Welcome to the final module of Coaching Success.
Normally, this is where I’d put a wrap-up covering everything you’ve worked on and giving you some final words of wisdom.
Unfortunately, I just can’t do it with this programme. There’s simply too much to cover in such a short time and so this module will have to cover what I believe to be one of the most important elements of building a successful coaching practice: Conversion Rate Optimisation.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
It might sound like some geeky and weird scientific term, but this little concept is one of the most important elements in building a successful business.
It can turn confused visitors into paying customers, useless sales channels into cash machines, and most importantly, losses into profits.
Mastering this has the capacity to turn a floundering wasteland of a business into a thriving mecca.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors or customers who’re taking a specific desirable action.
It’s increasing the percentage of people who click on your ads, sign up to your mailing list, download your free book, open your emails, and just about any other action you want them to take.
Essentially, it’s finding ways to get more people to do what you want.
What actions can you optimise?
Here’s the great part – you can optimise the percentage of people who’re taking any action. Literally, any action.
You know all those stats and actions you set out in the report you edited last module? You can, and eventually will be, optimising every single one of them.
For example:
Let’s look at guest post emails. In the guest post outreach process, you can optimise:
- The percentage of people who’re opening your guest post outreach emails
- The percentage of people who’re clicking through to check out your work
- The percentage of people who’re responding
- The percentage of people who’re responding positively
- The percentage of people who’re accepting your written guest post
- The percentage of people who’re posting your written guest post
- The percentage of people who’re leaving the link in that you added to the post
And that’s just one element! Think about all the other areas you want people to take in relation to your business and the actions that you could optimise in them.
What kind of results can you produce?
This is a good question – what kind of results can you produce through Conversion Rate Optimisation? Is it really worth your time?
To illustrate this, I’ll use an example from an affiliate marketing project I’m running.
The way affiliate marketing projects work is that you drive traffic to your website and on that site, you recommend a product. You make money when your visitors click through to the sales page for that product (on another person’s site) and buy the product.
When we first started the project, we were getting 10% of people who landed on our site to click through to the recommended website and 4% of those people would make a purchase.
That means that for every 1,000 visitors who landed on our website, 100 would click through to the recommended website and 4 would make a purchase.
4 purchases out of every 1,000 visitors? It’s not terrible but it’s definitely not great.
We decided that we needed to increase this so we started testing. We added more content, restructured the way the page looked, removed a few confusing elements and added a much clearer call to action.
And guess what the results were…
Within 2 months, we’d increased the percentage of people clicking through to the recommended website from 10% to 25% and the percentage of people making a purchase from 4% to 10%.
That means out of every 1,000 visitors, we were now getting 250 clicks through to the recommended website and 25 making a purchase.
That’s a 525% increase in sales, and therefore, profit through CRO.
Now, not every experiment is going to produce these kinds of results but these kinds of results are more than achievable.
What Impacts The Conversion Rate
Now we’re getting to the fun stuff – what makes a person more likely to take an action?
There are a lot of theories on this and you’ve learned some of them through this programme, but today we’re going to go deeper and explore the whole range of factors that influence conversions. We’re going to explore the conversion heuristic.
The conversion heuristic is a formula developed by the team at MecLabs to provide a structural framework for optimising conversion rates.
Through their extensive research, they’ve worked out that the conversion rate of any action, it this:
C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) -2A
Whilst this might seem intimidating and confusing, once it’s broken down, it’s actually quite logical, approachable, and useable.
Here’s what those elements all mean:
C = Number of conversions
Conversions are the outcome you’re attempting to achieve so they are the goal of this heuristic. It’s the end goal.
4M = Motivation times 4
Motivation is the single most important factor in determining whether or not your ideal client takes the action you want them to. If they’re driven, inspired, excited, or fed-up and are motivated to try and solve the problem, then this motivation will drive them to take the action you want. Because it’s so important, it’s multiplied by 4 in this heuristic.
If they’re driven, inspired, excited, or fed-up and are motivated to try and solve the problem, then this motivation will drive them to take the action you want. Because it’s so important, it’s multiplied by 4 in this heuristic.
3V = Value times 3
The value that you’re offering is the most important factor you can control whilst increasing your conversions. It’s your headline, it’s your hook point, it’s the solution you’re presenting to your ideal client to solve their problem.
It’s the reason you’re stating that your ideal client should work with you over your competitor and it’s going to determine whether or not they’re interested in what you have to offer.
As it’s the major element you can control and determines whether or not a visitor will even engage with your sales page, it’s been multiplied by 3 in this heuristic.
