Looking for the best marketing books? You’re in the right place!

In the early 2000s, PepsiCo ran blind taste tests that showed most people preferred Pepsi over Coke. Confident in the data, they launched a bold campaign but it backfired. Sales didn’t spike. In fact, Coke pulled ahead.

Why? Because marketing isn’t just about the product. It’s about memory, identity, emotions—things you can’t always measure.

That’s why the best marketing books don’t just teach tactics. They teach you how people think. And in 2025, as AI tools flood the landscape and automation handles the busywork, your edge comes from knowing what still can’t be outsourced: human insight, strategy, and brand intuition.

This list brings together some of the best marketing books for today’s post-SEO world. 

We’ve organized the 31 best marketing books into clear, purposeful categories, so you can jump straight to what matters most for your role, goals, or curiosity.

• Marketing Classics & Timeless Strategy: Essential reads on brand positioning, copywriting, and the fundamentals that never go out of style.
• Consumer Behavior & Persuasion: Understand the psychological drivers behind buying decisions and how to influence them ethically.
• Content Marketing & Storytelling: Books to help you craft stories that build trust, spark action, and grow your brand.
• Social Media & Direct Response Marketing: High-impact strategies for engagement, ROI, and platform-specific growth.
• Strategy, Innovation & Category Design: Forward-looking reads on long-term growth, market disruption, and owning your niche.
• Marketing in the Age of AI: Navigate automation, generative tools, and the future of marketing in an AI-driven world.

Each book in this list will sharpen your thinking, upgrade your strategy, and help you stand out—whether you’re a beginner, a brand builder, or a digital native navigating the noise.

TL;DR: The Best Marketing Books of 2025—What to Read and Why

• Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout -> For mastering brand perception and competitive messaging

• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy -> For persuasive copy and ad fundamentals that still work today

• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt -> For building clear, focused marketing plans

• Influence by Robert Cialdini -> For using psychology to make your campaigns more persuasive

• Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi -> For creating value-first content that converts

• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley -> For improving your writing across all channels

• Marketing Artificial Intelligence by Paul Roetzer -> For using AI tools without losing the human touch

• Conversion Optimization by Khalid Saleh -> For turning traffic into actual sales through better UX and copy

• Contagious by Jonah Berger -> For designing content and offers, people naturally share

• The Age of Invisible Machines by Robb Wilson -> For building AI-powered customer experiences

I. Marketing Classics & Timeless Strategy

These are the books that shaped modern marketing. Whether you’re launching a brand or repositioning one, these timeless titles will help you build strategy, find your competitive edge, and make your message stick.

1. Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout

Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout is a groundbreaking classic that introduced the concept of “positioning” — a strategy to help brands claim a distinct place in the customer’s mind. And now it seems almost prophetic when there’s so much noise in the marketing industry and positioning is one way to cut through the clutter with focused messaging and strategic perception.

Instead of trying to introduce something completely new, the book shows you how to link your message to something your audience already understands, making it easier for them to remember and trust your brand. You’ll learn how to simplify your messaging, avoid over-promising, and take a clear stand in your category.

Who It’s For: Marketers, brand strategists, founders, or anyone looking to differentiate their product in a crowded market.

What You’ll Learn: 

• How to create a “position” in your customer’s mind that reflects your strengths.
• Why simple, consistent messaging always outperforms clever or complicated branding.
  
• The dangers of repositioning and why it’s easier (and smarter) to carve out a new space rather than shift an existing perception. 
  
• The importance of timing and being first in a category. 
  
• Real-world examples of how brands like Avis, IBM, and VW succeeded (or failed) based on how they were perceived. 

One Smart Takeaway: “Marketing is not a battle of products. It’s a battle of perceptions.”

2. Conversion Optimization by Khalid Saleh & Ayat Shukairy

If your website gets traffic but few sales, Conversion Optimization by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy will show you exactly how to fix that. Written by the founders of Invesp (one of the first conversion rate optimization agencies), Conversion Optimization is packed with step-by-step advice on how to turn visitors into buyers without guessing.

It doesn’t just tell you to “test everything.” 

It shows you: 

• What to test
• How to understand user behavior
• And why small changes like button text, page layout, or offer framing can double your conversions.

This book is ideal if you want to grow revenue without spending more on ads—by making the most of the traffic you already have.

Who It’s For: Ecommerce teams, DTC founders, SaaS marketers, growth hackers, and anyone running paid traffic or managing landing pages.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to identify where and why users drop off on your site
• How to structure a high-converting landing page, from headline to CTA
• What kinds of A/B tests actually move the needle (hint: not button colors)
• Why understanding user intent is more important than demographics
• How to use psychology, urgency, and social proof to reduce hesitation and build trust

One Smart Takeaway: “Conversion optimization isn’t about fixing your website. It’s about fixing your customer’s journey.”

3. Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy, often called the “father of advertising,” built one of the world’s most iconic agencies and changed how brands speak to people. This book distills decades of his real-world experience into a surprisingly readable, even entertaining, guide for creating ads that actually drive results.

Ogilvy believed great advertising isn’t about being clever or flashy but more about selling honestly. His book teaches how you should always back your message with research, speak to real customer needs, and never underestimate your audience’s intelligence.

Even though this book was written in 1983, his lessons are still useful today:

• Keep your message clear and focused
• Use clean visuals that guide attention
• Write copy that informs, not confuses

This book is a powerful reminder that substance and clarity win over hype.

Who It’s For: Ad writers, performance marketers, founders building brand language, content strategists, and anyone who wants to write with persuasion and clarity.

What You’ll Learn:

• The anatomy of an ad that sells—from headlines and visuals to copy structure
• Why rigorous consumer research must precede any creative work.
• The lasting value of brand personality and tone of voice.
• How to advertise everything from luxury goods to charities.
• Lessons from classic campaigns by Rolls-Royce, Dove, and Hathaway shirts and why they worked.
  

One Smart Takeaway: “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”

4. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout

This book is like a cheat sheet for understanding how marketing really works (not just in theory, but in the minds of customers). Ries and Trout lay out 22 simple, no-nonsense laws that explain why some brands win and others quietly fade.

Each chapter is short and sharp, giving you one powerful principle—for example, why being first matters more than being better, or why trying to please everyone almost always fails.

If you’re launching something new, repositioning, or just trying to stand out, this book helps you avoid classic mistakes.

Who It’s For: Startup founders, product marketers, brand strategists, solo entrepreneurs, and anyone building go-to-market plans

What You’ll Learn: 

• Why customers remember the first in a category, not the best

• Why perception beats reality (and how to shape it)

• Why narrowing your focus often strengthens your brand

• How being bold and consistent gives you long-term power

• What not to do when you’re the #2 or #3 in a crowded space

One Smart Takeaway: “It’s better to be first in the mind than first in the marketplace.”

5. Marketing Management by Philip Kotler & Kevin Lane Keller

This book teaches you how to think like a real marketer, not just someone who runs ads or social media, but someone who understands how marketing drives the entire business.

It covers everything: how to find the right audience, how to price your product, how to position your brand, and how to build long-term customer relationships.

It’s not light reading, but if you apply even a few chapters, you’ll make smarter decisions, create better campaigns, and understand what actually grows a business.

Who It’s For: Aspiring CMOs, business students, generalists moving into marketing, and marketers who want to build strong strategic thinking

What You’ll Learn: 

• How to craft a full marketing strategy — not just isolated campaigns

• How to segment and target the right customers

• How pricing, promotion, and product work together (the 4Ps — and beyond)

• How to manage and grow a brand across its lifecycle

• How marketing connects with finance, operations, and overall business growth

One Smart Takeaway: “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.”

6. Purple Cow by Seth Godin

This book teaches one core idea: being “good” is no longer enough. In a crowded market, you have to be remarkable—like a purple cow in a field of regular cows. Something people notice, talk about, and remember.

Seth Godin shows you why most products fail, not because they’re bad, but because they’re boring. And why playing it safe actually puts you at more risk than standing out.

If you’re building a new product, launching a brand, or trying to grow faster, this book will shift how you think: instead of asking “How do I sell this?”, you’ll start asking, “Is this even worth talking about?”

Who It’s For: Founders, DTC brands, content creators, product marketers, and anyone struggling to get attention.

What You’ll Learn: 

• Why safe, average ideas get ignored

• How to build products and services that stand out on their own

• Why marketing is baked into the product, not just what comes after

• How to find early adopters who spread your message

• Why word-of-mouth always beats paid ads in the long run

One Smart Takeaway: “If it’s not remarkable, it’s invisible.”

II. Best Marketing Books on Consumer Behavior, Psychology & Persuasion

Great marketing starts with understanding people. These books decode how customers think, what drives them to act, and how brands can influence decisions ethically, using proven psychological principles that work across industries.

7. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

This is one of the most practical books ever written on how to ethically influence people’s behavior in marketing, sales, or everyday life. Backed by 35+ years of research, Cialdini breaks down six principles that explain why people say yes (or no) and how you can use them to improve conversions, messaging, and trust.

If you’ve ever wondered why testimonials work, why urgency drives action, or why people follow social trends, this book gives you the science behind it all.

Who It’s For: Marketers, copywriters, founders, sales teams — anyone who needs to persuade or drive action.

What You’ll Learn: 

• How to use social proof to build instant trust (e.g., reviews, case studies)

• Why scarcity (limited-time offers, low stock) makes people act faster

• How authority and even simple visual cues (like uniforms or titles) increase credibility

• Why people stick to their choices (and how to make your offer the first commitment)

• How reciprocity—giving value first—boosts response rates

One Smart Takeaway: “People say yes more often when they feel like they owe you something — even something small.”

8. Buy.logy by Martin Lindstrom

What if customers don’t actually know why they buy? Buy.logy dives into the subconscious triggers that shape purchasing decisions—many of which happen before logic even kicks in.

Lindstrom led a $7 million neuromarketing study (with brain scans) to understand how branding, emotions, visuals, and sensory cues influence what people buy and why. You’ll walk away understanding how the brain really responds to ads, logos, packaging, and messaging.

It’s especially useful if you’re working on visual branding, in-store marketing, or storytelling that needs to make an emotional impact.

Who It’s For: Brand strategists, product marketers, retail marketers, and anyone shaping customer experience.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why emotional branding works better than logic

• How visuals, smells, and sounds affect buyer decisions

• Why some ads backfire — even when they test well

• How mirror neurons, rituals, and symbolism play into brand loyalty

• Why logos and product placement succeed or fail at a brain level

One Smart Takeaway: “People don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion and justify it with logic later.”

9. Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

This book explains why some ideas catch on and others don’t even when the “bad” ideas seem to spread faster. Made to Stick gives you a clear formula for making your messages unforgettable, whether you’re writing an ad, pitching a product, or giving a talk.

If you’ve ever had a great message fall flat, this book will show you how to package your ideas so people actually remember and repeat them.

Who It’s For: Content creators, brand storytellers, marketers, educators, and anyone crafting messages that need to land. 

What You’ll Learn

• The 6 principles of sticky ideas: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories (SUCCESs model)

• How to turn abstract ideas into visuals and stories people understand instantly

• Why “surprise” and “curiosity gaps” are powerful tools for engagement

• How to use real-life examples to increase believability and retention

• How to test if your message will actually stick

One Smart Takeaway: “If you say three things, you’ve said nothing. Find the core of your message and stick to it.”

10. The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

This book is a crash course in how to build a brand people truly connect with not just a logo or color palette. Neumeier explains that a brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what your customers believe it is. The gap between your business strategy and how people feel about your brand? That’s the “brand gap.”

This book helps you close that gap through clear messaging, smart design, and a unified customer experience.

Who It’s For: Brand strategists, early-stage founders, designers, creative leads, and product marketers.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why branding is about gut feeling, not logos

• The five disciplines of great branding: Differentiate, Collaborate, Innovate, Validate, and Cultivate

• How to create a meaningful, consistent brand personality

• How to align your internal culture with your external image

• How to design brand touchpoints that leave a lasting impression

One Smart Takeaway: “A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

11. The Brand Flip by Marty Neumeier

In The Brand Flip, Neumeier builds on his earlier ideas by showing how branding has changed in the age of empowered customers and social media. He argues that the power has flipped, from businesses to consumers.

Your audience now defines your brand through what they share, say, and expect. This book helps you stay relevant by focusing on customer values, community, and co-creation.

Who It’s For: Marketing teams, brand consultants, DTC founders, and anyone navigating modern customer relationships. 

What You’ll Learn:

• Why traditional top-down branding no longer works

• How to build a tribe around shared values

• Why customer experience is the new marketing

• How to turn your best customers into evangelists

• How to align culture, mission, and business goals into one clear brand story

One Smart Takeaway: “Today’s customers don’t buy brands. They join them.”

12. Zag: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier

If your brand feels like it’s getting lost in the crowd, Zag shows you how to stand out. Neumeier argues that in a world where everyone is zigging (doing the expected), your best move is to zag—that is, to go in a completely different, focused, and bold direction.

This book helps you sharpen your positioning, clarify your brand purpose, and make strategic choices that separate you from everyone else instead of blending in.

It’s short, practical, and feels more like a workshop than a lecture. Great for when you’re stuck or want a reset.

Who It’s For: Founders, brand strategists, creatives, and product teams building something from scratch or trying to rethink their market position.

What You’ll Learn: 

• Why true brand strength comes from being different, not just better

• How to find your “onliness statement” (what your brand does that no one else can)

• How to build your brand around a clear idea, not just features

• Why narrowing your focus can actually widen your impact

• How to spot the right trends — and avoid jumping on the wrong ones

One Smart Takeaway: “When everyone zigs, zag. It’s the only way to stand out.”

III. Best Marketing Books Content Marketing, Storytelling & Messaging

Forget empty content and keyword stuffing. These books teach you how to create marketing that actually informs, entertains, and builds trust, so customers come to you, not the other way around.

13. Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi

Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi is one of the best content marketing books of all time.

Joe Pulizzi founded the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), one of the leading educational resources for enterprise brands in content marketing.

It is safe to assume that Pullizzi knows a thing or two about content marketing, and in this book, he gives plenty of great advice about how to do it right.

In this book, Pulizzi lays out a full content strategy, from finding your niche to publishing consistently across channels.

If you’re tired of chasing traffic or constantly pushing ads, Epic Content Marketing helps you shift from interrupting people to becoming their go-to source of value.

Who It’s For: Content marketers, solopreneurs, brand builders, and anyone creating blogs, newsletters, or video content.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to find your unique content angle (your “sweet spot”)

• How to build trust through consistent, useful content

• Why content should educate or entertain — not push sales

• How to distribute content across channels without burning out

• How to measure success and adjust based on results

One Smart Takeaway: “Customers don’t care about your products. They care about their problems. Create content that helps them solve those.”

14. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley

Ann Handley’s “Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content” is indispensable for anyone looking to succeed through content marketing or simply wanting to create good content.

It’s your go-to guide for writing better marketing content, whether it’s a homepage, a product description, a blog post, or even a LinkedIn update. Ann Handley makes writing feel approachable and gives you practical rules to write clearly, confidently, and in your own voice.

No fluff, no jargon—just simple, direct writing that actually works.

Who It’s For: Writers, marketers, founders, creators (or anyone who communicates online). 

What You’ll Learn:

• How to write clear, useful content that people actually read

• Why every piece of content should start with empathy and purpose

• Easy rules for grammar, tone, and formatting that make a big difference

• How to write for different channels without losing your brand voice

• How to edit like a pro (even if you’re not one)

One Smart Takeaway: “Your words are your web presence. Make them count.”

15. Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller

This book gives you a repeatable framework to clarify your brand message using storytelling. Donald Miller shows you how to stop talking about your product features and start making your customer the hero of the story.

If your website or pitch ever leaves people confused, this book will help you fix it fast. It’s especially helpful for writing homepages, product pages, emails, and sales decks.

Who It’s For: Founders, brand leads, copywriters, marketers, and anyone struggling to explain what they do clearly.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to simplify your message so customers actually get it

• Why your customer is the hero and you’re just the guide

• How to structure messaging like a story (problem -> solution -> success)

• What to include on your homepage to drive more conversions

• How to build a clear call-to-action that moves people forward

One Smart Takeaway: “If you confuse, you lose. People don’t buy the best product, they buy the one they understand fastest.”

16. Content Chemistry by Andy Crestodina

This is a how-to manual for content marketing that combines strategy, SEO, analytics, and writing—all in one place. Andy Crestodina breaks everything down into digestible, visual chapters with tons of templates, examples, and checklists you can apply right away.

It’s perfect if you’re doing content marketing and want it to rank, convert, and support your business goals.

Who It’s For: Content marketers, B2B brands, inbound marketers, SEO-focused teams, and anyone who wants content that performs.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to align content with keyword strategy and search intent

• How to write blog posts that get found and convert

• How to promote and repurpose content across channels

• What analytics to track (and how to improve based on them)

• How to use visuals, structure, and formatting to improve readability

One Smart Takeaway: “Great content doesn’t just attract, it answers questions, builds trust, and moves people to act.”

17. The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert Bly

This is a classic, no-fluff guide to writing copy that sells. Whether you’re working on ads, landing pages, emails, or brochures, Bly gives you the structure, psychology, and tactics that top copywriters use. 

Think of it as a practical reference manual: clear headlines, persuasive body copy, irresistible offers, and strong calls-to-action. If you want your words to make people click, sign up, or buy, this is your guide.

Who It’s For: Copywriters, email marketers, content writers, small business owners, and anyone writing to drive action.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to write attention-grabbing headlines and leads

• The AIDA formula: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

• How to write for clarity, not cleverness

• What makes a call-to-action actually work

• Tips for writing long-form vs. short-form copy

One Smart Takeaway: “The purpose of a headline is to get the reader to read the first sentence. That’s it. Do that well, and you’re winning.”

18. Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age by Jonah Berger

Ever wonder why some products or ideas go viral while others flop? Berger unpacks the science of sharing—why people talk, post, and recommend certain things. He also discusses how you can design content, campaigns, or even products that people want to spread.

It’s not about luck, it’s about psychology and structure. Berger gives you the STEPPS framework (Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, Stories) to help your marketing become naturally shareable.

Who It’s For: Social media marketers, product teams, growth strategists, brand storytellers and anyone trying to create buzz or referrals.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why people share content (and how to engineer that sharing)

• How to use emotion and relatability to drive engagement

• What makes something “talkable,” from headlines to packaging

• Why context and timing matter more than you think

• How storytelling builds memory and word-of-mouth

One Smart Takeaway: “People don’t share ads. They share stories, feelings, and things that make them look good.”

IV. Best Marketing Books on Social Media and Direct Response Marketing

This section focuses on results, not just reach. These books help you move beyond vanity metrics (likes, views, follows) and focus on strategies that generate real leads, sales, and business growth from social and direct marketing channels.

19. Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard

This book answers the big question most marketers avoid:

“Is social media actually driving business results?”

Blanchard takes you past fluffy engagement metrics and shows you how to plan, execute, and measure a social media strategy that supports real business goals, like leads, conversions, and customer retention.

If your social content feels busy but not effective, this book gives you a clear roadmap for tying social media back to revenue.

Who It’s For: Social media managers, digital marketers, CMOs, agency teams, and small business owners who want to prove ROI.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to align social media with your company’s business objectives

• How to create social KPIs that matter (not just “likes”)

• How to track performance across channels with real metrics

• How to justify your budget — with numbers, not just engagement screenshots

• How to build internal support and get buy-in for your strategy

One Smart Takeaway: “Social media is not free. It takes time, effort, and money. ROI isn’t optional, it’s essential.”

20. No B.S. Guide To Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy & Kim Walsh-Phillips

This book is a wake-up call for anyone too focused on likes and impressions. Kennedy and Walsh-Phillips show you how to use direct response marketing—content that gets leads, builds a list, and converts without wasting time on vanity metrics.

It’s straight-talking, aggressive, and full of real-world examples. Whether you’re running ads, sending emails, or building landing pages, this book helps you focus on what actually works.

Who It’s For
Email marketers, lead gen teams, solopreneurs, sales funnels pros, and anyone tired of vague marketing results.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to craft offers that people actually respond to

• Why likes don’t matter if they don’t lead to money

• How to write copy that sells — not just entertains

• How to build high-converting campaigns across email, landing pages, and social ads

• How to track real ROI from every campaign you run

One Smart Takeaway: “You can’t take likes to the bank. Direct response marketing is about cash flow not applause.”

21. The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen

Before influencer marketing had a name, Rosen studied how word-of-mouth really spreads and how some products become “talkable” from day one. The Anatomy of Buzz breaks down the mechanics behind organic growth: how messages travel, who amplifies them, and how to engineer marketing that spreads without big budgets.

After interviewing over 150 executives, marketing leaders, and researchers who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins and outs of attracting the attention of influential first users and “big-mouth” movers and shakers.

It’s a timeless guide to earning attention instead of buying it.

Who It’s For: Early-stage founders, growth marketers, PR teams, and product marketers focused on organic reach.

What You’ll Learn:

• What makes people talk about a product or brand

• How to identify and engage “influencers” before social media existed

• How to design marketing that travels by itself

• Why trust and early adopters are key to launching with momentum

• How customer experiences fuel referrals (or kill them)

One Smart Takeaway: “People don’t spread products. They spread stories, excitement, and value—in a way that makes them look smart.”

V. Best Marketing Books on Strategy, Innovation & Category Creation

These books go beyond day-to-day marketing. They help you think like a strategist, whether you’re defining a new market, building a long-term competitive edge, or designing products people can’t ignore. If you’re in growth, leadership, or product strategy, this section is your playbook.

22. Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Most companies compete in existing markets. The best ones create new categories and dominate them. Play Bigger introduces the idea of “category design”: the process of inventing a problem only you can solve, then positioning your brand as the leader in that space.

If you’re building something disruptive or struggling to stand out, this book will completely reframe how you think about product positioning and market leadership.

Who It’s For: Startup founders, product marketers, CMOs, and innovation teams building or launching something new.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to define a new category instead of competing in an old one

• Why category leaders capture the most value (not just market share)

• How to craft a powerful “point of view” that shifts customer perception

• How to align product, brand, and company strategy around that POV

• Why timing your launch and messaging matters more than you think

One Smart Takeaway: “The company that designs the category is the company that owns it.”

23. Competing Against Luck by Dr. Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, & David Duncan

Why do people buy what they buy? It’s not random, they’re hiring products to do a job. This book introduces the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) theory—a way to understand your customer’s true needs so you can design products and marketing that match.

Instead of guessing what features will work, JTBD helps you build around real, useful customer goals. If you’re launching or refining a product, this book gives you a research-backed lens for smarter decisions.

Who It’s For: Product teams, marketers, founders, UX designers, and anyone doing customer interviews or building roadmaps.

What You’ll Learn: 

• How to uncover the hidden “job” your product is hired to do

• Why demographics don’t explain customer behavior

• How to avoid building features no one uses

• How to structure interviews that reveal useful insights

• How to link innovation to predictable growth

One Smart Takeaway: “Customers don’t buy products, they hire them to get a job done.”

24. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt

What goes into developing a marketing strategy? What’s the difference between a good and bad marketing strategy? Richard P. Rumelt’s book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy answers all these questions sufficiently.

Most business plans are filled with buzzwords and vague goals like “become the market leader” or “drive innovation.” This book shows you how to recognize empty strategy and replace it with one that’s actually executable.

Rumelt gives you a clear framework: a real strategy starts with diagnosing the core problem, choosing a guiding policy, and focusing on a few coordinated actions that address it.

Although he doesn’t specifically discuss marketing, the core principles in the book can also apply to marketing.

Who It’s For: CMOs, marketing strategists, founders, consultants, and teams creating annual plans, go-to-market strategies, or business pivots.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why vague goals like “grow market share” aren’t strategy and what to say instead

• How to define a “kernel of strategy”: a challenge, a policy, and a set of actions

• How to focus resources on a single point of leverage

• Why trying to please everyone leads to weak results

• Real-world breakdowns of strategy at companies like Apple, Nvidia, and General Motors (what they did right and where they went wrong) 

One Smart Takeaway: “The first natural advantage of good strategy is clarity: it forces you to stop lying to yourself about what really needs to be solved.”

VI. Best Marketing Books on AI, Automation & the Future

AI is changing how marketing works, from how we write and automate campaigns to how we generate leads and build customer loyalty. These are the best marketing books to understand what works now, what’s coming next, and how to stay effective in an AI-first world.

25. Marketing Artificial Intelligence by Paul Roetzer & Mike Kaput

This is the most practical, marketing-first guide to using AI in real work not just theory. It shows how tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and predictive analytics can help you write faster, build better campaigns, automate targeting, and generate more qualified leads.

It also helps you avoid the hype and focus on what’s actually useful for marketers right now.

Who It’s For: Digital marketers, content teams, growth leads, marketing ops professionals.

What You’ll Learn:

• Where AI fits into your marketing workflow, from planning to performance

• How to use AI to scale content, personalize outreach, and reduce time on manual tasks

• Which tools are worth adopting now, and what to watch out for

• Why marketing teams need to upskill, not panic

• How to think ethically about AI and data usage

One Smart Takeaway: “AI won’t replace marketers. But marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”

26. The Age of Invisible Machines by Robb Wilson

This book looks at how AI and automation are quietly changing how customers experience brands—through chatbots, voice assistants, personalized flows, and backend logic we don’t even see.

