#23 – How Can E-commerce Brands Win With A/B Testing?

My name is Khalil Sladeh and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khalid amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, we are live. So super excited. Is this our second CRO Live Hour this year? 2023?

This is the second recording.

So, Simba, we were just talking before we came. You had a week off. You're recharged. Doesn't sound like you are really recharged.

I am because I think I was missing work because that's what I do, like almost every day. I think I'm recharged on that space. So I had a good meeting today with my team. So we spoke about some of the things that we are planning to do this quarter. In fact, we spoke about them sometime two weeks ago as the quarter started. So it's been good. How about you? How have you been? Liverpool not winning games?

Painful. It's been painful. I'm like, really, guys, what's going on here? We're halfway through the season. Yeah, it's been a rather painful. I mean, especially that game last weekend where for the first time in a long time I didn't watch the last 15 minutes and I'm like, okay, let's wait. Painful. Too embarrassing. So you never know with Liverpool and how, like, you know, they can pull through. Injuries are killing us. Midfield is killing us. This is killing us. That's killing us.

Yeah, that was my world in the past three years, I think, you know.

Watching soccer games is like, you know, my fun activity. For the last week or so, I've been just slammed at work, which is very unusual. October, November, business picked up. December usually, I mean, like nowhere out Half of the month or like the last 10 days, but now, like January starts. It's just like with diets. Everybody's like, oh, like, you know, I'm going to fix my weight problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Business owners all of a sudden, like, you know, wake up and it's like, man, like the advertising is just getting more and more expensive. And the best way to fix your costs per acquisition and how expensive that is, the simple thing that you can do is to fix your conversion rate. So that means for us a lot of conversations. And really it's one thing to say I am going to fix my conversion rates and I'm going to reduce my customer acquisition cost. But what that entails and having a very clear and transparent conversation with all these different companies is very critical because we're not interested in working with a company for three, four months. We're interested in working with companies for three, four years. So making sure that you set that expectation correctly from the get go and telling them, here is what you're walking into. Here are the things that will make this successful and here are the things that will make this painful for you and for us. So let's have this very honest conversation. And sometimes some companies are really eager to jump in. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I appreciate the fact that you want to pay us. Let's take it slow. Let's have this conversation because we don't have it right now. We are going to have it three, four months down the line where you do not have the right expectations. So what that meant is I had lots and lots of calls. I think the worst day was last week where I started my calls at 2am and I finished 10pm so basically I was on calls for I don't know how many hours. I can even do the math really quickly, almost 20 hours. So things are calmer this week. So I'm not doing something crazy as 2am but it's still lots of good conversations. I enjoy them. That's, by the way, my problem. And that's what James tells me. Sometimes you talk a lot about, like, you know, you need to wrap things up. And I'm like, oh, I. I want to explain everything to them.

Like, okay, yeah, I know this might not be one of the questions that we were asked today, but I just want you to walk us through what is like an ideal client for invesp.

So there are different things that I look at. Whenever a company talks to us from the get go, I evaluate the business and the numbers. Does it make sense for us to be working with them. And in that, I look at a couple of things. One, I look at their conversions. Can they actually do meaningful a B experimentation, a B testing on their site? And for that, there's different levels of number of conversions per month that the site has to generate in order for us to say, you know what, with this type of website and with the type of programs that we run, we're able to generate 20, 25% or 30, 35% or 60, 65% lifting conversions. I can look at the numbers, look at the site, and make an educated estimate or guess there. That's number one. Number two, revenue. Let's say you come into me and I'm going to give you even a 65% lift in conversions. Does it still make sense for us to work together? Because let's say you're making $10,000 a month from your website. I come in and I give you a 65% lift in conversions and in sales. That means you go from 10,000 to 16,500. Can you really afford our services? Does it even make sense to hire us? And this is just from pure business perspective. Second, I look at the type of website. There are some industries we just simply don't work with. And this is a business decision. We don't work with gambling, for example, porn websites. We don't work with them. Any alcohol. We just don't work with those industries. It's a business decision that we've made. Third, I look at the team structure. Do they really understand what experimentation is? We've worked with some amazing companies. The top management was very committed to conversion rate optimization and to experimentation, and they understood exactly what it takes. But sometimes their teams did not really understand what experimentation is all about. And instead of us spending 15 to 20 hours to launch an a B experiment, we were spending 60, 70 hours to launch an A B experiment. The game of experimentation has two components. One is really solid and deep and good research. Two is high velocity testing. It's a numbers game when it comes to that. So Instead of launching 10 experiments per year, you want to launch 60 or 100. The numbers make sense. So I evaluate the team structure and do they have the understanding, do they have what it takes to really engage? And I dare say that 60, 70% of the times when we talk to companies, we say, you know what? We'll pass. There's plenty of companies that offer conversion rate optimization. There's plenty of agencies that offer that, and there's plenty of people who are interested in doing conversion rate Optimization. But if there's not a good fit and a good match, then it's probably not wise because when one of those criteria doesn't match and it's not working, the relationship doesn't work and you go from oh, we're excited into three, four months down the line. Ah, this is not working out. No. Let's have a very clear and transparent conversation from the get go.

