More 2 Marketing

Susan
Welcome to modern marketing, the podcast and explores marketing, product and everything business. I’m your host, Susan, and today we’re talking about what is E comma, CRO process and how can understanding it help marketers? Today I have a very special guest, Ilan. He is a professional and e-commerce expert who specialises in growing revenue and profit and I have to say he does an Absolutely Fabulous, fantastic job. I’ve seen him myself. He has a passion for building up the understanding of data and businesses to make smarter decisions. He really does do everything in the digital space here. I’ve got to say, digital conversion is his game and he is a top performer when you want to engage. So welcome, Ilan.
Ilan
Thank you, Susan. Thank you so much for having.
Susan
Me. Tell us a bit about yourself. What you’re up to right now and what you do in the digital space.
Ilan
I am an independent E commerce adviser and also have a boutique CRO e-commerce agency which started to grow. So I we helped. Mainly direct to consumer e-commerce businesses grow their conversion rate. By and essentially the main goal there is to get more revenue and profit from the same amount of traffic by improving the user experience. So we do that in a few few ways. Probably we’re going to touch on a few of those during the session today. So that’s the main thing that I’m working on and then I do this a little bit of independent consulting, more growth advice, consulting for E commerce businesses where I’m not just looking at the 0 but a whole. Ohh, a lot of different things might be looking at their product road map, could be helping them with their email. Just trying to understand what the right thing is that they should be working on. Depending on the the growth stage they are at in the E Commerce E commerce business.
Susan
Fantastic. And I do know you have a huge pedigree in this as well from working with some of the biggest telcos in Australia through to some of the smaller businesses that need help. So you’ve got that really vast experience across all different business types to help to make their revenue better with the same amount of money for marketing spend.
Ilan
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s actually a really good point, I think. What conversion rate optimization or any sort of growth, what it looks like just so dependent what you should invest in, what you should focus on is so dependent on the industry you’re in, but also just the stays that your business is at, we’ll kind of talk often talk about in e-commerce, you talk about 3 stages as the growth stage, a build stage. The scale stage broadly to try and categorise it into three steps. Yeah, and I’ve done quite a few different things. I spent most of my career at Optus doing a lot of different marketing roles. Before I got into E, commerce has been more traditional marketing, working as a product, product manager and go to market and then got into digital and E commerce and then also worked in our app space as well, which is quite good. But I always, always loved ecommerce. And so I had a couple of side hustles during that time. So like all sorts of different things selling Kindles on eBay and. Selling importing football jerseys. I had a partner and a soccer shop because that’s what’s been a passion of mine, which so that’s been quite good because you do start to see how things look really differently at the enterprise level. And then of course.
Susan
Yes.
Ilan
That’s what what things look like when you’re starting and scaling rich. It’s all hard and there’s always a long list of things to do. It’s just the type of challenges and how you allocate your resources looks really, really different all the way through. But yeah, it’s really enjoyable. I think a lot of great brands out there in Australia and people are really focused on their product. OK. They’re very, very good at that and their marketing proposition, but then it’s like how do I bring that to life with my marketing on my website. So something I really, really enjoy. I really enjoy doing.
Susan
I think that’s one thing a lot. Of people just. Assume that when you build a website, people will come. They don’t realise how much of an art there is behind there. So let’s talk a bit about that in our podcast today and and let’s actually go right down to the basics. Alright, can you briefly explain what CRO, which is the conversion rate?
Ilan
Hmm. Let’s do it. Huh.
Susan
Optimization is and why it’s important for E commerce businesses.
Ilan
Great, great question. It is a term that. People, everyone has heard about it, but like you could ask 5 people and get 5 different answers. I think often I think at its core and I like to call it traditional. Co is AB testing so that is where we’ve got we’ve got. Let’s just take a very simple example. You want to test a new homepage design and so.
Ilan
You launch two versions. You could launch three versions, but typically you would launch two versions and you split test and you you monitor the metrics and you get to statistical significance which is very powerful because then you can say. Absolutely, this version is better, so this this is really, really important. We talk about data driven decisions. We’re not so often with the website in particular, it’s us an opinion based, external opinions, internal opinions. It’s hard to know if something work and what’s CRO does is allow you to. To answer that that question, and of course, when you see your conversion rate increase, that’s really translating to the bottom line as well. So that’s that’s what most people think of and that that is traditionally what 0 is. But there’s a bit of a process to that before you get to that point. And I think that some of the. The things that I maybe I can talk to as well, which is so powerful is how do I figure out what to test? How do I do the research before I actually start testing and and making changes?
