Andrew: This course is about increasing your conversion rate. It's led by
Dan Siroker. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Optimizely, which makes it
dramatically easier for you to improve your website through A/B testing.
Super simple, as you guys will see in this session. I'll help facilitate.
My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the Founder of Mixergy.com, where proven
founders like Dan teach.

In this session, here's a breakdown of everything that we're going to be
covering. This is everything that's in it for you. I want to call your
attention to just a couple of points here, to make sure that you pay
attention to them because I might have missed them if I were in your shoes.


First is, less is more. I'm going to put an exclamation point in front of
it. In fact, I did miss that until Dan before the interview said, "Andrew,
you've got to include that. You've got to make sure to talk about that."
Wait until you hear what he says about that. Also, the importance of
humanizing your site. Put an exclamation point next to that. Even the
Clinton/Bush people as you'll see, made a mistake there.

I want you not to make that mistake, so we'll talk about that and so much
more in this session with Dan. Now, let's go in and talk about... There it
is. To the big board. I want people to understand what's possible. Let's
start with the problem that many people have. In fact, this company right
here made that mistake.

Well, what's the mistake? Well, what's the problem and how did IGN have
that problem?

Dan: IGN is a great example of a company that's transformed from what was
traditionally known as a hippo syndrome, which is the highest paid person's
opinion, which is how decisions used to get made. They actually had an
internal decision that they wanted to make the videos link at the top of
their page, and if you scroll to the top you'll see there's a link to the
videos page. They wanted to make that more prominent.

Andrew: There it is.

Dan: It's the upper right there. They make a lot of money from video ads,
they have a lot of traffic there. What they found, and what they eventually
would have really hurt themselves with, was they wanted to move that link
to the far left and make it much more prominent. Change the visual
experience of that, make it a bit more standout.

What they realized, is actually after they made that move, that reduced the
click-through rate of that link by 92%. 92% fewer people were clicking on
the videos link, which meant 92% of people were less likely to watch a
video, which meant 92% of people were less likely to watch a video ad,
which is where they make a lot of revenue.

This is a sort of cautionary tale that says that these kinds of changes,
that in the past might have been made by the guy with the most grey hairs
in the room, should really actually be tested. You can do a lot to improve
your website by taking a data driven approach to these kind of decisions.

Andrew: I see. You would think that taking that little video link, I could
barely see it even though I prepared this. I put it up on my site.

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: I don't know if people can see it. It's over in the upper right,
little tiny thing. When they made that more prominent, it cut down the
number of clicks. What you're saying is, you just can't predict this stuff.


Dan: Yeah. This is also the kind of thing that in hindsight, they actually
kind of understood. The reality is, most of their traffic was returning
visitors. Returning visitors were used to where things were before. They
would actually gravitate to that.

The first thing they'd do when they'd come to IGN.com is to click on that
link, and because it's not there anymore, and because their audience is
pretty fickle, they're not going to go scanning around looking for where
this new link is. It's, oh, I guess the videos are no longer on the site,
hit the back button, and go back to Facebook.

Andrew: I see. That's an example of what's possible if we don't do what
we'll be talking about in this session. Let's talk about the good thing.
That if we do listen to everything that you and I are going to be talking
about, in fact, everything that you talk about, what is possible? The
example that you want to talk about is one that you experienced before you
launched Optimizely.

This is you, right? There it is. You're up there, upper right.

Dan: That's our team. Yeah. That's our team. Yep.

Andrew: That's your team when you were working for Obama. What happened
there? What were you able to do?

Dan: In 2008, I joined the Obama campaign as the Director of Analytics,
where my mission was really to try to use the data that we had to make
better decisions. In that, we did a lot of A/B testing, a lot of website
optimization. We got a lot of value out of it. We were able to raise an
additional $100 million in donations directly through the website, through
our optimization efforts. It made it very clear to me that there's a lot of
value that you can get out of A/B testing, but you constantly had this
bottleneck of requiring an engineer to be involved. We had used several
products available at the time and none of them were simple enough for a
marketer, for a non-technical, for a product manager or for an
entrepreneur. That's really the original inspiration for Optimizely. We're
trying to build the product I wish we had in 2008 to make it easy for
anybody to do A/B testing.

Andrew: Do you have an example of one thing that you were able to do
especially well back when you worked for Obama because you knew how to do
A/B testing that our audience might be able to get similar results if they
listen?

Dan: We actually worked pretty hard on understanding the entire funnel, so
we saw that a lot of people were banding on our Splash page, but weren't
signed up for our email list. That was a shame because we did a great job
of raising money from people who were on our email list. We actually ran an
experiment where we improved the signup rate by changing the button to say
"Learn More," and we actually removed the videos. We actually assumed the
videos on our page helped, turns out they hurt performance quite a bit. We
changed to [??] picture of the family image of Barack and Michelle and
Sasha and Malia and, in doing that, that was able to increase the signup
rate by 40 percent, which after we ran the experiment, we looked at the
impact throughout the rest of the campaign. That translated into hundreds
of thousands of more volunteers who came from those email addresses [??]
and more dollars and really had a tangible impact on the rest of the [??].

Andrew: Of course, today both candidates who are running for president, as
I saw on CNN when it came on, both of them, their campaigns are using
Optimizely to make sure that they optimize their sites and increase their
conversions. Your software is now being used by both sides.

Dan: Not only political campaigns. We actually have over 2000 enterprises
using us, including Starbucks, Crate & Barrel, eBay and a bunch of other
businesses we're really thrilled to be using our product.

Andrew: Let's go to the Big Board and see what people can learn based on
your experience. Everything that you learned by helping the Obama campaign,
by helping Starbucks and other candidates, we're going to condense and
we're going to bring it to the audience. First big idea is, Words Matter.
You say?

