As 2016 approaches, and we prepare to bid adieu to 2015, we took the time to look back and reflect on everything we’ve learned and written about this past year.

2015 was filled with guides to AB Testing, UX Design, and Psychological triggers. We dug deeper into landing page optimization, ecommerce, mobile and b2b optimization, everything we learned throughout the years from working with our customers and running countless AB tests.

To summarize this year, lets take a look at the most read, shared and debated Conversioner posts we’ve had and take a look at the year to come. *drum roll please*

#1. 26 Pricing Page Examples and Best Practices

Pricing has been the top question on everybody’s mind this year. The pricing page is that one place where your visitor decides to take that next step and put their trust in you and decide whether to invest their time and money in your business. How do you design a pricing page that helps your customer achieve their goals and increases your sales?  This post observes the most important elements of a pricing page, from strategy to messaging, design and AB testing. Checkout the in-depth analysis of 26 different pricing pages and learn how to optimize yours or create a new one from scratch.If you are going through this process, this is the post for you. And if you already have a great pricing page, perhaps you can make it even better! See how it compares to this list and if there’s something you can optimize (trick question! there’s always something you can optimize!).

2. 10 Psychological Triggers to Boost Revenues

Well, by now, thanks to Dan Ariely and his peers,  we know that we’re completely irrational beings and that different triggers affect our decision making process. Check out these 10 psychological triggers you can start using on your site to increase your revenues.

3. Boost eCommerce Conversion Rate: 30 Best Practices and Tips

e-Commerce was all the rage in 2015, and we have a feeling it’ll just keep going through 2016 as well. In this post, you learn 30 great tips on how to increase your ecommerce conversion rate, including tips about color, where to optimize, call to actions, personalization, emotional targeting, and forms. So if you missed this post, enter the new year prepared and read up on the greatest tips and tricks to improve your ecommerce site.

4. A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding UX Design

Sometimes we get lost in all of these shortened acronyms, so here’s a reminder of what UX stands for – User Experience. When you’re working towards increasing conversions, you are focusing on the benefits of the user- and you are doing this with imagery, with the copy. But the overall design has to keep the user in mind as well – and that’s a whole field in and of itself. But we wrote a beginner’s guide with you to get you started. It includes sources and tools that can get you started on the road to creating a great user experience for your visitors.

5. Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Persona

One point that comes up consistently throughout conversion optimization is -before matching your design, imagery, copy, and color to your customers – you have to know your target audience. And in order to really know and understand your target audience, you should build marketing personas. So here’s the play-by-play on how to go about doing that.

6. Speaking with Emotion: How to Increase Conversions with Words

The words we use have a powerful effect on the people around us. Online words are one of the main ways we communicate with our visitors. Check out this in-depth guide of words that can help you trigger the right emotions in your target audience.

7. 10 Landing Page Examples to Increase Sales

If you love landing pages like we love landing pages, you are going to love this post. It has some great examples on how to take your landing pages to the next level and increase sales. See what the best and worst companies are doing and how to apply these lessons to your landing page.

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8. 42 Mobile Landing Page Optimization Tips

I don’t know if you’ve heard but – Mobile is the new Desktop, and 2015 took mobile to the next level. Over 51% of internet browsing is now done on our mobile devices, and in 2015, statistics show that  2 billion smartphones have been purchased in the world! So it’s time to stop ignoring those small screens and start giving those mobile visitors more attention. In lieu of these findings, we wrote a detailed post filled with different tips on how to optimize your mobile landing page and increase conversions.

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9. AB Test Checklist: Everything You Need to Check Before Launching

You can’t optimize without testing, but how do you know you’re testing what you wanted to test, and that you’re doing it the right way? With all the different tools and different changes you’ve made, how do you know it’s going to go well? Here’s an All-Inclusive Checklist to end all Checklists that you should go through before you hit that “Start Experiment” button.

