In an ideal world, the path people take to become loyal customers is a long straight stretch of highway: they see the product, they buy it, they use it, and the cycle repeats.
In reality, this path is often more like a sightseeing tour with stops, explorations, and discussions along the way – all moments when you need to convince people to choose your brand and stay loyal to it, instead of moving on to the competition.
Understanding how people think and make decisions is crucial to generating conversions.
Identify the optimal time to ask the user to take action
Users don’t arrive on your ecommerce store and place an order right away. It’s a journey that starts with discovering a need and follows with researching options, placing an order, receiving a delivery and even after-sales support.
This customer journey often happens over a long period of time and can involve many visits to an e-commerce site.
Keeping in mind the long purchase cycle of our customers, we need to present users with different calls to action at different points in their customer journey.
Encouraging newsletter signups, in the research-to-purchase phase, can ensure that the user doesn’t forget about our e-commerce when it comes time to place the order.
After the customer has placed the order, clarifying the delivery status search on our site can reduce support costs.
When a user has just completed a purchase, instead of showing them a standard “Thank you for shopping” confirmation page, offer them the option to sign up for social media or a newsletter.
All of this means that a well-designed ecommerce site needs to do more than just offer an obvious “Add to Cart” button. Instead, each touch point must be carefully designed to ensure that the call to action is presented at the right time in the user’s journey.
Write compelling text that encourages action
The text associated with the call to action is critical to conversion: it’s a good idea to create complete product sheets, but avoid writing large blocks of text that no one will read.
User experience designers report that people read less than 30% of the text on a page: encourage clarity and readability by using headings, subheadings, lists and break up blocks of text to immediately identify the parts of interest to the user.
Through the titles we try to capture the attention of visitors to our site, being careful not to generate “clickbait” texts: luring them with a misleading copy can be counterproductive. Better not to exaggerate and maintain truthful content, promoting the advantages of our e-commerce.
Emphasize how a product will benefit the consumer and improve their experience, rather than simply listing product features.
Maximize visibility of calls to action to ensure they are seen by users
Design psychology indicates how cognitive load can cause users to miss visual cues on your site: if users are in a hurry or distracted, they could easily miss an invitation to action. So how can we optimize our calls to action to ensure they are immediately obvious?
- Positioning
Proper placement of a call to action can have a significant impact on visibility and, consequently, conversion. One crucial factor is the way users scan a page: the left side of the page is favored over the right side. This means that a call to action often performs better on the left than on the right, even if it’s further down the page.
It should be kept in mind that the position of a call to action does not make sense in isolation, but is strongly influenced by other elements on the page: surrounding text, video, or stylistic elements can draw attention toward or away from a call to action
- Images
Images are significantly easier for people to process than text, reducing our cognitive load: as a result, our attention is unconsciously drawn to images.
If an image is closely associated with a call to action, it increases its visibility and therefore improves conversion. However, if there is a disconnect between the image and the call to action, the user’s eye may go directly to the image, ignoring the call to action.
- Contrast and color
You can use color to draw attention to a call to action by contrasting the color of that call to action with the rest of the website. For example, if the predominant color scheme of the website is blue, using a different color will help make the call to action stand out.
Want to increase conversions on your website? Ask us for a no obligation consultation to improve your marketing strategy and online presence.
Pubblicato il 27 July 2021
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