Nice. So today we have a couple of questions to talk about. We received a bunch of questions in the past week. Last week we didn't do any CRO live hour. So thank God we're back this week. Are you ready for the questions?

I am ready for the questions and we're doing something a little bit different. I actually posted about this where we're going to take a question and we're going to do a quick answer. By Khalid standards, maybe eight to 10 minutes, hopefully not more than that. But then we're going to take another question and we're going to drill really deep into it. So let's see how this goes. I'm excited about this new format.

Yeah, sure. The first question is, how can E commerce businesses effectively use a B testing to optimize their conversion rates?

There are five things that E commerce businesses should do to be able to use a B testing to help them increase their conversion rates. Those five things, number one, is looking at the numbers to make sure that you have the right numbers. Number two, identify conversion opportunities. Number three, you need to create designs and messaging around those conversion opportunities. Number four, you need to rinse and repeat. And number five, my best tip, and we'll keep it until the end, is to think about how do you do strategic testing where you go from merely tweaking your templates into something more meaningful that can really improve your conversion rates. So those are the five things that we're going to be talking about. Let's start with number one. So number one is look at the numbers. Not every website is ready for conversion optimization. Not every website is ready for AB testing. You need to look at your numbers and to understand whether it makes sense to do AB testing or not. What numbers do we look at? Lots of times I hear people say, oh, let's look at the number of visitors. No, the number of visitors don't really matter. What matters more is the number of conversions that your site generates. For that, I'd like to break it down into different levels and layers. The first level, if you have less than 200 conversions per month. The second level, if you have 500 conversions per month. Third level, if you have 1000 conversions per month. Fourth level, if you have 2000 conversions per month or above, let's talk about each one of those levels. 200 conversions per month. Can you do AB testing at 200 conversions per month or less, can you do AB testing? Short answer is yes, but what is that? You can do AB testing, but it is going to be slow and it's going to be painful and you have to be fully committed to it. Now, there is a lot of information about doing AB testing when you have lower number of conversions. Let's say you have 40 conversions, maybe you have 100 conversions, maybe you have 70 conversions. There's a lot of information around testing. It's not impossible, but it is a different type of testing, A, B testing, a different type of experimentation. So if you are interested in learning about that, leave us a comment and I will make sure that I record a video and cover this in a different in a different video. Now let's go to the second level. If you have 500 conversions per month, you should start with experimentation. Because you have 500 conversions a month, that means you're able to launch experiments with multiple variables. The way the math that I do at a variety, very simple level, for every 100 conversions that your site generates, you can introduce one variant. So let's say you have 500 conversions. Guess what? You already have the control. So that's one variant. And you can test two to three other challengers to it. So it makes sense to do ab testing at 1000 conversions per month. If you have a thousand conversions per month and you're not doing AB testing, you are absolutely leaving money on the table. You're being silly if you. We want to be honest and have that very honest conversation, because at a thousand conversions per month, you can launch meaningful experimentation, meaningful AB testing on your website. 2000 conversions per month is the land of dreams for any CRO. That's where magic happens. That's what I'm absolutely in love with the website. You give me a site with 2,000 conversions per month or above, I'm like, oh, magic is going to happen over here. And if I said at 1,000 conversions, you know, you haven't tested, you're being a little silly. At 2000 conversions, I don't even know what to say. So you might as well really seriously consider AB testing at that level. So that was number one. Number two, what you need to do if your site is ready for AB testing, you need to identify conversion opportunities or a different way of looking at it. You need to identify problem areas on the website. Now, in order for you to identify problem areas, conversion opportunities, kind of the two sides of the coin, what you need to do is you need to do data analysis and you need to do customer research, you need competitive analysis and you need to do some usability testing. There's a lot of other things that you can do, but this is kind of the basic that most marketers and most business owners can do on their own. Data analysis. Look at your analytics, look at your heat maps, and look at your session recording. Those give you a wealth of information of how visitors are interacting with the website. And I think for each one of those, we really should record a video, kind of drilling really deep. But the problem that I see is that most companies, most companies nowadays have Google Analytics installed on their website. But then you ask them, how often do you look at your Google Analytics? And they'll tell you, well, I log in there once a week. And if they're being honest, some companies log into their Google Analytics instance once a month. Absolutely horrible. Because Google Analytics tells you problem areas on the website. It tells you where people are leaving steps in the funnel, where people are dropping out, where the site is leaking visitors. Same with session recording. Okay, so you already have that session recording software running on your website. How often are you watching those sessions? Because if you're not watching them, it's great that you have the software and you're paying some company. That's money. But if you're not making use of it, is it really helpful to you? Customer research. Every marketer on the face of the earth will tell you how important customer research is. Very few marketers will actually do it and talk to customers regularly. Look at competing, look at competing websites. You can get some ideas from them. Again, the idea over here is we are trying to find problem areas or conversion opportunities that can really help us pinpoint problem areas on our website. Number three, I've identified problem areas on my website. I look at all these problem areas. Now look at the top problem, the problem that you think. You know what this problem has the most impact on my bottom line. How do I do that? Lots of frameworks are out there to help you identify and prioritize all these problems. But here is a simple trick. Let's put all these frameworks aside. If you don't want to spend a lot of time evaluating every problem. The closest a problem is to the purchase point, the conversion point, the more impact it has on your bottom line. So for example, you're an E Commerce Website and you discover a problem. The checkout. And the last step of the checkout. Guess what? That is perhaps one of the first problems I want to tackle. As opposed to, well, we have a problem on our homepage. The closer a problem is to the bottom line, the more critical it is to fix that problem. So I have a problem. I think it's going to have an impact on my bottom line. You don't just just sit there and say, you know what? Let's go ahead and fix it. No, you create a hypothesis. You say, you know what? We think there is a problem over here because of X, Y, Z. And maybe this design that we're going to create is designed specifically to fix that problem. Sometimes not about design, correct, sometimes about messaging. We're confusing people with some of the messaging that we have in this step. So we need to have clearer messaging. So come up with a solution to the specific problem. Now, lots of times what people do is they say, you know what? You know, we're fixing this problem, but let's fix those other 10 issues on the page. No, no, no, don't do that. And you'll discover why in a second. Because after you come up with a design, guess what you need to do. That's when you run your a B tests. Correct? Run a B test to see basically whether people, whether visitors like your solution or not. That's how AB testing can really help you improve your conversion rates. And that's the reason you don't fix all other 10 problems. Because in 9 out of 10 times, you'll discover that the solution, the amazing solution that you thought is gonna help you solve your problems actually does not win. And people actually love your current design with current messaging, with all of its problems. That's the reason we test. So how many points did we talk about until now? We talked about looking at the numbers, identifying conversion opportunities. We talked about creating designs and messaging to fix the problems. Rinse and repeat. You continue with this process. We're constantly testing and experimenting, trying to find new ways. At a minimum, you should be launching two to four experiments per month. Two to four experiments, not one experiment per quarter. Not one experiment per year. Because at that point in time, you're not a B testing really. Maybe you're just, at that point, you're just doing something just to check mark something. Say we're doing a B testing. You need to be committed to it and think about all the big companies out there, the Amazons of the world and Facebook and Google and ebay and Netflix. They launch tens of thousands of experiments every year. I'm not telling you to launch tens of thousands of experiments, but be committed to this because this is going to help you improve your conversion rates. Number five, because I said I'm going to leave my best tip until the end. Think strategically about your website. Don't think only about tweaking the template. Oh, we're going to make a small change over here or we're going to change this color of the button over here and it's going to help us improve conversion rates. No, most likely it's not going to help you improve your conversion rate. The reason people buy from you because you provide them with an amazing experience. So think strategically about the type of AB testing that you need to do. If you are an e commerce website, your site is broken into five different areas. You have your landing pages, you have your collection pages, you have your product pages, you have your cart and you have your checkout. That is five areas. And what we need to do as people who are using AB testing to improve our E commerce conversion rate is we need to improve the conversion rate for each one of those areas. So I need to improve the conversion rate for my landing pages. I need to improve the conversion rate for my, my collection pages or category pages, my product pages, my cart, my checkout. Think about those five areas. If I'm able to improve the conversion rate in each one of those areas by 20%, what happens? I doubled my conversion rate. I go from 2% to 4%. That's absolutely amazing. So think strategically. Make sure that you hit each one of those areas every month or every six weeks. And this way it's kind of a snowball effect. That's how a B testing can really help you improve your site conversion rate. What do you think, Simba?

