#2 Value Propositions, Usability Testing, CRO vs. SEO, CLV

We are going live and I think we are live. Hello everyone. Another week CRO live hour. This is K. Simba Duvet. Okay with that. Let's see. We have a new intro that we're going to do today. Hello everyone. By the way, I missed the change that we've done between this one and the old one. Or my.

I think. Yeah, I'm not sure. I. I think we are like kind of like freezing. Is it me or is it.

I'm freezing still?

Yeah, you're freezing like big time.

Hold on. Oh, I'm freezing. Ah, man, again, I am freezing. So let me see. That's. I hate when that happens because guess what happened to me last time when this happened. I had to re record the whole live hour. Not a very pleasant experience to go through. I am freezing. I can see myself freezing. This is absolutely horrible. Let me see.

Is it because of like maybe streamyard or.

I don't know if it's because of streamyard or because when we use like.

Other platforms it just works quite well.

Yeah. But you know what it's telling me like, you know, connection unstable. If you are on WI fi, try plugging your router, moving closer to it. I am so close to my router it is not even funny. But am I still freezing or like just. The quality of the connection is not that great.

Yeah, the quality is not that great.

Yeah, I think that will improve a bit by bit. At least that's my theory. But okay, so we have people watching us so. And they're like we're not here to hear about your connection and it's lack of stability. Having. Having said that, Simba, how is. How was your week?

Interesting week. Like just any other week. So many lessons. Did some few interviews for the one of the articles that we're working on. It's always like an interesting thing to do. Like whenever I interview someone outside of invisp to talk about like their processes. Oh, now, now your. Your video is getting better. So magic. So yeah, that's. That's it. Did some lessons, launched some few campaigns and I'm still checking those and seeing how they perform. So. Yeah, how about yours?

Well, before I talk about mine because you'll get to hear me talk for a while I thought was interesting because that's something that by the way, and I'd love for you to talk about kind of the evolution of content marketing. Yeah. I mean you. You've been doing it now with invest for what, three years? Three. Three years, three months and one week. How about that? Yeah. Talk to us about the evolution because content marketing is at the core of how we establish our brand. I don't know if it's at the core of the business and generating business for us, but definitely that's how people know the investors brand. There's about, I don't know, 100,000 visitors that come to the blog every month talk to us about the evolution of content marketing. How has, how has it been in the last three years?

That's a very good question. I'll talk, I'll talk about it like from my own perspective, from how I have been seeing it like writing content, producing content for invesp. So by content like we are referring to articles because that's what I've been like doing for quite a long time before we even like started looking at podcasts. Podcasts and videos. So I started like I was coming from, from a journalism background, didn't know anything about conversion optimization. The very first day that I joined invesp, like I didn't know what conversion optimization was. I had like a brief just to prepare myself for the interview you so that I get the job.

So, so I, I still, by the way, that's a whole other conversation because I still remember your interview because you interviewed with me. You interviewed with Hadij at that point and Gulchin. Correct. Like, you know, so you interviewed with three different team members.

Yep. So I came in and as, in fact I, I was hired like as a content writer, content editor, something like that. And my first article that I wrote was about Google Analytics and that was one of the most overwhelming articles that I've ever written because one, I didn't like get to understand exactly what was happening. I just knew that with Google Analytics there are so many reports in it and I didn't know like what kind of metrics, which are important, which are not, which are less important. So yeah, that's okay. That's a story for another day. So I started like working for, on articles, writing articles, interviewing internal team members before I even like went out to interview external people. And it was just like focusing on writing opinion, opinionated articles. You know, I wasn't like much focusing on SEO or something like that. So with time, as I started to grow, I started like to do other things besides. Okay. Like things like content distribution, you know, and by distribution I just mean like maybe writing different formats of the same article and sharing it on, on different platforms. So I can say like those are the things that like that's how I've been evolving. And with time I started also Learning about SEO writing and all those kind of things and trying to introduce that, kind of like to introduce SEO writing to my, to the way I write articles so that I can write articles that are good, powerful, and that also rank. I was also like getting good at interviewing people because there's a difference between interviewing people when working for a newsroom, you know, for a news outlet and when you're doing it, like for content marketing purposes. So yeah, that's. That, that's. I'm not sure if I answered your.

Question, but I answered it. So let me tell you from my perspective. So this is the journey that you went through. From my perspective, it's kind of different stages. The first stage, I'm a content marketer, I don't know anything about conversion optimization. Correct. And oh great. So here I'm starting. So I think of that the first three months of you're really writing, but really more you're learning conversion optimization. Just the very fundamentals of conversion optimization. Did we ever end up using your Google Analytics article?

We never did because it was your first article.

But I don't know if you remember that I, I told you something, which I think I tell you.

Say, I remember, I remember, I remember. Maybe it's not like the same thing, but what you told me the first article that I wrote, it was about 6, 000 words, right? And then you told me, like, if you can write this article, this kind of article, you can kind of like write a book. That's what you do. I remember you saying that maybe that's different from what you.

