No matter how much traffic you drive to your e-commerce website, if your website is not set up for success, meaning taking your customer through a journey that’s designed for the best possible experience for that customer to buy, than your cost for acquiring customers won’t be as low as you need / want it to be.
All e-commerce businesses optimize for CAC (customer acquisition cost,) and one of the main ways to do that besides optimizing ad performance is optimizing for conversion rate. This of course is CRO, conversion rate optimization.
How many times have you looked at another website and said, “wow, that looks great, I should try that on my site,” or have been in a team meeting such as customer service team and they’ve mentioned that customers complaint about a certain aspect or functionality part of the site? When you start working toward changing and testing these elements, THAT is conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
But what is a good conversion rate? Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, you want to break into the top 10% — these are the landing pages with conversion rates of 11.45% or higher.
This great video by Mohamed Ali Aguel from the Affiliate World Conference in 2018 has some incredible tips to start CRO.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This presentation is about conversion rate optimization
And this subject is a little bit hard to talk about because we’re talking about data
As I always say, data is different from one person to another, from one website to another,
from one page to another. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you the ten hacks
that built our framework on how we start our pages.
When we start our pages, we start converting 5%, 6%, 7%.
And that’s what you’re going to get by the end of this presentation, hopefully.
Before we get into the into the CRO and the hacks, I want to explain
why CRO is important because a lot of people miss on it.
I know it can be a complicated subject. It can take time.
It’s a process, but it makes you money. And it’s free money.
Basically, what you’re doing with CRO is, you are maximizing on the traffic that you’re already having.
This is an example of how we use Xero to pretty much double out the conversion
rate from 2.52% to 5.18%, and that’s literally 105% increase
which, if you do nothing else with your ads, you just double your revenue.
Who thinks that’s awesome? Doubling your revenue just with CRO. Thank you.
You get cheaper CPAs, you get higher AOV, you get more revenue,
and obviously, you don’t need to increase your ad spend.
And now with Facebook, they make your your CPM higher.
If your website load speed or your website conversion rate is not high enough and up to their standard,
They start with the engagement on your page, then the load speed and that goes into CROs.
That’s one thing that actually pushed us to focus more, and more, and more, and more on CRO.
This is gonna sound a little bit weird. I’m going to offend a lot of people
CRO is a process. It takes time, there is no way around it. More importantly, your opinion does not matter
literally on every stage, I have to say this point, because I do believe in data.
You cannot beat data, you cannot argue with data. And the most important thing with CRO is data.
So your opinion does not matter, and assumptions are your worst enemy.
When you assume stuff with your website, you just shoot yourself in the foot.
You don’t want to be assuming anything. You want to be testing every idea that you have.
Sometimes, you see someone doing something and then you take it to your website.
It actually does more harm than good for your website. Don’t assume that someone is doing something good.
It may work for them but does not mean it will work for you, and vice versa.
So please do not assume anything. Also, get data or die trying.
That’s the name of the game. It’s all about data. We spend money to get data.
It’s not the term spend, we literally invest money to get data.
Whether in ads, in CRO, or email, or whatever it is. That’s what we do,
It’s all data based. And no amount of CRO will fix a bad offer.
If people do not like what you’re buying, if people do not like your offer, your product,
or the messaging, or the angle, no amount of CRO will fix that.
Can we all agree on these four terms, please?
Hack number one.
Again, the hacks are the framework that we end up with when we want to start a page from the get go.
Traffic sources are not equal, neither are your landing page. They should not be equal.
If you’re pushing traffic from native, and you’re pushing traffic from social,
and you’re pushing traffic from SEO, your landing pages should not be the same
because people that are coming from Google, they are aware of their problem,
and they’re looking for a solution. So it’s an easier sell for you.
Even if you’re pushing different angles on Facebook, you’re pushing the health angle,
and then you’re pushing a fashion angle, and your pushing a gym angle, all for the same product.
You should not be sending them all to the same landing page even if you are in Shopify.
It gets a little bit tricky on Shopify but what you can do is create different product pages.
You can hide these product pages and just send the traffic to them directly from Facebook.
This is a big one. You want to match your landing page with your ad angle or source.
Congruency is the name of the game, so that’s super important.
That’s the number one thing that pretty much helped us with our traffic and conversion.
Hack number two is, have your ad creative match to the image on your landing page.
I know it sounds basic but unfortunately, a lot of people don’t do it.
If you’re doing video ads, make sure you have at least the first 10 seconds of that video on your landing page.
Yes, you can embed your landing pages on Shopify.
If you do have funnels, or if you do HTML, CSS, PHP, and all that, it’s easier to embed your videos.
Little hack, embed your Facebook videos into your sales page. You get all that custom audience built from there.
