Reverse Flat Revenue With Conversion Rate Optimization
How to A/B Test + Optimization Lessons from 2 Homepages
This year it’s been a real focus for you to get your site traffic up. That’s what will lead you to more sales after all, right?
So you’ve invested in some great courses, diligently executed your content marketing strategy, and even incorporated some paid traffic to your lead generation cycle…
But you’re still faced with revenue that looks like this:
Why?
What do you do when you feel like you’ve tried EVERYTHING and while it feels like you should be moving in the right direction (after all, you’ve got more views now), but all of that work hasn’t moved you any closer to your growth goals!
What can you do?
Let’s do a thought experiment together.
Imagine if this was your monthly traffic and you want to increase revenue by 20%:
Assuming that 5% of people wind up buying, about 330,000 people buy from this online store (Walmart data from SimilarWeb) each month.
So what are your options if you wanted to increase revenue?
You could…
- Buy more paid placements with something like Google Adwords until you get enough visitors to increase your revenue by 20% (expensive)
- Try to use SEO to increase your visits enough to increase revenue by 20% (takes forever, and is hard to do yourself or expensive if you don’t)
- Hire 10 marketing people and hope they figure out
- Offer 20% more products (more overhead)
None of these are really great options because they all need more time, money, or other resources.
What if instead of trying to get more traffic, you tried to get more buyers?
What if you could change the way your site looks or how you explain things to increase purchases by 20%?
Say you increase your 330,000 sales by 20%, to 396,000 sales (instead of 330,000).
If each sale is an average of $20, that means the extra 66,000 sales brought a $1.32 Million increase in revenue.
That’s what conversion rate optimization can do for you.
The Fundamentals of Conversion Rate Optimization
You can find your conversion rate by dividing your number of successful events by how many total visitors you’ve had.
With conversion rate optimization (sometimes called CRO) you’re taking a scientific approach to changing certain variables about your website hoping to increase the number of successful sales and leads you’re getting to your business!
Gathering Data
A great source of information will be your Google Analytics panel, which you’ll want to set up according to these directions:
Customer surveys are another great source of information on existing behavior and thoughts.
We’ve covered asking your customers questions before, so you’ll definitely want to check out the guide to figuring out what data points you should collect and what to ask.
To get you started with generating your own customer data, here are 12 starter marketing research questions:
- How would you describe [product/service name] to a colleague or friend?
- What other options did you consider before choosing [product/service name]?
- Why did you decide to go with [product/service name]?
- What almost prevented you from signing up?
- What questions did you have about [product/service]?
- What ultimately convinced you to sign up?
- How could we do a better job of persuading your friends or colleagues to choose [product/service name]?
- How would you persuade more people to choose [product/service name]?
- What are you hoping to accomplish with [product/service name]?
- When did you realize you needed a product like ours? What was going on in your world that caused you to come looking for [product/service name]?
- What problem would you say [product/service name] lessens for you?
- What two adjectives/words would you use to describe our product/service?
Another valuable source of customer feedback is on-site surveys. A great question that yields valuable results for on-page surveys is “Were there any questions you needed answers to but couldn’t find on our website?”
Another great question to ask on-site is “Is anything preventing you from placing your order today?”
Qualaroo is the big player in the industry for on-site surveys, but you can also use some free solutions like:
What else is preventing people from making a purchase with you?
We’ve already discussed how website usability issues can prevent people from being able to make that purchase with you.
How can you tell if your website has design issues that are preventing people from making a purchase? You can easily buy user tests from this website, you only need about 5 to get a feel for the patterns in usage.
The Free-to-Paid Journey
In 99% of cases, someone who’s visiting your website for the first time is using it for free.
They haven’t become part of your inner circle by paying for access to you yet.
Your Free-to-Paid Journey is the process of delivering value through free content like blogs, podcasts, and videos and how you lead these people each step of the way to becoming customers.
I encourage you to take the time to sit down and plot out the flow of what steps people are already taking to become customers, or to sit down and create the sequence of steps that people will have to go through because you want to be sure that every little detail is accounted for.
Let’s think about a Free-to-Paid Journey together:
Step #1: Maybe someone consumes your free media, like a blog post or a video.