Dan: Words matter. They really do matter. This is a lesson that surprised
me time and time again, the impact of just a simple word change from one
word to two words or focusing on the actual verbs of what you want somebody
to do when it comes to your website and that by actually testing that and
understanding that you can get a much better sense for what's effective at
convincing somebody to take some action on your website.

Andrew: For example, this site, what were they able to do with that
understanding, Live Chat?

Dan: Live Chat Inc. is a startup and they actually ran an experiment using
Optimizely to try to get more people to click on that big orange button.
They started off with what most startups have on their website, which it
says, "Free Trial." Everything else is the same, it says, "Free Trial, 14
days. No credit card required." They ran an experiment where they changed
the two words, the words "Free Trial" to "Try it Free," which is what it
says today. In this case, the improvement they saw was a 15 percent lift in
clicks, a 15 percent lift in signups and a much more effective way of
getting people to actually follow through on their funnel. This is an
interesting lesson here, which is you can generalize this to say, if you
want somebody to do something on your website, tell them to do it. 'Try it
free' is a verb, it's like a sentence. You're telling them, 'Try it free.
Just do it. Click it.' 'Free Trial,' you're not telling them what to do.
That was a very interesting insight for this example.

Andrew: People from the Mixergy audience submitted their websites so that
we could learn how to apply these ideas to actual sites. Here's one called
Content Spree. What would they do, based on what you just taught?

Dan: Content Spree's actually a pretty good website. I think they have an
opportunity here to actually improve the effectiveness of the two buttons
down there on the left-hand side. It takes awhile to understand what they
do, it seems like it's a marketplace for content and they have two
different audiences here. What I would recommend to them is actually try
different calls to action that reduce the barrier to actually engaging with
their product. For example, the "Start a Project" call to action feels like
a big investment of one's time. To start a project sounds like you're going
to have to go through lots of steps afterwards. But if you actually click
it you realize it's just a simple form afterwards. It turns out it actually
seems like you can do it right away and just sort of start it for free. I
would actually change that to, or test various versions of that button.
Even as simple as, you know, get writing help free. Or get started today.
Something that's much lighter weight, doesn't feel like you're investing a
lot of time. And is a simple way for people to understand whether that
button is for them or not. Given that they have two different audiences.

Andrew: What about the idea that there are two, in fact let me bring this
page back up, the idea that there are two calls to action here and the
video. How do you feel about having a button that says find work and one
that says start a project? Should it be unified?

Dan: I think it's a challenge. I think part of it is that you're asking a
lot of the visitor to your website. You're asking them to understand what
you do as a business which is already in and of itself ambiguous. The other
thing is you're asking them to self identify which of the things you want
from that business. In this case are you looking to find work or are you
looking to actually get people to be a freelance writer for you?

I would actually suggest actually having two separate landing pages. Don't
actually force the issue on the home page. Have a landing page that's
entirely tailored to the experience of a potential write who's a
freelancer. And have a website that's tailored entirely to the business
that wants to hire that. If you frame it in those two different personas
you can do a much better job of actually determining what's the best thing
to show a person on that particular page and have one clear call to action.

Andrew: OK, another site here from a viewer is Libertyville Dental
Associates. What do you recommend for them? Let me zoom in.

Dan: Fortunately, Libertyville Dental Associates has a lot of room for
improvement. Their website feels very much like a yellow pages listing.
Which might work well in the yellow pages but doesn't translate well
online. The lesson here is words matter. If you look at the main call to
action at the top it seems like what they really want you to do is to give
them a phone call. It's unclear because you don't see that right away but
they have their phone number at two different places. There's no real other
conversion event besides a phone call. I think what they actually really
need to do is focus on telling people to call them. Having just a simple
call to action that says call us today for a consultation. Or special deals
if you call this week.

Give a reason to make a phone call and then tell people you want them to do
that. Then make it very clear what the phone number is. The tag at the top
there that says only $2,995 actually feels almost like an error or a
warning. It comes up in a yellow box with red text which isn't really
welcoming. It's not a call to action. Again, you're saying what it is and
not telling people what you want them to do.

Andrew: I see, OK. Emphasize a call to action. Use simple, clear language
to express it. We saw that here. The call to action is the phone number but
it's really small. And we see it in this page. Let's do one other one,
quickly, from the audience and then we'll move on to the next big idea.
This is What Does Your Start Up Do, how can they make it simpler?

Dan: This one I really enjoy because my biggest question when I came to
this website is what does this start up do? It seems like what they
actually do is they help your conversions by creating a video. I do think
they have an opportunity to improve the language on this page. The first
big red flag to me is the fact that I think it has basically four question
marks in the page right now. There's the big tagging at the left. There's
the play question mark. Does your start up need a video question mark. What
does your start up do question mark. Just from a sort of gestalt or the
immediate reaction a visitor has coming to a website, having a bunch of
question marks is not the most confidence inspiring reaction you get.
Because you end up having more questions in your head than answers.

I would recommend, actually, making it very clear what they're doing. In
fact I think the more important thing here is that first sentence at the
top. Boost your conversions with video. In some ways I think part of the
challenge here is the name of their business is WDYSD, which stands for
What Does Your Start Up Do. At the end of the day I would highly recommend
removing the question marks and then focusing their call to action on what
they have right now, which is good. Boost your conversions with video,
which is very benefit oriented and a clear description of what they offer.

Andrew: OK. Great feedback. Let's go on to the big board. The next one is
you want us to focus on the call to action. Let me see where my notes are
on that. There we go. Test differently out of focus on the call to action,
explore before you refine. And you have an example from this site, ABC
Family. Their new video page increased engagement but how much?

