As I’ve been doing Conversion Rate Optimization for 15 years, I learned there’s a variety of people who do this. You may be an artist, you may be a problem solver, but I surely know that you’re a risk taker. Your interest in Conversion Rate Optimization shows that you’re really on the cutting edge. Risk takers are optimizers, optimizers want results. You want results for your business, for your start-up and especially for your clients to get bigger results in a shorter amount of time. Remove all those unnecessary steps.
Today, I will show you how to use my system to triple your e-commerce sales and leads. We’ll use qualitative insight and quantitative data to execute successful conversion testing. We will use that to increase your sales and leads from your existing website traffic because it doesn’t matter how much traffic that you’re driving to your website if you really can’t convert that traffic into sales.
I’ll go through in detail about how I got started doing Conversion Rate Optimization. I gather that conversion mindset, that really start to think differently about my customers and how to generate more conversions from my existing iterative experiments to get bigger results from your actual split testing. We’ll then go into specific case studies where I show you a proven system to optimize your website and actually increase your profit. In the end, I’ll be doing e-commerce website reviews where I go through and show you exactly how to improve your e-commerce.
We’ll be going deep into this presentation. It’s an hour long, there’s a lot of information. I’m going to be showing you the tools that I use, how you should use them, and get the best results from using those tools. Now, we’re going to go ahead and jump right in to the presentation. Please let me know that you can see the presentation okay as I load it up into full screen.
Doing that slice and dice type of testing where you’re getting just enough results, very inconsistent. But the fact was, is that I didn’t have a system in place and I learned from the greats on how to create my own methodology to create a system and learn from the mistakes that I had in the past. I admit, I had an ego. I thought I knew everything about Conversion Rate Optimization for doing it for so long. But I’m going to tell you that all of that has changed in the last couple of years as I created a podcast where I interviewed the bet in digital marketing and understood their frameworks so I can apply it to my own methodology.
Today, I’ll be telling you about tripling your e-commerce sales and leads. Understanding that conversion mindset, how to think different about your customer so you can understand their problem and they create a solution specifically for them. We’ll then go into my marketing optimization system, a system that I built to get a better process, to have more predictable results and remove all the unnecessary steps to have a bigger impact and go through the research to get the right results.
Then, we’ll be going into specific e-commerce website reviews where I’ll be reviewing all of these 9 sites and then giving them specific tips on ideas that they can test themselves. Starting a little bit about me, I’m a website designer that helps websites increase the amount of money, leads, and conversion rates that they actually make. My website is alexdesigns.com and I’ve been doing this now for 15 long years. Eleven of those years, I worked at a .com as the e-commerce in customer acquisition director for e-diets.com, a very popular diet and fitness website.
But during that time, I created my freelance website business, alexdesigns.com in the year 2004. In 2005, I met my mentor, Bryan Eisenberg. You probably know who he is. He is the godfather of Conversion Rate Optimization. He, basically, taught me everything about what I know today. Then in 2011, I finally left that job and I was terminated with no severance and I became an entrepreneur. In 2012, I met my beautiful wife and I went out on my entrepreneurial journey and it was all new for me, because I never went to business school. I never went to marketing school. I’ve never really understood how to create a process that really works for me.
In 2013, I had to start my business over. Like any geek out there, I created a podcast. Marketing optimization, all focused on optimizing and maximizing your ROI from your conversion experts. Everybody used to come to me and say, “Oh, I need help with my SEO.” But that’s not the optimization I do, I do Conversion Rate Optimization. I created the podcast called Marketing Optimization and then turn that into a system that I now apply for my clients to get bigger results in a shorter amount of time.
I took all that and I applied it to a new book that I’m releasing that year in 2015 called Small Business Big Money Online. If you want to find out how to get that book for free, all you have to do is stick around to the end of the presentation and I’ll be giving away this book for free in May.
