When building marketing / sales funnel, one thing to avoid is incongruity. Incongruity is when users are shown different communication (these can be both contradictory or irrelevant) information at different stages of sales / marketing funnel.
To illustrate this, let’s take an example of an NCELL ad campaign that is currently being run.
NCELL advert about a data package.
This creative is trying to educate ppl about the new e-commerce facility in NCELL’s website by pushing a low resistance product ( often read lowest price point so users don’t need to think too much to try something out). The aim of such creative is to get maximum transitions to next stage of the funnel (in this case click to the website). For that purpose, this ad does its job. It is setup as a click to site ad and i am sure it does get a lot of clicks.
So far so good.
But, the problems start when users land to the next stage of this journey. Once you click on this ad, you are taken to this landing page.
NCELL’s landing page for its data pack campaign.
First of all, if there are any designers reading this, they will immediately dismiss this as a landing page. Even though, this page does not look like a landing page, in the context of this ad funnel, this serves as a landing page because this where the users “land” in the website when you click the ad.
With that bit of theory cleared, let’s move ahead with the discussion.
If you see this page (cursorily, because thats how ad clickers behave), you don’t see clearly what you came here for. You neither see a Rs. 40 product nor the package you thought you were buying. If you labour, you will find that the page is loading entirely different packages on initial tab load.
This is an example of incongruity due to irrelevance. Users went to this page expecting one content, but were treated with a completely different content. I will not be surprised if a lot of users would have dropped off without taking any action at this stage.
Users, who do choose to stay and explore more, will likely click on the all time data pack; hoping, finally they have found the relevant information. Let’s see if that is true. When you switch to the other tab, this is the screen you see:
NCELL Data Pack Landing Tab 2
However, even in this screen, you don’t see the pack which is at 40 Rs. A lot of users, by this time, will either feel cheated or feel confused. This is an incongruity caused due to contradictory information. Again, I will not be surprised if a lot of prospective customers drop off.
One good thing here though is there is action you can take on the page. I have seen several page landings where there is absolutely zero action to take. So, at least, this works well with that regard. I will not get into the conversation of how many actions are too much adding to further confusion to the user in this post.
Back to the discussion, If you are curious like me and want to understand what is really happening, I can take action by clicking on one of the 5 buttons. But, believe me, average users are not curious or patient.
But, if you do press the button, you finally understand that the data pack is indeed for 40 Rs., but the additional taxes make it Rs. 51.08.
NCELL Pricing Page
Facebook Ads Comment
That, leaves us with a question. How can we fix this problem? When I asked this question to the internal team of a premiere digital marketing company (ACT360) , I got the following suggestions:
- Have a dedicated single product/package or even a campaign landing page. In this particular case, NCELL is in fact running multiple ads (see picture below) to let users know about this e-commerce service they have come up with.Clearly, in the times of COVID, this is an important strategic direction, the company is taking. May be you need a separate landing page for such an important piece of communication.
NCELL ads about data pack on facebook
- Have a constant price reference. If the price without the tax is to be shown, maintain the same across the funnel stages. Ethically, I just feel that it is always good to show prices inclusive of all hidden costs.
- Add comparative rate. Show cheaper it is than their own regular packages. This will work to add more incentive for the user to complete the transaction.
- Add validity period. Validity period work in two ways. One, it introduces scarcity (a good motivator) to the offer and second it helps users who don’t want to transact right now to understand the until when the window of opportunity is present so that they could come back to redeem the offer at a later time.
What do you think?Let me know if you have other ways of solving this issue of incongruity in sales/ marketing funnel.