Friction for People: Dial-in Number

Nowadays, conference calls are taking place regularly while people are on the go. At least one of your participants may not be staring at their laptop with their ear buds plugged in, eagerly awaiting your call. A dial-in number ensures that people can call no matter what, even if they are mobile or even if they have no Internet, etc. The last thing you want to do is frustrate a sales prospect or your boss who just wants to join the meeting.

Also, a dial-in number is a bit of a standard these days; therefore, to some extent, it’s a matter of being professional.

Figure out if your product is a tool your users need in front of other people or if it is leverage they need to look good in their boss’s eyes. If so, then that’s a pinch point where you probably can inject friction until the user upgrades to the paid plan. No one wants to look bad in front of sales prospects, partners, or their boss.

HelloFax

HelloFax provides an online sending and receiving service that makes fax machines obsolete. Among other functionality, they charge to receive faxes and send faxes to multiple recipients during a single process.

Replace an Expensive Incumbent More Cheaply: Receive Faxes

HelloFax charges for receiving faxes digitally instead of via your fax machine. This lets you move off of your fax machine – no more repairs, no more paper, etc. This makes a ton of sense because the financial cost to support a fax machine easily outweighs the low end $10/month that HelloFax charges.

If your product allows someone to eliminate a more expensive alternative, your pricing can capture from 0% up to 99.9% of that value.

Make Life More Convenient (Part 2): Multiple Fax Recipients

Going through the process of sending a fax for a second time just to add another person is tedious. “Let me just add a 2nd recipient!” Imagine that for 10 recipients, and the pain of inconvenience becomes even more apparent, just as it did with Buffer and posting across 10 different social networks.

People are used to adding multiple recipients on content, whether it’s email messaging or mentioning on social networks, etc. By withholding this functionality, HelloFax ensures that people looking for the most convenient experience (who need to fax a document to more than just one person) will upgrade.

If your product can save someone time, and it forces them into unnecessary manual labor if they don’t upgrade, then (absent an alternative) they will upgrade.

Summary Takeaways

Withholding useful features arguably worsens the user experience. But the real world doesn’t operate with people giving away free cars as soon as you walk into a dealership, or showering you with fresh fruit to feast on when you walk into a supermarket. So, there’s no reason to believe you have to give all of your best functionality away in your software, either.

• Identify who your power users are and make sure you’re monetizing their extreme behaviors without detracting from the core user experience.
• Work is social: customers, partners, and bosses. Charge for making your customer look good.
• If you can make the convenience and/or return on investment of your product obvious, be sure to capture some of the value you are saving the user.

Figure out what your users are willing to pay for without driving them away, and you’ll unlock a lucrative product and pricing strategy. In a future post, we’ll explore a framework for applying these patterns to your own product and the differences between converting free users to customers and up-selling paid customers to more comprehensive packages.

About the Author: Jason Shah is the creator of HeatData, a mobile gesture analytics platform for tracking how people interact with mobile websites. Jason is also a Product Manager at Yammer, where he focuses on building out new features for the leading enterprise social network. He blogs regularly at blog.jasonshah.org and tweets shorter thoughts @jasonyogeshshah.

You see, while it might make you feel good (and it should) to see all that traffic, more traffic isn’t all that you need from your blog. In fact, it is often true that higher traffic pages also bring in the lowest conversion rates. This means that more people arrive at your page through search, take one look, read what they need, and head the other direction. They never materialize into a tangible lead or long-time reader.

This is often referred to as high bounce traffic. It usually isn’t good, unless you are willing to do something about it.

Making A Bounce Count

We recently did an inventory of high bounce pages on our own marketing blog. We had several posts – some a couple of years old – that were receiving a large share of the traffic to our site. They were good posts, and were great at being a continuous draw for readers, but they had a fatal flaw: most people came and then left quickly. The traffic was there, but it wasn’t doing us any good.

Chances are that your blog suffers from the same problem. What can you do about it?

The first step is to understand how your traffic is coming and going. To do this, use Google Analytics.

A simple content breakdown of your sites pages will reveal a lot. You can get here by clicking Content > Site Content > All Pages from the Google Analytics dashboard. You should see something like this:

With Google Analytics, you can easily identify high bounce pages.

The main thing that you are looking for here are pages with an extremely high bounce rate. We targeted pages that offered a 85% or higher bounce rate. We hypothesized that with a few simple changes we could significantly improve our daily lead conversions on these specific pages. Since they commanded such a large amount of traffic, we believed that they were key targets for conversion optimization.

Our hypothesis proved true, and we doubled our leads in less than a week. Here’s how we did it.

Find A Cookie

The key making all of this work is what we have come to call ‘the cookie’, that reward you offer up front. What are you dangling in front of your readers? What reasons are you giving them to come onboard? For many bloggers, a free ebook or an offer to join an email mailing list is the major goal. For others, it may be a more in-depth sales lead.

The key is matching your cookie with the content that your users are viewing. Because they are already on a specific post, it is pretty easy to understand what content your audience is looking for.

Visitors looking for general help on making a better website were first shown a pop-up offering a related ebook before they could access the content they came looking for.

Visitors that wanted help with optimizing Facebook were already primed for any Facebook content. Why not offer them a free ebook first?

A high-bounce post about something as simple as setting up a Twitter profile indicated there were many new Twitter users eager for help on using Twitter. We had an ebook just for them.

In our example, you can clearly see that Twitter and Facebook are the key topics of interest. We already had ebooks available on those key topics. We decided to offer these visitors an ebook on the topic they were looking for in a more persistent way: they could not immediately access the blog post unless they dealt with the pop-up offer. Visitors to a post about Facebook would be encouraged to get an ebook about the Facebook Timeline. Readers of our popular Twitter posts would get an offer for a free ebook about Twitter.

The important thing is that your cookie should be something that these visitors are clearly telling you they’re interested in. If they are arriving on a Facebook page, don’t offer an ebook about Pinterest. They’ve already told you what they wanted, so give it to them. The cookie must relate to the content if you want them to bite.

Make the Pitch

The trickiest part is making the pitch, deciding how you will present the cookie to the reader. We based our decision on what our pitch would be after considering some things we knew about our goals, our blog, and its audience:

• We wanted to target visitors on high bounce pages only. No need to hassle every reader on every post.
• Because we knew the content of the high bounce page, we wanted to offer visitors something they would actually want.
• We offered a high-quality cookie, and gave them a good reason to convert. It was geared to help them just as much as us.
• We opted to be a little more aggressive on these pages than we normally are, because of the high bounce rates. Most of these visitors are leaving anyway!

For our blog, we opted to create a popup box on each of the high traffic pages offering a free ebook for download. Readers could get around it by clicking the darkened area, but there was no obvious way to close the pop-up box otherwise.

Perhaps a pop-up isn’t something you want to use. There are other methods that might fit your blog better. The hello bar at the top of the page would work. Even an inline form in the middle of the blog post, asking them to sign up for your email list or free ebook would do the trick.

What you choose to do is based on what you know about your audience, and what you’re able to set up on your own blog. You’ll want to watch conversion stats to see how well your method is working, and if you need to be more (or less) aggressive.

Pitch Selectively

You might wonder why we wouldn’t do this on every blog post, if it increased our leads so much. In our case, it mainly has to do with the method we chose, the pop-up.

Respect Regular Readers: We wanted to avoid the “annoyance” factor with our regular readers, those who were signed up for our emails and coming into our blog repeatedly. They’ve already been “converted” on our site and are on our email list. The last thing we want to do is throw a pop-up in their face repeatedly. Since newer posts still received traffic from our Facebook and Twitter fans, we didn’t want to bombard them, either.

Pop-Up Intrusion: Let’s face it. Pop-ups, while they convert, are annoying. Rarely do readers enjoy dealing with a pop-up before getting to the content. The traffic on these particular posts we chose are one-time visitors, interested in getting the content and leaving. We placed the possible conversion as more important than annoying them. Using the hello bar, or inline forms, is less intrusive and you could very easily use them with higher frequency without having to worry about these issues. A pop-up is fairly aggressive and persistent.

