Conversations on Conversion interview with Anne Holland

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This is a very fun conversation on conversion discussion with Anne Holland!

Anna:  Welcome back to Conversations on Conversion. I’m Anna Talerico and I can’t tell you how excited I am today to have the infamous Anne Holland here with us today. You probably know her as the founder of MarketingSherpa and the publisher of whichtestwon.com, a super popular, fun site for marketers where you can see real tests and real results. You can check your knowledge and guess which of two tests won and then see the real results afterwards. There’s certainly a lot of buzz about whichtestwon.com right now, and we’re super excited to have you here, Anne.

Anne:  Thank you.

Anna:  Well, I want to go ahead and dive right in for the few minutes we are together today. Just in terms of conversion optimization, what do you see as the biggest opportunity? You know, areas that marketers aren’t taking enough advantage of yet?

Anne: Not enough people are testing. I mean it’s really depressing. Something like only 20 percent of marketers are doing any testing on their sites. If we could just get more people running very basic A/B tests on  basic parts, the impact would be huge to their bottom lines, to their careers, to their status in the company. I really, really would like to see more people testing.

That’s, that’s why I started whichtestwon.com to sort of evangelize and say “Look! Here are real life tests run by people just like you and look at what a difference it made to their companies’ bottom line.” That’s why we always share the results. We always say okay, it was you know 25 percent more or 40 percent more conversions. Because it’s, it’s such a huge difference. A lot of marketers still are doing things where they’ll launch a site or they’ll launch a page and then they’ll just swap it out for a different one, and run the other one for a while and call it a test. Is that a test? 

I mean I have actually talked to Fortune 500s where the IT department was like, oh, we don’t need to test the site, we already tested it when we launched and it was a usability test. Nothing to do with a true direct response test that you really can learn from, and that really will impact the bottom line. So first of all, you know, just test. Just test already.

Anna:  Yeah. What do you think is holding companies back? I mean it is remarkable, isn’t it, that only 20 or 30 percent of companies are doing any testing. And even when they are, they may be doing things like usability testing or sequential testing and calling that testing. What’s holding everybody back?

Anne:  I think it’s what held people back from search engine optimization for a long time and still does hold a lot of people back. It’s the IT hold. It’s thinking I’m going to have to go to the Tech Department and ask them to change something or ask them for their help on the site. It’s internal politics. It’s an internal lack of resources. It’s stuff like that, and that’s why I’m glad that there are testing firms out there now that can run the tests for you and do almost everything so your IT department doesn’t even have to get involved necessarily. Although politically you want to let them know what’s going on so they don’t get mad at you. 

The other thing is I think when you tell your CEO or your president I want to test, I think it sounds scary. I don’t like it when people who do tests call it an experiment. You know, that’s like the terminology that’s used by some of the software companies: “Let’s run an experiment.” Well, I’m sorry, if you tell those presidents that you’re going to run an experiment, that just doesn’t sound safe, you know? That sounds experimental.

Anna:  Right.

Anne: Maybe you should tell them instead, you’re going to make this page make more money.

Anne:  You know, describe the results. Don’t ever, for God’s sake, use the word experiment. Maybe not even the word “test.” You have to market this internally a little differently 

Anna:  Interesting. I couldn’t agree more. Actually, that’s a really good point. You’ve hit on two of my pet peeves, which is sequential testing, you know, swapping things out, and also that term ‘experiment’. I’ve tried to strike it from my vocabulary because when you look at it in black and white, I don’t want to be experimenting. I want to be optimizing.

Anne: Exactly.

Anna:  I’m sure you have some testing pet peeves along those lines. What are some of your testing pet peeves?

Anne: Well, I think some people get hung up on the small stuff.  I’ll have people call and say well, do you have any data on testing the color of the Submit button. They will have had a long committee meeting about this, or the color of their logo on the site - tiny little things like that. I’ll be like, you know what, you guys, did you get your Submit button above the fold? Let’s do that first. Let’s do the obvious — this probably is optimal because it’s been shown in so many tests to work. 

I think the first thing is instead of saying what are we hung up on internally, look at what the publicly available tests showing that tends to work? You have to test and it might not work for you, but test those things first. Is your button above the fold? Could you make your button bigger?  

We run the testing awards every year, and this year we gave an award to a test where the people had taken a button that was already like 300 pixels across, which is a pretty big, fat button, and they tripled its size. It’s the biggest submit button you’ve seen in your life. I mean it’s like half the screen. But by golly their response rates went up.

Another thing I’m seeing right now that seems to be working is making your Search blocks bigger for your site. Don’t hide it. Make it bigger. Make it more prominent. Make your 800 number or your phone bigger, more prominent. See if you can get more response rates from it. 

People who use search and people who pick up the phone tend to buy more than other people. Let’s focus on those key performance indicators, those things that we know will probably influence the bottom line right away, and let’s not worry about the lingo.

Anna:  Yeah. Start, starting with the obvious things, exactly. Whenever somebody says, “well, what color buttons have you seen work?” I always think, it doesn’t matter what works for ten other companies because something entirely different might work for you. You’ve got to test it.

Anne: That’s a really good point.

Anna:  So how should marketers go about deciding what to test? I know that’s the number one question we get, and it’s such a hard question to answer, but in general just where do people start?

Anne: There’s a couple of ways to start. I actually wrote a white paper and it’s available for free on my site. You can just go to Free PDFs. It’s a big tab on our home page, and get that. Basically I always tell you to first of all pick the page that you’re going to test. More sophisticated marketers are going to be testing a bunch of pages at once and doing all these fancy things. But your basic marketer says that, you know, I’m going to test a page. A landing page or a page — one of my page templates and just do that. 

Pick a page that is as close to the end of the conversion cycle as you can get it. Okay, so pick a page that maybe it’s the actual shopping cart. Or maybe it’s the page that is going to be the last page a lead fills out before they click Submit. Maybe it’s the page with the Submit button on it. It’s as far down as you can get in that funnel, in that conversion funnel. Then test your way out backwards. So test your way back up to the home page or back up to your landing page. So you want to pick a page where you already have conversions happening. Improve the conversions there because that’s going to give you your biggest bottom line. 

Anna:  I love this…

Anne: The money’s there.

Anna:  I love that. And the reason why is I’m always saying to people, you know, there’s no right or wrong way to do this because I usually tell people to start actually the inverse.

Anne: Ah!

Anna:  I say, you know, start with that first page and work your way down. But it just goes to show you, it’s really important that people try things on their own, listen to all the advice and figure out what’s going to work for them because what is most important is there is no hard and fast rules. 

Anne: No, and the other thing I always tell people and I actually do think this is a good rule—though maybe you’ll disagree—a lot of people will pick their worst performing page to perform tests on because they figure well, that’s the one that’s weak so I should fix it. But, I always say, you know what? Do the inverse. 

Perform tests on your best performing page. The page is already working pretty well but you can always improve it more. Testing always improves. That page is already working, so you’re doing something right. If you do something right even better, you’re going to do better. 

To give an example, if you’ve got a page that’s getting a 5 percent response rate and you can test and improve results by 50 percent, then you’re getting a 7.5 percent response rate on that page. But if you’ve got a page that’s getting a .01 percent response rate, even if you improve things 200 percent, you’re still only getting .02 percent response rate.

