Do you want to boost conversions on your website? As smart marketers know, your design can make all the difference. In this post, we’ll share 11 web design principles that will boost your conversion rate.

Many marketers harp on the importance of SEO, social media, creating lead magnets that convert and the like, yet having an excellent website design to start with is so often overlooked. While all of these components do matter, your web design isn’t just a “pretty face”: it can actually make or break your conversion rates.

According to research from Stanford University, 46.1% of people say a website’s design is the top criteria for deciding if a company is credible or not. So it’s extremely important that your design looks professional.

Whether or not your website is aesthetically pleasing also plays a big role in conversion rate optimization. Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain (according to Adobe). So if you want people to read your blog posts, they need to look attractive.

But that’s not all. If your website is unattractive, people will actually leave your site altogether. 38% of people, to be exact. That’s a whole lot of lost leads!

So regardless of whether or not design is your forte, you can’t afford to overlook it. Learn web design, hire a Web design expert, or do whatever it takes!

To start with, here are a handful of important design principles that will give you an immediate and sustainable boost in conversions…

1. Follow Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law is a popular theory that’s cited by a variety of individuals for different purposes but is frequently referenced in terms of web design. Named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick, the law states that the time it takes for an individual to make a decision is directly proportionate to the possible choices he or she has.

In other words, by increasing the number of choices, the decision time is also increased.

You may have heard of the famous study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper where they found that a display table with 24 varieties of jam attracted less interest than a table displaying only six varieties of jam. In fact, people who saw the larger display were only one-tenth as likely to buy as people who saw the small display!

That is an example of Hick’s Law in action: action is lost in proportion to the number of choices being presented.

In terms of web design, you can boost conversions by limiting the number of choices users have. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about where to cut back on the number of choices on your website is the navigation bar. Obviously, you don’t want to have too many links to choose from, otherwise, the user will lose interest in them altogether.

In other words, don’t do this:

However, Hick’s Law doesn’t stop there. Think about all the many different important decisions that users have to make on your website, aside from just which navigation link to press.

Here are just a few:

• Deciding whether to use the navigation bar or scroll down the page more
• Skimming the headlines to see which blog post to read
• Deciding whether to download your lead magnet, share your post on social media, or leave a comment
• Choosing between making a purchase, reading product reviews, or browsing for more products

These only just scratch the surface of the plethora of decisions that your users have to make. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed trying to figure out where to begin cutting back on these decisions, however, there is a simple way to use Hick’s Law in a pinch…

All you have to do is install a full-screen welcome gate on your homepage. A welcome gate covers the entire screen with a single call to action, so the user only sees one choice available at first. If they want to see more choices, they’ll have to scroll down.

This allows you to minimize distractions on your homepage, while still keeping the functionality of your homepage intact.

Overall, when applying Hick’s Law to your website, it’s important for you to know which actions are the most important for your bottom line. For example, do you want users to opt-in for your lead magnet, or do you want them to put a product in their shopping cart? Every page on your site should achieve one main objective.

The more you can limit your user’s choices, the easier your website will be to use, and your conversions will skyrocket.

2. Leverage the Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is a popular photography principle that can also be applied to web design. With the Rule of Thirds, you’re supposed to visually divide an image (or website page) into thirds (both vertically and horizontally).

This gives you nine equal squares:

According to the rule, the four middle intersections are strategic places of interest. When objects are placed at these points, it creates the most impactful image or design.

In terms of web design, you can place the page’s most important elements at these intersections to get people focused on them, boosting your conversions.

For example, Chris Lema’s homepage has the most important elements (the testimonial and the “Start Here” button) on the two left intersections:

John Lee Dumas’s hero image contains a call to action button right on the bottom left intersection:

Kissmetrics also places their call to action button at the bottom left intersection:

Notice how none of these websites place their navigation bar anywhere near the intersections. This helps to keep visitors focused on the main call to action on the page, rather than leading their eye to navigate somewhere else.

You needn’t design your entire website strictly by the rule of thirds, rather you can use it as a tool to help you place your most important elements.

Try taking a screenshot of your website (just above the fold or just your header section, not the entire length of the page because nobody looks at a website that way), and divide it up into nine equal squares. Then, you can decide if you want to make any tweaks.

3. Respect Users’ Patience

(Or rather, impatience.) It turns out that people are incredibly impatient, particularly when it comes to surfing the web.

According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, a mere one second delay in page load time results in a 7% reduction in conversions!

So when it comes to page loading speed, every second counts. To check your page speed and troubleshoot any issues, run your site through one or more of these free tools:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom
• GTmetrix
• KeyCDN
• Sucuri

4. Use Negative Space

In web design, whitespace is often referred to as negative space. Positive space is the space that contains all the elements on your site, whereas negative space is all of the empty space in between.

Despite the name, negative space is actually a positive thing in web design, because without it your website would be unreadable and unusable.

Negative space doesn’t just refer to the space between the larger elements on your page, such as the space between your header and your content, or space between your sidebar and your content. It also refers to the space between all the smaller elements on your page, like the space between paragraphs, the space between lines of text, and even the space between letters.

Paying attention to all of the forms of negative space on your site serves to keep everything legible, scannable (very important, because that is the way people read websites) and easy on the eyes. And of course, all of this leads to increased conversions.

Flat.io uses a ton of negative space on its homepage to keep the focus on their main call to action, which is to sign up with Google or Facebook.

Here are some tips to make sure you are using enough negative space:

• The smaller your font is, the more space you need in between letters.
• Your line-height (defines the space above and below lines of text) should be approximately 150% of the font size for body copy (in CSS, this would read: line-height: 1.5;).

However, smaller fonts need more generous line-heights. Note the difference that a larger line-height makes in the two paragraphs below:

• Break up large blocks of text into smaller paragraphs to increase the negative space in between them and make your blog posts more readable.
• Add white space in between the larger elements on your site (sidebar, header, body, footer, etc.) using ample margins and padding.

5. Consider F-Layout

Researchers have found that a user’s natural behavior when browsing the web is to read the screen in an “F” pattern.

Here is a heatmap that shows where user’s eyes typically land on a webpage:

And here is what that looks like as a wireframe:

As you can see, people first look from left to right at the top of the screen. Then they scan the page downwards, making small forays into the content. The area of a page that gets the least amount of visibility is the bottom right.

So what does this mean for boosting your conversions? Well, you can take advantage of this behavior by placing the most important objects and calls to action along the F-shape lines, and placing objects of less importance in lower visibility areas.

For instance, you can place your main call to action at the top of the page towards the left-hand side because that is where the user will look first.

Then, if you want your user to stick around to read your latest blog posts, you can place those headlines down the left-hand side of the page. Less important information (such as sponsored ads) can go in the sidebar on the right-hand side of your page, and you can place the information that you want to get the lowest visibility (such as a cookie policy) in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

6. Color Matters

“Colour is an often underrated aspect of web design but it can play a very important role in usability as well as convey the overall meaning of a brand as well as the overall mood of the website,” says designer Tom Kenny. “Different color combinations can evoke different emotions and reactions.”

When choosing a color scheme for your website, make sure to choose a combination that evokes the emotion that you want your brand to convey.