Content Relevancy: Other posts get high bounce traffic, too, and they may be something we’ll consider adding pop-ups to in the future. It’s definitely something we’re keeping an eye on, not just for targeting pages for pop-ups, but also as a suggestion for possible ebook topics that our traffic stats tell us people want.

For now, we decided to focus on these top few posts that we’ve seen consistently topping the charts for over a year. We want to watch how these conversions do, which leads us to the next important aspect: paying attention to the numbers.

Watch The Results

The fun part is actually watching the conversions roll in.

You will want to identify your key metrics before you make the switch so that you can measure the boost in performance  This helps you prove  scientifically that your changes made a difference. It also allows you to make additional tweaks and changes that are influenced by hard data. A change based on solid data is always better than a best guess.

We use KISSmetrics to track our own conversions.

The results were clear. In a mere 7 days, our lead conversions were up by over 50%! It was easy!

Conclusion

Most of the time, improved conversions and better traffic is right under your nose if you choose to make the time to look at what your analytics are telling you. Answers to what your audience wants are right there, and you only need to learn to interpret what you’re seeing and think of ways to use it to your advantage. This particular method didn’t even require a deep dive into the numbers; it only required us to pay attention to the high traffic posts. Instead of being satisfied with mere traffic numbers, we wanted to do something with that traffic.

As bloggers, it can be easy to focus on the blogging, leaving important conversion tracking and blog improvements in the dust. It never hurts to tweak, especially if we put a little science behind our experiments.

About the Author: Garrett Moon is a founder at Todaymade, a web development and content marketing company, and the makers of CoSchedule, a WordPress-integrated app that makes content marketing and social media easy.

Most of us aren’t that lucky. As a matter of fact, asking our users to do something, sometimes has the opposite effect!

There is a usability feature called a completeness meter that is employed by companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Box. These types of progress bars inform users of how close they are to completing a set of tasks by showing percentages of completion along the way.

Normally, these are used to encourage new users to add personal information or perform activities to develop a much richer user experience. You can think of a progress bar as missions or levels for a web application.

A Little Flash Back To Social Gaming

This area of onboarding fascinates me because of my social gaming background where I realized something. A lot of our games weren’t that great. But we had millions of users…who were addicted! One way we achieved this was by using proven game mechanics such as missions, points, social dynamics, and engagement loops.

If you do it right, you can make your game more addictive than semi-hard street drugs. In my first year of college, my roommate stayed up until 4:00 a.m. every day playing World of Warcraft. And this other guy lost his job as an English professor. Tragically, this guy actually died. And, sadly, this mom got 25 years in jail. That’s pretty powerful stuff if you can kill someone or make a mother forget her baby with it.

We can use the same techniques to make business applications better and more engaging. In fact, if I had to pick out the most effective tool for onboarding a user, it would be the progress bar.

Progress Bar/Quest List on Game of Thrones Ascent (Facebook game)

Psychology of the Completeness Meter

People want progress bars. In the famous paper “The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces,” Dr. Brad Myers of University of Toronto found people prefer to have progress indicators. Research companies, Lightspeed Research and Kantar, did a study on progress indicators for surveys which also corroborates the idea that people want a progress bar:

• Progress indicators increase survey satisfaction.
• Progress indicators increase respondent engagement.
• When respondents in the no-progress-bar group were asked whether they prefer to have some indication of progress, 75 percent said yes.

Okay, so people want progress bars. But why are they so powerful and effective for engagement?

It’s because, as people, we are driven to:

1. Have goals; and then
2. Accomplish goals.

We inherently feel good about achieving something. Dr. Hugo Liu from MIT and Hunch.com says in his article Need to Complete, “It turns out that when you finish a complex task, your brain releases massive quantities of endorphins.”

In their book Rules of Play, Dr. Katie Salen at Parsons the New School for Design and Dr. Eric Zimmerman of MIT explain, “Without a measure of progress to give a player feedback on the meaning of his or her decisions, meaningful play is not possible.”

Let’s look at the psychological effects at work in more detail. Dr. Tom Stafford from University of Sheffield, wrote a fascinating piece on BBC about why Tetris was such a massive success. In short, we have a deep-seated psychological drive to clean up, and Tetris holds our attention by continually creating unfinished tasks:

“Trivia takes advantage of this goal orientation by frustrating us until it is satisfied. Tetris goes one step further, and creates a continual chain of frustration and satisfaction of goals. Like a clever parasite, Tetris takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in getting things done and uses it against us. We can go along with this, enjoying the short-term thrills in tidying up those blocks, even while a wiser, more reflective, part of us knows that the game is basically purposeless. But then all good games are, right?”

So what is it about uncompleted tasks? It’s basically the need for closure and the Zeigarnik Effect. In the 1930s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed waiters had fantastic memories for orders, but only until the orders had been delivered. She describes this phenomenon as incomplete tasks that remain stuck in memory until they are completed. Both of these effects are built into progress bars.

First, we try to mentally fill in the gaps under Gestalt psychology’s Law of Closure. Our attention is held there as we envision completeness. The incompleteness causes tension (stress).

Second, we do things to resolve the tension. In operant conditioning, this is called negative reinforcement or removing something distasteful. For example, Apple’s iOS has shown us we can remove the ugly and annoying persistent badge if we update our apps. Some people are happy with their apps, but they will update just to make those numbers disappear because they are an annoyance (negative stimulus). With a progress bar, a person can achieve something (positive reinforcement) and remove an annoyance (negative reinforcement) at the same time.

I believe product designers can use this knowledge to hold users’ attention and get them to better understand and derive value from the app. So, if you don’t, you’ll have lost your users before they even know how great your application is. And whose fault is that?

Examples of Progress Bars in Web applications

Dropbox has a wonderful “Get Started” interactive task list. I like the way it makes all those tasks seem fun with its cute visuals. (They also went a step further with Dropquest.)

LinkedIn has a brilliant completeness profile bar. Recently, it has been replaced with a cooler profile strength indicator. As a new user, you’ll have a little profile meter on the bottom right of your page. It’s not very intrusive, but there’s a small link that says “Improve Your Profile Strength.”

Once you click on it, you’ll see all the things you can do to complete your profile and move up a level.

Box has a great “How to Get Started” progress bar implementation as well. I didn’t notice it until I had completed 3 of its 6 steps. If you hover over the task, you’ll see a picture that gives the task context, instructions on how to complete the task, and in most cases a call to action link. This is very well done.

Building Your Own Progress Bar

Right now, most sign-up funnels and progress bars are built in-house. If you’re looking to make an awesome progress bar to help your users and get more activations, I highly recommend checking out UI Patterns’s completeness meter guide. There also are some great progress bar design examples on Quora.

To get an idea of how much effort it takes to build with custom code, we asked 7Geese and Socialscape. At 7Geese, it took them 7 days of development time to build a progress bar with interactive guiders. At Socialscape, it took them 1 day to build a hard-coded, 4-step getting-started bar. Neither one had the resources available to set up analytics.

Let’s estimate the cost of a basic progress bar with no analytics. Say you take their average and use 4 days. Assuming your developer costs $90,000 a year and works 40 hours a week, that’s about $43.27 per hour. Four days is worth $1,384.61.

Let’s see what results would be required to make this worth building.

Break Even Analysis

(new users) * ( lift in activation) * (value of an activation) = cost of development

Imagine we’re Shopify and assume, after building the progress bar, we get 100 new users. Each user has a LTV of $4,158 because they stick around for 3.5 years, pay 12 times a year, and the average payment is $99/month. We want to solve for the X which is the lift in activation break even point.

(100) * (X) * ($99*12*3.5) = $1,384.61

If they can get more than a 0.3% lift in activation because of the progress bar, it would make the investment worth it.