It’s especially helpful if you’re building customer journeys or thinking about how to make your brand feel smooth, fast, and smart in a world of digital noise.

Who It’s For: CX designers, UX leads, marketers working on automation, product marketing teams. 

What You’ll Learn: 

• What “invisible UX” is and how AI powers it

• How to design customer experiences that feel natural, not robotic

• How to apply conversational AI to sales, onboarding, and support

• How backend automation affects front-end brand experience

• Why this shift isn’t about tools, it’s about user flow

One Smart Takeaway: “The best interface is no interface. AI-powered systems should serve without being seen.”

27. This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

In an age of AI-generated everything, this book is a grounding force. It reminds you that marketing still comes down to empathy, positioning, and trust, not hacks or volume.

It’s not about algorithms. It’s about knowing who you serve, what they need, and how to connect with them clearly and honestly. If you want your AI-assisted marketing to actually land, this gives you the human foundation to build on.

Who It’s For: Anyone building a brand, writing copy, or creating content, with or without AI tools.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why trying to reach everyone leads to weak results

• How to create something people genuinely want

• How to build trust, not just traffic

• How to speak to your smallest viable audience

• How to stay human while everyone else automates

One Smart Takeaway: “People don’t buy products. They buy stories, belonging, and connection.”

28. The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Written by the co-founder of DeepMind, this book gives you the big picture of what’s coming: not just AI tools, but a total shift in how work, power, and industries operate. It helps you think long-term: how to build resilient marketing strategies in a world that’s speeding up, getting smarter, and becoming harder to predict.

It’s not a “how-to”—it’s a strategic lens for leaders who want to stay relevant.

Who It’s For: Founders, CMOs, product strategists, brand thinkers who want a long-view perspective

What You’ll Learn: 

• How AI (and synthetic tech) will reshape every business function

• Why speed and adaptiveness are now survival skills

• The risks of unregulated AI and how to market ethically

• Why trust and transparency will be a competitive edge

• How to lead in a world where disruption is constant

One Smart Takeaway: “In the AI age, your edge won’t come from tools, it’ll come from how fast you can adapt.”

29. AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor

Most marketers are being sold AI tools they barely understand, with promises like “automated copywriting,” “personalized at scale,” or “predictive magic.”

This book helps you separate real AI from marketing fluff.

Written by two Princeton researchers, AI Snake Oil breaks down the difference between what AI can do well (e.g. generating content, recognizing patterns) and what it struggles with (e.g. understanding meaning, making decisions). If you’re evaluating AI vendors or tools, this book gives you the mental filter to avoid wasting time and budget.

Who It’s For: CMOs, marketing leads, consultants, growth teams, and anyone investing in AI-powered marketing tools or agencies.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why many “AI-powered” tools are overhyped or misleading

• The difference between narrow, useful AI and “general intelligence” hype

• How to ask the right questions before buying or implementing AI tools

• Where AI adds value in marketing workflows and where it doesn’t

• Ethical red flags to look for when using customer data in AI systems

One Smart Takeaway: “You don’t need to fear AI. But you do need to question what it claims to do, especially when it comes with a subscription fee.”

30. The AI Marketing Canvas by Raj Venkatesan & Jim Lecinski 

This is a strategic and practical guide written by a marketing professor and a former Google VP. It lays out a five-stage framework to integrate AI into marketing: from data collection to personalized experiences and predictive insights. It’s clear, credible, and made for marketing leaders.

Who It’s For: CMOs, growth marketers, brand strategists, and senior marketers building AI-ready teams.

What You’ll Learn:

• A step-by-step model for AI integration across the customer journey

• How to personalize campaigns using customer behavior data

• How to identify quick wins with AI before full transformation

• Use cases for content, media, pricing, and loyalty

• How to align AI with brand strategy and ROI goals

One Smart Takeaway: “The marketers who will win with AI are the ones who treat it as a partner, not just a tool.”

31. Mastering Marketing Agility by Andrea Fryrear

In the era of AI and ongoing algorithmic updates, speed and adaptability are crucial. This book teaches you how to build agile marketing teams that can test faster, respond to insights in real-time, and evolve messaging on the fly—something tools like ChatGPT and Claude make easier, but only if your team is structured right.

Who It’s For: Marketing ops leaders, in-house teams, startup CMOs, agency managers.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to implement agile workflows tailored for marketing (not borrowed from software dev)

• How to prioritize quickly without drowning in tasks

• How to create feedback loops that adapt messaging in near real time

• How to balance experimentation with long-term brand strategy

• Tools, templates, and rituals for keeping teams aligned and fast

One Smart Takeaway: “AI makes speed possible. Agility makes it valuable.”

How to Apply What You Learn From the Best Marketing Books: 5 Proven Marketing Moves for 2025

Reading great marketing books is valuable, but applying what they teach is what drives real results. Based on the key insights from this list of best marketing books, here are five high-impact marketing strategies you can use to achieve your marketing goals in 2025:

1. Set Measurable Goals and Build Strategy Backward

Books like “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” and “Marketing Management” emphasize that effective marketing starts with clarity.

That means setting measurable goals (not vague aspirations), identifying the biggest obstacle in your way, and creating a focused plan to address it.

For example, instead of saying “We want to grow brand awareness,” define a measurable goal tied to business impact. Something like, “We want to increase demo requests from qualified leads by 30% in Q3.”

Once the goal is clear, define the challenge, like “Our current landing page converts at just 1.2% and traffic quality is inconsistent.”

Now build a strategy that addresses it:

• Focus the media budget on high-intent search terms

• A/B test new landing page layouts

• Update CTAs based on scroll and click behavior

This is the difference between random activity and strategic marketing.

2. Make Your Brand Easy to Understand and Easy to Share

In Contagious, The Brand Flip, and Ogilvy on Advertising, a consistent message emerges: people don’t just buy products, they spread stories that reflect who they are.

To stand out, stop describing your product in features. Instead, craft a simple message that resonates with the customer’s self-image and inspires them to share it.

For example, instead of “We offer scalable CRM integrations,” say “We help fast-moving sales teams close faster with tools that feel like second nature.”

Create messages that are:

• Emotionally relevant

• Socially shareable (makes them look smart or helpful)

• Instantly clear

Then bake those into your homepage headline, email intros, and product explainer.

3. Create Content That Solves Specific Problems

Books like Epic Content Marketing, Everybody Writes, and Made to Stick all highlight that content isn’t just filler; it builds trust, solves real problems, and nudges people toward action.

For example, instead of “5 Social Media Tips,” write “How B2B Brands Can Get Leads from LinkedIn Without Paid Ads.” Then break it down with steps, visuals, and a soft CTA to your demo or resource.

What works:

• Narrow focus

• Clear structure

• Immediate value

• A useful next step

4. Leverage AI Tools But Keep Your Strategy Human

As explored in Marketing Artificial Intelligence, The Age of Invisible Machines, and This Is Marketing, the future belongs to marketers who use AI to amplify—not replace—their voice.

For example, this could mean: 

• Using ChatGPT to draft three email variations per segment, but review and rewrite them based on tone, industry, and context.
• Or, using predictive scoring to prioritize warm leads, while allowing sales to use their judgment when reaching out.

For example, when we’re updating an old article, I start by using SurferSEO to analyze what the top-ranking pages are covering. It helps me identify content gaps—subtopics we’ve missed, outdated angles, or questions people are searching for that we haven’t addressed.

Based on that, I sketch a revised outline. Then I feed the outdated version and the new outline into ChatGPT or Grok with a clear prompt: make it relevant for 2025, plug the gaps, and optimize for both Google and AI tools like Perplexity.

The exact AI prompt I use to turn outdated blog posts into top-ranking, AI-citable content. 

Once the outline feels solid, I take over. I bring our own test results, fresh examples, and real insights to ensure the content is genuinely helpful and original.

And it works like a wonder! 

We used this exact approach to approach a blog post that had been dead for months. And after the updated outline and data from 2025, it started picking up traffic within just 3-4 days. It’s clear: AI can help you smartly shape the structure, while your own human insights and data will make it actually work!

5. Optimize Every Step with Real Data, Not Assumptions

In Conversion Optimization by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy, the message is clear: testing isn’t optional. Understand how users behave on your site.

Run A/B tests.

Refine your offer and layout based on real-world behavior, not internal opinions.

Small changes in messaging, layout, or offer framing can significantly improve conversions over time.

For example, we ran an A/B test on an eTextbook product page to reduce user confusion around rental durations. The control version displayed rental options as “90 Days,” “120 Days,” and so on.

In Variant 1, we replaced these durations with exact expiration dates—e.g., “Access Until May 20, 2024.” In Variant 2, we combined both: duration + expiration date.

The results were clear:

• Variant 1 outperformed the control with a 14.35% increase in conversion rate and a $2.65 lift in revenue per visitor.

• Variant 2 showed no significant improvement, suggesting that clarity beats complexity, and that adding too much information (even if helpful) can overwhelm users.

This experiment reinforced the core principle: even small changes in microcopy or layout, when based on actual user behavior, can significantly improve performance.

Here are some other elements you can test:

• Record scroll depth to see if people even reach your CTA

• Test testimonials vs. feature blocks above the fold

• Track micro-conversions (e.g., clicks on FAQ links) to measure interest

Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways from the Best Marketing Books!

So, there you have it! Diving into some of the best marketing books is like giving yourself a masterclass in cutting-edge marketing strategies. Some even help you hone your business strategy in everyday life.

Whether it’s gaining deeper insights into consumer behavior, mastering content creation, or leveraging social media, each book packs a powerful punch of knowledge that can help grow your business with a winning and successful marketing strategy.

And remember the marketing tips for 2025! These strategies are fresh and geared to keep you ahead of the curve. So, pick up some marketing books based on your industry and interest, use what you learn, do market research, and watch your business grow.

Resources You’ll Love.

1. What are the 4 Ps of Marketing? Understanding the Basics

2. How to Manage a Remote Team in a Way that Drives Business Growth

3. How To Build Thought Leadership From Scratch For Your Business

4. 12 Entrepreneurship Lessons Every Entrepreneur Must Know

5. 13 Best Product Marketing Books in 2023

Best Marketing Books FAQs

The post The 31 Best Marketing Books to Read in the Age of AI (2025) appeared first on Invesp.

Certainly, there’s really no easy way when it comes to understanding your customer’s experience. Many turn to customer journey maps. There are positives and negatives that come with customer journey maps, and like any other marketing research and documentation, it comes down to two things:

• Identifying the goal and purpose behind it,
• Knowing how actually to apply and use it.

If you go with customer journey maps, we highly recommend you keep the two criteria in mind.

In this post, we’ll be detailing the steps to help you craft a complete and comprehensive customer journey map for your business and discuss how to evaluate and use it effectively.

What Is A Customer Journey?

A customer journey refers to the process that a customer goes through when interacting with a business or brand, from the initial contact to the final purchase and beyond. It encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a company, both online and offline, throughout their entire relationship.

Understanding the customer journey is essential for businesses as it helps them identify opportunities for improving customer experience, optimizing marketing efforts, and building long-term relationships with customers. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can tailor their strategies and communications to meet the needs of customers at each stage, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company or product, from initial awareness all the way through to post-purchase follow-up. It’s a marketing tool used to understand the customer’s experience at each stage of the buying process and identify opportunities to improve that experience.

These maps are a compact visualization of an end-to-end customer experience, and they can take many forms (infographics, illustrations, diagrams – all that good stuff). A customer journey map illustrates all the places and touchpoints customers come into contact with your brand, online or off… and they help you look at your brand, product, and processes through the customer’s lens so that you can visualize the literal customer journey through the funnel.

In this post, we’ll be detailing the steps to help you craft a complete and comprehensive customer journey map for your business and discuss how to evaluate and use it effectively.

How To Create A Customer Journey Map

I had a chat with Khalid, and he had this to say;

“The way we build the customer journey maps is through jobs to be done analysis.

When we start working with a company, we tell them to give us people, recent customers who just bought the items, and they’re still fresh in their minds.

Most interviews are forward-looking but don’t help build the customer journey map. Rather, we go backward and ask them questions like what was going on in their life that day they decided to purchase the item, etc.

We repeat this process across 5 to 10 customers, and then we go further to run website polls and send email surveys to validate the insights we got from JTBD.

All this yields so much insight that helps us see the different steps taken by customers.”

https://youtu.be/_kUexbOmbf0

Matthew Fairweather, director of Matthew Fairweather Ltd, says:

Customer journey mapping is really a mixture of art and insight… But that’s just a visual aid. The real work in customer journey mapping is using all of the customer information and data available to you from across the business and delivering a process and structure to their experience.

Here’s what you need to create an effective customer journey map:

1. Nail down your buyer persona

The first step in creating a customer journey map is understanding who your customers are.

Shay Namdarian of Collective Campus explains:

To best understand the customer, organizations need to develop personas. Really get into their shoes so you understand how they behave (including likes and dislikes) and why they do what they do. Although everyone is unique, these customer profiles provide guidance and input for the journey mapping.

If you haven’t already done so, get started on developing your buyer personas.

While doing this, keep in mind that it isn’t sufficient to have just one buyer persona. People at different buying stages will behave and interact with your business differently. So it’s worth distinguishing between someone who has been doing market research for a few months and is ready to make their purchase. And someone who has only recently begun thinking about solving their particular need (by trying your product/service).

2. Understand your buyer’s goals

Once you have your buyer personas built, the next step is to dig deep and understand what each of them hopes to achieve as they go through the customer journey.

Think about what your customers’ ultimate goals are in each phase (and remember that these may change as the process unfolds).

Some examples might be:

• Researching the different options that are available.
• Ensuring that s/he is paying a fair price.
• Seeking reassurance that s/he has all the necessary information about the product.

A great way to go about doing this is first to identify the paths that your visitor may take on your site. If your visitor is a member or a pre-existing customer, the first thing that they might do is to log in. Other activities include browsing, searching for products, and comparing products. Once you’ve nailed down a full list of these activities, you’ll be able to identify all your touchpoints and the goals associated with each touchpoint.

The next step is to determine the goals for each customer phase clearly on your map (as demonstrated in this sample map from Heart of the Customer).

By doing this, you’ll be able to examine how well you are meeting those goals and answering customers’ questions.

Different ways to understand customers’ goals

• Survey/interview different customer groups
• Get user testing feedback
• Study customer support emails/transcripts
• Identify customer questions in each phase
• Use customer analytics tools like FigPii to gather information

3. Map out buyer touchpoints

A “touchpoint” refers to any time a customer comes into contact with your brand – before, during, or after they purchase something from you. This also includes moments that happen offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone.

You’ll want to take all potential touchpoints that occur between your customers and your organization into account. That way, you won’t miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers and make improvements that will keep them happy.

So, how, then, do you identify customer touchpoints?

Because there are so many different ways for customers to experience your brand, the idea of figuring out all potential touchpoints may seem daunting at first.

However, you can make this task easier by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and walking through their journey step-by-step.

Ask yourself the following:

“Where do I go (and how do I get there) when…”

• …I have a [problem that your product/company solves].
• …I discover the product or business that solves my problem.
• …I made my purchase decision.
• …I encountered the business again after the purchase.

This should reveal all touchpoints pretty clearly.

Another way of accomplishing this task would be to ask customers directly about their experience with your brand – or put the above questions into a survey.

Additional tip: Use Google Analytics

If you have Google Analytics 4 set up for your website, there are two reports which you may find useful:

1. Behavior flow report

This report displays how a customer moves through your site, one interaction at a time.

It’s great for helping you understand how customers behave and what paths they take while navigating your website. It also reveals specific sources, mediums, campaigns, or geographical locations they come from.

Additionally, it can help you identify any pain points on your site where users may be struggling.

2. Goal flow report

The goal flow report displays the path visitors follow to complete a goal conversion.

It helps reveal how traffic navigates through your funnel and whether there are any points with high drop-off rates or unexpected traffic loops that need to be addressed.

4. Identify customer pain points

At this point, it’s time to bring together all your data (both quantitative and qualitative) and look at the big picture to identify potential roadblocks or pain points in the customer journey. You may also want to note down areas where you’re currently doing things right and figure out ways to improve.

To do this, ask yourself questions and interview customers and customer-facing staff.

Some potential questions might include:

• Are my customers achieving their goals on my website?
• Where are the main areas of friction and frustration?
• Where are people abandoning purchases (and why)?

Once you know where the roadblocks and pain points are, mark them down on your customer journey map.

For example, take this chart from UserTesting, which depicts positive and negative customer experiences by color code.

5. Prioritize and fix roadblocks

If you look at it from a micro perspective, here are some questions you can ask yourself: What needs to be corrected or built? Is there a need to break everything down and start from scratch? Or are a few simple changes necessary for a big impact?

For instance, if customers frequently complain about how complicated your sign-up process is, it’s probably time to revamp it and make things easier.

After identifying these roadblocks, take a step back and look at the big picture from a macro perspective. Recognize that the end goal is not to optimize each step or touchpoint just for the sake of optimizing it but so that you can push your customers down the funnel and bring them one step closer to converting.

At the end of the day, you want to be getting more conversions. So everything you tweak in each customer touchpoint should all be contributing to that one goal.

A Case Against Customer Journey Map

While fixing your roadblocks, here’s something to consider: most customer journey maps are company-centric. They look at touchpoints based on the company’s perception of where the customers should be. Instead of where customers are actually at.

Bearing this in mind, it makes sense to try and shift from this older, more traditional style of mapping to looking at a customer journey map as a model in which you can identify points to educate your customer. The key here is to build a content marketing strategy and an inbound marketing strategy that is compelling. So that it will draw your customers to engage with you and learn more about your products and your brand.

6. Update and Improve

Your customer journey map shouldn’t be left to gather dust on the shelf once it’s completed. Because your customers are constantly changing and evolving, your customer journey map should also be doing the same. Consider it a living document that will continue to grow and develop.

If possible, test, update, and improve your customer journey map every six months or so. In addition, customer journey maps should also be tweaked accordingly whenever you introduce significant changes to your product/service.

Stages Of A Customer Journey Map

The customer journey can be divided into several stages, which may vary slightly depending on the source but generally include the following:

1. Awareness:

This is the stage where a customer first becomes aware of a product, service, or brand. This awareness can happen through various channels such as advertising, social media, word-of-mouth, or online search.

2. Consideration:

After becoming aware of the product or service, the customer starts to research and consider their options. They might compare different brands, read reviews, and gather information to make an informed decision.

3. Decision:

In this stage, the customer decides to make a purchase. They have evaluated their options and are ready to buy. This could happen online or in a physical store.

4. Purchase:

The customer makes the actual purchase, completes the transaction, and becomes a paying customer.

5. Post-Purchase Experience:

The relationship between the customer and the business doesn’t end after the purchase. Businesses often engage in post-purchase activities such as follow-up emails, customer support, loyalty programs, and soliciting feedback. This stage is crucial for customer retention and building brand loyalty.

6. Advocacy:

If the customer is satisfied with their purchase and overall experience, they might become an advocate for the brand. They could recommend the product or service to others, write positive reviews, or engage with the brand on social media, thus influencing other potential customers.

Components Of A Customer Journey Map

There are different types of customer journey maps, but to create good customer journey maps, you have to include the following five components:

1. Touchpoints:

Touchpoints are the interactions between the customer and the business at various stages of the journey. These can be online, such as website visits or social media interactions, or offline, such as in-store experiences or customer service calls. Identifying touchpoints helps businesses understand where and how customers engage with the brand.

2. Customer Actions:

Customer actions represent the specific activities or behaviors customers undertake during their journey. This could include researching products, reading reviews, making a purchase, or seeking customer support. Understanding these actions provides insights into customer behavior and intentions.

3. Emotions and Motivations:

Emotions and motivations delve into the customer’s feelings and reasons behind their actions. Customers might feel excited, frustrated, satisfied, or confused at different stages of their journey. Identifying these emotions helps businesses empathize with customers and design experiences that resonate emotionally.

4. Pain Points:

Pain points are obstacles, challenges, or frustrations that customers encounter during their interactions. These could be issues with website navigation, unclear product information, or unsatisfactory customer service. Pinpointing pain points highlights areas that need improvement and can guide businesses in creating solutions.

5. Opportunities:

Opportunities are areas where businesses can exceed customer expectations and create memorable experiences. These could be personalized recommendations, proactive customer support, or loyalty rewards. Identifying opportunities helps businesses enhance customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty.

Types of Customer Journey Maps?

Since the customer journey is not linear, it also makes sense to have different types of customer journey process(s). There are different types of customer journey maps, and they all can help you improve the customer experience – but you have to choose/create a customer journey that aligns with your specific purpose. That said, now let’s take a look at each one of them:

1. Current State Journey Mapping

If you want to understand better what your customer experiences while interacting with your product or service right now, consider using current state mapping. This type of journey mapping is about visualizing your customers’ thoughts, actions, and emotions as they interact with your brand’s touchpoints.

Suppose you have a huge amount of visitors using the Chrome browser to access your site, but most of them leave your site without converting. You also notice from the journey map that the same type of customers use Safari or Mozilla Firefox browser to make a purchase.

Equipped with this kind of data, you can tell that your customers using Chrome to access your access are probably facing some issues. Current state mapping allows you to compare customer experience between these different browsers, therefore giving you room to uncover conversion roadblocks on underperforming browsers.

2. Future State Journey Mapping

As the name suggests, future state mapping helps you visualize what thoughts, actions, and emotions your customers will probably experience when interacting with your company in the future. In other words, they help you visualize the ideal journey you’d like your customers to embark on as they interact with your brand.

The future state is an effective customer journey map which is ideal for teams who want to close the gap between the current customer’s experience and where it should be. One important thing to note here is that there’s no future state customer journey design without mapping the current state first. You need to conduct research first, understand the current state, and then work on your future state.

You can also design a future state map if you have a new product or service and you want to illustrate your vision to your team and set clear strategic goals. Here are some more reasons why you should consider designing future-state journey maps:

• Keeps the focus on the customer
• Drive strategy
• Align teams
• Control power dynamics
• Uncover future pain points you’ll need to optimize
• Extract and articulate a vision

Unlike current state maps, future state maps are driven by business strategy.

3. Day in the Life Mapping

Sometimes, it’s necessary to know your customers’ real-life pain points. And, sometimes, when you look beyond how a customer interacts with your brand, you get to discover more about your customer behavior. This may entail asking for customer feedback or mapping day-in-the-life journey maps.

Day in the life mapping visually represents the customer’s journey in their real-life day-to-day activities. This type of journey map differs from the aforementioned ones in that it’s more about insight discovery than optimization. So it helps you discover your ideal customer touchpoints outside of your product, service, or brand.

4. Empathy Maps

Empathy maps are a tool that helps organizations gain a better understanding of their customers by mapping out their thoughts and feelings during the various stages of their journey. The purpose of empathy maps is to encourage organizations to think about their customers’ needs and desires in a more holistic way by taking into account their emotional responses, pain points, and motivations.

Empathy maps typically consist of four quadrants that represent the four key areas of a customer’s experience: their thoughts and feelings, their actions and behaviors, their pain points and challenges, and their motivations and goals. The quadrants are typically labeled “Say,” “Do,” “Think/Feel,” and “Pain/Gain,” respectively.

By using empathy maps, organizations can better understand their customers and develop more targeted strategies for engaging with them at each customer journey stage. Empathy maps can also be used to identify areas of improvement in a company’s products or services and develop more effective messaging and marketing campaigns.

Customer Journey Map Examples

To help provide you with a starting point, here are some awesome customer journey mapping examples you can use as customer journey map templates to create your own:

1. Dapper Apps

Dapper Apps’ customer journey map has five main phases:

• Research
• Comparison
• Workshop
• Quote
• Sign-Off

These help you systematically organize all your information about how your customer is interacting with your brand and gain insights from the knowledge.

2. IdeaRocket

dea Rocket’s customer journey map, on the other hand, follows a mostly circular path with 6 main phases:

• Interest
• Consideration
• Evaluation
• Pre-Production
• Production
• Video Usage.

While simple, it clearly outlines their process during each step of the customer journey. Based on insights from their SEM lead generation, the company focuses its CTAs for each phase according to what is appropriate for the visitor’s circumstances.

Customer Journey Map Templates

There isn’t an official template that you should be using… simply because no two customer journeys are the same!

Depending on the business, product, or service that is being mapped, best practices and design may vary. This means you have a great deal of freedom to explore and be creative – so construct your basic customer journey map using the following steps, and then go ahead and embellish it all you want.

However, if you need inspiration for your customer journey mapping process, here are some templates you can use:

The internet is not short of examples of customer journey map templates. You can look for more templates on websites like Canva and Lucidchart.

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

As David Weaver (co-founder of Vintage Cash Cow) explains:

“A successful customer journey map will give you real insight into what your customers want and any parts of your product, brand or process that aren’t delivering.”

