Andrew: Three messages before we get started.
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Here’s the program.
Hi, everyone, I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. Home of the ambitious upstart.
How can simple changes to a landing page, take a go no where business, and make it profitable?
Niki Scevak is the founder of Tomazo, which designs conversion optimizing landing pages, for his customers.
I invited him here to talk about specific changes you can make to your site right now, and see measurable lift in your conversions.
Niki and I met when he re-did my site welcome mat, you know that page you see when you go to Mixergy.com and ask you for an email address. Niki re-did it and lots of different ways helped me increase my conversions, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in this program too.
Niki, Welcome.
Niki: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: Give me an example of what you’re able to do, with what you are about to show us?
Niki: Sure, so before Tomazo, I founded an online real estate stock called Home Thinking Net. Helps home owners connect with their real estate agent to sell their home. I read about some A-B testing and conversion rate optimization. But it’s like you live in a positive outcome, but not a game change outcome. So, one thing I did test was, next to the name of the site that has the homeowners email agents. And so what we did is have, people tend to look at the face of an image on a particular webpage. And more than that, where that face is looking. So by simply putting a woman’s face looking at the form and pointing at the contact form, by enlarging the button, the conversion rate increased by 80%.
It was sort of I guess the light bulb moment, that I had with this conversion rate optimization. But the most profound thing to me was that, it wasn’t just 80% that day, it was 80% every single of the day, in the future.
So just that lure of compounding, the shear ROI, said this is, I’ve been spending most of my time in prod development, most of my time creating page, creating more products. And it was, I think at that moment was, stopped that. This is the most important way for me to spend my time, on my business. So that was really the light bulb moment for me.
Andrew: I see. All right. I was going to ask you what it was like before, but you just told us, right?
Niki: Yeah. I think that I had always had like a product development mind set. So I guess to prioritize everything to create additional product, to grow the audience. When in fact, sort of the unlocking of the business, if you will. We had all the raw ingredients that, we had the decent amount of traffic, the user base. Through these kind of changes, that unlocked the business potential and the size. So it was all in front of me, it just, I was spending all my time, badly allocating my time.
Andrew: Cool. And we did a pre-interview with you right? Jeremy pre-interviewed you, walked you through every part of the process of what we’re going to be doing here in the interview and the two of you together an outline and that’s what we’re going to use here in this interview. What was that pre-interview like for you by the way?
Niki: Comprehensive would be a good word, very thorough to help clarify all the thoughts and was very good.
Andrew: Ok. All right cool. Let’s go into the first tactic. What’s the first thing we need to know if we’re going to duplicate the success that you achieved using conversion optimization?
Niki: I think to simply that was the other thing is that over time people’s products and people’s applications add different services, adds different features and it just tends to be completely incremental and nothing gets subtracted. Really looking at a page and saying what’s the one thing I want a user to do on this page. Really it can only be one, often there’s multiple things. The very first step is identify what is the one thing that I want someone to do and that one thing should be ideally linked to some sort of proxy for revenue. If that metric goes up the business goes up. So to have it very hard coded into revenue generation, I think is also important as well.
Andrew: Ok. So you said clarify a single goal for each page and have it somehow link to revenue. I want to ask you a question about that and challenge you a little bit, because I feel in the real world sometimes I can’t figure out what that one thing is. Give me an example to illustrate how this works. How about one from Home Thinking, your previous company.
Niki: It’s a lead generation company, so we get paid when people contact agents.
Andrew: Excuse me you founded it in 2005 but you’re still at HomeThinking.com, you still own it?
Niki: Still operate, yes. I think that the entree into Tomazo was the sets of changes and these sets of test that we ran over the past couple of years just completely changed my outlook on this is the most important thing and then led to helping friends and now forming a business to help others with conversion grade optimization.
Andrew: Ok.
Niki: In terms of proxy of revenue so it might be on an online retail store someone adding a product to their shopping cart, it might be in this case a homeowner contacting real estate agent. There were other steps where we could sell the lead to the agent where we had how many agents who wanted to buy that lead. All of those other steps but the oxygen at the top of the funnel was people contacting real estate agents, so that was the goal on a profile page was to have the homeowner contacting you, the real estate agent.
Andrew: Ok. So what did you remove in order to get to that?
Niki: It had many different products around us researching different mortgages, researching different neighborhood data. So by simplifying it and making it about you’re there to learn about the agent and ultimately there to contact the agent. So by moving that other research data and that other navigational elements, that also dramatically helped our conversions.
Andrew: How much?
Niki: So with that and the lady pointing to the contact form and the larger button that all led to 80% increase in the conversion rate.
Andrew: I see. What I’ve got here in the pre-interview you said, “after moving the navigation and placing to the left hand side, conversion increased 25%”. Just that one thing, 25% removing the navigation from the top to the side.
Niki: Yes, so people tend to read in an F-shape if you will, so they go to the top left-hand part of the page, they scan across then they go down the left hand rail of the page and then they’ll also go side to side a little bit down the page on the sort of the bottom of the fold. So that is the absolute water front real estate of a page, so you have to think very hard about what you have in the most important area of the site. Even things like some people have logos very large, some people have different other log in links that are more prominent than they need to be. So think very hard about what you put in that F-shape on the page. Also, people often enter in browse mode, so the first obstacle that you need to overcome is within two seconds establish that this page is worth spending more time on for that user. Connecting with that person that you actually are solving a problem that they are having, so the navigation tools…
Andrew: Let’s talk a minute about that. I want to talk about connecting with the user and all the other elements of a landing page later on, but I want to take it step by step. Because if we shove too many options and too many requirements in one section of the interview, the audience is going to be overwhelmed. I want to walk them through what they need to pay attention to. If I’m understanding you right, the first thing you’re saying is, have a single goal per page.
Niki: Yes.
Andrew: Here’s what I want to challenge you on, Niki. First of all, I believe in everything you’re doing because I saw it in my own numbers. It influenced my results measurably, right, and you might even be sharing the numbers. This isn’t me pushing back because I think you’re full of it. It’s me pushing back because I want to understand. If you’re saying, focus people on a single purpose, why not get rid of the top navigation completely instead of just repositioning that top navigation on the side of the page?
