Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled conversions based on the advice we gave him. However, he said he had an unbelievable battle to explain and use an obvious technique: leveraging his company’s point-of-action assurances into the shopping cart.

Maybe I can spare you that grief.

What Are Point-of-Action Assurances?

At the point when a visitor is ready to take action, to fill out a form, to click on a button or link, they are at a seductive moment. It’s a delicate place. It’s at that point they could lose confidence in their decision and not take the action you want them to take. That’s why you must provide messaging to bolster trust and confidence.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this can be done.

One of the earliest tests we ran over a decade ago was adding the words “we value your privacy” near newsletter subscriptions boxes on several clients’ websites. We placed those four simple words near the e-mail form field and the button used to submit the subscription form. It often doubled the conversion rate from visitors to subscribers.

If you want to take this to another level, check out what my good friends and screenshotaholic enablers at TechSmith do on their forms with a reaffirming message from their president.

Point-of-action assurances allow you to handle the possible objections or concerns your visitors have just as they are ready to complete an action and without them having to go anywhere else on your website to look for the answer.

Take a look at the download button from Firefox as an example of adding point-of-action assurances on a graphic button. Notice how they tell people how large the file is, what version, etc.? You could do the same thing if you are asking people to download white paper docs, PDFs, or any other type of files.

Amazon used this strategy for years on its “add to cart” buttons. Even though they removed it, we have still used it quite successfully for clients recently. Notice how Amazon used the words “you can always remove it later” on the button and the use of the lock graphic and the additional words “shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.”

You can also use point-of-action assurances to help retail visitors overcome their shopping fears and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Notice the use of the lock and the “Shop with Confidence” messaging alongside the credit card input fields in CafePress.com’s shopping cart? This point-of-action assurance helps visitors feel more secure about entering in their credit card information.

The folks from 37signals use this well-designed strategy quite effectively in order to get their visitors to provide them with credit card information to set up a free trial account for their Basecamp product.

Visitors to retailers often have other questions that should be answered as point-of-action assurances inside the cart, instead of making visitors search your website for answers to your return, shipping, or guarantee policies.

Notice how Shoeline.com spells out its policies from the shopping cart page all the way through the final checkout page? This is how it lets visitors know that all its products are guaranteed and that visitors can return products within 30 days for a refund or exchange.

So You Want More Leads, Huh?

Well, this strategy of providing point-of-action assurances is a must, then!

Keep in mind that, according to studies, a lead loses six times its effectiveness within the first hour of contacting you. So an effective strategy is to set expectations of how you handle your leads, what will happen after they fill out your form, and when and how you will respond. Take a look at what Rad-Direct.com is doing on its Web forms:

First, it sets expectations about what you can speak to a systems engineer about. Then, above and below the form, it lets you know that it will respond to all inquiries within two business hours (it also has the point-of-action assurance about respecting your privacy):

Use this simple and powerful technique of point-of-action assurances that direct marketers have been using in their work for years and watch how your visitors reward you with more actions taking place.

My last two columns focused on evaluating the five dimensions that make the 10 design elements of the anatomy of a landing page convert better. A prominent feature found on many landing pages is a form to complete, or at the end of a retail landing experience, forms required to complete a check-out. I haven’t written about designing forms on ClickZ since 2004 or on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment since 2003. (Sorry, as you can see by the 300+ columns I’ve written here, there are many topics to cover under optimization.)

Today, let’s cover seven factors to consider when designing your forms for maximum conversionability and persuadability:

• Size
• Fields
• Labels
• Benefits
• Prominence
• Call to action
• Confidence building

Size

Size does matter sometimes, if you want to see customers take action! How many actual pixels (height and width) does the form take? I have seen forms that ask for very few fields, but because they look long, they intimidate users into a misconception about the amount of time it might take to complete a form. This is also one of the reasons you seldom want to place form fields horizontally next to each other – it makes the form look scary. For example, you never want to have a check-out with the billing information in the right-hand column and the shipping information in the left column. This is also related to how many fields you ask people to complete as well; the more fields, the bigger the form will be. Don’t make your form look like tax or department of motor vehicle forms.

Fields

The type of questions you ask in your form can also make or break its conversionability. If you start asking for a Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, blood type, what they had for breakfast, etc., you can stop a visitor in their tracks. This is the constant battle that marketing faces with sales about what data they need for a lead, while marketing struggles on the quantity versus quality issues related to leads and form completions. The fields you require should always be tested.

Labels

Now, it isn’t just what you ask but how you ask it. How you label a form field can have a tremendous impact on its ability to persuade a visitor to fill in the information. In fact, I remember asking my friend Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and GM, global marketing and eCommerce for Citrix, about his most surprising test while I was recording podcasts for the launch of my “Always Be Testing” book. He recalled how the label on one field for a Go ToMeeting account had such a surprising impact on conversion.

