Insights From A Conversion Rate Fanatic, Justin Christianson.

We've had something as simple as a product that had a scent to it. They had a scent guide on the page but visitors weren't seeing it, it was so far down. And the glowing thing is, why didn't you purchase? Because I don't know which scent to choose. So we just moved up the scent next to where they selected it and we bumped mobile conversions 30%.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Hello and welcome to the show. We're so glad you've tuned in. Today Roland talks with Justin Christiansen, an entrepreneur, digital marketing veteran and the number one best selling author of Conversion how to double your customers sales and profits with a B testing. Justin is the co founder and president of Conversion Fanatics, a full service conversion rate optimization company. So listen to hear how he manages the logistics of a retainer style consulting agency and he shares three counterintuitive insights that will help your conversion rates. So thanks for joining us and be sure to hit subscribe.

Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here with a.

New episode of Business Lunch. And I'm very excited today to have as my guest the co founder and president of of Conversion Fanatics, which is Justin Christensen. Justin, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

It's wonderful to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about who you are now and what you're doing at Conversion Fanatics and then we'll kind of go into the backstory.

So we started Conversion Fanatics six or seven years ago, basically on demand. People were always talking about the traffic side of things and I know you guys have your traffic and conversion summit and there's really nobody was talking about the conversion element and we tried teaching it and nobody wanted to learn it necessarily. They just said can you just do that for me? So fast forward. We've helped at this point close to several hundred businesses really just execute on their on site optimization.

So you guys basically go and do everything for them you like. If I say I've got my site and you know I want you guys to help me, then what do you guys do?

So we'll analyze the data, kind of take a better glimpse of what that data is kind of telling us in terms of story and then create a basic plan and start executing and then just building upon that and leveraging the results to really understand the on site behavior of those visitors, what they like, what they don't like, what holds weight, what doesn't just really help the scalability rather than hey, I changed the button color and it Raised or lowered my conversion rate, really just helping them identify more of what their visitors truly care about and how they interact with the brand.

Perfect. And is this the first business that you've had or are you a serial entrepreneur?

I've been doing this almost 20 years. I know I had an information publishing company for a handful of years, partnered with Mike Dillard way back, I guess, I don't even know. It's been 10 or so years ago since we parted ways, sold that back to him, had some startups, had some failed stuff along the way and just kind of fell on this from the consulting stuff that I built upon what I did with Mike and just some of the information that I published there and people just kept asking me about the implementation and really the optimization side of things and it's kind of spiraled into what it is now.

What would you say are some of the biggest things that you learned through the prior experiences that you brought into this that you think have been most helpful in being successful now?

Patience is probably the biggest thing that I have because I don't have any particularly going with the quote unquote agency model. As you know, in the direct to consumer market you get more feedback quicker. You can place an ad, you can see it works or it doesn't and kind of build upon that very quickly at the agency, you can't. You make the change and you might see the result 2, 3, 4 months down the road. So it's tough to make those quick decisions and just be in control of what you actually changed and attribute it to that outcome. So that's the biggest thing probably that I've learned is just kind of take it and really stick to the ideas. I've seen some ideas fail a little quicker than probably they should have. And if I would have stuck with them, one in particularly I built a software for split testing and optimization and analytics before things like optimizely and those things. And I let one mishap with a developer at the time derail the whole thing and I ended up losing it all when now I could have stuck that out and kind of fixed it when I was at the point of about a thousand members. So probably, yeah, patience and just seeing things through a little bit longer when you know they have a little bit legs, I guess you could say I've gotten a little bit smarter at what works and what doesn't.

And is there any software that's associated with this business?

Well, we leverage third party like heat maps type solutions. We have, you know, hot jar, crazy egg, whatever's really kind of in the. In the play. Then we leverage split testing software. Our go to is convert.com.

Okay.

We use VWO as well. But we're.

There's this, this one I don't know much about. It's called True Conversion that I hear is like just super awesome.

Yes. And I have had many of conversations with Rondo about that. For those of you who don't know.

That that's one of our softwares.

Yeah, we use it. It's not the. The main one but we do use it. We don't like to introduce a lot of extra things. I guess that's one of my little bit being jaded over the years and.

Well, or keep it simple. Right.

That's.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I see people over Automate and over. You know, particularly in the Shopify world that we live in. Majority is everybody just adds an app and adds a plugin and it ends up screwing up more than it helps in a lot of cases. So I don't like to reinvent the wheel particularly in the companies that we get to help. They're not small companies. And just to add another thing to their tech stack is not something they are generally fond of.

