When we’ve reduced the friction in a button, we have seen increases in click-through rate, or CTR, of 95% and 104.5%, with greater than 95% statistical confidence. We’ve also seen lifts in sign ups and trial starts of as much as 164% just by reducing the friction on a button, which is what you’re going to do today.

This tutorial builds on our Buttons for Beginners tutorial, so make sure to watch that if you skipped it. This is your tutorial of the week. To use it, block 30 minutes in your calendar to watch it. It does not have to be today. Invite your team to join you. Watch it together. Create action items and do the work I show you. Open the right tool for the job, like your CMS, right now and let’s get going. 

OK, to remove friction from your buttons, you need to start by thinking differently, not just about buttons but also about the visitors to your site. Think of visitors as lizards. Now, what do I mean by that? You may be familiar with the lizard brain, which is that oldest part of the brain, the part that first kept us safe, as humans, a bajillion years ago. The lizard brain is responsible for fight or flight, as well as feeding, freezing up, fear, and even fornication. 

OK, so the lizard brain is all about instinct. It makes decisions super fast based on simple inputs, like the color red means danger and quick, loud sounds mean danger, and even the words on a simple homepage button mean danger. So when you’re writing a button, don’t write for a rational thinking human being. Don’t write buttons for the neocortex. Write buttons for the lizard. Let me show you what I mean, as well as why, and importantly, how. 

OK, so this is actually a talk I gave a couple of years back, but it still so applies, and I want to walk you through it in case you didn’t see the talk. So what we’re worried about here is writing for a lizard. So when you look at these three, which button would attract a lizard’s eye? So we can see where they’re trying to focus us, but which button would attract a lizard’s eye? 

Now, that was our question when we ran this button test, and so we did something pretty obvious that you might do. If we want a lizard to pay attention to a button or notice a button, not to be afraid of it, however, but to notice it, we would probably pretty simply do that. So we change this to Start Free Now and we saw an increase of 81%, and this is statistically significant. So nothing to fear here. This is 100% like you can trust this. 

What’s interesting, I find, is that the copy is different across the three buttons. We have a Totally Free sign up and then a Start Free Now and Start Free Now. Even with this language, we still saw more people click through on the middle plan and the other ones were basically unchanged. So we didn’t see more people click through statistically, significantly at least, on Start Free Now, the leftmost one, or Totally Free sign up. 

Now, that does also say a lot about button copy. And again, when we’re talking to the lizard brain, it is trying its hardest to avoid work. It wants to avoid work while also staying out of danger. So looking at this one instead of looking at this one, even though this says Totally Free, this is just Start Free, and yet we still saw so many more clicks just by changing this button color. That’s all it took. 

Now, we took it a little further than that. Green is actually in the– this is for acuity scheduling– this was in their brand, at the time at least. So what if we, in really trying to write to attract that lizard brain, did this? So we turn that middle button orange and that brought in a 95% lift on the middle one. And again, the other ones were basically unchanged, except that more people were coming into these ones, so they changed in keeping with that, like down. 

So yeah, we saw a lot more people– not entirely– but we saw a lot more people click through when we made it orange, so out of that brand color and into something that’s really just there to attract the lizard. Now, you can see that none of the language, like the click triggers below, nothing changed. All that we changed was the button color, and the lizard brain liked it. 

Now here’s another example of what we can do here in just really attracting that lizard brain. So where would a lizard click here? So we want to remove friction, right? That’s what this whole tutorial is about, removing friction around buttons, getting your prospect to actually click. 

So you look at an ecommerce store like this, and there’s so much going on. It’s visually very stimulating for that lizard brain. Where should I look? So I might look at this guy. He’s in a bit of danger, however, it’s the kind of danger maybe I’ve signed up for, so I’m OK with it. There are people all over the place. 

Some are headless. There’s a bike going by. So there’s so much to look at. There’s this orange up here, this color over here, color there, color there. Our lizard brain is trying to make sense of what to do here, really hovering around this, because this is at least empty and you can figure out what to do with this versus all of these. 

So our hypothesis when we looked at this was like, well, a lizard doesn’t know where to click. This was not genius. We’re not talking with most times that we’re removing friction with the button. We’re not talking about some stroke of genius. We’re talking about just being really basic. Where do you want the lizard to click? Stop distracting. I can see why different parts of the marketing world, here for TG Store, might want different things on the home page. 

But how do we get a lizard to actually click? So think about what you might do here. Here is what we did. We simply added in these little categories to help that lizard brain zoom in on something and make sense of their main options. So what TG Store boils down to is, like a lot of ecommerce clothing and apparel sites, men versus women. 

At the time, at least, there was no– this was, I think, in 2014, this one, so it goes a while back. But those were the two categories at the time that it broke down into. And then we had cycling or running. So all we were trying to do was say, hey, lizard, I got you. There’s a lot here. Are you looking for cycling or running? For men or for women? That’s really what it broke down to. Had the image of a cyclist. And we tried to keep things similar here, so the people were close together. They were both wearing similar apparel so, again, the lizard brain isn’t distracted. 

How can you dramatically reduce those distractions in order to reduce friction? And then we had a little social proof, as well. So once the lizard brain does land on one or the other and starts to contrast the two options that they have, the lizard brain feels safer here. This is a safe place to be. Look, other people have been here. I’m not the first one to come here. If I click through one of these, my life is unlikely to get harder. 

