How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

0:00Most founders run their website the way people used to take medicine before medicine was a science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guest today doesn't play that game. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralize, and he built something called Predictive CRO, studying what's already won and lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads. While your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for, and a two minute test using nothing but Google Translate that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell. If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting. This is the Vault, let's unlock it. Sahil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We really got to be here. All the way from Spiralize, the business itself.

1:02Now I know before the show we were talking, I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and AB testing. I know that what you guys are doing is revolutionary and it's quite interesting. I'm excited to get into it. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point? My name is Sahil. I'm the CEO of Spiralize. We're an AB testing company. I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing different kind of SaaS tech companies my whole career. And I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Okay. Well, how did you get into Spiralize? Where did that tell us where that came from? Yeah, so it's a fun story. I am actually not the founder. I was the founder CEO of my previous company, which was at SaaS Business. I was actually an early customer of Spiralize.

2:04So around the time, Spiralize, just getting off the ground, I started using the product and I saw that it really worked. And it opened my eyes to the power of any... The power of AB testing as a way to improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how I became a true believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about what's the next thing I want to do. I had stayed in touch with the founder here. He had kept building the business organically, self-funded, was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because they... I lived in Atlanta already and Spiralize was based in Atlanta. So it was a good arrangement. And I had done the solo CEO founder thing, wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way. We both knew how hard that was. There was this mutual understanding of it. And we also had... There's some things he's really good at. There's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work really well.

3:04And it's worked out really well. I've been doing it now for four years. And we are using words like AB testing. And I'm just assuming there might be people listening. And that... What is even AB testing? So let's take a step back here and go, okay, let's talk about what are we even talking about right now? Okay. Let's take this. Let's even step away from like marketing, websites, business. Let's just start with something probably. Everyone can relate to, which is... When you have a new medicine, how do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment. You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better? You want to make sure it really works. So what do you do? You get 100 people. You give half of them what's called a placebo. It's a sugar pill. It's nothing. And you give half the people the actual drug. And you measure how many people got better.

4:08And what you want to make sure is that, say you had 100 people, 50 people, you make sure men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things. Because you want to make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one group and all the women in the other. And it turns out the drug works really well for men and not so well for women or some other variable. That's called randomization. That is an AB test. And it's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. There are other, you can do it before and after. It's not as good. This is the gold standard. Something called this double blind controlled experiment. Fancy words, AB tests same thing. So that is, now we accept that as the best way to know if a medicine works. If you went to the doctor today, and she said, hey, I've got something for your cold.

5:08Here, take this. And you look down, you're like, huh, I've never heard of this. Like I was going to take some robotussin. But what is this? And the doctor's, oh, it's, it's really good. You might ask, well, how do I know it's good? Like, oh, I gave it to my neighbor. We're great. Okay. Is your neighbor the same symptoms of me? How much should I take? Oh, just take a swig. Okay, like, is it effective at like two tablespoons, one tablespoon, once a day? Well, I bought trust me. I've been a doctor for 10 years. This will work. You would never do it. Okay, I'll release. I don't think you would. Okay, I don't think you would hope not. Okay, this is now back in the early days of medicine. Okay, and by the way, that time wasn't that long ago. Okay, we're measuring probably less than a hundred to 200 years of recent history.

6:09That's how people took medicines, right? That's the days of patent medicine. If people standing on a shoebox, hawking their saw hills patent cough syrup. Okay, no one would do that now. You would never take a cancer drug that hasn't been tested. Yeah, right. So there's the pre-scientific error to medicine and then work down in scientific error to medicine. Yeah, for people's websites, they do that all the time. They do the equivalent of, I'm a doctor. I've done this for 10 years. I don't know. I gave it to my neighbor. Work great for them. It should work for you. Yeah. All the time you look at websites. Why'd you do this on the website? Oh, it's best practice. What do you mean it's best practice? Well, I read about it on a blog. Okay, so it worked for one person. How do you know that works for you? Well, it looks good. CEO liked it. Yeah. Okay, all the decisions.

7:09I used to template. I picked the best. I, I, but I'm not going to name brands because this is not the fault of any of the brands who do website templates. There's lots of really good ones out there. Some also not good ones. I looked at three templates. They said this was the best template for my landing page. This was my, this was the best looking homepage template. By the way, if your saw holes barber shop, that's probably fine. Okay, but if you're building an actual business where the website is the front door to your business, but you may want to put a little bit more thought into it. Yeah. If you're an e-commerce brand, okay, if you are, if you're selling B2B SaaS and you're selling cybersecurity software, your average product probably sells for like $100,000. Every lead that comes, every person that comes to your website and goes away, that's really valuable.