That's different. Like, you know, but I mean, yeah, because we, we used to have these conversations all the time. First, I've learned, don't ask a new content marketer to write a 6,000 word article because guess what, I have to review it and I have to give so many comments. It was just killing me. And then by the way, understandably so because you're like, hey, I'm just learning about this topic. And it's just like I'm a freshman in college. You just gave me the book and just told me to write a, like, you know, a paper about it. So that, that's one thing. But I think like, I usually try and prepare our content marketers and tell them, listen, since you don't know the topic, you're probably six to eight articles I'm not going to use anyways. They're there just like, you know, I don't want you not to write because I think writing is important and you want to keep that skill going and like, you know, kind of like we hone in and, and to me as a content marketer, there's two pieces. There's the information and then there's the presentation of the information. Correct. Like the writing style and whatnot. Because there's specific style that I like. I don't know if it works for people, but kind of breaking the sentences and, and things like that. So that's the first stage, learning looking as like, oh, what's going on with CRO? And then the next stage, I think about six months usually to about a year and a half. There's still like in lots of feedback. Here's how this should be, here's the topic here. And then I think you moved into the stage. I'm like, hey, like let's start interviewing internally. Correct. Let's interview people internally. So you like, you know, you get their opinion, you enrich your articles and then maybe, oh man, like, you know, time flies. It's been two years ago. I'm like start interviewing externally and it takes a while. Correct. To push. I was like, we gotta do like external interviews because we. You don't have to be an expert at every topic. You're right. You're not going to be an expert. Correct. On each one of those houses. But you can interview experts and you can curate articles from them. And I think that that has been kind of like the transition there from one stage to the next. I don't know if you feel it's the same way, but.

Yeah, but you know, one of the things that I was talking to one of our like content marketers I think yesterday about the interviewing external people because I remember like the first ones that I, the first interviews that I used to do, they would last for about six minutes because I didn't know like how to even like ask follow up questions to whatever you, you he would have said or should have said. So I'll just go into the interview with that maybe six questions that I have and then about seven, eight minutes I'm done. So it takes some time to kind of like you first have to have maybe an understanding of how all this thing works. Today I had like an interview with Jordan from booking.com and I. It's one of the conversations that I enjoyed because I was like understanding exactly what he was saying, asking follow up questions and everything. So it was kind of cool.

That is awesome. Yeah. I mean we did the jobs to be done training earlier this week. Earlier yesterday. Yep. So it's fascinating to me by the Way Simba. When, when I look at the interviews that we did and this is us interviewing, you know, customers of our clients, the companies that we work with. Oh gosh. And we've been doing it now for like five years maybe. But when I look back at the first interviews, we also didn't know how to do follow up questions. Some of those were, were embarrassing. But it's one of those things that you have to get started and you'll get better at it as long as you're sitting back. Fine tuning. I mean there are people by the way who will do the interviews and they'll still do the same bad interviews over the years. It's like two. Couldn't you figure that like, you know, it could improve because to me there's two goals for the interview. One is like, okay, let me get a piece of information. More powerful is that personal connection. Correct with the person, you know. So it can be, it can be very powerful. So that's awesome. That is cool. I'm excited. I'm excited actually about the, is that the article on the culture of experimentation.

You'Ve just like it was supposed to be a secret then you've just said.

It now you know, you know, let's put it this way my friend. The beauty sometimes of having a link LinkedIn live where there is less than. I don't know how many people are watching us. Right. I discovered by the way, the metrics are not very accurate. But it's okay, we can reveal this a small set, you know, and you guys will put it together. Awesome. And I think, but, but here's the thing. I think there's a couple of really interesting interviews also coming down your way as well. So it should be, it should be fascinating. Awesome. So what do we have on deck this week?

Okay, so this week we have a couple of questions. I think they, we have about six questions this week and most of them they about conversion optimization. I see just a few tests about a B testing. So it's going to be interesting session.

Okay, okay, let's, let's have at it.

Okay, sure. So the first question that we got this week is to how do you sell CRO to stakeholders?

