Every website is leaking sales and conversions somewhere. While I love talking about driving more traffic, sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is improve your conversion rate. In this episode, I interview the founder of Conversion Crimes, Quinn Zeda and we discuss the most common eCommerce conversion crimes she sees. If you fix even a few of these you’ll see a meaningful improvement in your website performance. Here’s a look at what we discuss:
- Understanding visual hierarchy and the metaphor of volume knobs
- Creating a process of testing and iteration vs. launching a full site overhaul
- Using customer intel to create marketing breakthroughs
- Keys to better navigation and menu structure
- How to not confuse or overwhelm your visitors
- Using action colors
- Plus more!
Quinn Zeda
Mentioned in this episode:
“Atomic Habits” by James Clear
Episode Transcript:
Brett:
Well, hello, and welcome to another edition of The eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I'm your host Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a crime show. This is a crime show, this is a mystery show, actually it's not a mystery show at all, but we are talking about conversion crimes and how to avoid them.
Brett:
This episode is brought to you by eCommerce Influence. If you enjoy my podcast, you've got to check out eCommerce Influence, hosted by my friend, Austin Brawner. Austin interviews world class eCommerce operators like Native Deodorant founder, Moiz Ali, MVMT Watches CEO Jake Kassan, and Pura Vida Bracelets founder Griffin Thall. He deep dives into what's working right now to scale your business and he offers a refreshing break from the crushed culture plaguing our industry. The eCommerce Influence Podcast will not only change your perspective on building your business, it will change your perspective on what's possible for your life. I've known Austin for years, he's the real deal and he's someone you need to listen to if you're serious about growing your business. Check out the eCommerce Influence Podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to the show.
Brett:
I am delighted to have on the show the CEO and founder of Conversion Crimes, love the name, you're going to love this topic, my business partner Chris Brewer, he met my guest today through eCommerceFuel, awesome forum, shout out to my buddy Andrew Youderian, but Chris my business partner met Quinn Zeda from Conversion Crimes, they started working together, we sent a couple clients to Conversion Crimes and super impressed. And so then Quinn and I started talking, I thought, "man, there's a podcast episode here, we got to get you on and talk on the podcast." So with that quick intro, Quinn welcome to the show, thanks for coming, and how's it going?
Quinn:
Thanks for having me, that was a great intro, the crime scene and stuff, in our dev we've named part of it the crime scene where we actually do the testing, so that was great.
Brett:
You're like CSI for eCommerce conversions.
Quinn:
Yeah, so I so badly want to make a spoof website that's the CIA that's the Conversion Intelligence Agency.
Brett:
Yeah, that would be fun. I'm getting all kinds of ideas now for YouTube videos where you're dressed up like Dragnet or something like whatever that investigator was, and that's super old, that was even before my time, but you're dressed up like an interrogator and you're on the scene, you're on the case, so I like it. So Quinn yeah, if you would, give us your 30 second background or so and then we're going to dive into the most common conversion crimes and how to avoid those and how to make your site better and convert better, but yeah what's your quick background?
Quinn:
Yeah, so I started my business right out of college so I started freelancing design, eventually moved into websites and then user experience design, helping websites increase conversions. And so I ran an agency, Zeda Labs, where we helped on some businesses scale, and through all of these big projects that we were doing we found that the 80/20 of conversion rate optimization and user experience was usability testing. And so yeah, we built Conversion Crimes to help small businesses do that because this tool was out there for enterprise companies and we wanted to bring it to the SME market, so yeah.
Brett:
Cool. So a lot of times we walk about our guest's company at the end of the show, but I want to just let people get a teaser, an idea, what is Conversion Crimes? Because I love the model, I love the way it works, so talk about that.
Quinn:
Yeah, so basically it's usability testing. We work on our things, we're on our store every day, we know how to find things, how to filter for stuff, but you don't know what it looks like to someone for the first time. And where they're struggling, what they misunderstand, what they get frustrated with. So we have testers that meet your demographic and we have them record their screen while speaking their thoughts out loud while they're trying to do something like find an item in your store, answer a question about it, add it to cart and check out. And by watching these videos you can understand, just pinpoint exactly where the friction is. And if you fix the friction, you increase conversion to improve the user experience, you have happier customers, and yeah.