Customer journey maps are important for brands and come with many benefits. Here are some of the purposes of using customer journey mapping tools:

1. Identifying customer pain points:

At each step of the customer journey, you can get a deeper understanding of customer needs, actions, and what kind of questions they have. Knowing what kind of questions your customers have can help you know what you should really address on your websites. At the end of the day, you end up improving customer experiences.

2. Improves customer retention:

A well-crafted customer journey map considers post-purchase experiences. That knowledge helps you know why customers leave. And when you know this, you can enhance your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

3. Improves your marketing efforts:

When you understand how customers make decisions and which platforms they tend to use the most, you can create campaigns that are tailored to address their needs on those platforms.

4. You understand your customers better:

When you know all the touchpoints of your customers, you get an understanding of how your buyer personas navigate through your conversion funnel. This helps you personalize your marketing strategies in a way that leads to a positive customer experience.

Customer journey maps give businesses a way of getting into their customers’ heads, helping them gain valuable insight and understanding regarding common customer pain points. They also aid in building empathy for customers, helping brands understand what buyers want and how they feel.

5. Creates a new customer target base.

There’s a mental picture you have of who you think your customer is. In reality, most times, that’s not your ideal customer.

If you fail to have a customer journey map, you probably don’t completely know the demographics and psychographics of your customers.

This is bad for your business, and that’s because you keep throwing money down the drain targeting broad customer segments and interests. This leads to a spike in your CAC.

Researching your typical customers’ needs and pain points and mapping out their journey will give you a good picture of the people trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

6. Improves customer retention rate.

A customer journey map gives you a full view of your customer’s buying process. This view helps you see areas of difficulty that your customer might encounter, and you can improve their experience there.

Being proactive in improving your customer experience and decreasing their friction points will encourage more customers to stay with your company.

A customer journey map shows you individuals who are on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors and actions of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business. While you might not save them all, it’s worth the try since increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

Final Thoughts

We’re entering an age where businesses are all about the customer experience.

By shifting the focus to the customer’s perspective, brands can better understand consumer wants and needs. This allows them to create a more effective and satisfying customer experience.

A customer journey map is a proven framework for helping drive greater customer insights and improving internal efficiencies. While they are more significant than a “silver bullet,” they are still exceptionally effective tools for helping brands identify engagement and enhancement opportunities, increase conversions, and bring in eye-popping ROI.

Are you using customer journey maps for your business? Feel free to share any tips we may have missed in the comments.

We’d love to hear from you!

Customer Journey Maps FAQs

1. When should you create a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps should be created when you want to understand your customers’ experiences and interactions with your business. It’s beneficial during the planning phase of marketing campaigns, when launching a new product or service, or when you’re looking to improve your existing customer experience.

2. How do you create an effective journey map?

To create an effective journey map, start by researching your customers, identifying touchpoints, understanding emotions and motivations, pinpointing pain points, and recognizing opportunities. Engage with real customers, use surveys and analytics, and collaborate with various teams within your organization. Regularly update the map based on evolving customer needs and feedback.

3. Why are customer journey maps important for digital marketers?

Customer journey maps are crucial for digital marketers because they provide insights into customer behavior online. By understanding the customer’s digital interactions, marketers can optimize website design, personalize content, target specific touchpoints, and enhance online experiences. This knowledge helps in creating targeted, effective digital marketing campaigns.

4. What makes a successful customer journey?

A successful customer journey involves seamless interactions, personalized experiences, and meeting customer needs and expectations at every stage. It is characterized by clear communication, easy navigation, quick problem resolution, and emotional connection. Successful customer journeys result in satisfied, loyal customers who are likely to engage with the brand repeatedly and recommend it to others.

5. What’s the difference between customer journey and buyer journey?

The key difference between the customer journey and the buyer journey lies in their focus and scope. The customer journey encompasses the entire relationship between a customer and a brand, including pre-purchase stages, the actual purchase, and post-purchase interactions. It emphasizes long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. On the other hand, the buyer journey specifically concentrates on the stages leading up to a purchase decision, from recognizing a need to evaluating options and making a decision. It has a narrower focus centered around the activities and decisions directly related to the purchase process.

6. What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user journey map?

The terms “customer journey map” and “user journey map” are often used interchangeably, but they can have nuanced differences depending on the context and the specific focus of the mapping exercise. In general, both types of journey maps aim to visually represent the experiences and interactions of individuals with a product, service, or brand over time.

Additional Resources

1. What are customer journey maps, and how to improve them?

2. The importance of providing a great customer experience.

3. The importance of customer experience management.

4. 5 Usability design tips for a better user experience.

5. Stop confusing usability optimization with conversion optimization

The post Customer Journey Mapping: How To Create Complete Customer Journey Maps appeared first on Invesp.

Every decision your customer makes consists of several conscious and subconscious emotional triggers.

As neurologist Antonio Damasio argues in his book “Descartes Error”

“Emotion is a necessary ingredient to almost all decisions”

While most people believe the choices they make result from rational analysis of available alternatives. In reality, emotions are the main drivers in the entire decision-making process.

Damasio’s view is based on his studies of people whose connections between the “thinking” and “emotional” areas of the brain had been damaged.

While these people were capable of rationally processing information about alternative choices… they were unable to make decisions because they lacked any sense of how they felt about the options.

Now, there are several emotional triggers you can use to dramatically boost your revenue and drive your conversions to roof, while also acquiring and underscoring customer loyalty.

This post takes a look at the most common emotional triggers and shares few ideas and examples for introducing them into your own marketing activities.

1.Tell Stories

People love stories.

They appeal to the emotional decision making bits in ways facts and figures can’t.

As Princeton’s Uri Hasson puts it:

“By simply telling a story [a person] could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listener’s brain.”

We as human beings, have been telling stories for thousands of years.

The reason?

Stories trigger emotions.

Gerard Zaltman found 95% of cognition happens inside our subconscious [emotional brain].

Now: How do you incorporate storytelling to boost your E-commerce sales?

First, Define your brand:

• What do you offer?
• What market need are you addressing?
• What makes your brand different?
• Who’s your brand for?

Second, Leverage storytelling:

Replace Product Descriptions With Product Stories

Tell your customers interesting stories related to the product.

Zady is a good example of a clothing and consumer goods e-commerce company using the power of storytelling in product descriptions.

Replace “About Us” Page With “Our Story/History” Page

Tell your brand story. How it all started? What inspired you? What problems are you trying to solve?  The team behind your brand?

For example: Trader Joe’s tells a good story on how it all started for them…

 Provide A Face To Your Brand

Harry’s does this very well:

Entertain Your Audience With Good-Old Stories

Gatsby is a shirt!!

2. Inspire Fear

Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that something or someone is likely to cause pain or threat.

According to Academia.edu, Fear is one of the most frequently used motivators for getting people to respond to marketing of any sort.

But even though it evokes our emotions, it should rather be used delicately, because most people don’t like threats.

As Bart Schutz explains:

“Multiple variables have been found to influence the effectiveness of fear appeals, such as perceived severity, individual characteristics and -more important -susceptibility. But also the intensity of the fear: weak fear appeals may not attract enough attention, yet strong fear appeals may cause an individual to avoid or ignore a message by employing defense mechanisms.”

Why Fear Drives Conversions?

“Fear appeal” posits the risks that if you don’t “use” or “buy” a specific product or service – dire consequences will occur.

It is a deep evolutionary characteristic in humans that triggers us to avoid potentially dangerous stimuli.

In other words:

We’re driven toward things that give us pleasure and avoid which give us pain.

How To Use Fear Persuasively?

Multiple variables have been found to influence the effectiveness of fear appeals, such as, perceived severity, individual characteristics and more important – susceptibility.

Now, there are few ways you can to take advantage of the effectiveness of fear appeals in e-commerce:

1. Use personally relevant threats (not too small, nor too big).

For example,  You could take advantage of ‘the fear of missing out’ by offering limited time discounts…

2. Make sure you directly boost your customer’s efficacy, by convincingly offering your solution as easy and effective.

For example, Madewell does this well with all of it’s call to actions…

3. Provide a clear and strong call-to-action directly after/next to your scaring message.

According to Wheel of Persuasion, the most important ingredient in an effective fear appeal campaign is ‘perceived efficacy’

For example, this fear appeal calls for the viewers to wear a helmet – something easily implementable:

If your message is sufficiently scary and seems easy enough to avoid, then you simply need to give your viewers a call to action, or a way to assuage the fear (usually with your product or solution)

3. Leverage Greed

“Greed is good. Says Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love.”

Greed is commonly used in all sorts of persuasion. Just look at the use of the word ‘FREE’ in advertising.

Image Source:

Also, here’s how changingminds.org explained greed:

“It typically involves making the other person believe they are getting an incredible bargain (often without their apparent knowledge). Of course, they don’t get what they had hoped for, but they will do a great deal for you if they think you can give them something for virtually nothing.”

Greed + Free

You want to make your customers say:

“If I make a decision now, I will be rewarded”

‘Free’ is by no means a silver bullet but there are times when it is effective.

From the Hubspot blog, Emma Brudner shared great tips on using fear to sell:

1. Help your customers realize the cost of inaction. E.g “Limited time offer”
2. Emphasize the personal benefits.
3. Point out the hard ROI
4. Play up what they stand to lose.
5. Use words such as “reward” “free” “valuable” “exclusive” “all yours” “gain.”

4. Employ Altruism

Giving back is one of the most powerful tools you can use to enhance customer loyalty, increase brand awareness and boost your reputation within a community.

According to the Cone Cause Evolution Study:

• 85% of consumers have a more positive image of a product or company when it supports a charity they care about.
• 83% of Americans wish more products and services they use would support charities.
• 80% of Americans are likely to switch brands (equal in quality and price) to the one that supports a charity.

Therefore, not only will you boost your overall brand awareness and reputation… you’ll also significantly increase your revenue.

Why?

Altruism (giving back) provides a sense of belonging to your social conscious customers (more on that later)

Examples of companies using Altruism:

TOMS

TOMS started with one idea:

“For every pair of shoes purchased, a pair is donated to help kids all over the world who can’t afford shoes.”

They’ve grown from selling shoes out of an apartment to a $300m+ company in just 9 years, giving away over 45 million pairs of shoes to charity.

2. Tentree

Tentree plants ten trees with every product purchase. They’ve now planted over 12,682,850 trees worldwide.

You could start off with something simple, just like TOMS.

• Donate 1-3$ with every purchase
• Promote Local Businesses
• Participate in Holiday Food Drives
• Set Up a Collection Jar
• Hold a Contest
• Sponsor an Event

5. Encourage Reciprocity

The principle behind reciprocity is based on the idea that, we as humans feel obligated to reciprocate (pay back) those who do or give something to us.

This behavior was described in Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” We should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.

In e-commerce, Reciprocity is powerful.

All you need to do is give your customers something with perceived value and they’ll subconsciously feel obligated to repay you.

Free Gift With Purchase

Ulta beauty does this awesomely well by giving away a free bag if you purchase any $40 fragrance.

Ship A Surprise Gift

Each order from Gameklip included a pack of smarties:

And it made their customers happy…

Loyalty Points Program

For example: Gilt is motivating customers to spend more and be more active with their program. Some rewards include early access to sales, an exclusive first look at new products, and preferred customer service.

6. Use Social Proof

Social proof is a demonstration that other people have experienced your product or service –   thereby encouraging others to do so.

Marketers use social proof to increase conversions by easing the minds of worried customers.

Studies show nearly 90 percent of online consumers look at a product review prior to making a purchase.

Think about this for a moment:

When was the last time did you buy something online without reading a review or asking your friend about it?

Exactly… Zero times!

There are 6 major types of social proofs you can use to get that revenue lift:

• Customers – social proof from your existing customers or users (e.g. testimonials or case studies).
• Experts – social proof from credible and esteemed experts in your industry.
• Celebrities – social proof from celebrities or other influencers (e.g. celebrities who have bought your product, or visited your establishment).
• Crowds – large numbers of people who provide social proof (e.g. “300,000+ love “Yourawesomecompany”).
• Friends – e.g. 50 of your friends like “Yourawesomecompany”
• Certifications – a credible, 3rd party entity which certifies that you are a knowledgeable, high-quality or trustworthy source (e.g. “USDA Certified Organic”). (Source: OptinMonster)

For example:

Use a recommend-er like “Other people who purchased this item also purchased”

Display “# sold” and “# of people watching” as seen on every eBay listing.

Put total review counts on display, similar to how Airbnb lists reviews.

7. Build Trust

Trust signals are features or qualities of your site that inspire confidence, belief and assurance in the mind of the customer.

Experts at the Singapore Management University published an extensive study on the relationship between trust and consumers’ intent to buy.

The study revealed people are more likely to make a purchase from a website if they have both high levels of trust and low levels of perceived risk when using the website.

Now:

Here’s how to build trust with your e-commerce site and eventually increase sales:

#1 Social Proof (See above)

#2 Add Your Contact Information

When shopping online, most people have questions that can impact their decision to make the purchase.

You need to add various ways your customers to contact you or your team:

• Phone number
• Live chat during working hours.
• Email

#3 Add Trust Seals and Security Certificates

So what’s the deal with trust seals?

Actualinsights.com did a test and found:

“An overwhelming majority of 61% respondents have cancelled a purchase because trust logos were missing on the website.”

Image source:

Note: Trust seals/badges does not represent any technical security. It just makes a website look legitimate and professional.

On the other hand though, SSL certificates indicate the site is secure technically.

Wrapping It Up:

When evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, objective facts).

Each of the emotions outlined above will make a noticeable difference to your conversions.

But to get above-average results, you need to combine as many as you can.

Be responsible and always remember to look after what matters most: your customers.

It’s important to keep honesty and integrity front and center. As powerful as emotional factors in marketing can be, falling short when it comes to genuine copy and realistic claims can be disastrous.

What specific emotions are you using on your store? Did I miss it? Mention it in the comments below!

The post 7 Ways You Can Use Emotional Triggers To Boost Your E-commerce Sales (With Examples) appeared first on Invesp.

• Conducting a usability test or user testing is by no means cut and dry. Many methodological pitfalls can turn the whole test into a flop if not conducted properly.

• Over the past years, usability studies have undergone some tremendous changes. They are now more sophisticated yet easier to run, offering more actionable insights and better results to improve user experience.

• Keep in mind that every usability test is different in terms of its goals and requirements. However, these tests share common elements and can follow the overall roadmap.

• Define Your Goals: this is the most crucial part of the process. You should have a clear result for the study and decide whether you want to gather (qualitative or quantitative insights or address issues related to the design of your system.)

• The more focused your tests are, the more accurate and relevant the results will be. Conversely, the more questions you commit to, the more room there is for errors and misinterpretations.

• The second step is determining and recruiting users: The most significant and valuable insights derive from real users. The users included in a usability test must closely match your website visitors and your target market.

• Decide on the number of participants you need to recruit and how many you can afford within your budget. The number of participants can drastically affect the results of your test.

• The third step is to choose the format of your test: There’s the in-person usability test method and remote usability testing.

• The in-person usability test method has 3 types (the silent observer or natural, think out loud method, and the constrictive interaction method).

• Remote usability testing has 2 types; moderated and unmoderated usability tests.

• The fourth step is to define the tasks within the test. Almost everything you present to them during the test impacts your users’ responses and reactions, so you have to be careful not to create biased tasks for your participants to complete.

• Tasks may be either open/exploratory or closed/specific, and finding a middle ground between these two extremes would provide a healthy mixture for users.

Characteristics Of Good Usability Tasks

• Propose a task, not a question: avoid making the task look like a question rather than an actionable task that users are supposed to do.

• Be specific: Specificity is an essential component of your tasks. Do not leave users with questions in mind, wondering what they are supposed to do and what the next step is.

• Avoid instructions: Going to the other extreme and start giving instructions and indications to users to get the test right is another mistake.

• Give participants space: The core of testing a system’s usability relies on giving the users space and providing similar conditions to the real use of the system. You can assess participants’ frustration, struggle, and relief within similar conditions.

• The fifth step in the usability testing roadmap is to build questionnaires.

• There are 2 types of questionnaires, the first being the pretest questionnaire. This helps you to understand your users better. The second is the post-test questionnaire. these questions will also help you understand the experience that the participants went through as they completed the tasks.

• The sixth step is to try a dry run. This means running a pilot test will help you estimate the time necessary to complete the actual test.

• The seventh and final step is to report the findings. There is no specific or single method to analyze your data. You can choose and agree with your team on whatever method works for you. For example, you can summarize the difficulties encountered by each user and then gather the common ones.

Here’s A Longer And More Detailed Version Of The Article

How often do you conduct a usability test to realize middle-way through you should have taken a different route?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was very often!

Conducting a usability test is by no means cut and dry, and there are many methodological pitfalls that can turn the whole test into a flop if not conducted properly. It is also an important step when conducting a conversion optimization project.

With the different kinds of usability testing, you should keep an eye on the issues that may rise along the way.

This article will focus on answering questions such as:

• How do I get started with usability testing?
• What are the steps I need to follow to obtain valid results?
• How do I make sure not to miss anything?
• What are some of the pitfalls that I need to avoid?
• How do ensure that I will collect valid and significant results?

Over the past years, usability studies have undergone some tremendous changes. They are now more sophisticated yet easier to run, offering more actionable insights and better results to improve user experience.

Before diving into the know-hows, keep in mind that every usability test is different in terms of their goals and their requirements. However, these tests do share common elements and can follow the same overall roadmap.

Let’s begin with the planning phase.

1. Define Your Goals

Defining the goals of your study is probably the most crucial part of the process.

You should have a clear result for the study and decide whether you want to gather:

1. Qualitative, or
2. quantitative data, or
3. address issues related to the design of your system.

Having a clearly defined goal limitation is key.

The more focused your tests are, the more accurate and relevant the results will be. On the flip side, the more questions you commit to, the more room there is for errors and misinterpretations.

The scope of your test could be broad and addresses general questions such as:

• Which navigation page works best and provides a more user-friendly experience?
• How users are currently using my app?

Or even more specific questions, such as:

• What exactly is stopping users from proceeding to checkout?
• Which element on checkout attracts users’ attention the most?

 2. Determine and Recruit Users

The greatest and most useful insights derive from real users. Make sure you know your users well, so you can recruit the right participants.

The users to be included in a usability test must match closely your website visitors and your target market. There are instances where website visitors do not match your target market. In most cases, recruiting website visitors for a usability test (when possible) is the best option.

To get representative participants, you must know who the users of a current system are, or who the targeted users of a newly developing system will be. Only participants who truly represent the actual users can provide the kind of valid feedback you need to make meaningful improvements to a design.

Deborah Hinderer Sova and Jakob Nielsen

Image source: measuringu

Decide on the number of participants you need to recruit and how many you can afford within your budget. The number of participants can affect drastically the results of your test.

We typically like to limit the number of users within a usability test to anywhere from 3 to 8 users.  Some companies recommend conducting larger scale usability tests including 50 to 150 users.

Years of experience have shown us that there is marginal benefit from adding more users.

3. Choose the Format of Your Test

There are different formats for conducting the usability test.

In-Person Usability Testing

The Silent Observer or Natural: the observer stands silently behind the users and doesn’t interact with them in any sort of way to be able to analyze their behavior in their own environment.

Think Out Loud Method: this method might be uncomfortable for users since they describe everything they do or think of out loud, but it is extremely insightful and useful for the experimenters. The think out loud method allows you as an experimenter to have a clear vision about what’s going on inside the users’ mind as every part of their thought process is articulated.

Constrictive Interaction Method: using this method you can either have two users working together and helping each other completing the task, or you can ask questions and offer suggestions to them without helping them or guiding them to complete the task. This method allows interaction between the users and the experimenters and you can see how they work through the hurdles they face during the test.

Remote Usability Testing

Remote usability testing can be an alternative for in person testing as it is time and cost effective and the users can complete tasks in their natural environment.

Moderated: these sessions allow the interaction between the observer and the test user. It is somehow similar to in-person testing as both the moderator and the participant are online simultaneously.

Unmoderated: these testing sessions are completed by the participants independently behind their screens, without an interaction with the test moderator, and there is no opportunity for the experimenters to ask questions or have any sort of involvement during the task even if needed.

Editor’s Note: We highly recommend in-person usability testing as they allow you to read the users’ body language and be in contact with them in real life rather than trying to infer their movements and watch them remotely.

4. Define the Tasks Within the Test

Your users’ responses and reactions are impacted by almost everything you present to them during the test, so you have to be careful not to create biased tasks for your participants to complete.

Tasks may either open/exploratory or closed/specific, and finding a middle ground between these two extremes would provide a healthy mixture for users. You can suggest scenarios for the participants, or direct provide the tasks for them to take.

Open/Exploratory Tasks: tend to be more broad, research-oriented. In this case, you provide participants with the minimal amount of information on how to perform the task.

These kind of tasks may have more than one answer as the answers vary from one users to another.

Closed/Specific Tasks: are more focused and goal-oriented. As they have an end point, they limit the scope of interpretation and confusion for the users and produce more adequate and accurate results.

Characteristics of Good Usability Tasks

When building tasks, follow these guidelines to create meaningful results:

Propose a task not a question

Avoid making the task look like a question rather than an actionable task that users are supposed to do.

A good task is NOT a question which participants are supposed to answer. A bad task is asking participants direct questions with predictable answers.

Make sure to choose the most meaningful tasks within your system, according to the goal you set for the test.

Be specific

Specificity is an essential component of your tasks. Do not leave users with questions in mind, wondering what they are supposed to do and what he next step is.

A good task is neither vague nor tiny, you want to make sure that you are not focusing on tiny and miner features and make main goals in your task and should cover and highlight only the important features of your system.

Avoid instructions

Going to the other extreme and start giving instructions and indications to users to get the test right is another mistake.

By doing so, you ruin your test. Instead of receiving accurate and real results, you will obtain the results you want. Biased results will not help you in assessing your system usability.

Give participants space

The core of testing a system usability relies on giving the users space and providing similar conditions to the real use of the system. Within similar conditions, you can assess participants’ frustration, struggle, and relief.

Editor note: a best practice we follow is to create the steps within a test and then conduct one remote usability test using these tasks. That will help us uncover any problems in the design of our tasks. It also allows us to refine our process.

5. Build Questionnaires

You can use two main types of questionnaire in usability tests.

Pre-test questionnaires: these questions help you understand your users better. With 7 to 10 questions on relevant background information, as users’ age, gender, educational background, beliefs, and their experience with the system (whether a novice or an expert), you can collect important data to evaluate how a target audience engages with your product. Keep in mind that these questions should have a direct relationship to your users, the functionality of the tasks chose, and the goal you set for your test.

Here is an example of the kind of questions you might ask in the pre-test questionnaires:

How often do you shop online? (i.e. Amazon, EBay)

• Never
• I shopped once or twice last year
• I shop approximately 3 to 7 times per year
• I shop regularly (How often?) ________

Post-test questionnaires: these questions will also help you understand the experience which the participants went through as they completed the tasks.  You can ask participants to give their feedback on how easy or difficult it was to use the system, and how much they enjoyed or disapproved the experience. Keep in mind that you should give your users space to judge the usability of your system.

A good example would be the following question:

How did you find the application?

• Easy to use
• Hard to use

Can you explain why? ______________

6. Try a Dry Run

Rehearsing for the study is crucial to make sure that everything is ready and to avoid any kind of complications during the real test.

Running a pilot test will help you estimate the time necessary to complete the real test. You can make a schedule for each task, in case of many, and prioritize them in accordance to their importance and relevance to the main goal of the study.

Through conducting a pilot test, you assure that the real test will run smoothly, without problems or major surprises. The dry run is also an opportunity to test if the tasks are clear to the participants.

We often run a pilot test with our team members. One or two pilot users are more than enough to detect severe problems and prepare ourselves for the real test.

These tests usually give us different perspectives on how users engage with a website. Just because it is a pilot test, it doesn’t mean you need to dismiss any findings. If everything goes well, the pilot test can also provide meaningful data to your study. Pilot tests can reveal interesting, unexpected findings on dry runs.

Editor note: When conducting an internal pilot test, make sure to include users who are not familiar with the system you are testing.

7. Report the Findings

If all goes well, after you finish your usability test, it’s time to gather and compare your findings.

There is no specific or single method to analyze your data. You can choose and agree with your team on whatever method works for you. For example, you can summarize the difficulties encountered by each user and then gather the common ones.

You can also classify these problems, if any, and rate them in accordance with their severity or importance, to determine which ones to address first and which to drop out of your list.

Based on the findings, you’ll be able to spot problem areas within the system and create solutions that will make it more useful.

Case Study: The Usability Test in Action

To illustrate the steps above, let’s take a look at the usability test we conducted for large e-tailer that provides digital photo finishing solutions and customized photo products.

Goal: The main focus of the study was to find answers for the following design questions and make informed changes while redesigning particular sections on the website.

• how easy it is to locate a particular photo product?
• how easy it is to customize it and add to cart?

The users: The study was conducted with 6 users. After completing the tasks, they were asked to answer follow-up questions.

The format: Users were using Chrome browsers because the application only supports that, and they were required to speak throughout their experiences as we have chosen the think out loud method in this test.

The scenarios and tasks: You would like to create a customized baby photo gift. You have different photos that you think will be lovely for some kind of wall decor in your bedroom.