The SEO traffic will watch that video, so retargeting gets a lot easier.
Hack number three, social and authority proof.
This is a funny one because this is when you abuse with it, it kind of stops working.
It starts going backwards. So if you have 17 as seen ads, it’s gonna stop working.
When I’m going to build my website, hopefully soon, it will be like, as seen on McDonald’s,
as seen on Burger Kings, as seen on this, as seen on that.
If you do 17 of these, it will not work. You want three, four max on as seen of, so we start with that.
Videos. You want video testimonials from your customer. How to get them? It’s super easy.
Basically, we send either an email to your customers offering something in exchange for that video.
And the number one thing is, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do it.
So just the phone, and send it to the Facebook page. That’s all. And we will send you a $50 coupon code.
That’s the perceived value. In reality it will cost you, literally the cost of good of that $50, which
can be $10, $20. That video, you can use it on your landing page, you can use it as testimonial to run ads,
you can use that as retargeting, etc. Media mentions, that’s something very powerful that we use
even if you can get a PR company. If a product is crashing, if an offer is crashing and it’s going into
multiple 6-figures, you want to go into the PR route and get it mentioned on PR stuff, depends on your niche.
Even if it’s a blog mention, even if you get a guest blog post about that product that you pay for it,
mention it as seen on whatever blog.com. That gives you authority.
The next one, number of customers. No one wants to be the first. Who here did Teespring back in the days?
Not a lot of people, a lot of new people. How it used to work with Teespring,
we set up the campaign, we want to sell 25 t-shirts, and then it will show 0 of 25.
And no one wants to be the first one buying. For some reason, they’re scared to be the first one buying a t-shirt.
Go figure. But what you do is, we used to buy the first three t-shirts. We used to buy them.
The seller will buy his own t-shirts and then we refund once the sales start coming in.
But with Shopify, you can mention your numbers of customers and be ethical about.
So please do. Number of customers helps a lot with conversion rate optimisation.
Reviews. As I said for the video reviews, you want the text. You can import them from AliExpress,
you can take them from Facebook messages and, what else do you get for reviews,
or the influencers type of reviews. That’s another one for the as seen as.
If you are in the niche and you find influencers, you want to take a screenshot of that and put it on your website.
It works like crazy.
The last one is number of items sold, which is exponentially or compoundly related to
the number of customers. So if on average, people buy 1.5 units from you,
you know the number would be one and a half. If you’re doing bundles
and all that to increase your AOV, which I’m going to talk about tomorrow at ECML,
then that number will be times five, times six. So 1,000 customers is 5,000 units shipped and sold, basically.
Hack number four, copy structure. Who was here in the morning? Perfect.
The rest you missed something probably good. So, copy structure. People do not take the time to read,
they really don’t. Who in here read a full text when they go to a website to buy something?
One, I only got one. Okay, three people out of all of you.
People literally just skim through the copy. So what you do is, you want to
be using benefit-based bullet points as I show today in the morning, you know
like the benefits and it’s bullet points. So you don’t write a whole paragraph of
black and white, and it’s all crumpled together because no one will be reading that.
People skim. They read, but they kinda read. They don’t go fully into the text.
So you want to maximise on that. What you want to do is, you keep your sentences short and sweet.
You don’t want to go into grammar and all that. Look at me, short and sweet. You want it short and sweet.
Especially if English is your third language, keep it short and sweet. That’s how you get by.
Do not distract your visitors on you pages or ads.
You know when you do the ads and tag and share, tag a friend then share and click here to buy,
Even Instagram influencers. Follow the page, tag a friend and follow this page to get a giveaway.
You don’t want to be that. You want one call to action for one specific action.
Usually, when I’m running an ad, I want them to go to the website.
If I’m running what we call the video ad, to build the audience, I want them to watch the video
because there is no call-to-action. In the beginning, we built the audience for video to get retargeting.
We want them just to watch the video. So the call-to-action is literally watch the video till the end.
That’s all what we want. So no tagging. Don’t tag your friends.
If you tag them, good. But I won’t ask you to do that. One call to action for one specific action.
That works also on your pages. The second one, you want to guide your customers
on what to do on your website, even on your ads. How many times you’re running ads and
you say, “How do I buy? Where do I buy?” Exactly, right? Thank you.
And you’re like, “The link is there four times, and there is a button says shop now. Even with that,
People will ask you, “How do I buy?” So it’s very important when they go to your website,
Especially if you are doing funnels with the long copies, you want to guide them
on where to buy, or how to buy. And you want to have multiple of the same call to action
Like shop now and then they scroll down and then there is the other shop now, etc.
So that’s very, very, very important.
The last thing you want is people being confused on your page. The moment they are confused,
the moment that they are gone. And do not assume people know what to do on your website.