Now, we could have done more with shop, but I don’t necessarily come here to, quote unquote, “shop.” I might want to find something, explore something. I don’t know. But at the time, we were just interested in finding the shortest button to use when creating these categories so our lizard brain can contrast the two against each other and start to narrow down its options. When we did that, of course, as you can see here, we saw 96.6% more people clicked Shop Cycling For Men and 104.5% increase in Shop Running For Men. 

We didn’t see similar statistically significant results on the women’s, but on the men’s for sure we did. And again, this speaks to that, which we talked about in the last Tutorial Tuesday– if you missed it, make sure you go and search for the right Tutorial Tuesday on buttons. But the leftmost– the F pattern still applies– the left most, quote unquote, “thing” is the thing that’s most likely to get clicked. So we saw that. That was pretty cool. 

One more example here in removing friction. So this was the control sign up on this pricing table. I’ve removed all the indicators of where the pricing table was. Sign Up! was the control. There were four buttons you could click. And we moved to Get Started with just three buttons. 

Now, what we saw there was once we switched from Sign Up!– which had an exclamation point, which I think is an important point, as well. So Sign Up! is one of those high friction words, and we’re looking for skating rink phrasing instead, which we talked about in the last training, as well. 

But Sign Up! is this frictiony word. My life is going to get harder. I don’t want to sign up for anything. I’m still uncertain about what I’m getting into. An exclamation point makes me feel like I need to be enthusiastic about it, as well, which I’m probably not. My little lizard brain is like, no, I don’t think so. And then there are four things, too, so we can talk about that, as well. 

But when we narrow it down to these three, we’re really using the Goldilocks principle here. The reason the Goldilocks principle exists and continues to work so often is because that’s how our lizard brain makes decisions. It wants to narrow down its option sets into the smallest number that still allows it to compare and contrast. 

So we get rid of one extra button, because these four buttons, the lizard brain’s like, what are you talking about? Bye. Whereas these three are like, OK, I’m used to seeing this. I can eliminate this one or eliminate that one. I’m probably I’m going to eliminate the middle one, but I’m going to compare and contrast either middle and right or middle and left against each other, and that’s how I’ll make a call. 

Now, everything else is the same except we got rid of this and we changed the language. And when we did, as you can see here, we had this 139% increase in people who clicked on the leftmost one, 200% increase in the middle one, and then 274% on the right. And the reason that you can get to statistically significant results like this, which seems, I know– even when I look at it, I’m like, really? [LAUGHS] It’s wild, right? But it’s because the button is the site of conversion. 

And so when we’re measuring based on did you click or didn’t you, then we can see, OK, it’s not like a headline where we can measure did they read the headline or didn’t they? We can’t see that. What we can measure is did they click or didn’t they? And that’s why we can see these really clear, good numbers here. So remove the friction around signing up and the friction of having to be an enthusiastic signer upper. 

Now, last one up is this when would a lizard click? And so this is something you have to figure out when you’re putting any button on the page. Where does the button go? Is my prospect ready for it? So we’re not in basic tricks to get more clicks at this point. 

Now we’re at the point of, OK, we know the stuff around trying to get people to click a button. So we have the contrast effect here. Or sorry, not contrast effect, the contrast in color. We have ways of drawing your attention here. There are arrows pointing at the thing. 

And then there’s this Show Me My Heatmap below, which is tapping into an older direct response sort of way, but whatever. Point is your eyes are being drawn here. The basic tricks to get more clicks are largely at play. The question here, though, is is the button arriving at the right time? Is it too soon? Is it too late? And that’s the question that we have to ask. And when we don’t know the answer, oftentimes we’ll put buttons all over the place, or we’ll sadly remove a button that needed to be somewhere and then it wasn’t there. 

So what we did in this case– because this was a long form sales page, you can add– sorry, the button wouldn’t just always appear. We wouldn’t have a button here and here and all the way down the page. And this is, again, crazy, as you can see. Adding this at the top, this sticky sign up bar, which is now a really common thing, but at the time, it was not a very common thing. And it would follow you down the page as you went. Again, not common in 2014. Common now. 

And the reason that it is common now, the reason I brought in 164% increase in sign ups, even though it added fields, whereas before there was like a button and you didn’t need to worry about a field, and here we have these fields that are being added, which is extra work, which is friction, however, the more important friction that it got rid of was the friction of, where is that damn button? I just want to try this thing already. It had other, of course, click triggers off to the side to help you feel good about, OK, I’m ready to do this, but we did see this wonderful increase in sign ups.

My phone. I have the joys of recording at home. And of course, that leads to really outstanding increases in revenue, based on that, of course. There are lots of factors that go in there. But when you can see massive increases just by removing friction, there’s just so much you can do, and then we can go even further with it. So that is the core of trying to get that lizard brain to move on instinct, to go with how the lizard brain works instead of against it, remove that friction, and see what the really great results can be for your buttons. 

So always, always, always question your button copy and design. Use this checklist. Does it look clickable or possibly disabled? Is it prominent enough to be easily noticed among all the other noise? Is it large enough to easily acquire or click? What other buttons are competing with it, and why are they allowed to do that? And does a lizard have to actively think before clicking it? Are you using thinky words like “learn” on it? Reducing friction is one half of the puzzle. 

In our next tutorial, we’ll talk about the other half and bring it all together so you can start to see results in the form of more clicks and better qualified clicks. Your task now is to revisit the buttons you optimized last week and further optimize each button using the techniques you just learned. Be sure to update those buttons by publishing the pages, if you’re allowed to, or set up A/B tests so you can measure how these efforts are paying off. 

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