Shopify has 40,000+ stores right now, so I’m assuming they’ll probably see more than 100 new signups in the future. If they have 1,000 new signups, the required lift goes down to just 0.03%. Any more than that, it approaches zero. And that’s not even factoring in missions that can drive virality, which adds more users into the equation.

The numbers show it might make sense for your company to build a progress bar into your application, if you don’t have one already.

Final Thoughts and Tips

In summary, users want a progress bar, your app will benefit from a progress bar, and it’s generally financially profitable to build. Now that you’re all excited about making a cool progress bar, I’d like to offer a few tips:

1. Don’t shortcut analytics. It’s important. A progress bar is not only for the user. Wouldn’t you like to see at what point users most frequently abandon, where most of your users are, and which users might need help? Utilize analytics that can help you and your users.
2. Make meaningful missions. Even though the progress bar is powerful and inherently rewarding, you still should try to provide interesting missions for the user. It’s just like building a form – don’t ask for things you don’t need. Build only missions that are part of your funnel or drive value. For example, one of Dropbox’s missions is to “Upgrade your account.” That’s the last step of its funnel.
3. Add rewards. Dropbox gives free storage every time you complete a mission. Can you do something like that? If not, explain the value. For example, LinkedIn shows “Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn.”

Finally, there is very little data on the actual effectiveness of progress bars. I guess it’s kind of like setting up an experiment to see if riding a bike is faster than walking after buying a bike. But, if you’re curious, we’ll be collecting data on exactly just how much more engagement and funnel completion we see after web apps implement progress bars. Follow us on Kera’s Onboarding & UX Blog to get the results first.

About the Author: Taige Zhang is a well-traveled product marketer at Kera.io, a software startup specializing in onboarding for SaaS businesses. He previously worked in analytics and product management at Apple, WPP, and Rocket Internet startups. You can find him on Twitter here.

1. Self-importance

“Hello Peter—what’s happening. Uuuh, I’m going to have to ask you to…go ahead and…yeeeaaah. That would be great…”

No one wants to be this guy. Not even awful, self-important bosses. He thinks he’s good with people. He thinks he’s making things happen. But…no. Just no.

Unfortunately, just as with bosses, it’s terribly easy for landing pages to get like this. Here are a few common ways:

Trying to be clever instead of trying to be clear

This is a particular problem for headlines—using puns, for example, or trying to play on pop culture references. I once saw a headline on a chef-related site saying “Got food?” I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it doesn’t imply any promise to solve a problem or answer a question.

But cleverness can be an issue for far more than just headlines. On the website below, the attempt at cleverness starts with a confusing, seemingly irrelevant headline—but then cascades down until the entire design ends up looking like a Star Trek fan’s space enthusiast site:

Nattering on about themselves

“The CRM Software Leader,” ZohoCRM’s landing page declares. And this is really what self-importance is all about. Boasting. Not thinking of what others are interested in, because you’re too entranced with your own excellence. A particular problem, I’m afraid, for creative types—of which I regrettably am one. There’s only one thing prospects are interested in, and it ain’t you. It’s whatever problem they have in mind when they get to your page. Talk about that—or they’ll bounce. Here’s a web designer who lost the plot on this one:

Trying to sound impressive

I’m sure we’ve all met someone like the Harvard grad student in Good Will Hunting. You know, the one in the bar with the pony tail and penchant for passing off quotes from history books as his own original ideas? He likes apples.

For landing pages, the epitome of the equivalent egregious proclivity is characterized by such latinate vocabulary and nominalized language common to corporate marketing copy. Stuff that uses big, vague words to say very little, but sounds very grand doing it. It’s like Rice Krispies—takes up a lot of space; has virtually no substance. A thin layer of some tasteless, nutritionally-deficient material, blown up with a lot of hot air. There’s nothing to sink your teeth into:

But it doesn’t have to be complete marketese to turn prospects off. Here’s a page that tries to walk the tightrope between a conversational style and buzzword-infested fuzz-puff—but falls to its inevitable demise:

2. Impatience

Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny-Penny!

We all want to make a sale. And we’d prefer to make one sooner than later. If we had our druthers, a landing page would consist of one big call-to-action button right at the top.

Unfortunately—we realize this—our prospects need a little more to work with before they decide to do whatever it is we want them to. But not, you know, a lot more:

Fourteen words should enough for anyone to join something that involves investing—especially when we’re talking millions of dollars. Right?

Hrmm, maybe not.

The problem is actually not being impatient for an action. Rather, it is being impatient for a big action. For joining or signing up or paying or talking to a salesperson or whatever the case may be. Because actually, prospects are impatient too! They don’t want to read lots of copy, or have to put in a lot of effort. They want things quickly, they want things easily, and of course they want things cheaply. But this doesn’t translate into landing pages being able to ask for big actions right up front.

Rather, it translates into being able to ask for small actions. Prospects want to do things—but they also want to take baby steps. Like men, they’re afraid of commitment. They like to feel they’re being active, rather than passive. But they don’t like to take actions without knowing what they’re getting into. So give them small actions. Ones which will move them toward taking the big action you ultimately want, by gradually helping them learn about it and see that it’s for the best.

So less like this…

…and more like this:

3. Coyness

I hope you’ve been practicing your telepathy, because although I’ll never ask directly, I’d really like you to plant one on me.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have those pages which seem to have forgotten the reason they exist. Pages which go to all the trouble of enticing a prospect, getting them fired up…only to come over bashful at the last second and think better of asking for anything. Pages like this:

Some coy landing pages manage to at least whisper their desires with tiny buttons that fade into the background:

But in both cases, prospects aren’t inclined to stick around if they don’t immediately see what they can do. If they miss it, they have plenty of other landing pages to look at—which won’t be so reticent about asking for an action.

That’s 3 nasty habits—do you have any others to share?

Perhaps your landing pages aren’t condescending or pushy or shrinking violets. But they could be indulging many other bad habits. Have you encountered any? Share them in the comments.

About the Author: D Bnonn Tennant is an expert in a rare trifecta: marketing, copywriting and web design. He is the author of the free email micro-course “5 Sales-Spiking Website Tweaks Gurus & Designers Don’t Know”. When he isn’t teaching entrepreneurs how to turn more visitors into customers, he’s either knee-deep in the guts of someone’s landing page, or schooling his kids in the manly arts of archery, fisticuffs and how to grapple a zombie without getting bit.

Especially when we are constantly being bombarded with literature out there like: “How to Increase Your Sign Up Conversions!” and “How to Create the Ultimate Sign Up Button!”

And you might even say to yourself once in a while, “If I can just increase the sign up conversion rate X% we’re gold!”

However, this is probably not the area you want to focus on. As a matter of fact, if you spend most of your energy on the step after sign up, I’ll wager to say you’ll have a healthier business in the long run.

Now I’m not saying to not spend ANY energy on your sign up process, but really, most of your focus should go towards getting people to activate into paying customers.

Why? Well, there are two really important reasons:

1. Because honestly, getting people to sign up for something free is fairly easy. The real bottleneck in most SaaS conversion funnels is getting people to pay. And as we all know, unrestricting bottlenecks generally has a multiplying effect on your revenue.
2. By doing so, you’ll learn A TON of important information about what makes your customers value your service. This information is key for strategizing and growing your business.

Activation: Getting Users To Become Customers

Most SaaS businesses track this funnel:

Like we said earlier, it’s easy to get people to sign up for the “free stuff”. But how do we “activate” them into paying customers?

These users have read about your service, heard about it from a friend, and eventually decided to sign up. But that doesn’t mean they are ready to whip out their wallets right away. They will need to experience something valuable about your product first.

Activation is: The first point where you deliver the value that you promised.

Understanding this point in your own SaaS funnel is the key to getting your non-paying users to become paying customers.

Before I show you where you can learn about how to get new users to become paying customers, let’s go through some examples of companies that perform this magic trick really well…

Dropbox

We talk about Dropbox a lot on this blog, but for good reason. They do a lot of things really well.