Dan: By 600%. So they learned a lot using optimizing on this page. They
realized that what might work well in traditional media, on ABC Family, the
television network, doesn't necessarily translate well online. And so they
ran several experiments and one of the things they learned was that what
people were actually looking for when they come to their website is to
catch up on episodes they've missed in the past. They're not looking for an
all new show they hadn't seen before. And so that's one of the things they
tested and were actually able to dramatically improve engagement.

You can see there at the top, they say shows, watch, schedule, all of those
things are new based off of what they realized from looking at the behavior
people exhibited on their site, is that people are looking, you can
actually if you moused over that there is a direct it's sort of a
navigational hierarchy, find the show you're looking for, watch the entire
episode of what you want and in some ways actually, one of the more
interesting lessons learned here is that it kind of went counter to one of
the things I shared earlier.

Earlier I told you if you want somebody to do something, tell them to do
it. They actually ran an experiment, separate from this experiment that had
this 600% increase, they ran a separate experiment, where all they tested
was the phrase full episodes versus watch episodes and my gut would have
said that watch episodes would have actually performed better but as it
turns out because people just wanted to get the full episode that they
hadn't seen before the phrase full episodes increased the click rate by
10%, they increased the view through rate by 10% and for them, most
importantly, increased the number of ads they showed during the television
show by 10%.

Andrew: Sorry, actually, that part I didn't get. So what you're saying if
full episodes increased, why is it that when I am looking at the site right
now, why doesn't it have a button for full episodes right now?

Dan: This is lower on the page. This is if you go to this particular
episode.

Andrew: Oh, I see.

Dan: See it says full episode right there. In the past it said watch
episodes and, again, this is another thing that was really surprising the
impact of the seemingly small change. What it really resonated with was the
fact that the words you use need to match what the people are looking for
on your site. And the better you can do trying to describe and show what
people are looking for the more effective you are going to be at converting
them into visitors and into customers.

Andrew: By the way, you have ABC Family as a client?

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: They increased they're conversions or their engagement by that much
or by using Optimizely?

Dan: Yes. And they have been very generous, we get free trips to Disneyland
whenever we go down to LA.

Andrew: Really?

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: Wow. All right, let's go on to a future success story. Help Juice,
doing very well, he wants to know what he can do based on what you just
said, testing layout and focusing on the call to action. Let me zoom out,
so that we can see his page a little bit better. This is what the site is.

Dan: So in this case, their website is pretty good. I think they tried to
make an emphasis on the start your 30 day free trial. I think the bigger
lesson that I want to impart with this particular website is to sort of
expand before you refine. Which is the idea that if you just take your
existing website and make small changes to it, small tweaks, you'll really
only get to a local maximum and I think this website has an opportunity to
expand, basically try dramatically different layouts, figure out the bigger
sort of macro design and user experience that sort of works the best and
then once you've expanded then you can refine and then you can take small
changes and sort of incrementally get better.

And in doing that, you really explore the entire solution space and have a
better understanding at what works best for converting your visitors into
customers. In this case it looks like they have an opportunity, they have a
very visual website, I think they have an opportunity to change the layout
pretty dramatically, I would recommend rearranging the page, maybe focusing
on making the customers and testimonials more prominent. And actually just
removing the screen shots and just giving one clear call to action. And
really this is a good opportunity, you have good content, move it around,
change the layout, and see what works best, then start refining.

Andrew: I was going to ask you what's an easy way to do all that and, of
course, it's Optimizely. Because when I submitted my site to you, and we'll
see my site later on in the program, my concern was, I don't want Dan
telling me to do all this work that I could never get done because I have
all this other stuff to do. I'd like to increase my conversion rate, but I
also have to take care of my customers, make sure they're happy. I also
have to take care of my employees. There are all these other things to do,
and I was asking, what's a simple way to do it?

Actually, usually using Optimizely, we could move stuff around very easily
and make these adjustments. In Emil's case of Helpjuice, if you're telling
him to change the whole site, where can you get other templates that he can
get to try out different designs? Is there a place he can go where you can
just keep going through a bunch of different designs and seeing which one
works, and then use Optimizely to optimize it?

Dan: Yeah. There are a couple options. In fact, in this case the hard part
is actually generating the content in the first place and being able to
actually have good visual and text content to use. Just removing and moving
things around in Optimizely, and I'll show this later, is actually very
easy.

It's a question of coming up with those ideas for what to move around. One
thing that you can do, in fact, we're doing this today with the Optimizely
homepage, is to go to 99designs and submit your homepage for a contest to
have people sort of come up with new ideas for it. In that, you actually
can get a really good idea of some just dramatically different layouts.

The folks on 99designs are actually quite good at helping you think outside
the box, because one of the biggest challenges businesses have is they get
too invested with their existing solution. So, they don't really think sort
of laterally around, what are the different options out there? So, that's a
great source for inspiration.

Andrew: I see. All right. That's where you guys are going at Optimizely.

Dan: We're doing it today. The Optimizely homepage is up for redesign on
99designs right now.

Andrew: Cool. I've got it up on the screen because we're going to be
talking about them, I think, later on. All right. On to the big board. This
is the one that I butchered, and you saw the board and you said, "Hey,
wait. Before we even start, fix that." Saying less is more, get rid of
text, images, or even field-on forms that will improve your bottom line.
Sorry, or even field-on forms, it will improve your bottom line.

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: You gave us an example of this company. Let me bring that company
up and show it to the audience. There it is. What is this site, and how did
they do that?

Dan: I think this will really resonate with your audience, because this is
a great example of how something in the past would have been decided using
the Hitler Syndrome. That was actually something they were actually able to
improve using basically a simple experiment.

