As online consumers – are we are all being rushed into everything a little too quickly these days?
A number of recent experiences have prompted me to consider whether the tactic of injecting urgency into the digital buying process is perhaps being abused by some.
I recently went to a talk at Zone by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler in which they promoted their excellent new book, The Communication Book.
As a UX writer, I’m naturally interested in communication. All the microcopy I produce needs to communicate the right information in the right way at the right time. So I was keen to hear about the theories they’ve spent years researching and testing.
Wish is a well-funded mobile commerce platform in Europe and North America.
As it is aimed at the deal-mad shopper, it makes a great case study for persuasion in mobile ecommerce.
Let’s take a look at some elements of the user experience (which isn’t one for the faint-hearted).
Cards on the table, B-commerce (branded ecommerce) is a completely made up term and you have every right to scold me for coining it.
What I intend to point out with this clickbait headline (but thorough article) is just how distinctive the Lush website is, both when it comes to editorial and ‘messaging’, and the nuts and bolts of ecommerce.
When creating and optimising our ecommerce customer journey, not only do we need to ensure that we make this as frictionless as possible, but also that we make it as persuasive as possible.
In my last article, I asked whether Booking.com is the most persuasive website in the world.
Now I want to provide more insights on how it is delivering content on a crucial page in the browsing journey: the hotel detail page.
If you’d like to read more about the persuasive techniques used on the search results page, take a look at my article titled Booking.com improving conversion with best practice persuasive design.
Strava and MapMyRun are both GPS-based web and mobile tracking services for runners and cyclists.
At a glance, they have similar homepages, designed to explain the concept and coax visitors to sign up.
The respective pages are similarly sized, with large imagery, simple text, top and bottom menus and the aim of quickly informing the user of the service proposition.
And yet, Strava is more effective. How does it do it?
One of the most important areas to invest time into is developing the persuasive layer of your online experience and deliver more reasons for your visitors to do what you want them to do.
In fact, I see persuasion as being one of the next big battlegrounds online.
As more websites are upping their game around the fundamentals of good user experience and usability principles they’re looking for the next area of growth and to gain competitive advantage.
One brand I’ve paid particular attention to since 2009 has been Booking.com. I previously wrote a piece back in October 2011 about the wide range of persuasive techniques used on its search results page.
Since then Booking.com has continually evolved and refined its online experience, adding in new features, functionality and in particular using even more persuasive techniques.
In this article, which is the first in a series, I’ve highlighted many of these newer features and provided tips and advice on how to apply these techniques to your business.
Vistaprint has an interesting order and checkout process. There is lots of cross-sell and a decent amount of persuasion tactics used.
A few years ago, the website was all sorts of wrong, as Graham Charlton detailed, beaten only by GoDaddy.
Things have moved on and I must say that I don’t think it’s too complicated any more. There are a number of steps to the order process and to the checkout process but that was to be expected when designing a customised t-shirt (my chosen product).
Cross-sell and upsell is now presented on pages where I already feel assured the design process is going well.
Mainly there was a lot of clear information and some fairly persuasive copy and design techniques which I think has been judged correctly.
However, the company must be careful to keep cross-sell relevant. After being offered similar products, stationery and the like, I was then offered website builds and marketing services. This felt wrong and made me think the process might become more tiresome. If I was busier, I could have abandoned at this point.
See what you think of each stage of the order process..
Let’s say you have a great product or service.
Let’s also say that whatever SEO, SMO or PPC strategy you’ve used (or not used) is successfully driving traffic to your ecommerce site, and that when those potential customers have clicked through to your homepage, or landing page, you’re confident that it ‘looks good’.
Finally let’s say your site even provides a fine user experience. No real complaints. Everything works as it should.
So now what?
Is there anything more you can do to convince that traffic to stay a little while longer? To not bounce straight back to the SERP? To respond to calls-to-action? To increase your conversion rate?
The techniques of content or the bigger genre of online marketing are not new, they’re just digitized. If you start looking seriously for the origins of digital marketing, you’ll ultimately land in 300BCE.
At its heart, digital marketing is persuasion. And if we’re talking about the basics of how to persuade, we should start with Aristotle.
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and father of rhetoric, set the gold standard for persuasion. All digital marketing is a shadowy form (Hahaha! Philosophy joke. Anybody?) of his original tenets.
You could say that the basic principles of digital marketing are just ancient Greek wisdom dressed up in plaid (that’s what we digital marketers stereotypically wear in the States, at least).
People trust what they see far more than what they hear.
The human brain processes visuals 50 times faster than text. It’s much easier to persuade someone into action through visual stimulus than by merely talking to them or providing a text document. The same goes for your ecommerce site.
At Searchlove yesterday, Conversion XL’s public face and conversion optimisation expert Peep Laja delivered his ideas on what your site should be doing to attract consumers, drawing from the latest research on neuro web design.