Make it All about your Customer, Not your Product
Highlights of the discussion:
- Understand why the buyer decides to make the purchase
- Make your message stand out with personalization
- Understand the goals of your client and the psychology of the buyers
- Make it about your customers not about your product
Tell us about Getuplift and your journey so far in Conversion Rate Optimization.
Getuplift is a conversion optimization agency. We help high growth businesses optimize their funnels and their websites. High growth companies have a lot of traffic that's coming in. They have some type of conversions, maybe they're collecting leads, maybe they're doing sales, maybe it's contacts or demo requests and essentially they want us to help make more of those. So our goal is to go in, analyze the website, understand what's working and what's not working and then create new variations that we can test. It can be copy, design. It can be a new homepage, it could be a new landing page. It can be an entire new funnel or an email sequence.
I've been in this industry for 13 years now. Early in my career, I was working in a social media agency. I was in charge of driving traffic. So, you know, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, YouTube, but a lot of that really kind of started and ended with comments like engagements.
I've always wanted to know are we actually impacting sales? Are we getting leads for these companies? I started experimenting in different ways with the ads within landing pages, not really with any real clear process, just kind of estimating what would make the change and the impact.
Later, I discovered the world of conversion optimization. I started a conversion optimization agency with two other partners, and we built an entire process. I think it was the understanding that in order to increase conversions and really affect my client's conversions, I needed to understand how people make decisions. I needed to understand the psychology behind the purchase and the signup. I mean, that's been my passion from the beginning and still is.
What are your biggest learning from experimentation?
When I got started with conversion optimization, I mostly changed elements on the page. As I mentioned, I was guessing, so a lot of my ideas for increasing conversions were like let's change a specific element on the page and see how that works.
But later, I understood it’s about the psychology— if you really want to increase conversions and you really want to drive more sales or signups or any leads, for example, you really need to understand the pains and concerns, the hesitations and all the challenges that your prospects are dealing with.
It's not just moving elements on the page to understand the conversion optimization is about solving people's problems. It's about identifying those pains and finding those solutions and showing them on the page for people. A lot of the time, people kind of jump in immediately to the solution.
People try to guess, or you Google to figure out how to increase my sign ups by a hundred percent, but the real way to go about it is to do the work to research your customers.
It's to do interview surveys, it's to do review mining, it's to get into your customers and prospects heads, and really understand who they are, what their pains are and their desired outcomes. That was my biggest learning. Ultimately my biggest failure was when I was trying to just change elements on the page because I just didn't get the results.
I didn't have a set process. I didn't understand what I was really doing. But once I moved away from that I've been 10 timing conversions for my clients ever since. Ultimately it's, it's a combination of the qualitative research that you need to do, and the quantitative research.
Where would you start your optimization efforts on the website?
If you're thinking about optimizing two paths and they happen at the same time, start with Google Analytics looking at your data and figuring out what's not working.
That's a technical point, and of course a piece of that is testing it, making sure everything's working, that nothing's wrong. So on the technical side, that's what you do, but then you have to move into the more emotional side, the psychological side.
What's missing on the page in terms of content, in terms of calls to action in terms of images, visuals, copy and so on.I always run a survey on the website for prospects to understand what pain has brought them to the website.
We also run a customer survey to identify the real value that our customers see from our clients. What are the real values and gains that they have, and we pair those together. We also use review mining.
All of that really helps us map out exactly who our customer is, all the types that they are, their pains, their desired outcomes, and help us map out a new variation and what needs to be said on the page to increase conversions.
What do you think is the biggest hurdle for the visitors on the website? What stops them from converting?
Every single company is trying to reach out via ads and text messages. There's like so much going on all the time and ultimately the problem really is finding something that you feel competent with. There are so many options. It makes it really hard to choose. And I think that it's all job as businesses to help our customers make smart decisions and show them that you are the right one for them.
We have to make sure that we capture people's attention, that we make it about them. I think that's where businesses struggle.
So many companies, so many websites that all talk about themselves, they're talking about their features and pricing. They're not talking about the product the way the customers would want to hear.
They're not talking about the customer’s pain points. They're not talking about their desired outcomes and they're losing them. The more you focus on yourself and the more you make it about yourself, the more you're going to lose customers.
Will it help to show relevant data, understanding the visitor and showcasing the particular data they're looking for?
Yes and it’s also about conveying we know that you're struggling with this, we know you've tried this and this. We know that this is how you feel. We know that this is what you're going through. Here is a solution that will work.
Most websites you'll go to says something like we're the number one in this industry or we have a hundred templates. We are the best AI, the best machine learning. It's all great, but people don't buy products. They buy the results. We're buying better versions of ourselves. So when someone lands on your website, they should be able to clearly see what's in it for them.