Niki: That definitely should be a testable experiment as well. It certainly, in the case of how I’m thinking, we certainly wanted to have the opportunity to jump into the other sites. I guess we only took the half-way measure but by removing the navigation completely that can be another testable idea. Ultimately it’s depending on the site and the application trade-offs you’ll have to make. Certainly I encourage people to actually test that idea.
I think the other great thing about conversion rate testing is, you’re in a business, you’re in a meeting, ten people have an opinion, you’ll spend two hours arguing about it. You’ll organize a meeting next week to argue about the same ten things. With conversion rate testing, that’s a fantastic hypothesis, let’s just go and see what the data tells us and then after the data tells us, let’s make the decision if that’s an acceptable trade-off. I absolutely agree with you that just by removing all the navigation that could be a good idea for many Internet sites.
Andrew: Niki, you and I have known each other for awhile now, right, via email. This is our first conversation, but we’ve known each other for awhile via email, right?
Niki: Yes.
Andrew: You trust me enough when I tell you, we shouldn’t talk about testing anymore. I’ll tell you why. The problem with doing interviews with A-B testing people, excuse me, doing interviews with people about conversion’s is that it’s too easy to say to the audience, test everything. We leave them with no direction when we say, “Test everything.” What I think is better is to say, “Part of it is testing and absolutely test everything. Now I’ve been testing everything for a long time, days, months, weeks, years, however long and I’m going to bring you the benefit of all of my learning. Of all of my lessons with those tests and I’m going to suggest a way for you to get started in testings. I’ll call by BS and test everything after I tell it to you.”
Niki: Absolutely. Also I would say that it’s even less about, I think when people look at A-B testing they think math, they think statistics. It’s not about that at all. It’s actually more about consumers psychology. Getting people to act now. Establishing trust very quickly. The whole world of conversion testing is more about that than it is about technology or statistics, math or anything like that. That’s also another important point.
Andrew: All right. Let’s talk about another tactic. First tactic, remove options. Of course, test it to see if you should remove everything or some of it. Second tactic is what?
Niki: I think the number one thing, if someone’s sitting at home listening to this interview is to change the, make whatever call to action button bigger and if you have a button with the word “Submit” change that. If there’s one thing to take away from today, is change the size, color, and wording on a call to action button. Just be amazed at the dramatic lift or dramatic change in conversion just from doing that. If there’s one thing to do, do that. I think [??] Dave [??] who’s an Angel investor in Internet start-ups, wrote a blog post years ago, make the button fucking bigger or it’s all about the faces, which is about images on pages and images and applications. If there’s one thing, double the size of your button.
Andrew: Double the size of the button. If it says “Submit” get rid of it and test something else. That’s it. Did we have the words “Submit” on our buttons?
Niki: You had a default button. The small gray button that comes default with the html, the biggest thing that we did is that we made that bigger. You did have “Start” the wording on the button you want to be a verb, so you wouldn’t say “Submit” in real life or you wouldn’t say “Submit” out loud, so don’t say it on a button. Be very prescriptive, so do this, “Add to Cart” or “Find Realtors Now” make it a verb or a phrase that you’re telling someone what to do. That’s important and then also one thing is you’re very clear, we’re not going to spam you. The founders we interviewed would kick our butts. What we did is incorporate saying, “No Spam” on the button in big words . . .
Andrew: Let’s hold off on that actually for a moment here because I want to stick with the buttons. I want to take it one step at a time. Again, if we break out each element that they should be paying attention to, it will be actionable. If we load them up with too much at once, it will be a big mess. Plus, I got to keep them hanging on for an hour, who knows, may be in the future we’ll hire somebody to put ads within these interviews and I’ll need them to pay attention to the end. That’s never happening. I know people keep telling me I should put ads within the interviews because fewer people will skip them. Screw that. I do not want to interrupt the conversation.
Let me stick here with this. First of all, I don’t know what dominatrix loving programmer invented the word or started using the word, “Submit” for buttons on the Internet, but I bet you it’s the same jerk who decided that every form had to have a “Clear All” button like “Submit” or “Reset.” Who the hell needs to reset a freakin’ form on the web. How many times do we accidentally hit the “Reset” button? That guy must of loved punishment to give it and to get and decided he was going to inflict both those buttons on the world “Submit” and “Reset.”
So you’re telling me, the one thing I did get right on my page, the one that you changed, was I didn’t have the word “Submit” I got rid of it and I replaced it with, what you prefer, a verb. Telling people what to do, which is “Start” or a phrase, but whether it’s a verb or a phrase you need to give them a command. What’s the next thing that they’re doing? You’re telling them what’s happening afterwards through that.
Now you also mentioned on Mixergy that we had the — by the way, can we show these pages to people? Do you have them somewhere?
Niki: Yes. I’ll post them in the comments of the interview. Put up the screen shots so you could see exactly what you had before and then what the winning variation, which was a plush 19.5% lift. That measurable increase but also looking at the simple changes that we made I think is, to me it was a light bulb moment. The series of simple changes increased the conversion rate by that much, 19.5% every day, every single day compounding on each other. You can bid more on your CPT, paid search, you can take it as an increased profit. It let’s you do so many different things. Just a series of simple changes create that scale of a lift.
Andrew: We did have a “Start” and you’re also saying, what you replaced it with was, you said, “Andrew, congratulations on having a ‘Start’ but that’s only the beginning of what you need to do to increase conversions and get that button to be more powerful.” You made the button bigger. You made it an image, not the standard html included grey button, and you also but a shield on it with a “No Spam.”
Niki: Right.
Andrew: I’ve gotten so many emails from people telling me have that button be a shield that says, “No Spam.” I’ve got to ask you the same thing that I’ve asked, what’s her name, Ann, I forget her last name, but here’s a big question, if someone’s going to be a spammer, basically he’s going to flood your inbox with stuff you don’t want. He’s in many cases committing a crime because spam now is a crime, right? If he’s going to go through the trouble of being that naughty, why not also go through the trouble of saying, “I’m not naughty” and but a button on it, right? Lying is a smaller infraction than spamming. Basically what I’m saying is why would you believe, why would people believe a shield?