First, let me explain what they do. They're purpose is, it's a start-up in
the Northeast that helps people report issues in the neighborhood and then
the city comes in and fixes them. They have a pretty small team. They've
built this really interactive, dynamic map that every time somebody reports
an issue, it jumps around on the map and shows you where those things are.

This is the kind of thing engineers got really excited about, because, oh,
this is a cool visual way to show what we do. In fact, they wanted to try
to prove that this was a good idea, and so they said, "All right. Let's
just compare it to a simple boiler plate, simple sentence with a simple
form field."

It turns out, they were really surprised to find what you're showing us
today, improved engagement over this thing that they had built by 8%. It
actually improved it. What they thought would have actually been much worse
than what they actually built, turns out to be better than what they would
have spent a ton of time creating.

The lesson really here is less is more. It's tempting to want to fill up
your site with a lot of interactive, dynamic, fast-moving content, but at
the end of the day, you're competing just like everyone else is with the
visitor's back button.

If they come to your website and they don't know what you're doing, and
they don't understand what they need to do when they come to your website,
they're going to hit back and move on to the next thing that they're doing.
This is a great example of less is more.

Andrew: That's a problem that I often have. If I feel that anyone might be
confused, I add text to explain it.

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: Then, if I feel like that's too much, then I call attention to that
text somehow. What you're saying is, "Dude, just cut it out. See if you can
shorten it." This is really simple. This is almost like a Google homepage.

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: It's that simple.

Dan: Maybe it is because it sort of resembles a Google homepage, people are
actually used to this design so they get comfortable with it.

Andrew: All right. Let's take a look at one of our members who submitted a
site. This is Petro Vera. This is not their homepage, but where the form
that they want people to use when they request a quote. What do you think
of this?

Dan: This is an interesting site. I do think that a couple small things
they can do is, you know, in this particular forum, you get two by clicking
offers from their homepage. I do think that, actually, if they made this
forum, a light box that appeared on every other page where they linked to
them, they're also going to be more likely to get people to fill it out.
But, in mind with a certain tactic here, that less is more, as much as you
can, reduce the number of fields on this form. It's shocking how directly
it correlates, the number of form fields on a form, and the conversion rate
of people filling out that form. Especially anything that's optional.

Unless you really need it on your form, there's no benefit to you, and
you're only reducing the number of people who fill out that form. If there
are things that are really critical, the best solution is to split them up
into multiple steps, because people...psychologically, once they've
finished the entire step, they're much more likely to follow through than
if they fill out half a form. They're much more likely to abandon it than
if they filled out one page of multi-step process. You can look at Survey
Monkey as a great example of that.

Andrew: This is the homepage. You're saying, as soon as they click the free
price quote, you suggest that this pops up on the page and...How do you
know what...I guess I know how to cut back. It's hard to say when it's your
own company, but in this case, ask for the phone number, ask for the name.
You don't even need to know the best time to call, you can figure that out
later. The budget, you can talk to them on the phone and ask about that.

Dan: All right. And this is the kind of thing, too, that if you're having
trouble coping with having to remove form fields, just tell yourself, "I'm
just going to run a simple experiment. Let's just deal with the trade-off.
Let's run 20% of our topic. Give them a form without a bunch of these
fields and see how that affects your conversion rate. If you realize that
you've doubled your conversion rate, it's going to be much more palatable
to you to say, "Well, let's nix the fields we don't need."

Andrew: All right. Here's another person...oh, it didn't come up. Let's
move on to this one. It's probably because I was trying to bring up too
many tabs at once, as you can see on the screen. Let's go to this one fore
now: restaurantengine.com. What do you think of that?

Dan: So, they have a great website. Good, clear action; good [xx] on the
top. It's immediately clear what they do. The recommendation that I have to
them is to focus on what they are actually doing really well, which is this
cold action [SP] at the top. If you scroll down, you actually realize this
page is pretty gigantic, they've got a lot of stuff going on. They have a
bunch of texts down below, and I would love to see the impact of running a
simple experiment where they just compare what they have today with just,
maybe the [xx] image at the top, and that's it at all, and see how that
impacts the number of people who convert on start your website.

Andrew: So, you're saying to get rid of the testimonials, maybe get rid of
the powerful website features, maybe get rid of the integrated social
media, all that just to have... [SS]

Dan: It's very easy to test. Exactly. Very easy to test. I think their
video does a good job of explaining what they do, all your going to do is,
by having people scroll down, all your going to do is have it more likely
that people will not come back to the top and actually take the callback
one. Just to see if that works. I think there are, you know, it's nice they
have a call to action at the very bottom, that might be an encouraging way
to get people to convert, but again, it's surprising to see...I'm sure they
put a lot of work into this website, because it looks really beautiful, but
you need to be willing to accept that, sometimes, less is more, and you'd
be more effective at turning visitors into customers if you nix things on
the range.

Andrew: OK. And it looks like the other sites are dirtydog [SP], but for
some reason, it's not coming up right now. So, let's go on with this right
now. Anything else on this topic, before we move on to the next big idea?

Dan: I think the last thing I'll say about this topic is that "less is
more" is universally applicable, not just to form fields, but to design, to
visual interface, to everything that's on your website. If you think about
the trade-off between having something on your website and having something
you want to click...if you want somebody to click something on your
website, just get rid of the thing that's not what you want to click.
They're more likely to click on the thing you want.

Andrew: I was just on with Jake[SP], and of course your camera, for some
reason, on my screen just keep adjusting, so [??]

Dan: I think it wants to go widescreen so you can see our beautiful new
office behind me.

Andrew: Yeah, congratulations on the new office.

Dan: Thanks. Yeah, we just moved to the top floor of a new building down
here. It's an old building, but a new office. [??].

