This is the sixth & last article in the series of 6 articles focusing on the Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization.

Before we dive deeper into the Best practices for CRO, I would like to mention that the following content is based upon the learnings that I did during the seventh week of Conversion Optimization, my nano degree course at CXL Institute, led by Peep Laja & team.

I have divided this article into six parts to ensure maximum readability & thorough understanding.

In the last article, we discussed

• Visual Hierarchy
• FAQs on Website
• Importance of Visual Design

In this article, we will discuss,

• Internal Search
• Shopping cart pages
• Ecommerce checkout pages

Let’s get started.

Internal Search

It’s a well-known fact that people who perform searches on an e-commerce website, tend to convert better. If you are having more 20 products or pages, it would be highly beneficial to add the search functionality.

Most of the time, people browse first as they don’t know what exactly they want. So they search with keywords, ending up on the particular product page if they find it. Let’s go through some of the best practices for the conversion rate optimization focusing on the internal searches.

Make The Search Box Bigger

Have you noticed how Amazon encourages search? They have added a search bar right at the top, with a dropdown menu for category selection just in case the visitor wants to refine its search.

Apart from size, the location of the search bar also matters. Most of the time visitors have to look around for the search bar, which highly affects the conversion rate.

Image Courtesy: Amazon.com

Product Images In The Site Search Window Boost Conversions

The search bar has evolved a lot in the past few years. Some stores show results on their search results pages, however, a widely adopted best practices is to show search results right under the search bar when the query is being typed.

Take a look at this t-shirt store, I searched for “Dragon” and instantly got results below the search bar, handy, isn’t it?

Image Courtesy: The Mountain

Optimize The Search Function

How can you make your search functionality better? Take care of these 3 basic add-ons.

1. Enable autocomplete – visitors should get suggestions as they type.
2. Show results even if the search query had typos.
3. Avoid “No Results found” – show relevant results if there are no exact results.

Shopping Cart Pages

Shopping cart is one of the most critical pages for your website. As soon as a buyer adds their first item in the cart, they have progressed to shopping from browsing. Our job is to make sure they progress towards payment.

What Should A Cart Addition Look Like?

Every time an item is added to the cart, a confirmation must be shown to the buyer. It can be either a small popup on the right side, it can be a tiny toast or a simple animation. You can also show the cart on the right-hand side of the page as soon as they add their first product. This way they will be able to see the cart contents along with the total until the moment.

Image Courtesy: aztecasoccer.com

The Product Is In The Cart, Now What?

As we talk about the cart addition, what’s the suggested action now? Here are the two widely used approaches.

1. Show ‘cart add’ confirmation and remain on the same page.
2. Transfer the user onto the cart page.

Both of the above-mentioned approaches have their own pros & cons, as it depends on the strategy for your industry. The metrics to keep in mind are:

• Average transaction value
• Average quantity per transaction

Displaying Cart Contents Well

How should your cart look like? Follow this checklist:

• Product photos
• Product name & price
• Ability to remove, save for later, change details like size
• Show the kind of payments they accept
• Show total price with the option to change the shipping
• A clear call to action

Image Courtesy: blissworld.com

Get The Visual Hierarchy Right

What is the most desired action on a shopping cart page? The “Continue To Checkout”button. If you have a website where people tend to buy a few products per order, make sure you show them two CTAs, one above & below the cart.

Tip: This is a good time to address the FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties & Doubts), so include a few icons to indicate secure transactions. Also, show all the possible payment options as it has proven to have a positive effect on conversions.

Don’t Make Coupons Prominent

Have you ever visited the cart page, and realized you don’t have a coupon code? It hurts, right? You feel less special triggering the thought of buying something expensive than others.

Buyers might leave the website to search for coupons on Google and might result in card abandonment.

How to avoid this?

Offer a “Got a coupon?” link or something similar, and clicking on the link makes an input field. Text links are not visually very prominent, so fewer people will pay attention to them.

People who already have a coupon code will be looking for it – so unless you hid it really well, they will find it and will be able to apply their coupon code.

Remind Them About Shipping And Security

As we discussed in the last article about FAQs that all the questions must be addressed in the copy. Likewise, mention the mode of shipment, return policy, secure payment & related concerns on the page.

