CXL Conversion Optimization

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I and a few other IMPACTers attended CXL Live 2017, a 3-Day Growth & Conversion Conference hosted by Peep Laja, one of the world’s most famous conversion optimizers, and his team at ConversionXL, three weeks ago.

We found ourselves in a weird and enigmatic environment as inbound marketing and sales professionals.

We were surrounded by statisticians, quants, CROs (conversion rate optimizers), data analysts, growth hackers, experimenters, and people with the title “scientist” rather than Directors of Marketing / Sales, Marketing Coordinators, or Social Media Managers.

WTF…

BUT, this is exactly why we opted to go.

Before I go into what I learned during the conference, let me share this life lesson:

Working to become an expert in any field may often engulf us in a bubble that makes us forget that other worlds exist outside of our own. Furthermore, knowledge from those other areas can be just as, if not more, helpful in growing our expertise.

CXL demonstrated this. Everything was worth it because of this epic cross-pollination of our previous marketing experience with a new understanding of data, experimentation, and spectacular traffic, lead, or revenue increase.

That being stated, let’s move on from life lessons and look at some of the main insights from the event that I believed would be most applicable in an inbound marketing scenario.

What Did I Take Away From ConversionXL Live?

First and foremost, as Oli Gardner, Co-Founder of Unbounce, put it, “we have to look at everything around us and optimize it.”

Even the title of this blog article reflects this sentiment:

Iris Shoor discovered that writing numbers in numerical form reduces cognitive burden and increases clickthroughs. (15 as opposed to fifteen)
According to Outbrain, blog titles with odd numbers are more successful than posts with even numbers, while titles with greater numbers beat those with lower numbers. (15 vs. 14, and 15 vs. 6)

As a result, optimize everywhere.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), often known as Conversion Optimization or Optimization, is a mentality – a culture. It is proactive.

Because we have access to a myriad of data sources to assist us analyze our success, CRO is also a discipline inside the inbound marketing landscape. However, such practice has been superficial in comparison to what was given at CXL Live 2017.

These 15 lessons should help create a deeper CRO attitude in you, helping you to convert leads and produce more revenue.

Please bear in mind that I am a CRO in training, and the teachings below might easily be understood in a far more thorough manner. Continue reading!

“Data overcomes instinct,” says Lesson 1. Spool, Jared

This was a great way to start the conference, and it’s something that marketers have struggled with for a long time. We’ve always been pretty adept at using prior experiences and results to draw broad generalizations about what will and won’t work.

However, the preceding phrase serves as a strong reminder that in order to get the greatest results, your marketing or design decisions MUST be founded on useful data (not simply data) that is actionable.

He claims that metrics like “average time on page” or “bounce rate” don’t tell us anything. “A metric should inform you what you will change.”

Personalization is a REAL conversion driver, according to Lesson 2.

According to Krista Sieden, Analytics Advocate at Google, the benefits of personalisation on conversion rates might be lost if they are not deployed across all economies of scale.

In other words, customization occurs on a large scale, on a local level, depending on activities, and in real-time.

Here’s a rundown of how you may customize at each level:

• Personalizing your website to the proper consumer persona on a large scale requires identifying who visits it.
  Personalization at the local level is tailored to a user’s preferences or purpose.
  Personalization from referral source is the process of tailoring the message or headline from external campaigns to your website or landing page.
  Personalization at the action level occurs when a user makes an action, such as submitting a form or purchasing something.
  Personalizing in real-time necessitates close monitoring of your users in order to identify their degree of interest and modify based on their overall engagement, for example, they’ve seen a specific service page four times and should thus be reading different material when they return.

  You’re wasting conversion possibilities if you’re not maximizing the user experience at each of these stages.

  Lesson 3: Create a hypothesis first.

  Micele Kiss, Senior Partner of Analytics Demystified, reminded us that before embarking on any conversion optimization experiment or project, we should write a succinct yet explicit hypothesis regarding the anticipated outcomes.

  Here is her desired structure for it:

  “I think that . If I’m correct, I’ll .”

  Here’s an example of the framework in action:

  “I believe we should do X, and a 2% improvement in conversion would result in a $1MM gain in income.”

  This is a crucial lesson for inbound marketers since we frequently brainstorm campaign concepts and delve into them before considering their possible results. This assists us in addressing the next difficulty, which is selling our ideas inside.

  “Copy either sells or it doesn’t,” says Lesson 4. Joanna Wiebe’s

  Boom.

  That’s it, folks. It doesn’t get much more genuine than that.

  Copyhackers founder Joanna Wiebe said that by doing side by side testing with her customers, she was able to uncover one of the critical characteristics of content that sells. She refers to it as “zooming in.”

