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Key Insights from Elite Camp 2015 Speakers

Elite Camp is a 3-day traffic and (mainly) conversion event. It’s among the very best CRO events in the world, and of course in Europe. This year was already its 6th year – and the format has proven to be so successful that the event has been replicated in many other countries.

Elite Camp 2015 had an enviable line-up of heavy hitters and rock stars. Here are top insights from every speaker of this year’s event.

noah278Noah Kagan (Sumome): How to Grow Your Email List Super Fast

  • Your emails subscribers are controlled by you, but Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc followers are not. Focus on building your email list above all.
  • You send like 100 emails / day. Put your newsletter signup URL directly in your email signature. Example: “P.S. Come eat tacos with me”
  • Optimize your top traffic pages for email opt-ins. Email-gating your home page works wonders.
  • Recycle your content for emails. Send it out, change the subject line and send it out again to people who did not open it the first time.
  • Free email courses work way better than offering PDF downloads: people download those to their “PDF” folder, and never open again. Much higher engagement with email courses.

chris278Chris Hexton (Vero): Top 10 Email Hacks for 2015

  • It’s not (always) about  getting new subscribers, it’s about making long term clients.
  • Don’t send more email, send more considered email. Send triggered email based on your behavior, tailor the email content based on what they did on the website (e.g. Airbnb sends you emails about apartments you looked at).
  • Segmentation rules: don’t send the same email to everyone on your list! Use personalized data in creating emails to get better results with that group.
  • The right people in your list make all the difference. Add qualifying questions to email signup forms. This might get your less subscribers, but asking the right questions there might get you more dedicated subscribers – people who want to pay you.
  • Ignore generic data on when to send emails. Analyze your own data, and make it visual to look at it from different perspectives. This chart makes it easy to spot best and worst times to send email:

brian278Brian Dean (Backlinko): How to Create Content That Converts

  • Most people say they’re annoyed by popups. But they just work so damn well – the debate is over. Use pop-ups, but make them as un-annoying as you can. Exit intent works great.
  • Offer something of value in your popup, something exclusive that can benefit the user. Don’t say silly things like “be the first to know” or “join my newsletter”.
  • Don’t do generic pitches, make specific offers on specific blog posts – offer content upgrades (e.g. blog post about 10 tips has an opt-in offer to get another 10 tips on the same subject). Think about ways to add more value to that post. Content upgrade could be one of these:
    • checklists,
    • setup instructions,
    • links to case studies,
    • tutorials,
    • swipe files.
  • Create a Mental Movie of your content upgrade resource in action – can you imagine your users benefiting from this?
  • Test fun, upbeat CTAs (e.g. “Get my free stuff”, “Get more traffic”) – they grab attention and reduce anxiety compared to same-old boring “Subscribe” or “Sign up”.

oli278Oli Gardner (Unbounce): Your 12-step Landing Page Rehab Program

  • Give the gift of simplicity, too much info is annoying to the customer.
  • You have to have clarity in your page headlines. Check you headlines and subheadlines, which one makes more sense? Flip them around if needed.
  • Get your attention ratio (stuff you can do vs stuff you should do on a page) in order. Optimal ratio is 1:1.
  • Never start a marketing campaign without a dedicated landing page.
  • If they’re about to buy, don’t do something stupid. Remove unnecessary copy near your CTAs.

ekman278John Ekman (Conversionista!): Onboard Like a Juggernaut

  • People don’t know they have to scroll, make them scroll. Above the fold matters a lot.
  • Autoresponder emails for user onboarding / activation are dead  – give your users a more personalized experience (e.g. trigger based emails)
  • Conduct cohort analysis -see what your customers do over a 30 day timeline, why are there changes in their activity?
  • When people want to leave – Ask them why are they unsubscribing? – make your users think twice if they actually want to leave your service
  • If you need money beforehand – tell people why you need their money. if possible, don’t ask for the user’s credit card up front.

peep278Peep Laja (CXL): This I Believe – From Data to Customers

  • Optimization is not a set of tactics. If your optimization looks like applying a number of tactics on your site, you don’t actually know what you’re doing. Optimization is a repeatable, teachable process.
  • The most important thing in optimization is the discovery of what matters. Once you know which bits of information and which parts of your site make a difference to your users, you will dramatically improve the percentage of winning tests and impact per successful experiment.
  • Being data-driven starts with asking the right questions. Once you know what you want to know, you can go out and seek data that might help you answer the questions.
  • You don’t need more data, you need the right amount of actionable data. Use ResearchXL framework.
  • Iterative testing is where it’s at: if your test fails, it might not be your hypothesis that’s wrong, but the implementation! If you have data to support your hypothesis, try multiple iterations.

