In this talk, the audience will learn: - How to tell if they could be losing website visitors and conversions because of a confusing website experience - How to see if your calls to action have a shot at getting any action - How to fix your website forms so visitors aren’t abandoning them
Sarah Bond:
Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Bond, and I'm the Senior Director of Marketing Strategy at Lucky Orange. Today, I'm going to take you through five common mistakes that product-led growth companies make on their websites. Before we dive in, a little bit of background. I lead marketing communications and brand for Lucky Orange.
Sarah Bond:
If you're not familiar with Lucky Orange, we are a website conversion rate optimization software. What that means is we provide tools to people who run websites to help them understand what visitors are doing on their website that's keeping them from converting, from becoming leads or from becoming a sale. And prior to Lucky Orange, I worked for many years for a healthcare information technology company, where I was responsible for crafting and determining our website strategy, what goes on the website, what audiences we want to engage, and evaluating whether or not our content was compelling and getting the results that we wanted.
Sarah Bond:
So this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart, and I hope you'll take some valuable tips away from this today that you can use to make your product-led growth website even stronger. Let's jump into it. In today's presentation, we're going to cover five different areas around product-led growth websites. First, we're going to evaluate pricing pages and we're going to use some tools to see what the most popular elements are on those pages so we can continue to refine those and ensure our pricing pages are performing well.
Sarah Bond:
Then, we're going to talk about website navigation and that coveted beachfront real estate that everyone always fights over to get their content in the main navigation. Well, how do we figure out if it's working for our users? And third, we're going to talk about calls to action. Are they compelling enough to get your visitors to want to engage with your site?
Sarah Bond:
Fourth, we're going to talk about pop-ups. In this first date scenario of a visitor coming to your website for the first time, are you coming on too strong? And last, we'll talk about forms. We'll use the Goldilocks test to figure out whether or not your forms are asking for too much information or just the right amount of information.
Sarah Bond:
Let's talk about pricing. For product-led growth companies, we all know how critical pricing is for us. It is the lifeblood of our websites, and we sweat these decisions over what goes into our product pages. If you've read Wes Bush's Product-Led Growth book, he talks about some really great things for pricing, like understanding the popularity of different plans and evaluating if your discounts are driving more engagement.
Sarah Bond:
If you're also looking at a pricing plan and you're trying to balance, well do I do free trial? Should I have a freemium approach for my product? Or should I do a demo? Wes has some great tips around a MOAT framework that walks you through understanding your market strategy, your ocean conditions, your audience, and your time to value that help you determine which of these is right for you.
Sarah Bond:
But let's shift gears and let's look at the alignment.io website. This is a SAS based company. They have three different plans outlined on their pricing page. You can see they have the strategy platform plan that's $4.95, strategy plus coaching and on-site sessions. And for these two, I have to contact us. I see they've got including here what's in each plan. It looks like there's a little duplication between the strategy plus coaching and the strategy plan. And then we've got the on-site sessions plan.
Sarah Bond:
I can also see here that they are doing try it for free and a blend of that schedule demo. So that'll be interesting to see if one approach is working better for them than the other. And let's just see if there's anything else on this page. It's pretty straightforward. What I want to do on this page to understand where people are engaging is use a tool called a clicks heat map to determine where the majority of people are looking and what they're engaging with on this page.
Sarah Bond:
So I'm going to go ahead and launch this heat map. What I can see from this heat map, where I see these orange dots or just red dots, that tells me where people are clicking the most. And what that's helpful to understand is this strategy platform is more popular than the other two plans. The other two aren't getting a lot of engagement.
Sarah Bond:
So when I'm looking at this, I might want to try something different, like perhaps for that strategy and coaching plan, instead of just saying, contact us, I'm saying something like, "Plans start at $100 a month." So you still leave some variability in there. But if your audience is very price focused, then you can give them that opportunity to understand what this plan includes.
Sarah Bond:
Continuing on here, we scroll down a bit and I can see that try it for free is getting some clicks, but I also want to see if people are scrolling all the way down the page here. So I'm going to use a scrolls heat map to see if people are getting to the calls to action. And yeah, it looks like they are. The good news is this is a really succinct page, so we know that people are seeing all the content. That reinforces for me that maybe it's the way that you're framing up your plans, this price versus no price, or perhaps the try it free versus schedule a demo that's having an impact here.