One practical way to do this is by curating a Pinterest board with images that reflect your vision for your brand. Then you can upload a few of those images to Adobe’s Color Wheel using the camera icon on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Once the image uploads, it will automatically create a color scheme for you based on the colors in the photo. You can also move the selections around if you want to tweak the individual colors.

Once you’ve created your color scheme, there is one important thing to keep in mind which will make or break your conversions:

Contrast.

Use contrast to keep text, headlines, and call to action buttons noticeable and readable. In other words, your font and button colors should be in high contrast with the background (e.g. white background with black text), and the elements that you want to highlight (e.g. subscribe buttons) should be in a color that stands out from the rest of your site.

So if we were to use the color scheme we created above, we would want to make shades of blue the predominant color, and use the bright yellow sparingly as a call to action color (since it provides the most contrast).

Let’s look at MailChimp for example. Which elements draw your eye?

Well, of course, the image in the center with the woman is very eye-catching, however, the two orange call to action buttons are really attention-grabbing. That’s because they are in stark contrast to all the blues on the rest of the page.

7. Remember to K.I.S.S.

You’ve probably heard the “Keep it Simple, Stupid” mantra before. Well, it applies to web design as well.

Simplicity is super important when it comes to driving conversions. Any time you’re creating a page, ask yourself whether there’s a way to make it simpler. The result is usually more aesthetically pleasing, and it almost always converts better.

Remember Hick’s Law? That comes into play here, but simplicity is more than just limiting the options. It’s about creating a clean overall design that is uncluttered and minimizes distractions.

Similar to Hick’s Law is the fact that people can only handle so much information at one time. Visually, if we see too much stuff all crammed into one page, we get overwhelmed and it bothers us. Creating a great user experience on your website means getting rid of anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to the design.

Apple is one of the greatest examples of simplicity in web design, and it is so effective that countless other brands have followed suit.

8. Use the 8-Second Rule

The general rule of thumb is that you have a mere 8 seconds to get a visitor’s attention, because that is the length of the human attention span. (Yes, it’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish!)

You only have a very tiny window of opportunity to engage a user when they first land on your site, so make those seconds count!

Here are some tips for grabbing attention and boosting conversions within the first 8 seconds:

• Use a large, benefit-driven headline that is brief and to the point.
• Use eye-catching imagery that conveys the main point or purpose of your page and draws the eye towards your main call to action.
• Make signup buttons large, simple and clear.
• Use power words to make your copy more enticing and engaging.
• Incorporate multimedia such as video, audio, or other interactive content.
• Use hover effects on your buttons (e.g. make them change color on mouse-over) to make them more satisfying to click.
• Use animated exit-popups to re-engage visitors who lost interest.

9. Remember the Gestalt Similarity Principle

The Gestalt design principles can be summarized by this one statement from Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka: “The whole is other than the sum of the parts.” Basically, the human eye and brain perceive a unified design in a different way than they perceived the individual components of that design.

The first Gestalt principle is the law of similarity, which says that the human eye/brain likes to group similar objects together. It’s a mechanism that allows us to make sense of things, and to organize noisy environments.

In terms of web design, you can leverage this law by grouping items that you want to be associated with one another, such as testimonial boxes, conversion buttons, or images.

For example, if you have an amazing testimonial and you want to use it to boost conversions on your opt-in form, you could place it directly below the form. Even if the testimonial wasn’t written specifically in regard to your lead magnet, the user will associate the two because they are in close proximity.

The law of similarity is also important for the user experience. By grouping all of the main elements of your signup form together (the headline, description, and opt-in button), and keeping them far enough away from the other elements on your page (using negative space), the user’s brain will be able to process the information quicker and more efficiently.

This of course is great for conversions especially because, like we said in the previous point, people have a very short attention span!

10. Use Faces to Increase Familiarity

People love human faces. “When we see a face, we are automatically triggered to feel something or to empathize with that person,” says designer Sabina Idler. “If we recognize content on a website — such as a problem, dilemma, habit or whatever else — we feel connected and understood.”

Make sure to incorporate faces into your articles, case studies and testimonials, opt-in pages, and landing pages for a boost in your conversions.

If you are the face of your brand, this is simple to do. Get a photoshoot done, and make sure the photographer takes plenty of horizontal shots with negative space on one side of you. That way, you’ll be able to place a call to action or some text there.

Here’s an example from Melanie Duncan:

However, if you aren’t the face of your brand, you can still use faces on your website by hiring models or using stock photos. Just make sure the faces you choose represent your brand accurately so that the user will be able to relate to the face.

Vendeve, a social network for female entrepreneurs, does a great job of this by using faces that reflect their target demographic:

11. Source High Quality Images

If there’s one thing that can really drag down the quality of a blog post or piece of content, it’s low quality images.

In fact, images can make or break a deal. Bright Local found that 60 percent of consumers are more willing to consider search results that include images, and another 23 percent are more likely to contact a business showcasing an image.

Specifically, you should avoid using lifeless stock photos that are irrelevant and bland. Research from Skyword found that if your content includes compelling images, you’ll get an average of 94% more views!

So instead of using bland images, source high quality photos that develop positive associations with the content and that feel personal. Remember: people like brands that they feel are similar to themselves. If your imagery is too “stuffy” or “corporate”, you’ll turn your visitors away.

Here are some of our favorite places for finding free stock photography that is high quality and personal:

• Pexels
• Death to Stock
• StockSnap
• Unsplash
• Superfamous Studios
• Negative Space
• Gratisography
• Little Visuals
• Picjumbo
• Kaboompics

Now that you understand these 11 web design principles, put them to good use by taking a hard look at your existing design. Which principles are you breaking?

Do you have too many navigation links? Not enough negative space? Or perhaps you don’t have any faces on your site? Many of these problems are quickly and easily fixed with just a few tweaks.

Defining a brand identity isn’t a “fluffy” exercise with little measurable returns. A solid brand identity can be the critical groundwork for developing prospect loyalty, customer retention, and competitive advantage.

CREATING A BRAND IDENTITY

To be clear, every company needs a brand identity. Even “boring” brands in industries like manufacturing, and B2B organizations. Your company might not be able to adopt a sassy, conversational tone like Taco Bell’s Twitter persona, but that’s okay. Maybe you’re more in line with the fun-loving, hard-working brand identity of Hubspot. Or perhaps you’re cerebral like IBM.

WHAT IS A BRAND IDENTITY, AND WHY DO I NEED ONE?

Your brand identity is how your audience perceives you. Snap Marketing puts it in even simpler terms, stating “a brand identity is the face of your business.” Without a comprehensive, well-defined brand identity, your audience might not understand who you are.

It’s important to note that brand identity is not the same as branding. It’s the product of effective branding. Brand identity is also not the same as a visual brand identity, even though marketers sometimes confuse the two. Brand identity includes:

• Visual Brand Identity
• Brand Voice
• Brand Values
• Brand Personality

Together, these four components create the look, feel, and tone of your company to the outside world. While your brand identity may evolve slightly over time, taking the time to define your company is absolutely a valuable exercise.

Brand Identity — 20 Questions to Ask

1. WHO IS YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER?

If your brand hasn’t developed buyer persona profiles or robust profiles of your ideal customers, this is the first place to start. Your buyer personas should shape almost every aspect of your brand identity.