Let’s move into the actual system. This is where it’s all going to be focused on and how you can triple your sales and leads. The marketing optimization system is broken up into discovery, hypothesis, execution, review and scaling process. You’re discovering who your customers are, what their problems and pains and desires are, and then creating a hypothesis, a specific educated guess so you can help make their lives a lot better. We turn that actually into split testing by creating wireframes designs and actually setting up that split testing. Then once we know that there’s a winner, we can actually review and scale and grow our bottomline.
Just because a test wins, doesn’t mean you make more money. We do this by understanding qualitative and quantitative data. We use the qualitative data to maybe create a hypothesis for a unique value proposition or copy test and then we’ll use that quantitative data that numbers knows, analytics to do user experience and ideal click map tests. From that, we’re all focused on scaling and growing your bottomline, showing real results.
Let me back up and tell you exactly how I got into this because I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. I took a lot of thins for granted. But one thing I was sure, is that in knew I needed to produce results. This is where I met Bryan Eisenberg, the godfather of CRO. He became my mentor and he told me specifically, “It’s not about winning awards. It’s about getting results.” Me, as a website designer, I want to make my websites pretty. They had to have a cutting edge design. But in the end, it was about making results for the clients.
Once I started working with Bryan Eisenberg, I started to learn about their persuasion architecture framework and how they did Conversion Rate Optimization in their early days. I started following their blog, thegrok.com, and I learned about the conversion trinity, the scientific method and how to run valid split tests. They gave me an opportunity to work directly with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. I redesigned their website, futurenowinc, and also their blog, grok.com.
This Is where I learned everything about marketing optimization because we’re optimizing more than just conversion rates, more than just revenue, more than just leads, it’s all marketing channels. This line which really stuck with me, because I started designing landing pages for them. Lead generation websites for attorneys, reducing shopping cart abandonment rates for great sites like backcountry.com. In the end, Bryan said that I was one of his secret weapons to help them get great conversion results for their clients as well.
We’ve put in the hours, we understood what has worked and hasn’t in the past. That’s because we built thousands of landing pages, hundreds of the different e-commerce sites. Through that, we executed over 5,000 different tests in over 11 years. From 2000 through 2011, I must have ran split tests every single day for 11 years. Now since then, it’s been a lot over 5,000 tests but this is a pivotal point in the Conversion Rate Optimization timeline.
Because in 2011, Conversion Rate Optimization exploded and that correlated with the end of the recession in the United States. This is interesting how it’s ironic that the same time period, Google Algorithm update came out called Panda, which leveled all the search engine results in 2011.
While SEO was declining, CRO became extremely popular. This was my time to become an entrepreneur. I finally left that .com job, I was terminated with no severance. Remember, I didn’t go to business school. I didn’t go to marketing school. I had no idea how to become an entrepreneur. I do knew that I was a website designer who helped improve conversions, that what I can do was a lot different than most direct marketers out there were doing. I went out on my own.
I thought that I knew everything about Conversion Rate Optimization. I would set up a test, and I would get a winner. But because I really didn’t have a process in place, I needed to learn from my mistakes really quickly, because I would a winning test and then a loser. Then I’ll get excited again because I’d have a winning test but then I have a loser.
I was getting really inconsistent results and about a 50% win rate, that push is not good enough for me. That’s not something that I could really explain to my clients. I really need how to figure out how to take my Conversion Rate Optimization completely to the net level. I needed to start over from scratch to understand that there was a lot more opportunity for me to learn because I was looking in the wrong places. In 2003, I really re-shaped my Conversion Rate Optimization career by creating a podcast. I wanted to know who was the best in the space and how I could interview them to understand what they were doing and apply it to my own methodology so I can get bigger results too.
The marketingoptimization.tv platform allowed me to interview people like Bryan Eisenberg. He taught me about the persuasion architecture framework or Brian Massey where I learned about the scientific method and how they applied the scientific strategy to get better experiments, create better hypothesis. They’re from [inaudible 00:14:08], I learned about the conversion optimization process, because if you don’t have a process and you don’t have a system then you’re just amateur. Don’t you want to become a master of CRO? There is so much more opportunity for you to learn.
