In 2023, 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.
Are you sold on the idea that it’s beneficial to understand your customer personas?
Hope so. If not, it’s guesswork. When you know who your customers are, where they are, what they love, and what they hate, you can market to them much more effectively.
You’ve worked all quarter on a new content marketing series and conversions are ticking upwards.
Do you attribute these conversions exclusively to your content? What about the customers who clicked through to your article from your social media page—do you attribute those conversions to socials or to the article (or both)?
“How do we get our customers to do what we want them to do?”
Digital marketers get asked this question all the time. But it’s the wrong question.
You’ve acquired a ton of customers lately for your company. On the surface, this is awesome. More customers, more money. So you throw your energy into your customer funnel.
However, soon after sign-up, they seem to fly right out the back door. Why is this happening? Why do customers leave—or use the service less—often without saying anything?
One of my favorite UX quotes comes from Chikezie Ejiasi, Head of Studio and Design Systems at Google.
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.”
It’s the early 1980s. You’re in charge of a fledgling ESPN, and you have two choices:
Which creates the more profitable programming bundle?
You put tons of time into creating your product, experimenting with acquisition channels, and honing your messaging.
Yet here I am, about to tell you that consumers are often swayed by such subtle nudges as the order in which you present your products, or the “serial position effect.”
When Warren Buffett coined the term “economic moat”, he stated that the products that have wide, sustainable moats around them, are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.
That’s why determining the competitive advantage of any company is key to investing, to which moats were initially tethered: a bigger moat makes a stock a better bet.
But the implications are broader, for companies large and small. An effective moat doesn’t require Amazon’s distribution network or Microsoft’s monopolistic software strategy.
“What is beautiful is good,” the saying goes.
This saying stems from a belief that attractiveness correlates to other good qualities. In a phrase, attractiveness is a Halo Effect.
Of course you can see that on the surface, the logic in that saying is flawed. What’s beautiful has nothing to do with what is good. But we still associate perception and individual traits, making our judgement often inaccurate.