The Key Steps to Turning Your Site Into a Conversion Machine
Tired of guessing? Foxwell Digital Membership connects you with the strategies and support to grow your business.
Oliver Kenyon, co-founder of ConversionWise, a fully qualified chef who has spent over 20 years working online, and has built the largest affiliate community in the world! With a team of 60+ members, this powerhouse CEO is leading ConversionWise to generate $400-500k in MRR while working with over 3,500 brands globally.
In this episode you'll learn from one of the the best (literally) in the industry regarding conversion strategies, landing page design, and affiliate marketing.
Oliver specifically shares his thoughts on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and the importance of focusing on revenue per session rather than just conversion rate. He also discusses the challenges of benchmarking CRO results, as it varies depending on factors such as price points and brand uniqueness.
Key Takeaways:
The importance of focusing on revenue per session
How to avoid doing this 1 thing without testing first
Why this testing is crucial for identifying and removing conversion funnel distractions.
How a trust policy bar can showcase trust indicators and a testimonial to handle objections your brand may encounter
Why Social proof, is essential for increasing conversions.
How the use of countdown timers, inventory timers, and seasonality can rapidly drive sales.
Why you should prioritize quality over quantity when running A/B tests
To learn more about Oliver and his team at ConversionWise head here:
To connect with Oliver follow him here on X.
To learn more about the Foxwell Founders community or to join head here
Full Transcript:
Oliver Kenyon (00:00.111)
you work out so you might be at 2800 or yeah six foot
Edwin @ Snappic (00:04.77)
Yeah, but how tall are you? we're the same. okay, cool. We probably have like lot of the same macros and everything.
Oliver Kenyon (00:09.41)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (00:13.083)
It depends what goals you're going for as well, right? Like now I'm trying to build muscle, it's like more about the protein intake and yeah, which I struggle with to get a lot of protein. It's all good. Let's talk some CRO guys.
Tris Dyer (00:17.711)
protein. a lot more protein. I think everyone struggles with protein. Yeah, exactly. yeah. So, So Oliver, what we do is some kind of peas and cubes there. I sent you a list earlier on, it probably felt a little bit heavily. That's okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (00:20.748)
It's so hard.
A girl.
Oliver Kenyon (00:32.919)
I didn't read it, I'll be honest. I just went onto the calendar to check the call. There was no call booking, so I went onto Slack, saw the list, saw the link, clicked it, we're here. All good. I can answer any questions.
Tris Dyer (00:39.963)
Savage. Cool.
Okay, cool. Couple of things. One tab open, no background noise. You do seem like you have all that stuff nailed anyway. In terms of the way they were gonna ask questions, I'll intro, get a quick intro title off you in a sec. What we'll do is we'll go through, I'll go, this is Oliver, conversion wise, yada yada. But then Edwin asks the first question, spit your shit. And then what we can do
Oliver Kenyon (01:05.294)
Yep.
Tris Dyer (01:12.045)
at the end we'll kind of do like an outro of like what it is. Oftentimes when you're, if you're spitting like some heavy stuff, you're like, big fact on this or big stat, we'll react and be like, my God, this is amazing. And then don't get thrown off by that. Just keep going. Be like, yeah, let's go.
Oliver Kenyon (01:30.542)
So good.
Tris Dyer (01:30.949)
But I think just generally our, like it's a chat. It's as we were just chatting there. Like it's very much we're talking, away. And like the idea here is it's supposed to be like a fireside chat. And so that's how it goes. How do you want to be introduced, Oliver?
Oliver Kenyon (01:43.106)
Love it. That's good.
Co -founder of ConversionWise, Oliver Kenyon, co -founder of ConversionWise, 12 years experience. 12 years, yeah, worked with over 3 ,500 plus brands, designed more landing pages than any other agency on the planet. Yeah, we were called the landing page guys for the first eight years of business, hence why we've kind of got that title, so yeah.
Tris Dyer (01:51.835)
Okay, need 12 years, okay, yeah, cool.
Tris Dyer (01:58.074)
Don't.
Tris Dyer (02:03.193)
Thanks.
Tris Dyer (02:09.812)
There's more lighting wages than anyone in the world.
Oliver Kenyon (02:12.238)
I've keep throwing that stat out there, no one's challenged me yet, but I believe it's true. Over 7 ,000 landing pages, so I believe it's true.
Tris Dyer (02:16.795)
Okay, I'll give it back.
Okay, wow. And your co -founder as well. I've completely wise. Okay, wise. Okay, super. That's some pretty impressive numbers right there. Nice one. Okay, cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, right. Let's go. Hi guys. Welcome to Foxwell Founders. I'm Triss.
Oliver Kenyon (02:24.131)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (02:33.724)
We're doing it a long time.
Edwin @ Snappic (02:42.016)
I'm Edwin.
Tris Dyer (02:42.957)
And we've got here today Oliver Kenyon from the co -founder of ConversionWise. Now, ConversionWise has designed more landing pages than anyone in the business and worked with over three and a half thousand people to help them optimize their conversion rate. So we are really excited to get into the detail of what actually creates conversion, what improves conversion, and how do we sell stuff. We're coming into Black Friday, how are we gonna sell these right? Edwin, kick us off with the first question.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:08.6)
So you have the title of most landing pages in the world. I will not challenge that. Tell me, tell me what is the last test that you ran that really moved the needle? Walk us through
Oliver Kenyon (03:15.483)
No one has yet.
Oliver Kenyon (03:23.918)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. So, yeah, I must admit, I keep throwing that stats out on podcasts and workshops. I was in London last night, yesterday and delivered a talk and I still haven't been challenged on it and I believe it's true. until someone says, no, I've designed more, we're claiming it. As far as the last test that we ran, we run multiple tests per week. So we have anywhere between sort of 20 and 40 tests running for our clients per week.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:52.024)
Good.