Andrew: Let me pan around, just a little bit here, using my
technology...see if it works. There, I'm looking over your shoulder.

Dan: That's a beautifully optimized [??], and you can see on the other side
we've got our [??]...

Andrew: There you go.

Dan: ...Our nice little lounge area.

Andrew: You guys are just crushing it. I don't know what I can say about
how big you got, especially compared to competitors. This won't go up
today, so is there something you can say about how big you are?

Dan: Sure, yeah. We're thrilled to announce that we very recently...there
it goes again, widescreen again...we're really thrilled...

Andrew: You're going to have to keep working with that, like me. Now it's
time to just stick with CNN...

Dan: We're thrilled to announce that we recently surpassed Google Website
Optimizer. Now, we're the fastest growing A/B testing tool in the world and
this is according to BuiltWith, which is a service that surveys the top ten
[??] websites, which is really exciting for us because, as I mentioned in
the introduction, we had used Google Website Optimizer in the Obama
campaign and constantly had this pain point of requiring a developer to be
involved, of requiring some engineer to actually create the experiments.
Now that we've actually gotten into a market that was originally really
started in Google and evangelized this A/B testing for the masses, in most
startups that you probably talk to, like three or four [??], Google will
get into their market and crush them. We did the opposite. We joined a
market that Google was already in and now we've beaten them. Today we're
announcing we raised another round of funding to go after [??] and we're
really excited to become the largest website optimization platform in the
world.

Andrew: Congratulations. In such a short period of time, too. On to the big
board and let's get more people improving their conversions based on what
you've learned. Next big idea is, Modernize Your Design. This is where the
site that I brought up earlier comes in. Modernize your design so it
doesn't look like it's from the 80s and you say put it on 99 Designs, which
I showed earlier. Have you bought anything from 99 Designs yet? Let me
bring them up.

Dan: We did. Our original logo came from 99Designs. The one that we use
today, that's on our homepage, and our original homepage design came from
99. We've since redesigned it several times and we've optimized it as well,
but we're big fans of 99 Designs. It's a relatively inexpensive way for you
to get a lot of creative input and for those who aren't familiar with the
model, you as a business or as a website can put your website or logo up
for a contest and people around the world will compete to try to improve
the design of your website. You only pay when you find a design you like
and you want to use it. It's a great way to outsource a design and bring
your website up to a modern look and feel people have been accustomed to.

Andrew: I understand the bigger point, but what I'm curious about is why
you specifically say 99Designs. I wanted to see if you guys had a
relationship with them. There's no affiliate connection there, there's no
relationship, as far as I can tell.

Dan: The co-founder of 99Designs is an adviser to the company, but we
certainly don't get any kickbacks for sending customers his way.

Andrew: Let's bring up someone's site from the audience. I hate to do this,
but this is the example that you came up with. What are you [??] on their
site?

Dan: They had a lot of things going for them, but the biggest challenge on
this website is the reaction people will get looking at this when they're
used to seeing sites like the restaurant site you showed earlier where
there's a very clear compelling call to action, a greater visual, very
clear this is for the iPhone, this is for the laptop. I think that the
design of this, it lacks. I'm not a professional designer but I think the
colors are definitely dated. The layout, there's tons of text. Even the
small things, if you see that free seven day trial badge over there, the
background of that is white, but the background of the page is a slightly
darker gray. Small things like that can have a big psychological impact on
the way people perceive how serious you are as a business. I would
recommend, this is an example of where it makes sense to go from the
beginning and have 99 Designs, or any other contractor, designer you want
take a fresh stab and try to improve the visual design of this page.

Andrew: I'm not sure people can see this so I'll give them the website.
It's HireYourVirtualAssistant.com where you can see this. Fair point.
Anything else on this topic before we go on to the big board and the camera
again. Here we go. Take it around your office.

Dan: That sounds great. I do think it's something that most websites
probably can get a lot of value from, so it's no harm in putting up a
contest.

Andrew: Next big idea, Quit Wasting Prime Real Estate. We are wasting prime
real estate? Tell your user what you want them to do right away. Anything
else is distracting and taking away from prime real estate.

Dan: That's right. This is the thing. There is this notion of above the
fold on a website and I wouldn't overemphasize the idea of above the fold.
You don't need to put everything you want somebody to do on the top of your
site, but I do think that actually being very ruthless with every square
inch of the top part of your site will pay dividends to you. And you can
look at a company like Amazon, they actually optimize per dollar per square
inch of their site. And they know that the real estate at the top of their
site in terms of the opportunity of dollar per square inch is very, very
high. And so they put the things that maximize the value to them as a
business, recommendation, other products people liked, who's looking at
this, all at the top of their site because they know that's the most likely
place people will look when they come to your site.

Andrew: And a good example of that that you gave us earlier is Shopify
[sp].

Dan: Yes, Shopify does a great, great job of this. Shopify gives you
everything you need to know about them in a clear, unambiguous language,
with a clear call to action. They're telling people what you want them to
do. Create your eCommerce store today with Shopify. They give you a form to
do it right away, you don't have to click to a separate page, there's a
video if you want a quick introduction, it's tremendous. And the nice thing
about how they've done this is they've then visually separate that,
everything you need to know about Shopify at the top with the rest of the
page where you can get additional information.

So if you scroll down you can still get more, you can get detailed
information, you can validation that they're in big publications, you can
get a little bit of testimonial quotes, but you never need to scroll down.
My guess is if they did the numbers on this and looked, probably a sizable
percentage of their customer's today might have never scrolled down on
their homepage and they sign up right from the home page, got started and
all they need to know is directly about the fold. So the lesson is really
to maximize the value of your real estate.

