Increasing Your Conversion Rates, Where Small Changes Have Great Impact with Kurt Philip

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is Increasing Your Conversion Rates, Where Small Changes Have Great Impact. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Convertica. Convertica is an agency that specializes in helping websites make more bottom line revenue through maximizing their existing customer value. A big hello to Kurt Philip. Hi, Kurt.

Kurt Philip 1:16

Andy, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to chatting about my favorite subject.

Andy Splichal 1:20

You know, it is one of my favorite subjects as well, conversion. So it should be a great episode. And let me start by saying, you know, I really liked your company named Convertica. Because it is not often that you can incorporate exactly what you do into your company name and increase conversions. And I assume that's what you're doing, right?

Kurt Philip 1:43

Yeah, well, I think I think if you're a conversion optimization company, you yourself should employ the same tactics that you get paid to do for your customers. Right. So we're coming up with the name originally, we were called the CRO guy when it was me and a few assistants, but very quickly grew out of that name and rebranded to ConvertKit. And it's been, it's been a great for four and a half years ever since then.

Andy Splichal 2:08

So that's a great choice. Now, let's just jump right into a hypothetical, say, you are an Ecommerce company, you are an Ecommerce owner. And your conversion rates are poor. Where would you even start if you want to increase your conversion?

Kurt Philip 2:25

You know, like in in 2021, it's super, super easy to set up an online store, right? You can go on Shopify, you can go on, on WooCommerce, you can set it all up yourself. And I think this is where the problem lies where most people are using the out of box themes and using the sort of templates that come with all buy premium templates that come with these, these stores. And they're not necessarily developed from a marketing perspective or a sales perspective, they're usually easy to operate easy to make changes, easy to upload content, but not necessarily from a conversion perspective. So the thing we see the most that gets the if there was like one overall thing to do on an ecommerce website that would guarantee an increase in conversions every time it's to build more trust and credibility on your website. Now what I mean by that is, when someone's finding you, generally, they don't know who you are, unless you're a well known brand. But if you're a boutique ecommerce store, you've got, you know, 10, 15, 20,000 visitors a month, it's most likely someone's typed in by best X you know, whatever your product is, or something of similar. And then they trust your website when you come to because you rank well on Google or your your driving ads, people don't really question it. So in order to make them push through to the sale, you want to make sure that you have that credibility and trust and how you do that is reviews, testimonials, case studies, reviews your own product on your own site showing in depth how the product works, most people just upload their products, add the price, maybe run a before and after price sale. That's you know, that's what everyone does these days. So

Andy Splichal 4:07

Talking about trust, I mean, it's kind of a catch 22 Right, you've just started a store. You don't have reviews right? You just started selling your widget how, what do you do?

Kurt Philip 4:18

So the best way to do it is to give away your product like give it out to your friends give it to influencers that's a really good way to do it. I mean, you don't want to go out and just cold message people about trying your product out but if you can get people who are well known that's even better, but having testimonials of your friends and family or anyone in your circle your business circle can can help you know just honestly reviewing the product you can if you get negative feedback from your product, well your customers will eventually find that out too. So use that feedback as a way to improve your product or your service and deliver a better but you need those those testimonials in 2021 you need them 100 percent because that's what's going to differentiate you from the rest of your competition.

Andy Splichal 5:03

Now, what, what is a good conversion rate? What is that number, that if you're not doing at least this, you should be really worried as a business owner?

Kurt Philip 5:13

I think it's, I get asked that on almost every call that I do when, when I'm on a sales call or podcast. And it's sort of like a vanity metric. People want to know if their website's converting well against the rest of the websites in their industry, right. But it's also very misleading, because there's so many factors that come into what is a good conversion rate you might have, you might be running a campaign that in a very generic industry, for instance, you might have a banner advertisement on a very large website that's getting like a million clicks a month, your conversion rates going to be super low, if it's super generic. Whereas if you're running Google ads to a buy best X keyword, your conversion rate will be much higher, but low traffic, so there's really no way to give a good sort of number on what is a good conversion rate, because it really depends on the traffic source and the buyer intent of that traffic source and so on. So people go out there, and there's tons of case studies that show and blog posts that show what industry averages are. But it also is very, it's not giving you a clear indication by looking at the average because the spread is so far across their own. I know, I wish I could give an answer. But there honestly is no answer to that question.

