Conversations on Conversion interview with Ben Jesson

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This was our sixth conversation on conversion episode, a lively discussion with Ben Jesson.

Anna:  Welcome back to Conversations on Conversion. I’m Anna Talerico and with me today from a very far away place, is Ben Jesson. Ben is the CEO and co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts based in the UK.

Conversion Rate Experts is a consultancy that helps clients test, specialize, and get the most out of their testing software. Ben, I am really excited to have you on the broadcast today.

Ben:  Really excited to be here. Thanks a lot for asking me, it’s gonna be good fun.

Anna:  Definitely. I am excited to talk to you because you are doing some very exciting things at Conversion Rate Experts.  What do you think is the most exciting thing that is happening with conversion optimization right now?

Ben:  Well, first as a business and also for the industry in general, it’s exciting that conversion optimization seems slowly be going mainstream. We have predicted that this year will be the year for conversion optimization, and this will be the year that everyone starts testing and tuning their websites and really getting to know what their visitors respond to.

The thing that excites us is the recognition that conversion is finally getting. When we first started testing we were paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month for split testing software. Now some of it is free, so there is no excuse in terms of getting started at all, and the community seems to be embracing it and growing. 

You know, there are lots of people sharing their techniques, their ideas, the way they run tests. There are several blogs out there that are extremely valuable. There are some fantastic books out there…conferences…there is even a dedicated conversion conference that Tim Ash is organizing. Websites like WhichTestOne from Anne Holland allows people to see what’s being tested and compare the controls for the winning versions. 

So, I tell you it’s going mainstream. Loads of people are talking about it, sharing, and helping each other. The fact that so many businesses are growing during a recession is due to measurable marketing, testing, what your visitors are responding to. Understanding how to improve your business, without destroying your traffic. So, I think the fact that people are thriving in such tough economic times thanks to conversion, just makes it even more exciting for the future.

Anna:  Yeah, definitely. It’s funny because it’s such a logical concept, conversion optimization, that it does seem that it would have been mainstream a lot longer than it has been. I know what you mean when you say year after year you’re thinking, “Well, this will be the year.” It does indeed seem like 2010 is actually the year, which is exciting.

Ben:  Yes, it does, it feels that way. You go into the conferences now and there are always a couple of panels about conversion and testing and popularizing, and several years ago that wasn’t really the case. Most people were still talking about traffic and acquiring visitors - not so much converting the customer. It is really good to see.

Anna:  You know when things go mainstream what always happens is that you have an influx of new people paying attention to the concepts, techniques, and tactics. What advice do you give to marketers who are just getting started with optimization?

Ben:  My main piece of advice would be to treat conversion as a process, rather than a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process of knowing what to test and then testing it. 

Would it be easier if I just quickly run through the processes that we would follow and we would advise events to begin to follow?

Anna:  That would be great, definitely.

Ben:  By far, the hardest part about testing is knowing what to test in the first place. The tools allow you to do things that are absolutely amazing, but the tools are only as good as the ideas that you’re testing in the first place. 

The big mistake that most people make when they start is that they get going is they throw a little bit of idea into the tool, they don’t get great results, and they give up because it didn’t work out for them. It is such a shame when that happens, because they focus on the tools and technology rather than knowing what to test. One thing that we advise people to do is take a step back and think of conversion as a process, not a one-time event. The first thing that we would tell them is to think about the strategy, their long-term strategy for their business. What are their goals? What is their KPI? What are they hoping to achieve? Not just with the website, but with the whole business. Keeping that in mind when you’re designing your tests, you want things that will actually help your business to grow, not just measure metrics in isolation. 

Once you know how you want your business to grow, you need to make sure that you’ve got all the right measurements in place, so that you can actually measure improvements in your business. Making sure that you have the right KPI, making sure that you are constantly reviewing how your business is performing, and where your website fits into that. 

Once you’ve kind of got the roadmap for what you are trying to achieve, the next step is to figure out which areas of the business to work on first. Web analysis will really help you identify the areas of your website that are failing at the moment, and usability will as well. Once you know which areas of the business you are going to start working on, it might be your home page, your product page, your shopping cart, your thank you page, or your user refer a friend program. As long as it’s an area where you can make quick measurable, meaningful changes. 

The next step is to figure out why people don’t convert, and I think it’s kind of obvious, but you can’t fix a problem until you know what the issues are in the first place. We need to figure out why aren’t people converting, why aren’t they taking actions. 

In our experience, you can follow just three questions that will lead you to really good test plans. The first question is this visitor ripe for the action that I am asking them to take? Lead quality is ultimately the first place to start. You need to make sure that the people who are actually landing on that page of your website are qualified enough to take action.  Look at your different traffic sources, look at repeat visitors and new visitors, look at branded search phrases versus generic search phrases, look at referral traffic versus search traffic and figure out who are the best quality prospects. Who are the best quality leads? What can we learn from them? Who are the poor quality prospects? Who are the poor quality leads and what can you learn from them? 

Really get a good handle for who is arriving at the website and quite simply, get the right people at the right time that align with your business goals and your business strategy. 

