MBA1143 Guest Teacher: Iz El-Bahnasy- How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show pumping great business lessons into your ears every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our Guest Teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Iz El Banasi and he'll be teaching you how to optimize your conversion rate. Iz knows a thing or two about conversion rates. He runs his own conversion app called gather over@gathercustomers.com he'll be talking about how to identify your customer's journey so you can make sure you can optimize your conversions along the way. Increasing your conversion rates is the best thing you can do in your business. It's also the simplest thing to increase revenues. There's a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Iz El Banasi Today's guest teacher is the founder of Gather. His app Gather allows you to get more leads and make more sales on your e commerce website, or any website for that matter. And he studied the behavior of his users as well as all the people that interact with the app installed on all these different websites to took all that information and rolled it into a great lesson today to show you how to optimize on your conversions. I'm going to let Iz take over and teach the lesson, but I'll be back with my takeaways and to wrap this all up. Take it away.

Izz hey, how are you? I'm Izzel Benassi. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you an intro into Conversion Rate optimization CRO in short, what is Conversion Rate Optimization? Conversion rate optimization is a process mostly based on scientific principles for improving the conversion rate on your website, app or online store. Now, it's important to define also what CRO isn't so that we can avoid many pitfalls. CRO isn't necessarily about increasing conversions indefinitely. The word optimizing doesn't mean increasing. In CRO you have to consider the whole customer journey, not just one step of it. The process usually involves the following 1. Defining your ROI and conversion goals. 2. Understanding what your customer journey or funnel looks like. We'll get to what a funnel is shortly and where the areas which are ripe for improvement are. 3. Understanding why these areas of the funnel are not performing well and how we may improve them. Number four implementing improvements scientifically and finally, number five learning from and doubling down on success. Let's get started with the first Understanding your ROI and conversion goals. This step is really important and is often missed by many. Before investing your time energy in improving conversion rates on your site, it is best first knowing what you would like your conversions to improve to. Perhaps they are good enough already and for now you need to focus your efforts elsewhere. Before you define your ideal conversion rates, you must first identify both your revenue goals, say your monthly revenue goals and your ideal return on investment. With that, you can use a calculator like the one found on our website. We'll link to it in the show Notes to figure out what conversion rates you should best aim for. Now that you know your target conversion rate, let's move on Understanding what your funnel looks like what is a funnel? Well, simply, we know that most customers won't buy from you as soon as they know about you. Customers usually go through stages before they make the ultimate decision. The progression through these stages is called the funnel. Each step of the funnel usually has less people going through it than the previous step. Hence it's called the funnel. Okay, that's the funnel. There are many ways to identify what the customer funnel looks like. A Typical funnel for an online store could look like a customer lands on the homepage, then progresses to the product category page, then progresses to the product details page and then onto the cart page to the checkout and then finally when they make a payment to the order confirmation page or the thank you page. There's also multiple versions of that. For example, the funnel can instead start on the product detail page. Okay. Using tools like Google Analytics or many other analytics tools, we can calculate the percentage of people who progress from one stage of the funnel to the next and then to the next. For example, 50% of visitors will progress from the category page to the product details page. This also means the category page has a 50% conversion rate. Of course, this is not just for ecommerce. Your funnel for say a software as a service product could look a customer sees an ad, then progresses to the webinar sign up page, then progresses to the webinar page, then progresses to a payment page and then finally into their account area. Okay, Once you have what a typical funnel looks like and what the percentage conversion rate between each stage of the funnel to the next looks like, you can then identify where the weakest stages are. Here's an example to reinforce this point. Let's use the first funnel we mentioned earlier. We calculate the progression conversion rate between one stage to the next and then we find out that There is a 20% conversion rate from the cart page to the checkout page. That is 20% of visitors to the cart page go onto the checkout page. We ask around and we realize that this is a lower conversion rate than our industry standard. We realize this is indeed the least performing stage of our funnel and that if we focus our energy there, we'd yield good returns. Moving on to number three, understanding the why and the how. Ok, so now we know what to focus on. Here's a few things CRO experts and entrepreneurs do to understand the reason behind the least performing part of the funnel. Experts use tools