DEV Community: Belhassen Chelbi

Your headline will write itself with this method [Graphic]

Belhassen Chelbi — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:04:38 +0000

Headlines aren't written. Headlines are designed.

To design is to understand the customer, craft using the best practices, and then test.

Voice of customer research:
Desire: Increase leads
Objections: "Is this going to affect my SEO?" / "Is this going to affect the UX?"

Best Practices:
Be specific: Increase leads by 30% (This is where you dig into the real data to figure out that percentage)

Headline crafted! What's next? Test!

How to increase your form conversion rate

Belhassen Chelbi — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 12:11:41 +0000

Optimizing your form conversion rate could be based on either strategies, tactics, or both.

In this post, we'll introduce some concepts with real examples to help you copy them for your own forms.

1. Break the ice

Instead of starting your form by asking for the most wanted information such as an email, name, phone number, etc, you can instead start with an ice breaker. That is a light question the users can answer without feeling an instant commitment till the beginning.

While adding another step may seem like adding more effort for your user, and more effort means less completion right? It's actually the opposite for this case, as we're not randomly adding another step but carefully breaking the ice to ease the commitment later.

2. Break it down

Long forms could be perceived as less time/effort consuming if you break them down. The idea here doesn't mean that we're going to fool the user. The user has to know that this is a multi-step form. We need to control what he sees in each step to reduce the cognitive load.

"In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources used."

Here's an example from the Shopify sign-up form:

3. Try Value-Based CTAs

Instead of using an action-based call to action, try a value-based call to action. For Clickfunnels, they didn't use "sign up now" or "create an account", instead, they focused on the value that the user will get: building funnels. Same for Kajabi. It's not as specific as Clickfunnels, but still used a value-based call to action. To make sure you know which approach works best for you, you can A/B test them.

4. Check for contrast

This is one of the most common problems on the web and the easiest to fix. The text on your website needs a good contrast ratio so it's easier to read and accessible to your whole audience. A low-contrast text can either be read with difficulty or can't be read at all. That's because 8% of your audience have visual impairments.

A great way to check your contrast ratio is to use the web aim contrast checker tool.

Get More Free UX Tips Every Week

5. Create curiosity

One of the ways you can motivate your users is by creating curiosity. For A1-Autotransport, people can get a quote at the end of the funnel. When we learned that people are using the funnel mainly as a quote calculator, I decided to use the generated quote to nudge their curiosity. So we just blurred it just before the final step where they enter the most important information (name, email, and phone number). The result: a 3.52% uplift with a $7,672 monthly monetary contribution.

6. One column instead of multiple columns

Based on studies from nngroups and CXL, presenting the form in a one-column layout is a must-have best practice.

The CXL study had 2 groups of people completing a survey. The group who had the one-column form completed it 15.4 seconds faster than the other group.

So if you're using a multiple-column form, just change the layout to one column.

7. Personalize the paths with logic branches

Your audience could be divided into segments. Sometimes, it makes sense to personalize the path for each segment. This way, you can craft a messaging that matches that segment.

Creating logic branches is very easy, especially with form builders like Typeform.

8. Personalize The Conversation

Here's another example from Typeform where you can use a user input, for example, their name, to make the copy more personalized and conversational.

9. Remove The Unnecessary

Go through each field and ask yourself: Do we really need this information? If the answer is "probably not", then remove it.

10. Use social proof to build trust

There are many ways you can use social proof to reassure your audience and make them feel that they're not alone and that they belong to a community.

11. Show the progress

If your form is broken down into multiple steps, people need to know where they are and whether they're close to the finish line or a little further. The worst thing you can do is give them no indication.

12. Conversational feedback

Treat your form as a person holding a real form and asking questions. That person can direct the (potential) customer, correct them if they made an error, and encourage them along the way. That person is your microcopy.

13. Offer incentives

At the time I'm writing this post, Shopify, Kajabi, Quickbooks, and other SaaS companies are offering special generous 3 months offers. While this isn't something you can add right away to your form as it's a business decision, this is a great conversion driver and should be considered if you have the ability.

For Binance, the incentive to complete the signup process is a $10 cashback voucher.

For The College Essay Guy, a combination of an incentive (free acess) and scarcity (until August, 31st).

14. Track Your Form User Behavior

While this is mentioned as the last tip in this post, it's actually one of the first things you need to do. Understanding the user behavior can be a great source of insights that you can use to optimize your form.

With session recordings, you can see how your customers are using the form like you're peeking over their shoulders. And this is even better than user testing as you're seeing their real behavior without the effect of your or your team's presence.

With funnels, you can see where the drop is happening and investigate that later.

