Those were just a few benefits. In this advertising tactic , I explain a trick to enhance your product images. And that tactic works for ecommerce as well. In short, Elder and Krishna found that mental interaction sparks more purchases. In other words, when participants envision themselves interacting with a product, they become more likely to purchase it. So how can you spark more mental interaction? All of those images increase mental simulation. People imagine themselves interacting with the product, and so they become more likely to purchase it.
You can refer to his book, Influence , for a deeper understanding. And it depends on your product and niche.
However, researchers have found a useful insight. With hedonic or frivolous products, you should incorporate more — rather than fewer — attributes. Sela and Berger found support for that claim. And they credit their finding to an increase in perceived usefulness:.
Baymard Institute looked at 31 different studies on shopping cart abandonment. They found that, on average, The tactics in this section will help you reduce that abandonment. Whenever we pay money for a product, we feel a sense of pain known as the pain of paying see my pricing article for more detail. Why do we feel that pain? It partly stems from cognitive dissonance. Whenever we pay money, we feel two opposing attitudes:. Those contradicting attitudes cause pain Festinger, And we usually resolve that pain by justifying one of those attitudes:.
By providing reassurance and justification during the checkout, you help resolve their dissonance. You guide them toward Option 1. The underlying psychology is important. Some marketers place trust symbols earlier in the funnel, such as the account creation process. People are rarely happy with absolute outcomes. In most domains, people compare their outcome to the outcome of other people Festinger, And that effect occurs with prices. How do we determine the fairness of a price?
We usually consider the amount that other customers have paid:. Both equity theory and the theory of distributive justice suggest that perceptions of fairness are induced when a person compares an outcome e. Just reduce the saliency of it. Instead of displaying a form field, provide a text link: Are you familiar with landing page optimization? When visitors click on a link, they leave your page.
Use that insight to enhance your checkout. Every link represents another opportunity to lose the purchase. To solidify your funnel, remove your site navigation and all unnecessary links. Visitors narrow their focus toward completing their purchase, and they become more likely to accomplish that goal. And for many reasons too. Maybe they changed their mind about purchasing.
The List Building Strategies that Grew 70, Subscribers
Or maybe they plan to come back. They just need to…. Unfortunately, our memory is crappy. Not a fun place. With resources like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads , you can show ads to people who abandoned your checkout. Or, better yet, you can email the people who abandoned your checkout. Either way, by retargeting those people — perhaps with an enticing discount — you trigger their memory to complete their purchase. With the rise in growth hacking over the past few years, social sharing has become even more important. Within a few short years, Dropbox became a billion dollar company.
What was their secret? Among a few key factors, they incentivized social sharing. By offering free storage for each new referral, they increased signups by 60 percent. To boost social sharing, offer an incentive. Most marketers use testimonials for their products. When you demonstrate that other customers were happy with their purchase, you reduce the risk for other customers.
Because sharing has a social risk, visitors feel more comfortable if other people have shared that message. Take advantage of that. Post screenshots of other people who shared your message. That way, you remove the social risk — sharing is the social norm. So people will be more likely to do it Asch, In Contagious , Jonah Berger describes social currency. We tend to share content that makes us look good. Suppose that you started a SaaS company. To grow your business, you plan to incentivize new users to share a message so that you can capture referrals. They would probably use a standard benefit-driven message:.
And it would probably entice the target market to click. They want to share content that makes them look good.
- Link Building Tactics for eCommerce Health (part 2 of 2)!
- Why Email Marketing is Better Than Social Media.
- Optimize Your Checkout with These 12 Simple (But Overlooked) Tactics.
By creating a message that makes people look good, your users will naturally want to share it. That type of message might perform better. So it makes them look good. Although you would need to confirm the results through split testing, that message would probably generate a higher percentage of social sharing from new users. Never conduct a test merely to see which variation performs better. Conversion Optimization In this article, you'll learn 30 psychological tactics to influence your website visitors.
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Welcome to a huge resource on conversion optimization. Why should you use 1 st person CTA wording? Why and when are trust symbols effective? The psychological principle involved Example: A page like this offers an opportunity to outline the benefits of joining your newsletter, letting you reach current blog readers who need that little extra nudge to sign up. AWeber has a fantastic example of this copy in its 7 reasons to subscribe page , which is a great place to link to on guest posts and off-site features. In other words, an AWeber guest blogger could link directly to this page in their byline, as it will convert far better than just shuffling someone over to the blog homepage.
