Turn Visitors into Buyers with UAM Method

and I’m a marketing manager at VWO. A full-funnel website’s experimentation platform. Today’s session focuses on a unique method that Will has devised. He has prepared an elaborate presentation to support why it matters to understand your customer’s behavior. Welcome to VWO Webinars.

 

Will Laurenson:

Thanks for having me. Yeah, a pleasure to be here.

 

Divyansh:

Just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. I want to let our attendees know that you too can participate in this discussion. You can send me a request using, the raise hand feature or on the chat panel. Or you can, you know, kind of request me to join on stage, and I’ll be more than happy to welcome you. And we’ll be dedicating a Q&A at the end. With that, Will, please take it away.

 

Will:

Cool. Yeah. Thanks. Cool. Yeah. Turning visitors into buyers with our UAM method, which we use with all our clients here at Customers Who Click. Just a quick introduction about us. So, I’m Will Laurenson. I’m the founder and lead consultant here. We’re a performance-based CRO agency, based in London. We use our UAN methodology to develop high-impact testing programs. Right? So everything’s bespoke. Everything’s kind of research and data-backed to make sure we’re really, kind of hitting hard with the with the tests we run. The goal is obviously to improve conversion rates, to improve average order value, and to make money for our clients. We’re performance-based, with a guarantee that we provide. You know, brands only pay us when, when we make money for them. And we have a 100k a month, money-back guarantee.

So get into it. What is CRO? I’ll keep this bit reasonably short because I’m sure, most of you are aware. CRO is conversion rate optimization. It’s not my preferred name for it, really. I know there’s a lot of debate in the industry, so I won’t go into it too much, but, it’s not all about conversion rates. 

It’s all about the process of kind of optimizing a business towards, you know, the core KPI, which at the end of the day is profit, right, profitable revenue. At, yeah, at the end of the day, the conversion rate doesn’t matter. AOV doesn’t really matter if the business isn’t profitable. It’s not making money.

So while we primarily target conversion rate and average order value with our tests, we have to keep in mind certain other metrics, right? So returns rate, frequency of purchase, revenue per session, really. So, you know, if our conversion rate goes up but AOV goes down, it might not be a successful test. Likewise, if our conversion rate goes up but the returns rate also goes up, that can be quite damaging to a brand, so we have to monitor those things as well. 

CRO is not just AB testing. AB testing is obviously a key part of what we do. It’s a way to prove our hypothesis, run our tests, and experiments, but it’s not the only thing involved in CRO.

There’s a lot more to it. But by optimizing the three most important factors on a website, and the things I’ll be talking about do actually fit into advertising, email, and various other aspects of the business, but for us, it’s about that on-site experience. So if you focus on these three things, we convert people for the right reason at a higher value and then more likely to come back in the future. So what is the problem we’re facing at the moment?

 

Divyansh:

Sorry for the interruption, but, there seems to be some issue when you’re transitioning between slides. And, do you mind if I share the presentation with the audience and it then appears on the screen?

 

Will:

Do you wanna do it natively instead? And we’ll just we’ll just forget the forget the things.

 

Divyansh:

Do you mind stopping sharing your screen? Because the presentation is going blank.

 

Will:

Oh, okay.

 

Divyansh:

Thanks

 

Will:

It’s, yeah, all looks fine for me. So yeah. Go for it.

 

Divyansh:

Yep.

 

Will:

Cool. So what’s the problem at the moment? Obviously, the cost of acquisition is always going up. At the moment, you’ve got more data, more privacy rules coming into place. You’ve got algorithm changes, everything messing with the advertising side, and there’s not a huge amount you can do there.

Right? There’s more competition in the market. So something like 1700 new Shopify stores every week. So then you’ve also got obviously big commerce, Magento, and all the other platforms. So a huge amount of more stores coming into play. And you might think, well, you know, brand new stores, it’s just people setting up whatever. It’s not really competition for us, but we’ll actually, you know, it’s competition for ad inventory. Right, these people are bidding on the ads now as well. Competition for share of wallet. So if I see your ads click through, don’t make the purchase, and then I suddenly get distracted by something else, you know, a shiny TikTok advert and I go and make a purchase there.

I might now not have the budget to buy from you. Right? So it’s not a direct competition you’ve got to be aware of. It’s it’s everything. And then, of course, there’s there’s, attention.

Right? So we’re at kind of peak content and it’s probably gonna keep increasing, but you know, there’s there’s so much competing for people’s attention right now. You know, you’ve got, you know, streaming, plenty of streaming options like Netflix, Disney Plus. You’ve got, you know, Kendall or just books generally. You got fitness, you know, Peloton, you got, Facebook, social media, or generally being social sociable.