Then from Oli Gardner, I learned about conversion center design. He really motivated me to communicate this better as a public speaker. Learning from the greats like this, I was able to get bigger results from the testing I was running. Removing all the unnecessary steps to get bigger profit through my Conversion Rate Optimization practice. I created the system, the marketing optimization system, branded the same as my podcast. Through this, I was able to start getting more consistent results. That’s what I highly recommend you do, create your own system. A pattern that you go through so you can have more predictable results and be able to teach your team on how to actually do what is going on.
Now, I’m going to take you through exactly how to use the actual system in this case study. I’ll go through in detail about how to use the system, get the right results, and triple your sales and leads. Energy first is the site that we’re going to be looking at. It’s all broken down into this 5-step process. The discovery, hypothesis, execution and reviewing, scaling process. We’re discovering who our customers really are, what problems that they have and how we can create better solutions to triple their sales and leads.
To do this, we need to use data. We need to figure out where people are going on their site. We need to figure out what they’re doing on those pages and then we need to figure out why. We start by doing that through the persona modeling. Let’s take for example, Amy. She’s a 40-year-old working mom and she is interested in losing weight. She goes to Google and she types in a certain query for “web protein shakes for breakfast”. She’s smart enough to know that she’s not going to click on the ads, the paid ads up top. But she does find an interesting natural search link that she’s very interested in, “protein shakes for breakfast, jumpstart your metabolism”. She says that this is a query that helped solve her problem that she’s looking for.
She arrives at a landing page, energyfirst.com, the case study that we’d be going through. We understand that looking at this page, you probably see it as, it’s busy, it’s not clear about the language that they’re using. They’re really not sure what they’re selling. We don’t really understand the benefits of the protein and how it could better our lives and also, what are the ingredients. I’m really concerned about what food I’m putting into my body.
This is where we start to apply the methodology. Starting with the conversion trinity that we learned from Bryan Eisenberg, we understand the relevance, value, and call to action. Are you really relevant to my wants, needs and desires? Is it relevant to the search query I just came from? Do I know why you were the right solution for me? Is it obvious for me what to do next?
Obviously, this page is pretty busy so there’s a lot to improve. But we’re going to do that through two different kinds of data, quantitative and qualitative data. Starting with the quantitative, understanding our analytics and our metrics, what’s actually going on with those numbers? We do that by starting with an 80/20 rule. Every e-commerce site usually has an 80/20 rule for their products. They’re making 80% of their revenue off of 20% of their inventory. Btu the same thing works exactly with your highest traffic pages. You want to understand your 80/20, 80% of your visits are coming from 20% every pages. You want to understand the most traffic pages, the most revenue on those pages and the highest bounce rate potential of these pages. If they’re over 55% bounce rate, you know you can reduce them.
We do this using different types of tools. More likely, you’ve used a lot of these different tools. Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely, Unbounce, Mail Chimp, Hubspot, Google Analytics, but in this case, for this case study, we’re just going to be using Visual Website Optimizer, Google Analytics and Adwords.
We look at Google Analytics to ensure that the goals and funnels are actually setup properly to being with, to establish our actual baseline. But the most important report within Google Analytics is your top landing page report. We can see it from this report, this time frame, that the whey protein powder page is making up majority of all the visits on the page, on the website. It’s also has a very high bounce rate and it’s making up a lot of transactions. This is a key indicator to tell you exactly where to start your testing.
We can also that the [inaudible 00:19:34]page and the home page are right underneath it. But even if you add up all the whey protein powder landing pages, it’s making up more than 50% of the sessions, the transactions, and has the highest opportunity for improvement. We know that the whey protein powder page is the page to start actually testing. We also want to know the keywords that people are using to drive to most clicks and the most conversions.
