EPISODE 78 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: WHEN YOU MAKE IT HARD FOR PEOPLE TO BUY FROM YOU

Sonya:
Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Boom Your Biz. I was interviewed recently about a term called conversion rate optimization. Often I hear agencies talk about changing the color of, say, a button or the layout of the menu, and then boom, the site magically increases in conversions by 25%. The truth is, though, there are a whole heap of factors that affect your conversion rate, from the quality of the traffic to the messaging and how you're showcasing the USPs. In this episode, I'll take you through some real life examples and tips on how to increase your conversion rate on your website.

Sonya:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre-Reid, and each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower, and inspire business owners, and myself along the way.

Dave:
Hey, guys, welcome to the Digital Divide. Today, I'm joined by my good friend, Sonya McIntyre-Reid. She is the head honcho of Linchpin Digital, Kiss Marketing, Boom Your Biz podcast, probably anything else out there that you can think of, she's in charge of. Sonya, thank you for joining me.

Sonya:
Thanks for having me, Dave. Good to be back on to talk Digital Divide topics. It's been a hot minute.

Dave:
It's been a while since we've talked, and this is cool because we're talking about something that's dear to my heart today. We're talking about conversion optimization, and the different impressions that we both have on delivery for that there, and I wanted to leave it to you to talk about what you've been experiencing recently.

Sonya:
Yeah, okay. So, CRO. Something that I have seen popping up a lot lately, agencies talking about the fact that they have, for example, added a search bar or changed where the shop button is on a website, and then they're showing these screenshots of look at how our conversion rate has increased by X percent, and it's resulted in X amount more revenue for this client.

Sonya:
And I'm just going to say, from personal experience, we have worked with clients where, yeah, their conversion rates increased dramatically when we start working with them as an agency, but we haven't touched their website. So for us, it comes down to the quality of traffic that's been driven to the website, and also the effectiveness of the re-marketing that has been done as well. I think the on-site experience is so, so, so important. I'm just going to give you a little example on something that got me the other day.

Sonya:
So I, like many other people, have been indulging in a lot of lockdown online shopping, right? And the other day, I don't even know why I bought them, I don't need them, I've got nowhere to wear them, but I bought some extensions for a ponytail. Random, I know. Basically, you put your hair up and then it looks like you've got a massive ponytail. Totally, totally sucked in by the Facebook advertising, totally sucked in by their Instagram account, and I knew what was happening. I'm a marketer. And so they kept spamming me, [inaudible 00:03:22] spamming, educating me with their ads, and eventually I got to their website and I was like, right, I'm going to buy.

Sonya:
The user experience on this website is probably the worst I have ever experienced. Could not find a color chart to pick what color was right for me. When I did find the product that I wanted, it was like a dropdown list of all these color codes, but not the names that they've sort of given to me in other areas. Checkout process is crap, all of that. But on the flip side, their marketing, their customer support, where they encouraged me to send a DM to their Instagram account, to send them photos of my hair so they could give me a manual color match, was fantastic. Their email series afterwards, their unboxing experience, all of that was absolutely incredible, but their on-store experience is crap.

Sonya:
So I think often when we're seeing these stats around, oh, look how much we've increased the conversion rate for this client, I think we need to look at it from a much bigger perspective and look at the big picture, because there are so many things that come into play when it comes to optimizing a conversion rate.

Dave:
I think that's a really interesting approach, because the traditional method of CRO, or a CRO techs out there, is go to the website, optimize the website, get a result. It's as simple as that. It's if I change one thing and I get a result from that, whether it be negative or positive, I get some data and I can make some assumptions. But take it a step back, how are people getting to the website? Completely fair. If I'm coming through with a horrible experience to the website prior, they're not going to get there in the first place to even make those optimizations on page worthwhile.

Dave:
So I suppose, from your perspective, it's how am I driving quality traffic, and how am I actually getting the right customer to the right page on the website? Whether or not that page is optimized perfectly doesn't matter, because my experience prior has made me want to go and get that brand. And actually, it's interesting that you mention that, because I worked with a watch company a while ago and this was one of my biggest, like my first CRO outings, where I realized that you couldn't convert on mobile, and so when we opened that up, their conversions exploded. But I remember people were still converting, a very small few, and it was by far the worst experience I've ever seen on a website, like almost impossible to check out unless you desperately wanted it.

