What is a conversion rate, and what does it really mean for you as a business owner?
In this guide, we’ll break down the definition of a conversion rate, show you the formula for calculating conversion rates, and help you identify whether your conversion rate is low or high.
At the end of the article, you’ll also find a link to our Conversion Rate Calculator to quickly help you unveil this mystery.
The simplest definition of a conversion rate.
The Simplest Definition of a Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is the percentage of prospects or leads that take a desired specific action.
The higher the percentage of people that take that action, the higher the rate. Thus, a this metric is a helpful way to gauge how a campaign, website or business is performing. Easy, right?
Let’s say you have people visiting your online shop and you want them to buy your products. The percentage of those visitors who end up buying from you is your online sales conversion rate.
A conversion rate can be calculated for each step in the sales, trial or lead generation process – like clicking on a paid ad, visiting a specific page, signing up for a newsletter, subscribing to a free trial or making a purchase – as well as for the entire customer journey.
You can even compare these conversion rates before and after making changes to the process or by running parallel campaigns. This will shed insightful information because it allows you to assess the sales funnel performance and identify ways to improve it. And this usually results in increased revenues.
What is a good conversion rate?
How do You Calculate a Conversion Rate?
This is calculated by taking the number of desired actions or conversions and dividing it by the total number of people involved, then expressing it as a percentage.
Conversion rate (%) = (Number of Desired Actions/Total Number of People) x 100)
Let’s take a look at some examples and tackle its calculation.
Conversion Rate Examples
Practice makes perfect. Let’s review some simple examples.
Online Store Sales Example
Imagine an ecommerce store that gets 100 visitors daily and 3 of them make a purchase. The online shop sales conversion rate is the number of purchases (3) divided by the number of visitors (100), expressed as a percentage.
(3/100) x 100 = 3% conversion rate
Lead Generation Example for a B2B Company
Now, let’s take a look at another example. Say a B2B company like Polycom, that sells the famous triangular conference room phones online, runs a pay-per-click campaign. They get 1,000 leads to visit their email signup page where 584 of them subscribe to download an industry white paper. We know you can calculate this rate blindfolded.
Correct, it equals the number of subscribers (584) divided by the number of Leads (1,000), expressed as a percentage. An impressive 58.4%
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
Now that you know what is a conversion rate and how to calculate it, the natural question that follows is, “Is this a good conversion rate?”
The shortest answer is that what could be considered a “good” rate is relative.
Conversion rates vary greatly by industry, by campaign type, by geo, language and device used. Conversion rates are not the same for ecommerce sites as they are for B2B sites, or for desktop, tablet or mobile users.
Let’s take a look at some stats on what some studies consider a good landing page or website conversion rate.
Across industries, the average landing page converts at a rate of 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Source: Wordstream
Converting at an 8.9% in the healthcare industry would make you a top performer, while in the travel industry, you’d need to climb all the way to a 19.7% to be at the top of the ladder. Source: Unbounce
Currently, Google Ads campaigns have been reporting average conversion rates of 3.17% on the Search network and 0.46% on the Display network. Source: Search Engine Watch.
Here’s something for you to ponder. If your conversion rates are as high as your competitors, will that stop you from working on increasing them?
Getting your customers over the blue line: the conversion rate formula.
So, What is a Low Conversion Rate?
In a similar vein, low conversion rates can also vary wildly from one industry to another, and even from one step in your funnel to another.
Are your conversion rates on the low end of the spectrum or very close to zero? Don’t worry. This is just an indication that there is work to be done and changes will be required.
You should also consider that a 1% conversion rate for a high-end, high margin product could equate to significantly more net profit than converting at a 90% on a low-end, low margin product.
If you do notice your business is actually experiencing low conversion rates, you know it’s time for action. Your goal is to have more visitors taking your desired action. That way you can have more leads, more sales, more revenue – and, hopefully, increase your profit margin. Do not hesitate to reach out to us if your business needs help increasing its conversion rates.
Should you be stealing ideas from your competitors? Wouldn’t you like to know how their website is converting first? It turns out that you can, and Mike Roberts wants to make it cheap and easy.
Novelty Bias.
It is the tendency of new things to increase our interest in them. For a digital marketer, it means preferring one design over another because it is cool, interesting, or just new.
We are rapidly leaving what I call the era of the carousel. This was a period of time in which rotating carousels were added to the top of almost every business website on the planet.
One person did it. It was cool. Several more followed suite. Before long website templates made this a standard part of their designs.
And for many of you, it actually lowered conversion rates.
This is Novelty bias at work. It often involves stealing ideas from others without knowing if they work, simply because they are new or interesting.
We’ve always said you should “steal like a scientist” riffing on the title of Austin Kleon’s book “Steal like an Artist.”
This means testing any ideas you want to steal from your competitors or other sites.
But, what if you could just see the analytics of any of your competitors’ websites?
UPDATE: Nacho Analytics No Longer Available
In July of 2019, the data feed that powers Nacho Analytics became unavailable. As a result, the Nacho Analytics service is no longer available. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll enjoy my conversation with Mike Roberts.
Your online competitors are now exposed. Intended Consequences Podcast
Who is the most curious person you know?
I make a good living trafficking in curiosity, and it’s been on my mind for several episodes of this podcast, Intended Consequences now.
Tim Ash told us how to build a curious business (Listen).
Dr. Diane Hamilton tested me using her Curiosity Code Index (Listen). Would you be surprised to learn that my curiosity is quite suppressed?
But, who is the most curious person you know?
For me, the answer is Mike Roberts. Mike called me late last year and told me about a new product he was launching that would let me see the analytics of any website. Then he told me the name: “Nacho Analytics.” I’m sure I woke up babies all over the neighborhood.
I knew that companies would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for this data. Mike wasn’t interested in this.
Mike is the Founder and CEO of SpyFu and Nacho Analytics. He is a digital marketing pirate, if you will. As I’m writing this, I realize he could be the “Dread Pirate Roberts” from “The Princess Bride.”
Find out why he’s pricing this so ANYONE can access it, and what Google said when they learned he was pumping his data into Google Analytics for easy access.
When you get back to the office:
If you’re afraid of Google Analytics, you are double handicapping yourself. Not will you not understand your own visitors, you’re missing out on understanding your biggest competitors’ businesses.
When you get back to the office…Subscribe to this podcast.
Because next time, I’m talking to Chris Mercer of MeasurementMarketing.io. My question to him is this: “How can anyone plug into Google Analytics? Where do we start?”
Every business wants to know their customers better. Yet many businesses are inward looking. What has to change?
When you want to save a file in your favorite application, which icon do most apps offer up?
Why it’s the image of a 3.5″ floppy disc, of course.
The Save Icon is typically a 3.5″ Floppy Disk
Why is it that the universal icon for saving a file is an image of a technology that breathed its last breath sometime in 2007? This is a technology that most users today have never even seen.
The reason is that Apple burned the 3.5″ floppy “Save” icon into our brains with the release of the Macintosh in 1998. Adobe, Microsoft and other software manufacturers followed suit.
By the time the 3.5″ floppy started being phased out just a few years later, the most primitive part of our brain had solidified this as the easiest to recognize icon when we didn’t want to lose our work.
Every time we clicked it, and got confirmation that our work was saved, we got a feeling of relief — and a squirt of dopamine. This cemented it in our mind and made it instantly available.
The image could have been a picture of a flying pig and we would still be using it today.
This is the behavior of our limbic brain, called “System 1” by Danny Kahnemann in the seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s been called our lizard brain and our monkey brain. It’s the knee-jerk decision maker, fight or flight.
My guest, Tim Ash, calls it the Primal Brain.
Why not something more intuitive? Like a file folder?
Or even a cloud?
Because, when our lizard brain doesn’t have a quick answer, it turns to our Executive brain. This part of our brain analyzes things to make decisions. And when this happens, it creates cognitive load.
This makes our applications harder to use and less satisfying.
We make few decisions with our Executive brain. It’s our Primal Brain — our emotional, fear-based brain — that gets the first shot.
So why are we using logic and rational thinking so much in our marketing?
Tim Ash started his career in the ‘interwebs’ back in 1995. He and I have a lot in common. For one, we both built web companies back in the ‘OG’ internet days.
On top of leading his CRO company SiteTuners, Tim is a digital marketing keynote speaker, founder of the Digital Growth Unleashed conference, and author of the book Landing Page Optimization. It’s still one of the first books I recommend to anyone who wants to get up on the learning curve when it comes to LPO….And back in the day, I learned quite a bit from it myself.
