Is there one magic button to rule them all?

By: Andrew Stockwell | March 9th, 2010

In ‘The Lord of the Rings’ the evil Lord Sauron was always hunting for “the one magic ring that rules them all”. Luckily he’s not an online marketer as that sort of attitude just wouldn’t do…

Life would be very easy if one call to action could rule them all. Sites would all be identical and the one ‘super design agency’ would be shared by all companies. Unfortunately when creating the right call to action, this is not the case. As online marketers we are uniquely placed to use the wealth of data and expertise at our disposals to understand exactly what works well on our websites and then select the right elements through testing and conversion rate optimisation. Central to any conversion rate optimisation process is selecting the correct places to focus attention and the right strategy to work towards. This can only be done with expert understanding, as Jim Sterne the Chairman of the board of the WAA stated recently in an interview with RedEye.

“The fact remains, it’s the analysis of the information by humans that generates insights, not the machine. That’s why medical diagnosis is also not automated.”

Let’s take a simple example (below) of adding an item to the basket. How do you create the right call to action.

On first view this may be the perfect button…

However some users may look at this and assume it’s actually asking them to review their basket rather than add something to it. I’ve seen this misunderstanding in usability testing sessions before.

So let’s make it a little more clear including what we are expecting the user to do…

Now we’re getting closer…but is this right for the particular product offering? What if we are a highly fashionable clothing retailer? Do our customers want to imagine themselves walking around with a supermarket basket??

Maybe we could try a bag?

As we are in the midst of a permanently ongoing sales period we are also very keen to create urgency to purchase. So let’s get a little more persuasive…

Actually orders are down so let’s get REALLY persuasive….

As you can see immediately we can vary a single call to action in many ways and we’ve not even looked at the strategy, page placement, page structure, journey, segment, colour, case, font, nomenclature, ethnography, etc, etc.

Optimisation is vital to doing business successfully online. Selecting and making changes that improve your conversion rate often have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Below is the RedEye Conversion Maturity Model taken from the Econsultancy Conversion Report. This model highlights which activities are associated with each stage of conversion improvement.