Andy Splichal 6:27

Now, speaking of traffic sources, do you find I know you know, I specialize in Google ads, and especially Google Shopping ads, and typically, those are going to have a higher conversion rate than organic. Do you find a pattern such as that, on conversion really across the board?

Kurt Philip 6:50

Again, it comes down to the buyer intent of the keywords, you know, like if you're typing in, just like if you've got a golfing website, and you're just ranking for golf, in general, you're gonna have a huge amount of traffic, but that buyer intent is going to be super low. Whereas if you type in best golf, golf clubs, gold, and you're looking for a gold golf club, you're going to convert much higher, but the traffic's gonna be a lot lower. So that doesn't matter if it's paid doesn't matter if it's shopping, it doesn't matter if it's organic, or even Facebook is a little bit of a different strategy. But it doesn't really matter on the source, it just depends on the buyer intent of the traffic that's coming to your website.

Andy Splichal 7:28

So we talked about trust is being the number one element, what are a couple more that people should say, you know, you tell them and they're like, oh, no, I better get to work all that?

Kurt Philip 7:41

It is really amazing. The type of sites we see come in that are, that are doing some good numbers, but are an absolute difficult user experience to actually buy the product. So a lot of times you see these out of out of out of box themes where you add a product to the cart, and then there's little animation and the cart icon jiggles. And that's all it doesn't say anything, it doesn't give the user the next step on what to do to go to checkout or view the cart or anything. And just go through and see how easy it is to buy your product, make it super simple. So if you have a low order, volume, per per visitor, or per customer, let's just say you sell one or two products, on average, have a little pop up that says checkout or view cart or, and have a thing at the bottom saying or continue shopping, give them an option, sort of like push them in the direction that you want them to go in. Because that that really helps and make it very clear what they can do next, having no steps or not giving them any steps to go next is huge for for bounce rate and, and lower conversions. But also, another thing is also having trust and security icons is actually really huge. Still, there's still a lot of sites that don't have them, you know, showing that this site secure, showing that you accept all different credit card types showing that you have a shipping policy that's very clear, because you want to keep that user sort of frictionless and you want to empty their insecurity from their minds that they might bounce you want all that removed and you want to keep them sort of in that flow state and having all these icons over the side or just below the free popular habit just below the Add to Cart button helps keep them in this state of of security and and trust.

Andy Splichal 9:34

You know, very interesting you named quite a few things. And I noticed that price was not one of them.

Kurt Philip 9:44

Price is perceived, you know it's you can for commodity products, like things that are bought on price, okay, that's different, let's say paper or staples or car tires to an extent but if it's Uh, if it's say, Cam, I'm just saying this because my wife was looking for it the other day, if it's like organic cam-bucha, making tools and like ingredients, there's no real tied value to it. So it comes down to how you tell your story, how high perceived value your product is, you're selling and so on. It's not as important as, as a lot of people think, obviously, top point, you got to have like the you got to test price. To a point if you're not making any sales and, and you've got a huge margin, let's say you're buying at 50. And you sign up for 100 will maybe bring it down a little bit too until it starts making sales. But when I'm when I'm giving these conversion tips, it's more sort of stuff that most people aren't doing versus you know, most people who get to the point of doing conversion optimization already are making sales already are generating conversions, and then they're trying to like, maximize them. So,

so conversion, that's one of those levers that that really can impact business, we're just a small change and can grow your bottom line huge. Let's let's go over some numbers, what can a small lift in your conversion rate mean to some of the bottom line revenues?