Screenshot that and add it to a Word document. (I like to use Word docs because you can just write “My Product’s Free-to-Paid Journey” and then scroll down screenshots of each step. When you want to add more products to your business, you can just write underneath “My 2nd Course’s Free-to-Paid Journey” and put your screenshots under that. Whenever you change something about your funnel, you can just take a new screenshot and change what’s in your Word document.)
Step #2: From that free media, they click out a link to an opt-in page for some kind of lead generation offer.
Screenshot the landing page and add that to your Word document.
Step #3: They input their information into the form and get redirected to a Thank You page
Screenshot the Thank You page and add that to your Word document.
Step #4: They get an email delivering your optin content.
Screenshot that email and add it to your Word document.
Rinse and Repeat: You’ll want to methodically go down every step, and screenshot every single communication you have with someone from the delivery of your content opt-in until you present them with your paid offer.
If you’re tracking the Free-to-Paid Journey of something like your Flagship Course which may be $1,000 (or high ticket), and there are smaller sales that happen before the main product you’ll want to continue cataloging each offer as it’s presented until you’re finally presenting your main offer.
Don’t forget to screenshot and document each separate step, including the landing page for your product!
It’s important to think through every last detail of each step.
Okay so they signed up for the optin. How are you going to deliver that? Will you make it an attachment to the email itself? Or if its a video should the video be able to be viewed in the email? Or will they have to leave the email inbox and click out to view the content?
Are you going to be scheduling appointments based off of this funnel? Logistically, how will you execute your booking? Do you have an existing scheduler, or will you have to incorporate a new tool? How easy or difficult is that tool for the prospect to use?
That’s why understanding your Free-to-Paid Journey is so important, you want to make sure that no detail is left unchecked.
Messaging Hierarchy
Earlier you learned about the importance of deciding on 1 main conversion goal to focus your A/B testing efforts around.
That goal is incredibly important.
Reaching that goal is what you’ve already identified as what will move your business forward, revenue wise.
But that doesn’t mean accomplishing that goal is the only function your website serves, right?
Your website probably wears many hats (just like you do in your business) and performs functions like:
- Telling people who you are
- Helping people find where they can connect with your business online
- Giving people free value to develop trust
- Pushing people out to optins like reports, whitepapers, and free courses
- Give people enough information to be able to make a purchasing decision
- Close sales
The rest of these functions might be 2nd or 3rd levels of your messaging hierarchy, or you may dedicate separate pages (or groups of pages) to these roles.
Your website is probably a prominent feature of generating leads, closing sales, and each step of your business’s cycle.
I’m sure that you have a variety of different products, different courses, different lead magnets, different funnels, and that’s why messaging hierarchy matters.
Hierarchy means that you’re organizing things, or website objectives in this case, by order of importance.
For example, if you use a lot of funnels in your business to sell your products then you’d probably want to have getting an email address pretty high in your messaging hierarchy.
If you don’t make many sales on your website, it’s not valuable for you to spend a lot of time trying to get people to stay on your website longer, or go to different pages.
If you mainly sell products by driving cold traffic to a landing page where you’re making the sale, then you might prioritize showing and explaining an offer on a sales page over getting someone to download an opt-in.
We’re going to look at some real examples in just a second and reverse engineer what other businesses’ messaging hierarchy looks like. We’ll think about what’s going on in their business model that causes them to value some actions over others.
This will give you clarity on where to place information on your website, how to organize that information on an individual page (including what content should go where), and where each page of your site fits into your overall marketing goals.
6 Step A/B Test System
Step #1 — Set Up Your Software
A powerful, free tool to perform A/B tests on your website is Google Content Experiments.
Setting it up isn’t complicated, it just takes a few more steps than some other solutions but you can find great detailed directions here.
If you’re looking for something with even more features, you could try a paid solution like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer.
Step #2 — Select Your Control Page
Simply put, this is the page you want to test that already exists on your site.
You’ll want to know the URL of this page so you can put it into your testing software.
You’ll also want to think at this point about how you’ll measure results.
Often, people will use a “Thank You page” to track results and compare which of the 2 page variations successfully sent the most people to this 3rd Thank You/Confirmation page.
If you don’t already have a Thank You page for this conversion, you’ll want to create one now. (Examples of Thank You pages.)
Step #3 — Create Your Treatment Page
The easiest way to do this for the purposes of Google Content experiments is to copy the page in WordPress.
Then open the copy of the page, make sure the URL has a distinct name from your control page, and make your test change to this treatment page.