Niki: I think the reality is that some people do believe, some people don’t. There are both cases. I think with spammers though, they probably wouldn’t be collecting email addresses by the web. They’d be buying up bulk lists because that’s an easier way for them to get email addresses than actually trying to convince someone on a web page. They’ll do it without permission rather than with their permission. I think just talking to the person in the voice that you have, the fact that you said, “Our founders will kick our butt” it just makes you seem like a real person. It’s not to say that it’s a 100% trust, but it’s increasing the trust a little bit or a measurable bit to some person in the audience.
Andrew: Every little bit might be catching another group of people. There’s some people out there who they see it and say, “You know what, all right, he told me that.” Now, what you mentioned earlier about the phrase that we had underneath the input box, it said, “Don’t worry, we won’t spam, if we do our founders will kick our butts” something like that. To be honest, I copied the attitude about that from Noah Kagan’s app Sumo. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s been an incredible influence on stuff like this and on the bottom of his welcome mat, underneath the email address he says, “We won’t spam, spam is for jerks and jerks we are not, or something like that. So I figured, hey, you know what, that’s kind of a playful way of putting it. I trust someone who can be that playful. Spammers are truly not that creative or else they would not be spammers.
Niki: Shows your personality, but ultimately also increases conversion. The results are kind of irrefutable, so.
Andrew: This is Ann Holland, who I mentioned early. I asked her the same question and she said, you know what, people just don’t think. What you’re doing is getting essentially, I think this is what she’s saying, a knee jerk reaction. You see a spam shield, you think trust. Just like if you see someone who looks like a cop standing on a corner and you fell like, all right, I’m safe to be on here. You don’t spend too much time analyzing his badge and making sure that he’s not a rent-a-cop, you just feel stronger and more confident. Before I go on to the next, actually let’s finish off this tactic by me asking you, what’s this eighteen percent? Eighteen percent increase just for making those changes, is that what you got me?
Niki: Yeah, so the series of changes, which was mainly around this button. We also added a few more testimonials.
Andrew: So, you say the over all we got a eighteen percent lift?
Niki: Yes, eighteen percent more people who came to this landing page, entered their email address and entered into the site and watched a interview.
Andrew: Got it.
Niki: Take a look at the screen shots, the majority of changes were around the button. We also added testimonials, which we can talk about later on in the evening as well.
Andrew: Hey, so you’re no longer running the test on my site, right? It’s on me to put all the HTML you’ve put together back on Mixergy?
Niki: That’s right, yes.
Andrew: So, I got to tell you something. We’ve been too lazy to do it and you’ve been very generous and you’ve kept us going for a while there, but a few days ago you cut us off. And you said, Andrew, I gave you HTML, by now you got to put it on your own web site. We’re not here to serve up the intro pages to your site and serve up these pages. I didn’t notice that you did it. But I notice the effects. I noticed that suddenly my email list wasn’t growing as quickly. Suddenly my orders weren’t increasing the way they did before, so what you did, and I’m so glad that you’re going to be showing people the before and after and whatever else you can show them to give them an understanding of what you did. Very powerful stuff.
Niki: Yeah, and I think so many people, there’s a thousand different positive thing you can do. There’s online marketing, there’s a host of different things and I think some of the conversion optimization gets, it’s just another one of those. But, I think when you drill down into it, the huge increases in impact that you can make for such a simple set of things is just, I think it’s the biggest ROI I’ve ever seen in any kind of thing that you can do to your business.
Andrew: All right.
Niki: So, I think it’s that important.
Andrew: All right, before I go to the next one, you’re a Mixer G fan, right?
Niki: Huge fan.
Andrew: Thank you very much for watching, and thank you for helping me with the business. So, I got a new set up over here because I got a new computer and the new computer doesn’t adjust well. What do you think of me keeping the books back here the way they are, should I keep them out of the shot and just have a plain background, what do you think?
Niki: I think it adds to your knowledge and your credibility, so I think it’s increasing the conversion on your concessions.
Andrew: I see, you’re right. It does send a subtle message, hey, this guy’s a reader, he might have been just finishing off all fifty of those books behind him, I trust him a little bit more.
Niki: [laugh] Or you might even put your Kindle behind there.
Andrew: Let me do one other thing, I’ve actually shortened my seat so I can fit better on the counter. Let me see what happens when I increase, when I raise it up. All right, now I feel a lot more comfortable, let’s see if I cut off my head this way. There I go. All right, let’s go on to the next point. What is the next thing we need to be aware of?
Niki: So, the simplest location of the page to one goal. Once you’ve decided that, it’s very important that you can connect with the user, within the first few seconds. So, someone’s going to bounce, they’re in a foraging mode, they’re search on Google, they click on a page, they give you two seconds to say, is this what I’m looking for or is this not. So, connecting with that user at rapid speed, so basically saying, why should they spend another thirty seconds investigating this page to see if it solves their problem that their having at the moment. So, just by connecting with the person, I want to buy Wigget, the best Wiggets on sale here. So, making sure that you have a very clear heading. Very simple, to get the person to say, I’m going to spend another thirty seconds on this page. That sort of just recognizing that someone is in a very brows mode on the internet, their not there to consider everything. Their there to say, is this what I want? No, yes. And your job is to connect with them within two seconds.
Andrew: I see.
Niki: So, large blocks of texts, complicating specification, all of that, that’s bad. When someone see that, they’re like, uh, I don’t want to look through all of that.” Something very simple to invite them into your site. It’s almost like, I think he called welcome mat, I think that’s a good word, welcome mat, for the actual landing page, within the landing page is something that you should do that will get more people to consider what you’re doing.