10. How to Consistently Grow Your Conversion Rates with Emotional Targeting

Last but definitely not least – how to grow conversion rates with emotional targeting. We wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t discuss emotional targeting, how to use it as a strategy, and how that, in turn, will increase your conversions. Read it here and learn how to take all those different posts on UX design, emotion-driving words, color psychology, marketing personas and A/B testing, to implement them into your strategy to create incredibly effective landing pages, pricing pages, and more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from the posts over the last year – these 10 and many others – and are seeing your conversion rates grow. 2015 was a fantastic year for conversion optimization growth and development, as well as for mobile!  We are excited for what 2016 has in store! Prepare yourself for exciting and detailed posts on analytics, personalization technology advancement tools for both desktop and mobile, heatmaps and of course, more posts on emotional targeting!

As psychology researchers continue to learn about the human mind, as technology continues to advance, and as the interactions of humans with technology continue to change, we will continue to learn and update you with different ways to improve your conversion rates.

A New Year’s Gift From Us to You:

In honor of the new year, Banana Splash (our favorite mobile personalization tool) is offering all of our loyal Conversioner readers a 14 day free trial and a 20% discount for your first 3 months of membership! Just put in the code: conv20

 

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.” -George MacDonald

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, trust is the “ belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, and effective”. Trust is an important emotional trigger because if a visitor does not believe you are reliable, good, honest, or effective, they are not going to want to interact with you. A visitor needs to rely on you and believe you are honest, have good intentions, and that you will provide the value you offer.

Due to the fact that emotions drive many of our purchasing decisions, and due to the fact that trust is a powerful emotional trigger that should be emphasized in almost every CRO strategy, we are dedicating an entire post to it – from what it is, to why we use it, to how we portray it online.

How is trust relevant to conversion optimization?

According to Forbes, trust is not just a singular thing. Trust is “a relationship established between a trustor and a trustee…The role of the trustor is to take risks; the role of the trustee is to be trustworthy.” So while we discuss different options for increasing trust on your site, you should remember to add only things that are true and relevant to you. If you want to be trusted, you need to be trustworthy. Being trustworthy and trusted is worth it because trust increases brand loyalty, customer development, and decreases churn. Creating loyal customers who will recommend you to their friends is definitely something to strive for because, according to 2015 statistics, personal recommendations were the most trusted form of advertising- with 83 percent of respondents stating that they somewhat or completely trusted recommendations they got from friends and acquaintances.

 

If you ask someone to leave their email in return for an e-book, they need to trust that you will actually send them that e-book and that your e-book is of high quality and will be helpful. If a user decides to purchase something from you online, they need to rely on you and believe that you will send that item to their home in an efficient manner, and that the item will be in good shape too!

As you  can see, trust can motivate a customer to buy, and it can increase returning visitors as well. So trust is important for our conversion rates. However, trust is a complex emotion. How do you convey it online – without a handshake, eye contact, or a warm smile?

Think of your site as your resume. You have but a few seconds to form an impression on your customers and make them trust you with your website’s design and messaging. Below are 4 tested methods we use to increase trust for our clients:

1. Evoking Trust with Trust Seals

One way to evoke trust is with well-known trust seals, which are logos and symbols that increase credibility.

These can be:

• Security Seals – These are logos that show that your site is secure. Norton Security, McAfee Security and many others, are often used to show that your site is safe, that these companies have inspected your privacy and security level and that private details will not be compromised or shared. Baymard Institute researched which icons were perceived as most trustworthy by online users and here are the results:

• Diplomas and approval from official organizations- This technique is used mainly by  doctors, veterinarians, accountants,lawyer and other accredited professionals. Highlight the fact that your business has been certified and/or that you are certified/have a license with icons from the appropriate well-known establishments.

Express Watch, a Seiko watch dealer, originally had a ‘discount price guarantee’ symbol on their product page.

When they tested substituting it for a trust seal, stating they are an authorized dealer, their sales increased by 107%!

Variation:

 2. Evoking Trust with Social Proof

Social Proof is a powerful driver of trust. It uses the power of numbers and the “bandwagon effect” to prove that you can be trusted. Robert Cialdini discusses social proof in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion  and says that often times, when people do not know how to act, they look to others’ behavior to see how they should act.

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When people do not know how to act they look to others’ behavior to see how they should act.
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• The Power of Numbers – There are a few ways you can use numbers to increase trust on your landing pages or homepage:
  • Display the number of registered customers you have to show that other people trust you. Show how many others have chosen to trust you, so new visitors can see that it is safe for them to trust you too.
  • Display the amount of people who have already purchased (like on Groupon – showing how many other people have already purchased this deal).