8:11You're millions of dollars you're losing. You're losing. So what is A-B testing is taking that same thing that we use in all many other parts of our life and applying the taking websites from the pre-scientific gut instinct era to the scientific era. There are, that's a journey. And for some companies, it makes sense to do that for some companies that doesn't. And it doesn't mean you can't make mistakes doing that. It's for a new age, it's not perfect. But if your website is an important place where you do business in some way with your customers or potential customers, this is a much better, it's a really good way to make your website your number one salesperson. And we're talking about optimization here. So we're talking about you, you have your website, which is let's call your A. And then what you're doing is you're just testing little things here or there on a variable on a B variable and sending traffic to both to see what converts.

9:17You don't have to limit it to small changes. You could make a big change. You could make big changes. Yeah, you could make big changes. If you're getting ready to run a marathon or a half marathon ever, I have ran a half marathon once and I promise I would never do it again. My body's not meant to run long distance. I'm in the same to get my wife ran once and she did great, but just watching her trains and I'm I have other things that I want to do. Okay, when you run, what did you do to get ready? I did the, there was like a protocol, this was a while back, but like I trained with a group and you do your runs and you know, you do your start with your two cases, you work your way up and then all the way up to you get to where you're going to go. So there's a training regimen. There's a training regimen for sure. There's probably a rest regimen. Okay, if you run 10 miles every day, you're not going to, that's not your work. That's not your work. This is in speed. There was, there was quite a bit of work. Yes.

10:17There may have been a dietary component. Okay, depending on how serious you are, maybe you didn't need to make drastic changes, but they probably some advice told you to avoid some foods. Probably go easy on the hamburgers and milkshakes and maybe go a little bit more on the healthy lean protein. Okay. Now, one way to get ready for a marathon is to only do one of those things. And then you could say, my, my time got better and I know with certainty, it was because I wore the right kind of shoes. And then the next marathon, maybe you'll add compression socks. And the next one, you'll eat chicken five times a week instead of burgers. You could do that. And then every time you got this like pretty high confidence level, but then the day, you know, what gets you there a lot faster, maybe you do, you should, you should combine those things. Eat lean protein, wear a good socks, wear a good shoes and train and get enough rest. Now, will you know that 10% of your reduction in your race time came from the socks,

11:22I'm just making shit up. And another 5% came from eating lean protein. No, you'll never know that. Okay. The same is true in A.B. testing. And you can get away with it. I would say, particularly on websites, particularly, you know, on like a B2B website. First, I just want to be quick, the stakes are much lower. Okay, we're not injecting a cancer treating drug into your body. Yes. The stakes are really high and you want to go one variable to the time they're absolutely. We're talking about can you get someone to fill in a lead generation form or click? I'm ready to start. I'm going to try that software for seven days first to see if it works. So the stakes are lower. The other thing is, for our audience out there, I'm going to use some acronyms, B2B, D2C, just business to business. Okay, if I'm selling software to other corporations, that's business. If I'm selling you, you know, shoes on the internet direct to consumer. In directing consumer, you have all this traffic. Okay, how many millions of people are maybe going to Nike.com to buy shoes a lot?

12:25So you can quickly get a sample size, which means, you know, maybe you run it for a week, and there's millions of people coming in. You can very quickly detect there's a difference between the performance to version of pages. On the B2B side, how many people are shopping for a new cybersecurity software today? Some, okay? And in fact, just quite a few, but not as many shopping for shoes. So one way to get results quicker is to make big changes. Okay, now you don't want to just do a bunch of random shit. But it is an acceptable trade-off to maybe you change the message on your homepage and the image that goes with it. And why? Because usually the messaging, the what's called the copywriting and then the visual image, they complement each other. And so if your headline is making some big claim about how effective your product is, say it's stopping cybersecurity attacks, maybe the image support that, and they work together.

