As of next week, I, Tommy Walker, will be leaving my post as editor of CXL.
I’ve learned so much in this past year, and I owe so much to this blog. If you’ll allow, I’d like to share the 6 major lessons I’ve learned as the editor of this blog.
When most beginners start with conversion rate optimization, they get carried away by the rosy picture of A/B testing. Let’s test button colors! Or maybe call to action text! That should get us a win of at least 30-50%…I think.
Unless you’re a giant like Amazon, you need to go beyond the random let-us-change-button-color-today kind of tests to move the needle through A/B testing. It’s not about tactics. It’s about the reaction your design creates in the mind of your visitors.
Here’s something scary, according to MECLabs & Magento’s 2014 eCommerce Benchmark, only 13% of those studied base their testing on extensive historical data.
David Skok, who is a must read for all startups, explains how as your SaaS companies grow, the size of your subscription base (or customers/users) increases so that any kind of churn against that base becomes a large number.
This equates to a loss of revenue, which requires more and more bookings (think signups) from new customers just to replace what you are losing every month.
Have you ever dreamed about learning which products your customers are most likely to buy in advance?
How great would it be if you could determine the highest price a customer would pay for a product? What if you could optimize customer service to resolve concerns proactively before they become issues?
“I use Tide. I’ve been using Tide for the last 40 years. I’ll use Tide to wash the outfit they bury me in.”
“Uh… Thanks Grammy.” I only made the comment that her clothes smelled nice, but her conviction made me realize something very important, “even if they’re on your site, that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy from you.”
Later on, I overheard my 18 year old sister say to a friend on the phone, “Oh My God, UGH, Do what you want, but I would never be caught dead, in clothes from The Gap.”
Here’s something that won’t come as a shock to people who work for big companies: not everyone is on-board with the idea of conversion optimization and testing.
In an ideal world, everyone would be excited by a data-driven approach & the idea of building a conversion culture is something the entire organization would be excited about from day one.
BUT this is the real world.
There are egos and opinions and red tape and executives who wet themselves any time there’s even the slightest chance they can be proven wrong.
Even worse, if your company is one with a silo mindset, where designers go over here, marketers are over here & IT belongs in a cave somewhere over there – the thought of even having one cohesive “Conversion Team” might seem laughable, if not altogether impossible.
For all of the talk about how awesome (and big, don’t forget big) Big data is, one of the favorite tools in the conversion optimization toolkit, A/B Testing, is decidedly small data.
Optimization, winners and losers, Lean this that or the other thing, at the end of the day, A/B Testing is really just an application of sampling.
You take couple of alternative options (eg. ‘50% off’ v ‘Buy One Get One Free’ ) and try them out with a portion of your users. You see how well each one did and then make a decision about which one you think will give you the most return.
List building is a top priority for a blog. In this review we look at 2 different blogs, and see how good of a job they’re doing at capturing emails.
Think about every lead magnet you’ve ever signed up for.
Of all of those free ebooks, courses, and discount codes, how many onboarding flows actually convinced you to become a customer?
And, if they did, how many do you still buy from?
Judging by my own inbox after I hand over my email address, what happens is just…disappointing.