• Number of products purchased/used – Similar to the concept above, except here you are not only showing how many people have registered but how many have actually used the product. For example, MyHeritage lists how many customers they have (2.0 Billion Profiles, 79 Million Users), but also how many family trees have been created (people who actively use their product). Similarly Piktochart shows visitors how many infographics  have been made via their platform. This strengthens trust because it’s one thing to sign up, but it’s another to use the product. This technique shows potential customers that the product is safe, useable and can be trusted.

• Trust by Relevance – Have you seen those sites that talk about where they’ve been mentioned (“As featured in”, “As seen on”)? This is yet another popular form of social proof that provides credibility. I mean, if Forbes, Business Weekly, The New York Times, and Moz mentioned your product publicly, then you must be trustworthy. Having big names write about you is powerful, so show it on your site to increase trust.
  

  Conversioner uses “As Featured On” on our homepage.

• Trust By Authority – Another way to evoke trust is to show what big names use your products and services. Some companies use celebrity faces to strengthen the trust of users in the product. You can also use authority names such as big companies that trust you enough to use your product or service. Statista shows some of their big-name clients to add social proof.

• Testimonials – What better way to prove that society trusts you than highlighting a past or current  customer’s experience? When a visitor comes to your site, they are wondering whether they can trust you with their business, their credit card information, etc. By showcasing  a positive customer experience other customers of yours have had, you lower anxiety. Others are working with you and enjoyed it, so they can too.
  

  Dapulse uses both video and image testimonials, as well as naming their big customers to induce trust in potential customers.

• Reviews - These are similar to testimonials in that these are customers who are sharing their opinion, but this time it’s not you telling your users about something your customer has said to you, but rather, this is communication directly from one customer to another. This is more commonly used on eCommerce sites. Consider sites you visit just for the reviews – like TripAdvisor and Yelp. These are companies that understand how consumers choose their next purchase and make a decision according to reviews. Many customers require and even need to hear these reviews to convince them to go to a hotel/restaurant/guide-tour or to buy a frying pan. There are dangers in a negative review, but a large amount of positive reviews can have a powerful, trust-inducing effect. In fact, according to eMarketer, consumer reviews are trusted almost 12 times more than descriptions made by the company, and according to iPerceptions (2011), user reviews on a site can increase the likelihood of 63% of users to make a purchase. And if those statistics don’t convince you, according to Revoo, reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales!

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Customer reviews on a site can increase the likelihood of 63% of users to make a purchase.
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3. Evoking Trust with Colors

When it comes to color, I could tell you that blue conveys trust because it is associated with security, reliability, and authority (think IBM, Intel, General Electric, HP) but in reality, trust is conveyed by color when the color you select is compatible with the message you send. If you are selling recycled notebooks, then a bright red and yellow logo and site -focused on power and energy – may not fit well, while one with earthy browns and light greens may fit better in the user’s mind, conveying reliability and a common mind and therefore creating a sense of trust.

4. Evoking Trust with Words

Words can have a strong emotional impact, and some words can affect us differently than others. Keep this in mind when writing copy for your site to make sure that the words you use are working for you in terms of the emotions you want to trigger and the message you are trying to send.

• Transparency- When you are clear and straightforward with your customers, you can portray reliability, transparency, and therefore – trust. When the user believes that you are good, you mean them no harm, and you are reliable, they are open to building a relationship with you. So sharing facts like – “no hidden fees” or “this is how we track analytics without breaking your privacy” are great!
  • At the same time, watch out for using sentences like “we won’t spam you” or “we won’t steal your data”. Be careful with the words you use and how you use them so that you do not evoke fear in customers and plant worries in their mind.

• Use Familiar Copy - Another concept that is discussed in Cialdini’s book, in Chapter 5, is “Liking.” This is the idea that humans tend to like people who are similar to them. If you use words that your customers are familiar with, they are more inclined to like you and feel secure with you, which is one step closer to trust. In order to use language that your visitors will find familiar and trustworthy, you can build marketing personas and get into the target audience’s mind, making sure you understand them and their emotional needs before writing. You can also send them surveys and read reviews by them for your products (or similar ones) to see the language that they use. When you use the same language that your users are using, it seems familiar and comforting. It can evoke feelings like empathy, understanding, familiarity, and inherently – trust.

