I see so many sites that are still making critical errors that are causing them to lose out to their competition.
These 3 hacks won’t make your brand ground breaking, but they may well make you more money (or make you look good to your boss). And at the end of the day, these things matter to most of us.
1. Add more proof
You’ve probably heard it a million times, social proof matters. But do you really have enough of it? If you are an e-commerce company, could you add any of the following?
- Product ratings and the number of ratings on collection pages
- Product ratings and the number of ratings at the very top of your product pages
- Full product reviews lower down the product page
- Filtering, sorting, and response functionality on product reviews
- Site-wide reviews on your homepage
- A site wide rating in a header banner
Social proof isn’t limited to e-commerce. If you are a service industry, agency, or SaaS provider, don’t forget your testimonials on landing pages or make the mistake of thinking they should be really long everywhere you display them. One short sentence can be enough to provide reassurance in many cases.
Proof can also come in the form of case studies where you demonstrate what you can do, before and after shots, awards, industry partnerships, or professional body endorsements. Anything that provides reassurance that your company is legitimate and trustworthy can count as proof.
But why is proof so important?
Buying from an unknown company, or buying a service (particularly if it’s B2B) can be seen as a risk. Although the degree of risk aversion varies person to person, we are generally quite cautious and look for things to set our minds at ease.
Social proof is one of the most powerful forms of proof as it tells us that people like us (the target audience) have taken the risk before us and it has worked out well for them. If we identify with those people as being our kind of people, we are more likely to conform and follow their lead in converting.
2. Make your primary CTA buttons different to your secondary CTAs
I love beautiful design as much as the next person. But sometimes that beauty can come at the expense of conversions. A good example of this is having all your call to action (CTA) buttons look the same.
I’ve seen pages with around 10 CTA buttons, all looking the same or very similar. Now 10 CTA buttons is far too many for a single page, (which is a different topic), but having them all look the same is confusing to say the least.
You might know which button you want your user to click on the most, or which button will help them best achieve their next step, but your users may not. If nothing stands out, they will become blind about where to go.
Even if all your CTA buttons have contrast to the background, your primary CTA buttons need contrast to the other buttons around them. This is because as humans we are drawn to contrast, our brains are hardwired to seek it out as difference can equal danger and we need to be prepared. Obviously, a different colour button isn’t dangerous, but our brains look for that contrast either way as we need to evaluate if there is a risk or not.
It’s sometimes necessary to break away from brand colours if they are all very similar. But often you can achieve a differentiation just by having primary CTA buttons a block colour and secondary buttons with no fill colour but the same colour outline as your primary buttons.
3. Restructure the information on your pages
How many times have you landed on a page looking for an answer only to be disappointed that finding the answer is going to mean skim reading the whole page or worse, that the answer isn’t actually there at all.
Hopefully, this isn’t the case for your site. But even if you think it isn’t, it’s worth revisiting your key landing pages to make sure you are actually providing the information users need in the order they are likely to need it in.
When we let design or sales copy lead the way we can sometimes end up with important information being missed out or pushed low down the page. For example, if you have a page titled ‘What we do’ on your agency page, it’s important to tell users how you can help them straight out of the gate. Someone viewing that page wants to know if the agency can help them achieve their goal, they will be less interested in more generic salesy ‘about us’ copy at that point. But unfortunately, we often see vague salesy copy come first.
Try not to look at your pages on your site at first, but spend some time thinking about what pages you have, where users are in their journey, what information they are looking for, and what they are trying to achieve on each page. Once you know this, you can revisit your pages and see if you really are being as helpful as you think you are. Moving content around should hopefully be fairly straightforward, and could result in much higher engagement from users.
Summary
So there you have it, 3 common mistakes I often see (too little proof, unclear navigation, unhelpful information hierarchy) and how to fix them. I hope you found this list helpful. If you’d like to go beyond these hacks or would like help implementing them, then we are here to help.
Hi, I’m Charlotte. I love writing about user psychology and tips I’ve picked up from leading user research and CRO projects. Get in touch if you’d like to work with me to improve the user experience on your site or click here to learn more about your future CRO team.