5 Neuroscience Secrets to a Better Customer Acquisition Engine

Your brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, which are the cells that enable you to process information. What makes these neurons exponentially more powerful is the electrical or chemical connections they create with one another through synapses – your brain actually houses approximately 2 ½ miles of neuronal network interconnections in every cubic millimeter of gray matter.

Clearly, your brain packs quite the punch. In fact, last year a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University collaborated with one from University of California, Berkeley to calculate that the human brain is actually up to 30X more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Incredible, right?

When considering the dominating influence that the human brain has on the purchase decisions being made by a company’s target audience, it’s stunning how little focus is applied to neuroscience in the customer acquisition development process at many companies.

It behooves any marketer to leverage the power of neuroscience in attracting attention, building relationships, and moving prospects to action. To that end, here are five effective ways to use neuroscience to rev up your customer acquisition engine.

1. Deviate

First, you need to grab the attention of your target audience. On average, your prospective customer encounters over 5,000 marketing messages daily, and this doesn’t even count social media. What’s a marketer to do to cut through all the noise?

Deviate! The brain is hardwired to love surprises, as evidenced in neuroscientific studies lead by Gregory S. Berns, M.D., Ph.D at Emory’s Neuroimaging Group. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure brain activity, Berns’ team showed that the brain actively responds more to the unexpected than even to things a person likes or finds pleasurable.

The dashboard SaaS company, Domo, which targets business executives, ran a series of ads screaming “CFO Porn!” and “Stop making I.T. your report monkey” in an otherwise serious market where they could have otherwise released standard ads about big data.

When seeing the ads, you couldn’t help but click on them. With Domo’s annual revenue reportedly approaching upwards of $100 million, deviation has certainly helped it to stand out.

The monthly razor subscription company Dollar Shave Club has utterly upended a mature industry with its series of jaw-dropping, laugh-out-loud videos, mocking the restrictions in drugstores that treat razor customers like felons or making fun of the excessive technology claims by the established players in the industry. Within 48 hours after launching their first video, approximately 12,000 people signed up for the subscription service. Within a few months, that exploded to 330,000. That first video? It now has more than 22 million views.

Deviating does not necessarily mean shock and awe, though. It just means being demonstrably different from the competition. Take the customer support software company Groove. Its blog first documented its rise from zero to $100K in monthly revenue and now to $500K in monthly revenue. They reveal EVERYTHING, showing you every pimple and scratch along the way. The level of transparency is unprecedented, and you can’t help but get sucked in and become a fan.

So shake it up and be different. Really different! If your brand awareness and direct response activities at the top of the funnel are currently blending in with the massive amount of noise enveloping your audience, craft your marketing for surprise and delight.

Not only does deviation help you to stand out among competing marketing messages, it also helps your target audience to remember you. Today’s consumer or B2B buyer has a higher threshold for stimulation than in the past. If the messages they are consuming are similar, it becomes more difficult for the brain to do the work of figuring out which messages to remember. The more you can deviate from the other inputs, the more likely they are to recall your message when it’s time to buy.

2. Evoke an Emotional Response

If you want new customers, evoke an emotional response. Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D., principal of a consumer psychology practice, reports in Psychology Today that emotional ads outperform content-based ads based on purchase intent by 3-to-1 for TV and 2-to-1 for print intent. Murray also points to fMRI neuro-imagery that shows consumers primarily use emotions over information (brand attributes, features, and facts) to evaluate brands.

According to a study from Google and CEB titled From Promotion to Emotion: Connecting B2B Customers to Brands, B2B brands achieve twice the impact with buyers when using emotional marketing that communicates personal value compared to marketing based on business value. From the study, “Despite our attempts to make purely rational decisions, we are primarily driven by emotional motivations… Purchase intent dips when messaging becomes less emotional.”

In studies by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, it was revealed that without emotions, people found it almost impossible to make decisions. Damasio studied a group of people with damage to the part of the brain that triggers emotions yet with their reasoning otherwise unaffected. What Damasio uncovered was that these individuals couldn’t feel strongly enough about one option versus another to make even simple decisions like what to eat, let alone what to purchase.

In other words, if your website is not evoking an emotive response in your site visitors, your marketing is essentially pushing your prospects to NOT make a purchase decision. This is why the marketing of companies like Mailchimp, Autodesk, and Google are centered on emotions. It’s why marketing powerhouses such as Nike, Apple, P&G, Red Bull, and MasterCard focus their marketing on your heart.

The benefits of a strong emotional connection with your audience extend even beyond the purchase itself. Emotion was the number one driver of customer loyalty in 17 of 18 industries studied by Forrester. Not only are emotions critical in ensuring your prospects make the purchase in the first place, but they are also critical in making sure your prospects continue to purchase from you again and again, reducing churn.