To begin to understand how our visitors think, Tim suggests we stop looking inside our companies, and start looking outside.
Listen in as Tim explains why you should always work backwards when it comes to a redesign. Start with your end users. Understand your audience. Then build.
Building a smooth customer journey is key to business and revenue growth. Here’s how to create a sales funnel that works in just 5 minutes.
You may not believe you already have one or more sales funnels in place, but all businesses do. Maybe it’s not working as expected. Or perhaps you would like to make it more effective. Follow these steps to create a sales funnel in 5 minutes that will have customers buying from you in no time at all.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
But first things first. Let’s quickly refresh the definition of a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is a hypothetical or ideal journey you would like a prospect to travel to become a lead or a customer. This is why sales or revenue funnels are also called “customer journeys” or “customer blueprints”.
They can be as simple as a one step Click to Call Google Ad, where the button is your opt-in point or as complex as need be. Especially for those businesses where lots of lead nurturing is needed for prospects to convert.
Call only ads are best used when there’s a sense of urgency to the offer. Isn’t this one of the shortest sales funnels ever?
Keep in mind, while you are building your sales funnel, that the best functioning ones are those that reduce friction. That is, they do not add unnecessary barriers or hurdles to the sales process.
Ready, Set, Let’s See How to Create a Sales Funnel in 5 Minutes
One of the sales models that is most frequently used in customer blueprints and customer journey mapping is the AIDA model, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, it maps how people make purchasing decisions. And, in spite of the technological developments, its importance and effectiveness has not diminished as humans have not changed their buying decision making process since then.
Whatever tactics you use to qualify leads and drive them closer to taking the desired action will change accordingly to where the lead is within the funnel: top (TOFU), middle (MOFU) or bottom (BOFU). It essential to understand how the funnel works from the moment you make the first contact (TOFU) with your ideal future customers to the moment where you convert those leads (BOFU). Keep in mind that each one of these components depends on the others.
Creating a sales funnel is as simple as defining the desired action and the target audience and then drawing the path between those two. And as complex as making it function successfully.
Here’s how to create a sales funnel (or improve the one you have) in 5 minutes.
AIDA model applied to customer journey mapping.
To Create a Sales Funnel First you Need to Generate Awareness
Attracting attention or generating awareness works best when you know your target audience media habits. You’ll be more successful if you advertise your brand, your products and/or services where the majority of your prospects already are.
These prospects may be currently looking for what your product or service provides or they may not. Those potential leads that are intently searching for a service similar to yours will notice relevant messages much more than those that are not.
For example, if someone is ready to upgrade to a new car, they will feel as if there are more automobile ads than usual. It’s because they are more aware. Generating awareness for your brand might be easier in this case. Funny how the brain works.
On the other hand, you may generate awareness amongst prospects with related needs. They are not looking for what you sell exactly. For example, while browsing their Facebook feed or reading a blog post, a person looking for a higher paying job may stumble upon a college or university they didn’t previously know existed.
Once you know where to find the vast majority of your audience, you can decide on a way to generate awareness about your brand. Usually these tactics range from PPC campaigns, TV or radio ads, billboards, blog posts, trade show participation, referrals, direct mail, email campaigns, online search results, all the way to super outrageous publicity stunts. You get the idea. Don’t craft the copy or the creative yet.
Have you chosen a tactic to introduce your prospects to your brand? Great! You’ve got the first step of your sales funnel covered. (Don’t overthink it) Move on to the next step.
Guiding customers through the buying stages: how to create a sales funnel that works in 5 minutes.
Second Step: The Interest Awakens
To create a solid sales funnel, you have to drive your prospects to click, call, download, sign-up, or visit you. And even though this happens at the last stage, you need to present the reasons why your are worthy of consideration in order to make it happen.
Do you have an eCommerce site and are offering free shipping? Is your SaaS fulfilling a productivity need that is important to your lead? Or do your cars flaunt the features your prospective buyers are searching for?
You need to know your customers and their behaviors, habits, and motivations to cut through the noise and to offer them something they recognize as useful or relevant.
This is the time to entice and convince them as to why they need your product or service.
Third Step: Pick Me! Pick Me! or the Sales Funnel Desire Stage
You presented your benefits properly and showed value to your prospect. Now it’s time to elicit desire. Congratulations! You are in the middle of the funnel (MOFU).
Keep an eye on your goal, your lead has to desire your product or service above any other.
Hence, you should keep educating and positioning your brand as the solution to their needs and problems. This is the stage where you shine a spotlight on those benefits. Testimonials, case studies, product comparisons, and customer reviews work well here.
This is also the stage where you match your product or service benefits to the prospect’s needs to clear up any barriers to the sale. This is a critical stage in which website traffic often fails to convert.
It seems to go without saying that any good sales funnel ends with a purchase. The biggest mistake people make when using the AIDA model, though, is to assume the sale will happen organically once the other steps have fallen into place. It won’t. Unlike an actual funnel, what goes into a sales funnel doesn’t always reemerge at the end. And people tend to not take action unless they’re asked. So, pay attention to your calls to action – the worst mistake sales people make is not ask for the close.
What’s your call to action? How will you prompt them to fill out the form, complete their shopping cart purchase, have a one-on-one call or meeting or do whatever final action you want them to take to complete their customer journey?
Purple mattress on exit intent pop up offer (BOFU).
Maybe you’ll offer them a free assessment, or a last minute discount if they complete the transaction right away. Take a minute to decide as the BOFU stage is the most crucial since it’s where you ask for the sale.
Ta Da! 5 minutes to build a sales funnel without writing a single line of copy — yet.
Would you rather have the conversion scientists identify your customer journeys to help you build your funnels? Then, check out our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit Services.
Sales Funnel Examples
Now that we’ve created our customer journey, let’s take a look at a couple of sales funnel examples for inspiration.
I think we covered one with the call only PPC ads example. Great for a local business like a personal injury attorney or a plumber, locksmith or any organization whose concern is to make the phone ring. Another requirement for successfully using this type of sales funnel is a sense of urgency to your product or service.
Purple mattress provides visitors with a humorously informational and convincing MOFU tactic on their landing pages with their zany videos backed by scientifically proven data. We may be a bit skewed as they also wear lab coats but go ahead, play the video and tell us what you think – unless you decide to buy a mattress first. ;)
A typical lead generation sales funnel example that remains mostly on the TOFU stage is to offer a Free Book, Research or White Paper to visitors – organic or paid. Take them to the next stages of the funnel by offering a one-time offer or a free consulting session. Keep qualifying the lead and close it with a call or an in person meeting.
How do you bring a data-driven approach to your website redesign? BigCommerce hired Chris Nolan to do just that. Here’s how he used data to drive a Market-first redesign.
When we lose an employee to another company, I feel a mix of pride and saltiness. I’m proud that working here turns otherwise ordinary men and women into highly valuable data-driven performance marketers.
But I hate getting my employees poached.
In 2018, it was time for one of our employees to step into a bigger role. After working with us for years, Chris Nolan (not the Batman director) stepped into a big role in a company with Big in its name.
Chris was tapped to be the cornerstone hire for the growth team at BigCommerce. We miss him, but have enjoyed seeing how a Conversion Scientist takes on a big organization like BigCommerce.
His challenge is the same challenge that “woke” marketers are facing in every industry. How do I get an entrenched culture to adopt data and testing.
You might say that Chris jumped out of his lab coat and into the fire with BigCommerce, as they recently redesigned their entire site. There is no bigger challenge to a growth marketer than an “all in” redesign.
BigCommerce homepage before the website redesign.
BigCommerce homepage after the website redesign
I invited Chris to come onto the podcast to share the challenges and triumphs of a new hire nudging a culture from the bottom during a website relaunch.
Buckle up.
Chris is the Senior Growth Strategy Manager at BigCommerce. Businesses build their e-commerce websites on BigCommerce technology. They recently completed a website redesign.
Chris started his marketing journey because he had a passion for human behavior. This episode is jam-packed as he walks us through agency relationships, differentiating mobile from desktop sites and how to think ‘market-first’ to get the right site experience for your next redesign.
Self Care Tip
Championing change in an organization is a long journey, but the victories come all along the way. So, when you get back to the office, do something to take care of yourself. Book a massage. Put a meditation session on your calendar. Invite a close friend to your favorite restaurant. Get a jog or workout in.
These are scientifically proven ways we make ourselves better marketers, too.