“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” -Stephen Covey

When your visitors trust you, they are open to building a relationship with you. They trust you with their email, their credit card, their billing address, and their google analytics data. Trust also helps you do your job more reliably so it really makes everyone happier and, in the long run, decreases churn. You can then turn this trust into a relationship, and a happy customer is a returning customer, and even better, a referring customer. So trust can bring about increased sales, increased customers, and even increased visitors.

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A happy customer is a returning customer, and even better, a referring customer.
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Do you have a specific site you trust the most? What makes you trust them?

 

 

Last month we completed our first round of optimization with Piktochart.

For those of you not familiar with the product (you should check them out), Piktochart is one of the top infographic tools in the world. With hundreds of creative templates, it allows marketers without design experience to create productive, professional infographics in minutes.

We’ve been working with them on optimizing their entire funnel, from sign ups to paying customers. Piktochart are always up for testing and learning in order to provide the best experience for their users, which is a great attitude, and we were excited to join the team!

This is their original homepage:

 

The current homepage already has some good tactics for conversion. They have a brightly colored call to action, a large headline, copy with the word “Discover” (which is a great attention grabber), and easy to digest bullet points.

They also use social proof and write where they have been featured, so that users can see how serious and well known Piktochart is.

The video shows how users can create their infographic – but it is not constantly running, so it does not distract users attention from the call to action, but rather allows the user to control their experience.

Piktochart wanted to work on the emotional targeting strategy and learn more about their customers, so we decided to take the current homepage, and kick it up a notch in terms of the strategy – bringing about the emotional triggers we want the users to feel in order to take action on the homepage.

We hypothesized, based on our marketing personas (discussed later), that our main emotional triggers were empowerment and energy. Our goal was to to give the user the immediate understanding of what they will be getting with this product, and the energy and empowerment to see themselves creating these infographics!

Our Mission: To Increase Sign Ups

Our Ship: The Homepage

Our Map: Research and Strategy

Step 1: The Ground Work

After researching the market and the competition and understanding the stage better, we discussed Piktochart’s goals and what they wanted to improve.  Piktochart was interested not only in signing more people up to their service but also in getting more people to create an infographic and complete it- so we kept this final conversion goal in mind throughout the process as well.

Our research showed that we should test making users feel a personal connection to the product, and feel empowered to design, as well as energized to continue designing from the homepage through the entire template creation process.

We started with an analysis of the product, the market, and the target audience. We researched the competitors and the target audience, and studied Piktochart’s user data with Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Crazy Egg heatmaps.

Step 2: Recognizing and Understanding the Target Audience

Once we had this data, we created several Marketing Personas. With our marketing personas, we were able to develop our strategy and tactics based on the emotions that would trigger our personas.

This is part of one of our marketing personas – as an example for you!

Step 3: Developing Your Strategy

The next step was combining the behavioral information we researched with the emotional research results to define a clear strategy. So we considered what emotional needs will pull our users to take action, and developed tactics that would fulfill those needs.

Step 4: Designing for CRO

When designing for Conversion Optimization, one must consider coloring (and branding), imagery, and copy while keeping those emotional triggers in mind!

Based on our research on the target audience, we knew that many of our users were professionals and students, not graphic designers, who wanted to turn their content into something beautiful even with their lack of design skills. So our copy reflected our understanding – they want to create something impressive, and quickly too.

Here is the variation we created:

The Changes:

1) Image: We wanted to express value and energy, so we changed the image to reflect the end product – the infographic.

2) CTA: The focus was to create infographics, so we put in a clear Call To Action button.

3) Overall Design: To give an overall infographic feel to the whole page we put the title in an infographic style banner, added some texture to the background and cool edges on the page.

4) Bullet Points: Due to the fact that research shows that users read less than 28% of text on the page, we wanted to reduce the overall amount of text on the page, and we kept what we felt are the most important (Nielsen Norman Group). So we selected three bullet points, based on user surveys of what features were important to users and heatmaps, and shortened the subtitle.

5) Copy: In order to make maximum emotional impact, we wanted to refer directly to the user – because we know those words have greater power. So we changed the copy to speak directly to the user.

