The role of marketing is to boost conversions and to do this we need to ensure visitors are seeing and engaging with our main CTAs (call-to-actions). But how do we ensure shoppers actually interact with our CTAs? The secret is something we call choreographed experiences (explained lower in this article).

Do you know shoppers notice only a fraction of what’s on the page? In our estimation, it’s around 20% of page content.

This is a problem because online retailers often make the mistake of assuming that because a message is on a page their job is done. As we’ve seen above there is an 80% chance this important message will be missed.

Identify your most important CTA marketing messages

The average session duration for an ecommerce is 2 minutes and 32 seconds (source). That’s not a lot of time to convince and convert a shopper, which is why we need to focus on a few key goals.

What are your top marketing goals? Here are the 2 I think I super important:

1: Overcoming the “unfamiliarity” barrier

When a visitor lands on a site that’s new to them their first thoughts are, “Am I at the right location? And does this business deserve my attention?”

To connect with this visitor we need to shape our “why we exist” pitch (article: how to shape “how we exist” pitch).

2: Identifying if visitor is in research mode

There are 2 types of site visitors: those in early-stage research mode and those ready to buy. We only have 2 minutes and 32 seconds with the buyer; don’t make the mistake of trying to cram the sale. You will fail. Instead, if the user is in research mode get their permission to keep in touch via email.

CTA hierarchy

Our marketing CTAs should reflect the stage of the shopper in their buying journey.

If they are new to your site we need to show them our “why we exist” story. Once they’ve seen that we need to find out if they are here today to research or buy.

With the right copy marketing CTAs maximize conversions

Now that we have our main CTAs we need to craft copy to draw attention to them.

For our “why we exist” story the CTA could simply say “why we exist“.

To identify visitors in research mode subtly include this CTA line in your sales copy: “are you here today to research/buy?“

You can also totally personalize the wording of your CTA. Follow these rules:

• It needs to connect with, and appeal to, buyer psychology
• Should stand out
• It should hint at something interesting while still being a teaser so the shopper feels the need to interact with it

CTA placement

What’s the optimal location for CTA placement? This is a challenge because shoppers don’t follow fixed shopping paths. Here are 3 shoppers:

These 3 visitors behaved in totally different ways. If your site has 1000s of daily visitors things start getting really complicated.

To find the optimal location you can:

Take a wild guess and just place the CTA at a high traffic location and hope people see it.

-OR-

Mention the CTA several times across the site. This dramatically increases visibility but also clutters up the shopping experience. It’s a bad user experience because if a user has already seen the CTA they don’t want to be prompted about it 5 more times.

Solution: boost conversions by setting our marketing CTAs as choreographed experiences.

How choreographed experiences work

If our site visitor ignores the “why we exist” message and moves forward (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:

Marketing CTA placements

We still need to decide on CTA placement locations. To do this identify your most visited pages. Place the CTA on each of these pages at 3 locations: top of the page, middle of the page, the lower half of the page.

Choreographed experience mechanism

Let’s say your funnel has 3 important pages:

• Page 1
• Page 2
• Page 3

On all 3 pages, we’ll show our marketing CTA at 3 locations (top, middle, and bottom).

CTA hierarchy states the most important CTA is “why we exist” followed by “are you here today to research?”

So, on top of page 1, we’ll show the “why we exist” CTA. If the user interacts with it then the middle of the page CTA will change to “are you here today to research?” question. If the user interacts with this then the final CTA at the lowest location of this page + all 3 CTAs on page 2 + all 3 CTAs on page 3 will disappear (since we got what we needed). If the user doesn’t interact with the highest order CTA (“why we exist”) we’ll keep on repeating it till they do.

The plumbing needed to make choreographed experiences work

Choreographed experiences are configured using cookies. This is how we know when an important element of a page has not been interacted with. The cookie will tell us if the user has “missed” our CTA. If they have, we repeat the marketing CTA. If they interact with it we hide all future mentions of this CTA for that visit.

Note about research mode

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

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.