When it comes to persuasion, human nature is very predictable. There are certain conditions in which we all react similarly. When the right conditions are presented to us and the right persuasive buttons are pushed they act as automatic compliance mechanisms that, once set in motion are very difficult to resist, this is just the way our brains are wired.

In the classic book on persuasion, Influence: The Physiology of Persuasion, Dr. Cialdini, who is regarded as the world’s highest authority on persuasion and influence, masterfully examines six principles of persuasion that are universal across all cultures and circumstances. Among the six principals are the principle of scarcity and the principle of commitment.

Both of these persuasion principles as well as others can translate online in the form of persuasive design and conversion rate optimization. Let’s examine how Totsy.com expertly applies the principal of scarcity and at the same time solves the problem of choice as discussed in a previous post.

Totsy is an Ecommerce website that adds a level of exclusivity through private selling and requires you to create an account before you ever see a single product for sale, creating a form of exclusive access for savvy moms.

Exclusive access alone is in itself a form of persuasion, by wrapping membership around the language of exclusivity on the home page. The button copy used to become a member fully supports the exclusivity of the site. Rather than simply saying, “Join” the button, says “Request Membership” which is congruent with the private access they promise for brand specific sales of up to 70 percent off.

Once a Totsy member the principle of scarcity is in full effect. Totsy features products on it’s site for a limited time, up to three days and typically at 40 – 70 percent off.

You can only buy 3 items – and preview upcoming items for the next 9 days. The limited choice of only 3 items is actually a good thing and encourages members to become repeat visitors, creating a behavior pattern in their customers to remain in a constant bargain buying mode.

The perceived scarcity that is created by limiting sales to a specific time with a countdown clock generates more demand and taps into the limiting factor of scarcity for every item.

The time for the sale is very prominent on the detail page and throughout the browsing visit. What is more interesting is the use of the principal of consistency. The persuasion principal of consistency states that if people publicly take even a small stand towards something, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Totsy capitalizes on this principal masterfully by adding a timer to the shopping cart. After you have added a product to your cart an Attention message warns you that your cart will be emptied in 9 minutes if you don’t check out or resume activity on the site. This creates a form of persuasive pressure for the buyer. They have committed to adding an item to their cart and now the pressure to remain consistent with their action of adding an item to the cart begins to build over the next nine minutes.

When improving website conversion rates through testing and optimization, understanding the why is critical. The why is at the top level of insight that we as designers and marketers need to continuously strive to get to. True insight from any testing and optimization comes from an understanding of what specific variable in your test made the difference. What was it that caused the lift in conversion rate, or the dip? Was it the headline, the button, the product image? What was it that you can point to and bring to your boss and say – Here. This did that and the impact was this in real money to the bottom line.

Knowing the why in any conversion rate optimization test for both positive gains and decreases means we can then begin to get closer to predictability. We can make changes in the future to generate consistent results. This is the holy grail of conversion rate optimization, but it is not always what we should be striving for. Often times when it comes to testing and improving conversion rates, businesses do not have the luxury of time.

Sometimes a business needs results and they need them fast. In such a situation it may be less important to know exactly which particular test variable contributed to the impact of improvement and it may be more important to just simply increase results. This is not the dogma of the scientific method but from a business perspective it makes sense.

Sometimes the business need outweighs the needs of science. We’re not living in a lab with white coats and precise measurement tools. We’re building e-commerce sites and living in the trenches of online conversion rates. To get closer to understanding the why we need to conduct systematic tests, changing only one element at a time or conduct very strict multivariate tests, which require a considerable amount of traffic in order to be statistically valid and a disciplined thought process.