Tools like Hotjar, Mouseflow, or VWO have to be in your arsenal to understand the user behavior and act on it

Conclusion

To optimize your form, you need to understand the user behavior and treat your users as humans because they are. That means creating a conversation with them, easing their effort, reassuring them, making them feel they belong, offering them great value, etc.

If you'd like to get free micro lessons like these about UX and conversion optimization, consider joining my free newsletter:

Get More Free UX Tips Every Week

How to increase your product page conversion rate [20+ examples]

Belhassen Chelbi — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 11:58:49 +0000

Most of the product pages out there are composed of a product title, price, description, an “Add to cart” button, some photos, and if lucky we may find some testimonials.

I’ll show you 20+ examples of how you can try to optimize your product page to increase conversion revenue. And most importantly, you’ll learn the concepts behind them.

1. Elevate the offer

Biotrust are elevating their offer by offering the product and giving 2 ebooks with a $50 value, as they claim, for free. The goal here isn’t to throw as much free stuff as possible. The goal is to make the offer more compelling by offering other valuable complementary products.

2. Connect with your audience

People love connecting with other people, especially in a (sometimes) dry E-commerce world. If you’re the creator/inventor of the product, try telling your story. Jiggypuzzles.com does this for every product:

They add a picture of the creator
They tell the story using the words of the creator in the product description

Or you can tell a story through a video as the founder of the brand, just like the Fit Father Project’s founder Dr. Anthony Balduzzi did. His emotional story is about how his father’s early death inspired him to make it his life mission to save 40 men+ by creating his program that helps them become healthier and live longer.

3. Offer a REAL guarantee

Some brands offer a 30-day guarantee and communicate it with their customers as a badge. That’s good.

But what Infinity Hoop did is beyond that:

They branded the guarantee as “the infinity promise”. Which meant it’s important for them.
With my help, we wrote copy that explains this in detail.
We gave it a relatively high place on the page to put more emphasis on it as it was very important for the buying decision.

4. Show your shipping info as a timeline

Based on Goodui, Etsy has tested their shipping info as a timeline and they implemented it. I think the reason for this is that a timeline creates a clearer vision in the customer’s head making them imagine the product coming and thus encouraging the buying action.

If you‘re enjoying this post, I’m pretty hopeful that you’re going to like the micro lessons I write for my deep camp newsletter. Consider joining my tribe 🙏

5. Show and tell your customer stories

People like to see proof that your product works. Testimonials are good and there are many ways you can use them. A great way to use social proof is to combine testimonials with photos/videos from your customer.

6. Stand for something! Show It!

If your, product helps a certain cause, talk about it.

7. Replace your variant dropdown picker with photos

This is a great way to offer a super UX (User Experience) to your customers. instead of making users go through a dropdown with variants as text (Green, Yellow, etc). You can show them the variants and make them interact with them, see the product and pick whatever they want. It makes it easier to browse them and requires much less mental energy.

8. Offer a payment plan

This generally applies to a product with a relatively high price, but I’ve definitely seen it for $20 products too. Product plans lighten the strain and therefore ease the buying decision.

You can do this easily with Integrations that make it super easy to get payment plans set up. Afterpay for example is a good tool that makes it easy to set up payment plans. There are other good alternatives too. Try offering this for a while and see if it has an impact on your revenue.

9. Scannable benefits with icons for visual customers

Based on nngroup, 79% of users scan your website. So to optimize your website for the majority of users, it’s helpful to create visual icons, each accompanied by a couple of words to communicate your product benefits.

10. Incentivize them to buy more with attainable rewards

The incentive here is free shipping. The price you need to pay is just another case of drinks.

And this is a great incentive because the reward is:

(Relatively) Easy to get: You don’t need to buy a bunch of stuff
Specific: Instead of saying Free shipping for $70+, they saved us the calculation. Just buy a second one and you’ll get free shipping.

11. Answer their questions and objections

This section is where you answer people’s questions and treat their objections. It could be an FAQ or this could actually be in different formats across the page. What’s important is that you understand their objections or any ambiguities they have in mind and treat them effectively.

12. Summarize your product in a few words

This is not a slogan. But if you can summarize your product in a few words in a way that makes it unique, try it. For Supply, 6 words “No cuts, No nicks, no learning” say a lot more than a competitor who’s rambling about irrelevant features. Not only that, but It cuts to the point very early in the user journey.

Note that this is NOT a replacement for a product description.

13. You’re safe

Security badges are the oldest ‘trick’ in the book. However, they still can play the role of reassurance not only for conscious analysis but on the subconscious level.

14. Upsell

While optimizing the conversion rate is a great objective, the ultimate one is to increase revenue. If your product could use this concept, try upselling either more of the same product or a better version of the same product.

To incentivize people to buy more:

Create a significant discount and highlight it
Offer multiple options and recommend one.