Well, and that's the thing, it's, it's, you can generate more revenue from the same amount of spend on since you're talking about you're an AdWords specialists, you can generate more cost per click. So you can if you're paying $1,000 a day on on ad budget, any any revenue you make on top of that is going to come to the bottom line, right. So it's very common that we see over the total campaign of most of our clients work with us for about six months, most of them will see 20 to 40, over the lifetime of the campaign with all with all the increases, added up to the bottom line revenue. Those are sort of numbers we aim for when we work with clients. So obviously, if we see a site that's perfectly polished, and that's like, perfectly conversion optimized, maybe, you know, we're not looking to take them on just to work with them. We work with sites that we go, okay, this needs work here, this needs work here and so on. But yeah, on average, it's usually between that above that 20% Anyway.

Now, given how much it can increase the bottom line number, do you find that most companies spend enough time focusing on really working to improve their conversion rates?

Four years ago, I would say absolutely not. I think as the markets maturing, and this space is becoming more savvy, it's starting to become more common, I can just tell by the amount of competition out there around compared to four or five years ago, there was really only five or 10 competition out there. Now, it's just completely saturated. So which just shows that the, the awareness of conversion optimization is, is becoming a thing. And I think, post COVID as a lot of businesses went solely online, it's happened, it's happened more and more, you know, they, they want to work out how to increase their profit margins, they start reading about conversion optimization, they go down that whole rabbit hole, because it's a whole, it's a whole different world. Once you discover it and itself, it's like, it's like SEO, once you get on the word of SEO, it can gobble you up. So yeah, I think it's becoming more more of a mature industry. So it's becoming more popular.

So if a client when they first come to you, where do you guys start? I mean, is there a template that you have? You know, you're checking this box? Do they have the trust factor? Do they have a good site experience? Is it is it a fast? I mean, where do you guys start with a new client.

So we'll go through and look at where the traffic's flowing to start. So we'll, we'll look at their analytics, and we'll see where the users are spending most of the time where most of them are going to generally you can have all the pages on a website, there'll be five to 10 that have 99% of the traffic. So then we'll focus on optimizing those areas for the testing duration, because we run a lot of AP tests. So we'll focus on those because that's where we're going to be able to run tests, generally you need a lot of traffic to be able to run, run AB tests. So yeah, we'll look at the category pages, the product pages, cart and checkout primarily is where we'll focus most of our time because that's where that's where most of these sort of buying decisions are being made, which we need to to optimize.

Now, do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients that you'd be willing to share?

Yeah, there's actually a case study on our homepage about a client called Just Thrive who sell probiotic. About three years ago, there wasn't too many competition around now as there are today but they came to us and they were looking to leverage sales by adding a Subscribe and Save type model just like on Amazon. So we went in added that feature in but what they wanted to make sure this was very clear on the welcome call was that they didn't want people signing up on the Subscribe and saving and canceling after one month and buying the buying the product for cheaper because obviously that is a loss leader. So the first product they sell on this subscribing scale doesn't really make them anything until this you know, month four, month five or whatever. So we tested tested that and we tested a bunch and we go through detail on our on the case study that's on our homepage. But we ended up doubling revenue on this clients website, which allow them to scale scale their business a lot. And now it's now they've grown very large. And I don't know if they're the leader in the in the space, but they're doing some really, really large numbers now just from AB testing and conversion optimization just by mainly optimizing their product page and the way that the users flow through. And we really pushed this ascribing save model as the main option, and really showed all the benefits and features and how much they would save, and, and so on. So it worked really well in that case. But if they want to read more, they can jump over to Convertica.org On the homepage, and they'll see that case study there.

Now, on the flip side there, are there any challenges that sometimes you guys struggle with, in trying to increase a client's conversion rate?