That was a good answer. I think I'll have to listen to this episode again soon after this. You mentioned a lot of interesting things there, but I won't ask you like a lot of follow up questions. I just want you to repeat what you said when you mentioned that like an E commerce is divided into five sections because I've never had anyone put it that way. So I think that's so interesting.

So I always think that an E commerce website, if you look at an E commerce website, you have five main areas. You have your landing pages, you have your collection or category pages, you have your product pages, you have your cart and you have your checkout. This is the flow that the visitor uses to go through the website. If I look at each one of Those areas. And I say, you know what? There is a conversion rate for this area for my landing pages, from landing page to order confirmation. There is a conversion rate from my collection pages to my order confirmation. The same thing for the PDPs for the cart, for the checkouts. I run experimentation on each one of those five areas. And my goal is to improve that conversion rate for my PDPs from my cart, from my checkout by 20%. That's the whole goal. If I achieve that and I'm hitting those five areas, what I've done is I've achieved 100% increase in conversion rates for the whole website, which is absolutely powerful. Lots of times people come to us and they say, can you double my conversion rate? And I tell them, oh, man, that is a tough one. I don't know if I can double your conversion rate. It's a big problem. But guess what? I do break it down to smaller chunks. Think about those five areas. Think about how you can run 10 experiments on each one of those areas and hits a target of 20% lift. At the end of those 10 experiments, you can effectively double the site conversion rates.