3. Identify Their Urgent Wants

People visit your website for one of two reasons. They either want to achieve a goal or eliminate pain. So figure out exactly how your offering does either or both for your site visitors, and then cut the crap and focus all of your messaging on this.

There are different methods to achieve this. One way is a hardcore message that takes your audience by surprise with its penetrating directness. For example, certain marketing teams find it painful to create landing pages in order to drive new leads. Sometimes, they are required to have their web team do the heavy lifting for every page. The SaaS landing page solution Instapage eliminates this pain, with a website containing the super simple and short headline, “Create a Landing Page in Just 3 Minutes” and the call-to-action button “Build My Page Now.”

The clarity, directness, and boldness make the message not only immediately understandable, but also immediately impactful.

Another approach is to use the power of mirror neurons to move your audience to action. Mirror neurons were identified by a team of scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, Italy that was monitoring the brain waves of monkeys. When a graduate student walked into the lab with an ice-cream cone and then raised the cone to his mouth, the monkey’s brain started firing neurons in reaction. What was amazing was that those neurons were the same neurons as if the monkey were eating the ice-cream itself. In other words, the monkey’s brain did not differentiate between the observation of the eating of ice-cream and the actual act of eating it oneself.

Let’s say that your site visitor is looking for financial management software. Instead of showing only screens of your interface, show your prospective customer what their life could look like if they used your product. The top of the Mint.com home page displays a person by the waterfront under the headline “That Horizon Might Be Closer Than You Think. We’ll help you get there by managing your money and budgets better every day.” The urgent want of the site visitor is not the tactical idea of organizing one’s finances, but instead is peace of mind by achieving sufficient wealth and eliminating money-related anxiety. And through mirror neurons, Mint is triggering their neurons so that site visitors feel as if they are already achieving this.

This is the strategy that many fitness and weight loss programs use in their marketing. All the before-after examples that they feed you are to activate your mirror neurons, because they know that your urgent want is to lose weight and look fit. If they focus instead on specific exercises, or diets, or ingredients in their messaging, the impact is weakened, because the brain does not react as viscerally.

4. Scare the Heck Out of ‘Em

People fear loss more strongly than they seek gain. This aversion to loss is powerful, and can be used effectively when you show prospective customers all the negative effects caused by not purchasing your product.

What’s especially surprising is that even if you present the same information to the prospect but frame it in the sense of what they lose, your conversions can increase. For example, instead of speaking to how your product saves the prospect money, tell them to avoid losing money by making the purchase.

A UCLA study was the first to provide neural evidence that people are hard-wired to avoid loss more than seek gain. The study examined the behavior of people who were given 250+ opportunities to gamble with $30, with a 50-50 chance of winning each time. For example, would they agree to a coin toss in which you could win $30 but could just as easily lose $20? On average, with the risk of losing $10, participants in the study needed the chance to win $19 in order to accept the gamble. The study found that the reward center of the brain responds not only to actual gain and loss, but to potential gain and loss.

Quantifying people’s predilection for loss aversion, Professor Daniel Kahneman at the University of California, Berkeley, who later won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, found that most people are about twice as sensitive to potential losses as to potential gains.

In the examples below, the automated investment software company Betterment uses loss aversion in its messaging to make its site visitors anxious about losing money to excessive fees. They then take that message further by detailing the different types of fees site visitors should worry about losing, such as trade fees, transaction fees, and rebalancing fees.

5. Price It Like You Mean It

You know that the price you set will influence whether a prospective customer buys from you. But beyond just the price, the actual display of the price can also have a major impact at a subconscious level on the buying decision.

Research findings by professors at the University of Richmond and Clark University published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology reveal that the brain believes that a price is actually more affordable or more expensive in just the presentation of the number itself. For example, the price $1,000.00 could be written as $1,000.00, $1,000, $1000.00, $1000 or $1K. The shorter the display of the number, the more affordable it is perceived, even though all of the actual numbers are exactly the same.

A University of Pennsylvania/Carnegie Mellon University study published in the Journal of Consumer Research further revealed that the framing of a price can have a drastic impact on purchase rates. For example, by changing the language for an overnight shipping charge from “A $5 Fee” to “A Small $5 Fee”, purchase rates of tightwads increased by 20%.

Another pricing strategy to drive your prospects to make the purchase is through the use of multiple price points. Even if you have only one product, it’s important to segment the pricing into multiple options (even if one option is going to end up representing 90%+ of the sales).

When I worked at Panasonic, we would always add a more expensive option to any product. Psychologically, when the brain sees two options, it makes it easier for the prospective buyer to make the purchase, as they are either going to feel good about saving money and purchasing the cheaper option, or feel an elevated sense of worth by buying the more expensive option. This is called perceptual contrast.