Andrew: It’s another thing I stole from Noah Kagan. The first page welcomes you to, the first page you see when you go to a website, if all it does is ask you for your email so you can continue, Groupon does this, Noah’s app Suma does this, many sites do this. Most people call it a squeeze page. I hate that term squeeze page because I’m not trying to squeeze the email address out of people and Noah starts referring to it as a welcome mat. I think well that is a welcome mat. Here’s what the sites about. Here’s the first step you have to take, you give me your email address and you move. I think well, welcome mat’s a lot friendlier so I’m going to use the welcome mat word, the phrase.
You’ve got an example of, when you mentioned in this tactic, simplify the page so that one actionable goal sticks out to the user. You told Jeremy that you had an example of a daily deal site and what they did before and after they recognized the truth in this tactic. Can you give me that example? Do you remember what it is?
Niki: The daily deal sites, it was a check out process for a daily deals site. They’d already made the decision to buy the daily deal. When they got to the checkout page, it still had all of the deal information, the Twitter sharing links, the Face Book sharing links and by switching that from the left to the right and again they can even consider removing that once they got to the checkout page, conversions lifted, I think it was something like 20% – 25%. Just by re-ordering the page from the deal information on the left to the deal information on the right and having the checkout and credit card information on the left-hand side of the page.
Someone is in the checkout process to give you their money, not to share the deal on Twitter or share the deal on Face Book. Just by clarifying that simple, it sounds silly but just by going through that exercise, conversions are up 25%.
Andrew: I can understand the thought process behind the daily deals site. They are thinking, look someone saw an offer that they like, they clicked to buy it, we want them if they decide not to buy it to maybe Tweet it out or maybe to look at more information so they can consider buying it, or maybe share it on Face Book. You want to give people lots of options so that if the one you want to give them isn’t the one that they want to take that they’ll have other options. You’re saying in your tests and specifically in this test, if you remove it you’re going to increase more conversions on the one goal that you have. Let the other goals fall away.
Niki: Yeah. You can consider in terms of sharing that deal on Twitter or Face Book, do it after the confirmation, do it in a confirmation email, perhaps even wait until they redeem the experience and then ping them to share how it went at the ice cream parlor on Twitter and Face Book. Think in when does it make sense to share the deal. Right before you’re buying it doesn’t make that much logical sense.
Andrew: All right. I think Dan [??] in his book, Predictably Irrational, talks about a girl who tells a story about a girl who has two guys that she’s interested in and because there’s one guy that she’s not very interested in, because she can’t say no to that guy and just say cut it off and go to the person who she might be interested in, she’s potentially ruining the relationship with the boy that has potential. She’s spending a lot of time with the boy that has no potential instead of focusing all of her time on the one that does have potential.
Niki: That book is an absolutely fantastic book that everyone should read and that is actually more about online marketing and online businesses than people think it is. All the principals around consumer psychology apply to the web. Even more important, in the world of the web than in the offline world.
Andrew: I did a course with a guy name Juan [??] for a [??]. He read that book, Predictably Irrational, and he says when he reads these books he has to test it on his site because he has big traffic, he has a lot of room to test. Now I won’t give away what the test, he tested it on his website and the results that were in Predictably Irrational were applied to his site and gave him a lift in orders. I’ve got to recommend that book because it’s fun, but also because if you apply it to your business, especially when it comes to conversions you’re going to see a lift, I know Juan did.
All right. Next point is establish credibility. Now, I’m doing it apparently by having these books behind me. I like that. Maybe I also need to have a certificate behind me that looks like a college diploma but you can’t really make out that it doesn’t say Harvard, it says Hervard or something. What do we do on a web page to give ourselves credibility and measurably speaking, what’s it done for people?
Niki: Yeah. I think everyone would remember that, from browsing through different websites, series case studies or series testimonial, saw custom logos on sites, and what they design to do is to say that other people are using our product and loving it. So the trust is in, from the user’s point of view, has someone just like me, done this and being happy. So everything that you can do, to help communicate the trust that you have with other users and that other people are using it. All ways tend to increase conversion. I think that usually the best way is just real honest testimonials or reviews from people spoken in real language. I think that kind of growing trend is people putting tweets as testimonials on their page.
So usually testimonials or reviews of other users, who are happy. But the more realistic and the more honest they are, as well, that leads to biggest lift. So if it is like, ‘Wow, Andrew is just like the best in the world, like is just so amazing’. That’s actually less effective than, ‘ You know, I did learn one of two things from the interview and it helped my business’. That’s more effective than glowing, absolutely got glowing reviews.
Andrew: I see. All right. You got an example of an eBook that did this?
Niki: Right. So this was an eBook. I got a surgery procedure, which was pretty major in someone’s life. And this was, he’s a doctor, he has all the credibility and the trust, on his landing page for the eBook. He did have fantastic testimonials, but what he was leading with was more, sort of the specification, or informational, of exactly what’s in the book, what’s the books about. By reordering sort of the, by putting the testimonial higher, that led to an increase in conversion rate.
So by prioritizing, specially in things like that, where the experience of others and the empathy of someone going through that, leads to bigger increase in conversion. So that was much more important in that case, for that particular product than others, but that’s an example as well.
Andrew: I see. So he’s a surgeon, instead of telling you what’s in his book, instead of explaining to you why his book make sense, just giving a testimonial was more powerful.
Niki: Yeah. Just reordering. So he let me know what’s in the book, lead with other customer stories and other customer scenarios, and exactly the situation where they were in, at that point in life, where they had to get this particular surgery, that was more important, than learning about what was in the book.
So by leading with testimonials, people sort of moves through the sales funnel. Obviously they researched the exactly that, it is the product that fits their needs. But they care about it more, they give it more time, and giving it more consideration, because the testimonials are first, instead of last.
Andrew: I see. By the way, when I first realized that I have made it, was when I started to see people who I interviewed in the past, put the Mixergy logo on their press pages, in your case, Tomazo.com has it on it’s homepage. That’s when I realized, now people are actually proud to have done a Mixergy interview. It stands for something, and they’re using it on a sales page which is one of the most powerful, most important pages in their business. That and I can see now the power.