That's good. The first point that you mentioned, I don't have, like, my pen here, so I'm taking notes in my phone.

On your phone? Yeah, I have a pen here. You want it?

Nice, nice. So one of the things that you mentioned, like the first point, you were talking about the numbers. You said you first have to look at your numbers. It's interesting that I've seen, or I've read a couple of articles about a B testing, and the number that most people usually focus on is the traffic. They say if you need this amount of traffic so that you can hit a certain sample size to run a B test. I've never had, or maybe most of the articles that I've read, they don't talk about the conversions. It's like the traffic. That's what is important.

Yeah, it's interesting. Focus on the number of conversions. Forget about the number of visitors. If you look at any of the statistical calculators that are out there that help you determine how long you need to run a particular AB test, what they'll ask you, they actually ask for the conversion rates. And the conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. That's. And it's really driven by the number of conversions. That's the reason, if you dig deep into it, the number of conversions is going to help you determine how fast you can run AB testing. On a particular website. If you talk to anybody who has been doing stuff CRO for a while, actually somebody who's an expert in CRO or somebody, let's not go as an expert. If you talk to somebody who's been doing CRO for seven, eight years, you will see that the first question that they'll ask you is, hey, how many conversions are you getting per month? If you hear somebody ask you about how many visitors, you probably don't want to hire them to help you improve your site conversion rates.

That's a good one. So I'll ask you the second question.

Yeah, let's go. Second question. Supposed to be a discussion, lengthy discussion.

Let's. So the question is, what are some best practices for creating high converting landing pages for E commerce companies?

Best practices for creating highly converting landing pages for E commerce companies. Whenever I think about landing pages and the best practices when it comes to landing pages, I think about seven different things. You have to have them on every landing page. You have to do them right in order for you to have a highly converting landing page. Let's talk about those seven points and then we'll start drilling really deep into them. First one, we need to look at the traffic source and the promise that you're making on that traffic source. Number two, you need to look at the goal of the landing page and understand how that landing page is there to serve that goal. Number three, you need to look at the messaging and the unique value proposition that you have on that landing page. Number four, look at the headline of the page and is it really doing a good job of persuading visitors to stay on the page? Number five, you need to look at the design of the page. So there's some good practices when it comes to design. Number six, you need to think about the form that you have on the page. Even lots of times I talk about about form and people say, well, we don't have it on e commerce website. Oh yeah, you do have a form on e commerce website. You just don't know it. And number seven, which is what everybody talks about, but in this case I kept it at the end is the cta. The CTA and how important it is. So we'll talk about that. Should we jump in?

Yep. First of all, let's start with number one, the traffic source. What exactly will you be looking at when you look at the traffic source?

So before a visitor lands on your landing page, they are somewhere and somewhere there on the world wide web or an email, maybe on a social platform, there is A promise that is getting made to that visitor. If you click on this link, you're going to land on this site, on this particular landing page. And here is what you get. You need to understand that visitors coming from different traffic sources come with different mindsets. For example, if I'm sitting on Facebook and I'm chatting with some friends, or if I'm on Instagram scrolling through pictures and I see an ad and I click through it, my mindset was not necessarily thinking about buying products. I was not thinking about that. I was actually in a very cyber social setting, if I may say. So I'm not thinking about buying. So that is social traffic and this is the mindset that that social traffic comes from. It's a lot different than somebody going to Google searching for how do I fix XYZ problem? Your ad appears and they click on it. Because by typing that search query, that question into Google, they're saying, hey, I have a problem and your ad there makes a promise, hey, we solved that problem for you. Click over here. It's different also than the mindset of a visitor who's sitting there. I wake up in the morning, open my email, I'm scrolling, I see an email from you, you have a special offer, I click on it. So the traffic source impacts the quality of the visitor landing on your website. That's number one. Number two, there is a promise that is getting made to the visitor and we need to maintain that promise promise on the landing page. If your ad, let's say I search how to solve XYZ problem. How? Like you know, how to fix a water leak in my house, how to buy like the best swimming suit for a lady, for example, I click on an ad and I land on the landing page. But the landing page has nothing to do with what the ad had promised me. Guess what? Goodbye and good luck. Because the first thing that the visitor is asking to themselves, am I in the right place or not? So we need to make sure that we maintain that continuity between the ad or the pre sites to the landing page. If there's a disconnect there right away visitors are alert and they'll say, you know what, don't have to deal with this. Goodbye and good luck. So that is the first thing that you want to look at, traffic source and the continuity of the promise that is being made to visitors.

So basically on the traffic source you'll be looking at the intent, right? You look at the channels, right? And look at the intent. Is there a way like to strike a balance? Because it's obvious for someone who was scrolling down on Facebook and someone who just went on Google and typed something like the intent is might be different. So is there like a way to create a landing page that might kind of like even compel a person who's coming from Facebook or to end up maybe purchasing or downloading something?

