Conversion Rate Optimization Archives - Page 5 of 10

The Importance of Context with Marketing Experiments

By now most marketers are familiar with the process of experimentation, identify a hypothesis, design a test that splits the population across one or more variants and select a winning variation based on a success metric. This “winner” has a heavy responsibility – we’re assuming that it confers the improvement in revenue and conversion that we measured during the experiment.

The experiments that you run have to result in better decisions, and ultimately ROI. Further down we’ll look at a situations where an external validity threat in the form of a separate campaign would have invalidated the results of a traditional A/B test. In addition, I’ll show how we were able to adjust and even exploit this external factor using a predictive optimization approach which resulted in a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) increase of almost 70%.

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By James Niehaus|2020-01-28T08:41:14-08:00January 28th, 2020|Experimentation, B2B, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Optimization Pitfalls to Avoid In 2020

The Activity Trap

Sales reps aren’t paid on the number of calls they make, and real estate agents don’t get commission on the number of showings they do. Activity does not equate to outcome, and conflating the two can have really expensive implications.

The same story applies to marketers. We seem to spend a lot of effort fostering cultures of activity rather than outcomes.

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By James Niehaus|2020-01-02T06:38:17-08:00January 2nd, 2020|B2B, Strategy, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Personalizing the Revenue Journey with Segment Data

Accelerate your customers journey to revenue with FunnelEnvy, now powered with Segment.

Segment helps their customers instrument, store and unify data about their visitors and the actions they take all the way to revenue. Now with the FunnelEnvy Segment integration you can deliver personalized, 1:1 website experiences and optimize for revenue using all of that rich customer data that you’re already collecting in Segment.

What does this mean? Segment customers will be able to run more effective campaigns using better data with less custom code required.

Check out our integration on Segment

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2019-09-19T13:21:58-07:00September 18th, 2019|SaaS, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How Not Picking an Experiment Winner Led to a 227% Increase in Revenue

By now most marketers are familiar with the process of experimentation, identify a hypothesis, design a test that splits the population across one or more variants and select a winning variation based on a success metric. This “winner” has a heavy responsibility – we’re assuming that it confers the improvement in revenue and conversion that we measured during the experiment.

Is this always the case? As marketers we’re often told to look at the scientific community as the gold standard for rigorous experimental methodology. But it’s informative to take a look at where even medical testing has come up short.

For years women have been chronically underrepresented in medical trials, which disproportionately favors males in the testing population. This selection bias in medical testing extends back to pre-clinical stages – the majority of drug development research being done on male-only lab animals.

And this testing bias has had real-world consequences. A 2001 report found that 80% of the FDA-approved drugs pulled from the market for “unacceptable health risks” were found to be more harmful to women than to men. In 2013 the FDA announced revised dosing recommendations of the sleep aid Ambien, after finding that women were susceptible to risks resulting from slower metabolism of the medication.

This is a specific example of the problem of external validity in experimentation which poses a risk even if a randomized experiment is conducted appropriately and it’s possible to infer cause and effect conclusions (internal validity.) If the sampled population does not represent the broader population, then those conclusions are likely to be compromised.

Although they’re unlikely to pose a life-or-death scenario, external validity threats are very real risks to marketing experimentation. That triple digit improvement you saw within the test likely won’t produce the expected return when implemented. Ensuring test validity can be a challenging and resource intensive process, fortunately however it’s possible to decouple your return from many of these external threats entirely.

The experiments that you run have to result in better decisions, and ultimately ROI. Further down we’ll look at a situation where an external validity threat in the form of a separate campaign would have invalidated the results of a traditional A/B test. In addition, I’ll show how we were able to adjust and even exploit this external factor using a predictive optimization approach which resulted in a Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) increase of almost 70%.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2019-08-01T15:03:11-07:00July 14th, 2019|Experimentation, B2B, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

A Culture of Optimization Eats Experimentation and Personalization for Breakfast

As marketers we could learn a lot from ants.

They don’t attend conferences, have multi-million dollar budgets or get pitched by the latest AI-based tech vendors. Yet over millennia they’ve figured out a radically efficient solution to an important and complex problem – how best to find food to sustain the colony.

This is no easy task. The first ant leaving the colony walks around in a random pattern. It’s likely he (foraging ants are always male) doesn’t find food, so he’ll return back to the colony exhausted. It’s not a completely wasted effort however, he (and every other ant behind him) will leave behind a pheromone trail that attracts other ants.

