While it’s essential to focus on features, user experience, and growth metrics, something many SaaS founders often underestimate is the significance of cognitive biases in pricing architecture. Understanding a few key principles of human psychology can help you guide users toward higher-priced plans.

When done correctly, psychological pricing strategies create genuine win-win scenarios where customers feel confident in their decisions while businesses optimize for sustainable growth.

The basics of SaaS pricing

The software industry’s shift from one-time purchases to subscriptions fundamentally changed consumer behavior. Unlike the old model, where companies had little incentive to maintain previously sold software, the subscription model encourages continuous updates and feature additions, benefiting the consumer.

Customers now feel a sense of ownership over the experience, and there is an inherent ongoing value perception that companies must meet. Ideally, companies take the monthly subscription fee and put it back into the product, upgrading or adding features to their software.

For companies, switching to the subscription model significantly boosted valuations. It also opened up opportunities for tiered pricing that wasn’t relevant for the one-time purchase model. It allows businesses to cater to different customer segments and extract value based on usage or features.

Successfully structuring SaaS pricing involves more than just crunching numbers; it requires an understanding of consumer psychology. By aligning pricing strategies with how users perceive value, make decisions, and react to choices, SaaS companies can craft pricing that not only attracts but also retains customers.

An overview of SaaS pricing models

The SaaS industry employs various pricing models beyond simple monthly or annual subscriptions, often adapting to the value delivered and the specific use case.

Subscription-based (annual recurring revenue)

This is the most common model, where customers pay a recurring fee (e.g., monthly or annually) for access to the software. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is a key metric for SaaS companies, representing the total revenue expected from all active subscriptions over a year.

As mentioned above, the subscription model benefits consumers by providing ongoing updates and improvements, rather than a one-time purchase that quickly becomes outdated.

Companies that offer subscription-based pricing: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify (premium), Apple Music

Seat-based

This model charges based on the number of users or “seats” that have access to the software. Pricing scales linearly with team size, making it predictable for both the company and customer. This model works particularly well for collaboration tools and enterprise software, where value increases with the number of users.

Seat-based pricing aligns cost with usage in a way that feels fair to customers—small teams pay less, larger organizations pay more. It also creates natural expansion revenue as companies grow their teams.

Companies that use seat-based pricing: Slack (per active user per month), Zoom (per license), Asana (per team member), Monday.com (per user), Microsoft 365 (per user license)

Freemium or feature-based

A freemium pricing model offers a basic version of the product for free, with limited features or usage, while charging for advanced features or increased functionality.

Companies that use a freemium pricing model: Canva (access to limited features by giving an email address), Spotify (free model with ads and limited functionality), Figma (three free designs before payment is required).

Skill-based

A pricing model that is driven by AI tools, skill-based pricing up-charges for advanced knowledge versions of the product rather than just features. Companies offer different tiers that represent varying levels of the tool’s competency, from basic automation to expert-level performance. Pricing reflects the sophistication and accuracy of the work delivered.

Companies implementing skill-based pricing: ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) vs. ChatGPT Pro ($200/month for higher capability)

Usage-Based / Tokenization

Another option emerging with AI tools, this model charges based on the value delivered, such as the number of hits, credits consumed, or output produced (e.g., minutes of video). This often supplements a base subscription.

Companies on a token-based model: Opus, a video clipping software, where you buy “tokens” to produce content.

Hybrid Models

Many companies combine these approaches into a hybrid model. For instance, a base monthly subscription might include a certain number of “tokens,” with additional tokens available for purchase.

How consumer psychology plays into SaaS pricing

Within these different pricing models, there are usually tiers of service offered.

Consumer psychology plays a crucial role in both how pricing models are perceived and how the tiers of your plan are chosen.

In Jon MacDonald’s book, Behind The Click, which explores the psychology behind user behavior, he says, “what feels true is often more real than what is actually true,” highlighting the power of emotional appeals over pure logic in decision-making.

People make quick decisions based on mental shortcuts. Pricing tiers should align with these shortcuts rather than creating friction. “The less effort it takes to process information, the easier we can make decisions and move on to the next task,” says Jon.

To better understand the connection between consumer psychology and SaaS pricing, consider these principles.

Key Psychological Principles in SaaS Pricing

• Anchoring Bias
  • Meaning: People overly rely on the first piece of information they encounter (the “anchor”) when making subsequent decisions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: The initial price presented, or the first tier a user sees, can heavily influence their perception of value for all other tiers. Companies should carefully consider which tier to highlight first. Avoid leading with discounts if the goal is to establish premium value.
• Priming Effect
  • Meaning: Subtle cues (words, images) can influence subsequent thoughts and actions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: The language, imagery, and overall design of a pricing page can introduce or “prime” customers to associate certain emotions or benefits with different tiers. For example, using visuals of a simplified workflow for a basic tier and a thriving, collaborative team for an enterprise tier.
• “Bye-Now” Effect
  • Meaning: Merely reading the word “bye” can subconsciously nudge people to think of “buy.”
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Although subtle, this suggests that carefully chosen words in calls to action or surrounding copy on pricing pages can have a minor,subliminal influence on conversion.
• Ikea Effect
  • Meaning: People feel more attached to items they’ve created or had a hand in assembling.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: If a SaaS product offers customization, highlighting how users can tailor features or workflows can increase their sense of ownership and commitment, making them more likely to subscribe and retain.
• Decision Fatigue
  • Meaning: The more decisions made, the more mentally drained one becomes, leading to poorer decisions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Limit the number of choices presented on a pricing page. Use clear distinctions between tiers, recommend a “most popular” option, and provide comparison charts that simplify complex information.
• Less-Is-Better Effect
  • Meaning: People might prefer a lower-quality item when presented alone, but their preference can flip when compared to better options.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: When presenting tiered options, strategically place a slightly less impressive (but still functional) tier next to a desired middle-tier option. This makes the middle tier appear more valuable and appealing.
• Decoy Effect
  • Meaning: Introducing a clearly inferior “decoy” option makes a target option seem more attractive.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: A common strategy is to offer three tiers: a basic, a slightly more expensive but much more valuable middle tier (the target), and a very expensive, feature-rich tier (the decoy). This nudges users towards the middle.
• Bundling Bias
  • Meaning: People tend to overvalue bundled packages, even if they don’t use all the components.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Offer feature bundles or user bundles within tiers. This makes customers feel like they are getting more value, even if they don’t utilize every single element.
• Loss Aversion
  • Meaning: The pain of a loss is more intense than the joy of an equivalent gain.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Emphasize what customers gain by choosing a higher tier, or what they avoid losing (e.g., time, efficiency) by upgrading. Guarantees and clear refund policies reduce the perceived risk of a “bad” purchase.

SaaS pricing strategies that convert

Here are a few ways you can start turning your new psychological knowledge into revenue via your pricing strategies.

Offer pricing tiers

The way you present your pricing tiers significantly influences user perception and choice. This is where choice architecture comes into play.

People tend to avoid extremes and gravitate towards the middle option. Offering three tiers —a low-priced, feature-limited option, a mid-priced, balanced option, and a high-priced, feature-rich option —often leads users to choose the middle tier. This is because it feels like a safe and reasonable compromise.

Prioritize the customer needs

Ultimately, the most effective SaaS pricing strategy is one that is tailored to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience.

Talk to your users, understand their pain points, and learn how they perceive the value of your product. Then, experiment with different pricing tiers and messaging to see what resonates best with your target audience.

The goal is to make the right decision for them as much of a no-brainer as possible. This means understanding what problems customers are trying to solve and how each tier addresses those problems.

Segment customers

Successful pricing tiers align with customer identity and use case psychology, not just feature differences. Adobe does this well by segmenting products and pricing based on three audiences: personal/at-home, student, and professional. These are the buckets of software you can choose from, and grouping them and the prices based on how you self-identify will support users in autonomously picking the right option.

Conduct a verb-scoring exercise

If you need competitive inspiration for how other SaaS companies are feature-gating their products, try a verb-scoring exercise. Though it is pricing strategy adjacent, understanding customer expectations based on competitors can help you decide what sort of pricing model or feature-gating strategy you’d like to adopt. When done correctly, verb-scoring can help you find ways to monetize, mitigate “free trial abuse,” and acquire new users.

Frame pricing

Don’t just give a total annual or monthly cost. Emphasize the savings for upgraded plans, slice the costs differently by showing how much it costs per day or per use, or compare plan outputs. By framing the pricing differently, you can help customers see why these plans matter.

Simplify choices

More isn’t always better, and that is especially true for pricing strategy. Reduce the number of decisions customers need to make. Curated collections, clear comparison charts, and simplified product descriptions within tiers can combat decision fatigue.

Leverage social proof

Show that others are successfully using your product and how they are benefiting from it. This includes customer testimonials, reviews, “bestseller” indicators, and even real-time purchase notifications.

Don’t ignore the details

Even subtle changes to your pricing can have a significant impact on user perception. Ending prices in .99 instead of .00 can make them seem significantly cheaper, even though the difference is minimal.

In some cases, removing the currency symbol (e.g., just “30” instead of “$30”) can make the price seem less salient and more appealing.

Finally, visually highlighting the plan that offers the best value can draw attention to it and increase its adoption rate. A badge or a different color can do wonders here.

Review your pricing strategy for more conversions

Successful SaaS pricing is a blend of art and science. By strategically applying the psychological principles and strategies outlined, SaaS companies can design pricing tiers that not only make economic sense but also resonate deeply with the human element of decision-making. Doing so logically leads to higher conversions and sustained customer loyalty.

Start by auditing your current pricing through a psychological lens. Are you creating clear choices without overwhelming options? Does your tier structure align with customer identity and use cases? Are you leveraging social proof and strategic framing?

When you have some ideas for improvement, test them with your users to see what should be implemented. And if you’re looking for other monetization strategies, get in touch.

The post The Psychology Behind Successful SaaS Pricing appeared first on The Good.

Drawing from those years of experience improving SaaS platforms, we’ve identified and addressed form fatigue across various products. In this article, we’ll show you how to uncover and fix it effectively.

Keep reading to learn:

• Research methods for uncovering form fatigue
• User behavior patterns that indicate your users suffer from form fatigue
• Actionable strategies to improve form fatigue and increase conversions

What is form fatigue?

Form fatigue occurs when a user gets frustrated and/or exhausted by the complexity or length of a digital form. The poor design of the form directly contributes to this sense of fatigue and causes them to abandon.

Psychologically, users are conditioned to prefer experiences that require minimal cognitive effort. We want experiences that accomplish our goals simply and quickly. When a user experience does not meet those instincts, conversion rates drop.

Form fatigue is typically caused by things like:

• Content fatigue: When excessive textual/visual content on a page overwhelms users, hindering their ability to find relevant content for successful task completion.
• Heavy cognitive load: When undue mental effort is required to accomplish a task, causing analysis paralysis or frustration, leading to abandonment.
• High interaction cost: When a task or interaction requires significant time and/or effort to accomplish, possibly creating frustration and resulting in abandonment.

How to identify form fatigue

When working on a product day in and day out, you might be too close to the forms to know if fatigue is happening. That is where research can help.

Getting an external, real user perspective can expose things like content fatigue, heavy cognitive load, or high interaction cost in your forms.

So, the best way to identify form fatigue is through user research. While there are plenty of methods, the best for this particular scenario include:

• Session recordings
• Heatmaps
• Scroll maps
• Click maps
• User tests

With your raw data in hand, look out for some specific patterns that might indicate form fatigue:

• Scanning: A user scrolls over content (text or images) at a higher scroll rate on mobile, while on desktop they might hover over some words or phrases, or completely skip over content altogether.
• Halted Scrolling: The user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves or this pause may indicate that the user perceives a false bottom.
• U-turns: When a user back navigates to the previous page they were just on, using either breadcrumbs or the back button.

These research patterns can point to moments when users are experiencing form fatigue and the digital experience can be optimized.

7 ways to prevent form fatigue

If you suspect form fatigue or uncover evidence of it in your research, don’t fret. There is plenty you can do to fix it. For companies building new forms, these tips can also be used to prevent form fatigue in the first place.

1. Execute the 10 principles of good form design

The first, and arguably the most important, way to limit form fatigue is to understand and act on the principles of good form design. Website forms are one of your most important onsite elements. They are the crux of a user’s path to conversion.

Bad form design can cause users to drop off during critical conversion opportunities, leaving them frustrated or confused, while great form design creates a seamless user experience that can increase conversion rates and leave users feeling excited about a product or company.