Andrew: I'm going to say, on my screen though, I love Shopify but I'm
surprised that the questions button is right above the button for create
your own store.

Dan: That's true.

Andrew: Had you noticed that?

Dan: I hadn't noticed but that's definitely a bad thing for them to do.

Andrew: I wonder if it's just the screen that I'm using right now because I
have never noticed that before. All right, but their using their real
estate properly because everything that you need is basically, your telling
me, is above the fold, I don't have to scroll to do anything.

Dan: That's exactly right.

Andrew: All right. Let's take a look at someone from our audience and see
how they do it. What do you think of this site? Barefoot Wallets.

Dan: They have a cool product and they are a sort of traditional eCommerce
company and they don't really tell people what you want them to do. You
come to this page and you have a sense of what they do but you don't really
know what their selling, and it's a real shame because their logo takes up
probably 25% at the top of the page, they have this hero quick nab that's
been through a bunch of different products but there's not real call to
action. There's no 'Hey, learn more about why our Barefoot Wallets are
better than traditional wallets'. Whatever it is that makes them unique
doesn't come across on the first thing you see when you come to their page.


And so, here I think they have an opportunity, again this sort of fits in
with less is more, just feature one of your most popular products on your
homepage, explain why it's valuable, get somebody to engage with your
website, click on that, learn more and then from that you can get people to
look at other products on your site. It's overwhelming to see all of these
things going through so fast and my guess is that the vast majority of the
people who visit this website hit the back button and go back to where they
came from.

Andrew: All right. Back to the big board, let me bring it up here. There it
is. Next big idea is show off benefits before you sell because customers
want to know what's in it for them. Benefits, benefits, benefits, I keep
hearing that. You got an example of someone who does that well. Let me
bring them up here, who are these guys and why do they do it well?

Dan: New Relic is a great company. They offer application performance
management. And you wouldn't know that from their homepage, which is
actually OK, because what they're actually selling on their homepage is the
solution, it's the benefit. The real benefit is what's in the small text
there, a slow app can kill your business, New Relic shows you what to fix.
That's the most compelling benefit but what they realize is who they're
selling to is mostly engineers, they're IT guys, they're people who don't
want to be sold to and so they actually get around, actually frankly they
can convince people as one of their benefits is hey, just try New Relic and
you'll get a free T-shirt and their T-shirts pretty cool, it says data nerd
and you can actually wear it around as a sort of badge of honor and that, I
think, is a very compelling way to sell their product because they don't
come up, they've created a new category, application parts management, APM.


The way they sell their business to investors is probably very different
than the way they sell to customers and I think that's smart because you
come to this website, you immediately see a benefit, well I get a free T-
shirt, that's a benefit, and the more you think about, you know what, a
slow app could kill my business, let me learn more and engage with what
they do. And so they have a tremendously high conversion rate on this,
their new rocker customer's of ours and we're new customers of theirs and I
think they've done a tremendous job of really convincing people what their
benefits are directly on their homepage.

Andrew: Would you say in their case that they should explain what the
product is somewhere up higher than this section right here, a slow app can
kill your business, (?) shows you how to fix it?

Dan: I do think making that more prominent is something that they should
probably consider. I do think the bigger lesson here is not so much that
they made that less prominent than the free T-shirt because I'm sure they
actually doing the numbers, I'm sure they found that offering a free T-
shirt does a tremendous job of getting people to convert but part of the
biggest benefit and the biggest reason to learn something from this is that
this is a benefit, this isn't a feature. They aren't talking about oh yeah
we have cool graphs and time series data and we monitor ever sequel command
that your back end does, they're talking about the benefit. The benefit is
we will make sure that you can understand and fix a slow app because a slow
app can kill your business. That's really, really important.

Andrew: All right, and one of our users sent over this site,
EasyJuiceRecipes.com and actually, this I think is the page that leads to
this form, and this is the form that they want help with.

Dan: So and I think in your question you sort of, you've given away the
challenge here. Is this page it's not really clear what the benefit is, you
don't really know what they're selling. And I think it's admirable that
they've taken the web 1.0 blink tag and transformed it into the web 2.0
aero-blink tag, and I think that definitely attracts people's attention to
the form. But the reality is I think they are trying to get away with
gimmicks and tricks that tries to convince somebody to actually fill out
their name and email address but the more effective way to do this is just
convincing them the benefits of doing so.

And once somebody psychologically agrees that the benefits are something
that they want, they'll do whatever they need to fill out the form and
submit. So here, I think they can get rid of a lot of the stuff on the
website, maybe even get rid of those arrows, focus on what they're actually
offering as a benefit to the person who is actually signing up and I think
that will dramatically improve the conversion rate on this page.

Andrew: All right, and a benefit that is, let's read this, discover how to
easily make more than 100 delicious and nutritious fruit and vegetable
juices without the hassle of flipping through countless books and magazines
and websites. So is this enough of a benefit that if they made it more
prominent and didn't have the arrow that you'd be happy with it?

Dan: I would say they could improve that by saying make 100's of delicious
and nutritious fruit juices. Get people hooked, get them to understand too
is this even the right page for me. Once they read that I think chances are
people are more likely to read that than that full on big sentences and
once they've read that you can baby step them into the other benefits of
well, actually the big benefit is now you don't have to flip through all
these old countless books and catalogs, you can do something that
traditionally would have taken you a long time you can do it much more
quickly but the challenge of having so much text there, it's much more
challenging to get somebody actually go through and read this whole big
paragraph.

Andrew: So again, it's also less is more, that less text will get more
people to understand what the message is here?

Dan: That's exactly right.

