Persuasive Design

Using the principle of social proof to create persuasive designs.

How to leverage your existing users to drive better conversions in your landing page.

This is what you are actually aiming for with your designs.

If you have built a landing page for your new product, then it’s quite common that you’ll have something of the following as the CTA:

Sign up, Create an account, Join our waitlist, Get early access (and a couple of other variations of the same) to persuade your visitor to just give your product a try — either by signing up, or joining a waitlist.

Have you considered how your visitor reaches your landing page? Via a search engine? This means that she is simultaneously looking at 10 other such landing pages with more or less similar copy and CTA.

Or does she arrive on your page via a social media ad or perhaps an email? In this case, the visitor isn’t very motivated. Unlike the previous case where she was actually searching for a solution, here she has the additional task of figuring out if she actually needs the solution at all.

The challenge for you is to cater to both the use cases.

Now, would she click on that CTA? Would you? Do you stumble upon every landing page and simply signup because you like their value proposition? These days every product brands itself as the best, or the easiest, or the cheapest, or the fastest. When everybody is claiming to be on top, it’s highly likely that visitors are full of doubt, and have very little trust.

The best, the easiest, and the funniest — these strategies might have worked in the past, but they are everywhere nowadays and have become meaningless. Like banner blindness, people have developed value proposition blindness. When everybody claims to be the best, nobody actually is.

What you have to do is design better motivators to influence the visitor into clicking that signup button of yours? Help them answer this lingering question on their mind: “Do I sign up?”

Will changing your CTA to Signup for free be of any help at all? No!

Millions of apps are free. Nearly everything has a free trial. You are still not standing out. The user still has to make a choice: “Do I pick this free product, or the other one which feels more of less the same and is free as well?”

When you design the CTA, or write the copy, you inherently become a choice architect. You have to use different means of persuasion to help your visitor make a choice.