Brett:
Yeah, usability is key. Having good graphic design and pleasing aesthetic, I love that, but usability that's where it's at. It's impossible for us as business owners to fully look at our site objectively. We can to a certain degree put ourselves in our customer's shoes no doubt, and we can think about, "Hey, is this easy for me to navigate?" But we can't fully thing like our customers and I'm confident from feedback that I've heard people listen to these records they're like, "Oh, I've never thought of that, didn't even see that, I was so used to that." So super, super helpful. Well, we'll circle back to that in a little bit but let's talk about what are the most common conversion crimes that you see that just come up again and again?
Quinn:
You know, so really the most common one is that people go to a website and they don't know who it's for, what it's about, what they're supposed to do there. To really that's the value proposition's not clear. On eCommerce stores it could be that they're showing a collection or something and so they assume that the store's about bags when it's really about something else or that's just one piece of the store and so they bail out. And so yeah, the biggest one is value proposition. And it seems like that would be the easiest thing to do, but it's actually one of the hardest because the simpler and more concise that you can explain something, the longer it took to figure that out.
Brett:
Yeah, like that old saying, I'm sorry that I wrote you a long letter I didn't have time to write a short one, or something like that. But yes, to get something concise and clear takes work, it's like a tagline for advertisers is one of the hardest things to create because it's so concise. So yeah, what are some great examples here, who really does this well where you land on the page and you know, "Okay, I know exactly what the benefit is here for me as the user, as the shopper, and know exactly what I need to do next. And I know why this product is different or better than other or why it's better than me doing nothing." Do you have any good examples?
Quinn:
Oh man, those are hard to do right off the top of my head.
Brett:
I know, so if you don't have examples then, maybe you can think of some as you talk, and if not I'll think of some tips on how do you make that proposition really clear.
Quinn:
Yeah, it's a hard process. Even I'm struggling with this for Conversion Crimes because it's like what is that sentence or thing that's really going to attract people's attention and make it super clear exactly what you do, who do you do it for, and why it matters to people. I think one of the examples that I pulled up recently was Bench, and I'm going to look it up.
Brett:
Do it, yeah.
Quinn:
Because they said, "You run your business, we'll do your bookkeeping." Very clear, it's like I don't want to do my bookkeeping so they take care of it, "Get a professional bookkeeper at a price you can afford and a powerful financial reporting with zero learning curve." So it's just short, sweet, tells me everything I need to know. It's like if that's not me I'm going to bail out, but if that's totally me I'm going to go ahead and continue to learn more.
Brett:
Yeah, I am a big fan of cereal. I love cereal, I would eat it multiple times a day and most days if I could, but it's not very good for you and I'm trying to stay at least somewhat fit and I'm just past the 40 year old mark so it's not as easy to stay fit. And so I discovered this company called Magic Spoon, I don't know if you've heard of it. It's high protein, low carb, almost no carb cereal. It tastes really good, some of it tastes like Fruit Loops and some of it tastes like Cocoa Puffs kind of. But anyway, you get to their page and it's, "Healthy cereal that tastes too good to be true." So it's a really good line. But then as you see it, it's fun because cereal's fun. And their market is adults, their market is adults who are on a ketogenic diet or just trying to go low carb, and so it's very clear it's high protein, low carb, it's sweet and delicious. The site's fun, easy to navigate, I think it's a really example. And they got me hooked on the subscription and I've kept ordering. So that's one, and it's easy because it's very different. Most cereal is high carb and high sugar so this is high proteIn lower carb, sugar, and they do that in a fun way so I thought that was a pretty good example.
Quinn:
Yeah, another one that I liked was skatertrainer.com. So it's the original Skater Trainer, the number one tool for mastering skate tricks fast. Build confidence, practice anywhere, patented design made in the USA. But it's their background video that goes with that that shows you exactly what the product is and what it does, so just immediately clicks there. Even if the text isn't completely on point, it's just all those elements together paint the picture really well.
Brett:
Yeah. I'm trying to be a surfer, but I live in Missouri so I can only surf a handful times a year.