Susan
And I think that whole about what to test and how to test would stumble a lot of people. They would just assume, Ohh, I’ll just change the whole picture here. They don’t think about all the other elements that could be on that site from the font, the colour, even what the button is.
Ilan
Hmm.
Susan
I I’ve had the privilege of working with Ilan, and I remember seeing one of the split tests that you did do in the past, which was literally the colour of the buy now button.
Ilan
Hmm.
Susan
And there’s the statistical difference of those two colours. That were put out. There one of them you would have thought would have worked cause it was on brand, but it was actually the other colour that really drove all the conversions.
Hmm.
Susan
And that’s something that people might not even think about is changing the colour on their button to say, buy now because they’re too fixated on brand colours.
Ilan
Yes, it’s it’s a classic that gets spoken about a bit changing colours or making minor things. One thing I would say is that sort of thing is is really when you’ve got a lot of traffic, but he’s very powerful, a few things to touch on there that often what I like to talk to people. That is conversion focused design. Now your brand and aesthetics are still critical at the end of the day, there’s a person on the other side of the computer and how they feel when they’re looking at your brand and the importance of your brand. Assets are part of that experience. So we can’t move too far away from that, but. Where they’ll be testing does help. There are things out there that perhaps somewhere in the marketing or brand department will say this is off brand, but these are really and are we willing to box ourselves in a way where we’re restricting the options to grow the business. In the example you mentioned, just just there so. It can be very, very powerful, particularly in enterprise businesses where you’ve got a lot of traffic. And those small changes like typically if someone buys your product, it’s not because of the colour button but the colour button has drawn their attention and and just made it easier to purchase. And so it does have an impact. It might be minor, but when you’re in a business with 1,000,000 billions of dollars of revenue, even a tiny little uplift from doing that. Test can have a a huge a huge difference and I think that’s why it’s good. For. Businesses because you can say to people we’re just testing like, don’t worry, we’re not changing the brand like and that’s where Sarah is powerful as well because it allows not just the.
Ilan
Not just people working on the website to renovate, but other parts of the business to try new ideas and actually test them with real customers on your website. I mean, that’s where. That’s where really we’re getting true customer feedback. We have clicks and we have some intent from customers maybe on ads. But the website that come to the website, there’s real customers there. So we can really test things not only in terms of yes, we want to purchase, but just as an example. So we’re thinking of a new headline like change the headline on the website and test it and that headline. Might give some insight to other areas of the business as well. So it becomes quite powerful. In in that way.
Susan
And one of the things I love is also the whole heat mapping.
Ilan
Yes.
Susan
So do you want to explain what heat? Mapping is for everyone as well.
Ilan
Yes, yes. And if you like, I can talk touch on the different types of research because there is a few that we use when we’re essentially trying to get ourselves into. The shoes of our. Customer and heat maps are such a great tool in order to do that so they can show us a few things. People talk about this umbrella term heat maps, but underneath that there’s a few different types of heat maps or what I would just say are visual tools that are showing you how your user is interacting with your site. And so the first one is. Scroll map which is fantastic. So that shows you how people where people drop off on the page, what percentage of the page people are seeing and how many people see it. It’s always an eye opener. Of course. We know that OK, 100% of people see the top of the page and.
Ilan
People do drop off but. I recommend anyone listening to put a heat map on their page. There’s a lot of great tools out there. There’s a free. One or Microsoft clarity. It’s not. I’m not partnership with them. I just like to recommend it cause it’s free. There’s others like.
Susan
Yep, that’s good testing tool. Yep.
Ilan
Yeah. And put it on and I think you’ll be surprised at what you see, how quickly people drop off on some of your big. Images so you think and this is where with CRO we wanna use data and get as close as possible to the customer. So instead of a team sitting around in the office saying I think people are going to see this and we’re going to lay out the page, it’s like let’s really understand what people are saying. So there’s your scroll map, which is what people are looking at. Then things get interesting. So we’ll get a click map so that then shows you. Our people are clicking some software have what’s called a like a mouse map. So that actually shows how the mouse is moving across the page. So all.
Susan
Creepy. Yep. And so that ones are kind of the creepy one for me. In case you like thinking to go there, but you don’t actually click it, you move it back and then they know.
Ilan
These. Pardon. Yeah, it’s, it’s. Yeah. Well, then that yeah, the next level of that is session recordings, which I tell people don’t worry, no one’s looking at you, looking at looking at the website. It shows the complete customer journey. So from the minute you see the page they land on and you can see them. Where they’re clicking, where they’re scroll. So it’s always fascinating. It’s so interesting and and and that tool Microsoft Clarity has just introduced a great feature which one of the problems with with session recordings, it takes a lot of time to watch. But so they’ve they’ve introduced a feature which has AI, it watches the recordings for you in a way and then it gives you a summary and tells you what to go look at. So instead of sitting there for an hour looking at.
