Universal CRO principles

In an earlier article, I talked to you about the known persuasive biases. We can turn these biases into certain “principles CRO ”, which are what we first need to know and then work on to improve our conversion.

There are seven:

1. Attention.
2. Context.
3. Clarity.
4. Congruence.
5. Credibility.
6. “Closure” (of the campaign).
7. Continuation.

And I’m going to go through them one by one. Briefly, mind you, because this article has already ended up quite long.

#1. Attention

Let’s start by talking about “ The Attention Ratio”.

It can be defined as the “ Attention Ratio ” of any landing page as “ The number of actions I can take on the landing page, divided by the number of actions I should be able to take on it”.

What do we mean by “ actions”?:

• Clicks on banners.
• Navigate to other sections.
• Share on social media.
• Subscribe to blogs or a newsletter.
• Download a PDF.
• …

On a home page, for example, it may be 10:1 or 20:1 (or even worse), on an internal page somewhat lower (say 5:1), and on a paid-traffic landing page it is usually 1:1 or 2:1, which is what the attention principle considers correct.

The (false) exception to this case is very long landing pages with several CTAs. The key here is that they all point to the same goal.

In other words, paid landing pages should be focused on just one thing:

• Clicking a button.
• Signing up.
• Buying.
• …

Whatever it is, but not several different actions.

That is why it is almost always advisable to avoid top and bottom menus, search bars, social media icons, etc.

This is when we are talking about websites with specific products or services.

If we are talking about ecommerce sites with thousands of products, it is more complicated, because you cannot create a paid landing page for every product that is different from the product URL on the website.

In these cases, I recommend making the “add to cart” button absolutely dominant, while everything else takes a back seat (add to wishlist, share on social media, compare, mark as favourite…).

As a summary, this image taken from an Unbounce report makes the importance of this principle very clear:

#2. Context

This principle states that you have to give the user the information they need to convert, before and after the click.

Before the click:

This context depends on the user’s expectations , the stage of the buying cycle they are in (looking for information or already decided?) and the channel they come from.

So, an ad on FB allows a few characters and an image. That is not much context compared with an email, for example. Or with the landing page, where the product is explained in depth.

After the click:

When the user reaches the page, if I want them to convert, I need to fill in any missing context. In addition, there has to be a match between the design and messages of the advertising channel and what they find on the landing page.

This matching is called “scent”. All communications have to share the same “scent ”. The user automatically confirms that they have reached the right place, without any doubts.

In this respect, it is important that the user’s first impression is certainty rather than doubt, and the elements on the page have to reinforce it. Headers and main images are very relevant here.

This example of Simyo’s Instagram ad and its corresponding landing page will make things clearer:

#3. Clarity Principle

In the online world, apart from chats or WhatsApp, users do not browse “accompanied”.

There is no salesperson there to help and guide them, which is why the clarity of our landing page is so important, with copy and images that cannot lead to confusion.

Also, given that the Internet is huge and users are impatient, if our value proposition is not understood immediately, the user will probably leave our site and move on to the next Google SERP.

In this respect, two concepts need to be distinguished:

• Unique Value Proposition (UVP): that of the site or company, communicated mainly on the Home page.
• Unique Campaign Proposition (UCP): the one relating to the offer of that specific campaign.

In the case of brand campaigns, both will match, but in other campaigns such as limited-time offers they will not, because the UCP is much more segmented and targets a specific type of user.

Besides that, another point to bear in mind is the information architecture:

• Order.
• Visual dominance of the copy.
• Clarity vs “cleverness”: copy with a double meaning may not be understood correctly.

I’m showing you MailChimp’s landing page, as I could with any other Digital Marketing service, because they tend to take great care over this aspect and make technology look simple:

NOTE: This principle can easily be tested in full with the technique “5 second test”.

I’m not going to discuss it in depth here, because I consider it more of a UX technique than a CRO one. You only need to know that it consists of showing your website to a user for just 5 seconds (sometimes 10) and asking three questions to find out their first impression.

#4. Congruence Principle

It consists of aligning ALL the elements on the page with the campaign objective, avoiding elements that add nothing or directly work against the goal and reviewing the copy to see whether it supports the objective.

Here is a sample of Hubspot’s landing page, which I think is a very good example:

The URL (at the time the article was published) to see it in full here.

How to carry out an analysis on the landing page:

1. Take the content of each element on the landing page (headers, paragraphs, bullets, image descriptions) and put it into an Excel file.
2. Score the congruence:
1. If the content is aligned with your campaign objective, mark it as 2.
2. If it is relatively aligned, give it a 1.
3. If it has nothing to do with the objective, give it a 0.
3. Look at the result. If it is low (less than half of the possible points), you may need to review the content.
4. Be careful with SEO copy, although this should not be a problem on paid landing pages.