Anna:  What a good point.

Anne:   If we’re trying to convince the CEO and the president to give us the budget, anything you can do that affects the money directly, or that you can prove affects the sales works to your advantage— it’s about being political. 

Anna:  Love it. Definitely. What is like your number one piece of testing advice? And I know you get asked this 100 times a day.

Anne: In general, most people have too much stuff on their landing page or the pages that they’re testing. There’s usually way too much stuff. There’s all these extra links and extra design elements and pictures and columns, and in general if you can simplify that page, if you can say, you know what, instead of being three columns it’s going to be one column. Instead of having four different images we’re going to have one big image and maybe people can scroll over it and see other stuff. Instead of having, you know, two headlines we’re going to have one headline and a couple of subheads. Super, super clarifying it and then taking the type face and making it bigger. 

I’m over 40. If your type face is 10 points or below I’m squinting and I’m in pain and I’m like oooh. You know, I’m not reading the copy. So, do the web 2.0 thing and boost up your copy. It’s okay to have copy run below the fold. 

You don’t have to make your type face tiny so that you can get all your copy above the fold.  You know, if it’s good copy, and it’s relevant to me, I’m going to keep on reading. But I’m not going to keep on reading if I’m squinting and I can’t see it. 

Boost your point size. Clarify and simplify that page. It’s often a very hard thing to do politically again because you may have three different departments who all think they should have their gizmo on the page, too.

Anna:  Right, right. I love the point size point because you know it’s just like you said. People try and cram it all in or they’re afraid to go big with their fonts because they think it’s going to push the page big. But,  sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. I couldn’t agree more. Love it.

Anne: Yeah.

Anna:  So I’ve been wanting to ask you this because whichtestwon.com is such a fantastic site that. Has there been anything surprised you about testing since you launched whichtestone?

Anne: The thing that I ike—and sometimes hate the most—about whichtestwon.com is that every week we’ll post another test — andit’s a real, live test somebody has just run. It might be an ecommerce test or, or a lead generation page test or I mean all different kinds of tests. And each week you have to look at the two pages to pick from. 

You have to look at the two and you have to choose which one you thought was the test winner, and I can’t tell you how often I’ll get it wrong. Here I am, the expert —  it just goes to show, if you’re designing your website and making monetary decisions by gut or by instinct or even frankly by best practices alone without testing, you’re probably not designing this as the page that’s actually going to get the best results. 

There are times when I’m just dumbfounded. I’m like, THAT WON?? WHAT? But I’ve got to tell you, our head reporter for that site, Natalie, she goes and she looks at the data. We check that a test had conclusive results. We check that the data was statistically done properly.We know what testing platform they used, the whole bit.  

There was once an ecommerce site, and they took their standard ecommerce product page where you get a picture of the product at the left and add the cart thing at the right. I mean that’s an absolutely standard Amazon.com approved layout. In this one site they flipped it, they put the shopping cart at the left and the picture of the product at the right. I’m like that’s so wrong. That won’t work. Everyone’s been trained to click on the right. I was just like there’s no way that’s going to win, and of course that was the winner. [Laughter].

Anna:  Basically, everything has surprised you since launching, whichtestwon.com!

Anne:  [Laughter] I’m like “yes, I knew it,” and I’m very proud of myself, but then the pride, the stuffing gets knocked out me with the next week!

Anna:  Wow. Well, I know our time is nearing an end, and I just want to thank you so much for doing this. I hope you’ll come back again because I do think we could talk all day about this stuff.

Anne:   It would be very easy to.

Anna:  Good, good. Well, everyone listening, thanks for joining us and stay tuned for our next Conversation on Conversion.

Don’t forget you can download can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.

Conversations on Conversion interview with Khalid Saleh

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

This episode features a lively discussion with Khalid Saleh. Here’s a transcript.

Anna:  Welcome back everyone to Conversations on Conversion. I am Anna Talerico and with me today is Khalid Saleh. He is the president and co-founder of Invesp, a long-time e-commerce conversion rate optimization company. Khalid is a frequent speaker, so you probably already know him from his many speaking engagements at events like SMX,  eMetrics, PubCon, DMA, and others. He is a sought-after conversion rate expert, especially in the e-commerce arena so we are really excited to have him today. Khalid, welcome.

Khalid:  Hi, Anna how you doing?

Anna:  Great, I am so glad to finally be sitting down with you on the record to talk a little bit about conversion rate optimization, which as you know has had a bit of buzz this year.

Khalid:  Oh, definitely. It is sort of funny, because back in ‘06 when we used to talk to companies about conversion rate optimization, there was not a whole lot of focus on it. But I think with the down economy, most companies are starting to see how can we really turn more visitors into actual customers, so there has been tremendous focus on it since last year, actually.

Anna:  And because of this new focus there are a lot of people just getting started. The question of the day seems to be, how do you get started? What advice do you give to marketers who are just getting started with conversion optimization?

Khalid:  There are a few things I think every marketer should keep in mind whenever they’re starting with conversion optimization. First, I always tell marketers to go for small, consistent wins. Those are a lot more important than one time, inconsistent, big wins. 

Lots of times when we work with a client they’re looking for a tremendous number of changes. They want to change everything on their website. The problem with that approach is you do not know what’s going to work for you and what’s not going to work for you. Really, what’s important to you ultimately is to increase conversion rates. It doesn’t matter whether you change a lot of elements or not. You should really evaluate a change on your website by the results, not necessarily by the amount of work you’re investing. 

I was just talking to a client yesterday and we were working on their checkout process. He was expecting a major change with his checkout, but we just tweaked it in a couple of areas. This gave them about a twelve or thirteen percent uplift, and he came back and said, you know, I expected to have to do lots more. 

What I always tell clients is to not evaluate the size of the recommendation. Evaluate the size of improvement, because that’s a lot more important. 

The other thing is, you should probably spend some time really focusing on the analytics because where you start is extremely important. We work mainly with ecommerce websites. Our typical clients have anywhere between ten thousand to twenty thousand items in their catalog, so you can imagine they’re sometimes about two hundred to three hundred category pages. Then there’s the main home page and there’s the checkout process. The question is where you should start because ultimately you have limited time, limited resources, so you need to really pick the right page. 

Analytics experts, consultants, if you have your own analytics team, you should really spend quite a bit of time looking at the numbers story behind the websites to tell you ‘well, here are the areas of the website that are working really well. Here are the areas not working really well.’ And based on that, you will see where you should start. 

Finally, I also tell clients, if you’re just starting with conversion optimization, in the first month or so when you’re deploying your first test- let’s say, whether it is A-B or multivariate, just go for something small. You know, change the button on a call-to-action or just a tagline. 

Ultimately, the goal of that is to get your technical team familiar with the testing technology that you’re going to be deploying and working with over hopefully long term, long period. 

The first couple of months you’re just learning the technology, making sure that it’s integrated and plays nicely with your own ecommerce technology, or whatever technology you’re using on your website.

The first two or three months we call research months where it’s really about figuring out where you should start, deploying small tests, getting really comfortable. The third or fourth month is when you start aiming. 