Task 1: Find a customizable a wall decor photo you like and can imagine in the bedroom.

Task 2: Create 3 different customization options for your photo.

Task 3: Add the 3 different customized items to your cart.

Task 4: Create an invitation for a baby meet and greet using 2 of the customization you just created.

Task 5: Complete your purchase

Questionnaire and findings

Question 1: “How would you rate your overall experience on this site?”

• 5 users rated the experience as fair and excellent.
• Only 1 user rated the experience as poor.

Question 2: What would you say is the most frustrating aspect on the website?

Main Comments of the participants:

• Builder functionality problems
• There were several website glitches
• Slowness of the builder

Question 3 : What would you say is the most frustrating aspect on the photo builder?

Main Comments of the participants:

• Navigating the builder
• No guidance or informative indicator about process
• Users could not find CTAs

Question 4: What is the first thing we should improve on the site?

Main Comments of the participants:

• Improve or change the builder
• Highlight next steps
• Add more design and filter options to the builder

This testing revealed problems in the following areas:

1. Builder functionality
2. Builder “Add to Cart” and “Save Project” CTAs
3. Unclear user flow
4. Overlooked functionalities

Over to You

Preparation is key when it comes to the validity and significance of usability studies. Defining the scope of the test and what you are trying to accomplish to start with.

Note that words are powerful and it takes only one wrong word to change the whole task conception and only a  good one to correct it. Hence, it’s fundamental to be careful and avoid bias when creating your tasks.

It’s highly advisable to conduct a pilot test before having any test users take the real one.

Be open minded and get ready to be surprised, because at this stage you can come across findings that you never guessed or thought about.

The post The 7 Step Roadmap For Effective Usability Testing appeared first on Invesp.

No designer, developer, or marketer can alone spot the entire range of problems on a website.

Why? One direct reason is that only real users can identify some of these problems.

The market nowadays is a fierce battlefield, as everyone is striving to provide the best they can for their users. At the frontline, marketers need techniques to better understand websites’ visitors and customers.

There are many articles that tackle usability testing and its benefits. But most of these articles deal with usability as a broad and theoretical term. Most fail to suggest concrete steps to detect usability problems and to come up with possible solutions.

One of the very first steps when implementing the 12-steps conversion optimization system to increase a website conversion rate is to conduct a website assessment. This article will provide 7 concrete techniques used by UX experts and CRO specialists to uncover problems within your website.

1. The Guerilla Testing -In Person Usability Testing

Some VPs of marketing and CMOs are unable to understand that guerilla testing can take place throughout the entire life cycle of a website.

The term usability, according to Nielsen, stands for the quality attribute that assesses how an interface is easy to use for both novices and experts. The ease of use is a goal for designers, developers, and marketers all along.  

These usability tests are usually described as laboratory-based studies in which users perform tasks in a set similar to their environment, while observers take notes.

With more than 80% of subject matter experts using it as their first and primary resort when it comes to problem detection, guerilla testing is one of the most commonly used methods for a better user experience, as you can see in the graph below.

Image source: measuringu

How to Conduct a Usability Testing?

Our detailed guide on conducting usability testing broke the process into 3 stages:

• Step1: Planning the Test
  • Identify the Goal of the Research
  • Select the Research Method
  • Design Your Research Questions
  • Recruit Participants
• Step 2: Conducting Your Research
• Step 3: Analyzing Research Results
  • Transcribing Your Data
  • Data-Mining: Looking for Insights
  • Defining Themes & Looking for Patterns

The Usability Testing in Action

Let’s take a look at this case study of an usability testing for an e-commerce website, where three users were recruited to accomplish the tasks using the existing web-services.

The main objective of this testing was to identify some of the pain points users faced while browsing the website with its current design and determine if users are able to find their way around easily, no matter what they were looking for.

Scenario and Tasks:

Tasks were presented in a contextual scenario for users to complete, as the one below:

‘’Christmas is coming and you want to buy presents for your family. Your mother has always wanted a Michael Kors watch in rose gold, so you want to purchase it for her.”

The aim of having a scenario was to keep the tasks between users as coherent as possible, so the results could be efficiently compared in the analysis.

Tasks:

1. Browse and find Michael Kors watch in rose gold and its details, as price, warranty, the material used for production.

2. Add the product to the cart, and proceed to checkout.

3. Find the information on the company’s policies including its delivery and return practices.

Execution and Observation:

First, participants were asked to browse the website to find the “Michael Kors watch in rose gold.” When being asked to find one specific product using the navigation, two out of the three participants couldn’t locate it right away, and they started questioning whether there was that option at all.

Concerning the second task, the participants had no problem adding the product to the cart and complete the checkout process.

As for the third task, all participants in the usability study had difficulties finding information about the delivery and return policies on the website.

Advantages of Usability Testing

• Help you identify and uncover problems; as user testing can help in clarifying any issue you noticed during analysis of analytics data or heatmaps/video recording.
• Test the validity of a certain feature on a page or on a site.
• Uncover unexpected problems within your website that you may not have picked up on earlier.
• Help you inform the design process.
• Quick and easy to conduct, and it doesn’t require much effort to deal with.

Disadvantages of Usability Testing

• Data contamination: it’s a bit scripted and controlled, so, of course, that contaminates the data to a certain extent.
• Subjectivity: the person conducting the user test can make prompts or suggestions the can impact the validity and compromise the test further.
• Users awareness of the test: because it isn’t a normal online experience but rather a test, users skew their behaviors.

2. Heuristic Evaluation: Critique Expertise and Feedback

Heuristic evaluation relies on using subject matter experts (SMEs) to predict problems in an interface (website/mobile/mobile app) and rate these problems. It’s still one of the most used methods by the majority of experts.

Different CRO companies approach heuristic evaluation in different ways. But all heuristics are rooted in the same principals.

At Invesp, we combine the conversion framework, a form of qualitative data, with our heuristic evaluation process to make sure that we cover as many problems as possible.

Nielsen uses 10 basic heuristics as broad rules which cover many of the possible user interface problems. You can work your way around these rules, by adding anything that works for your website, as well as by eliminating whatever does not apply to your situation.

So, how many experts should be conducting the evaluation? You need more than one expert to uncover heuristic problems. The more experts you add, the more problems you will be able to uncover.

We usually recommend conducting the heuristic evaluation with 3 to 5 experts. Having more than 5 experts conducting the evaluation does not seem to add a lot more value.

Severity Rating in Heuristic Evaluation

As we go through the process of evaluating a website, there are two things that happen. We uncover problems with the website. These problems receive a rating as follows:

• P1: Catastrophic and nearly unusable for all users, imperative to fix
• P2: Major problems are present but users are still able to perform tasks
• P3: Minor problems are present from some users
• P4: Cosmetic issues only

These items are then sent to client or development team to fix. At the same time, the team will uncover research opportunities. These are items that we need to investigate further, come up with better designs or visitor flow. Research opportunities discovered during heuristic evaluation are one of the basis for our CRO work.

How to Conduct Heuristic Evaluation?

The knowledge and experience of reviewers are crucial for heuristic evaluation, because they can affect the findings drastically.

You go through three fundamental steps when conducting a heuristic evaluation:

The Preparation phase:

• Agree on who will do the review.
• Determine the key principles or guidelines of the evaluation.
• Select the key content areas for evaluation that will cover a wide range of evaluation type.

The Execution phase:

• For each heuristic, experts, individually or in a group, determine how severe each problem is, and provide a severity rating from 0 to 4.

The Consolidation phase:

• Discuss the aggregated findings and point out the problem areas; these problems can be either details or a more general pain point.
• Look for patterns.
• Suggest appropriate recommendations and allocate resources to fix those problems throughout realistic solutions.

The Heuristic Evaluation in Action

The following case study is a user interface evaluation of the Gateway to Electronic Media Services (GEMS) system.

Image source: GEMS

The focus of the study is to determine problem areas of the website and make informed decisions about the areas which need improvements.

For these purposes, a questionnaire was designed based on Nielsen’s 10 heuristics and conducted across a sample of 25 students of NTU.

The evaluation included four different tasks for the users to complete:

• Finding the title of a book.
• Finding the author(s) of the book.
• Finding title of the book using the ISBN.
• Finding the ISBN number of a book with the help of a title.

The overall impression of the users:

The users were asked to give their impressions of the GEMS system, as you can see below:

This case study poses an interesting question. Who should conduct the heuristic evaluation? Should CRO/usability experts conduct the review or should we recruit users of the system? If you have the budget and time, do both. If you have to absolutely choose one, then we believe that conversion experts are better than non-specialist when it comes to conducting heuristic evaluation.

Advantages of Heuristic Evaluation

• Obtain feedback in the early stages of the design.
• Obtain more accurate and detailed results.
• Easily obtain meaningful results in a very short time.
• Evaluate and examine potential issues in your website.

Disadvantages of Heuristic Evaluation

• Based on personal inferences made by experts, which makes it subjective to some extent.
• The evaluation may identify minor issues along with some of the major ones.
• The fact that only experts can undertake this evaluation makes it obligatory for you to assign and hire experts, in case you lack the needed knowledge, which requires resources.

3. Cognitive Walkthrough

Cognitive walkthrough is based on suggesting how users would accomplish tasks by tracing the mental processes expected from them.

This technique’s primary focus is the ease using of a certain website, and it’s based on a theory arguing that users learn through a series of exploration and not through a formal way of training.

After choosing a certain task from the suit of tasks that the website supports, the expert’s main objective is to determine one or more sequences of actions that will be actually followed by the users.

How to Conduct a Cognitive Walkthrough?

The process of conducting a cognitive walkthrough evaluation can be done through three major steps:

Step 1. Preparation

• Define an assumed user background and their knowledge of your website.
• Choose a task sample: it should be both realistic and important.
• Specify correct action subsequences for the task.
• Determine interface states along the sequence(s).

Step 2. Analysis

• For each correct action, come up with a successful story that can explain and give reasons why a user would choose to take that action, or a failure story on why a user wouldn’t choose to take that action.
• Record problems, reasons, and assumptions.
• Suggest alternatives and solutions for the defined problems.

Step 3. Follow-up

• Modify your website based on the findings, to eliminate the problems.

The Cognitive Walkthrough in Action

This case study was conducted using the “História do dia,” a children’s website.

The method used to validate the cognitive walkthrough for children included five main steps:

1. Performing the cognitive walkthrough on all the tasks available on the website (performed first by an expert).

2. Creating a list of typical tasks that children perform on the website.

3. Getting two other experts to perform the cognitive walkthrough on the same list of tasks.

4. Testing the tasks with children, and recording their results.

5. Comparing the difficulties experienced by the children and the problems predicted on steps 1 and 3.

Users:

Children aged 5 to 7, with a certain knowledge of using the mouse and keyboard. The users can read as well and know the basics of web navigation.

List of Tasks:

Read the daily story:

1. Click the picture associated with the story.
2. Click the icon to start the story.
3. Click the and icons to navigate through the story.

• Results:

Hear the daily story:

1. Click the picture associated with the story.
2. Click the icon to start the narration.

• Results:

Read a story from the archive:

1. Click the “Arquivo” icon.
2. Click the desired month.
3. Click on the period within the chosen month, in which the story was first made available.
4. Click the picture associated to the story.

• Results:

Vote on the daily story:

1. Click the “Votar” icon.
2. Choose how many stars will we awarded to the story.

• Results:

Conclusion:

As shown in the table below, the cognitive walkthrough is a reliable source for usability problems prediction and can provide insightful information about improvement areas within an interface.

Advantages of Cognitive Walkthrough

• It’s an effective method to identify and uncover problem spots, if there are any, and suggest the possible reasons behind these problems.
• it uses a more detailed and more complete procedure with more practical instructions for the experts and it uncovers almost 40% of the problems and hurdles revealed by user testing.

Disadvantages of Cognitive Walkthrough

• Requires expert’s knowledge to be conducted.
• It provides no quantitative data, because it’s mainly based on theory.
• Time consuming at the level of conducting a complete and thorough analysis.
• Depends on analysis and theory rather than user testing.

4. Checklist Review (Guidelines Review)

The checklist review is similar to the heuristic evaluation, but more detailed, based on concrete test statements and a set of best practices and principles.

How to conduct a Checklist Review?

In his book, “Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience,” James Kalbach states that  the checklist evaluation or the guideline review is conducted throughout three main stages:

• Preparation: this stage involves recruiting the subjects once they become familiar with the key pages of the site, and determining which items need evaluation.
• Execution: at this stage, there are only major steps; you review the test statements, and rate both those checkpoints and how they are met.
• Consolidation: this stage is fully devoted to a thorough analysis to allocate patterns within the findings and how each key page works, what are the main identified problems and what are the appropriate recommendations to address them.

Because of their detailed nature, these statements and guidelines tend to grow over time to cover all the areas where there might be a problem within the website, which requires more attention and focus when being executed.

These statements are time consuming, but still easy to conduct. They can replace usability tests in case there are any budget constraints.

Evaluation Point	Rating	Comment
Navigating
All the major parts of the website are accessible to the home page
Critical content is located high in the structure of the site
Content is within three clicks of the home page
Alternative navigation mechanisms are available
An exit point appears on every page
Further navigation suggestions on every page apart from a global navigation
Related information is linked together
Navigation links behave consistently and predictably
Labelling
Links are labeled accurately with mutually exclusive terms
The language used is simple and in terms that the site visitors can understand
The meaning of navigation is clear, consistent, and useful
The destination of navigation links is predictable
Abbreviations are not used; or, when they are used, they are clear and obvious to target audiences
Each page has browser title that is coordinated with the navigation and page title
Each page has a clear page title, related to other labels around it
If the site supports multiple languages, the navigation is flexible to accommodate translations
Visual Designs
Navigation options are clear and visible
Navigation options are readable and quickly scannable
There is a clear hierarchy of options, labels and headers on each page
The navigation mechanisms are pleasing and attractive
The layout is clear with a sufficient amount of white space
Colors are used effectively to prioritize and organize navigation
Browser
Back buttons and other assumed browser functions are operable
Each page has a human readable URL
The URL is related to the name of the company and shows a predictable structure within the site via directory structure
There are no broken navigation links

Advantages of the Checklist Review

• Quick feedback to designers with relatively direct answers
• The detailed nature, which limits the scope of interpretation and guessing
• Relatively inexpensive
• Doesn’t require knowledge and expertise to be conducted

Disadvantages of the Checklist Review

• Time consuming due to its detailed nature
• Requires a lot of intention and focus when being conducted

5. The PURE Method: A Substitute for Usability Testing

The term PURE stands for “Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts.” This new method, according to Christian Rohrer, is used to estimate the amount of ‘friction’ a typical user is likely to experience when using an interface. The focus is on examining the ease of use.

To estimate this friction, the method provides a type of scoring, and the experts’ job is to rate it in conformity with to a set of predefined rubrics and criteria.

To simplify scoring, Christian Rohrer came up with colored bars heights. Each bar and color has a significance.

Keep in mind that the numbers and colors shown in the scorecard represent the level of friction; the more friction there is, the higher the number and the ‘’hotter’’ the color becomes.

Bar heights	Significance
	The green bar stands for steps that can be easily accomplished by the target users due to the low cognitive loads and mainly because the patterns are known.
	As for steps that fall in the yellow range, they require some efforts from the users’ part to be accomplished as well as having a significant cognitive load.
	The red is bar indicates steps that users would be able to accomplish, but require a humongous cognitive load. However, most of the steps in this stage are challenging. The majority of users is likely to fail.

As the name suggests, with the PURE method experts first quantify the ease of use of a website by aggregating rates, according to a set of criteria. Next, they provide qualitative insights on how to fix the issues they rated.

The PURE method combines both behavioral and attitudinal measures. In this sense, it enables you to fill the gaps left by the traditional methods, which can be either behavioral or traditional.

You can find below a scorecard demonstrating the aggregation of scores in every task.

The numbers and colors also indicate an overall rate for the task, usually determined by the worst score.

For instance, in the following example, a single step rated (3) on ‘browser extension’ led the entire task to be labelled red, indicating failure points in a fundamental task.

At the scorecard, green and yellow indicate tasks easy to fulfill, with less friction.

Image source: app.box

How to conduct the PURE evaluation?

The PURE evaluation is quick, cheap, and reliable. However, it takes around ten detailed and specific steps to receive valid results.

Identify target users profiles: defining your type of users profiles will help the experts keep the rating consistent. For this task, we usually recommend our panel reviews the website personas.

Defining fundamental tasks: identify tasks that are fundamental to your evaluation by asking questions as:

• “What are the critical tasks for the business to succeed?”
• “What kind of steps allow the target users to meet their core needs?”

Uncover your users’ happy paths: the name happy paths refer to the most desired way in which your users wish to accomplish their tasks.

Having more than one path sounds reasonable especially when you have more than one user but it will result in loads of work and data analysis in latest stages.

1. Setting your steps’ boundaries: this stage is dedicated to setting your steps’ beginnings, where users are provided with a set of options, as well as the endings, when they are expecting a response from the interface.
2. Review by 3 expert raters: A panel of 3 CRO specialists gathers in a room to conduct the PURE review. We try to select experts that does not have previous involvement in the design in hand or any other product professionals to avoid bias and subjectivity when rating. The lead in the panel starts performing each of fundamental tasks. The rest of the panel will observe and record a score. Each member of the panel will record his score silently without sharing it with others. Again, each task will be rated on a scale of 1 (easy) to 3(challenging).
3. Determine PURE score for each task: In this step, the panel goes though the tasks and each member reveals his score for the different tasks. The panel must agree on the score for the task.

The panel might have different opinions and rate differently, which will lead into having the following cases:

• Case 1: all three decide on the same individual score: in this case the decided score is obvious and the marge of disagreement is absent.
• Case 2: 2 out of 3 agreed on a certain score; it’s obvious that the score represents the majority, unless the discussion revealed opposite insights that the majority have missed and the panel decided to choose the less popular score as their decided score.
• Case 3: all three experts have different scores, in this case, the discussion will clarify any wrongful assumptions or misunderstandings to the method or interface.

Summing up the PURE scores: in the final step, the score for each task is added up. just as mentioned earlier, these numbers, bar heights, indicate the simplicity or the complexity of the task in hand. Knowing where your users encounters hurdles help give you more space for improvement and enhancement within your product.

Advantages of the PURE Method

• Easy to conduct and cost effective.
• You can use it on user experiences that haven’t been completely built yet.
• Provides regular assessment and tracks improvement over a long period.

Disadvantages of the PURE Method

• Requires knowledge and expertise to be conducted.
• Time consuming and requires a lot of effort and planning.

6. The Navigation Stress Test

The navigation stress test was first introduced by Keith Instone. This test asks tough questions about your website, helps focus on navigation issues, and forces you to make conscious design decisions.

These questions revolve around three basic points:

• Where I am?
• What’s here?
• Where can I go?

How to Conduct a Navigation Stress?

The stress test method is quite easy and simple:

• The first step is about randomly choosing a webpage.
• After removing the URL from that page, print it in black and white.
• Pretend to be a first-time visitor or you can ask someone who has never seen the site before to participate in the test, and try to answer the questions included in the chart below:

Navigation Questions	Mark up on the paper
What is this page about?	Draw a rectangle around the title of the page or write it on the paper yourself
What site is this?	Circle the site name, or write it on the paper yourself
What are the major sections of this site?	Label with X
What major sections is this page in?	Draw a triangle around the X
What is one level up from here?	Label with U
How do I get to the home page?	Label with H
How do I get to the top of this section of the site?	Circle the major groups of links and label: D: More details, sub-pages of this one N: Nearby pages, within same section as this page S: Pages on same site, but not as near O: Off-site pages
What does each group of links represent?	Write the set of selections as: Choice 1 > Choice 2 > …

Chart source: instone

• Start marking up the question you answered with the symbols in the chart.
• Prepare recommendations and solutions for the questions you didn’t answer based on the findings.

Applying the Navigation Stress Test

Advantages of the Navigation Stress Test

• Among the cheapest methods to evaluate your website.
• One of the quickest techniques to apply.
• No need to hire experts to conduct the test.

Disadvantages of the Navigation Stress Test

• The major problem with this method is the limitation to the specific page you are evaluating. It is hard to generalize the findings for the other pages of the website.

7. UX Benchmarking Studies

UX Benchmarking studies, also called summative studies, help you position your website features in comparison to industry standards.

With benchmarking, you can test, measure, and track how well your website is doing in correlation to user’s experience metrics over time.

These studies combine both quantitative and qualitative data to measure and quantify the user experience.

Benchmarking studies can be divided to two categories:

Stand-alone Benchmarking: this type of benchmarking is an extremely effective method to help you establish your own best practices, identify problem areas through comparing evolution of your website over time.

Competitive analysis: this type of analysis is based on adding another component to the equation, usually your most important competitor, to help compare your site key performance indicators, such as:

• success rates of revenue driven tasks
• efficiency metrics such as time on tasks

Net Promotor Scores (NPS) with competitors to recognize and see the areas that they need more focus in comparison to them.

How to conduct a Benchmark in 4 steps?

Image source: Slideshare

1. Set a plan:

• Determine and define your comparators or what do you want to benchmark and why. For instance, it could be all your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or just some of them.

Examples of KPIs:

• Satisfaction
• The average number of errors
• Task success rate
• The average time of tasks
• Define your target audience.
• Select competitors to benchmark against.

2. Conduct research using task-based testing:

• the rationale behind choosing a task-based testing is to make sure that your based line metrics are available for later measurements.

3. Gather both quantitative and qualitative data:

• Use the quantitative data for testing.
• Use the qualitative data to support your findings and support the why.

4. Re-test and research at least twice a year: to measure and track the changes and see if your expectations are met.

UX Benchmarking Studies in Action

In the following case study, you can check an UX Benchmarking conducted between American Airlines and Delta Airlines.

The plan

The plan for this study included pre-task questions, two tasks to be performed, and follow-up questions:

Image source: How to conduct UX Benchmarking

The tasks

The two tasks users had to perform were:

1. Go through the entire process of booking a flight.
2. Locate the total price for checking in two bags.

The post-tasks included:

• Self-reported success
• How satisfied were you with the process of booking a flight?
• Ease of use
• Ease of navigation
• Clear where to start
• Satisfaction with amount of time to complete the task

The wrap up included:

• Overall rating
• Post-task branding attributes
• What did you like the most about the airline website?
• What did you like the least about the airline website?
• Likelihood to recommend

The results

For the first task, the majority of participants reported being able to successfully complete the entire purchase process.

Image source: How to conduct UX Benchmarking

Image source: How to conduct UX Benchmarking

For the second task, the majority of participants reported not being able to find the total price for checking in two bags.

Image source: How to conduct UX Benchmarking

These are the heatmaps of users’ paths when trying to complete the second task:

Image source: How to conduct UX Benchmarking

Both websites had negative scores for recommendations. Most participants reported they would not recommend the sites to family and friends.

Advantages of Usability Benchmarking

• Puts you in continuous improvement mode.
• Helps you to understand how much improve you need to achieve significant performance.
• Enables you to outperform your competitors.

Disadvantages of Usability Benchmarking

• Enable to measure the overall effectiveness.
• Puts your business at risk in case you choose the wrong type of competitors.

Over to You

Choosing the most trusted and adequate method to enhance the user experience within your website is indeed an overwhelming process.

Taking into account the large numbers of methods out there, keep in mind that no matter which one you conduct, at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you have chosen the most feasible for your situation.

Test for the right reasons and you’ll have a good chance of achieving great outcomes. Do the opposite and you’ll end up with some misleading insights, wasting hours, resources, and putting your whole business at risk.

The post Usability Problems – 7 Methods to Uncover Usability Issues on Your Website appeared first on Invesp.

• Losses terrify us as human beings. The possibility of losing what’s closest to our hearts and wallets impacts our decision-making.
• According to old wisdom, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but that’s not always the case when we process our decision-making, especially when cognitive biases come into the picture.
• How you frame your offer helps how your customers perceive if you’re helping them save some money or lose it.

What Is Loss Aversion?

• Loss aversion is an automated response in behavioral economics that facilitates decision-making and helps us avoid loss at all costs.
• As humans, we go through tiny millions of decisions. On food, we overlook over 200 decisions daily.
• We’ve developed mechanisms to help us reach decisions faster to cope with overflowing choices.
• The riskier the context, the more loss aversion affects our decision-making. 

Loss Aversion On A Riskless Context

• An experiment gathered three groups of people: sellers, buyers, and choosers of coffee mugs. 
• The sellers received a coffee mug; they would have to decide on a selling price. No one wanted to sell their mugs for less than $7.12, while the buyers evaluated the mugs and established $2.87 as the maximum they would pay for acquiring them.
• Between the $7.12 and the $2.87 price evaluations lies a gain/loss perspective. Buyers saw the mug as a gain, so they attributed a lower value to it, as they were cautious about not losing money either. On the other hand, Sellers saw the mug as a loss of one of their goods, so they attributed a higher financial value to it.
• What about the choosers? This group could choose between gaining a mug or gaining money. Loss aversion plays upon somewhat risky situations than riskless ones such as the mug or money dilemma. The choosers didn’t overprice nor under-price the product because there was no risk involved. They would gain something, either way, be it money or a mug.