2(I-F) = Incentive minus friction, times 2
As you ask your ideal client to take the action you desire, you’ll be offering an incentive. In the case of your optin, it’s your free product. In the case of a coaching calls, you might offer discounts for extended signups. Whatever action you want them to take, there will be an incentive. That incentive plays an integral role in determining the percentage of people who convert.
That incentive plays an integral role in determining the percentage of people who convert.
But that percentage is limited by the friction involved in taking the action. Friction is the element that is used to measure how difficult it is to take an action.
How many fields does someone have to fill out? How many steps does someone have to go through to pay? How many times does someone have to call before making contact with you?
The more friction built into your system, the lower your conversion rate will be.
Interestingly though, even though more friction results in lower conversions, it also results in higher quality leads. If someone’s willing to work through a higher level of friction to take the action then you know they’ll be far more dedicated to solving their issue.
As it plays a major role in determining the conversion rate, but is a non-factor if your ideal client doesn’t buy into your value offering, it’s been multiplied by 2 in this heuristic.
2A = Anxiety times 2
The final element in the conversion heuristic is anxiety.
When asking anyone to take an action, there will be a level of anxiety present.
- Can he deliver on what he’s promised?
- What’s he going to do with my credit card details?
- Who’s going to find out about this?
This anxiety limits the percentage of people who’re willing to take the action you want them to, and therefore, your conversion rate.
As this only becomes a factor once your ideal client buys into your value offering, and is therefore less important than the value your offering, it’s multiplied by 2.
How do you do CRO?
It’s all well and good to know this heuristic and be able to recite it at fancy meetings of intelligent people, but unless you can actually use it, it means nothing.
So let’s get into the process of how you actually use this.
Step 1. Research
When most people jump into the world of CRO and learn the conversion heuristic, they decide that they need to start coming up with and running tests immediately.
But this is a flawed mindset because that’s not how CRO works.
CRO is the process of improving elements that are holding your conversions back. How can you fix them when you don’t know what’s wrong?
You wouldn’t just try and fix a car that won’t start by tinkering in the engine. You’d stop and try and work out why it’s not working before you jump into work.
That’s exactly what you have to do with CRO.
The first step in CRO is to work out why your conversions aren’t higher. You first have to work out what’s broken before you start trying to fix it.
Now, this is the hard part – how do you work out what’s broken?
There are MANY different tools and methods to do this but they all revolve around one, core idea: ask your ideal client.
Your ideal client is really the only person who knows why they didn’t take the action you wanted them to. They’re the ones who know why they didn’t subscribe to your mailing list, they’re the ones who know why they didn’t make a purchase, they’re the ones who know why they didn’t join your webinar.
They have the knowledge you need and so the research process always starts with getting information from them.
“But if they don’t take action, how do you find out why???”
Ok, yes. Extracting information as to why they didn’t take action can be tough, especially when you don’t have any further contact with them, but there are some tools you can use dig in and work out what’s going wrong.
1. Customer support
Customer support is the simplest and fastest way to work out why people aren’t taking the action you want them to. The people who call customer support, particularly sales support, are calling because there’s an action they want to take, but for some reason can’t.
They want to sign up, they want to pay you, they want to join in, but they just can’t manage to do it.
When they submit a support ticket, they’re telling you exactly how your system is broken.
Customer support is an invaluable tool for discovering how you could improve your conversion rates.
NOTE: This is why I’m incredibly vocal about company founders doing customer support, right from the start of the project. You will learn more about how well your offering is structured by talking to your clients than any other tool will ever show you.
2. Google Analytics
Buried inside that magical tool you started exploring last week is a wealth of information. A veritable treasure trove of learnings and insights.
You can learn a lot about not only how your visitors behave on your website, but also how their behaviour changes by source, access device, country, and many other segments.
Here’s a great article on different ways you can segment your Google Analytics data to find out what’s really happening below the surface: 10 Google Analytics Reports That Will Tell You Where Your Site Is Leaking Money
3. Observational Tools
One of the many incredible advantages of running an online business is that you can measure, track, and observe everything that happens on your website.
Literally, everything.
Whilst you can’t climb through the screen and observe people as they use your website, you can:
- Watch movies of how they interact with your website
- See patterns of how their mouses move over your site
- Tell exactly where they’re clicking and how often
- See how far down the page they’re scrolling.
As well as having all this data broken down by country and device.
There are many different tools for doing this, but there are only a handful that allow you to do all of these in one system.
My favourite for this is a tool called BeamPulse.
It’s a French company that has all these elements built into it and they give you 2 months and 10,000 visitors free when you sign up. Not a bad deal.
4. Surveys
Here’s something revolutionary – if you want to know something, ask.
One of the simplest ways to gather important and useful insights into why your site isn’t converting the way you want to is to ask the people.