These are the ten established form design principles to help you create better experiences:

1. Priming: Prepare users by setting clear expectations about the form’s purpose, length, and benefits before they begin.
2. Error Prevention: Design forms to minimize user mistakes by using constraints, clear labels, and smart defaults.
3. Error Recovery: Make it easy for users to identify, understand, and fix errors with real-time validation and clear messaging.
4. Feedback: Provide immediate, actionable responses to user inputs to build confidence and guide progression.
5. Proximity: Group related fields together logically to make forms easier to navigate and process mentally.
6. Convention: Follow familiar design patterns to ensure users can complete the form intuitively without unnecessary friction.
7. Momentum: Encourage users to keep going by visually or textually reinforcing their progress through the form.
8. Proof: Build trust and reduce hesitation with evidence like security assurances, testimonials, or recognizable logos.
9. Demonstrated Value: Highlight the benefits of completing the form so users feel their effort is worthwhile.
10. Perceived Effort Level: Design forms to appear simple and manageable by minimizing visible fields and breaking longer forms into steps.

To learn more, we explore these principles and include 32 good form design examples in this companion article.

2. Ask for minimal information upfront

In research and testing for clients, we have found that asking for less information upfront may help to prevent form fatigue and in turn, increase initial registrations. The highest converting forms ask for only the necessary information in order to register, saving additional information for post-registration. That could be as little as just the email or include name and other essential information.

Once the user is registered, they can be guided through additional steps to help personalize the account to their needs, for example, more personal information, settings, shipping preferences, choosing a plan, adding orders, etc.

3. Reduce form length perception

For forms that can’t reduce the information required, research shows users’ perception of form length can be as important as the actual length.

You can reduce perceived effort with strategies like:

• Chunking forms into steps: Break longer forms into smaller, manageable sections and use clear step titles (e.g., “Step 1: Account Details”).
• Collapsible sections: Use collapsible form fields to make the interface less overwhelming while still providing access to all necessary fields.
• Auto-advance fields: Automatically move users to the next field when input is complete (e.g., credit card information split into boxes).

4. Make clear suggestions

Simplify decision-making by limiting options and highlighting recommended choices. You can use autofill and predictive text to reduce manual input and create an intuitive, logical flow that guides users naturally through the form.

5. Optimize for mobile or desktop

At this point, we shouldn’t even have to say it, but you’d be surprised how often teams forget to tailor the experience for the correct device. Form fatigue is exasperated when the design doesn’t function on the user interface being navigated. The design should adapt for mobile or desktop users, regardless of whether you are an app-first or desktop-first product.

One essential way to do this is by adjusting keyboard inputs. For example, when a field is asking for a zip code or phone number, default to the numeric keyboard on mobile to make it as simple as possible to fill out the form.

6. Use gamification to entertain

Gamifying the form-filling experience can motivate users to complete it. So, when you have an extensive form that needs filling and can’t be simplified, add elements like milestones, progress rewards, and personal messages to keep users entertained and motivated. Celebrate small wins when users complete sections and consider unlocking discounts, offers, or badges as users complete each step. It’s hard to be fatigued when you’re having fun.

7. Leverage post-signup emails

Preventing form fatigue can also happen by supplementing information in other ways. Use post-signup emails to collect information that isn’t imperative to registration. For example, a user’s birthday could come in handy for rewards later on, but it is better to collect it post-signup to prevent form fatigue.

Additionally, the email body can link the user to connect new apps to their account, access more discounts, watch tutorials, download resources, or contact their team.

Many SaaS companies also send emails from a real person to encourage users to respond if they have questions or need help. These personal follow-ups can also help recapture users who abandon the form initially.

To prevent form fatigue in UX design, focus on strategies that simplify and streamline the user’s form-filling experience. Remember, the goal is to make form completion feel easy and painless for the user.

Ready to eliminate form fatigue and boost conversions?

Form fatigue can quietly undermine your UX efforts, leading to missed conversions and frustrated users. However, with thoughtful research, clear design principles, and actionable strategies, you can create forms that not only engage users but also encourage them to complete the journey.

At The Good, we specialize in helping businesses like yours eliminate friction and create digital experiences that drive results. See this form improvement example from our work with Helium 10.

If you’re ready to optimize your forms and increase conversions, reach out to our team today. Let’s work together to turn your users into loyal customers.

The post A Guide For Preventing Form Fatigue To Increase Conversions & Improve UX appeared first on The Good.

There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like a company is giving you the bait and switch. In user experience design, we call this poor priming and expectation-setting, and it is a violation of one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization.

Heuristics, by definition, are mental shortcuts used to solve problems quickly and effectively. They allow people to speed up analysis and make informed, efficient decisions. Knowing our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions, you can imagine how heuristics play a crucial role in how customers navigate and perceive digital experiences.

Digital experiences that violate user heuristics are bad for users and bad for business. So, let’s take a look at how to address the priming and expectation-setting heuristic in a way that improves the user experience.

What is the priming and expectation-setting heuristic?

Priming and expectation setting is a heuristic that sets users up for success by clarifying how the interface will perform, indicating what actions users should take, and managing user expectations.

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey to reduce cart abandonment rates or sharing estimated delivery dates to manage customer expectations.

Priming and expectation setting is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Analyzing your digital experience with heuristics in mind keeps the user at the center of analyses and guides your strategy toward building journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Identify violations of this heuristic with user research patterns

Before you can start to address any heuristic to improve the digital experience, you have to understand if, where, and when users are getting stuck.

To understand if your digital experience is violating the priming and expectation-setting heuristic, a great place to start is user research. Set goals, pick the right method for your needs, and start talking to your users (or observing their behavior).

As you analyze the research, look for patterns including:

• Rage clicks: User clicks on an element multiple times without getting the desired or expected result. Usually, this signifies unclear system status, meaning your user doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed.
• Low directness: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content, struggling to find items of interest, and possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty. This can be a sign of unmet expectations, meaning your system’s interactions, navigation, or language don’t match users’ mental models of real-world or site conventions.
• Price sensitivity: Users express concern about product or shipping prices, potentially leading them to abandon. This often indicates poor priming because of unclear or missing elements in the interface that typically guide user behavior and inform them of what to expect.

The good news is once you identify the patterns, you can address them with tactics to improve priming and expectation setting. Doing so is an ethical way to improve customer sentiment and increase conversions.

Real-life examples of using priming and expectation-setting to improve the user experience

Most companies have a chance to improve priming and expectation setting across their digital journey. Here are a few real-world examples that can inspire your efforts to adhere more closely to the heuristic. You might see some pretty compelling rewards for your improvements.

Offline download delivery priming

We worked with the largest digital repair manual database, eManualOnline, to find opportunities to improve their on-site experience. Following similar recommendations as outlined above to identify violations of optimization heuristics, we conducted user testing. It revealed that users were confused about how eManualOnline delivers their manuals, as some are digital downloads and others are physical editions.

Because of the mixed delivery method messages throughout the site, customers felt a lack of trust when confronted with the website.

We decided to test out highlighting delivery methods to clarify any confusion and increase transactions. We A/B tested 2 variants: a control and a variant that made delivery methods clearer at various touchpoints.

The variant with clear delivery method language showed a 14% lift over the control. Clarifying access methods for offline downloads resulted in stronger purchase intent. This is a clear example of priming and expectation setting at work.

Permission priming in user onboarding

When onboarding a user to a new digital experience (app or desktop service), priming and expectation setting can strongly impact churn metrics.

Here’s a good example from Scan & Translate. It reminds users that in order to use the scan features and gain value from the app, they need to grant camera permissions to the system.

Preparing, or priming, a user before you ask permission to access their OS makes it more likely that they’ll comply with your request. This is vitally important because your product might not be able to provide value to the user without access.

Expectation-setting without compromising brand language

Residential furnishings brand, Knoll, has a range of uniquely crafted and handmade products. The care and detail that goes into each piece means longer lead times on shipping and delivery.

When we took on a project to improve their digital experience, we tested out adjusting their copy to better reflect the craftsmanship of their work.

Changing the wording from “Lead time: 8 weeks” messaging to “Made for you. Ships in 8 weeks” led to our biggest test win of the year in terms of revenue.

It created synergy between the brand’s needs (priming purchasers that shipment won’t happen for a while) and the customer’s needs (understanding why shipment won’t happen for a while). It also had the benefit of turning a challenge (long lead times) into a compelling conversion booster (custom-made).

Priming in form design

Priming is one of the first principles of form design. It keeps users on the path to form completion by clearly setting expectations and ensuring they don’t drop off due to surprises.

Priming in form design takes many forms but often is provided through progress bars. Adding this element tells the user what they can expect from the process during or before completion of the form, setting the expectation so that users come prepared to fully fill out the form.

See this example from Etsy. The company features a progress bar with clear labels to prime users about what to expect during the mobile checkout process.

To set expectations with a form, you can also be clear about the end result or value users receive upon completing the form. This can generate excitement for the product, motivating form completion.

The “Try Demo” button from ServiceNow, shown below, primes users to know what they can expect after they fill out the form. Users will get to demo the product and can also expect everything in the bulleted list to the left.

Using heuristics to theme your roadmap of opportunities

To transform the priming and expectation-setting heuristic into an actionable improvement opportunity for your digital property, consider building a strategic roadmap.

Leverage user research to identify common patterns indicating violation of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. Prioritize those opportunities based on their potential for impacting KPIs. Then, develop a plan to test improvements with a theme-based roadmap.

Taking the time to really understand where users are getting stuck in your digital experience will set you up to make more efficient and impactful decisions.

Our team can support you on your journey through a custom Digital Experience Optimization Program. You’ll have access to an entire team of researchers, strategists, designers, and developers that will help remove violations of the priming and expectation-setting heuristic (and more).

The post How To Leverage The Priming & Expectation Setting Heuristic To Drive Conversions appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

A seamless and compelling customer experience is crucial in today’s competitive digital landscape.

Many companies focus on tactical or superficial changes, but true optimization lies in understanding the why behind customer behavior. Jon’s new #1 bestselling book, Behind The Click, focuses on this exact topic. 

Jon and Ryan share some of the psychological principles found in the book and how brands can leverage these insights to create compelling digital experiences.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why psychological principles are important in crafting digital experiences 
2. What heuristics are and how companies can leverage them 
3. How heuristics are different from mental models 
4. How to create subconscious trust

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better E-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
All right. Jon, you recently came out with a book called Behind the Click where you get pretty deep into the psychological principles of conversion and what people do online and why. You’ve obviously done a lot of research on this. And I find it fascinating. The book’s nubbing out selling a lot of those. Maybe you’re not going to do conversion anymore because you sell too many books.

Jon:
It was number one new book in marketing and consumer behavior on Amazon. It beat out two folks that I’ve looked up to as content producers over the years. So beat out Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, which is-

Ryan:
What?

Jon:
… unheard of. Yes.

Ryan:
That is phenomenal.

Jon:
And then-

Ryan:
A virtual high five for that.

Jon:
I know. And then it beat out Ross Simmonds, which if anyone knows who Ross is, he’s all about content and B2B world and very popular following. So it’s his first book.
I’m stoked because those are two people I never would’ve thought that I would’ve had a chance to beat out in a bestseller.

Ryan:
That’s pretty awesome. So all right, if you’re listening and you see Jon out, he’s buying.

Jon:
Little does Ryan know you do not make money selling books.

Ryan:
But all that said, obviously you are an expert in understanding the psychology behind the clicks. Today I want to ask some questions and get some understanding of the why people do things. I see the data and I know why I do. Well, I might think I know why I do things, but it’s probably a lot of subconscious things.

Jon:
That’s the key.

Ryan:
Childhood issues that come back, rears its ugly head when I’m trying to buy things. But it’s like why do people suddenly abandon carts? I see the data and it still boggles my mind. You searched for something that says you are trying to buy this. You got to the page to buy that. You put it in the cart and then you didn’t buy something like, oh, as a digital marketer, it’s frustrating why we have such high abandoned cart rates, platforms, all these things, but I know that there’s a lot behind it.
So give us an overview of what are some of these hidden, let’s say psychological forces out there that influence what we do online that maybe we’re just not even aware of.

Jon:
Yeah. Well I think it all stems from the fact that in today’s competitive online landscape, but there’s just a need. You really, it’s a need. It’s not a want. It’s not a desire anymore. It is a need to have a seamless and compelling customer experience.
I don’t think enough brands understand that. There’s so many companies that focus on tactical changes. When you really start thinking about true optimization, it lies in understanding the why behind consumer behaviors, and that’s what gets missed.
Again, at the core of successful digital experiences are all of these psychological principles that influence how customers interact with your website and/or app. The key to unlocking this mystery lies in the way that our brains work.
There’s really three big principles. We’ll probably only have time to cover a handful today, so let’s focus on three. Heuristics, mental models and that subconscious trust that gets formed from the other two.

Ryan:
Heuristics, that is a big word, and if I ask my kids to spell it, they would struggle. So let’s start with heuristics. What does that mean and what do you do with that?

