The whole point of A/B testing is to find out what ultimately drives your audience, right? Here’s what plays out on your site right now. You have to create a feeling that makes people sit up, take notice, and want what you have. “Too much A/B testing is a waste,” he says, “because you end up testing things that are too small to be worth the time.” What’s better is getting emails. Hack #3: ‘Funnel’ People into Your Opt-Ins People are already flowing through your site. For example, it will show you where people are coming into your site, what pages or posts they’re reading, and where they’re trying to go next. I want more people going to that page to convert! But when you visit the homepage, there’s no simple blog link or ‘latest posts’ section found. No matter where you came into a site, they would attempt to show you the same exact thing initially: Many websites, like Groupon, just started changing their homepage to be a stand alone welcome gate, so it was the default page you hit when you visited their site. Because too often, small tests like the button color only produce tiny results (if any).
Most marketing blogs go on and on about how some A/B test increased conversions 10x.
I hate to break it to you, but here’s the honest truth:
Those are the exception, not the rule.
A/B tests fail more often than they succeed. And in many cases, the results you see aren’t worth all the effort or attention you’ve been paying.
So forget about A/B testing for now.
Because I’m going to show you three techniques to drive conversions more consistently (even though no one talks about them).
I’ll even pull back the curtain on some techniques that I use on this site to convert as many people as possible.
Let’s do it.
Hack #1: Test ‘Big’ Elements Instead of Small Ones
Every day you see the same articles across Twitter or Facebook.
“How Company XYZ Doubled Conversions with this Button Color Change.”
But let’s be honest with each other for a second.
The color of your CTA button doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. In fact, in most cases, you should almost never waste time A/B testing something so tiny.
Why?
Small changes only net you small improvements.
And that’s the best case scenario!
Otherwise, the worst case is that you end up spending all your time and energy on something that produces zero results for you.
WordStream proved this in their analysis of over $3 billion in annual ad spend. They wanted to figure out what separated the highest converters (often converting 2-3x the average) from everyone else.
Was it small button color tests? The answer was a resounding: No.
Instead, what they found with these smaller tests is that any short-lived improvements “often regressed back to the mean.” In other words, they were temporary and wiped out in a matter of time.
The biggest contributing factor to high-converting campaigns came down to ‘big picture’ things like your offer, messaging, customer segments, etc.
For example, no button color test can save your site if it’s already suffering from:
- Flat design with no interactive elements (too minimalistic)
- Unclear page navigation or overly complicated (multi-tiered) menus
- Carousel sliders that don’t show all the important content up front
Even ‘beautiful’ websites can kill conversions if the experience confuses audiences or keeps them in the dark.
High converting sites don’t just focus on optimizing single landing pages or obsess over tiny design elements.
Instead, they focus on having a site-wide conversion strategy (which we’ll see over and over again throughout this entire article).
Their homepage leads off with the benefits of using their software. Even their navigation tells you exactly who their product is for and where you can go to learn more.
If you scroll down further, they even give a list of their key audiences with links to their more actionable CTAs.
Their site is clear, interactive, functional, and beautifully simplistic. The entire thing is designed to point users in the right direction (to sign up!). Not for any generic offer, either, but down a path that’s tied to your business.
So they’re already segmenting you, ‘funneling’ you down a path where every piece of content is hand-selected for who you are and what you’re interested in (more on this later).
The whole point of A/B testing is to find out what ultimately drives your audience, right?
It turns out you can already get a lot of those same insights from Google Analytics in less than five minutes.
Here’s what plays out on your site right now.
People are reading a blog post about Facebook.
They like what they see so far and want to keep reading related info.
So they look over to your sidebar and start searching based on topics just like they might in Google.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice, simple report that told you what people were searching for? There is!
Inside Google Analytics, look under “Behavior,” “Site Search,” and “Search Terms.”
Not only can you see what’s searched, but also how often.
So this even prioritizes your work for you. There’s no guesswork. The answers are already sitting there for you to peruse.
Google Analytics can also tell you the interests of your audience (above and beyond what they’re searching for). Look under “Audience,” “Interests,” and “Affinity Categories.”
These are broader categories that provide you with a better idea about your audience: what their interests are, what their hobbies are, and how they self-identify.
Now you have some insight to make better decisions.
You can reorganize your site to better match and segment these interests. And you can run new tests on these big actions you’re taking.
No, not A/B tests. But A/B/N tests that compare things like which segments convert best or does positive or negative messaging work better.
If you can pull valuable data from your analytics first, you may not need to test at all.
Hack #2: Create a Sense of Urgency to Drive Micro-Conversions
Earlier, we saw Quickbooks using a “Limited-Time Offer” to get you to convert.
What they’re really doing here, underneath the surface, is creating a sense of urgency to get you to take action.
Let’s be real again: Most people don’t need things today.
They might want it or enjoy it.
However, the vast majority of us are selling stuff that isn’t life or death.
That makes our job tricky. How on Earth are we supposed to sell something if people don’t feel a burning desire to care about our widget as much as we do?
The trick is urgency. You have to create a feeling that makes people sit up, take notice, and want what you have.
This does something magical for conversions: It switches the conversation from, “Should I buy this product?” to “If I’m going to buy this, I need to buy it soon before it’s too late.”
One of my go-to urgency building tactics is a countdown timer that I use for my webinars…
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