How a Few Hours of Work Can Make Your Website 10X More Effective

[travisl]

Hey guys,

I wanted to share this with you because I thought it could be really useful. Heck if I would have known this when I just started off I would have been a lot better off.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about conversions, considering I just left my last startup job whose website had trouble in this area, and wrote a post (<there if you want to read the whole thing in it's entirety) that compares 2 fictional businesses side by side, inspired by 2 real businesses that I've run before. The one that has a good website, and the proper tools converts blog traffic to email subs at 10% and traffic to landing pages at 55%. The other converts 1% or less, because the proper website and tools are absent.

One business is working SMART and takes the same amount of effort to succeed, while the other business is not and fails.

Here's the illustration:

And now how that translates to sales:

All of that can come down to how well your website is put together.

Studies show that:
94% of a website user’s first impressions are design related while 75% of web users admit to making judgements about a company’s credibility based off of their web design.

You could literally take you 3-4 hours to setup a high converting site with the proper tools. And that could be your deciding factor between success and failure.

It would take you the same amount of work to drive 1000 visitors to either site in the illustration, but one business will thrive off of it, and the other won't.

This is one way to work SMARTER if you're building an online business.

Thought this would be helpful for you guys, and would love to hear your thoughts, questions or experience on the subject.

 

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[oldkevx]

Yep, always know your KPIs.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[SenGracic]

Thanks for the read !
Great post.

 

[OverByte]

@travisl How would you improve an existing website to increase the conversion 10 fold? Do you have any examples? Like, what are the top mistakes designers make? Your illustration is great and it makes sense to have a higher converting page but how to get there seems in my eyes a much more valuable question. Thoughts?

I Appreciate the post. Thanks.

 

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[Iwokeup]

Nice infographic. But as always, the devil is in the details. What design elements are actually effective? Is this niche specific?

*Edit to add: it seems like you're posting this as a way of driving traffic to your course. Not cool man. Shady.

 

[The-J]

Driving traffic isn't the hard part though.

It's possible to see conversion rates of around 40% with a well targeted AD - LP combo. However, as @Iwokeup said, the devil is in the details.

"Good" design does not always make a high converting website/landing page. Some websites don't look great but convert quite well. Seemingly "good" copy might convert poorly, too. If your website is nice but your ad is telling people the wrong thing, they'll bounce right off. Might be a nice design and good copy, but you're not giving people what they asked for!

TEST EVERYTHING. Test, analyze, tweak, repeat.

Then you include e-mail which is another beast altogether. You could be converting your landing page visitors at a 40% rate and converting subscribers at a 0% rate because your offers in the e-mail aren't targeted well enough to your audience, or your offers just suck.

Or you might have a good LP with a 40% conversion rate but as the people go through the funnel, they don't like your upsells. You end up with a 40% LP conversion rate and $0 in revenue. This happens quite often.

Building a list is great, and you should pay attention to your LP conversion rate, but there's so many other things to look at. Conversions don't tell the whole story. And you gotta make sure your revenue model is solid, because high conversions could be costing you money if you're operating at a negative.

Cute infographic though.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

The infographic is great at explaining the importance of conversion and optimization. Thank you for sharing.

Unfortunately, it doesn't go into any detail into HOW to ramp that up.

It's almost like saying "If you invest $50 every month and it earns 15% per year, you'll have $29,000,000 after 50 years!"

Ok, like, so how do you get 15%?

Do you plan to share your ideas on that?

 

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[Gsuz]

I created a thread some time ago where you can find several recorded videos from conversion rate optimization experts. Click here! Might be useful for people that want specifics.

One very important thing IMO: Think BIG => Change the angle, motivation and/or emotion. Andre Morys talks about this in great detail.

When Facebook designed the page that comes up when you try to deactivate your account. What options did they have?

They could have splittested the placement of the button, increase the font size, decrease the font size and so on.

What did they do?

They focussed on the emotion. When someone tries to deactivate his Facebook account, what's the number 1 thing that could stop him from doing so?

The friends he made, the connections with other people, the images he shared. So they put emphasis on that by saying "XYZ will miss you." "Send XYZ a message."

They even require you to state the reason you want to leave. When you pick the reason, you get a popup that helps you to deal with that specific problem.

Basically, they're saying. YES, you can deactivate your account AND here is WHY you shouldn't to stop you from doing it.


Another important thing is looking at the big picture: Yes, you might increase your optin rate by 30% when you hype and promise guaranteed results, but that might also increase your chargebacks and returns when people feel like they overpaid when purchasing something later down the funnel.