Jon:
I will admit that I can only spell it because I had to write it 100,000 times for this book. So yeah, that was a mental leap for me for sure.
But look, to make sense of all of this constant barrage of information, we really rely on mental shortcuts and that’s what’s called heuristics is these mental shortcuts. So these shortcuts shape consumer perceptions and they influence purchasing decisions, whether or not you know it.
So as a brand, by understanding heuristics, you can design experiences that cater to those shortcuts instead of get in the way of them. That ultimately leads to more conversions and ideally loyal customers. So to summarize, you can really think of heuristics as brains shortcuts. We’re wired to take these shortcuts to make quick decisions, and they play a crucial role in how we navigate and even how we perceive online experiences.
First things first, we might look at a site and say, wow, this site looks untrustworthy just because the design looks very dated, for instance. Maybe there’s an old Yahoo store that you go on, you’re like, wow, okay, I don’t know, this looks like it was built in 1990, probably maybe not safe. I don’t know. What are they doing with my credit card? Is it secure?
I say all this to basically say that consumers really have a perception and that perception holds more sway than objective reality. So this is why companies play such a critical role in shaping how customers perceive those companies. If you understand how customers’ mental models function, you can really make a great digital experience.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. So obviously getting a site that feels modern, that’s going to be different from most people, but just a similar flow or feel to the site. Then I could see, all right, something that would go against that would be if I landed on a product page and the image was on the right and the checkout button or add to cart was on the left, that would negatively impact my brain 100%.

Jon:
Right. Well, this goes right into Steven Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think, where he’s basically saying, we have these mental models. We have these shortcuts our brain is taking when we interact on websites online and we expect things to work a certain way. If you change that up, all of a sudden now I have to figure it out and I can no longer use my mental shortcut.
So there’s a lot of talk about button colors. You don’t hear it as much anymore, thank God.

Ryan:
Thank God.

Jon:
But I will say it used to be all the rage, like, oh, let’s try changing button colors, and I’m like, “No, because you’re just screwing up my mental models. Green means go, red means stop.” So don’t make the buy button red, just don’t deal with it. Why even test it?
Now you could do branded colors, et cetera. Outside of those mental models I don’t care what color you make your buttons, it’s not going to make a difference as long as you are not disrupting somebody’s heuristics and mental models. So if I look at something and I know red means stop, green means go. If you flip that on me, I’m likely going to click on the wrong button and then I’m just going to be upset and then it’s just downhill from there.

Ryan:
Okay, got it. So heuristics would be just shortcuts that I take mentally to get to the end place. And then is mental models a subset of that or is it just closely related cousin or something?

Jon:
Yeah, it’s related, and I’ve said the two together here a little bit today. A mental model is more like a map of the entire customer’s journey. Think about it this way, where you have a map of what somebody needs to do to go from point A to point B, like a treasure map, but maybe there’s a dotted line that goes between two separate points and skips over a third. It’s a shortcut.
So heuristic would be, oh, I know I can cut through that yard as the crow flies and I’m going to be able to get there quicker than if I go step by step. So this is where the mental model is that full map of instructions. I kind of know I’m going to go research the product if I like it, I know I’m going to add to cart. I know I need to enter my payment and shipping information and then complete the checkout. I also think I should get a confirmation post-purchase email.
There are these things that I know what to expect of the overall experience I’m going to go through. That’s my mental model of that experience because I’ve done it so many times.
Heuristics is going to say, okay, I know I’m always going to ship to my house, so maybe I’m going to use something like one password and it’s always just going to pop in my address and I never have to think about it. I just click one button and it’s done. It’s a shortcut.
Or I know that if I am on Amazon and I really want that product, I can just one click purchase and buy now and it’s done. I don’t have to enter anything because Amazon has all my info.
So you can look for these opportunities, but really what mental models are going to help you do is understand and even predict the customer’s behaviors as they interact with your website or your app. So by ensuring that your customer’s mental models align with your digital experience, you can create a seamless, effective experience that’s going to lead of course to increased conversions and customer satisfaction.
The challenge I see is that so many marketing and sales departments grasp this concept in theory, but they so often miss the mark on the execution. The first step, unfortunately, is often needs to be revamping the customer journey to focus on what is going to really have an impact on that experience.
Unfortunately, what most brands are doing is they’re focusing on superficial changes. They’re aiming to make their website prettier, for instance. Oh, it doesn’t match. It’s not great branding. It doesn’t look great. Well, as long as it looks trustworthy and it’s in line with your brand to some degree, that’s all you really need to convert because the consumer sees that they trust, and then the mental model is, I know what steps I need to take. So they go and they take those.
So if you focus on this mental model, what you’re doing is you’re shifting the focus squarely onto that consumer’s experience, and if you actively remove the barriers that interfere with those shortcuts that people are doing throughout those mental models, you’re going to build that subconscious level of trust with your customers.

Ryan:
I feel like the danger a lot of brands can do is try to make a platform fit your belief of the brand rather than have your brand fit the platform. I see brands try to do this. Now that we can do headless, for example, on Shopify, like, oh, we can do this really crazy stuff with this front end and then just have them check out on Shopify because Shopify is easy.

Jon:
But what you’re doing is you’re disrupting that entire mental model of what people need to do before they get to check out. You’ve given them… You’re meeting their expectations once they get to check out, but they’re not going to get to check out if you’ve disrupted that entire model before it.

Ryan:
Yeah. I think that brands really have to figure out what that balance looks like, have the brand experience be cool, but also don’t ruin what my brain has been trained to do on [inaudible 00:11:52], on Shopify and whatever else.

Jon:
Right. And I hear this all the time, is, oh, we’re going to use Shopify’s checkout because people trust it. Sure, I agree with that. Consumers see it, they trust it, but do they trust the rest of your site? Maybe not, right?

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert the podcast focused on E-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with E-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.
If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
That leads us into that subconscious trust. I talk about subconscious trust based on search results pages and where you should be and how or why. So I understand that piece, but once you get to the site, how do you build that subconscious trust if I don’t know who you are yet?

Jon:
That’s a great question. You bring up a really good point though, Ryan, which is there needs to be that thread from the ad somebody sees to the page that they land on when they click on that ad. And if there’s not a thread there, you immediately lose their trust.
If an ad says something, but then they go to a landing page that doesn’t align with that, and this is why Google scores ads based on a landing page in part. You’ll definitely know more about that than I do, but I know enough to know that if you have a landing page that resonates with the ad, you’ll be in much better position in terms of ad score.

Ryan:
For sure.

Jon:
Yeah. That’s why Google wants you to do that because they want their ads to feel trustworthy. So when you work with these kind of mental models and cater to the shortcuts, you earn that trust, and that’s really what it’s all about. It’s familiarity, of course, and ease for the consumer, and that’s far more powerful than any catchy marketing slogan that you could use.
I think brands really need to understand that this is the baseline. If you don’t have a familiar experience that is easy for consumers to use, do not worry about anything on the marketing side. Get the base in there first.
You really need to have a trustworthy digital experience, and that means three things. To feel familiar. To do what it says. You’re making a promise, you want the website to live up to that promise, and then you want it to function intuitively. And if you can do each of those things, then you’re going to win.
So maybe I can talk about each of those really quick. So feel familiar. So the internet has matured and with it so have user expectations. Customers have developed a strong sense of how websites and apps, how they should function.
So everything from your classic navigation menu to having the ever-present search bar at the top right, there’s a certain, let’s just call it rhythm to digital experiences.
So when a customer adheres to these established norms, customers really feel like they have a sense of familiarity and control, and that really just focuses on reducing friction and gives them a more positive reception to your brand. So deviate too much and you just risk creating confusion and really eroding trust.

Ryan:
Well, I guess as we’re looking at this and saying like, yeah, it’s got to be familiar and it’s got to be the same as we expect. How do we evolve online? We can’t just be stuck with the existing Amazon checkout or Shopify feel on process there. Do we just rely on somebody else to change it or do we make small tweaks? What do you think about, I mean, how does that function?

Jon:
It’s a really great question and one I get all the time. Well, aren’t we going to end up in everybody having the exact same website? The reality is no, I think is the short answer. The longer answer is, would it be that bad if the web was so usable that everyone could get what they needed done quickly and move on?
I’m not suggesting there’s no branding, there’s no marketing. All of that needs to be there. You need to differentiate yourself somehow. This is where creativity can come in to play, is how you’re going to apply your brand on top of these core tenants, these core principles. Because you want it to feel familiar. So that’s important.
Now, not everyone should be using the same imagery, the same branding theme colors or the same page layouts. I’m not suggesting all of that. I am suggesting that there are these mental maps, these mental models of how people know they’re going to get their task done on a website, and if you totally disrupt that, you don’t feel somewhat familiar on that journey, you’re going to have problems.
So I’m not looking for this sea of sameness, but what I am looking for is for everybody who’s swimming in those waters to at least understand they’re in the same ocean. Does that make sense?

Ryan:
Yeah, I think that helps. There’s always going to be small evolutions and we can’t be afraid of those. At least if you’re testing it, don’t just do it and believe it’s going to work and ignore it. But I mean, the spork had to come from somewhere and so somebody didn’t reimagine a fork. So small tests.

Jon:
There you go. And the sporks, if you got that at a restaurant, you’d be like, what is this? You would at least question it. It would feel unfamiliar. But-

Ryan:
But it would be close enough that you’re like, I get what I’m supposed to do with this.

Jon:
Exactly.

Ryan:
It’s not going to change that shortcut and mental imagery I have on it.

Jon:
It probably wouldn’t. You would still use it to eat, right? However, you do pause and it does make you stop and be like, oh, what’s this? This isn’t normal, and that can be dangerous.
Now how do you get over that? Well, it should do what it says, which is the next thing. If the spork can accurately feed me. I can use it as the tool I need to use it as great, right? It does what it says, because customers really crave that predictability and that transparency in their digital experiences.
So as a brand, when you make a promise, whether that’s about your pricing, your refund policy, your product features, you have to honor that promise. It’s essential. When you get to a checkout and there’s unexpected fees or you have a really convoluted purchase process or hidden terms and conditions that violate the consumer’s trust, you just end up having more issues and people are going to abandon.
You have to really be upfront about all costs and keep interactions straightforward to build confidence and credibility. So if a server came up to you and said, hey, yeah, we serve sporks here, so just know that’s what you’re getting today. Now, they probably would be, the consumer at least, would have an upfront understanding of that and not be as shocked because you let them know.
So I love, by the way, how we took an example of something completely offline to compare a digital example, but I will say it’s true and people get it right. So not a bad analogy.

Ryan:
It was a small enough iteration that nobody freaked out. You’re like, oh, I get it. But if you moved your terms and conditions into top now, they’ll be like, that’s way too different. Just maybe move it left, right.

Jon:
That’s fair.

Ryan:
That’s making more sense now in how we can small iterations of testing to evolve, but you’re not going to drastically change it or you ruin [inaudible 00:20:16].

Jon:
And I think that’s a great segue to the third point here, which is functioning intuitively. So Intuitive design is crucial, especially for SAS products, but very much so for online purchasing.
Users are really familiar with digital platforms in their lives, so you don’t want to force them to relearn fundamental workflows for your product. So really, instead you want to leverage these common design patterns and visual cues. And a spork, again, that’s what I was saying, if actually does what it needs to do, holds that promise, and it’s easy to understand what it’s supposed to do, nobody freaks out, then it feels natural. And customers can really focus on the value you’re providing, which in this case would be the meal, not the spork, the utensil.
That’s really what you want to focus on is the value that you provide.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. So is this really about the customer as the advocate?

Jon:
For sure. I think that focusing on psychological principles means flipping the script. It’s a shift from what do we want to tell customers to what do we need the customer to know to move forward, and that’s a very different point of view than most brands take.
Because way back, oh, it’s been 10 years now, maybe, when I published my first book, Stop Marketing Start Selling was a whole book all about this core tenet of how brands are always shouting at customers when they get to the site instead of helping customers accomplish their tasks and getting them to move forward to that next step.
So businesses that truly excel put themselves in the customer’s shoes, and I think that’s what you need to do. That’s the only way, and I think understanding the psychological principles is that the consumers are going through is key to doing that. You got to champion the needs of the customer, even though the customer’s not physically present in your company meetings, you can’t see them on your website. You still have to have that empathy for them.
The most successful digital experiences put that customer at the forefront. By understanding the psychological principles that drive their behavior, you move beyond that surface level changes to create meaningful interactions that resonate on a deeper level.

Ryan:
Yeah, it’s not about trying to trick the customer.

Jon:
No.

Ryan:
I think as long as your perception or the way you’re looking in the lens of your site is to help and get the customer to the end, not everybody’s going to buy your stuff.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
You accept that. Understand, I’m not trying to trick somebody that wasn’t going to buy it into buying it. The people that are going to buy it. I need to make that as seamless and as easy as possible to get to the end of that transaction and move on with their life because their entire life shouldn’t be trying to transact on my site.

Jon:
Right. Exactly.

Ryan:
I like it. That’s always customer first. So thank you, Jon, for giving us some insight into heuristics, which I’ll remember how to spell for the next probably two or three minutes, and then I’ll forget.