And you had to start with the most difficult question first. But okay, that's fine. I don't think you only have to sell CRO to stakeholders. You have to sell CRO to everybody in an organization. All it takes is somebody who does not believe in an experimentation or conversion rate optimization for the whole program to slow down or come to a screeching Halt. There are certain programs, marketing programs that get executed by a single person and SEO writing, content, publishing, it, that's, that happens really easily. Or content piece of content marketing, that could happen also. Like, you know, a single person can put it together and publish it. CRO or experimentation, on the other hand, it's a multi disciplinary process. There's lots of teams who are involved. At the minimum, you have the analysis piece, you have the design piece, you have the development piece, and then QA and then the release. There are many things that happen. The more people that get involved in a process, the more chains you have in a process, the higher the chance it is for it to slow down or break. You're introducing more points of failure into, into the process. So over the years I have learned that before we start an experimentation program, we have to have a very clear conversation with both upper management and the people who are going to be running the project. The concerns of somebody who is looking at the day to day, who is in the trenches dealing with experimentation program are tremendously different than the concerns of upper management. Upper management ultimately probably has specific goals, KPIs that they are looking to accomplish quarter after quarter in my experience. And different people will look at this differently. But usually your KPIs are around your market share. Correct. Sales and positioning and branding, how people perceive you, the lifetime value that you're trying to get out of, of your customers. They're always influenced by the market situation that you're in. They're always influenced by your competitors. They're always influenced by internal, internal factors. Your day to day team that is working on an experimentation program has completely different concerns. Correct. They might be worried about how is this going to impact my design, how am I going to release this code, how am I going to maintain the code? So completely different, different conversations that you must have at the upper management level, the conversation and a fruitful conversation around the KPI. And how does an experimentation program help you achieve the goals that you are trying to achieve? Because every experiment that we launch should have a way to support that top level KPI that an upper management person is concerned for. If an experimentation program is working completely separately in a different area and doesn't support what the executive is looking at and what the executive cares about, that program has a good chance of failing at the end. So first you want to attach your program to the specific KPI and that is very critical. Second, there are enough case studies out there that show that experimentation is not a choice at this point. It's a way of doing business. And you have to be able to to slowly build the mindset of upper management and move the mindset of upper management towards that. It's like nowadays in 2022, everybody expects to have project managers. Everybody expect to have management principles applied to every organization. 150 years ago it was like, hey, do we need to have managers? Do we need to actually structure teams this way? It was not a fact of life. You move forward like 150 years, it's a fact of life. The same is experimentation. Right now is maybe 15 years ago it was just like, what is that altogether? Nowadays you have more and more organizations that believe that experimentation and conversion optimization is fundamental to their success. And those who do not think that way are getting eaten by the other companies that are moving a lot faster, executing a lot faster, experimenting a lot, a lot faster. So you need to show some case studies that really helps set the mindset of executives to understand the importance and the value of experimentation. The third thing that I find very valuable, which is sometimes easy to do, sometimes not easy to do, but especially if you're an internal resource, is to try and run a couple of ab experiments on new features that you are releasing to the websites, Especially features that maybe the executive is fundamentally interested in, though in, in. So you can, after you run your A B test, you can take those results and sit there and have a very honest and conversation with the executive. Hey, by the way, we ran this experiment just to measure the impact of this new feature. Oh, guess what? There's two possibilities. Correct. There's one possibility that the new feature actually helped us increase like, you know, our revenue and our conversion rate by 10%, 12%. The result itself will sell the program. And at the same time, if you run the experiments and remember the executive is the one who suggested let's say this feature or the care for it. And it shows that, hey, this new feature actually reduce our conversion rate. That's a tougher conversation to have, but an important conversation to have because you can come and sit with, hey, Mr. Jones, we've launched this experiment. I measured actually the impact of this release that we just did and it actually reduce our conversion by 5 by 10%. What do you think? The idea there is not to score a point. The idea there is to show the value of the experimentation program. And I think that's kind of initial step because your goal is to pique the interest of the executive to say, you know what, we probably need to look at this bit more carefully. That's the goal initially and I think if you manage to get them interested, you're having more and more conversations. That is a step in the right direction. Eventually what you want is you want those executives to share some of their ideas in order for us to test them. And when you're, when they're sharing their ideas is like, hey, so where did you get this idea? Maybe he saw it on a competing website, maybe has a hunch about how customers are viewing the product. So you want to also start that culture of experimentation, of asking, hey, where did you get this? Is it worth testing? And then you roll it into the testing program, and then you test it, and then you come back to them and report the, the results. I think culture doesn't happen overnight. Culture has to be built, and you have to be very conscious while you're doing it. You have to follow specific steps. You can't leave it up to chance because there are too many things that could slow down or take the culture in the wrong direction.

Yeah, you said so many interesting things there. And one of the points that I picked out that I like the most, you say, like, experimentation is a way of doing business. Right. Which means, like, it's bigger than marketing, it's bigger than one department. Like, it involves the whole organization to come and do things together, share insights, share the learnings. So one other thing that I think about, experimentation, the way that I see it is also about maybe trying. Maybe that's also another way you can sell it to the stakeholders. Like, it's a way of trying to decrease risks, you know, instead of like, launching like a certain feature or a certain platform without experimenting. So I think of. It's also like another way of.

Yeah, I, I like, I like, I like the positioning of thinking that, hey, experimentation is a way for us to reduce risks. Correct. Whenever you have a business decision, sometimes you're just trying to minimize risk. Other times you're trying to increase benefit. Correct. And at a minimum, if I'm releasing something new to my site, at a minimum, I don't want things to get worse. Correct. My goal is for things to improve. But, yeah, I'll take you to an example. I don't know if you remember this. I think it was New Balance. And this is from back. I don't remember the exact year, maybe 2011, 2012, where they thought it was a great idea to build a new website. They put it together. They release it sometime around beginning of November, before Black Friday. They put it on the new site. They had an old outdated site. They invested a ton of money in the new site, they put it up and their sales took a nosedive. They had the right mindsets, they had the right teams. The design that they produced is absolutely horrendous and people let them know through by their wallet that the design is very confusing. I think it took a couple more months for them to roll back to the old design, by the way. Or they're like, you know, let's. Somebody lost their job, somebody big lost their job and then you sold old site design was, was rolled back as, as the default. And lots of times, by the way, these are conversations that we have whenever we have a company that we're working with and a CMO or a VP of marketing is thinking, hey, let's go ahead and release a new site design. It looks outdated. We need to do this and we need to do that. And we tell them. We've had way too many companies that come to us because they released a new site and their conversion rates dipped. As a matter of fact, one of the things that good CRO companies know and good SEO companies know is that when a company releases a new site, they're probably ideal candidates to work with as for conversion optimization or for SEO, because usually the new site drops the conversion rates and there's a high chance also that the new site will cause a drop in traffic. People don't think about it, oh, you know, they're coming with good intentions, but you're not going to be rewarded for intentions. You know, people don't judge you on your intentions. So yeah, experimentation will help you to minimize that risk and understand exactly what you're walking into as opposed to. Well, yeah, let's just push it out there and just hope it works and just, you know, pray that it works. Not a good way to do business.

