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the Free CMSWire NewsletterIf ‘Always be Testing” isn’t a mantra of yours, you could be missing out on customers and valuable feedback. Yet, even if you can’t employ comprehensive usability testing, there are many ways that you optimize your website for success.
Recently, Marketing Experiments, a research lab specializing in optimizing sales and marketing processes, hosted a web clinic called Optimizing Landing Pages: The four key tactics that drove a 189% lift.
Presented by Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MEC LABS Group, basic principles for improving landing page conversion and communicating a site’s value exchange were shared. (The 189% lift refers to a recent MEC LABS experiment in which experimenting with principles they outlined produced a 189% gain.)
What Do You Mean - a Site’s Value Exchange?
As it turns out, each time a user visits a website they have two perceptions: cost and value. By wearing your designer and marketer hats, you need to address both your user’s:
- Perceived cost of visiting the site: the amount of time needed to figure out intent and goals, and their
- Perceived value: what they think they are getting from your product, service, company.
It’s your job to reduce the first, while increasing the second.
Because we have all suffered through sites that make it almost painful to complete a transaction, or make us click through too many pages to learn more about what we want to do, we understand that users usually know how much time they are willing to invest on a website.
As marketers, it’s our responsibility to give users what they want in a manner that is convenient and efficient, even it’s just an illusion.
Reducing Perceived Costs
Depending on your product or service, the process may be complicated. You may need more information from a prospective customer before you can begin to demo a product, for example. Yet, by merely simplifying the layout or changing the language, users may feel more comfortable and not as intimidated.
McGlaughlin shared a few tips for reducing perceived costs:
Eliminate any length or difficulty from whatever process the user needs to complete. Whether it’s a registration or sign up form or an eCommerce form, consider reducing the number of fields required.
When testing your site and viewing it from a prospective customer’s point of view, continually ask yourself: Where am I? What can I do here? These questions will help you better understand how to layout and design your pages. Users are eager to complete tasks, but in order for them to understand what is expected on them, they have to first understand where they are in the process and why it’s necessary.
Of course, these types of changes and observations are particularly helping, if you continue to monitor their results or compare them against original layouts. By not taking the time to set benchmarks before making changes, you may not fully understand how your changes have affected the user’s experience.
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