ArticleThe BIC Framework For Conversion Rate Optimization
One topic I’ve mentioned across multiple newsletters, but never really dove into, is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
At this point, we’ve all probably seen the math on how a 1% increase in conversion rate can result in staggering improvements for the overall brand. We are all aware that conversion rate increases are the proverbial tide that lifts all boats, bolstering the performance of not just paid, but organic, referral, email, and direct traffic.
CRO is the “Going to the gym” of marketing: we all know we should do it. We all see the gym bro posts proclaiming the benefits. We hear our doctors and health professionals recommending that we exercise.
And yet, the statistics don’t lie: most of us don’t get enough exercise. The vast majority of us don’t go to the gym. And almost all of us watch content on social media about going to the gym, as if doing so will get us healthier by osmosis.
The same is true of CRO.
We have all seen the case studies and fancy charts going up-and-to-the-right. We all want the shiny thing at the top of the mountain (a toned/chiseled physique or a high-converting site). But most of us still can’t bring ourselves to go to the gym or start a CRO program.
Let’s fix that.
For this week’s issue, I want to share my “BIC” framework (yeah, it’s a work in progress) for CRO. Like its namesake (the classic pen), it’s simple. It’s approachable. It’s easy. And it works.
What you’ll notice about this is that there is relatively little emphasis on A/B tests, and massive emphasis on audience understanding, asking the right questions, overall principles and concepts to experiment with, and structure/prioritization. The reason for that is simple: most marketers have no idea how to run statistically-valid tests, and even if they did, the value of those results is relatively low to most brands.
With that, let’s dive in:
Basics
The last thing that most brands coming to us for CRO want to hear is that we’re going to start with the basics. Many of them are gung-ho to test button colors, new imagery, video content, sticky forms/carts and the like, but are incredibly resistant to validating that the fundamentals are in-place.
My perspective on this is simple: you will beat 80% of everyone else by being doggedly brilliant at the basics. An obsession with doing the little things uncommonly well pays extraordinary dividends over time. But doing that isn’t flashy. It doesn’t win awards or garner “oohs” and “aahs” from your peers at conferences and industry events. It just sells more / converts more.
Mobile-First Design:
The vast, vast majority of pages I see are still designed on desktops, for desktops. That’s absolutely mind-blowing to me, considering that 75%+ of traffic comes from a mobile or tablet device. If your website/landers are not designed + built from a mobile-first perspective, you’re likely to end up with a suboptimal website experience no matter what else you do. Think of it like upgrading the engine of a car with a flat tire – yes, it will go faster. No, it will not go as fast as it could if the tire were in optimal condition.
If you’re not sure if you have a mobile problem, do these two things: (1) go through your entire customer experience from your mobile phone. Find an ad. Click on it. Go to the landing page. Shop/browse/explore. Checkout or submit a lead form. Then, immediately repeat this process on the desktop version. If you noticed a difference – that mobile was more difficult despite less content – that’s not good. (2) Google Analytics 4 has excellent device-type reports that you can pull – use them! If your site is performing significantly worse among mobile devices, drill down to the specific pages that are the worst offenders, then prioritize them.
Story Alignment:
A fantastic page tells a story. It has a narrative flow that draws your audience in, shares with them what they need to know, directs them on what to do next, and empowers them to do it. And like a good story, everything – every word, every image, every quote, every button, every box – has a purpose. It is there to advance the story of the page. This sounds great in theory, but it rapidly goes off-the-rails in actual application – brand managers want to include X. This person wants to push Y higher up the page. The CEO/CMO thinks we should also include a callout for Z.
The well-crafted narrative gets lost.
Fixing this requires a few things that aren’t typically in the domain of CRO: (1) a true, comprehensive understanding of your target audience and (2) a willingness to cut until it hurts.
The first is easier: every page on your site should be designed with a core target audience in mind. Some – like your home page – may be designed for multiple audiences, but one must be primary (even if by a hair). Once you’ve clarified who that primary audience is, your next step should be to understand that audience as deeply and comprehensively as possible. Fortunately, there are dozens of great tools out there to help you along the way, including:
- Sparktoro
- Moz
- AHRefs
- Qualtrics
- Pollfish
- Momentive
- Opiinion
- SEMRush
- Answer The Public
- Google Search Console
- Meta (FB + IG) + Google Ad Transparency Center
- (many, many more)
Not to mention your own data that’s probably rotting a data lake somewhere:
- GA4 Data
- Your Competitors (more info from Keeping Up With The Joneses)
- Your Customer reviews
- Customer service tickets (there’s gold there)
The data you gather from the above can be used to make reasonable inferences about your audience, including:
- Their goals
- Priorities
- Information/Knowledge Level
- How do they learn
- Questions
- Challenges/Pain Points
- Common Objections
- Alternatives
And from that understanding comes the story that you must tell and the mechanism by which you must tell it on the page. Make no mistake: this is a radical departure from how many brands build their landers/pages. It requires a TON of work and refinement.