  Zooming in is the (simple but difficult) technique of increasing your specificity or reality in explaining the difficulties your consumers are having, the concerns they have about those problems, and the solution you can supply.

  By focusing on the over-summarized, generic “fluff” that plagues so many websites and advertisements, you’ll pave the way to more memorable text that will resonate with your consumers and really sell.

  Lesson 5: A strong value proposition minimizes distraction and worry.

  Chris Goward, Founder & CEO of WiderFunnel, presented a wealth of knowledge throughout his session, but if I had to pick one item to share with the inbound marketing community, it was a simple, but deep remark about what a successful value proposition achieves.

  We all know that a value proposition is often made up of three components:

  What you do and who you do it for is only for your benefit.

  However, we can better develop those three components by understanding how a great value proposition should lessen the distraction and worry felt by our consumers when buying.

  This is possibly one of the most crucial lessons here, as value propositions are an essential component of practically any marketing action.

  Lesson 6: Experimentation and testing should be part of the culture.

  The continuous enhancement of existing designs to generate more clicks, traffic, leads, purchases, and so on is a basic pillar of Conversion Rate Optimization.

  To do so, David Nye, Manager of Experimentation and Web Analytics at Hotels.com, believes that a business must have a consistent approach, appropriate technologies, suitable resources, and an overall culture of experimentation and testing.

  Hotels.com is an example of testing on a big scale, yet this testing attitude or culture may still survive in a smaller-scale, B2B, inbound market.

  For three reasons, I believe one of the next evolutions in the inbound marketing field will be a stronger emphasis on experimentation and testing.

  For small to mid-market B2B firms, more and more experimentation, testing, and logging solutions are becoming available.
  Many businesses who have engaged in inbound marketing in recent years should now be seeing compounded increase in their website traffic, moving their emphasis to finding ways to convert more of that visitors.
  Conversion Optimizers have already laid the groundwork.
  “Web forms are frequently the final and most essential mile in a lengthy journey,” says Lesson 7. Julie Grundy’s

  That is correct. Have you ever clicked on anything that sent you to a landing page with a form that had 20 fields that seemed to exclusively benefit the company? Have you ever clicked a “Submit” button and mistakes appeared, but you couldn’t immediately rectify them and press the back button? Those are conversion possibilities that were passed up.

  Marketers frequently focus on which fields (and how many) should be included in a lead form to gather the appropriate information, while ignoring the actual user experience of that form.

  Perhaps this perspective stems from using the same online form technology for a long time, not finding a tool with deeper form customization, or it just hasn’t been acknowledged. Whatever the limitation, having a terrible user experience on the component that really gets you the email address or even the transaction is not an excuse.

  To create a really optimal conversion form, you must lessen the cognitive burden on the user, assist them in managing any errors, and make it appear as though the user is filling it out for themselves, not your firm.

  Finally, improving your form’s end-user experience is just as important as everything else you’ve done to get a prospect to that point.

  Lesson 8: If you don’t conduct user research, you’ll wind up “vanilla.”

  Several topics developed during the meeting, but one stood out significantly in the context of inbound: user research.

  Deep user research (or buyer persona study), beyond the conventional demographic information, according to Stefania Mereu, Director of User Experience at Pearson, is the first step to better converting message and design.

  It also does not have to take months to finish. The majority of the data might already be in your analytics tools. An hour spent examining keywords can provide you with enough clout to develop a specialized audience group deserving of a certain message.

  Lesson 9: Improving conversion rates isn’t the only goal.

  While the majority of the conference concentrated on boosting conversion, click-throughs, and sales, Chris Out, Managing Partner at RockBoost, took us in a different route that many CEOs would find useful.

  He got us to think, “What game are we REALLY in?”

  The truth is that conversion optimization is about more than just conversion rates. It’s all about boosting your clients’ LTV (lifetime value) through raising their AOV (average order value) and frequency of purchase. This has a significant influence on a company’s overall worth.

  “If you’re not conducting functionality testing, you’re not optimizing,” says Lesson 10. – Abigail Hough

  Abi’s story was amazing. As the Device Experience Director at Endless Gain, she helped a customer identify $100M in lost revenue as a consequence of a single feature issue.

  The lesson learnt in the context of inbound is to test, test, and test again before investing extensively in the marketing of a campaign or the launch of a website.

  Clearly, if even one component of your campaign or website fails to function effectively (for example, an automated email or a call-to-action button), it can utterly stymie conversion.

  Optimize functionality by investing not just in simulator testing technologies, but also in people testers who have access to the actual devices.

  “Conversion does not have to happen only on your website,” says Lesson 11. – Bill Leake

A website conversion will seldom (if ever) result in a sale for B2B enterprises providing complicated products with a prolonged purchasing cycle. To be clear, this is not a justification for not having an engaging website that allows visitors to give their email address in return for information.

