Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Pedro Cortés

In every single one of my articles, I’ve tried to explain mostly universal techniques that could improve product understanding and conversion rates, but there is something that could help every single website in the world, and that is to Design around objections and your current customer’s feedback!

What your website might be doing to your visitors…

What your website might look like (vague/hard to understand):

“Your website (example)” (Optimizely example from this awesome article)

And your potential customers trying to figure out what it does…

<a href="https://medium.com/media/cae8461189d59882fad183536d04dd47/href">https://medium.com/media/cae8461189d59882fad183536d04dd47/href</a>

What Objections can tell you

When you find out what things are turning off your potential customers (aka their objections) it can either tell you one of three things:

You are not solving the right problems
Your traffic is not targeted enough
People don’t understand how or what you do

We will focus on the last one.

What’s the point of having a great product if people can’t understand it from your Landing Page?

Don’t expect people to try and see it for themselves first…

If that is working somewhat well right now imagine how many customers/revenue you are losing!

How do I find those objections?

You need to try to find out why your current customers felt convinced by the product, what things they didn’t understand as much and if you can try to find out why people left your website by interviewing them.

Ask them these questions:

What was your impression of the product/service?
What was the feature/section that made you buy/sign up?
Did you understand the main functionality/benefit?
What did you expect from this product/service?
What results do you want to get with our product/service?
Did anything concern you?
Did you hesitate in buying/signing up? If yes, why?

Note: if they are not your target customer ignore their objections because if you act on them you might be ruining the message for the ones who actually need your product or service.

But be aware!

What people say they want the most in your product/service and what actually made or will make them convert might be completely different!

<a href="https://medium.com/media/f0cb636ae610793ff63cfbf4d604046e/href">https://medium.com/media/f0cb636ae610793ff63cfbf4d604046e/href</a>

How to fix this:

Use the questions covered and keep asking why. The real reason they like/dislike your product is very rarely the first thing they answered!

I know it might seem weird to do this with every question but when you do it you will get more meaningful answers that reveal the real things you need to focus on your website and even in your product.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/f3f7c7ac5f277764629fada7d20c38a2/href">https://medium.com/media/f3f7c7ac5f277764629fada7d20c38a2/href</a>

Change the way you think about Landing Pages

This is mainly about the way you might think about your page’s structure and how you organize and prioritize the sections to achieve a certain message/explanation. The main difference between what I called the “normal mindset” and the “new mindset” is to stop thinking about pages as a bunch of sections instead of a detailed “story” that predicts and answers your potential client’s most important questions or needs.

“The normal mindset”

My website consists of a bunch of different sections that showcase my product/service.

Header
A bunch of features
People saying good stuff about my product
End of the Page

“Your new mindset”

My website needs to follow a detailed story that, based on my client research, predicts and answers my potential client’s frequent questions, doubts or their needs.

What does it do?
How does it work?
Why should they trust this?
What are their needs? Let me show them how we can help…
Look, similar people are getting great results!
Final CTA. Click me!!

Actionable items (with case study)

These examples refer to common objections you might be facing too (I won’t reveal the confidential ones) and they are from one of my client work projects (smartbnb).

Objections

Below you can find the objections and the respective solution.

1. “What does it do?”

With decreasing attention spans and patience for bad websites, it is increasingly important to show what your product does and how much value it could provide as fast as possible, that means your headers need to be really good, here are a few requirements.

Clear headline
Clear description
CTA with a lot of contrast
An easy to see screenshot to give more context to the product

Header of smartbnb.io

2.“How does it work?”

Clear and structured content so people can follow along
Explains the most important features in the right order of importance
The images and icons also help with the explanation

One of the features breakdowns for smartbnb.io

3. “Why should I trust this?”

If you can’t create trust on your website then how do you expect people to pay for your product/service? If your product is good enough then you probably have a lot of people saying good things about you, so create content around it to make your website trustable.

Use feature specific testimonials for your USP so it seems like your product is so valuable people will become a customer just for that feature alone. If you add that plus explaining the rest of the value properly than you create a killer impression!
Use testimonials from all the different customer groups you have. If you have the same product attracting different customers with similar needs then making each of them feel like they can relate to at least one testimonial from a current customer in the same situation as them.
Show companies using your product, the bigger the clients you can showcase the more people trust how your product works and by seeing you have bigger clients than them there is no reason you couldn’t fulfill their needs (another common objection).
Show press coverage from targeted websites, figure out what your potential customers are reading and try to get coverage there if they respect the opinion of the website then you will get a lot of points by having that on your website.
Reduce commitment, find ways to let your potential customers know that you don’t want to trick them and they can leave whenever they want.
Just answer their objections…. study your FAQ really well and focus on featuring the ones that classify as objections.

Feature specific testimonialTestimonial section (with placeholder testimonial)Blogs that recommend smartbnb.ioReducing commitment by letting cancel anytimeAnswer their objections directly (from the pricing page)

4. “Do people use this? There is no way it can handle my demands…”

Use statistics and high numbers to showcase how many people are getting value from your awesome product
+ most of the social proof from the previous point

9,5/10 on trustpilot.com and used on 7000+ properties (shows multiple times throughout the website)

Final thoughts

For most Startups their website is a huge sales channel, it is what new potential customers see, it’s what your current customers comeback to and it’s where press and yourself redirect traffic to, please give it some more thought!

Focus almost as much time and attention on how your value is perceived as creating the value you provide

About me

I’m Pedro, a Product Designer passionate about helping startups with their conversion rates and acquiring new customers with their website. I love to combine the psychology of buying decisions with the Design skill that goes into any of my projects to get the best results for my clients. Sounds like a fit?

Follow Me: Behance, Dribbble, Medium

Need help with your conversion?

Tell me about your current situation, needs or goals in the comments 👇 or …

Drop me a line: pedro@cortes.design

Design Landing Pages around Objections! was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design Landing Pages around Objections!

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