How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guess today doesn't

“play that game. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralize and he built something called "Predictive CRO"”

studying what's already won in lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads. While your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for, and a two-minute test using nothing but Google translate that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell. If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting.

This is the vault. Let's unlock it. Sahil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We've only got to be here. All the way from Spiralize the Business itself. Now I know before the show we're talking,

“I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and AB testing,”

and I know that what you guys are doing is revolutionary and it's quite interesting.

So I'm excited to get into it, but before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point? Yeah, so my name is Sahil, I'm the CEO at Spiralize or an AB testing company. I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing a different kind of SaaS tech type companies, my whole career, and I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Okay, well, I mean, how'd you get into Spiralize? Where did like tell us where that came from?

Yeah, so it's a fun story. So I am actually not the founder. I was the Founder CEO, my previous company, which was that SaaS business, and I was actually an early customer of Spiralize.

So around the time, Spiralize just getting off the ground, I started using the product and I saw

that it really worked and it opened my eyes to the power of any. The power of AB testing as a way to

“improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how we came”

to True Believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about what's the next thing I want to do. I had stayed in touch with the founder here. He had kept building the business organically self-funded. It was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because I lived in Atlanta already in Spiralize space in Atlanta. So it was a good arrangement. And I had done the solo CEO Founder thing wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way. We both knew how hard that

was. There was this mutual understanding of it. And we also had, there's some things he's really good at. There's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work really well. It's worked out really well. I've been doing it enough for four years. We are using words like AB testing and I'm just assuming there might be people listening. What is AB testing? Let's take a look at that. Let's talk about what are we even talking

about. Let's take this. It's even step away from marketing, websites, business. Let's just start with something. Everyone can relate to which is when you have a new medicine. How do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment. You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better? You want to make sure it really works. What do you do? You get a hundred people. You give half of them what's called

a placebo. It's a sugar pill. It's nothing and you give half the people that actual drug and you measure how many people got better. What you want to make sure is that say you had a hundred people, 50 people. Men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things because you want to make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one group and all the women in the other and it turns out the drug works really well

for men and not so well for women or some other variable. That's called randomization. That is an AB test and it's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. There are other you can do it before and after. It's not as good. This is the gold standard for me called this double blind controlled experiment. Fancy words. AB test. Same thing. So that is now we accept that as the best way to know if a medicine works. If you went to the

and you're like, "Huh. I've never heard of this. I was going to take some robitussin." But what is this?

And the doctor said, "Oh, it's really good. You might ask, "Well, how do I know it's good?" Like, "Oh, I gave it to my neighbor. Work great." Okay. Is your neighbor the same symptoms of me? How much should I take? I just take a swing. Okay, like, is it effective at like two tablespoons, one tablespoon, once a day? Like, well, well, I bought trust me. I've been a doctor for ten years. This will work. You would never do it. Okay, I really don't think you would. Okay, well, thank you.

You would have hoped not. Okay, this is now back in the early days of medicine. Okay, and by the way, that time wasn't that long ago. Okay, we're measuring, but probably less than 100

“to 200 years of recent history. That's how people took medicines. Right? That's the days of patent medicine.”

If people standing on a shoebox, hawking their sails patent cough syrup.

Hey, no one would do that. No one would do that. No. You would never take a cancer drug

that hasn't been tested. And yet, right? So, like, there's the pre-scientific era to medicine and then work down in scientific era in a medicine. Yet, for people's websites, they do that all the time. They do the equivalent of, I'm a doctor. I've done this for ten years. I don't know, I gave it to my neighbor. Work great for them. It should work for you. All the time, you look at the website. Why'd you do this on the website? Oh, it's best practice. What do you mean it's best

practice? Well, I read about on a blog. Okay, so work for one person. How do you know that works for you? Well, it looks good. CEO liked it. Yeah. Okay, no solutions. I used a template. I picked the best I, I, but I'm not going to name brands because this is not the fault of any of the brands who do website templates. There's lots of really good ones out there. Some also not good ones. I looked at three templates. They said this was the best template for my landing page. This was my

this was the best looking homepage template. By the way, if you, your saw-hills barber shop, that's probably fine. Okay. But if you're building an actual business where the website is the front door to your business, you may want to put a little bit more thought into it. Yeah. If you're an e-commerce brand, okay, if you are, if you're selling B to B SaaS and you're selling cyber security software in your average product, probably sells for like $100,000.