Oliver Kenyon (03:52.588)
A recent test that I actually shared yesterday was an incredibly simple test and I shared this on my Twitter and this one kind of took me by surprise, but often people overcomplicate CRO, we all know that. I was speaking to someone at the event yesterday, I said to them, CRO is effectively common sense. When you hear about it and you hear about these tests,
It makes sense, right? But we just don't think about doing it at the time. And all this test was, we could see from scroll map data that a lot of people were scrolling on the, a homepage of a store, selling multiple SKUs. And we could see that people were scrolling, but they then weren't going through to the collection of the product pages. And I know this sounds like a very simple addition and hopefully we can get into some way geekier tests as we go through the chat. But all we did was add a relevant call to actions under each section that spoke to the description
or the text above the section, for example. If a section on the homepage was talking about viewing the whole collection, well, they didn't have a CTA to the collection page, we added it, we then clicked through to collection page. If a specific section was talking about a pain point that a product solved and they didn't have the CTA to the product, we just added the CTA. So a real simple test that clients pay us a good amount of money to execute.
But when you hear the results, it's amazing. So this test added an additional $108 ,000 in monthly revenue for this client, quite a high volume store. We ran it for about three weeks, got it powered statistical significant and implemented the test and the client was pretty happy. But again, this is the latest test that comes to mind because it was yesterday and we concluded it, but sometimes, yeah, don't overcomplicate things. think common sense comes out
Edwin @ Snappic (05:20.256)
I won.
Edwin @ Snappic (05:40.642)
So 108k on the percentage wise, what was the conversion rate before and then what was the conversion rate after?
Oliver Kenyon (05:45.774)
I'd have to look into the actual stats. There was a relatively good uplift in, basically we normally track on revenue per session. So yeah, it's very hard obviously to track from a CTA that wasn't there to a CTA that's there. So you you couldn't have tracked a relative increase in click through rates, but what we can track in is how much money.
are we making per visitor to that specific page? And that's where we saw that increase in that revenue. So yeah, a dramatic increase.
Edwin @ Snappic (06:16.964)
What's this? it's
Tris Dyer (06:16.995)
Nice, nice. I was going to say when it comes to CRO, that's good, I mean, that kind of makes a lot of sense. Like when it comes to CRO and you talk about kind of smaller percentage increases, is there a certain amount of volume you should be spending or making before, or certain volume traffic that you should be getting before you can actually start to consider CRO as a realistic effect on your campaign?
Oliver Kenyon (06:39.982)
Yeah, yeah, great question. And 100 % the answer is yes. That's why we almost have two sides to our business. So what we recommend is over 100 ,000 sessions per month, you have enough data to quantify a test.
quick enough, you can test on any volume of data. So you could be doing 2000 sessions per month and you could be A -B testing or A -B -C -D multivariate, whatever you want to call it. You could be testing, but you're going to become frustrated because it's going to take far longer to become powered and to make an informed decision if that's actually a statistical uplift in revenue per session or click through or conversion rate, whatever you're tracking. Whereas when you're doing over a hundred thousand sessions per month, that's going to be a lot quicker typically within the kind of two to three week timeframe.
you can test more aggressively. What we recommend with fewer hits per month is you take bigger swings. So that's why we have our landing page side of the business where you can completely redesign pages based on best practices, frameworks, conversion principles, more of a conversion design perspective, taking out the kind of analytical side of things and looking more from a UI, UX perspective and taking a big swing.
And that's where we again, we'll see bigger uplifts because you can afford to take those bigger swings as opposed to, know, smaller tests that add up to increases based on data.
Tris Dyer (07:58.755)
Okay. And so taking that you wouldn't advise if you were having kind of a large volume, large traffic, you wouldn't advise taking those big swings. It's kind of the smaller test that you're testing or the big swings work regardless who you are.
Oliver Kenyon (08:11.01)
It depends what you're trying to do. So if you're looking to scale via paid, for example, you may be off, better off taking a bigger swing. For example, if you're sending all your media right now to a collection or a product page, I would be testing landing pages for sure. So I would be testing direct response, aggressive sales pages, landing pages, bundle pages, subscription, whatever that may be as dedicated one -off pages to see if they perform better on paid media.
But when we see people make this mistake a lot, so a lot of customers, clients will come to us and they'll have a store that's doing, I don't know, let's say 200K in revenue per month right now. And they do, let's say 30 % in repeat purchase from customers who are coming back to their store and repeating the purchase. Now,
Tris Dyer (08:55.513)
Decent.
Oliver Kenyon (08:56.941)
The issue is everyone gets fixated on brand. They see the next shiny object, they see one of their competitors that have an updated website and they think, shit, like we need to update our site. We need to redo everything. We need a new brand guide. We need to make it all shiny, all bells and whistles. And it's gonna make us loads more money. And we actually refuse to work with those clients because it's gonna put us in a detrimental position because what typically happens nine times out of 10 is
Tris Dyer (09:07.877)
the magpie.
Edwin @ Snappic (09:19.492)
Cool. Looks good.
Tris Dyer (09:21.486)
and.
Oliver Kenyon (09:25.894)
redesign the website, we follow all the best practices, but normally it's the repeat business that dies because if you imagine...
Let's take a real world situation, right? You might shop at, let's say, I'm say Tesco, right? Over in the UK, we have a big supermarket called Tesco. Do your grocery shop, you walk into the supermarket, you know within that supermarket where you're going. You know what you gotta buy. If I need strawberries, it's right there. If I need cereal, I'm going around the corner, it's the second aisle on the left, I'm picking it up. You're almost in a routine of where you're going within that shop to get your products.
and you're gonna go check out. Now you imagine if overnight that store completely switched, right? All the aisles, all the products moved all around the place. Not only are you gonna be pissed off, but you probably will miss products that you were gonna purchase and be frustrated and you're be walking out that door spending less money or you're just gonna be annoyed and be like, they've moved everything around, I'm gone.
Tris Dyer (10:18.895)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (10:26.602)
Basically what happens when you redesign your website because you think you should be having this updated brand design and everything, these repeat customers come back and they're not following the same pattern. They're not in that same journey and funnel that they were before to get the product that they so desperately want. So we recommend strongly against large volume clients taking big swings as in redesigns, updated themes, et cetera on their stores. Do it on external pages.