Anna:  I love the advice to start small, because I think that’s why some companies never get started or they flail around. When you get started small you eventually look back and end up seeing a big body of work that you’ve accomplished without having to bite off everything at once. 

Khalid: Yeah, it’s a lot better to focus on the long term in conversion optimization. What will pay off as opposed to quick gains, or too many changes.

Anna:  Sure, I think biting off too much is probably one reason why conversion programs go off course. What do you think are the top three reasons that conversion programs go off course?

Khalid:  Whenever I’m talking, I’m talking from the lands of ecommerce. Last year we talked to over two hundred, two hundred fifty different ecommerce companies, some of the insurance retailers, top 500, and the consistent thing that we hear from them is they’ve tried conversion optimization. They’ve invested the resources and it did not succeed. 

At some point, I think about half way through last year almost seventy-five percent of the companies we talked to really were turned off by testing. They tell you ‘well, you know you guys talk about it all the time. Tell us we can achieve results but we’ve tried it and it didn’t succeed.’ One of the reasons for that is really not picking the right type of test, whether it is an A/B or a multivariate test. 

We were just talking to a client of ours recently - it’s a huge website. They have about four million visitors a month and they tried to deploy a test. They got to their checkout process and they said you know what, we’re going to optimize the first step of the checkout process. They went ahead and created thirty thousand different combinations from that checkout process.They were deploying multivariate tests.

You know, the theory was ‘what are the chances that those thirty thousand combinations would be beaten by the original design.’ So the test ran for a couple months and low and behold, the original design beats all those thirty thousand combinations. So, just this random guessing, hoping one of the combinations is going to win sometimes really backfires. 

The same client just deployed an A/B test where they have the original, and we gave them two other versions, and both versions are beating the original. 

The other thing that many clients do not think about is having the resources to implement testing. We see it because we’re a consulting company. The clients are ready, they’re excited about testing, but they have not thought about the amount of time it requires or the technical resources to implement the task. That’s very important because they are two big elements in conversion optimization. 

While there is figuring out where you should start optimizing and what you should change,  the other critical part is actually having to do the work. That becomes an issue because yes, there is excitement about conversion optimization to start with, but that sometimes fizzles out because your IT team and your development team have about a million other things going on, and conversion optimization gets pushed back…especially the first few months. 

The last thing is stopping too quickly. Too many companies try conversion optimization for a couple of months and they don’t see the results and they say you know, we’ve tried it. We’ve had enough. Let’s just move on to the next thing. 

I always tell clients if you’re going to do conversion optimization for less than four months, you probably should not even plan on it. Four months. Give it time. Give it its due process. 

Anna:  I love that actually. I always say at least three months, so I’m going to change mine to at least four months because I think you’re right. You’ve got to start with a minimum commitment and four months sounds like a great one. I’m also glad you mentioned resources because I’ve been doing these Conversations on Conversion for a while and there’s not been a lot of talk about resources, and I almost think it’s a bit of our dirty little secret in the industry. It is a lot of work, whether it’s with technical resources, whether it’s the strategy, whether it’s the analytics, or design. You know there’s so many different types of resources that could be part of the conversion program, and I think you’re absolutely right that not being realistic about the resources is probably one of the biggest downfalls of programs. I’m really glad you brought that up.

Khalid:  Yeah, we always tell our clients ‘If you want to have a successful conversion rate optimization program, understand it’s a collaborative effort.’ There are the conversion optimization consultants or the in-house team, and there is the technical team, and there’s the SEO. Really, everybody has to come together for conversion optimization to succeed.

Anna:  Definitely. So, I know this is a question you get a lot too, and I always hate to ask it because we all know there’s no magic bullet, but I do like to give people tips. Here we are talking about how much work it is to optimize, and this is sort of the flip side of that coin. There are so many little things that we can do to help move the conversion rate forward but if somebody could just do one thing today to help with the conversion rate, what do you think that one thing should be?

Khalid: We’re working on a book for O’Reilly on conversion optimization and one of the metrics that we use, which I think is really helpful and not many people talk about, is what we call visitor abandonment rates.  I’ll talk about it from an ecommerce perspective. 

If you think about an ecommerce website, the first way that you can tell a person is engaged with your website is whether that visitor is adding an item to their cart. So look at the percentage of visitors who are not even doing that simple interaction. 

Let’s say you have a subscription website or let’s say for example you have a website that offers white papers. The very first level is a person maybe filling a form. What is the percentage of people who are not even taking that simple action? It is not necessarily a full conversion. For example, on an ecommerce website that gets fifty thousand visitors where only three thousand are just adding items to their cart, that tells you that there are major issues on the site, whether it is a site design, navigational issues, and product pages. So those are big things that you can focus on and really kind of start the war against low conversion rates with before even going and figuring out the other aides of conversion.

Anna:  Love that. Definitely. So, one final question before we wrap up: what do you think are some trends or advice that may be overhyped or just plain wrong? You know, what should we think about avoiding in conversion optimization?

Khalid:  I always talk about the best practices, the policy of best practices. Really, what works for one website might not work very well for your website. I recall working with a fairly large ecommerce company back in the late ’90s and they competed directly with Amazon. The methodology there was ‘let’s copy whatever Amazon does’. So as Amazon introduced a new design, basically our technical team would be working on that. While Amazon reported at that point in time a ten twelve percent conversion rate, that other company had less than a two percent conversion rate. So really, what works for one website does not always work for you. 

I’ll give another example. This was featured in the Internet Retailer website. One of the tests we did with one of our clients occurred during the checkout process. We added what we call an ‘assurance center’ where we said okay, what are the biggest fears, concerns, doubts that a visitor might have that would stop them from actually moving forward with the checkout process. For that one client, just merely adding a simple assurance center helped reduce abandonment rates on their checkout by about thirty-two percent. Since then, lots of consultants started saying well, an assurance center is the way to go. But the truth of the matter is we’ve had other clients where adding an assurance center actually caused reduction in conversion rates. So ultimately, yes, there are best practices but you have to see what works for your website and test it and then go from there. 

Anna:  What a great note to end on. I could not agree with you more , and that’s why when doing presentations or webinars, we’ve got to rely on those practices because we’re spreading the word, but always tell people to take them with a grain of salt. Just test and experiment on your own site because there are definitely no hard and fast rules when it comes to optimizing conversions.

Khalid:  Definitely. Definitely.

Anna:  Well Khalid, Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a pleasure to talk to you finally, on the record, and I just want to tell our listeners to please check out Khalid’s site which is invesp.com. And we’ll all keep our eyes out for the book you’ve got coming out with O’Reilly on conversion optimization. That sounds really exciting.

Khalid:  Thank you, Thank you. Pleasure all the time.

Conversations on Conversion interview with Jay Baer

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This was our a great conversation on conversion with Jay Baer.

Anna:  Welcome back to another episode of Conversations on Conversion. Today with us we have a very special guest, Jay Baer. Jay is the president of Convince and Convert. He’s a social media strategist and speaker. I actually stumbled upon Jay’s blog, convinceandconvert.com about a month or so ago. I was stuck there all day reading through his blog and video archives. I just loved what Jay is saying. I love, of course, the name of his blog. Jay’s background is in usability and web development, so there’s not just a singular focus on social, he has a very holistic view of social media and conversion. I knew when I found his blog that he was somebody that you guys would want to talk to as well. So Jay, welcome. 

