11 ways to increase product conversion rate!

Improving conversion rate is one of the core tasks in operations, which means lower costs and higher profits for the company. When we have a high conversion rate, it means we can invest boldly, spend money to attract users and establish strong competitive barriers.

The following article will analyze some specific details of the operation process and gain an in-depth understanding of how to improve conversion rates. Since the operating scenarios of different products vary greatly, this article discussing operational details may be a bit scattered in structure, but the focus is to help you think about the essence of operations through every detail.

01. User motivation and resistance analysis

In the process of using a product, there are always two opposite forces affecting the user's behavior, one is motivation and the other is resistance.

In order to improve the conversion rate, it is necessary to analyze the resistance and motivation of users in the purchasing process, analyze the specific resistance and motivation, and then reduce or lower the resistance as much as possible, continuously enhance and increase the motivation of users, and ultimately maximize the operation results.

After reading the entire article, you will find that improving conversion rate is nothing more than increasing motivation and reducing resistance.

02. Conversion rate of purchase page

Why start with the conversion rate of the purchase page? Because the conversion rate of the e-commerce purchase page is the most representative and it is also the scenario with the highest degree of conversion rate optimization.

Let’s look at a scenario: Xiao Ming is an operations staff who has graduated for one year. He accidentally opens a website he has never seen before. A 400-page book called “Operation Control” is being sold, claiming to be “a treasure book that can effectively improve operations capabilities”. The price is 400 yuan, but it only costs 99 yuan to buy it on the same day.

The following will analyze the various driving forces and resistances that arise from the entire process from when he first learned about the product to when he finally placed an order to purchase it.

Let's take a look at Xiao Ming's motivation and resistance in this process:

The pain point is that I have been working very hard in operations this year. Despite my efforts, I have not achieved much. Now I am confused and want to find a solution.

The cool thing is "effectively improving operational capabilities";

The additional value is "after the operational capability is improved, you will be promoted and get a raise to become the CEO, marry a beautiful and wealthy woman and reach the pinnacle of life";

Positioning match refers to whether the book's positioning matches Xiao Ming's "operation staff who graduated one year ago". If it is written for inexperienced college students, Xiao Ming will probably not buy it.

Impulse is when Xiao Ming is tempted by some of the previous factors, including “only 99 yuan for same-day purchase”. It generates a motivation that goes beyond rational judgment and is even difficult for the self to perceive. This motivation plays a big role in many powerful products, but it will gradually decrease over time.

Trust is the trust that users have in merchants. Only with trust can users believe the authenticity of product introductions and proceed with transactions. Without trust, users will doubt: “Could this website, which they have never seen before, be a scam website?”

The price is "99 yuan", Xiao Ming will think that selling a book for 99 yuan is a bit expensive;

Product comprehension barriers refer to the fact that the book itself is a very informative book with rich cases, embedded QR code scanning to watch videos, participate in online discussions, and view the latest cases, but the page uses the "latest 3D reading interactive experience mode", and users cannot understand this feature after reading it;

Doubts about the product refer to the doubts that users have after reading the introduction, such as "Can I get a refund if it's not good?" or "Is there a reader exchange group?"

The purchasing experience refers to comfortable reading, fast jumps, and convenient payment during the viewing process;

Rationality is often the enemy of quickly completing a purchase and will greatly prolong the user's decision-making time.

Additional explanation

There is a difference between "product comprehension barriers" and "doubts about purchase". One is that the product features cannot be described well enough for users to fully understand, and the other is that users themselves have doubts about purchase. For example, in the former, some users cannot understand "what is Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor", and in the latter, some users wonder "do I need to use Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor for daily use".

Isn’t “attached value” the “cool point”? Strictly speaking, yes. But the reason why it is singled out is that when operators summarize the "high points" of a product, they often only focus on the product itself and tend to ignore the added value. Customers who buy Maseratis are not buying the "exhilarating" speed, but the "added value" sense of status.

03. Improved visual experience

The quality of the visual experience is related to the resistance of "product comprehension barrier", which greatly affects the purchase conversion rate. Let me share a sentence with you: "Users have no obligation to look through your terrible page, work hard to find the highlights of your product and finally give you their money."

