From Scratch Communications

Hey EuroDNS, your checkout experience is a conversion killer. I bet you could gain double digit growth by auto-detecting the credit card type. It is even worse than my screenshot shows, because entering a Mastercard number fails when Visa is selected. This has been best practice for at least a decade. Let me know if you need help improving your UX. I know you do. :)

What would be worse than someone making a career from telling companies how to build things that are known to be fantastic for profit but utterly terrible for the collective mental health of humanity? 10 years ago, Nir Eyal wrote a book: Hooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products. This is a massive euphemism. It means how to make your product addictive. It's the tobacco & alcohol playbook, applied to tech. It has created some of the worst experiences of our time, and the total cost of the damage is immeasurable. Now the same person is offering meaningless listicles in how to not be miserable, without mentioning his previous involvement once. This is what we are up against. This is why we need to talk about ethical marketing and ethical product design. Look carefully when you applaud someone for their canned inspiration on LinkedIn. They may be on their next chapter, cashing in on selling the cure for their own disease. Thanks Matt Watkinson for making me aware of this "transformtion".

Your sales page is probably not long enough. (I was tempted to add "unpopular opinion" – but then, many conversion copywriters would agree. So it's not that unpopular after all.) If your business offers services, online courses or high-end products, chances are you’ve got sales pages on your website. Some of them might be long-form sales pages, running to 2,000 words or more. And you might be wondering: Do my sales pages really have to be this long? Do people even read all this content? Couldn’t we get away with a shorter page? If your conversion rate is not quite as high as you’d hoped, you probably feel tempted to hit delete on most of the copy – and keep it short and sweet. But here’s the thing: In my experience, the number one reason why short-form sales pages do not convert is that they’re too short. Not long enough to: → bring your reader along on an emotional journey. → give visitors all the specifics they need to make a considered choice. → stand out. Short copy doesn’t always give you the space to get past the generic. And if your page is saying the same as everyone else’s your potential customers will get bored and click away before they reach the buy button. Don't believe me? Check out my recent article: https://lnkd.in/dPxEy7Zg - It explains how great copywriters (like the ones on our team!) structure your sales page. - I analyse 2 long-form sales pages that do an excellent job: reMarkable and Linking Your Thinking. - And I list plenty of practical takeaways so you can put these best practices to good use.

Today's e-commerce conversion rate optimisation tip: Put everything right where it belongs. Misguided novelty is an easy mistake to make when you want to stand out. But it creates visual noise that distracts from the three things your online shop needs to do: - Help people discover your products - Help people decide if / which ones they want to buy - Make it easy to buy your product Everything else is surplus. It might even harm your business by getting in the way of the purchase. What kind of thing do I mean? 1. There’s a lot of good website design and copywriting on the product pages at Buy Me Once. But 3 top navigation bars in 3 different colours is a bit much. And why is the shopping cart not next to the rest of the menu? Spelling it out as “Basket” instead of using an icon makes it even harder to find. 2. At Wordery, the cart icon is tiny and tucked away between the currency settings and the account. With the wishlist highlighted this much, it would be good to test whether many visitors expect the pink button to lead to the checkout. Note the social sharing buttons above the book title – let's make sure they don't distract people from actually getting the book. 3. Ever tried to plan a kitchen at IKEA? You may never know what the Metod / Maximera cupboard looks like on the inside. IKEA only show the complete product with a half-open door or a detail shot of the corner of the door. The video does not show the interior either, although it is part of this product version. And of course, clicking on the thumbnail makes it zoom in. Frustration guaranteed. The takeaway: - User Experience (UX) conventions exist for a reason. They’ve been tried and tested for years or even decades. They help visitors find their way in an online shop, fast. And they reduce cognitive load, so they can focus on what matters most: your wonderful products. - Put your cart in the most prominent place of the menu. That’s usually at the top right. - Make sure everything on the page is there by design. There needs to be a good reason for why it’s there, why it’s not somewhere else, why it looks exactly this way, and how that fits into the bigger scheme of your overall website design. Experienced designers will get these details right without you even asking – leaving you free to focus on your product strategy. Shameless plug: We have ace designers at From Scratch Communications. Ping me if you'd like a chat about optimising your online shop. 👋

Today's e-commerce conversion optimisation tip: Make it easy to find more information about the product Make sure important product information isn’t hidden away in tabs. As Baymard Institute reports, core product content is usually overlooked in ‘Horizontal Tabs’ layouts – it might as well not be there at all. It’s surprising how many people miss information displayed in tabs or don’t understand that they can click certain visual elements for more details. Some reports put it at up to 25%. You might think, “Fine. So the majority gets it.” And of course, you’re right: the majority gets it. But what if you could magically get 25% more conversions just by removing the tabs? That’s why we always recommend looking at those percentages in terms of how much more you could gain with quite a small investment – as opposed to thinking, “Okay, 75% get it. That’s the majority. I’m fine with that.” It can take lots of effort to achieve even a 5% conversion lift. Even a 2.5% or 3% improvement is cause for a celebration. That’s 3 more people buying something for every 100 that land on your page. 🚀 An improvement like that can make a huge difference to your business bottom line. Here's an example from the BAM Bamboo Clothing online shop: Wondering which size to order? Interested to learn what other customers thought of their Enduro Bamboo ⅞ Deep Waistband Leggings? If you don’t pay close attention to the horizontal tab layout, you might completely miss the fact that this information is available on the PDP. The takeaway: - Avoid using horizontal tabs to present your product details. - If your online shop template has horizontal tabs, write a strongly worded email to the provider and get a custom website designed. - Snap up the easy UX wins to build the best possible website based on evidence.