CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Mini-Degree Scholarship Program WEEK 3 Review

I left off last week’s blog post covering the principles of persuasive design module in the conversion rate optimization best practices training. This week, I will continue to cover what I have learned and provide some applicable insights I took away from these best practices.

First up is typography and content. In this module, I learned that it is important to make sure that the content is easily readable and consumable in order for it to gather the most focus and attention from a website visitor. Font sizing and types is critical for ensuring this is done effectively. For body copy, it is recommended to have a font size of at least 16px. For headlines and calls to action, font size should be noticeably bigger than for body copy.

There is even some evidence form studies showing that bigger fonts elicit stronger emotional connections. I imagine this is why headlines and calls to action are best with bigger fonts (relative to the rest of the font sizes for other text) since those are critical aspects of a website landing page to get a user or prospect to take the desired action we want them to. In order to do that, they need to know what information is most relevant to them (the headline should convey some of this at the very least), while the call to action (button or whatever format a CTA may be in) is how the potential prospect can take action after being presented with the headline and other supporting relevant information needed to move further down a sales funnel or whatever funnel is set into place (lead generation, email sign up, booking a call, etc.).

In terms of fonts, there does not appear to be a one size fits all font, but the principles of readability are important here. Most sans serif and serif fonts are sufficient to use. If anything, it comes down to context and understanding what makes the user experience better for the demographic of the people that go to your website and landing pages. In my past experiences with one of my e-commerce websites, I used bigger sizing for my fonts because my demographic that bought from that store consisted of elderly people who typically have more trouble reading smaller sized fonts than most other people of a younger age. In another e-commerce website, my demographic consists of millennials and Gen-Z women. So, the type of font and font sizing I use may be a smaller size and more consistent with those of similar websites in my niche. I can research common fonts and sizes use for my target niche and demographic.

Furthermore, it is good to keep in mind that people prefer to consume that is easy to consume and well-structured. It is best to avoid bunching up written copy and content into cluttered chunks and walls of text. I am personally guilty of writing in big walls of text, both in personal communication and also for long-form copy for product descriptions and sales pages. It is something that I need to continue improving on. I tend to forget that I am not my user, prospect, reader, or customer. A few best practices for written content and copy length are:

- using plenty of ordered unordered lists
- always serving images with text to break things up on the page (maybe I should be doing this for my blog post reviews moving forward perhaps?)
- forming a new paragraph after every 3–4 lines of text
- adding a sub headline after every 1 to 2 paragraphs

In a study, researchers found that concise, scannable and objective copywriting resulted in 124% better usability. I am not sure how usability was measured for this study, but I’m pretty confident that better usability translates to better conversion rate and user satisfaction on a landing page or website.

Scannable copy is huge for me personally. Going back to what I said about writing long-form copy, I often forget that most website visitors will NOT fully read all the copy I have. So, I need to make sure to add headlines, sunheadlines, break things up, and bold, italicize, or underline the most relevant information needed for someone to buy a product. A good rule of thumb I will apply to scannable copy is to make whatever copy I bold (or make clearly noticeable) be sufficient enough information for a prospect to make a decision on my desired call to action. As noted from what I learned, stuff that gets read the most includes:

- headline
- intro paragraph
- bullets above the fold
- sub-headlines

Ideally, I will make sure I include a headline (maybe a sub headline too if needed) and 3–5 bullets above the fold outlining the primary emotional or functional benefits on my e-commerce website product pages.

I covered more ground than I anticipated for this post regarding just the typography and content module for the best practices training. I will finish things off by covering the home page module.

I learned that a homepage has two primary roles on any website: give users information and provide top-level navigation towards additional information further inside a website. For most websites, the top landing page is the home page. Because of this, it is important to effectively convey the value propositions. Consider these questions from users who land on the home page:

- What can I do here?
- Why should I do it?
- How is this better or different from other offers?

A secondary goal for the home page is to bring users further down the sales funnel by taking them off the home page. It is important to present a relevant call to action on the home page to get someone further down that sales funnel by taking the desired action to the next step in that funnel. CXL found in a study that:

- The bigger (more text) the value proposition, the quicker participants noticed it and longer they looked at it for.
- Participants preferred information in the form of a bulleted list (compared to a short paragraph and a bulleted list with descriptions).
- Participants were able to recall more advantages when more advantages were listed.

I will keep these things in mind for my homepage on my e-commerce websites. However, my websites typically have only one product, so I may not need to drive traffic to a homepage (especially with PPC adds). Instead, I am better off removing the extra homepage step in the sales funnel and send traffic to the product page or a long-form sales page. When I add more SKUs to the websites, I will likely need to focus on iterating the elements of the homepage.

To cap this off, this week I discussed what I learned in the best practices training of the conversion optimization mini degree from Conversion XL (CXL). I went over the typography and content and home page modules. I will continue my discussion of best practices next week.

-David