Every lead that comes, every person comes to your website and goes away. That's really valuable, you're millions of dollars you're losing. So what is AB testing is taking that same thing that we use in all of many other parts of our life and applying the taking websites from the pre-scientific gut instinct era to the scientific era. There are, that's a journey and for some companies it makes sense to do that for some companies it doesn't. And it doesn't

mean you can't make mistakes doing that. It's for a new mistake that's not perfect. But if your

“website is an important place where you do business in some way with your customers or potential”

customers, this is a much better, it's a really good way to make your website your number one sales person. And we're talking about optimization here. So we're talking about, you have your website, which is let's call it your A. Yep. And then what you're doing is you're just testing little things here or there on a variable, on a B variable and sending traffic to both to seeing what converts. You don't have to limit it to small changes. You could make a big change. You could make big changes.

Yeah, you could make big changes. If you're getting ready for to run a marathon or a half marathon

ever, I have ran a half marathon once and I promise I would never do it again. My body's not meant

to run long distance. I'm in the same to get my wife ran once and she did great, but just watching

“her trains that I'm, I've other things that I want to. Okay. When you run, what did you do to get ready?”

I did the, there was like a protocol. This was a while back, but like I trained with a group and you do your runs and you, you know, you do your start with your two-cater, you work your way up and

There's a training regimen for sure. There's probably a rest regimen if you run 10 miles every

day, you're not gonna, that's actually worse for distance speed. There was, there was quite a bit of work. Yes. There may have been a dietary component. Okay. Now, depending how serious you are, maybe you didn't need to make drastic changes, but they probably some advice told you to avoid some foods, probably go easy on the hamburgers and milkshakes and maybe go a little bit more on the healthy lean protein. Okay. Now, one way to get ready for a marathon is to only do one of those things.

And then you could say, my, my time got better and I know with certainty, it was because I wore the right kind of shoes. And then the next marathon, maybe you'll add compression socks. And the next one, you'll eat chicken five times a week instead of burgers. You could do that. And then every time you got this like pretty high confidence level, but then the day, you know, what gets you there all

“fast? We do, you should combine those things. Eat lean protein, where good socks, where good shoes”

and train, and get enough rest. Now, what you know, that 10% of your reduction in your race time came from the socks, I'm just making a shit up, and another 5% came from eating lean protein.

No, you'll never know that. Okay. The same is true in AB testing. And you can get away with it.

I would say particular on websites, particularly, you know, I'm not like a B2B website. First, I just want you to go, the stakes are much lower. Okay. We're not injecting a cancer treating drug into your body. Yes. The stakes are really high, and you want to go one variable to time there. Absolutely. We're going to get someone to fill in a lead generation form or click. I'm ready to start. I'm going to try that software for seven days first. See if it works.

So the stakes are lower. The other thing is, in a, you know, for our audience out there,

“I'm going to use some acronyms, B2B, D2C, just business to business. Okay. If I'm selling”

software to other corporations, that's business business. And if I'm selling you, you know, shoes on the internet, direct to consumer. Okay. Directing consumer, you have all this traffic. Okay. How many millions of people are maybe going to Nike.com to buy shoes a lot? So you can quickly get a sample size, which means, you know, maybe you run it for a week. And there's millions of people coming. You can very quickly detect. There's a difference between the performance

to version of the pages. On the B2B side, how many people are shopping for a new cybersecurity software today? Some. Okay. And in fact, just quite a few. But not as many as shopping for shoes. So one way to get results quicker is to make big changes. Okay. No, you don't want to just do a bunch of random shit. But you, it is an acceptable trade off

“to maybe you change the message on your homepage and the image that goes with it. And why?”

Because usually the messaging, the, the, what's called the copywriting and then the visual image, they complement each other. And so if your headline is making some big claim about how effective your product is, say it's stopping cybersecurity attacks, maybe the image and support that, and they work together. So it's not just changing random things. But this is for our marketing people and the audience today. And we're going to talk about some very specific examples.