How often do your landing pages break promises made in your ads or newsletters? Here’s an example that may hit home.
This is a tale of two companies who can’t afford to blacken their reputation any more than they already have.
It is the story of one letter, one landing page and a broken promise.
Experian doesn’t have many friends in the public domain. Their main job is to prevent people from getting homes, cars and frozen pizzas. Their second job is to make it hard for victims of identity theft to redeem themselves.
Adobe is a company who gave 2.9 million of their customers’ account information to thieves.
I love my Adobe software, so I was philosophical about the security breach. I got a nice letter saying that they’d hired Experian to make sure I didn’t fall victim to identity fraud.
The letter gave no hint of irony.
“You have until February 28, 2014 to activate this complimentary credit monitoring membership by using the following activation code: XXXXXXXX. This code is unique for your use and may not be shared. To enroll, please visit http://www.protectmyid.com/adobe, or call …”
I visited the link in the letter. The letter made a clear promise and this link contains a promise by including the word “adobe” in it.
The link sent me here:
This landing page broke a promise made in a letter.
No blank for an activation code.
No mention of Adobe on the page.
A broken promise.
I took the time to try to sign up. They wouldn’t take my activation code.
The best brand experience is giving visitors what they expect. These companies are pissing on the people they have already let down.
How many times are your ads making promises that your landing pages are breaking?
When Landing Pages Break Promises UPDATE
The landing page has changed. Now THIS is a promise kept:
This landing page from Experian keeps the promise.
This is a landing page that keeps Adobe’s promise. My only criticism of this page is the use of stock photography, which we call business porn.
What is the ultimate marketing technology stack? Join us in learning how to build a MarTech stack with Dan McGaw from Effin’ Amazing.
Dan McGaw sees the threads that connect customers to websites to campaigns to decision makers. We call these “MarTech stacks” and they are the hot topic in digital marketing these days.
We all have stacks. Email platforms, marketing automation systems, customer management systems, analytics databases… And then each of the services we work with adds to our marketing technology stacks — Facebook, Instagram and other social media, Google Ads, Amazon.
Most of our MarTech stacks come together piecemeal, one part at a time, independent and unintegrated. This means we spend hours drowning in spreadsheets as we try to answer simple questions, like, “Should I run that campaign again?” and “How many times do I have to touch my prospects before they buy?”
Fortunately, Dan is sitting down with me and I’m going to wrestle as many insights from his brain as possible. He knows all of the tools. And he doesn’t mind telling us how to build a MarTech stack.
Buckle in.
Utilizing the Vice Framework for Marketing Stacks with Dan McGaw Intended Consequences Podcast
On today’s show, we’re talking about the VICE Framework, what it means and how marketers can apply it as they experiment in their marketing teams. Dan McGaw from Effin’ Amazing will also tell you how to build a MarTech Stack to support the execution of your market strategy.
Let’s Dive into Building a Marketing Technology Stack
There’s a lot of talk about MarTech stacks at all levels. From email marketing, customer journey marketing automation, customer relationship management CRM, google analytics, tag management all the way through to search engine optimization or SEO tools.
There are dozens of options, dozens of choices and new interesting tools appear daily. This is the golden age of marketing.
Is there a common marketing technology stack that’s a good starter stack of tools that right now are best in class for most organizations? Or do you have to evaluate all the options and pick the right tool for an organization?
There’s definitely different tools and some are better suited for certain types of business. You have the all in one packages, which usually just do OK and most marketing operations can get away with that.
Think about a platform like HubSpot, HubSpot does everything. They do it about 60% well and about 40% not.
For most people 60% is good enough. For other companies, that’s not going to be enough. So we typically look at best of breed tools, MarTech stacks that pushes the limits of reality.
When you think about your normal SaaS company, there’s a plethora of options and you really need to focus on what is the outcome you’re trying to create and then start to research the different management tools that are out there.
The ultimate stack is what we recommend to all businesses that want to get started and be scalable and effective in their marketing efforts in the future.
So the big thing that companies need to understand now is this concept of customer data platforms or customer data infrastructures.
1. You need to be able to send your data to one source and that one source needs to distribute it to all of your other tools. That’s known as a CDI customer data infrastructure.
The three main players in that space are Segment, Metarouter and Mparticle. They are web tools which have client side libraries, JavaScript and then server side libraries that you can use. They also integrate with tools like Salesforce so they can consume data from Salesforce and pass it downstream to other tools.
That way you have one source to send your data to and then it’s distributed throughout the rest of the MarTech stack. And it becomes the hub of how data moves around.
2. The next thing you need to have is CEP or marketing automation tool like Marketo or Pardot’s marketing automation platforms.
3. The one tool that we recommend to everybody is a platform called Autopilot. Does email, text message, can send web hooks, other platforms integrated with Zappier, there’s direct mail and a text bot. But it really can work as a transactional system – where x happens and it immediately fires – or it can do a 16 day drip campaign.
3.a. If you’re a B2B, you need a CRM I would always recommend Salesforce.
4. And then your downstream analytics tools. Google Analytics is cool, but it doesn’t do enough. I recommend either Amplitude or Mixpanel.
That’s a primary marketing technology stack right there. So you have Segment, Autopilot and for B2B Salesforce. And then you have something like Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Tip for evaluating your Martech Stack
You’ve seen the bulletin boards in movies used by detectives to help solve a crime, covered in pictures and connected by strings tacked together.
Here’s my martech stack diagram.
You should do something like that.
When you get back to the office, bring to mind your most recent campaign. On a bulletin board, or whiteboard, draw the path of your prospects through the various systems in your stack all the way through to purchase.
Even if the systems aren’t in your control.
Draw green lines (or string) if you can track your prospects from one part of the stack to the next.
Draw red lines if you must manually move data, or if data is not available.
For us, the Marketing Scorecard is where we analyze all of the work we’ve done. There are several red lines leading into it. It’s in a spreadsheet and I manually enter data weekly to answer questions like, “How much is a new subscriber worth in dollars?” and “How has our new landing page changed acquisition cost?”
Then get to work on the red lines. Some of them are red simply because you’re not using the data. I rarely log into Sprout Social to see how our campaigns are driving new subscribers and leads.
Reach out to sales to see if you can get a regular report of sales. Figure out how to tie web campaigns to closed deals by passing campaign identifiers with form data.
Then listen to this podcast again. You’ll see Dan in a whole new light.
What is the role of data within a digital agency? Should you collect data if you’re redesigning a website? We discuss these issues on Intended Consequences.
When we redesign our website, we are given a rare opportunity to change the bones we build it on.
Imagine that your website is a doll. You start with a generic, human-shaped form and begin to turn it into something. You choose the clothes, the hats, the shoes, the shades for it. Some you buy. Some you make yourself.
Your website is similar. You rent server space from a host and drop a content management system on it. This is a generic website-shaped form that you can begin dressing. Lest you think you can do anything with this digital doll you’ve purchased, be careful.
You can’t put Barbie clothes on an American Girl doll. You can’t put GI Joe clothes on your Star Wars action figures. Likewise, the host you choose forms the bones of your site, and limits what you can make of it.
And this is why we often find ourselves frustrated that our Mr. Potatohead host can’t deliver a chic Bratz website.
If you want your website to fit into WordPress clothes, my guest today has the host for you. WPEngine is a host dedicated to WordPress websites. David Vogelpohl is responsible for marketing these hosted services.
David Vogelpohl WPEngine Intended Consequences Podcast Featured Image
David is the VP of Web Strategy at WPEngine. This conversation builds off the conversation Joel and I had on the last episode about website redesigns.
I’ve known him for a long time. I knew him in a previous life when he founded and built a design agency here in Austin. I’ve spoken at the meetup he founded called AUSome. So it’s rather ingracious for David to come on my podcast and counter what we preach here about Website redesigns.
David says that data doesn’t really matter for him and his team when it comes to website redesigns. He says no matter what, an agency has to use data to show customers the results – and as an agency, you have to live with the good – and the bad. Listen in as he explains…
Data-driven Design Tip
We don’t always get to research our campaign and website designs. That’s just the way it is. But every launch is an experiment.
When you get back to the office, think back to some of the campaigns or web pages you launched. Take the time to drill in on how that effort performed. Not just the results graphs you presented to the team. Ask yourself what you can learn from it.
Did your emails have different open rates? The ones with higher open rates may have had more relevant subject lines.
That service description page you launched… is it a factor in getting more demo requests from your visitors? Analytics can tell you.