So a couple of things on that. First, if you already have a landing page and you're already driving traffic to it from different traffic sources, segment your data. So you can really understand. Here is the conversion rate for people coming from Google, Google Organic, Google paid, Facebook organic, Facebook paid, so on and so forth. So you look at the conversion rate and you understand what's going on. As opposed to my landing page has a conversion rate of 15%. No, we need to segment that in a more meaningful way. Let's segment that data. Let's analyze it. That's number one. If you notice that there is significant differences in the conversion rate, which most likely you will notice, then start thinking about creating custom landing pages for these different channels. People are not used to that, but we've done that even with large e commerce companies where we said, you know what, since Google paid traffic is extremely high and people have already raised their hand and they said, I have a problem. We want to create a specific landing page for that paid traffic coming from Google to really give them the absolute information that they need to make a decision and push them through. And what we saw when we did that is 40 to 50% increase in conversions for that particular traffic source on a landing page that is designed. Designed for social media. The messaging really matters. And you've seen this. Correct. You're scrolling. Something captures your attention on the ad on Facebook and you're like, oh, this is interesting. Or you're watching a video, like a video ad on Facebook and you're like, this is interesting. What happens is that there is no communication between the guys who are creating the ad and the guys who are creating the landing page. So it gets on the landing page and it's almost like, you know, they forgot about all these promises and the beautiful messaging that used in the ad. No, you need to make sure that it is consistent because there is something that happened on Facebook or on the social media site that made somebody say, you know what? Although I'm looking at my feed and I'm looking at my friends and talking to them, I want to click on this ad. So somebody somehow not fully raising their hand, but they're saying, this is interesting. So we should be testing messaging on the Social media platform. And then those winning combinations, we need to make sure that we're also using them on our landing pages. So custom landing pages for different traffic sources can work wonders.

Nice. So moving on to number two, the goal of the landing page. What exactly do you look at?

Number two is the goal of the landing page. Every landing page should have a goal, primary goal. This is what we want every visitor who lands on the page to do. The problem is when people, designers, marketers create landing pages, they're like, oh, let's throw this. And we want this and we want to capture an email and we want to capture that. You end up with a hodgepodge of million things going on to the point that I'm not even sure what you want me to do. No, there should be one primary goal. You're an E commerce website. Your goal, if you get somebody on a landing page, let's say it's a PDP or it's a micro page for a product page, is to click on the add to cart. That's it. Don't add like, you know, a million other things. I see add to wish list. Dude, I just searched in Google. I said I'm looking for this particular product. I land on your landing page. I don't even know your website and you're telling me add to wish list? No, you know, that's not the goal over there. So think about the primary goal should be clear. And for that I love to use what I call the Greek language test. What is that? You take the landing page and you change the language completely to a language that you don't understand. I don't speak Greek, so that's the reason I mentioned Greeks. Change it to a language that you don't understand. It could be Russian, it could be, I don't know, whatever language you can think of. Can I still figure out the primary conversion goal and click on it or am I going to be confused because there's too many buttons that have the same look and feel and I'm just not clear on what you want me to click. A well designed landing page, people can actually select the options correctly even if it's written in a language that they don't understand. Not easy to do, but not impossible as well. So think about the goal and have a clear goal. You can have other secondary goals, that's fine, but they should not be competing with the primary goal.

Can you say that if a landing page also has a navigation menu that has like also different categories or different options, that's not ideal because it might confuse people or something like that.

This is a little bit different between an e commerce website and a lead gen type website. While the lead gen type website, hey, I want to download a white paper. So I click I have a landing page. Generally speaking, having the top navigation is not a good idea because somebody's there. Again, primary goal I want you to convert. Click on that conversion. Remember, by adding top navigation you could be driving people away from your landing page and they get confused and they never convert on e commerce website because it's not a single conversion that you want. Correct. Maybe you're looking for one product back and offer you other products. So lots of times e commerce websites will keep the top navigation. This is a really good area to test run an A B test on your landing page with top navigation. Without top navigation. Remember I mentioned that we've ran. We've created specific landing pages for paid. We've created specific landing pages for traffic coming from Google paid ads and in those we stripped out the navigation. We just wanted somebody to convert. It was not something that the company that we're working with was comfortable with but when they saw the conversion rate just absolutely made sense. So it is something I would test and it's not only just test navigation or not. If you are going to have that navigation, I would test different formats of that navigation. Correct. What elements do I need to have there? Absolutely most important elements are going to help my visitors have a better experience.

Okay, so moving on to number three. You said messaging and the value proposition. Since we are focusing much more like on e commerce, where do you put like the value proposition on the landing page?