Yeah, I'd say the, there's a couple. So the main issue would be oscillating traffic volume. So you know, a client might come to us when times are good. And they want to maybe they want to sell in two years, and they're looking to maximize the revenue on their site before they before they exit. And then for whatever reason, maybe the trend ends on there, maybe their product is part of a trend and it dies off. We saw this with people selling PPE equipment masks and sanitizers themselves. And they were guys doing so much money in this space, like 10s of $1,000 a day from a startup when this happened, when COVID really about a year ago, year and a half ago. And then it just then it just died. And we were like mid running tests, and then the tests, all of a sudden, we would be able to run a test a week or a test every two weeks. And then the tests, you know, draw out for two months now because of course everyone's everyone's good. Now they don't need this equipment to buy this stuff. So that's one area and otherwise,

I gotta say that's, that's a trend I don't mind seeing end. And, no offense to

No, you gotta you got to. Yeah, I think the owners would be the ones here because they think they're on to the next. The next thing that's gonna set them up for life. And they've just invested all this money into stock and everything and then boom, it's over. So

So lack of traffic is a big one. Or traffic. Yeah, not by

Or ending of trend or ending of trends in general. Another one with a couple of years ago with those fidgets, spinners, those things that were

Oh, yeah, yeah,

There was guys doing 1000s and 1000s a day on these things. And then they went and bought heaps of stock. And then and then that, that had the same same thing. The other one is a little different where we've we've got a team that does everything from start to finish runs a test, as the debris designs does the reporting and full integration of the winning split tests, or if they're not doing split tests, and they're just doing conversion optimization, our team does all the coding and implementation on the site, can but what will happen is, a lot of times, if a client already got a dev team, it can be a sort of a clashing point. Because all of a sudden, you've got another team stepping in. And like, developers are very funny about their code. You know, they don't like other people touching it and coming in. So that's the other issue is trying to make it as seamless as possible. We have, you know, what we want to achieve, and what the owner of the website wants to achieve, but sometimes the ways to get there can be it's been an experience, we have very good process now for doing it. But it was a learning experience. That's

What, you talked about code. Are you guys agnostic platform? Can you work on anything? Or is there certain platforms that you guys really specialize in with your service?

To be honest, 95% of the websites we work on are either Shopify or WordPress is just the way that the industry is evolved. And they are the easiest to work with in terms of being able to edit and configure and so on. We work with some Drupal, some straight up PHP coded sites.

What about like, big commerce or Magento?

Bigcommerce is fine because it's primarily PHP and HTML. So it's essentially the same as WordPress. It has a few little bugs and stuff, but we've worked with a few now that's fine, but Magento is one of the ones that we just stay clear of all based, we don't come across any of them. Not the other way if we haven't personally come across any of them.

So let me ask you before we really jump more into your services, but you know, personally is you've grown this agency, from you said a small team to a much larger here, have there been any business books out there that you can attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, many, I'm a very avid, avid reader in terms of business books, a couple of the early foundational ones, the E-Myth was was a huge one Built to Sell is another one that not necessarily even if you want to sell your business, but building a business to be able to run itself and scale. That taught me a lot about that. I'm just looking at my shelf right now, actually, while we're talking biology is a good one, too, about consumer buyer awareness and like how, how Pete why people buy and what what they're incentivized by. And I just read a great one that's actually in my top five. Now, it's not directly related to business, but it's directly related to your psychology. And it's helped me a lot i`t's called the psychology of money by Morgan Housel. Fantastic book. I'll read that again soon. For sure. So there's, there's just a few that sort of kicked me off. But I think the one that really got me into business, surprising that he was The Four Hour Workweek about 15 years ago,

Tim Ferriss, all right

Yeah. That totally taught me business in a weird way, like a lot of people's goal is to live the four hour workweek. But there's also, it's also a way to hack running a business. And then it teaches you all the business skills. It's like a real life MBA, how to hire, how to scale, how to automate, how to build, you know, assets, and sell them and so on. And, yeah, that book started it for me. And that's where the the journey sort of

So back to your agency. What problems do you believe that you solve for your clients? And how are you able to stand apart from your competition?