Quinn:
There's no surf there.
Brett:
No, there's zero. You can actually surf behind a boat, you can surf at the lake. That's pretty fun, you can do that.
Quinn:
That's wakeboarding.
Brett:
Well no, there's wakeboarding and then there's wake surfing.
Quinn:
Really? I've never heard of that.
Brett:
It's cool, I'll share what that looks like, but it's fun. And so anyway, I recently bought at the recommendation of some peeps a balance board from Revolution Balance Boards and they do a really good job. So basically it's a board that sits on this long cylinder so you balance on it and you can kind of mimic you're riding a wave, but they do a really good job of explaining what the board is, what you're doing, and it's a really clear value prop on their pages. It's revbalanace.com, another good one to check out.
Quinn:
Oh yeah, those are cool. I want one of those.
Brett:
Yeah, they're really fun, yeah you'd like it. So tips then in how you make the value proposition clear, because like we talked about it's not super easy.
Quinn:
Yeah, it's really hard. But when I'm writing stuff, when you can sit there and you can brainstorm all day, sit there any write out hundreds of headlines to figure it out. But really the best thing that i found is just to talk to people, talk to the audience. I record a lot of my sales and demos calls and I go through the transcript and I'm just highlighting cool things that they say, and that's actually how we got one of ours on Conversion Crimes. It was, this guy was just like, "Yeah, every store's losing money somewhere."
Brett:
Yeah, isn't that great? It's such a good line. My buddy Austin Brawner and I, Austin runs a podcast eCommerce Influence, shout out Austin Brawner. We were just doing a joint podcast together the other day and he was talking about he interviewed somebody, I can't remember her name, but she said, "You don't need to be a copywriter, you need to be a copy paster." Because you really need to just listen to good lines that customers or users are giving you because they're using the language of other customers and users and then repurpose that, copy and paste that. And so obviously you're going to write some too, but that's where some of the gold is is just in what your customers are saying.
Quinn:
Exactly. Like running surveys, so one of the questions that I love to ask is like, "How would you describe us to a friend?" And so we send that out, so we see how are other people describing us. And so it's like literally you don't have to sit there and wrack your brain to come up with all these ideas for your value prop, it's literally just asking your customers, surveying them, getting on calls, doing transcript, whatever, and start to see patterns between what people are saying. And then you're just taking that and you just wordsmith it a little bit.
Brett:
Yep. Wordsmith it, make it concise, make it where it's not colloquialisms or whatever, make it work. Okay, I love that. So think about it, is your value proposition clear? And probably it could be better, probably people are going to your site and it's not immediately clear, it's not immediately obvious why you're different, better, valuable, why I should buy it, why I should feel good about spending my money, why you're better than competitors, why you're better than just doing nothing, it's probably not clear. So definitely ..
Quinn:
Yeah, and one of the things that I see that a lot of stores do as well is they put collections and these sliding images on their home page when people come on. And big stores, Target can do that, Walmart can do that, Macy's can do that, whatever, because they already have an audience that knows exactly what they sell. And I see a lot of smaller stores copy these things and do that, but the problem is if someone's coming there for the first time and you're showing a collection or just one part of your store, people interpret that differently and they think maybe that's all you offer or they get confused on the offering. And so what I've found come up in the testing is that a lot of times first time visitors are just confused about he store because they're trying to push collections or a specific product or something like that and they can misinterpret it. Now, it depends on what your store is, where you're traffic's coming from, all of that, how far I would take that advice, but just something to look out for.
Brett:
Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes, we want to learn from places like Amazon and other big retailers, but you can't always do what they do. And you're exactly right, people know and trust Amazon and so they can display everything, but they don't know or trust you yet so you need to be really clear on what you offer and who you are and why they should trust you. Awesome, okay. So getting your value prop clear, super important, not always easy but definitely worth the time. What's next? What's another common conversion crime?