Once the visitors are actually on the site, there are two things that tend to trip them up. The first one is user experience. Assuming that your visitor is a qualified prospect. all websites suffer from user experience issues. Those are visitors who come to the website and who want to take action, but for whatever reason, they are prevented from taking action because the user experience is too difficult for them. You know, the copyrighting doesn’t make sense, they click on the wrong thing, they have errors on a form, it doesn’t load quickly enough in their browser. it crashes in their browser, they give up go and have a drink and forget that you ever existed. We find that there’s a lot to understanding the user experience; figuring out what’s going wrong and than split testing the corresponding fix.  A great book is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.”  Then there are great sources like ClickTale and Crazy Egg that give you additional insight into how people are actually navigating the websites. 

Once you’ve got a good handle on the user experience issues, the next thing you need to address are those visitors that are qualified prospects but for whatever reason they simply aren’t persuaded to take the action that you want them to take. They are not persuaded to read your headline. They are not persuaded to click on your add to cart or enter their credit card details, they are simply not persuaded to do what you want them to do. That is a tough thing to fix, because most of your website visitors come and go without any level of interaction. You don’t understand why they came to the website. You don’t understand what went wrong. You don’t understand what their objections were, and they leave and show up in your web analytics as a unique visitor that clicked around a few pages and than left, without taking action. We recommend that you put in as many feedback mechanisms as possible, to understand why your visitors aren’t converting, to collect objections, and than to split test the corresponding objections. 

If your prospects don’t believe your product works, than you need to test content that shows that your product works, you need to show demonstrations, testimonials, videos…Understanding and gathering objections is a really critical part of the process, but it is often overlooked just because it’s so difficult to get that level of feedback from your visitors. We recommend things like usability testing on your actual prospects. Exit surveys. 4Q and Kampyle for people to leave comments on your website, survey your customers and ask them why they really didn’t become customers. 

Just have a good understanding of who your visitors are, what they want, what their objections are, and what their concerns are and how you can help them overcome those objections.

The next step really is to list all of your user experience issues, list all of the common objections, and create content that overcomes those obstacles. Then plug that content into a split testing package and measure which of the things increases your conversion rate the most. It’s like a compass that steers your business. You are constantly testing what your customers are telling you is wrong, and you are then testing this on all of your visitors. Constantly look at what is working and see if you can create bigger and bolder tests based on what’s working. Constantly look at what is not working and understand what is not working and than stop wasting your time on that part of your sales message. 

I just realized that that was quite a long-winded answer, sorry.

Anna:  No, actually I am glad that you went through that, it was great. We can boil it down to asking ‘is it usable’, ‘is it persuasive’, and than move into the constant testing. I think it was very helpful, actually. I love that you start with, “Is this the right visitor for what I am expecting a visitor to do?” Because I actually think that’s often overlooked. We look at pages and we talk about what to do on those particular pages, but you know it really is about stepping back and saying, “Who is landing on this particular page or who is coming to this site and how can we make sure that what we are asking them to do is appropriate for where they are, in terms of their expectations, etc.?” 

What do you see as some of the common obstacles that you or your clients directly face when they are getting their testing program started? How do they overcome some of those challenges or obstacles?

Ben:  Yes, I would say that the big picture is creating an experimental culture within a business. For decades most businesses operated on ideas that come from within the organization. Avinash actually says, this kind of HIPPO opinion, that is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion,  that gets implemented in the business. 

One thing that we encourage is to create a kind of experimental culture within the business. Because we know that within a culture, you can often hit obstacles, and you need buy-in from many different people within an organization. 

Conversion is not about just the tools - it is not just about the copyrighting and the messaging, which is marketing -  its not just about the product itself, which is the product development team -  its about bringing all of these things together and making them kind of work in harmony. It’s creating a culture where people are always looking outside of the business for ideas, and being brave and bold and not worrying too much.

Start to think of your business as an experiment rather than a fixed way of doing things. Don’t just test your favorite ideas, test things that are happening in the markets or other industries. 

When people in the company object to the changes that you are making, just remind them that it’s just an experiment, that you are just doing it to see how your visitors will respond. You can’t damage the business because you never implement something that doesn’t win. If it doesn’t work, fine we learned that it doesn’t work and we won’t waste any time on it in the future. If it does work, we’ve just grown the business with the productivity. Giving the experiment a mind set is important, because once everyone is excited and involved in the project, the obstacles are never really that big of obstacles. 

Anna:  You said a little negative there in your answer that I thought was interesting, which was, “Don’t be afraid to fail.” I find that interesting because more and more of our customers who use our tool are expecting almost every challenger to win. It’s a funny expectation and I wonder if it comes from so much focus on how effective testing can be, that we have almost brainwashed people into thinking every test will be a winner and it’s just not the case. As you have mentioned, as long as you are coming away from the failure with understanding why and what to do next, than it’s still a win, even if it didn’t change the conversion rate.  

Ben:  Absolutely, don’t be scared for a test to fail. As you long as you learn from your experiments, you can make just as much money from the winners as the losers Again I use the expression, split testing is like having a compass that steers your weakness in the right direction. 