But keep it simple! Getting carried away by offering more pricing options can easily backfire. In a study by Sheena S. Iyengar at Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper at Stanford University, researchers set up a jam-tasting table at a supermarket. At times they offered six varieties of jam, and at others 24 varieties. While more options brought more tasters, only 3% actually bought the jam. Compare this with a 30% purchase rate when only six varieties were offered. That’s a 10X difference in purchase rate!

Conclusion

The brain is a major influence on whether your target audience will respond to your marketing and will make a purchase from you. By structuring your customer acquisition funnel based on an understanding of neuroscience, you can significantly accelerate your customer growth, increase conversions, and build your business.

About the Author: Tom Shapiro is the CEO of Stratabeat, Inc., a branding, marketing, and design agency. Through his career, Shapiro has developed marketing strategies for a range of startups as well as Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, UnitedHealthcare, and P&G. Follow him on Twitter at @TomShapiro and @Stratabeat.

5 Neuroscience Secrets to a Better Customer Acquisition Engine

Your brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, which are the cells that enable you to process information. What makes these neurons exponentially more powerful is the electrical or chemical connections they create with one another through synapses – your brain actually houses approximately 2 ½ miles of neuronal network interconnections in every cubic millimeter of gray matter.

Clearly, your brain packs quite the punch. In fact, last year a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University collaborated with one from University of California, Berkeley to calculate that the human brain is actually up to 30X more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Incredible, right?

When considering the dominating influence that the human brain has on the purchase decisions being made by a company’s target audience, it’s stunning how little focus is applied to neuroscience in the customer acquisition development process at many companies.

It behooves any marketer to leverage the power of neuroscience in attracting attention, building relationships, and moving prospects to action. To that end, here are five effective ways to use neuroscience to rev up your customer acquisition engine.

1. Deviate

First, you need to grab the attention of your target audience. On average, your prospective customer encounters over 5,000 marketing messages daily, and this doesn’t even count social media. What’s a marketer to do to cut through all the noise?

Deviate! The brain is hardwired to love surprises, as evidenced in neuroscientific studies lead by Gregory S. Berns, M.D., Ph.D at Emory’s Neuroimaging Group. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure brain activity, Berns’ team showed that the brain actively responds more to the unexpected than even to things a person likes or finds pleasurable.

The dashboard SaaS company, Domo, which targets business executives, ran a series of ads screaming “CFO Porn!” and “Stop making I.T. your report monkey” in an otherwise serious market where they could have otherwise released standard ads about big data.

When seeing the ads, you couldn’t help but click on them. With Domo’s annual revenue reportedly approaching upwards of $100 million, deviation has certainly helped it to stand out.

The monthly razor subscription company Dollar Shave Club has utterly upended a mature industry with its series of jaw-dropping, laugh-out-loud videos, mocking the restrictions in drugstores that treat razor customers like felons or making fun of the excessive technology claims by the established players in the industry. Within 48 hours after launching their first video, approximately 12,000 people signed up for the subscription service. Within a few months, that exploded to 330,000. That first video? It now has more than 22 million views.

Deviating does not necessarily mean shock and awe, though. It just means being demonstrably different from the competition. Take the customer support software company Groove. Its blog first documented its rise from zero to $100K in monthly revenue and now to $500K in monthly revenue. They reveal EVERYTHING, showing you every pimple and scratch along the way. The level of transparency is unprecedented, and you can’t help but get sucked in and become a fan.

So shake it up and be different. Really different! If your brand awareness and direct response activities at the top of the funnel are currently blending in with the massive amount of noise enveloping your audience, craft your marketing for surprise and delight.

Not only does deviation help you to stand out among competing marketing messages, it also helps your target audience to remember you. Today’s consumer or B2B buyer has a higher threshold for stimulation than in the past. If the messages they are consuming are similar, it becomes more difficult for the brain to do the work of figuring out which messages to remember. The more you can deviate from the other inputs, the more likely they are to recall your message when it’s time to buy.

2. Evoke an Emotional Response

If you want new customers, evoke an emotional response. Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D., principal of a consumer psychology practice, reports in Psychology Today that emotional ads outperform content-based ads based on purchase intent by 3-to-1 for TV and 2-to-1 for print intent. Murray also points to fMRI neuro-imagery that shows consumers primarily use emotions over information (brand attributes, features, and facts) to evaluate brands.

According to a study from Google and CEB titled From Promotion to Emotion: Connecting B2B Customers to Brands, B2B brands achieve twice the impact with buyers when using emotional marketing that communicates personal value compared to marketing based on business value. From the study, “Despite our attempts to make purely rational decisions, we are primarily driven by emotional motivations… Purchase intent dips when messaging becomes less emotional.”

In studies by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, it was revealed that without emotions, people found it almost impossible to make decisions. Damasio studied a group of people with damage to the part of the brain that triggers emotions yet with their reasoning otherwise unaffected. What Damasio uncovered was that these individuals couldn’t feel strongly enough about one option versus another to make even simple decisions like what to eat, let alone what to purchase.

