Looking for a college is like looking for new cereal at the mega-grocery store. You have a rough idea of what you want, but your choices are endless. You find yourself just staring at the boxes, dumbfounded.

Plenty of websites have popped up to help students move from “dumbfounded” to “college-bound.” We’re going to tear down some of their landing pages to help build your expertise, starting with DegreeLeap’s College Finder Tool.

Whitespace is not blank-space

I commend the designers of this page for their minimalist approach. It’s always good to have plenty of whitespace so it’s easy to look at the page and so you don’t find yourself squinting and wondering what the heck it’s trying to say.

But this page goes a little too far. Almost one-third of the main section is completely blank, and it makes the bullet points look like they’re crammed under the headline. The whitespace appears to be encroaching on the other elements, rather than letting them relax and spread out, which completely defeats the reason for having whitespace in the first place. These guys should test spacing out the bullet points and adding some content below them. Perhaps an image of a smiling student next to a quote about why they love DegreeLeap?

There is also a good-sized piece of unused real estate under the form. Right now, that space is showing off the page’s nifty background, which isn’t doing much for conversions. I would test adding a trust logo, testimonial, or some other call-out to make this section start achieving some goals instead of wasting space (like a lazy college student).

I know what to do — why should I care?

Enough tearing down, here’s what I like: First, the headline is clear as day. How many times have you written a three-word headline? Not many, I suspect. People don’t have to guess what they can do on this page. It’s more obvious than a bad wig.

The page also makes great use of bolding. Instead of emphasizing hype-words like AMAZING and INNOVATIVE, the designers made the bullet points easier to scan by putting their main points in bold. It only takes a glance to know that this site uses a matching engine to pair you with up to 10 schools, whether online or off, and that it’s been used by more than 100,000 people.

What these bullet points lack, though, is an answer to why factor. Why should I bother filling out this form instead of going to one of the other millions of college search sites? What’s so great about this one? What exactly is your site going to help me accomplish? A list of features doesn’t do much to get me excited.

When does it all END? Oh, very soon.

The progress bar on this page is a nice feature, especially since the form is displayed gradually. Rather than making people wonder whether they’ll ever finish the form, the little progress bar tells them “hey, chin up, you’re almost there.” Which is good, because if you leave people guessing, the first thing they’ll wonder is “why don’t I try another website?”

Faster than the speed of words

Images are magical little things. They can communicate faster than words. You can look at an image on a box of Canadian cigarettes, for example, and instantly realize that you’re not doing yourself any favors by sucking one down.

That’s why we love the school logos at the bottom of this page. They instantly tell people, “hey, you may not know us, but look, these are our pals! Everyone knows our pals!” The visitors are comforted in knowing that they’re not in some nasty back alley of the internet. It makes them more willing to share their information.

We’d love to see more imagery applied to some of the unused space on the page. Seals showing that a website is “trusted” or gives a “100% satisfaction guarantee” can instantly tell people that they should lay their concerns aside and start filling out the form.

Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed

Degree Leap

If you’re like the other gazillion websites trying to get people to sign up for an email newsletter, then you probably have an opt-in popup form. You know, it’s that annoying lay-over popup box that asks new visitors to opt-in with their name and emails.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were landing page optimization best practices for designing these? Then your opt-in popups could grab many more subscribers right out of the gate. At the very least, it would be good to know which elements are worth focusing on in testing.

Since we thought it would help a LOT of people to get some straight answers on popup opt-in forms, we got Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker on the phone (Conversion Voodoo is very lucky to work with the best of the best in online marketing). We had an idea for him:

“Whaddya think about us running some tests on the opt-in popup for your newsletter?” Jeremy’s reply was about as easy as they come, “Have at it!” So we did.

Not only that, but Jeremy requested that we post the results for his audience. All we could say was “absolutely!” We rarely get to publish results because 99% of our clients want to remain anonymous — so this was sweet!

Our goal was to test the “default” settings on the popup to see if there were the better ways to convert visitors into subscribers. We hoped to find some best practices to share with you for your website that may not have a horde of visitors every month like the Shoemoney blog. Although we counted more than 30 different elements in opt-in popups, we whittled that number down to the most relevant (i.e. the ones you should care about), which you’ll see in the tests below.