For real. Even if one button that says shop now, you want click here to buy now.
Click the green button that says add to cart to add to cart.
Do not assume that people understand what the heck they are doing on your website.
Sometimes you watch the recordings and you see people. And then, the same people
will hit contact us and you time it, and you go to the customer support, “I can’t figure out how to buy.”
You’re like, “Okay.”
This is my favorite one. Most people are not using it, which is the simplest thing that you can do.
People trust a phone number on a website. And you don’t have to answer the phone number.
All what you have to do, get a toll-free, forward it to a voicemail where it says, “Hey thank you for contacting XYZ. We are receiving a high amount of calls or we are not available at the moment. Please contact us at support.xyz.com. That’s it. And then you get to them into email.
That’s all what it is. It cost you what, $20, $30/month? Less. And it acts very, very well.
Because people, especially if you are in the older market, like 45 plus, people love the phone.
If you don’t have a phone number, for some reason they don’t trust you because in their head, what type of business doesn’t have a phone number?
So this is the easiest hack. If you can do anything, get anything out of this presentation it’s this thing.
Go put a 1-800 number on your website and put it on a voicemail. If you want to answer it, That’s even better.
If you have people to answer it, even better. But imagine me picking up the phone for some niches.
I shouldn’t be picking up the phone for that. It gets me in trouble. FAQ for your sales and checkout page. If you know how to use them, they have this psychological effect. You can guide people on how many units they can buy, and what they should be buying on your website.
So you can increase your AOV with an FAQ. Let’s say I’m selling this bottle of water.
Why should you buy two instead of one? So you have one for the gym, and one left in your car, and one for your house, and you can give one as a gift. And then you save on shipping, and then you do this. So FAQ is very, very, very powerful thing. The frequently asked question, how long does it take to be shipped and all of that.
So the FAQ, you overcome the objections. If you know how to do it to play on the AOV,
You can do very, very well with it. And obviously, it reduces your customer support ticket.
No one will be emailing you, how long does it take to be shipped, or how do I track my order.
So you can optimise your FAQ to save money, make more money, and convert more.
You can do the FAQ if you’re doing funnels, you can do them on the checkout page.
If you are doing Shopify, you can have them as a tab on top.
Hack number eight.
Who’s still using audio messages? No one, this is like the old school stuff and it still works.So the audio message on your checkout page, I’ve never done it with Shopify,
I do it with funnels. Like click funnels or PHP or e-manage or whatever it is.
When you include an audio message on your checkout page, and again it works better with the older population,
like 45 plus, you want to include.
Imagine they are on the your checkout page and there is someone telling them, “Hey. This is Mo from XYZ.com.”
You are now on our checkout page. If you want to buy, you can actually select the quantity,
and why you want to select the quantity, and which quantity you may want to select.
You guide them on the checkout page. So instead of telling them just select number one or two to buy
one unit or two unit, you can tell them in the audio message, our best offer
today is three three units. And by buying three units you get a free gift, and free shipping.
And this order is available for a limited time. You have someone talking to you on the checkout page
and that’s super, super powerful. Why to buy.
The reasons why they are on this page. You remind them of why they clicked on that ad, and why they are here,
how to buy, what to buy, and where to buy.
And then you want to emphasize on everything I said, what you have on your checkout page.
You tell them on the right-hand side, you have this on the left-hand side.
So basically, all what you’re doing is guiding your people on your page so you don’t want to lose them.
Giving to charity is a big one, free shipping, secure checkout, money-back guarantee.
Those are the emotional authority type of stuff that you want people to see.
I know we take that for granted because we’re marketers, trust me.
The normal people who are on the other side, they trust this stuff more than we do
because we’ve seen it everywhere, they didn’t.
When adding the secure checkout, or your money back guarantee, and your free shipping,
and giving to charity is a big one. This is a hack on its own. That’s very powerful.
And we have seen it. It increased by 0.2%, 0.3% our conversion rate.
Hack number nine, Sales notifications. This is the easy one.
Either you use the Use Proof or use FOMO if you are on Shopify.
What you need to do, do not use them on mobile because they block the add to cart,
and you need to modify the CSS or the frequency of the popup.
I went to a website where the popup, just tack tack tack like you’re playing a game
to push the add to cart. Timing it to push the add to cart. You don’t want to do that.
You want people to see it, see that people are buying.
You do that with the number of customers, people bought from you, and the number of items sold.
It becomes a very powerful combination.
Hack number ten.
I’m sorry running through those hacks because I have a limited time.
Giving back. For every purchase made, a percentage is given to a charity organisation.
This works great in the pet niche, veteran niche and all those emotional niches.
