We all know that the less roadblocks you have in the way of your prospects becoming customers the better you are going to be.
You want to give your prospects the quickest pain free path to give you money that you can. This means simple instructions, clear communication, and every possible option to complete the buying decision possible.
In the case of one of our clients, their prospects were instructed to sign up for a free account, which included choosing their username and password. Normally you would think that is pretty self explanatory as just about every site on the web these days has some kind of “login” function.
Well in online marketing we don’t assume anything, and the more places you can “help” the prospect through the process the better off you are going to be in the long run. Basically you need to, for lack of better terms, “dumb it down” for your prospects and treat your prospects/process as if they have never done anything like it before.
As you are going to see in this article, helping your prospects through the process can dramatically increase the conversion results you are looking for.
Like I mentioned, this client was asking the prospect to select login details.
To remove some of the friction and to help them, we decided to test out a simple “hover” next to the form field where they select their username and password.
As you can see in the image, we added the “?” which hovered to messages that read …
“Please choose a username for your account. We recommend something short and easy to remember. Keep in mind that your username will be visible in your referral links, so it is important that you choose something that you want to be seen.”
…and…
“Please choose a password for your free account setup. We recommend a password between 8 and 12 characters long containing both letters and numbers. Be sure to write down your password so you can remember it when logging into your account.”
We ran a simple A/B test with one page containing the “hovers” and the other page without.
You wouldn’t think it would make that much of a difference but remember that in marketing we can’t assume ANYTHING.
In this case thinking that it wouldn’t make a big difference would have proved to be a BIG mistake.
Those little “?” with the messages explaining what we wanted the prospects to do increased the conversion rate on people signing up for the account, not by a little, but by a whopping 76%.
…76.77% in fact.
The page without the “?” converted at 3.75% while the page containing the help fields converted at 6.63%.
That is a HUGE increase in conversions from a change that took very little effort to implement.
The moral of the story here is that you need to remove friction, in this case it was what we wanted the prospect to do with the their username and password. The more friction you can remove from your entire sales process the more opportunity you give your website visitors to complete the processes you want them to complete whether it be become a lead by filling out the form, filling out the order form, buying additional products in a one step upsell process, or buying more products from you as a repeat customer.
Take a long hard look at your process and see if there are friction points that can be removed, or if there is some possibilities to add a little “help”.
Either way, test it and see what results you can produce.
If you would like to discuss how we may be able to work together to optimize your sales process and get you a complimentary conversion analysis, contact us.