MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas
MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas |
The Best Conversion Rate optimizers do NOT make changes to webpages… Posted: 23 Aug 2016 12:42 AM PDT Editor's Note: For anyone new to this blog, Adam Lapp has been MarketingExperiments' head of optimization for around three years. He's been optimizing web paths for much longer, though – somewhere in the ballpark of 10 years. I've personally worked with Adam for five years now, and he has, hands down, the most brilliant optimization mind I've ever seen. So naturally, I was thrilled when he sent me a draft of this post for the blog. It's been a while since Adam took some time out of his busy schedule to write for our blog, but his posts are full of real-world optimization wisdom that many of our readers have found invaluable in the past. The casual tone of this post may be a little different from what you might be used to on this blog. That's because I've left Adam's personal writing style, for the most part, intact. This post is written by a true expert and I wanted it to be as directly from the source as possible. I hope you enjoy. Here's Adam… Best, Paul Cheney Managing Editor
I remember I once I designed and ran four tests in a row — two product page tests and two homepage tests — for a Fortune 500 industrial supply company, and lost every time. The designs were solid – better navigation, easier to find buttons, improved copy and value proposition – but they all lost. When I look back at it, these four tests lost because I was trying to optimize webpages. So, what the heck am I talking about? Well fortunately and unfortunately, the probability of a prospect converting begins increasing or decreasing long before they get your website.
At the beginning of the customer journey, when they are in the act of shopping, they likely have several tabs open, have a blurry vision in their head of what they want (that may or may not match what's on your page), and could be anywhere from "super-urgent-peeing-their-pants" to fulfill their needs or just half-heartedly window shopping. At any time, these prospects potentially get a metaphorical puddle splashed on them by a metaphorical car driving down the metaphorical promenade. The fact is, the problem you are trying to solve does not exist in on the page, it exists in the mind of the customer. If you are focusing on the page, then you've already lost. You have to understand where prospects are in the process, what their values and pains are, and what mental conclusions they need to make prior to saying "yes" and buying. You have to harness your customers' motivation before you start changing page elements and writing new copy and putting that new design up on Adobe Target or Optimizely. So how do you do this? Well let's say you are staring at your ecommerce product page right now (well not now because you are reading this post) wondering why none of your recent changes have made an impact… Step #1: Ask some questions to get inside the mind of the customer:
Ultimately, you cannot optimize a webpage … only how your customer experiences a webpage. That's why I said the act of converting on your site begins with birth. From age zero until now, your prospect has developed a unique way of looking at the world, and thus your webpage and copy. There's a sequence of thoughts that has brought them to this page, and a sequence of thoughts occurring as they experience the page, that if you ignore, you will achieve minimal impact on conversion. Step #2: Determine the where your customer is in the thought sequence Where have they been and what is the next step in their thought sequence? There are a few key things you can do to determine this:
Step #3: Create a business-sensitive test plan I'll cover this in depth in part II of this blog post. Stay tuned next week and I'll even provide a helpful infographic you can use as a cheat sheet for planning your tests.
You might also like… Landing Page Optimization: 6 common traits of a template that works A/B Testing: Example of a good hypothesis Quick Lifts: 4 ideas to increase email clickthrough
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