Right? There are so many things pulling people in all different directions. So if you don’t grab that person at the right time, you know, and and and convert them, you’re gonna miss out. So, also, barriers to entry have never been lower. Right, sourcing products that easy.

You know, you can set up a, well, setting up a website is easy. You can set up and be running within a few hours, probably, including sourcing some products. Right? Running ads is easy. You know, anyone can get set up with ads.

And obviously blasting out some email campaigns. You know, all the tools and tech are there to make this as easy as possible so anyone can do it. You’ve just gotta make sure you stand out. Every website is the same. Right?

Everyone uses pretty much the same template. For a reason, obviously, those templates do work. Everyone uses the same apps, you know, bundling apps, timers, you know, whatever. You know, it’s madness. Nothing stands out.

Everything looks the same. So, you know, it’s just a template, obviously, but pretty much every eCommerce website, home page looks like this. Right? You’ve got the hero section. You get a few categories below.

You have the navigation and your options at the top. Everything is the same. And particularly in fashion, I find, even like the bra the branding is so similar as well. Right? Nothing really stands out.

You get one chance to convert that customer. Alright. So you get you get one opportunity. If you don’t convert that person then you’d lose them, at best, maybe you bring them back in 6 months, right, with another ad. So you’ve had to pay for that traffic again.

At worst, you could be looking at years before you get an opportunity to sell that to that person again. So what do most brands do? Most brands throw money at the problem, but new ad agencies, new creative, panic testing new channels. I know one brand that I think spent about $10 on TikTok in a week and then gave up on it because it didn’t work, and that was it. Was basically just throwing away 10 grand, and looking for the latest hack, right, and let’s be honest, you know, any hacks and things you get for advertising, you’re gonna make such marginal changes to your, to your performances, you know, provided your your campaigns of running at a reasonable rate already, you’re gonna be making small small changes.

You’re looking at bringing you’re looking at bringing in the very best people just to get you some slightly, you know, incremental improvements there. And, generally, once a new hack has come out into the market and people know about it, 100, if not thousands of brands have already been doing that, right, because their ad agencies have been on it for a bit. Once it comes out into the market, it’s generally because those agencies don’t find it so useful anymore. So they’re happy to share it because they’ve moved on to something else. And then, of course, most brands discount.

Right? They just check discounts out by email. They have a nice signup offer. They’ll do an exit intent, giving people a discount to stop them from leaving. Can be really, really damaging.

Right? So it has a a massive impact on your margin, and your profitability. You were tracking from the wrong customers as well. Right, if you attract discount customers, they will only buy from you again if they get another discount. And then you’re just you’re barely making money any money off them.

You’re gonna be constantly chasing sales, constantly worrying about, you know, revenue and profit. And, and it’s just yeah, long term, it’s very damaging for the business. And there are some brands, you obviously try a bit CRO themselves. We might install a few apps, you know, all the apps in Shopify, you know, they’ll they’ll promise you, you know, conversion uplifts of 30, 40%. Very little to back that up, and very few of them will recommend testing the app as well.

So people just start installing these apps that don’t really spend time setting them up properly. It’s normally get them set up and then forget about them. It’s a bit of a scattered approach to AB testing. So they run a few runs a few tests. They don’t really get anywhere with it, and so they give up on it.

And, you know, it’s it’s, like, CRO doesn’t work for them sort of thing. Generally, they don’t spend the time learning what their customers really need. And they they just don’t they’re not putting the resources into it. Right? You know, testing and then CRO, it’s it’s not something that your marketing manager can, you know, add on to their responsibilities and do for 30, 45 minutes, each week.

Right. There’s a huge amount that has to go into it. So I’ve kind of developed the the UAN method, which is what we use as, at customers you click. And, you know, a big part of it came out of, my background, which was was in-house, actually. So my frustrations were always being handed the budgets and told to grow the business, knowing that, you know, our apps weren’t good enough. The website wasn’t good enough. You know, we were struggling to convert people. We were struggling to retain people. And that has nothing to do with the advertising side. Alright. The advertising was doing the job. 

So I started to move more and more into, you know, doing some customer research, speaking to customers finding out what they actually cared about, and then running a few tests where I could and also working with the product teams to develop, our products and websites further. And that’s that’s kind of what what led me to CRO, in the first place and and got me starting this agency. I remember one time in particular, we got told that our advertising budget was gonna drop for the next month because we hadn’t spent our full budget. Right? 