Quinn:
Yeah, so the next one is visuals hierarchy issues. So what I mean by that is it's basically how important is prioritized on a page and when someone's coming you have a million things you want to tell them like, "Hey, we got free shipping. Hey, we got this new product in. Hey, we got this thing." And so you overwhelm your pages with all this information you want people to know, and all the information is important but what is the most important thing for them to know? Because what happens is if they come to a page and they have all of this and it's not laid out in a way that shows them a clear hierarchy of the importance of each piece of information then they don't know where to look and they're kind of scanning around, they're confused. And you want to visually lead people from one thing to the next. So I kind of think of it as volume knobs. So you want to turn on, for example the value prop, the biggest headline, you want that to be the loudest and most obnoxious thing, so you got to turn up the volume. How do you do that? Bigger text, bolder text, having more space around it, making it a color that stands out against your color scheme. All of these different ways are ways you can turn up the volume and make it stand out more against other things.
Quinn:
So then you think about what's the second most important thing? Okay, we're going to turn down the volume a little bit from that so we're going to make it a little bit smaller, maybe it's a regular font not bold, it's under the headline. What's the third thing? Okay, the CTA, so let's make a big orange box or whatever for people to click. So it's just giving them information in the order they want to see it, you're progressively revealing that information. A lot of stores I go to and they just put everything and there's just no method to the madness, it's like total chaos.
Brett:
Yeah, if everything is displayed as important then nothing is important, nothing stands out, so you really got to make that clear. So you talked about a big orange CTA button, do you have any recommendations there? I've heard all kinds of different things on testing your add to cart or your start checkout button or whatever. Sometimes I hear people say it should be a different color from what's on the rest of your page, other people opt to make it blend it and match. Do you have any tips or advice there, anything you've seen based on your user testing?
Quinn:
Yeah, so what I liked to do when I design websites and build websites and stuff is make what I call an action color. So out of all of the colors that you use in your brand, what's the most eye popping attractive one? What's the one that stands out amongst all of them? So you take that one out and you designate it as your action color, and you only use that color when you want to designate an action like CTA. And so that way when it's on the website, it stands out like this is the action that I want you to do. This is attracting your attention. This is the end goal where you're supposed to go so that helps lead people to it, it makes it stand out, it makes it very clear that that's the action. Because you want them to go there, you want to help them with you product, so you're leading them there. Now you don't want to necessarily make everything that you can click the action color, so usually we also have a secondary action color. And sometimes that's just an outline, so if you have a big orange button that's colored in, the secondary button would be maybe white with the orange outline or something like that. Yeah, I don't like when they make everything the same color because it blends in and you don't really know where to go.
Brett:
You don't know where to go, you don't know what to do. There are no visual cues there. Okay, so we want to think volume knobs, so we're going to turn up the volume on some of the most important elements, that value prop, want to turn on the volume but not quite as high on other important things, we want to think about an action color. What are some other tips for visual hierarchy issues and solving them?
Quinn:
Yeah, so breaking out text, giving it space. White space is another way to really give visual hierarchy. So a lot of people try to crowd things in and push things in, and the more space you give things the more the eye is able to move from one piece to the next, so I kind of also talk about progressively revealing information. So sometimes what you can do is, okay what information do they need to click on this thing? Give them that information. Once they click on that, then you can reveal the next information that they need or what have you.
Brett:
Don't want to overwhelm people. You want to give them enough to allow them to say, "yes I think this is what I'm looking for," so they click and they keep taking the next steps and so there is a progression there, I really like that. Okay, awesome. Okay, so we got value prop, we got visual hierarchy issues, what's the next conversion crime we need to avoid?
Quinn:
Yeah, so specifically for eCommerce stores are the filtering issues. So how people filter through the different products that they have, the different categories, how they're grouped together. So that can be confusing, especially if you have a lot of products with a lot of variables in it and things like that. So there's one store recently that I was watching testing for where they had a lot of colors. And when I say a lot of colors, I mean 100. So it was like they had a filter for every color. It was like baby blue, dark blue, navy blue, all 20 different shades of blue, so to actually find teal the tester couldn't find it. They actually scrolled past it like six times and they got frustrated not being able to find it. It was there, but they couldn't find it.