Persistent Cart

Persistent Cart not only improves the customer experience by combining guest and customer carts and allowing customers to start or finish check out from multiple devices, but it also increases conversion rates by reducing cart abandonment.

Save all the items in shopping the cart when a customer logs in. When they log out or access the cart from a different PC, re-add those (previous) items into their cart.

Ecommerce Checkout Pages

Follow these simple tips to ensure maximum conversions:

1. Leave credit card info for last
2. Design a payment form that looks like an actual credit card
3. Make it look secure
4. Store credit cards in your system

So, are you ready to implement some of the above best practices for the conversion rate optimization that we discussed?

P.S: If you found this post helpful, please share it on social media.

RECEIVE WEEKLY LESSONS

This is the fifth article in the series of 6 articles focusing on the Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization.

Before we dive deeper into the Best practices for CRO, I would like to mention that the following content is based upon the learnings that I did during the Second Week of Conversion Optimization, my nano degree course at CXL Institute, led by Peep Laja & team.

I have divided this article into six parts to ensure maximum readability & thorough understanding.

In the last article, we discussed

• Home pages
• Pricing & pricing pages
• Website speed optimization

In this article, we will discuss,

• Visual Hierarchy
• FAQs on Website
• Importance of Visual Design

Let’s get started.

Visual Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an organizational structure in which items are ranked according to levels of importance.

When we talk about visual hierarchy, we focus on the order in which the human eye perceives the design.

In web design, there are some sections or parts that are more important than others. These can be forms, having certain CTAs, value propositions. Since these are important, you would want them to get more attention and time.

Remember, that visual hierarchy is not only about size, but also about color, & position of an element on the website.

If you are having 5 identical buttons on your website, the user won’t be able to differentiate and you will always get random clicks. However, if you make a button prominent by changing its color, size, or position, you will be driving more clicks on that particular button.

Start With The Business Objective

The easiest way to prioritize elements is to rank them on the basis of your business objective.

In order to understand this phenomenon and practice it, start visiting the website and rank them the elements in the visual hierarchy. Compare them with your own website. Do changes as per your analysis.

Rank Your Most Wanted Actions For Every Page

Once you are done with the landing page, head over to other pages. Identify the most wanted action on each of these pages. Make it stand out on the whole page.

Example: ActiveCampaign wants the visitor to choose the Professional Plan, there can be several reasons for that. So they made it prominent by putting a badge of Most Popular and highlighting the plan with dark blue color.

Image Courtesy: ActiveCampaign

FAQs On Websites

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is a list of answers to common questions about a product or service.

The purpose of FAQs is to provide information on frequent questions or concerns.

The question is, should a website has an FAQ section or not?

For a marketer, the priority should be to eliminate the need for FAQs. If your audience has to read instructions to figure your product or service, you are not communicating the message correctly.

There are many websites that put their whole pitches in FAQs disguised as questions, which is an absolute waste of space.

If you are needing an FAQ section to explain your pricing, you must review your pricing page and the whole copy. Try to put the answers to FAQs in the copy.

How to figure what to put in the copy? Just pay attention to the questions that are being asked via support emails, live chat & queries. Then put the answers to these questions into your website copy.

Importance Of Visual Design

What is your definition of the best design?

The best design is the one that was driven by data and brings in the most money. Creativity is important, and an essential part of web designing but the decision should be taken on the basis of data.

Why design is important? Humans process visuals 50 times faster than copy, and we are quick to judge. Period.

Design affects the trust scale too. If you a poorly design website, visitors would instantly doubt your authenticity within milliseconds.

Let’s talk about a few critical, & objective aspects of design.

People Judge Websites In Less Than 50 Milliseconds

Humans make snap judgments when they meet a new person; websites are judged similarly!

As per the research conducted by Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek & J. Brown. It was concluded that it takes about 50 milliseconds for visitors to form an opinion about your website.

As per the research conducted by Google, visitors develop opinions even within 17 ms (though the effect was less pronounced on some design factors).

The first impression depends on multiple factors, some of them are:

• Structure
• Color
• Spacing
• Symmetry
• Amount of Text
• Fonts

First Impressions Are 94% Design-related

As stated earlier, the design drives trust.

There have been multiple studies, that concluded that design elements have the biggest influences on first impressions, including logo, main images, colors & the navigation menu.