In other words, if your website is not evoking an emotive response in your site visitors, your marketing is essentially pushing your prospects to NOT make a purchase decision. This is why the marketing of companies like Mailchimp, Autodesk, and Google are centered on emotions. It’s why marketing powerhouses such as Nike, Apple, P&G, Red Bull, and MasterCard focus their marketing on your heart.

The benefits of a strong emotional connection with your audience extend even beyond the purchase itself. Emotion was the number one driver of customer loyalty in 17 of 18 industries studied by Forrester. Not only are emotions critical in ensuring your prospects make the purchase in the first place, but they are also critical in making sure your prospects continue to purchase from you again and again, reducing churn.

3. Identify Their Urgent Wants

People visit your website for one of two reasons. They either want to achieve a goal or eliminate pain. So figure out exactly how your offering does either or both for your site visitors, and then cut the crap and focus all of your messaging on this.

There are different methods to achieve this. One way is a hardcore message that takes your audience by surprise with its penetrating directness. For example, certain marketing teams find it painful to create landing pages in order to drive new leads. Sometimes, they are required to have their web team do the heavy lifting for every page. The SaaS landing page solution Instapage eliminates this pain, with a website containing the super simple and short headline, “Create a Landing Page in Just 3 Minutes” and the call-to-action button “Build My Page Now.”

The clarity, directness, and boldness make the message not only immediately understandable, but also immediately impactful.

Another approach is to use the power of mirror neurons to move your audience to action. Mirror neurons were identified by a team of scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, Italy that was monitoring the brain waves of monkeys. When a graduate student walked into the lab with an ice-cream cone and then raised the cone to his mouth, the monkey’s brain started firing neurons in reaction. What was amazing was that those neurons were the same neurons as if the monkey were eating the ice-cream itself. In other words, the monkey’s brain did not differentiate between the observation of the eating of ice-cream and the actual act of eating it oneself.

Let’s say that your site visitor is looking for financial management software. Instead of showing only screens of your interface, show your prospective customer what their life could look like if they used your product. The top of the Mint.com home page displays a person by the waterfront under the headline “That Horizon Might Be Closer Than You Think. We’ll help you get there by managing your money and budgets better every day.” The urgent want of the site visitor is not the tactical idea of organizing one’s finances, but instead is peace of mind by achieving sufficient wealth and eliminating money-related anxiety. And through mirror neurons, Mint is triggering their neurons so that site visitors feel as if they are already achieving this.

This is the strategy that many fitness and weight loss programs use in their marketing. All the before-after examples that they feed you are to activate your mirror neurons, because they know that your urgent want is to lose weight and look fit. If they focus instead on specific exercises, or diets, or ingredients in their messaging, the impact is weakened, because the brain does not react as viscerally.

4. Scare the Heck Out of ‘Em

People fear loss more strongly than they seek gain. This aversion to loss is powerful, and can be used effectively when you show prospective customers all the negative effects caused by not purchasing your product.

What’s especially surprising is that even if you present the same information to the prospect but frame it in the sense of what they lose, your conversions can increase. For example, instead of speaking to how your product saves the prospect money, tell them to avoid losing money by making the purchase.

A UCLA study was the first to provide neural evidence that people are hard-wired to avoid loss more than seek gain. The study examined the behavior of people who were given 250+ opportunities to gamble with $30, with a 50-50 chance of winning each time. For example, would they agree to a coin toss in which you could win $30 but could just as easily lose $20? On average, with the risk of losing $10, participants in the study needed the chance to win $19 in order to accept the gamble. The study found that the reward center of the brain responds not only to actual gain and loss, but to potential gain and loss.

Quantifying people’s predilection for loss aversion, Professor Daniel Kahneman at the University of California, Berkeley, who later won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, found that most people are about twice as sensitive to potential losses as to potential gains.

In the examples below, the automated investment software company Betterment uses loss aversion in its messaging to make its site visitors anxious about losing money to excessive fees. They then take that message further by detailing the different types of fees site visitors should worry about losing, such as trade fees, transaction fees, and rebalancing fees.

5. Price It Like You Mean It

You know that the price you set will influence whether a prospective customer buys from you. But beyond just the price, the actual display of the price can also have a major impact at a subconscious level on the buying decision.

Research findings by professors at the University of Richmond and Clark University published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology reveal that the brain believes that a price is actually more affordable or more expensive in just the presentation of the number itself. For example, the price $1,000.00 could be written as $1,000.00, $1,000, $1000.00, $1000 or $1K. The shorter the display of the number, the more affordable it is perceived, even though all of the actual numbers are exactly the same.