Yes, you can have a test, say for example, an above the fold test, fine, but complete pages, complete layouts, complete theme updates, it's going to take six to 12 months to recuperate that repeat purchase and new visitors to come up to where you were before. And we've seen it time and time again. So that's one mistake that I think big brands make.
Edwin @ Snappic (11:08.898)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (11:17.531)
Jesus.
Edwin @ Snappic (11:17.764)
So how do you have that conversation? Because you, you know, it's, it's so I have to have that conversation all the time, right? Brand comes in, they say, Hey, we got this new designer, we want to spend, you know, 50 K or whatever on this redesign. And I'm there screaming, like, just spending 50 K in marketing, but they're like stuck on it. But tell, tell me how, how are you having that conversation with
Oliver Kenyon (11:20.661)
Difficult, it's a difficult one.
Tris Dyer (11:22.253)
Hahaha
Oliver Kenyon (11:33.225)
Yeah. Done.
Tris Dyer (11:37.039)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (11:42.933)
from a consultative perspective, I think they need to appreciate that this is coming from a good place. All of us here, we work on performance, right? Like as in our fee's a bit different. So we go fixed monthly fee because we believe that all the incremental increases that we generate should stay with the brand. But we work on performance as far as if we don't increase revenue and pay for our retainer, they're not coming back. So.
I have to be, and our staff, you we have a team of 50 plus people, they have to be coming from a consultative approach where they say to the brand, we would not recommend you do this. We're here to make you more money. We're here to turn more clicks into customers, make you more revenue per visitor. If you do this, we are telling you now, this is not going to result in the outcome that you want. So what we recommend is you can aesthetically update your site, but you do it from an iterative approach, similar to
So when we are running these tests, if you've got a new style guide or if you want a new layout or a new slight feel or maybe it's the brands.
direction is changed slightly and you want that to be mirrored on your design, let's do it through an iterative approach through A -B testing and when we then implement winning tests, we do it along that new field, but let's not just change everything overnight because again, what typically happens, and bear in mind guys, I've ran a design and development agency for 12 years, so we've done this for years in the past where we built new websites and I'm the first person to say, people come in, they say, look, we want this live in a month, normally it's six months.
So you spend six months obsessing over this new site. You put all this budget into it. At the same time, you're not testing on your site. You're focusing on this brand new shiny object, this new design. You launch it and you're disappointed. And it happens nine times out of 10. So I would take an iterative approach and just do it based on actual results and actual tests that you're running to then update the site bit by bit, basically.
Tris Dyer (13:43.461)
make sense. And so when you're doing those tests, you're doing it bit by bit and you're fine, you're testing to a statistical significant level, you want to make sure that it's making sense. And I mean, obviously, right. say we get you come, you come across a test, I'm sure you do frequently come across a test that doesn't get statistical significance. Say, you know, do you look at a different threshold? Do you change the goalposts a bit? Like, what do you do? Do you say, okay, well, that actually didn't make a difference. We're going to leave it as is we're going to test something else.
Oliver Kenyon (13:50.825)
Yes.
Oliver Kenyon (14:02.089)
all the time.
Tris Dyer (14:13.506)
What is the next move?
Oliver Kenyon (14:14.475)
Yeah, that's the nature and the day -to -day of CRO. Anyone who's doing CRO A -B testing that says more tests win than lose is lying to you. Yeah, 100%. The first thing we say on prospect or sales calls is we hold our hands up. More tests are gonna lose than win. And that's a fact. We'll typically, let's take a boom, Ezra Firestone's brand that we run CRO for. We had 20 tests running in the first three to six months.
15 of them were losing tests, five of them were winners and big winners. And I'm talking extra 3 million in annual revenue for that brand, which more than outweighed everything else we did in the losing test, but you will lose more tests than you will win. I think the agencies that will be good for you as a partner for an econ brand, for example, is someone who takes understandings and learnings from those losing tests and rolls it into the next test.
CRO, in my opinion, is all about understanding your specific audience. It's very contradictory, but I feel that there are best practices for CRO. I think there are best frameworks. I think conversion design and conversion principles are fact. There are things that you need on your website in order to make more people purchase, fact.
Your brand is so unique, even your closest competitor, your demographic, your audience, your brand, your tonality, your voice is so unique that you can't copy what other people are doing. So I think you need to get very deep into that qualitative and quantitative data. You need to be really speaking to your audience, surveying your audience, getting that feedback, and then making informed decisions that is an iterative and learning process within the first kind of three, six months where you are losing tests, but you're understanding why.
and each losing test gives you more data and information on what does this audience respond well or not well to. And then you take that learning and you move on.
Tris Dyer (16:11.387)
So you win and you learn. Yeah, you win and you learn really is the thing.
Oliver Kenyon (16:16.234)
Absolutely, I mean, it's very cliche. It's easy for me to say, but yeah, like, you you get these guys on Twitter, every loss in your life, you learn from and you move, but it's true. It's true in CRO. Like you do need to look into why that lost, what can we do differently next time? But yeah, 100 % more tests lose than win all the time. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (16:25.277)
Edwin @ Snappic (16:29.12)
In exclamation.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:36.1)
Let's circle that back though. So let's say you run a test, right? And you get, you get 56 % positive and then, you know, more positive than negative, but it's not statistically significant. What do you do with
Oliver Kenyon (16:51.542)
You understand why, I guess. one thing we also do is, and a lot of, I'm not talking about other agencies, but I think looking into the intricacies of like filtering between, we've had tests, for example, that have been outright.
horrible losers on desktop, but when you filter down to mobile, the test is a clear winner. So like you filter, you go one step further, you look at different devices. Tests are so different, because we could be talking about a price and offer test versus a UX UI test.