If you do have some resources cooked up, make them accessible by email via an auto responder so they can be delivered safely to a new signup. To highlight your best content, rank well in search engines on the topics that matter most to your business, and generate qualified email leads , you need to create hub pages. The first requirement of a resource page is that it needs to address a cornerstone topic that is regularly relevant to your industry.
Copyblogger does these pages very well. Because Copyblogger is all about online marketing, having a hub page dedicated to landing pages—an important subject in the online marketing community—is a very smart thing to do. It gives readers a starting point if they are specifically interested in the topic of landing pages, and it lets a passerby reader know that Copyblogger talks regularly about this subject.
This hub page also allows the Copyblogger editorial team to recycle and breathe new life into their previously published content on landing pages. Categories pages are an inefficient way for showcasing your greatest content, since they put things in chronological order rather than highlighting the must- reads of your blog. Hub pages, however, will be prominently featured on your site, visited often by people who want more on the topic, and give you the ability to place the spotlight on your most exceptional articles.
Optimize Your Checkout with These 12 Simple (But Overlooked) Conversion Tactics
On our pages, we call out the most pertinent articles and include a quick description as to what the article is about:. This allows interested readers to really zero in on the best content on your site about a topic that they enjoy a win for both of you. But wait a minute Guideline 3 below will walk you through this linkage. The final item on your hub page should be an email opt-in form that lets readers know how to get updated on this kind of content in the future—for free. These pages often rank well in search engines since you can aggressively link to them from guest posts and other features because they serve as a content hub on a popular topic within your industry.
Your business may be targeting eCommerce terms or other industry-specific searches. If so, make sure you take advantage of the opportunity that hub pages provide to help you build your email list! The most basic technique here is requiring an email to sign up which most companies do , but this is also an opportunity to get creative. Ruben Gamez, founder of Bidsketch proposal software, integrates email into his product by requiring your email address to see a sample copy of an assembled proposal.
The important thing to keep in mind here: This means being completely honest and transparent about what handing over their email means for them. If you plan to include them in your newsletter after the signup, notify them. Email leads are most effectively captured through landing pages. Create a landing page for each downloadable resource, for each guest post more on these later , to explain why your newsletter is worth signing up for, etc.
If the desired outcome of any webpage is an email signup, the structure of the content should be styled as a landing page; in other words, no sidebars, no footer, a subdued header, and plenty of single-column copy that dives right in to what the page is about. If you need more advice on creating landing pages that work, check out the advice featured on Unbounce.
Downloadable resources can be an incredible source of new email leads. The reason to put them behind an email opt-in besides the obvious benefit of growing your list is to qualify the people signing up; only the most interested customers will bother with an email form to access the content that suits their needs. Founders and marketers always ask what these guides should be about. Resource-style content such as white papers, eBooks, and infographics is made for promotion.
Notice that the call to action at the end of the presentation leads to our resource page, where visitors can download the eBook in exchange for their email address. This process is effective because it lets you work with content you have already created and turn it into something that generates leads on an entirely different platform. You provide them something for free, which starts the process of reciprocity, and, in turn, they may write about your latest creation and drive new visitors to your site.
Since so many guest posts are now floating around the web, bylines are getting ignored. So in order to maximize the return on your guest post, you need to get strategic. The best way to do this is to integrate step 2 landing pages everywhere! Srini Raos, founder of BlogcastFM, does a great job with this technique following a recent feature he guest wrote on Copyblogger. Newsletter engagement is best measured by open rates and click-through rates.
Constant Contact keeps a detailed list of average open and click-through rates on their website; you can see the full set of data here. So how do the most engaged newsletters keep their open and click-through rates so high? The secret boils down to using proven psychological principles that invoke curiosity, grab the reader, and compel them to take action.
Below, we analyze five different studies that offer proven tips for helping you improve engagement. All marketers should be familiar with the work of George Lowenstein, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University. According to one study , when subjects were interrupted while doing brain-buster tasks that they were making progress on, nearly 90 percent carried on working on the puzzle anyway! Creating suspense in your e-newsletter will make readers want to see it through to the end, which means clicking through to wherever you are sending them.
This creates a subject that is too vague, and one that might be construed as spam. Columbia University psychology professor Sheena Iyengar made waves with her research on why choice is demotivating, which was later expanded into her book, The Art of Choosing. Her famous jam study shows how people react to an abundance of choices and explains why action paralysis seems to occur when we are presented with a lot of options.
While she noted an increased interaction from customers with the jam display, only around 3 percent of customers actually BOUGHT the jam, whereas more than 30 percent purchased from the 6-jam display! Another handy tool is Majestic SEO, which is free for domains you own.
