Server response time is often overlooked when it comes to improving page speed.
It can, however, have a dramatic impact on your organic traffic. Users like fast sites, so Google likes fast sites.
In 2023, we’re all familiar with the standard “best practices” of CRO: always use social proof, always reduce form fields, never use image sliders, and so on.
As someone who believes that best practices are merely common practices, I’m always looking to test the tried and true to see how, well, true it really is.
First up? Social proof.
Years ago, when I first started split-testing, I thought every test was worth running. It didn’t matter if it was changing a button color or a headline—I wanted to run that test.
My enthusiastic, yet misguided, belief was that I simply needed to find aspects to optimize, set up the tool, and start the test. After that, I thought, it was just a matter of awaiting the infamous 95% statistical significance.
I was wrong.
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.
It’s a cultural trope to “want what you can’t have,” but it’s also a principle based on decades of psychological research.
That principle, scarcity, is incredibly powerful in marketing, persuasion, and conversion optimization—when done right, especially in a free market with limited resources. If people believe that they’ll be missing out on something, they’ll be prompted to act more quickly to get it.
No business starts out with the goal of blending in. Yet, standing out from the competition is one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs and marketers continue to face.
Wanting to be different from your competition is one thing, but how do you achieve it? The answer, in many cases, can be found in creating an effective differentiation strategy.
“How do we get our customers to do what we want them to do?”
Digital marketers get asked this question all the time. But it’s the wrong question.
Kyle Poyar, VP of Growth at OpenView, said it clearly: “pricing is your most powerful and most immediate lever to accelerate growth.”
Changes in pricing are bound to have an impact on performance. It’s a mechanism that can change your business’s trajectory, but it doesn’t get enough attention.
A few years ago, I launched a kind of “Groupon deal for musicians.” I gave away $1,250 worth of products, including recording time and iTunes distribution, for just $69.
I had spent four months building it, and invested a significant amount of my personal savings into ensuring the campaign was everywhere.
It had to work, and I obsessed over conversions. This obsession paid off when I managed to increase conversion rate from 2.5% to 10.8%.