13:26So it's not just changing random things, but this is for our marketing people in the audience today. And we're going to talk about some very specific examples. This is what we're talking about, A.B. testing. Yeah, I think it's interesting because as you're speaking, I'm thinking, okay, for a true A.B. test to happen, we need traffic. Yes. So what is that number? There's, I don't think there's a set number, but more is better than last, obviously. And then you're talking about making big changes. Yes, big, small, minute changes. The question I have, because as a non-A.B. testing expert, one thing that I've always thought about A.B. testing is, if you change too many things and you don't know what works because you've changed everything, and you can't control the variable. That's right. That's right. And what I'm talking about here, maybe a good way to kind of put some boundaries on it is, I might change, I might be okay, I could probably get okay with changing a

14:29few variables on one section of one page. But I wouldn't change multiple sections on the same page, and I wouldn't change something up funnel or upstream and on the page and maybe after the page. Maybe just start with, I'm just going to pick something simple, a shopping cart add to cart. And I want to test, do I get more people to add to cart if I say free shipping or free returns? By the way, both probably work. Maybe you should test both. I could do that. Maybe I would change the button color and maybe I could also change the font size, how visible I want to make it. I probably could roll that out all into one test. What I wouldn't do is then also change maybe the ad copy that gets people to come to that site, to emphasize one of the, because now I'm really distorting the effect of the experiment.

15:34I think that's where most experimenters would say, hang on and be careful about changing too many things, because now you're recalling what's called confounding variables. And it clouds. You just really don't know which thing made a difference. I couldn't agree with you more. I haven't heard the word confounding, but yeah, it's if you're changing too many variables and you just don't know which ones are actually working. It's interesting because we can go as detailed as like you said, as simple as a small button going red or green. As simple as I love what you just said, free shipping or free returns. When is there, when is there a business ready to start doing this type of A, B testing? What levels of traffic are we talking about to the website? Now I know that's subjective, because I want to make sure everyone is clear. Yes, someone coming to Nike website and buying a pair of shoes, very different than a cybersecurity product that's a million dollars.

16:37Having said that within the guard rails, when is it that people are coming to you usually? Where are they when they're saying, hey, we need to hire you in your service for A, B testing? So maybe a good way to put it is, let's just start, why do we care about traffic? We care because you want to make a decision based on what's called a statistically significant result. So if you run a test for just one day, maybe you run it on a Monday, well maybe the people that shop on the weekends are different than the people that shop on during the week. Who knows? Okay. So you want it to be representative of your traffic. And the more traffic you have, the more quickly you can represent it. But I want to talk about there's two factors here. One is just the amount of traffic. The other is time. Because if you have a high traffic site, a running the test for one day still isn't enough time for the reason we just talked about. Maybe the weekend shoppers are different than the weekday shoppers. So you want to look at both of those

17:42things. For a business to business type of website and you're optimizing for lead generation, lead generation being someone fills in a form and they're saying, hey, I want to check out your product. I want to see a demo. I want to do some kind of free trial. Usually where it starts to make sense that this is worthwhile is if you're getting 100 submissions a month. These are ballpark numbers, take them as guidelines. There's some companies where 100 is more than enough and there's somewhere not nearly enough. Yeah. But most of the time if you're south of 100 ish or maybe 50 to 100, one, you probably then don't have enough traffic. So traffic is not enough. You should look at the number of conversions. The second thing is it probably means you're a small business. Nothing wrong with that. But there are probably other things you need to be working on before you work on conversion rate optimization. You know, most probably maybe you just need to be trying to get more

18:43traffic or more of the right traffic. Yeah. Your ideal, but I use a marketing drawing and ICP ideal customer profile or persona. Same thing. Just there in the first place because if they're not even coming to the site, optimize it all day long. It doesn't really. It doesn't move the needle. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Now you guys at your business, you said you guys do very unique or you have a scientific way of a bee testing. What exactly is that or what makes it unique or different for you? Yeah. So we do a thing called predictive CRO, predictive conversion rate optimization. So what most in-house testing teams do, by the way, there are many, many good ones that are out there. You tend to see these at bigger companies because they have the maturity in the budget to actually hire a team of data scientists. They have people whose their whole job is every day designing,

19:46doing web design. But most companies don't have that. And so when they say, oh, we're going to redesign the site. Maybe they hire an agency. Maybe they have someone in-house to do it. And what they're mostly relying on is personal experience. They might be right. They might be wrong. But the data available to them like inside their head is probably a very small number. And it's hard to know if the thing that worked for your last company is it is it transferable to your new company? Okay. Okay. Why? Because two things have changed since you even if you actually ran this as a good statistical rigorous AB test. One is a function of the company you're at today and the coming year yesterday are probably different at least a little bit. Okay. Number two time.