 

Step 5: Testing

We ran the test for 10 days, using Optimizely, with a 50/50 division for traffic between the Original and the Variation. The variation design improved registration by an overall of 11.4% with an improvement of 14% and 15% on Google+ and Facebook Registration respectively, and an improvement of over 20% on certain browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome.

Next Steps:

After increasing conversion of user flow to sign ups, our next step for the emotional targeting strategy is to optimize the registration page and we’ve just launched it! Our goal is to continue the same strategy through the process of the user funnel. This is the variation we created vs. the original design:

Original:

Variation:

Which variation do you think is going to win?

Have you ever read a book that made you cry or laugh out loud? Although you are reading words on a page, they can bring about strong emotions in you as they paint pictures in your imagination.

Words are a powerful tool that stirs emotions and can directly increase conversions. We can feel the impact of words from the heart palpitations we get from a newspaper headline, a song on the radio, a book, or the words of a bully. Words can truly change lives.

So while we discuss imagery, color psychology and layout in messaging, it is also critical to discuss the words we use. But words on their own are not what makes them memorable. What makes words stay with us are the feelings they bring about in us. So in order to understand what words to use, we need to understand what emotions we need to convey. In conversion optimization, this means we need to understand the emotional triggers that motivate our target audience and for that we need emotional targeting.

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Words are a powerful tool that stirs emotions and can directly increase conversions.
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What is Emotional Targeting Anyway?

Emotional targeting, is a methodology in which we recognize the emotions that motivate our audience into taking action (buy, sign up, leave an email), and then focusing on turning those emotions into triggers within our marketing strategy and design.

First, you should recognize your target audience. Next, hypothesize the emotions that will speak most to your target audience. After that, write and design your marketing strategy based on these emotions, and then – test!

The Basics:

Let’s start off with some general rules:

1. Shorter is Sweeter:

• Our brain can only hold a limited amount of information at a time, so the shorter your message is, the more likely it is to stay in your reader’s brain! (Think Elevator Pitch, but shorter!)
• “ The human brain can really only hold on to four things at a time, so if you go on and on for five or ten minutes trying to argue a point, the person will only remember a very small part of that. “ Researcher Andrew Newberg
• Longer messages cause readers to skip over words to try to get to the point. In fact, users have time to read a maximum of 28% of the words during an average visit, and the real number is more likely 20% of the web page! (Nielsen Norman Group)
• You want to think of your message as a headline – use it to catch your target audience’s attention. Once you have their attention, they will be willing to read more, because they want the facts! But your initial interaction is meant to catch the attention of your target audience, and to weed out those who aren’t interested in reading more. (Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins)

2. Define Your Emotional Triggers

• How do you want to make your user feel? Do you want to catch their attention using Fear? (Don’t miss out!) Empowerment? (Just Do it!) Hope? (It’s just around the corner!)

3. “How does this make me feel?”

• After every sentence you write, read it again and think about what emotions it brings up. Sometimes a difference in one word can change the feeling of a whole sentence.
• If you feel you have been working on something for too long, ask someone in the office, or in your family, how the sentence makes them feel as well.

4. Consider Your Product

• There are some emotions you do not want associated with your product, or don’t suit your product.

5. Match Copy to Image

• Remember that words complement the image you use. Since a large percentage of our brain is geared towards visual, it is important to match the feeling we’re trying to stir in our visitors with a suitable image.

Turning Our Words Into Actions:

Now that you have defined the emotions you would like your reader to feel, let’s provide some examples of words for different emotions we can use, along with some relevant examples from well-known brands. We can make our readers feel all kinds of different emotions.

Anger

You can use negative emotions such as Anger to get your users to relate to a cause and donate, like here for example:

Keywords: Words that increase feelings of anger include: severe, shocking, enraging, atrocious, tragic, unfair

Fear

Fear of loss can motivate people to purchase different products. For example, fear of death or sickness. Look at what this insurance company did with their advert:

Or what a company that helps smokers quit used in their ad:

Another way to use fear is to play on the emotion of FOMO or “Fear of Missing Out” in advertisements and convey a sense of urgency.

Keywords: “Limited Offer” ,“Don’t Miss This!”, “Sale Ends Today!”

The word “Limited” raises in us the feeling of Loss Aversion, which refers to people’s penchant for choosing to avoid loss over acquiring gains.

