Today in Digital Marketing - Special Episode: Increasing Your Conversion Rate

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, today's episode is a special edition as I'm out of the country for agency business until Tuesday night. In those four days of absence, though, we are bringing you some deep dive interviews with marketing scientists. These interviews are usually exclusive to members of the Premium Podcast or our Premium Newsletter, but we're bringing you four of these during my absence. If you like what you hear and want to learn more about the premium podcast, just tap go premium in the show notes. Our regular marketing newscasts return when I'm back on Wednesday. Enjoy. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:00:33 If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Back in 2009, a longtime engineer at Google was looking at their search results page and thought to herself, that shade of blue we use for links, it seems a little, I don't know, off? And so she tested a couple of different shades, then a couple more. Eventually,

Starting point is 00:01:13 Google tested 41 different blues to determine which one people were most likely to click. Turns out, by the way, people will click links if the blue leans a little over into purple compared to blues that have a tinge of green. You might laugh at the seemingly tiny change, but that small tweak had enormous consequences. Indeed, people started clicking on more links, and that included links on ads. Google says switching to a slightly different shade of blue earned the company an extra $200 million a year in revenue. That engineer, by the way, Marissa Meyer, who went on to be Google's VP of Search and later CEO of Yahoo.

Starting point is 00:01:55 A-B testing, of course, is a staple in a marketer's toolkit, especially those who sell things. For good marketers, increasing the conversion rate, even by fractions of a percentage point, is an obsession that can pay off in spades. But how do you do it? What mistakes should you avoid? And where is the middle ground between providing your customers with a rich brand experience and pushing them to buy? For answers, I'm joined by Sean Brandt. He is co-founder of Audit, which has worked with more than 750 direct-to-consumer brands. The company describes itself as a brand-first conversion rate optimization agency. But more importantly, he is a fellow Canadian. Sean, welcome.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Thanks for having me, Todd. I'm excited to be here. Obviously, I want to get to specifics around what tiny changes you've seen that moved the needle. But I wanted to back out a little first. Walk me through some of the broader shifts that you've seen direct-to-consumer brands making in the last like two or three years or so. Yeah, I think the major shifts that I'm seeing is that when it comes to new brands popping up, you're seeing a lot more similarities between them in similar spaces. And for me, that's becoming an issue and why brand for CRO is so important because Shopify apps, like templates, Shopify apps, all of the different facets

Starting point is 00:03:12 that have made it difficult to launch brands in the past are becoming more and more accessible, right? Packaging providers, all the different, I guess, stages in a product development journey and launching a D2C brand, they're all really accessible. So what you start to see is brands popping up in the same space that have similar aesthetics or similar stories or similar complex, like the components that the product is made of are the same. And so it's become really hard for D2C brands to stand out.

Starting point is 00:03:42 And a lot of that, how they stand out actually ends up being on the, on the ad strategy and the user experience because the products start to just, they're all kind of the same with a different wrapper. And, and it, so that user experience and how you're taking them through that customer journey and explaining your brand becomes almost more important than the actual product itself itself because there's just so much noise out there in terms of the competitive landscape. So let me, I want to get kind of the brass tacks here. So let's imagine that you could only change three things on a DTC's website homepage. What would they be? The first thing is when you land on the page, probably the most

Starting point is 00:04:22 common thing that we're constantly pushing to customers is when the customer scrolls past that first section, do they understand what you do? And you'd be surprised how many submissions and customers we get where you go to that first snippet of the homepage where you're introducing yourself to the customer and they don't tell them. They use marketing jargon or they're very vague and you really just don't leave understanding what you what the product does and what makes it unique it sounds silly that it should be in that top part because there's obviously a whole home page that you can do that in but so many customers make that first impression and either leave or scroll so it really is critical to be telling them and in a really simple way exactly what you do right off

Starting point is 00:05:05 the hop i think the second thing is um you know reviews have kind of become reviews and social proof in general have kind of become that that word of mouth trust factor right so it's kind of become the same as a friend or your mom saying hey make sure you try this this is great like it worked for me reviews ares are that, right? So when you come to a site and you see a brand with no reviews or no one else talking about it, it becomes really hard to build instant trust for a brand and build that kind of rapport with a consumer. So a lot of what we're working with brands on is how do we build that even if you don't