Human minds process visuals 50 times faster than the copy.

Inspiration Drives Better First Impressions

Impression-related impressions have a greater impact on the first-impression formation, followed by usability. Visual appealing stimuli are an important tool for getting visitors to stay on your website.

If you are a tour operating website, using larger than life photography would really increase the gains.

Have a look at the Active Adventures website, as they know how to capture people when they feel most inspired.

Two Key Ingredients Of Web Design People Like: Simplicity And Prototypicality

Simplicity: As per a study by Google, in 2012, researchers found that simpler & familiar design is better, as compared to visually complex websites.

The simpler design promotes less noise, which means fewer distractions. Simplicity is about focus & clarity of the purpose that should make the visitors instantly understand what’s going on, leading to the singular goal of the page.

Prototypicality: The human mind creates a template of everything that it interacts with. When we put the same phenomenon on websites, the human mind creates a blueprint of how a SaaS website, blog, or e-commerce site should look like.

If you change the design too much in the pursuit of innovation, it might backfire.

Stop Arguing Over Opinions. Data-driven Design Is The Way: Measurable Approach To Better Design

If it can be measured, it can be improved.

There are several tools that let you assess your design, measure the clicks, and analyze the funnel. How long they stay, and what errors & issues make them leave the website.

The whole point of data-driven design is to use the data to identify what’s working and what’s not, and to improve productivity.

So, are you ready to implement some of the above best practices for the conversion rate optimization that we discussed?

P.S: If you found this post helpful, please share it on social media.

RECEIVE WEEKLY LESSONS

This is the fourth article in the series of 6 articles focusing on the Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization.

Before we dive deeper into the Best practices for CRO, I would like to mention that the following content is based upon the learnings that I did during the Second Week of Conversion Optimization, my nano degree course at CXL Institute, led by Peep Laja & team.

I have divided this article into six parts to ensure maximum readability & thorough understanding.

In the last article, we discussed

• Principles of persuasive design
• Typography and content
• Radical redesign vs. evolutionary design

In this article, we will discuss,

• Home pages
• Pricing & pricing pages
• Website speed optimization

Let’s get started.

Home Pages

Whenever a home page is designed, there are two goals as the main objectives.

1. Provide information to the user/visitor
2. Provide useful links via top-level navigation for all the related additional information

As we dive deeper into the home page design, we come across the third goal or you can term it as the secondary goal. The secondary goal is to send visitors to the sales funnel. In order to achieve this, you have to work on the page fold, CTAs and visuals to lead the visitor in a particular direction.

To assess a home page, we look for answers to the following questions

1. Does the page have a clear value proposition?
2. Is there a single, clear primary call to action?
3. Are there links to additional information?

Have a look at the home page of Slack and analyze it as per the above questions.

Courtesy: Slack.com

CXL conducted a study to evaluate the value proposition presentation and came around some interesting insights.

• The value proposition should be bigger intriguing the participants to notice it and focus on it.
• Bullet lists are preferred over a short paragraph.
• If you increase the benefits, it is easier for the visitor to recall a significant number of them.

However, it’s not recommended to blindly copy a home page, assuming it would yield similar results for your website as well. So keep experimenting by trying out different copies, visuals & layouts.

Pricing & Pricing Pages

The pricing page is the goal line to the business objective; It’s the point at which a buying decision is made.

We, as a business owner put so much time, sweat equity, and love into our products, but when the time comes to set up our pricing and build out our pricing page we spend only around a few hours arguing amongst our teams before deciding the number backed by a few discussions. As we talk about the best practices for conversion rate optimization, pricing page plays an important role in determining the growth of your business.

The Higher The Price Point, The More You Need To Explain

How much time would you spend on taking the decision if the product price is 1$? Minutes or even seconds. But if the product is being sold for 1000$, now? You would want to know more information or consult the product representative, take a look at reviews, or even read the FAQs.  In other words, the more expensive your product or service is, the more content needs to be in front to back your pricing.

Don’t Ask People How Much They Would Pay

Instead of asking people to suggest the pricing, create a simple formula around it. Test the pricing with actual traffic and experiment with a few numbers until you come up with a rational price that performs well.