This is what we're talking about, AB testing. Yeah. I think it's interesting because as your, as your speaking, I'm thinking, okay, for, for true AB test to happen, we need traffic. Yes. So what, you know, what is that number? There's, I don't think there's a set number, but there more is better than last, obviously. And then, and then you're talking about making big changes. Yes, big, small, my new changes. The, the, the question I have because as a non-AB testing expert,

one thing that I've always thought about AB testing is if you change too many things,

and you don't know what works because you've changed correctly, and you can't control the variable. That's right. That's right. And what I'm talking about here, maybe a good way to kind of put some boundaries on it is, I might change, I might be okay. I could probably get okay with changing a few variables on one section of one page. But I wouldn't change multiple sections on the same page. And I wouldn't change something up funnel or upstream, and on the page, and maybe after the

page. Okay. Like, maybe just start with like, I've got a, I'm just going to pick something simple, a shopping cart add to cart. And I want to test, do I get more people to add it to cart, if I say free shipping or free returns? By the way, both probably work. Maybe should test both.

how visible I want to make it. I probably could roll that all into one test. What I wouldn't do

is then also change, maybe the, the ad copy that gets people to come to that site to emphasize

“one of the, because now I'm really distorting the effect of the experiment. I think that's where”

most experimenters would say, hang on, it's like be careful about changing too many things, because if you're recalling what's called confounding, confounding variables. And in clouds, you just really don't know which thing made a difference. I couldn't agree with you more. I haven't heard the work confounding, but yeah, it's if you changing too many variables, and you just don't know which ones are actually working. It's interesting because we can go as detailed as like you said,

it is as simple as a small button going red or green. As simple as I love what you just said, free shipping or free returns. How when, when is there, when, when is there a business ready to start doing this type of AD testing? Like what levels of traffic are we talking about to the website? Now I know that's subjective because you, I want to make sure everyone is clear. Yes, someone coming to Nike website and buying a pair of shoes, very different than a cyber security product

that's a million dollars. Having said that within the guard rails, when is it that people are

coming to you usually? Where are they when they're saying, hey, we need to hire you in your service

“for AD testing? So maybe a good way to put it is, let's just say, why do we care about traffic?”

We care because you want to make a decision based on what's called a statistically significant result. So if you run a test for just one day, maybe run it on a Monday. Well, maybe the people that shop on the weekends are different than the people that shop on during the week. Who knows? Okay, so you want it to be represented of your traffic? And the more traffic you have, the quickly you more quickly you can represent it. But I want to talk about there's two factors here.

One is just the amount of traffic, the other is time. Because if you have a high traffic site running the test for one day still isn't enough time for the reason we just talked about. Maybe the weekend shop is a different than the weekend shoppers. So you want to look at both of those things for a, let's talk about for a business to business type of website and you're optimizing for delete generation, delete generation being someone fills in a form and there's thing hey, I want to,

I want to check out your product. I want to see a demo. I want to do some kind of free trial. Usually where it starts to make sense that this is worthwhile is if you're getting 100 submissions a month. These are ballpark numbers. Take them as guidelines. There's some companies where 100 is more than enough and there's somewhere it's not nearly enough. Yeah, but most of the time if you're south of 100 ish or maybe 50 to 100 one you probably then don't have enough traffic. It's so

“traffic is not enough. You should look at the number of conversions. The second thing is it probably”

means you're a small business. Nothing wrong with that. But there are probably other things you need to be working on before you work on conversion rate optimization. Maybe you just need to be trying to get more traffic or more of the right traffic. You're, your ideal, you're just a marketing

drawing and ICP ideal customer profile or persona, same thing, just there in the first place. Because

if they're not even coming to the site, optimize it all day long, it doesn't really, it doesn't move the needle. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Now you guys at your business, you said you guys do very unique or you have a scientific way of AB testing. What exactly is that or what makes it unique or different for you? Yeah, so we do a thing called predictive CRO, predictive conversion rate optimization. So what most in-house testing tweens, too, by the way, there's many, many good ones

that are out there. You tend to see these at bigger companies because they have the maturity and the budget to actually hire like a team of data scientists and they have people who's, their whole job is everyday is designing, doing like web design. But most companies don't have that. And so when they say, oh, we're going to, we're going to redesign the site, maybe they hire an agency, maybe they have someone in the house and done it. And what they're mostly relying on is personal

experience. They might be right. They might be wrong. But the data available to them, like inside

your last company, is it, is it transferable to your new company? Okay. Okay. Why? Because two things

“have changed since you, even if you actually ran this as a good statistical rigorous AB test.”

One is a function of the company you're at today in the coming, I guess, are probably different, at least a little bit. Okay. Number two, time. Okay. If you look at a website from five years ago, you can probably tell those built five years ago. And if you get in the way back machine and just look at some big company that you would consider modern, but has been around for a long time, like Salesforce. If you look in the way back machine, you look at Salesforce's website from 10

you're looking at how big you pick. Oh my god, what were they thinking? 10 years ago, it looked normal.