Dave:
And you're exactly right. Their organic posting, their paid ads, their perception, their brand, everything was so solid that people so desperately wanted their product that they would push through that horrible experience on the website and then they would convert. So let me ask you this question, the website that you found for the hair extensions, which by the way, is definitely not my target market. I am definitely not going out and getting a ponytail anytime soon. But let's just say the audience came through and they did improve the on-page experience, do you believe that that would potentially help the experience in total? Or do you think that they're so keen to buy from the existing ads that it doesn't matter what they land on?

Sonya:
Do you know what? I think their cost per purchase would drop dramatically. I think they're spending a lot of money at the moment getting people back to the site, they're probably spending a lot of money on customer support. So yeah, I think their cost per purchase would drop hugely. I think their conversion rate would increase. So yeah, I think there's a place for it. I am concerned when it comes to agencies talking about CRO as well, though, that I feel a major, major part of CRO is actually going back to, god, I hate to say it, their branding and their messaging, because if you land on a website and the copy is not clear and the design of the site is crap in terms of aesthetics, you're not going to get very far.

Sonya:
I think when people talk about CRO, when you see these case studies where it's like, oh, we made all these small tweaks, and people hate red buttons so we made it green and this kind of stuff, I think that is incredibly powerful if you are a company that is getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, right? Because you've then got that data to see how these tiny little tweaks make a difference. If you're a small to medium-sized business, you probably, first of all, need to be looking at your branding, your messaging, how you're communicating USP to people, and making sure that's front and center. So sometimes it really doesn't come down to, all right, we're just going to make your website look pretty. It comes down to how are we communicating about your brand? But then that feeds into your ads, it feeds into your emails, it feeds into your social media, it feeds into everything.

Sonya:
So I think it probably comes down to looking at, right, where are they doing really well? If nothing's working, then going back to the drawing board and starting with what is your messaging, what's your USP, where do you sit in the market as it currently stands, and then introducing the CRO. So I think, you're a small business that's got, say, $10,000 to invest, but you're not getting any sales at the moment, CRO might not be the best avenue for you, because essentially, you're likely not even getting the traffic to the website to see whether or not the CRO optimization or the CRO changes and things that have been made are actually working or not. Does that make sense? It's kind of a chicken-and-the egg scenario, right?

Dave:
Absolutely. No, I completely agree. I think people need to redefine the way that they look at their budgets these days. People will look at one channel and go, I'm going to invest in it, and they're going to be like, CRO, I want to improve my website, let's drop 10K, as you just said, or let's drop five K of my 10K budget into making the website experience incredible. Cool. That's fine. But if you have no customers coming there, then what's the point? Vice versa, if you have customers coming to your website and the website is dreadful, I mean, by the sounds of your experience before, you pushed through, but the majority of people will get stuck there. So it's a compromise, isn't it? It's like I want to get traffic to the website, I want the traffic to be good, and then if there's a disconnect any time throughout that whole process, it's more than likely that you're going to end with a negative result.

Dave:
It comes down to messaging on your advertising, being consistent with messaging on the website. It comes down to the experience, and getting to the website being similarly as good on the website, and if you can get all of that crafted nicely, then your little split tests and tweaks, they're really quite irrelevant, because I've already invested in you, I'm already keen to buy your product and I'm already there. So having a red button versus a green button, okay, maybe. Maybe I'm going to get one extra conversion per month, maybe. I'm not sure, if I'm a small business. As you said, if I'm a $10 million e-commerce website that has hundreds of thousands of people coming through daily, fine. We can see that traffic, but for the smaller websites, maybe you're right.

Dave:
Maybe it's a little bit more of a conversation around what is your key messaging, what are you trying to get across to these people, and how are you doing that from your original touch points before they land on the website? And then even, as you said before, afterwards, incredible email sequences, re-marketing, whatever else you can do there. And just in terms of re-marketing, because that's a hot topic and something that not a lot of people are super familiar with, what are you finding working with re-marketing? Because I know that there's obviously a lot of redundancy with re-marketing if it goes for too long, or it's the same consistent messaging. How are you finding re-marketing working the best with your agency at the moment?

Sonya:
Yeah, look, so it's really interesting. When it comes to our e-commerce clients, I think everyone is so fixated on Facebook ads, right? They're like, oh, it's so sexy, everything's going to be driven by Facebook ads. What we're finding is that we're driving that initial traffic to the websites from a Google shopping campaign, and then we're going heavy on the re-marketing on social media. So there's one company that popped up for me yesterday, actually, and I know exactly what they're doing because I'm a marketer, but they had a fantastic landing page. I had a look at their product. It was some gimmicky thing like this eye mask that massages your face for migraines. I get migraines all the time, I'm staring at my screen all day, so it had me interested because of that literal pain point, right? But I looked at it, and I was like, you know what, Sonya? You've just bought ponytail hair extensions. You do not need any more gimmicky products, so I just put it to the side.