Jay:  Thanks very much. I am delighted to be here. 

Anna:  Very excited to be talking to you, for sure.  I want to go ahead and dive right in. I remember first hearing the term ‘social conversion’ last year. And I feel like everybody had a different definition of it, so I’d love to know what you think people mean when they use the term, and how you think it should actually be defined? 

Jay:  Well, if you asked 50 people what they meant by social conversion, you’d get 47 different answers. If you ask 50 people what they mean by social media, you’d probably get 50 different answers, so I’m not sure that you’re going to find a lot of consistency. What I think a lot of people are referring to when they say social conversion now is converting people to fans or followers. To say okay, this particular person has now signed up to read our blog, or follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on Facebook, and I guess that’s okay. 

You know, if you don’t have any other success metrics I guess that will work. But I really believe more and more in the notion of a conversion funnel for social media. I think you really need to have a defined set of objectives and a defined set of desired user actions in the same way you would on a website, right? 

I mean what’s the point of having a Facebook fan page if you don’t really have a plan for what to do with those people once they get there. So, I would certainly hope that we can get to the point where social conversion is really a funnel, and not just a single action. 

Anna:  Right, it’s like a step towards some ultimate goal.

Jay:  Towards something.  Because all you have to say is ‘I like this brand’, and you’re going to be tagged as a fan. So that bond is even less rigorous in the future than it has been in the past. That doesn’t really have any direct business objective correlation, right? We have 18,000 people who have clicked one button at some point in their life to say that they like this brand. That’s not exactly a blood oath. 

So hopefully people can say, “look, if we’re going to get involved in Facebook, or Twitter, or a blog, or YouTube, or any other sort of social outpost; why are we doing it? Are we trying to drive them back to the corporate website where they’ll fill out a lead form or purchase something? I mean what’s the point of this exercise?”

I really see most of the social outposts as sort of your advanced guard.

They’re the places where you are going to interact with individuals perhaps for the first time. But if you’re not doing a good job of moving them from those social outposts back to whatever is your social home base, the whole thing is really a colossal waste of time. 

Anna:  Yeah. And we’re not talking about that as much— bringing them back to the home base. I don’t see enough discussion around that. 

Jay:  A lot of companies are really in social scattershot mode. Where they have got a lot of stuff. They’re doing a lot of stuff. You know? They’re moving fast. And they’re building outposts. And they’re on Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and YouTube. They’re doing all these things, but there’s really no efficiencies there— there’s really no methodology. It’s sort of like “well, we’ve showed up to the party so now we can check that off of our list” and that’s really not the way to go. 

Anna: So what sorts of opportunities are companies missing by neglecting the conversion piece of social? Not converting to a fan or a follower, but converting to something more meaningful than that. 

Jay:  Well I think certainly it helps answer this question that everybody wants to know, which is what is the actual business job of social media. I won’t go as far as to say that ROI is necessarily easy to calculate, because sometimes the trail goes cold at purchase. Certainly you can paint a much more compelling mathematical picture about why you should be involved in social media if you’re paying attention to how your social outpost activity drives people to your home base, and what happens there. Secondly, I think there’s a lot of content deficiencies that most companies are not capitalizing on. What you find today are people saying ‘all right, here’s what we do on Twitter and here’s what we do on Facebook, and here’s what we do on the blog, and here’s what we do on all these other places’. There’s really no unified content creation strategy, or content syndication strategy. They’re treating each of these places as sort of a self-contained silo. That costs a lot of wasted time and effort. 

Anna:  So how do companies transform their social marketing to be more conversion focused then? I mean, I think people will be nodding their heads saying “yes, we need to do that,” but then I don’t necessarily know that they know how to do that. How do companies transform themselves to be more conversion focused in their social marketing and social media? 

Jay:  I think the trick is to turn the whole thing upside down. Say “all right, ultimately, what do you want people to do?” When I do a lot of strategic planning and consulting in social, I say, “Look there’s really only three business imperatives to be active in social media. You’re either trying to drive awareness, you’re trying to drive sales, or you’re trying to drive loyalty.” 

You have to have a real clear-headed picture of which of those is your game, and which game you’re playing. Based on that, figure out whether it’s awareness, sales, or loyalty. Then define what specific precise user behavior is going to make that happen. If it’s sales, obviously it’s buying something. If it’s awareness, it’s people becoming more aware of you and consuming your content. If it’s loyalty, perhaps it’s your current customers telling their friends about you in social media. 

Once you’ve defined those user behaviors, then you can start to build a conversion funnel that says okay, “if ultimately what we want people to do is buy stuff from us online, well first we have to get them to the website.” Well if we have got to get them to the website, how are we going to do that? Well, maybe we can try and find some people on Facebook. Well if we’re going to find them on Facebook, how do we get them to go from Facebook to the website.

So, if you start from an objective and work backwards, it’s much easier to put this together than if you start with “Okay, we have got to do the social media stuff now. Let’s figure out why. “

Anna:  Okay, so then we maybe sort of answered this, but let me just ask it direct: How do you objectively measure social conversions? I think the whole measurement piece of social and social conversion is still vague to a lot of people. 

Jay:  Yeah it is because there are so many different ways to do it. There’s not one answer. I just did a two-hour webinar earlier today on the mass of social media, and it breaks down probably 20 different things that you could measure as key social media metrics, and how to get at each of those data points. For example, one of the things that I talk about is a lot of companies don’t have e-commerce per say. Right? So the transaction occurs offline. I’m a good example. 

You can’t come to my website convinceandconvert.com, and add social media consulting to a cart. You know? Pay now with PayPal, right? It doesn’t really work like that. But there are certainly behaviors on my blog that are indicative of an interest in purchase.  I set up goals in my Google Analytics, things like people visiting my speaking page. People visiting my consulting page. People spending an extraordinary amount of time on my site. Then I track to see how many people who engage in those goal behaviors came from social outposts. 

I run a report every week that says how many people came from what I’m doing on Twitter and looked at my speaking page, or looked at my consulting page, and I use that type of data to understand what my social conversion funnel is, and how to modify my personal behavior on Twitter, and Facebook, and other blogs, etc.

Anna:  It’s almost like the micro-conversion. Looking at those things that lead up to the ultimate action. 

Jay:  Yeah. We’ve got to get past this notion that the only action that matters is a sale. 

Anna:  Right. 

Jay:  That’s ridiculous because there’s a lot of other behaviors that are basically markers for intent to purchase. You’ve got to measure those and then see what social media’s impact is on those behaviors. Because if you only measure sales, you know lead form, fill-outs, that kind of thing, that’s a pretty blunt object. 

Anna:  YSo you mentioned tracking things that are happening on the site. People getting to a certain page, or spending a certain amount of time. Should companies be tracking engagement in terms of the number of followers that are re-Tweeting them, or talking to them in social channels? Are there other sorts of things that happen off-site that we should be measuring outside of just the number of followers we have, the number of fans we have? 

Jay:  Definitely. I think if you were looking at awareness and maybe even loyalty as your core business objective, there’s things like content engagements. How much are people passing your content along via re-Tweets and diggs, and bookmarks. All that kind of data I think is important. I use PostRank for that type of calculation. I think theirs is a really good company and great software. That’s certainly one to look at. 

