There are many ways we can encourage people to purchase. But if we’re not careful, we’ll push people away.
These are friction points—moments in our marketing and business that push customers away. In many cases, we don’t even realize they’re there.
Friction points are a top reason prospects hesitate to move through your funnel.
What is a Friction Point?
Friction is anything—copy, design, process, policy, or user behavior—that slows down or even stops progress through your sales cycle.
Friction can stem from subtle details on your website and product experience: slow load times, unclear copy, surprise fees, clunky forms, weak mobile layouts, or confusing navigation.
Here are common sources of friction and practical ways your company can avoid them:
Landing Page Length
One frequent friction point relates to page length—the amount of information you share with visitors.
Friction happens when you share too much. Friction happens when you share too little. You need a balance that answers key questions without overwhelming people.
Marketers often gravitate to extremes—either ultra-minimal or exhaustively long.
The way to find the right balance is to continuously test your landing pages.
Consider the following case study where a longer landing page outperformed a much shorter variation. It was a PPC landing page aimed at getting prospects to sign up for a home energy audit.
The company was relatively unknown, and the offer was relatively complex.
In this situation, the longer landing page performed best and generated a higher conversion rate—friction was minimized because the page answered more questions.
When a landing page is too long, it can make your offer look complex. If a landing page is too short, it can make your company appear unprofessional or untrustworthy.
So how do you find the happy medium?
Qualitative research (talking to customers, running feedback surveys, interviewing prospects, reviewing support tickets) helps you uncover what people care about when deciding to do business with you. It’s common sense, but easy to skip.
Your landing pages and homepage should communicate exactly what users want to know, in the most distilled, scannable form possible.
Answer what customers care about first—value, proof, price, risk—and keep deeper details one click away. Use a strong headline and subhead, short benefit blocks, a clear primary CTA, visible trust signals (logos, reviews, guarantees), concise FAQs, and obvious navigation to knowledge centers, case studies, and technical docs. This way, detail-seekers can dig in without forcing everyone to read a wall of text.
Heuristics that often guide length: lower awareness or complex, high-risk offers usually benefit from longer pages; high intent, low-risk, familiar offers often convert with shorter pages—provided your message match and proof are strong.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance happens when your landing pages, marketing messages, and ads don’t align.
Online marketing is about how many moving parts come together. In an ideal world, everything—images, copy, themes, long-form content, product descriptions—flows harmoniously. In reality, it’s easy for intent and interpretation to drift apart.
At any given time, we’re wearing our marketing hats. There’s always a risk of disconnect between what you intend to say and how your audience interprets it.
If you copy a competitor’s “winning” strategy, you may actually lose. Why? Because your brand has nuances—positioning, promise, audience, distribution, and constraints—that make your context different.
Your brand’s personality, tone, and style may be different. Your customer base’s values may be different, too.
Cognitive fluency is the opposite of dissonance.
Cognitive fluency means making your experience easy to process. Use consistent message match from ad to page (same headline promise, imagery, and offer), clear hierarchy, generous whitespace, and readable text. Aim for a conversational reading level, sensible line length, strong color contrast, descriptive link text, and large tap targets—if people have trouble reading or processing information, they’re less likely to buy.
The Subconscious
Consumers are driven by instincts. As much as we like to believe we’re rational, emotion does the heavy lifting. Often, we don’t even notice it.
Friction often arises for reasons we can’t fully capture in analytics—highly emotional, subconscious cues.
Logic isn’t enough. You need to create an emotional bond by appealing to intuition, instincts, and senses—through clear visuals, reassuring microcopy, fast performance, and thoughtful microinteractions.
That’s why organizations invest in aesthetics and experience. Visual hierarchy, motion, sound cues, speed, and personalization all shape how people feel.
When you get it right, delight becomes one of the strongest levers for eliminating friction. Delight connects tiny details across your marketing to the bigger picture of your brand promise.
Here are steps we recommend for building delight:
- UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ PAIN POINTS: Brands win when they add real value to stakeholders’ lives. Learn as much as you can about your target customer. Listen more than you talk; study support logs, reviews, and lost-deal notes.
- DEFINE YOUR BRAND: Clarify what your company stands for and where your customers’ values overlap with yours. Codify your voice, promise, and non-negotiables.
- IDEASTORM: Use insights from steps 1 and 2 to brainstorm initiatives that build trust and inspire positive emotion. Think welcome moments, progress indicators, helpful defaults, and proactive education that reduce anxiety.
