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Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Hack
There are many ways to skin a cat. When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO), there are various approaches that marketers can take. In this article, I’ll expose you to my approach and make the case for why you should incorporate what I believe is the ultimate conversion rate optimization hack into your marketing tool belt.
Why listen to me? My name is Rishi Rawat and I’ve spent the last 15 years breaking my head to better understand why online shoppers behave the way they do. I know a thing or two because I’ve A/B tested a thing or two.
For an introduction to my approach, check out the video below (or continue reading to learn all the details):
Why Do You Need This CRO Hack?
Before I explain my CRO trick, I think it’s necessary to understand why I use it.
Here’s the reality: most (and by most I mean almost all) marketers are wasting their time and money in two ways.
1: Marketers are spending all of their available time perfecting their newest idea (a new landing page, new product page copy, a new email campaign, etc.) right away. For example, if they have the budget to spend 10 hours writing the copy for a new landing page, they’re using nearly all 10 hours to create one “perfect” version of the page.
If you spend all of your available time right away, you’re taking a big risk. What if shoppers don’t respond to your copy like you had hoped? Just because it sounds good to you doesn’t mean it will work for a shopper who has never purchased from you before.
A more effective strategy is to use some of your available time developing one pretty good sales pitch, some of your time developing another pretty good idea (that is significantly different from the first concept), and spending the rest of your time testing those ideas against each other. This increases your chances of reaching a real winner that resonates with your visitors. Read our article on developing an effective A/B testing strategy to learn more.
2: The second mistake leading to wasted time and lost dollars is attachment. Marketers are attaching themselves to their ideas too much. How much is too much? Any amount of attachment.
Whose idea is usually your favorite? The truth is that more often than not we think our own ideas are the greatest things since sliced bread. It kills us to admit that maybe there’s a better way to do something, or that even if we do have a successful idea that improvements can still be made.
The absolute worst thing any marketer can do is settle and marry themselves to any idea. Unless you’re seeing a 100% conversion rate (you’re not), then there is still work to be done.
So quit wasting your time and money “perfecting” your first idea right away, quit marrying yourself to every idea, and let me explain my CRO hack and how it can improve your optimization results.
The Conversion Optimization Hack You Didn’t Know You Needed
If there’s one lesson you learn from this article, it’s that you need to be your own biggest critic. We’re our own biggest critics in practically every other area of our lives (exercise, healthy eating, relationships)—the same should be true with our marketing ideas.
Anytime you come up with a concept, it’s critically important that you play devil’s advocate. What did you overlook? What selling angles couldn’t be incorporated into your sales pitch that could be tried out in a second concept (learn more about selling angles)? These are the types of questions you need to force yourself to ask after creating any concept.
You want your initial idea to be a huge success. I’m the same exact way. But what I’ve learned over the past 15 years is that the best way to achieve huge conversion lifts is to:
1: Convince yourself that your initial concept is going to be a massive failure, then ask yourself why it will fail. What are the ways in which your first concept will fail? What assumptions were you making that could be completely wrong? Note down your answers.
2: Immediately develop one, two, three, or more variations that are each significantly different from one another. These variations need to address the potential problems and oversights you identified in step 1 above.
3: A/B test the hell out of those ideas, then rinse and repeat.
Do these steps make sense? /
How Is This CRO Hack Different From Other CRO Strategies & Why Does It Work?
When it comes to CRO and A/B testing, many marketers use a different approach. They’ll test things piecemeal, meaning that they’ll test one small change at a time to confirm that this small change is a winner. Then they’ll implement that as the new live page (or email, or ad, etc.) and test another small change.
This sort of testing has its place. For example, if your only goal is to increase the click-through rate on a call to action, then sure, small adjustments make sense.
However, if your goal is…
- To boost the conversion rate of your best-selling product page by +10%,
- To funnel +10% more visitors from your most important landing page to your product page,
- Or to significantly improve your checkout flow,
…then piecemeal A/B testing is going to be a painstakingly slow process that will yield only minimal gains.
The better approach is to test dramatically different ideas. That means making wholesale changes to your sales pitch: add micro-improvements, incorporate your “why we exist” story into your pitch (it’s not enough to keep this locked away on your About Us page, which is seen by less than 5% of your audience), appeal to your shoppers’ specific needs and concerns with active participation, and rewrite your sales pitch using this highly-effective 9-point copywriting checklist.
Does this process make sense? /
What Is the Benefit of This CRO Hack?
The reason why testing dramatically different ideas—which only come about after you ask yourself why your initial idea could fail—is an effective CRO strategy (if not the most effective strategy) is because of how A/B testing tools work.
Every A/B testing platform is looking for a clear difference between two variations. If you only make small changes to your B variation, then the A/B testing platform is going to require more time to be certain of any impact.
However, if you make wholesale changes to your B variation, then the response from your shoppers—positive or negative—is going to be almost immediately clear. They’ll either love it or they’ll hate it (or, in some cases, you could have come up with a mixture of changes that resulted in a page that performs nearly the same as the original page).
Since the response from your shoppers is usually going to be clear within the first couple of weeks, the testing platform will have a much easier time detecting differences in performance. This leads to quicker test conclusions and, in the case of a winner, larger conversion lifts.
Are the benefits of this approach clear? /
Don’t Have Time to Implement This Conversion Optimization Tip?
This CRO approach is what we live by. Every project we work on incorporates the ideas mentioned in this article. It’s second nature to us. Check out our Case Studies page (where you can find many examples of this approach) and feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to chat and help you solve whatever problem it is that you’re facing.
Further Reading
We hope you enjoyed this ultimate CRO hack article.
We’ve spent the last 13 years in our marketing lab, experimenting with ways to optimize conversion rates and grow sales. We’re ready to spill the beans.
The following articles will save you 13 years:
— Before revealing the secret that’ll improve conversion rates by 20% let’s zoom out to see the forest for the🌲: Optimize Conversion Rates: A Totally Different Approach
— For every 1,000 product pitches encountered the shopper buys one item (and we’re being generous). You want this to be your product. How do our brains choose? They rely on a ranking algorithm, not dissimilar to the one Google uses for search results. Our conversion copywriting process is designed to get your pitch to the front of the line.
— The link above revealed how to construct the perfect sales pitch. Next, this killer pitch needs to be infused into your product page. We have just one chance to convert this visitor (only 15% of visitors ever return). Read this next: Infusing Your Product Story To Your Product Page.
About Frictionless Commerce
We deliver an unfair advantage to technical product DTC brands (for example, Dyson) by improving advertising effectiveness by 20% in 90 days. This is achieved using a buyer psychology conversion copywriting framework. All paid traffic eventually reaches the product page and this is where we strike. Our process.
If you like doing the hard work yourself, our founder Rishi shares conversion ideas on LinkedIn every day. Connect with him here.
If you want to make your life easier and still increase conversions, jump on a call.