Ilan
20 recordings it gives you a list and says this happened on this recording and then you can click in and just look at that section so it helps you understand behaviour from that perspective. So it. It’s always fascinating, and so some of the things that we look for with heat maps, for example, you can get dead clicks or rage clicks so are dead click, for example, is when someone clicks on something that isn’t clickable. So that tells us straight away, OK, something what do we need to change here?
Susan
His assumptions? He.
Ilan
Yeah. Or there’s rage clicks where people. Click on something quite a few times and get a don’t get a response. Maybe there’s a code error and another one which is quite good at called quick backs. So that’s when someone clicks on a page and quickly goes back. It’s almost like a bounce right within the page. They’re still on the site, but they’ve gone to a page and quickly gone back, and so when we see that we’re like all of this.
Susan
Ah.
Ilan
Is asking really good questions. OK? Why is this happening? And you can go in and try and come up with some solutions to help the customer on their journey.
Susan
And also it just helps to for you to optimise the site as well. To get a. Better performance so that the CX improves as well over time with all these iterations.
Ilan
The two, the two, exactly. That’s right. The two completely linked user experiences is almost directly linked to is. It’s almost like the reporting number for conversion rate is almost the reporting number for how good your user experience is.
Susan
And what else? If you’re, if you’re about to do pro for the very first time? Heat maps is one really great tool. Are there any other ones you think are really great for for the beginning first discoveries?
Ilan
In discovery phase, we’re really looking to understand the customer. So it does. So we’re looking for different different types of research which help paint the picture. So of course there’s Google Analytics. So that’s the, the other main tool in terms of quant analysis. Just getting some numbers because we can start to see. Have a look at our funnel and see where people are dropping off. See how long people are spending on certain pages or not spending time on pages. So it helps to set the context. Before we start to review the site where on my site are there opportunities to improve improve across the purchase journey. So there are two places to start with your research and then we want to do some call research as well. How do we put some colour around? What’s happening on the site?
We have what’s?
Ilan
Called a heuristic analysis, which is just a guess. A fancy way of saying, just really going through the site with a fine tooth cone and.
Susan
Do the journey yourself.
Ilan
Exactly going through the journey into hand, having it’s often important. To have other people go through the journey, a huge so often I do audits of sites and within 5 minutes I’ve found something and the clients like I can’t believe this was happening and I’m like, that’s OK, they’re we all have blind spots in our business and it’s just often it’s just putting getting some fresh eyes on there and and of course putting it in front of real customers. So with that, with that core research, putting the site in front of real customers, there’s a lot of. I really advocate for this and I think. People don’t do enough of it because of some of the the the effort that it takes sometimes to do market research, but there’s so many great tools out there now. Gone are the days of. Putting together a 5010 thousand dollar marketing research project and we’ve gotta go to this two sided mirror and buy everyone pizza and sit in a room and figure out what’s going on. There are online platforms there where I can I can recruit like find participants in my demo. Graphic and send out say 2 designs that I want feedback on on my website. I can get feedback on that from hundreds of people within 24 hours like it’s so easy and so affordable now. So that’s the other thing that you really want to really try and do. The other really big one is surveys and so having. You can have it on your site, you just have to be careful that it doesn’t interrupt the journey too much you can have. Literally have surveys. That pop up probably see this quite often. I mean, can you find what you’re looking for? How is your user experience today? The other thing you can do is implement them in post purchase, which is quite good. So at the checkout, while the experience is still fresh in their mind, you’re asking them some detailed questions about what they could find, what they couldn’t find. Just really trying to understand where the opportunities are. So that’s the the best place to start is really, yeah, figuring out what’s going on with your customers.
Susan
I think one of the the biggest tips that I’ve ever come across is. If you are a business and you’re employing new staff members on the very first couple of days of orientation, get them to go through the whole site the whole journey.
Ilan
Yes, yes. Purchase the product, get it shipped like absolutely.
Susan
I think that’s one thing that a lot of places don’t do, but you need to really understand the consumer journey to then be able to recommend improvements and potential new products or services or how to improve conversion rates and everything like that unless you’ve actually gone through the journey. How can you actually say that that will work or won’t work?
Ilan
Exactly. Exactly.
Susan
Now, how does improving that user experience that we just talked about the UX impact conversion rates? Have you got any examples you’re able to share?
