Poor Value Proposition Can Hurt Your Conversion Rate

The Ultimate Conversion Webpage Review webinar series reviewed several websites to show where owners go wrong in their conversion optimization efforts. This webinar involved a review of a number of websites, which is why it is broken down into so many parts. One of the numerous websites reviewed was an engineering site that quickly comes at you with the message of designing and optimizing. But the site doesn’t really fully show what’s in it for their visitors.

In this webinar, A/B testing software, Convert Academy teamed up with Bobby Hewitt of Creative Thirst to review a number of things that many websites do wrong that end up hurting their conversion optimization efforts. Conversion Optimization is the act of converting casual visitors or traffic into paying customers. There were several sites submitted for review, and you can watch its entirety here.

Poor Attraction

A website doesn’t have to give each visitor a reason why users should work with them. One of the things that spring to mind when you see design and optimize will probably be testing, or radio testing rather. The poor call-to-action is made even worse by these people asking you to get involved immediately, without giving you a proper value proposition.

There are 10 important characteristics of a great value proposition that can help you in avoiding poor proposition. Always keep in mind that a great value proposition should:

• Be embedded in a great business model
• Focus on what matters most to the customer
• Focus on unresolved pains
• Target few jobs, pains and gains extremely well
• Go beyond functional jobs and address emotional & social jobs
• Align with how customers measure success
• Focus on jobs, pain and gains that people will pay money for
• Differentiate from competition
• Outperform competition substantially on at least one dimension
• Be difficult to copy

Less Is More

According to Corey Eridon’s article – 13 Sloppy Mistakes You’re Making With Your Calls-to-Action,

Calls-to-action are one of those things in marketing where more is not always better. To get a visitor to convert on your landing pages, you need to provide the utmost focus. So while calls-to-action are important, having more than one on your landing page will cause some serious distraction and harm your landing page conversion rates.

[Tweet “More #CTA on your site only promotes distraction.  -@bobbyhewitt”]

Looking at the site, users are asked to ‘Get it now’ or to ‘Request a Brochure’. They have changed the original hierarchy, with ‘Request a Brochure’ or ‘Request a Quote’ being more prominent. The ‘Get it now’ call to action doesn’t bother explaining what you should be getting – whether it’s an analysis you are getting right now or probably buying in right now, they just don’t say it. Assuming it’s the latter, how can one buy without knowing how much it costs? Will you need a quote first? There are far too many questions that beg for answers – all issues to test.

There are two buttons competing for attention – the ‘Get it now’ and ‘Request a Quote’ – and if requesting a quote is the primary goal, the second button really seems irrelevant. Also, the language has been changed on the second overlay to ‘Get in touch’ or ‘Learn more’. There seems to have been a lot of things left to chance because, apparently these two buttons are inactive. Both are dead links – on an engineering site, remember?

You can proceed to click the ‘Request a quote’ banner, and what this does is take you to just a simple form. What this means is that it relies entirely on the homepage in order for the visitor to move forward. When you land on the form page, there is nothing there to tell why you should request a quote and what you really need to request it for. It simply features a giant message section. So, what’s one to do – write out the higher specifications? You could guess that that could be lengthy and pretty detailed given it’s an engineering company that deals with hydrodynamics and thermodynamics and such other stuff.

Above The Fold

Another notable issue with the site is that it seems to have a lot of stopping points. In fact, anyone using a small screen could be forgiven for failing to notice the additional content on the bottom of the page. As such, this is something else one could think of testing – minimizing the horizontal break.

[Tweet “A general best practice is to keep your most important content, including your call-to-action and form, above the fold”]

The language of the buttons could also be changed, as well as the urge to flip them – at least at the speed they’re doing so – which overall is not really getting across to the reason why one should go ahead and work with this company.

This is akin to giving someone a wedding ring before you even take them out on the first date: simply asking one to get in touch with you before you dine and wine with them. To put it politely, it will simply backfire on you. If you want to know more about the site reviews, you can watch the full webinar here.