What Makes Prospective Customers Run Towards You—Or Away From You

Here’s something important to understand if you want the people who click on your ads to turn into customers:

Each step on their journey from click to customer has to make perfect sense to them.

Which sounds simple. But a lot of online businesses get this wrong.

I see so many ads, optin pages and sales pages that don’t mesh.

They all lack an important ingredient:

Congruence.

So what does it actually mean to be congruent?

There are two types:

Visual Congruence

This is the easiest one. Does each step look like the previous and the next?

If you’re switching color schemes, design styles, or layouts from page to page, it’s easy for the prospect to get confused.

If prospects get confused and uncertain whether they’re in the right place, they feel lost. 

And lost prospects abandon their journey for the safety of Facebook or Google.

Make sure your entire customer journey feels visually cohesive.

Message Congruence

Essentially, the next step needs to match the context you’ve set.

So if a prospect just opted in to learn more about bananas, and you suddenly start trying to sell them llamas… that’s a problem.

Now obviously that’s a silly example. So let’s hone this in. 

Let’s say you’re a productivity expert. There are a lot of topics you could teach on.

So you put out a lead magnet with 5 tips to beat burnout.

But then on the thank you page, you offer a low-priced digital product all about improving sleep patterns.

Now to you as the expert, these things are probably closely related.

But in the prospect’s mind, their context has been broken. 

They were enticed by the promise of ending their feelings of burnout. But now you’re asking them to pay to fix their sleep patterns?

This happens all the time. Just because two concepts are related to you doesn’t mean they’re related to your prospects.

Which results in countless advertising campaigns losing sales.

Match the context as closely as you can. Both with your message and the visuals.

When each step makes perfect sense to your prospect, they’re much more likely to take it.