Determine what your buyer personas value from a brand. Are they looking for cost savings or the highest quality? Do they want deep relationships with their vendors or convenience? By understanding your ideal buyer’s pain points and priorities, you can formulate a relevant identity.

2. WHAT PAIN POINTS DO YOU SOLVE?

Your customers don’t start looking for your company because their lives are perfect. Chances are, you offer a product or service that will solve a problem. Maybe you offer personal finance software, and they’re tired of over-drafting their bank account. Perhaps you do compliance training, and they’re worried about regulatory requirement related fines. Your customers need you because of an existing pain point, or problem.

Your brand identity should instantly communicate how you solve these problems. Do you offer peace of mind? Workplace efficiency? The most convenient office supply delivery around? Regardless of how your brand connects with your customers, your ability to solve problems should be at the core of your brand identity.

3. WHAT KIND OF PERSONALITY DO YOU HAVE?

Brand personality is defined as a “human set of characteristics” that are connected to a brand. Brands with a strong, well-defined personality instantly win some likeability points because customers are able to relate to them on a personal level.

Human personalities are rarely single-faceted. Brand personalities shouldn’t be, either. When you are in the beginning stages of defining your personality, it may be helpful to think in terms of archetypes. Some household brands and associated personality archetypes could include:

• Apple: Rebel
• Taco Bell: Jester
• REI: Outdoors-lover
• Target: Bold
• Subway: Optimist
• Whole Foods: Peace-lover

4. WHAT IS YOUR COMPETITION?

Competitive analysis can be a helpful first step towards developing any marketing strategy. Brand identity is no exception. The branding lessons you can glean from your competitors can vary significantly according to your industry, and the level of competition you’re facing.

Your competitors could be textbook examples of poorly-defined brand identity. They may have little-to-no voice consistency across digital mediums, and a logo that’s unoriginal. Perhaps they have an excellent brand identity that’s memorable, unique, and incredibly easy to like. Regardless of where your competitors stand, use their statuses as a starting place for creating a brand identity that’s objectively better.

5. HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR CLIENTS FEEL?

When your most satisfied new customers communicate with your sales or account management team, what do they have to say? Listening to the interactions of new, satisfied customers can reveal a wealth of information about how you make your customers feel. Do they express:

• Relief?
• Inspiration?
• New-found energy?

The most frequent positive emotion your customers associate with your company is critical information for building a brand identity. Use this emotion to select visual identity aspects, including the optimal colors and fonts.

6. HOW ARE YOU DIFFERENT?

What does your brand offer that your competitors can’t? Perhaps more importantly, how can you communicate this in your brand identity?

Whole Foods is one of the most visible and well-known organic grocery chains. Their difference is communicated clearly in the brand’s logo, which is green and includes a leaf.

It is important to note that simply being different isn’t enough. As branding blogger Tito Phillips highlights, you need to actively “make a difference.” This means actively carving out a niche, and continually playing to your strengths. Anyone who’s shopped at Whole Foods knows the grocery chain isn’t trying to compete on price. In order for Whole foods to maintain their “niche” of fresh, local, and specialty foods items, they can’t compete on price — and considering their brand identity, that’s perfectly fine.

7. WHY DO YOUR CLIENTS TRUST YOU?

Conducting customer interviews or talking to your sales team can be an important tool for learning why your customers ultimately pick your company. The factor that leads to prospect trust and customer conversions can provide important clues to your brand identity. Your company’s unique trust factor could be:

• Transparency
• Expertise
• Flexibility

Use this “trust factor” as an important tool for defining why your brand is different, and building an appealing brand identity.

8. WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

Brand stories are an important component of branding. This includes both your literal history — such as how and why you were founded — and the story of the role you play in your customer’s life.

Your brand’s story should ultimately make your customer a hero. Perhaps you’re able to make them more effective at their jobs, so they receive tons of compliments from their boss. Maybe your mortgage products help them purchase their first home and start a family. This story can be an important basis for your brand identity and marketing content.

9. WHAT ARE 5 WORDS THAT DESCRIBE YOU?

An important exercise towards defining your brand’s identity can be developing a list of five adjectives that describe your brand’s personality, look, and voice. If Chik-Fil-A were to create a list, their five words might be:

• Quality
• Consistency
• Values
• Customer Service
• Commitment

What drove your CEO to start your company in the first place? How is your company different? By examining the values that run through your company, you can begin to develop a list of descriptive words.

10. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR EXISTING BRAND IDENTITY?

Whether or not your organization has put effort into defining a brand identity in the past, you have some identity if you have an online presence. It may not be cohesive or well-defined, but you have an identity in some form.

If your company is considering a rebranding or brand definition project, it may be important to consider why you’re initiating this effort. Is your existing brand poorly-defined to the point that it’s almost non-existent? It it a poor fit with who you really are? Have you introduced a new leader or ownership team that’s drastically changed your culture?

Understanding the reason you need to define your brand can reveal some important room for improvement. Use this knowledge to inspire the right kind of change.

11. WHAT BRANDS DO YOU ADMIRE?

You don’t need to look towards brands with similar products, services or customers. Developing a list of brands you admire can offer various types of lessons that can be helpful. Perhaps you admire Boxed Water for their values-forward branding and minimalist aesthetic. Maybe you’re a huge fan of Zappos for their intense focus on company culture and customer service. These concepts can be translated to companies in a different sector.

12. HOW CAN YOU SIMPLIFY YOUR BRAND IDENTITY?

Minimalism isn’t the right approach for everyone, but few companies can benefit from a “cluttered” brand identity. The minimalist aesthetic and design movement is closely associated with the concepts of modernism, rebellion, and edginess. It’s the concept of stripping down a design or object to the bare elements necessary for function. While a truly minimalist brand identity may be appropriate for a creative agency or architecture firm, it could feel out of place for a corporate insurance firm or accountancy group.

It’s possible to communicate elements of traditionalism, reliability, and values with a brand identity that’s pared-down, but not minimalist. Ride-sharing company Uber is a great example of a company who uses simple, sans serif fonts, bold colors, and a basic logo. However, in Uber’s case, they avoid appearing “too” minimalist. Simplicity is always better than confusion, but it’s important to ensure you’re still communicating the right message.

13. HOW WILL YOU TEST BRAND PERCEPTION?

Once you’ve developed a brand identity, it could be important to “test drive” it in front of a group of your existing customers or qualified prospects. This audience may be able to provide important insights that your marketing team missed. Forbes contributor Ari Jacoby recommends:

• Capturing your customer’s honest perception
• Shortening your information cycle, or how apparent critical info is
• Rethinking research to include A/B testing

If performing brand perception research isn’t plausible for your company due to timelines or budget constraints, I encourage you to perform research on how colors, fonts, and other aspects of brand identity are perceived by the public. Existing marketing and psychology research can provide a brilliant insight into your brand’s future perception.

14. WHAT IS YOUR AUDIENCE’S “LANGUAGE”?

What are the words and terminology your customers use to describe your industry, products, and services? There’s a good chance they don’t head to Google to search for “enterprise productivity solutions.” Chances are, they’re looking for “startup apps,” or “time-tracking apps.” Keyword research in HubSpot or another tool can be a critical step towards defining your language.