Quinn:
So having a really good hierarchy in your filtering so you're filtering products in a way that people actually use them. And also again going back to that progressively revealing information. So if you have a lot of colors, how can you filter those in a way that progressively reveals it? So start with blue, and then's it's like baby blue, navy blue, all the different blues that can go in, because then people are going to be able to find that so much faster. So if they sell blue, it's like blue, okay there's teal, all right maybe I should put that in green, I don't know, maybe that..
Brett:
No, I'm definitely the wrong person to ask there. But I get what you mean. So simpler options, do I choose blue and then once I get to blue then I can view other options, other blue variations.
Quinn:
Exactly. And also how they organize the filters. I've had sites where it's like they have five items and they have six filters, you don't need filters, you have six products. What are people going to filter through? Yeah, it's just the way that they also categorize items as well it not necessarily the ways that the users are thinking or wanting to filter things by. So a good example it maybe they have filtering by brands or cut or any of these kind of things. Like one of them had themed, but the customers weren't looking for those themes, they were looking for different things.
Brett:
The customers weren't thinking in themes, they were thinking specific product or something.
Quinn:
Yeah, they were looking for a specific cut or something like that, or they didn't know what the brand was and it was like they could only filter by brand. So making sure that your filters and categories match how users actually would filter and looK for that product, which is harder than it looks sometimes too.
Brett:
It is hard. So sometimes do you need to filter or do you need to categorize by use case? So I'm trying to do X, or I'm this type of person, I'm a business owners, or I'm a homeowner, or whatever, and so you kind of categorize that way. Or if it's something home décor or furniture related do you shop by room or do you shop by category? So thinking through those things. Any suggestions, obviously once you have something built and you can send users through it using a tool like Conversion Crimes would be super helpful. But other thoughts on how do we try to understand how do people shop for this? And so let me build my site accordingly.
Quinn:
Yeah, so usually when I'm starting anywhere for that stuff I kind of go and look and see what other stores are doing, especially the big ones, and then look at the smaller ones as well, how are they categorizing it? And that's a good place to start because you don't want to be wildly different. There is a standard for a reason because people expect things to be a certain way and so there is a time when you should deviate, but it's also good just to get a good baseline to understand what everybody else is doing in the market. I usually go through and I categorize like, okay they're all doing this, well why are they all doing that? There's a good reason for it so I probably need to do that too. These ones are doing this differently, why do they do that differently? What the reason for it, does that work for me? And that's kind of how I think through it and come up with my own for my own or whatever I'm working on, that's kind of the process that we've gone through.
Brett:
Yeah, totally makes sense. And as far as those things where you want your product to be different, you want it to stand out, you want the value proposition to be unique and to be compelling. And hey, some of your colors and designs and photos, that can all be, but you want the structure to feel comfortable and to feel familiar in a certain way. We don't walk into a store and think like, "Well, where's the checkout? Is the checkout on the sides of the store?" No, you know where it is, you're going to find it and you kind of know your way around. Things that are too disorienting can be problematic for sure.
Quinn:
Yeah, exactly. It's like okay everybody usually has their chat bot in the bottom right screen, so if you're going to move it you better have a good reason for that. The checkout is usually always in the top right. The menu and logo is always in the top left. And so when you change things up, it kind of catches people off guard. And in some ways, it can be a good thing, there's a reason to break the rules sometimes. Rules are meant to be broken. But the rules are also there for a reason, and so yeah people like things that they can ..
Brett:
But not just because, we don't break the rules just because. There should be some kind of strategy or some kind of, "Hey, I'm trying to wake someone up by breaking this rule," not, "I'm trying to confuse people by breaking this rule.
Quinn:
Yeah, exactly.
Brett:
Okay, awesome. So we have value prop, we got visual hierarchy, we got filtering issues, what's the next conversion crime?
Quinn:
Yeah, so pop ups. And this one's a little bit controversial because testers in general hate pop ups. They're always going to complain about them on usability tests especially.
Brett:
But do they work?
Quinn:
Exactly. So you may upset the tester and they may be talking crap about it and stuff but you're like, "Okay, but it converts. I may annoy you, but I didn't annoy the five other people that did this."
Brett:
Right, maybe it annoyed them at first but then once they actually saw the discount and they liked it, "And oh by the way, I sold 30% more," or whatever, so yeah.