I think things like share of conversation, which is a report that I’ve been running a lot for clients now that I like. That takes the notion of share of voice, which is how many times somebody talks about your brand versus your competitive brands in social media. It takes that report and adds some depth to it. It says how many people talk about our brand in the context of a key word that’s important to us versus our competitors. For example, if you are a university, you would run a report that says how many people talk about the university’s name and at the same time in their blog posts or their Tweets or what have you. You can sort of run those share of conversation reports to get an understanding of how well your brand is doing versus your competitors in terms of being the thing that people talk about when they’re trying to answer a particular question or a particular user need. 

Anna:  Got youit Well, I know our time’s running short. But let me just ask you one other thing before we end. If there was, and I hate these kind of questions, but I’ve got to do it because everybody wants to know. If there was one thing that somebody should go and do today within their social program to make it more conversion focused, or more measurable, what would that be?

Jay:  I would literally take a piece of paper and a pen, and create a diagram which shows how optimally a user would move through your social media presences to get to whatever action you want them to do. Take a marker and say here’s a circle for Facebook. Here’s a circle for the blog, YouTube, et cetera. Now let’s draw a little line that shows people moving between these different outposts. Ultimately at the end of the machine, it spits out revenue for you. Draw it out.

It’s so much easier to understand how social media inter-relates between social outposts, and from social outposts to the other things you’re doing in online marketing and traditional marketing when you actually look at it visually. I really recommend people go through that process. It will take you two minutes, and it will help you a ton. 

Anna:  Fantastic. Well, good, now everybody listening has an action item to go do right now. 

Jay:  Go. Go do it, and you know what? Post them up. Do it for yourself and then upload them. 

Anna:  Yeah. 

Jay:  We’ll take a look at them and we’ll talk about it. 

Anna:  That’s great. And since you gave a shout-out to PostRank, I’ve got to tell you that we have been using them too. We love their service. PostRank is fantastic for sure, and let me remind everybody who’s listening, convinceandconvert.com, Jay’s blog is awesome. So much fantastic content there. Take a quick peek over there, and you’re going to quickly become a fan yourself. I’m a loyal reader now. Jay, I am so appreciative for you taking the time out of your day to share your thoughts on social conversion. Thanks for joining us. 

Jay:  You bet. Sincerely my pleasure. Happy to do it again whenever, and thanks everybody for listening. 

Don’t forget you can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.

Conversations on Conversion interview with Scott Brinker & Justin Talerico

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This conversation is with Scott Brinker and Justin Talerico, co-founders of ion interactive.

Anna:  Welcome back to another Conversations on Conversion podcast. I’m Anna Talerico and I have not one, but two very special guests with me today. Scott Brinker and Justin Talerico who are co-founders of ion interactive. I guess I should also say that they are my business partners. We work together here at ion interactive, and a podcast series on conversion optimization would not be the same without them. So without further ado, I’d like to jump right in with some topics for our discussion today. I know this will be a little bit of a different format for us because we have two guests. But you know, I like a ‘free for all’ so just jump right in as you see fit. My burning question to start off with: is 2010 panning out to be the year of conversion rate optimization? You know we started off the year with a lot of buzz about that, a lot of articles, blogs, et cetera. I’m just wondering do you guys agree? What are your thoughts on that? 

Justin:  Sure. This is Justin. I’ll kind of jump in on that. I prefer to think of it as the first year of the decade of conversion rate optimization. Certainly we’ve had economic forces and marketing forces that have sort of taken us to the point where everyone just demands the efficiency, that they rightly should, out of their marketing, and out of their communications programs. It’s nice to see the market kind of coming around to recognize that it’s important. That what really matters is what we put in, what we get out, how satisfied folks are with the messages we put out there. And wow, yeah, it’s the year of conversion rate optimization, but it’s just the beginning. 

Scott:  Yeah, I would agree with that. This is Scott, and I guess maybe just to add in on that is if I step back a bit and take a look at the macro forces that are happening here in marketing, I would say 2010 is perhaps even more so the year where marketers take the bull by the horns as far as this new wave of marketing technology goes. 

I mean there’s so many innovative software-as-a-service type offerings out there now that marketers don’t need IT for. They can basically try it, subscribe to it, get it in their hands in a matter of hours, and actually apply it in a way that they can measure it with ROI to really deliver great results. Certainly conversion optimization and landing page management is one of the hottest fields for this generation of software-as-a-service offerings. But there’s a lot out there, I mean, marketing automation, social media monitoring…there’s so much out there now that it’s basically impossible for marketers to ignore this opportunity any longer. So this is the year!

Anna: What do you think the biggest opportunities are for conversion optimization? I know there’s  probably a lot that marketers aren’t yet taking advantage of. What do you think some of the biggest opportunities are? 

Scott:  Well I think there’s plenty. The two that come to mind first would be this idea of optimization beyond the website. I wrote a post on Search Engine Land a month or so ago about the five rings of optimization. Marketers certainly do have their core website, but they now have all these other properties out there in the web. Out in social media, they have Facebook fan pages or YouTube channels. In particular what’s most exciting to us is of course this world of landing pages and conversion optimization and microsites where marketers can do these very tailored experiences without having to adhere to really any of the constraints that core websites typically live under. So that’s a great opportunity. I think the other is this idea of multi-step landing pages, specifically using explicit behavioral choices to really tailor the experiences that respondents have. 

One of my favorite books in recent times here is by Stephen Woods, called Digital Body Language. He’s mostly focused on B2B marketing, but one of the points he makes that I think is really essential for landing page optimization is that one of the impacts the Internet has had in B2B marketing and sales is that it’s displaced the role of the consultants of sales persons. I mean it used to be that if I was going to buy something as a B2B buyer, I would call up my sales person and they would come and wine and dine me; they would be my source for information. But that’s changing and it’s changing rapidly. Now buyers are empowered to go on the Internet and do their own research. They want to discover for themselves what the right solution is, and what’s the important information for them to have. But in that process of having the sales person fall out of the loop, it’s really important for marketing to step up to the plate and fill that gap. To start to focus more and more on these mini consultative experiences when people respond to a particular ad, or when they respond to a particular email. I think yeah, that’s a tremendous opportunity for multi-step landing pages to fill that void. 

Anna:  Justin, do you have any other thoughts on what you see as some opportunities we’re missing in marketing? 

Justin:  I think that segmentation which is what Scott was eluding to a lot, is still pretty neglected. The other side of neglect is probably opportunity. The ability to have very, very specific marketing communication conversations with a variety of niche groups within what has traditionally been called your “target”. The ability to have those conversations exists, but how many marketers are actually having them? How many are putting out long-tail landing experiences, long-tail marketing communications that really do cater to these niche audiences? 

Obviously when they do, the benefits are huge, but it’s still a very small minority that actually is getting out to do that. That sort of relates to the second thing for me which is marketers have the ability in 2010 to run a very agile, high-speed practice. They have the ability to run a department. They have the ability to use tools and technologies that keep pace with their markets, but many of them don’t do that. 