For such a situation, where traffic in terms of visits is not all that high to conduct anything other than an A/B test. The business pain is high and results are required fast. Or upper management buy-in to the idea of conversion rate optimization or testing is low and you need a quick win. It’s OK to enter the world of testing and improvement without solving for the why. In such a situation you’re strictly solving for improvement. Your conversion rate optimization philosophy needs to shift in order to focus on the biggest gains possible. The best chance of reaching those big double, and triple digit improvements is to approach your testing in a radically different way. Changing one element at a time will beyond a shadow of a doubt tell you if that particular element improved your goal or not but you’ll most likely experience minor gains at best, in the range of a few percentage points. Taking a different approach however can lift your conversion rates in the triple digit range and beyond. To get the 100+% improvements your test page needs to be drastically different from your control page. Think of your test variable in this case as your entire page rather than simply 2 versions of the headline. There is a time and place in your testing plan to get more granular and bring it back to understanding the why but in the situation described previously your best chance for wind improvements is going to be found in wildly different test pages.

If you’d like to further discuss conversion optimization testing philosophy please contact me, (bobby @ creativethirst dot com) I’d be more than happy to chat.

Even if people are not fully aware of it, they think about things based on what surrounds them, like a picture in a grand elegant gold frame. Suddenly that picture becomes more elegant and takes on the characteristics of the frame around it. If this works for pictures would it work for other things?

For years advertising agencies have been trying to tap into the mental models of customers by focusing on the old marketing acronym AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. There is certainly a time and place for that tried and true formula. Every website needs to capture the attention of qualified visitors, peek their interest and desire and get them to take action and convert to a sale.

However, where agencies and marketers usually fall short is only focusing on creating awareness and framing. Awareness is a necessary part of any marketing strategy and every website needs visitors to be aware of them in order to get traffic. Framing aligns your product or service with a certain feeling or a particular set of attributes, which is also important in the grand scheme of your brand.

Focusing on just awareness (getting more traffic) and framing (look and feel) will only match your offline marketing campaigns which is far too often all any web designer has to work with. The marketing department is so caught up in a command and control environment they often can’t see beyond just matching the offline print and or television campaign online.

Online marketing however is a different beast entirely. Simply harmonizing your website with your print campaign only deals with framing your product in a certain light and is only one of several powerful tools that can be used to get more sales and conversions. In other mediums like print and TV framing is simply all that you can really do effectively. Other mediums are not interactive and can’t take the ball and run with it to further the sale or even close the sale like a website can.

Because marketers just want to match the offline campaign for brand consistency sake, they are missing out on more sales and higher conversion rates. Don’t get me wrong I fully support brand consistency but there is a lot more that a website can do than simply match the message along with the look and feel and add a call to action button. It’s sad that most websites are still thinking like online brochures. Brochure websites are still an epidemic and so many websites are leaving money on the table because they see the web as a magazine or TV ad with a buy button.

Websites need to do what ad agencies and marketing campaigns can’t do to fill the gap. They need to move beyond look and feel and help visitors make decisions to take action. This is the heart of what conversion rate marketing and persuasive web design is all about, help visitors buy.

This is a completely different approach than simply concentrating on just look and feel or framing. Persuasive web design pulls directly from consumer psychology and mental models, which is where framing comes from but it goes much deeper. It’s more than just visual, it’s verbal too, more in lines with an internal dialog with the visitor and your website in the form of links that pull visitors through an optimized path for buying. By combining design with psychological triggers like scarcity, social proof, reciprocity, consistency and more websites can begin to design the buying process not just the colors and look of your website.

Photo Credit: Gold Picture Frame by Goldener Bilderrahmen. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eriwst/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Do you remember what it was that got you to purchase the last item you bought online? It was probably one of only several reasons and you probably weren’t even fully aware of your reasons why. If it’s this difficult to know why you yourself buy, imagine how difficult it is to understand why someone else would buy from you.  You may think you know why someone is buying from your website but are you really sure? There is a process that customers unconsciously go through in their mind before, during and after they purchase. If you understood this process and knew the reasons why people buy from you, it should be easy to sell more right?