Loss Aversion In A Risky Context

• In this context, we’re examining patients’ reactions to a brochure on preventing advanced breast cancer.
• For the first group, the content emphasized the importance of performing self-examination. For the second group, the brochure highlighted the losses of not performing a self-examination.
• Scared by the possible losses, the second group indicated higher positive attitudes and behaviors related to the exams.

A Case Study On The Capuchin Monkeys

• Scientist Santos and her team created a non-human market where they introduced tokens as a means of exchange to get grapes.
• Soon enough, the monkeys understood they could get food if they handed one of the tokens.
• With time, the scientists started to change the offers, which changed the value of each token. Instead of getting one grape for one token, monkeys could get two or three grapes. With the change in offers, the monkeys had to decide between safe and risky bets.
• The scientists framed these bets differently in terms of loss and gain.
• In one of the scenarios, the monkeys could choose between indeed receiving one grape for one token, plus a bonus grape, or betting on receiving three grapes, two as a bonus, with the risk of getting just one grape (no bonus). In this gain perspective, monkeys always opted for the safe bet, the guy offering one grape plus one bonus every time.
• In the loss scenario, the monkeys started receiving three grapes for one token. But they had to make decisions on how many grapes they would lose. With these two scenarios, scientists could show monkeys, as humans alike, to avoid the certainty of loss and shoot for possible, uncertain wins. 

Loss Aversion In Marketing: Framing your offers

• The not-so-hidden secret to employing this technique? Just frame your offers in terms of loss instead of framing them in terms of gains.
• When tested among other cognitive biases on an e-commerce platform, loss aversion outperformed its counterparts, reaching the highest increase in conversions and the highest mean scores for maximizing page views, as Daugirdas Jankus found out in his research at the ISM University of Management and Economics.
• If you want to highlight your offer from the perspective of loss aversion, make it risky, and offer a referent to base the comparison.
• Discounts are a great way to reinforce loss aversion. Just tell your visitors they could be spending more to buy the same item or service. 
• With specific offers and clear deadlines, coupons frame the benefits of getting a product in terms of loss. 
• Receiving a free trial or sample automatically makes users feel like owners. Once this is established, they don’t want to lose the product.
• Pre-order deals play upon loss aversion by offering discounts and bonuses and providing early exclusive access to new items. Early access creates an ownership people want to preserve.

Here’s A Longer And More Detailed Version Of The Article.

Losses terrify us.

The possibility of losing what is close to our heart, or wallet, impacts our decision-making process.

Naturally, we avoid going through any losses, but our brains have mysterious ways of averting losses and falling into risky situations.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, old wisdom has taught us. Although that is not always how we process our decisions, especially when cognitive biases come into the picture.

So, the central question is: can you help your customers in making decisions that will keep the bird/dollars in their hands, by minimizing their losses? The answer is in how you frame your offers.

You will find in this article three leading experiments on loss aversion.

You will take a look as well at loss aversion outperforming other cognitive biases on increasing conversion rates for an e-commerce platform.

And you will also find inspiration in 13 marketing strategies to trigger loss aversion online.

Ready?

Let’s start!

What is Loss Aversion?

As one of our automated responses in behavioral economics, loss aversion facilitates decision-making, by leading us to avoid losses at all costs.

Decision-making is hard business.

Buying a car or committing to a mortgage stand out as major, energy-draining decisions. Not to mention choosing a career.

But we go through millions of tiny decisions as well. On food alone, we overlook, on average, 200 decisions a day. To cope with overflowing choices and prevent decision fatigue, we have ancestral mechanisms to help us reach faster decisions, based on our previous knowledge and interpretations of the world that surround us.

Our decisions may seem to follow a rational, clear, straight-forward process, but that is just our brains deluding us. We adopt a less logical route when evaluating our choices.

For instance, if we had to decide between gaining 10 dollars or avoid losing 10 dollars, we would avoid losing the money we already have. At a first moment, our happiness for a 10-dollar win should have the same intensity of our sorrow for a 10-dollar loss. But no! The feeling of loss is way deeper and more intense than the joy of gaining.

So, we avoid losses at all costs, and make decisions based on this cognitive bias.

The riskier the context, the harder loss aversion plays upon our decision-making. To better understand this correlation, let’s talk over a cup of coffee.

Loss Aversion on a Riskless Context

For a riskless situation, an experiment gathered three groups of people: sellers, buyers, and choosers of coffee mugs; as Nathan Novemsky, from Yale University, and Daniel Kahneman, from Princeton University, reminds us.

The sellers received a coffee mug they would have to decide on a price for selling. No one wanted to sell their mugs for less than $7.12, while the buyers evaluated the mugs and established $2.87 as the maximum they would pay for acquiring them.

Between the $7.12 and the $2.87 price evaluations lies a gain/loss perspective. Buyers saw the mug as a gain, so they attributed a lower value to it, as they were cautious in not losing money either. Sellers, on the other hand, saw the mug as a loss of one of their goods, so they attributed a higher financial value to it.

What about the choosers? This group could choose between gaining a mug or gaining an amount of money. Different from the sellers, this group would not receive a mug and then exchange it for money, they would either get a mug or money.

How would they put a price on the mug? Those who chose money over mug evaluated $3.12 as a fair amount to receive. They didn’t see the mug as something they already owned.

Loss aversion plays upon rather risky situations than riskless ones as the mug or money dilemma. The choosers didn’t overprice nor under-price the product because there was no risk involved, they would gain something either way, be it money or mug.

However, in this case, choosers’ evaluation of $3.12 almost matches buyers’ predisposition to pay $2.87. This low difference suggests that, in regular purchases, buyers’ expectation of exchanging money for an item diminishes the impact of loss aversion. Buyers didn’t think they were losing money if they spent $2.87. If loss aversion showed up for this decision, buyers would have set much lower prices in comparison to choosers.

In risky situations, loss aversion certainly comes in. Let’s see how this cognitive bias helps people take action when a life-threatening disease is involved.

 

Loss Aversion on a Risky Context

Designed by Freepik

Just to make sure we are at the extreme of a risky context, let’s check patients’ reaction to a brochure on preventing advanced breast cancer.

Two groups of patients received almost identical brochures on breast self-exam. For the first group, the content emphasized the gains of performing self-exams, while the second group received a negatively-framed brochure, highlighting the losses of not performing the self-exams.

Scared by the possible losses, the second group indicated higher positive attitudes and behaviors related to the exams.

As the disease is scary enough, and the content on both brochures was similar, a rational reaction would be a high increase in self-exams in both groups of patients. But loss aversion drove the decision of one of the groups. Framing the self-exams in terms of loss, instead of gains, led patients to take action.

No, we are not the rational decision-makers we wish we were. And we are not alone. As it turns out, capuchin monkeys are loss avert, too.

 

Undeniable Loss Aversion

Designed by Freepik

So far, we talked about loss aversion acting upon decisions on financial and health matters. It all seems pretty human. But, surprisingly, capuchin monkeys display the same cognitive bias for economic decisions, as scientists at the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University found out.

You can learn how the scientists created a non-human financial market in “A Monkey Economy as Irrational as Ours,” Laurie Santos’ TED Talk. In this market, Santos and her team introduced tokens which the monkeys could exchange for food. Soon enough the monkeys understood they could get food if they handed one of the tokens.

With time, the scientists started to change the offers, which changed the value of each token. Instead of getting one grape for one token, monkeys could get two, or three grapes. With the change in offers the monkeys had to make decisions between safe and risky bets.

The scientists framed these bets differently, in terms of loss and gain.

In one of the scenarios, the monkeys could choose between surely receiving one grape for one token, plus a bonus grape, or betting to receive three grapes, two as bonus, with the risk of getting just one grape (no bonus). In this gain perspective, monkeys always opted for the safe bet, the guy offering one grape plus one bonus every time.

In the loss scenario, the monkeys started out receiving three grapes for one token. But they had to make decisions on how many grapes they would lose. One of the guys always offered two grapes. This was a safe loss. The other guy sometimes offered three grapes, or just one grape. This was a risky loss. Rationally, the monkeys should choose the safe guy, with the safe loss, but acting on loss aversion, and mirroring human decision-making, they always made the risky decision of trying to keep more grapes, losing to risk one more grape in the transaction.

With these two scenarios, scientists could show monkeys, as humans alike, avoid the certainty of loss and shoot for possible, uncertain wins. Monkeys treat losses as more important than gains, just as we feel losses more intensely than we feel the gains.

The gain/loss scenarios also show the decision-making was based on the referent. The monkeys were considering taking the risky action when comparing the choice to the immediate option. They could not evaluate the general picture of receiving two grapes for one token, which was a gain already, when compared to the initial stage of one token buying one grape.

We need an enormous effort to understand reality in absolute terms, so, when making decisions, we use a baseline as reference. In evaluating a gain or loss scenario, we always chose a stand point of reference to base our assessment. This reference might trick us, as it happened with the monkeys and their decisions on trying to get more grapes.

When a close referent makes us lose sight of larger, more distant references, myopic loss aversion comes into play. Investors, in special, fall prey to this bias, as they tend to view their investments under short-term lenses. A larger gain accumulated within a year, for instance, gets dismissed by a recent minor loss over the last month.

As core as these biases are, they must have been shaping our decisions for a long time. Indeed, they have, and marketers could see them before scientists named them. As Robert Collier signals to us in The Robert Collier Letter Book, first published in 1931:

There are only two reasons why your reader will do as you tell him to in your letter. The first is that you have made him want something so badly that of his own volition he reaches out for your order card to get it. The other is that you have aroused in him the fear that he will lose something worthwhile if he does not do as you say.

 

Loss Aversion in Marketing: Framing Your Offers

When you want to inspire fear, be definite! Be specific!  Robert Collier

Inspiring the fear of losing: a powerful technique since the 1930s.

The not-so-hidden secret to employ this technique? Just frame your offers in terms of loss, instead of framing them in terms of gains.

When tested among other cognitive biases on an e-commerce platform, loss aversion outperformed the counterparts, reaching the highest increase in conversions and the highest mean scores for maximizing page views, as Daugirdas Jankus found out in his research at the ISM University of Management and Economics.

Along with loss aversion, Jankus tested the countdown effect, the bandwagon effect, the gain effect, and a control (no effect) variation. For one week, in a website with an average of 21,000 weekly sessions, the biases were tested for page views, view time, page value, and conversions. A weekly test on this platform guaranteed at least 400 unique session views for each of the page combinations with each bias.

The control variation, with no effects on, performed poorly for conversions, time on page, and all the other metrics. Pages equipped with cognitive biases had better overall conversion rates.

The messaging tested by Jankus was meant to trigger different cognitive biases on visitors of a food delivery platform:

Cognitive Bias	Messaging
Loss Aversion	The meal is already reserved! Do not miss a chance to order it!
Countdown Effect	Order your meal in [timer] and we will deliver it to you by [delivery time]!
Bandwagon Effect	This meal was already delivered to 100+ clients! Be one of them – Order Now!
Gain Effect	The faster you order – the faster you get!

 

You can see the messages above frame decisions from different perspectives. For loss aversion, the message implies that the meal already belongs to the visitor.

Difference Between Loss aversion and Risk aversion.

Loss aversion and risk aversion are related psychological concepts in the field of behavioral economics, but they have distinct meanings and implications:

Loss aversion:

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias where people tend to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. In other words, the psychological impact of a loss is generally perceived as more significant than the pleasure derived from a gain of the same magnitude. This phenomenon was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as part of their Prospect Theory. Loss aversion can lead to suboptimal decision-making, as individuals might be overly focused on avoiding losses, even when the potential gains outweigh the risks.

Risk aversion:

Risk aversion refers to the preference for avoiding uncertainty or taking on risk in decision-making situations. A risk-averse individual would typically choose a safer option with a lower, but more certain payoff, over an option with a potentially higher payoff but also a higher degree of uncertainty or risk. Risk aversion is a natural human tendency, as people often want to minimize the potential for negative outcomes. However, it can also result in suboptimal decision-making when the potential gains of a riskier option significantly outweigh the potential losses.

In summary, loss aversion is specifically concerned with the asymmetric psychological impact of losses versus gains, while risk aversion pertains to the general preference for avoiding uncertainty and risk in decision-making situations. Both concepts can influence human behavior and decision-making, sometimes leading to suboptimal choices.

How to frame loss aversion on your offers.

Let’s draw three guidelines from the three experiments of buyers under-pricing mugs, women acting on disease prevention after reading a negatively-framed brochure, and monkeys risk-betting to keep more grapes:

• Frame the offer in terms of loss.
• Make it risky.
• Offer a referent to base the comparison.

Let’s add three of Collier’s advice:

• Inspire the fear of losing.
• Be definitive, by setting a timeframe.
• Be specific, by stating a clear loss.

To sum it up, let’s check 13 techniques online vendors are using to frame loss aversion in their websites:

1. Discounts

The first money-saving technique that comes to mind.

If your goal is to inspire the fear of losing money, just tell your visitors they could be spending more to buy the same item or service. This is old, classic incentive.

DiscountHockey.com offers hockey gear and apparel at reduced prices, as you can see in one of their product pages:

How does Discount Hockey reinforce the discount?

They repeat the offer three times, in three different formats. In the role of the referent, the original price is stroke through. “Item is on Sale” is announced in a contrasting color, red. “Clearance – Save 58%” is declared in bold.

The offer is specific, 58%, and definitive, with few items in stock (zero items in this case).

You will notice that sometimes discounts belong to the website’s value proposition. At Orbitz.com, for example, deals are the essence of their offers.

How does Orbitz reinforces the deals?

They specify the offers, as “save up to 45%” and “save 10 dollars.” There is a timeframe for acquiring the deals, so, again, from the buyers’ perspective, it is better to make the purchase soon, from this site, instead of buying somewhere else for a higher price.

Orbitz uses repetition as well to reinforce the losses. “Deal” appears seven times in the screen below, and “Save” appears five times:

2. Coupons

Coupons are a long-established tradition.

From paper to digital, e-retailers offer coupons on-site, newsletters, as well as in affiliate programs with deal websites or micro-influencers’ sites.

With specific offers, and clear deadlines, coupons frame the benefits in terms of loss. If clients do not use the coupons in time, they risk losing money in purchases of the same items at a higher, regular price.

How do TheKrazyCouponLady.com and Coupons.com, for instance, advertise the deals?

They use repetition of terms, as “save” and “buy 1, get 1.” They state percentages and values of savings, as “$490.98 Available Savings.” They group the coupons in categories, so visitors can easily assess the discounts.

3. Free Trials and Samples

For saving money, free trials and samples loom large as customers’ favorites.

By receiving a free product or sample service, prospects become owners. Ownership makes the sample more valuable, as the coffee mugs priced around $7.00. Once prospects establish the ownership, they do not want to lose the item, or sample service.

An extreme example of successful free sampling comes from The Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. Once his books were pirated and distributed for free around the world, he experienced an astounding growth in sales.

Free trials of software as a service, as Netflix, Spotify, and Evernote, to name a few, also induce users to subscribe to avert the loss.

Although certain consumers may not be willing to pay the market price to try a good, they may pay the market price to avoid losing that good.

Sephora.com offers free samples the customers can choose to add to the basket, before checking out.

4. Pre-order Deals

Pre-order deals play upon loss aversion by offering discounts and bonuses, but also by providing early exclusive access to new items. Early access creates an ownership people want to preserve.

The time frame for buyers’ action is well determined in pre-orders, as the offer expires on launch day.

Jeff Goins, for instance, has a pre-order bonus for his new book. If customers skip this period for purchasing the book, they will lose money on the long run, when they will want to buy the bonuses separately. Goins has already used this strategy for selling his previous book, “The Art of Work,” which he sold 14000 copies in pre-orders.

This time, for “Real Artists Don’t Starve,” Goins is using a dedicated landing page, with clear directions, and a form to capture emails, to send the bonuses. Word repetition, “free” and “bonus,” accompanies coordinating colors between the CTA button, the menu, and book cover.

5. Referral Programs

Referral programs come in many forms, usually offering irresistible compensations in exchange for word-of-mouth marketing. They play with customers’ loss aversion specially when they offer discounts or free benefits.

Dropbox has a successful and famous case of referrals, that helped them go from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months.

They framed their referral program as “Get more space:”

Image source: Referral Candy

 

6. Exclusive Launches on VIP E-mail Lists

Exclusive launches on VIP e-mail lists is a great strategy for using loss aversion on your behalf.

VIP email lists bring together people who are already customers, who trust the brand, and are willing to spend money on your products and services. Exclusive launches celebrate this relationship and signal that customers shouldn’t miss the opportunity of acquiring the new goodies.

Emails are, after all, the preferred means for receiving brand promotions:

Image source: Marketing Sherpa

Evy’s tree has a fantastic example of using the VIP list to introduce their new hoodies:

“Here’s the formula and how it works:

A new hoodie inspired by a real woman is named, created, and topped with a story about why that woman is an inspiration

Evy’s Tree doesn’t immediately offer the hoodie for sale. Instead, it launches a sneak peek three days prior to the release. It slowly introduces the hoodie and tells the story behind the hoodie via its Facebook and Instagram channels

On launch day, Evy’s Tree sends out an email to its VIP email list letting everyone know the item is finally for sale and includes a link to a dedicated product landing page

Preorders are taken, with a delivery date somewhere between 2-4 weeks from the preorder date”

You can check the introduction of the “Diana” wrap, the announcement of the email, and the giveaway for the product launch.

7. Urgency

Urgency plays a crucial role in inciting loss aversion, as it sets the time frame for customers’ action.

By the end of the time frame, customers will lose all benefits, as those countdown clocks alarmingly indicate on landing pages.

Amazon, for instance, displays a small countdown clock for deals of the day:

8. Scarcity

Scarcity is also a fundamental feature for framing loss aversion.

The customer needs to act fast to complete the purchase and not miss the opportunity of acquiring a product at a low price.

Discounthockey.com uses scarcity by informing the quantity of items in stock.

9. Rewards Programs

Rewards programs create a new currency.

By collecting points, customers have a new currency to exchange for products and services, so they can save their money.

You can find many formats for rewards programs, but product discounts are customers’ favorite feature. More than half of global loyalty-program participants, 51%, say product discounts are among the three most valued benefits.

100percentpure.com has a rewards program called Purist Perks. The tiers of the program offer benefits that customers would not want to miss, as exclusive deals, sales, and product previews.  You can see they use the repetition for words as “rewards,” “perks,” and “benefits.” They clearly point out that you can “cash points for benefits.”

10. Brand Ambassador Programs

Brand ambassador programs also come in a vast range of formats.

Among the incentives these programs bring to participants, discounts and mutual partnership on marketing efforts are features the ambassadors would want to keep.

100percentpure.com also has an ambassador program. You can see how different this program is from the rewards program we mentioned above. Their Purist Pro Program is for makeup artists and estheticians who work with their products. These pros get discounts, the first benefit mentioned in the list below, but also a lot of marketing joint benefits.

11. Social Proof

Social proof can trigger FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), which, in turn, can play upon loss aversion. When suffering from FOMO, people want to keep up with trends and other people’s activities.

Groupon, for instance, employs many loss aversion strategies. For social proof, which doubles as scarcity in their website, they indicate how many people have bought the item, by also warning “limited quantity available.”

12. Cart Abandonment Notifications and Emails

With notifications for cart abandonment, you can reach out for your customers to recover items they were interested in buying. As they previous selected the items for purchase, they had already considered the items as their own. So, they should not want lose these products.

On pre-orders for the Full Focus Planner, Michael Hyatt chose to send a cart abandonment email, reminding the buyer to complete the purchase. The email mentioned the person could be distracted, and that’s why they left the site without buying the planner. He refers to the product that “you left in your cart,” meaning this belongs to the email recipient, it is just a matter of the person going back and retrieving the product, in order not to lose it.

13. User Interface and Design

At UI-Patterns.com, they compiled a list of four ways you can tingle loss aversion to users. You can:

1. Segregate gains (since gain brings less intense feelings of joy, by segregating them, you make them stronger).
2. Integrate losses (to intensify the strong feeling of sorrow).
3. Integrate smaller losses with larger gains.
4. Segregate small gains from larger losses.

Let’s check how Walmart organizes loss aversion on discounts. Their value proposition and tag line state “We save people money, so they can live better,” and “Save Money. Live Better.” We can expect their site to be structured to convey this message.

In the product page, you can see the “Save $50” in a contrasting color, that matches the CTA button. There is scarcity, “only 7 left,” in black.

They framed “2-day shipping,” and “free 2-day shipping” as gains, in green, with a note on the day of arrival. These gains are announced as nouns, opposed to the stronger command “save.”  In this sense, the 2-day shipping comes as a benefit vs. the action the customer can take that will prevent him from losing money.

 

They keep the interface and layout consistent though the shopping experience.

So, on cart page, when a new discount is introduced, in a banner, for opening up an account, it comes in the same orange color, with the same wording as “save.” The banner also offers a little calculation, so the buyer can see the savings of opening an account.

Free shipping is still in green, and it shows up below the item description, while the discount and scarcity indications show up under the price. So, gains on the left, losses on the right, close to price. Gains are reinforced under the CTA, as “Congratulations – You get free shipping!” again in green.

On another product page, you can check the consistency of the site. The discount appears twice, in colors that match the CTA button, with different wording, “Pickup Discount” and “Save an extra $0.80” Free shipping, as a gain, comes in black.

For retargeting, they keep the consistency, so you can see the CTA color and shape in this ad matches the CTA color and shape of the product page.

Final Thoughts: Optimizing Loss Aversion for Conversions

Do you know any other loss aversion strategy? If you have a suggestion to add, we would be thrilled to hear and add to our list!

After creating and implementing some of these loss aversion strategies to your site (or all of them, if you are extremely bold!), it is time to optimize them.

At a starting point, you should conduct qualitative research and carry out an Analytics investigation. You have to learn if your visitors are aware of all the benefits. Focus on evaluating the location and copy on your website that addresses the loss aversion strategies.

For instance, during research for one of our clients, we found out only 30% of visitors were aware of the incredible loyalty program the brand offered. In this case, we worked on streamlining the wording and adjusting the incentive so it was clearer for visitors the benefits of subscribing to the program.

You can also check our case study on improving copy and location for discount and social proof. With this optimization program, we helped our client reach 13.98% increase in conversion on mobile product pages and 17.75% increase in conversion on mobile cart page.

Remember to always A/B test your findings and hypothesis.

The post What is Loss Aversion and 13 Loss Aversion Marketing Strategies to Increase Conversions appeared first on Invesp.

Great question. Increasing the conversion rates of a SaaS (software as a service) website is part science, part art. That means, you need to take a look at the numbers and data from visitors’ behavior, while also looking for unique insights and solutions to some of the problems you uncover with the data.

To help you out with inspiration for future testing, we compiled real-life examples and case studies of successful and surprising A/B tests on SaaS websites.

But, first, a fundamental rule of thumb for A/B testing your way to higher conversion rates:

Understand Your Visitors

“If you want to build a multimillion-dollar online business, then you must understand how visitors view your website and how they interact with it.”

Before you conduct any A/B test, you must understand your visitors.

You should first conduct qualitative and quantitative research, as these are crucial to learn the background of visitors and the way they interact with your website.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research helps you to understand the underlying reasons, motivations, and opinions of your customers. From your visitors’ perspectives, you can find out the most common obstacles they face on your site, or what interests they have so you can present a more compelling offer.

This is valuable information. With this data, you can begin optimizing conversions by first addressing the most pressing needs.

Start with polls and surveys to learn more about your site visitors. Other forms of qualitative research include but are not limited to:

• Usability studies
• Heuristic evaluation
• Focus-groups
• In-depth interviews with website customers

Quantitative Research

When conducting quantitative research, you make use of the wealth of information that analytics software  provides in order to better analyze visitors’ behavior around your site. Analytics can either validate something you uncovered while conducting qualitative research, or uncover a problem or issue for you to investigate further.

Evaluate Google Analytics metrics  by setting up goals and funnels around your website to understand the different visitor navigation paths. Segmenting the data can also provide a wealth of information to better understand how different types of visitors from varying sources, incomes, demographics, genders, etc. behave differently throughout your site.

After collecting and combining data from both qualitative and quantitative research, you can compile a list of issues and prioritize them based on severity and impact.  This will help you to determine which pages and areas across the site you should test.

A/B Tests to Boost Your SaaS Homepage

Building a useful and beautiful homepage page is a demanding task.

Even with all the tools, tricks, and techniques available online to guide the design process of a homepage, companies still face the challenge of creating a page that truly addresses the needs of their customers.

Your SaaS homepage’s main goal is to meet your website visitors’ expectations.

Your homepage should:

• Clearly state and address your value proposition
• Provide visitors with information and elements to help guide them to their desired destination

We will go through each element of a homepage, breaking down what some of the best SaaS companies do to optimize their homepage, and suggest multiple tests you can start running on your site.

What Elements Can Be Tested on a SaaS Homepage?

If the core elements of your homepage are not user friendly and they confuse the visitors, you are missing a big opportunity to grow your user base.

Your ability to deliver a seamless experience on your homepage sets the expectation for your services, when a user becomes a customer. And today’s savvy consumers understand that.

