Tim: How important is design to conversion rate? Most people at this point understand that it has a big impact but beautiful design can sometimes hurt conversion rates if it’s not focused on getting the visitor to take the action you want them to take.
Phil MacNevin wanted to work with a company to boost their sales and noticed that their sales page was confusing and not clearly laid out. After making a few small changes, he took their sales conversion rate from 1% to 8%. That’s a massive uptick and something that just about any marketer would be foaming at the mouth over. To hear what he did and find out how to know if our site needs the changes, listen to the rest of the episode.
I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.
Hey Phil, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.
Phil: Hey. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Tim: Yeah. So you know, this is very cool. I want to hear before we dive into the actual tactic, I want to hear the results that it was able to get for you.
Phil: Yeah. So I mean there’s two specific examples that I have in mind. One of them was a sales funnel or they were both sales funnels and using this tactic we were able to increase the sales conversion rate on one of them from 0.05% which is their standard up to 1.5 so that was…
Tim: Nice.
Phil: …[Indiscernible [00:01:25] conversion rates which equaled a lot in terms of revenue. And then the other one using the same tactic, we increased their conversion rates from 1% to 8% in sales. So that was huge.
Tim: Yeah, that’s amazing. Cool. I’m excited to hear about it. Before we get into the specifics though tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Phil: Yeah. So I’m a designer by trade but for the last eight years, I’ve been focused specifically in the internet marketing and information marketing space. I was working with, I kind of got started in this area working with Eben Pagan of all people to work with.
Tim: Yeah.
Phil: He really pushed the boundaries with me in terms of what we can do which I really appreciated because back then when I was working with him, we were…you know, most people in the online marketing space were still using those pages that had the block type with the red and the yellow highlights and the underlines and like all that type of stuff. We decided we really didn’t want to do that. So what we did is we looked at Apple to see what they did in terms of design and aesthetics. We thought there’s a lot of room in this area to grow.
So a lot of the webpages that we created in terms of landing pages, opt-in pages, all that type of stuff took from Apple as inspiration and we designed beautiful opt-in pages and landing pages and that converted amazing. That’s kind of where I got my start now. I run a company called Lift Media, LiftMedia.co and what we do is we do the same thing for all sorts of people now. We design landing pages. We design sales pages, we design opt-in pages. We do product launches all that type of stuff with the goal of increasing our client’s branding aesthetic as well as increasing their conversion rates so that they can do better, reach more people and change the world.
Tim: Perfect. I love it and that ties in directly with what you’re talking about today. You know, focusing more specifically on sales and sales funnels, so why don’t you just kind of break it down for us? Walk us through what was the before and after and tell us a little bit about the changes you made.
Phil: Yeah. So I mean from a before and after standpoint, both of these sales pages were the copy was amazing, the products themselves were really great. But one of the things that plagued both of them was really bad design. Both pages were very cluttered. They were difficult to read, very long just it was really hard to tell where your eyes should be looking at when you’re reading one of these pages.
So it was a very simple tactic that we employed on both these and that was just to create what we called various color blocks or content blocks. Just so that we can organize the content better and make it easier for a visitor to scan through the content and see the parts that are specifically relevant to them as a personal user.
Just making everything a lot more readable. That included being a lot more aware of white space, adding white space where you needed it so having, padding in and paddings like space between elements. So increasing paddings so that text wasn’t bumping up into other boxes. Changing small things like line heights so making sure that txt wasn’t crammed together. It was just a little bit easier to scan, a little bit easier to read because one of the things that we found was that if stuff was too hard to read, whether it was too long or too cramped then people bounced off the page quicker.
[00:05:16]
So we wanted to reduce eye strain and make it easier for people to read. And then again like what I said before it’s introducing color blocks that defined different areas of content and kind of switched what you were talking about and making transition between maybe a benefits related copy versus features or versus a testimonial or those types of things.
Tim: And those are really the big things that you did then to get the results right? It was more focused on making sure that content all had its place and it was laid out in a way that you could easily understand what each thing was. And that when you are moving through the page, it didn’t seem like this big massive things to look at. Right?
Phil: Exactly, yeah. Just really cleaning everything up and making it super easy. We’re moving barriers basically for people to read your content, your sales page.
Tim: What would you recommend for somebody who’s looking at their sales page thinking you know I don’t know if this is cluttered? Like how can I tell if this is right for doing something like that?
Phil: Well I think it would be good to have a second opinion.
Tim: Sure.
Phil: Because I know especially for anybody who’s building their own stuff, sometimes it’s really difficult for us to see our blind spots and what’s working and what’s not. I know for me what works and I don’t know if other people out there have the same tactic would work. But I get my wife read it all the time.
Tim: Nice.
Phil: Especially if I’m confused on whether or not this will work or not because she has got a really good eye. Like she’s not a marketer. She buys things though and so I like to put things in front of her to see if would you read this page or not.
Tim: Got you.
Phil: If you’ve got someone who does a lot of online purchasing and maybe reads a lot of programs or does a lot of programs or that type of thing. It really anybody who’s not you can come in and look at it from a different angle to see if it’s something that’s difficult to read or not. The other type of person that I typically try to get someone to read is someone who’s a little bit more elderly.
Tim: Oh, yeah that’s a good tip.
Phil: Yeah. Just because it’s difficult for them to kind of read and be technologically savvy anyway. So if you can put it in front of who’s a little bit more elderly and it’s easy and simple for them to know what to do next, that’s like the ultimate test.
Tim: Nice.
Phil: Especially it doesn’t have to be anyone who’s elderly but someone who’s not technologically savvy. Because you’ve really got a design for your lowest common denominator and it’s all about removing barriers because you want more people to buy and the less barriers you have, the easier it is for people to click on that CTA and get that conversion.
Tim: that’s awesome. Yeah, I love it. This is great. It’s so interesting to see the impact that you know clarity can have on conversion rate. I think we talked about this a lot and it’s interesting to hear from a design perspective a couple of ways to do that. So thanks for sharing that on the show Phil. I really appreciate it.
Phil: Yeah, no problem, any time.