Now hold on a second. I can already hear what you’re going to say. People buy from a website because it has the lowest price. Yes price can be a factor in certain purchases, but don’t let price stop you from selling more. You may have bought from a particular website because of price but price probably wasn’t the underling reason you bought that particular product.

“A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.”
- William Feather

It’s so easy to shop for the best price online and it’s becoming easier offline too with the mobile web and advanced applications and functionality of some phones. But price is only one factor in a myriad of psychological triggers and functionality of online stores. Just imagine, being able to tap into your potential prospects subconscious mind and seeing those wheels turn. How much would you pay to know exactly what it was that got them to take out their credit card and hit that buy button? And how much more would they buy?

When you really step back and look at the buying process it doesn’t matter what the product is or who your prospect is. Underneath it all we’re just people and it doesn’t matter if we’re buying online or not we’re all subject to the same rules of humanity.

Fundamentally, there are 26 different reasons why people buy:

1.    To make money
2.    To save money
3.    To save time
4.    To avoid effort
5.    To be more comfortable
6.    To achieve greater cleanliness
7.    To be more healthy
8.    To escape physical pain
9.    To gain praise
10.    To be popular
11.    To attract the opposite sex
12.    To conserve possessions
13.    To increase enjoyment
14.    To gratify curiosity
15.    To protect their family
16.    To be in style
17.    To have beautiful possessions
18.    To satisfy appetite
19.    To emulate others
20.     To avoid trouble
21.    To avoid criticism
22.    To be an individual or express their individualism
23.    To protect their reputation
24.    To take advantage of opportunity
25.    To have the feeling of safety
26.    To make work easier

Now that you have a view under the hood of the buying mind, your job is to tap into one or several mental buying triggers, or reasons why people buy, and apply them to sell more. Which of these buying reasons tie to your customers and products? If you’re not sure run a simple online survey and get insight from the only person that really matters, your customer. But don’t stop there, look back at the 26 reasons and ask how you can add some of them to your selling process, you’ll be surprised at how much more you can sell when you do this effectively.

Just remember the key to effectively applying this is to tie it into your selling process holistically. Think of it like a tapestry, where one strand of thread is weaved together to make the whole. The buying reasons that are most appropriate to your customers needs to be weaved throughout your website, not just simply on the product page. Weave buying reasons in your headlines, your calls to action, your images, every element needs to support and tie into the whole. The reasons why people buy may be simple but applying them is part art and science. Remember, a website is a living-breathing thing, keep experimenting and testing to learn what works for your customers.

Which do customers find more attractive, 40% OFF or $5.00 OFF? A study conducted in the July 2007 issue of Journal of Marketing research asks that exact question.

The research discovered that customers are more persuaded by a percentage off vs. a dollar amount. This makes sense from a persuasive design perspective. Simply put, the number 40 is bigger than the number 5 in 40% off vs. $5.00 off.

Yes it really is that simple.

Offering a specific dollar amount off of a product with a coupon can change a customer’s perception of the product’s value. When buyers are presented with a percentage discount, a specific bargain price doesn’t ever enter their mind. Where as a specific dollar amount off like, the $5.00 OFF offer creates a specific dollar amount comparison to the total cost of the product. The discount could be the exact same dollar discount, but the percentage will be perceived as bigger. (Obviously that is dependent on the total price of your product.) Customers simply won’t do the math (with the exception of 10 percent or 50 percent offers, where the calculations are easier) and therefore, the percentage off seems like a greater savings to most shoppers.

We can also see the same persuasion perception happen on offers that are stated as a percentage range like. 20 – 50% OFF. Psychologically people have a tendency to assume they will get the lowest discount and think they will get 20% off not 50% or any range in-between. Perhaps consumers have developed a thick skin from years of being marketed to or maybe most people are pessimists, I’m not sure. Either way there are some significant insights you can take away and apply to online conversion rate marketing.