Point number three is messaging. Lots of times people on e commerce websites don't pay close attention to messaging. They think hey, it's a product, it's available, buy it or leave it. And what you end up with is copycat e commerce pages one after the next. I can sell the same product as my competitors but I can have have much better messaging. Messaging that appeals to my visitors and I can intrigue them to buy from me. Because most e commerce websites, what they end up doing is competing on price. So the way they encourage people to move forward is by offering more and more discounts or by offering faster shipping. Well, okay, I can compete on that, but that is a losing battle. That is a race to the bottom. Maybe a better way is to think about the messaging that we can put provide to our visitors where they think to themselves I am getting the best information about this product. When I think about messaging, I think about three different types of messaging. The functionality, the social and the emotional side of doing the functionality, the social and the emotional messaging. Everybody gets the functional side of messaging correctly. Here's a TV set and that's the end of that. Well, okay, so how do I think about the emotional side of buying a product and the social side of buying a product? I was looking at buying a large TV and a friend had bought a large TV. It's 120 inch, humongous. I don't even have space to put the 120 inch screen TV. And I'm like, dude, how much do you spend on that? Shocked me. He's like, oh well, you know, like TVs like this are like anywhere between 30 to $50,000. Big shock. Okay, 30 to $50,000 on a TV. I'm sorry, that's like, you know, car, I guess, you know, he loves his tv. Guess what? When somebody is buying such an item, you need to play on the emotional and the social side of buying a product because it's a huge investment. So what if I sell just smaller items? Oh my. Items are like, you know, very, very quick items and people don't think through them. Here's what I say. Take your top 10 sellers, top 10 best sellers, and play with the messaging and test that and see the impact of better messaging on those landing pages and see how that impacts your conversion rate. It can be extremely powerful.

So on a landing page, let's use Amazon as an example. Right? The messaging, where do you exactly place it? Is it like on the product descriptions or there's also a some different sections that you can put the messaging.

So a company like Amazon doesn't have the advantage that the small retailer has. Amazon is a big company with I know hundreds of millions of products listed. Actually, I don't know how many products they have listed on their site. But if you're an E commerce website with 200, 300 products, guess what? Creating messaging can be very easy. You just need to bunker down and do it and think about it. So I would do it in my headlines. I will do it in different areas. Lots of times people think about messaging as a single headline. The whole page sends a message. Your design sends a message, your copy sends a message. Every element needs to work together to send a message to the person to tell them, yes, you are in the right place. Yes, this is the right product. Yes, we are the best place to buy this product from that is powerful messaging, all these elements working together. And it is also about how you lay out the Information on the landing page. Correct. Lots of times people say, oh, we need to have reviews, throw them there. Oh, we need to have warranty where people buy. Throw it out there. We need to have the CTA throw it out there. The quantity and you end up with what I call a vomit. People laughed yesterday when I said that on a sales call, a vomit of useful information on the page. Page. Like, did you just say that? I'm like, yeah, I said that it's important to have the right information, but it needs to be structured in a good way that encourages people to take an action.

You also mentioned that the messaging has about three aspects to it, right? Like that's the functional, the social, and also the emotional. So for a website that is, let's say maybe more than 200 products, let's just say 2,000 items. How then do you get the emotional, the social and also the functional for each and every product? Do you go around interviewing customers who buy certain products or you look at.

It, five, five customers per product, that's 2,000. That's 10,000 interviews. And you are going to hate yourself during that. Don't do that. What we do is you need to think about this. Think about your top 10 items that you're selling on the website and validate whether using the social and the emotional side on those product pages will have an impact or not. That's number one. Number two, think about the emotional and the social aspect of the site might not be necessarily the product. Correct. So we work with a company, they sell beautiful, beautiful pajamas for ladies. They carry probably a thousand products. It's overwhelming to write copyright for those thousand products, but they actually do that. However, the whole site has an emotional and social side to it. So I use that in the copy and in the headlines. And guess what? The images on the page actually send the same thing about the beautiful and the feeling good and the feeling comfortable when you are wearing these beautiful pajamas. So it's not necessarily sometimes about the product, sometimes you can expand it to the brand, right? Amazon A to Z, Amazon promise, you know, you'll get the best price and you'll get it right away. Hitting the human need instant gratification. Get the product today and get it at the lowest price. People always want that. That's the Amazon promise. Because they're not going to compete and create emotional and then social features of a product. So they're like, oh, at a brand level, here's what we can do and here's why you should always come back to us.

Yeah, that makes a Lot of sense, I think, for the brand. Like maybe shifting from the product to also looking at the brand. That would be much easier. Okay, so moving on to number four. You said the headline on the page. Talk to us about that.