The change you made to your home page, did it reduce the scroll rate? Your heatmapping software can tell you.
If you don’t know the answers to any of the questions you have, you get to figure out how to collect that data next time, on the campaign or page design you’re doing right now.
You’ll gain some insights. But more importantly, you’ll learn how to learn from everything you do.
How is conversion optimization ensuring that website redesigns always deliver an improvement in performance? Brian Massey and Joel Harvey can tell you. And they do.
Poker is one of those games that, like digital marketing, requires a left-brain/right-brain approach. To begin with, good poker players know the percentages. They know that the two four’s in their hand gives them a 12% chance of winning in a typical game. That’s their left-brain, data-driven knowledge.
Then you add in all of the right-brain stuff. Emotion. Reading the other players’ faces. Controlling your own face. Tells. And past behaviors.
Yep, that’s digital marketing. But there’s one move that throws all of that out the window.
You may have seen it in the World Series of Poker on TV, or in a James Bond movie. One player pushes his entire stack of chips into the center of the table and says, “All in”. What he’s saying is, if he loses this hand, he loses everything. All of the other players have to ask themselves, “WIll I match his entire stack?” or should I get out now.
Going all in smashes everything. It may mean that you’re ignoring the data in one big high-stakes bluff. Or it may mean that you’re trying to ratchet up the emotion, scaring the rest of the table into making a bad decision.
There is an equivalent to “going all in” in digital marketing as well. It’s called a website redesign.
This is one of the biggest budgeted projects a company will do. When someone throws a lot of money at the marketing department, it can be hard to resist.
Sure, it could have a huge impact on the financial prospects of the firm. It can also cause you to lose everything.
Poker players have one advantage over digital marketers when going all in: They can see their cards. They know their percentage. Digital marketers? Well, they have past performance from the current site..
Joel and I are talking website redesigns today. And we’re going to tell you something that may blow your mind. Website redesigns don’t have to be an all or nothing hand. You don’t have to push all of your budget in and wait 3, or 6 or even 12 months later.
Listen to find out how we stack the odds in our favor, guaranteeing a winning hand.
The website redesign needs to be profitable – not pretty.
Users tell you what they think you want to hear.
Slow and steady wins the [website redesign] race.
Demand data.
When an agency comes to you and asks you to pick something, that’s an opportunity for you to say, “Wait a minute! You guys go off and collect some data and tell me which one of these is going to be victorious.” You shouldn’t be guessing. They shouldn’t be guessing.
Website Redesign Tip
The all-in approach isn’t just limited to website redesigns. Individual campaigns are usually all-in affairs as well.
When you get back to the office, open a spreadsheet and start writing out the assumptions that you’re making when designing that email, social media ad, or landing page.
You should quickly have a few dozen.
“We need to be clever in our headline”
“We need to have a picture on the page”
“We need icons on our website.”
“Video is required.”
Many of these may be well supported by past experience or best practices.
For each, you should ask, “Do I have a way of finding out if this assumption is a good one.”
You may be able to look at the performance of past pages. You may be able to see which email subject lines worked best in the past. You may create different versions of ads and see which delivers the best result.
Now you’re looking at your cards, and you’ll rarely win a hand if you don’t.
Let’s dive into a brand new online marketing concept: Contextualization. Thanks to AI and ML, we have come a long way from creating customer segments. To improve conversions, we also need to understand context. Read on.
I predicted years ago that my business would be using machine learning for much of what we do manually today.
When I talk to people like Olcan Sercinoglu, I know that day is coming. Olcan is the CEO at a company called Scale Inference. He studied and worked under Peter Norton from Google – the guys who wrote the book on Machine Learning – and has spent the last 25 years as a developer engineer. Scaled Inference focuses on applying machine learning to online user interactions, and to personalize their experiences in ways we could never do by ourselves..
If we can understand how machine learning is different, we can understand how our digital marketing will be changed in the near future.
And so my interest was, “OK, this is great, but how do we how do we build a platform that is useful to others?”
From Segmentation to Contextualization: The New Way to Look at Marketing Key Takeaways
Moore’s Law. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that we’d be able to fit twice as many transistors on a microchip every year. We are experiencing a golden age of tools – the tools are getting better, less expensive and getting easier to use.
The future of AI marketing. Is it all about personalization? Are the metrics you’re optimizing for clear? And if not, can AI even work for you? Or how do we take all this data and make it matter?
Contextualization. We are taking this idea of personalization and introducing you to a new term – contextualization. Everything you do as a marketer should flow from optimization. By understanding the metric first, then you can ideate and create based on the context that’s being emerged from the data.
How do we use AI to make us better marketers?
AI Optimization-Why context matters with Olcan Sercinoglu
But at the end of the day or what companies actually want out of that saying there hasn’t been much progress. I think a lot of progress is going to happen as machine learning shifts towards metrics and these easier modes of integration.
Moore’s Law: As Valid Today as it was a Few Decades Ago
In 1965, a man named Gordon Moore made a bold prediction, a prediction that was expected to fail almost every year since. It is a prediction that helps to explain the dizzying speed with which our lives are being upended by new tech..
What Moore said in 1965 is that we’d be able to fit two times more transistors on a microchip every year, year after year. What this meant for the semiconductor industry is that microchips would get twice as fast and cost half as much to produce every single year.
This, they thought, was crazy talk.
A Grain of Rice and a Chessboard
Take a typical chess board. On the first square place a grain of rice. On the next square put two grains of rice. On the next square, four. And double the number of grains of rice on each subsequent square.
By the time you reach the final square, number 64, the amount of rice you would need would require the entire surface of the earth and its oceans to grow, 210 billion tons.
That’s the power of compounding.
Every few years, the skeptics declared that we had reached the end of our ability to shrink these tiny transistors any more. “It’s just not physically possible,” they said.
And every time, Moore’s prediction was proven more or less true.
Even today, as the wires that run across microchips approach the width of an atom, engineers find ways to make things half the size.
Why should you care? As microchips shrink and drop in cost, so do the things we build with them. For example, the camera that is found in any laptop has a HD resolution and costs the manufacturer a few dollars. The cost of servers and storage space has plummeted as well. Hence, most of our computing and storage is done in the proverbial cloud.
All of this has created a golden age of technology — for consumers, for businesses, and especially for marketers. Entrepreneurs are using the cloud and cheap computing power to make digital marketing cheaper easier, and more predictable.
It is now more expensive to ignore the amazing data we can collect than it is to buckle down and put it to use.
While we’re sitting around wondering what to do with all of this data, entrepreneurs and engineers are using it teach machines to learn.
The Era of Neural Networks: Is the Future of AI marketing all about Personalization?
Neural networks are computer programs that work like human neurons. Like the human brain, they are designed to learn. Neural nets have been around for decades, but only in recent years have we had enough data to teach them anything useful.
Machine learning is lumped together with Artificial Intelligence, or AI, but it’s really much simpler than building an intelligent machine. If you have enough data, it’s relatively easy to teach a machine how to learn and to get insights from it.
In fact, machine learning is being used all around you and you probably don’t even know it.
In this episode, I am going to change the fundamental question you ask as a marketer. You will no longer ask, “Will this creative work for my audience?” You will ask, “Which people in my audience will this creative work for?”
And we’ll ask some more tactical questions.
How do we pull meaningful things out of our data in a reasonable amount of time.
So how do we understand the information that the machine pulls for us?
Are you optimizing for the right things? And if not, can machine learning even work for you?
How do we take all this data and make it matter?
How do we as marketers, become better at using the tools and resources available to us in the age of Moore’s law?
I start the conversation, asking Olcan, “Is the future of AI marketing all about personalization?”
From Segmentation to Contextualization: Focus on the Context that Your Visitors Arrive In
My favorite take away from my conversation with Oljan Sercinoglu is that context matters.
There is one big context that you don’t need machine learning to address: It is the context of your mobile visitors.
You may say that your website is responsive, and that you’ve already addressed the smartphone context. But, you haven’t.
Do you want proof? Check your analytics. You’re smartphone conversion rates are probably a half or a quarter of your desktop sites, even with that responsive design. I know this without looking at your analytics.
Mobile visitors are coming in a completely different context than desktop visitors. They don’t need a shrunk down version of your website. They need a different website.
Fortunately, you don’t need a machine learning program to identify these visitors. You can start personalizing your mobile site to deal with this new context.
Try this as a contextualization exercise: Reduce the number of fields on the mobile forms, or eliminate the forms altogether. Replace them with click-to-call. If you have an eCommerce site, make “Add to Cart” secondary and build your mobile subscriber list. Email is the life’s blood of eCommerce.