paul278Paul Rouke (PRWD): Iterative vs Innovative Testing

  • The more agile you are, the bigger effect your optimization will have
  • The boldness of your testing can improve your performance. Iterative testing – changing copy/headings, changing colors – the easier type of testing. Innovative testing –  full redesign, radical tests, changing customer journeys – very bold testing, will potentially have much higher impact on the bottom line.
  • Why iterative testing? – You want to walk before you want to run
    • Quick wins
    • Start to learn
    • Use your tool
    • limited resources
    • build momentum
    • develop testing culture
  • Why innovative testing? – you want to grow your business rather than just optimize your website
    • Get significant increases
    • Really shift user behaviour
    • Get evidence of major change
    • Business proposition evaluation
    • Simplify a stepped process

marie278Marie Polli (CXL): How to Optimize Low Traffic Websites

  • Optimization is people driven, not only data driven – if the data is not there, do the people part – qualitative research.
  • You can always do user testing, heuristic analysis and customer interviews – even if you have no traffic
  • Measure everything – from the start, so you got the data when you are ready to start testing – Set it up NOW!
  • Conduct funnel analysis – where are your visitors dropping off the most.
  • If you have low transaction count, test high impact things (big changes) – if the uplift is high, you’ll need less sample size. Don’t test stuff that’s hard to notice (meek changes).

tonwTon Wesseling (Testing.agency): Why (and How) to Run 250+ Online Experiments a Year

  • A/B testing is not a solution – it’s a tool, It’s part of a continuous optimization process
  • ROAR: Risk( 1000 conversions / mo ) -> Optimization (  10 000 conversions / mo ) -> Automation -> Re-think
  • If you are a young company, take risks – don’t be scared to even change your business model a little.
  • Have fixed time on your tests – if your test takes too long, testing cookies will disappear, corrupted data.
  • Only test those who can be persuaded – leave out logged in visitors and other irrelevant users.

parasParas Chopra (VWO): What Digital Marketing Can Learn from the World of Product Management

  • Marketing is almost equivalent to product management
  • Use minimal viable (low-cost) campaigns to test assumptions
  • Cost of customer acquisition = cost of visitor acquisition * conversion rate, if it is profitable:
    • Increase the volume for the same traffic
    • Find similar traffic sources
    • Test secondary assumptions, with minimal viable campaigns to acquire even more visitors
  • Agile means you need to move and respond fast,  continuously incorporate customer inputs. Detect changing motivations and desires, act on it.
  • Involve your users in everything, make them part of the team – be OK when they turn down your best ideas.

matt278Matt Gershoff (Conductrics): AB Testing, Predictive Analytics, and Behavioral Targeting

  • Use data to help assign customers to experience – different customers want a different experience.
  • Use bandit testing when running short-duration tests (e.g. Valentine’s Day campaign)
  • Use a predictive model to combine segment preferences. A model tries to predict what will work for whom – a more personalized experience will have better results.

craig278Craig Sullivan (Optimal Visit): Myths and Lies of Cross-Device Testing

  • Responsive site doesn’t guarantee conversions – it’s the specific implementation for all devices that matters
  • People don’t only use Iphones, check the stats
  • The customer journey is in your head – do you have actual data to back it up? Go through the user journey – is everything in place? Distractions? Eat your own dogfood –  figure out what is wrong with it
  • You think you have a hypothesis – always have a reason why you are running your test – have insight! Use this formula: “Because we observed data A and feedback B. We believe that doing C for People D will make outcome E happen. We’ll know this when we observe data F and obtain feedback G” – if your hypothesis answers this template, run the test, if not forget it!
  • Segmentation by device, will make the sample size small – pay attention to absolute numbers in any report (you’ll want 250+ conversions before concluding anything)

andre278Andre Morys (Web Arts): Five Neuromarketing Hacks to Dominate Your Market

  • Never believe A/B test case studies – they only show a part of the truth. Without absolute numbers it’s untrustworthy.
  • Something that you can’t see can’t change the behavior of your users. Test stuff that has the power to fundamentally change user behavior.
  • Statistical significance is not validity – don’t stop the test once you reach 95% significance. Make sure you have enough sample size and long enough test duration.
  • Your website is a salesperson, understand the biases that you can use – List of cognitive biases
  • Growth System = Goals + Ability + Culture

aleyda278Aleyda Solis (Orainti): The Ingredients for SEO success in 2015

  • SEO is not about rankings, it’s about visibility – connect with your target audience, maximize traffic and conversions along the customer journey
  • Check for semantically related terms and long-tail queries permutations – identify the most popular queries per device
  • Identify your industry main competitors – learn from their trends, volume and target queries. Compare them with yours – identify which are the unique and common keywords – do this with per device and search type
  • Mobile app optimization is an important SEO ingredient now – validate both desktop and mobile web crawling to maximize their effect. If you have a mobile app, let Google index it.
  • Use micro data to help google index your site – schema – take control of your own results

simo278Simo Ahava (Reaktor): Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager Ninja Toolbox

  • Stop doing plug and play analytics. Data is not easy.
  • Everybody talks about sessions, but few actually know what a session is and what ends a session and starts a new one
  • Stay away from aggregate metrics – combine, segment, visualize, predict
  • You can set up ecommerce tracking for measuring content consumption – just need to define the terminology.
  • Data is difficult – it’s supposed to be – data needs an active agent to interpret.

priit278Priit Kallas (Dreamgrow): Thinking – You’re Doing It Wrong

  • Anchoring effect – the first piece of informations establishes a range of possibilities. – use this wisely to manipulate your users
  • Ikea effect – when you build / configure something yourself you place a lot more value in it
  • Unit bias  – We believe that there is an optimal unit size – change people’s perceptions on what is the standard unit
  • Hyperbolic discounting – people want things now, not a larger gain later.
  • Availability heuristic – we overestimate the importance of information on websites. People use a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

Conclusion

Elite Camp 2016 is going to take place next summer – watch out for it!

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