We have an e-commerce website.<\/p>\n
We’d like to increase conversions of people buying our product. We have a decent amount of traffic but would like to get more people buying.<\/p>\n
If we could redesign the site in any way can you tell us exactly how to do so and provide examples of sites or templates we can pretty much copy?<\/p>\n
We are going to redesign the site from scratch.<\/p>\n
If we jump on a call can you tell us exactly how you would design the site if it were up to you for maximum performance and provide examples?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So, in response the conversion optimization agency or web design agency shows the potential client their work as requested.<\/p>\n
And the business owner makes a decision based on what looks good because after all that\u2019s what he asked for.<\/p>\n
Sure the agency talked about the results and how their other clients are happy and since the designs look good to this potential client and, that\u2019s the solution this client is looking for, he\u2019s hiring them to redesign his website.<\/p>\n
But is that really his problem?<\/p>\n
Oh Well, On To The Next Ball Of Flames<\/h2>\n
The business owner got exactly what he asked for a website redesign.<\/p>\n
The agency gave him exactly what he wanted.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s the problem?<\/p>\n
And who\u2019s mistake was it to begin with?<\/p>\n
The problem is, jumping right to the solution.<\/p>\n
When the solution, a website redesign, may not actually be the right problem to solve at all.<\/p>\n
So does the entrepreneur\u2019s business suffer because he asked for the what he thought he needed?<\/p>\n
The outside agency was just giving the business owner what he asked for, a solution based on an opinion.<\/p>\n
This is NOT really the entrepreneur\u2019s mistake.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the agencies fault.<\/p>\n
Or is it?<\/p>\n
You Don\u2019t Go To A Doctor And INSIST On Surgery<\/h2>\n
Would you go to a doctor and insist he perform surgery on you without a full check-up?<\/p>\n
No, of course not\u2026<\/p>\n
Then, why should your business be any different?<\/p>\n
Surgery on your business is the equivalent of doing a complete website redesign or ripping up any visitor facing experience from a competitor and rebuilding it without doing any check-up or diagnosis at all.<\/p>\n
Yet this is what most business do and what most agencies sell to businesses.<\/p>\n
There are many problems with this approach.<\/p>\n
First every marketplace has a different level of sophistication. The famous copywriter Eugene Schwartz wrote about this in his classic book, Breakthrough Advertising.<\/p>\n
There are 6\u00a0different levels.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Aware of the problem<\/li>\n
- Unaware of the problem<\/li>\n
- Aware of your solution<\/li>\n
- Unaware of your solution<\/li>\n
- Completely aware<\/li>\n
- Completely unaware<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
And each level of sophistication requires a totally different approach. If you\u2019re just copying your competitors without knowing what level you\u2019re copying, and without crafting the message and experience for your specific target customer, then you run the risk of implementing someone else’s solution to their problem, in a way that might not be your problem at all.<\/p>\n
Second, you\u2019re assuming it works for them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard this argument before from past clients, and there\u2019s a reason why those clients are in the past for me, Amazon does it this way and they are hugely successful, therefore we should do it that way too.<\/p>\n
This is a huge mistake. Just because someone else is successful does not mean it will translate to your unique situation. The reasons why they are successful is always more than simply doing one thing right. Your business is different, your offer is different, your market and buyers are different as is the level of trust they have with you and so many more variables.<\/p>\n
Solutions cannot be copied, underlying strategies can, but they always require a lot more digging and never translate directly.<\/p>\n
Third, best practices suck. Just implementing best practices you see on other websites won\u2019t get a breakthrough. They are just table stakes these days. They won\u2019t get you exponential growth.<\/p>\n
You may have some ideas about the problem that you can talk over with your agency but you should never assume without getting a second set of eyes on the situation.<\/p>\n
So then what is the answer?<\/p>\n
Diagnosis Comes First<\/h2>\n
Before we can prescribe the solution, we must first diagnose the problem.<\/p>\n
A complete website redesign might be the answer, in our experience most of the time it\u2019s actually not and in most cases it hurts more than helps and is difficult to recover from.<\/p>\n
Diagnosis, allows you to gather data, in order to validate that the problem that you think you have is actually the correct problem to solve at this moment. Data also helps you to understand the fears, concerns and buying motivations of your visitors so that you can support the underlying reasons why doing more of the same won\u2019t get you to where you want to go.<\/p>\n