I'm not saying that your technology doesn't matter or that pricing doesn't matter. Of course, features and pricing matters, but not before someone is convinced about the value. If I use this product, I will feel this way. I will look this way. I will achieve this result because ultimately that's what it needs to be about their results and, and who they are and who they will become.
What would be your approach in removing distractions on the website?
I just think ultimately what you want to do is look at the website and the whole customer journey and start asking yourself the important questions and start with the content. Of course the customer journey and what you have to click on and where you go to and the colors matter. But ultimately what you really need to understand is when someone lands on this funnel, do they know what's going to happen when they click the button?
Those are these questions that you have to ask yourself. So I would say that to start out, look at common UX issues, look at any technical issues, figure out that something's wrong technically, but more often than less, it's a strategic issue that needs to be addressed.
How do you prioritize your experimentation idea?
We prioritize according to potential impact and how much time needs to be invested. For example, if we completely change the pricing page, and this pricing tier we could gain 10 acts in sign-ups, but that could take six months to actually execute.
So the idea is that we're constantly looking at what are the top pages that need optimizing, where's the biggest potential for impact in terms of driving more conversions, what is the quickest way to get that, but also time for implementation and challenges.
There's a lot of questions that need to be asked. it's easy to say let's just improve the homepage. But you have to make sure that all the resources are available to you, then it won't take six months to actually deploy something. So it's a careful balance between where you can get the most impact if you made the changes and what is actually available for you to do. The biggest way is to offer what pages need optimizing. It's actually going back to that research, understanding the customers and then I can look at the website and say all this information is missing.
I always audit it in terms of content— what people need to see in order to convert. Come up with multiple ideas to test and we start testing them over time.
Any favorite tools that you highly rely on for CRO processes?
I have quite a few that I like using for different jobs. I like to use Typeform, HotJar or Lucky Orange. They help us identify what people are clicking on, how much they scroll, how deep they go on the website, what elements they're clicking on.
When it comes to testing tools, we really do work with what our clients have like Google Optimize, VWO. Our client is already using it because for me, that is the best approach and not to try and bring in new tools that will take ages to implement or people won't actually enjoy using. So I don't have a favorite AB testing tool but I guess the ones I mentioned are my best ones.
What educational materials or resources do you suggest for upcoming marketers?
I actually recently just wrote an article about 10 programs that I recommend taking if you want to excel in conversion optimization. But my favorite content hubs would be copy hackers where I learn a lot about copy and conversion copy. Our website Getuplift has a lot of content free guides and free courses for learning conversion optimization.
What parameters do you use to check your optimization experiment?
That depends on the KPIs that we have set for the test when it comes to eCommerce sites, then obviously most of the times it's revenue, but sometimes it's average or devalue. Sometimes it's add to cart if we're trying to increase the basket. It's different if we're working with SaaS. Sometimes our initial KPI would be to start a free trial, but ultimately a few months down the line, we're actually trying to get paid customers and paid users. So each test is different and we want to be monitored according to the KPIs that we set for each test.
When I work with our clients, every client has their north star goal. For example, with one of our SaaS companies that we're working with, they have a very, very big goal for free trials. We know that our goal throughout the year is to reach that amount of free trials, but over the different types of tests that we run we'll have different KPIs, whether if it's to see if we can get more people to start a free trial or if they go for a demo.
So then first we'll test to see how many demo requests we get, or sending people to free trials, but also making sure that these people are actually converting into paid customers, because if they're not, then we're just expanding the funnel for no reason. That's not relevant or helpful for this company. So, we measure ourselves differently for every task, but we have a north star goal for each one.
What role does personalization play in CRO for you?
It really depends on how advanced the company is and how ready they are for it. We do a ton of personalization in email marketing or segmentations. But we also do stuff on websites. So one of our clients right now discovered through intense research that new users and new visitors have a very different mindset than returning visitors, for example.
So for new visitors, we're showing a very specific message that will eventually send them down a rabbit hole to the specific pages we want them to visit. But returning visitors are getting a very specific hardcore call to action because we know they are probably more prone to sign up.
It really depends on the different clients that we're working with, but we do a lot of new versus returning. We do a lot of personalization on pricing pages and also getting people to answer specific questions on a website so that we can give them the right information and offer specific templates.
So personalization for us is a lot about the messaging that we're using at the right time. And it can be in a popup. It could be in a completely different homepage. It just depends on the goals and what we're monitoring.
One advice you wish you had got early in your career?
My biggest advice is always going to be to make it about the people. We tend to all rush to the next product, the next technology, looking for things to automate everything for us, but you have to do the basics. You have to understand who your customer is behind the screen.
Once you know this information, once you really understand your customers, then personalization and anything else really becomes so much easier. So my advice is always going to be to go back to basics. Don't skip the hard work of getting to know customers and really understanding the person behind the screen.