In particular, they are wizards at getting free users to become paying customers. Check this out:

It actually starts at their super simple sign up page.

This is all about first impressions. Before anyone becomes a paying customer, the introductory experience is fairly simple. Keeping things simple turns out to be a very hard thing to do, but users generally pay for ease of use.

Notice that the download .exe is only 152 KB, about the size of most website background images! More painless, easy experiences…

The team at Dropbox are masters at the soft sell. They make you love their product first before you would ever need to upgrade. Most companies would FORCE you to upgrade and take advantage of the memory bind you may be in. That never leaves a good taste in a customer’s mouth.

Now if you’ve use their web interface, you’ll notice in the incredibly un-cluttered navigation a little icon that says “Get Free Space!” Clicking on that brings you to this wonderful page:

Look at the genius ways they have incorporated the ways users can obtain free space.

Let’s start with this one: Get started with Dropbox = 250 MB

This is smart for many reasons. But honestly, rewarding your customers to learn your product is as clever as it gets. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t upgrade is because they just aren’t aware of the other features that provide value.

You can make all the FAQ pages, videos, and infographics you want – but if your users never look at it – what purpose does this media really serve? What Dropbox has done here is brilliant because it’s an easy way to get this information across. All they had to do was get users to “take a tour” and reward them with something they want: FREE SPACE!

I’m going to skip over the Facebook and Twitter connections because it’s fairly obvious.

Let’s look at that last one: Tell us why you love Dropbox = 125 MB

This is a great way to complete your product design cycle: incentivizing users to give feedback. You need a continual monitoring program to really hone your product. Knowing why people love your product does many things:

• It gives you the language that resonates with your customers. They tell you why they like your product in “Customer Speak”. That’s gold. Use these phrases in your marketing copy and see what results pile in.
• They tell you what use cases make their lives easier. This is a real eye opener sometimes. Knowing why your customers use your product is a great way to stay on the right development track – instead of following some pipe dream that the founding team THOUGHT would be the saving grace of the company years ago (over beers and pizza of course). This becomes a mechanism to help you improve the new user experience ;) – which is what helps you increase the amount of paying customers.

Ultimately what all this boils down to is: They have created a user experience that people love. Nothing is hard. Free space is easy to come by. Trust is built. And most importantly – users most likely have spent plenty of time using the product, getting comfortable with it – and of course: now probably depend on it.

Now when it’s time to upgrade – having the customer pull the trigger is easy. There is no harsh transition. If all their files are already in Dropbox, and their colleagues and friends are using it…getting them to pay a little every month is very reasonable.

So ask yourself: How can you create a similar “courting experience” with your product? Chew on that for a while and you’ll probably get excited enough to call a meeting soon :).

Finally, in this example – we should ask one very important question: How does the new user experience (NUX for short) help get users to paid activation?

In the case of Dropbox: Getting users to sync files.

So in your own case, be sure you can identify the one thing that you must get users to do to see the value in your product.

Shopify

Unlike Dropbox, which has a somewhat long term, slow sell strategy – Shopify is all about getting the new user experience right in the first 15 minutes.

Right off the bat the home page video addresses the problem and solution in the simplest manner possible.

Setting up an online store is a breeze. 3 fields and you’re on your way…

And here’s the smart step. They put the slightly painful process of account details AFTER you have created your store:

Once you fill out this form you’re ready to rock.

Now, I’m not going to get into how easy it is to add products (because it’s pretty darn easy). This post is about the courting experience I’m having with Shopify before I become a paying customer.

As an ecommerce business owner, a few things will be worrying me before I fully commit. First off – the issue of merchant accounts: How does it work? What are the fees?

As I peer down the page I see that every possible method is probably integrated with my Shopify account. As I learn more, they are fully able to interact with almost all merchant gateways.

What about if I want to use Shopify functionality on my own website? Well one simple chat confirms that I can.

And finally, what if I want to shoot my existing domain name over to this pre-made online shop?

By clicking on the domain’s button in this progress bar, I find out that’s not an issue either.

The lesson here is it only took about 10 minutes of my time to set up a shop and find answers to all the questions that were lurking around in my head – questions that would potentially cause me to click away and never finish my trial.

Intuitive usability always helps you covert trial users into paying customers. With that said – relentlessly find out what your customer’s pain points are and make it very easy to find answers to their potential issues. And of course, make set-up as painless as possible.

“A lot of the power of the Shopify model comes from the step-by-step breakdown. There’s no confusion on what to focus on next.” – Lars Lofgren, Analytics Guru at KISSmetrics

Finally, if Shopify provides an easy way for me to make a livelihood online, I will probably stick around past the free trial and become a paying customer. Especially, if I’m already driving traffic to my Shopify store.

How does the new user experience (NUX for short) help get users to paid activation?

In the case of Shopify: getting users to sell an item. And the only way to do that is to be able to help them set up shop quickly and easily.

So How Do You Improve Your SaaS Activation Funnel?

Getting people to check out your product for free is pretty easy. The hard part is getting them to pay for it.

The whole point of improving your SaaS activation funnel is to get your users to see the core benefit of your value as soon as possible. If they don’t see the value in your product, you’ve lost them.

And you do that by structuring the activation process to help users to get to that point of “value enlightenment”.

Since every single one of you has a slightly different SaaS activation scenario, we are going to have a webinar to help you all out.

We’ll go through the fundamentals of how you can improve this process, as well as our famous Q&A session. Here it is:

About The Author: Sean Work is the Inbound Marketing Manager at KISSmetrics. To keep up to date on future KISSmetrics articles, please follow him on Twitter or on Google Plus.

People are visiting your site, but for some reason, you’re not seeing your other numbers move at all. Should you throw up your hands and conclude that your marketing doesn’t work?

Not yet. The first thing you might want to look at is what people do after they go through your ads. If you don’t have a good landing page, it’s like going fishing without a net: you might land a big one on your hook, but you won’t be able to drag it into the boat.

You don’t want people to just visit your page. You want them to take action once they are there. So make it as easy and compelling as possible for them by including these elements found in a landing page that CONVERTS:

C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof

CLEAR CALL TO ACTION

In a famous scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, the man sent to train the hapless salesmen sums up his sales mantra – ABC: Always Be Closing. This should be the mantra of your landing page, too. And the way you accomplish ABC is by focusing on your call to action.

The call to action (CTA) is what you want visitors to do: Shop Now. Sign Up. Try It. Contact Us. See Our Video.

Whatever it is you’ve decided will move people further along your conversion funnel. That’s what you should be asking them, clearly and temptingly, to do. Don’t distract them with lots of other requests. The best pages accentuate only one CTA.

Considerations for strategy

This is a very powerful (and easy) area to test. So test color, size, and placement of the button. Test relatively demure copy (“Support Our Cause”) against more demanding copy (“Donate Now”).

Considerations for design

• Make sure the CTA is displayed at least once in a visually distinct, centralized, and obviously buttony-looking button. Don’t make people guess at what they should click on.
• Use visual cues, such as arrows or images of people looking at the button, to draw the eye.
• If you have other CTAs on the page, de-emphasize them visually compared with the primary CTA.
• If you have content below the fold, repeat the CTA. Always make it easy and compelling for the visitor to take the desired action.

The cautionary tale

Forrester Research. It’s really not clear what you’re supposed to do here. Do an advanced search? That’s the only thing that’s visually set apart, and it has a nice arrow pointing to it. Not sure how that helps them sell events.

Doing it right

Pocket. The eye goes right to the CTA. Especially nice is the way the video is miniaturized here, because often the play button on a video can be distracting.

OFFER

An offer is anything you give your visitors in exchange for getting them to do what you want. This can mean offers in the traditional sense of coupons or discounts, but it also can mean a free trial, a free version of the product, a whitepaper, or a matching gift.

