ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE WEB ENTREPRENEUR'S 3 PART FORMULA FOR MAXIMIZING SUCCESS
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Audiobook and Action Guide. . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Chapter 1: The Profit Hacking Formula . . . . 16 Chapter 2: Hacking Your Traffic . . . . . . . . . . 22 Chapter 3: Hacking Your Conversions I . . . . 32 Chapter 4: Hacking Your Conversions II. . . . 42 Chapter 5: Hacking Your Economics . . . . . . 68 Chapter 6: Massive Scale & Growth - Traffic. . . 80 Chapter 7: Massic Scale & Growth - Economics. 92 Chapter 8: The New Economy. . . . . . . . . . . 98 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 About The Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
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CHAPTER 4 HACKING YOUR CONVERSIONS PART II
Try to look at your weaknesses and convert them into your strengths. That’s success. -- Zig Ziglar
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O
nce you get yourself set up to begin A/B testing, it’s easy to get jazzed up about all the possible things you can do to increase your conversions. (Especially after painting the picture of your business’ future where you’re out-converting your competition!) But remember the lessons from evolutionary vs. radical redesign. Before you try to create a grand scheme of how you’re going to optimize your entire site by changing every element of each page - - be strategic. Pick the most important pages and the most important elements on those pages. Start there. Focus on the most important things. Tell the perfectionist inside you who needs everything to be exactly right to take a hike. The question is: do you want to take blind stabs at “perfection” or do you want results & success?
Your Most Important Pages So which pages on your site are most important? You might need to do some data analysis to find out for sure, but in general the most important pages are: • Cart page • Checkout pages • Lead generation pages 42
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• Plans & Pricing pages • Contact pages • Demo or quote request pages Why are these the most important pages? They directly impact your bottom line. Visitors on these pages are only a step or two away from converting to customers or subscribers. They are as “close to the money” as possible. Also, think about the pages that get the highest amount of traffic on your site. These could include: • Your home page • Your blog • Any page to which you actively drive traffic1 These pages are also among the most important on your site, because lots of visitors see them. Your site’s analytics should help you figure out which pages are the most important. To learn a bit more about using Google Analytics to turn your business into a truly data-informed operation (create conversion funnels, custom reports, segments, and more), go to ProfitHacking.com/Analytics. With properly configured analytics, you can see which parts of your site are leaking the greatest percentage of visitors and profit. You can see which pages are 1. These are often called “Landing Pages.” 43
HACKING YOUR CONVERSIONS PART II
QUICK HACKING TIP: Want some fast ways to test headlines? • Try out some different ad copy in Google AdWords or Facebook Ads • Ask your social media audience or email list to rank different potential headlines in a survey (offer a prize to randomly selected survey participants to boost completion percentage) • A/B test two very different headlines
When creating your headline or value proposition, you have to think about: • What your product or service is • What problem it solves or what benefit they can derive from it • Why it’s unique and/or better than the competition • Who is you your market, industry, niche, or audience • How much your customers know about your brand or your offering
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And much more. For a headline (and overall copywriting) master course, I recommend Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising.1 Here are two examples of sites with excellent headlines/value propositions:
Rejoiner fixes a specific problem (cart abandonment) for a specific audience (online retailers). They make a clear, quantifiable statement to their ideal customer.
1. As of writing, you can pick up a copy on Amazon for the low, low price of $962.92. You can also get the PDF for free at ProfitHacking.com/Breakthrough. 47
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Stripe says exactly what who it is for and what it does for them. Be clear in your headline about who you serve & what benefit you deliver. Clarity will almost always be more effective than trying to be really clever or persuasive.
The Offer You might have the best copy & the best design, but if the visitor doesn’t want what you’re offering, there won’t be a conversion. Start with the clarity of your offer. Is it abundantly clear what the visitor will get if they subscribe or purchase? Are all the key benefits shown & expressed? It may not be possible for you to easily revamp your offer but you can test how your present the offer via changes to the copy, images, order & phrasing of benefits, or order & phrasing of features. You can also strengthen your offer by including things such as bonuses, a warranty, or a guarantee.
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Your design and usability should make it easy for your least capable visitors to complete the desired action.
QUICK HACKING TIP: The Mom Test: My Mom has many talents & abilities. Technological know-how is not one of them. When trying to determine if a webpage or website is clear enough in showing the user what to do, I imagine my Mom visiting that site. Better yet, sometimes I observe as she uses the site. I pay attention to where she hesitates, gets frustrated, gets confused, or ultimately decides to bounce. Her feedback almost always inspires a winning A/B test or two. Find a person in your life with the same talent that my Mom has for highlighting issues on websites more experienced web users often overlook. Listen to what they say about their experience trying to complete the key actions on your site. Your bottom line will thank you.