If your website is generating millions of visits, you may want to consider putting that data to work for you. Not every business is ready for machine learning, but you don’t want to be the last business in your market to start using it.
When You Get Back to the Office
When you get back to the office, I recommend that you share this episode of Intended Consequences with someone else in your company. It’ll make you look smart and forward thinking.
If not I have a challenge for you.
Here’s my challenge to you this week – start to really think about how you define success. Answer the question, “I’ve done a great job because…” and fill in the blank. Answer this questions three ways. everything you do as marketer should flow from optimization.
Then ask, how do I measure each of those with data I’m collecting today. Once you’re clear that it’s the idea that by understanding the metrics, first then you can begin to prioritize your data gathering and create based on the context that’s being emerged from the data.
What is a Conversion Rate? What is a Good Conversion Rate?
Conversion OptimizationIn this guide, we’ll break down the definition of a conversion rate, show you the formula for calculating conversion rates, and help you identify whether your conversion rate is low or high.
At the end of the article, you’ll also find a link to our Conversion Rate Calculator to quickly help you unveil this mystery.
The simplest definition of a conversion rate.
The Simplest Definition of a Conversion Rate
The higher the percentage of people that take that action, the higher the rate. Thus, a this metric is a helpful way to gauge how a campaign, website or business is performing. Easy, right?
Let’s say you have people visiting your online shop and you want them to buy your products. The percentage of those visitors who end up buying from you is your online sales conversion rate.
A conversion rate can be calculated for each step in the sales, trial or lead generation process – like clicking on a paid ad, visiting a specific page, signing up for a newsletter, subscribing to a free trial or making a purchase – as well as for the entire customer journey.
You can even compare these conversion rates before and after making changes to the process or by running parallel campaigns. This will shed insightful information because it allows you to assess the sales funnel performance and identify ways to improve it. And this usually results in increased revenues.
What is a good conversion rate?
How do You Calculate a Conversion Rate?
This is calculated by taking the number of desired actions or conversions and dividing it by the total number of people involved, then expressing it as a percentage.
Let’s take a look at some examples and tackle its calculation.
Conversion Rate Examples
Practice makes perfect. Let’s review some simple examples.
Online Store Sales Example
Imagine an ecommerce store that gets 100 visitors daily and 3 of them make a purchase. The online shop sales conversion rate is the number of purchases (3) divided by the number of visitors (100), expressed as a percentage.
(3/100) x 100 = 3% conversion rate
Lead Generation Example for a B2B Company
Now, let’s take a look at another example. Say a B2B company like Polycom, that sells the famous triangular conference room phones online, runs a pay-per-click campaign. They get 1,000 leads to visit their email signup page where 584 of them subscribe to download an industry white paper. We know you can calculate this rate blindfolded.
Correct, it equals the number of subscribers (584) divided by the number of Leads (1,000), expressed as a percentage. An impressive 58.4%
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
The shortest answer is that what could be considered a “good” rate is relative.
Conversion rates vary greatly by industry, by campaign type, by geo, language and device used. Conversion rates are not the same for ecommerce sites as they are for B2B sites, or for desktop, tablet or mobile users.
Let’s take a look at some stats on what some studies consider a good landing page or website conversion rate.
Converting at an 8.9% in the healthcare industry would make you a top performer, while in the travel industry, you’d need to climb all the way to a 19.7% to be at the top of the ladder. Source: Unbounce
Here’s something for you to ponder. If your conversion rates are as high as your competitors, will that stop you from working on increasing them?
Getting your customers over the blue line: the conversion rate formula.
So, What is a Low Conversion Rate?
In a similar vein, low conversion rates can also vary wildly from one industry to another, and even from one step in your funnel to another.
Are your conversion rates on the low end of the spectrum or very close to zero? Don’t worry. This is just an indication that there is work to be done and changes will be required.
You should also consider that a 1% conversion rate for a high-end, high margin product could equate to significantly more net profit than converting at a 90% on a low-end, low margin product.
If you do notice your business is actually experiencing low conversion rates, you know it’s time for action. Your goal is to have more visitors taking your desired action. That way you can have more leads, more sales, more revenue – and, hopefully, increase your profit margin. Do not hesitate to reach out to us if your business needs help increasing its conversion rates.
Forget Industry Benchmarks. Your Online Competitors are Now Exposed
Web AnalyticsNovelty Bias.
It is the tendency of new things to increase our interest in them. For a digital marketer, it means preferring one design over another because it is cool, interesting, or just new.
We are rapidly leaving what I call the era of the carousel. This was a period of time in which rotating carousels were added to the top of almost every business website on the planet.
One person did it. It was cool. Several more followed suite. Before long website templates made this a standard part of their designs.
And for many of you, it actually lowered conversion rates.
This is Novelty bias at work. It often involves stealing ideas from others without knowing if they work, simply because they are new or interesting.
We’ve always said you should “steal like a scientist” riffing on the title of Austin Kleon’s book “Steal like an Artist.”
This means testing any ideas you want to steal from your competitors or other sites.
But, what if you could just see the analytics of any of your competitors’ websites?
UPDATE: Nacho Analytics No Longer Available
In July of 2019, the data feed that powers Nacho Analytics became unavailable. As a result, the Nacho Analytics service is no longer available. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll enjoy my conversation with Mike Roberts.
Nacho Analytics with Mike Roberts
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Your online competitors are now exposed. Intended Consequences Podcast
Who is the most curious person you know?
I make a good living trafficking in curiosity, and it’s been on my mind for several episodes of this podcast, Intended Consequences now.
Tim Ash told us how to build a curious business (Listen).
Dr. Diane Hamilton tested me using her Curiosity Code Index (Listen). Would you be surprised to learn that my curiosity is quite suppressed?
But, who is the most curious person you know?
For me, the answer is Mike Roberts. Mike called me late last year and told me about a new product he was launching that would let me see the analytics of any website. Then he told me the name: “Nacho Analytics.” I’m sure I woke up babies all over the neighborhood.
I knew that companies would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for this data. Mike wasn’t interested in this.
Mike is the Founder and CEO of SpyFu and Nacho Analytics. He is a digital marketing pirate, if you will. As I’m writing this, I realize he could be the “Dread Pirate Roberts” from “The Princess Bride.”
Find out why he’s pricing this so ANYONE can access it, and what Google said when they learned he was pumping his data into Google Analytics for easy access.
When you get back to the office:
If you’re afraid of Google Analytics, you are double handicapping yourself. Not will you not understand your own visitors, you’re missing out on understanding your biggest competitors’ businesses.
When you get back to the office…Subscribe to this podcast.
Because next time, I’m talking to Chris Mercer of MeasurementMarketing.io. My question to him is this: “How can anyone plug into Google Analytics? Where do we start?”
You’ll be surprised by some of his answers.
Resources and links from the Podcast
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The Barriers to a Data-Friendly Business: Turning Your Focus Outward
Conversion-Centered DesignWhen you want to save a file in your favorite application, which icon do most apps offer up?
Why it’s the image of a 3.5″ floppy disc, of course.
The Save Icon is typically a 3.5″ Floppy Disk
Why is it that the universal icon for saving a file is an image of a technology that breathed its last breath sometime in 2007? This is a technology that most users today have never even seen.
The reason is that Apple burned the 3.5″ floppy “Save” icon into our brains with the release of the Macintosh in 1998. Adobe, Microsoft and other software manufacturers followed suit.
By the time the 3.5″ floppy started being phased out just a few years later, the most primitive part of our brain had solidified this as the easiest to recognize icon when we didn’t want to lose our work.
Every time we clicked it, and got confirmation that our work was saved, we got a feeling of relief — and a squirt of dopamine. This cemented it in our mind and made it instantly available.
The image could have been a picture of a flying pig and we would still be using it today.
The save icon could have been a flying pig
Primal Brain with Tim Ash
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This is the behavior of our limbic brain, called “System 1” by Danny Kahnemann in the seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s been called our lizard brain and our monkey brain. It’s the knee-jerk decision maker, fight or flight.
My guest, Tim Ash, calls it the Primal Brain.
Why not something more intuitive? Like a file folder?
Or even a cloud?
Because, when our lizard brain doesn’t have a quick answer, it turns to our Executive brain. This part of our brain analyzes things to make decisions. And when this happens, it creates cognitive load.
This makes our applications harder to use and less satisfying.