A University of Pennsylvania/Carnegie Mellon University study published in the Journal of Consumer Research further revealed that the framing of a price can have a drastic impact on purchase rates. For example, by changing the language for an overnight shipping charge from “A $5 Fee” to “A Small $5 Fee”, purchase rates of tightwads increased by 20%.

Another pricing strategy to drive your prospects to make the purchase is through the use of multiple price points. Even if you have only one product, it’s important to segment the pricing into multiple options (even if one option is going to end up representing 90%+ of the sales).

When I worked at Panasonic, we would always add a more expensive option to any product. Psychologically, when the brain sees two options, it makes it easier for the prospective buyer to make the purchase, as they are either going to feel good about saving money and purchasing the cheaper option, or feel an elevated sense of worth by buying the more expensive option. This is called perceptual contrast.

But keep it simple! Getting carried away by offering more pricing options can easily backfire. In a study by Sheena S. Iyengar at Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper at Stanford University, researchers set up a jam-tasting table at a supermarket. At times they offered six varieties of jam, and at others 24 varieties. While more options brought more tasters, only 3% actually bought the jam. Compare this with a 30% purchase rate when only six varieties were offered. That’s a 10X difference in purchase rate!

Conclusion

The brain is a major influence on whether your target audience will respond to your marketing and will make a purchase from you. By structuring your customer acquisition funnel based on an understanding of neuroscience, you can significantly accelerate your customer growth, increase conversions, and build your business.

About the Author: Tom Shapiro is the CEO of Stratabeat, Inc., a branding, marketing, and design agency. Through his career, Shapiro has developed marketing strategies for a range of startups as well as Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, UnitedHealthcare, and P&G. Follow him on Twitter at @TomShapiro and @Stratabeat.

How to Create Urgency to Fuel E-Commerce Sales

Swift action.

Our marketing and sales teams dream of prospects who see our product, know they want it, and then buy without hesitation.

We all know that’s an anomaly. Most sales require your team to nurture the customer relationship and even demo the product.

However, there is a way to speed up the process. The key is to create a sense of urgency that will move the buyer forward in the sales cycle.

Dan Tyre, sales director at HubSpot, writes, “[The] top 2% salespeople can recognize ‘tells’ in prospects that indicate whether they’ll move toward purchase or delay the process.”

It’s time to harness the power of your team’s existing expertise with practical steps.

Let’s explore how to create a sense of urgency within your customers.

Why Choose Urgency

Urgency gives us a reason to think differently about our purchases.

Expert behavioral psychologists found that “urgent situations cause us to suspend deliberate thought and to act quickly.”

By creating a sense of urgency in the sales process, you motivate potential buyers to take action on your website. And that includes signing up for an email, enrolling in a free webinar, or actually purchasing your services.

Your goal is to break through the cognitive friction that delays people from converting.

Be wary of assuming that urgency equals persuasion. Because no level of motivation will convince someone to buy a horrible product that doesn’t meet a need.

“Winning a conversion takes two things: A feeling of desire (“I’ve got to have this thing!”) and a nudge that refuses to allow the lead to procrastinate (“But I’ll get it later”). Your sales copy is the hook, and urgency is the tug on the reel,” writes Joel Klettke, a conversion-focused copywriter at Business Casual Copywriting.

The longer your prospect waits to make a purchase, the less likely the sale will actually happen. More time translates into unrelated life distractions, the opportunity to shop with a competitor, and mental barriers to hinder the deal.

Procrastination is not your friend. Build urgency to seal the deal.

Word Choice Matters

Words have meaning. Therefore, every word on your website matters. So, choose wisely.

Write copy that will be a no-brainer for customers to take action. The key is to resonate with the shopper’s inner thoughts to sell your services.

Start by showcasing benefits, not features. Give visitors a glimpse of the results they will receive after using your services.

People don’t buy products to remain stagnant. Showcase how your product will make their lives better. Highlighting the value-added benefits will keep you at the top of their minds.

Vishal Ray Malik, founder of ConversionLink, notes that urgency is a driving force for effective sales copy. He suggests using a few of these keywords:

Inbound.org knows how to create urgency. Here’s an example of how the company elicits a response:

To understand which words trigger action within your customer base, spend less time selling. Instead, focus more time listening to your consumer’s word choices.

Tell your team to jot down what your clients are saying during sales calls or demos. You also can have your live chat agents record specific examples after chat sessions.

In the end, you want to help your prospects recognize their needs and why now is the best time to buy. Give them a reason to solve their problems today, not tomorrow.

Limited Offers

Scarcity can entice people to take action. It’s human nature to want to be part of something special.

And to speed up the sales process, businesses must tap into their customers’ brains to create that scarcity.

“Businesses keep this legacy alive by creating new products or consistently updating versions of the products they already sell. Anything new and improved, or rebranded, helps a salesperson who is creating a sense of urgency,” says Borja Obeso, Founder of Rebel Growth.