It’s not as much a criticism as just noting that it’s taking time for them to realize that they do have these things at their disposal. That they can keep pace, that they’re not beholden to other departments like IT to slow them down or bog them down. They really can do these things. They can take control and take ownership, like Scott said. That they can keep pace with the people in their markets, and the technologies at their disposal. They can actually move faster than basically they can keep up. When they realize that, and when they take that internally and they say wow, we can really do this, we can put out this long-tail stuff, and we can have these very niche conversations that are very, very successful for us. They yield a lot of results. I think when they come to terms with that and they realize that it is within their power, that’s really when they tap the potential of what’s going on today. 

Anna: Well that’s exciting! We could probably talk about all of this stuff that you guys have brought up all day, but I did want to ask you a couple more questions. Number one, which is the question I know you guys get all the time: what advice do you give to people who are just getting started with the conversion optimization? 

Justin:  My answer to that is very simple. I think they just need to get started. There’s a lot of organizational inertia against getting these programs going. There’s a lot of, ‘oh it has to be perfect, it has to do this, that, and the other thing’. We were in #CROchat yesterday, and people were talking about review committees within organizations. You know, just to get simple changes made and things of that nature. And my advice to someone who’s just getting started with conversion optimization is actually get started. Get something live. Get some results. Get some feedback from the market, and feel what it’s like to have that in essentially real time— to have your marketing be able to react to that, and respond to that, and test, and analyze, and do all those things that you’ve got the potential to do. Just remember, you can’t do any of it if you don’t get something live. So to me, getting started is about really just getting started. 

Scott:  Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think I would simply build on that. 

My advice would be don’t try to boil the ocean. It’s just insane for getting started. I’d pick something very, very specific. For instance, let’s say it is in search. Narrow it down to that. Say okay, we’re going to focus on something here with our search marketing. And then narrow down to pick a very specific ad group with some very specific key words and ads. Just say okay, this slice of that long-tail, this is what I’m going to do. Then make a couple of really great experiences just for those visitors.

Put yourself in the shoes of people who have typed in those keywords. They’ve seen that ad. They’re clicking on it. What’s the persona that you’re trying to talk to, to really give them the information and the offers that are going to excite them? Take that consultative approach that we were talking about. Make those experiences sing. Make them excel far beyond anything any other competitor is doing on any landing page in that space. Get that win. See the impact it has. Quantify it. Learn from it. You know, use that as your example to champion change in the organization. And then move onto the next ad group, and the next one, and so on. 

Anna:  Isn’t it amazing how when you do that, it does snowball. Pretty soon you can look back on a huge body of optimization work. 

So, why does one program succeed where another might fail? Why does one come in and get a whole program off the ground in a day, and another organization might really struggle with trying to get the ball rolling? Then once the ball is rolling, what are some of the red flags that say this might not be so successful? What are some reasons of failure so people can avoid some of those things. What do you think Scott?

Scott:  Well, there’s certainly plenty of hurdles that people can find in their way. I guess if I was going to pick three to really try and address at the very beginning, the first and foremost would be getting management on board. You need to have the management that you’re working with really see the opportunity and provide the support. Not just in resources, but also in the mandate of the rest of the organization to make it a priority. 

I think what’s sort of related to that is the next place these things seem to get into trouble is because it is a multi-party process to go all the way from the ads, and the emails, through the landing experience, through the final conversion. All it takes is one person in that ecosystem - maybe it’s your agency, maybe it’s your IT department - to basically drag their feet. It’s like the weakest link in the chain. The fastest you’re going to go is the speed of the slowest participant. So to really get everyone in that ecosystem on board and really committed to doing this. I think it’s incredibly important. 

Then the third thing both Justin and I were talking about earlier is this whole idea of this broader set of landing pages and conversion paths being more than just your website. I think the way some people fall down is they say okay, we’re going to do optimization. We’re going to pick a page, let’s say the home page of our website, and we’re going to convert that. We’re going to optimize that in a way that improves its conversion rate. But right away the mission itself is sort of flawed because it’s making the assumption that you can optimize this one page in a way that’s going to please everyone. There isn’t a one page to rule them all opportunity out there so much as it’s about having specific pages for really specific audiences. 

As soon as you shift your world view from saying okay, I’m going to optimize one page to be the ultimate page, to say hey, I’m going to have dozens, maybe even hundreds of pages, each of them incredibly tightly matched to particular audiences and particular messages that I’m putting out in the market, your chances of success increase exponentially. 

Justin:  Yeah, and to run with what Scott said, boy I couldn’t agree more with the lack of executive buy-in. When the senior management — depending on the size of the organization, you can take that as you want, but when senior management doesn’t understand the value proposition of conversion optimization, and they don’t understand the ROI that goes along with that, there is little appreciation for what it can do really for the top line of an organization. 

Then number two for me is what I call death by weeds. It’s focusing on the wrong things. It’s looking at the little things, and somehow turning them into the big things. When those little things become the big things, they generally turn into gigantic road blocks.

Those road blocks can come from IT, or I’ve seen them come from internal marketing folks who think it’s more important to worry about the minutia, that really has no impact on the success or failure of the program. You just get so caught up in that stuff that you lose the forest for the trees. You forget that what you’re working to do is make more people happy with what you’re putting out there. When you make more people happy, more people convert. When more people convert, you sell more stuff. You raise the revenue, and you reduce the expense. And it all goes toward the ROI. 

Then the third thing for me are some basic testing fallacies. I’ve seen this with clients and customers over the years. Serial testing instead of parallel testing kind of goes to what Scott was talking about testing on one page, then thinking that the results of that somehow have an impact on your entire organization, that it just applies over time in the future. That’s generally that’s not the case. Then there are trends versus conclusions. You see folks all the time that look at a trend and a test, not a result; and they make a decision on that trend. So something is moving in a particular direction, and they cut the test short, and they make a decision based on interim data. I can tell you that I’ve seen it time and time again that that data changes over time, and that you have to wait until you have true statistical significance before you use that stuff, otherwise you’re just guessing. You’re spending a lot of money to guess. Big problem. 

Anna:  Yeah. I’ll second that for sure. Well our time has come to an end. You know, I wasn’t sure how having a two-guest format would work, but I loved it. I thought it worked really well. I hope you guys agree, because I’d love to do this again. You know, I could talk to you all day, and I do, but it’s fun to do it on the record once in a while. 

Justin:  Yeah. It’s good to get together. 

Scott:  Yeah. I’m all inspired again. 

Don’t forget you can download can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.

Conversations on Conversion interview with Ben Jesson

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This was our sixth conversation on conversion episode, a lively discussion with Ben Jesson.

Anna:  Welcome back to Conversations on Conversion. I’m Anna Talerico and with me today from a very far away place, is Ben Jesson. Ben is the CEO and co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts based in the UK.

Conversion Rate Experts is a consultancy that helps clients test, specialize, and get the most out of their testing software. Ben, I am really excited to have you on the broadcast today.

Ben:  Really excited to be here. Thanks a lot for asking me, it’s gonna be good fun.

Anna:  Definitely. I am excited to talk to you because you are doing some very exciting things at Conversion Rate Experts.  What do you think is the most exciting thing that is happening with conversion optimization right now?