When you are in terms of defining conversion, is that basically how you get a visitor on a website to take a desired action?

Yeah, I mean it really depends on the business too. I mean we've got large law firms that we help generate leads for or we've got $200 million e commerce businesses. So the KPIs are definitely different. But it could be micro commitments such as an add to cart or an abandoned checkout. KPI or the holy grail is your conversion percentage to sale or lead and then your average order value, lifetime value.

What do you look at first?

I generally try to get the canvas of where the visitors are at, where they're going, where they're falling off based on the analytics. So just simple kind of 20 minute exercise that I go through and our team goes through just to see. It's like okay, we see that they're dropping off at your product page. They're not adding the cart. So we need to put some focus on that page first.

Is that where you start more on the like close to the money?

It depends. Sometimes we'll start on a homepage of a website versus the checkout. But some companies come to us like one recently, you know, that was a former shark tank company or something, something they wanted a landing page just because they were having issues. So we started on the landing page. Now we're backtracking and going to where the actual visitors are at just because they had a bottleneck in that. But sometimes we'll start on the checkout, sometimes we'll start at the homepage. It just really depends on each business and where kind of those visitors are falling off in that process. And we want to just gauge why that is and really just understand why. And that's what I do. I ask that question a lot of everything.

So do you have like an assessment that you go through with people to start that's kind of the same place that you start every time in terms of information gathering to then prescribe the actions to take?

Yeah. So I generally will ask a few questions. Again, I'm pretty simple by nature. We used to go through super, super long, in depth like user analysis and all of these crazy things. But I had found that you get kind of analysis paralysis. So I'll rather let the testing be the guide. So I want to get testing as quickly as possible. But I'll just look at ga. I'll look maybe their Shopify or their CRM stats, whatever kind of is at my disposal. Yeah, Google Analytics, it works. I mean it's simple, it's free in most cases. Some clients pay for the big level. But I'll look at demographic, age breakdown, conversion percentage, mobile, desktop, tablet, the shopping behavior, the products and the landing pages and the overall site visitors. There's really as in depth as I get and just really see what trend I can see because I look at so many that I just kind of know what a good benchmark is. How much time are they spending on the site? What's the average order value? What's the conversion percentage? I know that desktop is typically going to convert twice as well as mobile on most E commerce stores. I just know that new versus returning is about the same. I just get a general glimpse of where they are in that bigger picture and then based on some of their problem areas and we'll go from there.

So if somebody's like somebody's listening or watching this and they're thinking, you know, okay, what should I do first to help improve my conversions? What would you tell them?

Depends on the size of the business. So I go two ways. One is, and it usually starts with just asking your visitors what question we're not answering. I think a lot of people overlook the qualitative side and we get so hung up on the the what's and the hows versus the why and why we aren't answering certain Question. So I'll generally, I'll do an analysis from there. I'll just do an exit poll or a survey to the audience and say what question didn't we answer for you? Okay, why didn't you make a purchase today? Leave it open ended and let them vent.

So start by asking your customers what's working, what's not, what are their challenges kind of stuff. Right?

Yeah, I mean we've had something as simple as, you know, a product that had a scent to it, that they had a scent guide on the page but visitors weren't seeing it, it was so far down and they glowing. Thing is, why didn't you purchase? Because I don't know which scent to choose. So we just moved up the scent next to where they selected it and we bumped mobile conversions 30%.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it's just, I think a lot of people get so hung up on what we feel is right or what works versus, you know, you got to throw your ego out the window and just say here's the people with the money, you know, what do they care about the most? And we try to really just fine tune that. But generally what I tell people is just try to remove any level of friction in that process.

Right.

And that's all I do in terms of optimization. I'd like to say that we've got some crazy framework and some magic sauce, but it's really just we test and ask the right questions and what can I add? Remove, change, rearrange to alleviate friction from point A to point B. And that's really as simple and as complex as it gets. Obviously there's a thousand moving parts in between there, but that's generally how we go about it.

How do you do pricing? How did you decide how to price your services? And how do you price your services?