Yeah. So the thing that worked that was better than your, quote, control 10, five years ago

may not be, it could be, it could not be. But if, if you, if you're relying on personal experience, like now, maybe higher an agency to solve that problem for you. They do lots of AB tests, lots of CRO agencies, lots of good ones, so I'm not too good ones. They are usually relying on what they've tested for their other customers. It could be a big number, it could be a small number, but it's still a limited number. And while they solve some of that problem, they still have that,

what worked, did it work because circumstance? Or is it transferable? And to know that, you want to have, you want to be able to see where it worked. You also want to see where it didn't run. Winners and losers. Think about, if you, if you, if you interview athletes and you only talk to the win rate of the world cup going on right now, if you only talk to the winner of the world cup, and you said, what did you do to get ready for this game? That's pretty helpful.

But you probably should also go talk to teams that lost. It's about, what did you do to get ready for this game? And then compare that. Yeah, same thing here. You want to have the winners and the losers to know what works. And the more of that data set you have, the better. So the thing that we do that's different, we crawl the internet and we shamelessly steal everybody else's AB tests. I say steal because it's, I'm trying to be a little bit funny when I'm actually

stealing anything because all AB testing is in the public domain. Yeah, I hear you're saying, but you, you look at what everybody else is doing and see what the most converting for them. How do you know it's converting? That's a great question. Okay. Think about a company that, let's take Nike dot com. They're not a spiralist customer. If they're running a test on their homepage, what we can see is that they're splitting the traffic. We can actually see the visual

difference between the A and the B. Imagine every day for two weeks, they're running a split test.

And then, on the beginning of the third week, they send 100% of traffic to the B version of that

“homepage. Do you know that there are how they're sending traffic? Can you see that?”

There are some, there are some ways that are proprietary that we figured out how to do that. Okay, black hat or gray hat. That's, I wouldn't call it black hat. I would, I would call it white hat. Okay. Well, there's ways that you can see how much traffic are going in these different pages. I mean, this is for you can estimate, or you can estimate it. You can estimate it. So you know that, okay, they're running to, you have basically a way to find out that these big companies are running

AB tests and then figure out which one, which control actually worked so that you can now take that data for your customers. That's right. And what we're looking for are repeat patterns among similar companies. So if Nike dot com runs this really interesting test, I don't think that is necessarily super relevant for CrowdStrike, a big cybersecurity company and vice versa. And by the way, let's say CrowdStrike runs a test.

“Yes, it may be relevant for other cybersecurity companies, but is it predictive?”

It's really hard to know if you got an N of one. I would not go copy that because now you're just talking to the winner, you have the winners curse. Okay. You want to look at the winners and the losers, so what you want to look is like, hey, there's 100 cybersecurity companies. What is the, what is the portfolio of test they ran? And what things tend to win and what things tend to lose and then bet on that portfolio.

really got world series of poker type of player. Okay. Anyone of her hands or his hands can

win or lose. And if you only watch them play one hand and you said, I'm going to copy that hand. I think that's super predictive. But if you watch them play a hundred hands, you're going to detect some patterns. And if you watch five players play a hundred hands, you're really going to watch a hundred players by a hundred hands. Now there's some clear patterns of when they hold, when they fold. When they hold them, when they fold them. That is a, that's what predictive

CROs. It predicts not what one test will do. It predicts a portfolio of tests that you should run based on what's work for similar companies. And somewhere doesn't have to be just they look just like you. It could be someone that has a similar call to action on a paid landing page by the paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic traffic. And is it on a home page? Is it on a, on a, on a sign-up page? You want to look at all of those and then say, okay,

“which ones are similar? What's the predict the portfolio of tests you should run?”

Run the whole portfolio because across that portfolio, find the winners. Let's, let's talk. You, you know, you have so much basics here. And I want to talk, when I'm at basis, I'm at to say sorry data. You have so much data. And I think for, for, for my listeners, I'm just thinking about the, the smaller businesses that may not be able to bring in yet a data scientist or, you know, have a full CR-O team working before them. But they, but they can maybe understand

different things that we know through data that work. Like, for instance, for things that I know and I could be wrong, but I've heard is like, you want someone to say yes and move, you know, hit a button. But it shouldn't be red because red is a sign of stopping, right? Maybe.

“You see, that's window, then I've heard that. I've seen what I've seen. And that's what I've heard.”