But the reward is substantial, too: you get high-quality, incredibly relevant landing pages that resonate with your audience on an emotional and human level. They sell themselves as they scroll, to the point where the purchase/form submit is a mere afterthought – all because you took the time to understand them and put in the effort necessary to craft a page that spoke to them.
The flip side of this is that you must cut until it hurts. Anything on the page that doesn’t advance the story or fit in the flow must go. Your random call-outs about something else? Lose it. That cute little module you love so much that you jammed into the design? Seeya. If it doesn’t advance the narrative in a way that adds value to the primary target audience, it goes. No exceptions.
CRO starts with understanding your audience, not with A/B testing. And it’s wildly, hilariously irresponsible to incur staggering costs (either in actual ad dollars or consultant fees for testing or in incremental lost opportunity) to learn things about your audience that you can easily get from a relatively cheap platform or by simply reviewing the data you already have.
Beauty vs. Function:
We’ve all heard it 1,000 times: first impressions matter. And they do! But there’s a perception in the marketing world that every page should be designed and beautiful. I disagree.
Beauty can not come at the expense of experience, story or function.
Just as not all ads need to be beautiful (link to LinkedIn post on ugly ads), not all landing pages need to be beautiful. They need to be functional for your primary target audience.
Many marketers + CRO “pros” forget that they are in the results business, not the award-winning business. I don’t care how pretty a page looks; I care about how efficiently and effectively it converts the segment of my target audience driven to it into qualified leads or sales.
Test ugly landing pages. Test basic landing pages. Beauty is not a requirement.
The Loading Experience:
While beauty might not be a requirement, a smooth, fast-loading experience is one. There’s not much to say here that hasn’t already been said, but it bears repeating: if your site does not load smoothly and quickly on multiple device types (including those with 4G internet speeds), you should address that.
If you’re not sure, GA4 provides a loading report, and there are dozens of speed tests out there, the most common of which is Google’s Core Web Vitals. While I have some objections to CWV (including that many of Google’s own sites don’t pass), it remains an incredibly useful tool (it isn’t the end-all, be-all).
Making your site load faster and smoother doesn’t sound sexy, but the data is hard to ignore (from Fabric Inc):
There’s no point in doing advanced tests or optimization if you haven’t nailed the basics – all you’re going to do is waste money.
Impulse
Once you’ve nailed the basics, the next core area to focus is the “Impulse” – the desired end-action you want your audience to take on this page. That could be a lead form, it could be a purchase, it could be a job application, it could be something else.
The logic + math behind this is quite simple: everything else we test will be evaluated relative to its impact on this aspect of the page. If this part of the experience is suboptimal, the impact of other changes could be muted, masked or outright wrong – and the true cost of those tests will be significantly higher for the brand.
As I stated before, CRO is a results-driven business. It is only logical to first ensure that there is nothing blocking the result from occurring at the end of the maze, before we work our way back to the front.
Minimize Friction:
No-one enjoys miserable online experiences. No one likes a 19-step checkout process or a 17 field form. As a general rule, it should never take more than 3 clicks for a customer to check out on your site or submit a form. Do whatever you have to do in order to make that happen.
Friction is like salt: a little bit, used at the right time, makes the entire experience objectively better – it results in more qualified leads, it reduces returns, it ensures the person is legitimately invested in the outcome. Too much makes your pasta taste like the beach and your users scream in frustration.
Use as little as possible. 3 clicks.
Don’t Fight The Brain:
Millions of years of evolution have resulted in some mental technical debt. Use that to your advantage. If you’re curious on specific examples of this, check out this issue.
Reduce The Perceived Cost:
This can take multiple forms, from framing the offer in the most favorable terms (less than $1 per day), to reinforcing the security of your site (“protected with X encryption”) to highlighting no obligation / free quotes or a money-back guarantee. Remember, in the mind of your user, there’s always a risk in trying something new, buying a product or providing their information to a company.
Remember: perceived cost is composed of multiple factors: the price, the value and the risk they incur in doing business with you.
