In marketing a lot of time and effort goes into the philosophy and science of targeting the proper markets, understanding your customers needs, and crafting a campaign that demonstrates your product as the superior solution to their problem. What if there was something you could do that would increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by over 300% but it had nothing to do with the actual campaign?

Reducing Friction

Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form; Anytime you ask people to do something you are creating a point of friction. Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing. It is easy to forget about friction but doing so may severely inhibit the success of your campaigns.

Now that I have you thinking about friction, let me show you what happens to your marketing efforts when you reduce it.

Old “friction” form

On our website we have a 30-day free trial download page and when people download the trial they have an option to add their email address.

Problems that caused friction:

• Unnecessary instructions: There are four steps involved in downloading the free trial. We are telling the audience that the steps to downloading a free-trial are so complex that we had to give you instructions! That kind of complexity is surely going to cause friction
• Wrong order: They came to the page in order to download a free trial, but instead we talk about their email address and ask for it first. The actual links to the free trial downloads are much lower on the page.
• Email form field: We ask for an email address, but don’t say why. Sure we mention it way up at the top of the page, but they didn’t need to make a decision to give it until now.
• Too many versions: You want someone to make the decision about which version they need after they have decided they want to download it. Showing all of those versions and (unnecessary system requirements) makes it look more complicated then it needs to be.
• Special instructions: Install instructions do not belong in the download form. That information should be on the thank you page. Once someone has invested the time to actually download the free-trial.

New “reduced friction” form

• Removed all of those unnecessary instructions.
• Included a product picture and positioning message to remind them why they want to try out the software.
• Added a drop-down input field with the most popular version preloaded so that most customers will not have to change version.
• Email request is after the form free trial option and there is a clear benefit associated with providing their address.
• Large “download now” button makes it easy to understand the purpose of the form.

After implementing these changes our average email subscriber rate jumped more than 300%!

Only part of your overall strategy

By now it should be apparent that reducing friction will go a long way in creating more successful marketing campaigns. But remember it is only part of the solution; You still need to create marketing programs to attract new customers.

As part of your high level marketing strategy, map out the entire path a person takes from first-contact (whether it is an ad, a trade show booth, search engine etc.) to successful conversion to paying customer. Now that you have identified all of the areas of friction, you can build a marketing program with the greatest chances of success.

If you need help creating the strategy, executing, or just have questions about your customer experience strategy, lets talk – 714-248-5279 or our contact form. We’re here for you!