Frankly, even we were surprised by some of the test results. Wait till you see how your opt-in popup form should be designed to get the most conversions — and you better believe these aren’t the default settings on many of the off-the-shelf packages out there. Good luck and happy testing!

Headline:
If you’ve been keeping up with our landing page tear-down inspiration posts you know that one of the first things we test is the headline copy. For ShoeMoney’s popup we tested 6 varying headlines and found that there were two clear winners over the baseline.

Hover over the headlines below to see our findings:

The two headline winners both say exactly what the user is going to “get” when he/she signs up. These headlines also cater to the user’s want to make money online. You’l also notice they use specificity: “7 simple tricks”, and also urgency: “Limited offer”. Find a way to entice your website visitors with something of value worthy of their time.

Inline Field Labels:
A problem that we found with ShoeMoney’s newsletter popup was that once the user clicked into the field to type their email address, the field label disappeared! Simply by dimming the label within the field we were able to get a good sized bump in conversions. Take a look at your own forms and make sure that the labels are always visible.

Hover over the image below to see our changes and findings:

Bottom Copy:
This was another simple test. We compared the baseline bottom copy, which asked users to follow the RSS feed, to having no bottom copy at all. We believed that all friction that can keep a user from the targeted action should be removed. Guess what? It worked… big time.

As a note: we decided to leave the bottom copy visible for the final popup. Though if you want to remove something similar from your own site, we whole-heartily recommend it! And don’t be afraid of losing RSS feed subscribers because once you have then on your email list and are building a solid relationship with your users, you can always ask them to join your feed later!

Hover over the image below to see our changes and findings:

Auto-Center:
While running tests we realized that the newsletter popup on ShoeMoney’s site was in a fixed position. If the user scrolled down the page, the popup stayed at the top and was no longer visible to the user. We tested this baseline against a popup that scrolled the page with the user.

Interestingly enough, the popup that stayed at the top of the page was the winner! We believe this is due to the user still be able to see, but not reach, content behind the dimmed background of the page caused by the newsletter popup. If the user sees something they want to reach, they would be more inclined to enter their information into the popup and opt in.

As a note: on another client’s newsletter popup there was an adverse affect, so this is something you’d want to test on your own site.

Close Button:
When doing market research we find interesting items that competitors to our clients are using on their own site and we tend to test them into our own tests to see how well they do.

One particular item was the close button on the popup. ShoeMoney’s baseline popup had an “X” button at the top right corner which we tested against a “no thanks” link below the signup button at the bottom of the popup.

Turns out that ShoeMoney had it right from the beginning! The “X” button was a clear winner over the “no thanks” link.

Hover over the image below to see our changes and findings:

Clicking Dimmed Area (outside):
A notable problem we found with the baseline ShoeMoney popup was that if a user clicked on the dimmer area (outside the popup) then the popup would be closed! By tweaking the code so that the popup stayed even when clicked outside we were able to increase opt-ins by 19%.

Re-Popup if Ignored:
The final, and most code-intensive, test we performed was that if the popup was ignored by a user and that same user came to the ShoeMoney page again at a later time, the popup would reappear until the close button was clicked. The baseline has the popup disappear forever if ignored.

Even with this seemingly simple change, we increased opt-ins by a whopping 31%!

Conclusion
Never stop testing! When we went through this newsletter popup we had the intentions of testing every little detail that most people wouldn’t think would matter. Things such as different close buttons or fixed vs. scroll popups. As you have seen some of the smallest changes will lead to big conversion increases.

We hope this post has inspired all of you to jump onto your own websites right now and start making a list of items to test because there are big gains to be had, we guarantee it!

Note: All tests had confidence level of at least 95%, (so these are highly relevant data points) and well over 500,000 unique visitors during testing period (Shoemoney is a pretty big blog). Remember, always test new ideas into your site as your mileage my vary. You also should take into consideration if you should even use a popup form. We don’t advocate using popups, but we also understand how critical they can be to some sites to gain a lasting connection to visitors. You get to decide… Viva America!

Last year we posted about our Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays test we ran for one of our clients. This year we decided to some landing page optimization tests with variations of the Christmas theme.

