Last Wednesday we attended The Conversion Road Trip.
This event happening in 4 East Coast cities (New York, Toronto, Chicago and Boston) is organized by Unbounce, a company that focuses on improving conversion rates on landing pages.
The day-long gathering was packed with valuable insights from the world’s leading optimization experts. Here’s an overview of the seven conferences:
- The Landing Page Manifesto with Oli Gardner
- Marketing Strategy Hacks with April Dunford
- Save Your Quality Score, Save Your World with Christi Olson
- The 5 Biggest Hyper-Growth Lessons with Nemo Chu
- Full Stack Growth Marketing Panel with Sean Power, Hana Abaza & Nemo Chu
- How To Create Better A/B Tests with Karl Gilis
- Brain-Based Conversions with Luke Summerfield
Here are the top 3 lessons we learned!
#1 Don’t test stupid things
A/B testing is at the core of e-commerce analytics. However, A/B tests are often rushed or conducted randomly. Karl Gilis’ position was crystal clear: “don’t just go around testing every idea that pops into your head!”. Throughout his compelling keynote, Gilis called-out a myriad of bad practices, while shedding light on quick wins he implemented on the Suzuki brand’s website. Some more insights :
- Start with concrete hypotheses based on your data and make sure you measure the right goal. A solid hypothesis to start with could be: By changing ___________into___________ I can get more prospects to _____________.
- Don’t test changing the colour of a CTA. If this change makes a big difference, something else is wrong with your page.
- Keep yourself from copying tests you’ve seen on other websites.
- Focus on your users to find weaker performing areas of your website. To achieve this consider recording users’ sessions and analyzing mouse heatmaps.
- Stay away from sliders. Despite their mass-appeal, they aren’t beneficial to conversion rates; as they distract visitors who often mistake them for ads. Try replacing sliders with static banners: the result will speak for itself.
#2 There’s always a reason to celebrate
Once Easter is over, start getting ready for the next holiday. If there’s no major event in sight, Google some inspiration or invent one! Populating your promotional calendar with unusual holiday and discounts (relevant to your product offering) enables you to drive sales during lower seasons.That’s exactly what Alibaba did by creating the “Single’s Day Sale”, which is now a major online shopping day worldwide.
#3 Produce ideas like a rock star
Nemo Chu made a riveting analogy: comparing marketing brainstorms to record labels creative meetings. To come up with the next big shiny tune, labels gather songwriters in a room and (hopefully) greatness ensues. The same creative process can be applied to digital marketing. You only have to follow these simple steps:
- Get 6 to 8 key people together in a conference room with plenty of post-its.
- Set a 3-minute timer and ask attendees to write a total of 15 ideas for a specific project. At this stage, focus on quantity over quality.
- Review (quickly) and repeat step #2. This time, focus on quality rather than quantity.
- Use the following scoring system to rank each idea.
- How few resources are required? (1 to 4 = few)
- How does our gut feel about this being a success? (1 to 4 = great)
- How easy will this be to scale?(1 to 4 = easy)
- Finally, break down the chosen ideas into tasks. Divide them up and set up a timeline. You just got yourself a strategic marketing plan that’s already communicated to and approved by the key people in your company.
At the end of the day, we had a terrific time in Toronto and we come back sharper performance marketers.
Honestly, we can’t wait to attend the next Unbounce conference. In the meantime, we already started to implement these lessons in our day to day!
Co-Authors