Looking for a Path to Successful E-commerce Site Optimization? Here’s How to Set Yourself up for Success.

The following is adapted from Opting In To Optimization by Jon MacDonald.

Phil Jackson has more NBA championship rings than any other coach — thirteen, to be exact. Two he earned as a player with the New York Knicks. The other eleven he earned as a coach — six as head coach of the Chicago Bulls and then five more with the Los Angeles Lakers.

To get those legendary eleven, he did something no one else did at the time.

Head coaches work high-stakes jobs in the cutthroat, competitive environments of NBA pro basketball and American capitalism. In the eighties and nineties (Jackson’s era), most head coaches took a militaristic approach. They fumed, shouted, flaunted power moves, and shoved players into rigid systems. No other approach, it seemed, could pave the way to championship rings.

Until Phil Jackson showed up. And the only thing more surprising than his approach was the fact that it worked.

Most coaches taught players to focus on titles; Jackson encouraged players to focus on each other. Most coaches set up strict, uniform regimens for players; Jackson crafted a unique approach for each athlete’s strengths and weaknesses. (He treated dazzling Michael Jordan differently than hot-headed Dennis Rodman — and coaxed both enormous egos into operating as team players.) Most coaches visualized championship rings as symbols of power and status; Jackson taught his team they represented a circle of team compassion.

To use language from his book Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson focused on “the soul of success.” That’s what made him different from other coaches. He cared about titles, yes. But to him, rings and winning were the results of a healthy team soul, not the causes of it. Get the principles right, and the rest follows.

You may never have set foot on a basketball court. But you, too, are in a highly competitive world where a “win at all costs” mindset dominates. In e-commerce, the stakes are high — and getting higher as the industry accelerates and has a growing valuation in trillions of dollars.

I’ve little doubt if you’re reading this, you have an e-commerce site, and you’ve already invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and money into driving traffic to that site. I suspect you’ve worked very hard on generating wins like subscriptions, revenue, or more customers, too.

I also suspect something keeps you up at night.

Maybe traffic isn’t converting like you think it should, or the tactics you’re using aren’t working the way they did for a rising direct-to-consumer darling. At any rate, something isn’t adding up. You’re short on rings and wins.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. As the Founder and CEO of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm, I encounter this scenario every week. I’ve spent over twelve years helping the world’s largest brands like Nike, Xerox, Adobe, The Economist (and hundreds of smaller, yet well-known brands) successfully optimize their sites.

You’re not Nike any more than you’re Phil Jackson, but here’s the good news: with the right approach, you can earn the results many of the brands I’ve worked with have seen. Results like increased conversions leading to an average increased revenue of over 100 percent.

You can make that happen. But not, perhaps, the way you’d expect.

You won’t get there with a bag of in-favor hacks, a guide to the latest Shopify app promising huge conversion gains, or a twenty-seven-tips roundup claiming changing button colors will double your online revenue (spoiler: it won’t).

Rather, you need something that goes much deeper — something that, like Phil Jackson’s effective and revolutionary coaching approach, goes right to the soul of success. In e-commerce terms, you need a collection of conversion principles. Principles so proven over time that for brands of every size, they’re more like laws.

That’s what you’re holding. The immutable conversion laws in this book outline everything you need to know about the approach, practice, and mindsets that generate more conversions and revenue for brands of every size. Even better, you don’t need decades of experience, an unusual amount of skill, the best players in the industry, or millions of dollars in salary to apply them.

You just need a willingness to know who’s coming to your site, a curiosity to dig into what they’re experiencing, and the humility to make their experience better.

At its core, conversion rate optimization is about removing as much friction from a website experience as possible, so nothing inhibits a consumer from researching and purchasing a product. This benefits the customer AND you — at the end of the day, you both want a conversion: the brand for sustainable revenue, the consumer to solve the pain or need that brought them to your brand in the first place.

To learn more about how to achieve successful e-commerce site design and optimization, Opting In To Optimization is available on Amazon.

R. Jon MacDonald is the founder of The Good, a conversion-rate optimization firm that has achieved notable results for some of the largest online brands including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, The Economist, and more. He regularly contributes content on conversion optimization to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc. He knows how to get visitors to take action.