Ilan
Yeah. Yeah, it’s. Where it’s it’s directly linked. As I said, we when we have a good experience and customers are happy, they’re doing one of three things on a E commerce website. Generally they’re navigating across pages, they’re browsing specific content, images, copy, watching video. Is in. If that all works really well and having a good experience and they purchase and if and, then the conversion rate goes up. So what that actually looks like I might give you like 2 examples on either side of either end of the spectrum and it’s similar to what you mentioned in terms of a button colour, but a test we ran around back at Optus was.
Perfect.
Ilan
For mobile people purchasing on mobile, you have to put in your phone number while you were going through the process. And when you did that, it showed a full keyboard. We changed that experience just to show a number pad because all we needed with. Digits makes sense. And that increased the. Conversion rate by a couple of percentage points, which again just coming back to enterprise, when you have a. Lot when it’s. Quite large numbers like makes a makes a difference. Yeah. So just changing that, just changing that which was.
Susan
Significant. That’s.
Ilan
Which was a relatively small change for the developer. It wasn’t massive, he just needed to tweak a few things to ask the UI to do that, and had this had this uplift. So it’s quite, quite powerful, but we couldn’t get to that without watching what was happening with customers and looking at the data and saying hold on. Second, people are dropping off at this point. Let’s have a look at the screen. Hold on a second. It’s a bit tricky to put the phone number in correctly and do all this at this step, so that’s like an example of a minor up and minor optimization. And there’s so many of those. When you go with a fine tooth comb and look for those those. Little bits and pieces, as you said, as a as a real customer on the other end of the scale, a test that was really successful, we did a full product page redesign with the with the client. But we didn’t just jump jump to the design phase. I think that’s off. And. What what happens? A A brief comes in from someone talking about the product that goes to a designer. They might look at some competitors and make a really nice page, but a lot of the perhaps analytics and research gets missed and was very happy because this client allowed us to do this. It was for a arthritis cream product.
Ilan
And that’s the current product page. It just wasn’t explaining the benefits. It wasn’t showing testimonials, which is so important, all the sorts of things that are so important, particularly when you’re buying something for your. And so we went through the proper process with research and completely transformed the the page. It looked really different to a standard e-commerce page. We showed images of the target market. There were so many different things that were really well thought out across the page. And we compared, we did an AB test and the uplift. Like 40% on the conversion rate, it was massive and I was there anyone missing that is very, very rare to see uplifts of that. But we definitely saw why it was a winner. But it can happen and if you go through that, we’re very lucky because the client allowed us to really do the analytics and then I work with an excellent designer and developer who really understood what we were trying to do with the page. And we just kind of worked together on the execution to get those results.
Susan
I think that the key take out there is understand your audience to be able to marry that in with what the data is telling you. So you can make those informed decisions because otherwise, if you just went off and go OK, I’m just gonna look at the competitor. They must know the audience. You may know I’ve gotten that same result of the 40% uplift.
Ilan
Yeah, it’s. I’m. I just laugh because I’m so, so true cause we. We sit around internally and say the competitors are doing it. How do we know that it’s work? It’s working. We don’t. They’re probably sitting around saying the same thing, looking at you. So that’s all that. So that you’re right. It’s it’s get inspiration from competitors. But I think sometimes people often copy and it’s not about copying. Everything needs to come through, as you say.
Susan
Definitely.
Ilan
Back through your brand and your customers and your value proposition. And we’re talking a lot of marketing terms here and I think that’s something I say to people commensurate optimization. It is. I see it as part of a marketing discipline and but it sits on, we’re living on your website and we have more data. But at the end of the day. So I do want to know my customer, do I know my product and then like how am I explaining how the two are linked, how am I helping? Customers with my product and when you do that job really well with a whole lot of tactics and techniques, that’s when.
Susan
Customers respond exactly and and that’s exactly why I’ve got my podcast that talks about marketing, product and business because you can’t have one of them without the other one. They are all interlinked.
Ilan
Yes, the tracker the tracker.
Susan
And that’s why it’s great to get understandings and learnings from people like yourself and see how things actually do meld in with each other for your businesses to succeed.
Susan
Now, I’d love to know a bit more about how you use research to better understand the customer behaviours and preferences in CRO. You’ve touched on some of them. What else can you? Share with us.
Ilan
I think I did spend, yeah. I mentioned a little bit about if you’re starting off the type of research that you can do. So those are the key elements. One other one I I love to do is sentiment analysis. So what we can do is understand we can look at reviews. So we have all these customer feedback. That’s what we’re trying to do just in any type of way. Get us our hands on as much customer feedback as we can. So reviews are fantastic.