Over the course of time and thousands of individual ant voyages, food will (likely) be found. Ants that do find food will return immediately back to the colony. Other ants will follow this trail and, because pheromone trails evaporate over time, they’re most likely to follow the shortest, most traveled (highest density) path.

This approach ensures that the colony as a whole will find an optimal path to a food source. Pheromone evaporation also helps ensure that if the current source runs out, or a closer one is found, the colony will continue to evolve to the globally optimal solution.

It’s a classic optimization solution that maximizes a critical outcome as efficiently as possible, and one that has been studied by entomologists, computer engineers and data scientists. In the current B2B marketing environment it can illuminate where we’re spending our time and money.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2018-10-20T10:38:39-07:00August 21st, 2018|Strategy, B2B, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

If you care about B2B conversions, stop producing content

Houston, we have a problem.

As enterprise focused B2B marketers, we have a problem.

We all agree that we want to grow traffic to our website, turn the traffic into leads and convert the leads into customers.

Yet, we have all blindly trusted the theory that, producing more content, showing product options, displaying more testimonials, and creating more case studies will get you a bigger pipeline.

Let us be the first to refute this claim: more is not better.

In fact, with every additional piece of content or white paper you are killing pipeline. Why, might ask?

Because you are simply overwhelming your customers.

Explanation please!?

To illustrate this point, let’s talk about Cognitive Load.

Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.

When we put irrelevant, unnecessary and distracting information in front of people, we fill up that working memory. The result is a decreased ability to absorb information, learn and ultimately make decisions.

While it may seem that having multiple content options on your website increases the likelihood that you will connect with your visitor, it actually has the opposite effect.

When customers are given too many content options you are forcing them to make decisions that take up their mental resources, derailing your chance at a direct path to purchasing.

Can someone say cognitive overload?!

Think about it this way: the most important factor in the design of a website is making it easier for customer to find what they want. Customers crave simple and easy navigation over anything else in regard to design.

Most important factors in the design of a website

If your website presents multiple decisions for the user, you filled with decisions for users to make, you are not making it easy for them to find what they want!

Let’s break it down.

Let’s take a look at some examples unintentionally cognitive overload.

Content.

As marketers, we are producing too much content that is both expensive and unnecessary.

In reality, only a small portion of your content is necessary to help the customer move down the purchase funnel and it is our job as marketers to present that one (perfect) piece of content. Sadly, we are letting our customers down by allowing them to read irrelevant content and thus, introducing cognitive load.

Produce more content

Calls to action.

While letting visitors chose from multiple CTA’s may seem like a great way to help customers find what they want, it actually leads them to confusion. Rather, you should be putting them on a specific path that you have identified as most effective for conversions.

Multiple calls to action

Product options.

If you’re selling an enterprise focused product, it is likely that your website is showcasing all of the products and services that you offer. Again, this overwhelms customers.

We should know about our customers well enough so that we are only showing the products that we believe (based on research) they are likely to buy! Don’t give them fifty options and hope their first selection is the one best suited for them.

Analytic Solution

Case studies.

A customer only works in one industry; do not show them case studies from other industries where the use cases might be completely different. This content is irrelevant, distracting and increases cognitive load.

All case studies

Industry solutions.

We are asking customers to unnecessarily identify themselves. Having to go through a selection process, like the example below, does not inspire confidence that the software is well suited for a visitor’s industry.

Industry Solutions

Pricing options.

A multitude of pricing options is a perfect example of cognitive overload. We are overwhelming our customers with pricing options to the point where they don’t know which option to choose.

Target enterprise accounts shouldn’t see basic pricing tiers. Similarly, SMB’s shouldn’t see enterprise offerings. This substandard experience increases friction and reduces conversion rates!

pricing options

It is time to stop – your are overwhelming your Customers.

So, what’s the solution then? How do we make sure customers aren’t overwhelmed with cognitive overload?

It’s simple: reduce content and only show the most relevant information.

Calls to Action

Keeping this in mind, what if instead of showing everything to all of our visitors, we only showed the most relevant and effective calls to action?

Logos & Testimonials

What if we show the logos and testimonials that were most relevant to customer needs or highlighted the testimonials that most reflected their pain points?

Pricing Plans

What if we focused on and only showed the pricing that was going to be relevant for the given account and the features of those plans that were going to meet their needs?