Niki: Yeah. Absolutely. I can see the press fighting about people have seen it in the New York Times and seen it in the Wall Street Journal, as seen in Mixergy. All of those establishing credibility in the eyes of the user. And it does so very quickly. It’s, yeah, I know that, I respect that, okay, let’s read on.
Andrew: Next tactic. Reduce anxiety for users.
Niki: Right. This as in Nova’s case as in your case, the line about, we’re not going to stand you, we’re not going to, our founders kick our butts if we do. So reducing the anxiety, so around check out, information pages, if you seen pages with these the locks symbol or the shield symbol or varies sign of trust symbol, is to say that, by entering your credit card to this page, it’s a secure connection. So it’s about reducing the risk that something might go wrong if they do this page or if it’s an [??] page, exactly what will happen. Someone will follow up with you or just send you the white paper or setting their expectations about what’s going to happen afterward or that nothing is going to go wrong in terms of setting up their credit card information or that nothing is going to go wrong in terms of them getting spam.
Just by outlining and being very transparent about what’s happening will lead to an increase in conversions. If you don’t have all of that, then it’s just people that doubt runs through their mind. You wouldn’t think that a VeriSign Trust symbol on a checkout page would actually make any difference, it does. You can test it, usually it’s just simple things that get people to feel more secure that ultimately help in conversions.
Andrew: For anyone who read the book, Influence, it’s a click world. Did you read the book Influence by Robert Cialdini [SP]?
Niki: I haven’t, no.
Andrew: He just makes his point about how, I don’t exactly know how to tell his story well, but basically what he says is there’s certain human actions that you can trigger in other people without having them even think about it. I’ll give you an example in my own life. After Bradford and Reed I went out to check out all these organizations to see how they sell and convince people to do what they want them to do.
I went into a Kirby vacuum cleaning sales operation. I said, teach me some of the things that you do to get in the door, because nobody wants a salesman in the door, it’s a joke already that you don’t want the salesmen at the door. How are you guys getting through?
He goes, well we have a few tactics. For example, if we wipe our feet on their welcome mat, the homeowner will instinctively, without even thinking, tilt to the side. Once they’ve tilted to the side, if we walk forward they instinctively understand that they’ve welcomed us in and we’re suppose to walk in. Little tactics like that, without the person even thinking, just work on them.
Niki: Absolutely. Yes.
Andrew: So what you’re telling me it’s the same thing here, a VeriSign logo on a website. VeriSign I know is a company that’s earned it’s reputation, that will fight you if you put it on and you’re not suppose to, but there’s still just a jerk reaction.
Niki: The people have ample time to make a decision, to say that they want to buy the actual product from the store, they’ve reached the checkout page. Even with all of that, by adding the VeriSign check-in button can still add 10%, so 10% more people are completing the checkout just by adding this trust and credibility to the checkout page. So it is still quite dramatic even though you would think if someone has made all those decisions and reached the checkout page, why wouldn’t they check out?
Andrew: Right. Exactly. Actually you tell me how much. You talked to Jeremy about how a shoe retailer for women added a VeriSign secure lock. What happened to them?
Niki: That was sort of more of a makeover of their checkout page, but by adding in all these trust symbols the conversion rate went up by a little over 10%.
Andrew: With trust symbols.
Niki: Right, exactly. Also, to your earlier point, around that example of the vacuum cleaning company, if you have a really long form that people will look at, consider splitting it up, or consider even having an entrance button into it. So instead of having, this is a bad example, maybe it’s a 50-page checkout and when someone sees it they say, I don’t want to fill out 50 fields, but if you have a page beforehand that says, start the checkout process now, or if you have a few different fields that are more important or that are not the contact information of you and your address and so on, get them to fill that out first and once they’ve reached the second page of something, in their mind they’re already pre-committed to filling out the form.
If they’re filling out three of the fields they’re like, well I might as will fill out the other 47. In their mind they’re already saying I’m committed to filling out this form, much in the same way as someone wiping their shoes on the welcome mat to allow them in, it’s that subtle pre-committing in their heads that will increase conversion as well. If you have a really long form consider splitting it up into smaller chunks because people will commit more to filling out the whole of the form if they’ve even filled in a few of the fields.
Andrew: As you’ve noticed and as I’m sure our listeners have noticed, I’m running this interview kind of like a checklist. We’re giving them a checklist of items to be aware of when they’re creating their own landing pages. They could go and add all of them or they could pick one and add them and learn from your experience. Within this checklist I want to have few sub points for this specific tactic, when you’re saying that I can reduce anxiety by increasing trust, give me a few ways to do it. We talked about having symbols like Verisign. What else can we do? Quotes, testimonials, I think we actually talked about that before. Quotes, testimonials, what else, give me other things that we can do to reduce anxiety.
Niki: Just being transparent is what’s going to happen after this page.
Andrew: Tell us what’s going to happen afterwards?
Niki: So as you said with the founders, we’re not going to stand. Just by saying that reducing the risk of something bad happening. There’s the main things. Establishing a trust symbol, other people like them have gone through the process and liked it. Being transparent as to what’s going to happen next and saying that nothing bad is going to happen or just being completely transparent. Those are all sort of reducing the anxiety of these and adding a greater likelihood that they’ll act now which is what ultimately..
Andrew: Also tell me if I’m wrong here but more human language helps to refer people.
Niki: Very simple language so its actually like an art form to the way that newspapers like the New York Post writes. So these are all very smart writers, they write in such a simple language. I always think of it as the Ernest Hemingway of writing, try to write simply as possible in a simple language with the least adjectives as you can and that will resonate more than if you spew a paragraph of jargon. I think even in the software world or in the technology world people are always fallen into the trap of using acronyms and words that strategize and words that don’t really mean anything. So if you can talk very simply and very clearly that’s what’s most powerful. Use the least words as possible, don’t use big chucks of text use bullet points. I heard there is a writing style that works on the web and works in direct marketing. It ultimately connects with more users.
Andrew: Next tactic. What’s the next thing that my precious, precious audience needs to know?