Benefits

Too many companies present their visitors a form without reminding them of why they should complete the form, what are the benefits of completing the form, and what will be the next steps after they complete the form. Check-out processes should show people what items they are ordering (both in text and visually), when the order will arrive, and the total costs early on. One such example is when we added the beautiful gift box that one of our jewelry clients sent with their products in the check-out process – it had an immediate and direct impact to conversion. In lead generation, you could do similar things especially when promoting a white paper or Webinar; merchandize your B2B offering effectively.

Prominence

Make the form jump off the page. Do you make it obvious that you want people to complete it? Adding a bit of color behind the form and a bit of design around the edges, or a simple graphic or icon is often enough to make it more visually prominent. If you are offering a white paper, possibly include the cover of it by the form and remind them of the benefits.

Call to Action

What do they click on when they complete the form? There are several factors that matter here: text versus graphics, shape variations, colors, style variations, icon variations, size variations, legibility, location variations, and wording. You can read about the details about each one of these in this column, “Calling You to Action.”

Confidence Building

Establishing trust and credibility on a Web site should be its own column. However, there are several general ways to build confidence for your visitors; you can leverage others credibility (known third-party endorsements and reviews, trust marks, customer logos ,etc.), leverage the voice of the customer with reviews and testimonials, use point-of-action assurances to ease concerns, doubts, and fears, and do everything else to provide a quality experience.

Are you showing good form? Test and leverage these seven form factors and boost your conversion rate today!

Can you spare an hour this week for what took me the past decade to put together?

This Thursday, January 7, 12pm EST, courtesy of my friends at MarketMotive, you can join me for this free workshop on the 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites.

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing? Bryan Eisenberg, who has been helping companies improve their conversion rates since 1998 will reveal 21 of his most valuable tips that will help you increase your conversion rate. In this fast paced session you’ll find relevant examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. You’ll learn the key principle of GTC – Get the Cash! Guaranteed you’ll never be able to look at a website the same way again.

Why is this webinar free?

1. My good friends from MarketMotive and I want you to kick off 2010 the right way by focusing in on improving your conversion rate. They gave away all their workshops in December, but I pushed them to give this one for free as well.

2. This is my last presentation for MarketMotive before we begin our Certification in Conversion & Landing Page Optimization course on January 11. We want people to see the caliber of information we provide monthly in our workshops, so please invite others to check it out. They may decide that learning internet marketing online from MarketMotive’s esteemed faculty may be just the edge they need in 2010.

3. If you want to find out more about how you can improve your conversion rate after learning the 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites, you can always sign up with MarketMotive to have me be your hands on instructor  for the Conversion & Landing Page Optimization certification, so you can do it yourself or you can reach out to me and I’ll help you find someone to help you in your efforts.

Yesterday, my aunt Arlene called me in a panic. She had an appointment to run to and an online shopping cart full of gifts for her grand-children and great nieces and nephews and couldn’t figure out how to ship them to their multiple addresses. Amazon.com does a pretty good job at letting you put multiple addresses in your address book but when it came time to selecting which products go to which addresses a simple 8 characters could have made a huge difference.

You know I am big fan of Amazon and their focus on continuous improvement and testing, but I think they are letting bunches of people become frustrated because of the usability challenges of a pull down select form field. You can see below a screenshot of the page Amazon provides to send your choices to multiple addresses. Notice on the right the select pull down menu and the fact that it is showing only one address. My aunt, and I am sure plenty of other people might not figure out that you have to hit the little arrow in that pull down menu to see the other addresses. It is well known that many users find drop down menus a usability challenge. I checked this page on multiple platforms and browsers and it displayed the same way.

If Amazon would have defaulted the size of the drop down to show at least 3 addresses, I don’t think she would have had a problem realizing that her full address book was in this pull down. There certainly is room in the design for it, because the item descriptions on the left all take up at least 3 lines. However, the one line pull down probably looks better form a designer’s perspective. You can see in the code snippet below how Amazon could make this process easier with just 8 characters, size=”3″.

What do you think Amazon should do? Should they eliminate the pull down all together? Sending packages to multiple addresses is a big issue this time of year. Should they let their customers become frustrated at this process? What would you do?

Here are the top 10 converting websites for August 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. Schwan’s 45.1
2. ProFlowers 34.1
3. Vitacost 24.4
4. Woman Within 24.1
5. Blair 22.2
6. 1800flowers 20.5
7. AbeBooks 19.2
8. Amazon 17.0
9. QVC.com 16.8
10. DrsFosterSmith.com 16.2 <

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

My good friend, Dr. Ralph Wilson spent some time with me at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to discuss with me how to improve a product page.