So it was kind of if we haven’t spent our budget, we don’t need that much money so it can go somewhere else. And the reason we weren’t spending it was because we knew we had conversion problems. So I think that was the kind of final bit that made me go, “I know. I’m done with advertising. This isn’t my space. I wanna focus on that, the customer experience.” So UAM methodology, is, it’s kind of niche-specific CRO. So bespoke programs. So everything is tailored to that brand. We, you know, we’re looking at first principles, understanding the why, you know, why do customers buy? Why do customers not buy? Why do they, why do they respond to different, stimuli in different ways? Different little, you know, behavioral tricks that we employ on the website, and everything’s research-based.

Right. So really, really focused around, prioritizing data-backed testing, not just guesswork. So we have a prioritization model, which actually will come up later in the presentation. If a test doesn’t score well on that model, it doesn’t get it doesn’t get done. Right.

Never runs. So this in this encourages people to actually do some research, or at least, you know, if they have an idea, then they have to put it through the model, which means they have to go and do the research to see whether or not they can check those boxes. So ‘U’ is usability. So this is, firstly, does the website work properly? Right. Sounds simple, but, you know, the number of times, in fact, had it this morning, I was looking at websites and they had a Google reviews badge which was just stuck out in it was like a third of the way up the page into the screen on mobile as well. So it just got in the way. So it’s stuff like that. Right? You look at your website on certain devices and certain browsers, and you will see little pop-ups get in the way.

You know, if you’ve got those, I don’t know exactly what the term is. It’s like sticky email, pop-ups where, you know, you close the pop-up and it gets stuck as a tab on the side. Things like that. It’s loyalty widgets. It’s live chat widgets. If it’s not done properly, you’ll find that on the PDP, you know, you might be scrolling the PDP. You’ve got a sticky call to action, which is currently hidden behind 2 widgets. Right? So no one can actually add the car to that device. So can the website work properly, please? And the second part of that is, does it help customers find what they’re looking for? Right. Is the navigation clear? Do you have search capability? If I land on your homepage, can I find what I’m looking for?

If I click on a shopping ad and I land on a particular product, can I then, you know, if I decide, actually, that’s not for me? It’s not quite right. Can I easily get from that page to a product that is more appropriate for me? So And then, obviously, there’s the buy-in piece. Right?

You know, if you’ve got a nice frictionless, checkout, if you’ve got different payment options, faster payments, all that sort of stuff, you know, or do you have things that get in the way? So one example is clear navigation and categories. This is one I really, really like actually it is the Zalando website. You know, it’s nothing special here, but these little icons just add so much to this navigation. 

It’s almost like, you know if you have text on a page, but then you add bullet points to it. It just kind of separates everything more nicely and makes everything a bit more, easy to understand and consume. You might not actually need these icons to determine what, you know, each category is, but the icons are just separating everything, quite nicely and just, just create creating that differentiation. So I think I think this is really good. I’ve run similar tests where we’ve actually used imagery. So we’ve put quite big thumbnail images, of jewelry, for example, and then and just had, you know, rings, necklaces, whatever, as as the text underneath, but the main part has been the imagery.

That works really, really well. What doesn’t work well is if you use kind of branded collection terms and things like that. And if people open up, let’s say, for example, this clothing tab, and they see a bunch of words that mean nothing to them and don’t tell them what’s behind that click, they’re not gonna click. They’ll they’ll browse a little bit more on your website and then they’ll go somewhere else. Let me get rich search.

So, this is 2 screenshots. So they’re on the right side of articles that sit underneath products but just couldn’t fail on screen. So here, you can see I’ve searched for whey protein he gets us suggested search terms, then you get your products where you’ve got, you know, the name, the price of the image, you get some articles and you get some categories. Right? So you get it’s the search experience to try and help you.

Right? So it’s if you know what you want here are the products, if you don’t really know what you want, here’s some advice that might help you find it. Now they could go a bit further and add like a quiz or something on here as well and say, you know, still not sure. Take our quiz to to find the right product, and product options. So this is a test we actually run for a client where, all these options, these size options were all individual buttons on the page.

So there’s well, like, 9 there, I think. So nine buttons are all the same size as this, drop-down menu. Right? So it was a massive, like, wall of text on the page. The same one for the same for the light color as well.

You just had so many options there. It was just overwhelming for the customers for the customer. So we just turned them into dropdowns. We saw a nice improvement in conversion rate because it was now just easier to use the website. Right? The experience on the website was better. Then we’ve got a, which is anxiety. So these are all the questions and concerns someone has about your products and your business. Alright. So, you know, there are obviously certain questions people have to have answered about your products.

Order to make a decision on purchasing them, but then they also have to be convinced that you’re the right business to buy those products from. So examples of that are, reviews, and social proof, right? It’s a great place to start. You know, if you can get a decent score with tens of thousands of reviews, massive, massive plus points for your brand, right, for both of the products, Right? Especially if you use, if you can get video even better, if you use product attributes, that’s really good as well, particularly for clothing where size matters. 

