How to Convince your eCommerce Visitors to Sign up

The Ultimate Conversion Webpage Review webinar series found that every site that was evaluated was in dire need of some vigorous testing – whether it’s A/B testing, multivariate testing or split testing. In this latest and last installment of the webinar series, we will be taking on a site called Asher – which deals in sales training. Sales positions are often the most difficult part of marketing because it deals with interaction with customers.

In this webinar, Convert teamed up with Creative Thirst‘s Bobby Hewitt to review a number of things that many websites do wrong. These things end up hurting their conversion optimization efforts. The website Asher, for example, have run into several pitfalls in their conversion. But while they can be damaging, they can be easily avoided. For the full presentation, you can watch the entire series here.

Convey Your Site’s Value

Looking at the homepage being reviewed, it has a lot of ‘Asks’ on it. It asks the user to sign up all the way down at the bottom. This may or may not be a good thing since it lowers the conversation as well as provides little value. According to Peter Sandeen’s article – Dominate Your Market,

People won’t ever buy from you if they don’t even understand why they should pay attention to you. And they notice you only if you have a strong value proposition.

So, what happens when you do get around to signing up? You will get sales tips delivered to your inbox. But the problem is that it doesn’t really tell the user how often the tips will be delivered, and the sign up button also doesn’t give the value of what exactly one will get upon registration. You could say this is a lot like using a submit button, and ‘submit’ is the worst text you can use on a button.

What could be tested here is taking that button and testing different copy that speaks to the benefit of what is being sold: the sales tips and sales strategies. It could also speak to the benefit of what one will get in their inbox: could be specific tips straight to the inbox.

But then, another question arises – what exact tips will I get upon signing up with them? In such a case, giving the users a few tips or a little sample would be a good idea. Take, for example, when you visit the supermarket. They have a new product out there that they let you know about by having a table that they display all the samples on that you can get for free before you make the decision to buy. Same case here. Give the users a little taste before they sign up. And it’s not like you are giving them anything here really.

[Tweet “Don’t get in a rut. Run simple A/B splits test on buttons and links to test language, colors, graphics, and more.- Litmus”]

The Important Questions

Scrolling back to the top of the page, you encounter a rotating image (a prevalent issue throughout the webinar). Looking at the banner, it doesn’t offer much into why you should take the call to action. So, assuming you proceed to click through and identify the sales aptitude – why is sales aptitude that important? In the case of Asher, it is jumping straight into the middle of the conversation and ignoring the start. They say, for instance, that it can revolutionize my entire sales team and other such marketing antics.

There’s another call to action that seems to have been sneaked in – ‘What can dramatically improve your sales results?’ Not bad but it fails to quantify exactly how much that can be improved. Additionally, what is the average improvement in sales results that one can gain by going through Asher’s training course? What could help here is to provide the visitor with a quantifiable number that he/she can expect from working with Asher or hiring their services – is it 10%, 20% or what?

To summarize it all, know first what your visitors want to know. Most visitors ask these questions when they enter and had a look at your website:

• What’s in it for me?
• Why should I share my personal info?
• What am I getting?
• Can I trust you?
• Okay, I shared my info, now what?
• Maybe I want to know more?

Honest Assurances

The page also features webinars, white papers, videos and training (category level pages) which seem like social proof, except they are not. These are areas where a keen eye would expect to see social proof. The question of ‘why I should work with you?’ will no doubt spring to mind again. Who have you worked with in the past? These are some of the things that need to be tested for those with similar pages. In this case, including client logos just about there would be a great idea. You could consider graying them out to avoid visual conflict with the other elements on the page. Speaking of visual conflict…The top image on the page could also be accused of visually competing albeit not as dramatically as some of the other sites that we reviewed.

Another statement that says ‘Asher’s training and coaching process develops…helps Business 2 Business achieve sales goals’ had to be put at the bottom of the page so one has to get to the bottom to understand this was a B2B company. This is the sort of copy that should be at the top of the page. Another strange button on the site is one screaming ‘See Asher in action!’ The reason I’m saying strange is because apparently it is one button that has been visually made to look like two. Some of the call to actions are pretty compelling but lack resolve. Take, for example this one: ‘Do you want to increase your sales by 10%, by 100%, by 130%?’ The thing is, people know they are already losing sales. So it would be wise to give an average of how much that can be improved.

What about the social proofs at the bottom? One thing to test here would be to take all the companies, plus their names and logos and put them right at the top. The entire top section can be replaced with that. Given this could eat up a lot of the space and push down the content, you could tighten them up a bit, or even take a part of it – the most important – such as the title and leave out the logo, moving the social proof up top. Additionally, all this is in the wrong order of conversation given that I just found out everything about you and you’re now telling me that you know others who have done it, which should come first before what you did. If you want to find out more, or if you want to view the full presentation, you can watch the entire series here.