A quick example: we were working with a client that has a really low cost product, and they make their money from the usage of the product. The product was really cheap on the front end and we were always saying, what if it were cheaper? Would that on the whole be better for the business? And people were saying, let’s decrease the price by five dollars, ten dollars…We said, “Let’s just try something crazy, let’s try free.” “Let’s totally remove the barrier of the price on the front end and see what happens.” 

So we ran a split test for a free product, a very low end product and free didn’t win. The test never reached statistical significance in months, and we thought, ‘wow, what if we hadn’t of tested this?’ First of all we might have made all of the products free, which would have put a lot of risk on the company, and would have affected the cash flow of the company, but also it wasn’t what our customers wanted. It didn’t overcome one of their objections, so we kind of sat there and we said, “All right than, the low end price of this product isn’t an issue since you know free didn’t win,” so, let’s go the other way and let’s look at up selling and cross selling. Maybe the product is too cheap in the first place, and we can actually manage to come up with packages that up-sells to the product, which might have increased the average value. 

We understood why it lost and it pointed us in a different direction, and the following test worked and increased average order volume. So, don’t be afraid of losers.

Anna:  Right. So, I know we’ve got to wrap up, but there’s a couple more things that I wanted to ask you. One of which is, if somebody could just do one thing today to help their conversion rate…what should that one thing be?

Ben:  Oh a good question. One thing…..ah.

Anna:  I know. I never know if I should love or hate that question, but I do seem to get it a lot.

Ben:  It’s a good question and I will stick my neck on the line. There is an unusual thing that you can do which will help you improve your web page. Imagine you are working on a product page on a website or on a sales letter kind of page. Imagine you’re selling that product face-to-face or on the phone. Get a Dictaphone and record yourself, and give the best sales pitch that you can imagine. Try and make a list of all the common objections, all of the common things that people would ask, all of the evidence that they would need, all of the persuasive things that you would need to say and really do it in the privacy of your own office or your own home. Just try and sell the product face-to-face, using your voice not the keyboard. Then compare what you just said to what’s going on your web page. 

Anna:  Oh yes, I love that.

Ben:  So compare what you said to what’s currently on your web site and look for content that you have said out loud, but isn’t on your website. Look for what is missing. 

One of the first things we say to our clients when we speak to them is, ”sell me what you are trying to sell your visitors.” We record the call and than we play it back to them and say, “Hey it just took you seven minutes to persuasively sell me on the benefits of your products but yet when I read your copy on your web page, it literally takes me 45 seconds, so what is missing?” If you believe that you need seven minutes to sell it face-to-face, why is your website only taking 40 seconds. 

Anna:  Interesting.

Ben:  Compare the difference in how you would sell it face-to-face and how you are selling it on your website. Quite often it is shocking the difference.

Anna:  Yeah, I love that. Okay,  I’ve got to switch gears and I am dying to know, because everybody is so excited about the site that you just launched: whichMVT.com. I would love to know what went into that and why you guys decided to do it.

Ben:  Okay, it’s a story that goes back a long way. Myself and Carl, who co-founded the business, we ran a company’s website that sells products on-line, so we have background in running a web business. We had never worked in a consultancy before we built this one, so, our background is in physically doing what we talk about. We tried desperately to out source our conversion project. When you are running a business, there are so many things going on that you quickly want to identify a vendor or solution, and out source it. Then you just have to oversee the project rather than take personal responsibility for it. When we were shopping around (this was back in 2004/2005), we were shopping around for multi-variate testing software from different vendors, there was just no where to go to get a good overview of the pros and the cons of the different tools out.

Back then there were maybe only five companies at the most, and they were all fairly similar in terms of price and features. So, you kind of go with the one with the best customer recommendations. The one thing that we found, as the market has grown and people like Google entered the market with a free tool, lot’s of people are saying, “Hey you’ve Google’s tool here and it’s free, then you’ve got something Omniture Test and Target, for example, which is thousands of dollars a month” and many others.

Most people out there don’t know that they exist, because they have never been listed all in one place.  First of all, it was something that we wished we would have had back in 2005, and than after we started the consultancy business, its one of our most frequently asked questions, ‘which tool should I have?” “where should I start?” Then we thought, if we are going to solve this problem for our clients, we might as well solve it for everyone else as well and make the information publicly available. So we spent some time speaking with vendors about their products and about the tools. We’ve had demos, we surveyed people, and customers can leave reviews on the web site as well. We are totally impartial. We don’t profit from this. There is no bias. All of the reviews are from reviews of the software. All of the product information is from the vendors themselves and we are just kind of keeping it organized in a useful way so that people can actually get started with this. Because we are so passionate that people starting to run tests, we try and do everything we can to help them.

Anna:  Yeah. It’s fantastic. We’re so excited that you guys did it and I think again, the industry really needed it.

I wanted to thank you again for coming, and I wanted to remind our listeners that you can find Ben’s company at Conversion-Rate-Experts.com. It is located in the UK, and works with companies on conversion rate optimization.  Ben, thank you so much for coming today, I really appreciate it.

Ben:  It’s been a pleasure, thanks a lot Anna. 

Don’t forget you can download can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.