But you look into it, why did it lose? And you pitch it against the other tests and you look across all your tests. Is there any commonalities between losing tests? Is there something that just doesn't work on this site? Was there a bottleneck here as opposed to here? And you try and hypothesize, that's all you're doing. CRO is effectively guesswork. You're coming up with ideas, you're hypothesizing, you're guesstimating that that's gonna be better than that. And after 12 years, I feel I could do that better than the next person, but I'm still guessing.
I'm still making informed decisions backed on that data, but yeah, you look into that test, you look into the intricacies, you see if you could spot commonalities, you can see if there's a trend in why things are losing within the same page or within the same funnel, and then you kind of take those learnings and move on.
Tris Dyer (18:13.893)
Makes sense, makes sense. And I guess the question that I suppose is everyone's lips is there a benchmark that you have? Say for example, I'm looking at a site, there's a certain amount of landing page views, there's certain amount, like for the amount of landing page views, there should be a certain amount of add to cars and certain amount of conversion. Do you have benchmark that you go off?
Oliver Kenyon (18:29.704)
Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (18:31.15)
For now I'll just say it depends. Not it depends.
Oliver Kenyon (18:34.489)
It's really difficult to answer that. That's a question we get asked a lot and it's a very, it's not a one size fits all because you have different price points, you have different AOVs, you have high ticket versus low tickets. It's very difficult brand to brand to kind of estimate those benchmarks. The teams do have kind of, you know, from carts checkout, et cetera, but again, it depends on.
A lot of things come back to those conversion principles. Do you have trust and credibility on your site? Do you have authority? Do you have social proof? I know all those things are gonna help boost those stats, but it's very case scenario.
Tris Dyer (19:17.507)
Mm -hmm.
Edwin @ Snappic (19:17.732)
So let's say you have a fashion and apparel brand, AOB 75, right? Tell me maybe like, I'd like to know a benchmark conversion rate. If you can't give me that, tell me like in the funnel, like generally, what are the bands? Like what are the
Oliver Kenyon (19:20.572)
Mm.
Oliver Kenyon (19:34.459)
Yeah, it's really difficult without looking into the data of our current kind of clients, what that would look across the funnel. It's quite a difficult question to ask without having that data in front of me and just kind of looking at it from brand to brand. But yeah, apparel is one of those where it's that's where you do get that argument of like brand versus.
conversion because so many apparel brands, clothing brands, their stores look very, very different to a supplement brand, for example, because it's all about white space, it's all about design as opposed to performance, and that's where it's a very hard match between performance and brand. Yeah, it's difficult without looking at that data.
Tris Dyer (20:23.683)
Okay, so call it, like I mean, I guess like one of the things I suppose we look at is, know, we, from our side as marketers, we look at like average basket size, we look at kind of understanding all that kind of stuff. How much does kind of outside of the step to step to step, do you actually look at from a conversion rate and do you actually start to test? Like if we add, if we move this here, we get a bigger basket size, that kind of thing. Is that a good test thing for CRO?
Oliver Kenyon (20:42.6)
Yeah. 100%. Yeah.
Yes, yeah, definitely. our overall objective is that revenue per session. People get a little bit fixated on conversion rate when it comes to CRO, clues in the name, but the easiest way to increase your conversion rate is to slash your costs. Anyone could increase a conversion rate. You make your product free. Your conversion rate goes up through the roof. What we try to do is a blended average between conversion rate and average order value, which is basically your revenue per session. How much money are you making per click on this specific
flow. But what we will then do further is we will break that down into each step of the funnel. So let's say one month goal on a client might be that they're getting a lot of people to their collection page. How can we increase the click through to the product page? Then we'll look at say product page and if there's a bottleneck in product page versus people actually getting to the checkout, how can we increase that conversion rate specifically? So we do look at things from
but that's supported by actually niching down into those specific steps within the pre -purchase flow. And often that's things as simple as like removing an upsell pre -purchase because it might put people off before they get to that cart or that checkout. A lot of stuff we do is based around usability. Like you would not...
Tris Dyer (21:57.755)
Thanks,
Oliver Kenyon (22:16.176)
you would be amazed at how many stores we get on e -comm that have these annoying customer support pop -ups, exit intent pop -ups that pop up after five seconds. And a lot of it is around user testing. one of the first things we do when clients come on up with us is we actually do full user testing. We get actual people to go to your store and try to check out and note down any hurdles.
Again, just mentioning those kind of pop -ups and stuff, wouldn't, you'd be amazed at how many people within like the cart itself, for example, still have these modals popping up and still have these little customer support icons on mobile that overlay the add to cart button. So yeah, right. So like we've all done it on other people's stores.
Edwin @ Snappic (22:55.544)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (22:59.909)
We actually had a person launch a sale, their biggest sale of the year this year and their pop -up came over the whole site on mobile and you couldn't get out without putting your email in and it was like, please stop.
Oliver Kenyon (23:09.562)
Right, but we don't visit our own stores. We don't test our own flows. How many people listening to this own econ brands have actually gone on their site and checked out as a customer in the last six months? Probably very, very little. So user testing is huge. We do that quite a lot. And you'll find when we go into those intricacies of like...
product page to checkout or checkout, cart to checkout. It's often things like that that kind of really skewed the data. It's not rocket science. We're not doing these massive A -B tests that are completely redesigning your cart. It's like, let's remove the distractions. Let's make the flow a lot easier. Let's force the button to the bottom on mobile. Yeah, social proof and trust and et cetera are great within the cart itself, but yeah, it's
rocket science is.
Tris Dyer (23:58.48)
that.
So let's get to the actual detail. so like, you know, we're talking about like ideas and thoughts of the things you can test, but let's get into the let's go. I've got a cart, right? I've got a sorry, I've got a page, a product page. I'm looking at my product page. I'm going, what are the key things that I should be looking for here? So you're saying about making it simple and everything else. What are the things if you were to look at a product page, you're like, you're definitely looking for these pieces of information. Or, you know, maybe even there's there's some gotchas that are like, okay, there you should definitely not have there in the way.
