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How To Make Website Visitors Convert Better

feeding the birds breadcrumbs

Psychology Behind Website Visitor Conversions

Before you start your first landing page test, it’s important to understand some psychology around the behaviour of compliancen and why people must complete things.

When you’re looking to generate leads, trials, or demos, if you keep taking fields away (like we spoke about before), you’re left with the fields that are the most threatening for a visitor to fill out.

The usual supects

  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone Number

This is their contact information. The information that they hold most precious and would prefer NOT to give out if they can avoid it.

If they give you this information without you giving them the information they want, then they’re no longer anonymous, and that can freak people out.

So how do you get that information from them, in a willing manner, that also leaves you with higher conversion rates?

You add more fields and more steps. The exact opposite advice of what everyone else is preaching.

But here’s the catch.

The order of your fields and the order of your steps are extremely important.

Your goal is to get the visitor to micro-convert on a step with fields/questions that are easy to answer. Once you’ve done that, you unlock some pretty crazy conversion potential:

I didn’t make this up, there’s actual research behind this

Here’s How It Works

Compliance Psychology is literally the landing page version of the “Yes Ladder” that’s used in sales.

It’s the art of eventually getting to what you want (the conversion) as a marketer, by getting visitors to accept/say yes to much smaller requests first. I like to think of it as an appealing micro conversion or a snack sized commitment.

It’s the science of working backwards from whatever your big ask (your call to action) is on your landing page.

  • Are you a divorce lawyer who wants to drive free consultations? Ask your visitors how long they’ve been married and how many kids they have.
  • Are you an online university who wants to drive applications? Ask your visitors when they graduated high school and how many hours they’d like to be in school.
  • Are you an interior decorator who wants to drive quote requests? Ask your visitors how many square feet your home is or how many rooms they have.

By asking your visitors questions with fields that are easy to answer and allow them to stay anonymous, you’ll set yourself up for a higher chance of them to finish the entire conversion process.

The Breadcrumb Technique

Originally coined by those PPC geniuses at Klient Boost this is a way to let the visitor see the trail by giving them one bite at a time.

Why You Can’t Lessen The Amount of Form Fields

Since we’re a PPC agency that uses PPC platforms like Facebook and AdWords to drive traffic and conversions, we’ve been fortunate to use the landing page test of The Breadcrumb Technique across hundreds of different industries.

The more we use it, the more it affirms the reality that less fields don’t always equal more conversions.

Some of the hypotheses we’ve thought of as to why using multi step landing pageswork so well have come down to this:

  • Having just the fields of name, email, phone number make the visitor believe that they won’t get an answer to their question without having to speak with someone first (this goes against their goal of being able to compare you and your competitors while still being anonymous). Plenty of Hotjar polls prove this.
  • People are busy. If they find your landing page via a Google ad click, then they won’t want to fill out seven different lead gen forms (because of seven different Google advertisers) as they know seven different companies will call them back.
  • People are lazy. They want quick answers, and most of their questions revolve around costs. They know they won’t get a quick answer if they have to wait for you to reach out to them.

    Another thing to understand – people can be anonymous while comparing you to your competitors, so the last thing they want to do is give you their contact info before they’re able to compare you.

Now some types of landing pages don’t do well when utilizing The Breadcrumb Technique, and these mostly include when you’re trying to promote eBooks, guides, and white papers, that usually only require an email field on the form.

The severity of your ask of your call to action determines whether or not The Breadcrumb Technique will work for you.

If you’re asking for someone to request a free consultation or get a quote (a big ask), then the technique will work. If you’re trying to promote a free eBook, a podcast, or a webinar (small ask), then the technique won’t work that well.

There’s something about this technique that continues to perform, regardless of the industry.

But be careful…

Dont Overdo the Landing Page Form Fields

The order of your fields are sometimes much more important than the fields themselves.

That’s pretty crazy to think about.

You can actually get away with asking questions that people normally wouldn’t convert on, as long as you consider the timing of the field.

It’s the same thing that happens with the “Yes Ladder” and “Foot-In-The-Door” techniques.

If you go straight for the jugular, you’ll most likely lose. That’s why the Scott and Jonathan from earlier in this lecture were able to increase their “yes’es” from 20% to 76% when they asked for small favors first.

Think about the fields and steps in your form and how they can be rearranged so that the least threatening fields/questions are first, followed by contact information fields as the last step.

I’ll give you some real life examples:

As a kid, you probably wanted to spend the night at your friend’s house. But out of fear of getting a no from your parents, you ask if you can go to your friends house for an hour first, and once there, then ask if you can spend the night.

  • If you need to borrow a car for a longer period of time, ask first if you can borrow it for a short drive. It will make the owner feel more at ease knowing that you didn’t crash it on the short drive.
  • Remember when you were in school and had project due dates? You could ask if you could turn in the paper a few hours later, even though you know you’re eventually going to ask if you can turn it in a few days later.

    So how does this translate to your landing page test?

    The questions/fields you ask on the first step could be the same questions you ask to qualify a lead. Or you could also make them up to make the visitor believe it’s part of the information you need to give them what they want (a free quote or free consultation as an example).

    Take the example test we ran below for another SaaS company. We already used The Breadcrumb Technique but later found that we asked the wrong questions on the first step.

Key Takeaway

Aim for a small conversion first, that micro commitment is key to something bigger on teh users part. So as you take a look at your landing pages, focus on the small ask first and get people to micro-commit.

Even with more steps and more fields, you’ll start seeing you conversion rates increase. Test everything because you may have an increase does not mean stop there try and improve on that with another round of testing.

I hope this has been helpful now go and make some sweet conversion rates. 

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