How can a simple image tweak increase your click-through rates by 12% (or more)? Today, we're learning the ins and outs of consumer insights with Justin Chen.

Specifically, Justin shares:

• The importance of A/B testing to improve CTR.
• Why gathering customer feedback can help you grow faster.
• How images influence consumer behavior.

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Try PickFu for Free
• Connect with Justin on LinkedIn

About Justin:

Justin Chen is the co-founder of PickFu, a consumer research platform companies use to get fast, reliable feedback from real people. Thousands of global brands, small and large, now rely on PickFu to help them make better data-driven decisions about their products. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from U.C. Berkeley and an M.S. in engineering management from Santa Clara University. Justin has been a serial entrepreneur for 17 years and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

The big question is how do we as entrepreneurs build wildly successful, profitable businesses without hustle, culture, burnout or venture capital? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. Welcome to The Growth Pod.

Today on the pod we have Justin Chen, who is the co founder of Pickfu, a consumer research platform that companies use to get fast, reliable feedback from real people. Thousands of global brands, large and small now rely on Pickfu to help them make better data driven decisions about their products.

He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an Ms. In Engineering Management from Santa Clara University.

Justin is a serial entrepreneur of 17 years and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Justin, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Angela, I am so excited.

Today you're going to teach us about how to increase click through rate by 12% with a single image change, which I think is going to be so huge and transformational for everyone regardless of the type of the business. So I'm excited to get into that.

But first, you have a really long history of being an entrepreneur and a founder, so I'd love to know what's one thing that you wish you knew before starting your first business?

I don't think anyone realizes how long or how persistent you have to be with these things.

I think a lot of times in the media you hear about what seems like an overnight success, but when you read the story, it actually took 10 plus years of grinding away. And I think that's it's easy to jump into things, it's harder to go all the way with it.

And so not that I don't wish I did this, but it would have been nice to kind of have that insight going into it.

Yes, absolutely. I feel like that overnight success thing really resonates with me. A lot of people who are like, oh, that's. They just write it off as luck.

And it's years of like trial and error and different experiments that have really gone into the overnight success that you're seeing. So that's right.

It's a lot of iteration.

Absolutely. Okay, so when it comes to improving conversion rates, why do you think this is an important topic?

It depends on the type of business, but for most it comes down to sales. So a lot of our customer segment are actually brands. So they're selling consumer products either on Amazon or Walmart or something like that.

They're selling physical products. And a lot of times the click through rates that we're trying to improve leads it directly to sales. So maybe you're selling like A dog bowl on Amazon.

So how do you make that more appealing? So that as people are searching for dog bowls, you're the one that they click on and deeply consider to purchase that product.

So a lot of our customers will come to us to get feedback on that kind of imagery because you really need to make that first impression.

And you know, kind of that old adage of don't judge a book by its cover is more true than ever, that people do judge it by their main image of what's in the search results on Amazon or any of the marketplaces that we're searching on. So it really makes a difference to spend some time optimizing those things. So the way that we do it is we have a panel of people that we tap into.

They're just consumers who are incentivized to give feedback on things. And you could pose very short surveys to them. For example, the question could be, which dog bowl would you buy?

And you could put up a couple of your variations or your dog bowl versus your competitor's image. And people will vote on which one they like and they'll give written feedback why. And this is all incredibly fast and off platform.

So you're privately getting this information from this digital focus group and that allows you to make a more informed decision about what image to put up that might perform better. That's kind of the story about how we've helped a lot of brands increase click through rate by, you know, 12% or more with a single image change.

I love that. I think that a lot of people, when they're thinking about testing their images, they run AB tests on their website.

And the problem with that could be that you're maybe paying to send people there through your advertising and different methods to get people onto your website. But with Pickfu, you can get these insights before you even start spending money to get consumers to your website.

And you can see, is this more appealing than my competitor's image? Between these two images of my own dog bowl, for example, you know which one's more appealing?

And I've seen on your LinkedIn specifically all of the different types of insights people have gotten, including the product packaging, for example, that worked really well for someone. So it seems like, like these are really valuable insights that you're able to get before you even launch a product.

Yeah, that's right. And one of the downsides of potentially testing things live is that kind of by definition you're losing out on some sales, right?

You're showing an option that is less performant than the Other one. And so if you can get as much data as you can earlier, before you even launch some of these changes, you're going to save yourself some headache.

Some of your rankings may be affected if you start performing less, less well. So. And to your point about the packaging, a lot of times people will come to us because you know the click through rate's not good.

They'll run one of these tests. Invariably the feedback is actually not on the image, but on the branding or the packaging design or the actual product design.