Here we can see that the whey protein shakes has a lot of sessions and has a lot of goals. It also is picking up a lot of traffic through natural search. We know that the shakes for breakfast page and the whey protein powder pages are two pages that have been high on our radar to increase our conversion and get the best return. Also looking at our segments, we want to ensure that we’re marketing to the right segments. In this case, they’re having mostly high traffic from their desktop experience. In this case, we’re only going to be testing the actual desktop. Now, using Google Analytics, we went through, we found our top traffic landing pages. We know exactly where people are going on our site. Those 5 pages are probably where we’re going to spend our most time testing.
Now, we need to figure out exactly what they’re doing on that whey protein powder page. We do that through heat maps using something like digital website optimizer or inspectlet. We could tell exactly where people are clicking. Obviously, people are clicking on the right side towards these radio button and the call to action areas. But if you look to the far left, people are very interested in the reviews and the ingredients. This helps us add to out hypothesis that people are interested in the reviews, they’re interested in the ingredients and maybe they’re having a little bit of hard time actually checking out.
Now we know where people are going on the site, we know what they’re doing with heatmaps, we need to figure out why. We do that using the qualitative insight, understanding what’s going on in the mind of the customer. We do that by gathering feedback. Understanding what’s going on in the customer’s mind and using that voice of the customer, will help you get better research. Doing the right research will help you get better results in your long-term testing. This is the proven strategy to increase your profit by doing the right research.
Remember, we’re still in the discovery process here. This is only the first step. If you put the effort in to your research, you’ll create a better hypothesis and run better tests to triple your sales. In this toolkit, we’ll be using user testing, visual website optimizer, Inspectlet, survey monkey and [inaudible 00:22:24]. We’re trying to gather as much feedback as possible. We do that through tools like survey monkey. Here I’ll tell you how to create a survey, get the best insight from it, and then have ideas to actually start split testing.
The secrets to higher conversions live in your customer’s mind. You want to try to get a hundred responses in your survey monkey feedback forms and try to really understand what’s going on in the mind of the customer. Remember this, you will start to understand patterns of language that people have to help them make their lives better. You want to use the information that people are telling you and then use that back in your marketing material. These patterns of insight are excellent for your unique value proposition and your copy-writing tests.
You can see here, people were talking about the ingredients or the best protein powder on the market. All we used was that information back to create our unique value proposition. But you can automate this process o collect surveys. You want to add a survey to your thank you page, add a survey to your email footers every time an email goes out. You’re asking for a survey feedback, promote your survey on Facebook and [synthetize 00:23:43] your email list to fill-out a survey and maybe give them a coupon. You also want to use things like [qualeroo 00:23:50], where as people move their mouths to the back banner on like your checkout or cart page, you pop open a survey and ask them why they’re not checking out. Or, on the thank you page, you ask them what made them purchase from today or why not.
We also use tools like UserTesting to watch people go through your site, competitor’s sites in different Google search queries. This will help you understand the real experience of your site from watching people in their own shoes. We also want to watch the right type of testers, the trick to using user testing is to bring in your ideal customers. You do that using screeners. This will help you avoid getting protesters that could be biased.
Here’s cheat sheet that I created, you can screenshot it, or you can download it at the link below. This is a cheat sheet that I asked all of my e-commerce experiences questions on how to get the best out of user testing. I ask them their first impressions. I ask them to go through the actual checkout process and ask them if they would purchase or why not. Then I have them go to Google and have them find a competitor to figure out which site they prefer and why.
I also want to know all the questions that the visitor has to eventually buy the product from us. For example, people want to know about the returns. They want to know the privacy, the trust. How can I get a refund? The last question we ask is, “If you had a magic wand, how would you actually improve this experience?” These open-ended questions will help you understand your site a lot better than you ever thought in the past.
Now we know where people are going using something like Google analytics where you find out what they’re doing on that page using heatmaps like inspectlet, but now we know why. We watch people go through the site using user testing. We now have enough qualitative and quantitative data to start creating our hypothesis, creating tests to copy and our unique value propositions or the user experience, to scale and grow our bottom-line. That’s what it’s all about in the end.