If you get images, yeah, great. So then reviews are really, really important. I’m sure that’s nothing new to people here, but there are different ways of using them as well. You can stick them in different places on the website on the product page.

You can get them in the gallery. You know, you can find different places to test different types of social proof as well. Size guides are particularly important, but not these ones. So these, these kinds of generic size guides are just, to be honest, useless for people, they don’t really help, you know, so many brands are different in the way they make their products different. Right? So your shoe size is gonna be different. Right? Because some shoes will be wider. Some will be narrower. 

You know, it causes all these sorts of problems, but you can also see, so this was clicking on size and fit here. But I’ve also got, you know, what’s my size? So you can, you can open up a tool that will help you find the right, the right shoe size for you based on what you what else you wear. Right? So if you say I always wear vans this, make, model, model of, of fans, in a size 10, then the product will tell you that tool will tell you, cool, well, we recommend you get a 10 a half in these products.

Right? So these things are great, really, really important and a little bit difficult to build yourself. Because they rely on so much data, anything you can do to make this really, really clear, super important. And then we got, like, explain this. Right?

So this is a this is an Amazon image. It’s just it just makes it so easy to understand what the 7-in-one functionality is, right because it’s clearly listed there in an image in the gallery. Right? And that’s ultimately what someone wants to know. Right?

Then there’ll be a few other pieces of information. They might wanna know, maybe how long certain things take, and how to clean them. You know, that all these sorts of questions people have it might possible that people wanna know what sort of plug this has. Right? So I look I found this on the UK Amazon store because I’m in the UK, but it says America’s number one multi cooker.

So that might raise the question for some people. Is it gonna come with an American plug? And if that question is not answered on the page, people bounce, people can’t buy it, right, particularly important with things like food. Right? Foods food is always a good example.

If someone has a not allergy or a peanut allergy, at the same particular, if the product doesn’t mention allergies, then they can’t buy it. Right, because they’re just not gonna take that risk. So they just cannot make that decision. Even if you’re a bit vague and you say nuts, and that person’s like, well, Is it peanuts? If it’s if it’s not peanuts, I can have it, but you’re not telling me that so I can’t buy it because, again, they can’t take that risk.

So it’s all about finding out what’s the important information to people and presenting it on the pages. And then we get into motivation. This is probably the most important piece, really, because of usability, right? If you help someone find the products Cool. They’re they’re there on the product. And if it’s easy to buy it, cool. That’s just, that’s nice. Right? The anxiety piece is the questions. Right? So if they get to that stage where they’re they’re ticking off all those boxes and their checklist, they’re saying, you know, no nuts. I cais hate this dish in the microwave. It’s designed for one person. Here’s the nutrition call. All these things ticking off the boxes, but if they’re not excited about it, then, you know, there’s nothing kind of pushing them over the edge to, touch and make that purchase. So it’s why, you know, lots of lots of brands will talk about getting into shape, losing weight, that sort of thing.

Right? It’s what are people trying to achieve by buying these products. Sometimes it could be time-saving Right? So does your website help people understand their desired outcome in your product? And then does your website kind of just motivate and encourage people a little to go over the line? 

A couple of examples here. True classic. Right? So they do a really good job. This is almost like using the before and after concept, except they’re they’re comparing it to a different or just other brands, they have a lot of content that shows off the fit of their products, right, and how good it is. Right? That’s the piece that motivates people because they’re making the point that, you know, it’s not just that their t-shirts are really good. It’s actually making people realize that their existing t-shirts look a bit rubbish. Right?

They don’t they don’t fit very well. They’re not, not aesthetically pleasing. You know, they don’t they don’t present the person very well, whereas true classic T-shirts do. Alright. So that’s the big motivating factor for them there.

And then there’s a bit of scarcity and urgency that works. So this is the stuff that if you haven’t answered people’s questions and you haven’t shown the desired outcome, this doesn’t do a lot. But if you’ve got those two pieces, this just helps people get over the line. Right. When they’re ready to say, yeah.

Do you know what? I like this product. I want it. But, you know, do I do I need to purchase it now? Maybe I’ll just have a think about it.

If you can say to someone, you know, you’ve got was 4:27 now. If you said you’ve got 33 minutes to buy it and we can ship it to you tomorrow, that’s that’s gonna make me think, well, I can’t come back to that later. Because I want it tomorrow even though I don’t really need it. So it just it just helps nudge people over the line. And then you got a little bit of scarcity, urgency messaging around, you know, how many products are left in stock.