Congruence beyond the landing page:

• In marketing campaigns (including SEO snippets)
• In the site flow: what do users do when they arrive organically at a certain URL? If they navigate to another page where they leave us the lead, we could consider including the form directly on the original page, avoiding one step in the funnel and the resulting drop-off.

#5. Credibility Principle

Although users increasingly trust websites nowadays and are less reluctant to leave their details (including credit cards), it is still worth looking at our landing page and seeing whether it creates that feeling.

There are many elements that increase it:

• Customer testimonials.
• Ratings and Reviews (with or without photos).
• Media appearances / referrals.
• Badges, such as “Confianza Online” (less and less, in my opinion)
• Number of sales or customers.
• Success stories, awards won or major customers (in general, but with nuances).
• Payment via PayPal or refunds.
• SSL / Https.
• Clear legal policies: privacy, returns…

At Yo pongo el hielo we use most of the above.

For example, in this image you can see user ratings alongside the media outlets we have appeared in and a sponsorship we carried out with Málaga CF:

There can be a problem if we only show some of the testimonials (obviously the positive ones) and users realise it.

To solve this, if we are really sure that the positive effects of showing them all outweigh the negative ones, we can use several techniques:

• Show all ratings, but prioritise the positive ones, as Amazon or PCComponentes do.
• Show selected Tweets / Instagrams, but link to our profile, as Pepephone does.
• Use a widget to show all user comments from social media on our site.

My recommendation is to use the techniques above when we are sure that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (a single negative review is more powerful than 5 positive ones).

Otherwise, filter, but use common sense so you do not fall into hyperbole, lack of trust and therefore lack of credibility.

To avoid that:

• Testimonials must be specific (“ This monitor has very accurate factory colour calibration, I barely had to touch the controls to calibrate it to 100% ”), not vague and generic (“ this site is great”)
• Avoid exaggerations: “The best animal website in the world”
• Pay attention to details: Are they all women? Does nobody look like a user of the tool?
• If they are real, even better: I have to ask for them; it is hard for people to leave them just because
• I will never recommend that you make them up, but, if they are not real, at least make them look real.

 #6. Closure Principle

Closing a negotiation in the physical world, or a conversion in the digital one, is the most critical point.

That is why you need to focus here.

There are several factors that influence it, positively or negatively:

• Negative influences or “ Stopwords ”: negative words close to the CTA. The underlying idea is not to make a user who intends to convert doubt right beforehand. For example, adding text with the word “ Spam ” near the newsletter subscription button.
• Positive influences: these are the ones that reduce “anxiety”. Example: “ You will receive your order tomorrow ” or “ Sign up for the webinar now and receive a copy by email in case you cannot attend”.

One of the aspects that receives the least attention, even though it matters, is the CTA copy. You should think about it very carefully:

• Is it the most suitable? I can propose an A/B test with several options.
• Be careful with the use of “Free”, as it can create doubt.
• Is it well placed? I check it with Heatmaps.
• Does it work correctly in every case? I review it with recordings and GA4.

An example I liked:

#7. Continuation Principle

Once the conversion has taken place, I can start thinking about the next steps the user could take on our landing page or site (micro or macro conversions).

For example:

• Add more products to the order or buy again.
• Share it on social media.
• Subscribe to our newsletter or blog.
• Sign up for an event or webinar.
• Watch a video tutorial for the tool.
• Start using the tool for free.
• Buy a paid plan for the tool.

Each of these points has a cost for the user and they are unlikely to make a very large leap such as the one between leaving us a lead to download a PDF (landing-page objective) and buying a paid plan (site objective), at least not that soon.

So the right thing is to think about and make an intermediate step easier that brings them closer to the final objective (in our example it could be “watch a video of the tool”).

For example, I think Miravía does this well by activating and emailing you a discount for your second order at the very moment you finish the first.

Landing-page timing

Once a campaign has ended, it is possible to repurpose the landing page for another type of conversion and capitalise even further on the cost of the action.

Example:

I have a landing page whose objective is to get the user to sign up for a webinar. Once the webinar has ended, I have two options:

• Mark the webinar as over and watch the landing page lose its value
• Reuse the landing page to try to get the user to leave me a lead in exchange for the webinar recording

I use the continuation principle to “keep converting”.

With Continuation, we finish the CRO principles that are useful for you to know.

That wraps up today’s article, but don’t leave yet, there’s more…

More about CRO…

Did you like the article?

Well, here you can continue with the rest of the articles in the CRO series:

• What CRO is and the user matrix.

• Biases and persuasion in CRO and copywriting.

• The universal CRO principles (the one you’re reading).

• CRO techniques to improve conversion.

• Tools for CRO.

• Testing methodology for CRO.

• Bonus: What Microsoft Clarity is and how to integrate it with Google Analytics.

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