If you’ve followed our blog before, you know that creating a sense of urgency for your users to act usually increases conversions. Since we practice what we preach, we decided to run a headline on one of our client’s websites doing just that. We tested a headline that reminds them how near Christmas is. We came up with 2 variations of this headline: one that just states the days, and another that states the days, hours, minutes, and seconds and counts down in real time.

The test:

Here’s the day countdown:

10 days til Christmas.

Here’s the realtime seconds countdown, +10.2% in conversion rate:

9 days, 13:22:03 til Christmas.

Validity notes: This test ran on a site that gets more than 4,000 conversions a day. It was declared a winner with over 95% confidence in less than a week. Additionally, conversions are actual end-goals, not just clicks to the next page.

Why does this work?

It emphasizes the urgency.

Here's a simple experiment to make the point. Try to do any task in one minute. Now try to do the same task while having your friend audibly countdown the time left for you every second. The latter scenario is far more stressful. Your heart starts pumping, sweat starts beading on your forehead, and adrenaline starts coursing through your veins. While we’re not trying to invoke stress in our users, we do want them to notice the urgency. Typically conversions increase when your users have slight pressure to make a time-sensitive decision as soon as possible.

For years advertisers have known that it pays to announce "Limited time offer!" We're taking that same concept to the next level.

It catches their eye.

Remember those early banner ads that caught your attention by flashing bright colors at you? Same thing here. Although we'd like to think we're being a little more polite.

Things that move catch your attention. It’s a science fact. What do camouflaging animals do when they are trying to hide from their predators in plain sight? They hold still. Not moving allows things to blend in and be overlooked. And the opposite holds true too.

The Downside to this test: Depression sinks in the day after Christmas... You'll have to turn this winning variant off and it's back to the baseline.

Here's our Christmas gift to you

If you'd like to use this on your site, just customize the following code snippet. Here's the HTML that will display the countdown:

<span id="xmascounter"></span> until Christmas.

Here's the JavaScript that will keep it ticking:

function calculateXmasCounter() {
    //calculate
    var now = new Date();
    var xmas = new Date(2011, 11, 25, 0, 0, 0, 0); //Xmas 2011 (be careful: 11 is December)
    var hoursleft = 23 - now.getHours();
    var minutesleft = 59 - now.getMinutes();
    var secondsleft = 59 - now.getSeconds();
    var daysleft = Math.floor((xmas - now) / (1000*60*60*24));
    //format 0 prefixes
    if (minutesleft < 10) minutesleft = "0" + minutesleft;
    if (secondsleft < 10) secondsleft = "0" + secondsleft;
    //display
    document.getElementById('xmascounter').innerHTML = daysleft + " days, " + hoursleft + ":" +minutesleft + ":" + secondsleft;
}
calculateXmasCounter();
setInterval(calculateXmasCounter, 1000);

Contact us today to increase your Conversion Rate . . .

We put our money where our mouth is – click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our $10,000 guarantee!

Here is (our mockup) of Expedia’s experiment – see the field deletion in Variant B?

At a glance, they simply dropped the “Company name:” field and that increased their site PROFIT by $12 million a year according to Silicon.com.

Why was changing this field so critical?

Because that single field broke the flow of their entire UI:

• When visitors see the “Company” field, they were confused.
• Visitors thought Expedia meant they should put in their Bank name.
• Users then put their’s Bank’s address into the billing fields.
• This led to failed transactions, which led to abandons.

Conversion rate optimization gains are often just a function of getting your broken UI the $!@$!@ out of the way of your end user . . .

Yes, it’s that damn simple and you need to start by understanding how users ACTUALLY interact with your funnel.

Do it yourself, have us do it for you, but heck just do it.

Here’s a breakdown of our favorite platforms to learn more about how to uncover buried friction in your conversion funnel:

• UserTesting.com – For less than $100 you can have three complete strangers go through your website, attempt to perform a task, and listen to their annotation and observe them through a screen capture.
• UserFly.com– UserFly is the more macro-version of UserTesting – this system allows you to watch as live user sessions play out on your site, and dig into the data.
• ClickTale.com– Incredible set of tools, the “attention heatmaps” in particular have provided us with double digit conversion insights on a regular basis, well worth the price of admission as well as their user session recording.
• Finally, worth a mention is a newer tool that has disruptive potential -GazeHawk.com provides eye-tracking studies for less than $50.00.