Locate the URL so you can set up your Google Content Experiment.
If you decided to go with another software tool like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer then making your Treatment page will be something you do inside of your A/B testing software, and not necessarily through WordPress.
Step #4 — Determine Your Primary Conversion Goal
Something that I teach a lot to my marketing students is to start with the end first.
You can’t “get there” before you know where you’re going.
Take a look at the dollars in your revenue and try to reverse engineer the steps people take to get there.
What needs to happen immediately before you make a sale? Does someone sign up for a free trial? Does someone download a report or some kind of optin? Do they go through a specific funnel?
Whatever it is, you need to track down the last step people take right before buying and be able to identify that in your customer’s journey.
Whatever that last or second to last step is will most likely be your primary conversion goal.
So if your goal is to increase the number of free trial signups, it doesn’t matter if one test you do gets more optins if those optins don’t actually translate into new trial accounts.
Even if a treatment generated more leads but less “closes”, that’s a failure.
It’s okay to fail!
You’re going to fail a lot in this testing process.
That’s actually good.
Every time a treatment fails to beat your control, you’ve just learned 1 more thing that doesn’t work.
That means you’re 1 step closer to what does work!
Be patient with yourself during this process, and be sure that you’re extremely clear on the ONE result you’re trying to get from this testing process.
Step #5 — Create a List of What You’d Like to Test
You may want to create some kind of spreadsheet that looks similar to this:
So you can keep track of all of your ideas on what to test, and keep track of your results for each test in one place.
What should you test?
In the next section we’re going to dissect some live pages of real businesses that will give you TONS of ideas on what you can change about your website.
The most important part of A/B testing is to only make 1 change per treatment.
If you change the headline, the button text, AND the button location then which change accounted for your results?
It’s not possible to tell! That’s why it’s super, super important to be disciplined with yourself and ONLY test 1 change per treatment.
Step #6 — Start Your Test
Prioritize your list of tests and decide which you’ll start with to begin testing one at a time.
You’ll want to run each test for about 7 days, or however long it takes you to get enough data to really make a statistically significant judgement.
Dissecting 2 Websites for In-Practice CRO Lessons
To demonstrate some of the theoretical concepts you’ve just learned, I thought we’d take a close look at the homepages of a few companies who I know are ruthless about monetizing their businesses and conversion rate optimizing their websites.
Russell Brunson calls this “Funnel hacking”, and there’s a lot to be learned by looking closely at what industry leaders are doing and applying their tests in your own business!
DigitalMarketer
Business Model:
DigitalMarketer makes revenue through selling event tickets, courses, professional certifications, and subscription model masterminds. Many of their products do have their own landing pages or pricing pages, but some don’t. For many of the events for example, most of those customers comer from their email list, their other communities, previous attendees, and some from paid ad placements in spaces like Facebook. They get their traffic through content marketing, and using Facebook ads to get people into their individual blog posts.
Homepage Analysis:
It’s clear that email marketing plays a big role in DigitalMarketer’s Free-to-Paid Journey, that’s why it’s so prominent on the homepage.
Just the email optin alone takes up ⅔ of the page!
It’s interesting to note that they’re not using any kind of report or white paper to get the email address, they’re positioning basically their email list as the community itself.
Just from looking at the homepage it’s likely that generating email leads is their primary conversion goal (Step #4 of our A/B testing process) for their homepage.
I got a popup with a discounted ticket offer for one of their more popular events, Traffic & Conversion Summit — so I have a feeling that they direct paid traffic to this homepage because they’re monetizing visitors in this way.
It’s a pretty subtle upsell to have it as a popup instead of as text.
The information isn’t a hangup for people who aren’t interested, and people who are interested click off to this page where they can spend more time getting detailed information:
Look at the image and click through to the actual landing page and try this out for yourself!
How do you think the goal of this landing page is different than the goal of their homepage (which is also structured like a landing page)? Leave a reply to this article and let me know what you think!
Speaking of testing, DigitalMarketer is always testing so much so that this very pop up test is as recent as September 28th! (Hint: When you click it on the homepage you’ll see something called a UTM code where they happened to include the date they launched this test!)
Back to the DigitalMarketer homepage.
Underneath of the email optin, the second level of their messaging hierarchy is a call to action essentially to segment yourself.
Are you an individual user, or are you a decision maker at an agency who might want to buy their enterprise solutions?