Niki: This was going back to the original point of how people read in F shapes so connecting with user problem. So one example is Home Thinking, it ranks the agents by their sales history and by the customer reviews about the jobs that they have done. So the big heading was “Home Thinking ranks realtors by their past sales history and customer reviews of the jobs that they have done”. By replacing that with “Home Thinking finds the right realtor for you”, that decreased the bounce rate on the page and ultimately increased conversions because more people were going and considering the page. The first version is telling exactly what you do so thinking on benefits and partially spelling out the benefit in a simple way in the heading. That ultimately helps conversion as well. “Home Thinking finds the right realtor for you” versus “Home Thinking ranks agents by their past sales history”.
Andrew: Actually can you give me those two again because we broke up a little bit, and I want to make sure that we get the before and after very clearly. So what’s the before?
Niki: So the before was “Home thinking ranks agents by past sales history and reviews”. We replaced that with “Home Thinking finds the right agent for you”. The benefit of Home Thinking is you’ll get the right realtor at the end of the process to help you sell your home. So using that benefit rather than the descriptive of the service ultimately increases conversion.
Andrew: Ok. One last tactic. Then I’m going to ask you more about the process that you used when you re did my welcome mat. So what’s the last tactic on our list?
Niki: It’s again to reiterate sort of talking in that simple language and also talking in a language that people understand. The best example that I can think of is if you remember ten years ago when the iPod first launched there were many different music players out there so Dell and Creative Labs, I think, had one. All these different firms had music players and they all advertised, you know, 500 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, it was all in gigabytes. Apple’s marketing was, around the number of songs, “The iPod lets you store 500 songs or 1000 songs.” It was speaking in the language that people were connecting with.
So, you know, people who have iPods want to have songs, they don’t want to, in terms of storage space, and have to make the calculation of “each song is 4 or 5 MB, therefore, this could store x number of songs.” It was speaking in the language of songs, rather than gigabytes and I think that everyone has an example on their site or their webpage that they can take that and change the gigabytes into songs and speak in the language of the actual problem that the user has, rather than the technical specifications behind it.
Andrew: I see. All right. You know, by the way, one of my favorite listeners, I say favorite because he keeps giving me feedback for years, Paul McGee has been giving me feedback. He says, “Andrew, one of the things I don’t like when you do over and over, it drives me nuts, is you repeat what the guest said. And the reason that I do it is sometimes when I run, I miss a point that a guest has said and I wish that whoever interviewed him on whatever program he was on just summed it up a little bit. If it’s a key point, tell it to me again. I even like it sometimes when books will give me the point and say, “If you missed it, let me just repeat the one core thing that you need to take and then give it back to me.”
So, anyway, I’m going to trust Paul because he pays close attention. The guy knows what he’s talking about. So, I won’t repeat that. I will, instead, ask you about the process you used for me. So here’s what I saw on my side and I want to understand what happened from your side, Niki. You said, you e-mailed me and said, “Andrew, I can help increase your conversions. I want to work with you.” and we started having a conversation and I liked talking to you and I wanted to work with you and said, “Sure.” You got to work on my site and one of the first things you did was, well, you sent me a list of questions and then the next thing I remember you doing was, you sent me different website designs from different designers. I think you even used their names and you said, “Steve just sent you this. What do you think of this? Send him some feedback. Janice just sent you this. Give her some feedback.”
Anyway, you took all that then you created a bunch of landing pages. You tested them. I think you made some adjustments and then we came up with a winner. And if we were to keep working together, if I were to not be so lazy and keep on working on my own, then all we would do is just keep iterating on the process that you and I just went through, right? And I shouldn’t say “lazy” because we have to stay focused, there’s so many things that we could do, especially at the end of these interviews, I have to pick one thing at a time and I tell the whole team here at Mixergy, “This is our focus and all the other great ideas, we’re going to learn from them and we going to wait and integrate them, but first let’s focus on one thing at a time. That’s why we’re not redoing that.” But let me ask you about that. The first thing that you did was ask me questions. Is it always the same set of questions for everyone?
Niki: Yeah. It’s getting to know what people like and don’t like about a page and, as you said, it could be a reason why a certain thing on a page could be killing conversions, but it could be worth it to that site to be, you know, “This is absolutely sacred. I don’t want to remove this. I don’t want to change this.” and that’s fine. So, it’s basically getting to know the page, getting to know the business, the kinds of traffic that is sent to the page, whether it’s like a PPC landing page, whether it’s an organic search.
So understanding the state of mind of the user who’s coming to the page, the sorts of decisions that they have to make, the competitors, it’s just a simple set of questions that help the designer get started. So the designers are graphic designers, but they’re also, sort of, grounded in the principles that we talked about in this interview. So the psychology behind what they’re trying to figure out is the psychology behind the user who’s coming to this page. What are the objections they might have in their mind when they’re visiting the page? How can you say that you solved their problem? What sorts of things might be going through their minds so that we can put it on the page so that we can increase conversions.
Andrew: So what I imagined was going to happen was, if I told you that I was buying pay per click traffic, you might do things like use the keyword that I bought in my pay per click ad campaign, use that keyword on my landing page. If I told them that I was getting traffic from somewhere else, you might refer to the location where I was getting traffic, something like, “Welcome”, since we happen to be using Noah’s site over and over here, “Welcome, App Sumo customers”, that type of thing.
Niki: Sure.
Andrew: Those are things that I can figure out from a distance. What are you seeing here? Tell me more about how you use these answers to take the first step in your process.
Niki: So the understanding the traffic is, I think, is a search for users. As I said, they’re there, they make a very quick decision, so within a few seconds they’re likely to say yes, no or should I explore this page. People from AppSumo, they’ve got the deal email, they might have browsed the actual detail page, clicked around, they know Mixergy because they’ve listened to a few interviews in the past. Those guys are going to give you more of a browse mode.
They’ve already with your brand, so just understanding that that person is researching in a different way is important versus say a PPC learning page. How to learn Facebook Ads course, click onto the Facebook page course, does this look like the best guy to teach you about Facebook ads, yes, no, and then they’ll read the page.
