Ask Your Website Users How You Can Improve: 4Q Review & Case Study

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When it comes to boosting website conversion, I’ve always been in the quantitative camp – “send enough users to different versions of your landing page and look at which version works best (i.e. delivers the best conversion results)”.

And that approach works great, but there’s still plenty of room for qualitative tools to help increase your conversion rate (in fact, the two play very well together.)

Conversion optimisation isn’t about software and tools

The tools you need to do A/B and multivariate testing are relatively mature, and they’re not just cheap, they’re free (try Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer for starters.)

But the tools aren’t the constraint.  The constraint is knowing what to test.  You not only need to devise the right test elements, but you also need to apply a proven process to increase conversion on an ongoing basis.

Coming up with “stuff to test” happens in a number of ways, including marketing expertise and experience of what has worked in the past.  Another valuable source of information is to rely on the voice of the customer to help you answer the 4 critical site experience questions…

The 4 critical site experience questions

1. How satisfied are my website visitors?
2. What are my visitors at my website to do (their purpose)?
3. Are they in fact completing what they set out to do?
4. If not, why not?  If yes, what did they like best about their experience?

Knowing the answers to these questions can provide you with new optimisation ideas and priorities, straight from the customer’s mouth. You gain insight into WHY visitors are doing what they’re doing (or not doing!) on your website.

How We Used the Free 4Q Survey Tool To Answer The 4 Critical Questions

Late last year we used the free 4Q exit survey tool (a collaboration between Avinash and iPerceptions) to ask our website visitors the 4 critical questions.

Here’s how the invitation process works (from the 4Q FAQ page):

4Q employs a two-stage invitation process. When visitors arrive at your site, they will be presented an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, will be launched and will wait in the background for the visitor to complete his or her session. 4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.

The tool is, by design, extremely simple.  Here’s a sneak peak at the control panel:

4Q Exit Survey Control Panel Screenshot

Once the survey is set up, it’s a case of insert-the-code and away you go.

One of the nifty features is the ability to adjust the survey invitation rate — so only a percentage of users are invited to participate.  For our test, we used 20% of site traffic.

4Q Survey Results – What We Discovered

• Over the course of the test, 46 surveys were completed
• The overall “task completion” rate was 75% (i.e. 25% of people who completed the survey were unable to do what they came to do on the site.)
• A few responses were “junk”, but that doesn’t matter.  We are looking for patterns and bright ideas.
• What they liked: a number of users commented on our use of fact-based website optimisation methods and liberal availability of online marketing case studies.
• What they didn’t like: a few users were looking for information/articles and resented being “sold” to.

Bright ideas:

Here are some examples of useful gems from the survey which we have translated into action:

Bright idea #1:

I had trouble finding the right subscription, which a friend forwarded me initially. I suggest having a ’subscribe’ link in your email subscription.

Bright idea #2:

Well, I loved the case studies; I really felt like I was connecting with a business that had succeeded as a direct result of their relationship with you and I wanted to be one of those too. But It wasn’t clear which of your services they had used to achieve those results when I went to look on your Services tab to find out more.

Sample output from 4Q

Final thoughts

Was using 4Q worth the effort?  You bet it was.  It is very quick to set up, provides a good user experience and yields measurable and usable qualitative information.

We have since installed 4Q surveys on several sites for our SME consulting clients and a couple of Enterprise clients as well.  In each case, the results have been well worth the effort. In one case, the results have heavily influenced the direction that a major site redesign is taking.   Better to know this information NOW, rather than after the redesign has taken place.

When you take your instructions directly from end users and marry them with scientific testing and tracking, you can also cut weeks or months of your conversion improvement cycles.  And you know what they say about time = money!

Why not give 4Q a go?  And if you need help with an orchestrated program of traffic and conversion improvement, get in touch and we can explore whether or not we’re a ‘fit’.

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Want To Boost Site Conversion? Increase Your Font Size

Sometimes the simplest website changes can produce the most rapid Return On Effort. One of the easiest ways to make your site convert better is to make it easier for users to read.

In fact, a whole category of website conversion heuristics is based around making your content easier for website visitors to digest.