Quinn:
Exactly. So this one is very contextual, you have to take it in with the other information and understand if that is valid or not valid. So a lot of the things that come up with this is the pop up comes up within a couple seconds of landing on the site and then the chat bot comes up, "How can I help you?" Then there's the pinwheel that flies out on the side like then you just hit me within three pop ups and I've been here like seven seconds. I'm overwhelmed. So that's a very valid experience that that's overwhelming and people in general don't like that. But if somebody's browsing the site and they're on a product page and they've been on the page for a minute or what have you and they get a pop up that says like, "Buy now, save 10% on your order." Am I going to click on that when I'm ready to buy? Yes I want to save 10%, that's going to convert, that's going to work. So it's about right now, right place on pop ups and the sin, the crime is just overwhelming people before they've even had a chance to know who you are.
Brett:
Yeah, and think about it from a physical store perspective. We walk into a physical store, maybe it's the first time we've been there, we want to get our bearings, we want to look around, and I've some studies that show if an associate comes up right away and says, "Hey, what can I help you find or what can I help you do?", most of the time a customer will say, "I'm good, I'm just looking." But if the customer goes somewhere specific and then the associate asks, then sometimes they get feedback. So you can just imagine if you walk into a brick and mortar store and three people bombard you with, "Hey, can I help you with anything? Are you ready to check out? Are you ready to buy something?" You'd want out of there, you want to get oriented first, and the same is true online as well.
Quinn:
Yeah, exactly. I kind of think of it as like when you're at a conference or whatever and there's people, you're like, "Hi, I'm", and they're already handing you the business card.
Brett:
And you're like, "Easy buddy, I didn't say I wanted your business card."
Quinn:
Yeah, I don't even know you yet.
Brett:
Right, exactly, that's another great example. Okay, so pop up issues, right time, do some testing, be cool about it, I think there's definitely a right way to do it. And I think it's been established, if you do the right kind of pop up you're going to get more email sign ups, you're going to get more of all of that, but just do it the right way.
Quinn:
Yeah.
Brett:
Okay, awesome. What's the next conversion crime?
Quinn:
Yeah, so the next one is that the process is not clear. So this kind of ties in a bit to the visual hierarchy one as well but this is more about the steps that you have to take. So there's a lot of stores out there that are like, "Okay, here's the product," you buy it, you put it in your cart, you check out. But there's also tons of stores out there where they have, "Okay, we're doing customized products." Whether it's printing t-shirts or they have where you can make the custom bedsheets or now they have glasses, whatever it is, the steps that the customer has to do to create that product, to customize the different things about it, is unclear. And that's one of the other crimes because if a person can't figure out how they're supposed to customize the product or you've made it confusing, then they're not really going to sit there and figure it out, they're just going to bail.
Brett:
Yeah, exactly. We are impatient online, because maybe in a physical setting or in person setting we don't want to offend people or don't want to appear rude or don't want to appear impatient, some of us anyway, but online no worries, I'm out of here if this is unclear, it's not working, I'm bailing because I'm not hurting anybody's feelings. Yeah, so great, so then tips, suggestions, how do we make the process clear?
Quinn:
Yeah, that one's a little bit harder because there is definitely UX involved in that, you have to think about it kind of goes into all the other said crimes put together and that you have to progressively reveal that information. Don't give them all the options at once, what's the first option that they need to make? And make it clear how they're doing it. I'm thinking of a very specific store in my mind right now where they sold all kinds of household products but you could custom design them and stuff, and I remember sitting there and I had no clue how to customize the product on the thing. And then when I finally clicked on something it did something I didn't even expect, which surprised me. So that one's about really thinking through which steps does the customer have to go through to do these? How can I make that as clear as possible and as obvious as possible for them so they go through it, they know exactly what they're supposed to do, and we meet their expectations along the way. Because that's another one, another crime is mismatched expectations. So our customer clicks on something and they expect one thing, like to get more information, and then it opens a Facebook group, you're like, "Wait, why'd you send me to Facebook?"
