Marketing has never been easy. But 70 years ago, long before phrases like conversion optimization were a thing, your job as a marketer was simple—convince the consumer that, out of the dozen or so companies selling X product, yours was the one for them. Fast forward to today, and you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of niche brands—all competing for attention. And by competing, we mean FIGHTING—the average person sees anywhere from 347 (our conservative estimation) to 4000 ads daily. 

If you’re a marketer, that makes standing out a headache because—let’s face it—what are all these ads trying to communicate, if not…

• We have the best quality product
• We offer the best prices
• We have the best customer service
• We have the happiest customers

The buyer sees this message over and over again, every day, all year. If you’re a buyer, this feels like too much. You’re overwhelmed by all this messaging, and you still need to decide what to buy. You need to choose what’s best for you—and if you have a family, what’s best for them, too. You have a job or a business to run. Do you really have the time to think carefully about every single one of these products, weighing the pros and cons of a thousand different shoes, golf clubs, or toilet covers?

So, how do you decide? For some, it’s just a matter of what’s most within reach or familiar. But when buying something for the first time, everyone relies on cues and subconscious shortcuts to help them decide.

Over the past 13 years, we’ve studied consumers and tried to figure out what these cues and shortcuts are—we’ve tried to answer the question: why do buyers act the way they do? After thousands of hours of research and hundreds of experiments (most of which failed), we’ve isolated a few decision-making catalysts buyers rely on. They’re all in the 9 Truths About Online Shoppers. 

But that’s just half the story. The other half will completely change the way you think of conversions.

A Different Mental Model for Thinking About Conversion Optimization

When people think of conversions, they often focus on the wrong thing. No you won’t convert all the thousands of visitors on your page. And if you’re trying to, you’re quite literally wasting your time. That’s like a fisherman trying to empty the ocean of fish—it will never happen. With conversions, we’ve learned that…

That means rethinking your strategy, beginning with who you try to convert.

Optimizing Conversions—The Target

There’s only one group of visitors you should be worried about converting. They’re the cornerstone to building a strategy destined for success. Ready?

They are people leaning in with interest.

You’ll find them…

• Viewing multiple images in your product image gallery
• Slowing down when they get to your product description. 
• Opening up your FAQ content
• Reading multiple product reviews 

Some of them are already buying. But some don’t.

We’ve learned to make this second group the principal target of our conversion strategy—we’re laser-focused on them ALONE. But how do we get them to buy?

Optimizing Conversions—The Approach

What we DON’T do is redesign your page. Why? Your page is already working for some of your visitors. And complete redesigns can affect them. So, we had to figure out a non-intrusive way to target our cornerstone audience without disturbing your current buyers. You’re about to see a summary of the 3-step approach that gets us a whopping 20% bump in conversions in just 90 days. 

Step 1: Mapping High Visibility Locations for CTAs

Remember those places on your product page we said you’ll find people leaning in with interest? We place subtle call-to-actions there. In the example below, we’ve added red arrows next to them so it’s easy for you to spot them:

On the home page

Image source: Drive

On the category page

Image source: Drive

On a product page

Image source: Drive

And the checkout page:

Image source: Drive

Step 2: Build the Sales Pitch(es)

Once a shopper clicks on one of the CTAs you placed on your page, they’ll see a sales pitch we’ve custom-built to convert. How do we write this sales pitch? We rely on our 13 years of studying the 9 Truths About Online Shoppers to write up dozens of sales pitch variations. Which leads us to the final step. How do we figure out which version to use?

Step 3: Finding the Winning Pitch

We A/B test copy variations until we find the winning ticket. For example, one variation might focus more on the origin story; the next variation might focus on us versus them messaging; another one might double down on selling the shopper on your point of view (how you see the world).

To see these 3 steps in action, check out this demo for a luxury chocolatier.

Too Good to be True?

I understand your skepticism, but this is how we do all our conversion work. It’s how we’ve boosted sales for sports products. Sold skincare products. Pet products. Consumer electronics. Athletic gear. Back pain solutions. Food items. And more.

About the Author

Rishi has been doing conversion optimization for direct-to-consumer brands for the last 14 years. But his approach is different. Rishi doesn’t think it’s smart chase all site visitors. He prefers to target and convert the subset of visitors who are leaning in with interest. These are people who are going through your product page image gallery, slowing down to read your product description, and going through your reviews. His conversion philosophy is explained here: https://frictionless-commerce.com