Ben:  Well, first as a business and also for the industry in general, it’s exciting that conversion optimization seems slowly be going mainstream. We have predicted that this year will be the year for conversion optimization, and this will be the year that everyone starts testing and tuning their websites and really getting to know what their visitors respond to.

The thing that excites us is the recognition that conversion is finally getting. When we first started testing we were paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month for split testing software. Now some of it is free, so there is no excuse in terms of getting started at all, and the community seems to be embracing it and growing. 

You know, there are lots of people sharing their techniques, their ideas, the way they run tests. There are several blogs out there that are extremely valuable. There are some fantastic books out there…conferences…there is even a dedicated conversion conference that Tim Ash is organizing. Websites like WhichTestOne from Anne Holland allows people to see what’s being tested and compare the controls for the winning versions. 

So, I tell you it’s going mainstream. Loads of people are talking about it, sharing, and helping each other. The fact that so many businesses are growing during a recession is due to measurable marketing, testing, what your visitors are responding to. Understanding how to improve your business, without destroying your traffic. So, I think the fact that people are thriving in such tough economic times thanks to conversion, just makes it even more exciting for the future.

Anna:  Yeah, definitely. It’s funny because it’s such a logical concept, conversion optimization, that it does seem that it would have been mainstream a lot longer than it has been. I know what you mean when you say year after year you’re thinking, “Well, this will be the year.” It does indeed seem like 2010 is actually the year, which is exciting.

Ben:  Yes, it does, it feels that way. You go into the conferences now and there are always a couple of panels about conversion and testing and popularizing, and several years ago that wasn’t really the case. Most people were still talking about traffic and acquiring visitors - not so much converting the customer. It is really good to see.

Anna:  You know when things go mainstream what always happens is that you have an influx of new people paying attention to the concepts, techniques, and tactics. What advice do you give to marketers who are just getting started with optimization?

Ben:  My main piece of advice would be to treat conversion as a process, rather than a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process of knowing what to test and then testing it. 

Would it be easier if I just quickly run through the processes that we would follow and we would advise events to begin to follow?

Anna:  That would be great, definitely.

Ben:  By far, the hardest part about testing is knowing what to test in the first place. The tools allow you to do things that are absolutely amazing, but the tools are only as good as the ideas that you’re testing in the first place. 

The big mistake that most people make when they start is that they get going is they throw a little bit of idea into the tool, they don’t get great results, and they give up because it didn’t work out for them. It is such a shame when that happens, because they focus on the tools and technology rather than knowing what to test. One thing that we advise people to do is take a step back and think of conversion as a process, not a one-time event. The first thing that we would tell them is to think about the strategy, their long-term strategy for their business. What are their goals? What is their KPI? What are they hoping to achieve? Not just with the website, but with the whole business. Keeping that in mind when you’re designing your tests, you want things that will actually help your business to grow, not just measure metrics in isolation. 

Once you know how you want your business to grow, you need to make sure that you’ve got all the right measurements in place, so that you can actually measure improvements in your business. Making sure that you have the right KPI, making sure that you are constantly reviewing how your business is performing, and where your website fits into that. 

Once you’ve kind of got the roadmap for what you are trying to achieve, the next step is to figure out which areas of the business to work on first. Web analysis will really help you identify the areas of your website that are failing at the moment, and usability will as well. Once you know which areas of the business you are going to start working on, it might be your home page, your product page, your shopping cart, your thank you page, or your user refer a friend program. As long as it’s an area where you can make quick measurable, meaningful changes. 

The next step is to figure out why people don’t convert, and I think it’s kind of obvious, but you can’t fix a problem until you know what the issues are in the first place. We need to figure out why aren’t people converting, why aren’t they taking actions. 

In our experience, you can follow just three questions that will lead you to really good test plans. The first question is this visitor ripe for the action that I am asking them to take? Lead quality is ultimately the first place to start. You need to make sure that the people who are actually landing on that page of your website are qualified enough to take action.  Look at your different traffic sources, look at repeat visitors and new visitors, look at branded search phrases versus generic search phrases, look at referral traffic versus search traffic and figure out who are the best quality prospects. Who are the best quality leads? What can we learn from them? Who are the poor quality prospects? Who are the poor quality leads and what can you learn from them? 

Really get a good handle for who is arriving at the website and quite simply, get the right people at the right time that align with your business goals and your business strategy. 

Once the visitors are actually on the site, there are two things that tend to trip them up. The first one is user experience. Assuming that your visitor is a qualified prospect. all websites suffer from user experience issues. Those are visitors who come to the website and who want to take action, but for whatever reason, they are prevented from taking action because the user experience is too difficult for them. You know, the copyrighting doesn’t make sense, they click on the wrong thing, they have errors on a form, it doesn’t load quickly enough in their browser. it crashes in their browser, they give up go and have a drink and forget that you ever existed. We find that there’s a lot to understanding the user experience; figuring out what’s going wrong and than split testing the corresponding fix.  A great book is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.”  Then there are great sources like ClickTale and Crazy Egg that give you additional insight into how people are actually navigating the websites. 

Once you’ve got a good handle on the user experience issues, the next thing you need to address are those visitors that are qualified prospects but for whatever reason they simply aren’t persuaded to take the action that you want them to take. They are not persuaded to read your headline. They are not persuaded to click on your add to cart or enter their credit card details, they are simply not persuaded to do what you want them to do. That is a tough thing to fix, because most of your website visitors come and go without any level of interaction. You don’t understand why they came to the website. You don’t understand what went wrong. You don’t understand what their objections were, and they leave and show up in your web analytics as a unique visitor that clicked around a few pages and than left, without taking action. We recommend that you put in as many feedback mechanisms as possible, to understand why your visitors aren’t converting, to collect objections, and than to split test the corresponding objections. 

If your prospects don’t believe your product works, than you need to test content that shows that your product works, you need to show demonstrations, testimonials, videos…Understanding and gathering objections is a really critical part of the process, but it is often overlooked just because it’s so difficult to get that level of feedback from your visitors. We recommend things like usability testing on your actual prospects. Exit surveys. 4Q and Kampyle for people to leave comments on your website, survey your customers and ask them why they really didn’t become customers. 

Just have a good understanding of who your visitors are, what they want, what their objections are, and what their concerns are and how you can help them overcome those objections.

The next step really is to list all of your user experience issues, list all of the common objections, and create content that overcomes those obstacles. Then plug that content into a split testing package and measure which of the things increases your conversion rate the most. It’s like a compass that steers your business. You are constantly testing what your customers are telling you is wrong, and you are then testing this on all of your visitors. Constantly look at what is working and see if you can create bigger and bolder tests based on what’s working. Constantly look at what is not working and understand what is not working and than stop wasting your time on that part of your sales message. 

I just realized that that was quite a long-winded answer, sorry.

Anna:  No, actually I am glad that you went through that, it was great. We can boil it down to asking ‘is it usable’, ‘is it persuasive’, and than move into the constant testing. I think it was very helpful, actually. I love that you start with, “Is this the right visitor for what I am expecting a visitor to do?” Because I actually think that’s often overlooked. We look at pages and we talk about what to do on those particular pages, but you know it really is about stepping back and saying, “Who is landing on this particular page or who is coming to this site and how can we make sure that what we are asking them to do is appropriate for where they are, in terms of their expectations, etc.?” 

