Who Should Consider Crowdsourced Conversion Optimization?
This is a guest post by Hagi Erez, Founder/COO Pluralis.
CMOs and CRO professionals all know the challenges and the extensive resources (both financial and human) that are involved in building the ultimate landing page — the one that doesn’t stop converting.
I said, “Why not build a community of professional optimizers, via the power of crowdsourcing, to work on these pages and optimize them? We can then gamify it by pitting the best copies in a contest-type scenario against each other and award a prize for the highest converting copy.”
No matter what type of business, the constant unknown is that you don’t know what will to work until you try it, test, and then retest. The pages you think will convert the highest, in reality, might convert the poorest and vice versa. If you keep hitting this conversion wall, your only option is to test another idea, and there are many creative ideas from different conversion experts to choose from. This is the core idea behind Pluralis.
It is statements like the one below that inspire me to continue building the Pluralis platform, making it as user friendly and intuitive as it can be.
US B2B ECOMMERCE SALES TO REACH $559 BILLION BY THE END OF 2013
– Forrester Research
Pluralis is crowdsourcing the art of conversion optimization through a network of global optimization experts. The platform provides these CRO aficionados with an intuitive and user friendly platform, whereby they can make changes as they see fit and the contest holders can provide feedback on the copies that have been submitted.
Pluralis is all about equal opportunities. For online businesses, it is a sure win because of the low risk and great benefits they receive by realizing higher conversion rates. It is a win for the creative optimizers in the Pluralis community who are granted a cash reward while lifting not only rates but their CRO confidence level.
By using their good eye and knowledge of what it takes to make a landing page convert, the creative optimizers in the Pluralis community can optimize the page as they see fit and be in the running to not only win large cash prizes. They can also use it as their own virtual conversion playground to hone skills and market themselves through hard work.
Small businesses might not have the resources (time or financial) to hire teams of copywriters and designers, go over revisions, approve drafts, make changes, test and then go through the entire process all over again. Sometimes, all it takes is a few small changes to boost conversion rates well above 20%. Upon conclusion of testing, the optimizer with the winning page would win a client-specified reward based on their page’ percentage level of lift over the control page (the baseline).
Testing is another area that can prove quite costly for a company and is based more on what a business thinks might work than what actually does. For companies that have many landing pages to test, this is also a huge cost to consider.
Via crowdsourcing CRO efforts, small and medium-sized businesses can now compete with the larger and richer companies to do professional LPO (Landing Page Optimization), and they can do it without paying tens of thousands of dollars. Moreover – they pay for results and not efforts. If there is no lift, businesses are not obliged to pay and can even relaunch the contest at no extra charge.
The entire crowdsourcing concept for businesses is so attractive as they now have access to the skills of global communities. It creates competition.
Successful companies such as 99designs are the perfect example of this trend. By creating a marketplace of those who need design work and those who can answer their needs, 99designs’ solution promotes competition, where anyone can join and be in the running for a prize.
The power of the crowd has the ability take your business higher whether it is for composing a jingle, building a website or optimizing your landing pages. Welcome to the New and Improved Internet Revolution.
Hagi Erez, Founder/COO Pluralis
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Hagi, crowdsourcing a/b/n sounds interesting, but I think it there will be complications.
If the tests are purely design related, it will be ok. But generally, a/b/n tests require way more than that. Some concerns:
1. I don’t know how much time will experiment designers put into understanding the business they create tests for (value propositions, processes, regulations,etc). Unless they spend a few hours understanding the industry/niche/competitors, success rates will be low.
2. Without understanding the target market they will be addressing, most of the tests will fail and probably get frustrated.
3. We all know that even the best CRO experts get wrong. I dare saying that at least half of the tests they run, fail. No matter how you market CRO services, there’s no math or magic formula that applies to conversion – it’s more like an art, luck and knowing your target market. So, I am not sure who is willing to do all this work without being paid.
That being said I am sure businesses will benefit from this and should at least test the service.
Thanks for bringing the product to market!
Hi Traian, you put down good comments and I’m happy to address them:
1. Our experts community is a combination of conversion optimizers, ROI oriented designers and copywriters. Improving CR of a web page is indeed an art that only creative professionals can succeed at.
2. As part of creating a contest, the contest holder fills a brief to the optimizers with detailed information about the business, the page, the goals and audience.
3. Our experts are well aware of the different parameters that makes a well converting page. From a survey we have done lately, our community of experts spends a long time on every revision. Sometime around half day of work and more.
4. There are always some that don’t put enough efforts on the revised page. Those are usually not selected by the contest holder for testing.
5. What’s unique about Pluralis is the opportunity for the optimizers community to put their ideas into test and have real time, objective, measurements to compare their work with the work of the other contestants, see what works, what doesn’t work and why. This is a very educative platform for professionals – on top of the high performance based rewards.
6. At Pluralis we are well aware that even best optimizers do not generate lifts all time. Our platform is oriented to that and the contest holder can re-launch a contest ended with no winner – free of charge. Say the contest holder received 20 submissions, selected 3 for testing, and the contest failed to generate a winner – he will re-launch the contest in a click of a button, selecting other copies for testing or calling the community to provide more copies and put their knowledge and creativity into test. Eventually – a winner will be found.
Best,
Hagi Erez
Founder COO, Pluralis.
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing about it! Kinda like 99 Designs but specifically for landing page optimization, right? I can already see how this could be extremely useful for small businesses and solopreneurs who don’t have the budget to hire a team of conversion experts. Democratizing the optimization process and making high conversions accessible to everyone, no matter how small their team – i love it, great idea!