Break Out of The Conversion Rate Optimization Frame

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

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