Brett:
Yeah, really thinking through what are people expecting when I label the button or the action or the section this way and then am I delivering on that expectation. Okay, awesome. That was conversion crime number five, process not clear. I believe we have one more, the sixth and final, maybe not the final conversion crime, I guess these are the big crimes, there could be subtle crimes, there could be misdemeanors that fall..
Quinn:
Yeah, there's a lot more crimes. We did testing on a lot of SME stores and these were the commonalities, like the top ones that came out over about I think about 35 stores.
Brett:
Okay, cool. So conversion crime number six, what is it?
Quinn:
Navigation issues. So with the site menus and stuff on the stores. So some of the big crimes we see here is gian mega menus, which if you have a ton of products, mega menus are helpful, but if you have not put again visual hierarchy on those menus then people don't know where to click. So if they go to this menu and there's 40 things on it and they're looking for this one thing, people skim and if every single thing is the same volume then they can't skim, they can't use that as a map to the information. So I kind of think of it like this, when you go a Chinese restaurant and they give you this menu and it has 100 items on it and you're sitting there looking through it and you're like, "What should I eat? What should I go?" And it takes you like 30 minutes to figure out what you want to eat. Well, when you go to more of a fine dining restaurant, they've just got like seven items there. And you can look at it in literally 20 seconds be like, "Yep, I want the chicken parm, that's what I'm going to eat tonight."
Quinn:
And the same thing is with menus, you got to make it what are the top seven categories? Make those big bold fonts. And then t-shirts, pants, whatever. And then you're going to put the smaller sub items in front of those which helps make your mega menu or the big navigation more easy to navigate, which helps people find exactly what they want. So yeah, it's kind of all of the things in on, the categorization, how they filter it, the visual hierarchy, being able to progressively reveal even if that's a big heading and then smaller ones underneath it.
Brett:
Yeah, I love this. First of all this has been fantastic, it's been a ton of fun, you're great to interview and thoroughly enjoyed this. So let's talk though, do you have resources? Do you have anything for people to download or check out that walks through conversion crimes or anything you'd point people to?
Quinn:
Yeah, we've got a case study thing that we just made that kind of goes over these conversion crimes, so I can send that to you or we can link to it.
Brett:
Awesome, I'll totally do that. And then yeah, so anything else you want to share about conversion crimes? So if someone says, "Okay, yes I want user testing, I want to have users goes through my site and my product detail pages and I want to see these recordings," how does the process work? How does someone go about getting signed up?
Quinn:
Yeah, so there's kind of two ways that we work with people. We have our self serve or guided. So a lot of friction to getting started with testing is, "Well, I don't know how to write a test." So we actually write the tests for you. You tell us, "I want to find this information," or, "I don't even know what I'm looking for, I just want to find my crimes on my site," or, "People are hitting me up support asking what color backpacks I sell, why can't they find that on the product page? Why are they hitting me up?" Or, "I'm getting a lot of customers saying I'm a scam, why do they think I'm a scam?" We had that one. So we take that, we write a test, we send it out to the testers and then they deliver it, you watch the videos, you make notes, you tag issues. And you kind of extrapolate the information from that and make changes on your site. Now, some owners they want to save time, they want someone to do it for you. So we actually also have a pool of experts that will actually watch the videos for you, make the notes, then make a test summary and then say, "Okay, here's all the crimes we found, here's exactly how you fix them."
Brett:
Nice. That is awesome. And so do you have more people choosing that option or the self serve option?
Quinn:
Both. I find the expert insights is a bit more popular.
Brett:
Yeah, just easier, we've not done tests we maybe need someone to walk us through that.
Quinn:
Yeah, so sometimes we have customers that they start with the expert insights to understand and then they move into watching the videos themselves or they just always have us do it. It's really easy because you take it and you're like, "Okay, yes, yes, yes, yes, no," or whatever, and they hand it to a developer and then it's pretty hands off ..
Brett:
Cool. That's awesome. Any favorite stories, success, wins, surprising things that people find out by going through and using your testing service?
Quinn:
Yeah, so my favorite one is the scam. So they were getting these emails from customers accusing them of being a scam and they're like, "Our customers are whack, that's totally not the truth."
