The Persuasion Slide

by Roger Dooley

  A classic experiment found that customers who had three kinds of jam to choose from actually bought more product than customers offered a much wider selection.8

  Big retailers have no choice but to offer a wide variety of products, even in the same category. But companies who sell just a few products, or several variants of the same product, should be wary of needless additions to the product line. A “paralysis of analysis” situation may result when customers stop to ponder which of several similar items they should buy.

  Adding the right additional product may actually reduce friction by helping the customer make a decision. If one has two products, for example, adding a third that is not quite as good as one of them (but is similar in cost) will steer customers to the better product that it resembles.9

  Similarly, adding a much higher priced product to an existing lineup of two items will allow customers to choose the middle product as a reasonable compromise.10

  Providing differentiating information like product reviews can also help customers arrive at a decision when faced with confusing alternatives.

  Abandoned Shopping Carts

  One of the most profound examples of losses due to friction is the amount of merchandise left in e-commerce shopping carts. Customers arrive at an e-commerce store, look at products, put one or more in their shopping cart, but leave without completing the transaction.

  Statistics vary, but many sources put the cart abandon rate at over 70%.11 Think about it – that’s nearly 3 out of 4 apparently motivated shoppers who never finish!

  This adds up to a multi-trillion dollar problem for e-commerce sellers.

  There are many reasons that shoppers abandon their carts, but difficulty in final stages of the ordering process is almost certainly the biggest.

  Low Conversion

  While abandoned carts may be the most visible indicator of “near misses” in the persuasion process, most sites suffer from conversion problems. Typically, only a tiny fraction of visitors sign up for newsletters, complete an information request form, or take some other action that the site operators want them to.

  There can be many reasons for low conversion rates – people didn’t notice the offer (no nudge) or saw it but weren’t really interested (no motivation) are two possibilities. But other visitors may be at least mildly interested in the offer but don’t complete the actions needed to complete the process. In the latter case, friction was stronger than gravity-induced momentum and the visitors stalled mid-way down the slide.

  The Frictionless Order

  Amazon.com currently has one of the easiest ordering processes of any retailer. One component is their popular Amazon Prime program that eliminates shipping cost and guarantees two-day delivery on most products.

  Unless an Amazon customer logs out, she will normally be logged in when she returns to the site. Her payment and delivery options will be stored, and the One-Click Order button will be available on every product page.

  That one-click button makes it trivially simple for the customer to buy an item with absolutely no checkout process. The customer can see when the item will be delivered and to which address, if she has more than one stored at Amazon. One click, and two days later the product will be there. That’s near-zero friction!

  [For notes, updates, contact info, and a free Persuasion Slide workbook visit persuasionslide.com]

  Chapter 8: If It’s Not Motivation, It’s Friction

  When analyzing any persuasion process, one of the most important things you can do is look at every element on your web page, print piece, etc. and determine if it is helping move the customer toward the goal.

  If it is, it’s motivation. That’s good.

  Now here’s the harder part: if an element isn’t actively motivating the customer, it’s friction. It’s the enemy of persuasion. It may stop the customer before he reaches the bottom of the slide. Ultimately, it should be eliminated if at all possible.

  Eliminating these frictional elements can be hard work. Somebody had a reason for putting them there. There may be a business benefit associated with them. They may seem harmless. But, they aren’t.

  The Friction Hunt

  The first step is to go through your persuasion process, taking a critical look at every element. To the extent you can isolate the process from other activities, you will make it cleaner and more effective.

  Landing Pages – Pure Conversion

  A website landing page targeted at a very specific search term is a good example of a pure process. You know what the visitor is looking for, you can provide the solution to her problem, and you just have to convince her to take the next step.

  The purity of focus of a landing page allows it to be highly optimized. Conversion experts remove every bit of extraneous material. The copy is short and goal-focused. The next action is clearly identified. And distractions like links to other parts of the site, pointless photos, etc. are removed.

  A well-designed landing page is a steep, slippery slide. Once a customer is nudged into it, the probability of reaching the bottom of the slide is very high.

  If you are lucky enough to have a landing page environment to accomplish your persuasion, your friction hunt is simple. Look at every element and ask the question, “Will this motivate the visitor to act?”

  If the answer for any element is “no,” try to eliminate it. Some common examples of frictional elements that sneak onto landing pages are:

  Images – Graphic designers put photos and illustrations on pages because they think they make it more attractive and professional. There’s nothing inherently wrong with images, but all too often they are meaningless stock photos of business people shaking hands or the ever-popular “girl wearing headset” shot. These photos serve only to distract the visitor from taking action.