There are several different tools that allow you to quickly survey your visitors.
If you’re surveying people who you have regular contact with (for example: mailing list subscribers or regular website visitors), the cheapest and easiest way to do it is through Google Forms.
It’s a completely free tool you can use to create surveys of any size and get insights into your business.
If you’re attempting to survey visitors you don’t have regular contact with, things are a little trickier, but not too much more.
There are several tools that create popup surveys your visitors can complete after they browse your site. My personal favourite is iPerceptions. It’s free (with limited features) and is well trusted throughout the industry.
Step 2. Create a hypothesis
Once you’ve collected feedback from your ideal client’s as to why they’re not taking the actions you want them to, the next step is to create a hypothesis as to how to overcome this.
This is where you start to use the conversion heuristic and your own smarts and come up with theories as to what’s wrong and how to fix it.
For example:
You spend a day answering customer support tickets and you consistently get questions from your ideal clients asking if your website is secure enough to use credit cards on.
You realise that this anxiety is causing your ideal clients to not take action and so create the hypothesis that increasing the amount of security symbols on the checkout page will reduce your ideal client’s anxiety, and therefore, increase conversions.
Every effective conversion test is grounded in research and is driven by a measurable testing hypothesis.
3. Test that hypothesis
Once you’ve got your hypothesis, it’s time to put it to the test.
To do this, you need to make sure that you’re getting statistically significant and comparable data and not just setting up your new page and seeing what happens.
You can’t just create a new page, put it up, see how it goes for a few days, and declare it a winner. You must split your traffic in two and let roughly the same amount of people see each variation for a minimum of 100 conversions and three weeks.
This is the only way to make sure you’re getting an accurate representation of whether or not your hypothesis is correct or not.
“But how do you do that???”
Trying to manually split traffic would be hard (basically impossible) on your own, but luckily for you, there are tools that do this for you.
These magical A/B testing tools split your traffic between the two variations of your page and record the number of conversions you achieve.
Lucky for you, BeamPulse is one of them.
But if you don’t like using it and want to explore what else is available, here are three others:
“How important is testing?”
This is one of the most common questions I get around CRO (and in business in general) – “Do I really have to test? The answer is obvious!”
The simple answer is “Yes. You have to test – everything.”
When you start to get into the world of CRO, you’ll start to see that you don’t actually know what’s going to work better. You can think and theorise and debate and reaffirm all you want, but you really know nothing in business until you have stats to back it up.
This doesn’t just go for testing, it goes for every business decision you will ever make.
You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. The only time you ever know anything is when the stats prove it and even then, they only prove it for that particular period of time.
So yes, you must test everything, always.
Examples in Action
Whilst this is all good a well to read in theory, it’s another thing to see it in action. Conversion Rate Experts have a great series of case studies on their site that show you this in action.
Here are 4 great CRO case studies of this in action:
- How we made SEO Moz $1mil with one landing page
- How we made $14mil for a travel company
- How we doubled the sales of a web app
- How we increase the conversion rate of Voices.com by 400%
Exercise
Your exercise today is simple.
As you don’t have enough traffic to your website (correct me if I’m wrong here), it’s going to take a long time to get any kind of statistically significant testing results for a long time.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t start collecting data to learn from the few visitors who are landing on your site.
So, your exercise for today is to create a survey to add to your site that you can use to learn about what your visitors are dealing with and what they want from you.
You can choose any method of information collection you want but the easiest one to start with will be iPerceptions.com.
You can use it for free, add it to your WordPress website really simply, and start getting information from your ideal client.
Do that now and post your survey questions on the forum when you’re done.
Activity
As this is the last module of the programme, it’s time to get things wrapped up.
Because this call will be your last chance to ask questions, your task for this week is imagine your company 5 years in the future and come up with a list of questions you have about how to get there.
It can be anything:
- When should I take on a business partner?
- Which skills should I learn and which should I outsource?
- How much time should I spend networking?
Anything you need to know but don’t currently, write it down. We can work through them on the call to make sure you’re fully equipped to move forward confidently.
Additional Reading
What you’ve learnt today is just the tip of the iceberg of the world of CRO. It’s a dark and deep hole you can fall into if this is the kind of thing that excites your brain.
If you do want to get more into it, here are some of my favourite resources.
- Conversion Rate Experts – these guys helped Google develop their content experiments tools
- ConversionXL.com – Peep Laya has forgotten more about CRO than most people will ever know. There’s a reason he can charge $7,000/month for his services.
- WhichTestWon.com – a great place to test your CRO guessing power through seeing real test results
- Marketing Experiments – an incredible vault of past experiment results that will get you thinking