Other people I've said, no, you're actually wrong red actually does work. So are there, is there anything that, for sure, that are basics like these are the most, like these are the musts. Like, these are the musts that you have to have. Or that we still work. That's a great question. Here are three things that are listeners today can use right away. And they have to spend money by fancy software, higher and expensive agency to do. Let's start. Number one. And by the way, what we're

going to tell are like home pages and landing pages. I'm starting it because that's where most people's traffic goes. Okay? If you have some niche page or some techno like a page that describes the technical attributes of your product, those are necessary elements of the user journey. Okay? I'm putting those aside for now. Okay, because typically those are so specific to you and your

“product or your service. You should just, those are people searching also for you and they're”

already in the final. They're looking at the technical page there. They're, they're already sold.

They're, they're just trying to find a way to buy. Okay. First thing, show the product, show the

product, show the product. Okay. We have a phrase, happy people, kill conversions. What does that mean? Happy people, hurt conversions? So many websites have stock photos that they got on in their Adobe account of two people in a conference room looking at a tablet. Wow, first of all, who's having this much fun in a conference room? I want to go through this. My conference room is not that much fun. No one, let's talk about this. Can you think about, can you think of the last

car add you saw? Okay, what do you remember what car it was for or what brand? I'm thinking, I remember, I don't know why it's sticking out for me, but I was thinking about the audio one, there was one that was an audio one. Okay, cool out is it? How do you make it's really nice cars? Can you picture what was it a TV ad YouTube ad magazine? It was an awesome TV ad, it was a luxury TV ad. I only remember because it was around where I live and it was a ball and ad with a new car and

cool rolling into a $40 million home on the bank of the ocean and with the beautiful life

jacks, you know, husband gets out, smiles, slowly keys to her, she gets in, they drive off and then the audio comes in, quattro. Right? Awesome. So there's a component of lifestyle, there's a component of aspiration, but there's also kind of showing the car. Imagine the same ad, okay, picture it right now and just imagine you had a magic eraser and you just erase the car from that

Yeah, good looking. Okay, would anyone then say, I think I'm going to go to my Audi dealer

and check out a car? No. No, you big, what the, tell us this. Okay, this is actually really important. I hope we worry if they're here listening, this we're starting to get something very important here. AKA, remove the stock, remove the stock photos. Yes, if you have, if you're a product company, show the product. If you're a service company, show the people who deliver the service. Explain that. Okay, so we worked with the company that does home air conditioning repair.

Imagine, you know, I live in Georgia. If my AC breaks, that is like the top of the list, I might fix the AC before I fix the toilet. Okay, it's like a 110 degrees in August.

You just cannot live without air conditioning. Okay, I can go to the backyard to go the bathroom.

I can't live without air conditioning. Hey, and we ran an AB test. Their home page had stock photo of mom was two kids. Everyone looks happy. And it kind of looked like, I don't know,

“mother's day, like the kids were giving her tulips. It was, it was a happy person. I think it was supposed”

to convey that hey, if you need your AC fixed, you're going to be happy when it's fixed. And the AB test we ran against it, we just, we, we replaced the photo with an image of three uniformed people in front of their van with the brand name of the van. And that was the image on the home page. Didn't change the copy, it didn't change the offer, it didn't change anything else, it didn't change the social proof. And there was a double digit improvement in people,

either filling in the form or clicking, they had two called an action. It's a local, it's a local thing. So it's clicked to call or fill out the form. Okay, and keep them like, these people are already very high in tent when you need your recognition. That's fine. You would think, what could you do to actually stop someone from calling? What turns out? Yeah, double digit change. Just by people saying, oh, this is who I'm going to get. I get a professional person coming to my home in a nice fan, and they're going to fix my AC right away.

We worked with a company that does home warranty. And the home page showed images of that kind of like, again, stock photos of happy people, presumably it resonates. It's like, oh, they're happy. I'll be happy. Yeah, yeah, they have homes, insurance or whatever warranty. I have it. Yeah, yeah. And what we tested against it is images of things getting fixed. And AC unit getting fixed. It was like a faucet, a bathroom faucet getting fixed and then hot water tank. Yeah, and then like an electrical,

like, you know, what is it called? Or they put that thing in your outlet to see if it's producing electrical charge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are all intuitive things. Okay. The kind of things also just the average DIYer probably doesn't do themselves. They want to call professionals. It's clearly like, you will get these things fixed. Someone's going to come near home and fix them. These are

“ones double digit lift. Wow. What about the positive show, the product show, the product?”