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The PIE Framework At this point, you have a small handful of the most important pages on your site as well as several things on each of those pages that you want to test. How do you decide the order of what to test? Use the PIE Framework. There are three parts to this framework and you give each potential test a score from 1 – 10 in each of the three. The tests with the highest scores are the ones you start with and then work your way down from there. PIE stands for: Potential Importance Ease
Potential How much potential is there for a lift in conversions from this test? How much potential is there for a lift in profit from this test? How much traffic does this page get? Does your sales page have a weak headline? If yes, then testing to improve the headline will score very high for potential.
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Will the test have an impact beyond just the page you’re testing? For example, a winning test on one product page of an ecommerce site has potential to win on every other similarly structured product page of that site. You’ll need to test a winner for one product page on several other product pages before making a sitewide change, but that is a high leverage test with a lot of potential.
Importance You mostly took care of this step at the beginning by taking the time to identify your most important pages and the most important elements of those pages. But there are degrees of importance, so here is where you can compare and contrast which elements are most important to you and your site.
Ease The third part of the PIE Framework is Ease: How much work is it going to take to get the test up and running? The less work it takes, the higher the score you give the test. This is especially true with the first handful of tests you run. If the first couple of tests require a lot of time or resources to implement, you may quit before 57
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you even start. And that goes double if the first few tests require a bunch of work and then fail to increase your profits. So you want to make sure that you start out with easy tests. The easiest tests are changes to the copy or images on a page. Changes to the location or placement of various elements are also pretty easy. Adding or subtracting elements usually take little work as well. Tests that require more resources to implement are things like changes to the layout or design of a page. Testing a completely new, radical redesign of a page requires significant effort and resources. Pages that have a lot of back-end functionality require more resources as well. Prime examples would be pages that have required fields like form submits or checkout pages. For example, testing a different layout or design on your checkout page to (hopefully) create a better user experience will likely score high on Potential and Importance but low on Ease. Revisit the tests you came up with for various pages on your site when you stopped reading earlier, and any you may have added since then. Go ahead give each test a score from 1 to 10 in each of categories of the PIE framework. 58
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Page and Test Idea
Potential 1-10 Importance 1-10
Ease 1-10
Total Score
If you’re new to testing, knock out some tests that score highly in Ease at the beginning. Get some winning tests under your belt and see firsthand how increases in conversion relate to increases in your profits. Once you’ve experienced that, there’s no going back - - you’re a tester and conversion optimizer for life! Soon enough you’ll be ready to tackle the tests that are lower in Ease but much higher in Potential and/ or Importance.
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The True Leverage of Conversion Optimization I hope you’re excited to read this section because right now, I’m pumped to be writing it! This is the kind of conversion nerdery that can really get the blood flowing. There are two main factors that make increasing your Conversions so high-leverage: 1)
There is a lot of leverage in small numbers
2) There is a significant multiplier effect with Conversion optimization Leverage In Small Numbers What does it mean to say there’s leverage in small numbers? It’s easier to double a small number than it is to double a large number. Remember the example from the “Profit Hacking Formula” chapter about doubling a business by doing one of these three things: 1) Doubling your traffic from 20,000 a month to 40,000 a month 2)
Doubling your conversion from 2% to 4%
3) Doubling your profit per buyer from $50 to $100
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then you’re wasting two incredibly valuable assets. You also need Traffic to be able to run A/B tests to improve the other two pillars of the formula. Take a hard look at how your business invests its resources (mainly time & money) into the three different categories of Traffic, Conversion, and Economics. Evaluate how you are investing your resources into each pillar of the Profit Hacking Formula. You can either rank each of the three from 1 – 3 based on how much time (or money or other resources) you invest into improving that pillar or you can give each one an estimated percentage of your time (or money or other resources): Traffic
Conversions
Economics
Time Money Other resources
How do you think you should be investing your resources to get the greatest gains in profit over the next 3 months? Set the tone for the next quarter year now by writing down the shift in your resources your business will make: Traffic
Conversions
Time Money Other resources
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Economics
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The percentage of time & resources you should devote to each of the three pillars will depend on where your business is at right now. These percentages will change regularly as the reality of your business changes over time. I recommend you recalibrate the percentages once a quarter to ensure you’re putting your focus where your business most needs it.
THE PROFIT HACK RECAP
aaEconomics is the core component of all marketing. If you begin with the end in mind, then you want to start with Economics.
aaOne of the most important things you can test in your business is the prices you charge for your products or services.
aaThe back end is where the real profit is made
aaCreate and offer premium options to your prospects and customers
aaWork with all three pillars regularly to keep your business optimized 78