Having worked now with, I think we're around 750 websites now the last for four and a half years, the main thing that differentiates us is we don't spend a lot of time on research, which some people like some people don't like, but we can get straight in there and start testing and improving conversions, because we just have so much data now. So we have, we have spreadsheets and spreadsheets of different industries, different types of sites, we've worked on what one want last, the win loss ratios for the more so we can see, okay, let's just say a PPE equipment website came to us, we've already tested four or five of them. And this works, you know, four out of five times, this works three out of five times and had a 20%. Conversion rate increases, did 15. And then we just test the things we've tested in the past, because there's a high success, but they'll also work well on the client's website. And that's the sort of strategy we employ. Now, obviously, it was very different at the start, you know, when we were starting out, we had to sort of learn and deliver now, it's very, it's very quick, well oiled machine, I think that's what separates us most, because I hear from some clients, they've worked with other firms, and they spend a month, six weeks, like running tests on what the users are doing and where they're clicking like a lot of heuristic stuff, and then they get started in month two or three, whereas I think we have the first test running around 10 Days, Seven to 10 days. So that's, that's probably the biggest differentiator.

Now, let me ask, you had mentioned a couple times how one of the problems it's so easy in people like for Shopify, just put in a theme. And you can start selling right. Now, when you guys are converting, is there a particular look like if you're using Shopify, you're you, you're like, wow, I really liked this theme. And are your clients kind of look in the same after a while, because that's what works? Or is it more that you take what they're doing with their theme, and then you're adding different elements?

Yeah, correct. The second part, obviously, a lot of the big companies we work with, like most seven and eight figure businesses that we work with already have very strong branding guides and guidelines that we have to follow. So it's not so much that we're copying and pasting the tests from other clients, it's more you know, what was it about the test was it the function it's more the functionality of of the site and like I said before, you know, if, let's just say the mattress niche for example, if it If you're in the mattress niche, and most of your customers 99.9%, your customers is just buying one product. Because they just buy one mattress, they're not going to buy three mattresses. If that's the case, and we can see that in the data, then we'll send people straight to the checkout after the add to cart, or we'll just say bye now. And I'll go straight to the checkout, rather than in putting steps in place that they could possibly drop off, we want to get them straight to that checkout process. That's one that's proved to, to work really well on on low order, sites like that. So that's what I mean by looking at test data and seeing what works or another really good one is having a Buy Now button to the bottom of on mobile at the bottom of the screen that's always sticking on the product pages. So as soon as they scroll past the product image, the Buy Now button pops up and always just above the thumb. So even if the even if the user is, you know, right at the bottom of the product description, if they see if their core does have that feature, I want it they don't have to scroll to the top again, and possibly lose interest or whatever, they can just hit the Add to Cart right there while they're ready to go.

That's a great idea. I'm surprised. I'm surprised Amazon's not doing that.

Yeah, they've got all Amazon's a complicated one, though, because they have a lot of cross selling. And they have so many features at the bottom right? This is more for various, very specialized product pages that have one goal publishing.

So I see on your website, it states that you guys will increase 20 to 100% using conversion rate optimization. Let's let's talk about that number. It's it's quite a range 20 to 100%. How did you get to that? Is that an average? How did you get to that number? And what services are you are you offering that predict those kind of results?

So we just looked at, like I said, we don't take on every client we take on clients that we know we can get good results for so we looked at it was about a year and a half ago, two years ago, we looked at the average of all our, our wins for our clients. And we saw that it was much higher than that 20% At the time, we were working with primarily affiliate in Legion sites at the time. Now ecommerce is our our main thing, but we just saw that, okay, when people want when people are working with conversion rate optimization, they want to know, especially during the signup phase, what you know, what are you going to get me on the low side, like what is the minimum, you'll be able to get us because they're paying a certain monthly rate, they want to just work out, you know, when they're gonna get ROI. That's, that's perfectly what our business is, you know, summed up as so that's why because that's the range in which our clients get together increases on average. And if we get to that, if we don't get to the 20%, by the end of the campaign by the end of the six months period, then we just keep testing until we do. And I think last year, we had one refund, the year before we had two or three. So it's it's a system that worked well. And eventually, you know, some clients are slower than others. And we might test for four months after an extra charge, but we eventually get there. It just takes a bit more time. But

Is it a six month contract, then that you that you have with clients?