Is the introduction page user-friendly? Is the layout easy and simple to read? Does it look professional? Does it give people a sense of trust? Has the mobile reading experience been optimized accordingly? These will affect the user's conversion rate.

The knowledge of visual experience is very profound, so I won’t go into detail here. I will just give you an example of pure text typesetting so that you can understand it.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A graphical interface provides a better reading experience than pure text, and a video is more convincing than pictures and texts.

Be good at using the same color depth and font size to distinguish different levels of text, rather than just using different colors. Using more than 3 colors will make people lose the focus and the visual effect will become low.

I pay great attention to the layout and pictures in the article because I hope that my users will not lower their judgment of my article due to poor layout.

I would like to recommend a book called "A Design Book for Everyone". It is a design cultivation book written specifically for non-designers. If you master some of the design principles in it, you can at least have the ability to judge beauty and ugliness, and will be less likely to make some very low-level mistakes.

Of course, the visual design must be related to the target audience of the product. Magical websites like 58.com and Ganji.com seem to be stuck in the last century. Is it because they can’t afford good UI designers?

Definitely not! 58.com spent 1.6 billion USD to invest and acquire 14 companies 18 months after its listing. Could it be that it cannot afford a designer?

58 does have a deep understanding of its products and markets. Most of 58.com's users are from lower-class groups. If the website is made too cool, it will hinder users' judgment.

To take an extreme example, a construction team chose the Peony State Guest Room of the JW Marriott Hotel as its recruiting location. Would the migrant workers dare to go there after seeing the recruitment notice? Most people would probably wonder if this is a scam?

04. Dispel user defenses

People are naturally defensive, and users will have many doubts when taking action: Is this a scam? Is it really as described? What if there is a problem? Being defensive and suspicious will inevitably hinder the conversion rate of many users, which is a very big obstacle.

Two major directions of eliminating user defenses:

1. Build trust: Build trust in the product;

2. Resolving doubts: If there are doubts, appropriate safeguards can be taken to resolve them.

Ways to build trust:

1. Customer testimonials.

Show more successful cases among your customers with photos and reviews, which will make it easier for other users to trust you. When there are no customer cases in the early stage, in order to obtain more effective customer cases, you can reduce the price or offer free trial to allow some of them to use it first.

2. Explain the company's advantages.

The user is not an employee of your company, so he does not know the advantages of your company. You can actively display your team's advantages, financing situation, awards, licenses, and industry certifications.

3. Ask celebrities to endorse your product.

You don't have to invite a celebrity; well-known figures in the niche industry will also do. Startup companies often invite their investors to endorse their products. Xu Xiaoping and Kai-Fu Lee often endorse the products of the companies they invest in.

Ways to clear doubts:

1. Add Q&A (Frequently Asked Questions).

Write down the questions you anticipate users will have in the Q&A section. After this Q&A is written, it can be continuously iterated based on the interaction process with users to cover the users' common questions to the greatest extent possible.

2. Establish a guarantee system.

Some customers have huge concerns, and it is difficult to allay their concerns simply by providing text answers. In this case, it is necessary to design a certain protection system to allay customers' concerns.

A very successful case in history is the emergence of guaranteed payment launched by Alipay, which prevents users' money from being directly deposited into the merchant's account, providing a protection system and thus greatly improving the conversion rate of users on Taobao.

Another commonly used guarantee system is "full refund if not satisfied", which is applicable to almost all products and services, and brings great benefits to enterprises. It not only lowers the marketing threshold to allow more users to use your products, but also adds a highlight of user word-of-mouth communication, and raises the standards of the entire team in pursuing high-quality products. It is a system with far more advantages than disadvantages in business. The number of people who "maliciously take advantage of" is much smaller than imagined, so there is no need to worry about this part of the loss.

3. Facilitate communication among users.

Customers will always have some questions that you cannot think of in advance. There are also some customers who are worried about the answers and need to confirm with you again. At this time, it is very important to have a smooth user communication mechanism, which can include "consultation pop-up windows", "consultation phone calls", "QQ consultation", "message reply", "call back" and other methods.