Starting point is 00:05:42 have reviews? So maybe it's as simple as saying, hey, even if you don't have reviews? So maybe it's as simple as saying, hey, okay, you don't have reviews. Let's reach out to some of your Instagram followers and get some opinions from them. And let's start building our own reviews or pulling in, you know, reaching out to customers more personally and saying, hey, we'd love some feedback, like really helping them figure out unique ways to build social proof into their homepage, even if they are a new brand that doesn't necessarily have a ton of that. It's interesting because I discount the reviews on a product or a homepage if it's clear that they've been cherry picked. You know, like I don't mind seeing things that are automatically inserted from TripAdvisor

Starting point is 00:06:17 or something because I know that there's a sense of editorial control or something like that, you know, whereas the ones where ones where you know often products will say will have reviews that say i love this product and then the review name is dave you know i had a great time sarah where it's you know you can't tell whether it's whether it's it's real or whether it's they've just made that up how do you combat that if if you were using your approach of reaching out to you know instagram commenters and things like that? Yeah, I think that's kind of where the design and UX layer comes in. I think it's a constant design problem of trying to make sure that, one, that they're actually real reviews, right?

Starting point is 00:06:57 We would never recommend making up reviews. But two, that the user sees that and feels comfortable with it. So I think Amazon is like the baseline, you know, king of this, of trying to make sure that they're proven. And I think that comes down to publishing what app that they were collected through, allowing users to access the database of them rather than just saying, hey, here's a static image of it, right? Anyone can Photoshop a review in, but it's a lot harder to say, hey, these were collected through, you know, Juniper or Yotpo, go to that app and read them all. And so there's different layers and levels to, I guess, making sure that they feel more trustworthy. I think that the higher that number climbs, right, of the total

Starting point is 00:07:42 reviews, the less likely it is that they called their, you know, their Rolodex or their family to write a bunch of reviews. So it's kind of finding that balance. And it's not easy, especially for brands just starting out. As you probably know, Sean, one of the big trends right now in the digital ad space is that the platforms, the various ad platforms, Meta, Twitter, Google, and so on. They all seem to have this newfound obsession with machine learning. And so things that advertisers were able to tweak, like crafting very specific audiences and limiting delivery to just those audiences, or day partying, or having a very specific headline and body copy matching, those options are being taken away from us, all in the service of a kind of, you know, daddy knows best mentality that these platforms have. Do you think we might start to see that play out in the CRO and e-commerce space that those platforms will say, you know, look, we've got the data.

Starting point is 00:08:34 We're going to design the page, your page, the way that we think is best, even if you don't? Yeah, I think you will see snippets of that in the space. I think that the one thing that will never change and across every evolution of retail and digital marketing and brands living online versus physical, the one thing that continues to be proven is that the brands that have the most trust with their consumer are the ones that win out. And the ones that have a more authentic experience win out. When you look at companies that have been around for decades, centuries, they're the ones that all have a brand presence that feels authentic, high quality, timeless. The ones that are fabricated through data, they might have some

Starting point is 00:09:22 success in terms of short you know, short term, like you said, converting higher because of maybe it's AI learning or whatever. But for me, there really is nothing that can be compared in terms of a long term strategy for a company to investing in your brand and your storytelling. I don't I don't think there's any, at least in the next 10, 20 years, anything that's going to be able to trump that for me. Right, but you know what I mean though, right? With this machine learning stuff where it's, you know, and I'll admit that I have kind of a hate on for it because I like control. If I'm running an ad campaign, if I've got training as a digital marketer, I've been in this business almost 30 years now,

Starting point is 00:10:00 and I want a headline to go with a specific body copy because I think it'll perform better or I've proven in past campaigns it's performed better. You know, that in itself is a kind of CRO at the perhaps at the ad creative level. Yeah. If, as I think I heard you say, you think your industry is also kind of going in that direction, what can we do to prepare for that? Let's assume that we're in that world where, you know, Shopify doesn't give us, you know, the element of control that we want. What should we do? I think, honestly, that's part of why we exist. Sorry, when I say we, I mean audit. Like, I think there's going to be aspects of that space that make sense for your company and for your business to make more money. But I think setting up a foundational level of rules that say we can't break outside these as a brand, I think is important when you're