Andrew: All right, on to the big board and the next big idea is humanize
your site. Humanize your site to increase rapport with visitors, be more
visual. And you've got an example of someone who learned to do that well,
let me bring up that site. Now actually this is my second time coming on
this site, actually more than second time, I remember the first time it was
different and I've got a screen shot of what that looks like. Should I
bring that up or do you want to see this?

Dan: This is great and I can talk about what they've done because they're
one of our first big customers after the earthquake in Haiti and in fact
they weren't really customers, we worked with them pro bono, but they were
able to actually dramatically improve the effectiveness of their
fundraising online by really focusing on humanizing what they were doing.
And they ran a series of experiments after the earthquake in Haiti to try
to increase the amount of money they were able to raise for Haiti in
relief. They started off, and they have actually changed their layout quite
a bit, they started off with a really simple donation page, a page that
just had a form, a bunch of form fields, some text and description and just
by adding an image of relief workers working in Haiti they were able to
improve the dollars per visitor, which is the average amount of money they
raised per person coming to their website by 8%. So it's 8% more money
they're raising for every visitor to their site, just by adding a picture
that humanizes what they do online.

Andrew: Here's an example of what I saw then. This is what you see when you
go in for the first time or if you use incognito on Chrome and, again, it
says, 'Donate now,' but there's also a picture of a woman who I'm guessing
is a worker there? Am I right? This is an example of what you're talking
about?

Dan: This particular image might be different, but I think this is a
perfect example of showing what you're actually doing by helping thousands
of [??] rebuild, you actually see the face of the person, either the relief
worker or the person you're helping directly. By humanizing it, even just
by putting a human face on it, I think there's a psychological response
people have, especially when what you're offering is a very human thing.
Here they're not offering a cool new gizmo or gadget, what they're offering
you is to help another human being. By humanizing your site, you'll be much
more effective at getting somebody to connect with that message and then
convert into a donor.

Andrew: I think I saw it one other place. I saw it a couple of places on
the site, but this might be another example of it. Let's see if I can bring
it up here. Basically, when you hit the Donate button, there is, as you
said, a form and also a photo of one of the workers at the top. I've got so
many browser tabs up. Actually, when I opened them up in preparation for
this session, Chrome said, "Are you sure you want to open up all these?" I
had to say, "Yeah. I think I am." Let's see what happens. Loaded. Thank
you, Chrome. "Each dollar you donate today will help to further sustain
economic development in Haiti." [??]. When you say humanize, you say bring
the person in who you're talking about.

Dan: Exactly. It makes a tremendous impact and, in this case, for the
Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, it made a huge impact, but even for businesses
that don't support or do these noble, charitable causes, having a human
face to what you do online really connects with visitors to your website.

Andrew: We even found that in courses, the usual way to do this stuff is to
not have video and I can understand why. Video's a big pain. There's a lot
there to keep track of, different video cameras, which sometimes do the
thing that today our cameras are doing. Also, there's a lot of movement,
but what I found is when we just show the face of the person who's
teaching, the audience likes the session better. They connect with it
better, they remember it more. As much of a pain as it is, we decided to
keep it in.

Dan: I'm flattered. I'll take that as a [??] to say that my face has a high
conversion rate. Thank you.

Andrew: It's [??] more than mine. Let's do that. Going over to someone from
our audience, this is a site that we got from one of our viewers, one of
the fans at Mixergy. It's Wealth Care for Women and your advice for this
site is what?

Dan: It's humanize it. This is a perfect example. In fact, I think [??] the
opposite here. This is Wealth Care for Women. It's personal, financial
advice for divorcees, widows and other independent women. If you take a
look at this picture, you see a picture of a man. You see the guy in the
bottom right hand corner, the About plaque [SP], nothing against him, but
if this is Wealth Care for Women, the first thing you should see is a
picture of a woman, not a picture of Russ over in Atlanta. This is a great
example of really trying to understand what somebody is looking for on your
website and trying to connect with them on a very human level. By
humanizing this website, it'll be much more effective at connecting with
its audience.

Andrew: That makes perfect sense, especially seeing what this site did.
Absolutely. Just a photo of a woman here who's helped, up at the top. On to
the big board. Let me make sure that I increase my own conversions here.
Now, the big board. Clarify what you're signing up for, is what you're
saying. Clarify what they're signing up for. This site.

Dan: I definitely think that site resonates well with that call to action.
I'm going to show you the experience of creating an experiment using
Optimizely and really try to bring home the point I made earlier that
Optimizely's designed for anybody, not just for engineers or technical
folks. I'm going to show you the full experience. To get started you go to
Optimizely.com and enter the URL you want to test into our homepage. When
you do that, that will load Optimizely's visual editor where you can
actually see the page directly in context with our tool.

At the top, we have controls to manage the experiment and below we have the
site that you want to optimize. In this case, this is a sign up form to
confirm your email address, if you want to subscribe to Mixergy. As I move
my mouse around, you can see there are different parts of the page that got
highlighted and if I click on any part of the page, I can actually make
changes to them. Here, I'm going to click on "Confirm your email to listen
in," and I get a series of options. In this case, I'm just going to, I say,
"Edit element. Edit text," and say, "Join the community of founders" and
have a slightly different call to action, in this case, a call to action
that might resonate to what people are looking for in your community and
the fact that they're looking to hear from founders, and with just a simple
click of my mouse, I can create a variation of my website. I can quickly
compare it to the original page and I'm up and running.

If I want to actually start this experiment, now, in less than 60 seconds,
all I need to do is copy and paste this one line of JavaScript to my
website. This line of JavaScript never changes and it's unique to your
account, so once it's on your site, you never have to go back and pull it
off and re-implement it and re-instrument your site, which is a great way
for non-technical people to get this up and running and then drive the
process after that. This is how ABC and Starbucks and SalesForce is able to
actually give the power of testing directly to marketing, directly to
product management without requiring IT to be part of the process every
step of the way. I'm going to show you a couple more examples of some
things you can do. I'm going to create a couple of variations.