Jon:
You’re not alone. I bet you that if I had to rewrite it again today, there’s a 50/50 shot, I’d get it right even after spelling it 100 times. So look, I was never a spelling bee champion, so I’m okay with that.

Ryan:
Me neither. Now I’m okay with it as well. As long as we’re helping people convert online.

Jon:
If you know what it means-

Ryan:
Help customers.

Jon:
… after today. I hope you do. Then you’re in a good spot.

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon. I appreciate the time.

Jon:
Thank you, Ryan.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 106): How Psychology Influences Purchase Decisions appeared first on The Good.

Do you ever wonder why a customer who seems ready to buy suddenly abandons their cart at the last second?

It’s not always about the product or the price.

In today’s competitive online landscape, a seamless and compelling customer experience is crucial. While many companies focus on tactical changes, true optimization lies in understanding the ‘why’ behind customer behavior. At the core of successful digital experiences are the psychological principles that influence how customers interact with websites and apps.

The key to unlocking this mystery lies in the way our brains work. To make sense of the constant barrage of information, we rely on mental shortcuts known as heuristics. These shortcuts shape customer perceptions and influence their decisions. By understanding heuristics, you can design experiences that cater to those shortcuts, ultimately leading to more conversions and loyal customers.

These psychological principles and how to effectively apply them are the focus of my latest book, Behind The Click: How to Use the Hidden Psychological Forces that Shape Online Behavior to Craft Digital Journeys that Delight, Engage, and Convert.

Let’s go into a bit more detail on one of the core concepts that will help you optimize your customer experience: heuristics.

Heuristics: The Brain’s Shortcuts

Our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions. These mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, play a crucial role in how customers navigate and perceive online experiences.

For customers, perception often holds more sway than objective reality. This is why companies play a crucial role in shaping how customers perceive them. Understanding how your customers’ mental models function is pivotal to their experience.

Mental Models: Mapping The Customer Journey

A mental model is like a map of your customer’s digital journey. It helps you understand and even predict their behaviors as they interact with your website or app. By ensuring that your customers’ mental models align with your target audience, you create a seamless, effective experience that leads to increased conversions and satisfaction.

While many marketing and sales departments grasp this concept in theory, the execution often misses the mark. Too often, the first step in revamping the customer journey focuses on superficial changes that aim to make the website ‘prettier,’ neglecting the more important aspects of functionality.

By understanding the mental shortcuts your customers rely on, you shift the focus squarely onto their experience. Actively removing barriers that interfere with those shortcuts builds a subconscious level of trust with your customers.

Behind The Click

Learn how to use the hidden psychological forces that shape online behavior to craft digital journeys that delight, engage, and convert.

GET YOUR COPY

The Power Of Subconscious Trust

When you work within your customers’ mental models, catering to those shortcuts, you earn a certain level of trust. This sense of familiarity and ease is far more powerful than any catchy marketing slogan.

We unpack more of these elements in the upcoming Behind The Click, but fundamentally, a trustworthy digital experience should:

Feel Familiar

The internet has matured, and with it, so have user expectations. Customers have developed a strong sense of how websites and apps should function. From the classic navigation menu to the ever-present search bar at the top right, there’s a certain rhythm to digital experiences.

When a website adheres to these established norms, customers feel a sense of familiarity and control. This subconsciously reduces friction and makes them more receptive to your brand.  Deviate too drastically, however, and you risk creating confusion and eroding trust.

Do What It Says

Customers crave predictability and transparency in their digital experiences. When you make a promise – whether that’s about your pricing structure, refund policy,  or product features – honoring that promise is essential.

Unexpected fees, convoluted purchase processes, or hidden terms and conditions violate the customer’s trust. Be upfront about all costs and keep the interactions straightforward to build confidence and credibility with your customer base.

Function Intuitively

Especially for SaaS products, intuitive design is crucial. Users are already familiar with countless digital platforms in their lives. Don’t force them to relearn fundamental workflows for your product. Leverage common design patterns and visual cues. When your product functions in a way that feels natural, customers can focus on the value you provide rather than the mechanics of using the interface.

The Customer As The Advocate

Focusing on psychological principles means flipping the script. It’s a shift from “What do we want to tell customers?” to “What do customers need to know to move forward?”

Businesses that truly excel put themselves in the customers’ shoes. They champion the needs of the customer, even though the customer may not be physically present in company meetings.

The most successful digital experiences put the customer at the forefront. By understanding and catering to the psychological principles that drive their behavior, you move beyond surface-level changes and create meaningful interactions that resonate on a deeper level.

My book, Behind The Click: How to Use the Hidden Psychological Forces that Shape Online Behavior to Craft Digital Journeys that Delight, Engage, and Convert, provides actionable strategies and real-world examples to help you apply these principles.

It’s your guide to transforming your digital presence into a powerful tool for attracting, engaging, and converting customers.

The post How Does Psychology Influence Purchase Decisions? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Have you ever wondered what goes through your customer’s mind when they make a certain purchase decision?  

Well, you’re not alone.

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss “Behind the Click”, Jon’s upcoming book, which focuses on the psychological principles behind each purchase decision. Jon discusses the inspiration for the book, his approach to writing it, and the overview of the content. He also offers insights into how brands can utilize the information presented in the book to optimize their digital experiences.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What ‘Behind the Click’ is about
2. What heuristics are and why they’re important
3. How to ethically use the insights and strategies in the book
4. What phases of the customer journey are included in the book
5. How to write books effectively and efficiently
6. How to get your copy of ‘Behind the Click’

Get your free chapter: http://thegood.com/btc/

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive & Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Hello Jon. Good to see you. Good to hear you.

Jon:
You too.

Ryan:
As we prepare for Snowmageddon here in Portland Oregon, again, there’s the threat of a snowflake on our weather app. So, everybody is panic buying kale, and my wife went to Costco and bought all their sleds, so we’re ready for the half an inch of snow that’ll melt by 9:00 A.M. on Saturday.

Jon:
But last year you had the big dirt pile from all the construction you were doing and your kids could sled down that. Did you still have that?

Ryan:
We did. No, we’ve gone from a massive dirt pile to small gravel pile and the kids are going to have to work a little harder to find the slopes and maybe run faster to make sure they can sled if it happens.

Jon:
If it happens, right?

Ryan:
I put it at about a 50/50 shot here in Portland with the forecasters since evidently Portland is difficult to forecast snow weather.

Jon:
I do agree with you, however, we have a hundred percent chance of Portland freaking out whether or not it snows, so.

Ryan:
For sure. I remember the weirdest one that was what, two years ago maybe, that every storm in the city ran out of kale before a snowstorm or reported snowstorm. I’m like, who needs kale? If you’re going to get stuck at home for two days, go buy a bunch of beer.

Jon:
Right? The other side of this argument is last year you did a really great partner event at Logical Position headquarters and it did snow and it wasn’t a lot of snow, but it did ice over a little bit and every highway in town just shut down. And at the good, we had a couple team members who were stuck in their cars on I-5 for quite a while. So, I guess the threat is real, let’s put it that way.

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, the crazy thing about that, we had people coming from all over the country because if you’re in Chicago or New York and it’s February, it’s much better to be in Portland usually where it’ll be 50 and raining most of the time. But I had a wine event scheduled afterwards, and the only people that could make it from Oswego out to Sherwood for the wine event were the people from Chicago because they could drive. Our VP in Chicago, drove just a rental Nissan Maxima I think all over. He was fine. I was like, “what’s wrong with this? This is normal.” I’m like, “No.”

Jon:
I hear you. I grew up in Ohio and two inches of snow was like, get your boots on and get to school. Here, it’s two inches and they’re like, okay, let’s move on. But yeah-

Ryan:
We’ve already had basketball cancel Saturday morning.

Jon:
Okay, lovely. Well, there you go.

Ryan:
Thursday we’re recording this.

Jon:
Commence the freak-out.

Ryan:
Yeah, the freak-out is commenced, but we’re not here to talk about the wonders of Portland weather and how we freak out at the dumbest things. You are a big deal and you are releasing your third book with The Good.

Jon:
You make me blush, big deal.

Ryan:
I mean, I don’t know anybody else in the e-comm ecosystem that I’m connected to that has written books as successfully as you have that we have some partners that like eBooks, but they’re not published tangible physical copies that you can get on Amazon. So, it’s pretty cool. So, you’ve got another one coming and having read your previous one, opting into optimization, how much do we need to know about optimizing? I mean, why write another one?

Jon:
This is exactly the challenge where when you niche down like we have the topics are never ending, right? I mean, this is what episode 99 of Drive & Convert. I mean, you and I still haven’t run out of things to talk about, so I probably could write books every couple of years for the rest of my life and not run out of things to write about. But I did feel like Opting In was all about the way of thinking about how to do optimization and not specific tactics. And I feel like on a day-to-day, I’m fighting the industry on the perception around tactics that in optimization and specifically conversion optimization, as it has become more commoditized over the years, there’s been a shift of people just blindly applying tactics. And I really want them to understand the reasoning behind why they’re doing this. And what we touched on very little in Opting in to Optimization was the psychology behind this.
And I’m continually fascinated by it, and I think it’s really important that folks know about the psychology. If there’s this tendency to jump straight into tactics, everyone really wants to know what. What tactics to deploy, how to boost revenue, they want a checklist, but they don’t understand the why. They’re really often missing that why. So like you said, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about both the what and the why of digital experience optimization. My first book, Stop Marketing Start Selling really talks about the awareness of strategies and traditional marketing aren’t enough to convert and provide actionable steps to shift the mindset into a sales focused digital journey. It was really, hey, once somebody gets to your site, your marketing has won. It’s now time to start selling to them, and that’s how you’re going to get people to convert. And sales isn’t a pressure tactic, but it’s helping people make the best decision for them.
And if you understood that you were ready to start doing optimization, right? So, then the second book Opting in to Optimization really dives into specific strategies, some of how to implement them, but also why they work from that technical standpoint. So, you understood a little bit of the why behind it, but we talked about how to do customer research and why that was important. Up until this point, really our team at The Good has always been asking questions like, well, okay, why should we implement a specific tactic? And we ask that of clients all the time, why did you implement this tactic? So, out of all of that, I really felt like there was room to dig deeper, and that’s what this third book is really meant to do here, because to create digital experiences regardless of the technology, the changing of user behavior, you really have to understand the root of what drives successful digital journeys.
And the answer doesn’t live in user data all the time. As much as I love data, it really lives in human nature and collecting all that data is almost pointless if you don’t understand the why behind the actions people are taking, right? It’s important to have that data. We’ve talked a lot about that, even recent recordings, right? But you need to understand the psychology behind why people are taking those actions. So with this book, I’m really taking it one step further to ask questions like why does the underlying thought process make something effective, right? Or why did the tactic elicit a specific response from that specific user, which are really important questions once you have the data.

Ryan:
Got it. So, I mean I think too often that not enough people in our industry think about the why. It is kind of like, I want to take a pill, I want an easy button. Just tell me what to do. I don’t care why I have to do it. Let’s just do it. Well, it’s like you and I have this conversation all the time. Just because your competitor does something, doesn’t mean it is right or is based on logic or makes sense for your brand. Mom told us “If your friends all jump off a bridge, you’re going to do it?” I mean, my answer was always like, “Well, how deep is the water and would I be landing in it? Sounds fun.”

Jon:
There you go. That’s why you’re a good entrepreneur, right? You answer questions with another question.

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, if you don’t understand some of the stuff behind the scenes, it’s going to be very difficult to win. You have to know, okay, if you’re playing basketball that you play a lot of, why are they going to the right all the time? Well, if I just, Hey, they do well. If you don’t understand the why, then if they pivot and change, you’re not going to be prepared for that. So, I’m excited, but I’m guessing this is beyond just more of some why questions. So, what is the book about?

Jon:
Yeah, great question. I mean, diving a little bit deeper, there are so many hidden factors to influence decisions for your customers and why your customers are making decisions. And they have little to do with the facts of your brand or the products you sell. And yet most brands are still really just selling based on stats and figures of their products, right? They want to get that emotional journey, which is great. And then once they’re at the site, they want to say, “Hey, it’s a black t-shirt in size extra large.” But really there’s more behind that and behind the click, which is why we’re calling it that, right? Dives into the psychological principles behind these shortcuts our brains take to make all these decisions. We make hundreds of thousands decisions a day, and you don’t even think about it, right?
A decision of just when to take a drink, right? You don’t even think about it, you just do it, right? So, really we wanted to talk about how these different elements for your company’s digital experience really play into those shortcuts and either guide your customers towards a purchase or send them running to your competitor. And so, understanding these underlying principles is really important, and you can deploy different optimization tactics to create that digital experience that not only meets, but also anticipates your customer’s wants. And I think that’s important, so.

Ryan:
Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

Jon:
So, is worthy of a book.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive & Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your host are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
As a brand reading this book, I mean, what do you expect them to do with this information? I mean, they’re already in optimization or hopefully thinking about it or moving down that process. So, what are they going to be doing with this new information?