Online solutions like CrazyEgg.com mimic the functionality without being as exacting, and most traditional eye-tracking vendors rely on expensive hardware solutions and charge 10 – 20x that fee.

If you think $12 million is a big number, make sure not to miss the story of the button that increased sales by $300,000,000.

Check out more Conversion Voodoo content . . .

• Bank an 11% conversion rate increase with a “Commitment Checkbox”
• Proper placement of “trust logos” can make a huge difference in conversion rate.
• 3 Landing Page Teardowns for Inspiration

Contact us today to increase your Conversion Rate . . .

We put our money where our mouth is – click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our $10,000 guarantee!

Alright, you’ve gotten someone on your website. They like what they’re seeing. They want a loan. They take a look at your online application and — that’s it. They think “Wow. That looks like a ton of work. I wonder what’s up on Facebook?” And away they go.

We’re continuing our three-part series on auto loan landing pages today, and we’re hitting on something almost every loan site screws up: form pages. The forms are way too cluttered! They’re traumatizing to look at and even more painful to fill out. People would rather redeem beer cans for nickels than use these to apply for a loan.

Normally we focus on landing pages, but today we’re opening it up to online forms. Too many companies are killing their completion rates. We can stand by no longer.

The vertical groove

Whether you realize it or not, there is a rhythm internet users get into when filling out form fields. It goes something like this: first name, last name, email, address, city… and so on. When the fields are in a single column, the information just flows out. The users keep going until they’re done. You never want to interrupt this rhythm. But when there are multiple columns, it disrupts their flow. They have to stop, scroll up, think about what to do (ugh!), and start again. So keep it simple, keep it vertical, and don’t make them work anymore than they have to.

Our tests have consistently shown that having a single column of form fields on a longer form increases conversion rates, even without any other changes (when compared to a multi-column newspaper style layout). This makes sense when you think about it, because a multi-column format is confusing.

Who the heck are you?

Brands like Wells Fargo have a big advantage: people know them. Their logo conjures up feelings that have been embedded by millions and millions of dollars in advertising. The logo is like a big stamp on the page that immediately tells people “We’re not some fly-by-night internet scam. You know us. Don’t worry.”

So why not use that asset to your advantage on your form pages? That’s what Wells Fargo did by including it at the top of their auto loan application page. That logo makes people feel better when, while typing in their social security numbers, they look up and think “am I sure I this is safe?”

You, savvy marketer, might not be as lucky as the marketers at Wells Fargo. The people filling out your form might not know much about your company — and that’s OK. You just need to provide some assurance that you won’t use their information to do something unsavory, like buy mail-order pain killers from Mexico.

Try including logos from well-known organizations that you’re associated with, such as the Better Busine

ss Bureau. Also test using logos from well-known publications that have featured your company (“As seen in ****”). The idea is to use the power of these well-known brands to lend your company credibility and assure users. Of course, you always want to ask permission before adding another company’s logo to your site.

Let me get your digits

As far as phone numbers go, we like what we’re seeing. First of all, a phone number is provided to speak directly to a loan officer who can help users fill out the form. Users don’t have to click to a “contact us” page to see the number — which is great. They can stay right on the page without extra clicks and further distraction. What’s even better is the office’s hours are posted so people don’t waste even more of their lives listening to robotic voices in a call system maze.

Toward the bottom of the page, we noticed that Wells Fargo is aware that they’ve made it to the 21st century. The form doesn’t bother asking for a home phone number and instead requests a “primary phone number” as a required field and makes “secondary phone number” an optional field.

Requiring people to provide a “home” phone number when so many people no longer have one only forces people to stop and think “hmm…I don’t have one of home number. Should I leave this blank? Oh, I can’t leave it blank. It’s required. Well, I guess I’ll just put my mobile number. Oh, but that other field asks for my mobile number. Hmm… I hope this doesn’t stop me from getting the loan. I really want that hybrid.” All this eats up valuable effort that should be spent filling out your form.

Keep them on the form — do not link elsewhere

“Learn more” links can be tremendously helpful. They can clear up confusion around privacy policies, return policies, or in this case, immigration status. But these links can cause more problems than they solve when they send someone to a new webpage.