If you reduce the risk, the perceived cost goes down.
If you increase the perceived value, the perceived cost goes down.
Notice how, in both of the above, I didn’t change the actual cost. Reducing the perceived cost does NOT have to include discounting. The default to discounting is a scourge on the marketing industry, and I wish fewer people did it.
Post-Conversion Experience:
I am still blown away by how few brands pay attention to what happens after the conversion (purchase, lead, application, whatever). This is the ultimate impulse zone, and most brands squander it. This is your chance to drive up AOV, to arm your sales team with critical information to help them close the lead, to excite a candidate about working with you.
Your prospect just got a dopamine hit when they converted. They did it. They’re excited. Relieved. Wondering what to do next. They’re in an impulse zone. This is the proverbial toddler in the checkout aisle….and all you put there were crossword puzzles.
Direct them to something else.
More information on your organization. An upsell on what they already purchased. An upcoming event you have. Make that post-conversion experience remarkable.
Here’s the part most marketers miss: Each one of those things dramatically increases the value created by the other work you’ve done. If your post-conversion experience provides Sales with incremental data on the prospect that takes their lead-to-close rate from 25% to 35%, that’s likely hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in now-realized pipeline. If you increase AOV from $100 to $110, that could be an extra 35% in contribution dollars. That’s STAGGERING. That’s transformational.
Want some ideas? Check out this issue.
Content
If the basics are the foundation on which your program is built, and the impulse section above focuses on the end of the maze, this section (“Content”) is all about the beginning & middle of the maze.
Say Less:
If I didn’t know any better, I’d guess most marketers were paid by the word. Say less. Write less. Cut until it hurts. When you’ve gotten to the point where the pain of cutting a single word more is visceral, you’re probably close to saying the right amount. You don’t need to say everything. You shouldn’t throw the kitchen sink onto every page. Every word should have a purpose, and that purpose should be irrevocably grounded in helping your primary target audience progress through the story you’re telling on the page. Anything that doesn’t do that needs to go.
Cut the fluff.
Say less.
Profit.
Hammer It Home:
There’s a strange derangement among many marketers (I struggle with it, too) where we don’t like to repeat ourselves. We say something somewhere once, and we fear ever being called out on repeating it.
That needs to die.
Hammer home the key points. Emphasize the results.
Imagine that your results + proof points are the star players of your team. Each time they’re referenced on a page is akin to giving them the ball. Any time they aren’t is a time when the ball is in someone else’s hands.
Let your star players do more heavy lifting. Put the ball in their hands.
Hammer home your results & benefits. Don’t fear repeating yourself – if for no other reason than 90% of people don’t actually read entire pages.
Be Simple, Clear & Compelling:
Everyone wants to feel smart – and that includes marketers. So we lean into big words. Jargon. Complexity. Lose them. One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein speaks to this: “If you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well enough.”
As a marketer, this should be your guiding principle.
Simple, clear communication is one of the easiest ways to improve a page’s conversion rate, and is (somehow) the one to which marketers are most viscerally resistant.
If you’re not sure if this applies to your (or your client’s) site, there are three ways to figure it out:
- Review your heatmap + session recording data (if you don’t have Clarity or Heatmap.com or Hotjar installed on your site, fix that) – if you see people breezing right past those paragraphs of text, that’s a good indicator they either (a) don’t understand them or (b) don’t care to understand them. Either one is bad.
- Run your page through something like Website Readability Checker – I’m not a huge fan of using only automated solutions, but this one is solid for giving you a general sense of readability.
- Conduct a focus group with the page’s target audience – these are surprisingly easy to do – all you need are 20-50 willing participants, a small incentive for each and ~20 minutes. You’ll likely be shocked at how many people struggle to comprehend the content as it is presented on your page. If possible, present the focus group with a revised page that has a much higher readability score (meaning it uses simple, clear language) and ask for their feedback. The results of these are usually eye-opening.
Here’s a shocking statistic: 54% of Americans have a literacy level below a sixth-grade level. 34% more read at an intermediate (seventh/eighth grade) level. There’s a reason the show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? has aired 118 (and counting) episodes.
As a concrete example of this, I’ve audited plaintiff attorney landing pages for multiple firms (truck accidents, car accidents, manufacturing accidents, class actions, work injuries, etc.) that were 5,000+ words long. From a marketer or lawyer’s perspective, it was absolutely fantastic content – detailed, comprehensive, rigorous, well-cited – and it didn’t convert. And, in almost every case, the attorney was convinced the answer was more content. It was only after walking them through their audience and their comprehension levels first, then asking them to treat the landing page like it was a jury instead of a judge, that we got somewhere.