Brett:
Something's wrong with our customers.
Quinn:
Yeah, they were literally, and I was like, "Hey, let's run a test, let's figure it out." And so we ran this test and so they ran a high end consumer electronics store so they also had a financing option, so when you went in and put stuff in the checkout you could then go to a finance kind of thing. And what was happening is that when they were sending that form to the third party, it was putting an error in one of the form fields, so it was automatically sending the information so the customer didn't have to enter it again, but it was sending that information incorrectly. So the customer is getting an error but not knowing what they did wrong. And given that we're dealing with financial information, they thought the entire store was a scam and they were stealing it and they were going to steal their identity. They're going to have to close down their credit.
Brett:
Yeah, that makes them feel very suspicious.
Quinn:
And so when they saw the video of that they literally, it's a five minute fix, they just took that thing off the form and their conversions went up like 120% after that or something. I can't remember the number off my head, it was 100 and something. And the other interesting thing was their cart value went from 1000 to 1500 to 1800, like literally overnight.
Brett:
Yeah, that's beautiful. And one of the things we talked about too as we were prepping a few weeks ago is sometimes people get tired of their website or it's not quite performing the way they want it to or maybe their competitor does a site redesign and so they have website envy or whatever. And so they just decide, "Oh, I'm just going to redesign my site." Well what would probably be a better first step is do some user testing and see if there's just some little tweaks and some little changes and some little iterations that you can deploy that will make a big difference, because that has a much higher probability of success versus a complete overhaul and redesign which is expensive and timely and, oh by the way sometimes it doesn't even improve.
Quinn:
Risky.
Brett:
It's risky. Sometimes, and I remember seeing this, we used to do marketing for a design agency and a developer, and sometimes you'd redesign a site and it looked better but it didn't convert as well. So now you've spent all this money redesigning a site that now performs worse than you had before, which is scary.
Quinn:
Exactly. Yeah, I've had a few friends that redesigned their stores and their conversions actually dropped significantly. And it's because it's risky, you're making so many changes at once. And I used to sell these websites, I used to do these big redesigns, and I actually found my most successful project was actually a 16 personalities, and what we did was it's like, "Okay, what can we launch and execute in this time period to make this site better?" So it's like, "Okay, it needs a new header, it needs a new footer and we need a new value proposition." Boom, done, traffic doubled, conversions doubled just from that. And it was like the next month, "Okay, what are we going to do here? Okay, the sales page needs some work. Okay, what are some tweaks we could make there?" And we just kind of tweaked it to success rather than change everything at once, because when you change everything at once you don't know what made it do what.
Brett:
Yeah, you don't know what was successful or you don't know what just broke, you have no idea. And yeah, this process of constantly iterating and improving, that's the way Amazon works, that's the way Google works, it just totally makes sense.
Quinn:
Yeah, and if you make it a habit to continue to improve and find this low hanging fruit and make little changes, all of that compounds over time. I've been really inspired by James Clear's book, Atomic Habits.
Brett:
Atomic Habits, I love that book.
Quinn:
He's just like, "Get one percent every day and that's 37 times improvement," or something, I can't remember the exact number.
Brett:
Yeah, it's 360% better, so it's basically 37 X, yeah.
Quinn:
Yeah, exactly. And that's way less risky, it's way better to do that. So rather than redesign your site, it's like, "Hey, let me visit this every month or every quarter, bi-monthly, whatever, and find these things that we can tweak and just do that over time." It's like interest, it compounds.
Brett:
Yeah, and I said that incorrectly, it is 37 X not 360. One percent compounded over 365 is basically 37 X. Yeah, so man it just works, it absolutely works. So highly recommend it. Quinn, this was awesome, thank you for delivering the goods, appreciate the time and we'll have to do this again sometime.
Quinn:
Awesome. Thank you for having me. This was a really fun time.
Brett:
Good, good. So check it out, Conversioncrimes.com, see for yourself, I think you need this tool, I think it's going to make your website, your business, your life better, so check it out. As always, we'd love to hear from you, we'd love to hear feedback. And hey, if you haven't done it already, leave that review on iTunes, that helps other people discover the show and it would make my day. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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