Don’t believe me? One easy way to apply this principle online is to conduct an A/B split test for an adwords campaign. Simply run two separate consecutive ad tests through ad words.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Choose a one week 7 day period that does not have any holidays in it and run version one of your ad copy with 20 – 50% OFF.
2. Immediately follow up that test for another 7 days again with no holidays in this 7 day run and be sure to include the same days as the previous test (Thursday through Wednesday vs. Thursday through Wednesday, etc.) and run version two of your ad copy with the 50% OFF offer.

Your success metric for this test will be the (CTR) Click Through Rate. CTR = total clicks / total impressions. Think of the CTR as a visitor converting from your ad to your landing page. CTR is a the proper metric for this test since your testing variable is the ad copy not the landing page or final sale. You simply want to find which offer drives the most traffic to your landing page.

Here are some examples on how to use the percentage discount offer in your ad words ad.

20 – 50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 20 – 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

Vs.

50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

In this example the only variable was the discount price since we are testing to answer both the which and the what. Which AdWords Ad will generate the highest CTR and What element can we attribute the difference to. Depending on your test goals, time, resources and business goals you may not always be concerned with answering what element attributed to the difference. Some times the most important thing is getting the highest conversion rate increase as quickly as possible.

You can also conduct the same test with a percentage discount vs. a dollar amount (40% OFF vs. $5.00 OFF) as the variable. You may be surprised at what works for your prospects, it’s not always the most obvious or what would be the best offer to you. Remember, your customers don’t think like you do. As I say to all my clients, let’s test it.

In a previous blog post we spoke about the monkey see monkey do principle of online social proof  As the web moves more and more towards a social tool with social media sites popping up like zits on a teenager I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a look at how the principle of social proof is being applied online.

First let’s revisit the concept of social proof

Social proof, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior to take. Basically we all just really want to fit in, we’re hard wired that way. Most people will follow what the crowd is doing just to be considered part of the group. When in a group situation we make the assumption that the surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, than we do and we deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed, so we follow them and do what they do. If you don’t believe me just look at the stock market.

Social influence in general can lead to conformity of large groups of individuals in either good or bad choices. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as herd behavior.

Social proof works offline because we are around other people and their behavior influences us, but online we are acting mostly alone without the pressures of a crowd to guide us or tell us where to click, yet the power of social proof online is as clear as in the real world.

When you are offline and among other people, hey you’ve got to step away from the Internet at some point right, unconsciously you are assessing subtle clues and instinctively processing information about the exerting behavioral force of others around you. i.e. the person next to you or the group itself.

But come on, you’re smarter than that. Right? Could we really be subconsciously assessing how credible or how much we trust in the guy to the left while deciding if his decision was right and if we should follow it or not? Years of Social Psychology studies say we do.

The Principle Of Social Proof

The principle of social proof is activated by similarity: it operates most effectively when we are observing the behavior of people just like us. This explains why testimonials by “ordinary” people online are so powerful vs. the paragraph of marketing about the product written by the company. People use the actions of others to decide on what is proper behavior for them-selves, especially when we view those other people as similar to ourselves.

Offline you’re subconsciously assessing how close the crowd or the guy to your left is to your beliefs before assessing if you should follow the crowds actions. You do this by assessing their outward appearance. Are they summarily dressed to you? Do they belong to a group that best represents you or a belief you identify yourself with? In short do you trust them? The same questions are asked in the mind of your prospect when they arrive on your website.

According to the Social Psychology Quarterly in an article titled Leading the heard astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market by Matthew J. Salganik, of Princeton University says:

Consumers’ decisions about cultural products can be influenced by popularity (Hanson and Putler 1996; Senecal and Nantel 2004; Huang and Chen 2006; Salganik, Dodds, and Watts 2006), in part because people use the popularity of products as a signal of quality—a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as “social” or “observational learning” (Hedström 1998)—and in part because people may benefit from coordinating their choices such as listening to, reading, and watching the same things as others (Adler 1985).

