How Conversions Happen
Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed you can do so here:
Today’s my birthday (yay!) so giving myself a break and keeping this issue short and to the point. If you like this quick style and what to see more of it in the future let me know!
Conversion rate optimization is all about making things happen. You want someone to sign up for your list, buy a product, or add that cross-sell.
For someone to take action you need 3 things – a user that is sufficiently motivated to take action, sufficiently capable of taking action, and a trigger offering them the opportunity to act.
This model created by BJ Fogg states ‘Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger’.
Basically, if someone is highly motivated the action can be more difficult. If they’re not motivated at all, the action must be really easy to do. The ‘trigger’ is the thing that’s going to present them with the opportunity to take the action.
Imagine a store that requires you to fill out a 3-page application to shop there. Taking action is very hard and you’re likely not motivated enough to deal with the application.
But, if I told you the store had a 99% off sale you may consider filling in the application. If it was your favorite brand you’d be even more motivated. If it was 99% off, your favorite brand, and a product that normally retails at $600 I can almost guarantee you would fill out the application.
As you can see, motivation is malleable. Increasing motivation is essentially what all marketing aims to do. A great place to start with increasing motivation is implementing some of Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion.
Now imagine if instead that store had one-click checkout, with your card details already saved, with 20 years of brand recognition so you trust them, with a detailed description of how the product will solve your exact problem….. just imagine taking action is that easy.
You may be willing to buy the product even if it’s $600 and being sold at full price by a brand you don’t really know. This is the art of making things easy to do and it’s why Amazon converts so much traffic.
It’s not all about reducing the number of form fields but also intangible things like building trust, answering questions, and overcoming objections. This is where you should focus when trying to optimize your website as its much easier than increasing motivation.
In either case, you need to be prompted to take action. If there’s no ‘shop now’ button nothing else matters.
When thinking about triggers you can imagine the average Ecommerce home page. Some people naively think you should have a ‘shop now’ button in every section going down the page.
In reality, you’re abusing your trigger. If someone wasn’t ready to take action right away in the hero they need more information. Placing another trigger before they’ve gotten enough information to act will cause them to start to ignore it.
I could go on here but I think you get the point – timing a trigger is important. To study good trigger timing you should look at info product sellers like Ramit Sethi and Brennan Dunn.
Aside from timing there is the visibility of the trigger – which you can learn about in this post on visual hierarchy – and the offer itself.
Every CTA is an offer to take an action. A hero button could say ‘shop now’ or it could say ‘shop our best sellers’ or ’shop products up to 60% off’. Your offer doesn’t necessarily need to further increase motivation (that’s the job of your copy) it just needs to be sufficiently relevant to the context.
Looking at your website through the lens of this model can uncover a bunch of opportunities for improvement.
That’s all for today’s issue. If you liked it, let me know on Twitter:
