How to Concoct a Bloody Good Ecommerce Experience
Your ecommerce site is probably less engaging than a horror movie. Let’s fix that.
Is your ecommerce site failing to engage and convert visitors? It doesn’t have to be this way.
In considering how to go about fixing this state of affairs, let’s look at the horror movie genre specifically. It’s something of a niche genre, and it’s generally not considered an industry leader. And the average horror movie is probably going to be a tough sell to your parents.
In these ways, perhaps, it’s a lot like your product.
Just like a film director, you’ve got to sell an experience without ever interacting directly with your audience. In the same way a horror director uses a variety of cinematic techniques to conjure a screenplay into frightful and fulfilling story arc, you can employ some subtle practices to create a great user experience and engage new and old customers alike.
Read on to learn how.
Urgency
The building crescendo of the music makes your heart race. The protagonists are mere inches from certain death. You bring your hand to cover your eyes, but feel your muscular control slipping away. Your middle and ring fingers part over your eye — you literally can’t take your eyes off the screen.
All movies utilize suspense to some degree, but suspense is a virtual trademark of the horror genre. But just why is it can’t we look away—and how can you create this same state of visceral attention in your target audience?
Simply put, suspense arouses the audience, and arousal is instrumental in regulating attention. A smart horror director capitalizes on this attentive state to prime the audience for a scary scene. This heightened attention allows for optimal scariness.
Instead of actually scaring your visitors, though, you want to use arousal to create an urgency to purchase.
You can instill this urgency the way a director elicits goosebumps: by optimizing the attention ratio of your page. Though far from scary, I’ve always admired the way Bonobos accomplishes this. Their landing page often features a “shop now” button in focus, surrounded by an image or graphics that prime visitors with emotions to be associated with purchase.
Cultivate urgency and excitement by using vibrant colors and stimulating content to build up to the purchase. Again, there’s no need to scare your customers — just excite them about your product, in a subtle way, to wrestle their attention from the distractions outside of your control.
Indifference
What do you call a horror film without death? A comedy. And a bad one at that. Blatant disregard for life is a hallmark of all the silver screen’s most fascinating, twisted antagonists. Horror film directors must have a certain level of zen that allows them to let go of characters they develop over the course of a movie before killing them off. Thankfully, learning this type of practical indifference does not require a guru on a mountaintop—and it will allow you to transcend any bias that could be holding your brand back.
When it comes to your website, practicing indifference means you might have to let go of some familiar interfaces, strategies or features that are failing to hit the mark when it comes to your audience’s expectations. The solution? Make objective decisions by testing everything and keeping your ego out of it. Most of us are not gifted with the ability to see the future, and the next best thing is the objective predictability offered by A/B testing.
Statistically significant data should always play a big role in your user experience decisions. But indifference applies here, too: Don’t obsess over the data to the point of paralyzing indecision. And over-scrutinizing your tests in the short term can lead to false positives.
Indifference is not to be taken lightly. It’s a powerful tool and must be treated as such. Obsessing over every statistical outcome is one thing, but completely losing interest in your business means you’ll soon have no business. Focus on creating a good experience, and the data will validate your effort.
Practicing indifference when it comes to your website means you might have to let go of some familiar interfaces, strategies or features that are failing to hit the mark.
Fear of Loss
The word “fear” was bound to show up in a big way, wasn’t it? The first thing to realize is that mere shock value (boo!) isn’t a sustainable marketing ploy. The horror film that employs a series of jumpy scares isn’t the one that sticks with you, but the horror film that makes you feel genuinely creeped out and deeply unsettled is the one you’ll rave about to your friends. And how does a film accomplish this? Through atmosphere and tone.
People buy things for various reasons, and like it or not, these reasons are almost always emotional. Buyers are also more likely to respond favorably to subtle cues distributed strategically throughout the purchase experience, rather than to spastic bursts of content, which are more likely to just distract or deter them.
Now, do you want your visitors to leave your site feeling “genuinely creeped out and deeply unsettled”? No, but you can use the psychology of fear in a different way. A big emotion-driven lever for many purchases has to do with the idea of loss aversion, which argues that people will often give more weight to what they stand to lose if they don’t buy than what they have to gain if they do.
This means offering more than just a product, especially if visitors can easily find the same good or service somewhere else. It means emphasizing the customer service and brand experience they stand to lose by purchasing somewhere else. While your products and services are usually what’s hogging the limelight, these other elements are the subconscious focal point behind many people’s purchase decisions.
So don’t be afraid of conjuring a little fear of missing out on a great brand experience. Don’t be shy about how amazing your brand is, but don’t be in your face. Build the perks of buyership into the woodwork of your digital experience, and set a tone that implies your customers will lose big by buying somewhere else.
Scary simple
Convenience has proven itself to be king. For most people, reclining with popcorn to passively consume an entertaining story like Paranormal Activity beats actively reading one in a book, like Stephen King’s paperweight The Shining. Macabre as this reality may seem, it’s just how things are. So make things easy for your customers.
Look at your conversion funnel, and find the pain points where your customers’ exit rate is high, to identify the pages they’re getting hung up on. Then identify and address any convoluted interactions or unnecessary content that may be upsetting the attention ratio and compromising your visitors’ experience.
Build the perks of buyership into the woodwork of your digital experience, and set a tone that implies your customers will lose big by buying somewhere else.
When things are overly complicated, it activates the brain’s systematic processing function. This is this way our brains deal with complex or unfamiliar inputs, and, from the standpoint of efficiency, it’s suboptimal. Our brains generally want to use the other option, heuristic processing, which takes the emotional path to a decision. This is a much quicker method of sorting mental inputs — and it’s the one you, ecommerce horror film director extraordinaire, should be using to prime your site for maximum DREAD — er, engagement and conversion.