  If you have a photo that will motivate the customer, like a picture of someone who used your product with great success, or an “aspirational” picture that will underscore the results your product achieves, great! Use it!

  Text – We all have a tendency to oversell. We want to tell people about ourselves, our company, our history. We think this will help them decide to buy our product or work with us. In the context of a landing page, though, this kind of fluff is rarely productive. Unless you know of a specific concern that needs to be addressed with background information, leave it out.

  Links – One of the huge advantages of websites over print materials is that one can link to related content. In a document like a service manual, that’s great. On a landing page, though, every link creates a risk that it will be clicked and take your visitor off the page.

  Sometimes links are present because of designer laziness – the page template used for the rest of the site has them, so why not the landing page? In this case, the landing page should have its own template without a pile of distracting links.

  If you really do need to link to off-page content – say, a legal disclaimer or a size chart – consider using a hover text box or a popup that will leave the original page open.

  Occasionally, links can help conversion. Imagine a landing page for a computer peripheral. The visitor may arrive looking for that device but be uncertain as to whether it will work in his environment. A link to a compatibility chart or one titled “Will this device work on my computer?” can provide the reassurance needed to close the deal.

  Other Website Pages

  Sometimes, one has to design a web page that isn’t a highly targeted landing page but is still part of a persuasion process. These pages often have multiple objectives, which creates new challenges.

  Home pages tend to be the most difficult to work with. Multiple groups within a company may need or want a piece of this prime real estate. The visitors may not all be potential customers – the page may have to serve investors, press, employees, information-seekers, and so on.

  The minimum friction approach in this situation is to make things as clear as possible. If a visitor can arrive at the site’s home page and,
in a second or two, determine which of several big links to click to proceed, the home page is a success.

  Your home page, or any site page, doesn’t need to satisfy every visitor need on its own. Rather, each different type of visitor needs to be able to proceed very rapidly to the part of the site that will respond to those needs.

  For home pages and other key hubs, clarity of navigation for every type of visitor is more important than solving their problems or providing lots of information.

  Fighting friction is well worth the effort. Eliminating needless friction elements will not only increase conversion, it will improve the overall experience for customers and website visitors.

  [For notes, updates, contact info, and a free Persuasion Slide workbook visit persuasionslide.com]

  Chapter 9: Small Slides

  Web conversion processes are often quite simple. You attract the customer to the offer, motivate the customer to buy, and either a transaction results or it doesn’t. Conversion optimization specialists constantly test big and small changes to try to tack on an extra few percent to the conversion rate. Even small improvements can make for a big increase in profit.

  Of course, many sales and persuasion processes aren’t that simple.

  A business-to-business sales process may involve dozens of steps, each of which can derail the process.

  Perhaps, for example, the customer’s engineer must be convinced to write the specification in a particular way. Then, a purchasing agent must be persuaded to list the company as a suitable vendor. After that, a committee of several constituencies may evaluate the product and make a decision. Upper management may need to approve the decision, or may introduce new variables late in the process.

  My Not-So-Simple Luggage Buy

  Even apparently simple conversions can be complicated when examined carefully. I recently bought a new laptop case for travel. The transaction may have looked simple – I visited the vendor’s site, dropped the bag in my cart, and checked out. Score one for the conversion optimizers.

  In fact, my buying process was anything but simple. It played out intermittently over a period of days. I searched Google for dozens of terms, and clicked on multiple paid and organic results in many of those searches. On varied websites, I examined products, read reviews, followed new links to related products, and read more. I started to get retargeting ads from sites I visited and probably clicked a few of those as well.

  Eventually, I made a decision and turned into a conversion. While my process was perhaps a bit obsessive, as a frequent business traveler I wanted to be as certain as possible that my purchase would meet my needs. For example, every bag was a compromise between capacity (bigger is better) and ability to be crammed into a variety of non-standard airplane storage bins (smaller is better).

  How does one model a messy process like that? While there are certainly various “buyer journey” models that have been proposed, they tend to illustrate the big picture and not help very much at the website optimization level.

  Micro Conversions

  One way to address more complex persuasion tasks is to break them into small pieces.

  Not long ago, data expert Avinash Kaushik suggested that a single-minded focus on website conversions was not enough. Doing so could, he said, hurt revenue in other ways. While orders placed or leads generated are important metrics, other user behaviors might be important, too.

  For example, a customer conducting research for a future purchase might choose to view or save product information, a key step in an eventual sale from the website itself or at a retail location.