Remember that rhythm we were talking about? That flow people get into when they’re filling out forms? The flow that you never want to interrupt? Well, if you send them to a new page, what you’ve done is worse than interrupt their flow. You’ve put them into a new world from which the only escape is to stop, think, and navigate a return — or give up. Then, once they’re back, they have to think about where they left off and where to start again.

All this is unnecessary. You’ve worked hard to get these people to this form, so don’t send them somewhere else. That’s just adding work. Instead, test using pop-ups to provide little bits of additional information. That way, the user never leaves the form, and when they’re done reading, they’re right back where they left off.

Remember: Form pages are not the same as landing pages. However, both combine hundreds of variables that can be tested and optimized to improve results.

To see our comments, just rollover the images and our notes and suggestions will popup.

WellsFargo

Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed

Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by checking out all the other sites in the same industry/niche market. It helps us to see what else is out there and gets us inspired to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on form pages for auto loan lead generation campaigns.

We’ve received many requests to make more detailed comments and give example ideas for these landing page inspiration posts. Starting with this post, we’ll break down our landing page optimization reviews into multiple posts. In this series we’ll look at 3 auto loan websites, and will post separately over the next few weeks.

You haven’t made a sale yet!

A big problem with most form pages is that people forget to keep selling their product or service to the customer. Many users will get to a form page and say “ah-yeesh, guhhhhh, see-ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!” and bounce. You can help prevent this by continuing your sales pitch from your landing page. The form page is a great place to use customer testimonials and well-known trust logos such as McAfee, as well as what’ll THEY will get (Benefits).

Use the copy on the form page to remind your customer of the benefits that your product or service will give them. The last thing you want is to have a customer back out of a sale because they have lost interest due to a lack of information or having not been fully convinced.

At the top of this form, there is a “1-2-3″ graphic. Not very motivating. If you gotta have a “1-2-3 step” form (I would debate heavily that you do NOT need to), at least put a little extra subtext that conveys: This form will be worth your time.

You might think that everyone loves the crazy complex forms the DMV makes everyone fill-out in line, and you figure, “Hey, every time I go to the DMV, I see a whole lotta people filling out those crazy, complex, suicidal-thought-producing forms… It’ll work for our site.” Sure, there’ll be some people that will file lock-step behind whatever you put in front of them, but there are actually a good number of people that say “No way!” It would be good to design forms for the 99.247% of the people that do not have sadomasochistic tendencies.

One note on the use of trust logos. Although we have seen trust logos lose their ability to radical bump up conversions (they’ve become ubiquitous), and this site played it smart by not only putting those trust logos on their page, they put it at consistently prime locations. We generally recommend placing trust logos near the CTA (Call to action) buttons or near highly sensitive personal information.

Freebies = More Conversions

Anytime you can offer something special (that they would want) to your visitors as a reward for taking an action, that is pretty sure to help. Discounts, free “insider” information, tips and tricks, etc. are always nice bonuses that help people feel they’ll get a little extra for taking action on your site.

FederalAutoLoan.com even gives a free offer on the form page to further drive the idea that the customer is getting a great product. High fives and a nice “attaboy” for that little add-on. Good way to add a little extra incentive and to differentiate you from the other sites.

Make It Readable

Don't make me squint!

So, which is easier for you to read:

My website visitors all have 20/20 vision, so I save space by making the text really small. Imma sew smahrt.

I consider the average user may not be able to easily read small print, so I’ll make the page longer before I even think about making my site visitors put their face 2 inches from the screen to read.

OK, extreme example, but it is relevant. This particular site is not a worst offender, but at 11px (11 pixels), that’s definitely below the minimum size that we recommend using. We recommend for “small print” to be a minimum on 12px, period. For some of the sites we optimize for clients, we even go to 14px for long form labels. Sounds extreme, but in our tests it makes a difference.

Misc. Changes – Too Many To Count, Oh My!

Oh crap. I’m tired, way to many problems on this site, but I must mention a few more. I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.

I’m back. (Yes, I washed my hands.)

Let’s run down just a few more problems here:

1. Steps 1-2-3

At the top the show it takes 3 steps, but what are those steps? Nobody knows. This may be because they know the next 2 steps may tick people off, and so they don’t show it. (Just incase you’re wondering, the other 2 steps are Employment Info and Financial Info) But often times letting them know is better than letting the user wonder and get filled with fear of what’s to come.