Jon:
Well, hopefully you’re right. They’ve read Opting in to Optimization and they understand when they’re ready to start optimizing and really what’s behind optimization, right? What are the core ideas behind optimization? Well, now we want to take a step back and optimize the entire digital experience from the first time customers encounter your company to well past the checkout into post-purchase. So in this book, you’re going to find actionable optimization strategies to deploy on your website as well as the psychological principles behind those strategies and what they do and why they do and do not work.
And I think important to understand because if you can look at a data set and focus on why something is happening, what’s the psychology behind why something is happening, you can then optimize that experience to better have a more successful customer journey. So, the thing to understand about all of this too is a checklist, a list of tactics, it’s going to change, right? Every month, right? Because technology’s changing, devices are changing, preferences change, but no matter what else changes in the future, if you focus on the customer experience, you will win because psychological principles that influence how we make decisions has stayed the same for millennia. And that’s what I want people to understand are all these psychological principles.

Ryan:
So, I mean, do you have a psychology degree? I mean, you are deep in psychology at this point.

Jon:
Well, it’s funny. It’s like you could say, “I’ve earned an MBA by running a business for 15 years,” right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
It’s the same type of thing here. I truly do believe, while I don’t have a psychology degree, that I’ve learned so much about it almost by necessity at first and then really by interest. And so, did a lot of research for this book, I mean, this has been six months plus in the making of deep diving into a lot of psychology stuff I hadn’t thought about since college in a lot of cases. But I really wanted to take all of those and break them down into four phases that I believe a customer goes through. So, that’s discovery, right? Understanding who you are and what they need. So, that research that you’re doing leads them to information gathering, right? So at that stage, they’re really trying to understand, can you solve my pain or need? Right? And if you can, then they move into that decision-making and conversion stage.
And so, this is truly where when you say conversion optimization, they’re talking about just conversions, and there’s so much more that could be done with optimization. And then moving into post-purchase, what happens after somebody makes a purchase? Right? There’s a lot you can do there to influence people coming back to you again. So, I break all of those down into four areas, but I also cover why brands should work with heuristics or shortcuts, right? Things that we know to be true. So, how to ensure those are used for positive intent versus a hack to try to get the customer to convert and complete a purchase. And I just go into why that leaves a lasting negative impact on your brand because this information is just as easily could be used in the wrong way. You could try to take the psychological learnings and try to hack together a funnel that plays on all of these. The challenge is that consumers can tell when you’re doing it for negative intent. You can tell that somebody is trying to hack you and get you to do what they want you to do.
And if you combine too many of these, it really clearly starts to show, it’s like a site with 101 pop-ups and a little thing out of the bottom that says, so-and-so bought this, and they’re trying to play on social proof and discounting and limited time, and they have a countdown clock on the page, and then they say, “Oh, we only have one left in stock.” And then you come back a week later, “One more left in stock,” and it’s like all of these things, or the sale that never ends but always has an end date, right? It’s like, oh, we extended the sale another day just for you. And it’s like, no, you were always going to do that. You’ve had this email scheduled for weeks.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
So, if you start combining all of those factors, you really tip your hand. You show the consumer that you’re trying to hack them into doing what you want. So, I really want to make sure I state that we go into in the book, I really do discuss how to use these appropriately, and I think that’s important.

Ryan:
Even email pop-ups, when you first get to a site.

Jon:
It’s funny you say that because the book is like 55,000 words, so it’s going to be like 250 pages perhaps. So, it’s going to be a big book. I had to leave some stuff on the cutting room floor, and I felt like that was one of the things that my point of view is out there. People know it. I did not need to reiterate that, so I left that out.

Ryan:
Got it. So, from a practical standpoint, you are husband, father, business owner. How do you find time to add in book writing throughout the week? I mean, you were even remodeling your house while you were writing this, and your remodel was as bad or worse as me knocking my entire house down and building a new one. So, what does that look like from a practical standpoint?

Jon:
That remodel took longer than writing this book, yeah. Well, here’s the thing. When you do this every day and the content, it’s really not hard to get the content out. And I’m actually putting together a whole course on how to write a book in this method because I have done it in a way that makes it as easy as possible. So, basically what I do is I write a big outline and I stew on that for a month, six weeks. It doesn’t have to be overly comprehensive, but it’s an outline of all the stuff I want to touch on, how I want to kind group the information. That may change down the line as I kind of research and learn more and write more. But then I go into starting to do interviews. So, I do an interview with my key team members who know about each of these as well, and we basically sit down and talk for a couple hours about it, and that conversation helps me get the information out.
And I find that’s way easier than sitting down trying to write a whole chapter on this. Because if I have that, then I can take that recording. I can outline all the key points that I made, and in the recording I can say stuff like, “Oh, well, I think we have an example here from this client. I’ll have to go dig that up and put that in here.” So, then it gives me a point to go back into the outline and say, “Oh, there’s an example here. Research this client. We did this for, et cetera.” So in the end, I’m able to spend a lot of time talking about the stuff in the book, and then turning that into writing is much easier because I already have the information out.

Ryan:
So, we’re going to get another piece of content about how to write your own books in the Jon MacDonald method.

Jon:
Yeah, eventually I will, yes. Because I’ve had so many people ask me this question, “How are you writing a book every 18 months, et cetera?” And the reality is it’s a lot of effort. Don’t get me wrong. It is a lot of effort, but if you sit down with a Google Doc blank page and try to write everything, it’s going to take you way longer. Then if you sit down and you say, “Okay, I’m going to discuss these points with somebody,” and then that forces you to talk about it for an hour to two hours, and then that becomes the outline for the chapter where you can then go back in and you know what you want to write about, which becomes much easier to do. And for me, maybe not for everybody, but I think it’s a methodology.

Ryan:
Oh, for sure. I mean, obviously you’ve proved it works, at least for one person, so there’s got to be other people.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
That need this hack. Okay, so you’ve got it written. It’s being printed now, I assume. Do you have a date that it’s going to be available for us to dive into?

Jon:
Yeah. So, ideally this point, we’re looking at end of February, early March of 2024, so it will be sold everywhere, Amazon, et cetera, your local bookstore. We have a publisher I’m working with, so it’s going to be published everywhere. I’ll eventually get to recording an audible version. I did my own for Opting in to Optimization, I read the entire book.

Ryan:
Oh, wow.

Jon:
I enjoyed the process and swore I would not do it again. But I have a feeling I forgot enough that I’ll probably be talked into doing that again. So, should be fun. And then of course you can, if you want get a sample chapter, be notified when it’s available for purchase, sign up at thegood.com/BTC, so BTC as in beyond the click, behind the-

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. And does that also sign you up for your regular content emails too?

Jon:
Yeah, we probably will have that as a checkbox option, but not a requirement, right? But you can definitely do-

Ryan:
It should be, everybody listening to this should be signing up to Jon’s emails. You’re missing out if you’re not.

Jon:
Well, I think a lot of content’s going to be coming out from this book through that drip, drip, drip, if you will, of different things over from our newsletter called The Good Question, so. Which I think you’re referencing to.

Ryan:
Oh yeah. So I mean, if you’re afraid of competitors getting Jon’s information, you better buy the book and read it quicker because they’re going to get it through the emails potentially, or drip stuff, so.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
All right, so new book from Jon MacDonald Behind The Click, the psychology of the why people are doing things, so you can figure out and understand what you’re doing on your site. I’m excited.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
Looking forward to it.

Jon:
Thank you. I am too.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive & Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 099): Announcing Behind the Click appeared first on The Good.

With interactions at an all-time high, any point of friction can lead to lost business and, worse, lost customers. As part of creating a seamless digital experience for your users, you need to know your customers. And that starts by understanding their expectations.

Aside from providing a better digital experience, customer expectations can also impact your brand image and boost brand loyalty.

Luckily for you, understanding and meeting customer expectations begins with only three steps.

Once you know your customers’ expectations, you can begin to optimize your digital product to meet each level of those expectations.

1. Listen and Respond When Your Customers Speak

First and foremost, listen to your customers early and often. One option for you to better understand your customers is to leverage surveys for customer feedback. You can also use other methods such as:

• Usability testing
• Session recordings
• Heatmaps

You also want to provide numerous avenues for customers to get in touch with you, such as email, chat, and phone. Few things are more frustrating than not being able to easily communicate with a company when there’s a problem.

If your customers have to go spelunking deep into your menus to find contact information, they’re going to come away feeling frustrated.

2. Talk Regularly To Customer Service

Ask your service reps to provide some input. They interact with customers on a daily basis, and they probably have the best sense regarding the expectations of your customers.

A customer usually files a complaint when the brand doesn’t meet their needs or expectations.

Additionally, the more communication there is between customer service and the rest of the team, the more likely it is that you can fix inefficiencies.

Fixing the inefficiencies will make customers happy, which, in turn, makes your support reps happy. Ultimately, it will also make your revenue happy.

3. Leverage Data to Optimize Digital Experience

By consistently listening to your customers and your customer support reps, you create feedback loops. This allows you to identify both the areas in which you’re doing well and the ones that tend to cause problems for your customers.

Once you’ve identified the problem areas, you can begin systematically and strategically using digital experience optimization methods to make improvements.

By focusing on reducing friction in the most problematic areas, you can make a significant impact relatively quickly.

The most challenging part about this is step 1: you have to be willing to listen to your customers. From there, you can establish processes that will help you establish a feedback loop. In the last step, you can make use of the data and feedback collected to improve upon your problem areas.

Keep in mind that just because there are only three steps, it doesn’t mean that the process will be easy or straightforward. However, if you can remember that your main objective is to figure out and address the pain points of your customers, you are on the right track.

The post How Can I Better Understand And Meet Customer Expectations? appeared first on The Good.

As a brand, it’s important to understand customer sentiment: how your customers feel about you. Once you uncover their thoughts, you can make ethical optimizations to your business and website experience that create more positive sentiment.

In this guide, we explain customer sentiment and how to analyze it. We also explain how ethics are intertwined with sentiment and how our proprietary model helps you identify ethical activities that have the best chance of moving the needle.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the emotions customers feel toward your brand, products, or services. It helps you understand whether your customers’ feelings are positive, negative, or neutral, as well as why they feel that way.

Generally speaking, if your customers have positive sentiment, they are more likely to buy and become repeat loyal customers. Customers who think of your brand negatively are less likely to buy.

What affects sentiment? Your products are the biggest factor. If people love your products, they’ll probably think well of your brand. But your service quality, personal interactions, charity work, company values, website experience, and other factors can influence sentiment.

Sadly, there is a discrepancy between companies’ opinions on customer sentiment and how customers actually feel. A NICE CXone report discovered that 50% of businesses believe their customers have a positive sentiment toward their brand, but only 15% of customers agree.

What’s interesting about sentiment is that it’s infectious. It can spread from one customer to others. For instance, suppose a customer has a delightful experience with your brand. They will undoubtedly share their experience with others, which will improve those people’s sentiment.

If you gather enough feedback from customers about their feelings, you can take steps to address any issues and build a better brand experience. But to get this feedback, you have to ask the right questions.

Direct vs. indirect feedback

Customer sentiment relies on direct and indirect feedback. Both are valuable. Their differences lay in how you get them.

Direct feedback refers to statements your customers make to you directly. This includes emails, phone calls, customer support tickets, live chat, or in-person conversations. Generally, these only happen when customers aren’t happy, though direct praise isn’t uncommon.

Indirect feedback refers to statements your customers make publicly, but aren’t intended for you. This includes conversations with friends and social media conversations. With the right tools, you can find and listen to these statements.

Some communications straddle the line between direct and indirect. A Twitter complaint, for example, is directed at the brand, but the tweeter relies on the pressure of a public conversation to make their point or get a response.

Measuring customer sentiment

We have lots of ecommerce metrics to measure how people feel, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), ease of doing business (EODB), or Net Promoter Score (NPS®).

While those metrics are valuable, they don’t attempt to understand why customers feel the way they do. To learn why, we have to approach it qualitatively.

More than 90% of communication is nonverbal, but that presents a challenge when you’re dealing with written communication, which lacks visual and acoustic aid. The words people use are only a fraction of their feelings.

This is referred to as the Iceberg Principle. Like an iceberg’s mass, which sits mostly under the water, your audience’s sentiment is similarly obscured. It’s your job to decipher the true meaning.

Customer sentiment is based on words, so we have to either a) have to have conversations with our customers, or b) peer into their conversations with their friends, family, and followers. A star rating will tell you whether a customer had a good or bad experience, but it doesn’t give you any information in regards to fixing the bad and leaning into the good.

Sentiment analysis, therefore, will put you on the path toward improving the experiences of all of your future customers. According to the Customer Service Trends for 2022 report, 64% of consumers stop doing business with a brand after only two or three bad experiences, so it’s important to make sentiment-improving changes quickly.

