Your users will make mistakes. It’s inevitable. That’s what error messages are for—but so many companies fail to follow best practices, and they’re pissing off potential customers in the process.
So, how can we better design error messages to improve the user experience and increase conversions?
It takes one wrong word to put your foot in your mouth. We’ve all done it and, in the process, squandered an opportunity to impress someone (or some crowd).
With copy, you have a chance to slip up on every homepage, product page, or ad.
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?
Nothing is more frustrating than filling out a badly designed form.
It’s a common experience, though. How many times have you entered a password only to be taken back with red ink proclaiming “Error! Password needs a capital letter, two numbers, a special character, and a quote from a Fetty Wap song.”
The call to action is a core component of marketing, sales, and any persuasion-based effort.
When it comes to calls to action, there’s a lot of theoretical content about how to tweak copy, color, size, and other elements, but, sometimes, it’s easiest to learn through examples.
Read any copywriting manual or article, and it’ll tell you that the headline is the most important part of your sales copy. That’s true.
Unfortunately, the advice that follows is often originates from snail-mail sales letters from the 1950s. I researched 500 headlines of successful online businesses and figured out which formulas work today.
In marketing, a call to action (or CTA) is any message designed to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale.
According to Wingify, almost 30% of all A/B tests run by their customers are call-to-action button tests. But only one in seven of those call-to-action tests produces a statistically significant improvement. When it does, however, the average increase is 49%.
If you want to get people to buy your stuff, you need to understand how consumers make purchasing decisions.
In the world of data-driven marketing, more and more tasks require a bit of coding.
Article originally published at Smashing Magazine.
Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.