14. Specific Number-Based Benefits

If your product has **measurable **impacts, use and highlight it across your product page.

Conclusion

Your product page is the most impactful page on the buying decision. While you can use different ideas to optimize it, you need to seek deep knowledge.

You can combine multiple ideas and get inspired to try new ones based on the concepts behind these ideas.

If you like this, I’m pretty hopeful that you’re going to like the micro lessons I write for my deep camp newsletter. Consider joining my tribe 🙏

Do you think copywriting is worth learning?

Belhassen Chelbi — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 21:00:27 +0000

Have you ever thought of learning copywriting as a developer?

Best UX writing examples and the reasons why they work

Belhassen Chelbi — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 22:56:00 +0000

I've collected some UX writing examples with smart/creative concepts behind them:

When a form field placeholder copy becomes your salesperson

Be super specific

Free -> $0.00

Create Urgency with scarcity

Imagine, in real life, 4 products left on the shelf and 2 people have just taken 2 of them to put them in their carts. That makes the ones more desirable.

People can't see that online. Can they?

Super low engagement: When UX writers and marketing strategists collaborate

Mock the competition

More examples and deeper explanations are found here in the original post!

Much love❤️

SaaS Founders, Show yourselves!

Belhassen Chelbi — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:12:17 +0000

Whether it's a side project or your main business, share your SaaS in a comment and tell us why you built it 👨‍💻

Online Course Page Conversion Optimization Checklist

Belhassen Chelbi — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 14:20:03 +0000

If you have an online course about React, Angular, CSS, good ol'plain CSS, whatever. I made a checklist you can use to review your own course sales page

Be Unique with a Unique Headline

[ ] It's clear. If they read only the headline, they'll understand what's this course about
[ ] There's a differentiation between you and other teachers

The Teacher Story

[ ] I'm telling users who I am
[ ] I'm telling users why I decided to teach this course
[ ] I mentioned proof of success in my teacher story

Make them trust you

[ ] Does the fold include social proof (testimonials, companies you worked with, accomplishments)
[ ] Is there a repetition of social proof on the page
[ ] The social proof is relevant to the audience (if it's a freelancer Bootcamp, mention some testimonials from agencies freelancers )

Calm their anxiety

[ ] I know what makes my users fearful, uncertain, and doubtful of enrolling
[ ] I'm addressing the issues on your sales page

There's something for you, user!

[ ] I have an incentive (Money-back guarantee, discount, free e-book/manual/T-shirt, etc)
[ ] The incentive is clear in my copy and design
Are you offering value for people who won't buy
[ ] Almost everyone won't buy from the first time, are you giving them something to capture their emails?

My website looks aesthetically good

[ ] I've shown 20 people my website for only 5 seconds. They had a positive first impression

My website is easy to use

[ ] The most important things come first in the page
[ ] The most important things are more visible than the other elements (font weight, font size, color, position)
[ ] The contrast between foreground and background is OK
[ ] Consistency
[ ] Same colors
[ ] Same fonts
[ ] Consistent spacing
[ ] The images are relevant to the copy

If you fantasize about quitting dev, what you have in mind to do?

Belhassen Chelbi — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 22:48:26 +0000

A better developer with product design

Belhassen Chelbi — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 23:29:43 +0000

I became a much better developer when I practiced product design for almost 2 years. I created this YouTube channel, the first video is not scripted and it's still new, but, what I promise is, if you decide to take this little journey with me, you'll learn some great things from product design

So what I'm asking for here is just some support from this great community, let's start things together and I'll be happy to get any feedback.

Again this is not a scripted video, hopefully in the next ones will be scripted so no more guessing and more value to you.

Join me in this journey and thank you :)))

Does Product/UX design interest you?

Belhassen Chelbi — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 13:24:23 +0000

I generally talk about Product/UX design but I'm not sure if dev.to is the right platform(I know what is it about 😅 ) So if you have any interest let me know.

Subjects:

How to make your website more usable?
How to strategize about a product (the basics, nothing too complicated)
How to create a successful marketing landing page?
Tools to help you design and plan (pre-coding) ?
etc ..

Struggling to get away from computers

Belhassen Chelbi — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 06:04:55 +0000

Everything I do, I do with a computer. I design, I code, I learn things and I entertain myself with a computer. This can be good but I'm on my computer all the time.

I go the GYM, anything else I can do to get away ? Did you struggle to get away too? If you overcame this, how did you do it?

Domain specific web framework examples

Belhassen Chelbi — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 19:56:31 +0000

I'm exploring web frameworks that are specific to a certain domain like Ecommerce, CRMs, or whatever. Things like Odoo, Prestashop, etc.

Any modern frameworks/solutions you have in mind like Saleor or Forem.. ?