It’s a very different mindset of the user depending on whether they’re coming from search or whether they’re coming from a more trusted referral or they’ve interacted with you in the past, or another differentiator is whether it’s just from ads or whether it is from repeat visitors as well, so people that come back every week tend to respond to different designs than if someone is just introduced to you for the first time through Google.
Andrew: Can we share those questions with the audience if they ask you for them?
Niki: Yeah, absolutely. There are about 7 or 8 and it really is just by these starters for the designers in the marketplace. Tomazo is like 99 designs just for conversion testing.
Andrew: Let me get to that in a moment. By the way, here’s what I think we should do, I’m never going to, if I can help it again, say to the audience, if you would like these questions email me because I get flooded with requests. I think the better solution and you and I talked about this before the interview, is for me to say in the comments you can see Niki’s link to these questions and everything else on his website, that way I don’t have to keep going back and forth with people via email one-on-one and the best people should end up on Niki’s website anyway right, you can’t just grab information and go, connect with Niki, go check out his website and in those comments they can see that, so we’ll add those in there.
Now I understand the first step. The next step, that is exactly what I was going to ask you now, you send my answers out, my goal, my traffic sources and all those things over to who, and you end up with a bunch of designs. Do you work with a set number of designers or are you just emailing it out and are you saying whoever wants to submit can submit?
Niki: We match people to three different conversion designers, so it’s like an eBay feedback rating system on all our designers. We know all their tests, we know that designer x has improved 100% of the time and he’s the average improvement on each design, so we’ll match people with three designers, three designers then do a different version of that page. The other important thing is that we always want to, if we don’t increase your conversion rate, we’ll give you your money back or we’ll run new tests.
We only want to get paid if in fact your conversion rate increases and the great thing about conversion rate design is it’s so admissible, so if we’re not going to bring any value, don’t pay us any money. So we end up, with our thinking in the marketplace, if we have three people the chances of you increasing your conversion rate are pretty solid in each test.
Andrew: Three different people, you’ve rate them in the past based on how they’ve performed for people, you at Tomazo will run the tests for the customer.
Niki: Yes.
Andrew: If you don’t increase their conversions you give them their money back. Increase their conversions by how much?
Niki: Positively, but usually if it’s not at least 5% then it’s too fuzzy to say whether you did increase it or not, so anything up from 5% I think is measurable. At the minimum you should be getting 5, I would say the average from testing is usually between 10 and 20 or 10 and 25% lift with all these other elements applied to the pages.
Andrew: All right. I’ve got a sense now of the process. I was going to ask you how long, but that’s not relevant because it depends on the amount of traffic, the length of time, right?
Niki: Yes. And the other important thing is that the length of time that a test will run actually depends on two things, one is just the amount of traffic you have, but number two is how different the variations perform, so if they all perform relatively similarly the tests will take a really long time. If one just completely outperforms the other variations, the test actually doesn’t take that long at all. basically, what you’re looking for is the difference in conversion. If there’s a huge difference in conversion the test doesn’t take long at all and actually doesn’t need that much traffic to prove that its design is better than the other ones.
Andrew: OK. Let me give a quick message to my audience and then I’m going to ask you a personal question that you should lie to me about, but I hope as a friend and a person who’s a fellow entrepreneur you’ll tell me the truth and I’m going to call you out on this on camera here. I’m going to ask you to do me this favor and I’ll call you up and ask you to do me this favor.
Here’s the thing I wanted to say first to the audience. If you want to see more, by see more I mean, literally look at the screen and see specifically changes that need to happen to a website and specifically look at the screen and see how they impact the site. If you’re a premium member, go to mixergy.com/premium and you will see. We did a course with Dennis of Reedge where he showed his computer screen and walks you through a process of how to increase your conversion step-by-step-by-step and he does it on his screen. Shows you videos of himself making those edits.
He does everything. This guy just went overboard with all the work that he did, but it’s good for you, you the audience because he created these videos showing step-by-step how me made these changes. He teaches you step-by-step how to make changes on your site and increase conversions. If you want it, mixergy.com/premium if you’re a premium member. If you’re not a premium member get on it all ready. Go to mixergy.com/premium and sign up. I’d love to have you join us.
All right. Are they competitive with you? Did I just give a quick mention of a competitor or no?
Niki: Ah, no, I think as I said, we’re trying to beat some of the 99 designs of conversion rate testing. Some people [??] other designers we want to connect people to the best of the conversion rate designers. So complimentary competitors . . .
Andrew: He’s actually not a designer. What he does is, he has software that will do — I should of said this clearer — what Reedge is R-E-E-D-G-E.com what they do is A-B testings. He’ll take your website after Tomazo’s done with it, with whatever their best design is, you give him the URL of your website that his best design on it and he makes it very easy for you to continue testing on your own. The initial design, I’m guessing, would be better off to come from Tomazo. You guys will actually give them the original design, right?
Niki: Yep. There’s other great tools as well like, Optimizly and Visual Website Optimizer . . .
Andrew: That’s who I think he’s competitive with, exactly, Optimizly, Visual Website Optimizer like you said. My guess is that he was so helpful here to Mixergy premium members because he wants them to understand that Reedge is out there as a competitor and that Reedge does certain things that the others don’t. Like he would actually with the software tell you where, he’ll let you serve up different ads based on how many times a person has visited your website.
Anyway, here’s the thing I’m hoping you’ll answer me. I’m determined to make these interviews better and better. As a fan, you personally and your company, Tomazo, want me to do better with this interviews. One thing that I’ve done is I started hiring researchers. Now researchers will look over all your history and they’ll give me information. They’ll tell me about things I didn’t even get a chance to ask you about. We talked about homethinking.com, but we didn’t even get to ask about StartMate, the group of start-up executives offering mentor-ship and seed financing to founders of Internet and software businesses, etc. I’ve got more research now on you than I could ever fit into an interview, which helps me do a better interview.