Online social proof supports a persuasive approach to web design and focuses on your prospects. Not everyone is at the same point when they are visiting your site. We would all love it if each visitor was ready to make the purchase or eager to enter their email address or what ever conversion goal your site may have. Social proof is just one element persuasive designers can use to make your prospect feel comfortable before clicking that buy button. The key is putting the prospect at ease.

Visitors can be influenced online with social proof by clearly showing what other people have done before them. We’ve seen some examples of this In the image at the top of this post. Just by showing the actual number of people that have taken action social proof is being exerted online. The best way to use this online is to align the social proof action you want your prospect to take with the action of what others have taken before him. In this way previous online visitors are influencing new prospects.

The Web has come a long way since the 90’s. Connection speeds are faster, pages load quicker, screen resolutions have expanded and visitors have become more web savvy. These and other factors contribute to the death of the page fold.

What is a Fold?
The term “fold” and “below the fold” come from the newspaper industry. Newspapers were really thick back then, most of them are still long and are folded in half to display. The concept was that you kept the most important elements above the fold since everything below the fold is not visible on the newsstand display. On the web the fold translates to any content that the visitor needs to scroll to in order to see it.

The Fold is Not Really That Important
Now you don’t need me to tell you that the web is different than a newspaper, but I’m going to anyway. The old mentality of the fold for a newspaper is based on catching your attention to get you to buy that particular paper among the stacks of others on display. In a world that’s moving away from disruptive advertising and more towards search driven awareness grabbing the attention of a web visitor is shifting beyond the awareness step and straight to the interest and possibly directly to the desire step of the AIDA formula. (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) In this new marketing world the fold is becoming less important.

cxpartners, a user centered design agency in Bristol UK has recently posed an article on their blog with evidence from user testing that proves the page fold is a myth. We’ve been telling our clients that for years, thank you cxpartners for qualifying this for us.

According to cxpartners: “Over the last 6 years with over 800 user testing sessions on only 3 occasions has the page fold been a barrier to users getting to the content they want.”

As a side note cxpartners eye tracking study supports a previous blog post of ours on how to Get More Sales With Effective Web Copy using an F pattern layout for maximum conversion rate marketing.

The Fold Is Kind Of Important, A Little Bit
The fold still exists on the web, it’s just a limitation of the height of your prospects monitor and screen resolution. Scrolling down on a web page is easy, so the barrier to scrolling is not as big as the second half of the front page of the newspaper that you can’t see on the newsstand.

However, scrolling below the fold will always be tied partly to the motivation of the visitor, how good your content is or how closely it is matched to their needs and how persuasively designed your page is.

The design of your page is connected to your conversion rates and that brings us to designing for conversion.

The Principles Of Designing For Conversion & The Fold
People are inherently lazy so you shouldn’t always count on them scrolling. You need to bake persuasion into your design to help your prospect get to the information they need in order for them to feel comfortable to convert to a customer.

Principle 1
Peek out a bit to let them know there’s more.

Let’s take a look at an example from Homedepot.com There’s a dangerously large amount of white space above the product details on this page. For a decision maker that is about to spend $800 on a snowblower you’ll want to know a lot more than just the information that HomeDepot shows you above the fold here. There’s so much white space at the fold line that a prospect may not feel there is more information below the fold.

How Can This Page Be Designed Better?
Building on the first principle of designing for conversion and the fold this page can easily be adjusted to take advantage of persuasion and help the future owner of an $800 snowblower to make his purchase with a bit more confidence and reassurance that he’s spending his money wisely.

I’ve redesigned some elements to reposition the product description as well as other tab information that a methodical decision maker who needs to think through his decision with all of the information presented to him to appear to peek out above the fold. By breaking the image at the fold line this persuasively lets him know there is more content down here that is important. Additionally by repositioning the customer rating box below the add to cart button, this design is also appealing to the skeptical decision maker, who needs to hear things from credible sources, such as third party non biased customer reviews. By aligning this element below the Add to Cart button we created a linear thought hierarchy in the mind of the visitor at the right point within the metal dialog of their online shopping experience.