Sentiment analysis is the process of trying to understand your customers’ and potential customers’ feelings about your brand, products, and overall experience. Furthermore, it helps you look beyond their words at the tone of their comments. You can do this manually or with a customer sentiment analysis tool.

Let’s use a basic example. Suppose a customer leaves a product review that simply says, “It’s fine.” At face value, that’s a good review. “Fine” certainly isn’t negative, but even through the text we can see that the customer isn’t really happy with their purchase. Maybe the product isn’t what they wanted, but not worth initiating a return.

They said “Fine,” but in actuality, they had a negative experience. Even the most basic customer feedback can help you discover potential optimizations.

The Intersection of Ethical Website Design and Customer Sentiment

Now that you understand customer sentiment, you’re probably wondering how to improve it.

There is a general correlation between higher sentiment and more conversions. It’s not a linear relationship, however. While customers who like your brand are more likely to buy, increasing sentiment doesn’t always improve conversions and boost sales.

There are definitely some things you can do to improve customer sentiment and will make people more likely to purchase. Social proof, for example, makes customers feel better about their purchase and improves conversions.

However, some sentiment-improving activities won’t impact your conversion rate. Having a blog or offering a freemium model of pricing makes people feel good, but doesn’t necessarily move users down the conversion funnel.

As you would expect, activities that produce negative sentiment, such as poor imagery, hidden prices, and slow-loading pages, can hurt your conversion rate.

However, we have to consider the ethical ramifications of any initiative, even if they lead to more sales. Some sentiment-reducers can actually boost sales, like popups, false claims, and blatantly copying your competitors. These initiatives work in the short term, but they often have long-term, irrecoverable effects on your brand.

If you’re confused, don’t worry. Here’s a model we put together that shows common site elements and how users interpret them based on our research and testing.

The top left quadrant represents activities that will improve customer sentiment, but won’t boost your conversion rate. These are not a priority.

The bottom left quadrant represents activities that will reduce customer sentiment and reduce your conversion rate. They frustrate users and detract them from making a purchase. Avoid them at all costs. If you have any of these issues, don’t bother testing. Just fix them.

The bottom right quadrant represents activities that might improve your conversion rate, but are still unethical. They work, but that could affect your brand image over time. They also might have non-customer-related consequences. False claims, for example, could cause legal trouble.

We know that no one intends to create dark patterns or act unethically toward their site visitors, but it does happen. For instance, there is a fine line between “urgent language” and misleading users. These are elements to stay away from and potentially test to determine if it improves sentiment and purchases.

The top right quadrant is the intersection of ethics and good design: activities that improve sentiment and conversions. These represent opportunities that deserve your attention.

What we do at The Good focuses on this top right quadrant. We approach optimization with an understanding of what drives positive sentiment. This helps us develop better outcomes for our clients. A client may have a lot of ideas but we may not test all of them for data-backed reasons or because we know it won’t move the needle towards purchase.

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How to Conduct Customer Research to Improve Customer Experience

How to Find Ethical Initiatives That Increase Customer Sentiment and Conversions

In order to find initiatives for testing, we first focus on that top right quadrant. This is the sweet spot where optimizations have a reasonable chance of improving conversions and increasing customer sentiment.

• Post-purchase incentives
• Shipping incentives
• Imagery with product in-situ
• Brand value alignment
• Social proof
• Search improvements
• Quality tiles
• Priming
• Buy-now-pay-later
• Urgent language

Does this mean that those initiatives will definitely improve sales and sentiment? No. Nothing is guaranteed because all brands, products, and audiences are different. But these are great topics to inspire your experiments.

Furthermore, there are probably some ethical activities that improve sentiment and conversions that are unique to your business. Maybe your customers want a product builder on your site. Maybe they want you to get involved with a related charity. Or maybe they want special, nonstandard product filtering.

If you aren’t sure what your customers want, you’ll have to go out and get that information. Here are some actionable ways to determine customer sentiment and learn how to improve it.

As you hunt for your own optimization, plot them in our sentiment-ethics model, then focus on the ones that fall into the top right quadrant.

1. Collect reviews and survey responses

If you aren’t already, someone on your team should be reading every customer review that comes in. This includes reviews on individual products and general brand reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Trustpilot. If you don’t have reviews coming in naturally, start requesting them as part of your post-purchase experience.

Don’t focus on the bad reviews from unhappy customers. Positive customer experiences can validate what you know works in your website experience and marketing campaigns.  

Additionally, use online surveys to collect your customers’ opinions. These are typically longer than a simple product review request, so your response rate will be lower, but they give you the opportunity to ask probing questions. Plus, surveys aren’t public, so only you see the answer. You can encourage your customers to be brutally honest.

Who should take your customer satisfaction survey? It depends on what you want to know. If you want to know what you’re doing right, talk to your most active customers. If you want to know what you’ve done wrong, ask customers who only purchased once.

Most importantly, make your customer surveys easy for customers to complete. Send a link to a simple form. Include multiple choice questions they can complete quickly, but also add comment boxes so they can provide unique feedback in their own words.

2. Conduct customer interviews

User interviews are one-on-one conversations with existing users or potential users in your target audience. The purpose is to get direct feedback on how they feel and what you can do better in your brand experience, including your ecommerce site.

Admittedly, user interviews are expensive and time-consuming. Someone on your team has to conduct each one. And sometimes you don’t come away with any valuable feedback. If you need feedback at scale, opt for social listening or satisfaction surveys.

But customer interviews have the potential to provide a surprising amount of information, especially if the interviewer has experience pulling information out of your customers. A skilled interviewer can probe deeply to extract powerful insights.

Analyzing your feedback from interviews is challenging because the information is qualitative and unstructured. You (or someone on your team) will need to go through them one by one and divide customer comments into categories that help optimize the website. In some cases, you might look for answers to specific questions, such as “Why don’t our users take the quiz?”

3. Monitor customer service calls and live chat

When customers contact you directly, it’s important to measure their sentiment. Since 96% of customers don’t complain when there’s a problem, you have to take the ones that do complain seriously.

Suppose a customer calls to complain about missing shipment tracking information. Perhaps they didn’t receive the shipping confirmation email. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the tracking field in the email itself.

In this case, the customer support representative should summarize the encounter in a shared document or CRM. Then, review these notes regularly to look for repeat complaints. If you see sentiment patterns, have someone fix the issues so future customers don’t suffer the same problems.

4. Conduct customer sentiment analysis with AI

Sentiment analysis (sometimes called opinion mining) is a process that uses conversational artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to determine the sentiment behind text. It attempts to extract those intangible bits of communication and identify customer issues.

These kinds of tools can analyze any type of text: social media posts, review sites, news articles, blogs, support tickets, live chat transcripts, and more.

After reviewing the comments, the AI will unpack the text to understand its structure and classify the words as positive, neutral, or negative, thereby turning qualitative information into quantitative data that can be analyzed at scale.  

How does it work? The algorithms turn words into vectors, then use the distance between those points to understand their relationship. For instance, a sentiment analysis AI would group “Honda” and “Ford” together because they are related. (This TEDx talk explains everything.)

Sentiment analysis can detect emotions, like anger, happiness, frustration, or disappointment at different stages of the customer journey. It can even deduce what customers think of your product. Suppose customers complain that a product “breaks right away” or “isn’t very durable” or “fell apart in my hands.” In this case, the AI would classify all of those comments as “low quality” to give you a comprehensive picture.

Fortunately, you don’t need to build this yourself. There are plenty of pre-built sentiment analysis SaaS tools your data team can use, such as Talkwalker, Reputation, Repustate, Brand24, or SentiSum.

5. Interact with your audience on social media

A proper social media presence is more than just blasting out content into the void. Smart brands engage with their audience to create genuine relationships and extract valuable social media feedback.

In a 2020 Bain & Company study, 54% of companies reported using technologies for analyzing customer sentiment from social media platforms. This is expected to exceed 80% in 2023.

The benefit to these interactions is that you can hear from all customers, not just recent ones. You can even learn what non-customers think of your brand and website experience.

When a social media user mentions your brand, document their comments. Try to determine why they made those comments and how you can fix the problem for that customer and future customers.

If your brand gets a lot of social media activity, consider using a social listening platform to monitor conversations at scale, such as Sprout Social, Falcon.io, or Hootsuite. These tools let you track brand mentions, hashtags, and any keywords you like.

The Best Results Come From Tailored Insights

Best practices only take you so far. At a certain point, you have to run methodical experiments to determine what moves the needle for your brand and ecommerce site.

At The Good, our experts can help you develop accurate insights tailored to your specific site and user goals. We’ll find ways to increase conversions and customer sentiment without violating ethics, mistreating your users and customers, or causing long term damage to your brand.

Our years of experience let you focus on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact. You may have a lot of ideas, so we work collaboratively with you to test ideas that move the needle towards purchase while surfacing improvement opportunities that your team can implement. 

Learn more about our Conversion Growth Program. Let’s accelerate your business growth with our done-with-you optimization program that has proven results and no long-term commitments.

FAQs About Customer Sentiment and Ethical Design

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the overall attitude, opinion, and emotions of customers towards a product, brand, or service. It can be positive, negative, or neutral and can have a significant impact on a company’s success or failure.

What is a sentiment example?

An example of negative customer sentiment in ecommerce is when customers leave negative reviews about a product they purchased online, citing issues such as poor quality, incorrect sizing, or slow shipping times. This negative sentiment can discourage potential customers from making a purchase, leading to a decrease in sales and revenue for the ecommerce business.

How do you measure customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment can be measured through various methods such as surveys, feedback forms, social media monitoring, online reviews, and sentiment analysis tools. These methods allow businesses to gather data and valuable insights about customer opinions, emotions, and attitudes towards their products or services.

What is ethical website design?

Ethical website design involves creating websites that prioritize the privacy, security, and well-being of users. It includes transparent data collection practices, accessibility for all users, and user-centered design that prioritizes usability and functionality. Ethical website design also avoids the use of manipulative tactics to exploit or deceive users.

What is customer sentiment analytics?

Customer sentiment analytics in ecommerce involves analyzing customer feedback, reviews, and social media mentions to understand customers’ emotions, attitudes, and opinions about a company’s products or services. This helps ecommerce businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience and ultimately drive sales.

Hundreds of millions in revenue generated with our strategic optimization programs.

But don’t take our word for it. Hear about the amazing results from 15+ years in business, straight from the source.

SEE HOW

The post Drive Business Growth at the Intersection of Positive Customer Sentiment & Ethical Website Design appeared first on The Good.

Do you avoid those unauthorized shortcuts and stick to the main route, or are you one of those who helps create a new route?

Those crowd-created shortcuts, called “desire paths” by urban planners, hold a crucial lesson for digital marketing managers and ecommerce managers.

Desire paths hold a crucial lesson for digital marketing managers and ecommerce managers. #UX #webdesign
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As it is with foot traffic, some online visitors are observant and content to follow the path you’ve set forth. Your job is to make the signs they follow easy to see and understand.

Other online visitors are easily frustrated. They don’t want to exert a whole lot of effort trying to figure out your navigation. They’re in a hurry. They want more control over the customer journey. The better you can serve or sway those visitors, and the less friction involved in doing so, the more they’ll convert into a lead or purchase from you.

An understanding of online desire paths can help you construct a user experience pathway to guide visitors on their way to becoming customers.

First, we’ll consider how land planners are learning big lessons in design from those crowd-generated shortcuts. Then, we’ll talk about how you can use online desire paths to boost conversions, sales and customer satisfaction through an improved user experience on your ecommerce or lead-generation website.

If you want to know what your customers want… watch what they do.

Desire Paths Show Us What People Want

The Pathways to Parks Project seeks to identify spaces and paths that would lend themselves to conversion into public-centered spaces. Their philosophy is that people are best served when walkways and rest stops are built to serve the user… not vice versa.

For example, a vacant lot pedestrians cut across to save travel time on foot can become a brick path with benches and shade. Unused corners of a rooftop parking garage can be converted into viewing areas and leisure spaces. The multidisciplinary contributors to the project are both active and proactive in their work: they don’t just plan things for people; they let the people show them how to draw up the plan.

Even the best-laid plans can fail in time

Brazil’s capital city is a picture-perfect planned city. From the air, one can see the shape of an airplane – with government buildings located in the cockpit.

Designed in the 1950’s, Brasillia is a marvel of urban intelligence… except the planners imagined ready access to vehicles would do away with the public’s desire for walking. The 1970’s fascination with running on purpose (jogging) would’ve been laughable 20 years prior.

Furthermore, the utopian dream of a new car in every driveway and an unlimited supply of cheap fuel has thus far failed to materialize.

Consequently, the Brasilia of today is criss-crossed with desire paths, and the problems those paths create (an extraordinarily high rate of cars killing pedestrians, for instance) are giving urban planners and university classes everywhere a case study in what happens when the public doesn’t like the architect’s’ decisions.

The Brasilia case study is providing an opportunity for planners and students to learn from the world’s greatest teachers: actual users of the space.