Oliver Kenyon (24:28.229)
Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (24:29.285)
go into some specifics that people can go into their pages and go have a look.
Edwin @ Snappic (24:31.65)
But vertical, right? Because vitamins are different from, they're all different from product solutions.
Tris Dyer (24:36.761)
Yeah. Let's go apparel.
Oliver Kenyon (24:38.792)
100%, they are different, but I think there are best practices. That's why I said, I do believe there are best practices in CRO. I think there are best practices on all stores to tick boxes, right? I think that there's, we kind of define this into nine or 10 key principles that should be on all stores to increase conversions.
Above the fold on any product page, we look for several things. One, we look for trust and credibility. So what is above the fold when you're competing with your Amazon? All of us go onto Amazon and don't think twice within a split second. We don't think twice about trusting Amazon. We just know they're not gonna steal our money. They're not gonna sell us shitty products. If they are, we can return them the next day. They're gonna do next day delivery. We just trust that brand. You do not have the luxury as a econ brand yourself
to gain that trust and credibility from a cold consumer without thinking. You don't have that luxury. So you need to prove to these people that you are trustworthy. So one thing we like to do is we call it a trust policy bar. Just below the notice, your navigational bar, mobile and desktop, you have a very thin bar with three to four icons plus text of things that make you trustable as a brand.
So think about your brand specifically. That could be something like you offer a satisfaction guarantee. That could be that you've served over a thousand plus happy customers. That could be that you're vegan friendly. That could be that you're made in the U .S. That could be that you're veteran backed. That could be that you offer 24 seven support. Whatever makes
legitimate as a brand. doesn't take up much real estate. It's one bar, the thickness of your navigational bar, icon plus text, scannable content, have it on rotation on mobile, have it stretched on desktop, ticks that trust and credibility box. Second thing we always look for is social proof. Now, all themes that are built to convert, which is complete bullshit, no themes out there are built to convert, they're pretty rubbish. All themes have social proof. So most of them have review.
Oliver Kenyon (26:45.705)
reviews built in. But typically what those reviews will be will be these boring five stars and it just says like 43. Take that one step further. So leverage social proof. So what we do is we'll go.
rated 4 .8 out of five stars by 43 plus happy customers or verified buyers or whatever you're selling, lean into that social proof. Another great thing you can do above the fold with social proof, not necessarily on your product page but on your homepage, is actually including a testimonial that handles an objection. So if you're surveying your audiences, which you should be, post purchase surveys are a necessity within CRO, but
a sticking point or a friction point or an objection that a lot of your customers have. So post purchase surveys, you should be asking, why did you purchase? But really importantly, you should be asking what almost made you not purchase today. Take that response and you'll find a lot of people saying the same thing. So they might say something like, we were unsure of the quality of the product. Take a testimonial.
that talks about the quality of your product and put that front and centre above the fold on your home page and you've already handled the objection of most of your buyers coming through as cold consumers. So social proof is two.
Tris Dyer (28:05.061)
So question just on that specific part, that makes like, duh. As you said, most of CRO is like, duh. But like, with that, like how trustworthy is that kind of, like if you were getting it, say you were a Shopify store and you're taking it, say you've got dropshippers or say you've got some way where you get reviews that are on your site. Like how much more important is it to have a third party trust, like Trustpilot or one of these that are separate to your on -site reviews? Because the people look at it go, well, they've just written those themselves.
Oliver Kenyon (28:10.355)
Common sense. Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (28:34.729)
Yeah, I think there is definitely credibility in having the kind of reviews .io or Trustfile or whatever app you're using, 100%. But even by just putting those logos underneath that statement above the fold and then having it clickable that scrolls to the testimonial section where you have the embed, I think that goes a long way. We obviously think like marketers, so we know that people do make up those reviews for sure. The most cold consumers coming to your page wouldn't, but I think you can back it up
with that kind of logo, icons work very well as you said. So social proof is crucial. Product pages, let's talk about image carousels.
Tris Dyer (29:08.475)
Okay.
Oliver Kenyon (29:16.233)
100%, you need a, normally typically on mobile, it's different on apparel stores. People think they have to these huge stretched images. You don't have to one -to -one ratio, which gives you some nice real estate above the fold. Sounds silly, but thumbnails below your product carousel work way better than radio dots because it's a visual draw, especially on mobile. Make sure that you actually showcase that there's more images, not just the little dots, because it's a proven fact that if people view more images in your carousel, they're more likely to buy your product.
Edwin @ Snappic (29:34.276)
Sure.
Oliver Kenyon (29:46.326)
So just encourage them to do that by actually showcasing little thumbnails underneath your carousel. When it comes to product images, I think people undervalue the power of infographic type images. So, you know, we typically will have professionally shot images. People think it's got to be these amazing images of every fucking angle of
Edwin @ Snappic (30:06.349)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (30:06.364)
whatever it may be, fine, yeah, fine. It's nice, yeah, exactly. It's nice to have one or two, but what works really well is the second image within your carousel is the product, but you annotate it. So you have lines coming off it, and then you type the actual, you actually write the benefit of the product. Let's say it's a skincare, cream, or whatever it may be. You have an arrow that comes off and it says.
Tris Dyer (30:07.931)
closed around the corner.
Tris Dyer (30:17.401)
Yes.
Oliver Kenyon (30:29.512)
for example, healthier, happier skin, the outcome, the benefit. So actually, I always say this, I always say you've got to treat people like they're five when it comes to CRO, but just shoving things in front of people's faces and making it obvious is a really good way of doing it. So just annotating your product images, moving down above the fold, we always, always, always see wins, unless it's a product that needs pre -education. So if it's a very technical product where you actually need a blurb of text, taking that big paragraph
boring.
descriptive text from your product description and just turning it into three benefit driven bullet points, using bullet points, three benefit outcome bullet points that are scannable, easy to read on mobile, performs a lot better than long blocks of text that push everything else below the fold. And then it comes into above the fold usability. So I think when you have a product with multi variant options so that you can select, let's say, know, medium, large, extra large.
different color swatches, just thinking about how
layout appears on mobile to the consumer. So let's say that you've got color swatches, put the color swatches next to the thumbnail of the image instead of below the, you know, always have your color first because on mobile, you want those swatches to be within the same fold as the product carousel. So when you click it, the image changes. Sounds stupid, but we get a lot of customers that the swatches are way down. People are clicking it on mobile, but they can't see the image at the top of the page changing, right? So like it's just around that usability.