Designing For Several Folds
You can’t ever be 100% sure where the fold will be on everyone of your prospects experience with your website. A good place to start however would be your web analytics data. Even in a free analytics tool like Google Analytics will tell you the screen resolution of the majority of your visitors. One strategy you could take is to design the fold for the largest segment of your traffic with this data.

Another approach, would be to design for several fold lines depending on various screen resolutions, which could very well drive your web designer crazy. The bottom line is you can’t control the online experience and you will never know exactly where the fold is for each of your prospective customers. With this in mind here are a few more guiding principles to design for conversion and the fold.

1. Use horizontal design elements sparingly, especially bold ones. See cxpartners Hotel Tropico Playa example for this. Psychologically horizontal lines cause web visitors to mentally stop, which could cause them to not scroll.

2. Use vertical design elements, especially for longer content pages. Vertical design elements will draw the viewers eye down the page. This can be accomplished with images, colors, shapes, copy, etc.

Previously we looked at several ways you can tap into what motivates your visitors in order to maximize your online conversion rates. Ultimately you will want to do some real user testing with live people to truly understand what’s going on inside your users head, but I’ll save that for a later post. To turbo charge the principal of tying motivation and conversion rate optimization, you need to couple your visitors’ motivations with how they move through your site. Today let’s concentrate on building from the last pos to produce more results.

Visitors move through a website in a very particular way. Your web analytics click path analysis can give you a broad sense of where visitors are going and how they flow through your site. But it’s important to understand a general information flow philosophy and how to use it to design for conversion rate optimization.

The way people interact with a website and generally how people seek information, is shaped by the structure of the content itself. This is essentially the behavior known as information foraging. We move from web page to web page, website to website, search result to site, search to site, repeat, repeat seeking out patches of useful information or really just for exactly what we’re looking for.

Like our hunter-gatherer ancestors or animals foraging for food, that went from bush to bush looking for the richest juiciest berries we have adapted this to information seeking which is essentially what Information Foraging Theory (IFT) is all about.

Peter Pirolli, the father of Information Foraging Theory got involved with a group of fellow researchers after he joined the Palo Alto Research Center in 1992 to study information-intensive searches. Building on the work of John Anderson, who first studied the mind-environment link and the work of E.A. Smith whose behavioral ecology theory says that people’s strategies can be predicted in part by scrutinizing their environment, Pirolli realized that optimal foraging theory and the core mathematics behind it could be applied to how people search for information.

There are three main concepts from Information Foraging Theory that translate to Conversion Rate Marketing

1. Information Patches
2. Information Scents
3. Information Diet

When an animal goes foraging for nourishment, they use their nose to direct them to where the food is. Visitors move through websites in much the same way. On the web however, a prospect follows information scent to forage for what they are looking for.

This pattern from the very top of the buying funnel, beginning with search would look like a hub and spoke. Starting at a list of search results as the hub a prospect would click out to a site. If the website didn’t carry the information scent the visitor was searching for they would go back to the hub and click on another result to go down the path of a new spoke.

Trigger words that the user searched for or words that solve his particular problem become the basis of the scent.

Pirolli evaluated his theory by testing Stanford students in a controlled search experiment to see how users followed information scent. He found that the difficulty of foraging on the Web appears to be related to the quality of the information scent cues available to the user. With strong scent, users moved quickly towards the target information. When the information scent was weak, visitors took more of a meandering path through a site.

The quicker a prospect moves to the target information, the more likely they are to buy from you. The weaker the scent is along the trail from search to site, to page to page the more likely the visitor will give up and go back out to the hub to find a new spoke.

In relation to your marketing conversion rate, it is vital to build into your design a strong scent trail for your forager to follow if you want to present your best chance of higher conversion rates.