Things That Typically Work Well And You Should Experiment With

• Multiple prices vs. one price – list multiple packages with proper differences so they can decide which one is the best for them.
• Decoy pricing – a tricky scenario where one package is given an upper hand to ease the buyer’s decision
• Price Anchoring/Contrast principle – create multiple packages, having a huge difference, causing the customer to buy the cheaper pricing package/plan.
• Decoy + Contrast – use the above two points to create a pricing strategy for different packages.
• Price ending with 9s – do you think $9 price ending increases demands? Yes, and it’s backed by a number of case studies.

Should You Always Reveal The Prices (even in B2B)?

Definitely, if your competitors are disclosing the pricing on their website, whereas you are offering the visitor to request a quote, you will lose a lot of business. Most of the time, visitors are too impatient to request a quote.

However, if you don’t have fixed prices, you can always put a few slabs for the visitors so they would have an idea of estimated pricing. This practice will also ensure better qualified leads.

Image Courtesy: Logz.io

Some Best Practices/tips For Optimizers To Consider When Assessing Pricing Design

1. Make it easy for the visitor to understand the differences between plans.
2. Help the people identify the right plan for themselves.
3. Address FUDs (fears, uncertainties, doubts).
4. Offer multiple currency options to aid their buying decision
5. Give a discount on annual plans
6. Display a clear call to action

Website Speed Optimization

Website speed optimization affects the instantaneous gratification of the visitor. You wouldn’t want your website to take extra time to load as the visitor would instantly shift the focus on any other tab on the browser. A fast loading website can have positive effects on everything from user experience to bounce rate, time on site, and other important metrics.

Ideal Site Speed

Jakob Nielsen, who holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction, says 10 seconds can be the maximum loading time for a website.

Let’s take a look at some interesting stats:

• 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
• 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes three seconds or more to load.
• more than 75% of your website visitors will shift to competitors if your site is not speed optimized.
• 8% of people cite slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning their purchase.

Image Courtesy: Google PageSpeed Insights & Nonfig

Tools To Evaluate Site Speed

All of these tools make it simple to test your site’s performance – usually, it’s as easy as pasting in your site’s URL and letting the tool work its magic.

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Sitespeed
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom

Tip: Check speed info in Google Analytics by visiting speed reports under the Behavior.

So, are you ready to implement some of the above best practices for the conversion rate optimization that we discussed?

P.S: If you found this post helpful, please share it on social media.

RECEIVE WEEKLY LESSONS

This is the second article in the series of 6 articles focusing on the Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization. You can read the second part here.

Before we dive deeper into the Best practices for CRO, I would like to mention that the following content is based upon the learnings that I did during the Second Week of Conversion Optimization, my nano degree course at CXL Institute, led by Peep Laja & team.

I have divided this article into six parts to ensure maximum readability & thorough understanding.

In the last article, we discussed

• E-commerce Category Pages
• E-commerce Signups
• Incoming Phone Leads & Call Tracking.

In this article, we will discuss,

• Principles of persuasive design
• Typography and content
• Radical redesign vs. evolutionary design

Let’s get started.

Principles Of Persuasive Design

The literal definition of Persuasion is, “In business, persuasion is a process aimed at changing a person’s (or a group’s) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or another person (s), by using written, spoken words or visual tools to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination thereof.”

When we talk about Persuasive Design, it resonates with the effort that the marketer does to trigger a specific action by the visitor on your website.

Do you know what tactics Gary Vaynerchuk uses to persuade his audience? He talks fast, acts confident, guards them & swears a bit here and there too.

Let’s discuss the five principles of Persuasive Design

1. Clarity Above All

As soon as the visitor lands on your website, the human brain starts to process the copy & design. Some of the common questions are, what is it? What can I do here? How is it useful to me? If your copy & design are apparent in the first few seconds, your bounce rate will decrease, and the average time would be positively impacted. However, if you use long sentences, and words that sound more like riddles, the visitor will instantly lose the focus.

Courtesy: overflow.io

2. Visual Appeal

The human brain processes visuals 50 times faster than the copy. Whatever you do, make sure your website has compelling visuals. So, if you are selling physical products, show the best pictures. If you are selling services or SaaS tools, show the screenshots. Google recognizes two factors that determine visitors would like the website or not.

