How Do I Increase Conversion Rates Without Being a Slimy Jerk?
You’ve been on those websites before. Popups, interruptions asking you to subscribe, flashy things grabbing your attention. You know they want to juice you till the last drop. Slimy!
Those sites have got their reasons: they want to up their conversion rates. “Let’s not waste those conversion opportunities!”
But that’s not what you want to do.
In previous articles, we saw that if we can up our chances of increasing conversions, we don’t need as many visits to measure, with numbers, if an improvement we make is significantly better.
But how do we remarkably improve our conversion rates without being a slimy jerk?
…So The Visitor Can Make Progress
Here’s a simple formula for how a visitor makes progress:
No to the past approach ⚬→ Yes to the new approach.
That’s what people come to your website for. They have a job to get done, an itch to get scratched, a pain that needs removing.
They want to move away from what they’re currently doing (which takes a lot of energy, like changing orbits), and move on to a new way of doing it.
The goal is to make a big difference in your conversions.
The solution is to make your web page really help the visitor make progress.
But how do you deeply understand the visitor and their need for progress?
Turn to research, turn to theory, or better, turn to both.
Turn To Research, In the Absence of Hard Data
Whether you’re sitting on visitor traffic data or whether you’re just starting to collect some, getting into the mind of your visitors can be done with research.
Research, in this case, is about finding the pains that people are experiencing. You’re looking struggles, annoyances, boil-over points, “I’ve had enough” moments.
Look to forums, do deep searches on Twitter, join chat communities. Then listen carefully for signs of pain and what they’re doing about it.
If you’d like to really equip yourself with research practices, check out Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s 30x500 course, which I took. I recommend it! You’ll get researching and online prospecting skills that you can keep honing so you can create products that people actually want to buy (because you’ll know).
Turn to Theory, In the Absence of Research
But even before you turn to research, you can imagine painful situations that you’d like to address, before you validate your hunches with research. And then, you can write pages that are written for progress, with confidence.
For that, I recommend using the following lenses:
- the Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory helps you understand the job for which people hire your approach, and the circumstances that make them fire their previous approach;
- the Forces of Progress Diagram maps out what’s going on in the mind of the buyer, to push the buyer toward making a purchase, or to pull them back toward doing nothing;
- the idea that non-consumption is your biggest competitor, that “I’ll do it myself with what I currently have” is what you’re really competing against;
- how writing headlines that communicate you understand the struggle might work better than headlines that communicate the benefits;
- how writing really long pitch pages can help give your visitor multiple chances at connecting with the right words for what they’re going through, help you make them feel you understand their struggle;
- how using “when” might be more useful then using “what” and “for whom”, when you communicate how your product can help.
Even Better, Combining Both Research And Theory
If you’ve got recent buyers and you’ve got a good handle on the theory, you can interview them to get their purchase story so you can really get to the bottom of the job for which they hired your product, service or approach.
That combination of research and theory will give you the best shot at increasing your conversions without resorting to slimey tactics, interruptions and pushiness.
It’ll help you communicate your product with more confidence, and your visitors will be glad to finally have found just the thing they needed to make the progress they wanted to make.
Stay Sharp!
“What about concrete examples?” Look out in the next few weeks for articles that takes these ideas to improve concrete things, like your newsletter sign-ups, an ebook sales page, or how to package up your consulting services.
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Pascal Laliberté
@pascallaliberte