Considerations for strategy

The best offers pull users deeper into the conversion funnel:

• A bill pay website might offer users $10 for the first bill they pay, which would require them to sign up for the service and connect their accounts.
• A consulting agency might offer a free 60-minute consultation, which really is a meeting to describe how awesome the agency is.

Whatever you offer, try pairing it with a deadline to create a sense of urgency and spur a response.

Considerations for design

Make sure the offer is conveyed simply and that it doesn’t distract from the CTA.

The cautionary tale

AAA. There’s a lot going on (wrong) here. Most insurance sites offer a free quote with minimal information (mostly just a ZIP code). AAA takes more of a “demanding” rather than “offering” approach, blocking your view of their page until they get what they want. Peeking into the gloom, you can see that even after they get your ZIP, you get zip – just an invitation for someone to call you. Just what everyone wants!

Doing it right

United. Credit cards almost always include an offer – no surprise given the direct mail experience these companies have. Note that the offer requires the cardholder to use the card over several months, by which time, hopefully, its use will have become ingrained. Good visual cues drawing the eye to the CTA, too.

NARROW FOCUS

AKA Keep It Simple, Stupid. Research has shown that the more choices you offer people, the longer they take to make a decision. So the clearer and simpler you make your page, the more likely you are to get someone to take the action you want.

• Do you really need that navigation bar? Take it off or visually minimize it, and otherwise eliminate things that can be clicked on that aren’t your CTA.
• Do you really need to talk about your company philosophy? Move it to the “About” section and limit content that doesn’t serve the purpose of moving people down the funnel.
• Do you really need to collect all that information? If you’ve got a form on your page, keep it short. Study after study has shown that more fields = lower response, so ask your visitors for the bare minimum.

All this advice is particularly hard for marketers to follow when it comes to the most important landing page on their site: their home page. No matter what kind of marketing you’re doing, a huge chunk of your traffic is going to hit your home page first, so it should be treated like any other landing page. (It should be stripped of extraneous links, actions, and content.)

Focus on the CTA and leave links about your job listings and office Chihuahua for well below the fold (meaning out of the region that people see when they first get to the page).

Considerations for strategy

• Keep copy brief and make sure everything you place on the page is relevant to its purpose.
• Although many people will flow through your home page, you don’t have to send all of them there. Creating dedicated landing pages for your marketing programs will help you stay focused.
• Form length is another great area for testing!

Considerations for design

• Use visuals to keep the focus on the most important features of the page.
• Set off the core space of the page with white space and move administrative links to a visually down-played footer.
• Make sure any header or side links don’t distract from the core mission of the page.

The cautionary tale

Oracle. How many things are there for you to click on just in this portion of the landing page? Thirty nine. That’s 39 opportunities for whoever visits the page to wander off before completing what the page owner would like the visitor to do. And this is where you ended up after clicking on a paid search ad, so they are paying a lot to distract people. (Sorry, Oracle, I owe you $10.) It’s a perfect example of where using a dedicated page would help them cut out unimportant content and focus on what they want to achieve.

Doing it right

Salesforce. This is by no means the prettiest landing page. But for enterprise software, it is admirably restrained. There’s no navigation bar up top, the few administrative links are tucked away at the bottom, and social links are small and discreetly grayed out. The form asks for just a few fields and follows up with a nice, bright, benefit-offering CTA.

VIA: VERY IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTES

We’ve all heard stories of companies that reserved a catchy URL, put up zero information about what the site was for, and harvested 1 million email addresses before they even launched.

You should assume that’s not going to happen to your company.

Instead, you’re going to have to give visitors some good reasons they should do what you want. Those reasons are the VIA: Very Important Attributes.

The reason for the “V” and the “I” is that this shouldn’t be a laundry list. The visitor is giving your site a quick once over, and they don’t want to read your product manual on the first page. Identify the two to five things about your product or service that you think will be most important to your visitors, and showcase those.

Considerations for strategy

It’s generally believed that you should describe what you’re selling from the customer’s viewpoint. In other words, explain what problems your product or service can help solve. That may be true for your site, or it may not; this is a rich area for testing. In general, you can describe your VIA as:

• Features – a list of cool things about your product or service
• Benefits – how the features will help your visitor
• Pain points – how the features will help your visitor avoid misery

Try different approaches to see what works with your audience. It’s important to test which attributes you highlight, how many you show, and how you describe them.

Considerations for design

• Make sure the list of attributes doesn’t distract from the CTA. You might tease attributes above the fold, and then locate fuller descriptions below the fold.
• Setting attributes off with icons or pictures can make a list more visually appealing and friendly.

The cautionary tale

Yammer. So… Now that Microsoft has bought Yammer, are they not actively trying to get people to sign up for it anymore? Because jeez, Yammer, show a little leg. Not only is this the WHOLE sign-up page, but the page you get to for “yammer.com” is just a log-in page. You have to click to find this tempting treat.

Doing it right

Unbounce (below the fold). There is a quick description of three VIA (with links so someone can learn more if they want). At the bottom of the page, there is another visually-distinct CTA for those who are ready to try it out.

EFFECTIVE HEADLINE

Copy written for print or display ads often features a clever, funny, or outrageous headline. It has to because those ads are trying to wave their arms in your face and distract you from whatever it was you were doing so you will look at them instead.

On your webpage, though, you aren’t fighting for attention. You’ve already done something to funnel your visitors there. Now you just need to convince them to pull up their chairs and stay awhile.

People coming to your site are going to decide in a split second if they want to go back to their game of “Words with Friends” or stay and see what you are all about. A key way to keep them is to tell them in plain language what your site is all about.

Ÿ Selling a blanket with sleeves? “Home of the Slanket, the famous blanket with sleeves.”

Ÿ Selling a marketing consultancy? “How to market better.”

Ÿ Selling the latest location app? “Find your friends instantly.”

Considerations for strategy

People who are busy thinking “What the heck do these people do?” are less inclined to read your whitepaper, fork over their address, buy your widget, sign up for your webinar, or download your app. So when you’re writing your headline, go for clear and explanatory over coy and clever.

Considerations for design

Make sure the headline stands out visually, even more so than the logo/name of the site.

The cautionary tale

Workday. Between the two-word headline and the secondary text stuffed full of jargon (a trap most enterprise software has a hard time resisting), you come away not really knowing what Workday does. Of course, this is the third entry on a jQuery slider (and one of the other ones was a little better), but do you really want to assume your visitors are going to stick around for your slide show?

Doing it right

Cloudera. Okay, got it in a split second: it’s a platform for big data. The CTA (which could be better accentuated) tells us it’s for the enterprise.

RESOLUTION-SAVVY LAYOUT

Do you know that there are people out there still surfing the web on 800 x 600 monitors? And that the most popular screen size in the US still is 1024 x 768?

That means the overall visual picture you see on your big HD monitor might be very different from what your customer is seeing. Keep the most essential parts of your message – logo, headline, call to action, a supporting visual – in the center top of the screen, with supporting messaging lower down on the page.

Considerations for strategy

Make sure your designer knows which are the most important elements on your page and puts them front and center.

Considerations for design

If you can adjust your display, check the layout of your page at different resolutions to make sure that even people with older monitors will be able to see your headline and CTA without scrolling. And of course, check it on mobile and tablets.

The cautionary tale

This is Basecamp on a 1024 screen. We’ve got links that look like Google ads, an admittedly solid headline, and a mop of talking blond hair; but, after that, you have to start working for it.

Doing it right

And this is Visual Website Optimizer at 1024. Aah, it’s all there – good headline, bright CTA, social proof, and some VIA. Even on a smaller screen, the most important elements will be visible.

TIDY VISUALS

If you have spent more than 30 minutes on the Internet, you likely have seen one of those ads that has a GIF of a rotting banana with the headline “Lose 50 lbs with this one weird trick.”

Unless you’re actually selling a miracle weight loss cure to suckers, don’t let your landing page be that ad.