Good one. So, yeah, I think you can argue maybe for both ways. I, I totally like understand the way, the way you have explained it because it's also about minimizing risk at the end. On the other hand, like there's also like an opportunity cost of maybe changing things and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, I mean, I cannot tell you how often I, I did a video at the beginning of COVID and is talking about by the way, same concepts then like, you know, the new site design and how much it hurt conversions. And I think I had just released the video and I had a CMO for a large SaaS company ping me and let's say that his name is Andy and Andy said Khaled, we have a major disaster. I'm like what happened? He's like, well we just released the new new homepage design and they're a SaaS company. With E commerce, changing the design of the homepage is not going to impact you a lot. As a matter of fact most, most E commerce companies change the design of the homepage regularly. Like you know these, they shift things. But with SaaS it's not as complex of a site correct homepage about us pricing page, you know, against supporting pages. So the homepage is very critical. Well they changed the design of the homepage conversions to canoes dive. He's like, can you look at the data? And I'm like, well I'm like, I can look at the data but your conversions already dropped. I'm like send me the old page, send me the new page. Let me at least take a look at them. I put the two pages next to each other. I told him don't tell me which is which. I could tell right away which one is which because you can tell that the new page has a nicer design but the old page when it comes to copy has so much clearer. So spot on. You knew exactly what you are getting from them. And I told them, yeah, your, your old page, you know, performance would perform better, much better as a matter of fact. And again it took him, I think about like, you know, actually in that case, like in about four or five days to roll back to the old, to the old design.

That also goes back to one of the topics that we spoke about a few weeks ago about ugly web page converting beta than yeah.

Yeah, I mean like, you know, but, but this is interesting because we're updating the design of FIG PI. It's fascinating to me because I knew exactly what needs to be done. You know, it's just, it's funny when you know exactly what needs to be done and I'm like, you know what, we've got to do it. And to me it's not even about the design in this case because what we did is we just changed the copy completely. So I actually spend the weekend playing with the copy and I had to swallow my pride and say, you know what? Okay, so most people who come and use figpi, they're looking for an alternative. They're typically looking for, for an alternative for Hot Jar or Crazy Egg. They're looking for an alternative for, to vwo sometimes convert, mostly vwo. So I'm like, you know what, let's tell people like, you know, that's hey, you know, we are a lightweight, user friendly, much faster alternative. To hotjar and nvw, Just come out and say it. That's it. That's our headline. And just like enough hits on that point. Because that's exactly the reason if you read our reviews, you will see that most people are switching to us from, from our competitors. They've used a competitor before. So I'm like, you know what, let's just admit that and move on and get it, get it over with. What's fascinating to me, by the way, is looking at the people who are subscribed who are now subscribing to figpi in the last, I would say probably like three, four weeks because we released the plugin, our app on Shopify. For the first two, three months we had one review. Things were just slow. And I'm like, okay, well that probably was not a very good investment. Something happened by us remaining consistent. Something happened. And more and more companies are now subscribing to FIG PI. More and more companies are actually paying for it. And I think over the period of like in the last three, four weeks, we got like, you know, 15 reviews. And I'm like, okay, something clicked. Something is happening. So this is just interesting.

What is that something that happened? Tell us more.

I am not sure what it is that happened. I would love to know. I. I do think that the A B test Wednesdays, which are basically a B test case studies that we publish. I publish it. I had publishes, it's. We do it every Wednesday. I definitely think that peaks people interest. I've gotten a ton of messages of people saying, oh yeah, this is really helpful. What is the platform that you're doing the testing on? And that's really what what I see, I see. By the way, Zach, Zachary and Ahmed joining like, you know, sent us messages. Hello guys.

Okay, so moving on to the next questions because if I keep on like maybe asking will not like get to these questions. So okay, top of mind, right? What are 10 ways that you can do to increase conversions on an E commerce website?