20:51If you look at a website from five years ago, you can probably tell those, Bill, five years ago. And if you get in the way back machine and just look at some big company that you would consider modern but has been around for a long time like Salesforce. If you look at in the way back machine, you look at Salesforce's website from 10 years ago, I'm like, oh my god, how are they thinking? 10 years ago it looked normal. Yeah. So the thing that worked that was better than your, quote, control 10, five years ago may not be. It could be. It could not be. But if you if you're relying on personal experience, maybe a higher agency to solve that problem for you. They do lots of baby. There's lots of CRO agencies, lots of good ones. Some not too good ones. They are usually relying on what they've tested for their other customers. It could be a big number, it could be small number, but it's still a limited number. And while they solve some of that problem, they still

21:53have that. What worked? Did it work because circumstance? Or is it transferable? And to know that you want to have you want to be able to see where it worked. You also want to see where it didn't work. Winners and losers. Think about if you if you interview athletes and you only talk to the winery of the World Cup going on right now, if you only talk to the winner of the World Cup. And you said, what did you do to get ready for this game? It's pretty helpful. But you probably should also go talk the teams that lost. It's about what did you do to get ready for this game and then compare that. Yeah. Okay. Same thing here. You want to have the winners and the losers to know what works. And the more of that data set you have, the better. So the thing that we do is different. We crawl the internet and we shamelessly steal everybody else's AB tests. Now I say steal because it's I'm trying to be a little bit funny when I'm actually stealing

22:56anything because all AB testing is in the public domain. Yeah. I hear you're saying, but you you you look at what everybody else is doing and see what's the most converting for them. How do you know it's converting? Oh, that's great question. Okay. Think about a company that let's take Nike.com. They're not a spiral as customer. If they're running a test on their homepage, what we can see is that they're splitting the traffic. We can actually see the visual difference between the A and the B. Imagine every day for two weeks, they're they're running a split test. And then on the beginning of the third week, they send a hundred percent of traffic to the B version of that homepage. They pick the one. Do you know that there are how they're sending traffic? Can you see that? There are some there are some ways that are proprietary that we have figured out how to do that. Okay. Black hat or gray hat or you that's I wouldn't call it black hat. I would I would call it white hat. Okay. But there's ways that you can see how much traffic are going to these different pages. I mean, this is for you can estimate or you can estimate it.

23:58You can estimate it. So you know that okay, they're running to you have basically a way to find out that these big companies are running AB tests and then figure out which one which control actually worked so that you can now take that data for your customers. That's right. And what we're looking for are repeat patterns among similar companies. So if Nike.com runs this really interesting test, I don't think that is necessarily super relevant for CrowdStrike, a big cybersecurity company, and vice versa. And by the way, let's say CrowdStrike runs a test. Yes, it may be relevant for other cybersecurity companies, but is it predictive? It's really hard to know if you got an end of one. I would not go copy that because now you're just talking to the winner. You have the winner's curse. Okay. You want to look at the winners and the losers. So what you want to look is like, hey,

25:02there's 100 cybersecurity companies. What is the portfolio of test they ran? And what things tend to win and what things tend to lose and then bet on that portfolio? Okay. Okay. Not unlike if you were a poker player. And you followed someone who's really good world series of poker type of player. Okay. Any one of her hands or his hands can win or lose. And if you only watch them play one hand, and you say, I'm going to copy that hand. I think that's super predictive. But if you watch them play a hundred hands, you're going to detect some patterns. And if you watch five players play a hundred hands, you're really going to watch a hundred players by a hundred hands. Now there's some clear patterns of when they hold when they fold. When to hold them. When to hold them. When to hold them. That is a, that's what predictive CROs. It predicts not what one test will do. It predicts a

26:05portfolio of tests that you should run based on what's work for similar companies. And similar doesn't have to be just they look just like you. It could be someone that has a similar call to action on a paid landing page by the page traffic tends to behave differently than organic traffic. And is it on a home page? Is it on a on a sign up page? You want to look at all of those and then say, okay, which ones are similar? What's predict the portfolio of tests you should run? Run the whole portfolio because across that portfolio, you'll find the winners. Let's talk. I know you have so much basics here. And I want to talk, when I'm at a basis, I'm going to say sorry, data. You have so much data. And I think for for my listeners, I'm just thinking about the smaller businesses that may not be able to bring in yet a data scientist or have a full CRO team working before them. But they can maybe understand different things that