Check if the consultation button is prominent? Is the consultation method convenient enough? Is the cost low enough for users? If you just leave an email address, it will be inconvenient for users to communicate and most of them will give up directly.

A few tips:

1. During the consultation process, "response speed" and "professionalism" are the main factors affecting conversion rate.

2. Try to leave as many ways of interaction as possible. Users have different preferences. Some users like to communicate directly by phone, while some users do not want to leave their mobile phone numbers and choose text consultation. Telephone communication is costly, while text consultation can be multi-threaded and highly efficient.

3. Voice communication has a higher conversion rate: Voice can better convey the customer service's attitude towards the customer. The customer can feel the customer service's sincerity and enthusiasm, as well as the care for him, which makes it easier to close a deal. Especially for products with higher average order value, voice communication is more effective.

4. Active pop-up windows are also a very effective method in some product scenarios, because most potential users are not so proactive. Whether to use a pop-up window depends on the balance between conversion rate cost and user experience.

5. During the consultation process, ask the user more questions about their situation. Don’t directly tell the user “You are a perfect match for our product.” Instead, ask and confirm the user’s situation, then slowly guide the user to understand your product. Finally, let the user come to a conclusion: this product is quite suitable for me.

05

Enhance pain points and pleasure points

Pain points and pleasure points are two aspects of user needs, representing the pain that the product can solve and the happiness it can bring to users.

Pain points and pleasure points are the basis for determining users' product choices. Any operations that are divorced from user needs are empty. Pain points and pleasure points cannot be defined by oneself, they must be recognized by users, which requires a full understanding of users during product design and operation.

Product positioning should be focused. Don’t try to cover all groups of people when the product is first launched, and don’t launch a platform with large and comprehensive functions from the beginning. The correct approach should be to focus on a small segmented group of people and maximize the experience of this part of users first.

Ways to increase pain points and pleasure points:

1. Description of the visual experience.

Use more words that users can visualize to describe the pain, for example, "the embarrassment of being late for work" and "it seems like the whole company stopped and watched you breathlessly walk through 7 rows of desks." The latter is more vivid.

2. Resulting in painful consequences.

The bad results will be derived, and one bad result will be deduced to a series of bad results, making people feel the more serious consequences.

Psychologically, pain points are more likely to make users take action than pleasure points. Therefore, we must put more operational resources into making users feel their pain points. Losing represents pain points, gaining represents pleasure points. Even if it is the same functional point, try to express it in the form of pain points.

For example, for a health app, it would be more influential to talk about how much troublesome disease pain can be reduced rather than how much health can be gained. As another example, suppose you, as an operations staff, want users to sign up for a 7-day trial membership.

Copywriting 1: Just 3 steps to register, you can easily get 7-day membership of a certain website and enjoy the distinguished experience!

Copywriting 2: Congratulations, you have obtained a 7-day membership of a certain website and enjoy the distinguished experience! Click Register to reserve your eligibility.

Which copy feels better? Copy 2 will obviously make users more willing to register.

06

The impact of warm and cool colors on users

Color has a great impact on people's psychological changes, and this influence works without the user's awareness. Color is a very vast subject, which cannot be fully covered in several books. Here I would like to share something that is easier to understand and change, which is the impact of warm and cool colors on user behavior.

Do you know why most fast food restaurants are decorated in warm colors? Why are hospitals and stations usually decorated in cool colors?

Psychologists who study color have conducted experiments and found that when people are in a red environment, their pulse speeds up, their blood pressure rises, and they become excited and impulsive; while in a blue environment, their pulse slows down, their blood pressure drops, and their emotions become calm and rational.

In this experiment, red and blue represent warm and cool colors respectively.

On the one hand, fast food restaurants designed with warm colors allow users to feel the potential for enthusiastic service. On the other hand, it will prompt customers to be more impulsive and excited, finish their meals and leave faster, thereby increasing the turnover rate and ultimately achieving an increase in sales. The cold colors used in hospitals and train stations are intended to help passengers feel calmer and reduce the irritability and discomfort caused by waiting.