Their reports can show you places where your URLs are mentioned but not linked. Instead of, or in addition to, offering a sitewide coupon code to your customers, offer exclusive product-level coupon codes to high profile bloggers to share with their readers. You can contact bloggers who are a good fit for specific products and get links directly to product pages. Other good link targets are frugal living and personal finance bloggers.
Not just any business can create a business page. Wikipedia requires that a topic has received significant media coverage from reliable sources and they must also meet their notability guidelines. You need extremely high-quality content if you want to reference it in Wikipedia. Be careful when editing in Wikipedia. If a moderator senses you are promoting a business, you will have your account closed, links removed and your IP banned, preventing you from editing again in the future. You can create a new account from another IP address, but after being flagged, you can bet that Wikipedia moderators are watching closely for any new edits that someone might make that are related to the business you were trying to promote.
Every little edit on Wikipedia is heavily moderated. Instead, think about how you can work with other complementary, non-competing websites. For example, if you are a clothing store, get in touch with editors at fashion websites and ask if you can contribute information about product details. Many bloggers love getting free, original content from experts. Who else knows your products better than you? This idea comes from Rand Fishkin.
All you have to do is ask for a link in your order confirmation email. Your customers already like your business and probably have no reservations about linking if given the opportunity. You could potentially add incentive as well and give them a discount on their next or even current purchase if they reply to your email with a link to their post. You could also start an incentive program for your employees to write expert articles for your blog and then share their posts on social media. I got this awesome idea from my coworker, Everett Sizemore. If you have an affiliate program, you can create co-branded pages on your site for each affiliate.
BeachBody is a great example of how this works. You have to be careful with this strategy though because your affiliates might not realize that crappy links can hurt your website and they might go on a spamming spree. After a customer makes a purchase, ask them to share their purchase on their social media accounts.
Table of Contents
You want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to share. Below is an example of how Amazon does it. You should also place sharing buttons on your product pages and even in your confirmation emails. Baked-In Link Building involves building your site and content in such a way that by the nature of having more optimized content, it attracts more search traffic and indirectly more links. Some methods of Baked-In Link Building include:. The great thing about a blog is you can write about anything you want. As your blog content earns links, it funnels some of that link juice down the line to your product pages.
A resource library is a page that links to all the high-quality educational content on your site. This is a great way to get your customers to create content for you. When your customers ask questions about your products through email, social media or in person, put those questions on your site, along with your answers.
Buggies Unlimited is a golf cart parts company that has what is probably the most popular golf cart forum online. Forum posts are great because they are highly targeted for the search engines and are entirely user-generated. Sometimes users will even include links to your products, which is a great way to naturally build internal links.
You can create videos product demos or viral videos , infographics, comparison charts, polls, giveaways and sweepstakes, which can all be placed on the product or category page to which they relate. You can also add trustbait or linkbait content right to the page. That often leads to error pages or simply blank useless pages that benefit nobody. Make sure you redirect those pages to retain any links they may have.
When redirecting pages, try to redirect to something similar if possible. You might find that some people link to your search results pages when referring to your products, i. Search results pages are typically disallowed by robots. Internal links are great because they help PageRank to flow throughout the site, they help search engines determine relevancy based on the anchor text you use, and they are the easiest to get because you can edit your website content in any way and at any time you want.
From product pages, you can link to similar products, complementary products or your most popular products in that category. You can add links to product and category pages from blog posts too, but be careful not to annoy your readers or potential linkers. Add links only as they come up naturally. Not every post needs to link to something. The main focus of the blog should be to provide value to your customers. You should also promote your articles by adding a link to related articles at the end of your posts.
Want More Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies?
If you are using WordPress for your CMS, there are several plugins that can do this for you automatically. To prevent your site from ever having to deal with a Google penalty, you need to set some quality guidelines on the sites you contact for links before you reach out to them. There are many factors you can use to determine the quality of a link placement. The simplest method, which is also free, is to use advanced search queries. Below are some examples. There are also paid tools you can use to do a lot of the prospecting work for you.
Here are some of the tools we use or have used in the past:. CisionPoint can help you find expert journalists who cover your industry and who may be interested in your content, using you as a source or doing an interview. All of these tactics are powerful ways to build high-quality links to your eCommerce site and when combined with smart strategy , can drive great traffic to your category and product pages. Do you have a favorite link building tactic for your eCommerce site? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Keep this handy reference guide available as you plan and execute your eCommerce Link Building strategy.