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Chapter One
What Is Holistic Conversion Rate Optimization?
When talking about conversion rate optimization, we often talk about low-hanging fruit in reference to ideas that easily and/or quickly improve conversions. Who wouldnāt want some low-hanging fruit? Easy pickings are often where we find some of the fastest and highest returns.
When I look at the idea of low-hanging fruit, a whole series of questions comes to my mind. What is low-hanging fruit? What makes one fruit a better pick than another? Can you tell if a conversion idea is ripe just by looking at it? If you have to start cutting branches, which branch is best? And when you get right down to it, isnāt all fruit low-hanging if you cut down the tree?
Let me be clear, I am not suggesting you cut down your marketing tree because then the tree will die. I am also not necessarily suggesting that you have to start over with your website to improve conversions. The secret to why a fruit hangs low on a tree is often embedded in the roots. Who is to say that you canāt go after the low-hanging fruit of conversion while simultaneously building a better and longer-lasting foundation, which will bear more branches and higher volumes of fruit? Who is stopping you from planting a second, third, or even fourth tree? What is keeping you from selectively improving the DNA of the tree so that it bears more delicious and low-hanging fruit? And whatās the best way to reach the not-so-low-hanging fruit?
These are the kinds of questions most people donāt typically ask. But they are the questions that are important to ask when looking to improve conversion. Convert Every Click is about questioning your assumptions and looking at your marketing in a different way. Itās training yourself to ask the questions and reach for new heights. Itās training yourself to see the bigger picture while remembering the individual prospect or customer at the same time.
Ever since I can remember Iāve been an inherently curious person, which made me a natural experimenter. I loved to take things apart and rebuild them. I also enjoyed building things from scratch. I had many interests and experimented with many projects throughout my life. Iāve come to realize that most of them contributed to making me into the person I am today.
My fatherās lifetime hobby has always been the art of performance magic. When I was eight, he brought me into his hobby and exposed me to a world of concepts that most people donāt learn in a lifetime. Having to go on stage and present an illusion at age eight was a nerve-wracking experience. Any performance is an art with many parts. As a presenter, you focus not just on yourself, but also on what your audience perceives. Your perception and your audienceās perception are totally different things. Every individual has different needs and wants, and so itās the performerās job to try to give each of them what they are looking for. These lessons I learned so young became very valuable later in life with conversion rate optimization.
Around the same time I was learning magic, I was exposed to our first home computer. Because of my keen sense of curiosity, my first thoughts with the computer were How does this work? and What are all the things it can do? I quickly learned almost everything it could do, and even took it apart and put it back together. My parents didnāt love finding that out. Luckily, it still functioned afterward, and apparently I learned some useful skills. A few years later, when I was 11, I made my first business website. At 13, I took on my first e-commerce client.
From ages 13 to 24, I created many different businesses. I spent time as a web programmer and as a print and web designer, and I was always learning how to be a better entrepreneur through each of my businesses. I also studied psychology and learned more about its profound effect on business and marketing. Because of my need to experiment and figure things out, I went from business to business, learning many skills and gaining exposure to many industries along the way. Because of my early exposure to technology, I always had a special knack for understanding the intricacies of the online world. One of my old employers called me a ātriple threatā because of my skills in web design, coding, and marketing. Most importantly, because of my entrepreneurial experiences and studies in psychology, I came to understand and greatly appreciate how each of these skills plays a role in generating a good return on investment from every effort, both online and off-line.
Since then, Iāve built a series of āCoreā companies, which fill different needs for different audiences. ConversionCore is a consulting firm that focuses on using my holistic conversion techniques to help mid- to large-sized companies grow their bottom lines. My other companies include ClickCore (an ROI-focused web development company), AutomationCore, which helps small businesses grow through marketing automation-related products, and a few sideline software companies, which solve different problems for different audiences. One of those software companies was acquired, and in 2012 became my first seven-figure deal.
It all comes back to psychology and experimentation. I could never have sold that software company or helped grow so many of my clientsā companies without all of the lessons and skills I learned through the years. None of that would have been possible without my natural curiosity and need to continually improve existing systems.
Fortunately for everyone, technology has advanced to the point where you can often use software to test your ideas in the real world and see if youāre improving. You donāt have to deconstruct and reconstruct entire businesses to achieve improvements. Iāll tell you about the software later in the book.
