Success is when preparation meets opportunity. In a similar vein when you create a landing page that’s aligned with interests and aspirations of the visiting traffic you succeed at conversion rate optimization.
Vague ideas that supposedly worked for someone at some point in history do not necessarily translate the same way for you.
The design should be rooted in principles that work.
How to find those?
By gaining an understanding into how people behave and what motivates their behavior and action you can uncover startling insights into landing page optimization that can bring home the bacon.
Personality types: The latest research
Research released this month offers novel insights into personality types.
Analyzing data from 1.5 million people who answered several personality questions, researchers have been able to classify people into four broad clusters like: average, reserved, self-centered and role model.
What they’ve found challenges everything we know about human psychology.
Here’s what they found.
- Average Average people are low in openness but display higher levels of moodiness like anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness. According to lead author Martin Gerlach, the typical person would fall in this cluster with more females being average than males.
- Reserved Reserved are likely to be emotionally and mentally stable. They’re not open about their feelings. What separates them from the “average” cluster is their lack of neuroticism and extraversion. They are best left alone, are agreeable and conscious of what they’re doing.
- Role Models Role Models aren’t very moody and score low on those personality traits like anger, jealousy, sadness or moodiness. They’re like the rock- dependable, in charge of things and always open to new ideas. More women fall into this cluster than men.
- Self-Centered Self-Centered ones score highly on extraversion meaning they thrive around other people. They aren’t particularly agreeable, open or conscientious of their behavior. These are who you call brats. And most people don’t want to be around them. With age, the number of self-centered people are going up.
This kind of data gathering and analysis wasn’t possible before the internet. Online surveys were used to gather the data with a promise of letting people know their personality types.
With most people falling to the average cluster type traits that are dominant in this cluster can help you design pages that respond well.
Again as people age, personality types shift generally to the better side. Older people tend to be less neurotic yet more conscientious and agreeable than those under 20 years old.
If teens are exhibiting self-centeredness it will change when they get older.
Psychology of similarity—Degree of similarity
According to the researchers Kahneman and Tversky, we human beings judge the probability of an event based on representativeness or similarity.
If your call to action button appears more like a button it’s more likely to get clicked. It’s supposed to be a button and share characteristics of buttons like say round shape, somewhat standing out of the page, looking clickable. Not a hyperlink or an image. They won’t do.
When people come hopping on a landing page they don’t know what they’re going to face next. There’s uncertainty associated with the first-time visit. And such events are judged by degree of similarity to what it intends to represent and other things that the visitor might have already seen. In this case, familiarity drives clicks.
Go and apply this takeaway to your CTA button.
Sans those button-like characteristics the button doesn’t look like a button. When that happens visitors are going to fly past it.
Don’t put some text in there, or use a hyperlink or an image or a GIF and expect people to understand that it’s a button and what’s expected of them is to click through.
Don’t be too clever either. This too is going to buzz past them. Bridle creative prowess and ninja design skills to stick to what works.
Where you can unleash your creativity is in the choice of color, font and wording. But the general shape and appearance should match what’s commonly found. Follow prototypical design.
Rectangular shapes, rounded corners, shadow and depth effect are what you need.
Psychology of Gaze
Another research research presented done almost two decades ago cemented the fact that as human beings we love following gazes.
In so much that our brain has 30 dedicated areas that process visual input. And it’s not only eyes that matter. The entire body language signals in directions where we want others to pay attention to.
You can’t have people looking at your Call to Action in the literal sense.
What to do instead? Employ arrows and photos of excitedly gazing people to direct attention.
If you use visual cues like arrows or images of people gazing at the product, you can direct people to look at the product or the call to action.
Sunsilk using the power of women’s gaze to call attention to their haircare product.
ConversionVodoo took things up a notch by testing a CTA with 9 different gazes.
The control
And these are the other 9 images:
One of the greatest lifts of 6.83% was produced with the woman excitedly pointing towards the call to action. You can see that the green ones all converted highly.
No gaze resulted in the worst performance.
In yet another study, the image of a baby looking at a call to action increased clicks to the button than when the baby was looking elsewhere.
Psychology of the Mere Exposure Effect
Mere exposure effect says that the likelihood of an action being taken increases if the number of prompts for that action increase.
That is more the number of times you repeat something, due to mere repetition or enhanced exposure the chances of driving attention increase.
Simply by repeating the CTA throughout the page and doing nothing else one company improved conversions by 20%. That’s akin to saying that somebody dragged my fat ass in the 100m olympic race and got me the gold medal.
One CTA was below the checkout cart-the place where it usually is and another at the top of the cart- an unusual position.
The control:
The button sizes for continue shopping and continue to checkout were the same.
A test was run after duplicating the “continue to checkout” CTA, higher up on the page.
The variant caught the attention of first time visitors with its prominently placed CTA atop the cart.
Being highlighted it stands out and appears important.
It also becomes easy for customers with multiple items to checkout easily. The convenient placement chucks out the need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Have you ever used these tactics before? Do you have more that you can share to inspire our community? Please let us know in the comments below.