Proper diagnosis involves diving into your web analytics data to see what your visitors are doing. Surveying both your buyers and non-buyers to understand what the hard data cannot tell you. Listening to your visitors with one-on-one phone interviews and recordings of your visitor\u2019s screens showing where they click, scroll and even where they pay attention on your web page.<\/p>\n
At the same time understanding the economics of your business is vital to a proper diagnosis. You can\u2019t get to where you want to go without knowing what key performance indicators to watch and how you\u2019ll measure success in order to optimize your business, not just your conversion rate.<\/p>\n
Once, and only once you have properly diagnosed can you accurately prescribe.<\/p>\n
Therefore\u2026<\/p>\n
Prescription Comes Next<\/h2>\n
Without a proper diagnosis you can\u2019t get to the right prescription and solution that will make a meaningful impact.<\/p>\n
Prescription requires connecting the dots, uncovering patters and dissecting the data sets gathered during the diagnosis phase.<\/p>\n
But even a prescription needs to be validated to ensure it is correct.<\/p>\n
Knowing you have a diagnosis is great but knowing you have the right diagnosis and prescription that go together is even better.<\/p>\n
The only way to know for sure is to test your solution with a hypothesis, measure results then repeat the process again and again until you\u2019ve extracted as much value as you can.<\/p>\n
This process is know as A\/B Testing or split-testing and involves diving your traffic up between different versions of a webpage, measuring the results of each version separately and improving from there.<\/p>\n
Implementing The Solution Comes Last<\/h2>\n
Finally, after a proper diagnosis and prescription, then and only then can you begin to even talk about the right solution for your business.<\/p>\n
This is where tying back to your key performance indicators comes in and proper accurate measurement before and after implementation is vital. Because if you don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going or where you\u2019ve been then you can\u2019t get to where you want to go.<\/p>\n
Implementing the solution is the easy part however, but it\u2019s not over just yet\u2026<\/p>\n
Beyond measurement you\u2019ll also want to learn something about your hypothesis and about your customers and visitors.
A properly structured hypothesis that looks at what behavior you want to change, and properly measures the outcome through a post-test analysis process involving analyzing the behavior of visitors to each test treatment or version of your webpage looking for more answers and questions that prove or disprove your diagnosis and prescription is important to success at this stage of the process.<\/p>\nThis closes the loop, which many practitioners of optimization leave off. They simply validate the results but never look beyond what happened.<\/p>\n
Looking into the behavior as well as the financial impact allows you to learn more about your visitors, which in-turn helps you develop new hypothesis to further test and gain even more improvements. In fact even if your test is a failure, you can still learn something by testing that you never would have been able to see if you had insisted that you had the right problem in the first place or the solution that you thought was right for the problem.<\/p>\n
So much opportunity would have been missed and you\u2019d never know what you did wrong in the first place by rushing to the solution or blindly copying your competitors or other industries without a full understanding of the situation and the underlying strategy you\u2019re solving for.<\/p>\n
Tying It All Together<\/h2>\n
Without a proper diagnosis you should never prescribe a solution.<\/p>\n
Maybe some design agencies can, and maybe some conversion rate optimization specialists can too, but those that do are doing a grave disservice to you and your business.<\/p>\n
They are doing surgery without knowing the root cause of the problem and that always causes complications, and unnecessary expenses on top of failed or lackluster solutions. In the medical world a doctor would be sued for malpractice for this. But a design or conversion agency seems to get a pass to go on and mess up someone else’s business.<\/p>\n
A solution that is not specific to your exact set of unique problems is not going to dramatically move the needle for your business in any way that you can leverage.<\/p>\n
This is why you split-test.<\/p>\n
That one little thing can make all the difference between massive growth and lackluster results.<\/p>\n
Remember, the goal of a website is not to be pretty, it’s to increase revenue and that is why you will get a research driven diagnoses before you get a prescription to your business problem.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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