The business world is slowly catching on to these conversion techniques, and I hope they will become mainstream someday. For now, I want to give you a serious competitive edge over other companies. In this book, Iām not just going to tell you how to perform the magic, as if it were a memorized trick. Iām going to show you the principles behind the magic of conversion rate optimization, the psychology that makes it really work for all kinds of audiences. And just like magic (pun intended), youāre going to be amazed at what you can do once you understand the foundations.
Donāt get me wrong; magic is only an analogy here. Weāre not trying to trick people into buying your products or signing up for your mailing list! The goal is to put your products and services in the best light, present them at the best angle, so each audience member sees it in the best possible way for them.
This whole book is about revealing those secrets to you. Starting in the next chapter, I hope your eyes will be opened to a whole new perspective of the online world. Even if you think you already have a pretty good handle on your business, youāre going to see something new. But before we can begin, itās important for you and I to be on the same page about what conversion rate optimization is from my perspective.
Letās Start at the Beginning
Even if you already know a good deal about conversion rate optimization (CRO), youāre going to find that I approach things a little differently. At some point, CRO became known for on-page optimization, and the industry grew around that. People even now work in isolation, one page at a time. Once they get results for that single page, they move on to the next page.
The problem is that no single marketing component works in isolation. Everything affects something else. Itās an entire ecosystem of marketing. When you tinker with one piece by itself, you may have no idea what youāre affecting down the line. A boost in conversion rates on one page might actually hurt the bottom line, if youāre not paying attention to the bigger picture.
Holistic Conversion Rate Optimization (HCRO), on the other hand, takes the entire marketing ecosystem into account. We like to think in terms of the entire marketing process, including funnels and overall structures. While we do look at individual pages and metrics, we always look at them while simultaneously considering the big picture. In other words, in addition to optimizing the website, we look at what happens before prospects hit the website (traffic), as well as what happens after they leave (follow-up). I call this the Holistic Conversion Timeline (Figure 1.1). The traffic stage happens at the beginning of the timeline on the left, then people progress to the website, then thereās a follow-up stage. The follow-up takes them back to the traffic stage. There may be other steps in between these three major points on the timeline, such as phone calls or direct mail.
A conversion can happen anywhere on the timeline. For example, if you have an online ad with a phone number, a person might convert into a customer without ever getting to the website. Or if you collect a lead on the website and you have off-line follow-up, they might convert on the follow-up end of things.
In my opinion, the goal should be to lift your overall revenue and/or profit, even if that means doing something counterintuitive, such as lowering a certain conversion point. This big-picture, or timeline, view of CRO is one of the main reasons why Iāve been fortunate enough to have over 90 percent increases in conversion rates for my clients. Itās also the reason why I was strongly encouraged to write this book.
Another component of HCRO is the concept of trying to convert all visitors. Traditional CRO typically seeks to optimize for the largest group of people only. But that still leaves out people who might convert, if they were presented with a different experience or offering. So, HCRO solves this problem by optimizing the entire business from a customer-centric perspective. We essentially create a unique optimized experience for every visitor, or as close to it as we can get. The more we lean toward a truly customer-centric and dynamic website, the closer we get to converting all people who come in contact with your business.
Youāre going to be amazed at all the ways you can grow your business using HCRO. But we need to go over a few terms and concepts before we can dive into all the other cool stuff I want to show you.
What Is Conversion, Anyway?
A conversion is nothing more than a transition from one state of being to another. You can convert from one religion to another. You can convert from one career to another. You can convert a cold call into a hot lead. You can convert a lead into a sale. Itās a change from one thing to another.
Although the most obvious examples of conversion may revolve around religion or politics, itās no different in the world of business and online conversion. The goal is to transition anonymous people (your web traffic) into something more useful to you (leads, customers, or raving fans).
A conversion online can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Itās the tipping point where a goal is reached. That can be a link clicked, a page read, a form submitted, a purchase madeāanything that moves a person closer to your ultimate goal. Because this is a business book, letās assume that ultimate goal is probably to make more money (or to collect donations or spread education in the case of nonprofits).
Good. Now we know what a conversion is. But what is a conversion rate, and why should you optimize it? A basic conversion rate definition is the ratio of conversions over traffic. In other words, how many people saw a certain product divided by how many people bought it (if a purchase was the goal).
So if 100 people saw your web page for lawn furniture and 30 people purchased a set, then the conversion rate is 30 of 100ā30/100, or 30 percent. This is just a basic example. There are many ways to define a conversion rate. Weāll go over that in more ...