27:07we know through data that work. Like for instance, for things that I know and I could be wrong, but I've heard is like, you want someone to say yes and move, hit a button, button shouldn't be read because read is a sign of stopping, right? Maybe. See, that's what I've heard that. I've seen interesting. And that's what I've heard. Other people have said, no, you're actually wrong. Read actually does work. So are there is there anything that for sure that are basics like these are the musts? Like these are the musts that you have to have or that we know. So that's a great question. Here are three things that our listeners today can use right away. And they don't have to spend money by fancy software, hire an expensive agency to do. Let's start number one. And by the way, we can tell our like home pages and landing pages. I'm starting because that's where most people's traffic goes. Okay. If you have some niche page or some techno like a page that

28:10describes the technical attributes of your product, those are necessary elements of the user journey. Okay. I'm putting those aside for now. Okay. Because typically those are so specific to you and your product or your service. Those are people searching also for you and they're already in the final. They're looking at the technical page. They're there are result. They're there just trying to find a way to buy. Okay. First thing, show the product, show the product, show the product. Okay. We have a phrase, happy people kill conversions. What does that mean? Happy people hurt conversions. So many websites have stock photos that they got on, you know, in their Adobe account of two people in a conference room looking at a tablet, going, wow, first of all, who's having this much fun in a conference room? I want to go on a conference room is not that much fun. No one, let's start with this. Can you think of the last

29:17car ad you saw? Okay. Do you remember what car it was for or what brand? I'm thinking, I remember, I don't know why it's sticking out for me, but I was thinking about the Audi one. There was one that was an Audi one. Okay. Cool Audi. Is it? Audi makes really nice cars. Yeah. Can you picture what was that was it a TV ad, YouTube ad, magazine? It was an awesome TV ad. It was it was a luxury TV ad. I only remember because it was around where I live and it was, it was, you know, a ball and ad with a new car and cool rolling into a $40 million home on the bank of the ocean and, you know, with the beautiful life jacks, you know, husband gets out, smile, slowly keys to her. She gets in, they drive off and then the Audi comes in quadril. Right. Awesome. Awesome. So there's a component of lifestyle. There's a component of aspiration. Yeah. But there's also kind of showing the car. Imagine the same ad. Okay. Picture it right now and just imagine you had a magic eraser and you just erase the car from that ad. Yeah. Totally. What would be left? Lifestyle? Lifestyle. Yeah.

30:22Lifestyle is the rich and famous. Yeah. Good looking. Okay. Would anyone then say, I think I'm going to go to my Audi dealer and check out a car. No. No. What the hell is this? Okay. This is actually really important. I hope people are if they're here listening, this is we're starting to get something very important here. AKA remove the stock. Move the stock photos. Yeah. If you have, if your product company, show the product, if you're a service company, show the people who deliver the service. Explain that. Okay. So we worked with the company that does home air conditioning repair. Imagine I live in Georgia. If my AC breaks, that is like the top of the list. I might fix the AC before I fix the toilet. Okay. It's like 110 degrees in August. You just cannot live without air conditioning. Okay. I can go to the backyard to go to the bathroom. I can't live without air conditioning. Okay. And we ran an AB test. Their homepage had stock photo of mom with two kids.

31:26Everyone looks happy. And it kind of looked like, I don't know, Mother's Day, like the kids were giving her tulips. It was it was a happy person. I think you're supposed to convey that, Hey, if you need your AC fixture, you're going to be happy when it's fixed. And the AB test we ran against it, we just we we replaced the photo with an image of three uniformed people in front of their van with the brand name of the van. And that was the image on the homepage. Didn't change the copy, didn't change the offered and change anything else. Didn't change the social proof. And there was a double digit improvement in people either filling in the form or clicking they had to call to action. It's a local, it's a local thing. So it's click to call or fill out the form. Okay. And keep in mind, these people are already very high in 10 when you need your air conditioning. You would think, what could you do to actually stop someone from calling? What turns out? Yeah. Double digit change, just by people saying, Oh, this is who I'm going to get. I get to I get a professional

32:29person coming to my home in a nice van. And they're going to fix my AC right away. We worked with a company that does home warranty. Yeah. And the homepage showed images of that kind of like, again, stock photos of happy people, presumably it resonates. He's like, Oh, they're happy. I'll be happy. They have, yeah, they have a home assurance or whatever warranty. I have it. Yeah. And what we what we tested against it is images of things getting fixed. Okay. An AC unit getting fixed. It was like a like a faucet, like a bathroom faucet getting fixed. Yeah. Water and then hot water or tank. Yeah. And then like an electrical, like, you know, that what is it called where they put that thing in your outlet to see if it's producing electrical charge? Yeah. Yeah. These are all intuitive things. Okay. The kind of things also