15. HOW DOES YOUR LOGO COMMUNICATE YOUR BRAND?

Your company’s logo is one of the most important aspects of your visual brand identity. Ultimately, you don’t “own” your colors and font. Your logo will be one of the few original aspects of your visual identity, and an effective logo can create a lasting impression. An effective logo design is:

• Original: contain some visual elements, such as color combination or design elements, that no other company has.
• Timeless: avoid incorporating trendy design concepts, to ensure your logo will “age well” over time.
• Adaptable: the logo should scale well from thumbnail to a much larger scale. It should also translate well to both print and digital formats.
• Memorable: While “memorable” can be a difficult concept to test, your logo should leave a lasting impression.
• Relevance: Your logo should be clearly connected to your industry or products and services.

16. WHAT IS YOUR FONT?

Typography communicates a lot more than “just” letters. It can impart feelings of energy, fun, humor, traditionalism and more. Much like colors, humans associated emotions and adjectives with fonts. Common font associations include:

• Serif Fonts, including Times New Roman, Georgia, and Garamond: Authoritative, Traditional, Respectable
• Sans Serif Fonts, including Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana: Modern, Clean, Stable
• Slab Serif Fonts, including Rockwell, Courier, and Museo: Bold, Strong, Modern
• Script Fonts, including Lobster, Lucida, and Brush Script: Elegant, Friendly, Creative
• Modern Fonts, including Politica, Eurostyle, and Matchbook: Fashionable, Stylish, Exclusive

Most brand’s visual guidelines include a list of three or four fonts. This will often include a primary and supporting fonts. By selecting typography from within the category that best aligns with your brand’s values, you can get the right message to your target customers.

17. WHAT ARE YOUR COLORS?

Humans associate colors with emotions. Your brand’s primary and supporting colors are an important component of your visual identity. By selecting colors that are associated with your brand values, you can instantly communicate your company’s mission.

Common color associations include:

• Blue: Integrity, Trust, Tranquility, Loyalty, Intelligence
• Green: Money, Growth, Freshness, Environmental-Friendliness
• Yellow: Happiness, Originality, Energy
• Purple: Royalty, Spirituality, Luxury
• Pink: Femininity, Compassion, Playfulness
• Red: Power, Strength, Passion
• Orange: Courage, Originality, Success
• White: Cleanliness, Purity, Freshness
• Black: Elegance, Drama, Strength

It is important for global brands to take note that color associations can vary according to culture. Blue’s perception in the U.S. may be drastically different than in the Middle East.

18. HOW DO YOU INTERACT WITH CUSTOMERS?

The voice you use to interact with customers via social media and content marketing is an extension of your brand voice. Are you humorous, or straight-to-the-point? Do you respond to questions with experience, or links to peer-reviewed studies? Your brand guidelines should include instruction for social media and customer interactions, in order to deliver a consistent brand experience.

19. HOW CAN YOU STREAMLINE VISUALS?

Once you’ve developed a visual branding style guide, assess it to see if it can be streamlined or improved. Your visual identity must be able to scale up and down across digital and non-digital mediums. Test the digital and print performance of your:

• Logos
• Color combinations
• Fonts

20. WHAT DOES YOUR VOICE SOUND LIKE?

When it comes to defining and documenting your brand voice, look to your customers for inspiration. When your buyer personas read and speak, what do they sound like?

• Are they academic or conversational?
• Do they reference studies and statistics frequently?
• Are they prone to incorporating anecdotes or stories?
• Are they long-winded or straight to the point?

Your brand’s voice should sound relevant to your buyer personas’ education level, language preferences, and tone.

FINDING YOUR BRAND IDENTITY

In an era of rampant digital disruption, brand identity is a crucial tool for developing customer loyalty. If your customers don’t relate to your brand’s visual identity, voice, and values, they won’t remember you, let alone develop the loyalty necessary to make a repeat purchase.

Defining a brand identity is a crucial first step towards developing a digital customer experience across multiple platforms, including your website, content marketing, social media, and more. By letting your customers buyer persona profiles and customer insights dictate your identity, you can develop a relevant brand that your customers will love.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of increasing the number and quality of visitors to a website by improving rankings in the algorithmic search engine results.

Research shows that websites on the first page of Google receive almost 95% of clicks, and studies show that results that appear higher up the page receive an increased click-through rate (CTR), and more traffic.

The algorithmic (‘natural’, ‘organic’, or ‘free’) search results are those that appear directly below the top pay-per-click adverts in Google, as highlighted below.

There are also various other listings that can appear in the Google search results, such as map listings, videos, the knowledge graph and more. SEO can include improving visibility in these result sets as well.

How Does SEO Work?

Google (and Bing, which also power Yahoo search results) score their search results largely based upon relevancy and authority of pages it has crawled and included in its web index, to a users query to provide the best answer.

Google uses over 200 signals in scoring their search results and SEO encompasses technical and creative activities to influence and improve some of those known signals. It’s often useful to not focus too much on individual ranking signals and look at the wider goal of Google, to provide the best answers for its users.

SEO, therefore, involves making sure a website is accessible, technically sound, uses words that people type into the search engines, and provides an excellent user experience, with useful and high quality, expert content that helps answers the user’s query.

Google has a very large team of search quality raters that evaluate the quality of search results, that gets fed into a machine learning algorithm. Google’s search quality rater guidelines provide plenty of detail and examples of what Google class as high or low-quality content and websites, and their emphasis on wanting to reward sites that clearly show their expertise, authority, and trust (EAT).

Google uses a hyperlink based algorithm (known as ‘PageRank’) to calculate the popularity and authority of a page, and while Google is far more sophisticated today, this is still a fundamental signal in ranking. SEO can therefore also include actions to help improve the number and quality of ‘inbound links’ to a website, from other websites. This activity has historically been known as ‘link building’, but is really just marketing a brand with an emphasis online, through content or digital PR for example.

Relevant and reputable websites linking to a website is a strong signal to Google that it might be of interest to its users, and can be trusted to appear in the search results for relevant queries.

How To Do SEO

SEO involves technical and creative activities that are often grouped into ‘Onsite SEO’ and ‘Offsite SEO’. This terminology is quite dated, but it is useful to understand, as it splits practices that can be performed on a website, and away from a website.

These activities require expertise, often from multiple individuals as the skillsets required to carry them out at a high level, are quite different – but they can also be learned. The other option is to hire a professional SEO agency, or SEO consultant to help in areas required.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO refers to activities on a website to improve organic visibility. This largely means optimizing a website and content to improve the accessibility, relevancy, and experience for users. Some of the typical activities include –

• Keyword Research – Analysing the types of words and frequency used by prospective customers to find brands services or products. Understanding their intent and a user’s expectations from their search.
• Technical Auditing – Ensuring the website can be crawled and indexed, is correctly geo-targeted, and is free from errors or user experience barriers.
• Onsite Optimisation – Improving the website structure, internal navigation, on-page alignment, and content relevancy to help prioritize key areas and target relevant search phrases.
• User Experience – Ensuring content shows expertise, authority, and trust, is simple to use, fast, and ultimately provides the best possible experience to users against the competition.

The above list only touches upon a small number of activities involved in Onsite SEO as an overview.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO refers to activities carried outside of a website to improve organic visibility. This is often referred to as ‘link building’, which aims to increase the number of reputable links from other websites, as search engines use them as scoring as a vote of trust.

