What Your Customers Really Need Is…More Site Testing?. “We have the best prices”…“Our product has more features than the competition”…“Our customer service is incredible”… Now, all of these answers are great, but most of the time, they don’t answer the real question: why do your customers buy from you? But how do you really know that your customer service testimonials are why people convert on your site? But what if you change your site to emphasize your testimonials and your conversion rate goes down? Testing your website As any good scientist will tell you, if you really want to prove something, you need to run a test! Although website design best practices can help improve the performance of your site, your site traffic is always unique to your site. How to effectively test your website So, if simply making tweaks to your site that you think will improve performance isn’t a great idea, how should you test your website? Your traffic changes over time As any good marketer knows, your traffic changes over time. Confidence Yes, I’m about to get statistical on you. In website testing, most people shoot for at least 95% confidence.
Why do your customers buy? What are they looking for? Why do they convert on your site?
Ask most marketers or business owners these questions and you’ll usually get a lot of very specific answers. “We have the best prices”…“Our product has more features than the competition”…“Our customer service is incredible”…
Now, all of these answers are great, but most of the time, they don’t answer the real question: why do your customers buy from you?
What do your customers really care about?
When someone clicks on an ad and visits your page, it’s true that they might be looking for the best price or a certain set of features. It’s even possible that they might be looking for testimonials about customer service.
But how do you really know that your customer service testimonials are why people convert on your site?
Maybe you think it’s your testimonials, but it’s really your price…or your features…or that cute puppy in your hero shot. When you get right down to it, most of the time you don’t really know why people decide to buy from you.
However, that doesn’t stop us from assuming that we know why people buy from us. Humans have this funny tendency to believe that “if it matters to me, it must matter to everyone!”
So, if you value your customer service, those testimonials about your awesome customer service reps must be why people convert, right?
Well, maybe.
But what if you change your site to emphasize your testimonials and your conversion rate goes down? What then?
Was it a bad month? Did you use the wrong testimonials? Or did you change the wrong thing on your site?
Testing your website
As any good scientist will tell you, if you really want to prove something, you need to run a test! In online marketing, we call this conversion rate optimization, but it’s really just the art of creating hypotheses about your website and testing them.
To show you how this works, let’s use SurvivalLife.com as an example. When Survival Life set up their site, they used a clean, minimalistic site design—you know, the kind web designers rave about.
The team at Survival Life loved the design, but they were smart enough to realize that what they loved might not be what their audience loved. So, they decided to test an “uglier” design against their award-worthy template.
To their surprise, the ugly design far outperformed their original template.
But why? Most web designers and even conversion experts would tell you that a clunkier, uglier site will get worse results than a simple, beautiful template. In fact, that’s what the team at Survival Life believed, so why did their uglier site design work better?
The answer is fairly simple. The “ugly” site design was what their audience resonated with.
Although website design best practices can help improve the performance of your site, your site traffic is always unique to your site. That means no one—including you—can completely predict which site elements or changes will improve your conversion rates.
However, just because you can’t predict how your audience will respond to a change in your site doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try out new ideas. The key is to test them. That way, you can tell which changes make a difference…and which ones don’t.
How to effectively test your website
So, if simply making tweaks to your site that you think will improve performance isn’t a great idea, how should you test your website?
Once you’ve come up with a few testing ideas, here are a variety of tools you can use to test your site (VWO, Optimizely, Google Experiments, etc). Each of these tools has different strengths, but they all serve the same fundamental purpose: they allow you to…
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