- TRACK EVERYTHING: Branding and experience are measurable. Monitor conversion rate, time to value, activation, retention, referral rate, NPS/CSAT, brand search volume, and support ticket themes. Tie initiatives to these metrics.
- PROTOTYPE & TEST FAST: Ship small experiments (copy, layout, onboarding steps) and validate with usability tests and A/B tests before rolling out widely.
- CLOSE THE LOOP: Share insights across teams and respond publicly to feedback when appropriate. Show that you listen and evolve—trust grows when customers see action.
Trust
Why should customers trust your company? What makes your brand different from all the shady businesses around the world that have—time and time again—scammed customers, exposed data, or simply failed to respect them?
At any given time, consumers are thinking:
“Why should I waste my time?”
And honestly, they’re right. It’s your responsibility to communicate trust signals clearly. Use a mix of social proof, transparent policies, recognizable payment options, clear pricing, and fast, helpful support to prove your value.
Customer Reviews & Testimonials
The darker corners of the Internet are ready to exploit uncertainty—sometimes the not-so-dark corners, too.
One way to ease fears is to show the footsteps of people who have been there before.
Customer reviews and testimonials add credibility to your claim that what you sell is legit. Today’s consumer is self-directed; by the time they reach your website or a sales form, many are already close to a decision.
Clarity.fm brings together teams of expert consultants. When someone searches for a marketing expert, how do they know who to call?
Reviews from previous callers.
Anyone selling anything needs a verifiable reputation to justify prices. Prioritize authenticity: use names, roles, company logos (with permission), outcomes, and before/after specifics. Highlight recent reviews, show a ratings breakdown, and respond to critical feedback professionally.
Do your best to personalize testimonials and reviews straight from the source. Present a clear framework for how you save customers time or money. Summarize the high-level outcome, then support it with details that matter to your buyer.
One word of caution: testimonials should answer the questions your customers are actually asking—avoid vague praise and cherry-picking that feels staged.
Safety Seals
Data privacy and security are major consumer priorities. Breaches happen, which makes people hesitant to share personal data and payment details. The perceived risk can easily outweigh a $10 impulse buy.
Trust and safety seals can help signal that you take privacy seriously—when they’re legitimate and earned. Place them near forms, in the footer, on checkout, and on About pages, but keep the experience clean. A few strong signals beat a clutter of badges.
Complement seals with visible security fundamentals: sitewide HTTPS, modern TLS, security headers, clear privacy and refund policies, and well-known payment options (e.g., Apple Pay, PayPal). Make these cues obvious at key decision moments.
To further promote safety, ensure sitewide HTTPS with a valid TLS certificate (free options like Let’s Encrypt are widely supported).
Final Thoughts: Always Be Testing
We’ve reached the end of this section and covered the core consumer-psychology concepts behind friction.
As we conclude—especially when we’re talking about friction—keep running A/B tests to challenge your assumptions. You won’t truly know where friction lives unless you continuously research it. Even analytics can mislead: a 5–10 minute session could signal engagement—or confusion.
A/B testing, session replays, heatmaps, and form analytics will help you spot patterns, pinpoint friction, and fix blockages in your conversion funnel.
Qualitative research is the next step—talk to customers to understand the “why” behind the patterns. These insights improve copy, design, onboarding, and support.
Trust the data—and the people behind it.
Key Takeaways
- In addition to moving people through your conversion funnel, remove the barriers stopping them—these barriers are called friction.
- Friction stems from confusion and frustration. It’s easier to close a tab and visit a competitor than to decode unclear messaging.
- The best way to eliminate friction is to keep things simple—answer questions directly and don’t overload people. Provide clear paths to deeper information (knowledge bases, FAQs, case studies) for those who want it.
- Build trust through testimonials, trust seals, transparent policies, and credible reviews. Be specific about sources and place these signals where decisions happen (pricing, forms, checkout).
- Always be testing and challenging assumptions. Combine A/B testing with qualitative research. Use analytics, session replays, and customer interviews to guide improvements.
- Match ad promises to landing-page content, maintain consistent tone and visuals, and optimize readability—message match and cognitive fluency reduce drop-off.
- Make security obvious: sitewide HTTPS, recognizable payment options, and clear privacy/refund policies reduce perceived risk and increase conversions.