Andrew: Specifically, what would you suggest that I do with this site?

Dan: The first thing that comes to mind is the smallest sentence here that
says, "Don't worry. If we spam, our founders would kick our butts before
you do," and then this little No Spam icon. What I found, we've worked with
over 2000 customers who had over 60,000 experiments run through Optimizely,
any time that refers saying you're not going to do something, or don't
worry about the thing, the first thing people do is worry about that thing.
By saying you're not going to spam them, the first thing I'm worried about
is, you're going to spam me. What I would suggest is, using Optimizely you
can click on this image and say, "Edit Element," and say "Change Image." I
happen to have an image on my desktop that might actually work a bit
better.

In this case, this image that was on my desktop is a simple image, very
similar to your old image except for now it says, "Join the Community,"
instead of "We won't spam you," [??] say you won't spam. The image is
there, the button's the same, everything else is pretty much the same, but
instead of saying, "I won't spam you," you tell people to, "Join the
community." What that's done is actually uploaded that from my computer. I
posted it on [??] on your behalf using Optimizely and so you don't have to
worry about a content management system. You don't have to worry about
underlying asset libraries, you can do that all directly in our editor. The
other thing I recommend, and this is something that we do pretty well, it's
very unique in our visual editor, is that we allow you to dynamically
rearrange parts of the page.

This is one of the biggest challenges with WYSIWYG editing is that the
parts of your page are structurally bound by the HTML. Here, one hypothesis
I have is that these quotes down below are actually really compelling and I
want those to be much higher above the fold. I can actually click on this
and say, "Rearrange." What this will do is allow me to actually rearrange
these elements. You see as I'm dragging, they're rearranging dynamically on
the page. I can see the container they're in. I can see the other elements
and now it will also dynamically move the other elements lower. You can
actually take your page and, as I said earlier, expand before you refine.
Really move things around, rearrange the layout, remove parts of the page,
really visually change the experiences of the people who come to your
website.

There, you can see, with just a couple of clicks I have the original page,
I have the call to action, "Join the Community of Founders." I have
variation two, I say, "Join the Community," and variation three, where I
make the testimonials more prominent. These are all really good examples of
things that you might want to test, but I think even bigger point that you
made earlier is this is a great opportunity to use the services of
99Designs or even just to ask your audience too. Say, "Hey." Actually, what
you should do, Andrew, this would be great. Tell your audience to go to
Optimizely, tell them to put this website in there and then create
variations of this website, directly optimize and send them to you.

The way you can do that is actually, each one of these variations has a
unique preview URL and so this actual URL that I just created of this new
design, your audience can just take this URL and send it to you and you can
directly see, on this particular site, what are the different things that
you can do. It's a great way to crowdsource using your audience.

Andrew: If you were going to suggest one thing, it's to say, actually
you're suggesting a couple of things. You're saying, get rid of the No Spam
and just let people join the community and a call to action shouldn't be,
"Confirm your email to listen in," it should be, "Join the community."

Dan: That's right.

Andrew: That's because you're saying, be clear about what people are
signing up for. Tell them what it's all about here.

Dan: You might say the tactical, and you're actually doing this confirm
your email address, but people aren't coming to this page because they
really want to [??] their email address. They're coming just because they
want to be part of this community that you've built. They're other
entrepreneurs or founders who share their secrets and their stories. I
think that's really what will resonate with people. So, from a message
point of view, that's probably more compelling.

Andrew: OK. All right. So, we're going to try to do that. We'll run a
couple of experiments, and one thing you've told me and you wanted us to
make sure to include this disclaimer in this session is you've got to test
everything. You can't ever know, but you've given us some ideas of what to
test, and you've told us what's worked for other people. So, I'll test
this. We'll see. Will getting people to confirm their email addresses or
messaging ads confirm your email address be better than joining your
community or vice versa? I'm looking forward to seeing what those results
are.

You know what actually, I should come up with another variation or two
based on clear benefit, just being very clear about what people are signing
up for, but I don't think we're doing a good job of that. In fact, can you
go to the original page?

Dan: Yeah.

Andrew: I'll tell you, I basically copied from Noah Kagan when he said
confirm your email address. I said, all right, it seems to be working for
him. He must have tested it, so I put that on our subscription form. That's
their subscription form that you're looking at there.

Dan: Yeah. That's exactly right.

Andrew: It says, confirm your email address instead of sign up. All right.
We covered a lot of tactics here, and one thing a member recently told me
helps him get a lot of value out of these programs is, he said, "Andrew, I
don't take every single tactic and use it all", he says. "I just take the
one that's easy, and I start off with that. And then, I might do the next
easy one and then the next one and then the next one and the next one." So,
maybe, instead of doing everything that you've heard here today, you can
find one idea that especially had impact on you. Or maybe, an idea that was
especially easy. Pick that one and start with it.

So, maybe, it's humanizing your site. Remember the example of the site that
added a photo of a person on it and how it increased its conversions.
Maybe, you remember the concept of less is more. I almost left that out
because I didn't realize how important it was. Dan told me, include it.
Maybe, that's the one you want to start off with. Look at your site and see
if there's any text you can get rid of. See if there are any excess images
you can get rid of or maybe it's... Let me see, one other one, modernizing
your design. Whichever it is, it doesn't matter, pick one, implement it,
get the results and then go back and do another and get more results and
more results and more results. Along the way, let me know about your
progress.

Thanks for being a part of it, and if you want to use Dan's site to help
increase your conversions, it's just Optimizely.com. Go check it out.
Thanks. Bye.