We move now into the hypothesis phase to create a specific educated guess to validate each of our observations to improve that problem, to have a solution to each understanding. We need to understand the user a lot more. We need to gather all their intelligence and put it together actually into our hypothesis. We want to understand the voice of the customer, the actual demographics and why they actually want to purchase the product in the long run. In the end, they want to get healthier and they want to live longer and they’re willing to pay for these products to do it along the way.
In our hypothesis, we’re able to gather all the insight. If this is the right information for them, we knew that the value proposition needed to be simpler. We knew that the text needed to be easier to understand. People also wanted to learn more about the guarantee, have a risk reversal. They also wanted to know about the reviews and the credibility symbols, make people feel a lot more comfortable through iconology and easy to understand designs.
Now, we’re able to actually create our hypothesis. You can actually download the cheat sheet that create those hypothesis that I’ve created from previous efforts from Bryan Eisenberg. But if you want to use a hypothesis framework to understand the problem that people have, create solution for that observation and ensure that you’re able to track the success for it to track the success for each experiment, each of the goals.
In our hypothesis phase, we’re also able to prioritize all the different tests that we’re going to run. You don’t want to just shoot in the dark and just try to test anything, you want to have a specific strategy for all of your split testing efforts. You can see here that five out of the six tests are all related around the whey protein powder page, our biggest revenue, generating opportunity page. Only the second test, the shopping cart test, is essential to reducing the cart and checkout abandonment rates.
From that, we’re eventually going to reach a local maximum where we can’t optimize our site any further. That is an indicator where we actually start doing the re-design. In summary of the hypothesis for the whey protein powder page, essentially, we’re just trying to not make people think. We’re trying to have a clear headline, a clear tagline. The over-all goal is to increase the conversion and increase the average order value.
In the cart and checkout tests, we’re trying to increase trust, add more security, improve the user experience and reduce cart abandonment rate. Now, we have enough information to our research and hypothesis to begin executing and creating our tests. We’re going to create wireframes, designs and split testing to actually run and validate our tests.
The process is pretty simple, to setup an ab split test, you start with your control, the original whey protein powder page that you see here. Yes, it was busy, had a lot going on and we use data to validate that. From that, we’re able to create a new variation, taking the exact same information from one page and then sling it down and making it easier to understand in a nice layout with the credibility [stills 00:29:45], better unique value proposition and the risk reversal.
This test resulted in a 65% increase in conversion. Just by taking the exact same information from one layout and applying it to another one in an easier to understand way. But Conversion Rate Optimization never stops. We always want to take our baseline, make it the new control and then start trying to improve it any further. We learn that this page was still very busy. It was missing some elements from our first initial rounds of tests. We knew that we can make the design a lot better.
We’ve created a completely new design, we knew that people didn’t necessarily want to buy the jars of protein, they actually wanted to have the shake. We changed the image, we changed the language to make it a little bit easier to read, which is the value proposition. We also changed the reviews and we also confused that maybe people didn’t understand how to use the radio buttons appropriately so we separated out the products separately.
Then we’re able to move the ingredients above the fold, but unfortunately this test lost. Even though it was a new design and it was based on hypothesis, we knew that this field experiment, we can learn a lot from. We knew that this was not the right approach for this particular variation. We went back to the drawing board. We went back to our new control, that was our new baseline winner, and we asked people in user testing through feedback and people were still confused. They said it was too sales that it didn’t directly speak to me. All we really found out is that people want a more cutting edge design. Something simpler, easier to understand and it addressed all the questions that people had along the way.
This resulted in a 56% improvement in conversion rate. Taking one test, trying to improve it as much as you can, having some losers but are eventually accomplishing your goal by having an over-all winner. But just because they test whims doesn’t mean you make more revenue. You want to ensure that you’re reviewing all of your tests using a statistician or an analytics person to ensure that this is the right result for your production environment. Breaking down why this particular test won, we can look that it had a very clear unique value proposition that had social proof above the fold with clear cut actions. It had great customer reviews above the fold and then it had visual cues at the fold-line to tell people that they can actually scroll down and see more information.