33:32just average DIYer probably doesn't do themselves. They want to call professionals. It's clear. You will get these things fixed. Someone's going to come to your home and fix them. These are from double digit left. Wow. What about the product? Show the product. Show the product. So like for a SaaS company, you would just show show like the screenshot of the app. The screenshot of the app. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's lots of different ways to do it to style it. If you're concerned that the picture of your app is proprietary and that's a source of competitive advantage, first let me say your competitors almost certainly already know what your app looks like. Okay. They've downloaded it. They probably signed up with a different email and they're using it. Everyone does that. So just let me know. I hear that. But even if you think that's true, you could do a stylized version of your user interface. But you're trying to get the person to do is just think of that out of you. You got to put the car in the out of you to get the person to go to the dealership. Yeah. Put a picture of your product. So it's number one.

34:33Everyone can do that right now. Just go to your website. Just ask yourself, do I have happy people? Because I'm probably hurting converges. Okay. Number two, this is a good one. Take your homepage. Right. Yeah. Just in a browser. Okay. Right click in Chrome. And one of the things will be Google translate. Pick a language that the people around you don't speak. Okay. So maybe pick Arabic. Pick Hindi. I'm picking languages and speak at home, growing up. Okay. And then take your homepage. Show it to five people who don't know that it's your company. Know you want. Just ask them, what do you think this company does? Okay. And by the way, they're not going to come up with something specifically. This is a point of sale entry system for multi-location retailers. But they might say something like, oh, this looks like business software or something. Okay. If they can't even come close to the category, you have a problem.

35:35And the translation technique, what it's doing is it's removing the copyrighting from the equation. And it's forcing the person to use the imagery to draw an instantaneous conclusion about MI in the right place. And by the way, that is what your audience does when they reach your home page or landing page because the brain processes images faster than words. So imagery is very important then on super important, super important. And so if your copyrighting is doing all the heavy lifting, you have a problem because you've created this high cognitive load home page or landing page. The copywriting is absolutely important. But the instantaneous react decision that almost everyone knows when they get to a page was, I might even in the right place. Just like when you walk into a restaurant. If you're on date night, you're looking for certain things. You haven't tasted anything. Okay. You're looking for ambiance. Is there a smile? My, the matri-d. What's on the tablecloth? Okay. Is this like white

36:40tablecloth? Is this checkered more casual Italian, like little Italy kind of thing? Where am I going to to Chipotle? I love Chipotle. There's certain things I expect when I'm in Chipotle. Okay. And if I don't see them on my brains making kind of real quick decisions, you know, if I go into Chipotle, I expect to kind of smell a certain way. It's kind of that grilled chicken that, you know, that's what I expect. If I go to kind of date night at a nice place, there's a different kind of just all these little things. And my brain's making instantaneous, subconscious level decisions about, am I in the right place? You can do this. Don't spend money on fancy software. Don't hire an agency. I didn't get it. And then I got it. And I was like, oh my God. So I want to make sure it's very clear for people here. Like step one, remove the stock and just get rid of any happy, go lucky stock. And replace it with your product or service. And replace it if you're a product-based business, replace it with your product. If you're service-based business, replace it with the service people or the type of service. Or the outcome.

37:45Or the outcome that people are going to get. Like so, for example, like we worked with a higher education company, show the diploma. Yeah. Show them getting graduate, show them graduate, show them throwing the, whatever the hat up, whatever it is. Number two, this was very interesting. Take your website, put into a different language and send it to the homepage. You only need to use for the homepage. Sorry, take your homepage, put into a different language, send it to somebody and just say, hey, what is this company does? What is this company do? And if they can't tell you within a range, obviously within a range, it's a business service. Oh, it's a, it's this type of service or this type of product that tells your imagery is off. And people look at the imagery versus the copy, which is very interesting to me because I come from direct response copy market, like writing, where it's all copy. Like the copies, like the most important thing. And

38:46you just said imagery and copy are almost equal. Well, well, let's let's talk about that a little bit. There's two jobs. What the imagery does is it helps establish for the website visitor that they are in the right place. It is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and you go, hey, am I in the right type of restaurant fast food or fine dining? Okay. What the copywriting does, think of that as I'm reading the menu. Okay. And if I see some things and they're described in a way that's enticing, that speaks to me to what I'm looking to get out of the experience, and I'm going to order. Okay. And by the way, I make Donald's like, what they write those value meals in a certain way. That's copywriting. Yeah. Okay. And it works. And if you go to a nice restaurant. And if you go to a nice restaurant on date night, the way they write the menu is written in a certain