Gosh, why do you pick 10? Can you, can you, can you help me here? Why 10, 15, 20? No, my God, I was thinking like, you know, like three, four. Yeah, yeah. I mean there are several things that you can do to improve conversion rates on E commerce website. But the very first step is to forget about the website conversion rates and instead what you want to do is split your metrics between desktop and mobile. Let's not talk about the website conversion rate. Let's talk about the mobile site conversion rate. Let's talk about the desktop Conversion rate, that's number one. Number two, let's forget about the overall conversion rates, put it aside for a little bit and start thinking about the different funnels that we have on the websites. And to me, an E commerce website has probably five main funnels. Landing pages, correct. And those could be category pages. Category page to product page, product page to the cart, cart page to the checkout, checkout to order confirmation. And then you have also before that, correct, the traffic as experimentation team. I'm not going to worry about the traffic. The traffic team, your performance team, your growth team, whatever you might call them, they're responsible for that. I'm responsible. Post, click after somebody lands. So instead of talking about the conversion rate for the site, I want to look at these different funnels. Category to product, product to cart, cart to checkout, checkout order confirmation. And let's evaluate each one of those and understand where people are struggling. Are we getting enough people to the product pages? Are enough people clicking on the add to cart and are people abandoning the cart or on the checkout? You want to answer those questions because those will tell you where you should focus. Because otherwise an E commerce website has many, many opportunities. But imagine. Yeah. Do you decide to yourself, well, I'm going to focus on my product pages. Great. Except that maybe you don't have enough people coming to the product pages and the problem is happening upstream in the category pages. Well, you probably want to fix. You focus your effort, your effort there. Or maybe your product pages are performing really well. But the cart and the checkout is where people are struggling and we see that, by the way, many, many times. So understand your site metrics. Number three. So that's two. Number three. There's fundamental, there, there is a fundamental question that I ask. Understanding that visitors come from different traffic sources, they land on different pages of the website. Your goal on every landing page first is to tell people you are in the right place. You can trust us. You are in the right place. Because if people land on your website and they're like, what is this? I don't know what this place is. I don't know if I can trust this website. Guess what happens, People bounce. So you want to tell them you're in the right place, you can trust us. And you can kind of flip those. So you want to evaluate for the different traffic sources and people come to the website. You want to evaluate. Are you very clear? And letting people know that they are in the right place and that they can trust. So how do you do that? Your headlines matter A lot. Correct. The continuity matters a lot. Social proof matters a lot. Those are things that I'm looking at when it comes to the landing page. Three different things that I'm looking at. If somebody is coming from paid ad, the paid ad is promising them, you know, to see a specific product and we're taking them to their own product or we're taking them to a category page. If the paid ad is showing them a certain price and then they land on the, on a product page that has different price, guess what? You broke the continuity. And people are going to say, you know what? No, I don't need to deal with this. So how many is that? Five different things. Correct. Now at this point, you figured out the issues, you figured out how to keep people on the page. That's all you've done. That's not enough to take people to take the next step. So now we need to think about the visitors mindset and this is very essential. What information do they need in order for them to move forward? And this will vary based on the page. The goal of a category page is merely to filter people to the right product page. The goal of a product page is to convince people that this is the right product, the right price. You really should add it to the cart. The goal of the cart page to say, hey, you've already added the item to the cart. Let's go ahead and start the checkout. And the checkout is like, hey, get out my credit. Get, get out your credit card. Let's go ahead and place the order. Understanding the goal of the page. Sorry about that. Understanding the goal of the page will help you and will help you structure the page the correct way. You need to think about what information does the visitor need to make that decision to move on to the next step on a category page could be that one. You know, they need to, to be able to sort items. Maybe they need some sort of filtration. And lots of times, by the way, people throw the filtration and the sorting really quickly without paying close attention to it and they think that they're done. No, no, you're not done. There is so much that you can do with filtration and sorting to make the life of the visitors easier on a product page. Somebody got there. What information do they need though? They need the product information. Maybe they need, let's say you have an apparel website. You need to give them the product specific features for the product. You need to list all of those to help somebody make the decision. So how Many is that? 6. 7. Look at the pages again, and you think to yourself, what information do I have that I actually don't think is helpful to visitors? This is a tough one because you need to have the right amount of information on the page to persuade a visitor to take the next step. And people marketers, people in general, don't have an issue with adding more information. They struggle with removing information. But you can increase conversion rates by removing some information. And by the way, for each one of those steps, experimentation is very critical. But then you need to look at your page altogether and say, okay, what information do I need to remove from page, knowing that's not gonna hurt my conversion rate. That's number, what, seven, eight. Oh, eight. You need to think then about what are the fears, uncertainties, and doubts that people have in every page and how we address them. Now, lots of times people think about fuds and they say, well, here's the fuds for looking on my site. No, again, different fuds at different pages. The fuds that I have as a visitor on your homepage or landing page, a lot different than the fuds that I have on the CART page. I have a set of fears, but some of them are magnified at certain stages. Some of them are. Are less than other stages. So you want to consider that, and you want to be able to provide those assurances to people to go ahead and take the right to take that, to take the action on a landing page. I'm thinking to myself, can I trust this website? Are they like, they have what I need? Are they credible? Those are the concerns that I have on a product page. I'm thinking, well, is this the right product? Is this the right price? Can I find better price somewhere else? Different set of questions. Correct. I'm not thinking, can I trust this website? It's still there in the back of my head. But now I'm thinking about the item and its price in the checkout, I'm asking different questions. What if I want to return this item? What if it's too expensive? What if it doesn't arrive in time? So again, different fuds that we're trying to address at different stages in the buying. Buying funnel, that's 8, 9, and 10. 9 is, how do you incentivize a visitor to take an action right away? Now, by incentivizing. It's not about discounts. Lots of times people use discounts. And I'm like, no, don't rely on discounts. Discounts have their place, their time, and their. Their place. But you can incentivize people done in a good way, using scarcity, you know, using and using scarcity. Using. I forget the other, like the other, other method that we use. But scarcity, you can incentivize people to act right away to say, you know what, we only have a certain amount of items limited, a certain quantity or act right now. You'll receive it and you receive the item. You'll have it in your hands and in like two days or three days. Those are different ways that you can encourage people to act. Now the final thing that you want to think about is you want to consider the, the copy overall that you're using. Different people have different copy, different types of. There are different types of visitor Personas and you want to appeal to those different Personas. Everybody is coming to buy an item from you because they have a specific need in their life. They have a job that needs, that must get done. You need to hone in on the job that people need to get done.

