Increase conversions by changing clever headlines to relevant ones

It may seem like making your web visitors chuckle with a clever headline will only help increase conversion rates. After all, if you put them in a good mood, they’ll likely see your call-to-action in a positive light, right? 

The problem is, not everyone in your audience is as clever as you are. While some may immediately get the reference, some may miss your point completely.  When the latter happens, your conversion rate takes a hit, while your bounce rate balloons up.

While clever headlines may help win some people over, relevant headlines come with additional benefits:

SEO

Some landing pages are perfectly suited for being indexed by search engines. These include pages that don’t have time sensitive data, or group-specific offers.  SEO’d landing pages can help you increase brand awareness and increase leads/sales.  Writing headlines that include relevant keywords help the search engines properly index you.

Clarity

A clear headline is one that can be understood immediately by everyone who reaches your landing page. This is important since you have mere seconds to capture the attention of visitors. A clear, benefits-driven headline will work well to capture the attention of your visitors.

Concise

Having a concise headline is important because visitors will only skim your page before deciding if they should stay and learn more. Capturing them with a short, sweet headline keeps them longer and increases your chances for winning the conversion.

Call-to-action

A relevant headline is the start of the path towards your call-to-action. 

No doubt, headline writing can seem like an art. It has to include relevant keywords without being too wordy. And within those few words it has to capture the attention of your visitors and draw them towards your call-to-action. The good news is, online testing allows you to try a variety of different headlines on portions of your traffic to see which one works the best to increase your conversion rates. 

Effective web page headline writing is part art, part science, and all about relevance. 

Why landing pages need an urgent call to action

I just finished reading The Art of Choosing by Dr. Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia University. In the book she says that humans have two routes for processing information, the automatic system and the reflective system.

The automatic system “operates quickly, effortlessly, and subconsciously. It’s a continuously running ‘stealth’ program that analyzes sensory data and triggers feelings and behaviors in rapid response,” says Iyengar. This system is driven by emotions or in-the-moment feelings. The next time you make an impulse purchase, you can thank the automatic system.

The reflective system, on the other hand, is “driven not by raw sensation but by logic and reason… Reflective processing allows us to handle highly complex choices.” You can thank the reflective system for your well thought out decisions.

Iyengar says “when the two systems generate matching answers, there’s no conflict. All too frequently, though, the answers are different, and in such a situation, one must prevail over the other. If there’s no time to be lost, we’ll probably go with the automatic response; if there’s no rush, we’re much more likely to rely on our reflective powers.”

So what does this mean for landing pages?

They must have a strong, urgent call to action.

Even if your solution is rationally the best fit, visitors won’t always come to that conclusion on their own (even if given all the time in the world to weigh their options). Instead you should remove the distractions that cause internal conflict and focus the visitor on a strong and urgent call to action.

Of course this only works to your benefit if the automatic response is favorable. This means making sure all the other elements of your landing page are optimized to set the right mood for the visitor.

It’s also important to remember that the automatic system is only triggered in response to emotion. This means your landing pages must elicit some kind of emotional response. A study conducted in 2009 on emotional vs. rational messages found that emotional messages beat rational ones almost every time:

What the data show us is that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure fall somewhere between the two.

 It turns out that emotional campaigns in general generate a wider range of desirable business effects, each of which plays its part in improving profitability. But they excel in one noteworthy area: reducing price sensitivity, and hence strengthening the ability of brands to secure a premium in the marketplace (or, in the current economic climate, to hold firm on pricing). For most brands, clearly the impact on the bottom line of a 1% increase in pricing is much greater than of a 1% increase in volume sold, so this is a particularly important strength.

Of course this data talks about “most brands,” which doesn’t necessarily mean you. 

You’ll want to test both emotional and rational approaches for your audiences. Perhaps one will work for one traffic segment, and the other will work for a different segment. Test it! And whichever approach you use, be sure to include a strong, urgent call to action!

Conversations on Conversion interview with Bryan Eisenberg

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

This is the fourth conversation on conversion episode, a lively discussion with Bryan Eisenberg. Here’s a transcript.

Anna:  Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations on Conversion. I’m Anna Talerico and I’m very excited to have Bryan Eisenberg on the line. You probably already know Bryan, he can be found at BryanEisenberg.com, he is also a frequent speaker and best selling author of books like “Always be Testing” and “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark,” which can be found on amazon.com. I’m very happy to have you here Bryan, Welcome.