In this image, the words “Flash” and “Hurry! It won’t last long” create fear that one will miss out this sale.

Urgency and Instant Gratification

In today’s world where people expect their page to load in 3 seconds or less, urgency does not always go with fear. It can also go with positive emotions like feeling content or calm, which are associated with instant gratification.

Keywords: Words such as “Now”, “Tonight”, “in one hour or less”, or “within 10 days” appeal to that instant gratification trigger.

In this image, the advertiser speaks directly to the buyer’s need for instant gratification  - you can sleep better as soon as tonight!

Happiness and Joy

You can also use your words to portray happiness and joy, if that is what you think your audience should feel when they use your product. We are all familiar with at least one company that consistently advertises its’ products with feelings of happiness and joy (and they use the right colors for it too!).

Keywords: Enjoy, fun, delight, sunny, eager, cheer, satisfy, and play

Empowerment

Empowerment is another popular emotion many marketers want their users to feel. You want your user to feel capable of using your product, or empowered by your product. You may feel that your target audience are leaders who enjoy doing things first, who want their feelings of superiority to increase.

Keywords: Motivated, brave, capable, bold, inspired, can, do, choice, and daring.

In this image, CoverGirl says girls can – sending an empowering message to girls and women.

This image, which was a symbol of women empowerment during WWII, signifies both a sense of community and a sense of empowerment (Yes you can combine two emotions in one which is very recommended at times).

Health

With today’s health craze, one great way to impact customers is to mention health, freshness and environment. Using the right words can show your target audience that your product is the healthy, refreshing, new choice.

Keywords: Boost, cure, vitalize, vibrant, natural, well, wellness, live, energize, fresh, good, and flush.

The use of “good” repeatedly makes you associate this juice with positive, healthy thoughts.

You want healthy and positive things in your home, and Tide knows that.

McDonalds is fighting their “Junk Food” stigma and using words that will make us feel healthy when eating there (note how they changed their colors from red to green).

 

Hope

Hope is another important trigger to use in marketing strategies. Hope is a strong driver of purchases, since everyone wants to believe they will get better  (and if you can buy something that will do it for you, then why not?).

Keywords: Bright, future, success, hopeful.

The word Imagine activates a part of our subconscious brain that starts picturing, for example, our life with an HD TV screen.

Obama used Hope in his campaign as well, along with empowerment. These posters along with the “Yes We Can” moved a nation to act and vote for a change.

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Hope is a strong driver of purchases, since everyone wants to believe they will get better
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Belonging

You want to create a sense of belonging when looking for people to join your newsletter, or subscribe to your site. Some people use a support community to help sell a product as well. Using numerical examples such as the amount of money raised, or amount of people who are in the community can also help create this feeling.

Keywords: join, together, us, community, belong, love, gather, connect, with, home, and family.

McDonald’s (below) used these emotions to help promote their restaurant chain and turn it into a “family establishment”. They used both familiarizing words like “your” and “family” to make it feel like home. Notice the “we do it all for you” at the bottom too.

In this ad, you wouldn’t know it but Microsoft is the advertiser. This makes you feel as though, if you use Microsoft, you’re at home, you have a family feeling, it brings you together with others.

Here, Nike is inviting users to “Join the challenge”, making it both a competition with yourself, and becoming part of a community. Nike also use the term “your”, personalizing the ad.

Other Successful Emotional Words

Some words that can trigger emotional reactions that are not attached to a specific emotion are:

• You – Making it about the consumer.

• Because – People like to have a reason for what they do (check out Robert Cialdini’s, the Psychology of Persuasion)

• Discover – feeds our need for being the first, as well as our strong sense of curiosity. Additional words that raise curiosity are: secret, confidential, sneak peak, “be the first to know”, and banned.

Our emotions are complex. We want to feel loved and supported, yet we want to feel in control. We want to be unique and to gain others’ attention, yet we want to belong and be a part of a community. We search for peace and balance, yet we seek challenge and success.

And the list goes on.

But once you create your target audience personas and prioritize the emotions you want to reach, choose your words wisely. Choose fitting images and colors, and write copy that will have your users doing what you want because it’s what they want.