Sonya:
But I'm being re-marketed at the moment with this fantastic ad that says, "60% off sale, ends in 24 hours. Get in now." I know that this sale runs all the time, but they're only going to keep me in that audience for, say, the next 48 hours and then I'll be taken out of it and they'll be trying other techniques. So I think it all comes down to what the price point is of your product. How long does it usually take someone to make a decision? What's the competition like? Because we all know at the moment, particularly with the iOS updates and things like that, say I'm shopping for a Father's Day gift. We can do some very broad targeting, such as people interested in Father's Day, for example, and if you look at, say, a bottle of whiskey on an online store, then you're also going to see all of these other companies popping up at the same time, so you've really got to get them back to make that purchase quickly.

Sonya:
So I think giving them an offer that they just can not resist is the best way to go about it, but at the same time, you've got to balance that, between cheapening the brand and cutting your own margins versus just discounting. So I think that's where it comes into having all of the other things, such as your content marketing really being up to scratch, educating people as to your USPs, and I keep going back to that, but it is so important.

Dave:
Absolutely.

Sonya:
And I think at the same time, though, when we're talking about CRO and all of this, you can't simplify it too much. So I've had instances where, say, a business owner is like, oh, I'm an absolute legend at Google ads. I'm running my own Google ads, and I get tons of traffic to my website and no one's purchasing, so it's a website issue. Sometimes, it might not be a website issue. Sometimes, it might be an ad issue as well. I don't think you can ever take a really, really zoomed in approach and go, this is where I'm being let down. Great marketing happens when all channels are thought about.

Dave:
I agree. And I think, unfortunately, because agencies and providers, freelancers, have an agenda, they have an area that they specialize in... Something that I'm reasonably passionate about is that not every website needs SEO, even though everybody hears the word SEO as a buzzword and goes, I need to be doing SEO, they don't really actually understand what that means. So similar here, just because everybody is sending traffic to the website and it's not converting doesn't mean that CRO is the solution. It doesn't mean I need a website rebuild because things aren't working.

Dave:
Are your ads actually working the way that you think that they are? Because vanity metrics like traffic or click-through rate or whatever, fine, that's excellent. But when you look at the actual traffic that's going to the website, is that really the traffic that will convert for you in the long run, and are your ads set up to actually target the people that you want to? And nine times out of 10, we do it every single day, you notice that somebody comes across and says, my ads have been set up incredibly, and you can find two or three points to improve immediately, and then straight away you're already onto a better thing. So I think you're completely right. I think-

Sonya:
Oh my gosh. Can I just say quickly-

Dave:
Go.

Sonya:
On the note around ads, something that is happening a lot with people, particularly setting up their own Facebook ads, is that they think that they have a traffic problem, so they set up a traffic ad. Facebook will literally go and find people, based on their past behaviors, tend to go and just click through to a website. It doesn't mean that they're finding people that then go on and shop and actually check out, or even add a product to the cart. You could be getting traffic from these people, and they could just be window shoppers. And Facebook literally has that data. They go, all right, cool, you want traffic? Let's get traffic to your site, and they're ticking that box for you. They're not taking the box for conversions. So just be wary if you are running traffic ads, particularly with e-commerce, for that.

Dave:
Absolutely. And I think the whole entire point of this conversation is to get people thinking a bit broader than what they have been. Everybody thinks of the service-based offerings from agencies, Google Ads, social ads, email marketing, SEO, CRO. They productize them into a point where it's like none of them are really communicating with one another. But when you look at the holistic picture, and I don't like using the word holistic, but it's true, you need to look at the whole entire journey. This is why people are pushing for user experience. This is why Google's algorithms are now pushing towards having a legitimate and an authentic experience on a website, because if you can't get that whole journey complete, then you'd have drop off across the board. And the traditional sense of CRO, which is that on-page metric, doesn't matter anymore because you've got so many other sources of traffic and sources of, I guess, touch points prior to getting onto the website that are so much more important.

Dave:
I can talk about CRO for hours, but I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for joining me. If you guys want to find Sonya, you can find her on LinkedIn. You can go find her on a million different things. Go listen to her podcast. Boom Your Biz. Sonya, thank you so much for joining me.