Another way is to include countdown timers on your product page, rather than showing the date the sale ends. MakersKit implements this strategy on sale items.

Timers give the precise “deadline” of when a customer will miss an opportunity. So, it encourages the consumer to either buy or face the consequence of not having the product.

Moreover, clarifying the consequences of inaction may induce FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). This occurs when people don’t want to be left out of the “in” crowd or conversation.

Restricting quantity works, too. It produces exclusivity.

Knowing that a limited supply exists tramples procrastination and entices people to take part. Amazon is well known for this technique.

Limited offers let consumers know up front that action is necessary, in order to obtain what they desire.

Visual Urgency

E-commerce centers around being the most visually attractive product. People hate ugly websites, and don’t trust them either.

Smart design can be used to appeal to a customer’s sense of urgency. Graphical elements, like color, size, and shape, play a major role in whether people click a call-to-action or abandon a shopping cart.

Colors impact your customers’ buying decisions. Oranges, reds, and similar shades work well because they remind us of emergencies.

Zendesk, a customer service software company, uses orange for their “Try it for free” button.

Arrows can also help draw people’s attention to particular information or deals. Notice how content curation tool Quuu uses an arrow to highlight their “hand curated, not machines” benefit.

Copywriter Christina Boyes, says, “Most designers and marketing writers will tell you that placing social proof and testimonies near the call to action buttons can improve your credibility and improve conversions.”

Video hosting company Wistia adds testimonials to their pricing page to help induce sales faster.

Induce emotion with your visual cues. And compel customers to learn more about your services. Influencing their behavior will create an urgent demand for your product.

What Not To Do

Knowing what to do is half the battle. The other 50% involves knowing what will not cause urgency amongst potential customers.

So, sit down with your team and discuss the copy and design tactics that should be eliminated from your website conversion strategy. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Don’t urge customers to buy just for the hell of it.


• Don’t nag customers every single day to participate in a “once-in-a-lifetime” sale.


• Don’t participate in unethical sales techniques, like lying to the customer.


• Don’t pressure a customer to buy when the service doesn’t meet their needs.


• Don’t coerce consumers into special deals only to charge them higher prices late.

Use these no-nos as a foundation to build an honest sales campaign. Your customers will value your business more.

Encourage Action

Urgency is part of our human DNA. Sometimes, we just need a little push to move forward.

Learn how urgency can work for your business model. Word selection in your copy determines whether your customer will act or not.

Offer limited offers to pique interest. Produce visual aids to draw in the buyer. And avoid common pitfalls, like dishonesty.

Don’t wait for sales. Instead, create customer urgency.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

5 Steps to Building a Cart Recovery Email Strategy That Will Increase Your Conversions

For an e-commerce business, shopping cart abandonment is the most common and most inevitable scenario. A Baymard Institute study states that 68.63% of carts are abandoned every year. That means that only about 1 in every 4 customers actually finishes their purchase.

Despite this loss of sales, most e-commerce marketers are targeting these lost customers with nothing more than retargeting ads. There is a lack of proper marketing strategy to target these potential customers early in the buying process. The shoppers are simply retargeted later with Facebook ads alone.

Although retargeting is an effective way to recover the lost revenue, the most important tactic I’ve found for tackling shopping cart abandonment is to send cart recovery emails. Cart abandonment emails are not just highly conversion-centric, they are also personal, re-engaging shoppers with a human touch. These emails have a high open rate and click-through rate compared with promotional emails.

Also, email marketing has been shown to have a better ROI than social media marketing, SEO, and content marketing, which is why email marketing is a key part of the marketing strategy of every e-commerce business.

But, most of these online retailers do not have a properly crafted email strategy for cart recovery.

Here are the five best strategies for a successful cart recovery email program:

1. Segment and Conquer

The success of an email campaign is directly proportional to its relevance. When subscribers receive personalized emails, they are more likely to take the desired action. Your cart recovery emails are no exception to this rule.

But, when it comes to abandoned cart emails, most marketers believe that handing out discount coupons to every abandoner can solve their problem. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Why? Because to recover these lost carts, you have to address the intent of the abandoners.

Now, the question is, how do you do that? Well, segmentation is the key to slicing and dicing your cart abandoners so that you can follow up with customized messages based on where they are in the customer lifecycle. The reason a first-time shopper might abandon their cart can be different from the reason a loyal customer might not complete their purchase.

By segmenting your abandoners into different categories like first-time abandoners, repeat abandoners, and existing customers who abandon, you can send more relevant messages.

Remember, cart recovery is a battle, and segmentation is the sword that can help you win the battle.

2. Craft a Unique Subject Line

When an email lands in your inbox, how do you decide whether to act on it or not? If you like the subject line, and if you trust the sender, you will open it; and if not, the chances are high that you won’t open it. In fact, 33% of email recipients open an email based on subject line alone.