We make few decisions with our Executive brain. It’s our Primal Brain — our emotional, fear-based brain — that gets the first shot.
So why are we using logic and rational thinking so much in our marketing?
Tim Ash started his career in the ‘interwebs’ back in 1995. He and I have a lot in common. For one, we both built web companies back in the ‘OG’ internet days.
On top of leading his CRO company SiteTuners, Tim is a digital marketing keynote speaker, founder of the Digital Growth Unleashed conference, and author of the book Landing Page Optimization. It’s still one of the first books I recommend to anyone who wants to get up on the learning curve when it comes to LPO….And back in the day, I learned quite a bit from it myself.
To begin to understand how our visitors think, Tim suggests we stop looking inside our companies, and start looking outside.
Listen in as Tim explains why you should always work backwards when it comes to a redesign. Start with your end users. Understand your audience. Then build.
Warning: Tim doesn’t pull any punches.
Interview with Tim Ash: Which part of your visitors’ brains makes the decisions.
When you get back to the office…
You team has data, insights into your visitors, prospects and customers. It’s time to let this data out into the open.
Invite your PPC team to talk about what ads work and which don’t.
Invite your email marketing team to talk about what subject lines are killing it and which are not.
Ask your sales department to tell you which customers buy the most, and which products are most popular.
This is the beginning of understanding your audience from THEIR point of view.
Resources and links from the Podcast
You can visit TimAsh.com for more information on Tim’s new book and to join his pre-announcement mailing list.
Unleashing the Primal Brain by Tim Ash
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How to Create a Sales Funnel in 5 Minutes
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Ecommerce CRO, Lead GenerationYou may not believe you already have one or more sales funnels in place, but all businesses do. Maybe it’s not working as expected. Or perhaps you would like to make it more effective. Follow these steps to create a sales funnel in 5 minutes that will have customers buying from you in no time at all.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
But first things first. Let’s quickly refresh the definition of a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is a hypothetical or ideal journey you would like a prospect to travel to become a lead or a customer. This is why sales or revenue funnels are also called “customer journeys” or “customer blueprints”.
They can be as simple as a one step Click to Call Google Ad, where the button is your opt-in point or as complex as need be. Especially for those businesses where lots of lead nurturing is needed for prospects to convert.
Call only ads are best used when there’s a sense of urgency to the offer. Isn’t this one of the shortest sales funnels ever?
Keep in mind, while you are building your sales funnel, that the best functioning ones are those that reduce friction. That is, they do not add unnecessary barriers or hurdles to the sales process.
Ready, Set, Let’s See How to Create a Sales Funnel in 5 Minutes
One of the sales models that is most frequently used in customer blueprints and customer journey mapping is the AIDA model, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, it maps how people make purchasing decisions. And, in spite of the technological developments, its importance and effectiveness has not diminished as humans have not changed their buying decision making process since then.
Whatever tactics you use to qualify leads and drive them closer to taking the desired action will change accordingly to where the lead is within the funnel: top (TOFU), middle (MOFU) or bottom (BOFU). It essential to understand how the funnel works from the moment you make the first contact (TOFU) with your ideal future customers to the moment where you convert those leads (BOFU). Keep in mind that each one of these components depends on the others.
Creating a sales funnel is as simple as defining the desired action and the target audience and then drawing the path between those two. And as complex as making it function successfully.
Here’s how to create a sales funnel (or improve the one you have) in 5 minutes.
AIDA model applied to customer journey mapping.
To Create a Sales Funnel First you Need to Generate Awareness
Attracting attention or generating awareness works best when you know your target audience media habits. You’ll be more successful if you advertise your brand, your products and/or services where the majority of your prospects already are.
These prospects may be currently looking for what your product or service provides or they may not. Those potential leads that are intently searching for a service similar to yours will notice relevant messages much more than those that are not.
For example, if someone is ready to upgrade to a new car, they will feel as if there are more automobile ads than usual. It’s because they are more aware. Generating awareness for your brand might be easier in this case. Funny how the brain works.
On the other hand, you may generate awareness amongst prospects with related needs. They are not looking for what you sell exactly. For example, while browsing their Facebook feed or reading a blog post, a person looking for a higher paying job may stumble upon a college or university they didn’t previously know existed.
Once you know where to find the vast majority of your audience, you can decide on a way to generate awareness about your brand. Usually these tactics range from PPC campaigns, TV or radio ads, billboards, blog posts, trade show participation, referrals, direct mail, email campaigns, online search results, all the way to super outrageous publicity stunts. You get the idea. Don’t craft the copy or the creative yet.
Have you chosen a tactic to introduce your prospects to your brand? Great! You’ve got the first step of your sales funnel covered. (Don’t overthink it) Move on to the next step.
Guiding customers through the buying stages: how to create a sales funnel that works in 5 minutes.
Second Step: The Interest Awakens
To create a solid sales funnel, you have to drive your prospects to click, call, download, sign-up, or visit you. And even though this happens at the last stage, you need to present the reasons why your are worthy of consideration in order to make it happen.
Do you have an eCommerce site and are offering free shipping? Is your SaaS fulfilling a productivity need that is important to your lead? Or do your cars flaunt the features your prospective buyers are searching for?
You need to know your customers and their behaviors, habits, and motivations to cut through the noise and to offer them something they recognize as useful or relevant.
This is the time to entice and convince them as to why they need your product or service.
Third Step: Pick Me! Pick Me! or the Sales Funnel Desire Stage
You presented your benefits properly and showed value to your prospect. Now it’s time to elicit desire. Congratulations! You are in the middle of the funnel (MOFU).
Keep an eye on your goal, your lead has to desire your product or service above any other.
Hence, you should keep educating and positioning your brand as the solution to their needs and problems. This is the stage where you shine a spotlight on those benefits. Testimonials, case studies, product comparisons, and customer reviews work well here.
This is also the stage where you match your product or service benefits to the prospect’s needs to clear up any barriers to the sale. This is a critical stage in which website traffic often fails to convert.
Fourth Step: Ask for the Sale
It seems to go without saying that any good sales funnel ends with a purchase. The biggest mistake people make when using the AIDA model, though, is to assume the sale will happen organically once the other steps have fallen into place. It won’t. Unlike an actual funnel, what goes into a sales funnel doesn’t always reemerge at the end. And people tend to not take action unless they’re asked. So, pay attention to your calls to action – the worst mistake sales people make is not ask for the close.
What’s your call to action? How will you prompt them to fill out the form, complete their shopping cart purchase, have a one-on-one call or meeting or do whatever final action you want them to take to complete their customer journey?
Purple mattress on exit intent pop up offer (BOFU).
Maybe you’ll offer them a free assessment, or a last minute discount if they complete the transaction right away. Take a minute to decide as the BOFU stage is the most crucial since it’s where you ask for the sale.
Would you rather have the conversion scientists identify your customer journeys to help you build your funnels? Then, check out our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit Services.
Sales Funnel Examples
Now that we’ve created our customer journey, let’s take a look at a couple of sales funnel examples for inspiration.
I think we covered one with the call only PPC ads example. Great for a local business like a personal injury attorney or a plumber, locksmith or any organization whose concern is to make the phone ring. Another requirement for successfully using this type of sales funnel is a sense of urgency to your product or service.
Purple mattress provides visitors with a humorously informational and convincing MOFU tactic on their landing pages with their zany videos backed by scientifically proven data. We may be a bit skewed as they also wear lab coats but go ahead, play the video and tell us what you think – unless you decide to buy a mattress first. ;)
A typical lead generation sales funnel example that remains mostly on the TOFU stage is to offer a Free Book, Research or White Paper to visitors – organic or paid. Take them to the next stages of the funnel by offering a one-time offer or a free consulting session. Keep qualifying the lead and close it with a call or an in person meeting.
Once you have a funnel ready an implemented you will want to test it, so we leave you with 9 Imaginative Approaches to AB Testing Landing Pages to get you started.
Developing a ‘Market-First’ Strategy for Your Website Redesign
Conversion-Centered DesignWhen we lose an employee to another company, I feel a mix of pride and saltiness. I’m proud that working here turns otherwise ordinary men and women into highly valuable data-driven performance marketers.
But I hate getting my employees poached.
In 2018, it was time for one of our employees to step into a bigger role. After working with us for years, Chris Nolan (not the Batman director) stepped into a big role in a company with Big in its name.
Chris was tapped to be the cornerstone hire for the growth team at BigCommerce. We miss him, but have enjoyed seeing how a Conversion Scientist takes on a big organization like BigCommerce.