Number four is the headline. People don't pay close attention to the headlines. So your headline has two jobs. Tell people that they are in the right place. Number two, pique their interest. That's really what the headline does. So it's a subcategory within messaging. Sometimes people go to one of two extremes. Very functional messaging product xyz. And that's the end of that. Well, guess what? Product XYZ is available from 10 other retailers. Okay. And sometimes they go to the other extreme where I land on the landing page and I look at it and I'm like, I have no clue what you guys sell. I just don't know. Somewhere in the middle. Correct. Especially on a landing page. So if you're not driving people to a pdp, we work with a skincare brand, so that's important. The landing page is where they drive traffic to is you need to tell people that they are in the right place because skincare product for acne. So. And you need to tell them why they should care. You need to pique their interest. And that's the job of the headline. Don't go all too functional. Don't go all too emotional. Somewhere in the middle. Here is the functionality that we provide because you want to feel the emotional benefits. Without. Here is the thing that people hate. This is kind of the simple formula that I use. Functional plus emotional without. And the barrier, the thing that scares people from using the product that intrigues people. And by doing this, remember now, your headline is also fulfilling the promise. Somebody landed on the landing page with the. Because they came from external side. We told them, yes, we are. You are in the right place. Let me pique your interest. Okay, great. Now let me hand you to the rest of the page. So that's what happens with the headline.

I think when it comes to headlines, right. It's a big problem on B2B on sales companies because there are some like websites that I visit, read the headline and still don't get what they do.

I have a call. It's funny, I had dinner this week with a SaaS company. Company. Absolutely love the guys and have a personal relationship with one of them. And it's funny because he had told me, hey, I want you to look at our website. So I'm like, hey, yeah, sure. I looked at the site and Fairly technical, fairly understand marketing. I looked at it and I'm like, I have no clue what they do. Okay. And then when I sat at dinner with them, it took him, I think, about 10 seconds to explain to me what they did. And I'm like, oh, it was such an interesting concept. It's completely unique. And I don't say this lightly because I think most people copy from each other, but they really come up with a completely new concept. It's a disruptor concept to the industry that they work in, which is rare to find something like that. Lots of times people take the concept as existed. Skincare, but we're going to offer it to online or skincare, we're going to offer it a subscription. That's not disruptive. Correct. But you think about Uber, that was disruptive. So this particular company was disruptive. However, their disruptive idea and hobby, beautiful it is, was not while communicating on the landing page or the homepage. I read it back and forth, back and forth, and I'm like, God, man. And sometimes, by the way, this happens because the idea is so unique that it's challenging to come up with a way to describe it. But the funny part is when I asked him, he managed to explain to me in 10 seconds. And I'm like, oh, man, I should just take the words how you explained your idea and just use that instead of the fancy words that no one understands. And then instead of telling people something, stay. Remember, the headline needs to pique people's interest. What does the headline do now? Leave. And that's what happens. That's not what you want to happen on a landing page.

That makes a lot of sense. So number five, I had to ask you this. You put the design of the page on number five. I think most of the people, not even more, some people, they would put the design of the page on number one. Why number five and not maybe number one or number two? Because I think, like, that's the first thing that you see right when you get to a page is the design. Oh, why is this, like, thing here? Why is this element there? So why on number five and not on number one?

So number five is design, and it's intentionally number five. Because design is important, but words a lot more important. And eventually, if you're online, if you work in E commerce, and if you do marketing, you will discover that one way or another, words capture, captivate our interest, people are willing to put up with just really bad design. If the messaging and if the words are powerful enough to pique their interest. That's the reason design is important, but it's not more important than messaging. We need to figure out our messaging because that's what we're going to compete on if you're going to compete on design. So guess what? The next company that has a better designer will beat you. So don't compete on design because design is a commodity and it's a commodity that is very easy to copy. You can buy templates nowadays for very long with all respect to all designers out there and beautiful work, design has its place and design serves a purpose because design also communicates the message that you have for the page. But if you don't have your messaging clearly defined, your design is not going to be able to communicate this. So you have your headlines and your messaging saying one thing and your design something saying something completely different. And you have conflict. And people can sense that conflict. Your visitors can sense that conflict and they'll say goodbye and good luck. Now we don't need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to design. There has been enough design patterns out there that you want to start from those patterns. So if you are designing a landing page, there are design patterns for landing pages for E commerce. Don't reinvent the wheel, however, take design patterns and sprinkle a little bit of difference in them when it comes to design. Lets your brand show through the design where you can stand out. People want to feel the normalcy that they feel when they're surfing the web, see things where they expect to see them, but you want to be a little bit, a little bit different. That's where design, where beautiful design, design that captivates can really help you improve conversion rates.

I've noticed that most of the E commerce websites, they look the same whether it's a landing page, whether it's a homepage. Maybe the homepage may be a bit different, but when it comes to product pages, category pages, most of them, they look the same. If you remove the logo from both, you might have like a difficulty in knowing which is which. So why do you think that is important to have like the same kind of a design?