Your emails are unique. Your subject lines should be, too.

When recipients read your subject lines, they should be reminded of what they left behind. A well-written subject line can go a long way toward piquing the interest of reluctant customers. So, don’t be lazy when crafting your subject lines for cart recovery emails. Depending on what is triggering (discussed in step 5) the email, you can include urgency, scarcity, or emotions like anxiety to influence hesitant shoppers.

Craft your subject lines to convey your call to action in a way that whets the appetite of your subscribers. But, being direct doesn’t mean you can’t be creative.

Here are a few subject lines that have caught my eye:

• Stock availability count less than 3


• Warning: Unattended items in your bag may be eaten by gnomes


• Had your eye on something? Enjoy free delivery at Liberty.co.uk

Also, make sure to optimize your subject lines for mobile as more than 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device these days. And, keep your subject lines short. It’s advisable to keep them under 30 characters as the average mobile screen has room for only 4-7 words max.

3. Don’t Be Fooled by Statistics

Timing is everything when it comes to recovering your lost carts. According to statistics, 90% of your leads go cold within an hour. But, before you automatically follow that statistic, consider the type of product (perishable or non-perishable), ticket size, etc., and then decide when you will send your email.

For example, if someone has abandoned a smartphone in their cart, they might need more time to finalize their purchase, but the same rule doesn’t apply when a shopper has left a shirt in their cart.

4. Be Sure Your Emails Are Responsive

You can create a great email that includes rich product images, compelling copy, a good offer, and a good CTA. However, if it’s not responsive across all devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, it’s not going to increase your conversions.

Being responsive is the key to making the customer experience seamless because people are checking their emails on different devices, mostly mobile. How optimized your emails are for these devices will play a significant role in determining whether or not people will complete their purchases.

5. Send a Series

While a single cart recovery email can boost your conversions, sending 1 or 2 follow-up emails can get the most out of your cart recovery campaigns.

We recommend a series of 3 emails be sent at pre-determined time intervals. The first email, triggered within an hour, could be a gentle nudge reminding customers they’ve left something in their cart.

If the first email does not persuade customers to complete the purchase, then a second email could be triggered with an aim to induce urgency. And, for those customers who still don’t convert, a third and final email could be triggered to persuade them with an incentive to complete their purchase.

Follow-up emails can also be triggered by inventory levels of the product in the cart. For example, if the number of units of the product in inventory drops to a certain number, that could trigger an email.

Here is an example of a 3-email series cart recovery campaign:

But, don’t be tempted to blast your abandoners with too many emails without testing the impact of these additional reminders in your cart series. Also, personalize these recovery emails based on the customer actions, and optimize accordingly. For example, by including relevant recommendations based on the products in the cart, you can even upsell/cross-sell.

Customize Your Cart Abandonment Emails Based on Customer Lifecycle

To aid your cart recovery efforts, you should customize your email messages according to the various stages of the customer lifecycle. For example, if a repeat customer abandons his shopping cart, instead of sending a friendly reminder, you should ask him if he faced any issues during checkout.

Also, for these customers, don’t fork out cash to incentivize the purchase lest you risk conditioning them for a discount on purchase every time. Ideally, you should test a number of customized approaches to get better results. And, don’t forget to test the ideal number of cart recovery messages for every stage.

About the Author: Reshu Rathi is Digital Marketing Manager at Betaout, a customer segmentation and marketing automation platform for e-commerce. Her job is to create content and marketing campaigns to help e-commerce marketers personalize their marketing and increase conversion. You can follow her on Twitter at @reshurathi, or check out Betaout.blog.

5 Killer Conversion Optimization Techniques That Improve Your Rankings

Conversion optimization and SEO have a rather symbiotic relationship — they rely on each other in order to function.

Just as no salesperson can perform their job without a steady flow of customers in their store, no call-to-action can drive conversions without traffic coming to the website. On the other hand, what good are droves of customers if you don’t have an effective strategy to influence them into making a conversion?

Leveraging SEO and conversion optimization offer a balanced approach to your marketing strategy, addressing both sides of the equation. Even if your company primarily invests in PPC to reach its target traffic, ignoring the organic side of search is a mistake — don’t lose out on an opportunity for new customers.

Whether you’re developing new content or simply want to revamp your existing landings pages, these tried and true conversion optimization techniques can improve your performance in organic search over time.

1. Limit Your Scope

Google loves websites that provide immediate answers.

The first page of search results is loaded with pages considered most efficient in terms of answering your search query.

While it’s tempting to optimize pages for a broad audience in order to attract more visitors, this approach often creates a poor user experience.

Addressing a wide range of topics all but guarantees your audience will need to dig for the information they need. Landing pages that speak to everyone speak to no one in particular.