39:47way to make you feel like, oh, the chef is just, is I'm getting something so special. This meal is it's going to be when they talk about where is the food source from and whatever foam they use to decorate the plane all these things, right? And you would never see the automatic Donald's value meal and vice versa. So the copywriting instrument, but they serve to they, in for our conversation we're having today, they really kind of have two different jobs. Yeah. Okay. Now let's talk about the copy. Right. Is this number three or is this number three? Number three. Number three. So we talked about first just technically get rid of stock photos. Number two, make sure whatever images you use are low cognitive load. Yeah. Low cognitive load. Okay. Low cognitive load. Okay. I see this all the time in B2B websites. They have like a schematic of how their software fits into the ecosystem and the tech stack and how integrates with 17 different things and it's animated and things are flowing and

40:52that's the wrong place to put it. That's a high cognitive. Put that on your technical page, put in your solutions page, put it on your, you know, how the how the whole thing works. Okay. This is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and the maturity before they ask you, hi, how many people today or do you have a reservation or you want to sit at the bar that I'm explaining to you like the 17 steps the chef does to prepare the vegetables today. You're like, whoa, hang on. I just, can I just see the menu or like I just want to tell you table for two. Okay. You don't will need with let me tell you where we source the chicken and you know that kind of right. So um, imagery is important. Home pages should start with low cognitive load and then move the user to high higher cognitive load as they move through the journey. All right. You're a restaurant. You start with can I get you a drink? Let me bring you the menu. Have you thought about an appetizer today? Okay. Let's pick your meal.

41:56All right. McDonald's has it down to or Wendy picked your phone. There's a number one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Give me a one. Three words. Low cognitive load. Low. Low. Low. Low. Then then yeah, then you go to a higher cognitive load. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Don't do like some complicated schematic bubble. Okay. Remember to hear something with the copywriting. Make it skimmable. The more it offends your 12th grade English teacher, the better. Okay. You're not writing for the AP English exam. Not taking the CT. This is not the entrance exam. This is not your personal statement to get into graduate school. No one cares about what your belief system is, your aspirations, or what you think you're about. They came there because they have a problem they're trying to solve.

42:58So, well, you've done direct response copy, right? You can make it easier. What is this? It's interesting because the war, it's interesting. Yeah. Oh man. You're going to open up a whole of can of worms here for me because I have seen little copy convert, right? But then where we're talking about so, I'm talking to B2C at this point, right? Business consumer. And there's people that I see writing copy that are like essays. Like I mean essays, but they're converting. It's like long for me. I'm sure you heard of like a long form sales letter. But it can work. Long form can absolutely work. Long form copy, long form video, long form anything can work in the right place. Like I come from the world where it's pre headline, headline, sub headline.

43:59That's great. And what do you put in the headline? Well, the hook, yeah. The hook. Start with the hook. Yeah. That is out of the pain or the solution, right? Like pain or slushion, start with the hook. Free is who it's for, right? Yeah. That those things are all called skim ability. Yeah. Okay. And if you write a long paragraph, now how can you find the hook? Yeah. Lead with the hook. And then your subheading needs to support the original claim before you make new claims. Yeah. We see this all the time. There's a bold claim. And then there's three new claims. Like hang on a second. I just, yeah. Like I still haven't, I haven't bought into your first claim. Why are you telling me about the next claim? Like if your hook is safe cart, we just bought a Volvo. Okay. So we just, my, my oldest is, um, is about to get a license. Yeah. So she's going to not tomorrow, but after some practice,

45:06she's getting her our 2017 Subaru great safe car. So we went out and found a nice, uh, pre-owned car for my wife with about a Volvo. Like beautiful cars safe. The hook, great safe car. Well, it's just going to say, right? Like everyone knows Volvo safe, right? You think Volvo's known for it? And they, and they do a great job. They've also moved up market, by the way, right? The old boxy cars that we all group, the gray box Volvo that we know is like an indestructible cage. They look nice too. Okay. But they, they, they, they first get you to buy into that it's safe before they start telling you about all the other things, right? Everything is, hey, we're safe. That's the hook. Why is it safe? We've got these great cameras. We've created this like motion detection. By the way, they're, I didn't know this so we went shopping. Do you know, Volvo weighs more than a suburban? I would assume so. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't. Well, it's, it's steel. It's like some kind of special steel they're made out of. Yeah, they're safety. They're heavy cars. They're heavy. Yeah.

