How to Build Websites that Sell: The Scientific Approach to Websites

The Fogg Behavior Model—explains that three elements must come together at the same time for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability and trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. Bottom line is this: Behavior = motivation x ability x trigger.

Human photos on a landing page increase sales and conversions Medalia Art sells Brazilian and Caribbean art online and using photos of artists on their homepage increased conversions by 95 percent.

Appsumo founder Noah Kagan has said this about their experience: Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change. It’s a good expectation to have. If you’re expecting every test to be a home run, you’re setting yourself up for some unhappy times.

Three core motivators: sensation (pleasure/pain), anticipation (hope/fear), and belonging (acceptance/rejection) Best trigger: tell the visitor person to “do this behavior now.”

Conversion optimization is the method of tuning websites or landing pages with the goal of converting more visitors into customers. The higher the conversion rate (%), the more sales (sign ups, subscriptions, etc) you get.

If you decide to still charge for shipping, you have to do this one thing: mention shipping costs up front.

A 2009 survey of 2,000 online British adults found that 50 percent of those who regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method is not available, they will cancel the purchase.

Insufficient information. A chair, two feet tall, black, $5,000. There are thousands of sites that hardly provide any information about the products they sell. Research says 50 percent of purchases are not completed due to lack of information. FUDs: fears, uncertainties, doubts. Much like the list of questions above, every person has some doubts in

There are three ways to create urgency: Quantity limitations (Only three tickets left at this price) Time limitations (Discounted tickets until July 1st) Contextual limitations (Father’s Day is coming, get a gift now)

The new thumbnail contained the text ‘Watch this video because it’s only 2:18 long’. I thought to mention the duration of the video, so people wouldn’t worry about it taking too long. The word ‘because’ was used as it triggers an automatic compliance response (as per Cialdini). The new thumbnail looked like this: Twice the amount of people watched