Yeah, this has been the million dollar question literally for the entire history of the company. We used to think that we needed to be the custom boutique everything. And we realized that we're not in competition with other agencies doing what we're doing initially. Maybe because when we first started, the companies were charging stupid amount of money for redesigning a landing page and not even testing it for clients. So we said we'll do it for a fraction of that, but we'll actually test it for you. And then we figured out we're not competing with other agencies, we're competing with internal resources. So you know why you can just hire somebody for a decent salary or you can hire this agency. So we're basically competing. We'll give you the entire optimization department for basically the price of a decent developer in house is essentially what it is. And we come with a bunch of developers and designers and strategists and analyze and all of that stuff. So we just went with flat retainer because we figured out that optimization is very hard to quantify on a grand scale. So it's like if I can see revenue, I could justify even now, this time of year, just coming off Black Friday, Cyber Monday, everybody's revenues are inflated, everybody's conversion rates are inflated. And I could say, oh yeah, it was because of our split test. Now you owe us a bunch more money. You can't charge on a performance basis when you're optimizing. Because I've seen reduction in customer support complaints, I've seen cost per acquisition be adjusted and average order values and lifetime values and all of those things you can't necessarily see on the surface when you're rearranging something on the page. So we just look for the long term scalability factor. So we're just flat retainer and we just roll up our sleeves and go to work.

So for other people that have consulting type businesses or thinking of adding consulting to their business if they were to go with the retainer option, is that a kind of all you can eat based on some number of hours or credits or how do you control or monitor the usage and demand?

Yeah, scope creep is definitely one of the things that we come across. Generally we don't say no to much as long as it's in relation the optimization. Because sometimes people will come in and be like, oh, I've got this bug on my site, can you fix it? It's like, no, we're not developers, we do develop, but we're doing it to help you improve. Sometimes we'll fix it if it's quick and there's a little bit of that. But for the most part we keep it pretty in line. I mean, we're generally pretty good about having done it so much that we're generally pretty good about pushing back on. Hey, that's out of scope. And we have it built into our contract that if it goes past, they have to. We have some ridiculous fee built in that nobody seems to want to take advantage of. Silly hours like $500 an hour for development. It's like something that just out of the ordinary. So we build that into the contract. So they're generally not too keen to jump on that development.

How do you decide when to increase prices?

Well, constant now the demand is a Lot higher. So the prices have obviously gone up. Um, we've got a lot more people reaching out to us and realizing that optimization is more important than say, three or four years ago.

Right.

So we've tried to stay away from the race to the bottom because, you know, as you probably know, those that pay the least generally value at the least. Yeah, those that pay the most are generally the easiest to work with. So we kind of try to find that happy medium and we've really gotten good about who we work with and saying no to the wrong people. Whereas, you know, luckily, we're in that position where we, you know, can be comfortable and know that we can deliver for a client rather than, hey, good, you've got money, let's work together.

Right.

I'm really good about saying no now, so. But I generally will keep it in within a range if clients demand a little bit more attention, a little bit more handholding, particularly from me. And rather than the team or even Maneesh, my business partner, they pay a little bit more for my attention and they pay, you know, if they need more tests or have more kind of product lines, or maybe they've got a funnel and they've got their e commerce store and they want to battle it out and us work on both of it. I'll treat it as a separate project. So it's basically its own entity, its own business, because they've got different inputs and outputs. So I'll basically double the price in a lot of cases or give them a slight discount on that second one. But generally all I want to be able to do is ROI if the business is there. And I know I can ROI an X number of, you know, time frame. That's really all I care about. And that's what I honestly, I lose sleep over, is making sure that we roi.

That's really great. What is the target that you're like if somebody comes to you, what are you trying to do for them? Usually in terms of a metric on.

Conversion improvement, honestly, I don't care as much about the conversion rate as I do say a metric like revenue per visitor or an average order value, because conversion rate can stay the same. But a business could have 300% more revenue as, you know, if you scale the traffic. Conversion rate is generally the first metric to dip. And we're seeing it luckily now we're seeing a lot of businesses. Both of them are rising with the Black Friday, Cyber Monday and all of November. But I generally look at a couple things. Conversion rate obviously is important, but I want to Mitigate the downside as they scale. You know, we've had businesses scale 300% in revenue in a year, but conversion rate went from like 1% to 2% and then dropped to 1.5. But it's still higher than where it was, but lower than where our peak was. But yet they've got 300% more revenue. So I look at a few different factors and we don't just bucket it into what is your conversion rate and where are we at after three months? Because what would you rather have more conversion rate or more revenue? I mean, most businesses choose that, particularly if we're doing UX UI kind of optimization, because we're better understanding our visitors and the brand equity plays a role into it. And, you know, if we're helping them better identify their customers, those customers are worth more long term. And we're seeing upticks in email performance and SMS performance and all sorts of things because we're just able to get more experience and more engagement on that store.

If you were going to say, what are the three most counterintuitive things about what people think about conversion optimization, what would you say those would be?