Those are all things that they can't change right now.

They've already got all this product in stock and they really should have been tested earlier before ordering the product or even stocking that inventory.

So really gathering feedback as early as possible in the product process is the real way to improve your click through rate and your and your conversions.

Yes. And that sounds like a very expensive headache to have and a very expensive lesson to learn. So I love that there's so many different options.

With Pickfu, you can not only test the product packaging, but also listing images, things like that. And I've even seen people doing it for book covers. So it seems like that there's so many different options for you to get on there and test. Awesome.

So with that sort of background, what types of businesses do you think need to pay attention to their conversion rates? We've mentioned E. Com a little bit and the importance of maybe testing your product packaging.

But are there other businesses that could benefit from this as well?

For us, we target anyone who's selling to consumers and that's a really wide breadth of people.

So like you said, we have a lot of authors and publishers that are testing book titles and book covers because they are selling in a competitive marketplace and you really do need to stand out. So for us, we think it's incredibly important.

Anyone who's selling in these competitive marketplaces, whether it's Amazon or the iOS app store, the Google Play Store, even in Google Search, there's the shopping and there's all these different images and competitors that are being shown. So really focusing on those competitive areas.

In the gaming space, we have a lot of mobile game companies that are testing their app icons because again, if you're searching for a solitaire app, you probably don't really care which one it is, but you're gonna, your eye is gonna be drawn to the app icon. That's most interesting.

And then you wanna focus on improving the app Store screenshots and kind of all that marketing collateral that's on those listing Pages.

So I think almost every product has a parallel, even software products where you may be in an app, you know, the Apple App Store or some kind of a software marketplace. So there's a lot of parallels between the E commerce area that we have a lot of focus and kind of everywhere else where you are selling things.

Developers.

Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like there are many different use cases for a B testing things and just getting those insights early and often.

And I love your example about the mobile game developers because that's something maybe that you don't think about a B testing or icon but it's something that is so quick and easy to get those insights.

So I love that and just our conversation is making me think about all of the different things like I'm going to launch a new lead magnet, I should get on there and ab test like even just like the COVID design or maybe even the titles. Today you are going to teach us about how to increase click through rate by 12% with a single image change.

So I am very interested to hear how we can go about achieving this.

Yeah, so the way we have this particular case study on our website of it's from yes Bar which is one of these like protein bar type things. And so they wanted to test out a main image change so that they could improve their click through rate. So they held all other things consistent.

And what we did with them is we work with their designer to come up with a couple new variations of the main image.

And so this is taking their existing product, not changing the product itself but actually just changing the layout a little bit to make it more appealing, convey a little bit more information about the product within the image. And so we ran a single pickfu test. I think at the time it cost $85 for this test of three different variations.

Immediately it came back one with the one was the resounding winner. And so we just took that variation and they changed it. We put it live.

We monitored all the performance and did a comparison of from the past performance and we immediately saw a 12% increase in the sessions that they got from the search results on Amazon with just that single image change. And we've seen this repeated over and over with a lot of our other clients.

But the more advanced approach is then to take that image and then take tested against your top competition to make sure that your your improvements are not just a local maxima of like okay, well I have the best version of my image but that doesn't really matter if I'm competing against all the other Protein bars. So the next step was actually to take to do it against your competition.

And what we've seen when people who do that, they actually are able to increase their prices because their main image is now so much more compelling and so much more performant that they're selling it for.

You know, we had one that was a headphone manufacturer and he actually raised his prices by €9 per unit and increased the click through rate in sales, all by just adjusting the main image. Nothing about the fundamental offering or the product.

I really advise anyone who's doing anything, especially in a competitive marketplace, to start testing this.

And the key value is actually in all those written responses that we talked about because people will talk about how like, well, I like how this image conveyed this information or emphasize like this point or showed the product in use or whatever it is and then you can start leaning more and more into that with your design.

Yeah, I love that.

I think that one of the biggest things about doing any sort of AB testing with marketing is not understanding why consumers are behaving in a certain way. So having that written feedback from people is valuable into why they're making those decisions and that can help you make better informed decisions.

And I also loved what you said about how the image change not only increased the click through rate, but also the conversion rate and everything. A lot of times online your story is told through your imagery.

And so while this test maybe wasn't done to improve conversions, the story was so much more compelling in that image that it did end up having that impact.

That's right.

I mean, I think it really changes the narrative of what you expect to click on sometimes when you've got that powerful hook image, for example, like if you've got a product that includes a lot of accessories but you don't showcase that, then you may not even get the click.