The next step I had in mind for improving these interviews is to do pre-interviews so that we don’t just rift here for an hour but I dig into your soul practically. Not your soul, your history and pull out the best pieces of information, the best, most actionable lessons that you learned by suffering every day through trial and error and then bring it to my audience. Now this is a new process, the thing I’m going to ask you to do is, tell me openly, how do we do with the pre-interview? What could we do better?
Niki: Firstly, I think it was a great process. Honestly to focus to have some of the backbone of the interview to hang on to as you said so you don’t wander off on tangents, it’s all very set structure. I think it’s fantastic. Any information, any podcast, any research or anything like that, the aim is to make actionable advice. I think anything to tease out exactly what people should do after this is ultimately the goal. I think pre-interview certainly helped. I didn’t do an interview without a pre-interview so I can’t compare, but I would imagine that . . .
Andrew: What about this, here’s the big concern that I have and you think you said earlier, I think you used the word “rigorous,” my concern is this you and I are friends and we worked together so I know your business and I know part of your process. I’m asking you now to do a pre-interview, does it feel excessive to you? Do you feel like, hey I got stuff to do at work here, I’m willing to commit a whole hour. First of all Andrew wants an hour, he doesn’t want to do a five minute interview the way someone else does, he’s asking me for a freakin’ hour.
Second, he wants to do it by video Skypes, I have to make my hair look good, my hair looks great today. I have to have a nice backdrop, good lighting. And in addition to all this hour with all the lighting and everything, suddenly I’m Barbara Streisand on stage in front of my fellow entrepreneurs, he’s going to ask me to do another hour with a stranger who I never met before, and pull out information in a structured way that I don’t talk this structure. Like does any of that ring a bell, you can be hones with me. I like kicks to the gut, when I’m starting something new?
Niki: I think, the way I see it, it’s an evolution from just, you know, fireside chats to almost like online education. So the way I kind of view Mixergy of where the very first interviews it was just learning from informal chats from entrepreneurs. It seems to me, this may be my wrong perception, that you’re migrating to more like an online education site, or an online education service where there’s structured learning, there’s structured insights, there’s trying to make everything as actionable as possible. So I think it certainly fits well with that, and I think as a guest, it’s an honor to be, asked to have an interview. So there’s no complaints on my side at least.
Andrew: Well I appreciate that. All right, and if you feel that I put you on the spot, but privately you feel comfortable giving me more negative feedback, I would love it, I would love it. In fact, let me say this to you. If you come up with one negative thing, I will give you a free ad on Mixergy. One negative Andrew, and you don’t have to do it now, you could do it privately, but I will anonymously reveal what you said maybe. I don’t know, whatever you feel comfortable. How does that sound? Am I putting you on the spot here?
Niki: In my mind I’m thinking, maybe an hour is a long commitment for someone. Maybe there’s like a five minute version of an interview that you can tease out. Maybe there’s something like a summary.
Andrew: You mean of the interview, the interview maybe should be shorter?
Niki: Different structures of the interview, so people who want to spend the whole hour and maybe there’s a two minute version that someone can say yes, this interview is worth listening. But I definitely may not have to listen to the whole thing to begin with. I can listen to the two minute version and then if it all sounds good then I’ll listen to the full interview.
Andrew: You know what I’ve been thinking actually. See I need simple ways to go forward, and hiring a writer to do what you just suggested, I think is too tough for me right now. Especially since I’m maniacal about making sure that everything works out well. Actually I guess it’s just with writing that I’m maniacal. But here’s what I’m thinking. I’m looking here at the pre interview notes. I and I feel the way we structure the pre interview notes it would probably be useful on it’s own as like a along form blog post if it was cleaned up a little bit and made to read more like people talk. Or maybe it could just be re-purposed as a check list that we could give people.
I tell you what, I’m going to thing about this, if anyone has any feedback they can go to Mixergy.com/contact and give me feed back on how we could do this. But I think your point is dead on right. And I appreciate that. First of all, I owe you a lot of appreciation for what you did to my site. You know your stuff, I never heard of you to be honest with you before, and I don’t know how much I would’ve trusted you before. I’m such a jerk, you just said something nice. But here’s what I’m saying. You can’t argue with numbers.
First of all you showed me numbers as you increased my results and second I feel it, everyday now since you’ve taken your designs off of my site I actually see the numbers go down. You should do that for your customers. You should say, thank you very much, boom take it off and let them feel the pain. That’s suffering. I couldn’t figure out, I said what did I do wrong, do people not like my hair, you know, you know I was letting my hair grow, is it just that they feel that I’m talking to the wrong guests because now I’m talking to different kinds of guests. I don’t know what it was, and then it occurred to me.
I looked at my traffic sources and the Tomazo wasn’t showing up any more and I said, ah-ha. That’s what it is, I forgot to change it. So that’s the best endorsement I can give you. That I suffer when you leave.
Niki: Feel the joy is how we prefer to work.
Andrew: Feel the joy when you’re there and suffer when you’re gone. Measurable, measurable decrease, and I don’t thin it’s 18% I’m feeling less. Her let me see what my numbers were. Can I look over at the numbers here, I feel like I’m maybe taking too long here. It’s significantly less since you went.
Niki: We’ll put up the before and after so that everyone can see the before and after so that everybody can see exactly the differences between the two. I’ll put up the questions if anyone else has any questions we’ll be happy to answer them in the comments as well.
Andrew: And as always, check out the site of the person you’ve been listening to. If you’ve been listing to him for an hour, you got to check out his website and see what this is about, and see maybe how he’s doing his headlines and see what the offer is on his site with the money back guarantee looks like on the site. The website is Tomazo, T-O-M-A-Z-O, for the transcribers to make sure that we get it all right in there. And thank you Niki, thanks for doing this interview.
Niki: Thank you.
Andrew: All right, and I hope you all if you watched it, and benefited from this we’ll send him a thank you note and connect with him a quick email saying, saw you on Mixergy or saw you on whatever interview site with whatever jerk who kept talking about himself in the books behind him, it’s not a mention for me to it’s not a mention for me just that you say thank you and build your relation ship with Niki. Niki, I’m going to say it first Niki, thank you so much.
Niki: Thank you.