Correct.

That's number one. Number two, there are people like me who are very spontaneous, very impulsive, very quick. Don't over overwhelm me with too much copy. There are people who are methodical who are going to read a whole bunch of copy. They're going to read every word. There's place to support those people. There's place that support the impulsive, spontaneous people. Your copy needs to appeal to all these people because they all land on your different pages. So give the spontaneous and the impulsive the information that they need in small bits right away. Have the rest of the information available to somebody who is logical, methodical, who's going to read every piece of copy. Again, those are not tactical issues, but I think they guide an optimization process for you because this can translate to many, many things. There you go. That's 10 Simba.

I thought you were going to add another bonus. Okay, cool.

Yeah, I mean, you can take each page, by the way, and you can think about each page, but then it really varies from one website to the next. I think these are kind of the principles that you can apply to each one of one site. So if you think about, think about trust, for example. To me trust is about like seven or eight things. And lots of times people think trust is very simple. Oh, let's go ahead and add social proof. You cannot imagine how often I see people suggesting adding social proof. And I wish it's that easy. It makes sense. Having social proof will help increase your conversion rates. But I can give so many examples where adding social proof, that's not help. Might even hurt your conversion rates. And people say, really? I'm like, yeah, sure. Let me give you an example. You are a small business. You target small business that has a budget of 3, $4,000 a month, for example, for digital marketing services. That's your target audience. People come to your site and they see these logos of big companies. They see a logo of Amazon, Microsoft, and I don't know who else, and Ford and gm. And that is social proof. But guess what? That social proof scares people off. And they say, you know what? Probably too expensive for me. So what starts a really good concept. The implementation of it was absolutely horrible. We were working with a company and we came to them and we said, hey, we need to add social proof. Their director of growth said, of course, it's very clear, you know, we should always add social proof. We don't need to ab test this. Let's go ahead and add it to our website. And we said, probably not. We want to test it. And it was back and forth, back and forth. At the end, we end up producing four challenges, four designs against the control. Each one of those designs was focused on increasing social proof. And the goal is to improve conversion rates. One design increased conversions by 8%. One design increased conversions by 2%. Two designs reduced conversion rates. This is very powerful. And I was having a conversation with her. I told her, you know, I could have deployed any of those designs because they all looked good. The tweaks and the differences between them are very small, but they're done intentionally. And I could argue for each one of those four designs. But ultimately it's your visitors who judged. I could have deployed the design that actually increased conversion rates by 2%. So although we've done the work, we didn't get the maximum impact. Even worse, I could have deployed one of those two designs that actually reduce conversion rates. So again, the idea of social proof made sense. The implementation of it did not. So that's the reason you want to kind of consider the pages and you want to understand the site and specifically.

Yeah, that's a good point. Because like most of the times I read a lot of articles about everything to do with CRO and in most articles that I come across or webinars that I attend, it's as if, like, if you add social proof, we have worn on trust, you know, but they don't like explain to you, like, as you say that? No, it's not like. It's not like social proof will work for you all the time. Sometimes it might, like just be Killing convictions. I think that's a good point. That's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean like the idea is fine. It's just the implementation of it. Correct. And yeah, you need, you need to think through that a little bit more. The devil's always in the details. Yeah.

Okay, so the next question is about CRO versus SEO. Which one should you prioritize?

Oh, man. And we have like a few of our SEO friends watching, I think which one you should prioritize. Whether you should prioritize CR or SEO depends on the company, depends on your marketing budget, depends on what you are in your journey. SEO is a long term brand building exercise. Trying to do marketing without SEO is probably not a good way to do business. So SEO is very critical. It's about bringing traffic to the website. But it takes while, it takes a while for SEO to succeed. It might take anywhere between 6 to 12 months before you start seeing the beginning signs that SEO is, is working. Lots of times companies come to us and they say, well, I'm already, I'm working on my SEO, but guess what, I also have a budget for paid campaigns and I want to increase my conversions before I open that, before I open that budget. There are two approaches in that case when it comes to CRO. Fundamentally you cannot do AB testing if you have less than 200 conversions a month. A B testing is going to be very slow, it's going to be very painful and it's going to take lots of patience. So if a company is doing less than 200 conversions, I tell them from the get go, CRO is going to be tough. It's not the case, that's not doable. But you really have to have the patience for it. My experience, most people think that they have the patience for it. Very few people actually have the patience for CRO when they have little conversions. So if your traffic does not justify doing AB testing now the question is, well, what do you do? Well, in that case, traditional CRO is not going to be done on the website, as in no more. You're not going to be able to do AB testing, but you want to do at least a CRO audit. So look at issues around the website. Now, as you do a CRO audit, you're identifying issues and you're coming up with suggestions. But we go back to the example. You need to add social proof. Well, I can add social proof to my site in so many different ways. Which one is going to increase conversions? Typically out of a B tested, this, the fact that you don't have enough Conversions. Well, in that case you have to trust the company or the partner on the individual who's doing the analysis for you and say, you know what, because we don't have data, I'm going to go with your suggestion and your, your implementation. Implementation. That's when I would do CRO. To me, if, if a company does not have the, the, the enough conversions, I always tell them, go focus on SEO. Go focus on, you know, bring more traffic, go focus on ppc, bring more traffic. Because you will enjoy CRO a lot more if you have enough traffic and if you have enough.