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Write copy that will have your users doing what you want because it’s what they want.
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Sources:
ThePersuasionRevolution
Copy Bloggers
Kissmetrics
Outsmartyourbrain
Gulyani
Entrepreneur.com
Lean-Labs

When people venture into AB testing they have a set agenda, like increasing registrations or downloads for example. All efforts are dedicated to increasing that one KPI and running different AB tests to improve it.

For me, conversion optimization has always been about more than just optimizing that one KPI. It’s about running meaningful tests that can teach us more about our customers and using those insights to change entire processes within the business leading to higher profits and revenues across the board. In essence, imagine being able to truly understand your customer on an emotional level and translate that knowledge into relevant, optimized interactions.

Done correctly, conversion optimization can help us optimize customer service processes, sales methodologies, user journeys and entire products. All these changes can lead to higher revenues by simply running meaningful tests and following a strategy.

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CRO is about being able to truly understand customers and translate that knowledge into revenue
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The Gap

So how do you do conversion optimization the right way? how do you run meaningful tests you can learn from? To start off lets take a look at what people are doing today and define the key points that need optimizing.

The #1 Issue:

Not knowing what to test leads to meaningless tests which lead to insignificant results

• In 2014, 42% of marketers said the hardest part of CRO is analyzing the results.

• In Q1, 2015, 63% of marketers said they optimize their site based on intuition.

These two numbers are a direct result of the fact that the vast majority of tests ran these days by all marketers are solely behavioral targeting tests. Behavioral targeting means that the type of browser, geographical location, time on page and other behavioral metrics decide which type of variation of a landing page the visitor gets to see.

Image source: VWO

Then to optimize this process, AB tests are run on various elements of a landing page such as the color of a call to action button, a title of a page or an image. In the example below you can see what these sort of tests look like:

Basically marketers do not know what to test, so they look at the numbers, see patterns and guess what needs to be tested, then once the results come in, they’re not sure what they mean or what to optimize next. The reason for this is that behavioral targeting is a good start, but it isn’t enough.
Let’s take a look at the missing part.

The Missing Link

In order to test correctly and reach meaningful results, you need to have a strategy, and combine emotional targeting with behavioral to your testing methodology.

Emotional targeting is the missing link in most online marketing strategies and notably in conversion optimization. If behavioral elements such as time on page and type of device are what lead the behavioral targeting methodology, it is the emotional gain that leads the emotional targeting methodology.

The emotional targeting methodology derives from one of the most basic foundations of marketing and psychology: People are irrational beings and our decision making process is almost entirely emotional. Which is why, in order to sell you have to appeal to the emotional side of your customers.

Throughout the history of marketing, offline advertisers have always used emotion to derive sales and revenue. The offline advertising world focuses on the emotional value and not the features or pricing of a product like in the online world.

Take Sprite for example, their ads are meant to make us feel excited, alive and energized. There’s no text telling us that drinking Sprite will energize us or that it’s better than any other drink, by simply using colors, images and movement Sprite make us feel it.

When it comes to the online world the average person sees hundreds of messages and ads a day and has to somehow navigate through them all and make a decision. We tend to think that by highlighting our features or cost customers will choose our product when in fact, no matter what you are selling, what resonates with with your customer isn’t your product but the emotional gain.

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No matter what you’re selling, what customers care about isn’t the product but the emotional gain
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Good marketing leaves an impact which is focused on helping customers become better versions of themselves. Showing them the person they can be (who they dream to be) and how the product can help them become that person.

The online advertising world is almost completely behavioral, technical and product focused. It’s all about the features or the pricing of a product, using a lot of text to explain why it is better than another. For example: Skype.

Skype uses its headline to tell you what it does and a preloaded video showing you people using Skype. The most highlighted information on the page is the features such as “Call, message and Share” and so is the price (free).  

But what would an offline Skype ad look like? Would they promote themselves the same way? Apparently not.

While in the online world Skype is all about their product, their billboard is clearly appeals to the emotion of their customers and the people they want to hire – “Embrace your true calling”.
To me this makes no sense, though we know emotions sell, the offline world which cannot track its results solely uses emotion while the online world which allows for seamless tracking and analysis focuses on behavior only.

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Show customers how your product can turn them into the person they dream of becoming
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Putting Theory Into Practice

Let’s have a look at how applying emotional targeting can increase conversions dramatically and have an impact on entire business.