Now we’ll start to look at the data, not only from the user experience, but how does the data really reflect to the test that we just ran. In summary, we’re able to have a 150 more sales per month, 3 times the leads per day, with a 50% decrease in CPA. We’re increasing the return on investment by lowering our ad spend, and a 5% decrease in bounce rate. This resulted in doubling our sales and tripling our leads in five months.
This is the average way that we walk through the process of doing the discovery, hypothesis, execution, review and scaling process. But we’re not done because we need to take what has won and be able to really scale and grow our bottomline. Just because you have winning tests, doesn’t mean you actually grow your bottomline. Doesn’t you actually have an over-all gross conversion rate. In order to do that, you have to take one winning element and then apply that across your site, create additional landing pages with your best performing results, apply that to your mobile and iPad strategy, or your paid advertising like your Facebook marketing, your Goggle adwords, or your affiliate marketing sales.
I’ll show you exactly how to take one winning landing page and scale it to all of your other products. Now, we have our winning control, it won by 56%. We’re able to clone that page for our other top traffic landing pages. You probably remember going back to that Google Analytics report but the green superfood page was a top traffic page as well. We, literally, just cloned it with the exact same elements, new copy, easy to understand, credibility above the fold and that had an increase of 10% conversion improvement for this particular project.
Then, we’re able to do it again by cloning the pre-workout energy drink page, another landing page for their inventory. That had a result of 16% increase in this conversion improvement for this product. It did the exact same thing for the Omega products, Fish oil, Omega, Omega Mix, and that had an increase of 12% improvement.
Now, we have worked all the way through our funnel and our landing pages for our top-selling products, we can then apply what we’ve learned to the homepage, taking the existing homepage which you know it’s decently designed, but we knew that we can make it a lot better by adding this new cutting edge flat design to help and improve as well. The homepage is tested a little bit differently. We test it mostly focused on reducing bounce rate. This had 7% more clicks, reducing the bounce rate by 7%.
In summary, we’re able to actually go throughout the site, create a discovery hypothesis execution review and scaling process, to understand who our customers really are, what pains, problems and desires they have, create a hypothesis, execute tests, review and scale and grow your bottomline. In between all that, there’s a lot of steps. You really need to understand your customer mindset. What’s that voice of the customer? Gather intelligence and then use qualitative and quantitative data to run successful split tests during the execution and creation process to review and scale and grow your bottomline.
In the end, the strategy for you to triple you e-commerce sales, especially if you have an unoptimized site if you’ve never done this before, I would tell you today to stop buying additional traffic. For the next few months, only focus on converting your existing traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic that you’re driving to your website if you can’t convert that traffic actually into sales.
The next few months, only focus on your highest value revenue potential tests. Those five landing pages, we have the most opportunity, try to optimize those as much as you possibly can. Initially, you may have some losses but how can you leverage those losses to make, actually, more money. Once you have a proven strategy that’s working for you, you can lower your CPA, remove your bad traffic, make all of those words negative keywords so you’re actually increasing your return on investment by spending more money on quality traffic, then scale your wins to lead generation, social media and different e-mail marketing channels.
Now, you want to focus on increasing your sales, increasing your budget and doing affiliate marketing. The first six months of your optimization strategy should all be focused on quick wins. You should know more about your user experience than your actual customers do. That completes the initial round of the Triple You E-Commerce Sales and Leads in the next 6 months. If you do have questions about this, simply reach out to me by sending me an e-mail, alex@alexdesigns.com. Also, if you want to get the new book that I have coming out in May, all you have to do is visit this URL and I’d love to send you the book. I’m really excited about it. It has lot of the same information but broken down into a more easy to understand fashion.
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