Does Your Call-To-Action Always Need To Be Above The Fold?

I was recently speaking with a potential client about their homepage, and they asked me what I’d change to improve conversions. I told them to put their call to action below their sales copy, because as it was, they were giving no reason for people to click. They simply had a “click here” button (that didn’t stand out mind you) and their copy was below it. You’d think they would at least have a second call to action below the copy, but they didn’t.

In response all they said was, “heh, why would we do that? why would that be better?”

You just can’t help some people. You really can’t.

Via SocialMediaToday

“What many would consider a textbook position to put a call-to-action, high on the page, above the fold, may sometimes deliver substantially better results if placed lower down the page or after additional information to motivate a click has appeared first.

To understand this you need to appreciate the context of the decision you are asking your site visitors to take. If the buying decision is complex or needs to be carefully considered, today’s surfers are extremely tolerant of supporting information like comparison charts, videos and customer references. And so it really doesn’t matter where the final call-to-action sits, as long as the right amount of supporting information can be accessed easily and quickly to enable a decision to be made. Requiring a visitors to make a few downwards swipes or to hunt briefly for the buying button is no longer automatically a barrier to success. In UI design context is king…” [Continue Reading]

How To Design Kickass Long Form Sales Pages

I know what you’re thinking, “aren’t long form sales pages super cheesy”? Most of them are yes, but that doesn’t mean yours has to be, and it doesn’t mean long form sales pages don’t work.

Peep Laja tells us more:

“The amount of copy you need depends on the complexity and cost of the product. The more complicated and/or expensive the product, the more you need to explain, show, educate, convince.

If you’re selling a box of matches for $0.25 – and I need one – I don’t need to read any copy. I just buy it. The product is simple and cheap.

On the other hand, if I’m on the market for a new car or a house – both complicated (many things to learn about them) and expensive – I will take weeks and months to do research, read and compare.

If you’re selling something that costs say $300 – I don’t need weeks, but I do need an adequate amount of information before I can justify (to myself, to my wife, to my boss etc) such an expense.

Buyers are readers

Worried that your copy is too long? Don’t. If somebody is ready to buy after just a brief skim – having just read ~20% of the copy – they can just skip ahead and click ‘buy’. No problem.

But if somebody reads ALL the text on your site and STILL has questions and doubts, then you’ve got a problem. This is why long form copy works well.

True – most people will not read the whole sales copy – and that’s okay. It’s not a novel. The consumers who do are the ones who are actually going to buy…” [Continue Reading]

Effective Copywriting Is The Key To Online Success

It’s very easy to become overwhelmed when you’re trying to figure out exactly how to make a steady income online. Everybody has their own “system” for generating “mega bucks” online, and there are many ways to make money online, but wouldn’t it be great if there was one skillset that you could develop over time, a skillset that could ensure you never struggled to make a living online, ever again? Well, there is, it’s called copywriting.

So how do we start to develop this skill? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Write everyday. Sean Ogle makes a great suggestion in a recent blog post:

“They say practice makes perfect, right? Well, how can you get better at writing, if you don’t do it on a regular basis?  I’ve written at least 1,000 words almost every single day this past year.  It doesn’t matter what you’re writing — just going through the exercise helps to internalize some of the basic psychological elements of persuasive writing…”

2. Read How To Win Friends and Influence People. This book does a great job delving into what really makes people tick, and how to use this information to become more influential, both in person and in print. Obviously, this is very important for any aspring copywriter.

3. Read Ogilvy on Advertising. This is an older book but many of the principles still apply even in the modern, tech-drenched world we find ourselves in today.

4. Start selling something, anything. The only way to determine whether or not you’re getting better is to test your skills in the real world. You do that by putting together a real offer and asking people to buy! While you’re at it, write up two variations of the sales letter and split-test them against each using Google Experiments inside Google Analytics.

Have you started to develop this skillset yet? Leave a comment and let me know!

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WhichTestWon: A Weekly A/B Testing Showcase

Are you an A/B testing nut? If so, you’ll love WichTestWon.

The site features a different A/B test every week and let’s you guess which variation won the split-test before giving you the test results. It’s a great way to test how accurate your gut reaction is at picking a picking a winner.

It just goes to show how often our gut is wrong, and why it’s important to test, test, test. Within’ reason of course.

Check out 3 interesting A/B tests from the gaming industry.

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Why You Need To Avoid Pointless A/B Tests

It’s easy to get carried away when performing A/B tests, which is why I like to focus on testing only the most important elements of my sales message; my headline and my price.

Robert J. Moore, co-founder of RJMetrics, explains why:

“In a data-driven organization, it’s very tempting to say things like “let’s settle this argument about changing the button font with an A/B test!” Yes, you certainly could do that. And you would likely (eventually) declare a winner. However, you will also have squandered precious resources in search of the answer to a bike shed question. Testing is good, but not all tests are. Conserve your resources. Stop running stupid tests.

The reason for this comes from how statistical confidence is calculated. The formulas that govern confidence in hypothesis testing reveal an important truth: Tests where a larger change is observed require a smaller sample size to reach statistical significance. (If you’d like to dig into why this is the case, a good place to start is Wikipedia’s articles on hypothesis testing and the binomial distribution.)

In other words, the bigger the impact of your change, the sooner you can be confident that the change is not just statistical noise. This is intuitive but often ignored, and the implications for early-stage companies are tremendous…” [Continue Reading]

What do you plan on testing next? Leave a comment and let us know!