Sarah Bond:
And maybe instead of schedule a demo, you could do something on strategy plus coaching like try a free coaching session. That might drive some more engagement. One of the other things that you might try here is doing instead of a list of bullets for each one, making it easier for your visitors to compare that strategy plan to the strategy, plus coaching by presenting this in a grid view so that I can see with strategy, I'm getting five things because there are Xs in that box. But with strategy plus coaching, I'm getting that many more things because I get what's included in strategy plus coaching. That may be another consideration to try out here.
Sarah Bond:
Let's move on from pricing and let's go on to our next topic, navigation. If you've ever had to build out a website and get consensus from other teams or business units, you know how challenging it can be to figure out what goes in your main navigation, because everybody has the mentality, if I'm not included in the main navigation, then no one will know that my product, my feature, my solution, my event, whatever it may be even exists.
Sarah Bond:
And when we think about website navigation, it's easy to want to try and pack everything in there. But Wix, they recommend doing no more than five to seven elements in your website navigation. If you're primarily a mobile first approach, then you might even streamline that down to smaller number of elements so that way people aren't having to scroll. You really have to think about this in context of what your visitor is looking for.
Sarah Bond:
I always use an 80/20 rule when I think about my website navigation in that 80% of the content should really be about what I know of visitors coming to my website, what they're looking for. And 20% of those elements should be those wow elements where people say, "I had no idea you also offered this or that I could do that or I could engage in this manner." Because you really want this to be about making it easy for your users to navigate this content.
Sarah Bond:
One of the things that you should also consider in this scenario is when people are coming to your website, if you're seeing a lot more search traffic coming in, then that can be an indicator that they're not finding what they need in your website navigation at all. So let's go ahead and take a look at my email verifiers website. We can see they've got their main navigation here, but they also have some other things like the super saver discount, the 60% off, we've got our no credit card required, a phone number, a sign in, a sign up. We also have a couple of the elements down here, view pricing, start a free trial, but I'm curious to see what the engagement looks like.
Sarah Bond:
So I'm going to go and scroll a little bit here. See, okay, got all of these elements covered. I want to launch this clicks heat map again. Wile I'm in this clicks heat map, what I want to do is look at the interaction with different elements. So I can see this offer I have here, I'm not getting a ton of engagement. I'm getting about 1% of my traffic is engaging with that. If I continue to move on, I'm seeing that free signups, pricing is getting a lot, API, not much. These elements down here are getting some good engagement as is sign up and sign in.
Sarah Bond:
So that's really important to take a look at and to understand where people are engaging with this site. Because I now know that pricing is one of my more popular elements on this site. And I know that looking at opportunity and resources aren't getting much traffic at all, that could be telling me that, hey, I can really get rid of opportunity and resources, and maybe I replace it with something that ties to pricing like a compare plans option. That could be a way to get your pricing focused audience, to get deeper engaged with your website.
Sarah Bond:
If you see something like on this site where you have opportunity and resources that aren't getting very many clicks, drop those down to the footer. I also wonder if you drop out resources and opportunities, something like features that could be getting overlooked because there's just a lot going on in this navigation, you might also see that start to increase because you're reducing that cognitive load on your website visitors when they come to your site.
Sarah Bond:
Okay. Our next topic that we're going to talk about is calls to action. With calls to action, you really want to think about what are you asking the user to do, and is there value in it for them? So things like schedule a demo while it's very straightforward, there could be something more specific that you use to get them engaged, like a more detailed call to action, such as, "Help your HR professionals do more remotely. Schedule a demo today."
Sarah Bond:
Giving them that value proposition and tying it to your schedule a demo call to action can really help show the user how they would benefit. You don't have to think of your calls to action just as a little button. You could use it as a graphic or create a photo where you do highlight a little bit more of those aside from just one button.
Sarah Bond:
But what I want to do is take you through HRAPP's website and look at their calls to action. Already above the fold here, we can see we've got three different calls to action, and I'm curious how many more we're going to see on their home page. So going down, I've seen three, there's four, a know more option. I've got five with a video. I can see I've got another one around try it for free and talk to us. In addition, I still have that persistent book a free demo hanging out over there as well.