Think back, what kind of places have warm colors and what kind of places have cool colors? Do they match the main scenes they correspond to?

Now that we know about warm and cool colors, what impact does this color have on operations? Will it affect the conversion rate?

Products have usage scenarios. If the usage scenarios tend to be emotional and impulsive, warm colors are more suitable; on the contrary, if the usage scenarios tend to be calm and rational, cool colors are more suitable.

Specifically speaking of the interface, if it is an interface that requires users to wait, it is best to make it relatively cold; if it is a page that wants users to take action as soon as possible, it would be better to use warm colors. Using colors that don’t fit the scene will affect the conversion rate.

One of the main features of e-commerce is to use discounts and promotions to put users in an irrational and impulsive state, allowing users to buy more things, or even buy some things that are useless after taking them home. Therefore, in the e-commerce scenario, putting users in an "emotional impulse" is something that many product managers, interaction designers, and operations managers often think about.

Overturning the original color system and switching to warm tones is very costly for a large company, which shows how important color is to conversion rate.

Warm colors can make people impulsive, but lack a dignified and high-end feeling, so high-end brands have more cool color elements.

07. Establish standards for excellence and inferiority

In the process of studying user purchase and usage, I found a common obstacle for users, that is, customers don’t know how to choose, are not sure which product is best for them, and don’t know whether the current product or service is the best.

During the hesitation process, most users gave up, especially some novice users, who did not quite understand the sophisticated technology used in the production process.

To reduce customer hesitation, you can tell users the criteria for judging the quality and gain their recognition, so that users can draw the conclusions you want based on your guidance, thereby helping users to quickly understand and choose.

Among all the advertisements I saw when I was a child, the one that made the most extreme use of it was the Robust advertisement. Through research, the marketing team of Robust discovered that the purification process of mineral water is very long, but consumers are not aware of it. So a great advertising idea came up. Robust promoted its water as "purified through 27 layers of water". After informing users of this established "standard for judging quality", users would not hesitate to buy, so Robust regained a large market share.

In fact, most mineral waters at that time met this standard, but Robust was the first to promote the 27-layer purification standard as a selling point. When users saw multiple mineral waters during the purchasing process, they would quickly decide to buy.

When Lei Jun first launched the Xiaomi phone, he was guiding the audience to feel the importance of "price-performance ratio" throughout the process, and even let users ignore other factors.

For a period of time, Mi fans who had heard this speech would use the price-performance ratio as the "standard of excellence" to measure mobile phones. They thought Xiaomi phones were the best and did not consider other factors (quality, craftsmanship, brand, battery life). They looked down on Lenovo, Coolpad, ZTE, Huawei and other brands of mobile phones at the time.

Luo Yonghao will use his emotions to tell you that a good mobile phone must have user experience and texture; LeTV will tell you that a good mobile phone has a so-called "complete ecosystem" in terms of cost-effectiveness; Zhou Hongyi will tell you that the criterion for judging the quality of a mobile phone is the security of the underlying system.

You want to say that your APP is the best among its peers. How do you prove it? It also establishes standards for judging quality.

Toutiao, "The headlines are what you care about", focuses on recommending personalized news reading based on personal browsing history. Once this "standard for judging quality" is established, some users who accept this standard will no longer hesitate between different news clients, but will directly choose to download the Toutiao APP to get a personalized reading experience.

When Baidu was competing against Google, it launched the slogan “Better understanding of Chinese” and won most of the market share in Chinese search. From the time Google entered China to the time it exited China, it has never surpassed Baidu in market share, which has a lot to do with this slogan.

Generally speaking, users often use brand awareness as a criterion for judging products. However, when faced with unknown products, users lack the criteria to make their choices. Therefore, start-up products need to establish and communicate "standards of excellence". If you shop on Taobao frequently, you will find that this method is most commonly used by Taobao copywriters. You can pay special attention to it next time you shop.