So, like, for a SaaS company, you would just show, show like the screenshot of the app. The screenshot of the app, yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's lots of different ways to do it to style it. If you're concerned that the picture of your app is proprietary and that's a source of competitive

advantage, first let me say your competitors almost certainly already know what your app looks like.

Okay. They've downloaded it. They've probably signed up with a different email and they're using it. Everyone does that. So, just let me. Yeah. No, I hear that. But even if you think that's true, you can, you could do a stylized version of your of your user interface. But you're trying to get the person to do is just think of that out yet. You got to put the car in the out yet to get the person to go to the dealership. Yeah. Yeah. Put a picture of your of your products. It's number one.

“Everyone can do that right now. Just go to your website, just ask yourself, do I have happy people?”

Because I'm probably hearing cameras. Okay. Number two. This is a good one. Take your home page. Right. Yeah. Just in a browser. Right click in Chrome. And one of the things will be Google Translate. Pick a language that the people around you don't speak. Okay. So, maybe pick Arabic. Pick Hindi. I'm picking languages and speak it at home growing up. Okay. And then take your home page. Show it to five people who don't know that it's your company. No, you won't. Just ask them.

What do you think this company does? Okay. And by the way, they're not going to come up with something

But they might say something like, oh, this looks like business software or something. Okay.

If they can't even come close to the category, you have a problem. And the translation technique, what it's doing is it's removing the copywriting from the equation. And it's forcing the person to use the imagery to draw an instantaneous conclusion about MI in the right place. And by the way, that is what your audience does when they reach your home page or landing page because the

“brain processes images faster than words. So, imagery is very important then. Super important.”

Super important. And so, if your copywriting is doing all the heavy lifting, you have a problem because you've created this high cognitive load home page or landing page. The copywriting is

absolutely important. But the instantaneous react, the decision that almost everyone knows when they

get to a pages, I might even in the right place. Okay. Just like when you walk into a restaurant, okay, if you're in date night, you're looking for certain things. You haven't tasted anything, okay. You're in for ambience. Is there a smile, might that make your D? What's on the table cloth? Okay. Is this like white table cloth? Is this checkered, more casual, Italian, like little, Italy kind of thing? Where am I going to Chipotle? I love Chipotle. There's certain things I

expect by wanting Chipotle. Okay. And if I don't see them on my brain's making kind of real quick decisions, you know, if I go into Chipotle, I expect to kind of smell a certain way. It's kind of

“that grilled chicken that, you know, that's what I expect. If I go to kind of date night at a nice place,”

there's a different kind of just all these little thing. And my brain's making instantaneous subconscious level decisions by am I in the right place? You can, yeah, you can do this. Don't spend money on fancy software. Don't hire an agency. I want everyone to do something. I didn't get it and then I got it and I was like, oh my God, so I want to make sure it's very clear for people here. Like, step one, remove the stock in, just get rid of any happy go lucky stock in. I'm going to place it

with your product or service. And replace it. If you're a product based business, replace it with your product, if you're a service based business, replace it with the service people or the type of service outcome or the outcome that people are going to come. Like, so for example, like we worked with a higher education company, show the diploma. Yeah, I show them, get in graduate, show them through on the, whatever the hat up, whatever it is. Number two, this is very interesting. Take your

website, put into a different language language and send it to a page. You only need this for your home page. Sorry, take your home page, put into a different language, send it to somebody and just say, hey, what, what does this company does? What is this company do? And if they can't tell you within range, obviously within a range, it's a business service. Oh, it's a, it's this type of service or this type of product that tells your imagery is off. And people look at the imagery

versus the copy, which is very interesting to me because I come from direct response copy market,

“like writing where it's all copy, like the copies, like the most important thing. And you just”

said, imagery and copy are almost equal. Well, well, let's let's talk about that a little bit. There's two jobs. What the imagery does is it helps establish for the website visitor that they're in the right place. It is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and you go, hey, am I in the right type of restaurant, fast food or fine dining? What the copy writing does, think of that as I'm reading the menu. And if I see some things and they're described in a way that's enticing,

it speaks to me to what I'm looking to get out of the experience and I'm going to order. Okay, and by the way, McDonald's, like, they write those valuing meals in a certain way. That's copy writing. Yeah. Okay, and it works. And if you go to a nice restaurant, and if you go to a nice restaurant on date night, the way they write the menu is written in a certain way to make you feel like, oh, the the chef is just, I'm getting something so special. This meal is just, it's going to be

when they talk about where is the food source from? And whatever foam they use to decorate the

plain, all these things. And you would never see the McDonald's value meal in vice versa. So the

copy writing is from it, but they serve to, they infer, or for our conversation we're having today, they really kind of have two different jobs. Yeah. Okay. Now, let's talk about the copy. All right. This is number three or this number three. Number three. Let's see number three. So we talked

low cognitive load. Yeah, low cognitive load. Okay, low cognitive load. Okay. I see this all telling