1. Low visual complexity – the simplicity of design of the website
2. High prototypicality – how familiar is the layout that you used

Courtesy: Logz.io.

3. Visual Hierarchy

When we talk about using visuals, we tend to focus on the design that prioritizes the objective of the website. As the first impression, the visitors notice the main design, the CTA, discount offers banner, or maybe the copy that you wrote as the highlighted headline. Now, if you want any of these to stand out, you have to give them appropriate size along with a color that makes it visible more than any other element as the first impression.

don’t forget that visual hierarchy is not about correctly stuffing everything. It’s also about the correct usage of white spaces to make the overall design look more straightforward, and the attention remains on the main element.

4. Conserve Attention At All Costs

Now that you have prioritized clarity maintained a visual hierarchy and used highly captivating visuals. It’s time for you to keep them hooked to your website. How would you sell your photography services? You can put high-quality images of your previous work and keep showing them until, at the end of the scroll, they find your fees or a form to contact you. Since you have already captured their attention, it would be easier to sell to them.

5. One Action Per Screen, When They’re Ready

How many pages does your website have? What are the most desired goals of these pages? Determine the actions. Every page on your website must have a single CTA, that should be most prominent, and visible. However, the CTAs, or triggers should be placed carefully, after analyzing the peak of motivation for that particular action. Poorly placed CTAs would harm your conversion rate.

The goal of persuasive design is to make sure the fold area is distinct, creating a value proposition statement, and giving people enough reason to scroll down.

Typography And Content

Typography focuses on adjusting the text within the design while creating compelling content. It provides an attractive appearance and preserves the aesthetic value of your content. When we talk about best practices for conversion rate optimization, typography plays a vital role in setting the overall tone of your website and ensures a great user experience.

Let’s understand this with the help of a few questions.

What’s the best font size and type?

The recommended smallest size is 16 pixels for body copy. However, smaller font sizes can be used for mentioning help texts such as instructions for form labels, etc. Apart from font size, line height needs to be carefully assessed too. Headlines & CTAs would be more significant & prominent.

Is there a best font?

No, however, some standard fonts are used mostly as they are easy to read, such as Arial, Georgia, or Tahoma. If you are using a new font that forces the visitor to apply extra focus on understanding the text, you will affect the readability negatively.

How to structure the copy?

The recommended approach is

• using ordered and unordered lists,
• serving images with text to break it up,
• new paragraph every 3-4 lines,
• sub-headline every 1-2 paragraphs.

Is there an optimal line length?

As most studies confirm, the ideal length is around 50-75 characters.

If the length exceeds, the reader will have a hard time focusing on the text.

If you have lesser characters, the visitor’s reading rhythm would be disturbed now and then.

What gets read?

To answer this, I am mentioning the most favorable structure of copy that is easy for the eyes to scan.

• Headline (#1)
• Intro paragraph,
• Bullets above the fold,
• Sub-headlines.

 The amount of text that read by a great deal is reduced due to poor content. Don’t try to save money by hiring a cheap copywriter, as it will drastically affect the conversion rate.

Radical Redesign vs. Evolutionary Design

Local Maxima

The point where despite your continuous changes to the design, the effects are close to negligible or non-existent, is called the Local Maxima. This is also the point where the conversion analysts have to make a decision. Either they go with more updates to the current design (evolutionary design approach) or choose to redesign of the page. This decision heavily relies on the data along with their intuition.

Courtesy: Andrew Null

How To Decide When To Redesign?

The first simple answer to this much-debated question is to assess if it’s brand & identity redesign? If yes, the optimal solution is to start over. Otherwise, go through the conversion research, identify the issues, and make sure you note down everything that is working. As it’s preferable that the new design includes all the positive aspects of the previous design.

When is Radical Design Better?

• You’ve hit the Local Maxima.
• Outdated tech-stack and legacy technologies are used.
• The design layout is not the standard practice anymore.
• Conversion analysis has revealed a considerable number of design issues.

When is the Evolutionary Approach Better?

• You have space and ideas to test with a high probability of significant effects on conversion rate.
• A large number of returning visitors have adopted your current design.

So, are you ready to implement some of the above best practices for the conversion rate optimization that we discussed?

P.S: If you found this post helpful, please share it on social media.

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