Bryan:  Thank you so much, pleasure to be here. 

Anna:  I’m really excited to talk to you because you’ve done so much in the space of conversion optimization for so long. I could probably keep you on the line all day, but I want to go ahead and dive right in to what I feel like everybody’s been talking about, and that is 2010 being called the ‘year of conversion rate optimization’. Do you agree, what are you seeing, and what do you think about it?

Bryan:  I wrote a column about this and said I refused to give my answer to it because I didn’t want to jinx it. I think a lot of people are talking about it, and there’s definitely a lot more awareness, but I’m still very hesitant to say it. In 2005 when I first published “Call to Action,” I thought that was definitely going to be the year. A lot of people were talking about it, and it was starting to become a popular buzz word, people were really getting into analytics. I think what’s going to hold it back, is the fact that it’s still not easy, and most marketers like things to be easy. Analytics got adopted because all they had to do was put a couple tags on and they got some reports and said, “I’m doing analytics.” It’s a lot harder to fake that with conversion rate optimization.

Anna:  I think what you have is a lot of new people who have never worked on conversion optimization before, and they’re starting to get revved up, or at least explore what it means. Then you have on the other side, people who have been doing this for a while and it’s old hat to them. In terms of people who have been doing conversion optimization for a while, do you see that there are things that we’re not taking advantage of or that we need to be focused on and we’re not focused on?

Bryan:  You know, it’s amazing, I don’t even think it’s a question of what isn’t being done. You know, ninety percent of the time, the battle is not in making a site friendly or making the buttons more visible, or moving things around. It really just comes down to the fundamental messaging that the company is working from. 

You go ahead and implement a task with unique value propositions for a client, and all of a sudden you start seeing huge boosts. That’s something basic and fundamental that every website should have, but so many don’t. If you think about the way just one little line is going to have an impact, what happens when you really start focusing on the core messaging and on the core persuasive processes that are in place? It just requires a tremendous amount of work, but I think that is where people are going to start getting to the next level. It’s not going to be about landing page optimization alone, it’s gonna be about the full process optimization.

Anna:  Right, that’s so true. What kind of advice do you give to people who are just getting started?

Bryan:  Find things that move the ‘Who Cares’ meter. Just test little, little, little things. Don’t go overboard. 

I like to explain to people this is a lot like trying spicy food for the first time. What you’re looking for is to get people to have the addiction to the spicy food, to always seek it out more. The problem is that first time you try it, it doesn’t really taste that good, it kind of hurts your mouth, you’re not really sure about it,  you may take a couple bites and then you may come back in a few weeks later and try something else, and that you really enjoy.  I think that’s really what testing is about, it’s getting that momentum where it’s not just a one time event, saying, ‘oh yeah we’ve done a couple tests this quarter. ’ But it’s that your organization and culture become addicted to this concept.

My last presentation at SES London was on twenty-one secrets for top converting websites. The main secret is about this concept of change. Everything around us is changing and is changing faster, and faster, and faster, and faster, and unless we develop cultures of execution that can change, adapt and test, at the same pace, we’re gonna be left the way the horse and buggy was, to cars. 

In the academic world, it’s publish or perish, I think in the new marketing world it’s test or die.

Anna:  I love that! I’m sure you’ve seen this before where you have two organizations both pulling the trigger at the same time, and one just gets it and they’ve got that momentum. They may just dip their toe in the water but they’ve got that forward progress, and another can be six months down the line still planning and over complicating things, and meanwhile no optimization is happening. It’s amazing to see how much culture can impact the momentum you can get really early on.

Bryan:  Well, it’s even bigger than that when you think of a company like Google. When Google first came out with Google Website Optimizer, even internally, there were a couple of groups that took to it right away- they were very excited about it, and other groups were extremely resistant about doing anything. Then, slowly as they started putting together some of the stories and some of the wins, other groups started saying, maybe we could do something with that. That’s what you’re looking to achieve, and nobody would think of Google as a company that’s not data driven or, or not testing oriented, right?

Anna:  Yeah.

Bryan:  But now it’s common practice everywhere throughout Google to be using Google optimizer and to have tests running.

Anna:  Yeah, that’s a great example! You know, I always like to tell people what sorts of pitfalls they may want to avoid. I’d love to hear your perspective on this. Do you have top three reasons why you think optimization programs fail? I think we’ve already touched on some of them but it would be great to just hear your top list.