Remember when it comes to design, people are used to certain things on e commerce website. They expect to select the quantity, product options, click on the add to cart. So every website will have those elements. And maybe this leads us to point number six, which is the form. Lots of times people don't think that an e commerce website has a form. But yes, a form is the interaction that you have with the user when the user inputs information and then clicks on a button that is what? A form. So for an e commerce website, that is your product option, that is your quantity, that is any options that the user has to select before clicking on the add to cart. And lots of times we know we need to have that information. So what happens is that people, people copy that information from one website to the next. That's fine because there are some design patterns there. But sometimes there are specifics for your website that you want to think through. And sometimes people throw in additional form elements that don't belong there just because they think they need to throw that into the form. I'll add an element to the form. Reviews. Okay, so any type of number of reviews, because that's social proof that's going to tell people that, oh yeah, we're credible. Yes, you can buy a product. Where do you place the reviews? How do you design the reviews? There's five different design patterns around reviews. One of them might work for your visitors, one might not. So think about that, how people interact between the different elements. We work with some apparel companies. Think about this. There's different sizes for small, just small size, regular and large for ladies. How do I actually design that in a meaningful way for my particular target market? So we work with two companies. One of them sells to women aged 20 to 35. The other sells for women age 50 to 65. They both have the same challenge. Correct. We have small size, regular and large. And guess what? One segment, one side deals with a particular segment that is very Internet savvy. The other deals with a completely different segment. We need completely different design pattern. We can't just copy from each other. People sometimes love to copy without thinking about their particular target markets and the people who are coming to their website. And that's where you end up with friction. That's where you end up almost convinced to buy from you. But you just made it too difficult. Goodbye and good luck. I'm not going to buy from here and I end up leaving that landing page.

That's good. That's good. So before we move on to the next one, we have a comment on LinkedIn from Josh Roberts. The comment reads, thank you for the insights. Viewing your landing page in a foreign language to see if the goal can still be understood is a great idea.

Thank you. It's Josh, you said. Yeah, and, and by the way, this was inspired by the fact that I pre Covid I used to travel quite a bit and I would land in all these European countries. I'm at the airport and guess what? I, I was a little bit cheap, so I don't want to just use my ENT or Verizon plan. So I'm like, I'm just gonna go ahead and just like, you know, figure out how do I join the WI FI at the airports. And sometimes some of those countries, they don't really acknowledge the fact that there are people who don't speak their native language. So I'll look, I'll be like, you know, somewhere in the Ukraine and they didn't have, I think, and I might be mentioning just the wrong country over here. And I'm like, oh, this is, I can't figure out this one. Let me see if I can figure out how I can get free WI fi without understanding a single word on the page. And some of those pages were designed beautifully, some of them were absolutely horrendous where I just could not for the life of me figure out how to get free WI fi end up like having to pay ATT over ISA for that day. So that's where this was inspired by.

Nice. Number seven, the cta. What's up with the cta? Why is it number, why is it number seven? Yeah, it's usually like in the top three. Usually when people talk about landing pages.

Number seven, the cta. I know I have to talk about it because people talk about the CTA all the time and they make it sound like the CTA is going to have an earth shattering impact on your bottom line. Unless you are doing something absolutely stupid. No, it's not.

I've also had people saying that you shouldn't test like the CTA button colors and some they say that you shouldn't test the cta just place it there. So I just want to hear your thoughts on those.

Some companies, some beginners will make the CTA sound like it is going to be the life changing experience that's going to have the most impact on your conversion rate. Other camp that says testing CTA is useless. It's probably definitely not a conversion rate changing experience, but at the same time it's not very useless. So I will test the cta, I will test the placement, I'll test the color, but it will not be the single element that I test. It will be part of a bigger test that I'm doing on the page. So we've done that for offensive look optic where we've changed multiple elements. One of them was the design of the cta, the placement and the color. And that test was absolutely amazing because it was a 22% lift in conversion. Rates. And it ran. It ran for three weeks, collected enough data, we went back, tested again, Absolutely killed it for them. Now, there's simple rules for the cta. It needs to be obvious, it needs to be clear. If I look at it from far away, I can recognize it. That's what the CTA is supposed to do. Unless you have thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of conversions. And we published this case study, and this was back in 2009, 2010, with Google, where they tested the 4000. Some combinations of the blue registration button. Correct. And that made the difference for Google on the account registration, about 8% lift. But that is Google. Guess what, my friend, most people are not Google. It doesn't make sense to have a single test around the cta. If somebody is suggesting that the CTA is the single thing that you should test, yeah, I'll tell them, no, don't do that. Would I include as an element in a much bigger test? Of course I would. So that's the reason I kept the CTA until the end. So what do you think?

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point because most of the time I just see people talking, saying that you are like not a pro when you focus on CTA button colors or something like that. But the way you say it, like as an, it has to be part of a much bigger testing strategy. That makes a lot of sense because sometimes one thing that I have learned talking to you or listening to you during the CRO level is sometimes to get to a certain conversion rate, you have to go through a certain number of tests. And so maybe sometimes that might include the CTA testing or something like that. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So I might have missed some things when it comes to landing pages. Would love to hear from people in the comments and as usual, if you have not subscribed, make sure that you subscribe to the channel. So I'm saying this for our YouTube channel channel, and if you have not followed us on YouTube, make sure that you do that. We should post a link to that. And with that, we come to an end for the CRO Live hour. We shall come back again next week.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you everyone.