His challenge is the same challenge that “woke” marketers are facing in every industry. How do I get an entrenched culture to adopt data and testing.
“Market-First” Strategies with Chris Nolan
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You might say that Chris jumped out of his lab coat and into the fire with BigCommerce, as they recently redesigned their entire site. There is no bigger challenge to a growth marketer than an “all in” redesign.
BigCommerce homepage before the website redesign.
BigCommerce homepage after the website redesign
I invited Chris to come onto the podcast to share the challenges and triumphs of a new hire nudging a culture from the bottom during a website relaunch.
Buckle up.
Chris is the Senior Growth Strategy Manager at BigCommerce. Businesses build their e-commerce websites on BigCommerce technology. They recently completed a website redesign.
Chris started his marketing journey because he had a passion for human behavior. This episode is jam-packed as he walks us through agency relationships, differentiating mobile from desktop sites and how to think ‘market-first’ to get the right site experience for your next redesign.
Self Care Tip
Championing change in an organization is a long journey, but the victories come all along the way. So, when you get back to the office, do something to take care of yourself. Book a massage. Put a meditation session on your calendar. Invite a close friend to your favorite restaurant. Get a jog or workout in.
These are scientifically proven ways we make ourselves better marketers, too.
Resources and links discussed
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When Landing Pages Break Promises
Landing Page OptimizationThis is a tale of two companies who can’t afford to blacken their reputation any more than they already have.
It is the story of one letter, one landing page and a broken promise.
Experian doesn’t have many friends in the public domain. Their main job is to prevent people from getting homes, cars and frozen pizzas. Their second job is to make it hard for victims of identity theft to redeem themselves.
Adobe is a company who gave 2.9 million of their customers’ account information to thieves.
I love my Adobe software, so I was philosophical about the security breach. I got a nice letter saying that they’d hired Experian to make sure I didn’t fall victim to identity fraud.
The letter gave no hint of irony.
I visited the link in the letter. The letter made a clear promise and this link contains a promise by including the word “adobe” in it.
The link sent me here:
This landing page broke a promise made in a letter.
No blank for an activation code.
No mention of Adobe on the page.
A broken promise.
I took the time to try to sign up. They wouldn’t take my activation code.
The best brand experience is giving visitors what they expect. These companies are pissing on the people they have already let down.
How many times are your ads making promises that your landing pages are breaking?
When Landing Pages Break Promises UPDATE
The landing page has changed. Now THIS is a promise kept:
This landing page from Experian keeps the promise.
This is a landing page that keeps Adobe’s promise. My only criticism of this page is the use of stock photography, which we call business porn.
Now, where did I put that letter?
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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How to Build a MarTech Stack with Dan McGaw & Brian Massey
Conversion Marketing StrategyDan McGaw sees the threads that connect customers to websites to campaigns to decision makers. We call these “MarTech stacks” and they are the hot topic in digital marketing these days.
We all have stacks. Email platforms, marketing automation systems, customer management systems, analytics databases… And then each of the services we work with adds to our marketing technology stacks — Facebook, Instagram and other social media, Google Ads, Amazon.
Most of our MarTech stacks come together piecemeal, one part at a time, independent and unintegrated. This means we spend hours drowning in spreadsheets as we try to answer simple questions, like, “Should I run that campaign again?” and “How many times do I have to touch my prospects before they buy?”
Fortunately, Dan is sitting down with me and I’m going to wrestle as many insights from his brain as possible. He knows all of the tools. And he doesn’t mind telling us how to build a MarTech stack.
Buckle in.
Utilizing the Vice Framework for Marketing Stacks with Dan McGaw Intended Consequences Podcast
On today’s show, we’re talking about the VICE Framework, what it means and how marketers can apply it as they experiment in their marketing teams. Dan McGaw from Effin’ Amazing will also tell you how to build a MarTech Stack to support the execution of your market strategy.
Let’s Dive into Building a Marketing Technology Stack
There are dozens of options, dozens of choices and new interesting tools appear daily. This is the golden age of marketing.
Is there a common marketing technology stack that’s a good starter stack of tools that right now are best in class for most organizations? Or do you have to evaluate all the options and pick the right tool for an organization?
There’s definitely different tools and some are better suited for certain types of business. You have the all in one packages, which usually just do OK and most marketing operations can get away with that.
Think about a platform like HubSpot, HubSpot does everything. They do it about 60% well and about 40% not.
For most people 60% is good enough. For other companies, that’s not going to be enough. So we typically look at best of breed tools, MarTech stacks that pushes the limits of reality.
When you think about your normal SaaS company, there’s a plethora of options and you really need to focus on what is the outcome you’re trying to create and then start to research the different management tools that are out there.
How to Build a MarTech Stack with Dan McGaw
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What is the Ultimate Marketing Technology Stack?
So the big thing that companies need to understand now is this concept of customer data platforms or customer data infrastructures.
1. You need to be able to send your data to one source and that one source needs to distribute it to all of your other tools. That’s known as a CDI customer data infrastructure.
The three main players in that space are Segment, Metarouter and Mparticle. They are web tools which have client side libraries, JavaScript and then server side libraries that you can use. They also integrate with tools like Salesforce so they can consume data from Salesforce and pass it downstream to other tools.
That way you have one source to send your data to and then it’s distributed throughout the rest of the MarTech stack. And it becomes the hub of how data moves around.
2. The next thing you need to have is CEP or marketing automation tool like Marketo or Pardot’s marketing automation platforms.
3. The one tool that we recommend to everybody is a platform called Autopilot. Does email, text message, can send web hooks, other platforms integrated with Zappier, there’s direct mail and a text bot. But it really can work as a transactional system – where x happens and it immediately fires – or it can do a 16 day drip campaign.
3.a. If you’re a B2B, you need a CRM I would always recommend Salesforce.
4. And then your downstream analytics tools. Google Analytics is cool, but it doesn’t do enough. I recommend either Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Tip for evaluating your Martech Stack
You’ve seen the bulletin boards in movies used by detectives to help solve a crime, covered in pictures and connected by strings tacked together.
Here’s my martech stack diagram.
You should do something like that.
When you get back to the office, bring to mind your most recent campaign. On a bulletin board, or whiteboard, draw the path of your prospects through the various systems in your stack all the way through to purchase.
Even if the systems aren’t in your control.
For us, the Marketing Scorecard is where we analyze all of the work we’ve done. There are several red lines leading into it. It’s in a spreadsheet and I manually enter data weekly to answer questions like, “How much is a new subscriber worth in dollars?” and “How has our new landing page changed acquisition cost?”
Then get to work on the red lines. Some of them are red simply because you’re not using the data. I rarely log into Sprout Social to see how our campaigns are driving new subscribers and leads.
Reach out to sales to see if you can get a regular report of sales. Figure out how to tie web campaigns to closed deals by passing campaign identifiers with form data.
Then listen to this podcast again. You’ll see Dan in a whole new light.
OK, scientists. That’s it for this week.
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The Role of Data in Digital Design with WPEngine’s David Vogelpohl
Conversion-Centered DesignWhen we redesign our website, we are given a rare opportunity to change the bones we build it on.
Imagine that your website is a doll. You start with a generic, human-shaped form and begin to turn it into something. You choose the clothes, the hats, the shoes, the shades for it. Some you buy. Some you make yourself.
Your website is similar. You rent server space from a host and drop a content management system on it. This is a generic website-shaped form that you can begin dressing. Lest you think you can do anything with this digital doll you’ve purchased, be careful.
You can’t put Barbie clothes on an American Girl doll. You can’t put GI Joe clothes on your Star Wars action figures. Likewise, the host you choose forms the bones of your site, and limits what you can make of it.
Data in Digital Design with David Vogelpohl
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And this is why we often find ourselves frustrated that our Mr. Potatohead host can’t deliver a chic Bratz website.
If you want your website to fit into WordPress clothes, my guest today has the host for you. WPEngine is a host dedicated to WordPress websites. David Vogelpohl is responsible for marketing these hosted services.
David Vogelpohl WPEngine Intended Consequences Podcast Featured Image
David is the VP of Web Strategy at WPEngine. This conversation builds off the conversation Joel and I had on the last episode about website redesigns.
I’ve known him for a long time. I knew him in a previous life when he founded and built a design agency here in Austin. I’ve spoken at the meetup he founded called AUSome. So it’s rather ingracious for David to come on my podcast and counter what we preach here about Website redesigns.
