Persuading completely rational people to make a rational decision or take a rational action would be easy. Unfortunately, you’re stuck dealing with irrational thinking, fueled by cognitive biases and emotions.
So, how do you persuade effectively when people are so heavily influenced by subjective (and contextual) factors?
You’d like to think that you’re a completely rational person making completely rational decisions, right? It’s nice to believe that you haven’t made major life decisions based on how you were feeling.
Well, you have. Many times.
Bo Bennett once said, “Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires.”
At the same time, affiliate marketing has a mysterious aura. Many of the top search results for the term focus on what it is and whether you can make money from it.
The truth is that it’s not all that mysterious. It’s nothing more than another marketing channel for you to experiment with, analyze, optimize, and grow.
We’re all familiar with the standard “best practices” of CRO. Always use social proof, always reduce form fields, never use image sliders, and so on.
As someone who believes that best practices are merely common practices, I’m always looking to test the tried and true to see how, well, true it really is.
First up? Social proof. Does it really work as well as we all assume? Why? And more importantly, what’s the best way to implement it?
Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” But what if your data is wrong? What if you’re not measuring correctly or completely? What if there’s a whole pile of things you think you’re measuring when really…you’re not?
A lot of the people relying on Google Analytics are relying on bad data. No, not because Google Analytics is awful. Because their configurations are broken. That’s why you need to conduct a Google Analytics audit.
You often read that most people prefer to watch a video than read text.
How true is that statement, really? You’ve been hearing about video for years now. Big brands are spending tens of thousands on videos that fall flat, while a lucky few are going viral.
But even they struggle to repeat their original success. And what do views have to do with actual money in the bank?
There’s no denying that your homepage is vital to your site, especially if you’re a SaaS company. It’s likely one of your most visited pages, acting as a proverbial launch pad.
While you read about optimizing individual landing pages day in and day out, optimizing homepages is less frequently explored. Do the same old rules from 2010 still apply? Are people still visiting and using homepages they same way they were a decade ago?
Several years ago, Jeremy Smith wrote, “Traditional optimization is dead, and in its place is arising a brave new world of mobile conversion optimization.”
I have to disagree. Is mobile conversion optimization a “brave new world”? Yes. Is traditional optimization “dead”? Not by a long shot.
Traditional (i.e. web) optimization and mobile optimization are two separate practices, requiring two separate strategies. One is not replacing the other. Instead, optimizers must learn to master both.
Think back to the last experiment you ran for your SaaS company. What were you trying to learn or improve? Maybe you wanted to increase email captures or free-trial leads.
Now try to think of the last time you experimented with something other than your acquisition strategy. If you’re struggling, you’re not alone.
One of my favorite UX quotes comes from Chikezie Ejiasi, UX lead at Nest.
He wrote: “Life is conversational. Web design should be the same way. On the web, you’re talking to someone you’ve probably never met—so it’s important to be clear and precise. Thus, well-structured navigation and content organization goes hand in hand with having a good conversation.”
Can tabbed navigation be clear and precise? Of course it can, which makes it a valid form of navigation and content organization. What matters, as with most things related to UX, is how you implement it and how you optimize it.