  Kaushik dubbed these small steps “micro conversions.” Kaushik wrote,

  For micro conversions you could measure page views and job applications submitted and number of times the Print This Page was clicked (the hypothesis being you’ll buy in a store or something like that) or Task Completion Rates by Primary Purpose for Support, Research & Careers from your website on-exit survey.12

  Each of the small steps in the process becomes a micro-conversion when successfully completed.

  One could view each of these micro conversions as a sub-slide, rather like the amusement park slides that have a series of sloped sections punctuated by flat spots.

  Figure 22 - Some slides incorporate multiple slopes and flat spots

  At amusement parks, children rarely get stuck in the middle of one of these slides, much less fall off completely. In the real world of conversion, though, such failures are all too common.

  Many traditional sales efforts can be viewed as multiple step slides. For example, the first slide might be getting the potential customer to accept a phone call. Next, an in-person visit might be essential, followed by approval of a sample or demonstration, and then a trial order.

  Only if each of these initial slides is successful does the real sale take place. Each one has its own need for a nudge, motivation, and minimization of friction – any one of these steps could be where the customer stops.

  Micro-Commitments

  Sometimes, breaking what seems to be a simple slide into multiple smaller slides can have a big impact on results.

  Ryan Levesque is an expert in building sales funnels that convert web traffic into revenue. In his excellent book Ask,13 Levesque explains how surveys can be used to target the needs and interests of individual customers.

  One problem with surveys, of course, is that most people hate filling out survey forms. (For me, the word “survey” in an email headline signals a quick trip to the trash folder.)

  Levesque counters this disdain for surveys in a couple of ways. First, he highly recommends not calling anything a “survey.” Rather, a “quiz” or some other process with a useful payout is less likely to turn off customers.

  The second thing Levesque does is break a long survey into multiple short steps. Each of these steps has a low barrier to completion.

  When a visitor completes a step, Levesque dubs it a “micro-commitment.”

  This is sound psychology, since we know from Cialdini’s work that commitment and consistency influence behavior. Fill out one form field, and you are more likely to complete the next one as well.

  From the point of view of our slide model, Levesque has transformed what might be a high-friction slide – a form with many fields – into a series of much lower friction slides.

  Not only is the first slide far more likely to work, the tiny commitment made in that step makes each subsequent slide more likely to work.

  To get people to take that first step, Levesque says, it has to be particularly easy. In a recent blog post, he explained,

  “The first question that you ask needs to be easy, nonthreatening, and simple, to avoid triggering their fight or flight response…

  Most of the time (in markets where this is appropriate and makes sense) I like to ask, “Are you a man or a woman?” because it doesn’t take much thought, and there’s usually one clear answer. But that first click takes them deeper and deeper, slowly warming up the water until you ask them the important questions.”14

  In the case study presented in the blog post, Levesque compared a standard email optin-form with a micro-commitment approach. The latter nearly quadrupled the conversion rate, dropping the cost per lead from $12.89 to $3.37.

  As simple as the usual “name and email” form is, visitors may fear it. In Levesque’s words, it triggers a fight or flight response.

  You may find that your value proposition is so high that you convert at a high rate with a standard opt-in form. But, it’s worth testing the multi-slide approach to see if it can further improve results.

  Truly Complex Slides

  Some persuasion processes are very complicated. Imagine the steps needed to, say, become a major information technology hardware supplier to a Fortune 500 company. At different stages of the evaluation process, many layers of management would be involved, from support staff up to the CIO.

  Different geographic and organizational entities would enter the process.
Compliance with local practices, policies, and regulations might come into play. Political issues unrelated to the merits of the products but highly relevant to the internal power structure could affect the process. Even board members and external entities could be involved.

  Clearly, this is no simple slide.

  The best way to think of this kind of problem as a persuasion slide exercise is to break the process down into small pieces. Perhaps a particular VP needs to be won over, or a group of support engineers must produce a positive report. Each of these becomes a slide that must be built individually.

  It’s important to note that even “gravity” – the inherent motivation that the persuasion target begins with – may vary by role, too.

  The CFO may place a high value on specific aspects of the deal, like immediate cash outlay or on the lifetime cost of the products. Support staff may focus on how simple most users will find the products, or how easily the products can be supported from a remote location.

  Figure 23 - Some slides can be quite convoluted

  If we focus on each of these as an individual slide with a desired outcome, we can maximize the probability of overall success.

  It’s a useful way to think of a complicated sales process. Often, there’s a tendency to focus on one or two key decision-makers. The reality is usually more nuanced, and by focusing on these smaller successes it will be easier to persuade the ultimate decision-maker.

  [For notes, updates, contact info, and a free Persuasion Slide workbook visit persuasionslide.com]

  Chapter 10: Final Takeaway