Below, we’ve pointed out some of the crucial elements of a SaaS homepage.

Site Navigation

Navigation is the foundation of any website. It helps site visitors find their way through your site, according to their priorities and desires.

You can come across a few different conventions allowing users to navigate through a website, but for a SaaS page visitors have a single expectation. In general, they expect the navigation menu to be prominent, at the top, flowing from left to right.

Let’s check three points you should consider if you want to conduct A/B tests on your website after changing navigation:

1. Test the top navigation

Your navigational menu affects how you can get visitors to your sales generating pages, pricing page, and contact page. The way it appears and the contents within the menu should be mapped to the various paths that you know visitors take (having a customer journey map would help). A top navigation should not be designed based solely on what the HIPPO at the office thinks.

2. Remove, or add, drop down menus and test your navigation

3. Decrease the number of the items on your navigation

Above the Fold Value Proposition

Your value proposition answers two main questions for your visitors:

1. What makes your business unique?
2. What do you do better than everyone else?

So, it makes sense to display the value proposition above the fold, your real estate area. According to a study conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, 80.3% of the visitors focus their attention at the top of the site.

If visitors land on your website and bounce off just because they do not understand what service you are providing, what is the point?

Look at this homepage. Can you get in 5 seconds what it offers you?

This homepage belongs to Revcontent, a content-discovery platform. They recommend content form to other websites based on the content the visitors already reviewed. However, the service they offer is not clear in their chosen headline.

The main headline remains the central piece of copy on your homepage. It should stand out and carry your company’s value to the visitors when they land on your homepage.

A headline that does not convey the right message, about what you are doing as a company, can cost potential customers and increase bounce rate.

You have just a few seconds to fascinate your visitors, make sure you have a clear and effective headline.

To charm visitors with your service, you should have a clear value proposition, with the elements of headline, subheadline, and an image that mentions the service you are providing in a simple way.

In the example above, Sales Cloud present their value proposition with a question “Want a big jump in revenues?” They complete the proposition with “Blaze your trail with the world’s #1 CRM platform for sales.” From this value proposition, visitors can understand the benefit, big jump in revenues, as well as the main service provided, a CRM platform for sales. You can even glimpse their dashboard at the bottom.

When in doubt, use Grandma Approach to validate your value proposition. This approach considers that you are covered if your grandma can understand your value proposition. Everyone will understand your offer.

However, just going out and about to ask your grandma will not give you any healthy results. You can a find better approach by A/B testing your proposition with both segments: visitors that are aware of the service you provide and visitors who do not have any idea about the value you offer.

4. Test your value proposition

A/B testing your value proposition, via headline or subheadline, is a surefire way of optimizing your homepage. First, you have to determine which aspects of your services/products appeals to your visitors the most, and then you A/B test your ideas as headlines and subheadlines, to find out which ones better convey your value proposition and result in higher conversions.

Hero Image

The hero image is one of the first element visitors notice when they enter your homepage. As this image represents what you are selling, it plays an important role in determining your visitors’ website experience.

The way SaaS companies use hero image has evolved over time. You can check part of Basecamp homepage evolution in this case study.

Generally, it is best to give relevance to the value you are proposing to your visitors. You want your hero image to evoke the service you offer. A strong, relatable hero image also helps in reducing your website bounce rate.

The hero image above is an excellent example in which you clear visualize the result promised by the headline, and strong value proposition: “Build your online store with BigCommerce.”

Bigcommerce is a technology company that provides software for ecommerce companies. Companies can either use ready-made templates or they can build customizable ones for their websites.

In just a few seconds in this homepage, any visitor can understand that the site offers you the convenience of building your ecommerce website in a professional and easy way.

 5. Test real person as a hero shot

Associating the image of a real person to an offer, instead of a stock photo, increases conversion by 35%, as Marketing Experiments shows us.

6. Test product images vs. real person photo (it is best to do so if you fail to achieve high conversions from a real person image)

So, as we learned with Marketing Experiments above, a hero image with a real person has better effects on conversion rates.

Not always, though. Check out the example below:    

Wordstream came up with the idea of using “Rocket Kid” hero image on their homepage. They ran the test with the variation above for 15 days. In the end, surprisingly, the non-human variation got higher conversions.

You can test many hero image variations. You should test real person photo, stock photo, explainer video, group photo (group of people working), customer photos, or even illustrations.

7. Test illustrations

As a SaaS business, you are probably already familiar with Dropbox. The company has been using illustration as a hero image for a long time:

By using illustration, you can better describe the image choices including technical details and the content.

8. Test a team (group of people preferably) as hero image

Flow is a company offering a service to ease business workflow, as you can guess by its name. It makes sense that they use a hero image of a team, because their offer is related to team work.

CTA (Call to Action) button

CTA buttons on your homepage help determine your visitors’ primary action and path. Although it is not a priority to optimize CTA buttons on your homepage, or any page, CTA location, color, and copy can have an impact. Having the right balance is important.

You can test the location and microcopy of a button, but it is best if you are specific in the changes you make and determine customer centric solutions.

Here are some important ingredients to test on your homepage CTAs.

9. Test the color of the CTA button

Changing the color of a CTA button is classic A/B testing.

It seems too simplistic, but color affects your website visitors’ mood. Green represents moving forward, while red relates to blood and warning, and blue stands for trust and calmness. For SaaS companies, this research found the majority choose green and blue CTAs:

Image source: Chartmogul

Basecamp uses a green,  and capturing CTA button in its sign-up. You can see below how the CTA stands out to capture visitors’ attention.

Besides the influence on visitors’ mood, colors work as visual cues. Contrasting colors help to highlight the CTA button and draw visitors’ attention to the desired action.

Consider possible FUDs of your visitors, when you design your Call to Action button. In this desktop website below, you can hardly see the CTA button.

If you have a homepage like this one, you must consider changing to a bigger, colorful, and capturing CTA button, to minimize any uncertainties.

Then you should frequently ask yourself this question:

How often am I A/B Testing the color of the CTA buttons on my homepage?

10. Test CTA copy

Let’s take a look at a real-life example shared by WhichTestWon.com.

As a conversion optimization company offering the same service as WTW.com, we could easily predict which version won. Here are the actual results:

Version A is the original page copy and Version B is the variation. As you can see, just by changing the micro copy in the CTA button, they were able to increase conversions (form fills) by 48% with 98.5% Confidence Level. In this case, rather than “Watch Demo” the users are attracted by “See Product Videos” CTA, which is more convincing and clear.

 11. Test the size of the CTA button

The original page for SAP BusinessObjects had a small blue text link:

To increase conversions, they created a big orange button and changed the headline to FREE CRYSTAL REPORTS 2008, in a larger font:

The result is inspiring: they increased their conversion rate by 32%.

12. Test a sticky CTA

An always-visible CTA is a great recipe for higher conversions. You can choose a sticky sidebar, header or footer to add your CTA.

Basecamp uses a sticky CTA footer for their mobile homepage:

General Design in a SaaS Homepage

13. Test long form design vs. short form

An A/B testing conducted by Signal v. Noise about Highrise marketing site shows 37.5% micro conversion increase when the company tested longer page design.

Short form design is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

The company then believed they could go further in terms of increasing conversions. So, they tested a totally different variation to see if they got better results.

In this design, they simplified the text, instead of customer testimonials they used hero image of a person, and highlighted value proposition as a subheadline.

Highrise increased micro conversions by 102.5%, and macro conversions by 47%, which brought a revenue boost for the business.

14. Test a total make-over

CloudSponge company had an outmoded website design in 2010. They were suffering from low conversions. The design of their homepage looked like this:

As you can see, the website design was simple but unclear or attractive. They needed a better website design.

The new design gives visitors reasons to be interested in CloudSponge. They provide a value proposition, which explains the company’s offer, and present two different CTA buttons as “Sign up” and “See Demo.” Visitors can watch the explainer video next to the “See Demo” CTA to learn more about the service. Additionally, features are listed under “Why Cloudsponge.” In the end, the new design achieved a 33% conversion increase.

15. Test image slider vs. video

Device Magic tested if a video or an image slider would convert better on their homepage.

Original:

Variation:

The sliders came in a basic and easy to capture format. As a result, conversions uplift from homepage to signup page by 35% and subsequent signups by 31%.

Remember that visitors’ time is important, they do not want to waste time with trying to understand your offer. For this example, the video was four minutes long and the screen cap was not capturing at all. That’s why the slider converted more than the video.

Now, when you look at the website of Device Magic, you can see they are testing a different homepage. They use neither a long video nor a slider. There is a short video playing continuously which shows people using the program.

They use an understandable and strong value proposition and a clear CTA button, with a two-minute video about the service. So, the video playing in the background incite visitors to click on “See How” button.

16. Test auto-play vs. click-to-play videos

Imagine you are using click-to-play video on your homepage and then decide to go with auto-play video. Would the change impact your conversions? There is only one way to find out.

A/B Tests to Boost Your SaaS Pricing Page

Every page on your website has one unique goal in delivering the value you offer to your customers.

Up to now we have discussed how to deliver value on your website pages to increase your homepage micro conversions. The next step is to convert these micro conversions into macro conversions, by selling your product/service to the visitors. At this point you should consider finding the right ways to optimize your SaaS pricing page.

Each marketing and sales funnel leads to your bottom line and pricing page is the final stop before visitors become customers, and you make a revenue.

Let’s see some A/B testing opportunities you should consider.

17. Test the position of the lowest and highest prices

Hubspot is using low to high pricing mechanism.

Wufoo is using high to low pricing mechanism.

18. Test same colors vs. different colors

  19. Test the number of pricing tiers

55% of the companies use three or four pricing tiers. So, starting by testing three to four pricing tiers on your pricing page is best.

Then, you test two or five pricing tiers, depending on your pricing mechanism.

20. Test a list of all the features on your pricing plan vs. list of features with check boxes

In the pricing plan above, features are listed under each pricing package. This might waste users time while comparing the packages.

The one above is designed with check boxes so that users can easily compare each package.

21. Test your most expensive product as “request pricing” format

Not all SaaS companies show their pricing tiers on the website, some of them ask visitors to contact them for pricing information. This way, they can offer different prices to different customers. In the end, this format might be a win-win situation for both sides.

Jason Lemkin SaaS analysis shows that 38% of SaaS companies list their most expensive pricing tier as “contact us.”

22. Test packages as named and unnamed

Many SaaS companies think that as far as they create pricing tiers for each persona they are on the right track. However, one fifth of the companies use their pricing tiers unnamed.

23. Test customizing and relocating the pricing tiers

Here is a good example on pricing page optimization.

The new pricing page beat the original version by 57%:

 During the A/B test, the new version of challenger generated 57% more leads. You can see the change of their pricing structure into customized pricing. 24. Test anchor pricing

Basekit is a mobile site builder company that hosts small businesses, to build their own websites or online stores. The company conducted a successful A/B test on their pricing page to improve macro conversions.

In the example below, Basekit made a significant change on their pricing page. They named each product tiers as Basic, Business, and Enterprise. They also decreased CTA buttons to one green color and changed the CTA name to “Get started.” They also tested anchor pricing, highlighting their “Business” product to compel visitors.

The test resulted in a 25% increase in conversions.

25. Test clear pricing features

Lyyti sales team and Sampsa Vainio, conversion optimization expert, changed the original, cluttered pricing page for a user-friendly one.

This was the original:

According to the heatmaps and clickmaps reports, users frequently moved between the pricing and the features page. This original page has barely visible CTAs and no information on features. Prospects could not distinguish the features offered in each plan.

Here’s what the successful variation looked like:

They increased visits to the lead generation page by 93.71% with a statistical significance of 96%.

 26. Test long pricing plans vs short pricing plans

Lyyti’s example also shows that long pricing plans can perform better than short ones.

27. Test “useless” pricing plan

Have you ever heard about Predictably Irrational theory? Based on this theory, you can increase conversions by setting an illogical pricing tier among your offers.

This useless plan has no potential of being sold. The sole purpose of this specific offer is to make the next pricing tier much more attractive. People will always choose the most reasonable cost-benefit option.

Useless pricing plan is a strong model to test. Are you still not sure whether it works or not? Then check out this real-life example below.

One company decided to try useless pricing for their business. This is the original page:

With this pricing, 40% bought the yearly plan and 60% purchased the monthly plan.

This is the variation:

The company knew that customers wanted the first two features, so they included it in all plans. The result was a 233% increase in conversions. Eighty-six percent purchased the $299 plan and 14% chose the monthly. So, the middle pricing tier ($289) psychologically affected people to select the third ($299) pricing tier.

28. Test pricing tiers with discounts

Meebox is a Denmark origin web hosting and cloud hosting company. They ran a test on the pricing page, offering discounts on their plans. While the original offered no discounts, the variation displayed 20% of discount for the middle plan, and 40% for the highest plan. These discounts applied only if customers locked in for a 2-year period.

Original:

Variation:

Meebox saw a 121.56% increase in revenue, a 46.24% increase in Average Order Value, and a 51.85% increase in conversions.

When offering discounts to potential customers, try to make it work for your company as well. It may not have been profitable for Meebox to offer a discount if they would not have guaranteed customers to pay for 2 years.

29. Test CTA copy on pricing tiers

Your CTA copy should be simple and persuasive to convince visitors. Instead of doing drastic changes starting with small changes in CTA copy would be meaningful to see the difference. Never forget that you have only few words to persuade customers.

Unbounce is a leading landing page provider who tested CTA copy on its pricing page. Not features, not design, or multiple elements. What Unbounce did is just changing “your” into “my.” Perhaps the visitors found it more engaging. The conversion rate of the company increased from 30% to 90%.

30. Test a value-based pricing model

Server Density is a SaaS company who offers hosting and website monitoring. Their initial pricing model depended on cost, as you can see in the original page. They tested it against a separated pricing tier, in a value-based pricing model.

As a result, free trial sign-ups decreased but overall revenue boosted. They effectively lowered the costs of the “tire-kickers.” In the end, they increased total revenue by 114% with the new designed pricing tiers.

Over to you

For any company, it is a tough task to generate value online. SaaS companies frequently change and adjust their websites, especially pricing pages to stay ahead of the competition in a crowded market.

In this article, we go over most of the common elements in SaaS websites to come up with concrete testing ideas, supported by real-life examples and case studies.

Many SaaS companies test their homepage and pricing page time to time to reach optimum results. However, we cannot say that there is a best method or optimal solutions such as changing a particular element or designing the page in a specific format.

The best thing is to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis in a long run to see what your visitors want and how you can meet their needs. Then determine the less converting elements on your site and try to come up with long lasting solutions.

With possible solutions in hand, you still need to conduct A/B Tests wisely and pragmatically to find the best converting homepage and pricing page for you.

References

https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/6_simple_a_b_tests_to_optimize_your_conversion_rate

https://www.intechnic.com/blog/best-examples-of-website-goals-and-objectives/

https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/saas-home-pages/

https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-landing-pages/

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/20566/The-Button-Color-A-B-Test-Red-Beats-Green.aspx#sm.0005dujsq1dh0dh3z0a1f6r0eu44j

https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-landing-pages-2017-analysis/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/cro-case-studies/

http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/156183/5-Best-SaaS-Pricing-Page-Features-to-Add-Value

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/types-of-landing-pages-guaranteed-to-convert-and-how-to-use-them/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/your-complete-guide-to-call-to-action-button-plus-a-bonus-with-free-200-effective-cta-buttons/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/fears-uncertainties-and-doubts-reducing-visitor-anxieties-to-increase-conversions/

http://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/conversion-rate-optimization/what-makes-a-great-hero-shot/

https://www.designforfounders.com/ab-testing-examples/

https://thechrons.com/its-time-to-bust-these-7-ab-testing-myths-2/

http://assets.ioninteractive.com/storage/content/infographics/ion_Infographic_LandingPagesWork.pdf

http://www.funnelenvy.com/blog/7-call-action-case-studies-conversion-boosting-insights/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/guide-to-conducting-qualitative-usability-studies/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/polls-101-a-kickstart-guide-to-knowing-you-customers-and-increasing-conversions-on-your-website/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/guide-to-optimize-saas-pricing/

http://radio.shabanali.com/predictable.pdf

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/research-topics/email-marketing/email-optimization-a-single-word-change-results-in-a-90-lift-in-sign-ups.html

https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/high-converting-landing-pages/?utm_campaign=blog-post-social&utm_content=38848645&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/07/hero-images-guide

http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html

http://babich.biz/best-practices-for-hero-images/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-to-turn-your-homepage-into-high-conversion-machine/

http://blog.usabilla.com/5-expert-tips-for-improving-your-navigation-menu/

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/84427/Freemium-Pricing-for-SaaS-Optimizing-Paid-Conversion-Upgrades.aspx

https://bestengagingcommunities.com/2015/05/19/top-5-things-you-should-ab-test-except-forprice-on-your-pricing-page/

https://www.process.st/saas-pricing-pages/

https://foundrmag.com/saas-pricing/

The post 30 A/B Tests to Boost Your SaaS Conversion Rates appeared first on Invesp.

Many books have been written, articles published online, videos produced, and agencies formed.

As experts and thought leaders in the industry, we’ve put together a list of conversion optimization resources (best books on conversion rate optimization etc).

We’ve compiled a list of the top 100 conversion rate optimization books, videos, and articles that you need to own, bookmark, and/or read on conversion optimization.

Conversion Rate Optimization Books

1. Don’t make me think – Steven Krug
2. Considered by many experts as the ‘layperson’s usability bible’. This book is recommended for all those who want to know how to get started with web usability. It’s also a great refresher course in the basic steps for advanced users as well.

2. Web Analytics: An Hour A Day – Avinash Kaushik
3. This book provides a step–by–step guide into creating a successful web analytics strategy. The book helps you glean more than the average number of actionable insights from your web analytics data.

3. Call To Action – Bryan Eisenberg
4. This book provides foundational information on how to plan, achieve and evaluate performance results.

4. Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash
5. Tim Ash is the Founder of Conversion Conference and CEO of SiteTuners. This book explains all the basics and goes beyond specific roles to provide a practical and pragmatic view of CRO.

5. Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers– Ayat Shukairy and Khalid Saleh
6. The book introduces  the Conversion Framework process developed by the folks here at Invesp and used by optimization teams across the globe to help companies increase their website conversion rates.

6. Always Be Testing – Bryan Eisenberg
7. This is one of the first books that focused on conducting A/B and MVT testing. Although many tools have been developed since then, this book continues to be one of the best in the field.

7. You Should Test That – Chris Goward
8. The book helps you learn how to convert your leads into buying customers. This book helps you understand the testing procedures that are necessary to optimize website elements in order to encourage visitors to take specific actions.

Beginner Guides On Conversion Optimization

3. 3. 8. DIY: How to map your buyer personas to improve conversions

Any marketing effort requires a good deal of market research. It’s important to anticipate customers every move, how they think, and what their interests are: this can be achieved through the creation of personas. This guide helps you through a step-by-step process to develop the right personas for your website.

3. 3. 9. Guide to Competitive Analysis for Conversion Rate Optimization

You can learn a lot from your competitors, both good features and elements to avoid. A comprehensive competitive analysis is fundamental to any CRO program. This guide will help you in conducting a full competitive analysis.

3. 3. 10. The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

This is a step-by-step tutorial that helps you convert all kinds of site visitors to buying customers. This guide will help you learn the basics of CRO, and guide you to build your own conversion plan and test it. You’ll be able to improve your site’s performance while being wary of the common CRO pitfalls.

3. 3. 11. The Definitive Guide To Conversion Optimization

Ensuring good Conversion Rate Optimization should be every business’s top priority. Aimed at marketers, founders, entrepreneurs, and bloggers, this guide provides a detailed, and very scientific, approach to CRO needs and processes. A useful resource to anyone who wants to learn about CRO and wants to know how to get the best out of their CRO testing plans. This guide is  and others.

3. 3. 12. The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

This handy infographic helps you get started with Conversion Rate Optimization and maximize business ROI from the start. Learn about the Good Path and the Bad Path of CRO, to avoid random testing and guesswork.

3. 3. 13. Your Step-by-Step Guide to A/B Testing with Google Analytics

A guide to help you using a free tool for conducting A/B tests. You will learn how to set up tests, and how to identify when to stop testing. Whether you’re planning to build a blog or opening up an online retail business, you need these tips to succeed.

3. 3. 14. The Landing Page Makeover Guide – 7 Tips for Higher Conversions

This article shares the most successful landing page optimization projects with the reader. Learn seven tips to achieve higher conversions with your landing pages, from studying your audience to creating benefit driven copy.

3. 3. 15. Learning Zone By Conversion Rate Experts

A collection of CRO advice articles from conversion rate experts. A must read for anyone interested in digging deeper into conversion optimization.

3. 3. 16. What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and why do you need it?

This is a series of beginner’s guides aimed at educating on what CRO is and how to measure and improve conversions. The guides stress CRO as being extremely critical to the success of any business, even if a site is doing very well in other areas. The takeaway is that no matter how good the design or how good the content, the important thing is to ensure the site converts well.

3. 3. 17. 20 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts Share Their Top Tip for eCommerce

This slideshare presents 20 top tips shared by conversion rate optimization experts who’ve succeeded in various ecommerce ventures. The guide stresses on hyping underutilized pages, such as the Thank You page, to up conversions, and the importance of guiding visitors back to their cart. There’s also emphasis on remarketing.

3. 3. 18. 4 Principles For Higher Conversion

Increasing CRO is a complex issue for all businesses, big or small. Through conversion marketing, it is possible to address the huge percentage of visitors who don’t make it to the conversion bracket. This guide focuses on the shopping conversion rate enjoyed by online retailers and how it can be increased through best practices, usability principles, and determining and sticking to KPIs.

3. 3. 19. MarketingSherpa Quick Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

This guide offers several tactics to make sure that you are running valid tests to optimize conversions. Many important decisions are made based on inaccurate data. The guide emphasizes calculating the statistical significance of the data you’re testing instead of going with just any data. This guide presents you with 9 tactics that will help you run valid tests. You’re also provided a validity tool that’s free so you can evaluate testing data.

3. 3. 20. The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

One of the objectives of CRO is to optimize visitors’ experiences on your site, to convert them into customers. As fundamental as search engine rankings are, this guide focuses on CRO, which is what impacts your business’s bottom line.

3. 3. 21. Split-testing 101: A quick-start guide to conversion rate optimization

This guide presents 108 methods to increase your website’s profits. It also introduces split-testing software and how such software can be used to increase CRO. You’ll understand how to carry out split-tests and evaluate the stats.

3. 3. 22. Conversion Optimization Guide

This guide emphasizes the need to reduce friction during visitor’s interaction with your site. The idea behind getting a visitor to complete the steps required for conversion is to provide the visitor with a pleasant and unhindered experience. This guide talks about increasing sales with your present traffic itself, testing conversions and what mistakes to avoid.

3. 3. 23. A Guide to Conversion Optimizer

This guide helps you understand how Conversion Optimizer works. Your bottom-line depends not on clicks or impressions, but on maximizing conversions. Conversion Optimizer gives you the maximum or the average amount you’re willing to pay for a conversion. Based on the conversion bid metric you choose, Conversion Optimizer will focus on converted clicks or on conversions.

3. 3. 24. The definitive guide to multivariate and A/B testing

A collection of several articles that delve into creating an A/B and MVT tests.

3. 3. 25. The Beginner’s Guide to Simple A/B Testing

This guide emphasizes on A/B testing for improving online conversions, achieving growth in business, improving sales and getting the maximum out of web traffic. A/B testing can be used to test emails, copy, landing pages and much more. There are definite advantages to split-testing methods, and this guide goes on to illustrate these advantages.

3. 3. 26. A/B Testing Best Practices Can Save You Time, Money and Effort

This guide focuses on the best practices of A/B testing, and how they can save you money, time and effort. A/B testing can ensure a pleasant and rewarding experience for users on your site, by optimizing each page element.

Conversion Rate Optimization Blogs

3. 3. 27. 5 reasons to get obsessed with conversion rate optimization

This blog post provides 5 excellent reasons for any business to get really obsessed with Conversion Rate Optimization.

3. 3. 28. What to do When Your Split Test Fails

This blog post explains in detail why split tests, or A/B tests as they are known, fail. One reason could be invalid tests. Another reason could be the SEO expert failed to run tests that are significantly different. The variation between the A and B tests should be significant in order to consider the results.

3. 3. 29. How To Get Management Excited About Conversion Optimization

A search marketer’s job is to generate more web traffic, leading to more sales. However, more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean greater conversion rates. This blog  post explains why the pursuit of traffic might distract businesses from the actual goal – CRO – and how higher conversion rates bring down search marketing and acquisition costs.

3. 3. 30. Supercharge Your Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Structure CRO & Win

Creating the right kind of web traffic has become extremely challenging these days, thanks to algorithm changes everywhere. The traffic that you do enjoy is doubly precious. This blog post explains how to use various persuasive methods and acute data analysis to leverage existing traffic and increase conversions.

3. 3. 31. Conversion Optimization Tactics in Action

This blog post shares a number of successful tactics to help businesses leverage conversion optimization advice. The blog focuses on boosting ecommerce sales, getting more customer reviews, getting the most out of call to action buttons and more.