So, what are the criteria for quality in your product operations?

08. Quality of traffic sources

In the early stages, many novice operators use various means to attract users in order to achieve traffic goals, but the quality of traffic is not high, which will greatly affect the conversion rate.

A common mistake in the past was to use a completely irrelevant picture of a beautiful woman, hoping to generate clicks and thus achieve conversions. For products that are not related to pornography, this is a really naive approach.

All traffic has a cost. Even free traffic requires time and energy. The free traffic with a very low conversion rate does not necessarily have a lower average activation cost than paid traffic. Therefore, we also need to calculate the average activation cost of users from different channels.

For example, for APP, the traffic from the points wall and pre-installed apps is often of poor quality, with low retention and activity; the traffic from ASO is relatively accurate, with very good quality and data.

To ensure the quality of traffic, the most important thing is to mark different traffic sources and ensure that user data from different traffic sources can be monitored. For example, WeChat can generate a QR code with a marking function.

Especially in the O2O industry, many applications only focus on quantity but lose supervision when promoting them offline, resulting in a large amount of capital loss. Therefore, controlling the quality of traffic is an important task to maintain conversion rate in the long term.

09. Lower the threshold for first-time use

Users will naturally have concerns and doubts about products, especially when others have to pay. Most businesses require users to pay before they can start experiencing the service.

The user usage threshold includes the need to pay, register, download, and complete information. Before the user formally pays, the threshold can be lowered to allow the user to experience the product first, so that they begin to rely on the product value and eventually become customers.

If some products can experience more complete functions in WeChat official accounts, users can use the functions through service accounts without the need for users to download the APP to register and activate, etc. This is also a way to lower the user threshold.

In short, you can think about and observe users, and think about what barriers will hinder users from coming in before the first use or payment, and then lower all possible barriers, and the conversion rate will inevitably increase.

10. Reduce dropouts

Traffic is brought in with great difficulty, and it would be a pity if it leaves easily in the process. Users should not be allowed to jump out too easily in the core process of the product.

One more step to leave the confirmed option

The reason why users leave may be due to accidental touches or hesitation. An extra step of confirmation can win back many users who do not strongly want to quit.

Web page loading speed and stability

Because of waiting for the web page to load, many users will jump out of the page, which will also reduce the conversion rate. Amazon once released a study showing that every 100ms loading delay on the website would result in a 1% drop in sales.

To speed up page loading, the commonly used methods in the industry are: let key elements load first, load js asynchronously on demand, use a good structure, do not overload the layout, do not use images to represent text, compress Java files, use Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and optimize CSS files.

Try to use PNG images, cut large images into multiple parts, set a fixed size when possible, and use AJAX for asynchronous updates. This can make full use of multi-threaded loading in modern browsers, merge multiple interfaces into one, and reduce the overhead of multiple http links.

11. The ultimate fate of conversion rate

When the conversion rates in all aspects are optimized to the extreme, there will be more competitors, profits will gradually decline, and eventually be replaced by new products. In order to prolong the product's market position, when the conversion rate has been increased to near the limit, the product life cycle begins to decline.

At this time, the only way to deal with it is to continuously innovate products, services, and models. It’s innovation, not optimization!

This means jumping into a new dimension and breaking out of the original business and product framework. If you want to make a horse run faster, the question is no longer how to train a faster horse, but to develop cars, airplanes, rockets, and even time machines.

Optimize after creating the product, innovate and optimize after encountering bottlenecks. Innovation and optimization are the inevitable path for the development of an industry.

The ultimate fate of the conversion rate is not the sadness of operations, but the wonderful thing about operations. There is no need to repeat the same work, and there are always new opportunities and challenges.

Related reading:

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2. Community operation, how to improve activity and conversion rate?

3. How to effectively improve your product conversion rate? 3 case studies!

4. Community operation: How to increase the conversion rate of fission communities by 10 times?

5.4 steps to increase conversion rate by 50%, revealing the underlying logic of traffic acquisition!

6. Promotion and marketing: What to do if traffic is high but conversion rate is low?

Author: Operation

Source: Operation