However, it alters the context of a conversion.

Instead than focusing on the immediate sale, Bill emphasizes the importance of relationship development, which he characterizes as “micro conversions” and “making people happy.”

We may extend contact beyond the website by providing live-chat capability… or even prominently showing a phone number in the header!

In any case, moving a sale further becomes a matter of utilizing additional, perhaps offline conversion chances.

Lesson 12: Increasing traffic does not result in more conversions.

The third day of the conference began with Guillaume Cabane, VP of Growth at Segment, yelling, “We need more leads!”

Who doesn’t desire it, after all?

The argument was made that money comes from leads, and leads, of course, come from traffic. However, 95% of internet traffic does not convert in many circumstances. Guillaume assisted us in understanding the fundamental reasons for why and what the solution IS NOT.

Increasing website traffic to increase the quantity of leads is not the answer. According to Guillaume, the great majority of traffic isn’t converting for the following reasons:

Visitors find it challenging to relate to generic messages that “solve for the average.”
Visitors’ cognitive burden causes them to overthink, resulting in no action or the wrong action being made.
The user experience on the website is subpar.

The solution is to concentrate on the following:

Take everything we learned about customization from Krista and apply it to dynamic website content with hyper-targeted messaging using real-time data enrichment and machine learning.
Redesign the site or individual site features to improve user experience and decrease the amount of thinking required by the visitor. Better user experience = increased conversion.
Lesson 13: It doesn’t work until you establish goals.

Sean Ellis, CEO of Growth Hackers, reminded us that Stephen Covey’s second habit, “Begin with the goal in mind,” applies equally to conversion optimization and growth.

According to Sean, “making expansion sustainable” necessitates setting “the proper” goals from the outset. A good goal is one that solves a problem while also working toward a high-level organizational goal. Having the correct objective in place is essential for keeping both your immediate team and other teams around the business united and focused on the collective results.

It should come as no surprise, then, that without these objectives in place, teams would struggle to align on “the correct” tasks, resulting in wasted effort and stagnation.

Lesson 14: There is a formula for reconverting current clients.

Chris Out told us on day 2 of the conference (and previously in this piece) that conversion for the sake of conversion isn’t enough – it’s about boosting clients’ LTV (lifetime value).

Lincoln Murphy, THE Customer Success Consultant, presented his technique for re-converting new and current customers on day three. Excellent timing!

It begins with “orchestrating,” as Lincoln puts it, the upsell opportunity as soon as a consumer becomes a customer by providing a value-add product or service and informing them that they are not yet ready for it.

The idea is to foster trust by assisting them in understanding what they should and should not do.

The goal of “logical intervention” is to re-engage with your consumer depending on an event or action. Perhaps they’ve been a client for a specific period of time, or they made the initiative to examine your price for the updated version of your product.

Finally, based on the consumer event or behavior, make the relevant offer. “It doesn’t matter what you want to sell; it matters what people want to purchase,” Lincoln stated.

Lesson 15: CRO (and SEO) should always prioritize customer satisfaction.

Wil eynolds, Founder & Director of Digital Strategy at Seer Interactive, closed the conference by reminding us why we marketing geeks and data nerds get up every day…

To help others address their challenges.

Increasing click-through rates and boosting your ranking in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) are just byproducts of deeply understanding who your consumers are and addressing their problems in the most effective way possible.

In conclusion, “it’s nice to feel uncomfortable.” – DiScipio, Tom

This is a little meta, but after learning all of these teachings at CXL Live 2017, I’ve constructed my own deeper lesson. This lesson was reinforced when my business partner, Bob, asked if I wanted to go for a 3.5 mile run the morning before our trip home.

I’ve never ran more than 3 miles in a row, and I peaked in high school (just to give you an idea of my running capabilities.)

“Sure, why not?” I said. I’ve known Bob for almost 7 years and he’s never had a stupid suggestion – and that’s the honest truth.

As we approached mile 4 (yes, mile 4! ), Bob was slightly ahead of me, pushing me to keep going and explaining that the hardship I was experiencing was only the result of “development” — me getting more athletic.

This was an excellent summary of the meeting. To progress, you must put yourself in new and difficult situations.

Was CXL Live 2017 unpleasant? Yes, but only in the correct manner!

As a marketer, it’s difficult to hear from experts and speakers that, in many cases, we may be at the root of poor design and strategy decisions because we don’t always deeply consider the real and complex, quantitative side of things – the unarguable reasons to do one thing over the other or change our strategy.

This brutal reality was exactly what our team needed to hear.

It is how we develop.

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