3. 3. 32. Marketers Have It Wrong: Forget Engagement, Consumers Want Simplicity

This article mentions the efforts of businesses in building brand loyalty and impacting purchase decision. The author points out that customers follow brands on social media not for the sake of the community, but mainly for discounts and coupons. The article explains further on how to leverage this customer behavior to have a bigger impact on purchase decisions.

3. 3. 33. Website Redesign for Higher Conversions? Tread Lightly

This blog post is meant for businesses who decide to redesign their entire website to up their conversion rates. With advice on why it’s not recommended to make too many sweeping changes or opt for a radical web design, the blog goes on to explain why a major change in web design might actually bring the conversion rate down, instead of up.

3. 3. 34. Make your visitor your fan in 6 easy ways

Your business website is the most critical part of your business. This blog talks about why it’s important to keep visitors engaged with content on your site. The blog goes on to explain the many tricks you can try to keep visitors coming back to your site to check on the content, including basic changes to your site.

3. 3. 35. Experiments at Airbnb [Case Study]

This blog post discusses the need to run various controlled experiments in order to learn customer behavior. The blog provides the example of Airbnb, a two-sided online marketplace on which experiments were recently run. The blog shares both the gains and the pitfalls of conducting similar experiments on a business site.

3. 3. 36. 8 Questions about increasing your website conversion rates

Find out the answers for the most common questions on CRO. From best strategies, to tools and overlapping tests, you will learn great insights to improve your conversions.

3. 3. 37. Online Lead Generation Through Your Website: A Guide For B2B Companies

This blog post deals with a question that troubles many businesses – are sufficient leads being generated by their websites? This blog is aimed at B2B companies that are struggling with online lead generation strategies. The blog goes on to explain how to generate high quality leads that company sales teams can close easily to increase profit margins.

3. 3. 38. Bridging The Gap Between Phone Calls & Analytics in 2014

This blog post is aimed at marketers who understands the importance of everything that goes into conversion optimization. With all that effort and knowledge, such smart marketing companies might forget how to address web visitors who actually calls in using a telephone. All the collected data and data analysis fail in this case.

3. 3. 39. A/B Tests That Destroy the Myths Created by A/B Testing

A/B testing has resolved many issues for web retailers, helping them achieve greater CROs all around. However, A/B testing has created some myths. This blog explores why this is and breaks many of the myths that A/B testing has generated over time.

3. 3. 40. What’s Wrong With A/B Testing

Granted, A/B testing is a marketing standard as far as ecommerce goes. However, A/B testing, while sounding simple, can be quite complicated. How does one determine small differences in customer behavior based on A/B testing? This blog questions if A/B testing is appropriate in all cases and what are the alternatives.

3. 3. 41. 3 Ways to Convert Shoppers with Effective Website Navigation

This blog demonstrates how effective site navigation helps convert more visitors. With effective navigation, customers can quickly find what they need and complete their purchase. Depending only on a navigation tool aimed at not-so-aware customers might defeat the purpose.

3. 3. 42. 9 Things You Must Know About Conversion Rate Optimization (Before You Start!)

This blog explains several conversion rate optimization techniques that every keen business should know. Among the recommendations, a business should always learn about competitors’ progress, and understand which techniques worked for them but might not be applied to every situation.

3. 3. 43. The Ultimate Guide to Increasing Ecommerce Conversion Rates

This blog provides an excellent guide to increasing your website’s conversion rates. Several tips are provided on how to enhance user experience and thereby increase conversion rates. This blog is a good beginner’s guide on CRO techniques and how to enhance user experience.

3. 3. 44. 8 Ways You Can Tweak Your Microcopy To Boost Your Conversion Rates

This blog presents 8 simple techniques on writing web copy that truly converts. Each technique relies on years of research and A/B tests done on web copy samples. The blog is a good guide for web copywriters and businesses.

3. 3. 45. A 5-Step Framework for Conversion Rate Optimization

This blog explains the common conversion roadblocks that can be found on a business website, and how these blocks prevent conversion. Main among these is lack of trust among users, and the importance of building a strong relationship with them through security signals and safe shopping.

3. 3. 46. 12 Rules for Maximizing Conversions from AdWords

This blog provides an excellent guide on Google AdWords and how to use its various features and tools to excel in your campaigns. Some of the suggestions include rotating Google Ads and otherwise manipulating their placement.

3. 3. 47. 9 Insanely Simple Ways to Optimize Your PPC Landing Page

This blog is a wholesome guide on how to prevent your PPC Ads from taking your visitor’s attention elsewhere. There are ways to leverage PPC Ads to increase your site’s conversion rate.

3. 3. 48. Cart Abandonment is Rising: 5 Tips For Cart Recovery

This blog focuses on how to prevent shopping cart abandonment rates through various tactics. The blog offers tips to personalize shopping carts and follow up with customers when a cart is abandoned. A good guide for any online retail business that’s suffering high shopping cart abandonment rates.

3. 3. 49. Why Use AdWords? Here Are 10 Reasons

This blog explains why marketers and businesses should use Google AdWords. Filled with many examples and scenarios.

3. 3. 50. 25 Tips to Optimize Landing Page Conversions

This blog details 25 excellent tips for optimizing landing page conversions. Apart from the obvious design and user experience changes any business should attempt to up landing page conversions, the blog also describes how savvy marketing techniques can gain more user eyeballs.

3. 3. 51. A Step-By-Step Process for Creating the Ideal Landing Page

This blog talks about the perfect landing page and what it should contain, ideally. It goes on to provide a step-by-step process for creating such a landing page. Knowledge of the user plays a huge role in the creation. This is a good guide for those who want to increase their landing page conversions.

Conversion Optimization Lists Guide:

3. 3. 52. 75 Resources for Writing Incredible Copy that Converts

Great web copy can entice, pull and convince users to commit to your CTA. That’s why great copy writers are highly valued by businesses. Use this list of 75 copywriting resources to understand and learn how to write masterful web copy for your website.

3. 3. 53. 31 Conversion Optimization Tips – How to Increase Conversion Rates

This list provides 31 top tips for Conversion Optimization. Each tip is less than 140 characters long, which is the perfect length for a tweet. These tips have been used by several businesses to lift conversion rates successfully.

3. 3. 54. 21 User Activation Hacks You Need To Know

Acquisition is only the first step of the conversion funnel. Making them stay on your site and commit to the action you put in front of them is called activation. This is the stage where you have to use every bit of your cunning to convince users to stay. This list of 21 user activation growth hacks helps you understand the reasons for user retention.

3. 3. 55. Top 20 Conversion Optimization Tips

This list of top conversion rate optimization tips is exactly what any small or big business needs to grow profits. This list gives you a clear idea of what to test, where to begin and what to avoid during the conversion process.

3. 3. 56. 16 Ways to Simplify Your Prospects’ Decision-Making Process

This list provides 16 ways to help you simplify the decision that users have to make on your site. You can use this list to make it easy for customers to buy from your site and avoid all the confusions that come up when we try too hard to convert leads.

3. 3. 57. 10 Principles of Successful Landing Pages

The 10 elements of a successful landing page list helps you understand what should go into your landing page and what you should avoid. It’s a simple list, easy to understand and implement, and useful for any business.

3. 3. 58. 7 Steps to Higher Conversion Rates

This list presents 7 steps to higher conversions that will make a real difference to your business. If marketers simply learn A/B testing mechanics without knowing what to test, the tests won’t glean results worth a penny. This list is meant to help marketers understand what to test for higher conversions.

3. 3. 59. 5 Ways to Improve Your Contact Form Conversion Rate

Most marketers ignore the contact form when optimizing their sites for conversion. Contact forms allow users to directly interact with the company, and therefore have great potential for conversion. This list shows 5 excellent ways to use contact forms to increase conversions.

3. 3. 60. 21 Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices for Beginners

This list provides you several great best practices for conversion optimization. You can use them to make changes to your website, one at a time. The list encourages marketers to take risks and explore ideas to improve conversion as well.

3. 3. 61. Statistical Significance for CRO: 6 Things You Need to Know

This list helps you understand the statistical significance between two different numbers, so you can make better sense out of your A/B tests and analytics data. This list is a good reference point for A/B testing initiates.

3. 3. 62. 17 Of The Best Conversion Optimization Blogs On The Internet

This is a list of 17 blogs that will help boost your knowledge on conversion rate optimization; each blog has been written by a conversion rate optimization expert. This list is a good reference point to anyone who’s trying to increase their website conversion rates.

3. 3. 63. 30 Conversion Rate Experts to Follow on Twitter

This is a list of 30 conversion rate experts that are worthy of being read and followed on Twitter. Beneath each expert, you’ll find a small excerpt introducing the person and an introductory bit on their achievements and published materials.

3. 3. 64. Best Practices in Conversion Rate Optimization Debunked

Do you believe every so called conversion rate optimization ‘best practice’ thrown about out there? Not all of them come from experts who’ve tried them out. Here’s a list of several CRO best practices debunked, so you know what to follow and what not to.

3. 3. 65. CRO Statistics: How to Avoid Reporting Bad Data

Read this blog to learn how to avoid reporting bad data to your clients. A clear understanding of statistics is necessary if you are to present valid, testable data. This blog is a ready reference to those who are in the business of managing CRO for their clients and superiors.

3. 3. 66. Mobile Landing Page Optimization – 10 Best Practices for Success

This blog gives you several best practices to help you create well-optimized mobile landing pages to boost conversions. Marketers can no longer ignore mobile landing pages, and this blog makes a point of this awareness.

3. 3. 67. Conversion Rate Optimization Round table – 11 Conversion Rate Experts Weigh In

This blog discusses how important it is to focus on improving conversion rates via landing page optimization. It also talks about ways to make the checkout processes friendlier and easier for better user experience.

3. 3. 68. Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization – 91 Point Checklist and Infographic

This blog presents 91 touch points where users engage with the site. Each of these touch points is an opportunity to optimize conversion. This blog is a good reference point for CRO beginners and marketers.

Case studies and Surveys On Conversion Optimization.

3. 3. 69. 4 Simple Tips That Doubled Our Conversion Rate

This case study shows how 4 simple tips actually doubled the company’s conversion rates. The study includes various conversion optimization best practices such as writing compelling copy and optimizing CTAs.

3. 3. 70. 100 Conversion Optimization Case Studies

This list of 100 conversion optimization case studies aims at educating and informing marketers on how to optimize their websites for better conversions. The tactics included in these case studies have been curated from top CRO experts.

3. 3. 71. 50 A/B Split Test Conversion Optimization Case Studies

This blog presents 50 A/B split testing case studies and explains how important testing is, what to test, and how to test various elements for maximizing conversions.

3. 3. 72. 20 Landing Pages Torn Apart by Rand Fishkin, Oli Gardner and Peep Laja

This study lists 20 landing pages of well-known companies along with professional critiques on each one of them. These critiques are provided to help marketers understand that a truly optimized landing page has nothing to do with money, but with clever strategy.

3. 3. 73. Case Study: Removing Video increased conversion rate by 88.46%

Does every optimization trick work on every site? Apparently not. Despite all the best practices out there, what works for your site might differ from best practices. In the blog under study, removing a video actually increased conversion rates.

3. 3. 74. Improving Website Navigation Increased conversion rate by 18.5%

This case study illustrates how improving site navigation helped customers locate products easily and thereby improved conversion rates for the company. Apart from CRO, improving site navigation also helped impact overall customer satisfaction positively.

3. 3. 75. 59% of businesses say conversion rate optimization is crucial to their digital strategy

This case study illustrates the growing awareness among companies of the importance of conversion optimization. The increasing awareness of CRO has led to a very competitive marketplace, with companies vying with each other to achieve max conversions.

3. 3. 76. 30 Conversion Rate Optimization Stats You Should Know

Conversion optimization is a largely numbers-driven marketing discipline. This slideshow depicts 30 very interesting CRO stats gleaned from several case studies. This slideshow is useful to CRO experts and marketers as a reference point.

3. 3. 77. 4 default settings that will destroy your AdWords account

This blog presents default settings in AdWords that you should probably change. The blog is a good reference point for marketers and CRO experts.

3. 3. 78. Lessons from the personalization pros

This report presents the result of the 2014 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey. Marketers and optimization experts can benefit from finding out how fully CRO-optimized companies run tests and obtain quicker results.

3. 3. 79. TrustRadius Conversion Rate Optimization Survey Results 2014

This slideshare presents the results of the “Conversion Rate Optimization: A Survey into CRO Practice Maturity, Software Usage & Spend August 2014” event. It’s an excellent reference point for marketers as it contains many CRO guidelines and examples.

3. 3. 80. 6 Conversion Rate Optimization Case Studies With Surprising Results

This blog presents 6 case studies on conversion optimization that are different from the norm. Common, every day elements, such as social media sharing buttons, are tested for conversion impact. The blog is a good reference point for those who want to approach CRO differently.

3. 3. 81. 5 Conversion Rate Optimization Case Studies You should Bookmark

Not all marketing agencies put conversion optimization to good use. This blog focuses on CRO tactics instead of on-page CRO elements. The blog presents the larger picture of conversion optimization, something that goes beyond just achieving success in CRO.

3. 3. 82. 47% of Ecommerce Sites Commit This Usability SNAFU

This blog talks about various snafus that companies commit and the negative impact they have on CRO and usability. For example, many companies refuse to get rid of home page carousels.

Conversion Rate Optimization Videos/Webinars.

3. 3. 83. How Some Companies Succeed at Converting Visitors yet Fail to Earn Great Customers – Whiteboard Friday

Conversion is not the end of the marketing goals for any company. To ensure long-term success, businesses must focus on building loyal relationships with their customers. This presentation explores why even so-called loyal customers decide to leave and what businesses should do to retain them.

3. 3. 84. Preparing Your Website for Conversion Optimization

This webinar discusses some of the top case studies on conversion optimization. Top tips that are gleaned from various successful conversion optimization projects are shared with viewers. This webinar is a useful watch for marketers and business owners who are new to conversion optimization.

3. 3. 85. Ecommerce Product Page Optimization – Webinar Recordings

This webinar talks about the importance of removing distractions on the landing page, and retaining the CTA and the “the Add To Cart” buttons on every page. The webinar also covers why it’s important to consider the location of upsells/cross-sells and other items.

3. 3. 86. 20 Tips to reduce shopping cart abandonment

This Flash presentation provides 20 excellent tips to all marketers on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. The material presents an excellent view towards improving sales fulfillment by building customer loyalty.

Conversion Optimization Infographics:

3. 3. 87. How to Optimize Your Landing Pages [Infographic]

This infographic provides a succinct view into what a landing page’s actual purpose is, and why businesses should improve their landing pages. It also presents 16 top tips for higher converting pages.

3. 3. 88. How to Create Effective E-commerce Product Pages [Infographic]

This infographic uses 21 simple steps to help businesses understand how to create effective product pages, to ensure better customer experience and high conversion rates.

3. 3. 89. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics [Infographic]

This infographic presents clear stats of shopping cart abandonment. It also helps readers understand why online shoppers abandon their shopping carts and what can be done to prevent this from happening.

3. 3. 90. Online Shopping Personalization – Statistics and Trends [Infographic]

This infographic talks about the importance of personalizing the customer’s online shopping experience. What you take away from this infographic is how to engage online customers and keep them feeling cared for through personalization techniques.

3. 3. 91. Top 2014 Conversion Optimization Statistics (Infographic)

This infographic helps you understand conversion optimization statistics across businesses. It also presents what marketers are doing to increase CRO and the various devices through which users are converting online, for the year 2014.

3. 3. 92. How To Test Your Landing Pages [Infographic]

This infographic talks about the importance of testing your landing page elements using the split, or A/B and Multivariate testing methods. Both these testing methods are explained diagrammatically along with examples.

3. 3. 93. The A-Z Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (Infographic)

This infographic presents a total A to Z guide to conversion rate optimization. 26 top tips are presented to help you improve your conversion rates. The tips cover a broad range of topics, from A/B testing, browser testing, customer relationship development, landing page optimization and much more.

3. 3. 94. Integrating digital media in-store [Infographic]

This infographic explores the techniques being employed by retailers in the UK and USA, and their similarities and differences. Why do 52% of American consumers feel let down, as opposed to only 28% in the UK? If you want answers, read this infographic.

3. 3. 95. How to use Conversion Optimization to Battle Shopping Cart Abandonment – An Infographic

What causes cart abandonment and how to battle this regularly-occurring phenomenon? That’s the question answered by this infographic, which explores cart abandonment rates across businesses, along with how to make customers feel more comfortable with shopping online.

3. 3. 96. How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns [Infographic]

This infographic explores why PPC Ads don’t perform as planned and what should be done to increase their performance. The infographic presents 20 top tips to optimize PPC campaigns, including geo-targeting, testing Ad placement and more.

3. 3. 97. Infographic: 7 Ingredients to Create the Perfect Landing Page(@Convert)

This infographic presents the 7 absolutely must-have elements for the perfect landing page. Getting your landing page right is probably the best thing you can do for your online retail business. Use this infographic to learn how to fine-tune your landing pages to get the conversions you want.

3. 3. 98. A Simple Guide to Optimizing Your Landing Pages [Infographic]

This infographic provides simple tips on how to optimize your landing pages. It charts the path that a user takes to convert on the site, and how to optimize landing pages to take advantage of this process.

Landing page templates:

3. 3. 99. Free Landing Page Templates

You can download and use these two landing page templates to achieve high conversion rates. If you’re planning on creating your own templates, we recommend that you base the page design on well-defined buyer personas.

3. 3. 100. The Ultimate List of Free Landing Page Templates From LeadPages

Use this free landing page templates to achieve the kind of conversions that you want to enjoy.

The post 100 Must Read, Bookmark, Save, Listen to Resources On Conversion Optimization appeared first on Invesp.

Has it ever occurred to you that are completely clueless about why your customers leave your website without converting? Many a times even top retailers face similar situations where they manage to drive in heavy traffic but end up with low conversion rates. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) has gained so much popularity and over a period of time it has become one of the most important factor in revenue generation.

 Surprisingly, you’re doing good if your conversion rate is around 2% – 5%. This means, however, on average, over 80% of your site visitors come to your website without taking any action. Devastating isn’t it? Imagine what could be your revenue if only you could convert at least 10% of your website traffic? That’s roughly 5 times you current ROI! Tempting right?

 And while it is important to find the right techniques and strategies for your website, it’s equally important to determine the current conversion optimization mistakes that if mitigated can improve your conversion rates today.

Mistake #1 You Have Nothing Unique To Sell

You have an awesome product/service idea! But when consumers visit your website, they fail to connect with your website because you lack the Unique Selling Point (USP). You must figure out a USP factor that would make your brand or business stand out from the crowd. You are up against thousands of other brands that sell similar products. When they customers reach your website, there has to be something motivating them to buy from you.

Your USP must be able to deliver the essence of your brand where customers remember you for what you exist in the market amidst thousands of other companies producing similar products.

British Airways is one of the leading airlines in the world. Their USP ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ is short, simple and something that can greatly influence a first time visitor to the site. (because everybody want the best and the most accepted brand). They have managed to carve a niche for themselves in the airline industry by reaching out to customers as being the world’s favorite.

Here are some tips to come up with a unique selling point for your business:

• Research your competitors to identify potential areas of differentiation
• Survey your customers to understand what motivates their purchase decisions
• Brainstorm ways your product/service could stand out and fill an unmet need
• Highlight your unique attributes prominently in messaging/branding

Further reading: Value Proposition: What is it, how to write one + modern-day examples.

Here’s an example of another value proposition that works:

The main strength of this value proposition is it is clear and concise. Even if a visitor had never heard of Lightshot, it’s immediately clear what they offer.

Also, their emphasis on how convenient and easy it is to use their service helps them to stand out from their competitors.

Mistake #2 Your website Takes Ages To Load

If there’s one thing that can annoy your first-time visitors and regular customers is having a very slow website. Studies show that 47% of users expect a site to load within two seconds, beyond which they’re highly likely to leave your site. Slow loading time can be a major reason for websites facing a high bounce rate. Also,a second’s delay in page response costs 7% reduction in conversions. Lastly, you lose your ranking in Google which is something you don’t want to mess around with.

Some pro tips on how to improve website loading speed?

Tips:

• Evaluate your site performance regularly using tools like Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed Insights. Conduct stress tests and load tests to improve your server response time.
• Compress and optimize your image sizes without reducing their quality using io and combine your images into CSS sprites.
• Minimize your CSS/JS and HTML files
• Enable caching with advanced caching system and use a CDN to boost performance

Mistake #3: Your website design Sucks

As the saying goes, ‘first impression is the best impression’.

Studies show that nearly 66% of users believe that a good website increases a business’ credibility and are more likely to turn into potential prospectus.

Today, most businesses are truly considered genuine based on their online presence. Hence, broken links, cluttered images, poor design concepts, non-responsiveness, poor site navigation, misleading call to action buttons etc can turn off your visitors.

Example of poor website design:

What it got wrong: Lack of visual hierarchy.

The problem with Wayfair’s homepage is that almost every element is the same size and color and has similar copy and icons. So users are being told to shop for beds and mattresses, vanities, area rugs, outdoor seating, and bedding sets at the same time. Rather than decide where to click first, some users might leave the site.

Tips to improve your website design

• Review web design best practices and ensure core elements like navigation, CTAs and layout are optimized.
• Ensure visual hierarchy on all of your web pages.
• Use A/B testing to experiment with new page layouts, fonts, colors and other design changes
• Seek regular feedback from users on design through surveys and user testing.
• Stay current on web design trends and implement responsive design

Mistake #4: No Focus On Landing Pages

Didn’t know that landing pages could drive traffic and increase conversions? If not, you’re not the only one who’s ignorant about how massively landing pages convert. Sadly, most marketers don’t understand what to avoid while setting up landing pages.

Another major concern among the marketers is that they don’t understand whether to optimize their current landing page or create a new one.

According to MarketingSherpa, 62% of B2B companies have less than 6 landing pages.

• The advantage of a landing page is that it focus on a single idea and hence it’s easier to drive traffic to a targeted page. That ways you get visitors perform one specific task instead of confusing them with too many informations or actions.
• Landing pages can be used to track your customer activity, closely.
• Since landing pages have all the predominant elements like the keywords, relevant images/videos, links and succinct content, it helps you boost your search engine ranking.

Tips to improve your landing page:

• Identify high-value user actions and create dedicated landing pages for each
• Follow landing page best practices like single CTA, relevant copy, clear messaging
• Use A/B testing to optimize page elements like headlines, images, calls-to-action
• Analyze landing page performance regularly and continue iterating

Mistake #5: You Lack Visually Appealing Images

Unlike the physical stores, the only way users can understand or virtually ‘feel’ your product is through images. Studies reveal that websites with images have 94% more views.

“As long as the image quality is high, say 1,500 to 3,000 pixels per inch for an image scanned from film, users will be able to see the necessary details to make an informed decision on their purchases”, says Eoin Townsend, Chief Product and Strategy Officer (Xtend Digital)

On the contrary, lack of images is one of the main reasons for abandonment. Hence, it’s important that you include images that appeals to the emotions of your customers.

Tips:

• Add bigger, high quality images with detailed views
• Provide 360 degree view of images
• Zoom in/out options
• Stick to real life images to humanize your website

Mistake # 6: Low Quality Content

When users visit your website, content plays the major role in engaging with your customers and letting them understand your product/service.

• Quality content helps you rank higher on search engines because Google checks for your content’s credibility, including its backlinks before it indexes your page.
• A well-written content decreases your bounce rates and people begin to trust your brand or decide to buy from your products.
• Above, users don’t think twice to share quality, interactive and interesting content.

Tips to improve low quality content:

• Perform content audits to identify thin, outdated, or poorly-performing content. You can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc.
• Improve content with more research, data, analysis, original ideas, and actionable advice.
• Hire copywriters or optimize writing workflows to create content faster.
• Promote high-quality content through SEO, social media, and email marketing to increase your content’s reach.

Mistake # 7: Not Making Use Of ‘Error:404’

It’s quite natural for users to stumble upon a ‘404 error page’. But your creativity lies in creating a 404 error page that works for your benefit. Redirect users to your services and other posts so that visitors can continue to engage with your website without being frustrated and disappointed.

See this interesting example from HelpScout:

Tips to maximize your 404 pages:

• Customize your 404 page with branding elements, navigation and search bar
• Provide helpful content like popular links, related posts, contact info on 404
• Redirect 404 traffic back to relevant site pages so users stay engaged
• Use 404 data in analytics to identify frequently-broken links and fix them

Mistake # 8: Lack Of Trust Elements

Your customers want to buy from you or use your service. But, how do they trust you? 73% of consumers think that online shopping is highly risky. This is because of the rising security threats that makes customers wary of your website.

The first set of trust elements users see on the Figpii website is examples of brands that use the tool.

