Are "sliders" killing your conversion rates?

Slide on over and let’s take a good look at those pretty little site elements we effectively know as “sliders”.
Yes they look cool and yes they let you pack in a bunch of information about your company into a small space but the big question is how much weight do they hold on your conversion rates?
Before we get into our findings, let’s take a quick trip down exactly what our mission as marketers is first.
Our mission as marketers is to find a targeted audience, present a pain our product or service solves, engage them enough to click on our ads, then once on our site engage them enough to watch/read more, followed by leading them down the path of least resistance to our end goal and that is to take a desired action.
In essence, traffic and converting that traffic into leads and sales.
The faster you can grab attention of the visitors and get them to continue down the path to our end goal the better off you are going to be, and I shouldn’t have to say it, but you will in turn make more money.
Fancy “moving” elements on our sites you would assume would help with engagement of our visitors.
But that is an assumption and assuming anything will work in marketing without testing it can be a slippery slope.
This isn’t 2005 anymore and although pretty, sliders, we have found actually hold quite a bit of weight in how visitors perceive our marketing messages.
You may feel that packing a ton of information above the fold of the page on what your company does, how you can help etc. is a good thing but our test findings have actually proven otherwise.
You see sliders are distracting and can lead to confusion in the eyes of your website visitors.  So much so that in a handful of tests across multiple different niches/industries has shown that sliders can reduce engagement in a page by more than 60%.  In turn decreases conversion rates by 30%-50%.
One test alone we removed the slider element and it increased conversion rate to sale for one brand by over 500%
The reason, we are led to believe, is “sliders” are confusing, they are distracting, and they take away from our mission and that is to get our visitors to take our specified desired action.
Instead, what we have found to be effective, is replace the slider elements with static, benefit driven images.
Use bullets to highlight the benefits, showcase ONE key product or service, and give them a strong call to action on what you want them to do next.
May sound obvious when you think about it that way, but if it were so obvious then why do so many companies choose to use them?
Something to think about.  Go out there and test your slider elements and see just how much weight they hold on your overall conversion rates and site engagement.
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If you want more out of your advertising and would like to get a free conversion accelerations session with one of our experts, be sure to contact us.