2. What phone number should you collect? Yikes what a crazy question.

I can tell you without a doubt, that people are fleeing from this page when they see this, because they made the form have no right answer for people without a cell phone or people without a landline at home. We are going to make a separate post on this one for more detailed analysis. What I would guess is that this site is a lead generator/aggregator and is required to have to phone numbers, so what do you do?

Short answer: Make it primary and secondary phone fields, and make the secondary phone NOT required. (If possible, otherwise make a note, use same number in both if you do not have another phone number).

Why is this one important? There are more than 25% of all people in the U.S. that no longer have a “home phone”, meaning they only have a cell phone. And 15% of the population don’t have a cell. That’s 40% of your visitors saying “How do I answer this impossible question?” Since you are not a site for brain teasers, use a different solution.

3. Auto-Tabbing nightmare. Argh!

On every field on the form, except the phone fields, you must tab or click to get to the next field. However, on the phone field they decided to have some fun and “mix it up on the dance floor, yeah baby. Yeehaw.” Not fun. Change-ups are for baseball not long complicated forms.

We recommend requiring tabbing all the way through all fields. In other words, STAY CONSISTENT. If you want to get a little fancy, use JavaScript to automatically tab to the next field in only ONE condition, that they keep typing. And only for the sequence of of area code to prefix, and prefix to the last four digits, nothing else. (Again, we’ll do a more detailed blog post on this one).

Please post any comments on other elements that could be changed to improve these pages. There is still a LOT there to have some fun with!

To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.

FederalAutoLoan.com

Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our guarantee!

Wow. Great way to communicate several different ideas in one headline.

1. Adds F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). The reader now is going to question themselves, “Is my mechanic lying? Is he over charging me?” It’s a great way to help the prospect be more open to what you’ve got to say.

2. Implied Credibility. Asking tough questions make you look like the good guys just trying to look out for the little guy, “We just want to make sure you’re OK.” If we’re asking if your mechanic is honest, then we must be honest. They are now positioned as the “Consumer Reports” of auto repair.

3. On “my side”. The fact that this company is asking this question, puts them on the same side of the table as the prospect. Now their mechanic is the “other guy” and is now on the other side. We’re now buddies locked arm-in-arm to double check to make sure “those guys” are honest.

4. Clear CTA (Call to Action). Find Out! Simple, even a little private investigator-ish. “Yeah! I’d like to know if they are lying. I’ll bet you there are some dirty little secrets they’ll be able to tell me.”

5. Purple Cow. You Must Stand Out! They are certainly making themselves standout with this statement. They are the keep-em-honest guys.

Reality check: These guys are no different than any other auto repair shop, but they position themselves as the place to find out if your mechanic is trying to screw you. Of course, if you don’t have a regular mechanic that you go to, might as well choose the guys who are the “consumer reports” of auto repair in the area. Great positioning. If you have a mechanic, might as well check these guys out, and confirm that they are on the up-and-up.

Warning: If you make this type of positioning statement, you had better stand behind it and deliver. If you don’t people will work hard to expose you. So deliver on the implied promise of Honest/Fair.

No Job Too Big/Too Small

Overcoming Objections. Nice touch. A good possibility that the prospect is asking some questions to themselves, “But I only need my oil changed, probably not worth your time.” Or maybe their car is missing the engine and 3 of the wheels, no problemo, “No Job Too Big, we can help”. This, in a round about way, says “We want you.”

Call For Free Estimate

They blew their credibility here. Why? Now you see through their thinly veiled marketing techniques, they want you to come in and get an estimate for repairs. No thanks.

I’d recommend changing this to “Call Now to Find Out!” This keeps the intrigue in the mind of the prospect: “Is this some sort of auto reporting agency? Maybe they have a report, or some secret behind-the-scenes info…” They’ll still be getting an estimate, but the more important thing is to: get them to call!

What are some other messages you see contained in here?