Tips:

• Your website should be up-to-date
• Don’t forget to add security certificates/trust badges
• Display your contact details, prominently
• Be active on your social media accounts
• Provide suitable testimonials
• Add customer feedback/reviews

Mistake # 9: Lack Of Predictive Search Engines

Your website search engine is a starter to encourage user engagement. And ever since 2004, predictive search has become an important element for improving conversions by 4.63%. Your search engine should be able to understand your user and help them to get to their product easily. An ideal predictive search features include,

• Use pre-populated keywords
• Recommend cross selling in your product recommendation
• Using images in search recommendations
• Auto correct features

Mistake #: 10 Your Checkout Page Is Complex

Customers can get frustrated when they have to fill a 3 page checkout form.  The scary part is you could be missing out on 68% of potential customers during their checkout. And it’s very likely to lose them to your competitor. If your checkout system has several factors like those mentioned below, then definitely you’re committing a major blunder that can affect your conversion rates.

• Having them create an account
• Reflecting shipping charges at the payment
• Including unimportant fields
• No option to sign in as a guest or account creation via social media
• Failure of coupon codes
• Limited payment options
• Not mobile-friendly sites

Here are tips to improve your checkout experience:

• Simplify checkout flows with fewer fields, guest checkout and saved details
• Allow shoppers to checkout directly from the product page
• Remember customer details to pre-populate forms and reduce data entry
• Make checkout mobile-friendly and speed up page load times

Further Reading: 12 Mobile Checkout Best Practices For e-Commerce Websites

Mistake # 11: No Online Customer Support

Believe it or not, your site visitors can easily get lost just like in any brick-and-mortar stores. But unlike brick-and-mortar stores, customers find it difficult to communicate their needs in online stores.

According to Andersen Consulting, 62% of consumers prefer to buy from online stores powered with live chat support. Not only does it strengthen customer relationship but a live chat support can,

• Convert browsers into buyers in a cost-efficient manner
• Resolve customer complaints without any delay
• Achieve high customer satisfaction leading to increased conversion and average order value

Some tips to improve your online support:

• Implement live chat to immediately assist users navigating your site
• Provide multiple support options like phone, email, in-app messaging
• Monitor support conversations to identify frequent questions and pain points
• Link to helpful self-service content like FAQs, forums and tutorials

Mistake # 12: Generalized Marketing Strategies

Who wouldn’t love to be treated special? If your marketing strategies are generic and not personalized according to your customer base, then you aren’t gaining much out of your business. According to Invesp, 57% of consumers wouldn’t mind sharing their personal details for their benefits.

By sending personalised offers to customers based on their on their search history and previous purchase, you get them to convert. Make use of real-time personalization tools will help you modify your website and campaigns based on user experience. It greatly helps in customer retention and helps you focus on your targeted audience better.

Tips to improve your marketing strategies:

• Segment your email lists based on user behavior and attributes
• Personalize on-site messaging and offers based on past engagement
• Use progressive profiling to gather more customer data over time
• Test tailored calls-to-action and content against generic alternatives

Mistake # 13: Not Performing Any Kind Of A/B Tests

There are several ways to try out a single change. But if you don’t test your options, you never know which one works better. This is why it’s crucial for your website or campaigns to conduct A/B testing on a regular basis. Through A/B testing, you learn the tactics to convince your customers to convert. Some of the most popular A/B testing tools include,

• Figpii
• VWO
• A/Bingo
• KISSmetrics and
• Convert Experiment

Some tips to improve your A/B tests:

• Identify pages and user flows with high potential impact and volume
• Use A/B testing tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize to set up tests
• Start with simple element changes like headlines, button wording, layout
• Analyze results and double down on winning variants

Mistake # 14 Not Making Good Use Of Analytics

Analytics help  you to measure, track and monitor your results. With the support of analytics, you learn your customer interests and customize your website elements based on their behavior. If not, you never know how your business is scaling. Online market can leverage analytics in order to measure your product specifications, social media activities, manage inventory, increase user experience, marketing etc.

Doing business based on a clear, thorough statistics shows you how you can optimize you website to increase conversions. Most importantly, analytics is important for major business decisions where you can’t go by just guesses.

Tips to improve your use of analytics

• Identify your key site goals and configure analytics tracking appropriately
• Review reports regularly to uncover opportunities and pain points
• Share insights cross-departmentally so all teams can optimize based on data
• Use analytics to guide your testing and personalization strategies

Further Reading: What marketers should know about Google Analytics 4

Mistake # 15 Non Mobile-Friendly Website

Did you know the mobile shopping recorded $771 million revenue on the 2016 Thanksgiving day?

If your website is not responsive / mobile-friendly, it’s the biggest mistake you could be doing right now. You could be losing 74% visitors who shops only through their mobile phones.

Still not convinced about your going mobile friendly? Google can penalize you for having a non-responsive site and it can also impact your ranking on a higher scale.

Because, you never know when your users want to shop using which device, creating a seamless shopping experience for them through responsive sites helps you retain mobile shoppers.

Tips to improve your site’s mobile friendliness:

• Audit site on Google Mobile-Friendly test and fix issues
• Implement responsive design to optimize for all device sizes
• Serve correctly sized images and reduce page weight for mobile
• Optimize checkout process and forms for touch input

Final Thought

Marketers tend to overlook most of these above mistakes because they don’t seem threatening in the first place. But over a period of time, such mistakes when not attended on high priority, can affect your conversion rates.

If you don’t act now, you could be losing out on a lot of customers. Hence, it’s important to keep in mind that customers have expectations and it’s our job to stop making mistakes and start maintaining a stellar conversion-friendly website to reap great profit.

FAQs On Possible Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes On Websites

1. What affects website conversion rate?

There are many factors that can impact the percentage of visitors that convert into customers on a website. Some key elements that influence conversion rate include:

• Page speed – Faster loading pages encourage visitors to stay on the site and complete desired actions like purchases or signups. Pages that take too long to load lead to high abandonment.

• Design and usability – A clean, easy-to-use website design makes it simpler for visitors to find information and perform calls-to-action. Poor navigation, cluttered pages, confusing menus and hard-to-find buttons hurt conversions.

• Content quality – Compelling, useful content builds trust and gives visitors confidence in the brand. Thin or low-value content fails to engage users and persuade them to convert.

• Checkout/purchase process – Too many complicated checkout steps or a difficult purchasing process increases abandonment. Simplifying and streamlining this process improves completion rates.

• Mobile optimization – With increasing mobile traffic, sites need responsive design and mobile-friendly checkout to boost conversions. Non-optimized sites see high bounce rates.

• Trust factors – Elements like reviews, testimonials, certifications and secure badges increase user trust and likelihood to purchase. Lacking these raises doubt.

• Personalization – Generic content and messaging misses the mark. Customizing site experience based on user attributes and behavior encourages engagement.

2. Which of the following are typical causes of poor website conversion rate?

Typical culprits behind low conversion rates on websites include:

• Slow page load speeds beyond 3 seconds lead many visitors to abandon before pages fully load.

• Navigation that is confusing and makes it hard to find information is problematic. Unclear menus, buttons and links hurt conversions.

• An unattractive design or outdated aesthetic signals the site is not reputable and discourages purchases.

• Low-value content like thin articles, product descriptions lacking detail and copied text fails to build trust.

• Checkout processes with too many fields, mandatory account signups or lack of guest checkout options cause abandonment.

• Sites that are not optimized for mobile devices see high bounce rates from mobile visitors.

• Lack of elements that convey trust like customer reviews, certification badges, contact information causes hesitation.

• Generic messaging without personalization does not effectively engage each visitor and lead them to convert.

3. How do you identify where conversions are failing on a website?

Some techniques to pinpoint where the website is losing conversions include:

• Using analytics software to identify drop-off points in the conversion funnel. This reveals pages where visitors exit without converting.

• Conducting user testing to observe firsthand struggles and pain points of visitors trying to convert.

• Surveying visitors who don’t end up converting and asking why they did not complete the desired action.

• Analyzing click and scroll heatmaps to see which page elements visitors interact with and which they ignore.

• A/B testing specific pages and flows to determine which version converts better.

• Looking at micro and macro conversion metrics to catch issues impacting both overall and specific goal conversion rates.

4. How would you improve conversion rates on a website?

Some effective ways to boost conversions are:

• Optimizing page speed with image compression, minified code, and caching to improve load times.

• Simplifying navigation menus, page layouts and calls-to-action to reduce confusion.

• Improving design aesthetics through a unified style, appealing visuals and clear information hierarchy.

• Creating targeted landing pages focused on specific conversion goals.

• Producing higher quality content that engages and educates visitors.

• Reducing checkout form fields and adding guest checkout to ease purchasing.

• Displaying security badges, customer testimonials and money-back guarantees to build trust.

• Adding live chat customer support to assist visitors in real-time.

• Personalizing site content and messaging based on interests, demographics and behavior.

The post 15 Fatal Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes You Could Be Doing Right Now appeared first on Invesp.

Websites need different solutions and implementations.The promise of magical elements raising conversions only holds true after thorough research and careful implementation of specific,new aspects to a site.

Websites do not share common conversion optimization solutions; they share common problems.

Find out below the 10 most common CRO problems we have identified affecting visitors’ trust on a site.

Identifying common CRO problems

From our experience working with large and small companies, we’ve collected amazing data on specific common CRO problems addressed by unique solutions we’ve implemented across our clients’ sites.

To identify problems and find solutions, we create tests at:

• Element Level
• Page Level
• Process Level

Solutions within these levels consider:

• Copy
• Location
• Design (look and feel)

What are some common problems we’ve seen?

In our new series of posts, we’ll talk about the common problems we see under each component of our Conversion Framework.

The Framework was developed in 2007, at the early days of Invesp. To meet our goal of helping clients create more usable, profitable, and visitor-captivating websites, we knew we had to establish a process and follow a methodology that would generate consistent results.

Seven components sustain our Conversion Framework. Each component is part of a process for understanding human behavior on the web, to recognize factors that convert visitors into customers as well as to identify features that scare people away from a website.

These are the seven main areas our Conversion Framework covers:

• Understanding website visitors through personas creation
• Understanding the impact of the buying stages
• Designing for the sale complexity
• Creating confidence and trust
• Dealing with FUDs (fears, uncertainties and doubts)
• Using incentives
• Engagement

Creating Confidence and Trust

In this post we’ll address common trust problems we’ve identified in a selected body of clients’ websites we analyzed and tested.

Trust plays a huge role on visitors’ decision to convert. This makes sense. If visitors do not trust the website, they will not buy from it. Visitors do not want to be ripped off or have their personal details stolen. They wish to accomplish a goal through an enjoyable, simple shopping or browsing experience.

As a website-centric factor, trust relates to how information is presented on a site through design, layout, copy, and flow.Keep in mind that some factors of trustworthiness remained the same over the years, even with the change in web design trends. You can work on enhancing visitors’ trust on your website by focusing on seven areas, broken down into 50 sub-elements of impact. The lack of a compelling, well-designed message might hurt your conversion rate by decreasing trust and confidence of visitors.

Our new tool FigPii (which is still in private beta), the first all-in-one, enterprise-grade growth hacking platform; has all the sub, and sub-sub elements of the Conversion Framework available within a tool called Panorama. Users of FigPii can go into the Panorama tool, upload a desired page for a problem analysis, and go through the panorama list to see what is applicable for the type of page you are evaluating. Within FigPii Panorama, you are presented a number of suggestions that can simply be implemented into an AB or Split URL test by using the Figpii Testing tool (within the same platform!).

But back to the crux of the matter, what are some of the more common Trust problems we have seen, and by addressing the, what type of a result have we seen?

10 most common trust problems and the uplift associated with them:

1. Lack of continuity in the design

Visual continuity in website organization and design assures visitors that the site offers accurate, useful information and helps them in understanding the system they are using. Lack of continuity might affect home pages, category pages, and landing pages, ranging from major navigation sequences to minor details, as the size and look of “continue shopping” buttons. Among the top 200 e-commerce websites, 21% fail to provide buttons of the same size and look.

For instance, this website failed to ensure that “call to action” buttons have the same look and feel on all product pages. On some pages it has more round CTAs…

…while on other pages they are more rectangular

The most important aspect to continuity however is not CTA buttons but rather the continuity between organic listing, PPC Ad, retargeting ad, and email to the landing page. Based on our review and analysis more than 60% of the top retailers still suffer from a lack of continuity between what the visitor initially sees, to the landing page, which results in a very high bounce rate.

Look at the Meltwater ad on the left and the landing page it leads to. The ad and landing page are disconnected: the ad promises one thing while the landing page says something completely different.

The second important aspect is site continuity. We recently worked with a billion dollar, publicly traded company. Their internet presence showed no continuity from page to page. Each page had a different style and layout. Even common pages such as category or product pages did not have continuity. The checkout was done through a 3^rd party, which meant that entire experience did not have the look and feel of the rest of the site.

In our own research, among our group of a 100 websites, we’ve identified lack of continuity as a CRO problem 50 times, and provided solutions that resulted in an average uplift of 32.5%, the lowest uplift being 5.34%.

2. No benefits visible above the fold

Where and what is most important on a page? Certainly, the top portion of the page which we call “the prime real estate area.” This area is where visitors will get hooked, and if a hook is not available, they will click out faster than they made it in on the page.

Below you can see a scroll depth report from a homepage of an apparel retailer. It simply means that 50% of webpage visitors don’t scroll deeper than above the fold area and 75% don’t check out the remaining two thirds of the page.

But with the need for speed that most visitors have, adding content, especially to that “prime real estate area” has been a tricky predicament for most websites. Content on the mobile site is even more difficult to include.

But does content still even convert?

Content displayed above the fold grabs 80% of visitors’ attention. Even content in the 100 pixels just above the fold is viewed 102% more than the following content in the 100 pixels just below the fold.

Of course, not all content is created equal. We’ve seen sites that put long paragraphs detailing the product, but they must be aware that most visitors online simply don’t ready content in that format. On mobile the stats are even worse. In order to get visitors to read the content, include the top features transformed into benefits. The top portion of the page is prime area to display optimized benefits. Of course, depending on the device, the benefits are optimized to serve users on multiple devices accordingly.

Whenever content is considered, we think about the logical persona and their need to dig deep and understand more, but that does not mean we include all that copy above the fold. It’s important to just take into consideration the performance of long copy compared to short copy on a page, and how to place that strategically throughout the page to target that specific type of visitor.

However, ultimately the lack of benefits above the fold affected conversions 65 times in the tests performed at our selected 100 sites. We could generate an average uplift of 15.7% with our solutions, with a lowest uplift of 0.34%.

3. Multiple competing call-to-action buttons

This is one area that still shocks me.

When it comes to CRO and Calls to Action buttons, many think it’s a trivial matter, and the effect is so little. However, there are too many sites, desktop and even worse on mobile, that are sloppy when it comes to CTAs.

In this example, a cart page is buried under multiple competing CTAs. Interestıng that “Proceed to Checkout”, the main CTA, competes with e-mail sign up button, because they have the same color, only the size is different. Of course, this shouldn’t be the case. Also the main action is muddled among the secondary CTAs which draw too much of unintended attention to themselves.

There are many areas to consider when thinking about CTA:

• The copy on the CTA is too often overlooked
• The size of the primary CTA as compared to other CTAs on the page
• The proximity of the primary CTA to other CTAs on the page
• And I’ve gotta say, but the color of the CTA.

So ultimately, whenever I evaluate any page, I need to understand what is the main objective and action that I can take on the page. Is it to “add to cart,” “subscribe,” “read more,” etc.

The objective can be muddled with a lot of other actions I present within a small space, so I need to be weary that my primary objective action button stands out in terms of design, color, copy, and placement on the page.

Visitors have a hard time building confidence in a website when they don’t know what to do or where to click. Multiple call-to-action buttons make it hard for the visitor to figure out the priority of actions he is supposed to take. What’s worse is when buttons are so close, the visitor accidentally clicks on the wrong button that either clears their cart or takes them to the first step of the process.

If you carefully study the heat map below, you will notice that two competing CTAs, the upper one “Add Both to Cart” and the lower one “Add to Cart”, a creating real confusion for the users because the former one is the first CTA they see. So, instead of pressing on the lower one to get an item to the cart, as one may assume should happen, they untick an upsell item (frame) and push “Add Both to Cart”.

As you see, effective call to action buttons play a major role on conversion optimization. On the 15 times we identified multiple call-to-action buttons interfering in conversions in our pool of a 100 sites, we provided an average uplift of 72.2%, from 25.3% up. And this area, although I’d venture to say is a CRO 101 issue, it remains to be one of the most prevalent problems across most desktop and mobile sites.

4. Element obstructing scent

Whenever I say the word “site scent” to someone unfamiliar with CRO I get a bewildered look. But the reality is, a website is like a trail. And in order to get visitors to a certain goal, you have to place the right signs and markers so they can follow the trail. Or like Hansel and Gretel, bread crumbs to get them to a conversion. That is how the term was born. And considering all types of visitors, in different buying stages, site scent has a clear path for each visitor to follow.

Information scent guides the actions of web users. What happens is that site scent might sometimes be covered by clutter that prevents visitors from proceeding. In these cases, it is important to investigate the obstacle that is stopping visitors. Elements that do not meet visitors’ needs should be eliminated to allow visitors to recognize their clear trail.

So what are elements that can be eliminated? This goes back to identifying the primary objectives and goals for a site and page. When those are identified, all elements should be pointing to the goals in some way shape or form. Of course, as emphasized above, you need to make sure you give actions priority, i.e. there should be one primary one and it should stand out.

This is a bookstore product page:

The page has overall cluttered look. The CTA and has text that is not conducive to conversion and social media icons take major parts of the real estate.

And this is how the winning variation looked like. Here the Scent was increased by reducing clutter and enhancing copy and design to match visitor expectations.

A few ways to find out if there is obstruction is:

• Through analytics of course, and adding events to certain actions thus measuring the actual clicks.
• Through heatmap analysis, you can see if people are finding what you want them to find.
• Through video recordings, set aside 1 – 2 hours a week to watch how visitors are interacting with your site.

I’ve seen obstruction anywhere from too much copy on a page, to untargeted images, to placing other unrelated images and elements next to the main CTA. Our tests identified elements obstructing site scent 20 times among the sites of a 100 of our clients. The average uplift when eliminating the clutter was 24.3%. The lowest uplift was 10.2%.

5. Lack of compelling headline

Headlines sometimes don’t have to be compelling per say. The most important aspect when it comes to headlines is having them clarify the contents of the page.

Vague, untargeted headlines or page titles backfires every single time. But let’s say we are talking about a blog post. A compelling headline should grab visitors’ attention as well as gain their trust by conveying the main benefit they can expect from services and products of that site. Testing headlines and improving web copy helps raise visitors’ confidence.

So if I’m talking about a content heavy site, I would argue it is more about the compelling nature of that headline. But compelling is never enough if it’s just plain confusing and unclear. So while Upworthy is known for it’s outrageous headlines, after a year in business, people got sick of content that didn’t live up to the headline.

But even when it comes to page titles and less dramatic headlines on sites where people are trying to buy something, there is a lack of clarity. The headline is often in the midst of a lot of other unnecessary details. Ultimately, all people want to know/see is what the page is about, so have clearly stated. Look at Jenny Craig website. When you land on it, it happens that the main headline, explaining what is the website about, is below the fold. So, the only thing you see is the banner with promotion campaign copy.

We’ve tested this on content, ecommerce, and lead generation websites alike and have found consistently, when done right, these titles can have a 24.89 – 53.4% increase in conversions, and 90% improvement in click-throughs to the next step, page, or following piece of content.

6. Lack of clear process

A persuasive and clear process lays out primary actions from one page to the next. Visitors’ trust level raises as they feel confident they are on the right track of fulfilling their goal in a website. You see processes laid out especially on sites that require some sort of set-up or on-boarding (like SAAS), or on checkouts. Having the process clearly defined has helped us raise conversions for clients between 65.9 – 230% increases in conversion.

 Clear processes are critical to help meet visitors’ cognitive progression on sites. They have expectations, but identifying that we are aware of their expectations the visitors’ mind will be put at ease and they will proceed more confidently on the site. They also eliminate the possibility of any surprises along the way prompted visitors to abandon the process.

7. Cluttered design

Sometimes the scent is clearly defined, but still, the clutter on the site is overwhelming. Some sites just need to be cleaned up in order to help visitors get on with the page. Clutter confuses visitors. Websites should strive for an optimal balance between visual sensation and graphic information. Less clutter meansmore focus on the page.

Qoo10 is a website selling beauty product with very overwhelming home page. Would it be easy for you to locate what you are looking for?

Clutter is one of the top 5 problems websites have. Why? Basically, website developers and front-end designers often respond to the needs and wants of multiple stakeholders within an organization. So when each stakeholder makes a request for a modification, suddenly you end up with a very cluttered design.

This is where CRO is critical. It provides stakeholders the data that impacts decisions and helps you modify the design accordingly. This particular problem has been evaluated on almost every site that we have optimized on a certain page, and modified accordingly giving anywhere between 3.62 – 35.89% improvement in conversions.

8. Too many columns

Too many columns produce an unbalanced visual organization that might decrease users’ confidence in a site. Look at the page carefully before determining how many columns you would have on the page. Too often sites want to increase AOV so they may add for instance a cross-sell option which is manifested as a column on the right side of the page. Now, this can often be a wonderful addition. But too many times it causes the page to look more cluttered and unorganized.

Some sites use a 3^rd column on the page to promote UGC (user generated content). Again, an important element for engagement on the site. However, it can be cluttering the page and losing the emphasis of the primary goal

So what to do. Rework these additional elements somewhere else on the page. Incorporate them into smaller design elements so they can still be present where you want them, without taking away from the page.

When I talk about measuring this, I’m talking about just the reduction a column. In rare cases we’ve added a column to a page. We’ve adding for instance filtration columns to sites that had nothing on the left or right of a category page relied heavily on top filtration mechanisms that visitor’s never clicked on).  The results for solving this problem on sites has helped us achieve anywhere between 9.32 – 46.89% increases in conversions.

9. Elements unbalanced, priority elements lost

Visual hierarchy in web design helps visitors build trust by making the site’s overall message clear.The hierarchy showcases priority of elements and gives balance to all visual elements on page. I’ve talked about this already. The prime real estate of the page is critical. But you have to decide what is an item that qualifies to be a part of that prime real estate part of the page?

In this article, I’ve already addressed the importance of the benefits, and the prime CTA, both to critical elements that need to be placed within that area. But there are other elements that are as equally important that need to be displayed.

After conducting qualitative analysis for a client we found that their site visitors were looking for specific pieces of information tucked away below the fold.

Even though the compatibility of the phone was stated in the product name, they still had doubts if a case fits their phone. They also wanted to know more about the features the product has. The original, actually, had a very detailed description of each item, but apparently no one noticed it on the page.

So, for the test we decided to move top four product features in the above the fold area to make them more noticeable for the visitors and point out the case compatibility one more time by providing a link to this information in the above the fold area.

Once we enhanced the presentation of those elements and provided users access to that piece of information, conversions increased 36.3%.

But we’ve conducted this type of analysis across multiple sites, and have found consistently that some pieces of information important to the visitors is simply missing from the primary area. But mitigating this problem across our sample sites, we saw increases that range from 14.32 – 95.99%.

10. Value proposition not enforced enough on page

A strong headline should present a compelling value proposition, explaining how services or products of the website solve target audience’s problems. The value proposition is a promise that enhances trust and confidence with the visitor.But some sites, like retail, don’t have a place for compelling headlines. So where is their value proposition present? Well ultimately, it’s important to present the value on as many elements as possible. For example, if your value is with the unique artistic pieces you provide, unlike anywhere in the market, this should be flaunted on the site, on the images (by an original  to XXX brand badge), in the copy, through the discounts, through the taglines, etc.

This is how H&M does it for its collaboration with Kenzo underlining that H&M is the place to find clothes designed by famous brands, but at a very affordable price:

Value proposition for most ecommerce sites starts and ends on the About Us page. But what’s the point of crafting a good value proposition that isn’t transcending through all elements on the site?

For instance, the value proposition of Forever 21 communicates that it is a well-established but highly competitive brad whose clients are so loyal so that they even call their children after it.

For many of our clients, it was initially about identifying the value proposition, because they didn’t have a very well-defined distinguishing feature. But for others, it was about having that value proposition clearly stated on the site through multiple elements. Focusing on this latter area alone helped us increase conversions rates for clients anywhere between 15.39 – 55.83%.

Conclusion

It’s critical to understand that copying competitor sites does not guarantee great results. Competitor sites are important to monitor, but never copy blindly. First, justify a change through qualitative and quantitative research. Second, identify the problem areas based on the research results. Third, prioritize based on (again) research.

I am not alone in my suspicion of best practices.Because it’s not about what another site does or doesn’t do.I’m not alone in this concern. Many top CRO experts agree.

But problems are similar from one site to the next, and through the years, I’ve seen the patterns and consistencies.

We’ve written about optimization best practices that might not be best for you, surprising CRO studies, and that time when multiple call-to-actions actually increased conversions.

So, after reading this, please keep in mind that the 10 most common trust problems we’ve identified might be addressed in many different ways.eventhough you may be within the same vertical, what works for one client, doesn’t necessarily work for all. And it isn’t because the element or the solution doesn’t work, it could be the way you implemented the solution.

Learn more on How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate Through Confidence and Trust.

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