Business owners. Do you want an unfair advantage over your competitors? Do you want to dominate in your area of expertise? You are listening to business life hacks. Learn to influence consumer psychology and shortcut your way to business success with tips, tricks and hacks from award winning digital agency jmarketing. Today we're going to be talking about conversion rate optimisation and called CRO for short. So for people who might not know too much about what that is, what is conversion rate optimisation, in your words? Josh, CRO, in my words, is the most important part of all digital marketing. It is how effectively your website and your messaging in general is at converting people into from general interest into an actual active lead and moving them through the cycle. So if I give you a really, really simple example, the most common use of CRO is if I make this tweak to my website, what extra percentage of those people visiting it are now going to turn into a lead? And you can just imagine how powerful that is for every dollar of advertising you're spending, if you're getting 10% more return for it, that is seriously impactful on your bottom line. Yeah, for sure. I know it's something that every big company spends millions and millions and millions of dollars on, and even if they can increase their CRO by 1%, it's considered money well spent. But I know a lot of times even big companies that hire quote unquote experts, spend tonnes and tonnes of money actually fail to increase their conversion rate optimisation. So where do you think some of the standard CRO tactics fall short? And I guess, could you give an introduction to some of the most commonly used CRO tactics? So I want to break this into two different answers. One of them is, what's the general playbook to go to? And we'll go into that. But what is more important is what are people defining as CRO? So many years ago, I had the privilege of designing one of the first digital marketing courses in universities in Australia. In fact, it was the first one later got rolled out to many other universities. And what was interesting about doing it was that after we'd had this think tank with all of these industry experts in the room and we'd all put it together, the university came back and said, we can't accept this. I said, why? They said, because it's just a marketing course. And that is the truth. CRO is marketing. And marketing is knowing your customer and how to give them what they are looking for and what they need. So I will go into the tricks of the trade, but I want to dispel that misunderstanding that CRO is just changing a colour or making a form like this. Real CRO is understanding your customer on a super deep level, understanding the frictions that are stopping them from inquiring and giving them exactly what they need in order to inquire. So I think, to answer your question, fundamentally, what companies fall down on is they get too close to who they are and who they want you to think of them as, and they don't put enough focus on what the customer is going through. An example I have used in the real world many, many times is a company called the beach house out of Chicago. And they make beautiful sofas, really beautiful. Everyone wants to buy them, but it didn't matter what they did, they couldn't get a sale from people unless they discounted like mad men. There was no shortage of people ooing and arring over them. Why couldn't they make the sale? Well, they called in a social scientist and they found out a really simple answer. People already had a couch. And if you've ever been to Chicago or any of the big us cities, you'll know getting rid of hard rubbish isn't easy. So by understanding that, they put a system in which said, we'll take your old couch away for free and sales skyrocketed. That is actually CRO. So that's the meta. So common tactics for CRO, things you'll hear about a lot. Changing colours on a website so that the content pops more. You'll hear about making forms and I think we should talk about this easier to fill in and giving them more social context so that people know what to understand. These are the most common CRO tactics. So let me ask you, Alex, if I put a form in front of you, you're interested in something, whatever it is you're into, and I put this big form in front of you, it's got 20 fields. How likely? What's your desire to fill that form in? Very low. The only exception would be if it's something that I really want and I've already decided I want to buy it. But even then it would be a huge blocker for me. Yeah, 100% it would be. And let's assume it is something that you're interested in, in learning more about. But the form only says inquire, name and email. What are the ods of you filling that form in? What do you feel when you go to it? I feel like I'm not sure what I'm going to get in return, so it's probably not worth my time to fill out and submit the form, even if it's only a couple of fields. That is exactly right. And in fact, in most people's minds there is a fear and a friction that worst case scenario is going to happen. They're going to get put on a whole heap of your email lists. Some guy is going to start calling you and trying to make like the hard gym sale to you. So it's all about social context is what I'm getting at. And I'll give you the example of the better form and you tell me again how this feels. In contrast, complete this form and receive our top ten best deals of the year straight to your inbox. No spam guaranteed. Give me your name, email address and option if you want me to text it or whatsapp it to you as well. Now, what are the ods of you filling that in? I'm much better because I know that not only do I know what I'm going to get, I know that what I'm going to get is actually valuable to me. Right. And you wouldn't believe how many websites I analyse on a weekly basis that have no context around their inquiry forms whatsoever. And this is another thing that we can now segue into the difference between hard inquiry forms and soft conversion points. I said conversion and inquiry. They are. Of course they can be the same thing. So when you go to a website and it's the first time you've been there, and you've got a general interest, particularly if it's say a business b to b thing, how likely are you to inquire on that first visit? Unlikely. Especially with the b two B thing that would require a significant investment. I would probably just scan the website, see a few key points and then do more research into those key points. So I probably will not submit for them the first visit. And here's another one for you, because this is going to segue into something else later. What if that website, you like their product, you like their service, but they don't tell you the price. What impact does that make on your likelihood to fill in their inquiry form or download their demo? As a different point, it would definitely. Make it much less likely, especially if we're talking about a b to b product. And I have like a set budget that the product has to fit within, and I have no idea whether product fits within that budget or not. I'd probably just go look at a competitor's website 100%. And that's because it's causing all of this friction in the process. So I'm going to talk about what soft conversion points look like as one of my favourite CRO tactics. And then we're going to talk about the nine frictions and what a role they play in it. We just mentioned pricing as one of them soft conversion points. Not just going for the jugular, not just asking somebody, hey, give us your details, inquire, because that's very forceful. A soft conversion point is leading someone through the process by giving value and a few of my favourites. Complete this quiz to see if this is right for you. Do you qualify? Complete these three questions or whatever. Get a price estimate, automatic price estimate. Fill in these, reserve your stay, no obligation or no cash down. All of these are really, really soft. Also, companies like using white papers and all sorts of things. Let me now ask that same question to you from before instead. However, instead of a conversion point. Sorry, a hard inquiry now, it says, see if this is right for your lifestyle. Answer five questions and we'll tell you the answer. Are there any risks to you filling that in at all? Not really, no. You might not believe it, but there's no risk, so why wouldn't you click through? And now. And here's the tricky psychological thing. At the end of it says, hey, Alex, congratulations, you actually qualify. And based on your answers, you look like you'd be a really good fit. Would you like a free trial? Is that more or less likely for someone to take or for you to take up the free trial than when there was just a random free trial box on the page? Definitely more likely to take up the free trial because now I'm already engaged. Exactly. And there's a psychological principle, it's called, oh, it escapes my mind right away, but effectively it's when you have done something, done an action, you are more likely to take the next action. And it's kind of like an old school sales tactic where they used to try to get you to say yes seven times so that you'll say yes at the end. It's the same psychological principle. If I can get you to really think about things and feel like I know you as a customer, the statistic is you're 84% more likely to take my recommendation. These are fantastic soft conversion points and I'd like to see more companies embrace them instead of just going for the jugular. Because 97% of people leave a website, only 3% are inquiring. What if we get 10% of people to complete a soft conversion point? It just makes sense. So you mentioned the nine frictions. How does that fit in CRO. How do you actually put that into practise to increase CRO on a client's website? Yeah. The nine frictions is a model we've been using at jmarketing for a long time now, and it has a near perfect success rate. These are the nine things that our subconscious brain is looking for. Now, I say subconscious brain, because what you need to understand about CRO is that it's all about pain and fear reduction. I'll say that again, but in a different way. We have built into us primal objective of our brain is to protect us. And so anything that feels like pain or effort, our brain is saying, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. You need that energy. You've got to keep that energy. And so we leave. We drop out of the buyer decision cycle. Sync with Google did a fantastic research article on how customers make decisions, and they found that when there is friction, we drop out of the buyer and decision cycle. If we know this, the question is, how can we remove friction? And the answer is, the nine frictions that I keep talking about. And these are things like, what's it roughly going to cost me? Doesn't need to be the exact price, but give me a ballpark, I don't want to feel wildly out of it. Are these guys really experts or is this guy someone trying to sell me on a lie? One of my favourites. Will this entirely solve my problem? So I don't want to take on, for example, remote it support. If they only are going to manage the network and not update the drivers on my computer, for example, or I lose my phone and they don't wash their hands with it, or my email goes down, but they don't deal with that bed and the list goes on. So if we take those nine frictions and we can work through them as a checklist on the website, well, now we can start to CRO because we know we can zoom in on things. It's not so much of an opinion. I can look through the website and say, all right, if my fear, I know my fear is pricing, and we do have a module on the website, but it's either super difficult to understand or it's just kind of, this customer spent roughly this much, what could I do to improve this? And then measuring it over the next period of time? What impact has that had on the amount of inquiries or the quality of inquiries that have come through? So the big difference between what we do at jmarketing, using the nine frictions to implement effective CRO strategies is that we're actually understanding not just the customer, the target audience, but exactly how their subconscious is working when they're going through the page. So we can overcome any issues that might be lingering in their subconscious. You can contrast that with the standard CRO stuff, which is just changing a colour, changing location of a button, just basically throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It's a crapshoot. You might eventually find something that works, just if you tried 100 things and you get lucky once. But that'll take a tonne of time and money and you'll be missing clients, missing potential customers left and right. But we use the proven system that speaks to the customer subconscious. That's CRO that actually works. Yeah. And if you speak to most ux professionals or designers, they will tell you CRO is about exactly what you said, moving buttons around, changing colours. But 99% of businesses and I have worked with small and very, very large, they haven't got the foundations right. What we talk about when we're talking about the subconscious, when we're talking about what customers want and what influences them. So long before you start worrying about which colour of fuchsia your background should be, you should be thinking about what are those nine frictions that the customer's mind is going through? And how can I tweak those to be more effective? So now that we know what ineffective CRO looks like, if I was a marketing professional or a business owner looking to improve my CRO, what's the next step I should take? If you're looking to improve your CRO, and everybody should be, the very first thing I would do is take down, write out a copy of our nine frictions. Make sure you understand them. And if you don't, listen to the podcast on the nine frictions and critically evaluate your home page. That's my very first step for you. This is what you can do for free. And I don't care if I'm talking to a mum and dad business right now, or the senior marketing manager of a multinational company, the rules do not change. It's always the same. And the agencies that support you rarely ever do any of this, if ever. So do it yourself. Go and have a look. Have a look to see. Do you talk about price? Do you show your expertise? Do you show your delivery capacity? Do you show. If someone buys from you, will you back them up with support or a guarantee? All of these things are critically important. And look at your conversion points. If I was a customer, what risk free thing could I do? Right now that would give me more of a feeling of comfort than I have before. Now those are what you can do. What I would also recommend you do is jump onto our website, www. Dot Jmarketing agency. Send us an inquiry about our top to tail audit. It is deliberately very, very cheap. So that you'll come in, you'll get a review from myself and my team taking you through all of your website, the small and the large things that you can do that will make an enormous change. And as a kicker, we will show you all of your own data and prove everything we're saying. None of this will be subjective. It will be 100% actionable information at a world class level. Yes, sounds great. Well, thanks for coming on, Josh, and sharing your expertise and hope to have have you on the podcast again soon. Thanks very much. Bye.