But if you actually display that, which a lot of products do now, all the different, you know, maybe ear sizes, earpiece sizes and there's a case and all these things.

And if you, if you lay that out nicely now, your expectations like, oh, wow, I'm, I'm getting a lot more in this product and like that's actually going to change how you compare it against all the competition. And then when you get to the listing, you're kind of set up for like, cool, I'm getting a lot of things and not just the headphones.

It's a much more primed buying experience.

Absolutely. I think that, you know, people make decisions so quickly, like you said, for the earpieces laying them all out.

It maybe even creates more visual space in your listing image and makes it look like it's more valuable when like you said, maybe you've included this the entire time. Amazing. So first of all, start testing early and often. Test everything. You can test everything from your listing image to book covers.

And the opportunities are really endless for testing for your business. And then three, continue. Once you have a winning image amongst your images, test against your competitor images to make sure that you are remaining.

You have that competitive advantage. Are there any other, like high level takeaways to sum up?

No, I mean, I think those are the important things. I think it's the harder thing is getting people into the habit of testing.

Yeah.

And so, you know, whether you use pickfu or just start going to coffee shops or whatever it is, talk to your existing customers.

Building this habit of gathering feedback I think is the hardest part because I think it puts people in a vulnerable state that they don't want to be in, obviously. But it's incredibly insightful once you start doing it and you, you almost get addicted to it.

We've tried to take some measures in our app to make it more habit driving. So like, we'll make it so that you could do polls as small as 15 people and that'll only be $15 and take like 5, 10 minutes.

And so trying to get it as small as possible, like, all right, I just, I'm gonna put my toe in and I'm just gonna try together a small sample size and see how it's, you know, what that's like. And then, you know, start doing that more iteratively and more frequently.

And so hopefully that starts to build that muscle memory of gathering consumer feedback. I'm saddened by how many people don't gather any kind of feedback. So any kind of feedback you gather I think will be very helpful.

Yes. I love that and I like how you guys are lowering the stakes of starting.

I think even though smaller tests are great for direction setting, you have two polar opposites and you just need a quick test on like, which way do I need to go with this? And then once you get more refined, you can do a larger sample size as you start to get a more and more ref version of whatever it is you're testing.

But yeah, I echo that sentiment. Not enough people are testing and cultivating that sort of like always be testing mindset is so critical in any business. Awesome.

So I'd love to know what's next for you and what's next for pickfu. I've heard a lot of great things.

Do you guys have anything coming up on the product roadmap that you want to share or anything in your life that's going on?

Sure. So on the product roadmap, one of the most interesting things about running Pickfu has been how global our customer base has been.

Probably about half of our customers are us. Everyone else is, you know, China and Europe, Latin America, all over the place because they're all selling in this global economy.

Everyone is selling into a different country or every country at this point. And so one of the things that we're doing is expanding our respondent pool to even more countries. So we started with the U.S.

but then we added Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, recently, Mexico and Japan.

So adding more countries throughout the rest of this year is kind of the main priority right now because we have, you know, for E commerce and for gaming, those are very, very global industries and we have people kind of cross selling into different countries all the time. So that's a big thing for us. Continuing to lower the bar even more to make it even easier for everyone to come.

It's, it's all self service so anyone can come, sign up for free, give it a try. And we want anyone to be able to access consumer research. We're trying to democratize it for everyone around the world. That's our main goals.

We're continuing to iterate on the platform. We're talking to our customers all the time just as we advocate.

So we're always trying to understand how can we make it easier, what features do you want? And just really trying to make it the easiest way to gather consumer insights.

I love that. Well, with that said, where can listeners find Pickfu and where can they connect with you?

Sure. So you can go to pickfu.com P-C-K-F-U.com Like I said, you can sign up for free.

There's a free onboarding poll so you could just try it without putting any credit card in and you'll, you'll experience what it's like to, to get feedback in real time for me. You can, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Justin Chen. I'm, I'm pretty active as you've seen on my profile.

Following me on LinkedIn, you'll be able to see a lot of the different use cases that a lot of our customers are doing with Pickfoot.

I highly recommend that. I found your LinkedIn very helpful when preparing for this episode.

So if you're listening to this and you are interested if Pickfu might work for your use case or not. First of all, just log in. Like Justin said, it's free to create an account and you can start playing around in there.

But also you can see on Justin's LinkedIn how people are utilizing Pickfu and the different insights that they're getting, and that can maybe help inform the tests that you then run. All right, awesome. Justin, I really appreciate your time today. I know that I got a lot out of the episode, and I'm sure our listeners did as well.

So thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

Yeah, it was a pleasure being here, Angela.