Here are seven ways you can increase your website conversion right now:

1. Increase font size. For example, change 10 or 11px body text fonts to 13px.  Some people find these larger fonts “childlike”, but our tests have conclusively shown that larger fonts can increase conversion significantly (especially where the original font size was very small to start with).  Graphic designers often specify smaller, “cute” fonts, but you should remember that text content is primarily a means to convey your selling message, NOT a design element.
2. Avoid large line widths. The human eye just isn’t designed evolved that well for reading text on a screen.  One of the things that tends to slow people down when reading is moving they eyes from line to line.  And the longer the line width, the more difficult it is for the eye and the brain to hook up with the next line.   That’s why shorter line widths of 600px or less generally help conversion.  Test 600px vs 900px and you’ll see what I mean.
3. Increase colour contrast. Another thing graphic designers seem to love are font colour choices based on design sensibilities rather than communication and legibility.  Light grey text on a mid-grey background appears to be a designers’ favourite.  On the web, as in print, poor colour contrast = decreased legibility = decreased sales.  By increasing colour contrast (good ol’ black text on white background is my boring-but-effective favourite) you will boost sales.
4. Shorten paragraphs. Long paragaphs make it harder for the eye to navigate text.   Anything much longer than 7 lines and you’ll start to put readers off.  Where your paragraphs are longer than this, break them into two or more pieces.  The occasional one line paragraph can also work well.
5. Give “texture” to long copy. Many of these tips are centred around breaking the monotony of long, “blocky” tracts of text.  One way to do this is by adding “texture” — creating varying areas of white space around lines and paragraphs. For example, you should always leave a “ragged right” edge on paragraphs (i.e not fully justified).  The ragged edge helps the eye navigate.  Indenting the occasional paragraph with a <blockquote>, or placing content in a centred box achieves the same effect.
6. Break the monotony. White space is one way to break the monotony of dense text content — another is to use headlines, sub headlines, colour, “callouts”, bullet lists, numbered lists and text effects (bold, italics, underlines, strikethroughs etc.).  These elements help to focus the user’s attention on key selling points and create variety that keeps the brain engaged.
7. Add diagrams, graphs and images. I believe that copy is the main tool in your persuasive toolset on the web.  But other types of visual content can be a very useful way to augment your central sales argument.  Use images, graphs and diagrams appropriately when they make your point better than text.

This Is NOT A Long Copy vs Short Copy Debate

Please note that this has nothing to do with the long/short copy debate (if you could still call it a debate – the long copy folks won that a decade ago online, and a century ago in print).

This is about recognising that text content can be daunting when presented the wrong way.   By making your text content as legible and digestible as possible, you’ll get higher readership and more leads and sales.  And isn’t that what we all want?

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Productivity Booster: Create An 80/20 List

Last week I stopped myself from just aimlessly doing stuff and decided to refocus on the 20% of activities that generate 80% of the results for myself and my clients. Here’s my 80/20 List:

My Critical 20 Percent List

Installing good Productivity habits [see this post] yield rapid results, but it’s easy to backslide. Staying focused on The Critical 20% is the surest path to reaching your outcomes faster and with less effort.

Despite the fact that I “know” I should be focusing on this stuff, it’s so easy to chug along just taking care of the “Urgent” without addressing Important items like systems creation, while keeping a nice balance between sales (getting the work) and production (doing the work).

[Tim Ferris has recently written about habit acquisition techniques based on Leo Babauta's Zen Habits methodology - worth a read.]

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How To Use Prospect “Filters” To Improve Sales Quality

When I started out in business and started to prospect for new clients, I needed leads. Any leads would do. Even if those leads weren’t highly qualified and ready-to-go, it feels better to be talking to prospects, writing proposals and “keeping busy” than it does doing nothing toward getting new clients.

Pretty soon, lead volume picked up substantially, thanks to the Education-Based Marketing approaches that I have written about on many occasions.

But “mindset-wise”, I was still in the “More Leads = Good” space. I started to get busier and busier, not only performing work for the clients that came in, but also processing and selling to new prospects.

This was when I realised that I needed more efficient ways to deliver hot, ready-to-buy leads to my doorstep to drive up conversion rates and spend LESS time selling to non-clients.

One of the strategies for doing this is the use of “Filters” to pick off UN-qualified leads before they enquire. Here are some examples of the kind of filters I tested:

• Price: “your investment will be in the $7,000 – $10,000 range”
• Aspiration: “if you’re just looking to maintain your current operation, this is not for you. Typical clients aim to increase their business by 50 to 100% within 12 months and have the capacity to do so.”
• Service Exclusions: “this service is designed to generate highly-qualified incoming sales leads via your website. We do not make outgoing cold calls, although your own outbound calling operations can fit into this solution seamlessly.”

An example from the finance industry

Several years later, a client in the finance industry was having a small problem with people who were financially unqualified applying for a specific range of products.

Despite clearly stating the main qualifying conditions on the sales page, a number of visitors were applying directly through the contact form. It was starting to occupy a significant portion of the salespeople’s time just to reply to these people.

The solution was to clearly state just above the contact form that the product was only available to customers who already hold equity in their own home. We even highlighted the relevant phrases with the famous yellow highlighter.

It did the trick.

Overnight, the unqualified leads stopped, leaving the client to focus on qualified enquiries.

One more important thing to keep in mind: occasionally when you employ this strategy, you overdo it and qualified leads get cut out of your funnel prematurely. Obviously you need to keep an eye on your metrics to ensure that this strategy had the desired effect.

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