Yeah. So in other words, you're saying that some of the maybe clients that might reach out to you, they don't have like a CRO problem, but they have like an SEO problem. Right, but what if, maybe, okay, so what if like maybe the project that they are selling is so high end, very expensive, like just a few people visit that site. So how does it work? Should they also go in?

No, because in that case, if, if a company is selling a high end product. I'll give an example. We work with a B2B company. It's an enterprise software package, $200,000 annual subscription. And like, you know, they're happy if they get 50 leads a year. A year, not even a quarter from their sites. Does that mean I cannot do conversion optimization? Does that mean that I need to do SEO? SEO in this case probably doesn't even make a whole lot of sense because the universe that you're going to be going after is a very small universe in the first place. So trying to like, you know, focus on SEO, write articles, get links, you know, your whole domain, you might be going after a thousand companies, that's it. Probably a lot faster to do account based marketing and get to those companies and do some offline marketing to get to those companies. That's a much better approach. So in this case, yeah, you can do SEO, you can do it for branding purposes, but you know, that doesn't generate the traffic, is not going to generate the sales that you're looking for. And you know also that if you're going to do CRO, you're not going to do a B testing from the get go. So that means I am implementing best practices, trying to improve conversion rates. So that's number one. Number two, I might, and let's put that might between quotations, I might do some A B testing, but it's very focused on what we call micro conversions. People are landing on my landing page. I just want them to click on the button and download a white paper. Correct. So CRO in this case is actually a lot harder because CRO needs to look at the full customer journey, understanding that we can do full A B testing because there's not enough conversions and there will never be enough conversions. But the value of a conversion is a lot. For a company that sells the software that's $150,000 subscription, guess what? If you're able to generate 10 more subscriptions a year for them, that's a million and a half. That is significant revenue. Is it easy? Not so easy. Is it doable? Yes, it is doable.

Someone was asking that, have you ever used CRO to shape up the value proposition of a client, maybe of a company that reached out to you?

It's an interesting question. I, I don't think CROs are in the business of creating the value prop of a company that they're working with. I do think that CROs can help executives and leadership teams and stakeholders to think through the value proposition that they have. And part of that is a good CRO program will do lots of one on one customer interviews. And when you're doing one on one customer interviews, you focus on the customer journey. And part of the customer journey is understanding the market's positioning, understanding the different features that people that consumers or customers are looking for, which features they feel are completely fulfilled by all the different offering offers that are competing against each other and which features are missing. If you're able to plot this or you say, you know what, features 1 through 15 are offered by everybody but features 16 to 20 people need them, but they're not available there. So maybe that helps us if we can think, can reposition our product there. You can take that information and give it to the executives. And the executives have to sit back and, and think. A CRO can take information again from the customers and have a very honest conversation with the executives. Listen, here is why your customers are actually choosing your product. Here is how they describe this product. Here is the job that they are hiring your product to do. And that's a very powerful conversation because it's coming from the mouths of the consumers. Now whether the executives accept it, whether they understand it, that's a whole other conversation. I go by the example of figpi. For a while we tried to position FIGPI in a certain direction and we had absolutely an amazing copywriter who helped us actually position ourselves in a certain way. It doesn't matter how you position yourself and it doesn't matter what's your value proposition is it doesn't matter what your unique value proposition is, if it doesn't provide the value that your consumers are looking for and that they think of when they hire your products. Eventually we have to come to the conclusion that's how consumers think of our products. And the positioning matters a lot. So we had two ways to deal with this. Either look at our customers and those who are using us. We have about 2,000 companies who are on Fitby right now, and they all have a specific need and specific idea of what fic5 rise to them. Or we can say, well, maybe this is not the customer segment that we're going after and we need to change our positioning completely. We've opted to say, you know what, People use us as an alternative. Use this as an alternative to hotjar. They use this alternative to VW or the uses an alternative to optimizely. It's not easy. Correct. But it's the reality. That's what people are saying. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, any session recordings, I need heat maps. And the other competitors are really looking very expensive. And you guys provide the same functionality, sometimes even better. We could have said, oh, better functionality than our competitors. But really, like, you know, we're an alternative, and that's how people are thinking. Now, I know by the nature of my positioning that I'm not going to dominate the market. Not at least not anytime soon, if ever. But I'm happy to do that because I'm small. I can move a lot faster than what my competitors, how my competitors move.