Ilan
And then the other one, which is always interesting, is web chat transcripts. So what’s different probably about this is I now have AI to do the heavy lifting. So say for reviews we want to understand how people use our product or some issues they might have and address those concerns up front so we can then put that information, put that information on the product. Page. So that’s really valuable. But how do I find those reviews? There can be a lot, but now what I can do is I can just export them and. The cheap put them in ChatGPT and I can ask ChatGPT. Tell me what are. How are people using my product like you can do it for you at bulk in a few minutes. It’s so powerful so and we want to look equally at our negative reviews and our positive reviews and what we can can learn from them. And often I find things in reviews which are passed to the marketing team. Because I’m I tell them this, this, this headline because it’s in the voice of customer. What better way to sell to new customers?
Susan
Yeah.
Ilan
Been in the voice of the existing customers, the same target market who are advocating for your product and some of the one liners they come up with are just fantastic. They make for great headlines. Then of course with web chats, if someone is coming through a web chat and asking the same question over again like we need to remove that friction and that should probably live somewhere.
Ilan
On the page as well. So doing that and again with AI, we can just ask it to pull out. What are the most common complaints instead of sitting there reading hundreds of hours of transcripts? An extension of looking at Web chat is speaking to customer service staff or retail staff. The people on the frontline speaking to customers every day. These guys that they have Nuggets of gold because they’re having that one. To one, yeah. Always right, it’s. And I know like in our days at Optus like you’d see execs and we’d be encouraged to get on the phone and to spend time in stores.
Susan
Yep, double jacking. Yep.
Ilan
Because you’re getting, you know that’s a challenge if you’re in ecommerce, for example, or any digital business. We’re sitting behind a computer all day. We’re quite far removed. From our customers. And so speaking to them and understanding how they talk about products, how they consider buying products and asking those asking those people, the internal staff, retail or customer service to look at your website as well and getting feedback because they’re the ones probably closer to the customers than all of us. And so that’s another great way. To do the research. So there are a lot of the initial research is research initial research that you do. Of course what we wanna try and encourage is a bit of a loop and a culture of experimentation and testing. So you, you do read, let’s say you’re starting and you do research, you implement, you test it. Is now all those results from those tests is new research. It’s new customer feedback and then we kind of go back again and start all over again with that new those new insights continuing to improve understanding of the customer.
Susan
I think the biggest thing to understand is you may not get everything right first time when you make changes, sometimes you may have all the best intentions and the data saying this and you put it in and unfortunately it doesn’t yield the results you’re hoping for. That’s not a failure, that’s a learning and that’s where you get more data from and then can move forward with it.
Ilan
You’re a client. I’d be like high fiving you. Right now. We are one of the things about Sarah. We’ve got this winners and losers tests, winners and losers. Now of course. We all want winners. We want to grow our business, but the losers are teaching you something and also equally important. They’re de risking changes. Just an example.
Ilan
Let’s say you’re doing a website redesign, a completely new website, and you just decide I’ve this. This happens. People just launched the website without any testing and then the conversion rate, the conversion rate dropped. Now imagine you’ve tested some of those elements and some lost before you’ve got this piece of information that we can’t launch this. So you’ve de risked going backwards and that’s what we. Often people make changes without any testing and what AB testing allows you to do, which is very important for bigger businesses because you’ve got like you’ve got a higher revenue base, it allows you to to make sure you don’t intro. Those negative changes, which can can take you backwards and what you say. Again so great to hear like you’ve learned something about your customer. This is this is some of the most direct customer feedback you can you can get when you run these tests, it’s very black and white. If something did or didn’t work.
Susan
Exactly. And one of the most fabulous tools I’ve seen when I used to help run some E commerce sites. There’s some tools that you can get that you can plug in and then you can actually watch what’s happening on your site live and it looks like a little supermarket and it’s got all the aisles and you can see when Johnny came in because Johnny’s is a logged in member and they’ve come before, you can even see Johnny’s purchased 5 things in the last 20 days. And then what? Johnny’s got in his basket and is he going to go forward with as you’re removing things from the basket, adding more that you have this added layer that you can actually talk to Johnny if you choose to. Too and I I think that is just so powerful for certain different types of sites to be able to help consumers when there’s a product or a service that may need their additional support for education because yes, they’re reading everything, but sometimes they may actually need to talk to a Rep, but they don’t want to start a chat, for example, unless it’s a personalised. Chat. So there’s definitely so many different ways, and yes, you get all the data from this as well. You can do some analytics on it as well to see how how it works. If if it is or isn’t and then you know a bit more about Johnny and people like Johnny.
Ilan
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Hot Jar actually allows you to similar similar to to put up a survey or to ask someone. Can you find what you’re looking for and that’s. So because you’re you’re you’re matching, you’re putting some call data with with the heat maps you’re seeing the clicking, but now you’re actually putting a person or understanding what that person’s trying to do, so you can understand, like, why? Why did you click here when trying to yeah, understand a little bit. More about what’s possible.