Starting point is 00:10:49 running stuff like that. The second that you let all control be taken over by that, I mean, for me, you're losing the essence of the brand completely. Let's say that I run an e-commerce store on Shopify and I read all the blogs and your reports and I get all the advice saying that I should move such and such an element 12 pixels to the left. But I'm on Shopify and I've got a choice of themes, but not like that level of granular control that might technically improve CRO. What do I do? From an execution standpoint? Yeah. Like if i know if i agree with you that you know turning it to a slightly different blue or something like that will will help but i'm stuck into you know wix or squarespace or shopify or whatever any of these platforms

Starting point is 00:11:35 where it's just not possible to make those changes because they've moved to kind of more about well you have this theme or that theme approach yeah as opposed to a highly customizable landing page, like say Unbounce, where you can get that level of tweaking. Yeah, I think the ecosystem is expanding so quickly. And honestly, it's catering to that exact problem. You know, as we speak, we actually have a partnership right now

Starting point is 00:12:01 with a website named Store Tasker,er. And their entire ecosystem is built around that exact problem. If a customer wants a customization that they can't do inside the Shopify backend or using a template, Store Tasker connects you with a developer on a freelance basis that can help you implement whatever that change is cost effectively. So I think as Shopify continues to expand, which it feels like it's never going to stop, I think you're going to see more and more solutions like that, StoreTasker being a more human one. And then to your point,

Starting point is 00:12:36 you're going to see more solutions like that that are just off the shelf and allow more flexibility inside of Shopify's themes and inside their ecosystem. Sometimes the things that change that affect CRO are not within our control. I'm thinking specifically of Apple's recent design change on Safari on their iPhones, where they've shifted that search bar from the top to the bottom. Does that have an effect on CRO?

Starting point is 00:13:01 I think it does. Maybe not short term. I don't think that necessarily someone shopping on Safari versus Chrome, which is still on the top right now, for instance, on their iOS device, I don't necessarily think that the conversion rate is different, all things comparable, just by using those two browsers. Where I think the big change is that, one, as a UX designer, I feel like it's a positive movement for the design space because I think that Safari change is going to bleed into a massive design trend that we see pretty much all websites, mobile, at least mobile sites and browsers move their, that section and their navigation to the bottom of the page, just simply because it's more

Starting point is 00:13:50 accessible. And I think there's a ton of examples in the past of when large brands like this or large influential design companies, you know, mostly Apple and Google, you know, make a design change or introduce a design element that then becomes kind of the norm over the next two, three years. I think this is one of those that we're going to see, you know, you're starting to slowly see themes in the Shopify ecosystem pop up where the nav is at the bottom. I think they're doing a poor job of executing it so far. It's, it kind of feels clunky and a little bit of a bad experience. But I think over time, we're going to see that really get dialed in, and it's going to be a much better experience overall.

Starting point is 00:14:32 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It's interesting also to see, you know, we used to have heat maps that showed how much time people would spend at certain parts of the page on desktop. And now I'm seeing heat maps that are essentially,

Starting point is 00:15:06 here's where the thumb can reach on these various devices. And having that inform your design decisions, which makes a lot of sense, actually. I think it's fair to say, maybe you'd agree with me, that there's kind of, when you think about it, like two types of marketing managers in the world. There's those that are like really brand folk like they want to create a cool site like a compelling brand experience that really resonates in consumers minds and then there's the manager that doesn't really care at all about the

Starting point is 00:15:36 cool factor but only wants sales numbers which one is right very hard very very good question a very hard question i think that they both have merit. I think both arguments have merit. I think if we look at what the definition of right is in that question, being revenue, I would say probably that short term, the one that's focused only on the conversion rate and leaving brand aside is probably right. In my opinion, long term, brand always wins out. I think a lot of the companies that focus strictly on what is converting

Starting point is 00:16:13 and not necessarily telling a story tend to be short-lived. And I think that finding a balance is kind of why we exist. I think that there is a middle ground where, you know, certain changes to your increase your conversion rate won't make sense from a brand perspective, and I think that's okay. I think I'd probably have a lot of arguments if I put this out on Twitter, but, like, there's certain changes that a conversion test might say you should make that I would say you shouldn't make, even if they increase your conversion rate, just because they might walk a line that, in my opinion, makes your brand look worse or less trustworthy.

