Have you been testing and tweaking your website and landing pages in a continuous yet barren attempt to improve your website conversion rates?
Maybe it’s time to stop changing button colours – and to start truly understanding who your visitors are, and what they want.
In this article I'm going to share with your how to go beyond website and landing page “best practices” with a better approach to conversion rate optimisation using customer experience, emotion targeting and psychology.
You'll find out how to effectively research your customer, understand their pain points and see their customer experience through their eyes.
Why? Because, if you can understand your customers decision making process, why they make decisions and what’s behind that decision, you can change everything on your website to really cater to that intent and increase your website conversion rate.
Online Conversion Optimisation is an Integral Part of the Business
I think most business are now starting to see that conversion optimisation is an integral part of the business. In order to drive more conversions, get more leads, more revenues, you have to be testing, doing the right research and trying to optimise the assets that you have whether if it’s your landing pages, your website, your email marketing - all in order to increase your conversions.
Where Your Going Wrong
When it comes to conversion optimisation, we all know that we want to improve our conversions. We want to get more leads or sales. But we don’t necessarily know how to do it.
I personally think many businesses rush into buying the latest software, different tools in order to help them get more leads and sales. Whether it’s testing platforms, analytic tools or research platforms.
But at the end of the day, you cannot switch out the actual human side of conversion rate optimisation.
What really matters is the actual human side of understanding people’s minds, understanding their intent, understanding their problems and roadblocks or challenges. And software, unfortunately, can’t really do that.
How do You Increase Conversion Rates with Emotional Targeting?
The first thing to understand is that conversion optimisation isn’t about changing buttons, or trying to change an element on the page and hoping you’ll actually increase conversions.
Real conversion optimisation is about solving people’s problems. It’s about understanding the people behind the screen and being customer centric.
When you know who your customer is, what their roadblocks are, their challenges, their desired outcomes and what they’re hoping to achieve, then it’s far easier to understand how to market to them. What copy you need to write, what exactly needs to be on your page in order to convert people.
So to have to make it about people, you have to make it about them and understand who they are and what they’re looking for. Then you’ll be able to know what to create in order to increase conversions.
> Researching Your Audience
There are thousands of companies competing for the attention of your prospect. It doesn’t have to be the specific competitor of yours. It’s anyone who’s online who has just got a video of puppies being cute. They’re competing with the attention of your prospect. In order to stand out, you really have to know who your customer is, who your prospect is, and how to grab their attention.
Doing this research helps you understand who the person is behind the screen. I’m not talking about the geographical location, their age, the browsers they’re using, or how many times have visited your site.
I’m talking about the emotional triggers that guide their decision making. Once you understand their psyche, their intent, their desires, the things that wake them up at three o’clock in the morning, drive them nuts, it’s so much easier to choose the right copy for your website, to choose the right colours, the right call to action buttons and everything.
5 Ways to Really Get to Know Your Customer with Emotional Targeting
1. Surveys
Number one is doing a survey on your website. Now this can be a prospect survey, or it can be your own customer survey, so you’re reaching out to people who have already purchased from you, who are already your customers.
For the website prospects who haven’t converted yet, we’re trying to figure out their pains and their challenges, why they’re on the website, what they’re looking for, why they didn't convert.
And once again, this isn’t about asking them about the features that they’re looking for or the pricing, it’s about understanding the problems that they’re trying to solve, the jobs that they’re trying to get done.
For the customer survey’s, I like to reach out to loyal customers, those who have been your customers for quite a while to understand what are the biggest values that you deliver.
Again this is less about the product but more about their customer experience, how they’re experiencing the product, they value the product gives them
All of this information helps us understand our prospects and customers a lot better and find the right messages you need to be putting on your website and how you need to make them feel when they land on your page.
2. Review Mining
Review mining is a process of digging into online reviews in search of qualitative data.
So if you’re a business that’s just getting started, and you don’t have customers to interview then review mining is a great place to get feedback.
Amazon is a great place to start by finding books that are trying to solve the same problem as your product. So for example, if you’re a copywriting agency just getting started, then I would go on Amazon, look for the top copywriting books that are essentially there to solve the things that you do with your agency and comb through the reviews of all those people who read the book.
What are they saying? What was missing in the book, what were they expecting to see? Why did they read the book?
These are people that could be using your services, that could hire you. And they’re essentially saying, I read this book, because x, y, and z and this is what I was missing. This is what I was looking for.
When you go through user reviews one by one, what’s really important to them rises to the top. You see recurring questions, recurring statements. You hear their frustrations, and you can feel their excitement.
You can then us this in your copy and messaging hierarchy – the things you need to say, and the order in which your visitors need to read them. Naturally, this exercise reveals not only pure gold for copywriting, but also for product development.
So, instead of writing your message, steal it. Steal it directly from your prospects!
3. Social Listening
Social listening is all about using social media to learn more about your audience. You’re “listening” to the conversations going on about your brand and industry on social media, and turning them into actionable steps that improve your marketing efforts.
You can then use this information to tailor your pages. Use the same words and terminology as your prospects, write headlines that talk directly to them, recognise their pain points in the copy, solve their problems with your product or service.
All of this together, helps us understand people a lot better and find the right messages you need to be putting on your page and how you need to make them feel when they land on your page.
4. Customer Interviews
We also have customer interviews that you can do, which I think are super important. I don’t think enough people talk to the customers and actually hear them, look at them over a Zoom call or whatever you’re using. Just to see their faces, see their expressions, to hear the words they’re using to describe you and the solution that you’re selling is super important.
5. Heatmaps
Heatmaps are an amazing tool when they’re used correctly. They show you how people are engaging on your website, where people are clicking, where they’re scrolling to, how much time they spend on the page, and all sorts of really cool things. Even how they move their mouse on your page.
Heatmaps give you great insights for knowing which elements on your pages need improving most or making more or less prominent. For example, when you see where users click and how far they scroll, you can determine whether to move a CTA or to A/B test other changes to copy, page design, or the user interface.
I use Hotjar to record heatmaps and visitors on my site. You can read more about Hotjar in this article: Hotjar Review and How it Can Help Increase Conversion Rates
> Make Your Marketing About the Customer and Not You
Take conversation away from you and how amazing you are, how great you are, what features you have, why you’re better, you’ve got better pricing, you've got better solutions, and all the buzzwords that are better from your competitor. Put that aside for a moment and start making it about your prospect or customer.
As an example, there are a loads of task management platforms on the market at the moment. We have Slack, and Monday, and Asana, and Trello, and Basecamp and the list goes on and on and on. But why do some of them really stand out?
Because they focus on the customer pain points!
If you look at their marketing and how they market themselves, it’s nothing to do with the amount of budgets that they have. It’s nothing to do with if their product is better or not. It’s about how they position themselves. They position themselves as problem solvers!
Slack talks about reducing the amount of meetings that you have. Basecamp talks about the whole idea of just removing all the pressure that you have on your life. Monday talks about having a great work/life balance.
It’s not about the competitor. No one ever mentioned “Oh we know Slack has this feature, but we have this.” You’ll never hear that. It’s always about how they’re solving a problem.
Target Emotions
Appeal to your customer’s emotions by analysing their wants, needs, and behaviours through the customer journey. It’s only then you’ll be able to use emotional targeting effectively.
If we keep treating our customers as if they’re just devices, browsers or geographical locations we’ll keep striking out, missing out on the real potential of conversion rate optimisation and getting frustrated with our results.