Susan
And I think also just diving back into your comment about talking to frontline staff, whether they are the call centre, the people behind the chat or even just retail faces. That is so important and so many companies don’t do that or it never gets to the decision makers that may be making the product or the service or the marketing. So breaking down those silos is immensely important. I used to do that quite a lot when I used to work at Optus myself. I’d go directly to my call.
Ilan
Hmm.
Susan
Centre every quarter and go. Can you get your wraps to put through a list of all the great ideas they may have, no matter. How big or small? And let me know how I can make their life easier and the customer’s life easier. So then I was hitting both. What was happening in the back end to help them alleviate from questions that they were getting or issues and at the same time making the consumer journey better too?
Ilan
Yeah, everyone wins. Yeah, but insights from the frontline is like a gold mine.
Susan
They are. They are, they’re they’re probably one of your best sources, if anything, because they’re going to be so. Truthful and raw.
Susan
Better than my my keyboard warrior chat stuff that you would read. In the transcripts.
Ilan
Gotta be careful with those. Gotta be careful with those.
Susan
Definitely. Now, what are some of the common challenges facing businesses when they’re trying to optimise their conversion rates and what do you reckon as some great ways? To overcome those.
Ilan
I really like this question it it’s very quite a lot of different types of businesses. I think overall, but regardless of the size of your business, it’s the patience required sometimes for CRO is a big challenge. Particularly in the current economic environment, people are looking for results. They’re looking to get results quickly, a lot of. A lot of business owners and executives are used to trying to find results from more direct marketing. What I’m for example, I put ads into Facebook and I get sales. Let’s do more of that. Let’s do more of that. I I run a discount and I get so. Those let’s do more of that. I launched it above the line campaign and I get sales. Let’s do more. They’re used to that mindset with, with Pro, even running a test off. Unless you’ve got amounts of traffic, you generally want to run a test for two weeks because you want to go through a business cycle. And then depending on the results, if it’s still quite close, you might need to run it a little bit. Longer and for a lot of people, that’s. When they feel that a sight change is the one to make. For whatever reason, they believe that often it comes from execs, and that’s always a challenge where you have strong voices in the room who say, let’s just make this change to tell them that you might have to make wait two weeks or a month. Is is like they just like what? What do you mean? We need to keep going. We need to move on to the next thing and so. The onus is then on the practitioner or someone internally to educate and explain why it is important and to also understand the goals of leadership. So explaining how this fits into your strategy. So I think a big part, well, I guess they have come back to your question and bigger business, it’s quite it can be political and getting ownership is a big. Big challenge to show people that this works and it’s not. We’re not always gonna test, but some things we really should be going through this process properly. And by the way, some of the biggest companies in the world, I think Jeff Bezos has a very well known quote around their success is I’m paraphrasing, but their success is directly linked to the number of tests that they’re able. To run like at a certain point, this is the way that you optimise with your customers. So I think I think that’s a. Big a big the the two there outside is like getting into that mindset. The education of understanding how it works and then getting traction and getting the resources to be able to do it, to do it properly. Some of the really the main challenges that I see.
Susan
100% I agree with you on both those points. I I think everyone’s been in a situation where the business is just like we can’t wait, we want to move with this, make the decision. Now, right or wrong, we’ll we’ll support you and then it’s wrong. And then they don’t. Ever said.
Ilan
What is that exactly?
Susan
And then I find that it could have been alleviated by just having that one or two weeks or whatever that business cycle happened to be and. That’s one of the things that there’s a risk sometimes associated with making any change, but if you make no change then something eventually will go backwards over time because you most of the time, people won’t keep coming.
Susan
You need to bring in new audiences. You need to bring in new people, new innovations. All the competitors come in, so you can’t stand still. And CRO is one of those powerful tools that can help you continuously up your game and innovate along the way.
Ilan
Yeah. Could Mr could Mr better myself.
Susan
So tell me what excites you the most about conversion rate optimization?
Ilan
I really like it. As I said before, kind of said it is, you know, it is marketing on the website and it is part of that customer journey. But it’s exciting because it’s probably as close as possible as you can get. To real customer feedback, you’re really at the pointing in in E commerce. They’re on the site. They’re looking to make a purchase. So I think it’s quite powerful in what’s possible because on top of that, you’ve got access to a lot. More. Data so you can actually see. Be what’s going on across the site and you control the website as well. So much of what we do in our marketing mix and our business mixes to an extent outside of our control, who knows what Facebook’s going to do with our algorithm. But here we have an opportunity with Pro to actually. We’ll get more data that we have available to us and make changes that can really impact the bottom line. So I really enjoy that from a business perspective. What I also enjoy is the psychology around it. I think that’s why I’ve spoken a lot about analytics and process because that’s really important. But. It is ultimately about selling online, and there’s a lot of really interesting ways that you can do that and test online behaviour. If anyone heard anything about behavioural economics and nudges, that is a core part of COO is when we get into the detail of the journey, what’s all the little things that we can do to help? Custom. I saw I heard of. I saw. I heard of a really good one the other day on another another. Another podcast actually. Where? The guest she. I could put this in the show notes actually, because I want to make sure she gets her credit. But she she spoke about when people shop online, you know, they buy.
