My job, as a marketer, is to help visitors experience a product story.

A product story is a special type of story that’s designed to connect with visitors and make them fall in love with your creation. The job of the product story is to educate and convert new visitors.

If you want to dig deeper into product stories read this article (although this post will make sense even without it): How to Optimize Conversion Rates and Grow Sales

You have spent weeks, months, crafting the perfect story.

Now we need to ensure that the most important details of the story are seen.

If an important detail is missed it could break the magic.

What’s critical, what isn’t

There are parts of our product story that can be skipped without a big hit to conversions. Then there are parts so critical to the overall storyline that if they are missed it would have a significant negative impact on conversion rates.

Making sure key story elements are seen

Here are 2 important elements we want our new visitors to see:

— “Why we exist” story

The “why we exist” story is designed to poetically explain what makes us the best in the world at what we do. Unlike the “why this product must exist” story, which the shopper is seeking out, the “why we exist” story isn’t something the shopper is looking for. But it’s a very important piece of the conversion puzzle so I, as the marketer, need to get this in front of my prospect.

— Knowing if buyer is in research mode

Visitors to our Shopify site are in one of two states: early stage research mode and ready to buy.

A 2017 Baymard Institute study found that 57% of visitors who abandon shopping carts do so because they are in research mode.

Keep in mind, we only have 2 minutes and 32 seconds with the visitor (source). Don’t make the mistake of trying to force a sale. You will fail (personal experience).

Instead, do this: for visitors in research mode shift the focus to getting their permission to keep in touch.

Knowing if key assets are seen

If your “why we exist” story is on a page can we be certain our visitor has seen it? No.

We can’t be certain because:

Shoppers notice only a fraction of what’s on the page. Around 20% of page content.

The shopper may have scrolled past. Not because they didn’t think it was important, but because they didn’t notice it.

There are ways to use scroll speed to know if a piece of content was actually consumed, but that requires coding knowledge. A simpler solution is to hide key content behind a clickable button (also called a call-to-action or CTA).

Now when the user clicks the CTA we know they at least saw our message.

Naming the CTA

The best name I can think of for the “why we exist” story CTA is simply Why we exist. This term is easily understood and has the right pull.

And the best way to know if a shopper is here for research or to buy is to simply ask.

But don’t make the question stand out too much.

It should feel like a natural conversation. Weave it into our product story.

The best approach is to start the story and insert this question at the end of the first paragraph:

Are you here today to research or buy? {Research} {Buy}

Here {Research} and {Buy} are clickable buttons.

What to do when an asset hasn’t been seen

One way to ensure important elements are seen is to repeat them several times. This dramatically increases visibility but also clutters the shopping experience. It’s a bad user experience because if a user has already engaged with a CTA they don’t want to see it 5 more times.

Solution: maximize impact by setting the CTA as a Choreographed Experience.

Choreographed Experiences maximize marketing message visibility while minimizing repetition. That’s what makes them so powerful.

How Choreographed Experiences work

If our site visitor misses our “why we exist” CTA, by either scrolling past it or moving to the next page, we repeat it. This simple flowchart shows how a choreographed experience can be configured:

Choreographed Experience Case Study

We were working on optimizing the bestseller sales for BakingSteel.com. One critical question was knowing if the visitor was here to buy or simply to research. Our strategy would have to change based on which bucket the visitor fell into. We knew people in research mode would not buy today, no matter what. So, instead of pushing to close the sale today, we shifted focus to getting their permission to keep in touch via email. But we had to know their intentions first. In this case study, you’ll see how we asked the question at 3 separate locations, but the visitor only saw it once: https://www.frictionless-commerce.com/case-studies/alternatives-to-pop-ups

The plumbing needed to make choreographed experiences work

Choreographed experiences are tracked using cookies. The cookie value tells stores the data to indicate if an important page element has been interacted with. The cookie will tell us if the user has missed our CTA. If they did, the CTA is repeated. If they interact with it we hide all future mentions of this CTA for that visit.

Note about research mode

We talked about adding the “are you here today to research/buy?” question. You might be wondering about the next steps for shoppers in research mode. If they are in research mode we send them a structured set of 3 emails. Details about that can be found in this article: Ultimate Email Nurture Campaign Guide.

Choreographed Experience: make your own rules

The example above talks about using “why we exist” and “are you here today to research/buy?” but it’s very possible there is another CTA on your site that’s more important to you. Don’t just follow our formula, build your own process for choreographed experiences.

Here is an example from the hydroslife.com (not a client):

Choreographed Experiences: part of the bigger picture

We hope you liked this article about boosting conversions by using marketing CTAs.

While choreographed experiences are important they are part of the picture. If your goal is to optimize overall conversion rates we recommend you read the most important article we’ve ever written: How to Optimize Conversion Rates and Grow Sales.