B2B websites, they have like a schematic of how their software fits into the ecosystem and the tech stack. And how it integrates with 17 different things. And it's animated and things are flowing. That's the wrong place to put it. That's a high cognitive. Put that on your technical page, put in your solutions page, put it on your, you know, how the whole thing works. Okay. This is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant. And the maturity before they ask you

how many people today, or do you have a reservation, or you want to sit at the bar, the dining room,

explaining to you like the 17 steps, the chef does to prepare the vegetables today.

You're like, well, hey, and I just, like, could I just see the menu or like, I just want to tell you table for two? Okay. You don't need with, let me tell you where we source the chicken and, you know, that kind of, right? So, um, imagery is important. Home pages should start with low cognitive load, and then move the user to higher cognitive load as they move through the journey. Your restaurant, you start with, can I get your drink? Let me bring you the menu. Have you thought

about an appetizer today? Okay. Let's pick your meal. All right. McDonald's has it down to, or

“Wendy's, pick your food. There's like, number one. Number one, just start there. You have to say two words.”

Yeah. Give me a one. Three words. Low cognitive load. Low cognitive load. Low cognitive load. Yeah, then you go to a higher cognitive load. Okay. Don't do like some complicated schematic bubble. Okay. Number two, stop at the copywriting. Make it skimmable. The more it offends your 12th grade English teacher, the better. You're not writing for the AP English exam. I'm taking this, ET. This is not the entrance exam.

This is not your personal statement to get into graduate school. No one cares about what your belief system is, your aspirations, or what you think you're about. They came there because they have a problem they're trying to solve.

“But well, you've done direct response copy. You make it easier to know. What is this?”

It's interesting because it's interesting. Yeah, man, you're going to open up like a whole can of worms here for me because I have seen little copy convert, right? But then where we're talking about so I'm talking to be to see at this point, right? Business consumer. And there's people that I see writing copy that are like essays. I mean essays, but they're converting. It's like long for me. I'm sure you heard of like a long form sales letter.

But it can work. Long form can absolutely work. Long form copy, long form video, long form anything can work in the right place. Like I come from the world where it's free headline, headline, sub headline. That's great. And what do you put in the headline? Well, the hook, yeah. Look, start with the hook. Yeah. That is out of the pain or the solution, right? Like

pain and solution, start with the hook. Free, free is who it's for, right? Yeah. Those things are all

“called scimmability. Yeah. Okay. And if you write a long paragraph, now how can you find the hook?”

Yeah. I lead with the hook. And then your subheading needs to support the original claim before you make new claims. Yeah. Okay. We see this all the time. There's a bold claim.

And then there's three new claims. Yeah. Hang out the second. Yeah. But like I still haven't,

I haven't bought into your first claim. Why are you telling about the next claim? Like if your hook is safe car, we just bought a Volvo. Okay. So we just, my, my oldest is, learned is about to get her license. Yeah. So she's going to not tomorrow, but after some practice, she's going to inherit our 2017 Subaru Great Safe Car. So we went out and found a nice, uh, pre-owned car for my wife, we bought a Volvo, like beautiful car, safe. The hook,

great safe car. Well, I was just going to say, right? Like everyone knows Volvo safe, right? You

way, right? The old boxy cars that we all grip the gray box Volvo that we know is like an instruct

“indestructible cage. They've now, and they look nice too. Okay. But they, they first get you to buy”

into that it's safe before they start telling you about all the other things, right? Everything is, hey, we're safe. That's the hook. Why is it safe? We've got these great cameras. We've created this like motion detection. By the way, I didn't know this so we went shopping. Do you know Volvo weighs more than a suburban? Uh, we'd assume so. Yeah. Is this safe? Yeah. I didn't, I didn't, it's, it's the steel. It's like some kind of special steel they're made out of. Yeah, they're safety,

they're heavy cars. They're, yeah, super heavy cars. You're driving basically a modern tank.