Sarah Bond:
Coming down to the bottom of the page here, I see some testimonials and it looks like we have a try it now option. So going through this website, there are eleven calls to action on this page, and that's a lot. I'm curious to see which of these calls to action are getting the most engagement. Do my visitors here just skim over these calls to action? Do they feel bombarded? All I care about is the sale, not necessarily what they care about.
Sarah Bond:
So to do that, I'm going to use a couple of different tools to help me diagnose that. First, I'm going to look at this scrolls heat map. As we've seen before, this shows me how far down a page people are getting, whether they're seeing those calls to action. If we pause it right here, I can see that, okay, 69 people have reached this point in my homepage, but what I'm looking for is this right here, what's called the effective fold.
Sarah Bond:
The effective fold is where 50% of people have stopped reading through your website. Out of the 11 calls to action here, what this tells me is that they are not seeing all my calls to action. So if I have really important, meaningful content that I'm relying on down at the bottom of the webpage to help make the sale or articulate my value proposition, this scroll heat map is telling me that no one's even getting down that far.
Sarah Bond:
So you can use this to determine if your lack of engagement with a call to action is because it wasn't compelling. Or if people simply weren't even seeing it. If we continue down this page, you can see that the amount of readership just continues to drop off that you go, and as you get down towards the very bottom, we're seeing very few people even making it to these last calls to action, so 17% there.
Sarah Bond:
Next, what I want to do is look at precisely where people are clicking. To do that, I'm going to go to my heat maps and what I'm going to do is I'm going to see these elements in just my clicks heat map. And I can see what's most popular. Pricing is pretty popular here. I can see that the side persistent one isn't getting a lot of clicks, which is a little bit surprising because you would think with it being a persistent nav element, that you would see more clicks on it. But I'm not seeing a lot of clicks.
Sarah Bond:
I want to see exactly what people are clicking on and this something that's called a precise interactions heat map. These dots show where people individually are clicking. And some of these that are out in the middle of the screen, it's probably someone clicking and then scrolling down the page, but I can see it on my elements where some of these clicks are happening as I go down. And we're going to look at those call to action buttons and kind of keep an eye on where people are engaging with those calls to action as they go.
Sarah Bond:
We can see not very many clicks on that CTA. The watch the video, it's getting some clicks, but the further down here that we go, fewer clicks. Try it now is getting some. And so, as you can see, this really helps you understand. Download our app, that one's not resonating. So you can use this information, start to refine and reevaluate your messaging on your calls to action by figuring out which ones are resonating and which ones are getting you the most engagement.
Sarah Bond:
Okay. So moving on from calls to action, the next topic we're going to talk about are pop-ups. Pop-ups, it's kind of like when you're on a first date and someone's coming on way too strong. Think about a pop-up in terms of, are you giving your website visitors the opportunity to even figure out what's going on on your website before you start to bombard them?
Sarah Bond:
One of the key things with pop-ups, if you're not using a time-based trigger for your pop-ups, you totally should be. I would even encourage you to get more sophisticated than that and start thinking about event-based triggers. With an event-based trigger, you could tell someone that if they're sitting on your pricing page for 15 seconds, let me initiate a pop-up. It could be anything from an offer, or you could have a live chat window appear asking them if they have any questions about your pricing page. These are all things that you can do. And really thinking about that experience from your visitor's perspective is so important.
Sarah Bond:
What I want to do now is look at the Site Assist website. They are also a SAS based company, and I'm kind of curious to see how their pop-ups, how quickly they happen. You can see pretty much when we've loaded this webpage, we get this pop-up here. It's a pop-up about speaking to the sales team. Let's go back here a little bit so we can see this better. The pop-up is about speak to our sales team, enter your number below to get in contact with us in 14 seconds. That seems somewhat oddly specific. And then it's got a call me now, or choose a time for us to call you.
Sarah Bond:
So you're asking me to talk to a salesperson before I've even had the opportunity to engage with your website, scroll down the page, look at content and evaluate it. What I'm curious to see is how people are engaging with this. You'll also note that typically in a pop-up you'll see kind of up here in the upper right corner, the ability to exit out. This one is down here, which when you're first looking at this, you might not even notice that because it's such a non-traditional place to close out a pop-up window.
Sarah Bond:
So when you're doing your pop-ups, you want to think about the user. Avoid using any sort of dark patterns where they can't figure out how to get out of the window or that your messaging says things like, if you're a antivirus software, "Are you sure you want to leave your device unprotected?" Visitors don't appreciate that so be pretty straightforward. But let's go ahead and look at a click heat map because I want to see if anybody is taking us up on this call to action pop-up here, call me now.