Say you're running an ecommerce store and you're trying to improve conversions for a specific product. Version A is all about how your product is of the highest quality, premium, best thing EVER. Version B is about how much money people save by buying it now instead of later. $99 instead of $179! What a GREAT deal! Nearly FREE. Buy now!

Let's say your customers want to be in style with the latest premium product and Version A converts 30% higher than Version B. After they get the product they might be like: Man, the quality is not that great, I'll return it.

Overall Version A has a 300% higher return rate than Version B. Version A might be still worth it if you're making so much more money than you do with Version B. But then you're at risk at tarnishing your brand's longterm image. Might still be worth it, because there are a TON of people willingly paying a premium price for a mediocre product.


Test LONGER: Say you're going to the gym, hop on the treadmill and go as fast as you can, you hit 50 km/h and BOOM, you stop! Then you run through the gym telling everyone how you're biking at 50 km/h. Yes, you do. For 10 seconds.

Same thing happens with conversion rate optimization "How I increased my conversion rate by 500% in 24 hours" You're selling 2 units a day, suddenly you get a bulk order, sell 10 and the next day you're back at selling 2 again. There are so many unknown variables that you simply have to give it more time.


Companies like Zalando have 70-80 people dedicated to conversion rate optimization (they even tested that they sell more shoes when the toecap is showing to the left) and they kick everyone's a$$. So: Keep testing!

 

[TonyStark]

.... (tumbleweeds)

 

[TonyStark]

The infographic is great at explaining the importance of conversion and optimization. Thank you for sharing.

Unfortunately, it doesn't go into any detail into HOW to ramp that up.

It's almost like saying "If you invest $50 every month and it earns 15% per year, you'll have $29,000,000 after 50 years!"

Ok, like, so how do you get 15%?

Do you plan to share your ideas on that?

He never replied...

 

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[fhs8]

If a website has a 10x less conversion rate then there's just something seriously wrong with it. In real life most properly done websites have somewhat similiar conversion rates. Changing button colors, font sizes, and button placement usually doesn't change conversion rates by more than 0.5% if they even do unless there's unusual circumstances such as a very bad button placement. It would take me about 3 paragraphs to explain this but a 95% 1-tail likelihood of an element converting better than another one is more like 60% if one is constantly checking every hour to see if any elements get to a 95% liklihood during testing and then immediately ending the test once that happens.

 

[travisl]

Nice infographic. But as always, the devil is in the details. What design elements are actually effective? Is this niche specific?

*Edit to add: it seems like you're posting this as a way of driving traffic to your course. Not cool man. Shady.

Gosh this thread was dead for over a month, then you guys started asking questions and I haven't logged in here in a while!

Design elements that are currently working: 2 step, permission based CTA's. For instance, minimalist page that explains your lead magnet, with a button that says "reserve your spot." Once the user clicks the button, they are then prompted for their email address and name. It works because it's easy to get someone to click a button, and once they start they are likely to finish. For those that are more annoyed by 2 step stuff like this, have an exit popup on the page, and you're likely to double your conversions (I did.) In a nutshell, that's how I created a page that converts at 55%, which is pretty good. I'd give you a link to an example, but it's a course landing page, so don't want to get accused of being "shady."

Shadiness: Super busy. Haven't logged in in a while. My bad! I usually don't like it when people abandon their threads either, so I feel ya!

I posted this because I thought it would help out here in this forum, and yes, if you thought it was helpful, you might check out what else I'm doing!

But I posted all the meat of my post here. It's not like I'm forcing you to sign up for anything, or linking back to a landing page. I just linked back to the full post for people that might want a more in depth explanation and sure, if you like what I'm doing or the way I teach, you can sign up, or not sign up for anything you want!

@travisl How would you improve an existing website to increase the conversion 10 fold? Do you have any examples? Like, what are the top mistakes designers make? Your illustration is great and it makes sense to have a higher converting page but how to get there seems in my eyes a much more valuable question. Thoughts?

I Appreciate the post. Thanks.

Existing website improvements: Start using content upgrades on blog posts. If you're using wordpress, use the Mailmunch plugin (free) and you can add conversion elements like click popups, sign up forms within content, timed popups, scrollboxes, etc. SumoMe is also good for this.

As far as design goes, just as long as you have a decently modern looking site, it will only make a marginal difference after that point. More important to focus on value offered. Make sure you have a good lead magnet that is sought after by your readers, and ensure that visitors see your CTA's. Then it comes down to quality traffic sources.