Information scent in this example takes the form of many elements, each of which have to work together to create a synergy of congruence between each step. Some examples of scent in this example include search words within the organic search result or PPC ad, the URL included in the search result, the headline, sub headlines, body copy, images and links on the page as a result of the search.

In an additional study, Pirolli plotted the average scent ratings (rated by a panel of experts) of all the web pages visited, Pirolli found the reason why people switch to another site is because initially the information scent is high, but when the information scent falls below the average information scent in the pages encountered, users switch to another site or search engine. Pirolli also found that starting with a high information scent was associated with longer runs at a web site stickiness.

This means that scent foraging continues beyond the congruity of search and landing page and extends to the overall website itself. Much like foraging for berries on a bush a user goes down one promising branch on search of information and if the scent is weak, he will go back to the hub a spoke pattern to begin again or find a new website to sniff around. Each website represents a new Information Patch and it’s human nature to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Or in this case greener on another website.

To further apply this to Conversion Rate Optimization, Pirolli’s model can be used to predict behavior before the user acts based on sound theoretical foundations. For example based on Pirolli’s model you can predict when people will leave a site by measuring the information scent. Imagine what this could mean to Conversion Rate Design. When people left a site, the scent was dropping. Interestingly, just before a participant left a site, the information scent was much lower than the web page he switched to. Again, when a user perceives that the current information scent is lower than the average, he switches to a more promising patch or changes his information diet.

Photo Credit:  Verdant Path by John Morgan. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmorgan/ / CC BY 2.0

In the previous post I touched on matching your prospects motivation for both your marketing channel, like an AdWords search advertisement, and the web page in which your prospect lands after clicking that ad. With this post we’re going to examine how to tap into the motivation of your prospects to increase and optimize your online conversion rates.

First let’s define motivation. From the perspective of conversion rate optimization, motivation is the glue between the click through rate of a marketing channel and the conversion rate of a landing page.

What specifically motivates your prospect is going to be unique to their needs and the problem your product or service solves for them. Always remember it’s all about them.

To get to the core of motivation you first need to start with the question. “What problem does your product solve?” Once you answer that fundamental question you can begin exploring what possible motivations your prospect might have. It is important to point out that there is a direct correlation here that begins and ends with your customers, not you or your product. This fundamental shift in thinking affects every element of your online marketing when designing for conversion.

Let’s Peal Back Another Layer of Motivation

Each individual marketing channel can give you an indication of your prospects motivation if you know how to look at them from the right perspective. For example, a visitor from a targeted keyword ad has a different motivation and is in a different mindset than a visitor from a banner ad. The banner ad visitor is arriving serendipitously and is less motivated than a visitor who has arrived at your site via a specific search term. The search visitor is focused and more likely his motivation is more specifically related to a particular task.

So How Can Your Website Focus on Motivation to Maximize Conversion?

One of the most powerful influences the web has on marketing is that it makes it very easy for marketers to target specific motivations and needs of prospects. I’m sure you’re already familiar with the secret to targeting these motivations but you probably don’t think of it as a motivation target. The secret I’m referring to is search engine advertising (SEA). By focusing on specific keywords or groups of two or three keywords through SEA marketers have a huge advantage. Based on the specific keywords or set of keywords marketers can infer what the motivation of the prospect may be.

For example if your prospects search was for the keyword “Laptops” This could infer they are in a browsing mode. They are not deep enough into the funnel to buy yet. Therefore your landing page for this generic search term needs to play more of an advisor role to convert this type of visitor. They may not know exactly what they are looking for and may need some help choosing. This type of visitor is going to think differently than a visitor who searches for “Sony Vaio Laptops”

The visitor who is in the “browser” mode (based on his inferred motivation and search term of “Laptops”) may be more persuaded based on price initially to winnow down his choice of laptops or perhaps by function, in how he plans to use it. Is this a laptop for casual use or for more serious business use?