Edwin @ Snappic (31:51.544)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (32:02.338)
Again, we find that actual pictures of the product in the color swatches performs better than the actual color. So actually giving people a clear view of what changes when it comes to the color. Because let's say you've got trainers and they might all be white, but the strip down the middle.
changes from blue to black to green depending on what color you want. Actually showing that on a picture that you can click like a thumbnail to then change the hero image works way better than just showing the green, the red, the white. It gives people a clear objective of what's changing when it comes to the color. When it comes to like size select, for example, do not hide them in a dropdown. Sounds stupid, but what's a dropdown? Two clicks. I have to click the dropdown. Then I have to click the size I want versus if you have them just in radio boxes, it's one click.
It's all there for me to see. can see what sizes you do. I can see that you do my size. Some people don't even know how to click a dropdown and can't see those options that you're hiding in the dropdown. So it's silly usability things. Honestly, it's crazy. Again, common sense, right? When you put it in this term, it's just obvious. It's like, don't make you click into something to click something. Just have it there to click. One click versus two click. Minutiae details on large volume stores make huge differences.
Tris Dyer (33:01.243)
Maybe.
Oliver Kenyon (33:19.525)
Size select, making sure you have that just within the fold above the add to cart. A nice full width pill button on mobile. So not these small, thin, small buttons that say add now or don't get clever with your add to cart.
Add to cart now directional queue pointing Chevron on the button works very, very nicely. And then another thing that we see people get wrong a lot above the fold on mobile is if you offer a, let's say like a 60 day money back guarantee or a 30 day money back guarantee or whatever, people typically will have it below the CTA, but they'll have it in like a drop down collapsible box.
Edwin @ Snappic (33:51.63)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (33:57.401)
We ran this test recently on a client store, a beauty brand, and saw a dramatic increase in revenue per visitor by just collapsing the box. Just collapsing the box because the text is there then for people to view without having to click to click down about the guarantee. They can just read about the guarantee and more people purchased.
Edwin @ Snappic (34:07.075)
What?
Tris Dyer (34:13.851)
Hey.
Tris Dyer (34:18.211)
That's incredible. It's such a small change.
Edwin @ Snappic (34:19.298)
Guys, XL, freshman Cypher, Oliver just did, that was crazy. Wait, wait, wait, he just like freestyled so much information. It's like we're on 106th and park right now. That's crazy.
Oliver Kenyon (34:28.089)
Ha ha ha ha ha
Tris Dyer (34:32.815)
Thank you.
Oliver Kenyon (34:32.99)
I love, I used to love that show, so good. So good, love hip hop.
Tris Dyer (34:38.675)
Okay, well, I mean, Oliver, that is amazing. So some of the stuff there, like it just, if I was the store owner and I'm listening to this, there's so much stuff that I could just go and have a quick look and go, am I hitting these best practices? These are the first steps. testing is obviously is the staple of CRO and then making sure that, you're testing, it sounds like volume of testing is as important as quality of testing. Cause if you're just, you do two or three tests, you're not going to get as much value as if you do six or seven, but you go.
Oliver Kenyon (35:06.021)
I would be careful with how many tests you're running at any given time. Again, that comes into a volume of traffic.
argument or discussion. So, you know, for example, I wouldn't be running three tests on the same page at once because you then get conflicting results, but you can have multiple tests running at once across your store. the, know, the, the, the cipher, whatever I just spat within, within my freestyle just then is best practices. And that's why I do think best practices do exist within CRO. I can all but guarantee if you follow what I just said, you're in conversion
Edwin @ Snappic (35:21.251)
It was
Oliver Kenyon (35:44.808)
will increase but when you're running A -B tests or you know A -B -C whatever tests split tests I would be careful with how many you're running depending on your traffic volume where they are within your store but you know there's no harm in doing a home page test versus a and a product page test at the same time and the test of new collection page but it's all dependent on how much data you're getting.
Edwin @ Snappic (36:09.54)
And so you mentioned before that you have these nine or 10 principles. those you spit that crazy block, that crazy freestyle. What other of those principles have we not heard
Oliver Kenyon (36:24.173)
Sure, I'm gonna try and run through the nine on my head. Let's count these down. So we always think that value proposition is huge. So value proposition, how are you showcasing your value proposition when someone lands on a page? Really cool way to do this is using things like comparison tables. So making sure that your value is comparable to another brand or whatever else is in the market, it leverages your value. An amazing offer is obviously crucial, not to quote Alex or Mozi, but it's very important to have an
no brainer offer and I'm not saying you have to discount, I'm not saying you have to slash prices, but what can you do
Valuate your offer or I guess increase your offer perspective from a cold consumer coming to your page So can you add something additional? Can you offer? Free support a free this is a test we ran so last last summer. It was a year ago We work with a brand called the cooking guild and they they sell a lot of cooking equipment so knives Barbecues, etc, etc. And we ran a test where we paid someone an upwork a couple hundred dollars to
design a barbecue, top 20 barbecue recipes ebook. Okay, just a really simple ebook. It's delivered digitally. It's a one -off cost for us. Don't have to print it. It's not physically shipped. It's an ebook. And all we did was below the product image camera cell on the product page is we added this little call out that said, now included free top 20 recipe ebook for barbecue lovers. We put it on the top selling barbecue page.
increase of I think around about $70 ,000 per month just by having that value. But that's an example of having an amazing offer. It doesn't have to be around price. You can just add things on to make it irresistible. Persuasive copywriting is huge. Obviously copy is massive. Copy is probably one of if not the single most.