Sharpening your focus is a top-down process that starts with the structure of your website. If you’re not familiar with the concept of SEO silos, it’s time to read up.

How you organize your pages directly impacts how search engines crawl your site and users find the information they need. So-called ‘silos’ give your content a natural place to exist within your site.

With a well-defined site architecture in place, your next task is ensuring the content of your landing pages remains highly focused. Segment variations of your central theme using a clear header hierarchy and tie in a strong call-to-action that speaks to the specific reader.

The difference can be dramatic to your organic performance and overall conversion rate.

2. Create Content That Converts

A website’s content is arguably the most important factor influencing conversion rates. It also plays an integral role in how your individual pages perform in organic search.

Great marketing content has the ability to seamlessly blend conversion opportunities. Take a look at the example below for instance:

There’s a few things to keep in mind when developing new content to ensure you’re getting the most out of it in regards to conversions and SEO.

First and foremost, your content should be designed for human audiences.

While it’s important to include keywords from an SEO standpoint, you quickly turn off readers with content designed for search engines that’s overloaded with terms. Remember, too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth.

In finding keywords to optimize your content, don’t fixate on volume. Keywords with less volume but obvious intent behind them are worth far more. Think discount running shoes vs. shoes — which is more likely to lead to a conversion?

Craft your content with clarity and conversion in mind. Write with a sense of urgency and utilize strong calls-to-action throughout that compliment the natural thought process.

The above example from Kissmetrics does a great job simplifying the benefit of the service and prompts the reader to make a conversion.

Keeping this content clean and concise makes it easy for your audience to absorb the value proposition and large call-to-action buttons influences their next move.

3. Rely On Visuals

Nothing encourages a visitor to flee your site faster than encountering a massive wall of text.

Breaking up content with visual elements can help make your content more digestible and keeping your audience engaged could ultimately make the difference in terms of creating a new conversion.

While incorporating images can dramatically improve readability and decrease your bounce rate, they must also serve a purpose. Always keep these elements highly relevant.

Determine whether a portion of your content is better served presented as an image. Mine your analytics for landing pages with higher bounce rates and see what opportunities are present to enhance the count with visuals.

Apart from better engaging your audience, images also affect the SEO value of your page. Be sure to optimize your images using file names, alt text, and appropriate captions.

4. Flash Forward

Does your website utilize heavy amounts of Flash? If so, you’re living in the past.

Once a cornerstone of the web, Flash has long since been labeled an outdated technology. Originally developed with a mouse and keyboard in mind, today’s internet users have evolved beyond traditional desktop computers — over half of all internet searches now attributed to mobile devices.

Modern web design has moved away from Flash, citing it as major hindrance in terms of accessibility. Flash hampers mobile and tablet users from accessing your full site; similarly, search engines can’t crawl Flash elements of your site, negatively impacting your overall optimization.

While having a few Flash elements won’t hamstring your site completely, it’s a major accessibility issue to address if it affects the way users navigate or interact with your content.

Beyond improving the accessibility of your site, stripping Flash elements can dramatically improve loading times. Faster loading times also give your site an edge in relation to how Google ranks your site.

The bottom line is you want to ditch Flash altogether to create the best user experience and improve your organic search performance — start preparing an exit strategy with your developers.

HTML 5 is the best alternative to Flash and other outdated third party media players. Simple in both form and function, this developer-friendly format ensures your video and audio files are accessible to users across all devices.

5. Perform Regular Testing

It’s nearly impossible to improve your conversion rate without setting a benchmark. Routine testing allows you to monitor your performance and inform your overall marketing strategies going forward.

If you’re just getting started with analytics, start simple. The first thing you’ll typically want to identify is your top pages, easily identified through Google Analytics (Behavior → Site Content → Landing Pages).

Using your top pages as a benchmark, identify the areas of your site where people most commonly exit (Behavior → Site Content → Exit Pages). Is there anything these lower performing pages might be missing present in your top pages?

Additionally, there’s a lot of intelligence related to your conversions to be gained from tracking goals in Google Analytics. Most importantly, you’re able to identify the areas of your conversion funnel that might need the most attention.

Use your data to make small improvements across your pages, making sure to monitor changes in traffic and user flow. Perform regular A/B testing to refine your strategies whenever possible.

The Bottom Line

Conversion optimization and SEO are complementary forces designed to build an audience and guide their behavior. Utilizing these techniques can move your website in the right direction in terms of both.

Remember, the benefits of a well optimized site don’t appear overnight — you’ll need to diligently test and revise your landing pages to see the difference to conversions and organic search performance.

About the Author: Tyler Thursby is a Senior SEO Analyst for Zion & Zion, a leading advertising agency out of Phoenix, AZ. He’s an accomplished writer who frequently blogs about content marketing, social media and analytics. Follow him on Twitter at @tthursb.