Alex Birkett is a former content and growth marketer at CXL. Currently, he is the co-founder at Omniscient Digital and works on user acquisition growth at HubSpot. Follow his writing at alexbirkett.com.
Are you sold on the idea that it’s beneficial to understand your customer personas?
Hope so. If not, it’s guesswork. When you know who your customers are, where they are, what they love, and what they hate, you can market to them much more effectively.
Scarcity is one of the oldest principles in persuasion: when access to something feels limited, people tend to place more value on the opportunity and make decisions faster.
In marketing, that might mean low stock, a limited release, fixed capacity, or a genuine deadline. Recent research still links perceived scarcity with greater urgency, but scarcity can also backfire when the constraint feels artificial or misleading.
Forms sit directly between user intent and conversion. Whether someone is creating an account, becoming a lead, completing a checkout, or submitting a request, unnecessary friction in the form can stop the process.
Good form design reduces that friction. It asks only for information that is needed, makes fields easy to understand and complete, prevents avoidable errors, and helps users recover quickly when something goes wrong.
FormAssembly’s analysis of 1.6 billion user interactions across different form types, industries, and devices found that nearly one in three forms experienced drop-off in completions. Long forms, confusing experiences, and poor feedback were among the recurring friction points.
You put tons of time into creating your product, experimenting with acquisition channels, and honing your messaging.
Yet here I am, about to tell you that consumers are often swayed by such subtle nudges as the order in which you present your products, or the “serial position effect.”
A/B testing splits traffic 50/50 between a control and a variation. It’s a new term for an old technique—controlled experimentation.
Yet despite all the content about it, people still test the wrong things and run A/B tests incorrectly.
When should you use bandit tests, and when is A/B/n testing best?
Though there are some strong proponents (and opponents) of bandit testing, there are certain use cases where bandit testing may be optimal. Question is, when?
At a certain point, the results from your A/B testing will likely slow down. Even after dozens of small iterations, the needle just won’t move.
Reaching diminishing returns, is never fun. But what exactly does that mean? In most cases, you’re probably hit a local maximum.
So the question is, what do you do now?
“What is beautiful is good,” the saying goes.
This saying stems from a belief that attractiveness correlates to other good qualities. In a phrase, attractiveness is a Halo Effect.
Of course you can see that on the surface, the logic in that saying is flawed. What’s beautiful has nothing to do with what is good. But we still associate perception and individual traits, making our judgement often inaccurate.
Heat maps are a popular conversion optimization tool, and for good reason. We leveraged correctly they are a powerful way to better understand your audience and deliver more value.
So what can heat maps answer?
In digital analytics, it’s all about asking the right questions.
Sure, in the right context, you can probably get by doing what Avinash Kaushik refers to as “data puking,” but you won’t excel as an analyst or marketer.
In addition, you’ll consistently come up short on bringing true business value to your company.