Top 5 Lessons Learned at Conversion Summit
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel and Benjamin attended this year’s Conversion Summit in Frankfurt. Today, they are happy to share their 5 top take-aways with you.
1. Establish a testing culture
Many companies out there tend to focus on very tactical tests, e.g. A/B testing button sizes and colors. The majority of the speakers at this year’s conversion summit recommended focusing on strategic tests by building up a generic testing framework that could be transferred to other situations, products and companies. The folks at ConversionXL, for example, created a research framework including technical analysis, qualitative surveys, user testing, web analytics, mouse tracking and heuristic analysis to feed your insights.
Another important step towards a testing culture is the creation and enabling of a CO (conversion optimization) team, that frequently and continuously runs tests without going through the lengthy approval process every time. In addition to that, you should avoid HIPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion) in the whole testing process. At the end of the day, the best bosses leave the testing to the product/testing team instead of consulting their spouses.
2. There is no best practice
One of the most important points that almost every company gets wrong is that there is no best practice. Every website is different and interacts with different people in different locations and languages. Websites are highly contextual. Just because your competitor’s website seems to work doesn’t mean it will work for you. And how do you even know their site is working? Maybe they’re testing 20 features at the same time without success or they’re not testing at all. If green checkmarks increased conversion rates on other websites, this doesn’t imply that it’s the best choice for you and your current product. Therefore, always start from scratch and always keep testing! Don’t copy tests but rather create them yourself to make sure they’re adapted to your individual target group, product and context.
3. Psychological user segmentation
Angie Schottmüller (CRO expert) and Gabriel Beck showed very good examples of a psychological approach to understanding your customers and adapting your copy, features and communication accordingly. Angie’s buying modalities, for example, use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to understand different user behavior and needs. She clusters customer groups into four different buying modalities such as competitive (NT), spontaneous (SP), methodical (SJ) and humanistic (NF). Each group values different kinds of content and interacts differently with your product. Whereas the methodical user segment (role model = Sherlock Holmes) is very slow, structured and decides based on logic, the spontaneous user segment (role model = Cpt. Jack Sparrow) acts fast and decides based on feelings and subjective impressions.
A similar approach is the limbic map, which displays the emotional facets of humans. It allows you both to “categorize” your current customer base and to compare it to the values your brand and product should communicate.
4. Copywriting
Michael Aagaard talked about the WYSIATI principle. What You See Is All There Is describes the fact that users judge a website/product instantly based on the information they see in the first seconds of their visit (although there might be much more information hidden somewhere else). This could lead to a situation where your users are totally misled by the information they see in the first couple of seconds. As simple as it sounds: optimize your product/website using your customers’ vocabulary. Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it makes sense to your customers.
5. Adapt your product to your customer
Most of the products out there don’t adapt to the individual user. Imagine someone would ask you to get married and you would say no (= no conversion), would you say yes the next day if nothing had changed? Probably not.
The same holds true for users that access the same page again and again but don’t convert because the page doesn’t change. A very interesting approach by Karl Kratz is to build multiple variants of landing pages to test the customer’s uncertainty in different ways. Maybe the user needs some social proof to convert, so why not add some customer reviews or testimonials? Or maybe some users don’t understand the product completely? In that case, go ahead and add a product teaser or a clear description the next time.
Final Statement: Think before you do
All in all, the Conversion Summit was a great source of knowledge and gave lots of insights into today’s trends in conversion optimization. At the end, Scott Stratten (author of the books “Unbounce” and “Unmarketing”) summarized the most important message in one statement: Think before you do. Many companies develop products or marketing campaigns without really thinking it through. This leads to QR codes on highway posters or next to “mobile forbidden” signs. Too often decisions are made without talking to all stakeholders first.
This post was written in collaboration with Daniel Zäh.