The golden nugget in that story is this: write your content for your audience’s comprehension level.
If your audience is PhDs working in suborbital aerospace engineering, feel free to be as technical as you want. If it’s ordinary, working Americans – remember the above statistic.
Show, Don’t Just Tell:
Most brands spend way too much time telling people how great they are, and way too little time showing their audience how great their lives would be if they used the brand’s solution/product/service.
Find clever, out-of-the-box, easy-to-understand ways to help your target audience see how your product/service will make their life better. Seeing is believing. Show them. Or, better yet, provide a way for your other customers to show them.
Results & Benefits, Not Features & Functions:
I hate to break it to you, but no-one cares about your fancy gizmo or new-fangled tech. They care about what it does for them. This is why understanding your audience is critical: it enables you to translate your features & functions into the benefits & results your audience cares about.
One of the most helpful ways to do this is to create a chart like this:
| Segment | Challenge | Result | Benefit | Proof Point |
Notice the feature is an afterthought – it’s not even on the chart. The focus is (rightfully) on the result we create (first priority) and the benefit our product/service/solution brings (second priority) to this particular segment, with some attention paid to how we demonstrate that (don’t just tell, show).
Coincidentally, this is exactly how our team is trained – Audience first, result second, benefit third, proof fourth.
Having a resource like this available will make your CRO efforts in this section of the process exponentially easier – it’s essentially a “cheat sheet” you can go back to at any time and deploy across your marketing organization – from ad creative through email + SMS.
The Right Picture is Worth 1,000 Words:
We all know imagery is a powerful tool. Most of us maintain multiple stock imagery accounts, as well as a dedicated bookmark list to sites like Pexels.com. We’ve all heard (and probably used) the Fred Barnard quote, “A picture is worth 1,000 words.”
But with all due respect to Mr. Barnard, I think he got it slightly wrong.
The right image is worth 1,000 words.
And in the case of most websites, the right image is one that resonates with your target audience. It’s authentic. It’s real. It advances the story you’re telling via your page.
I see way too many pages with irrelevant images jammed into pages because there’s an image slot in the template. I’ve seen stock images photoshopped to high heaven instead of just shooting something real. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same kitchen on about 13 home contractor company websites. And all of this will get worse as more marketers turn to ChatGPT and other image-generating LLMs for their imagery needs.
None of this is what I mean by the “right” image.
Time and time again, the highest-performing images we’ve seen on sites are real images of real people expressing real, human emotions. That’s what sells. That’s what converts.
As Simon Sinek famously said, “People don’t join companies. People join people.” The imagery we choose for our site and our landing pages is one mechanism by which we show our target audience who they are joining.
On a related note, don’t limit your use of imagery to photos – include (where appropriate) icons, infographics, videos, explainers, charts, breakdowns, etc. Most people struggle to learn from reading words alone; they rely on a combination of text, speech, experience and imagery – if you don’t provide each of those, it’s unlikely your entire audience is being set up for the best possible experience or your brand for the best possible outcome.
Validate It – Social Proof, Reviews, Awards:
Most landing pages have logo bars or review highlights or an “awards” section – and that’s it. They’re not connected to the audience or the story or the brand. They just sit there.
In far too many cases, that results in your hard-earned validation being ignored by your target audience – something you can easily confirm by viewing your session recordings + heatmaps. It’s frustrating to watch your target audience scroll right through that massive list of hard-won logos, or fly right by all those award wins or ignore those client testimonial tiles, but it’s important.
There’s no better way to see that your current validation isn’t working.
Instead, find ways to integrate your validation points into and throughout your landing page. Add icons to sections/benefits where appropriate. Include a hyper-relevant customer testimonial alongside a result claim. Sprinkle in real client logos next to the services you provided for them.
This not only follows the structure outlined in the chart above, but it also helps to provide multiple points of connection between your claims and validation.
Make It Easy & Avoid Surprises:
Finally, there’s no easier way to kill your conversion rate than to make it more difficult than absolutely necessary to convert. Go through the entire site. Ensure everything is simple, easy and straightforward. Double check that your CTAs are correct + relevant. Remove/remediate broken links or confusing detours.
Related to that: avoid surprises. Be clear and up-front about shipping costs or service costs. Don’t tout a free trial, only to ask for a credit card to claim the offer.
No aspect of the experience should come as an unwelcome surprise to your audience.
Until next time,
Sam