You have to be a bit careful with some of these, though, because some of them are overdone a bit, they’re not done very well, and they are, you know, people kind of look at them and go, Yeah. But are you really low on stock? So if it doesn’t it works for some products better than others. I think something like these shorts, I wouldn’t expect it to work very well, to be honest, because there’s a million alternatives. And at the end of the day, it’s just some shorts.

But if there was something that you were thinking, I really, really want this. I like this is really important to me. It’s gonna be life-changing to me, whatever. I might be thinking of this, you know, I guess this microphone, for example, that I got when I bought this if it had said only one left in stock, that absolutely would have got me to buy it there on the spot because this was recommended to me as a as a kind of podcasting microphone. I’m hoping the quality sounds really good.

But yeah, you gotta be careful the way you use it. We’re the clients who when we started working with them, had a timer in their checkout, which said, it was a basket hold timer. Right? So we’ll hold your basket for 15 minutes. Yeah.

Something like that. Well, yeah, we can hold your basket for 15 minutes, and it was having a negative impact on their conversion rate. So by removing it, we generated around 90,000 a month because it was it was putting people off. Right. This was quite a high-value product that people spent about 6 months on average, researching and doing their due diligence on.

So that little 15-minute timer at the end was just unnecessary pressure. Trying to move people forward when, really, if they were getting to check out, they were converting. So what do you do when you get the data? So when you do all the research and you’ve got everything, trying to work out what, you know, where to target, what to do? You know, you take all that raw data you’ve got from Google Analytics, from heatmaps, session recordings, and everything, and you need to kind of turn it into these, these kind of actionable, useful ideas. Right? And that’s where this kind of prioritization piece comes from, this research piece. So, you know, if I go back, let’s say to this, in fact, right, so if you stuck a timer or, you know, a low stock, if you put a low stock, warning on your product, right, you know, if you haven’t gone through this process and assess the data and really understand what your customers want, what’s going to affect their purchase decision. You’re kind of up here at the top where you’ve just randomly pulled out a piece of a piece of data and said, yeah. Let’s let’s run the test.

Whereas, really, you need to get you need to organize it. You need to understand it. You know, explain it with a story, you know, look at, you know, what people are telling you, what they’re doing on the website and say, well, you know, you create that hypothesis and you think, well, what’s the story here? You know, if you if you if you do that, you have really good high-impact tests. If you don’t do it, you’re kind of just picking stuff at random, and it’s generally why tests don’t work.

So here is the prioritization model I talked about. So once we’ve got the kind of what, how, and why, you know, good analytics, heat maps, and a bit of behavioral research, customer research, this then helps us develop those quality testing ideas. So we’ve run everything through here. The highest-scoring results here at the end are generally the ones that get tested first. And it’s a great way of not only kind of looking back at your own research and saying, well, you know, did we do enough research?

Have we qualified this enough? But it helps when we’re working with clients, we give them this sheet as well. And we say, look. Just just put your ideas through this scoring model. And, generally, they will score pretty much nothing, right, because the clients just come to us with an idea.

But then, you know, we push them on this a bit, and either they will say to us, can you obviously you’re the CRO agency. Can you go and investigate this a bit? In which case, we’ll go and do the research, or they will go off and have a bit of a look themselves. They will, you know, they might go into their reviews into their custom service platform and just see, you know, are people actually talking about this? Is this a problem?

That is worth solving. But analytics isn’t, it’s not just reporting. Right? So for every dollar you spend on data and reports, you need to be spending about $9 on analysis. Right?

So proper analysis takes time, takes experience, you know, knowing where to start, reporting on its own, is pretty pointless. Right? So you’ve gotta look at, you know, you gotta find that data and then you’ve really gotta understand the data. That’s that’s the important part. That’s Again, like, that’s the stuff that gives you those high-impact and meaningful tests when you actually combine your Google Analytics data, your heat maps, your session recording, and your customer research to say, this is where the problem is.

This is what people are doing on the website. This is why they’re doing it and why they’re behaving, as we’re seeing. When you get to that point at the end, that’s when you develop those high-impact tests. Right? But if you just did it on the analytics side, you know, you might see that you know, a good example I was talking about actually is, car abandonment rates.

Somebody even mentioned this to me yesterday, saying how they get a lot of people to their cart page and then they drop off. Right? So surely we need to optimize our cart, I was like, well, you know, we can have a look at the car. Obviously, there might be some opportunity there on the car, but most likely what’s happened is, well, either they’ve got a shipping cost that pops up and puts people off. More likely though, people aren’t actually fully convinced by their products. Right? Because the anxieties haven’t been dealt with. The motivation has not been worked on. So they’ve added to the cart because they’ve gone, yeah, you know what? I  like the image. For example, this looks like the sort of product I want. They get a car, and then and then they’re they’re just not ready. So either they’re bouncing and they’re going, in which case you potentially lose them, or, you know, if you’re lucky, what they’re actually doing is wish to list. Right? So they’ll add it to the cart. They might be hoping that you email them an abandoned cart just to nudge them to the site. 