Yeah, generally. So we have the A B split testing service, which is our main service. But as of about, I think was about a year ago now. We started offering a best practice package, which is for new websites and sites with low traffic, because we've got so much data now, like I said earlier, we can predict with high, high probability that what test will work well on one site, that one doesn't come with the 20 to 100% increase because we can't split test. So there's so many other factors that may come into play when they introduce new traffic sources or introduce any traffic sources at all. But that's that's the expectations are set with that one and that's just a one off fee for that because we just go through in one month and rebuild the website based on what converts best.

Now you had mentioned you're mostly ecommerce do you do anything else? Do you do professional services optimized for that? Or are you guys exclusively ecommerce?

We do pretty much most monetization methods now so we after COVID, before COVID was would be 30 to 40% I think was ecommerce now it's 60 to 70% I'd say we do a lot of lead gen websites like business websites that want to generate leads. And we do a lot of affiliate websites too. So top 10 type websites and best review websites where they're comparing different products and they get an affiliate commission from Amazon or other affiliate platforms. SaaS businesses we work with quite a few a lot less but they're usually larger. So yeah, what else? I think it's probably about it. Obviously a few of them monetization methods here and there few professional services, like you said, we have a few SEO companies that we work with, to optimize their lead generation to get them leads and phone calls. Butyeah, mostly, mostly ecommerce and affiliate.

So back to Ecommerce, is there a that's most of the listeners to the show? Is there a size requirement, they need to be a certain size to have the traffic? Before they would be a good fit for your agency to work with?

Yeah, for the ABs with testing? Absolutely. So we wouldn't really start looking at an e commerce website unless it was above 50,000 visitors a month, sometimes lower, sometimes 20,000. If it's if it's there's only a few products and most of the traffic's running through those few products. But there's, it's sort of like a depends, right? Because if they're one product, and they've got 20,000, that's by far, by far enough, revenue wise, or otherwise, like 100 to 500 is a good starting point. But again, it just depends on the traffic and the order volumes. So the main thing, main most important thing is traffic for that

Over the six months, is that a flat fee? Is that based on a percentage increase, how do you guys structure your fees?

It can get very complicated with those structure, you're doing a percentage down, a lot of companies do them, but we're used to a flat fee for that. And then at the end of the campaign, if we think there's still room to increase, because you know, six months was quite a quite a extended period where things change, then we usually negotiate different, different arrangements based on because we understand the character of the site and the potential it has by them. So sometimes we set goals like if we increase by another 10% We get x owners and things like that, but generally for that first six month campaign, it's just a flat fee.

Got it. Now, how can an interested listener? Whether they're perfect or not learn more if they wanted to, to know about working with you guys.

Yeah, so our website is convertica.org. Or you can find us on youtube Convertica, on Twitter Convertica. So we've got a very original name where it's very easy to find our sort of triggers into Google and COnvertica, all our properties will come up so

Awesome. Well, this has been great. Thank you again for joining us, you have given us a ton of great information.

Andy I appreciate I always love sharing the knowledge and I look forward to meeting some of your listeners.

Great. Well for listeners out there. Remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding to Convertica or connecting with Kurt you can find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business check out our all new podcast Resource Center now available at www.makeeachclickcount.com we have compiled all the different past guests by show topics and have included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any services that I've discussed during previous episodes. Again, to access you can go to www.makeeachclickcount.com click on the link to the podcast Resource Center found in the top navigation menu. That's it for today. Remember to stay safe keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.