Conventional wisdom states: You should use images that guide a user to the actionable elements (or interest/desire elements) on the page. That’s what we’ve been told and that is what most of us have believed up until now. This idea stemmed from eye tracking studies where an image of a person looking or pointing at your call-to-action guides the user to look in the same direction, and it works! Doing this is great if you want your users to look at your call-to-action rather than click on it.

Eyes Can Guide Your Eyes

Just look at this cool image from Human Tracking. Clearly the eyes glanced to the left will guide the viewers eyes to the left.

Guiding potential users to your call-to-action using page elements or images is common practice in conversion optimization. But we hypothesized that, while guiding a user to a button can increase conversions, we had a belief that conveying emotion is more important than simply guiding the eyes of the viewer.

Now I know some you are saying to yourself “Duh!” But look around… Most sites focus on guiding the eyes, not conveying emotion. Since we are heavy on “copy” in our company, clearly emotion is something we yearn to elicit in people who visit our sites.

Before we go on, I want to give a BIG shout-out to our massive-traffic clients who let us do crazy tests to learn from and to grow their conversions. Without them (and the massive amount of traffic) we couldn’t do these types of tests. And just FYI, a little disclaimer: No landing pages were harmed in the making of this blog post. In fact, we were able to chalk-up another W in the win column for our incredible clients. (Whew!)

Emotion vs. Eyetracking

To find out, we created a test where we replaced nothing but a single image of a woman on a current landing page, the rest of the page was kept exactly the same for the sake of control and valid test results (something a great post from 37 Signals can’t say about their latest conversion test). (Hint: They changed photos AND copy. Although a great design test.) And to clear up on statistical issues, our test was conducted with over 150,000 unique visitors, and 95%+ confidence levels on the versions that hit over 4% difference.

We tested 10 different images, all which were of the same model wearing the same color posing with different emotions and looking or pointing in different directions. Don’t get me wrong, eye tracking and creating a well designed eye-path is GREAT, but too often that’s all designers focus on.  While the images of the woman looking and pointing at the call-to-action on the page gave a slight conversion increase, they were not the highest converting images. Surprised? You should be!

It turns out that our hypothesis was correct. The model’s emotions were a larger factor in the conversion increase than where she was guiding the eyes of the user. We believe this is because the model’s emotion elicits a similar emotion in the user and in doing so, we can help the user into the emotional state that best fits our service or product and, in turn, makes the user more likely to make take an action.

For our test, we used this the following image as the baseline to compare all other images against. We chose this image specifically for being the “perfect” eye-tracking study image. The woman is smiling, looking and pointing towards the call-to-action on the page. All test images are being compared to this baseline.

Of the 10 images that we tested, six of them were of the woman smiling but not excited. Five of those were looking or pointing towards the call to action item on the page. These should be the highest increase in conversion rates, right?

Hover over the images below to see their results compared to the baseline image.

The images in red show a negative conversion rate change, the yellow images show a small (5%).

Also during this test, we found four outlining categories that the test images fell into: excited-forward, excited-pointing, plain-forward, plain-pointing. (The plain pointing category was the baseline so all conversion rate increases or decreases are in comparison to this.)

If you hover over the following chart you will find that while the plain-pointing is better than the plain-forward, both the excited-forward and excited-pointing are higher than both plain categories. The most surprising find is that, in our test, the excited-forward performed better than the plain-pointing category.

Final note and thoughts. We’re big fans of eye-tracking studies and seeing how people are visually responding to our designs, and we also recommend you become a fan of understanding how people view your site. (BTW, we like Gazehawk). The biggest take away for us, and serves more as a reminder: conveying and eliciting emotion is key to conversions. And if you can guide the eyes, as well as guide the emotions, double bonus points, life up!

Another interesting note from the data that is not shown above, is that in tracking the “value” of the conversion through the entire profitability funnel for our client, we noticed that in addition to the conversion rates being higher, the “value per unique” for Image #6 & 7 above had 10% and 12% increase over the baseline on the $/unique, and Image #8 was a -8% (Negative 8%) below the baseline on value. That’s a pretty big difference in $/unique. Just confirms the emotion theory.

What are your thoughts? What does this data tell you? What are your takeaways?

Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and paid only on results!

Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by checking out all the other sites in the same industry/niche market. It helps us to see what else is out there and gets us inspired to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for internet start-ups.