But most likely, they’re they’re just adding it to the cart to save it so that they come back the next day, and have another look. But that product is kind of saved for them there. But if you do it with an, you know, analytics alone tells you that cart is the problem, the proper, you know, research and reporting and analysis, tells you that the problem is actually somewhere else. 

So I wanted to talk about, you know, whether you do CRO in-house or or, use an agency. So I’ve been seeing a lot of people talk about how CRO is pointless for brands under 10,000,000 a year, which is just rubbish. CRO works for any brand of any size. Right? Because as I said, right at the start, CRO is not AB testing. AB testing is just at all.

AB testing is difficult for any brand under I would say about 3 to 4,000,000 because you’ve probably not got the traffic to to really do much. But CRO itself is the research piece the understanding of your customers, right, and any brand can do that at any size. So if you really value customer insight, you know, if you wanna know what your customers want from your products, from your business as well, and how to sell to them better, then CRO is a really important part, piece of your business. On the tin-houses side, you know, like I was saying, if you’ve got revenues of less than about 300,000, and traffic of less than 100,000, it’ll be tough to get our ROI with an agency. So, you know, maybe that’s not the best route.

But if you don’t have any in-house actual CRO experience. Right? So not someone who’s just run a couple of tests or stuck an app on a website. If you don’t have actual CRO experience, then, you know, getting a consultant might be beneficial, someone who can give you that strategy, that guidance, you can probably get about 60% of the way just doing this yourself. Right?

You know, hire a freelance designer developer who can put tests together and make some changes to your website. Follow good CRO best practices. And what I mean by that is not a sticky car, a sticky call to action, right, as a best practice. I mean, CRO best practices, so things like doing the research properly. Right, really understanding your customers following proper processes to make sure that when you make changes to your website, either you’re testing it, or if you’re not testing it, you are still properly monitoring and you understand what change that’s, that that in that is happening. What impact that change is having? Agency-wise, yeah, if you’re bigger than that, obviously, agencies are gonna take the program to the next level. So you get access to a full-service team. You know, account managers, strategists, analysts, designers, developers, and everyone is a CRO expert. Right? Everyone lives and breathes CRO. Right. So they understand how to design for CRO, how to build for CRO, how to iterate, how to understand, like, what customers want. And what that should mean, for your website. You obviously get access to tech stacks and proprietary frameworks such as UAM. Networks. Right? So if you, if you need this particular app or a or a freelance or an agency for something else, you know, agencies have that, have those, have that knowledge. You know, we’ve got our own little black books. But if you’re not ready for an agency yet, so, you know, if you’re bits too small or just, just not ready to start working with someone, don’t wait to get things in place.

Don’t put this whole thing on hold until you’re big enough to afford the fees for an agency. 

Make sure your analytics are set up properly, and get some tools up and running gathering data. So tools such as VWO, you know, you wanna be collecting that heat map data, the session recordings, get some feedback loops in place. So you’re at least gathering this information. If you don’t use it yourself, fine. You’re missing that a little bit, but, you know, as long as it’s gathered, then when you get a consultant or an agency in, they can just hit the ground running. And really get going with things. Right? As I mentioned, your CRO is not AB testing. It’s not a marketing channel.

It’s, you know, it’s a whole kind of growth discipline for optimizing your business. And that is actually the presentation. So, yeah, if there are any questions, Adam, into the chat, and we’ll start running through them. I’ve got my contact details in there. If you wanna find me on LinkedIn, I post pretty much every day, a couple of times a day, some CRO content. I’ve got a newsletter as well where I do CRO audits. And if you’re interested in working with us, on on your CRO program, our next onboarding date is 15th September. So you can, you can book a call on our website. It’s just a quick initial quick call, just to see if we’re we’re fit. Thank you.

 

Divyansh:

Thank you so much for the amazing presentation. The details to contact are around the screen, or you can write us to you write us to us. I’ll be happy to and we’ll be more than happy to connect you to Will. 

Now quickly hopping on to the questions. It’d be a great time to clarify any doubts or your philosophies in general regarding CRO and it’s and it’s a complex world. So that’s one question from let me just quickly pin it on screen.

 

Will:

Based on the CSL framework, we’ve just tweaked a couple of things. Yeah, we’ve just made a couple of changes that we think are more appropriate, but it’s heavily based on that. 