The prospect who searches was “Sony Vaio Laptops” however, is more qualified and the more specific search term of two or more words suggests his motivation is different than the previous visitor. Not only would he expect to see a page of Sony laptops and no other models but the search term infers his motivation is different than that of a visitor who is in a “browser” mode. Your landing page must be designed to tap into different motivations in order to maximize conversions.

To tie your conversion rate optimization strategy to the motivation of the visitor, the visitor’s motivation must be matched to the specific landing page they enter. Simply put, the continuity between the search term and the landing page needs to be inline with each other in order to maximize conversions. This is why designing for conversion that starts with your prospects motivation is so important.

However, motivation as expressed on a web page is only one part of an overall method for conversion rate marketing. To fully understand the connection between the click through rate of a marketing channel and conversion rate we also have to look beyond motivation and understand how a prospect seeks information, which will be the topic of the next post. So stay tuned.

Has a friend ever asked to borrow something that had a high personal value to you? Maybe you kept that object in pristine condition or maybe it was somewhat rare or maybe it’s just sentimental to you because of who gave it to you or how you got it. I don’t doubt this situation has at one point happened to you and at the time I’m sure you were very concerned for what condition the object would be returned to you in. The reason why you had such concern about this transaction is because you own the object and your friend does not. So you start to worry and wonder. Would he or she treat the object with as much care as you do? Would they damage it?

This situation describes something called the endowment effect.

The endowment effect states that people place a higher value on objects they own over objects that they do not.

It’s easy to see how the endowment effect has been present at one point or another in our lives and it’s quite easy to see how this effect exists in the offline world. But let’s take a look at how the endowment effect relate to websites? And specifically how it relates to your online conversion rate?

Online the endowment effect extends from things we own to things we feel an ownership towards. Any website where you have to sign up or create an account has the potential to use the endowment effect to increase conversion rate. The single act of signing up is only the first in a series of future conversions. Think of this customer or member as now entering a post conversion funnel. After a prospect gets over that first hurdle of membership is where you can take advantage of the endowment effect.

Now this may not work for all types of sites but with a little lateral creative thinking it can be applied to almost any website as long as you frame endowment around your conversion goals.

Here’s an example. Amazon.com has gotten me over the first conversion hurdle yeas ago. I frequently purchase from them and I have an Amazon account. Over the years they have taken me further down the post conversion funnel and got me to create a wishlist, a gift organizer, rate over 200 items so recommendations will be more relevant to me and even create 2 Listmanias, one on web analytics and one on persuasive web design. With each addition to my Amazon account I have gained more and more ownership over the Amazon website, and the endowment effect has made me place a higher value on conducting transactions on Amazon vs. bareness and noble.com.  (bn.com) thus increasing the amount of sales and conversions I complete on Amazon.com

Let’s take a look at another example, this time using Netflix.

Netflix, does a great job of creating a sense of ownership through the endowment effect. Similar to Amazon’s wish list I have my Netflix queue of movies and countless movies I have rated all in the effort for Netflix to become more valuable to me. So much so that I would not switch and have blockbuster.com deliver movies to me, even if it were cheaper. In order for Netflix to keep me as a customer I need to continue to fill my movie queue

The key to using the endowment effect online is to develop tools that make your product or service more valuable to your market that is also in line with your micro conversions.

Both of these sites much more valuable to me personally because they gave me a sense of ownership of them. More importantly they both built tools to enforce the endowment effect around key conversion goals of their sites.

Every tool I’ve described from Amazon (the wishlist, the gift organizer, rating items and lists) all support a conversion. When I’m ready to buy I start my browsing at my wish list. During the holidays I start my browsing at the gift organizer and search for similar items that I have bought family members in the past. Both actions lead to a conversion. Similarly on Netflix my movie queue is what keeps me from switching to another movie mail order company. Presumably my queue will never be empty and thus I’ll have no reason to look to blockbuster.com. Each movie I add to my queue is a micro conversion that supports the endowment effect and increases my sense of ownership of their service.

How can the endowment effect be designed into your product or service to increase your conversion rates?