For landing pages, see the description above for @Iwokeup

Driving traffic isn't the hard part though.

It's possible to see conversion rates of around 40% with a well targeted AD - LP combo. However, as @Iwokeup said, the devil is in the details.

"Good" design does not always make a high converting website/landing page. Some websites don't look great but convert quite well. Seemingly "good" copy might convert poorly, too. If your website is nice but your ad is telling people the wrong thing, they'll bounce right off. Might be a nice design and good copy, but you're not giving people what they asked for!

TEST EVERYTHING. Test, analyze, tweak, repeat.

Then you include e-mail which is another beast altogether. You could be converting your landing page visitors at a 40% rate and converting subscribers at a 0% rate because your offers in the e-mail aren't targeted well enough to your audience, or your offers just suck.

Or you might have a good LP with a 40% conversion rate but as the people go through the funnel, they don't like your upsells. You end up with a 40% LP conversion rate and $0 in revenue. This happens quite often.

Building a list is great, and you should pay attention to your LP conversion rate, but there's so many other things to look at. Conversions don't tell the whole story. And you gotta make sure your revenue model is solid, because high conversions could be costing you money if you're operating at a negative.

Cute infographic though.

This^. Read it. Read it again.

The purpose of my post was to open some people's eyes to the importance of working on your conversions. The importance is to build the functionality into your site, your tech, your funnel, so then you can start applying the business sense that @The-J is talking about. Take the first steps to build your email list, then you've got a bunch of testing that needs doing/subscriber feedback.

"Cute infographic" try to remember, it's mostly aimed at beginners, who don't quite understand the importance of the concept. I've worked with startups/new sites for a while and when I stress the need to focus on conversions, they'll often say "no we need more traffic" so most of the time they don't understand WHY it's important, and that's the purpose of this post!

 

[travisl]

The infographic is great at explaining the importance of conversion and optimization. Thank you for sharing.

Unfortunately, it doesn't go into any detail into HOW to ramp that up.

It's almost like saying "If you invest $50 every month and it earns 15% per year, you'll have $29,000,000 after 50 years!"

Ok, like, so how do you get 15%?

Do you plan to share your ideas on that?

Sorry. As I said, I haven't checked back in a while. I really wanted this post to focus on the "why" because I see a lot of people that you can teach the tactics to, but they won't do anything with it because they don't see the value.

How to get 10% Conversions on Blog Posts

Focus on creating content upgrades. A great example of a blog post with a content upgrade would be to write a kick a$$ article on how to publish your first book, and have a lead magnet specifically for that post that is something like a checklist for writing your book, or a list of publishers, or a tutorial on how to reach out to publishers, or how to get published on Amazon etc.

Essentially a "would you like fries with that?" but for blog posts. The perfect addition to whatever you're writing about.

McDonalds does meal upgrades and they convert, so smart content marketers have adopted that, and created content upgrades.

Great example is by Bryan Harris on his blog here

So once you come up with a good incentive, then it comes down to making sure that the readers see it, and see all of the value that you're offering with it. You can do this by adding a simple link to the end of your post, but as I explained in the post before, you can ramp that up as much as you want and use things like Welcome mat, in content CTA's, Popups, Exit Popups, Scrollboxes, etc.

People always complain about these things, but they convert the most people by far. Just like people complain that Macbook's aren't upgradable any more, but they kept buying up Macbook Airs, essentially supporting the thing that they don't like. As entrepreneurs, whether big or small, we are going to do what works.

This seems like a simple process, but I've used it to get up to 22% conversions on my site. To do that, your offer and post have to be killer, which you can begin to master over time, once you learn what your audience wants. To start off, you can expect 5%, then you'll get better, and get 10%, and so on. That's what I started with!

Landing Page Conversions

Explained in the post above!

Sales Conversions

@The-J 's advice is solid. For me, the comes down to building a list, keeping an eye on newsletter stats (what get's great open rates and clicks? what doesn't?) to find out what your readers are interested in.

Then you can segment out users on your list (whether you do it by people who click on certain emails, people who sign up for certain content upgrades) and go through some feedback loops on your product ideas.

I've done this. Instead of creating a sales page, I literally just wrote out a very basic product description in a google doc, and asked my most engaged subscribers to give me feedback on it, and asked if they'd be interested in buying. Made $900 in pre-sales to the first 100 subscribers that I emailed. This only took a few days before I ever built the product. This will help guide you on what products to create/promote to your list. Obviously, the best form of validation is getting people to take out their wallet. If you can sell a small portion of your list on a product, then you can create the product and launch it to everyone, and you're much more likely to have a very profitable launch than going in blind.