Good. That's a good one.

So we've been going for 55 minutes. You still have more questions, my friend. You tell one more, one more, one more question.

Okay, so how can you take. By the way, these are the questions that were sent to us. So I was just like, I'm reading this one as it is. How can you take customer lifetime value into account when running tests?

Oh, that's not an easy question. That's a whole other. Whole other program. By the way, earlier this week, which we've started doing is we've launched our internal training. This is where we bring everybody from the company. We're doing training for them. It's about an hour and a half. What do you think of the training program? I'm taking a break, by the way, before I answer this question, but you tell me, because you attended that training program on, on cr on like, you know, and it's going to be go ongoing for next 52 weeks at least.

Yeah, that's a good one. I Like it and you get like, you get to learn a lot of things. And the way that you and I had like kind of like break down things and explain how the process work. It's, it's different like from maybe reading about it or something like that. So I think it's very valuable. And also the fact that everyone from the team attends, it's also like a good thing because everyone gets to know how the process works as it is because most of the people, they just know like the basics of conversion optimization, that you start with the research, you prioritize, you, you design or you, you test, you repeat all that and that thing. But getting like into the nitty gritties of that, I think that's very, very important. And also speaking maybe for our, our, our content marketers, like, I think it will also like help the way they write articles because they'll be just coming from, in from an informed position. Not that now they are not informed. They are because they are doing like interviews. But they'll, the writing will kind of like improved. We'll kind of like.

Yeah, that's the idea. I mean for our CROs, it's a way to, and for our UX designers, it's a way for them to even get better, kind of emphasizing the fundamentals. But I figured like for the rest of the team, it's a good way to really understand CRO even better because you see the client delivery team that's constantly, I mean that's what they do for living day in, day out, hour and hour out. But it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Okay, so let's go back to the question. Customer lifetime value and how do you evaluate that? There are three metrics typically that you evaluate post every test. Fundamentally at the very top level, you want to evaluate conversion rates. Did the challengers improve? Did they reduce my conversion rates? That's the fundamental metric that you are looking at. And that metric usually is used to judge whether a test had won or whether it lost. Correct. The variation, did it, when did it lose? That's number one. There is the customer Lifetime value is the second metric that you want to evaluate because a design might have helped, it might have helped increase conversion rates, but it reduces the customer life value. You want to evaluate that and sometimes it's not very easy. You have to really, you have to have a good data sciences team that can look at the data that has access to the right information in order for them to measure the impact a particular variation or particular design or purpose particular A B test on your customer lifetime value. And sometimes not very easy, by the way, because sometimes measuring customer lifetime value takes a while if you're a subscription business. Well, okay, the customer lifetime value should be about $400. We just ran a test. It's a winner. Is it going to increase my CLV or is it going to reduce it? We don't know. It's going to take a while. But with the right data sciences team, they can slice and dice the data. They might be able to, to present you with the right answer parallel to the customer lifetime value. And kind of an alternative to that is revenue per visitor kind of evaluating that metric. It's not like a third metric, but it's kind of a metric that some companies evaluate the customer lifetime values, some companies that we work with evaluate the revenue per visitor to really understand the revenue impact that a particular test has. I've mentioned this before where you should not make a decision for a variation specifically based on revenue because conversion, again, we've talked that conversion, discrete events. Revenue is more continuous. So you have to be careful as you're doing that analysis. The third metric that you want to look at is customer sets satisfaction. Correct. You might have introduced a variation. You know, conversion rate is up. Your RPV or revenue per visitors up. Your customer lifetime value or CLV is up. But customer satisfaction took a nosedive. That's a very critical component that you want to evaluate. And your, the experimentation team must look at those three different factors, three different metrics whenever they are making a decision of deploying a winner or by the way, a loser on a website to say, you know what, here are the indicators. Here's our primary indicator, here's secondary indicator. Yes, we are going to move forward with this variation. No, we're not going to move forward with that variation. Experimentation doesn't happen in a vacuum. Experimentation is not only about increasing conversion rates. Experimentation is about improving customer satisfaction, number one, and improving revenue. So that's the reason you need to look at all those, all those metrics.

Okay, so those are the questions that we had for this week.

And awesome. Well, how long did we were we live for? An hour?

Yeah.

And 1 minutes and 40 seconds. So thank you everybody for, for watching. We're going live on three different platforms, by the way. So we're going live on my LinkedIn profile, we're going live on our YouTube channel and also going live where else? On Facebook. My. My Facebook. So if you have any questions, feel free just to shoot us a message on any of those platforms, preferably LinkedIn I'm so horrible when it comes to Facebook, by the way. I'm like, I log in and I see all these messages, and I'm like, oh, gosh. I'm not sure if there's a timeline for, like, if you don't respond to somebody, like. And then it's like, the message is too old. But you can look at my last 10 messages from Facebook, and they all start with the same sentence. Oh, sorry. Like, you know, I missed this message. It's been, like, a few weeks. Embarrassing. But if somebody has a question, feel free just to send me or Simba a message. We'll add those questions over to our list. And until next time, thank you, everyone, for watching us.

Bye.