Links from websites and pages with more trust, popularity, and relevancy will pass more value to another website, than an unknown, poor website that isn’t trusted by the search engines. So the quality of a link is the most important signal.

Some of the typical activities include –

• Content (‘Marketing’) – Reputable websites link to exceptional content. So creating amazing content will help attract links. This might include how to guide, a story, a visualization or infographic with compelling data.
• Digital PR – PR provides reasons for other websites to talk and link to a website. This might be internal newsflow, writing for external publications, original research or studies, expert interviews, quotes, product placement and much more.
• Outreach & Promotion – This involves communicating with key journalists, bloggers, influencers or webmasters about a brand, resource, content or PR to earn coverage and ultimately earn links to a website.

There’s obviously a huge number of reasons why a website might link to another and not all of them fit into the categories above. A good rule of thumb on whether a link is valuable is to consider the quality of referral traffic (visitors that might click on the link to visit your website). If the site won’t send any visitors, or the audience is completely unrelated and irrelevant, then it might not really be a link that’s worth pursuing.

It’s important to remember Link schemes such as buying links, exchanging links excessively, or low-quality directories and articles that aim to manipulate Google’s rankings, are against their guidelines and Google can take action by penalizing a website.

The best and most sustainable approach to improve the inbound links to a website is earning them, by providing genuine and compelling reasons for websites to cite and link to the brand and content for who they are, the service or product they provide or the content they create.

Resources To Learn SEO

There are lots of useful resources on the web to help learn more about SEO. Some of the key resources we recommend are as follows.

1. SEO Starter Guide – From Google
2. Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines – From Google
3. Beginners Guide To SEO – From Moz
4. Beginners Guide to Link Building – From Moz
5. Beginners Guide to Content Marketing – From Moz

Need Help With Your SEO?

Inbound 2.0 is an SEO agency that runs remarkably successful SEO campaigns in the most competitive sectors, using a unique blend of technical and creative expertise.

There’s nothing worse than pushy salespeople, which is why we don’t employ any. So if you’d like to discuss how SEO can help you with one of our consultants, then please just get in touch for a chat.

There’s no guaranteed time-frame for how long it will take for your website or new content to appear in Google’s search results. It can take anywhere from hours to weeks. Google must first index the new information and the time that takes varies according to a number of different factors. It’s ultimately out of your hands, but there are a few measures you can take to help speed up the process like submitting your domain name for the index, read on below for more info.

What is indexing?

When you do a Google search, Google doesn’t search the web—it searches its index of the web. Google keeps its index current by using software called “web crawlers” or “spiders.” Web crawlers prowl the web and gather data, particularly looking for new information like new websites, new content, and new links. That information is added to Google’s index, and once it’s in the index it can then be searched. When you launch a new site or add/alter content, it won’t be searchable until it has been indexed (but note that your new content is still accessible, simply by typing your website address into the address bar or following links there).
 

How do I know if my new content has been indexed?

You can determine whether or not your new content or website has been indexed simply by searching for it on Google. Try the following searches:

● “www” address. Type into Google your address, including the “www” bit. Preface it by also typing in “site:” e.g., site:www.minthair.co.nz

● “Non-www” address. Type in the same address without the “www” bit but still keep the “site:” preface e.g., site:minthair.co.nz

● Your company’s name. Type in the title of your business, and possibly also the industry. Use quotation marks around to ensure it searches for that exact phrase e.g., “Mint Bridal Hair Design.”

● A snippet of unique text. Find some text on your website that’s liable to be unique, and type that in using quotation marks e.g., “When looking for a hairdresser that you can trust creating a hairstyle for your wedding day you will want someone with experience and flair.”

If your content shows up, great! That means it has now been indexed. But if your site doesn’t show up, then it probably hasn’t been indexed yet.
 

How can I get my new content indexed faster?

You can try speeding up the process by simply asking Google to crawl your new site, page or significantly altered content. It’s quick and easy; just type in your website address into Google’s tool purpose-built for crawl requests (click here to visit this tool). But Google states upfront that there’s no guarantee this will move the process along any faster. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt anything so it’s probably worth trying.

External links. If there are links to your new website elsewhere on the web, then the chances of a web crawler discovering that content faster improves. If it’s a new website, you could add it to your social media profile (or create a new profile especially for it). You should also share the link e.g., do a Facebook post sharing the new link with your friends, or tweet the link out to your followers. Get set up on Google My Business which is a free directory and adds a Map search result for any local based searches. Another option is to write a post on an external blog that relates to your service, industry or website topic, make sure there is a link there pointing back to your website.

There’s no sure-fire way to get indexed faster, and it’s not an exact science. But don’t fret—Google’s web crawlers discover new content without you even needing to lift a finger. These measures may help, but your content will get indexed eventually regardless.
 

What if my content is indexed but doesn’t rank highly in search results?

Getting your site indexed is really just the beginning. Your site may be indexed but still not feature prominently in customer’s search results, which will mean fewer visitors to your site. To move up the rankings you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) to your website.

Retrieve questions, post answers, and provide frequently asked questions on your business locations.

Google released an update to the Google My Business API, the method developers can use to obtain data from Google My Business. The new version is numbered 4.3 and brings the addition of Q&A APIs so you can retrieve questions, post answers, and provide FAQs. It also lets you read reviews in bulk, identify unclaimed locations, report location issues and much more.

Here is a full list of what is new and what has changed in version 4.3:

Questions and Answers APIs:

Retrieve questions, post answers, and provide frequently asked questions on your business locations.

Bulk-Read Reviews:

Retrieve reviews for multiple locations in a single call.

Recommended GoogleLocations:

See unclaimed locations that Google thinks might be owned by you.

Report GoogleLocation Issues:

Report issues with either RecommendedGoogleLocations or GoogleLocations results.

Service Enum for PriceList sections:

Identify a PriceList section as either containing FOOD items or SERVICES provided.

Media Description:

Provide a caption when uploading new media.

CHAINS_QUERIES Insights:

Retrieve the number of times a location was shown as a result of a search for the chain it belongs to.

Notifications for Organization Accounts and Location Groups:

Accounts configured for Pub/Sub notifications will now also receive those notifications for any listings contained in an Organization Account or Location Groups they are an admin of.

ListLocations for Org Account and Location Groups:

accounts.locations.list called with a User Group or Organization account now displays all locations that are accessible by that account.

Why does it matter? These additions can help businesses that manage many locations, be it agencies or larger businesses with multiple locations. Using the API to build your own tools to better keep track of important information, as Q&As submitted about your businesses in Google Maps and local, is important. Be sure your local listings in Google are properly managed, maintained and looked over — sometimes APIs can help with that.

Retrieve questions, post answers, and provide frequently asked questions on your business locations.

Implementing psychological hooks in your email marketing campaigns can not just boost sales, but can also help you skyrocket your engagement and brand loyalty rates.

After all, understanding psychology allows you to guide your subscribers and customers to take the desired action. This helps you get better sales, but it also allows your customers to quickly see the value you’re offering.

Today I’ll show you the 5 science-backed email marketing psychological principles that will lead to better sales, engagement and customer loyalty.

It’s often said that the best way to sell a $2,000 watch is to put it next to a $10,000 watch.

This is what’s known as price anchoring. The truth is, most people are quite bad at determining the monetary value of anything.