 

Divyansh:

Are there any other questions? You can also, request us to join on the stage, and I’ll be more than happy to, you know, switch on your cameras and let you join the conversation with Will as well. So, that’s an opportunity definitely available for all of us. Okay.

Will:

So I think there might be some questions in the chat.

 

Divyansh:

Yep. Exactly. Well, do you mind? Yep.

 

Will:

That’s a good question. It’s a little difficult to answer that without knowing what the business is because that would determine what the best fit would be. You know, if it’s like a B2B or small B2C business, it’s gonna be very, very different. 

So we’re performance-based, so we don’t use base rates So it’s a little difficult to answer that, but I would be, I guess you need to speak to some people and just be wary of anyone who is charging too little and who kind of promises the world and says they get their clients 40% uplifts in conversion rate and, you know, big claims like that because either they’re lying to get your money or possibly what they’re doing is they’re not testing properly. And so as soon as a test, you know, you know, generally, what will happen is with a test quite often what we’ll see with the test is, you’ll see a big spike in conversion rate at one point in the test. 

But then by the time you finish the test after 2, or 3 weeks, you end up with that kind of 5% uplift. I remember 1, actually, generally when he thought this was gonna be a massive win, unbelievable win. After about 10 days of the test, we were up 140%, I think it was the conversion rate. Which was just, it was just insane. But because it was about 10 days in, I was thinking, wow, this is this looks fantastic. Ran it for a bit longer to make sure we got enough data through it, and it ended at about 88.9%, which I think was the final result. 

This is still a fantastic uplift from one test, but it just shows that you know, if if you get a, if you get a freelancer, someone who ends that test early because it’s up 80% or something, that’s not actually what you’re getting. Right. Hope that helped.

 

Divyansh:

Sarah, you can let us know in the chat itself if that answers your questions, or is or if there is any follow-up question to that. Coming on to the next question from Imran. Let me just quickly oh, it does answer Sarah’s question. Here’s another question from Imran.

 

Will:

And what strategies or techniques do you suggest to your clients? It has not only increased conversion rates but also ensured long-term improvement, overall user engagement, and customer satisfaction. Yeah. I guess that is kind of the UAM, methodology really. So now, if you’re making usability optimizations, you are you should improve user engagement.

If you’re tackling people’s anxieties properly, and then also focusing on that motivation piece, that’s gonna help you build that, that kind of sustainable long-term improvement and customer satisfaction. So based on research, you know, speak to your customers to find out what they care about, right? Because, you know, so many brands and an important part of that is the wording and like the voice of the customer. So you could, you could do that research and read through that research and say, yeah, that, that is what we’re saying on the website. But with, you know, but you’re saying one thing.

You’re not using the exact words they use. And so they don’t understand it. One example, just because it popped into my head straight away, I was looking at a website yesterday for an audit that we’re doing. And, in there, you know, the, the 3 digit code, well, I think it’s 4 digits on American Express, the, the security code for your credit card. Most people know it, as CVV, I think.

I think that’s correct. But they had CSC on their, they had CSC in their, in their little form. So it’s a small thing, but because they’re using different, different different letters to what people know, that might be something that just puts people off. Right. That’s a very specific example, but it could just be the wording you use on how you describe the material that your product is made of, right?

You might actually be describing the same thing, but some people just know it as a slightly different term.

 

Divyansh:

Thank you so much, for that elaborate answer, Will. I hope that answers your question, Imran. Do let us know in the comments, and just about to answer another question. Yep.

 

Will:

4 tips for doing on-site research for a better buy journey. So we start with Google Analytics, and we’ll try and identify in the use of the eCommerce funnel where the biggest drop off is, where we think that opportunity is. To be honest, the vast majority of the time, it’s the product page. Right? So people, people just aren’t selling their products well enough.

They’re not dealing with the anxieties and the concerns. They’re not motivating their customers enough. So Yeah. That’s generally where we start, then we move to behavioral stuff. So these will be heatmaps and session recordings.

What are what are people doing on the website? Right? Where are they clicking? Where are they not clicking? Are they dead clicks, or rage clicks, obviously? But, really, we’re looking at, whether they are seeing information that we think is valuable, to the purchase. So if you’ve got a video that you adamant is, is responsible for converting people and super valuable, then we’ll look at sessions we’ll look at, scroll maps, for example, And a lot of the time, because these videos are halfway down the page, we’ll find that you know, maybe 50% of traffic sees them. They’re not actually contributing as much as the brand thinks. Then we’ll move to some surveys. So this will be, we normally do email surveys now.

I used to do a lot of on-site pop-ups. We found them not as effective so much anymore with, you know, with so much mobile traffic. The pop-ups are just a bit more disruptive and they they can be a bit damaging to conversion rates. So we tend to do email surveys now. So we’ll do an email out to existing customers and an email out to, kind of leads.

