What makes people want to look at a website?
Not talking about buying, just wanting to stick with it, give it a chance.
We’ve talked about the 3 factors you should consider when looking at any website that influence conversions.
As a recap they are: Motivation, Value and Anxiety.
What is it that makes someone who just landed on a website, want to scroll or click to another page to learn more?
That’s Motivation.
Motivation is in short, anything that prompted the visitor to look for a product, their desired outcomes or pain points.
And as we’ve seen in our conversion optimization equation C= 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a, Motivation (M) has the strongest impact.
It’s not writing about you or your business. Not about your motivations, but the prospect’s.
A good way to differentiate it is also the difference between content writing and copywriting (and the skillset involved in each).
I was listening to a podcast with Morgan Housel, great writer and author of the book “The psychology of money”.
The way he goes about writing his posts is (paraphrasing), he asks himself what he thinks is interesting to him. Chances are the excitement will carry over to the reader. This is a good approach for content writing.
But for sales copy?
Nope. Instead your copy should read like your audience speaks. Sometimes the weirder and more unusual it sounds, the better.
Trust me, I learn new ways of saying things every day at my job!
An example is the golf industry or by contrast, the developer market. All the slang terms, all the super specific lingo.
You want to make it so that your copy is automatically and simultaneously repelling the outsiders. And attracting the right people.
Anyway , this is how you recognize good motivation copy.
Most of the times it’s in your main headline, but also sprinkled through the pages in important points of the user flow.
If you are familiar with bounce rate (a user who lands on a page, doesn’t do anything and exits right there), the main cause of it, is the inappropriate use of motivation in your copy.
Meaning a user was expecting to see something that resonated and that was relevant to his purpose, but didn’t.
90% of websites get this wrong.
Want to fix it?
Always ask yourself:
- What do visitors need to see? (Research your customers.)
- What did they see before landing here? (look at your traffic)
- How can I first match their expectations (usually in the first 10% of the page) and then exceed them (remaining 90%)? (combine 1/2 and create compelling copy/UX)
If you think about it, it’s something we all do. We have an idea, a goal, we type into Google (or click an ad), we land on a website and we internally run a check to see if that’s what we wanted or not.
Simple, but not easy.
Want to learn more about what kind of research to run and how?
Tomorrow we’ll look at what the second element, Value is all about.
Cheers,
Chris