In the TED Talk (above), Tom Hulme shows aerial photos of Brasilia and talks about desire paths.

Online Desire Paths and Digital Marketing

“People are resourceful,” Tod Hulme pointed out in his TED Talk, “they’ll always find the low-friction route.” That’s as true online as it is in nature – except the online public’s most readily available means of creating a desire path is to go elsewhere when they find your website too complicated or cumbersome.

People are resourceful, they’ll always find the low-friction route. - @thulme #UX
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It doesn’t have to be like that, though. By watching what your visitors do – in addition to listening to what they say – you can determine the desire paths of your audience. And the better able you are to provide the paths they want, the more capable you are of helping them travel the path that leads to becoming your customer or your repeat customer.

What if your desires and your customers’ desires don’t exactly coincide? By studying desire paths to determine how they want to circumvent your present design, you can make improvements to guide them gently. Either way. You both win.

Desire paths may be one of the most overlooked design tools in digital marketing, but the rise of interest in user experience is bringing the idea to the forefront.

Desire paths may be one of the most overlooked design tools in digital marketing. #UX #CRO
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By learning to identify online desire paths, then finding ways to leverage them, you’ll get one more step up on the not-so-savvy competition.

We won’t bog you down with technical data here. Our aim is to give you the information you need to take the next step in optimizing your ecommerce or lead-generation website for conversions.

The flipside of customer desire optimization

Before we go on to consider ways to identify and build better digital user desire paths, there’s one thing we want to emphasize: The user isn’t always right.

Yes, you want to attract and please those who are most apt to benefit from and purchase your products or services, but never forget the pertinent admonitions of two successful business leaders, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs:

Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Steve Jobs: “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

The proper aim of desire path research is to learn from your customers, not to hand over the reins of your company to them. That’s the aim of every study we do at The Good: actionable information.

Gathering data and deciding how to use it are two different processes. Like gathering your banking information and preparing a budget – one informs the other; it doesn’t dictate it.

Action Step: Consider feedback you’ve heard about your website design. Set aside defensiveness and learn from the complaints. Are some of the suggestions made by desire path creators? How can you help steer that traffic better?

How to leverage desire paths

At The Good, we sometimes speak with marketing managers who are leery of embracing the onslaught of data new tools and tactics can deliver. All of us, to one degree or another, are suffering from digital information overload.

For the seasoned marketing executive, the steady stream of computerized insight coming from analytics can seem outrageous. Imagine stepping into a driverless car. Can you trust the computer and the systems with your life? It’s easy to get that same feeling when asked to go against gut instinct and test something the data says will work, but your mind says won’t.

We are quick to remind our clients that experiments are for learning. You should never dive head-first into a stream without first testing and exploring the waters. Some experiments tell us what NOT to do. Others point to the best route. All iterations are helpful as long as something is learned and the lesson is remembered.

The attentive study of desire paths, as a means of informing your user experience (UX) planning, helps you know best how to set up your sales path. The optimum situation occurs when what your users desire and your path to sales are exactly the same!

That’s worth restating: When your path to sales and the user’s desire path match, you’ll be positioned for record sales.

When your path to sales and the user’s desire path match, you’ll be positioned for record sales.
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Case Studies Related to Identifying Online Desire Paths

Have you ever tried to point something out to someone – something obvious to you – but the other person just couldn’t see it?

The same thing can happen on your ecommerce or lead-generation website. You think your call to action (CTA) is the logical next choice, but your visitors aren’t quite getting it.

Let’s look at three field-gathered examples of online desire path discovery and optimization.

Case Study: Is your path to the sale visible?

One of our clients sold products similar in nature, but prices varied considerably depending on special features chosen. We designed a search filtering system based on the needs of the customer, rather than on the particular qualities of the products.

Our reasoning was that shoppers would find it easier to find what they wanted if filtering was based on their particular needs. We didn’t want to require prospects to find their way through a maze of product-based choices in order to hone in on the right selection.

Our plan made perfect sense from a site designer’s point of view. After launch, though, we found those who filled a cart and checked out for the final purchase actually took advantage of the filter a dismal 5% of the time.

Where had we gone wrong?

THE PROBLEM: We scratched our heads a bit, set up more experiments, and observed visitor behavior. It turned out that the path we’d laid out – it was strikingly obvious to us – wasn’t so obvious to prospects.

THE SOLUTION: We tweaked the design of the filter during several more testing rounds. Our aim was to make it so apparent prospects couldn’t possibly miss it. Further testing showed the changes were having the desired effect.

THE RESULT: In the end, the filter proved itself integral to 85% of purchases. The design team did the right things, they just didn’t make those right things as evident as they needed to be. (By the way, you can read more about that case study in our book, Stop Marketing, Start Selling.)

THE LESSON: The best user-centered design begins with intelligent reasoning based on education and experience. Before, during, and after launch, though… sound thinking must prove itself in line with the customer desire path. You never know for sure that you have a winner until your audience gives your work their approval.

Test, observe, interpret.

Test, observe, interpret.

Test, observe, interpret.

And don’t stop.

Case Study: Is your value proposition absolutely evident?

Diane James Home sells amazing flowers. They’re so amazing, in fact, they look real. We discovered that too much reality can be a big problem.

The company wasn’t getting an acceptable conversion rate from their faux flowers website. The photos were lovely. You could almost smell the flowers – exactly what you would want in an orchid you don’t have to water, an arrangement that would last for years instead of days.

So why weren’t they selling better?

The company used our free Stuck Score assessment tool, hoping to get a grip on the situation. After seeing the results, they enrolled in The Good’s Conversion Growth Program.

THE PROBLEM: Using a combination of tactics like user experience testing, user feedback, and data analytics, we identified the primary roadblock in the way of most visitors’ desire path: Many were failing to understand the site was selling high-quality faux flowers, not REAL flowers. That anchored the prices, making them seem unreasonable.

Those who were looking for faux flowers often left immediately (bounced), thinking they couldn’t get to where they wanted to go (a blocked desire path). And those looking for fresh flowers turned away due to a price objection. It was a lose-lose proposition.

THE SOLUTION: We experimented with ways to make it evident to visitors the flowers were exceptional examples of faux flowers, not beautiful real flowers.

THE RESULT: After several multivariate tests, Diane James Home realized a 52% reduction in bounce rate and a 50% increase in revenue.

THE LESSON: Even if your sales path and the prospect’s desire path lead to the same destination, you still must make sure your prospects realize it. Did you ever think you were headed the wrong way, turn around, then miles later realize you were going the right way after-all? Once a prospect abandons your page, you can’t be sure that visitor will ever be back again. Don’t be secretive about your offers. Make sure it’s easy to tell who they’re for and why they’re valuable.

[x_icon type=”bookmark”] Action Step: Ask your team this question: What do our visitors say is the most difficult to understand part of our website?

Case Study: You have the tool, but how does it work?

MasterCraft boats aren’t for everyone… literally. MasterCraft provides a boat design tool that allows customers to choose from among a variety of options to get the exact style, color, engine, and outfitting they desire.

During an economic downturn, sales began to drop off. Since investing in a specialty boat is typically not a spur-of-the-moment purchase, every qualified lead must be nurtured properly. MasterCraft was hoping to find ways to keep their high-ticket products moving.

THE PROBLEM: Our team highlighted several areas where the user desire path was thwarted, resulting in lost opportunities. Prospects were struggling with the boat design tool, a critical part along the sales path. In addition, the website performed poorly on mobile devices – another severe setback to the customer desire path and user experience.

THE SOLUTION: The Good’s data-backed design set up a series of user testing, configuration experiments, design iterations, and site updates based on qualitative and quantitative scientific methods. We re-designed to ensure the MasterCraft sales path matched the user’s desire path. We rebuilt the site architecture to perform exceptionally on mobile, we overhauled the boat design tool, and we streamlined the dealers’ ability to claim leads from the site.

THE RESULT: After the site and process improvements, MasterCraft realized a 29% jump in revenues and a 66% boost in website conversion rates. Rather than needing to worry about getting more orders for the current year, the digital desire path changes resulted in customers placing orders that wouldn’t be filled until the following year.

THE LESSON: Good enough isn’t good enough. You may have the tools and features your prospects want, but they have to be able to access and use those tools easily before you’ll get maximum benefits from your website.

Quick-Read Resources:

• Sites Designed From the Customer’s Perspective Deliver Better Results
• Data-validated Website Design Converts
• Customer Needs – The Key to Website Effectiveness

How to Recognize Online Desire Paths

We hinted at methods of determining online desire paths in our coverage of the three case studies (above). Now, let’s drill down into particulars.

Here are the primary tools and methods we use every day at The Good. The exact tools you need will vary according to the needs of your own business. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimization. There are similarities, but cookie-cutter methods sometimes cause more problems than they solve.

We’ll open up the topic and discuss the generalities.

For specifics, use the free Stuck Score assessment tool to get started. Afterwards, for qualified companies, we’ll provide a no-obligation consultation to help you determine the next step.

Who is the visitor?

You know your preferred audience. For ecommerce and lead-generation websites, that’s probably people with certain characteristics making them ideal prospects for your products or services. They’re the ones with enough need and ability to buy from you – your Ideal Customer Profile.

Your job is to help fan desire and get them motivated to buy. Like a boy who fell in a hole and couldn’t climb out – until he saw there was a snake in the hole with him – once prospects are sufficiently motivated, they will become customers.

Here’s something we tell clients over and over and over: the amount of traffic to your site doesn’t relate directly to the amount of sales you’ll make from your site. You don’t want a lot of traffic; you want qualified traffic. You want to attract genuine prospects. That’s your primary traffic-generation goal.

There are two basic ways to find out who’s visiting your website: analytics and membership. You want to tweak your site to attract qualified prospects, then you want to tweak your system to collect and store data about those prospects.

The more pertinent the information you have on a visitor, the better able you are to personalize that visit and the more likely you are to gain the desired conversion (or series of conversions).

Here are the tools and tactics we most often use to develop profiles of visitors to a website. Attracting the right people is the first job of an ecommerce or lead generation site.

Cookies can identify your visitors

Cookies are digital tags stored by visitors’ browsers that help the browser and your website communicate. There are multiple purposes for cookies. Here are examples of how you can use them in ecommerce. This is certainly not meant to be exhaustive:

• Cookies can store log-in information and connect the account to the customer
• Cookies enable your ecommerce site to welcome visitors back
• Cookies can store shopping cart data
• Cookies can store visitor preferences
• Cookies can track visitor navigation across multiple visits
• Cookies make remarketing campaigns possible
• Cookies make it possible for your website to offer up product selections based on the visitor’s history on your site

Cookies are marvelous little bits of data strings, absolutely, but they’re also not foolproof. For instance, every time you clear your browsing data, you can also clear cookies. That means your best customer can visit with a cookie-cleared browser, and your website won’t see the cookies necessary to recognize that person. It’s as if you never met.

More about cookies for ecommerce and lead-generation

Cookie setting and implementing requires special knowledge. We won’t attempt to cover cookie-setting here. Rather, we’ll point you towards more information.

Resources:

• How to Write a Cookie
• Google Analytics Cookie Usage
• FCC: Online Tracking
• Online Tracking Research Paper

Note the FCC Online Tracking resource is to the Federal Communications Commission website. Regulations concerning cookies are extensive and getting tighter all the time.

There’s constant chatter that “cookies will go away,” just as there are persistent claims that links will go away. Cookies and links, though, are part of the skeleton of the internet. Barring a major change to the system as it now exists, there’s little chance those fundamental pieces will become unnecessary.

Behind the flamboyant headlines you’ll often find an article about how another type of tracking code or system is taking over. For all practical purposes, though, every iteration is still a “cookie.” Web developers might change the terminology, but the end result is the same.

There is one significant difference, though. The most recent developments in tracking overcome the primary weakness of traditional cookies in that the user can’t clear them from the browser. For a discussion of the state of the art, see the Online Tracking Research Paper.

Requiring users to establish an account identifies logged-in visitors

This isn’t foolproof, since users can share log-in information with others, but anyone who must log-in to your website with a username and password has self-identified. Nor does it account for every visitor; it only works for those who complete the log-in process.

Once you’ve secured basic information – perhaps name and email address – you can then begin gathering further information about the person (or the account) and stacking it on piece by piece.

The same information-collection process can work for those who sign up for your newsletter or otherwise join your mailing list. And you can stair-step bits of data: address, phone number, birthdates, family size, other demographic information – anything important to your business the subscriber is willing to supply can help you build their profile. This is called progressive profiling.

Tracking cookies and memberships are the primary means of identifying visitors. Tying desire path observations to individual users and accounts helps you personalize the user experience.

What does the visitor want?

Google analytics and similar services collect information via tracking cookies, IP addresses, and other means. The most advanced systems can provide both qualitative and quantitative data.

Let’s look briefly at the leading analytics service, Google Analytics.