We made some basic notes on some of the elements that stand out to us. But there is one part of the landing page that every single internet start-up seems to screw-up on their landing pages (usually their home page): What is it your freakin’ product does for ME?

Use headlines to grab them by the throat

It’s nice to know that one of your buddies at mashable wrote an article about you, and you get to put their logo on your site as a solid trust element. Kudos. But no “real people” outside of “the valley” gives a flying fig newton about what they say, nor how brilliant you are. (no offense, we like mashable, but we’re not “real people” either.)

Real People. #1 search result for "Average American" in Google)

Real people, those average visitors that you are begging God to fall in love with you and your product, only have their internal radio tuned into one station: WIIFM. “What’s In It For Me”.

Out of the 3 sites we reviewed, I think Addroid did the best in terms of quickly explaining their benefit. But even then, they could improve their copy on the landing page as well.

The “real people” for your market may be different than the “real people” for ILoveTacos.com, but they are still tuned to WIIFM like everyone else on the planet.

Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

Your landing page optimization strategy needs to follow A.I.D.A: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Attention & Interest: You should have a short and shocking headline that is read first on your page. Get their attention with it. Then with a little more copy, get them to say “Hey! This may benefit me and my needs, I should invest 57 more seconds to see if I likey.”

Desire: Hit them hard with their love language and get them frothing at the mouth with desire. You’ve got them interested at this point so don’t screw it up! You can do this by sharing benefits of your product. In other words, what do THEY get out of this relationship. Share with them benefits, not features of your products. Usually, a benefit comes from the result of a feature.

Feature v. Benefit: A 500GB hard drive is a feature. The fact that you can store 1,857 hi-resolution photos of your kid’s first birthday, slapping herself silly with chocolate cake without making a dent in available storage, is a benefit.

On PEERS.ME, the headline reads “Sign Up!”. Not sure if that’s going to snap me out of my Facebook induced hypnosis. Actually, isn’t that a command? You’re telling me to do something, without getting my attention nor my interest. Where’s the benefit on this page? On the form page it has “Network Account” in big print. What the H – E double hockey sticks does all of this mean to a visitor tuned into “WIIFM”? Nothing.

Think about the prospect, not the product

Look at everything you have on that page, and see if it can penetrate through the 67,000 thoughts per hour that your prospect is thinking about. Does it help them? Is it clear? Is it motivating? Is there a bang? Heck, even a small spark will suffice.

It takes time to come up with a pithy statement that says the benefits that hit right to the heart of the prospect. But it is worth the effort to take that time, because you have less than 3 seconds to grab someone by the medulla oblangata to get their heart racing just enough to get them to ignore their twitter feed and take notice.

Action: If you’ve done your job properly, alls ya gotta do is: GET OUT OF THE WAY! Have one (repeat: 1, uno, ein…) call to action on the page. And put it above the “fold”.

If you are one of the designers for a site we’ve bashed, and we’ve offended you, please note we rant in love, with a goal of taking us all higher, even if it is a jarring slap in the ego. We know it can sting, we have to slap ourselves from time to time as well. Seriously, if the grammar police investigated our blog, we would be hanged. And if you’re ever in San Diego, let us know, and we’ll buy you a beer and tell the tales of the stupid things we’ve done…

For our landing page inspiration blog posts, we like to run though and point-out the good “best practices” on the pages, as well as highlight some of the elements that we would recommend testing.

Please use the comment area below to post some critiques and questions. Please add your thoughts on elements that should be pointed out on the pages. Often times, there are more gold nuggets there to find.

To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.

Addroid

Peers.me

Bug Muncher

Would you like to have one of our conversion rate optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our guarantee!

When we begin a new Conversion Rate Optimization project we like to start out by seeing what else is out there to help us get inspired and to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for insurance websites.

For our landing page inspiration blog posts, we like to run though and point-out the good “best practices” on the pages, as well as highlight some of the elements that we would recommend testing.

Please use the comment area below to post some critiques and questions. Please add your thoughts on elements that should be pointed out on the pages. Often times, there are more gold nuggets there to find.

To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.

Esurance

Allstate

Geico

Would you like to have one of our landing page optimization experts review your site? Just click here to contact us today and learn how we can drastically increase your website conversion rate for no money up front, and backed by our guarantee!