Starting point is 00:16:55 Can you give me an example? One of the ones we always deal with in CRO is, back to your Google example at the start, the color. You'll read a lot of blog posts or, or, you know, Twitter posts about this works for everyone, right? Make your buttons this color because this color works better. You know, like people that say, you know, people think of money when they see the color green or whatever it is, right? Certain colors click through better. And the argument, the simple argument on the brand first side is to say, okay, well, if my brand is blue or my brand is red, that's my primary color.

Starting point is 00:17:30 And the CRO person says, okay, well, we tried green buttons and we need to make them all green because your conversion increases by 0.2%. My argument is that I would rather not increase by that 0.2% because it's so off brand for me that it feels, it feels like an as seen on TV ad. It feels, it feels cheesy. It feels, it just creates a distrust with the consumer. It feels like I'm being sold something, you know, maybe that's not what they're thinking, but subconsciously when I see a brand that doesn't have consistencies, I'm instantly, you know, I've instantly a little hesitant and that's conversion rate, right? Anytime a consumer is hesitating, even if it's not with their mouse, you know, you're making them hesitate and that's, that's affecting conversion rate. It might not be in that moment. It could be long-term brand, you know, them being a brand ambassador versus never buying again.

Starting point is 00:18:18 But it's affecting it. I know you, I know you're not a landing page person per se. You're more on the DTC side of things, but I'm always, I I'm always, I guess I'm equally amused and frustrated by these information marketers and their landing pages, all of which look the same. You know, they've got the giant, very salesy headline centered, all caps, followed by an unskippable video that auto plays in the middle with no navigation bar followed by the list of benefits and then every and it's just it's a really long you've seen these right it's huge long pages they must do it because it works or do you think that maybe they're just doing it because that's always been the common wisdom you know, I had an argument with someone about this the other day because admittedly, we had a we had someone ask about an audit for one of those pages. And I said, no, I didn't want to do it because I didn't really have a solid answer. I kind of had the same mindset as you to say.

Starting point is 00:19:21 They have to be doing it for a reason because they're so ugly yeah and we had like if you just imagine this doesn't mean much to people but like the average home page for a d2c brand let's say is is 5 000 pixels long most of the ones that come to us that are like that they're 30 to 40 000 so they're six to eight times as long as a normal homepage, right? Which is, that's a lot of scrolling, right? Like there's a lot of time. But they are very, very, like to your point of the other question, these are the brands that are extremely and only solely conversion focused, data focused. They don't care what happens to the brand.

Starting point is 00:19:59 So to your point in the question, like they had to do it for a reason. I'm sure it has to do with things that they've tested. It's just honestly, it's one of those things for me. It's just not for me. I can't get it. I can't get behind it, regardless of what that conversion rate is. For me, it just seems cheesy. It feels like I'm buying weight loss pills that are full of flour.

Starting point is 00:20:19 It just feels so fake to me. I can't no matter how good the conversion is, I can't get behind it. Like I feel sometimes that they're trying to replicate the very old advice and and i think this advice still holds the the sort of if you're a student of marketing history the ogilvy uh factor where david ogilvy very famous ad business guy from long time ago uh changed the ad industry specifically creative by going super long form. We're talking newspaper ads, of course, because these are, you know, 50s and 60s. So whereas it might have previously a headline, an image, a couple of CTAs or, you know, a

Starting point is 00:20:54 USP in the ad, he came along and just would print buckets and buckets of text in there that people actually turned out and read. So I'm always kind of interested in that model and how the digital world is adapting to it. But part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is the paid reports that you do for your clients, which I've seen, I think are super helpful. They're visually easy to read. They're stuffed with detail.

Starting point is 00:21:21 Can you talk a bit about what you do for brands and also how much it costs? Yeah. So I think the best way to describe what audit does, and I actually just had this conversation with a customer 30 minutes before this, but it's really, it's a brand teardown. It's a fresh perspective on kind of every aspect of your digital experience and your brand experience. So we're really diving in and focusing on one for the pages that you buy. So the pages that we're auditing, what are the friction points in the user experience?