Working with WallMonkeys (a super cool print on demand service for decals and murals), our goal is to increase revenues and find a way to stand out from competitors.

Starting out we dug deep into the analytical data using heatmaps, Google Analytics and other tools to determine user behavior and the key points that needed optimizing within the funnel. We then ran our emotional triggers research and identified the triggers we wanted to start testing.

Two things became clear from the research, on the strategic side the target audience (mainly parents) needed to see how Wallmonkeys changes their entire home for the better. On the user behavior side we realized that the majority of customers started their purchase using the search bar.

The changes we made to the homepage were in structure, color, image and usability. Wallmonkeys is a fun, cool and exciting experience which had to stand out.

Using color psychology, we highlighted the fun, fresh and cool service that is WallMonkeys. The image was changed to reflect the target audience and the end result (brightening your home). In terms of usability, we enlarged the search bar and centered it. These changes lead to a 550% increase in revenue. By catering to the emotional needs of our visitors and emphasising the search bar in our test we increased the amount of searches on the site and also discovered that ‘search’ wasn’t producing relevant results at all times. This discovery allowed WallMonkeys to optimize search and as a result produce an even higher increase in revenues. By testing a strategy and making meaningful changes we were able to increase revenues and change important processes within the business.

Getting Started with Emotional Targeting

To get started with emotional targeting here are a few tips and steps you should follow:

#1 Getting to know your users

How well do you know your customers? Can you answer questions about their life, dreams and hobbies? There’s more to our customers than browser type and geographical location. Checkout this step-by-step guide to creating a marketing persona and dive deeper into successful emotional targeting.

#2 Show it don’t tell it

Show don’t tell is the art of conveying a message in a way that consumers can quickly comprehend and see what’s in it for them. Instead of telling visitors how amazing your product can be for them, show it to them by using images, colors and the right headlines.

A few facts about text vs. images and color:

• Almost 50% of our brain is involved in visual processing. (Human anatomy and psychology)

• It takes us only 150ms to process a symbol and only 100ms to attach a meaning to it

• On average users only read 28% of words per visit (more likely to read 20%). (Nielsen)

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On average users read just 28% of words per visit
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We suffer from an overload of information and the best way to convey a message quickly is by using visual and colorful aids. Which means: Show it, don’t tell it.

People do not read long texts or have time for them, make the most of the first 3 seconds a visitor lands on your page and show them without effort what’s in it for them.

Manpacks for instance could write on their landing page that they have an endless supply of condoms, underwear and socks. Then they could also explain about their fast delivery, the wide selections and how cool they are. Instead they use an image, well-known logos and one powerful headline to portray all of these values within seconds.

Which brings me to my next point:

#3 Value Over Features & Benefits

In Experian’s latest Digital Marketer Survey 49% of marketers said their top challenge is standing out against competitors.

When it comes to standing out against competitors, most online companies showcase their product, features and pricing when in fact using emotional targeting you could stand out in a crowd of features and bullet points.

Car insurance for example is an extremely competitive industry and you have to really stand out in order to succeed. In the insurance industry one of the most important elements people check is pricing; people want cheap car insurance and every company promises to do so. Let’s take a look at two companies saying the same, but very differently:

InsuanceStep has a landing page that says it: “Save up to 70%”.

While Quotelab, makes you feel it:

Note how their funnel is exactly the same, yet the use of the right colors (blue for trust and stability), a strong image and trust icons make all the difference.

#4 Using Color Psychology

Color plays an important role in emotional targeting. In fact it has long been proven by psychological experiments that different colors have an effect on specific parts of our brain and can change our feelings. For years artists, designers and advertisers have used color to affect us emotionally and change our feelings towards specific brands, logos and pieces of art. A recent study showed that the color of a logo affects consumer emotion towards its brand. The following article will show you how to increase conversions using color psychology.

#5 AB Test your Concepts

Last but not least, start AB testing your concepts and strategies. Once you’ve profiled your users, created a strategy and designed your landing page (or any other part of the funnel), it’s time to test it and gain insights about your customers. This is how you run meaningful tests that lead to higher conversions and important insights. Don’t forget to checkout this AB test checklist before you launch.