Customer Experience

What if we only showed customers relevant experiences based on what we knew about them?

Doing things right

Doing this right has real and meaningful implications. 94% of buyers in a Demand Gen survey choose the winning vendor because that company demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their needs.

In an Accenture survey, half of B2B customers already expect improved personalized product or service recommendations. In fact, 65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to their business.

The takeaways.

The more options you give customers, the more cognitive load you put on them. The result is a filled-up working memory and hindered ability to make decisions toward purchasing a product.

Instead of producing more content, focus on showing the single experience that will resonate most with your customers!

By Michelle Morrison|2018-10-01T09:48:35-07:00December 11th, 2017|B2B, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Conduct Holiday Conversion Optimization Testing Without Losing Sales

‘Tis the season for the holidays, consumer spending, and major ecommerce traffic increases. Over the next several weeks, the National Retail Federation estimates consumers will spend a staggering $655.8 billion, or just over $935 per person on gifts, services, and other holiday expenses. The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other winter holidays will see a definite spike online: the NRF estimates online shopping will rise between 7% and 10% this year, reaching $117 billion.

What does this spike in activity mean for busy marketers who are focusing on conversion optimization? Can you conduct CRO testing during the holiday season without losing sales? (more…)

By Liz Alton|2016-11-08T05:08:47-08:00November 8th, 2016|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Measure and Improve Customer Satisfaction

How satisfied are your customers?

In our efforts to increase conversions and revenue, we often overlook questions like this. We’ll instead focus on landing page optimization, look at conversion rates and roll out split tests on our email campaigns.

There’s this implicit belief that the only real metric that contributes to revenue increase is conversion rate. It’s true to an extent. The higher your conversions, the more money you bring in.

But conversion rate isn’t the be all end all for making a little more money. There are myriad other elements that contribute to a healthy turnover, chief among them, customer satisfaction.

“How do satisfied customers help my bottom line?” you might ask. Well, the benefit of having a satisfied and content consumer base is three-fold.

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By Peter Boyle|2016-02-01T14:40:22-08:00February 2nd, 2016|Conversion Rate Optimization|1 Comment

5 Simple Steps to Product Descriptions that Rock!

Online shopping’s pretty awesome, right?

No need to traipse around a store, carry heavy bags or navigate the multitude of other shoppers desperate for a deal. It is simple, easy and straightforward.

But there’s a problem.

It seems to me there are too many copywriters out there who depend on the convenience of online shopping to do their job for them. Rather than properly optimizing their product descriptions they take the easy way out and simply list a few features. These descriptions are, for lack of a better description, interminably dull.

“But wait,” you say, “that’s what a product description is, it describes the features of the product.” Yes, you are right. A product description should describe the product. But that is not all they are trying to achieve. The real purpose of your product description is to sell.

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By Peter Boyle|2016-01-11T15:26:01-08:00January 12th, 2016|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Increase Conversions by Taking on The Voice of Your Customer

What makes great copy?

It’s the million dollar question.

Your copy’s at the heart of nearly all your marketing efforts. From sales emails to blog posts and video scripts to social media updates. If your copy doesn’t hit the mark your campaign will fall far short of your goal.

The web is full of articles on the topic of creating better copy. We’re told to focus on the benefits, make it scannable, use power words and know what our audience wants.

All of these little nuggets of wisdom definitely help, but they’re something of a long way round. They require a lot of thought and analysis. They require hours of sitting at a desk and attempting to discern the deeper meaning of your product and how it appeals to your audience.

Fortunately for us all, there’s a little shortcut copywriters have been using for a long, long time.

Theft.

Yup. I said it. Why torture yourself in a vain attempt at discovering a marketing epiphany when you can simply “borrow” the best messaging right from the mouths of your primary prospects?

Conversions aren’t born of witty slogans or clever copy, they’re the result of desire and trust. If you can convince your prospects that you’re one of them and know their pain, can build their desire for your product and establish yourself as a trustworthy solution provider, the battle is all but won. What better way to show them you understand their problems than by using their own words?

“But surely stealing from your audience is bad,” you say. And yes, I’d be inclined to agree if we were talking about something of actual value, but we’re not. We’re talking about repurposing their language so that your brand better aligns with your prospect’s ideals, needs and opinions.

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By Peter Boyle|2015-12-30T14:42:51-08:00December 31st, 2015|Conversion Rate Optimization|1 Comment

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