Transcription
Did you know that there are a few variables on your landing page that control more of your conversions than your design and offer combined? Most marketers don't pay attention to it, and most CRO courses don't even teach it.
I run The Relics, a conversion rate optimization firm. And over the past several years, I've personally audited more than 1,500 plus landing pages, and I work with brands that are doing as little as a few thousand visitors per month to enterprise brands doing several millions of visitors. And my team and I are doing dozens of A/B tests for these clients every single month. So, I can tell you with full confidence that the gap between a landing page that is converting at 15% or 20% and the pages that are converting at 1% or 2% has nothing to do with the design or offer. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you exactly where those variables are hurting your conversion rate without you even noticing it.
Okay, so if you go and watch some videos on my channel, you will notice that I often talk about the structure and layout of a high-converting landing page, which genuinely does matter. But, the important distinction to make is that the layout is only half of the story. Underneath the structure and layout are all of these small psychological decisions that most people never even think about. But, it truly is those variables, those psychological variables, that can take a page from 1% to, you know, 15% or 20% over time.
So, the first principle is a little bit advanced, but it's done more for my conversion rate than anything else I've used. You've probably heard the advice: sell outcomes, not features, not deliverables. People buy outcomes. And while this is true, I like to go one layer deeper, which leads me into principle one of this video, which is to sell the core desire, not outcomes. Let me explain.
So, I see landing pages all the time, right, that sell the obvious outcome, things like "make X more money," "lose 20 lbs," "get clearer skin," etc. And there's nothing wrong with this on the surface level. But, the issue is that this only describes what the person gets. It completely skips why the person actually wants it. And that "why" is where all of the buying actually happens.
Take the example of someone trying to earn more in their career. Look, a lot of people obviously care about the money, the monetary aspect, but they don't care about the money itself on its own. What they're actually buying into as a byproduct, right? If you think deeper, it's not just the money. It gives them that sense of security, that sense of safety, and the peace of mind.
Another great example is weight loss, right? Obviously, the benefit of weight loss is people want to lose weight, right? That's their end goal. But, go a couple layers deeper. Why do they want to lose weight? What they're actually buying is they want to feel attractive again, right? Or they want to be able to play with their kids 20 years into the future and live a long, healthy life. So, the outcome is just the surface. The core desire underneath it is what actually makes somebody take action.
So, there's a framework to make this easier, which is called Life Force 8, and it's coined by Drew Whitman. The premise of Life Force 8 is that there are eight core desires that every human is biologically wired with, and by tapping into these core desires, you're able to drive people to take action.
So, here are all of the eight principles. I'm going to go through them rapid-fire with examples.
Desire number one is care and protection of loved ones. This is the innate primal human desire to ensure the safety and prosperity of your loved ones, whether that's your family, your kids, your husband, your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, etc.
Desire number two is freedom from fear, pain, and danger, right? So, wanting to feel safe and secure. So, we hit on both of these for our pool fence client in their headline, where we said, "Protect your kids," right? Which appeals to desire number one, and "Don't wait until it's too late," which appeals to desire number two.
Next is desire number three, which is social approval. This is the innate human desire to be accepted, liked, validated by others. So, for our lawn care client, for example, in the headline, we say, "Get a lawn your neighbors will envy," right? Which appeals to this desire.
Desire number four is to be superior and winning, right? So, things like status, success, etc. So, for this film producer course, right? On their landing page, we went with the headline, "Travel the world on global [expletive] and connect with top creators," right? Which appeals to that sense of status, and we showed course members filming Brian Shaw, who's a famous celebrity.
Desire number five is sexual companionship, right? Wanting to feel attractive and desired. So, for our Med Spa client, we specifically pulled a testimonial about all of the compliments that this person started getting, right? We intentionally picked this out.
Desire number six is comfortable living, right? Wanting things like physical comfort, a nice home, relaxation, right? Things like that. So, for a bathroom remodeling client, the headline focuses on precisely that, right? Focusing on the comfort with an image to complement.
Desire number seven is survival, enjoyment of life, and living a long, fruitful life. So, for a personal training client, the headline focuses on precisely that beautifully.
And lastly, number eight is enjoyment of food and drink, right? It's a little bit rare, but here's an example for our nutrition client that used this.
Applying this one principle has gotten us some insane conversion lifts because we're always operating under this mindset of how do we appeal to these desires.
Principle number two is cognitive fluency. Cognitive fluency effectively means that the easier something is to process, the more psychologically our brain trusts that actual thing. So, when a page is simple and clear, right? People tend to trust it a lot more purely because it took less effort to actually understand the information.
Now, the reverse is also true as well. So, I often see this mistake all the time with technical products, right? Like this is an IT company, for example, um, with their permission to share, right? I'm sharing their old page here, uh, which is basically an IT blueprint, right? That they're trying to sell. And they were saying that it's converting at less than 1%. And when I took a look at the page, I wasn't even surprised at all because there's so much jargon throughout all of their messaging. I told them up front, right? "No one has any idea what cybersecurity posture even means," right? Just tell people exactly what they're getting in layman's terms.