46:10Yeah. Super heavy cars. You're driving basically a modern tank. Yeah. Anyway. So they, they support the first claim. Then they go in and tell you about, okay, now let's talk about some other things. Let's say about what this is a fun car and let's say about how we made it nice. And same thing on your website, good copywriting. You start with the hook, make the hook believable before you start introducing your claims. These are three. I love it. Things that everyone can do on their website today. I'm just going to say it again, right? Get rid of the stock images or the happy images. Show your product or show your service or the outcome of the service. Low cognitive load on the pictures. So again, translate that to some language nobody can understand. Send it to somebody and say, do you know what this company does? The answer is they can't say it quickly. You know the problem. And then third is skim mobile copy. I mean, this is huge. This is big stuff. Like any business owner open up your website right now.

47:16And just look at it right now. Like you want to, if you're wondering, how do I make my website better? It's like, we just gave you the three answers. Very simple. Openly at website. I want to do it right now with you so we can go through it. I'm not going to. That's how I'm feeling. And then the bonus. What's the bonus? Here's the bonus. We're going to just, we gave you three. So one, two, three. This is like three a. Okay. Take whatever hook you have on your headline today, or if you're thinking of writing a new one, okay, write to new one. Take your three closest competitors. Take their homepage, put them next to yours. Like one, two, three, four. And then see if you can tell the difference. And if you can take your headline and put it on your competitors, it means you don't have a good hook. Because it doesn't stand out. And you're simulating what your audience is doing. They may not do me explicitly. They may be doing

48:20it implicitly. But you should always assume that your that your audience has your competitors. They come from your competitors website, or they're going their next, or they have them upside by side. Yeah. And it's a great test of the hook. And what it tends to do is it strips, it tends to force you to strip out jargon and fluff. And not even worry about am I better just start with am I different? Still saying the clear message though. Yeah, yeah, it's got to be clear. And I'm saying dude on a homepage and not on like a technical page or a solutions page. Because that's just a different ballgame. Okay, there. That way you got to keep it simple. And you just you had to strip out the jargon. Would you say, well, you're saying it less is more? Would you say on a home page? Because I'm seeing this more and more like home pages have very little copy almost now.

49:21Especially in the hero. Yeah, the top we call it the hero section. The top section section. I so I think there's a happy medium. I think you should not be afraid of putting copy on your home page. It does a lot of the heavy work, but it works better if you make it easy to skim. And you have a good hook. Yeah. I love it. If people what type of businesses do you work with? So we mainly work with B2B SaaS companies. Okay. We call the mid market. So about a hundred people to about 3000 people and about 50 million in revenue to about a billion, billion and a half in revenue. The companies are smaller than that. They usually are trying to solve other problems that we don't help them with. And the companies that are bigger than that, especially a lot bigger, they don't need our help. They have their own internal army of data scientists. And that's great. That's great for them. But for that part of the market,

50:26we can give them a lot of help. 50 million dollar plus SaaS companies is who you really focus on. That's right. And I love it. You said this. I remember you said this to me before. And I was like, wow. And you said anyone before 50 million, they don't have a conversion problem. They got a marketing problem. Where you think you said they got a marketing sales problem. Yeah. There's other problems you need to solve first before you worry about optimization. You know, I think of it as if you're, if you're, if you're out of shape and you haven't done any exercise, hey, you don't need to be trying to get your like marathon time down. And probably should start with like walk three times a week. Yeah. Yeah. Then maybe get to like, can you do 10 push-ups? Yeah. You do that. Then you can start doing things like optimizing for diet and body composition. And maybe can I do not just 10 push-ups, but 10 pull-ups. If you go straight to that, probably not going to work. Yeah. I love it. Where can people find you if they, if they are a,

51:26I mean, you know, if you are a 50 million dollar plus SaaS company, and you want obviously the best and the best in the business right here, AB testing. Where can people find you? So they can go to spiralize.com. If they would like to find out more. Also, if you want to hear more tips on like the kind we just talked about, check me out on LinkedIn. I post four mornings a week at 7.30 a.m. Eastern. And it's always some combination of easy to digest. 30 to 60 second things. I also have a game show where people come on. They try and beat me in finding different CRO crimes. That's actually the name of the show. CRO crimes. Nice. It's a lot of fun. Seven lightning rounds. The winner gets $100 through charity. I love it. Well, we're going to make sure we have those in the show notes for you. Any last departing secrets, words for the audience? I think we covered it great. Thank you for having me on. Thank you.

52:29If anyone made it this far, thank you for listening. Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.