As with the headline, distracting elements can work when you’re trying to get attention. But when people are on your site, you don’t want to sidetrack them with a bunch of visual junk.

• A clean, simple design with plenty of white space keeps people trained on your call to action.
• Big font makes it easy and compelling for them to read and understand what your site is all about.
• Bullets make big blocks of copy easy to scan.
• Videos pack a big impact into a small space and can increase conversions 80%.

Images and graphics that are relevant to your product and related to your audience support your message instead of diverting attention.

Considerations for strategy

This is another good area to test. Does your audience react better to photos or illustrations? People or objects? Does it help to show the product in action?

Considerations for design

• Less is more. It’s tempting to add dramatic swirls, jQuery sliders, exploding graphs, and stock photos of people looking deliriously happy with their computers. But as with everything else, make sure it is in service of, and not distracting from, getting visitors to take action.
• Speed matters. A landing page that loads quickly gets better response. Make sure your design doesn’t slow down load time.

The cautionary tale

My Health Insurance. To quote Whitney Houston: Hell to the no. Among other horrors, we have here the cheesiest of cheesy stock photos, one of which is distorted; an extremely unsubtle arrow pointing at a button that isn’t even a button; pixelated text; something that says “Choose your plan” and yet doesn’t give you anything to choose; and of course the clownishly huge “Click Here” button, which doesn’t tell you what will happen when you do. I suspect your computer will blow up.

Doing it right

Ribbon. The use of color here draws your eye to the call to action. Navigation items are muted. The design is clean and simple, and the product is shown in action with a video.

SOCIAL PROOF

I once had a summer job at a nonprofit where I collected money door to door. One day I got on a bit of a roll and signed up several people in the same neighborhood. After a while, I didn’t even need to go into my pitch; I just held up my sheet, showed people that all their neighbors had donated, and they ponied right up.

As social creatures, humans tend to place greater value on things that other people have already approved. That is why most sites will tend to display evidence of such social validation:

• A list of customers
• Press mentions
• Usage statistics
• Testimonials

If you are just starting out, you probably don’t have a lot of this. But even one or two quotes from beta users, alpha users – heck, your mom – can show site visitors that someone else has derived value from what you’re offering.

Considerations for strategy

Gather up some good evidence of social proof for your page. And if your page is long-lasting (like a home page), keep it updated. Include new press attention, updated user numbers, great customer quotes, etc.

Considerations for design

Even if you’re displaying client or press logos, it’s important to keep the design clean and focused. Make sure the logos are of uniform size, and display them in gray scale if possible to minimize clashing colors and keep the focus on you.

The cautionary tale

Evernote. This is a very clean, pretty page, and the VIA are beautifully displayed. But the CTA is literally fading into the background, and there’s no social proof. I think everyone in the world uses Evernote based on the number of other apps I see that connect to it. Maybe they’re shy. Don’t be shy, Evernote!

Doing it right

Optimizely. Four pieces of social proof on one screen: the note about being featured on CNN up top, the “#1” statement in the header, “3,000 happy customers,” and the visually uncluttered presentation of notable logos.

CONCLUSION

All of these recommendations can be summed up pretty simply: be clear about what action you want the visitor to take and make it as easy and compelling as possible for them to take it. You, too, will soon have a landing page that CONVERTS!

Oh and P.S. – Don’t forget to test!

About the Author: Beth Morgan is marketing consultant and early-stage startup advisor. You can find more of her writing at her website, Marketing Nerdistry, or follow her on Twitter.

You’ve probably formed some of your own ideas, too.

Unfortunately, in our work testing the so-called “best practices” over the past five years, my testing team and I have disproven many common recommendations for how to maximize website conversions and revenue.

That’s what this post is about — to tell you about one of the most important distinctions between successful and mediocre conversion optimization testing programs. It’s about strategy.

There are two kinds of people doing conversion optimization: tacticians and strategists. Tacticians focus on following “best practices” and improving metrics like conversion rate. Conversion strategists, on the other hand, focus on building a repeatable strategic process that creates powerful hypotheses and insights in order to fulfill business goals.

The business results can be astounding.

For example, in today’s case study, Iron Mountain, the conversion optimization strategy led to a 45% lift in the first test, then a 404% boost (!), then another 44%, then an additional 38%, followed by a 49% conversion rate increase. And that was just on a few of the landing pages.

I’ll give you details on one of those A/B/n tests in a moment; but first, let’s review conversion optimization at a high level.

A Quick Primer on Conversion Optimization

Your website has two kinds of conversions:

1. On-page actions (a type of micro-conversion)
2. Revenue-driving conversions (the ones that support your business goals).

On-page actions are things like add-to-cart’s and form submissions. Revenue-driving conversions are things like e-commerce sales and quote-request leads for your sales team.

For both types of conversions, your conversion rate hinges on six factors:

1. Value proposition – This is the sum of all the costs and benefits of taking action. What is the overall perceived benefit in your customer’s mind? Those perceived costs and benefits make up your value proposition.
2. Relevance – How closely does the content on your page match what your visitors are expecting to see? How closely does your value proposition match their needs?
3. Clarity – How clear is your value proposition, main message, and call-to-action?
4. Anxiety – Are there elements on your page (or missing from your page) that create uncertainty in your customer’s mind?
5. Distraction – What is the first thing you see on the page? Does it help or hurt your main purpose? What does the page offer that is conflicting or off-target?
6. Urgency – Why should your visitors take action now? What incentives, offers, tone, and presentation will move them to action immediately?

These are the six elements that both tacticians and strategists should understand to be able to make conversion rate and revenue improvements.

The main difference between tacticians and strategists is how they plan and interpret their tests.

Where Tacticians Shine

Conversion tacticians shine in the places where details are happening. They think about button color and size. These are the people who have arguments over whether a Big Orange Button (I call him BOB) will solve the problem. Tacticians have a tool kit that includes a wide array of tested elements that can be applied to a problem quickly.

Tacticians are great for getting started with testing, but they rapidly hit a limit on the benefit they achieve from tweaking elements, rather than enhancing customer satisfaction and business goals.

Tactical conversion optimizers rarely create hypotheses that describe customer behavior. They are focused on elemental, on-page concerns like form fields, pop-up windows, or maximizing your testing tool’s capabilities. Elements like these are the quick and easy areas to attack first, but they rarely result in big gains for your business, and they don’t generate marketing insights that lead to the next great hypothesis.

Why Strategy Is Better

A strategic approach aims for more fundamental and ongoing improvements. They aim for a mix of big wins and incremental improvements that give marketing insights.

Conversion strategists know three important things:

1. The only conversion rates that matter are relative.
2. Conversion rate improvement is a means to an end—and that end is profit.
3. Learning from hypotheses is more important than winning with every test.

That is why good strategists create documentation about why they are running tests and what customer needs they are trying to address. Making hypothesis-based testing part of your organizational culture is far more important than making a button the right color (hint: there is no right color). Strategists know that an ongoing, structured process of continuous learning and improvement delivers the best results over time.

The strategist knows from experience to look for meaning behind the numbers rather than simply taking test results at face value.

Take a look at this test result report:

At the point when a new traffic source was added to the test page, the conversion rates for all of the test variations dropped.

A tactician would see this conversion rate trend and say, “Oh no! Our conversion rate plummeted. We have to fix this!” They would run to the design department to order new buttons and images or turn off the new source of traffic.

A conversion strategist, however, would look deeper at sales and profit numbers to find out about order volume and order value. They might create a hypothesis for whether there’s a different customer need specific to the new traffic source and plan a new round of testing based on that hypothesis. The strategist may discover that our green combination is the best for the new traffic source, even though it isn’t the winner for the other traffic sources.

There could be many other insights and hypotheses the strategist would gain from the results analysis, too.

That’s why, in my 7-step testing process, the 7^th step is often the most important. That’s where the strategist solidifies the insights that can be fed into the next tests.