Bryan:  Yeah, I definitely think that the number one is not committing the resources to getting testing done. Like I said, it’s not a one time thing. You need to plan to have someone constantly analyzing the website, identifying the opportunities, coming up with what to test, coming up with those variations, setting up the test, executing it, monitoring it, revising it and then you know, making it live. This is an ongoing process and it’s not just focusing in on that one or two times.

Unfortunately the way most of our budgets are constructed today, they’re all focused in on generating traffic. Let’s increase our PPC spend, let’s increase our email marketing, let’s experiment in a social media applications or in social media campaigns. Instead of saying, ‘what if we spent ten percent of our new budget and focused it in on testing things?’. I think until that one piece is resolved, all the other pitfalls don’t really matter.

Anna:  You’re so right and it, and I don’t know why we don’t talk about that more - there’s absolutely a budgeting problem. It is remarkable that in 2010 budgets are primarily focused on driving traffic.

Bryan:  There was a recent case study that showed a company invested five thousand dollars in traffic optimization vs. conversion rate optimization and the conversion rate optimization gave fifteen percent return over the traffic optimization.

Anna:  Those are the best stories. Before we wrap up and I let you go, I want to ask,  is there one particular test that sticks out as your favorite?

Bryan:  One of my favorites that I show in a lot of my conferences because it’s really very illustrative of the process of focusing in on personas and understanding your marketing segment, is the one we did with overstock.com. We changed one graphic and that one graphic was worth over $25 million dollars on their DVD and VHS movies - their movie page essentially. 

They had a 92% abandon rate because next to the search engine at the top of the page was a graphic that said “kids titles for learning and fun” so the assumption was that someone looks at the page and says, ‘oh, I can search for kids titles, I’m not interested’ and they bounced right off. 

As soon as we went ahead and changed that graphic to ‘search from over 24,000 movies,’ we dropped the bounce rate by over thirty percent and it accounted for over five percent increase in top line revenue in a $480 million dollar company. 

One of my other favorites, that’s going to be a simple example to show people how easy it is to test is, is Dell. They had “Learn More” between all the options you can choose from -  different hard drives, different memory and all that. Throughout this, we came up with the idea of testing  “Help me choose,” and that’s still in the configuration all these years later; it’s accounted for tens of billions of dollars over the years, so you see just changing one graphic, changing three words, can have such an impact.

Now give me a reason why you shouldn’t be testing.

Anna:  I know, it’s a no brainer. Those are great stories! Again, I want to thank you for your time, this is going to be a great for our listeners. I just want to remind everybody to check out BryanEisenberg.com, it’s a great site with lots of information. Of course his blog is phenomenal, but also head over to Amazon.com and do a quick search for Bryan Eisenberg. You’ll see a ton of best selling books there for your reading pleasure. Thanks again Bryan, it was good to talk to you.

Bryan:  It was a real pleasure.

Don’t forget you can download can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.

Is your landing page leading to inaction?

I guess the first question is…is ‘inaction’ even a word? Sounds funny. Anyway, whenever a user clicks through to your landing page, you have the opportunity to get the user to ACT, and act now. Compelling imagery and copy is persuasive and exciting (“yay, this is exactly what I was looking for!”) and pulls a user in. But there are things beyond  scannable text and perfect pictures that make a landing page actionable.

For instance, more than one call to action often leads to inaction because of confusion or frustration. Also, the one call to action must be located above the fold, otherwise the user may never see it before bouncing. 

Here are some other issues commonly found on landing pages that lead to inaction:

No visual cue for action
Tell the user in big, bold buttons or text exactly what to do. If your call to action is hidden in lengthy paragraphs or tiny buttons, it may be overlooked.

Long pages and/or long forms
These look like a lot of work to the user, and can be very frustrating. Instead build excitement through paths. Make your content & forms smaller and more digestible so the page looks like fun, not drudgery. 

Mismatch
If you want really high conversions, you must have message match. Remember, both pictures and text tell a story; make sure you are telling the right one. Your landing page needs to very clearly echo the copy of the ad.

Information overload
A bunch of competing calls to action, lots of navigation and too much copy all lead to information overload, and information overload leads to high bounce rates. Instead, strip your page of navigation and multiple calls to action, and make your copy scannable through the use of bullets and short paragraphs.

More on evaluating your landing pages (video blog)

Here’s a bit more on the topic of evaluating your landing pages, springboarding on yesterday’s blog post on the same topic: