Live Conversion-Focused Website Reviews with Jon MacDonald

enior optimization consultant at VWO. For those of you who do not know about VWO, so VWO is a full-funnel A/B testing experimentation and conversion rate optimization for that one. Today’s session is a very exciting one since we will be doing a live website review with Mr. Jon MacDonald, who is the founder of a conversion rate optimization firm, The Good that has achieved massive results for popular online plans, including Adobe, Nike, Rocks, The Economist, and many more. Welcome to the session, John. I’m glad to have you here. I would request you to turn on your camera so that our audience can see. Alright.

Thank you, Jon. So yeah, I’m sure there’ll be a plethora of insights to take back from this, today’s session. Before we get started, I would like to thank everyone for tuning in from all over the world and inform you that we’ll be taking up questions at the end of the session. So please feel free to drop your questions at any given point during the presentation. So yeah, with that, Jon, the stage is all yours. Let’s get started.

 

Jon MacDonald:

Great. Looking forward to this. So I’m gonna share my screen here, and, we had several dozens of folks who submitted their site for tear downs today. And so what I did is, I selected just a handful of those that I thought we could get through in the amount of time that we have today. And, as Nancy said, feel free to ask any questions as we go through We do have time at the end to review those, together.

And, if I see something pop up I do have the the chat and the questions window open. I will try to also answer them as well. So Yeah. Let’s jump right in. So you should be able to see my screen here.

We have a handful of sites that I’ve preloaded up here for us to take a look at. What I’m gonna do for each of these is do a hard refresh. And I’m also gonna make the screen just a little bit bigger for everybody. And, do a hard refresh here so we see it as if it is a brand-new loaded site. Okay.

What we’re looking at first here is Bandana’s Wholesale. So, you know, first things are a couple of first impressions that come out of this for me. When I start looking at this site, there’s just a lot going on here. I bet if we did some heatmaps or some eye tracking on this, we would find that people just have a challenge understanding where to look first. You know, you’re really drawn into the facial expressions of the people and the photography here, but there’s also a lot going on in general here with all of the text and call to action.

So a couple of things I wanna point out first here as we kinda go through this. There are so many items in the navigation, I just don’t know where to start. The site is called Bandana’s Wholesale, and Bandana’s is the first item, but then we have dog bandanas Grandanas, Netgaters, headwear, socks, and others, which really just seems like a catch-all, customized, and then contact us. We have found at The Good in optimizing sites for over 12 years now and running 100s AB tests through platforms like VWO really is that you wanna keep this to 5 or less navigation items. Anything over 5 items and the consumer just gets very overwhelmed very easily. The first thing they do, and we see with heat mapping, is that people start reading the first couple, and then they rapidly drop off and stop looking at the rest of the navigation. So, from there, we really wanna focus on this main, value proposition area. And I call it that because most brands use this for marketing purposes.

The challenge with that is that when you were doing this with marketing content, you were missing the main content that should be here. That main content is what sets you apart and why should consumers care. So let’s look at this headline together. Quality bandanas are delivered fast for the guaranteed best prices online. And then they go into you’re in good hands, and they and they offer a CTA of shop bandanas.

Well, the biggest issue I have with that CTA is that these buttons also look like buttons down, right? So you have free shipping, fast delivery, excellent quality, and safe checkout. Those all look like buttons with the same design as Shop Bandanas. So what I really recommend is that you keep your call to action consistent throughout the site and try not to confuse what’s a button or call to action and what’s not. So as a consumer and a user, you would fully expect that you could click on free shipping and get details about shipping.

Things of that sort here, when in reality, this looks like it all takes you to the same place. Then we have the opposite problem here as we scroll down. Right? So we’ve got all these different photos, not quite as intriguing as the photography up top which is okay, but now we’re missing a call to action altogether.

So we’ve trained up here consumers to look for this square with the black shadow, where it says shop bandanas. And then we scroll down here, and there’s no call to action whatsoever. So this is, you know, a bit of of a drop-off and a little bit confusing for consumers. Now I understand you can click on these images and go to those categories, but, really want to tell people what you want them to do. Next, we scroll down and we hit what I call here is a wall of text.

The first thing we’re going to see in a heat map here is if we were to do a scroll map, right, how far down the page people are scrolling, what we would find very quickly is that people are gonna stop here, and they’re gonna drop off. Either they’re gonna bounce or they’re gonna scroll right back up and look for a different action for them to take. So what I really wanted to get across here is, yes, I understand this content is likely here for search engine optimization purposes. However, it is a very poor consumer experience, and you’re much better off as a brand to put this content throughout the page and where it’s gonna be helpful to consumers, and Google will actually favor that as well. So my guess is that very few people are scrolling down here to see any of these other items.

But regardless, I’m not a huge fan of this footer. I’m sure we’ll have the opportunity to talk about footers some more. But a footer should really have a couple of key items on the far left should always be a repeat of your shopping navigation, your products. Then in the middle is the miscellaneous help, you know, the contact, those types of things. And on the right should be all of your contact information.

What do I mean by that? Well, you should always re-put your logo at the top. And then, ideally, you have what we call at The Good, the trust trifecta. What is that? Well, it is a physical address or mailing address, a phone number, and an email address for support.

Now the idea here is very few people are gonna mail you something or show up at that address. It could be a P.O. box if you wish. But consumers just wanna know that if they have a challenge, they can get a hold of you. And an address, a physical address indicate that you are a more trustworthy brand and that you have a more solid or lasting business that they are not concerned about giving their information to, their credit card information, etc. So, that type of 3-column layout for a footer works extremely well.

On the left is products in the middle is support in miscellaneous links, and on the right is your contact information, including address, email, and phone number, ideally. And so you can also see that when you first come to the site, there’s just a going on here. You’ve got this accessibility menu, and you’ve got the chat here. And when I actually first came to the site, the chat had already popped up, so, really, there’s just a lot going on here to be thinking about. I would recommend, first, if I was to do anything for the highest impact, I would adjust the navigation.

You can see there’s only a couple under here, and it’s all buy pack and buy color. I would actually just start with bandanas, maybe Gaters, headwear, and socks, and leave it at that. Customized for the products you can’t. It should be under each of the items. Right? I know I can customize a bandana and put the customized link under there.

Other, I don’t know what really to do with that, but it’s a mix of products and, a blog, as you can see as well. I would probably put those under you know, maybe have a clothing and then socks and can go under a clothing, for instance, and really look at what consumers are really interested in the most. So do a couple of A/B tests, if you will, on the navigation itself to whittle it down to what people are actually looking for. Sort in your analytics and your top pages, and arrange your nav based on that. And then lastly, I really don’t recommend putting Contact Us for e-commerce sites in the main navigation.

I really recommend that this information goes down in the footer. We have done hundreds of tests on this, and what we have always found is that consumers will scroll down to the bottom right-hand corner of your footer and look for your contact information. That is the first action they will take, and that is actually why most brands have the chat widget in the bottom right-hand corner because consumers immediately look down in that direction when they wanna contact somebody. So that is why chat has, you know, had the trend of always being in that bottom right-hand corner. It follows that.

So, let’s take a look at the next site here. So we’re gonna take a look at Supply, which is a men’s grooming company, fairly well known, I believe, definitely to me. But the first thing I get here is this pop-up as soon as I have loaded this site, so submit and save up to $30, and then ask you to answer some questions. Now I totally understand being able to customize your marketing, your email marketing, especially. And, if you’re using this information to collect 1st party data, to be able to use it to personalize the site as well, That can be amazing and, is definitely helpful.

You’ve seen a lot of online quizzes happening lately with e-commerce sites. And those quizzes are a great way to collect that 1st party data and use that data to help you customize your marketing, email marketing, and your website. But I’m not a fan of having this immediately pop up as soon as I come to the site. And I’m not a fan of pop-ups in general. Now, I’m always, telling people, imagine if your website was a retail store.

Right? Treat it very similarly. If you’re a consumer, you walk into a retail store and a sales associate jumps out in front of you and says, Hey, John. Give me your email address. I’ll give you a discount.

Well, the first thing I’m gonna have is probably a pretty negative. Right? Nobody likes it when they’re walking down the sidewalk. You have someplace to be and someplace to go, and you get interrupted by that. You know, a person who wants to collect your information for the latest petition, etc. What I really recommend doing here instead is 2 things.

One is baking this into the page content. That can be really, really helpful. Two, make this an exit intent Now this may be an exit intent here, but, the reality is, third I really recommend not doing a discount in your pop-ups. Why? Well, 2 things are gonna happen with this.

The first is you’re gonna get poor data. Right? So you’re trying to collect 1st party data, but people who get pop up only want the $30. So they’re gonna do 2 things. They’re gonna give you that junk email address that everybody has.

They’re gonna sign up for, you know, everybody has that old Gmail address that they send all their spam to. Or what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna give you that email address, and they’re gonna they’re $30, and they’re either never gonna open your email. They’re gonna start marketing into spam, or they’re just gonna unsubscribe. So if you really wanna be sustainable with these email growth pop-ups, you really need to have something that is an offer, not a discount. What do I mean by that?

Well, if you’re looking at a discount, that is a dollar or percentage off. Now, discounting is not optimization. That is, I call that margin drain. You’re really just giving up a lot of money in the margin in exchange for an email address. Instead, if you do something like an offer, well, we will give free shipping.

And, right, you know, Supply already offers free shipping, but you could say, Hey, right now it’s free shipping for all orders over $10. What will give you free shipping no matter how much you spend? Or you could say, Hey, fill this out, and we’ll upgrade you to overnight shipping or 2-day shipping, something of that sort. Right? You could also say free gift with purchase.

Well, hey, if you buy this Supply single edge 2.0 razors, we will also give you one of our products for free if you sign up. So there’s a lot of options here. What you can do, you just have to be a little more creative. In fact, upon The Good dot com on our website, we have an article that has about 90 or so different types of promotions you can run as opposed to offers or discounts. So something to be thinking about there.

Okay. Let’s get in and actually look at the site now. I have a little bit of an issue with rotating, and animating types of content. It really becomes a distraction. It draws the eye in.

Now at the top here, you can see that free shipping, and then it rotates through to a lifetime warranty, and things of that sort keep going through. The biggest challenge I have with this is, we have run 100 tests on these promotion bars. We call them at the top notification bars. The only message that really moves the needle in terms of the average order value or conversion rate is free shipping. Why is that?

Well, we have come to find out that consumers hate surprises. No, no big surprise there, right? But for most consumers, what happens is they have this fear that they’re going to find a product they like online and then what they’re going to do is add that to their cart. And once they get into the cart and the checkout process, they’re hit with a surprise shipping fee. How many times has that happened to you where you’ve added something to the cart and maybe even the shipping’s more than the product itself?

Well, unfortunately, Amazon has trained all of us to expect fast free shipping. Right? Well, the biggest challenge with that is consumers, when they shop direct to consumer, brands like Supply, they expect that shipping’s gonna be charged and, they want free shipping, but they’re expecting they’ll be surprised. So if you put in that notification bar that you have free shipping, even if it’s free shipping over a dollar amount like they say here for $10. The reality is that you’re eliminating that fear for the consumer.

They’ve let their guard down, and they’re going to have a better brand experience and convert higher throughout the experience. So highly recommend pausing this, not having a rotating notification button, just sticking with free shipping and returns. Okay. So let’s take a look at the navigation here. They’ve got shop, about, help, build a box.

Okay. So there are a lot of things going on in this navigation. I call this a mega nav where you have it drop down with all of the other options here. I am a huge fan of just keeping your navigation about, shop. So what do I mean by that?

Well, the first thing I would test is moving these essentials or starter sets, shave, skincare, and accessories as the 4 main items. And then I would have, possibly help and maybe build a box. Although build a box doesn’t really tell the consumer what they’re going to get and what they want. So I don’t think that’s necessarily a helpful navigation item unless you have been a consumer of the brand before, in which case, at that point, you could say, okay, followup on an email and say, Hey, why don’t you build a box and save some, you know, save hassle in the future and have it automatically shipped to you, etc. So changing the navigation to be fully product-based will help people get where they wanna go quicker.

Understand that with all e-commerce websites, consumers are only at the site for 2 reasons. The first is to understand if your brand or products can help solve their pain or need. Right? So they have a reason that they came to your website. And generally, that’s around solving a pain or need that they have.

And then second is if they’ve determined that you can, they wanna convert as quickly and easily as possible just like you as a brand want them to convert. So what you need to do is get them to the solutions as quickly as possible. Most consumers aren’t ready or really, you know, want to see this information They wanna see it throughout the page content. They wanna see it on their journey of solving their problems.

They’re unlikely to go here first. Second help is something that can be great for consumers, but, that’s why I said you should probably leave it in the navigation here, again, if people really need help, what are they gonna do? Well, they’re gonna scroll all the way down to the footer here and look in the bottom right-hand corner for contact information. And instead of getting help, here I am, I’m getting offered to subscribe, to an email.

And, so I think that’s a bit of a challenge. And then again, in this navigation, the footer navigation sensor is here. They do a great job of having the trust trifecta here, but it’s in the wrong location. I would highly recommend moving the logo and, that content over to the right-hand side, repeating your product navigation on the left, and then these two columns could stay. The other thing I see so often, and we do a lot of eye-tracking heatmaps and mouse-movement heatmaps, and what we find in these is that the eye is always drawn to the payment icons, but they really serve no purpose in a site footer. You’re not really addressing any objections because consumers aren’t concerned in general about what payment forms you take.

They’re only concerned about that when they get into the checkout. And I don’t know about anybody listening to this, but I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been in an e-commerce website, and they did not take at least one form of payment that I had available to me. Right? So really give that some thought around, what, you know, if you need these icons here, generally, I would say no and just eliminate them. They become traction and put them in the checkout where consumers are gonna be using a payment, form.

Okay. Let’s take a look at the product detail page as we go down here. First things first is it’s always great to have, you know, a very clear idea right up front of the product name what people think of it, that social proof, the price, and then your options, and a very, very clear add to cart. So kudos to Supply, they’ve done all of that. And then they bust objections right away.

Free shipping, a 100-day trial, and a lifetime warranty shift fast. This is great. And then more social proof from a well-trusted brand, at least in the United States, and GQ, which is their men’s magazine. So that is great to see. They have pretty good product photography here.

I’m a little, wondering why they don’t put these videos first. I would really like to see, the video is one of the first items herein the photos, product photos. What we have found is that usually, we’ll get a lot more clicks, as, you know, consumers right now. We’re obsessed with TikTok and Instagram. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the internet. We wanna see videos.

 

And so making that accessible will almost always help. You can see here that they have a pretty good product description, but what I always wanna see in the initial product description are bullet points. I bet if we did eye tracking on this, you’d see that people start reading each of these lines and then they drop off really quickly because you’re like, ah, this is too much. I’m just gonna scroll and check out the page. So start with bullet points then get into a paragraph.

We’ve done a lot of tests on this. I’m not a huge fan of what we call accordion navigations. So you can see what’s included under this accordion FAQs and how to use it. The challenge with that is very few people will actually click on these accordion navigations. And so that information just goes unseen, and it really does not aid in the shopping journey.

So if it is truly important information, it should just be displayed on the page. Right? So what’s included? I think that’s probably pretty important to know what you’re buying. I would almost put these three items, very clearly up here in the description.

And then frequently asked questions. Now, if you’ve ever seen me speak before, you know I have a pretty hard stance on FAQs. My thought on FAQs, if you haven’t, is that frequently asked questions like this is where good content goes to die. Why? Well, again, most people aren’t going to see this, but I do give Supply, you know, a round of applause for putting this on the product detail page and not just having a blanket FAQ page on their site.

It’s great that they bake this into the product detail page, but what I would do is, again, have this content showing as opposed to hidden behind a click. If they truly are frequently asked questions, do you wanna make them easy to view and see? Okay. And then they back the social proof. This is all really great social proof.

Now we’re getting into some videos about how to use I think that’s really great to see. Love the preview video here. It’s very clear how, you know, showing it in use. I would almost put this video as one of the product videos up above. I understand it’s a widescreen video, but it’s something, you know, that I think would really help the product and make sure it gets seen if it was further up on the page.

Now we get into some product photography and more of a description, you know, photography on this site is really, really well done. So you can tell they really put some effort into it. Now we’re starting to bust some objections again. This is content that I would move higher up on the page. You’re really showing the value of why you should spend more on a razor and how you’re going to save money versus how you’re going to be wasting your money with a disposable razor.

So, something to really be considering here is, moving this higher up on the page. Now I am always a fan of having these add-on products. There are a couple of challenges here. 1 is curated for you. They’re trying to make it sound very personalized, but the problem is they don’t know me. And as a consumer, I’m like, he read it for me.

Yeah. You don’t even know who I am. This is my first time to the site or, you know, so I would almost say, something along the lines of what has tested and worked very well has been something along the lines of, you know, frequently purchased with this product, and that tends to do extremely well. So, the other thing here is you have this quick shop which, yep, brings up a popover. So I think that this is great because most brands, what they’ll do is just do an add to cart here.

The challenge with that is nobody is going to add to cart based off of a simple preview image, headline, and price. So I love that they’ve done quick shop, although what I would change here is just have the quick shop button and call to action underneath each of these not relying on somebody to roll over to be able to take that action. Okay. Customer reviews. Now here’s what I would always recommend doing with customer reviews, have a few highlighted.

So many brands on their product detail page will have an endless scroll of reviews as you can see here. Now Supply does a couple of amazing things with their reviews that I’m a huge fan of. They’ve checked all the boxes here besides the number of reviews. They show the average star rating. They show the breakdown of these.

That’s all content that people are interested in. In case you wanna see a couple of people who had an issue and what their issue was, you can click on that and view those. Right? But the other thing is they show them, by date, which is extremely helpful for consumers. They wanna see the most recent reviews first.

Then they show verified and some of them have photos. They’re short and to the point. This is great. And then you also get Patrick, who is actually responding. If you don’t know Patrick, I believe he’s the founder of Supply.

So the reality is, this is great content because, the real consumers the number one thing we hear from them that they wanna see in reviews is simply that they have, you know, interactions with consumers. Right? So if you have an issue, that, you know, that the brand cares, that they actually want to get a hold of you and actually make it right if you have an issue. And you can see here, you know, it does have a learning curve for those who have never handled it like ours. This is really helpful for people who are looking for, more information.

And then, you know, something like, let us know if there’s anything we can ever do for you. That’s just great to see that a brand is actually engaging in that way and cares. So this is all great to see. Again, hitting on that free returns, and warranty and spine, we already talked about the footer. So, great job Supply.

I think there’s some opportunity here for growth and optimization, but, you know, obviously doing a great job here. Alright. Next up are Odorfree professional ozone generators. So now I am not probably a target market here.

I don’t know what an ozone generator is, so hopefully, people who are coming to the site know. The brand is called Odorfree. That kinda of gives you an understanding that it should, reduce odors, right, so that’s something to consider. I do like that they put their phone number up front and center. They have the number-selling ozone generator.

Which really helps bring that social proof in. But really what you’re looking at here is the navigation. First things first, they have a home icon. I should never suggest having home in your navigation if consumers want to go to the homepage, you’re gonna click on your logo or just use their back button, and they’re gonna get to that homepage. So all the things to consider there around the navigation. You’re chewing up one of those recommended 5 navigation items with home.

You could easily eliminate that and simplify your nav. You also have an odor type here. Now this is where it gets interesting for me because there’s a lot of different types of odors here, that, you know, they talk about. So I wonder if this is a search engine optimization play. It looks like it takes you to each of these different pages, but I imagine the products are somewhat similar.

So that’s something to keep in mind if you’re a consumer, can be really helpful for driving down and personalizing. So that’s, you know, I’m okay with that. I think that be helpful for consumers, how it works, and then all of a sudden we’re into products. So now I’m trying to understand, if should I go by odor type or by the product. And these products, you know, like a villa, a suite, and a state, I don’t really know what that means.

Right? Those are types of houses, as I understand. So I don’t understand why I would get each of those different ones. So, I think that this is something that could have a little bit of work in terms of helping people find the right ones. Then we have info center.

There’s a lot of info here, but wouldn’t that be the same as how it works? And then reviews. I’m never a fan of putting reviews in the navigation because consumers aren’t coming to your sites immediately to go to reviews. Right? They’re going to go to the product page and then want to see reviews at that point.

Again, contact us. You don’t really need it in the navigation, and then all of a sudden over here, we have it in bright red before you buy with an exclamation point. What do you think people are gonna click on? Well, if I saw that, that’s the first thing I’m gonna click on. But if that’s true information that I need to know before I buy, why isn’t that front and center?

Why do I have to click on a link to go to it? Right? And it certainly shouldn’t be the last item in the navigation because the challenge with that is I may have chosen the product. I may have already, most likely, have already chosen an odor type I’m trying to remove. So I wouldn’t have even seen this item.

So if it truly is that important that you had to put an exclamation point there, put it in red, have something alarmist as before you buy, I would really have preferred to see that up front and center, maybe even in, this main marketing area here in the middle of the page. Okay. Now you’re asking them to find the best model. I think that’s helpful. Oh, one thing I really wanted to touch on here quickly is that we have this auto-rotating banner.

Now, there have been tons of studies done on auto-rotating banners like this, And what they have all shown is that the more items in an auto-rotating banner, the less any of them get clicked. Right? So, yes, you’re dividing the number of clicks by more items so that does make sense. But the reality is what you’re seeing is an exponentially decreasing number of clicks because people just get overwhelmed, and they can continue to scroll. And you can see how fast these are scrolling through.

Say, for instance, I’m now, I’m trying to read that information on the left, and I’m reading through that. Oh, done. It moved before I could even finish reading it. That to a consumer, gets very frustrating. So I always recommend picking one you can have the circle navigation and maybe even in the arrows on the side be present, but allow the consumers to click through.

Now marketing managers always say, well John, you know, I have all these messages that I wanna get across and a rotating banner allows me to do that. Some simple changes can be made. The first is to have your developer put a small snippet of JavaScript on here that chooses one of these images at random and displays it on every page load. And so you could say, hey, there are 4 options. Choose at random, a number 1 through 4, and display that image.

Right. So then on every page load, you’re getting 1 of those 4, and the consumer can then switch through. We have tested that and the click-through rate goes through the roof. So that is something, you know, a recommendation for these areas. Okay.

So now you’re telling people to, again, select an odor below that they would want. I think this is really helpful information, and then you can choose more. Now we’re getting into the different types of products. So what I would have done up in the navigation is actually instead of saying something like sweet 1500 villa, I would say something like up to 1000 square feet. So in this navigation, I would say 1000 square feet, 1500 square feet, 3000 square feet, 4000 square feet.

Because apparently, that’s what that number, right, 400,041,011,011,000 belongs to. So as a consumer, that’s gonna be a lot more helpful than, you know, having Villa 3000, Suite 1500, because they don’t know what that number means. And suite Villa State doesn’t really tell me anything about the devices. Okay. So now we’re talking about reviews.

Here, we have a few reviews being shown, which is great. The challenge is that, again, these are automatically rotating. So just choose 1 and, and take that route. And then, you know, now we’re getting into some details about them and showing, you know, some information about how they’re being used. This is all great.

How it works. That stuff people would definitely wanna know. And then call us for questions. That’s great. And then free 2-day delivery via UPS is being called out, that is great to see.

Again, I would change a little bit of the order of this navigation, but, I do like the social proof that they have down here, some of the certifications. That’s all really helpful. Again, eliminate the payment icons and this Facebook button seems a little random that it’s displayed there, but, it could just be, a display issue. So all in all, I think there are quite a few things that could change on this, to make it a little easier for consumers to understand what product is best for them and to understand what next steps they should take from there. So, alright.

Let’s jump into, Lusha. So this is more of a B2B site. Right? So not so much for consumers.

Now, the understanding here is it’s gonna be a little bit different when you think about that summer. However, the first thing you see when you get here, there’s just so much going on. Right? If you remember that bandana site, we looked at a few sites back. They had the same issues, but this is a little different in that instead of having a lot of distracting content, instead, they have pop-ups all over the place or distractions.

Right? So we’ve got the cookie. So, you know, over here, which I understand, in different locales. And if you’re marketing to different countries, you do need to have that at times. But then you also have this chat widget which becomes really distracting, not only because it doesn’t have a background to it. Right? It’s a transparent background. But you know, it draws my eye down here. So really, I would wait and do that on some type of action.

Maybe it pops up when you scroll down the page, 20%, something of that sort, or, maybe it just has to head there. What brings you here today? And if somebody clicks on that, then you get your options I am all about the chat on-site. It works extremely well, but it needs to not be a distraction from the rest of the content. And that is what is happening here.

Okay. I’m gonna close these out of the way. Now the first thing that I see here is reach your ideal future customers, locate accurate B2B contact and company details. Okay. Great.

Very, very clear how you help me and what the value proposition is here. But the first thing that you’re really trying to do is immediately convert people into starting for free. And signing up. Right? So the 2 main call to actions are enter your work email and enter your work email.

Now that could be helpful. But I do think that it’s a little premature to ask for that right upfront here. My guess is very few people are doing that at this point. If they are, I bet if we did session recordings and something like VWO, you would see very quickly that people, scroll down the page, view the information, and then scroll back up and enter their email. So my guess is they likely are not ready to do that based off of this.

Now navigation, they have, wide in Lusha, but the problem here is immediately going into capabilities instead of solutions, and it’s still not answering the ‘why’ question. Why them over any of the other B2B contact discovery companies? There are so many of these out there. I really wanna know why. Is it better, more accurate, a bigger database?

What is the difference instead of just going directly into the functionality of the features? I wanna know the benefits. That is the why. And then pricing is, you know, B2B is always great to have in the navigation. That’s probably one of the most clicked items here.

Not really sure why you would do enterprise or com customers. You know, that should be something more oriented around something like results right, especially if you go to that page and it tells you, what the customers are in terms of case studies, etc. And then company, okay, I think that’s great. In a B2B context, consumers of B2B products do want to know more about the company they’re working with.

Okay. So scrolling down here a little more, you’ve got some great social proof of people that have used them. Everybody knows these brands for the most part. Good rankings on the reviews. And then 600,000 sales pros like it.

They get free contacts for life and reach out to the highest accuracy rate. These are all the reasons why Lusha and that’s what I would have put in this navigation. And then have capabilities over to this to the right, perhaps. Now we’re scrolling down a little bit, and it’s discovering more. I like the animation.

The call to action doesn’t really stand out on the page very much. You can see they’ve tried to change that by having the arrow hand pointing there kind of like an arrow. But, you know, especially with the buttons that are shown in the image here, it becomes a little bit more confusing to the consumer. The most accurate data you’ll ever find, I think this is something that would be interesting to have higher on the page because this is what brands are most likely interested in. So reorienting some of the content, I think, could be really, really helpful here.

Okay. So getting down now, we’re saying get started. You get 5 free contacts, instant access, etc. That is great. That is all the information now that I’m ready to start.

I think you can be helpful. So again, I think, you know, almost to start for free, I would change to something along the lines of, view details, you know, learn more, something, or even just a get started button. Right? But again, I don’t think at the top of the page, consumers who are visiting are ready to convert just yet. Okay.

Now the footer here is really well done. You’ve got your products in terms of, what they, you know, what the options are from them. Some company information links, and then you’ve got your contact information over here. The only thing I would add is putting their logo above the social icons. And also if you have a phone number, or an email address that you can reach out to them, I think that’d be helpful, but less of an issue for B2B as it is for, direct to consumer e-commerce.

Okay. Looks like we have time for maybe one more. So we’ll do one more here. And, why don’t we get into, Coco Soul Organic? So the first thing is I come here and it says one tanning oil sold every 60 seconds, okay.

So my guess is this is for tanning oil. Hopefully, consumers know what they’re looking at here before they land on the site. So it says sun tan and body are serious for deep tan, silky skin, and shiny hair. Okay. This is really what I think should be up here in the main, promotion area because that is quickly and easily telling consumers what they should expect. And what products did you sell and what the benefits are. This one tanning oil sold every 60 seconds is more social proof. I think that should be replaced. So I would swap these two contents and see what happens there.

Now taking a look at the navigation, again, I don’t recommend having home in your navigation. Consumers will just click on your logo if they wanna go back home. And then products don’t really tell me what they’re selling. Consumers use navigation in e-commerce sites to help them understand what products you’re selling and how you’re gonna help them. So you really need to have that information trail there for that information.

I would just have your products listed here. Contact us, about us, again should be further down the page. Contacts should just be in your footer. About us should be that content should be sprinkled throughout the site and the shopping experience does not need to be in your navigation.

And then they also have this other hamburger navigation. It’s very much used in mobile, to just, have a whole bunch of other items here that really are just miscellaneous pages that should be in the footer. So you could very easily eliminate, most of this navigation and have it focus on products. And I do believe that you would see it perform a lot better. Okay. Again, in terms of the call to action as well, I would not do buy now. I would do something that is lower intent to purchase, something like view details or learn more. The challenge here is people probably aren’t ready to buy right now. They wanna learn more about the products and help them choose which one’s right for them. So as we scroll down here, you can see that they have the 3 different products, you know, the packaging looks great, looks very professional.

They have the title for it and a very short description, which is great. I am always a fan of having that low intent to purchase, item here, call to action here, based off of the homepage, etc., have him drive into the next step in the funnel, which would be that product detail page. I don’t believe that you should have add to cart right upfront here. Now most folks might say, Hey Jon, you know, you focus on optimizing for conversions. You wanna get people to add to cart.

Yes. We do wanna get people to add to cart. But consumers aren’t going to be ready to add to cart just yet. And all you’re doing by having the add to cart here is artificially increasing your cart abandonment rate because people are going to add these to the cart thinking that they’re going to be able to get more details. When in fact, it just takes them into the cart.

So always do something like view details or learn more, that low intent to purchase call to action. You also don’t wanna have 2 calls to action side by side in most instances. The biggest challenge here is we’ve actually got 6 calls to action spread apart, and it really just becomes a lot to review pretty quickly for the consumer. Okay. And then we’ve got this cool item.

Same exact thing there. And now we’re going down the skin. This really looks like every single product they sell is just being displayed on the homepage. I’m not a huge fan of doing that. I really think you should focus on more about the categories and just help people find the right category for them, right? Are they looking for sunscreen? Are they looking for hair? Are they looking for scrub box or, oils? Right? There’s so much stuff here in different categories, it’d be great to have those product categories in the navigation and, throughout here. And then do a, you know, a designed lookup, if you will, a section of the home page for each of those items.

Okay. Some more benefits. And then email sign-up built into the page. Now I do like that the email sign-up is built into the page, but the biggest challenge here is, you’re not really offering any benefit for signing up. And in fact, you just said, let’s be friends.

Subscribe to be among the first to learn about our new products and promotions. Now there is a couple of things that should always be on email sign-up forms. The first is, you really wanna set expectations. What are they going to get and how often are they going to get it? Right?

So here, you say be the first to learn about new products and promotions, but you don’t say how often you’re gonna email me. Is it once a day, once a week, or once a month? I wanna know what I’m signing up for. And then I’m giving you more consent in that case if you’re very clear about it so that I’m not gonna be surprised when I get an email every week, or annoyed by it and unsubscribe, or mark it as spam. Now they also do a really good job here of letting people know about their privacy policy and you know, I would rephrase this to say something like, that you will never use their information outside of the company.

But it does say it will provide received notifications for news, gifts, and future promotions, but I would just say something like I agree to the terms of use and privacy policy, and we’ll never sell or, distribute your email address if that’s the case. So consumers want to know, what they’re gonna sign for how often they’re gonna get it, and that you won’t abuse their information. So, join the club is not that great of a call to action only because they’re not really joining the club per se. Right? Most e-commerce sites when you say club, they’re thinking about rewards programs, etc., so that could be a little bit confusing of a call to action. Now we’re jumping into Instagram. The biggest challenge I have with these is that you can see down in the address of the link that if I click on it, it’s gonna take me directly to Instagram. Now the big challenge with that is, once you send somebody directly into Instagram, the chance of them continuing with your site is very, very low. Right?

So you’ll have consumers who click this and they get sucked into the black hole that is Instagram and they start scrolling and they never come back to your site. So highly recommend that use one of the dozens of apps and plugins available that allow you to have an overlay come up with the Instagram image in it, and then you can also make it shoppable. So, there are a couple of really popular ones out there where you click on it. It brings it up in an overlay box and it has the image on one side and then, the product details and comments on the other. And that stuff performs extremely well.

Okay. Now we have secure payment icons again, not really that helpful for the consumer. At this stage, then again, I would completely overhaul this navigation. I would have the products on the left. Some of these help items, like policy stuff in the middle.

And then the logo and the entire trust trifecta, as I’ve called it, is missing. There’s no address, no email, no phone number. So if I really need to get a hold of this brand, I have very little way of doing that other than clicking Contact Us, which my guess, if we go here, is going to be an email form, even worse, they ask you to contact them, but they do have an email and a phone number and an address. So all of that stuff, I believe, should go down in the footer here.

So okay. So that was quite a bit. I’m gonna leave a couple of minutes to see if there are any questions. I, unfortunately, didn’t keep up with any of them here. So Nancy, do you wanna come back on and let me know if there are any questions in the last couple of minutes that we have here?

 

Nancy:

So about the questions, Okay. So the first question that I have for you is on product details pages, you know, So some websites have these long, you know, detailed pages. They have maybe, you know, 10, 8 folds, and some websites You know, keep it very small. You just have a body and summary information, right? Maximum to 3 scrolls.

So what according to you is better? Because it’s generally said that people are not really interested in reading too huge chunks of, you know, paragraphs and a lot of information.

 

Jon:

Right. I fully believe that consumers do scroll these days. We’ve done a lot of scroll mapping, so having more information on the page is not necessarily a deterrent to people to convert. In fact, I would recommend having more information on the page than less. How the display of that information is I think what really matters.

What do I mean by that? Well, I would, personally make sure that you have bullet points first and then get into longer form paragraphs, if you wish to do so. That paragraph content can be extremely helpful for search engine optimization. But the bullet points are gonna be important as well to consumers who come to the site and just wanna skim through that information very quickly. And that’s generally how people are gonna engage with product detail pages.

 

Nancy:

Alright. Got it. Cool. That makes sense. Another question, So we have a few questions coming from, the people here. So one question is from Jack Fenton. He’s asking, did you see Shane’s raw stat data on having a higher minimum free shipping rate led to a better conversion rate thoughts replicate this yourself.

 

Jon:

Yeah. Interesting. I’m friends with Shane. Saw his email in this letter that came out last week. I thought that was really interesting data. And, you know, I think it’s definitely something that should be tested on your site.

The tool that he mentioned is a great tool. I’ve been following that since, beta. And it works extremely well. So if you’re on Shopify. So the thing to keep in mind there is you should always play around with free shipping, in terms of the value of free shipping.

Meaning, one of the best ways to improve your average order value is to raise your free shipping minimum. And that’s a number that you could start playing with. Say you offered over $50 you could say, okay. Now we’re gonna try it over 60 and see if your average order value goes up, and you could keep playing with that number over time. And I believe that’s really Shane’s point more than anything else, that it’s worth testing on your site based on your average order value.

The products that you sell and see what works best for your brand. We get asked questions like this every day in terms of should we do x or should we do y? My answer is usually we should test that. Right? It really should be tested, more than just copying what a competitor is doing or even what you read in a newsletter, I really just wanna make sure you’re testing it.

And I think Shane made a really great point in his newsletter that, hey, this is something that most aren’t even testing and can have some pretty interesting results if you start, seeing if it’s gonna work for your brand.

 

Nancy:

Alright. Great. Another question that we have is, what if we have you know, an insufficient number of reviews for a particular product? Maybe it’s because it’s new. So how do we increase the sale of such a product?

 

Jon:

Right. Well, the first thing is if you have, just a handful, a small number of reviews, instead of using the reviews app to just play all the reviews on the page, maybe just take those 3 and start to put them in strategically on your site. What do I mean by that? Well, just copy and paste the the text onto your site, for instance, right, and highlight the best 1 or 2, or even 3 reviews. Now if you don’t have any reviews, I highly recommend just don’t put star ratings on the page.

You know, most consumers won’t consider it or think about it if it’s not showing on the page. They won’t, you know, look at the page and say, oh, wait. There are no reviews on here. Now I will say that it is something that you should get more of, and the best way to do that is going to be post purchase email flows. That works best for collecting reviews.

So you know, where it’s legal in your location, you could send out free products in exchange for reviews. and get more reviews in that way. That’s not legal everywhere, but if it is for you, and where you’re located, then you could definitely do that. So you do have options for how to get more reviews. But if you don’t have them, maybe just put the 1 or 2 social proof items that you do have.

Maybe it’s your featured someplace in a newspaper or magazine or on TV, or you just have a quote with, you know, what they purchased and, it’s one sentence or just even a headline about in quotes from that person. So there are various types of social proof. It does not have to just be product reviews.

 

Nancy:

Alright. Perfect. We have actually another question from Jack again. He says, if you saw that customers were falling up and down the collection page and not clicking any products, what could you be looking to improve assuming the traffic quality and highly targeted? It’s good quality, basically.

 

Jon:

Right. Yeah. If I’m seeing that, then, the first thing I would probably do is start interviewing some users. I would wanna understand, what information they’re looking for that they’re not seeing. And this is where something like user testing can really come in, to be valuable to just say, hey, I’m gonna find people who match my ideal customer profiles. And when I ask them to complete some tasks, well, I record their screen and their audio and ask them to just talk out loud about the experience they’re having. Right? So you could do this over a recorded Zoom call, for instance. Or you could, you know, one thing I tell a lot of brands to do, especially smaller brands, is just take a laptop into your local coffee shop and say, hey, I’ll buy you a coffee. If while we’re waiting for the barista to make that coffee, you let me ask you a couple of questions about my website. And, you can qualify them ahead of time and say, hey, you know, I’m looking to do a little customer research. Do you buy razors, right, if you’re, you know, or do you use an electric razor, right, in which case they probably wouldn’t wanna buy from something like Supply, which we looked at. And if they fit within your demographic, then say, oh, great. You know, can I just, buy you a coffee and have you use this site and you tell me what you think?

I’m just gonna ask you to do something really simple. And I just wanna watch you do it. And, you’ll learn so much about what their objections are, what content they wish was on the site, that’s not there, or you’ll just watch them fumble around and not be able to find the information they’re looking for. And you’ll gain some empathy for the consumer really quickly and be able to, you know, help adjust the site. So if that’s happening, what I would do is go to session recordings, which, VWO is a great tool for session recordings, and you can see how people are engaging with your pay and see possibly where their mouse is stopping and, what content they might be engaging with in that way.

And then secondly, I would really do in-person user testing, if, you know, it can be remote user testing, or you could use, there are great tools out there like user testing.com, etc. You can go for help on that.

 

Nancy:

Great. Alright. So I think with that, we would like to wrap up today’s session since we’re running out of time. For the audience, you guys, can either reach out to me or Jon to continue this conversation or learn more about CRO or VWO experimentation, or anything, you know, you have questions about, on LinkedIn, and we will be happy to answer your questions.

So, yeah, thank you so much, Jon, for doing this with us. It was an awesome session with a lot of valuable insights. And thank you, everyone, for attending this session, and we look forward to seeing you in our next webinar.