Oliver Kenyon (38:19.117)
important CRO principle that we get the most uplifts from is just like having copy changes, which annoys the shit out of our customers because it's probably the easiest thing to do, but they're not complaining about the wins, right? So persuasive copy is huge. Social proof we've covered. Trust and credibility we've covered. Objection handling is massive. I know we've kind of mentioned that, but making sure that you have FAQs on all pages. So FAQs should be on your product page. You should have FAQs on your homepage.
Edwin @ Snappic (38:29.804)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (38:49.0)
handle common objections, which are things like, when do you shape?
how quickly will I get my product? When will I see results? But also then handle specific questions that are about your store and your products. So speak to your customer support center, ask them what are the most asked questions we get all the time and just answer it. Again, it's not common sense. Just put it in front of people's faces. So handling objections is huge. Maximizing revenue is definitely one. So once you've kind of ticked all these boxes, we tend to then look at like, how can we maximize revenue across the pre -purchase or
to purchase journey of a consumer. So you have to be very careful with this one, but you know, we're talking about cross -selling, upselling, that can have negative effect on your revenue per session. So be careful, it doesn't work for all stores. I would tend to try to do it post purchase as opposed to pre purchase.
I think that has to be done in a very tasteful way. Looking to things like dynamic shipping prompts within cart, not just offering free shipping on based on add to carts, but also offering like a free gift, taking it one step further. So encouraging more add to carts via a free gift is crucial.
Tris Dyer (40:01.325)
Like gamify, that kind of making sure that if you add like five more dollars you get a free gift that kind of thing.
Oliver Kenyon (40:06.663)
There you go. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So bang, you've qualified for free shipping. Why not add another 15 to get this free mug or whatever it may be, free cap, know, works very well in cat power. Look at cuts, cuts do this very, very well. So that's one. UX and UI and usability is huge. Again, we've kind of covered that, but do user testing, go through your site, see where people are dropping off, see where the bottlenecks are, see what annoying.
in pop -ups you have on mobile that are overlaying everything and are just not needed and kill them all. I think that's pretty much it. I think we've covered it. I don't know if there's anything I've forgotten, if I have, yeah, I apologize. yeah. Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (40:45.454)
So persuasive copy, I understand that for product solution products and vitamin supplements, but let's talk about apparel products, right? Let's say I'm selling dresses. Dresses, right? Well, how do I do persuasive copy like other?
Oliver Kenyon (40:53.201)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (40:59.975)
Absolutely. had a brand yesterday that I spoke to at this marketing club we were at and she sold nightwear, so ladies nightwear, pajamas, but luxury. We're talking not a huge high ticket, but we're talking mid ticket, $100 plus for some nice nightwear. And she asked exactly the same question. And I went on her site and gave her a bit of an audit yesterday. And I think when it comes to apparel, when it comes to
Edwin @ Snappic (41:20.43)
Right.
Oliver Kenyon (41:29.882)
clothing, et cetera. Think about the why. Why are people purchasing these clothes? Now typically when it comes to Ecom,
Most of our brands are mid ticket. We're not really necessarily selling cheap stuff. We're not kind of compete with H We're not competing with Zara. We're kind of selling a one off or a nice luxury item. So think about the outcome that someone is buying that product for and what people do wrong. it's again, it's common sense, it's cliche, it's a marketing statement, but they talk far too much about the features. They talk about the, know, I went on this lady's site and she's talking about how breathable the material is, how
98 % cotton thread how it's manufactured here and it's from the best materials and you actually negate the why as to why people are purchasing Why are they purchasing they're purchasing because in her case they want the best night's sleep of their life They want to feel cool and calm in bed. They you know when it comes to fashion fashion items in apparel stores They're not purchasing because it's made out of a certain amount of material
they're purchasing because they want to impress their friends. They're purchasing because they want to wow people walking down the street. So when it comes to copy, you need to be talking about, you know, be the envy of all your friends, stand out in the crowd, draw attention, you know, not necessarily draw attention, but you see what I'm saying. It's the outcome, it's the benefit, it's the why as opposed to the how you actually deliver that product with the material, et cetera, et cetera. And I think apparel brands typically get this wrong. They become fixated on
are materials better than our competitors when no, what really, no, exactly, what really people wanna know is how does it make them feel? How does it make them look in society? What results are they getting back? What feedback are people, what confidence boost is it gonna give them? And that's the same with health and fitness, it's the same with apparel. So yeah, copy needs to lead with that. And then you can go into your features for sure.
Tris Dyer (43:10.105)
Yeah, nobody gets.
Tris Dyer (43:33.112)
Yeah, it sounds like, you know, people start to kind of go towards the greenwashing as well. They're like, it makes you look like you care about the environment actually. But you know, that plastic bag that you, you know, the recycled bag that you bought. Yeah, it took way more plastic to make that than it did actual plastic.
Oliver Kenyon (43:43.216)
Yeah.
Yeah, and those things are good. Sustainability is obviously huge these days and that's another tick in like the trust and credibility box. I would have that in your kind of trust bar, policy bar along the top. But when it comes to that copy, first and foremost, always lead with the benefits. Again, not to be cliche, know, features tell benefits sell. So I would always go with the benefit first.
Edwin @ Snappic (44:08.868)
So Black Friday, on our mind, tell me what's the good stuff? What do we need to know? CRO.