Ilan
A lot of. You don’t might buy 3 or 4 sizes of the same dress because they’re not sure, and So what they did was introduce a little timer that says each dress takes 10 minutes to try on because the brand didn’t want people buying 4 sizes because of the returns. And so that little nudge like, completely changed the way people shopped. They still shopped, but didn’t add as many. And then of course, it made the returns easier. So it’s kind of like an end to end benefits. I think those things are always. So, so fascinating to to implement and and actually put in the real world and see how you always get to do all these little psychology, you know, psychological experiments on people on your site, which is always, yeah, super fascinating.
Susan
I love that and one of the ones that I’m wanting to see come to life as well going along the the fashion. Apparently, Australia Post in some of their locations is being contemplating, I don’t know if they’ve done it or not. I read this article a little while ago put. In a change room. Into some of their post offices. So when you go in and you get. Your. Package because you haven’t been home, you can quickly run to the change room. Try it on and then return it straight away.
Ilan
Yeah.
Susan
And there’s not. The delay. And my assumption there is because there’s probably been a whole pile of people that haven’t returned them within that week because stray post doesn’t.
Ilan
Yep.
Susan
And do as well as it used to a long time ago. It’s in the news. Everyone’s aware of that, so therefore they probably got a higher complaint. Volume. Coming through from it being rejected, so this is probably a way that they’re working with Australia posts to solve that issue.
Ilan
Yeah, that’s really interesting and that’s going to work. That’s going to work so well for everyone.
Susan
Exactly. It saves time. Hopefully don’t have to queue up too much either.
Ilan
Have to go back to the post office. The the Yeah, the the store gets their refunds back quickly. The customer gets their cash back quicker. Australia Post is probably easier. To them as well. So it’s kind of like winning across the whole. Process.
Susan
Exactly. And it’s not like they’ve got garments for sale in these stray posts either, so there’s not going to be that theft either when it comes to a lot of the fashion brands, when people take so many things into the change rooms.
Ilan
Yeah.
Susan
So so it’s it’s very interesting to see where that one will end up going to and marrying that with what you just said that this other brand is doing too that if if that same brand did the same thing imagine that.
Ilan
Such a big such a big problem to solve for for fashion brands.
Susan
Exactly. Thank you so much for your time, Ilan. I’ve loved this conversation. Now I end my podcast with the same question for everybody. So you were prepared? What brand? Any brand in the world best represents you and why?
Ilan
Great question. Had a good think about this. I went with a Swiss army knife. I’ve had a whole lot of roles over the years and I’m interested in so many different areas and. I always enjoy getting my hands dirty. So. I’ve. Tried a lot of different things with with coffee and doing testing and analytics and running my own businesses. And so I’d say, you know, if you’re a Swiss army knife, you you’ve got all these different tools and you just kind of have to find a way. So I thought I. Thought.
Susan
Maybe that was a good one and I’d like to probably add another layer to it as well. I know you love travelling. So the Swiss Army knife, not that you can take on planes, but it’s not from Australia originally, so it has travelled around as well to get.
Ilan
OK. Yes.
Susan
Here to to be able to have the amazing tools within it.
Ilan
Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. That’s, I love it. Great analogy. Yeah, it’s done a lot of different things over the years.