What people do, actually, is just to compare it with a similar item. Sometimes this is easy to do (for example, with most food products). Other times, however, it’s much harder, especially when the item is a unique product.

● The science behind it

One of the most famous studies showing the effect of price anchoring came from Northcraft and Neale, who asked a group of respondents (including real estate experts) to estimate house values.

For the experiment, they were given pamphlets of the prices of surrounding homes, including some exaggerated prices.

The respondents (both students and experts) completely overestimated the price of the house due to the fake reference prices in the pamphlets.

● How to use it for better email campaigns

This one is pretty easy to implement. If you want to sell a moderately-priced item, it’s important that you first set a reference point.

The first product should be something pricier. Let’s say you want to sell headphones for $75. Let that be the second item that is shown in your emails.

The first item should be the more expensive headphones (both with similar features), let’s say ones priced at $150. After seeing that, the $75 dollar headphones will look that much more attractive.

Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less really emphasizes this point: the more options you give your customers, the fewer choices they’ll make.

That’s because they enter into a state of analysis paralysis, where they don’t know what to choose. It’s pretty much information overload.

If you want your readers to act, you need to limit the choices you present to them. You can also look at it as curation.

● The science behind it

In 2000, Iyengar and Lepper ran an experiment to see whether less was actually better. They showed a group of shoppers 24 different jams, and another group was shown just 6 types of jam.

The group that saw 24 different jams initially showed more interest, but only 3% ended up buying. The group that was shown just 6 jams had a much better conversion rate–30% ended up buying jam.

● How to use it for better email campaigns

This is a prime time to talk about the benefits of segmentation. You see, when you don’t segment your lists, you end up sending the same email to everyone. That’s why most marketers just add a bunch of products to appeal to the majority.

But with segmentation, you can send out different emails based on the segment that you created.

Nonetheless, for better conversions, you need to think of the item or items you’d like your subscribers to buy, and then create your campaigns around that.

That means you should limit the number of products in your emails. Have a featured item, and then 2 or 3 supporting items–and that’s it.

You’ll have better conversions with less work.

The Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO) is a powerful psychological motivator that gets people to act.

This is based on the fact that, well, people are scared that they’re gonna miss out on something (like an experience, event or investment) that they’ll end up regretting.

● The science behind it

Worchel, Lee, and Adewole explored FOMO in a popular experiment. They showed a group of students similar cookies in two different jars. The students had to rate the value of the two jars of cookies, and initially, they were valued pretty similarly.

Later, however, one of the jars had 8 cookies removed. Because of this, however, most of the students valued the jar with only 2 cookies in it much more than the one that had all 10 cookies.

● How to use it for better email campaigns

You can introduce FOMO into your email campaigns by adding some scarcity. This can be done by having sales, products or events on a limited time basis.

This is what Omnisend customer Runway Rogue did in the email below:

This creates a sense of urgency and scarcity so that subscribers felt more compelled to buy.

This email marketing psychology hack is based on asking people to agree to smaller requests before asking them to do the bigger ones.

This leads more people to agree to the bigger requests since you “warmed them up” with the smaller ones.

If you have a great e-commerce marketing strategy, you can easily use this along the way to get more of your subscribers to buy from you.

● The science behind it

An early study that showed the effectiveness of this psychological principle is the 1966 experiment by Freedman and Fraser.

Here, they called around to Californian housewives and asked to discuss the household products they use. Three days later, they called again to ask if 5-6 men could go to their homes and inspect their cupboard for 2 hours.

Those women that had agreed to the first request (to talk about household products) were two timers more likely to agree to the second (bigger) request.

● How to use it for better email campaigns

You can do smaller requests quite easily in your email marketing campaigns. In fact, you can start it when the subscriber first signs up—just add double opt-in to your popup forms (I recommend you use an exit-intent popup here, as it won’t annoy your visitors and generally gives the best conversion rates).

Afterward, you can make smaller steps on their customer journey by having them fill out a survey, do a quiz for a prize, or even download an ebook.

All of these things warm them up for the bigger request you have: to buy something from you.

Lastly, we have the interesting phenomenon known as reciprocity. This psychological principle comes from the social anxiety or pressure people feel when they unexpectedly receive something for free.

They feel an urgency to “pay back” this gift by giving something back of equal value, or sometimes of even greater value.

● The science behind it

Researcher Philip Kunz did an experiment on reciprocity by sending Christmas cards to 600 people. However, he had never met those people before: he just wanted to see how many of them would reciprocate.

Of those 600, he received almost 35% back. That’s right: more than 200 people sent a warm, wonderful Christmas card back to a man they’d never even met.

● How to use it for better email campaigns

One of the best ways to use reciprocity in your email marketing is to give something unexpected (and of value) to your subscribers.

You can do this with a free resource (like a great ebook or video course) or even a small gift. Your gift can be free shipping, a % discount, or even an actual gift, such as a keychain, coffee mug or something similar.

This will make it more likely for your subscribers to want to “pay you back” by buying something from your store.

So, which is the best? Out of all these 5, the one that is best for your store will depend on your products and e-commerce marketing strategy.

However, the one consistent rule in e-commerce, as well as in business in general is: ABT—always be testing.

That’s why it’s important that you see which works best for you and continue improving on that. That way, you’ll see much better and happier returning customers.

There’s no denying it – consumer voice search numbers are on the rise. We all know about this popular study from Comscore estimating that 50% of all searches made by 2020 will be through voice. Google has also started to track voice search stats, giving definitive proof that people have started to use voice search to make shopping lists receive info about deals and promotions from brands, and to order stuff off the internet.

In other words, people have already started to shop using voice search, and it won’t be long before you, as a business, will HAVE to adapt to this shift in consumer search behavior. The good news, however, is that you won’t have to do too much if you want to optimize your business for the voice search revolution. But more about that later. Let’s focus on how voice search will affect businesses in the next 3 years.

To ascertain how voice search will affect businesses in the near future, we also need to look at two things:

● Where do the worlds of voice search and businesses collide?

● What are the devices that will power users to affect businesses using voice search?

For the most part, these are the two things that will help us judge how voice search will affect businesses. Let us now answer each of these two questions in detail.

Where do the worlds of voice search and businesses collide?

While users are driving around, or just getting ready to head out to eat or shop, they tend to use voice search for searches instead of text. Cases like these, where users talk to their smart device and completely avoid using touch/display interfaces will affect businesses directly.

In the future, it will soon be possible for consumers to complete a purchase using nothing but voice search. Third party apps or other e-commerce giants might give users the power to completely go from product/service discovery to purchase using nothing but voice, and this will cause a need for businesses to be ready for a voice-first world.

With the rise of products such as Apple Pay coupled with Face ID on the iPhone X, etc. we are already moving towards a scenario where touch and text input will be used lesser. Primitive ways of making quick purchases without using a smartphone or a computer have already started seeping into consumer households – take Amazon’s Dash Buttons, for instance. All that a user needs to do is click a button, and the household item will be delivered directly to their doorstep. It will be only a matter of time before technology like this will become voice activated.

What are the devices that will power users to affect businesses using voice search?