Google Analytics and Desire Paths

Just as most Microsoft Word users barely tap the potential of the program, the majority of Google Analytics users rarely get past the dashboard to dig down deeper into the report functions, custom variables, and to set conversion goals.

The set of tools available from Google Analytics’ solutions are representative of the kinds of visitor tracking or online path desire investigation resources every ecommerce or lead-generation site needs.

Here’s the current listing and a brief description of each:

• Google Analytics – The flagship analytics service identifies your visitors, tracks their actions, and compiles reports of pertinent data. Pages visited, time on page, visitor demographics, entry and exit pages – these are the types of read-outs readily available from Google Analytics, for even a casual user. Find out how to dig deeper at Google Analytics Academy. Both the standard program and the training are free.
• Tag Manager – Google Analytics performs its magic via Google Analytics Tracking Code, aka “page tags.” Tag manager allows you to customize your tracking strategy. Tag Manager is available for both free accounts and paid accounts (Google Tag Manager 360).
• Optimize – Still in beta testing, Optimize uses Bayesian statistical methods to help you perform conversion optimization experiments and A/B testing. Beta testers are getting free access, but this will likely be available to paid (360) accounts only after full release.
• Data Studio – Allows you to create custom reports. Again, knowing how to interpret Google Analytics dashboard results is important, but that’s just the surface view of the knowledge you can gain from creating custom reports. Data Studio is still in beta. Sign up for free.
• Google Surveys – You choose the target audience and pay Google to reach them with your questions. This is a pay-as-you-go system, and while it doesn’t track your visitors, it can help you learn more about how to attract the right visitors. A 360 version is available.
• Google Attribution – This tool is aimed at analyzing marketing spend and the customer journey. It looks at your marketing channels and provides feedback on ROI. This is part of the 360 package, not the free package.
• Audience Center – Another component of the Analytics 360 Suite, Audience Center combines analytics, tagging, attribution, and other tools to help you understand the paths customers now take and the online desire paths they want to take.

Many companies stop at the Google Analytics Solutions toolkit and don’t go any further in their work to gain information about visitors.

At The Good, we believe that’s normally not far enough – not for those who want to outpace competition and reach the highest optimization levels.

Let’s turn, now, to other tools of value in the pursuit of visitor insight.

Visitor surveys, focus groups, and other interview or questionnaire-centered methods can certainly help you understand your visitors’ needs. The old maxim, though, of “watching what they do, not just what they say” is invaluable in desire-path research.

We’ll consider ways you can gain deep insight on how users interact with your website. Once again, we’ll categorize the tools and techniques for the sake of organization, yet some may crossover to more than one category.

[x_icon type=”bookmark”] Action Step: Ask your team for a frank analysis of your current analytics tracking and reporting. What data are you not getting, but could use? Are you working from dashboard information, primarily, or are you digging deeper and pulling custom reports?

Using heatmaps to determine digital desire paths

Heatmaps show you a different view of how visitors interact with your website. The types of heatmapping normally used online include mouse movement tracking, scroll depth tracking, attention tracking, and click tracking.

In addition to providing a different view of online desire paths, heatmaps can provide visual insight on things analytics programs often can’t tell you:

• What path does the visitor’s mouse cursor travel on the page?
• Where does the mouse stop and hover?
• Where are the likely spots the visitor is looking?
• How far is the visitor scrolling down the page to view content?

There’s been considerable discussion about the validity of heatmaps, especially mouse cursor tracking. Visitors often park a cursor, but move attention elsewhere.

Don’t bet the bank on data collected from any tool. The more views you can get of visitor interaction, the more accurate your conclusions are likely to be.

At The Good, we primarily use heatmaps to look for trends, both positive and negative. To find out more about heatmaps, see our article, “How to Drive Conversions with Heatmaps.”

This scroll-tracking heatmap (see above) helps us understand where the hotspots are on a webpage. Keep scrolling, and the color turns green (less active) then blue (cold).

[x_icon type=”bookmark”] Action Step: How long has it been since you’ve collected heatmap data for your ecommerce or lead-generation website? If more than a quarter, take another look.

Using A/B Split testing to discover online desire paths

Split testing allows you to serve some of your visitors one version of a webpage and other visitors a different version.

Let’s say your marketing team can’t reach consensus on the copy for a call to action (CTA) button. Some want the copy to read “Buy Now,” but others champion “Add to Cart.”

What to do now?

Why not let your customers decide?

In A/B testing half of your visitors see the first variation, and the other half see the second variation. You run the test long enough to collect sufficient views to attain statistical significance, at the confidence level you’re comfortable with, and there’s your answer.

A/B methodology isn’t limited to only two variations, you could test four different designs and alternate which visitors see, but the most common A/B configuration is literally A or B.

At The Good, we believe in ongoing testing. We typically take the winner of the first A/B test, then put it up against another option or options. That would continue until we weren’t seeing a significant change in the results. That test would then be paused and revisited later.

Another type of split testing is more difficult to set up and interpret; it considers only one page at a time. In multivariate testing (MVT), you change multiple variables within a page and serve each up to observe results. MVT is especially useful for optimizing landing pages.

Because just about any part of a webpage can be tested, the best websites consistently run experiments aimed at continuous improvement – “conversion kaizen,” let’s call it.

Here are some of the page elements you can change and test:

• Test your CTA button colors, background colors, text colors
• Split test your copy – headlines, subheads, CTA’s
• Try testing variations ion product descriptions
• Change up product photos to see which get the best results
• Test page layout and design
• Try different features on the page

You can use heat maps, analytics, surveys, and other means to develop theories about the desire paths that synchronize your users’ online desire paths and your customer journey path. You can then use split testing to find out how those theories affect conversions.

User testing can help you uncover online desire paths

Perhaps the number one reason for missed goals in a marketing campaign is management’s tendency to fall in love with a strategy and design that makes perfect sense to them… but doesn’t play well with customers.

An Amazon study found one retailer’s drastic drop in sales (90%) was due to a “design improvement” on the checkout page. You can read more about that study here: The Key to Increasing Revenue. The feature looked amazing to management, but turned customers away almost entirely.

User testing lets you observe visitor behavior directly. Your prospects and customers will not only tell you what they want, they’ll show you.

Setting up user (usability) tests

You can run usability tests in person, online, or by watching recordings. The premise is the same: people interact with your website and you observe them doing it. That allows you to see what’s working well and where the Stuck Points are.

Testing styles vary in the amount of scripting provided. Some are tightly controlled (“Go here, do this…”), while others are loosely scripted (“Find and order a Columbia family-sized tent”). The latter are often deemed “unscripted,” but all digital user testing for ecommerce will necessarily include at least minimum directions.

The final breakdown for type of test concerns whether or not you will use moderation. In moderated usability testing, an observer interacts with the user while the test is in progress. There are pros and cons to each decision about the type of test to use.

Your selections will depend on your goals.

Define your goals for user testing

In the Amazon study mentioned above, researchers were trying to determine why sales revenue dropped so quickly and dramatically.

When you begin with a good question (goal), you can set the test up in the best way to accomplish that goal. Perhaps you’ve performed a radical redesign of your ecommerce or lead generation website (or are launching a new site) and want to test it. Your team loves the new design, but what will visitors think? Will they be as enthusiastic?

For complex or early-stage tests, you’ll may want to use an in-person, scripted, moderated test. In-person moderation will give you the ability to step in to answer and ask questions while the user is interacting with your website. Scripting will help you reap the most value from the time and money investment required.

For questions like, “What are the roadblocks to searching, finding, and purchasing items on our website?”, you may want to prepare a loosely scripted, unmoderated, recorded test. That will give you a look at user’s’ actions in the most realistic environment. Your instructions might be a simple scenario: “You’re looking for a new laptop computer. You’ll use it for work and business. Go shopping on this website. The software will record your screen and your voice. Talk as you go, describing what you are doing and why.”

Every test will provide insight on online desire paths. Those are the times where users get frustrated because your site won’t let them do what they want to do in the way they want to do it. A user might say, “I would love to sort by color, but I can’t figure out how to do that!”

Another might wonder, “How do I easily get back to my cart to make adjustments without losing my current search position?” Those are nuggets that can help you grease the rails of user experience.

To focus on locating online desire paths, moderating testing – whether in-person or virtual – can yield rich results. The test participant’s instructions might go like this: “You’ll be asked to perform several tasks. While you’re engaging in those tasks, please describe what you are doing, why you are doing it, and whether the website architecture allows you to quickly and easily accomplish the task. As you proceed, if you think of something that would help you perform the task, or if you want to do something, but can’t see a way to do it, please speak up.”

What are your goals?

That’s the first thing you should determine before setting up user testing.

The graphic above is from an actual usability study. To see the video go here: Watch This.

Choosing participants for usability testing

Typically, you’ll want those who participate in your user testing to be representative of your target audience. The level to which you can hone in on the best participants will, of course, depend on how well you’ve done at identifying that audience.

In our years of working with clients at The Good, we sometimes find there’s a discrepancy between who the company thinks their best customers are and who their best customers really are.

Who, for instance, should the bulk of marketing messages address for a company selling children’s clothing? The kids are the end users, but who shops and pays for most of the items sold?

How about sports clothing; you’d want a panel of men for that test, right? It turns out that women purchase about 80% of all sports apparel – including 60% of men’s sports clothing.

That doesn’t mean all women are better than all men for user testing an ecommerce site’s sports apparel path to sales. Your ideal customer personas will contain the information you need.

NOTE: User testing doesn’t need to be elaborate, and it doesn’t need to be expensive. Even a handful of tests – conducted correctly – can provide the breakthrough data you need.

Match the profile of those who will be real-life performers of the tasks your user testing requires, and you’ll get the best results.

Online desire path creators are those who know where they’re headed and want to take a shortcut to get there.

[x_icon type=”bookmark”] Action Step: Score your site to determine bottlenecks on your website. Then set up user testing to help assess why those bottlenecks exist. Perhaps nothing you can do will return a better investment than opening up your sales path flow.

Online Desire Paths – The Conclusion

You may have noticed how online desire paths correlate with user experience optimization best practices. They’re the same thing… only different.

Whereas user experience is the overall term for how your visitors relate to your page, online desire paths help you see how visitors want to relate to your website.

And the untold secret?

We’ve actually already told you – twice.

When you’re able to blend your customers’ desired paths and the path you want visitors to travel on the way to becoming customers and repeat customers… when you can make those come together and coexist like the Colliding Rivers, you’ll know and see what it means to be “optimized.”

Questions? Leave us a comment.

The post How Online Desire Paths Lead to a Better Customer Journey appeared first on The Good.

For every bounce, page view, and conversion there is a person completing those actions. Often, in the course of a busy day/week/season, it’s easy to forget that when a bounce rate increases or conversion slips, your company’s website is failing a real person.

The numbers in analytics are a lagging indicator of how well your site is helping people get what they want. Instead of getting stuck reporting on numbers, start reporting on customers and how well your website serves them.

It is hard to empathize with a number. Many decisions made about websites are based solely on the analysis of numbers. This is a mistake. If you realize that those numbers represent people (and potential customers) that understanding paves the way to really improve any key performance indicator. By judging the success of your site on how well it helps your customers get what they want, you can work in a way that leads to sustainable revenue growth.

Using empathy to drive sales begins with personal experience and customer service. You can’t get that by looking at numbers. To get there, you’ll have to actually empathize with the customer experience you’re providing through your brand site.

Create a personal experience

When you check out at a retail store, a cashier typically asks if you found everything you were looking for. That doesn’t happen online. That personal connection is missing, and it is hard to replicate. To close this gap, we need a way to see our customers for who they are—people who are trying to do something important to them on our websites.

To begin creating a more personal experience on your site, focus on how you can help one person do something on your site. It’s a lot easier to think about helping one person find what they’re looking for than helping ten thousand. By focusing on only one person, it’s easier to see where sites fail, succeed, or just cruises along.

Improve your customer service

The experience you create for your customers is equivalent to the level of service you offer them. A customer will rate your site’s experience as good, neutral, or bad. By empathizing with the customer’s experience on your site, you’ll have a much more complete picture of how your site is performing than your site stats could ever provide. This change in mindset paves the way for better sites, improved customer experience, and increased brand revenues.

Customer service is a process that extends beyond someone answering calls from upset customers. It is a mindset. Serve your customers by thinking about them as people who are visiting your site with some goal in mind, and help them accomplish it. Stop thinking of your site as a project on a 2-3 year redesign cycle, and to start thinking of your site as a platform for customer service. The site is a way to connect with your customers by understanding and empathizing with them. That empathy is an ongoing process that leads to revenue growth by finding new ways to improve your site to better serve your customers.

Getting help

To help our clients make this shift, we’ve designed the Conversion Growth Program. It is an ongoing and iterative program that is focused on aligning your customer’s experience and expectations with your brand, and continuing to raise the bar from that baseline.

The post Get Personal: How Empathy Drives Sales appeared first on The Good.