“Oh my god they’re giving the money back to something that I believe in.”
Please give the money back. Don’t just put it there.
Most charities, they actually have the badge that links to them.
When you click on the badge, it links to their website and says ‘a verified donor.’ You want that.
Bonus hack, that was a hidden hack. 10.5. I promised you ten hacks. Over delivering for your customers.
It’s not about CRO but it’s more about getting your customer to buy back from you.
to come back to your website and buy from you. Let’s say someone bought this bottle of water,
and the glass cost you $0.50, give them a glass for free. Don’t even announce it. Let them be surprised.
I hope you’re surprised right now, I really hope so you. You don’t look surprised.
So that’s something that you want to really do if you want to keep your customer coming back,
and basically falling in love with you, over delivering and under promising.
Bonus hack number eleven is, surveying your traffic.
Exit pop-up and for this I use Hotjar. This technique alone, we flipped funnels around.
We asked two very simple questions. Number one is, why didn’t you buy from us.
Very simple. You’re driving target traffic to an offer that you think is good, assumption again,
but people are not buying. So how would you know why they’re not buying?
Just ask them why aren’t you buying and then what can we do to serve you better.
So you’re coming from that position that I want to help you. I want to be the good guy here.
I don’t want to take your money. I just want to serve you better.
And people go, “Yeah, you want to do this.”
We launched a new funnel, and for some reason we launched it in the UK.
The prices were in USD and I completely forgot about it.
And most of the questions where, “I don’t know how much it costs in pounds.”
So we just changed them to pounds and the conversion rate went up.
That’s a big one. The next one is the hack number twelve.
This is the last hack. Surveying your existing customers. You know how we come up with angles,
and you always hear about marketing angles, and copy angles, and all that.
This is how you come up with other angles. You have this and you have the customer support tickets.
How are you liking your product? You always want to be making your product better.
How are you liking your product? Some people will like it but they will tell you,
Maybe if you did this part like this, or maybe if it was available in red, or maybe if it came with this thing
it will be better. So you want to take that feedback and you want to build up on it.
Number two is, why did you buy from us. This is how we come up with our angles.
sometimes you’re pushing a product, and people buy it for a complete different reason than what you’re
advertising. Five, six times you see the same thing pop-up over, and over, and over again.
You may want to take that and build a new page, and adjust for that angle and that segmentation of people.
What can we do to make your experience better next time?
You own a business, you’re in this for the long term, so you want you want to make their experience better.
So either they will tell you, usually about shipping, or about the quality of the product,
about the quality of the customer support. Sometimes they just praise you, which makes you feel good.
Alright, that was the last hack. So how do we put all of this together? This is the process that we do.
Number one, we build the page. We build the landing page whether it’s Shopify or ClickFunnels,
or whatever you’re using. We build the page.
And then, we install the heat maps and recordings. We don’t wait to start pushing traffic,
It’s part of the process of us building the pages. We install the heat maps and and record this.
We use Hotjar for that, that’s my favorite tool. There is also Crazy Egg, but I prefer Hotjar
because I like them. Then we push the traffic. All type of traffic, Facebook.
You can start with whatever traffic source you specialize in. Just push that traffic
because what you’re doing is you are collecting the data.
Then we analyze what’s happening. This is the boring part because literally you
are sitting, watching recordings and heat maps all day long.
You will have 100, 200, 300 recordings times 40 seconds to 1 minute each
So you are watching all of that, and you’re taking notes, and you are trying to find a pattern.
We’re trying to find why people are buying, or why people are not buying,
what are they clicking, which is not clickable, how are they moving their mouse,
what words are they highlighting when they are reading, you know we all read with the mouse,
or if they’re on the phone usually, you tap on the word that you want to read.
So you want to take note of all of that.
And then what we do is, we come up with theories.
They did not click on that because, this. And that’s the theory.
If we do this, that will increase that by X%.
If we change the button on the top instead of the bottom, or the right instead of the left,
that will increase the CTR, the click-through rate on the page.
That’s something, that’s the theory. And what we do to the theory, we don’t assume it works.
We test it. We put it to test. So we make the modification and the traffic we’re pushing.
When we do testing, we will test one theory at a time.
In CRO, you wouldn’t want to be testing 17 things at one time
because you don’t know what will working or what will not be working.
One thing at a time so you know what has the impact on your page and on your conversion rate.
Number seven. Obviously, we keep the winner.
What do we do with the winner? We don’t settle with that winner.
The winner is good. It makes our lives better, we make more money, cheaper CPA and all that.
That will become our new control. And our job, as marketers and as entrepreneurs, I guess online,
is to always beat that control. So what we do is we rinse and repeat that whole process all over again.
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. That was the framework for the CRO hacks.
Thank you.