Alongside the rise of voice search in smartphones, there has also been an increase in the production and purchase of voice-enabled smart devices like smart speakers and wearable tech in the recent past. Two of the leading sources of consumer voice searches have been Google Home and Amazon Echo. It is estimated that 500,000 Google Home devices were shipped during 2016. Amazon sold an estimated 4.4 million units of the Amazon Echo during the first year of sales.

Surveys report that 56% of online grocery shoppers already use or plan to use voice search enabled smart assistants or speakers to make their purchases. Increase in the purchase of wearable tech and the difficulty in using text inputs on these devices will increasingly contribute to the prominence of voice search in the coming years.

How will voice search directly impact the way businesses operate?

At this point, it goes without saying that voice search will demand businesses to change their SEO strategy, while also presenting them with several opportunities to expand their business’ marketing. These are some of the major things that will occur in the near future owing to the rise in voice searches:

● Partnership opportunities: Walmart is already partnering with Google to enable voice-based shopping. More opportunities such as this for letting businesses allow transactions and sales from customers to take place using voice only might pop up in the next few years.

● Focus on digital marketing spends: Businesses that want to leverage voice search to improve their online marketing will end up spending more on digital marketing and reworking their SEO for voice search soon.

● FAQ Strategy: Since voice searches greatly involve questions, there is bound to be an increase in search queries that start with ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’. To tackle this, businesses will shift to a strategy that involves them adding a lot of FAQs to their resources/websites to let users get the right answers concerning the business.

What should businesses do to prepare for the voice search revolution?

Different smart devices use different sources to get their business and listings data. Google Home, it goes without saying, uses Google My Business for its listings, Apple Watch and Siri use Apple’s MapConnect, and while it is still not clear where Alexa pulls its data from, it is widely agreed that it is from either the repositories mentioned above, or from one of the four major data aggregators.

Consumers are not going to stop checking out business location alone, either. They’re going to want data about your business hours, how expensive it is, and what the reviews of the business are like.

If businesses want to stay ahead of the curve and optimize for the voice search revolution, they will undoubtedly have to do these things:

● Get listed on all major platforms online. If you feel like it’s going to be difficult to manually list your business with rich data on every single platform, then you can use a listings management tool like Synup to get the job done.

● Maintain a good online reputation. You can work on improving your online star ratings by using a review generation wizard as well.

● Work on your business website’s local schema and build content to improve your chances of getting on position zero of Google

● Get your website’s local SEO done right in order to improve your chances of ranking higher on local searches

● See how your business is showing up on voice searches by using a voice readiness test tool. This will help you gauge how customers will find about your business on voice searches, and spot incorrect/missing data on your business listings

This is pretty much all that you need to do in order to make sure you are ready for voice searches. In the coming years, we are bound to see several changes in the voice search realm, ones that concern smart assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, as well as chatbots for businesses and third-party apps that can change the game for businesses.

Make sure that you keep yourself in the loop with rising voice search trends and changes in local SEO to keep your business optimized for consumer discovery and e-commerce transactions.

User experience is an anchor of modern business. You can’t maintain a long-term profitability if you don’t satisfy the needs and preferences of your customers. Web design plays a major role in this field because judgments on website credibility are 75% based on its overall aesthetics and usability.

Customer satisfaction ultimately influences conversion rates, so it’s very important to choose the best design solution for your company. At the moment, most designers are arguing over a simple question – which one drives more conversions, responsive or adaptive web design?

In this post, we will try to solve the riddle, so keep reading to find out!

Before we move on to the conversion theme, we must explain the concepts of responsive and adaptive web design. By definition, responsive web design offers users the optimal viewing experience regardless of the device type.

To put it simply, it’s an all-around player that doesn’t require code changes for different devices – mobile, laptop, tablet, etc. Responsive design usually shrinks content on smaller windows, putting priority elements in front and improving the overall readability of the content. This strategy has multiple advantages:

● Faster mobile development at lower costs. It’s easier to make a “one size fits all” solution than to create stand-alone mobile apps

● Reduced maintenance costs as there is no need for additional testing or support

● Responsive design makes the website simple and intuitive, thus decreasing bounce rates

● Improves search engine optimization because it all comes from a single URL

● Easier website analytics and reporting since the entire traffic is coming from one source only

On the other hand, adaptive web design creates different website layouts for different devices and screen dimensions. When a user enters your website, adaptive web design immediately recognizes device type and provides a user with the corresponding layout.

Most companies develop layouts for three types of devices: smartphones, desktop computers, and tablets. Adaptive web design also has a number of comparative advantages:

● The adaptive design ensures faster page loads because it only delivers features needed for a specific device

● Optimized user experience in case of multiplatform browsing

● It serves a wider audience because everyone cannot afford state of the art tools and gadgets

Now that we’ve seen the benefits of both web design strategies, we can conclude that responsive design makes a stronger impact on the mobile experience, while its adaptive counterpart serves better across various channels.

What does it mean in terms of conversion rates?

According to the study, the conversion rate is nearly three times higher on the desktop vs smartphone. Bearing this in mind, we can say that adaptive web design could be declared a winner if your business strongly relies on desktop users.

However, the fact remains that global PC sales are declining. While the number of laptops and desktop computer remains high – with over 260 million predicted shipments in 2018 – the mobile market is growing rapidly and taking over the business supremacy.

Research shows that smartphone devices will soon drive 80% of global internet usage. At the same time, Google reports that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing. Other stats also reveal the same trend:

● Retail e-commerce sales reached $2.3 trillion in 2017, making a 23.2% increase year on year.

● Mobile e-commerce could rake in $3.5 trillion in 2021 and then makeup almost three-quarters of entire e-commerce sales.

● Consumers who shop online using their mobile devices tend to spend twice as much via digital channels than those not buying on smartphones.

The stats clearly reveal that the global business is becoming increasingly mobile-oriented. As a result, websites that stick to adaptive web design might experience a declining conversion rate trend. But it doesn’t end with online conversions exclusively.

According to Deloitte, the biggest impact of smartphones isn’t direct sales generated through the mobile channel, but rather the influence they exert over traditional in-store sales to drive in-store conversion and in-store average order size.

Numerous companies already tested both web design versions to see how they influence conversions, and most of them came to the same conclusion. For example, Skinny Ties experienced a 13% conversion growth (71% for iPhone alone) since the introduction of responsive design. Besides that, the company improved a number of other indicators:

● They reached a 42% revenue growth for all devices, including a 377% increase for iPhone

● Bounce rate lowered by 23%

● Visit duration increased by 44%

Another example is O’Neill Clothing, an e-commerce store that decided to test the responsive design. They conducted a six-week trial to explore newly introduced mobile patterns, making the website fluid, increasing font size, and reducing the number of columns. As you can see, the results were staggering:

● iPhone conversions +65%; Android +407%

● iPhone transactions: +112%; Android +333%

● iPhone revenue: +101%; Android +591%

While this is only a couple of examples, it obviously reveals the potential of responsive web design and its effects on conversion rate.

There is no reason to go much further than Amazon, a game-changer in the field of online sales. The global e-commerce giant puts an emphasis on mobile responsiveness building the single column structure, keeping the critical features atop (cart, search…), and using the minimalistic approach to aesthetical elements like colors or graphics.

Therefore, you should stay up to date with the new developments in this field and test responsive web design by yourself – it could become a huge mobiles sales driver relatively soon.