Sarah Bond:
Okay. And I can see from the click heat map, these are where I'm getting clicks. So this is telling me that it's too soon. People don't want to engage with this pop-up. They're going to dismiss it. If your pop-up only happens once, which it probably should in this scenario because you don't want to keep bombarding them, the fact that you've triggered this pop-up too quickly means that they may struggle to find out how to reengage with you when they are ready to engage.
Sarah Bond:
Let's move on to our last topic, the Goldilocks test with forms. Whether you're an e-commerce website, a B2B website or product led growth website, there's some universal truths about forms. And part of that is because we all interact with forms on websites every day in our daily life. I mean, who here hasn't bought something off of an e-commerce site where you've had to create a form. Those best forms, whether it's an e-commerce form or some other website, those become the benchmark that we measure everything against.
Sarah Bond:
And when we are talking about best practices for forms, there are a few things to keep in mind. One, you want to do a single column layout. CXL Institute found that on average people complete a single column form 15.4 seconds faster than a multi column form. You also want to think about the type of information are you asking for. Are you asking them for information that you can gather further down the line that makes it easier for them to complete the form because it's faster?
Sarah Bond:
Another best practice is ask the easy questions first, their name, their first and last name, those sorts of things that they spend some time getting invested in filling out the form. So then when you're asking them for other information later, like their contact preferences or something else, they've already invested time and are less likely to abandon your form.
Sarah Bond:
When you can, use inline validation for your forms. If I'm typing a password and your password requirements require me to have a character, a number, and a capital letter, as they're filling that out, if their form isn't needing that, then you want to validate that. If their password doesn't meet that criteria, don't make them wait until they click submit to warn them of that. Where you can, use smart forms to complete the fields for them.
Sarah Bond:
So if you are requiring someone to enter their address, if they type in their zip code and you can auto-populate state and city if you're US-based, do that because it saves time and increases the likelihood that someone's going to complete your form and not abandon that form.
Sarah Bond:
Okay. Let's take a look at this form on this website Milk & Love. We can see we've got information, create a password, phone number, address, pretty detailed address information here, and then create account. To evaluate this, let's go ahead and let's launch into a type of heat map that's called a form analytics heat map. We're going to look specifically at an abandonment report.
Sarah Bond:
What an abandonment report tells us is the where people dropped off in terms of the percentage of people who abandoned my form. I can see that people are going ahead and entering information here in name and password, but where they're really getting hung up is this phone number field. I will tell you that we see a lot of Lucky Orange customers have the same struggle that people don't want to give you their phone number. They feel like that's personal information that just isn't necessary.
Sarah Bond:
So if you can eliminate those sorts of forms that are causing abandonment, or if you don't need that right now. Let's say you're a product-led growth company, and you might need things like their email address and their name to get them signed up, but if you don't need their phone number until they become a paying customer, save that for your initial free trial. And wait to ask that later when they've already committed to having a relationship with your product.
Sarah Bond:
Okay, so I want to see if there are any other fields, this zip and postcode field is causing some abandonment here too. So that could be another thing to look at and ask yourself whether or not we need that. Or could we again use one of those smart fields where you feel this and it auto-populates my field? I think that because this is the last field, too, people might be getting some form fatigue here with this lengthy form.
Sarah Bond:
Okay. One of the other things I also want to look at is a repeat fields form. A repeat fields form can tell me if people are getting hung up on my field and I can see this confirm password. We'll jump back into this. This confirm password field right here, it's getting repeated. So that could be an indicator that I do need some of that inline validation that maybe people are having to go back and confirm their password, because I've got a requirement like you can't use a previous password or something along those lines. That can be really helpful to understand if your direction isn't clear here for people and where you might need to go in and redo something like that.
Sarah Bond:
That brings us to the end of our presentation. I really appreciate you all taking the time to be with me today. And hopefully you've taken some actionable tips that you can use to improve your product-led growth website. And for hanging in here with me and listening to this presentation, I have an exclusive 21-day free trial offer for you for lucky orange, as well as 20% off of any plan available. Just use the link below and I'd love to keep in touch. If you found something in this presentation that resonated, please reach out to me and let me know. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much.