So, you know, people have given their email address, but not purchased. And we’re asking for those people, it’s, you know, what’s the number one reason you haven’t purchased from this brand. And then for both of them, we’re kind of going into what would you care about with these products? What are you trying to achieve with it? Why why are you buying it?

Why did you buy it? You know, all these these questions around people’s, people’s behaviors, people’s motivations. And then the final piece of that, which will be customer interviews. So we’ll also get people on a Zoom call, alright, or Google Meet, and we just kind of dive into that a little bit more. But here, it just gives you that opportunity to ask follow-up questions.

So I’m not gonna not gonna go through an example in my head. But, yeah, you’ll ask that first question of what’s what’s the number one reason you haven’t purchased. Yeah. They give you an answer, and then you can say, oh, well, what is important to you about x that they’ve mentioned, right?

Why is that important? And then you can kind of go deeper and deeper into that and really discover what that key motivation is. You know, it’s a bit like, you know, if someone said, yeah, a good example would be price. But when people give price as their objection, it’s actually very rarely price, which is the problem. The problem is they haven’t been sold on the product properly.

Right? So they haven’t had their questions answered. They haven’t been motivated by it. They’re not seeing the value of that product, and that’s where you get it when you go into things a bit in a bit more depth. Alright. So that’s that’s what the interview allows you to do. 

 

Divyansh:

I hope it answers your question. I mean Yeah.

 

Will:

I suppose I’m gonna add another one. I’ll add a lot of 5th. Which is when you run tests, always make sure you’re iterating, you’re learning and iterating from them. So if you get a positive result or a negative result, you should still be asking the question of why, why did this happen, why did we get the result, whether it’s expected or not, and what do we do next? Right?

So if you run a bit of social preview on your website and you get a positive result, the next step should be, how do we get a bigger positive result from this? How can we make this a better experience? Because, you know, we’re testing, you know, it’s it’s like deploying MVP stuff or minimum viable product stuff. So, you know, the first version of that social proof might be to put, a before and after review into your product gallery. Works really well.

Positive improvement. You go sweet. Okay. That’s an easy test because you’ve just gotta get a review from someone and put an image in place. With then you might think, well, let’s do a video version of this. Let’s see if we can get someone to take a video of themselves before and a video of themselves after using our product, right? 

That’s obviously gonna take, you know, a bit of time, to sort out, but that doesn’t matter. You get into that video and then you might find you get a better increase. And then you said, well, actually, maybe the next step for this is let’s do a, let’s do a little tab or something on our product page, which says, see what our customers think or see our customers’ results, and that’s where you can have a mix of both image and video before and afters. Right? So you gotta keep you keep iterating on it. You find something finds something you could think of because you think is gonna be impactful at first, and then you go deeper with it.

 

Divyansh:

Thank you so much for those really wise quotes, words well, and testing is all about iteration. And improving from that iteration. And this advice really brings us to probably the last question of our session. It’s on your screen, Will.

 

Will:

Yep. Yeah, we do. We use Bayesian statistics. We do we do quite a thorough analysis of a test, to make sure it’s sufficiently powered. You know, we’ve we’ve run enough data through it. And then we do some analysis on segments and, channels, devices, that sort of thing to see where the impact’s really been. We also do quite detailed, analytics audits set up, right at the start of of working with someone. So I can’t go into too much detail on that because it’s it’s the team who who actually executes that. 

But we’ll do, yeah, we make sure people are set up properly we run some practice tests first as well, to make sure that the data data was looking correct, but it’s also at the end of the day, the data is always going to be different between things. Ideally, we want it to be a very, very small difference. But that’s, between the testing tool and Shopify and Google Analytics, for example, there’s there’s likely to be differences. In all three of them. Yeah, hopefully, that answers the question.

 

Divyansh:

Do let us know, if there are any follow-up questions to that, with that, I think we wrap up a very, very elaborate and wonderfully done presentation. Thank you so much, Will, for taking the time out to come on, and meet up your webinars. If there are any questions or any doubts you’d want to connect with is available on LinkedIn. Otherwise, do reach out and we’d be more than happy to connect you with as well. With that, how great they had and, we’ll look forward to hosting you again sometime.

 

Will:

Awesome. Alright. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.

 

Divyansh:

Also, for folks still in attendance, there’s a quick poll. It helps us, you know, kind of improve the quality of the content that’s being offered. I’ll just quickly fill both of these polls on screen and we’ll hop off the stage for today. Thank you so much and, look forward to, seeing you all again for yet another VWO webinar. Bye bye