You’ll note that clicking “Request invitation” under the Individual selection simply scrolls you back to the top!
So again, they’re really prioritizing email collection because they’re taking the “attention” of their secondary level of messaging hierarchy to re-direct you BACK to their primary conversion goal!
So they really, really must make the lion’s share of their revenue from increasing that list size and using segmentation to dish out products to different customer avatars.
And finally, it’s kind of coming full circle to what I said earlier about how important content marketing is to their lead generation strategy.
Right at the bottom they want you to get lost in their archives of incredibly in-depth information because they’re figuring if you haven’t given your email address by now you must not know them well enough to feel comfortable doing that, so they want to take you somewhere you can develop trust for DigitalMarketer until you’d want to sign up to their email list.
Note that their blog posts have both ads for their paid products…
… And (sometimes) opportunities for you to join their email list for content optins.
Entrepreneur on Fire
Business Model:
If you want to get a perfect breakdown of where every dollar of John’s income comes from you can check out his monthly income report posts.
As a summary, Entrepreneur on Fire has quite a few revenue streams. First there’s advertising placements on his highly downloaded podcast. He also has some sources of affiliate revenue across his podcast (he plugs Audible in almost every show), and some other tools he uses which may get distributed to his own email list. He has some paid courses like Podcaster’s Paradise. Finally, he has some physical products like the Freedom Journal and the Mastery Journal. His main lead generation is probably content marketing through his podcast, since any of his guests will share their interview with their own community. Over the past 2–3 years he’s been focusing on building, segmenting, and monetizing an email list (which you’ve seen evidence of on loading the homepage).
Homepage Analysis:
The primary conversion goal for this page is to push you to his podcast. Particularly to push you to his podcast in a way that’s automatically updating, like subscribing to it in the iTunes store through your phone or on any of the other services on an Android phone.
This feels a little confusing because of the splash screen that asks for your email, and the Facebook messenger popup beforehand, right?
Like I said, over the past few years John Lee Dumas has been focusing on building and monetizing an email list, but it’s clear from the layout of his homepage (which he’s extensively optimized) that #1 his podcast is the most important part of his lead generation strategy #2 the podcast is a very big stream or revenue through the offers and ads in each episode.
So that’s why it makes sense to use the podcast as the primary conversion goal, even though he spent 2 opportunities asking you for something else first — look at how much screen real estate of the landing page is taken up by pushing you to the podcast.
Almost ⅔ of the whole page is dedicated to the primary conversion goal — the podcast.
Underneath of that you’ll notice some free courses as the secondary messaging hierarchy level.
That means that the second most important thing for John is getting you in these courses.
If you click on one you’ll find that it’s a simple email popup, so these are free email courses. (Except for the Goals course which links you out to Facebook, or at least it does for me.)
I’m sure that each of these free courses has an offer at the end to some type of paid course, affiliate offer to a relevant course of deeper study on that topic, or some other offer to monetize this action.
On top of that, when people join these courses they’re basically self-segmenting on his email list so that John can send them even more targeted offers and content.
Finally, the 3rd level of messaging hierarchy is again dedicated to the podcast. This time trying to catch any stragglers who aren’t sure what they’re looking for with some juicy content.
Something you’ll notice is that at the bottom 3rd of the page there are also some banner ad placements that link out to some of John’s paid products, and again to his newsletter.
Which again, leads me to conclude he’s monetizing this newsletter with a variety of his products and affiliate offers of other people’s products because there are a fair number of asks trying to get you on it.
I find it interesting that it’s placed next to do definitely monetized placements, physical products.
What I mean about an action being “monetized” is that the person either makes money immediately on your next click (with a sale or an advertising placement), or they probably make some money on you soon afterwards. (Like John isn’t paid right when you sign up for his list, but by community building he can distribute you to his free value like the podcast — which we’ve covered is monetized through ads — or paid offers like his courses, his products, or affiliate offers to other courses or products.)
What You Can Do Right Now
I know that this is a huge braindump of information right now, but here’s what you can do.
Take a deep breath.
Go back and review the 6 Step A/B Test System.
Get your website ready to begin testing.
Get ideas from these examples we’ve looked over, you can do this on your own too with some sites like these where you know they A/B test a lot.
Start working towards a tight sales cycle. Find out what actions are leading to your revenue and encourage more people to do that. Step by step increase the effectiveness of your revenue generating processes.