How to Avoid Friction Points for Your Customers

How to Avoid Friction Points for Your Customers

What is a friction point? Your landing pages and homepage should communicate exactly what users want to know, in the most distilled form possible. What’s most important is that your landing pages, homepage, and site navigation make it easy to find this information (not that the information is jam-packed into one page that nobody can read). f you’re a marketer and you’re thinking of copying a competitor’s marketing (winning) marketing strategy, you might actually lose. Here are the four steps that we recommend for building delight for your brand: UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ PAIN POINTS: Brands are most successful when they add value to their stakeholders’ lives. At any given time, consumers are thinking: “Why should I waste my time?” And honestly, they’re right. The company had three testimonials on their homepage. Trust and safety seals can help your brand explain to consumers that you’re serious about privacy. Safety, trust, and accreditation seals can be placed in various parts throughout your website — on landing pages, near your website footer, and on company about pages. Build trust through testimonials, trust seals, and customer reviews.

How to Sell to Different Customers Without Jeopardizing Conversions
It’s (Almost) Summertime, and Customers Are Distracted. Here Are 5 Ecommerce Trends You Need to Pay Attention to, to Keep Customers Listening.
Optimize the Value of Existing Customers With Facebook’s Built-in Tools

There’s many things we can do in order to encourage people to purchase.

But if we’re not careful…

We’ll push people away.

These are friction points, points in our marketing and business that PUSH customers away. In many cases, we don’t even realize it.

Friction points are one of the top reasons why your prospects are hesitating from moving through your funnel.

What is a friction point?

Friction is any variable, website quality, or user behavior trend that is slowing down (or entirely halting) the progression of your company’s sales cycle.

Friction can stem from the most subtle details on your website.

Here are some common sources of friction and ways that your company can avoid them:

Landing Page Length

One common point of friction relates to web page length — in other words, the amount of content and information to share with your website visitors.

Friction happens when you share too much. Friction happens when you share too little. You need to find a happy medium to effectively communicate with your users.

The thing is, marketers tend to gravitate towards opposite ends of the spectrum.

The key to finding the right balance is to continuously test your landing pages.

Consider the following case study where a longer landing page outperformed a much shorter variation. Aagaard was looking at PPC landing page of which the goal was to get prospects to sign up for a home energy audit.

The company is relatively unknown, and the offer was relatively complex.

In this case, the longer landing page performed best and generated the higher conversion rate. In other words, friction was at a minimum.

Longer Copy Friction

Let’s look at another example.

DesignBoost provides online courses that teach students how to design mobile apps, landing pages, and more with photoshop. They had the goal of increasing signups.

The original homepage was very, very long:

Long Landing Page Version

Now here’s the short version that was tested against:

Short Landing Page

When a landing page is too long, it can scare people away by making your offer look too complex. If a landing page is too short, it can scare people away by making your company appear (potentially) unprofessional or untrustworthy.

So how do you find the happy medium?

Qualitative research (talking to your customers, running feedback surveys, interviewing prospects, etc.) can help you uncover what people care about when deciding to do business with your company. What we’re about to say shouldn’t surprise you — it’s common sense.

Your landing pages and homepage should communicate exactly what users want to know, in the most distilled form possible.

Answer the question of what your customers care most about, and distill your answer into the most simple and straightforward possible forms. Customers who want more in-depth details will read through your company’s knowledge center, FAQs, case studies, and other in-depth marketing materials. What’s most important is that your landing pages, homepage, and site navigation make it easy to find this information (not that the information is jam-packed into one page that nobody can read).

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when your landing pages, marketing messages, and ads don’t make sense.

Remember that the heart of online marketing is how disparate, moving parts come together. In an ideal world, everything — images, copy, themes, long-form content, product descriptions — would flow harmoniously, but here’s the thing.

It’s really, really challenging to communicate with an audience. Any any given time, we’re wearing our marketing hats. There is always a possibility for disconnect between what you intend to say and how your audience will interpret it.

f you’re a marketer and you’re thinking of copying a competitor’s marketing (winning) marketing strategy, you might actually lose. Why? Because there are subtle details about your brand that distinguish it from other companies (that might even be doing the exact same thing).

Your brand’s personality, tone, and style might be different. Your customer base’s values might also be different.

Cognitive fluency is the opposite of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive fluency is as simple as making your website easy to read. The fact is that audience eyeballs are all created differently. Your 20-year-old marketing intern’s eyesight might be perfect, but your 72-year-old first-time buyer? Not so much. If people are havingtrouble reading or processing information, they’re less likely to buy.

The Subconscious

Consumers are driven by their instincts. As much as we like to believe that we’re rational and driven by conscious thoughts, the truth is that we’re driven by our emotional brains. We don’t even realize it sometimes.

Friction happens for reasons that we can’t fully capture or explain — for highly emotional reasons.

To effectively reach your audience, logic just isn’t enough. You need to force an emotional bond by appealing to your audience’s intuition, instincts, and senses.

That’s why so many organizations invest so much time (and money) on aesthetics and crafting an experience of delight.

When you get it right, delight is the single-most important variable for eliminating friction. Delight is about taking the minutiae (as…

COMMENTS

WORDPRESS: 0
DISQUS: 0