That you need to test a thousand tests a month to get there. Or I say that exaggerating. But we've had, we need to run 500 tests this month because we have the traffic to support it. And I'm like, how about we run five, like really effective tests and learn something or 10, you know, instead of that hundred? So I think over testing, because you can skew your data a lot, be led to false positives, that conversion rate is actually the sole metric. A lot of companies come to us and just say, I need to raise my conversion rate and they think it's going to infinitely go up from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, and it just doesn't work that way. The other one is the biggest mistake I probably see is going back to patients because companies think that they can run a test for one or two days and have statistically sound results when we've seen it swing wildly after four or five days. So I try to get at least a full calendar week in on a test and get a full at least a calendar weekend in there. But a lot of companies are quick to jump and think that they have a big win when they don't end up being a null or a losing result. So I'd say that's probably the three biggest things. That's great.

You mentioned over automation at the beginning. Will you talk a little bit about that. And what is the actual challenge with that? Because I know everybody likes whiz bang tools and whistles and things like that. So what's the danger of that and why should we watch out for it?

The biggest one that we see is in Shopify, probably because you install this app, it does a certain thing, it can make or break can help. But what happens when they update their code base or what happens when they do that and it can break five other things? Or it's really that we're introducing dirty code into a clean environment and we have no control over that code base. So now a lot of people are coming back and saying, well, my site speed's terrible, what can we do to fix it? The answer is nothing. Because you have 70 apps installed and happen to overlap each other six or seven times and you never know. We'll get companies messaging us at 10 o' clock at night. Be like, my site broke, what happened? Be like it was working three hours ago or four hours ago. And generally it's an app that updates or something like that. So generally we will try to simplify by hard coding it and making it a part of the theme like pop ups or timers and just little things that people integrate that are so simple. But yet the app that installed does 70 things instead of just the one thing you needed it to do. And we get a lot of stores that have a lot of apps. And the problem is if you deactivate the app, the code's still there. Even if you delete it sometimes the code's still there. So it's just knowing your environment and trying to be as clean as possible with that. And luckily we've got a lot of clients that are good about deleting stuff when they come in. Yeah, that's the biggest thing is over automation from that standpoint. You know, they've got four SMS platforms installed or they've got seven different email capture pop ups or you know, something at every step and you, you're finding, I've still got sites that I'm finding pop ups from and we've been working together for a year. You know, where'd that pop up come from?

Right.

It's like, oh, I don't know, we activated this. So it's just an interesting game of chess and or checkers when we're dealing with that. And that's kind of what's made me a little bit jaded towards automation. Be good from the if I owned more software as far as being the seller of the software.

Right, right, exactly.

And we built a few scripts that just we use for our clients that we just know are clean and simple and just straight to the point. So it works pretty well.

So who is the ideal customer for.

Conversion Phonetics generally e commerce businesses north of a million in revenue.

Million a year.

Yeah, million sales. And we can usually, usually ROI. I like to work with them if they got 50 plus conversions a day. Probably 50 plus sales a day. That varies. Obviously we got some with less, but their average order value is super high. So it's a little bit different optimization. But we work all the way up into. I mean we've worked with Clorox and, you know, NBC Sports and crazy big ones.

Do you have any resources that people could find to help them with this and what is the best way for them to connect with you if they have questions about how to get better at that conversion?

Yeah, I can actually give away a PDF copy of my book.

Oh, fantastic. What's the book called?

It's called conversion how to double your customer sales and profits with a B testing and wrote it a handful of years ago. Send everybody a PDF copy.

Is there a place they can go to download it?

And actually I think I'll create a URL conversionfanatics.com freebook. I'll create that right when I get off.

Versionfanatics.com fanatics is plural.com freebook we'll put it in the show notes and then also is there like a email or a site connect or a social or any place that they could connect with you to have a chat?

Yeah, on social. So if you just go to OneSpotsocial.com Justin Christiansen all one word. That's kind of my online business card.

One spot o n e s p o t social.

S oh, one spot social. My name Justin Christiansen. You can find all me on social. I'm on Facebook, I'm on, you know, LinkedIn, et cetera.

Conversionfanatics.com freebook and then they can pick up a copy of your conversion fanatic book on how to do a testing.

And do better download PDF of my book. And then you can find information, ton of resources. We've got a lot of videos, a lot of training, a lot of blog posts, a lot of case studies examples on our blog@conversionfanatics.com Fantastic.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. Anything that you want to say to everybody in closing?

Yeah, just don't be afraid to test and ask the right questions.

Awesome. Justin, thank you so much. I appreciate you hanging out with us today.

Yeah, thanks Roland for having me.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Frazier. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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