David says that data doesn’t really matter for him and his team when it comes to website redesigns. He says no matter what, an agency has to use data to show customers the results – and as an agency, you have to live with the good – and the bad. Listen in as he explains…
Data-driven Design Tip
We don’t always get to research our campaign and website designs. That’s just the way it is. But every launch is an experiment.
When you get back to the office, think back to some of the campaigns or web pages you launched. Take the time to drill in on how that effort performed. Not just the results graphs you presented to the team. Ask yourself what you can learn from it.
Did your emails have different open rates? The ones with higher open rates may have had more relevant subject lines.
That service description page you launched… is it a factor in getting more demo requests from your visitors? Analytics can tell you.
The change you made to your home page, did it reduce the scroll rate? Your heatmapping software can tell you.
If you don’t know the answers to any of the questions you have, you get to figure out how to collect that data next time, on the campaign or page design you’re doing right now.
You’ll gain some insights. But more importantly, you’ll learn how to learn from everything you do.
Then get back to work, scientists.
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Taking the Risk out of your Website Redesign
Conversion-Centered DesignPoker is one of those games that, like digital marketing, requires a left-brain/right-brain approach. To begin with, good poker players know the percentages. They know that the two four’s in their hand gives them a 12% chance of winning in a typical game. That’s their left-brain, data-driven knowledge.
Then you add in all of the right-brain stuff. Emotion. Reading the other players’ faces. Controlling your own face. Tells. And past behaviors.
Yep, that’s digital marketing. But there’s one move that throws all of that out the window.
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You may have seen it in the World Series of Poker on TV, or in a James Bond movie. One player pushes his entire stack of chips into the center of the table and says, “All in”. What he’s saying is, if he loses this hand, he loses everything. All of the other players have to ask themselves, “WIll I match his entire stack?” or should I get out now.
Going all in smashes everything. It may mean that you’re ignoring the data in one big high-stakes bluff. Or it may mean that you’re trying to ratchet up the emotion, scaring the rest of the table into making a bad decision.
There is an equivalent to “going all in” in digital marketing as well. It’s called a website redesign.
This is one of the biggest budgeted projects a company will do. When someone throws a lot of money at the marketing department, it can be hard to resist.
Sure, it could have a huge impact on the financial prospects of the firm. It can also cause you to lose everything.
Poker players have one advantage over digital marketers when going all in: They can see their cards. They know their percentage. Digital marketers? Well, they have past performance from the current site..
But do they use it?
On today’s show, I’m pulling in Joel Harvey – Chief Operating Officer at Conversion Sciences. Joel’s role is to make sure we live up to our company motto: “Always deliver remarkable results.”
Joel and I are talking website redesigns today. And we’re going to tell you something that may blow your mind. Website redesigns don’t have to be an all or nothing hand. You don’t have to push all of your budget in and wait 3, or 6 or even 12 months later.
Listen to find out how we stack the odds in our favor, guaranteeing a winning hand.
Website Redesign Tip
The all-in approach isn’t just limited to website redesigns. Individual campaigns are usually all-in affairs as well.
When you get back to the office, open a spreadsheet and start writing out the assumptions that you’re making when designing that email, social media ad, or landing page.
You should quickly have a few dozen.
Many of these may be well supported by past experience or best practices.
For each, you should ask, “Do I have a way of finding out if this assumption is a good one.”
You may be able to look at the performance of past pages. You may be able to see which email subject lines worked best in the past. You may create different versions of ads and see which delivers the best result.
Now you’re looking at your cards, and you’ll rarely win a hand if you don’t.
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From Segmentation to Contextualization: The New Way to Look at Marketing (Podcast)
Artificial Intelligence, Conversion OptimizationI predicted years ago that my business would be using machine learning for much of what we do manually today.
When I talk to people like Olcan Sercinoglu, I know that day is coming. Olcan is the CEO at a company called Scale Inference. He studied and worked under Peter Norton from Google – the guys who wrote the book on Machine Learning – and has spent the last 25 years as a developer engineer. Scaled Inference focuses on applying machine learning to online user interactions, and to personalize their experiences in ways we could never do by ourselves..
If we can understand how machine learning is different, we can understand how our digital marketing will be changed in the near future.
Olcan Sercinoglu | Why Context Matters
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From Segmentation to Contextualization: The New Way to Look at Marketing Key Takeaways
How do we use AI to make us better marketers?
AI Optimization-Why context matters with Olcan Sercinoglu
Moore’s Law: As Valid Today as it was a Few Decades Ago
In 1965, a man named Gordon Moore made a bold prediction, a prediction that was expected to fail almost every year since. It is a prediction that helps to explain the dizzying speed with which our lives are being upended by new tech..
What Moore said in 1965 is that we’d be able to fit two times more transistors on a microchip every year, year after year. What this meant for the semiconductor industry is that microchips would get twice as fast and cost half as much to produce every single year.
This, they thought, was crazy talk.
A Grain of Rice and a Chessboard
Take a typical chess board. On the first square place a grain of rice. On the next square put two grains of rice. On the next square, four. And double the number of grains of rice on each subsequent square.
By the time you reach the final square, number 64, the amount of rice you would need would require the entire surface of the earth and its oceans to grow, 210 billion tons.
That’s the power of compounding.
Every few years, the skeptics declared that we had reached the end of our ability to shrink these tiny transistors any more. “It’s just not physically possible,” they said.
And every time, Moore’s prediction was proven more or less true.
Even today, as the wires that run across microchips approach the width of an atom, engineers find ways to make things half the size.
Why should you care? As microchips shrink and drop in cost, so do the things we build with them. For example, the camera that is found in any laptop has a HD resolution and costs the manufacturer a few dollars. The cost of servers and storage space has plummeted as well. Hence, most of our computing and storage is done in the proverbial cloud.
All of this has created a golden age of technology — for consumers, for businesses, and especially for marketers. Entrepreneurs are using the cloud and cheap computing power to make digital marketing cheaper easier, and more predictable.
While we’re sitting around wondering what to do with all of this data, entrepreneurs and engineers are using it teach machines to learn.
The Era of Neural Networks: Is the Future of AI marketing all about Personalization?
Neural networks are computer programs that work like human neurons. Like the human brain, they are designed to learn. Neural nets have been around for decades, but only in recent years have we had enough data to teach them anything useful.
Machine learning is lumped together with Artificial Intelligence, or AI, but it’s really much simpler than building an intelligent machine. If you have enough data, it’s relatively easy to teach a machine how to learn and to get insights from it.
In fact, machine learning is being used all around you and you probably don’t even know it.
And we’ll ask some more tactical questions.
I start the conversation, asking Olcan, “Is the future of AI marketing all about personalization?”
From Segmentation to Contextualization: Focus on the Context that Your Visitors Arrive In
My favorite take away from my conversation with Oljan Sercinoglu is that context matters.
There is one big context that you don’t need machine learning to address: It is the context of your mobile visitors.
You may say that your website is responsive, and that you’ve already addressed the smartphone context. But, you haven’t.
Do you want proof? Check your analytics. You’re smartphone conversion rates are probably a half or a quarter of your desktop sites, even with that responsive design. I know this without looking at your analytics.
Mobile visitors are coming in a completely different context than desktop visitors. They don’t need a shrunk down version of your website. They need a different website.
Fortunately, you don’t need a machine learning program to identify these visitors. You can start personalizing your mobile site to deal with this new context.
Try this as a contextualization exercise: Reduce the number of fields on the mobile forms, or eliminate the forms altogether. Replace them with click-to-call. If you have an eCommerce site, make “Add to Cart” secondary and build your mobile subscriber list. Email is the life’s blood of eCommerce.
If your website is generating millions of visits, you may want to consider putting that data to work for you. Not every business is ready for machine learning, but you don’t want to be the last business in your market to start using it.
When You Get Back to the Office
When you get back to the office, I recommend that you share this episode of Intended Consequences with someone else in your company. It’ll make you look smart and forward thinking.
If not I have a challenge for you.
Here’s my challenge to you this week – start to really think about how you define success. Answer the question, “I’ve done a great job because…” and fill in the blank. Answer this questions three ways. everything you do as marketer should flow from optimization.
Then ask, how do I measure each of those with data I’m collecting today. Once you’re clear that it’s the idea that by understanding the metrics, first then you can begin to prioritize your data gathering and create based on the context that’s being emerged from the data.
Alright scientists, that’s it for this week.
Resources and links discussed
Olcan Sercinoglu | Why Context Matters
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