A Conversion Optimization Strategy Looks at the Big Picture

With a conversion optimization strategy, every test leads to insights that lead to more hypotheses to test. The learning from each test leads to greater lift in the following tests.

Let’s look at the Iron Mountain example again. For the past three years, my team has been testing and optimizing the conversion rates for Iron Mountain’s most important marketing touch points. In that time, we’ve run many A/B/n tests on various areas of the website, including landing pages and site-wide elements on ironmountain.com.

This partnership had unique challenges that emphasized the need for a strategy:

• How do you implement a conversion optimization strategy for a website that has over 17,000 pages, plus landing pages and campaign microsites?
• How do you make sure your website experiences are maximizing conversion rates and that the learning is applied across the organization?

Your conversion optimization system needs good planning and great execution. Individual tests should feed learning back into an evolving understanding of your customers.

Here’s an example of one of the landing page analyses we performed as part of a testing strategy for Iron Mountain:

Notice that a strategist is not looking to specific tactical changes when planning for the test. Each one of the called out points are conversion problems that can be turned into a hypothesis. Overall, there are also themes that emerge. Readability and distraction seem to be the major issues to address. This analysis contains 10 points of action that can be tested.

There is a rich pool of possible changes for each point of action. Any test that is performed in this structure, even the losing tests (because not every test will win), can offer marketing insight that can be taken to every portion of your site and business.

Strategy Turns Weakness into Strength

Take the worst thing on your page and hypothesize its opposite. This doesn’t mean changing everything that is orange to blue. It means making everything that is vague, clear. It means making everything that is distracting or frightening disappear.

The Results of Strategy: Big Wins plus Insights

This winning page design for this particular test gave Iron Mountain a 404% lead generation conversion rate lift!

I won’t promise that every test gives results like that. And they don’t have to.

This result was built on the backs of previous tests because of the strategic approach we took.

Plus, the learning from this test gave insights that led to wins in other areas. The marketing team learned the type of offers that work best. That’s an insight that continues to pay dividends over and over again.

Strategy Wins Because It Offers New Ideas

eConsultancy reports that companies which take a structured approach in their conversion optimization are 2x as likely to report large increases in sales than those that don’t. Conversion strategy leads to structure and a continuous stream of new ideas, while conversion tactics alone lead to guessing and a constant hunger for more advice.

Conversion tactics by themselves are dead-end streets. If you’re overly attached to one technique or answer to a problem, you will always find the place where they fail. When tactical tests fail, they are simply over. When strategic hypothesis-based tests fail, you get insights that can be taken to a new understanding of your conversion problems.

Because conversion strategy puts emphasis on customer needs and creating a vision for solving problems related to the business action, not the page action, it leaves fewer moments where you have to ask “What’s next?” This means that if you keep testing, you keep getting new insights. With new insights, you get new ideas. And then you have a continuous cycle of improvement.

Within a strategic framework, each time you start a new round of hypotheses, you will find new success for your business.

About the Author: Chris Goward is Co-Founder and CEO of WiderFunnel, the conversion optimization agency, and author of “You Should Test That!” He developed conversion optimization strategies for clients like Electronic Arts, Google, SAP, Shutterfly, and Salesforce.com.

The fact is, the world is catching on to mobile shopping, and in the U.K., more customers are doing their shopping by tablet than in-store. Rather than competing based on price alone, retailers have learned that offering the best possible mobile experience leads to higher conversions, more sales, and more repeat orders.

So what can we learn from the winners (and losers)? Read on to find out the latest mobile marketing conversion tips.

The Top Retailers’ Websites are Mobile-Responsive

In this world of app-hungry smartphones, you’d think that shopping online could be done more efficiently over an app – however, consumers don’t think so. In fact, according to a study by ZMags, only 4% of customers would prefer to browse online using an app on their phone or tablet, as opposed to 87% who would rather view a website on their computer:

87% of customers still prefer to browse and discover products on their computers versus an app

The message is loud and clear: a mobile-responsive website gets far more attention than an app. It’s important to note that you should look for a theme or website design which is mobile-responsive rather than “mobile friendly” or “mobile optimized”. All the terms sound alike, but here’s what they typically involve, and how they differ:

• Mobile Friendly – Sites that load equally well between mobile devices and PCs. Buttons and navigation, as well as images, tend to be much smaller and may not respond well to touch-screen style use.
• Mobile Optimized – These are sites that are built to work exclusively with mobile devices. Essentially, the site will detect whether you’re using a computer or a mobile phone/tablet and load the appropriate pages. These typically include larger, touch-screen-friendly buttons and navigation and a reduced need for extensive typing.
• Mobile Responsive – The ideal scenario. Mobile-responsive pages change their orientation based on the size of the user’s device – whether it’s a full-size screen or a small handheld. Essentially, it combines the best of both mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized practices to create a page that works well for any situation.

Lessons Learned from Apple, Best Buy and Kohls: Make Your Customer’s Experience Memorable

According to a study by Mobiquity, three of the top mobile website retailers – Apple, Best Buy and Kohls, lead the pack in terms of customer shopping satisfaction – and there are several threads that each of these sites has in common with regards to their mobile strategies:

Best Buy, Apple and Kohls consistently receive high marks when it comes to browsing and buying on mobile phones

For one thing, each mobile page loads quickly and efficiently – a major make-or-break function for people with limited data plans. But a fast loading page isn’t the only factor. For example, Apple’s mobile experience allows you to browse, buy and customize your product on-the-fly, while Best Buy lets you check out ratings and compare products directly from their device-friendly site.

It’s important to note that the Mobiquity study also found that as many as 43% of shoppers would be less likely to shop at a retailer after a poor mobile experience. 65% of smartphone-shopping customers felt that the load time for mobile sites was too slow, and as many as 39% noted that navigation was a problem for them.

The key message here is to keep it simple, clear and focused. Remove the clutter, optimize loading times and leave out the superfluous stuff that customers don’t need or want.

Lessons Learned from 1-800-FLOWERS and Comcast: Don’t Neglect the Click-to-Call

Don’t forget the “phone” in smartphone. Click-to-call is an extremely helpful feature to have. According to a Google study from 2011, 61% of users take advantage of click-to-call after searching for a local business. 1-800 FLOWERS and Comcast also saw a boost from using click-to-call – up to a 270% increase in click through rates.

For some retailers, a click-to-call feature resulted in 270% higher click through rates

Fortunately, adding click-to-call to your own website is incredibly simple and is done in much the same way as a regular hyperlink. The “tel” schema, as it’s known, works on a wide range of mobile devices, including Android, Safari on iOS, Symbian, Internet Explorer, Opera Mini and more.

The Highest Converting Mobile Retailers Optimize Their Forms

Remember, when optimizing for the mobile market, you have to strip away all the excess stuff or risk losing the sale altogether. This is critically important for your website forms. Reduce the need to constantly type in things, and keep your form fields short and to-the-point, ideally 3 fields or less for best results. Many companies and web service firms, such as FormSite and Constant Contact, already include the option for mobile-ready forms that automatically resize to fit the user’s screen.

You can also take advantage of HTML 5’s new form input types to customize your forms specifically for mobile users:

Examples of telephone and URL fields customized with HTML 5 input types

The bottom line with mobile marketing and conversion rates is a lot like optimizing normal websites – customers want fast, simple and effective. With more and more digital devices coming online and millions of sites and ads clamoring for our attention, the sites that take the time to streamline, track, test and measure their results will come out the winners – whether customers are accessing their page on a laptop, or a toaster.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversions with user-friendly design and compelling copywriting. Like this article? Get your free conversion checklist and web copy tune-up at iElectrify.com

Ever looked forward to doing paperwork for your bank or insurance company? Perhaps you’ve spent time delighting over the simple joy of entering your details into tiny boxes, and relish every opportunity to exercise your penmanship on their finely-crafted documents?

Presumably not in this reality.

Why would I even ask such a bizarre question?