Yeah. Anyway, so they, they support the first claim. Then they go in and tell you about, okay, now let's talk about some other things. Let's say about what this is a fun car and let's say about how we made it nice and same thing on your website. Good copywriting. You start with the hook, make the hook believable before you start introducing your claims. These are three love it. Things that everyone can do on the website today. I'm just going to say it again, right?

Get rid of the stock of images or the happy images. Show your product or show your service or the outcome of the service. Low cognitive load on the pictures. So again, translate it to some language, nobody can understand, send it to somebody and say, do you know what this company does? The answer, if they can't say it quickly, you are, you know the problem. And then third is timovil copy. I mean, this is, this just makes up. Like any business owner, open up your website right now and

just look at it right now. Like you want to, if you're wondering, how do I make my website better? It's like, we just gave you the three answers. Very simple. Open the website. I want to do it

“right now with you. So we can go through it. I'm not going to. That's how I'm feeling. And then the bonus.”

What's the bonus? Here's the bonus. We're going to just, we gave you three. So kind of one, two, three. This is like three A. Okay. Take whatever hook you have on your headline today. Or if you're thinking of writing a new one. Okay, right, new one. Take your three closest competitors. Take their homepage. Put them next to yours. Like one, two, three, four. And then see if you can tell the difference. And if you can take your headline and put it on your

competitors, it means you don't have a good hook. Because it doesn't stand out. And you're simulating what your audience is doing. They may not do them being explicitly. They may be doing it

implicitly. But you should always assume that your audience has your competitors. They come from

your competitor's website or they're going their next or they have them upside by side. Yeah. And it's a great test of the hook. And what it tends to do is it strips a tendency for you to strip out jargon and fluff. And not even worry about am I better just start with am I different? Still saying the clear message though. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta be clear. And I'm saying do it on a homepage and not on like a technical page or a solutions page. Because that's just a

different ball game. Okay, there. That'll make you gotta keep it simple. And you just gotta strip out the jargon. Would you say, well, you're saying it less is more. Would you say on a homepage? As I've seen this more and more like home pages have very little copy. Almost now. Especially in the hero. Yeah. The top, we call it the hero section, the top section section.

“I, so I think there's a happy medium. I think you should not be afraid of putting copy on your home”

page. It does a lot of the heavy work. But it works better if you make it easy to skim and you have a good hook. Yeah. I love it. If people, what type of businesses do you work with? So we mainly work with B2B SaaS companies. Okay. We call the mid market. So about a hundred people, two about 3000

people and about 50 million in revenue to about a billion, billion in a half in revenue. The companies

and smaller than that, they usually are trying to solve other problems that we don't help them with. And the companies that are bigger than that, especially that bigger, they don't need our help. They have their own internal army of data scientists. And that's great. That's great for them.

companies is who you really focus on. That's right. And I love it. You said this, I remember

you said this to me before. And I was like, wow. And you said anyone before 50 million,

they don't have a conversion problem. They got a marketing problem. Or you think you said they got a

“marketing sales problem. Yeah. There's other problems you need to solve first before you worry about”

optimization. You know, I think if it is, if you're, if you're at a shape and you have done any exercise, hey, you don't need to be trying to get your like marathon time down. And probably should sort of like walk three times a week. Yeah. Then maybe get to like, can you do 10 push-ups? Yeah. You do that. Then you can start doing things like optimizing for diet and body composition. And maybe can I do not just 10 push-ups, but 10 pull-ups.

But if you go straight to that, probably not going to work. Yeah, I love it.

Where can people find you if they, if they are a, I mean, if you are a $50 million plus as company,

and you want, obviously, the best and the best in the business right here, AB testing, where can people find you? So they can go to spiralized.com if they would like to find out more.

“Also, if you want to hear more tips on the kind we just talked about, check me out on LinkedIn.”

I post four mornings a week at 7.30 a.m. Eastern. And it's always some combination of

easy to digest 30 to 60 second things. I also have a game show where people come on. They try and beat me in finding different CRO crimes. That's actually the name of the show. CRO crimes. Nice. It's a lot of fun. Seven lightning rounds. The winner gets a $100 through charity. I love it. Well, we're going to make sure we add those in the show notes for you.

“Any last departing secrets, words for the audience. I think we covered it great. Thank you for”

having me on. Thank you. If anyone made it this far, thank you for listening. Yeah, and I appreciate it. Thanks so much.