Oliver Kenyon (44:10.682)
Yes. Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (44:17.284)
Yeah, from a CRO perspective, there's three things that come to mind front and centre. First and foremost is understanding your audience. So I think surveying your audience is crucial. Get to know your audience before you're running those sales. So get to know the tonality of your audience, get to know their wants and needs, get to
Do enough research that you have the arsenal to change copy, to change things on your site, to make sure that you're set up. Another thing I think is super, super important is getting very geeky and deep into the data analysis side of things. So a lot of people are struggling, I know with things like GA4, they might not have the proper tracking setup, but making sure that that's set up prior and look into...
the analytical side of things and see things like what are my best performing pages? Do I have a hero skew that I typically sell more of or am I selling multiple skews across the store? Do I have two or three products that are selling very, very well together without me even bundling them or knowing it? So doing a deep dive into your analytical side of your store, understanding where those bottlenecks are, what's your top performing pages, because what you're be able to do with that is not only before you hit those busy periods,
be able to try and plug the leaks, as it would say, stop the bucket from leaking and plug the gaps and the holes where people are dropping off. But also you're be able to speak to your email marketing company or your team and say, well, we've spotted
Edwin @ Snappic (45:46.241)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (45:54.757)
this particular page performs best on our store. Let's focus on sending all our marketing campaigns here. We've noticed that this product sells very, very well with this product. Well, let's, before we get into that busy period, email out a bundle and see if it works, see if it sells. And then you can make informed decisions based on that coming up to those periods so you're set up. I think what typically happens, everyone's guilty of it, is you get to a week or two before you're not prepared and you
sell and slash everything and you think you can just have this amazing week and typically you will make more money because everyone's looking for a sale. But if you can do your homework before and understand your audience, understand their wants and needs, their objections, but also what performs best, is it a hero skew versus all of your skews? You could, for example, make way more money sending all your media or all your email or retention marketing to one
on those sales periods versus sending it to your homepage because you've done the deep dive and you notice that that works better. Bundles work very, very well when it comes to Black Friday Cyber Monday, specific collection pages that just showcase the sales work very, very well. But also this again has to be tested, which is quite hard to do.
during Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend because I wouldn't be doing any A -B testing. So we do a site freeze on all our client stores. So we say to them, within three to four days, before and three to four days after, we are not touching your store because we do not want the blame if there's a bug or a losing test or, you know, these things happen in every single agency in the world. So we will do a strict site freeze. But what I was getting to is urgency and scarcity plays a huge role. Now, this is another one.
cross -selling upsell that can actually have a negative effect on your sales. So you need to do it in a subtle way. Things like countdown timers, inventory timers, they work.
Edwin @ Snappic (47:50.648)
Okay.
Oliver Kenyon (47:57.766)
but they need to be believable. So, you know, don't have them across the whole site. Don't have every single item on your store is running or low in stock because people now are so clued up. You know, I'm an old school affiliate guy. I've been doing this for 15 years in the kind of selling online space. And I come from the kind of rush my trial, the straight sale versus, you know,
pay for shipping, get free product where like you've got flashy banners, you've got countdown timers. And I think back in the day when people were almost new to buying online, they fell for it inverted commas.
Edwin @ Snappic (48:22.638)
Good job.
Tris Dyer (48:23.875)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (48:33.439)
Now people are so clued up to it that I just think you need to do it in a very subtle way. So yeah, inventory time is definitely work, labels work on collection pages, but don't overkill it. Don't force people to feel uncomfortable. You still want to give them a very positive buying experience pre -purchase. But yeah, definitely scarcity and urgency. One thing that we do, we test a lot and again, another winning test we've had recently is seasonality. So.
making a sale based on seasonality. I see people who run sales all the time, but they have no end point. So what works very well is, for example, having your summer sale, but reaffirming that it's a summer sale. So having a notice bar along the top that says summer sale now is on ends X or Y, giving them an end date and then making sure there's a clickable link in that notice bar that goes through to your summer sale collection page. Again, a test we ran recently, I think I added an additional 30K in revenue, is just kind of calling out that
summer sale, notice bar at the top, and just making things, not pissing people off. You don't want these flashy banners, you don't want these horrible pop -ups all the time, et cetera, and also communicating your sale to your consumer. So if you have a sale that is a dynamic coupon, so it's added to cart already,
Tris Dyer (49:33.563)
Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (49:55.973)
Tell your audience, say to your customers, know, discount is added at cart. Discount is automatically added at cart. Have it below every single CTA on your site. If it's a sale that is reliant on them putting a coupon in, tell them. 30 % off today, enter coupon, da da, to get your discount. Because you're just gonna cause headaches with customer support, et cetera. So think that's really important as well.
Edwin @ Snappic (49:57.502)
yeah. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (50:18.403)
Interesting. Wow. That's a wealth of knowledge, Oliver. Thank you so much. There's so much going on here. my head is spinning with so much stuff that we've got so much information. As you're saying, each part, I'm thinking some of the stories that we're working with, it's like immediately we can start plugging that in. it's amazing. It's fantastic. So thank you for that. Edwin, do you want to wrap it up?
Edwin @ Snappic (50:18.56)
Thank
Oliver Kenyon (50:22.262)
Of course, I could talk about this stuff for days.
Oliver Kenyon (50:35.592)
great, good, good. Of course.
Edwin @ Snappic (50:40.876)
Yeah, so I'm going to wrap it up. I'm going to outro. I think I intro'd you outro. you intro'd. I'll. So. Just a heads up, I I'm going to do a little spiel and then I'm going to say I'm Edwin and then Tris will go, I'm Tris. And then you go, I'm Oliver. And then I'll say we'll see you on the next one.
Tris Dyer (50:48.604)
I enjoyed. Yeah, yes I did. Yes sir. Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon (50:53.068)
All those tips, your heads just exploding.
Tris Dyer (51:07.887)
Yeah, you can do it, I guess.
Oliver Kenyon (51:08.43)
Cool.
Edwin @ Snappic (51:09.828)
I drop really fast, so I'll do my spiel and then I'll say I'm Edwin, like, really fast. And so it's just a heads up, but you'll follow Tris. Okay, cool. Alright, cool. Guys, I hope you caught all of that. We have the of CRO just spittin' straight fire for endless amounts. Facts! Guys, I'm Edwin.
Oliver Kenyon (51:31.384)
Ha ha
Tris Dyer (51:35.993)
I'm Trish. Thanks, Vin. Bye.
Oliver Kenyon (51:37.218)
I'm Oliver. Cheers guys.
Edwin @ Snappic (51:38.242)
We'll see you on the next one.