Starting point is 00:21:54 So regardless of where the user's coming from, you know, who they are does not matter to us. It's just a fact, a matter of how frictionless is that experience? And can we remove any barriers that might be stopping them? The second thing that we're looking at is as a brand, and when I say brand, I mean every single touch point and visual element. As a brand, how consistent are things, right? Do you have three styles of buttons like you should, or do you have, you know, 40 and the size changes every page that, you know, there's a shadow on some and not on others. All

Starting point is 00:22:25 these little consistencies, as you start to tighten them up in a brand, those are trust factors that don't need reviews, right? Reviews are one way of building trust, being consistent and having all of the details of your brand be dialed in. That's another way to build trust. So a big part of it is going and deep diving on these, on these brands and saying, Hey, you know, maybe you should consider not having four fonts on your site because this one's harder to read and, and, and customers are here and, and, and they want to build trust with you. Let's just keep them, keep things consistent. And we'll, we'll go into that line of detail. I think the most value that we're seeing in terms of our customer feedback is some of the stuff that we're recommending or

Starting point is 00:23:06 that we're mentioning, the customer comes back and says, Hey, love this. You know, we're probably going to implement 75% of it. The other 25% we either don't agree with, or we've tried it and we just weren't happy with it, whatever. But the main thing that they're giving us the feedback of, of, of that they love and the benefit is that it's helping educate their team on how to not miss these things next time. So a lot of it is education on like the simple consistencies and thought process of writing a headline, right? When, when you're done writing that intro headline on the homepage, is it telling consumers what you do? Is it too, like, is it doing it really simply? Is it easy to scan? You only have people's attention for such a short period of time. And so it's a lot of education on these tiny little,

Starting point is 00:23:52 I guess, little tools that we use to make decisions like this, whether it's color contrast of your typefaces on the screen to make sure people can read them, little things like that. So it really is, like I said, it's a brand teardown to make sure people can read them, little things like that. So it really is, like I said, it's a brand teardown to make sure that the details across your experience and your brand are kind of in line. And you have a couple of different price points? Yeah. So we position them based on how many conversion pages that we audit. So what we've kind of dubbed conversion pages are anywhere you're either driving traffic or that you're primarily getting traffic, if that's organically maybe. So we tend to focus on homepages, collections pages, and then your product page.

Starting point is 00:24:35 A lot of our customers do run multiple landing pages and homepage, so we'll audit their homepage and their landing pages as well. But yeah, we don't really step into, we don't audit your T's and C's, your blog posts, your pages that we don't necessarily, in most customer cases, consider to be a conversion point. They're a great supplementary material for users that do want to read more. But we're much more focused on that. And then we also audit. And in every audit report, we audit your navigation and cart experience. So the three price points are basically one, two, and three conversion pages. And those go $1,500, $2,500, and then $3,500. And what kind of organization or brand would get the most value from this?

Starting point is 00:25:21 Are we talking brands with 1,000 products? Are we talking a mom working a thousand products? Are we talking a mom working in her home who has a jewelry store? Like what organization do you think gets the most value from your reports? Yeah, I would say that at least our most consistent customer that's coming to us is kind of that brand that was the mom and daughter kind of running into the basement. They're making the next step up in their growth and kind of growing up a little bit. And, and they, I guess would use us as almost a precursor or a, or a replacement for hiring a brand agency or a UX agency to kind of up their game. Um, that said it, it really can, because the product is so flexible and we do look at different factors of how many

Starting point is 00:26:06 SKUs they have and how long they've been around or where the revenue's at the recommendations really are catered to each customer specifically so we've audited everything from you know thousand product marketplaces that don't even have their own brand to you know a single product water company that only has one page and one checkout and one. So it, there's such a, a large gap of customers that we can benefit. But I would say, you know, when we get customers coming in the ideal where I'm like, man, that's exactly who we're trying to target. It's those 500 K to like 2 million revenue type brands that are in that little growth phase where it's okay, we're taking the next leg up and we need to dial things in.

Starting point is 00:26:51 Well, I think it's great information. It's super helpful. Sean, thanks for your time. Yeah, thanks for having me, Todd. I really appreciate it. Sean Brandt is the co-founder of Audit. That is not spelled the way you think it is. Their website is oddit.co. They offer what they call a free quick win, which is a brief top line report of changes that they think you should make to your own shopping site. Again, that's free.

Starting point is 00:27:15 And their website is oddit.co.

Today in Digital Marketing - Special Episode: Increasing Your Conversion Rate

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