like surveys. These are surveys that can be embedded on your site which can be useful in gathering clues from customers. There's also heat and scroll maps. These are tools that record your customers interactions on your site. You can use them to anonymously identify various behavior patterns which give you further clues. Also experts use tools like user testing exercises which are tools and methods that allows your customer to tell you what they're thinking whilst they're browsing your site. These are done in a certain way to minimize biases and help you get a good understanding when figuring out the why and the how. It is always best practice to take multiple approaches and then look for common threads. For example, if customers during the user testing exercises say that they want free shipping, and your scroll map software tells you that your free shipping icon is pretty much hidden, that is, it's buried further down the page, you know what you need to do next. Another way of achieving a good understanding as what to do to improve your funnel is to do some research into other funnels in the market. How do other businesses approach this? A small change of making your free shipping icon more visible to customers can have dramatic effects on conversions. Okay, moving on to number four, implementing improvements scientifically. One of the ways scientists run experiments is being able to understand if their solution to a problem is better, the same, or worse than no solution at all. For example, if we were to move this free shipping icon to the top of the page, since our scrolling map software tells us that it's buried further down the page, will this increase conversions, make no difference to conversions, or worse, reduce conversions? We do that through what's known as split testing or a B testing. Split testing software serves two versions of the content on the page, the newly proposed version and the existing version. So in our example, the split testing software will serve the version of the page which has the free shipping icon on top of the page half of the time to customers, and the original version of the page the other half of the time. We set a goal to the experiment that says the version which yields the best conversion rates wins. Okay, moving on to number five. As you implement more and more split tests, you may start to notice patterns as to what works best. With time, you'll get better at proposing alternatives to web pages and app screens that are more likely to be successful in terms of conversion rates. Okay, that's all we have time for. Just to recap, customers make decisions on products and services in stages. The collection of these stages is referred to as the funnel or the customer journey. CRO is all about studying the whole customer journey, where we can identify where the ripest opportunities for improvements are. We use a number of tools and methods to figure out why these areas need to improve and how to improve them. Tools like user testing and heatmaps help with that. We use multiple methods and tools and then look for common threads. These common threads inform our decision and as to what changes to make. Once we know what changes to make, we implement those changes with a split test. Once we improve one area of the funnel, we then move to other areas that can also benefit. All right, this was an intro into the world of CRO. We've kind of scratched the surface here, and I hope you got excited about it and its potential for your business before I leave. Remember, although larger businesses often work with CRO specialists, if you're a small business owner, this does not mean that you couldn't get started with this stuff and improve your conversions and revenue for your business. Small and continuous changes can yield big returns. If you want to keep in touch and learn more about other nifty CRO exercises, be sure to check out the link in the Show Notes for the free PDF case study of how top ecommerce websites use the CRO process and the tools they use. I'll also link to some references that I've used here and other links that you might find useful. Thanks again for joining me today.

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Eduardo awesome, awesome lesson from Iz El Banasi. You could tell by his style of instruction that he gives you the facts. He's very scientific in breaking down this information and that's because he was originally an engineer before he became the founder of Gather. I know is personally he's a great guy and loves to get his hands dirty with some research. So follow the steps that is has placed for you in today's lesson. You may want to re listen to today's episode so you can call that Customer Journey for your customers and optimize every step of the way. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Every episode will download automatically right to your device no matter where you listen to podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some of us think that the best thing we can do for our business is just to get more traffic and get more eyeballs on our website. Yes, more traffic is great, but something that you can really control is how to increase the conversions with the eyeballs that you already have. So instead of trying to double your traffic, try to double your conversions. You can do that by taking a look at what works and what doesn't. So even if you only get 100 visitors to your website a day, increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 5% is something you can totally do. And it's a whole lot easier than doubling your traffic. So focus on conversions. Thank you so much and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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