Or I also see pages like this with extremely long paragraphs. This friction makes people trust you less, even when your claims are solid. So, the fix is quite simple, right? You want to use shorter sentences, you want to use plain words, and you want to use a clean layout with a lot of breathing room. My favorite tip is to write your page so that a 12-year-old could understand it, right? Literally, you can use an app like Hemingway, or you could even just throw your copy into ChatGPT or Claude and just say, "Rewrite this copy at a fifth-grade reading level."
If you're wondering how to apply these principles to your specific product or service, I've got two offers for you. First, I've handpicked the highest-converting landing pages that we've ever built, and we've built over 400 plus landing pages and put them into one massive swipe file. We have pages in this file that are converting as high as 15% to 20% utilizing many of the psychological principles that I'm talking about right now, and these pages are converting extremely high on Google Ads and Meta Ads.
If you want a bit more tailored feedback as to how these principles directly apply to your page, I also offer a deep dive audit, right? Where you can get a full 20 to 30-minute video audit of your landing page or website where I will personally walk through it and point out conversion improvements that you can make instantly. People see on average a 64% lift in conversions just by making a few of the changes.
Finally, if you're an agency or marketer, you can join our paid community where we talk all about the psychological principles and more. Back to the video.
So, principle number three, which is one of my favorites, is called the labor illusion. It's a really interesting cognitive bias which states that people tend to associate more value and more trust with your product or service when they can see all of the labor and all of the effort that goes into creating it. This principle was coined by two Harvard researchers, and it came out of an experiment with flight websites.
So, what they did was they had these two different websites, right? Where you could compare flight prices. And both of them had the exact same prices, right? Both websites, same price. The first website gave you the price instantly, right? So, you would search where you're trying to fly to, and within seconds it would basically just pop up the results of the different flight comparisons. The second website made you wait a few seconds, and while you're waiting, it shows a status bar, right? Where it's showing all of the things going on behind the scenes. So, it's like, "Now let's search Delta," "Now let's search United," right? "Now scanning through 200 airlines." Kind of showed people the process behind the scenes. And in this study, the majority of participants rated the second website, which was showing all of the stuff behind the scenes and kind of showing the status bar, as more trustworthy, and they would be more likely to actually proceed on that site than the first website. Even though that second experience was slower, watching it do all of that visible work and actually showing the process made the results feel more thorough, and it made people trust the brand a lot more. That's the labor illusion in action.
So, a real-life example of this is for our franchise client, right? So, in their headline above the fold, we have this, um, you know, offer of being able to make up to $300k in profit in your first 2 years, right? From owning your own franchise. People obviously desire this, right? But, they don't appreciate that just on its own. However, when we told them, right, that it includes all of these different things that we listed on the page and kind of spelled out all of the different facets of their offer and the things that are included, what we saw in user testing data and in the conversion rate was that people instantly felt that the offer was more valuable and they instantly understood why their price was so high and it really helped address that price objection up front, right? Because people can actually see all of the labor and all of the things that are included within that price.
The fourth psychological principle is loss aversion. In fact, typically losing feels twice as bad as winning feels good. So, when you think about your landing page, right? Most pages just talk about what you gain. A stronger close also will show the visitor what they have to lose if they don't take action.
So, here's a good example for our shipping client, right? They solve the problem of basically helping, you know, e-commerce companies recover hidden fees that they're actually owed from UPS and FedEx. So, we lead with the headline on their page that says, "You're losing $30k to $50k on every $1 million shipment. You just don't know it yet." And then right underneath that, we proceed to talk about all of the different things that they're losing out on as a byproduct of not fixing this pressing issue.
The final principle is something called the halo effect, which is all about first impressions. So, the halo effect is basically the idea that people judge your website or landing page in 50 milliseconds, right? That's how fast it literally takes the human brain to make a first impression about your page. And then, people will decide within 5 seconds whether they want to leave your page or stay on the page thereafter.
So, if the top section of your page, right? The first thing that people see when they land feels premium, it feels high-end, right? The typography, the fonts, the colors, the branding, the copy, right? Everything is on point, then people have a positive halo and they're way more likely to perceive your brand in a positive light even without reading anything else on the page, right? However, if the first thing that people see looks cluttered or generic, right? Or the design looks poor, things are poorly put together, copy's not good, then they automatically perceive the rest of your company and the rest of your product or service as completely bad even without giving you a second chance and looking down at the page.
So, to create a positive halo, right? You want a clean, modern layout with lots of breathing room. You want a clear visual hierarchy, which is effectively the flow of information from top to bottom. And you want to make sure you're doing things like consistent fonts, colors, you know, good copy, all of these different things to create a positive first impression.
So, those are the hidden variables point by point, five psychological jobs in order deciding your conversion rate whether you design for them or not. If you want the full version where I actually build a full landing page from scratch, right? With the hero, with the offer structure, actually writing the copy, actually planning out the design, you know, testing all of these different things end to end, click this video next and I'll walk you through exactly how you can build your own high-converting landing page for your own business starting today.