Responsive and adaptive web design both have their own advantages and shortcomings. However, it seems like responsive design wins the battle of mobile conversions, so this may be the right way to go if your company is smartphone-oriented. But if you still expect a lot of desktop users to become your customers, don’t be afraid of embracing adaptive web design.

Conversions are pretty much the key to any good business, right? Everybody knows that. You can’t really have a business if you don’t convert leads into customers and make sales. So you’ve gotten your website completely optimized and it’s doing really well with people…at least, it’s doing really well with people who are viewing it on their laptops or desktop computers.

However, and especially since Google’s serious crackdown on mobile responsiveness, ­­it is absolutely essential that your website also converts well over mobile. 80% of customers use their smartphones to shop and 70% of online searches end in a conversion within an hour. So if your website and landing pages aren’t mobile­friendly, you are seriously missing out.

Let’s be upfront about this. Just because your website is mobile responsive doesn’t also mean that it converts well. Sometimes mobile adaptations of your website cause important information to be below the fold or it takes way too much scrolling time. Here are some tips for really amping up your mobile website conversion rate, so that everyone shopping your website on mobile leaves with a purchase.

For obvious reasons, smartphones do not have the screen capacity that a laptop or desktop computer does. This means that a landing page on a computer (that already takes some serious scrolling time) is going to triple the scrolling time. People are going to get sick of it and leave your site, causing your bounce rate to skyrocket.

Let’s go over this example of an update that HubSpot made to one of their landing pages to make it convert better on mobile devices.

They made some simple changes to it and were able to turn it into a four­scroll process, which cut their previous eight­scroll process in half. This increases the likelihood of a new mobile lead because signing up for the ebook is now so fast and easy.

See what we mean? Less is more. Don’t try to cram a bunch of copy onto your landing page. Get straight to the point. People are looking at your website on their mobile device for a reason. So give them what they’re looking for right upfront.

Pop­up banners are a great way to get more conversions on a desktop, but on a mobile device, it doesn’t really work. So if you’ve ever considered using a pop­up banner on your mobile website, then we need to have a serious talk.

Don’t. Do. It.

Ever.

Pop up banners on mobile devices will absolutely kill your conversion rate. Pop­up banners disrupt the buying mindset that your mobile viewer is already in, potentially losing you a sale. (And you do not want that to happen.) You want the mobile user experience to be as quick and seamless as possible.

So when it comes to pop­ups, void it from mobile devices.

Sure, any good e-commerce site is going to create some type of urgency. And they are able to do it by making use of the psychological trick called the theory of FOMO.

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out and as you could have guessed, it has a major influence on how consumers behave.

So how do you apply this theory and create some type of urgency? Methods to how you use the theory of FOMO is really up to your creativity. One of the most common and effective ways of creating this urgency is by throwing a special offer into the mix.

Let your mobile users know that you know that they’re visiting your site on a mobile device and that you have a special offer specifically for mobile shoppers only. Since a lot of mobile shoppers are just “window shopping,” this compels users to buy now rather than putting it off until later or until they’re on a desktop computer.

Create an offer like a “buy one get one free” or free shipping or 15% off. Make the offer even more urgent by telling them that they only have 24 hours to buy after putting something in their cart to get the special discount.

Depending on your business, sometimes a phone call converts way better than anything else on a mobile device. Don’t make it difficult for potential customers to find your phone number and call you. Create a big, bright, attention­grabbing button in the middle of your landing page that says “Call now!” that mobile users can click and immediately call your business. Facebook advertising also has a click­to­call ad type for mobile ads as well, so you can also easily take advantage of this.

If your business does well with email leads or sales over mobile, then make your “Download”, “Buy Now,” or “Checkout” calls to action just as easy to find. Tell your website users exactly what you want them to do.

If you haven’t already gathered this, we want everything over mobile to be as fast and painless as humanly possible. 1, 2, 3, over and out. Sold. Bam.

Your people don’t want to fill out an endless form or go through multiple checkout pages. Instead of simply creating a mobile checkout that mirrors your desktop checkout, design a mobile checkout that requires as little information as possible.

Allow users to process payments via credit card, PayPal, or even processes like Amazon Payments. Have Google Maps fill in addresses, include a visual calendar for dates, and don’t require long forms to be filled out.

By keeping the process as short as possible, you’re decreasing the possibility of shopping carts left abandoned and sales being lost.

A large number of images can slow down your website like crazy. One of the top reasons for mobile users to click away from your website is a long load­time. Not only can this lose your business potential sales, but it hikes up your bounce rate like crazy. Make sure that the images for your mobile site have smaller sizes and can adapt to the various screen sizes (mobile vs tablet).

Rule of thumb is to have about five product photos per page. However, if that is bogging down your site, try to limit it to only one feature photo on the main page, with secondary photos posted on a different page.

User experience is everything on a mobile device, and a slow load time does not give off a good user experience. Focus on finding a way for each page of your website to load within 3 seconds on a mobile device, to ensure that nobody exits out of your site.

People can be clumsy with their iPhones. We’ve all had that unfortunate phone­falling­on­your­face moment. And sometimes we also accidentally click a link that was way too close to the one that our thumb was trying to get to.

Don’t let that happen to your customers. If there is anything clickable, keep it a safe distance away from other clickable links. Involuntary clicks can increase your drop­off rate when people get frustrated that they can’t get to where they want to go on your mobile website.

If a mobile user lands on your website and is immediately faced with a wall of text, that could be pretty daunting and they may just leave your website because they don’t want to read it all.

Instead, start with an engaging headline, videos, or image slides. Incorporate contests and games into your website and landing pages. Do not let new visitors be prompted with the dreaded wall of text. Mobile users tend to have a lower attention span than desktop users and all they want is to find exactly what they’re looking for without having to read a novel to find it.

This goes slightly back to rule #1: less is more. On a desktop sales page, you want to provide as much value as possible. You want a long form sales page with testimonials, product shots, pain points, and more.

For a mobile­friendly sales page, you want only the most relevant content to getting a sale. You want the most important content for your product/service to be above the fold. (On a mobile device, this means the first section of content that they see without scrolling down.) Many mobile responsive websites adapt to only show the product image above the fold. You need to manipulate this so that only a small scroll shows pertinent product information and users don’t feel like they’ll be scrolling forever to get all of the info.

We don’t ever want to omit the idea that oftentimes people on mobile devices are only window shopping and they will only make the purchase when they get onto a desktop computer. You always want to make it easy for those people.

Give the people what they want by offering an option to get the shopping cart or website in an email so that they can pick up where they left off from a different device. Create call-to-actions like, “Want to discuss this purchase with your spouse? Email it to yourself!” or, “Shopping at work? Buy when you get home!” so that they have an incentive to save their shopping cart for later.

Regardless of how well your website does with mobile conversions, there always will be those people who are mobile shoppers and desktop buyers. Don’t ever miss out on those sales and implement an “email shopping cart” option today.

Let’s recap: mobile responsiveness and high mobile conversion rates are not the same. Even if your website does adapt well to mobile devices, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it converts well. With a whopping 80% of people using a smartphone to search the internet, you want to make sure that your website is fully optimized for high mobile conversion rates. Take all of these recommendations under your wing and begin implementing them to create a seamless mobile shopping user experience.