Susan
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Now just to recap, so pro conversion rate optimization is extremely important for anyone that wants to go and seriously have a successful E commerce site no matter what type of site it is. Because it’s all about ensuring that what you’re creating is going to resonate with who comes, and that it’s always being optimised for any changes required overtime too, because nothing ever stands still. Now one of the core things of CRO is all about having the ability to do testing to ensure which one works best. Along the way and AB testing is one of those great ones that can do that for you because then you can do that true split test and then you’re making data driven decisions and that really helps you solve the why. What do I have to change and why? Why have they done this behaviour and why? Because by able to have those data driven decisions, you’re able to know possibly what to test and what you want to get out of that as well. Now conversion process design is so important as well, but sometimes you do have to work with the marketing people within your organisation. Might be yourself and ensure that the brand assets are treated with integrity, but sometimes you may need to make some amendments or changes and it’s just a test. See how that works. It’s not. You’re not committing to that. New colour or that new shade? Or or that new wording. It’s a test to see what resonates best to get the best convert. Positions, so there’s nothing to lose here as long as you’re not going too far afield. And that’s where you come to that middle ground and you really educate the rest of the business to understand how important it is to innovate and test along the way. Some of the great tools, if you’re starting out, you can have a look at heat mapping. So one of those. Fantastic ones that you can really see what the user is interacting with on your site. You’ve got different ones from scroll, map, click map, mouse map and also session recordings. And you can see things such as dead clicks, rage, clicks, and quick backs, and a lot of this can also be fed into AI tools to. Assist you to. Quickly understand what the data is saying and summarising it. A free tool that you may want to check out is Microsoft Clarity. It’s able to perform some of these for you and it’s free, so why not? Give it a. Though other tools that are great to do at the beginning but also throughout the whole process of you having an E commerce site is understanding and really appreciating that the power is of Google Analytics, you can actually get so many fabulous insights out of there to help you make data driven decisions such as the funnel, the sessions. Even where people are coming from to help your marketing people understand the return on investment for internal marketing, so you use it and abuse it, that’s what it’s there for. It’s a fantastic. Rule, but don’t underestimate the importance of qual research and this is all about actually knowing what the journey is. Get your new staff members to go through the journey and pick it apart. Purchase that product and that takes screenshots. Try and break it. Try and see what you could do to reduce clicks as well. There’s so many different things you can do going through the site. Does it make sense with the words? Does the flow make sense so much? Which data? There you can do? Just being hands on and spending a small amount of time going through the process yourself. Surveys are amazing, whether they’re within the page itself or doing it as part of the post transaction. There they can be a gold mine, but I have to say, for me, my personal favourite is the sentimental analysis. I am a huge advocate of going and finding out from the grass roots. What’s going on? How can I fix it? How can I make it better so this is actually taking the time to either speak to your frontline, getting them to fill in information, double jacking if you’ve actually got a call? Centre reading through transcripts that come through and also seeing what the reviews are saying too, and you can use some really cool tools like ChatGPT can actually help you if you throw in all of your web transactions to actually summarise it for you and pull out what the key questions or the key pain points are or how they’re feeling. So use those AI tools as well to assist you and save you all those hours of reading. Because let’s face it, there can be a lot of them. If you’ve got a large company and if you can save yourself hours and hours by using some of these AI tools, that’s one of the best ways that you can make changes fast. Yeah, hot jars probably are a great other tool just to consider that will help you understand your site and also some of the flows that they go through. And. Just be patient when you’re putting in those conversion rate optimization changes. Sometimes things won’t happen overnight. It all depends on how much traffic you have coming to your site to be able to see what the impact is. So sometimes it can happen within an hour, sometimes it might be whatever your business cycle is 2 weeks or a. But educate people within your business to understand that, because if they understand that they’re on the journey with you and then they’re going to be more excited when that time period elapses because they’re with you and they know it will take that time. Now, not all changes are going to be great. Not all of them are going to be gold mines, but The thing is you’re learning then to improve for the future. What works, what didn’t work. So use them as opportunities to improve your site. Like really make sure that the revenue is on track. The conversions on track. Consumers are happy and just continually iterate over time. Behaviour economics is amazing. We’re going to be adding in a link there into the show notes so you can hear a bit about another podcast that Elan has listened to, which has got some amazing insights there. But just remember, conversion rate optimization is about making your site magical, not just for you, but for your consumer. So hopefully you all get golden Nuggets at the end of it. How is the wrap up Elan?
Ilan
That was amazing. That was fantastic. It’s like you’re you’ve been doing Sarah yourself. I think it was honestly, such a good summary for people who, uh, haven’t got across this much before to learn more about it, so well done.
Susan
Thank you very much. Anything more you would like to add to the summary?
Ilan
Thanks for the chat. I’ve actually really enjoyed this. This is this time is fine which you know you’re having a good time. If anyone is interested in in learning more if they’d like an audit of their site, understand a little bit more about how they can understand more about their customer and improve their conversion rate. I am pretty active on LinkedIn. So love to have a chat about this stuff, so feel please feel free to to reach out.
Susan
Fantastic. Thank you, Ilan. I’ll include his details as well as his consultancy in the show notes for everyone to get in touch, definitely follow a line who’s bringing some great tips and tricks up on LinkedIn for you to learn along the way, and practical ones too. So appreciate your time alarm for everyone else. Thank you for listening to more to marketing. And don’t forget to add more to marketing to your playlist to hear future fabulous guests.