Well, I ask because I’m wondering—you obviously don’t like filling out credit card applications and the like. And you can probably guess that no one else does either. So…why do your conversion forms look like this?—

Online conversion forms like PayPal’s registration page (right) are invariably formatted exactly like printed forms such as this credit card application (left)—approximately as fun to complete as a hazing ritual, despite having exactly the opposite purpose.

And it gets stranger still, because if you’re like most people reading this article you know a credit card-style form is a terrible way to make prospects interact with your site. You’ve probably invested a lot of time into learning how clarity trumps persuasion. You’ve put a decent amount of effort into writing compelling content for your website, using the four keys of clear, non-icky copy. You may even have tweaked your site’s design to improve its conversion rate, because you know that sexy sites suck at sales.

So why, when it comes to the element your prospects have to interact with in order to become customers, are you throwing all those fine principles out—in favor of a credit card application form?

If I may ask, as politely as I can: Are you nuts?

“BUT BNONN, WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?”

It is something I call “narrative web forms”. Literally, forms that follow a narrative structure. They continue the conversation with your prospect, rather than ending it abruptly with a grid of information for him to fill out.

They’re also widely known as “Mad Libs” forms, for reasons which are obvious to Americans but not to the rest of us. Here’s a well-known example from Huffduffer:

The registration form for Huffduffer uses a “fill in the blanks” style paragraph structure, rather than laying out each field on a grid. Far more entertaining to complete—something that makes a decisive difference to conversions on the web.

These were a fad around 2010, after Vast.com reported that their narrative forms increased conversions by 25-40%:

Vast.com’s split test of a grid form against a narrative one led to a reported conversion increase of 25-40%.

But like most fads, there was a brief burst of “isn’t that neat” blogging, and not much else—these kinds of forms don’t seem to have widely caught on. But they should have, because in general they will produce conversion lifts.

Why Narrative Forms Work Better Than Grids

You might be thinking, from the example above, that 25-40% is a pretty vague number. Was it 25% or was it 40%—because those are pretty wildly different figures? And that’s a good point.

From what I can tell, because there were several changes to the form aside from the narrative structure itself (notice the number of forms and the call to action), Vast couldn’t determine exactly how much the narrative structure had contributed to the overall increase. So they gave a deliberately loose figure. But the important thing is they did get a conversion hike.

Why?

Let me suggest three major reasons:

1. Narrative forms create a context your prospect cares about

Your typical grid form is all about getting your prospect to give a website details about himself. A narrative form, however, reframes that process into a way for him to get the website involved in his personal story.

In other words, the form becomes about your prospect and his “journey”, rather than about you and the information you need from him.

Since what your prospect really cares about is him, and not you, it only makes sense that reframing the conversion process in this way will lead to lifts. It is simply focusing him on the thing that matters in his own mind.

2. Narrative forms closely mimic your prospect’s thought sequence

This follows on directly from the first point. As Flint McGlaughlin of MarketingExperiments is fond of saying, you don’t optimize web-pages—you optimize thought sequences.

Shockingly, the way the human brain makes sense of things is not by memorizing and regurgitating brute facts, but by placing those facts into narratives. We learn, think, and teach best when we use stories—because that is how our brains are wired to work.

So using a narrative form allows your prospect to place himself into the process of conversion, not just in the sense that it becomes about him, but also in the sense that it reinforces what he is thinking. As well as placing the conversion process into a “first-person” context, a narrative form continues the simulated conversation your prospect has been having with you—or with himself. It literally mimics what he is thinking at the time of conversion. This focuses him on what he is doing, emphasizing his thought sequence in his own mind. It creates the sense of continuity with what he was doing before, structured in a way he can follow toward his goal.

Compare this to a grid layout, which forces him to enter his information devoid of context, thus breaking continuity with what he was thinking before, eliminating his thought sequence—replacing it with a series of brute facts which he must regurgitate.

Notice also that by mimicking his thought sequence, you are getting him more invested in the process of conversion—so he is less likely to give up half-way through—while enjoying the chance to reiterate the benefits of converting as if he himself were speaking. This is very powerful. Just as call-to-action copy works better when you emphasize what your prospect gets, rather than what he must do, so it is with form copy.

3. Narrative forms reduce visual friction

Now I don’t say this as a hard-and-fast rule, but certainly in the A/B example above you can see that the narrative form looks easier to complete. This isn’t just because less space is used. (Although this certainly contributed to the overall conversion, it had nothing to do with the narrative structure.) Rather, it is that the fields are broken up, leading to a more varied visual appearance. This kind of contrast makes a surprising difference to engagement. Nothing turns off the brain like sameness.

Incidentally, this applies to any kind of copy and not just form design. Rows of equally-sized paragraphs will reduce readership just as much as rows of equally-sized form fields.

To demonstrate that length is not the issue so much as contrast, here’s my own contact form by way of example. It is not perfect, but what I want you to notice is that although it takes up a lot of vertical space (far more than it would in a grid layout), it does not feel long:

My own contact form, written in a narrative style. Although it takes up a lot of visual space, it does not feel long because the contrast between the various elements engages the brain, instead of numbing it.

When Narrative Forms Fail

This is all dandy, but what if you split-test a narrative form and discover it converts worse than the old grid form? Like, for example, Patrick McKenzie at Kalzumeus:

In a split test, the narrative form on the bottom garnered only a 21.7% conversion, while the grid-based control trucked along at 27.6%.

Patrick discovered that his narrative form had reduced his original conversion rate by 22%. How can that be if narrative forms are so great?

In my view, at least five things contributed to the failure of this narrative form—and they can all be avoided when you’re building your own narrative forms:

Firstly, there are actually two tests running here at once. It’s hard to know what effect that “Sign in as guest” link was having, so that casts some doubt on the results to begin with.

Secondly, while a form this short can benefit from a narrative structure, it is actually rather visually awkward to place the form fields inside the narrative. There isn’t enough space, and so it tends increase visual friction rather than reducing it. It would be better to place the narrative above the fields.

Thirdly, this is not a complete narrative form! He has simply given a narrative structure to the first half of the form, while leaving the second half the same as the control. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that if you don’t use narrative consistently, it doesn’t tend to work well.

Fourthly, what narrative copy there is, is just plain badly written. “I want to make bingo cards! Save them for me under my email address and I’d like to use this word as my password.” It reads like something written by someone with a less than adequate grasp of both grammar and the nuances of phrasing. How differently might the test results have been if the narrative had been expanded into a real conversation, and written competently?—

Notice I ditched the “We don’t spam or sell your details.” I’ve never seen any evidence they increase conversions, and it just doesn’t fit into the narrative. Indeed, if a salesperson said that to me in real life I’d be like, Why would you even say that…? Is it because you actually are gonna do it? Putting the thought of spam in your prospect’s mind seems like an almost certain way to inadvertently increase anxiety, rather than reduce it.

I also used much better button copy—in fact, this is what Bingo Card Creator is currently using on their signup form.

Fifthly, I don’t know what people were seeing before they got to this signup form, but it should go without saying that narrative forms cannot stand alone. Because the whole point of them is to mimic your prospect’s thought sequence, they will not work effectively if that thought sequence isn’t initiated higher up the conversion chain with effective, clear, conversational copy.

There’s no point trying to get all conversational at the conversion form if you haven’t been writing like that all along. It will simply seem jarring.

Will You Test Narrative Forms On Your Site?

I’ve explained why narrative forms work well and are likely to produce lifts for you. And I’ve given you some principles to apply, and pitfalls to avoid. But have I convinced you to give them a shot on your own site?

Add your comments below—I’d like to hear what you have to say.

About the Author: Bnonn is the author of the free email micro-course 5 Sales-Spiking Website Tweaks Web Designers & IM Gurus Don’t Know. It’s one quick lesson per day, each with a tested conversion-boosting tip you can implement on your site in 30 minutes or less (and none of them are about narrative forms).