Now I'm going through the process of building the sales page, funnel, and full product. If I can keep that $900 per 100 subscribers number up, it would be awesome (I have about 5K subs for my own blog right now) but realistically it will be less. Because those 100 subs are my most active people. But it still makes for much more lucrative products by a longshot.

Now you can create a sales page/use conversion tools to promote your product.

This is one way to do it!

.... (tumbleweeds)

I'm sorry man. Like a month and a half later. I hope some of this stuff makes sense. I'll check back sooner this time!

 

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[travisl]

I created a thread some time ago where you can find several recorded videos from conversion rate optimization experts. Click here! Might be useful for people that want specifics.

One very important thing IMO: Think BIG => Change the angle, motivation and/or emotion. Andre Morys talks about this in great detail.

When Facebook designed the page that comes up when you try to deactivate your account. What options did they have?

They could have splittested the placement of the button, increase the font size, decrease the font size and so on.

What did they do?

They focussed on the emotion. When someone tries to deactivate his Facebook account, what's the number 1 thing that could stop him from doing so?

The friends he made, the connections with other people, the images he shared. So they put emphasis on that by saying "XYZ will miss you." "Send XYZ a message."

They even require you to state the reason you want to leave. When you pick the reason, you get a popup that helps you to deal with that specific problem.

Basically, they're saying. YES, you can deactivate your account AND here is WHY you shouldn't to stop you from doing it.


Another important thing is looking at the big picture: Yes, you might increase your optin rate by 30% when you hype and promise guaranteed results, but that might also increase your chargebacks and returns when people feel like they overpaid when purchasing something later down the funnel.

Say you're running an ecommerce store and you're trying to improve conversions for a specific product. Version A is all about how your product is of the highest quality, premium, best thing EVER. Version B is about how much money people save by buying it now instead of later. $99 instead of $179! What a GREAT deal! Nearly FREE. Buy now!

Let's say your customers want to be in style with the latest premium product and Version A converts 30% higher than Version B. After they get the product they might be like: Man, the quality is not that great, I'll return it.

Overall Version A has a 300% higher return rate than Version B. Version A might be still worth it if you're making so much more money than you do with Version B. But then you're at risk at tarnishing your brand's longterm image. Might still be worth it, because there are a TON of people willingly paying a premium price for a mediocre product.


Test LONGER: Say you're going to the gym, hop on the treadmill and go as fast as you can, you hit 50 km/h and BOOM, you stop! Then you run through the gym telling everyone how you're biking at 50 km/h. Yes, you do. For 10 seconds.

Same thing happens with conversion rate optimization "How I increased my conversion rate by 500% in 24 hours" You're selling 2 units a day, suddenly you get a bulk order, sell 10 and the next day you're back at selling 2 again. There are so many unknown variables that you simply have to give it more time.


Companies like Zalando have 70-80 people dedicated to conversion rate optimization (they even tested that they sell more shoes when the toecap is showing to the left) and they kick everyone's a$$. So: Keep testing!

Great stuff!

This really makes me think about something I refer to as "design baseline" sometimes.

It is essentially how much users trust your brand by the looks of your website. Even if a website that looks like it was published in 2000 had a killer offer, it wouldn't see as many conversions as a website that had the same offer on a modern looking website. The ONLY cases where this still works for people, or people that are somewhat famous and have an extremely established and trustworthy brand already (like Seth Godin.)

You don't need anything fancy at all! Most WP/Squarespace/etc. themes will get the job done. Then once you've established your design baseline, it comes down to being creative like in @Gusz post, and attacking it from different angles.

If a website has a 10x less conversion rate then there's just something seriously wrong with it. In real life most properly done websites have somewhat similiar conversion rates. Changing button colors, font sizes, and button placement usually doesn't change conversion rates by more than 0.5% if they even do unless there's unusual circumstances such as a very bad button placement. It would take me about 3 paragraphs to explain this but a 95% 1-tail likelihood of an element converting better than another one is more like 60% if one is constantly checking every hour to see if any elements get to a 95% liklihood during testing and then immediately ending the test once that happens.

Yes true changing small design elements won't make a huge difference. Most new websites that I've worked with seen start (whether new blogs or startups) can expect their blog posts to convert at 0%-0.5% without using the techniques I talked about in my last couple posts.

Once they put them into practice, their blog posts will usually start converting at around 5%. There's a 10X (or more) increase right there!

 

[travisl]

Oops! Forum accidentally published 2 of the same post. Edited it so it's not duplicate.