Conversion optimization is hard, but the heaviest lifting is often organizational – changing an organization from a gut-based approach to one driven by data and experimentation.
Conversion optimization isn’t necessarily something you can major in during college, so how can you tell who will be a world-class optimizer and who will just be..meh?
While there are many universal traits that define a good hire – proactivity, strong work ethic, critical thinking, attention to detail, and so on – there are some specific and unique traits that help optimizers flourish.
Defaults are powerful, often deceivingly so. Even if you don’t put much thought into it, you’re nudging your users to act in a certain way. It’s up to you, then, to make sure that you’re nudging them to the best possible action for your company and themselves.
Every year we publish a list of most read articles on CXL. Out of all the blog posts we published in 2015, these got the most attention.
Let’s say you just started using a new SaaS product. Who do you think would be able to explain the product to you more clearly: an engineer, a marketer or a customer service representative? You’d think the person who helped bring the product to life (the engineer), right?
His definition, however, would likely be more detailed and complex, thus, more difficult for you, a first-time user, to understand.
As it turns out, marketers struggle with clarity, too. And it’s hurting your conversions in surprising ways.
Email makes the world go around, right? No matter how many times you read about “the death of email”, it remains paramount in the online world. In fact, I’ll bet you’ll receive at least two emails in the time it will take you to read this article from start to finish.
Are all emails created equal? No, not exactly.
According to Salesforce, the top 3 uses of email are newsletters (66%), promotional content (54%) and welcome series emails (42%). However, the top 3 most effective emails are mobile opt-ins (76%), birthday emails (75%), and transactional emails (74%).
Promotional emails get a bad rap, but when they work, they really work. SocialMedia Today, 43% of recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email.
Show an A/B test case study to a group of 12 people and ask them why they thought the variation won. It’s possible you could get 12 different answers.
This is called storytelling, and it’s common in the optimization space.
Conversion optimizers are in the business of attention management, just like magicians.
It’s your job, as an optimizer, to direct attention and focus your visitors on the next step. Yet, so few of us do this effectively. Landing pages are full of distractions, calls to action are cluttered, etc.
One of the testing strategies is experimenting with the path people take towards their final conversion/purchase. This is referred to as a split-path test or alternative path test.
This could give you the needed lift when nothing seems to move the needle anymore.
When you think about the holiday season, you think more traffic, right? More traffic means more conversions. More conversions mean more data. More data means more insights.
But is the data from the tests you run during major shopping holidays representative? We can’t throw sample pollution out the window, can we? Will your insights still be relevant in February when the rush dies down?