What do you see as some of the common obstacles that you or your clients directly face when they are getting their testing program started? How do they overcome some of those challenges or obstacles?

Ben:  Yes, I would say that the big picture is creating an experimental culture within a business. For decades most businesses operated on ideas that come from within the organization. Avinash actually says, this kind of HIPPO opinion, that is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion,  that gets implemented in the business. 

One thing that we encourage is to create a kind of experimental culture within the business. Because we know that within a culture, you can often hit obstacles, and you need buy-in from many different people within an organization. 

Conversion is not about just the tools - it is not just about the copyrighting and the messaging, which is marketing -  its not just about the product itself, which is the product development team -  its about bringing all of these things together and making them kind of work in harmony. It’s creating a culture where people are always looking outside of the business for ideas, and being brave and bold and not worrying too much.

Start to think of your business as an experiment rather than a fixed way of doing things. Don’t just test your favorite ideas, test things that are happening in the markets or other industries. 

When people in the company object to the changes that you are making, just remind them that it’s just an experiment, that you are just doing it to see how your visitors will respond. You can’t damage the business because you never implement something that doesn’t win. If it doesn’t work, fine we learned that it doesn’t work and we won’t waste any time on it in the future. If it does work, we’ve just grown the business with the productivity. Giving the experiment a mind set is important, because once everyone is excited and involved in the project, the obstacles are never really that big of obstacles. 

Anna:  You said a little negative there in your answer that I thought was interesting, which was, “Don’t be afraid to fail.” I find that interesting because more and more of our customers who use our tool are expecting almost every challenger to win. It’s a funny expectation and I wonder if it comes from so much focus on how effective testing can be, that we have almost brainwashed people into thinking every test will be a winner and it’s just not the case. As you have mentioned, as long as you are coming away from the failure with understanding why and what to do next, than it’s still a win, even if it didn’t change the conversion rate.  

Ben:  Absolutely, don’t be scared for a test to fail. As you long as you learn from your experiments, you can make just as much money from the winners as the losers Again I use the expression, split testing is like having a compass that steers your weakness in the right direction. 

A quick example: we were working with a client that has a really low cost product, and they make their money from the usage of the product. The product was really cheap on the front end and we were always saying, what if it were cheaper? Would that on the whole be better for the business? And people were saying, let’s decrease the price by five dollars, ten dollars…We said, “Let’s just try something crazy, let’s try free.” “Let’s totally remove the barrier of the price on the front end and see what happens.” 

So we ran a split test for a free product, a very low end product and free didn’t win. The test never reached statistical significance in months, and we thought, ‘wow, what if we hadn’t of tested this?’ First of all we might have made all of the products free, which would have put a lot of risk on the company, and would have affected the cash flow of the company, but also it wasn’t what our customers wanted. It didn’t overcome one of their objections, so we kind of sat there and we said, “All right than, the low end price of this product isn’t an issue since you know free didn’t win,” so, let’s go the other way and let’s look at up selling and cross selling. Maybe the product is too cheap in the first place, and we can actually manage to come up with packages that up-sells to the product, which might have increased the average value. 

We understood why it lost and it pointed us in a different direction, and the following test worked and increased average order volume. So, don’t be afraid of losers.

Anna:  Right. So, I know we’ve got to wrap up, but there’s a couple more things that I wanted to ask you. One of which is, if somebody could just do one thing today to help their conversion rate…what should that one thing be?

Ben:  Oh a good question. One thing…..ah.

Anna:  I know. I never know if I should love or hate that question, but I do seem to get it a lot.

Ben:  It’s a good question and I will stick my neck on the line. There is an unusual thing that you can do which will help you improve your web page. Imagine you are working on a product page on a website or on a sales letter kind of page. Imagine you’re selling that product face-to-face or on the phone. Get a Dictaphone and record yourself, and give the best sales pitch that you can imagine. Try and make a list of all the common objections, all of the common things that people would ask, all of the evidence that they would need, all of the persuasive things that you would need to say and really do it in the privacy of your own office or your own home. Just try and sell the product face-to-face, using your voice not the keyboard. Then compare what you just said to what’s going on your web page. 

Anna:  Oh yes, I love that.

Ben:  So compare what you said to what’s currently on your web site and look for content that you have said out loud, but isn’t on your website. Look for what is missing. 

One of the first things we say to our clients when we speak to them is, ”sell me what you are trying to sell your visitors.” We record the call and than we play it back to them and say, “Hey it just took you seven minutes to persuasively sell me on the benefits of your products but yet when I read your copy on your web page, it literally takes me 45 seconds, so what is missing?” If you believe that you need seven minutes to sell it face-to-face, why is your website only taking 40 seconds. 

Anna:  Interesting.

Ben:  Compare the difference in how you would sell it face-to-face and how you are selling it on your website. Quite often it is shocking the difference.

Anna:  Yeah, I love that. Okay,  I’ve got to switch gears and I am dying to know, because everybody is so excited about the site that you just launched: whichMVT.com. I would love to know what went into that and why you guys decided to do it.

Ben:  Okay, it’s a story that goes back a long way. Myself and Carl, who co-founded the business, we ran a company’s website that sells products on-line, so we have background in running a web business. We had never worked in a consultancy before we built this one, so, our background is in physically doing what we talk about. We tried desperately to out source our conversion project. When you are running a business, there are so many things going on that you quickly want to identify a vendor or solution, and out source it. Then you just have to oversee the project rather than take personal responsibility for it. When we were shopping around (this was back in 2004/2005), we were shopping around for multi-variate testing software from different vendors, there was just no where to go to get a good overview of the pros and the cons of the different tools out.

Back then there were maybe only five companies at the most, and they were all fairly similar in terms of price and features. So, you kind of go with the one with the best customer recommendations. The one thing that we found, as the market has grown and people like Google entered the market with a free tool, lot’s of people are saying, “Hey you’ve Google’s tool here and it’s free, then you’ve got something Omniture Test and Target, for example, which is thousands of dollars a month” and many others.

Most people out there don’t know that they exist, because they have never been listed all in one place.  First of all, it was something that we wished we would have had back in 2005, and than after we started the consultancy business, its one of our most frequently asked questions, ‘which tool should I have?” “where should I start?” Then we thought, if we are going to solve this problem for our clients, we might as well solve it for everyone else as well and make the information publicly available. So we spent some time speaking with vendors about their products and about the tools. We’ve had demos, we surveyed people, and customers can leave reviews on the web site as well. We are totally impartial. We don’t profit from this. There is no bias. All of the reviews are from reviews of the software. All of the product information is from the vendors themselves and we are just kind of keeping it organized in a useful way so that people can actually get started with this. Because we are so passionate that people starting to run tests, we try and do everything we can to help them.

Anna:  Yeah. It’s fantastic. We’re so excited that you guys did it and I think again, the industry really needed it.

I wanted to thank you again for coming, and I wanted to remind our listeners that you can find Ben’s company at Conversion-Rate-Experts.com. It is located in the UK, and works with companies on conversion rate optimization.  Ben, thank you so much for coming today, I really appreciate it.

Ben:  It’s been a pleasure, thanks a lot Anna. 

Don’t forget you can download can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.