This episode features guest AJ Davis. AJ is the founder of the Experiment Zone, a leader in helping ecommerce businesses provide their customers with a seamless user experience in order to get the most value from their website and increase their revenue.

Find out what it means to have a seamless user experience and how websites can use this knowledge to increase their online sales. Always start with your data to discover where to investigate potential problems with your website.

The three things that every webpage should do to increase conversion, yet 75% of websites do not. Tell them what you do, who you serve and why should customers choose you (your value propositions).

Why clarity and quickness are the two most important factors when it comes to increasing your conversion rates and how conversion numbers are a small hinge that can increase business exponentially.

And finally, how her experience as a lead researcher for Google optimizer helped AJ create an intentional process to improve their client's conversion rates through the Experiment Zone. Visit today to request a free conversion report card regarding one page of your website.

Episode Action Items:

You can find more information regarding AJ Davis at Experiment Zone by visiting https://experimentzone.com to find out how to unlock more value from your website by optimizing your user experience.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal, who was recently named to the Best of Los Angeles Awards’ Fascinating 100 List, is the founder and managing partner of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series and Founder of Make Each Click Count University found at https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com.

He is a certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience and counting helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal visit https://www.trueonlinepresence.com, read the full story on his blog at blog.trueonlinepresence.com or shop his books on Amazon or at https://www.makeeachclickcount.com.

New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast and on Make Each Click Count at https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com.

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Making Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is increasing your revenue by improving your user experience. Today's guest is the founder of the Experiment Zone, a leader in helping ecommerce businesses provide their customers with a seamless user experience in order to get the most value from their website and increase their revenue. A big hello to AJ Davis. Hi, AJ.

AJ Davis 1:17

Hey, Andy, thanks for joining us today.

Really happy to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

Andy Splichal 1:24

So in your bio, I just read it says that you help websites create a seamless user experience. So I guess my question is, What do you mean by a seamless user experience?

AJ Davis 1:37

Yeah, when I think of a seamless user experience, I want it to not be an experience that you think about. So if you have a bad experience that has friction, you have trouble understanding the return policy or finding the product you're looking for, we're going to remember that negative part of the experience. And so what we're trying to help our clients achieve is a really seamless, just easily flowing user experience where customers can come learn about the products or services, and then get right to what they're looking for, without getting anything in their way.

Andy Splichal 2:10

So no, no bottlenecks,

AJ Davis 2:12

No bottlenecks, no points of confusion, nothing more people have to kind of circle back or think twice about what they're doing.

Andy Splichal 2:20

Okay, well, let's start with a hypothetical. Say you are an Ecommerce owner out there. And you know, your conversion rates aren't very good. Where do you look? Where do you start? If you want to increase your conversion?

AJ Davis 2:33

We always recommend starting with your data. So kind of getting the facts on the ground, what's happening today? Or is there a certain part of your site where people are really dropping off and potentially getting lost. And that can be a really good signal for then where to go investigate further. So if we were to see a lot of people are getting to product pages, but not adding to cart, we would take a closer look at how the products being surfaced, how it's being portrayed in photos and the description. And so then you can do UX audit or review of that page to understand what might be confusing, what where might people be falling off, sort of a step after that is, if you can't see that and the data is still pointing to a problem. You can start AV testing different solutions, or to even get to a better idea of what to test, you can go and do some user research. So really working with people who are your prospects, seeing how they interact with that page, and it will become very clear what the problems are.

Andy Splichal 3:30

Now, what are you using to track that? Is Google Analytics? Are you going beyond that? How are you identifying where people are dropping off?

AJ Davis 3:39

Google Analytics is a great starting place. So that's typically where most of our clients have at least as a baseline, we supplement that with other data sources, click tracking is a really common one. So you can you see a drop off is happening on the product page, you might watch some click tracking videos or look at some heat maps to see what are people really interacting with. How far are they getting down this page. And then there's a whole bunch of different tools and the digital tools and then research methods that we use to get to the why of why that's happening.

Andy Splichal 4:09

Now, as far as heat maps, I was working with a private client and we installed a really cool app. I'm not not getting sponsored by anything but Hotjar for for the heat maps and did to ask surveys. Who are you using for to create those heat maps?

AJ Davis 4:24

Sure, it's great. We do have a lot of clients using Hotjar, in part because it is so integrated and you can pop a survey up and really get to the point of what's going on. Microsoft clarity has come out as a really good tool, especially for getting started. There's it's a free tool and it tracks all your clicks. So for some businesses, that's a lot more feasible than some of the price points out there. So it's kind of depends on what you're trying to learn and what your budgets are and all these other factors that can go into it. But certainly if you're asking the right questions of your data, and you've got a good click tracking tool, most of those can answer it.

Andy Splichal 5:00

Now, what do you think is a good conversion rate? What's what's the number that if I'm selling stuff online, and I don't have this on my website that I, I should be worried?

AJ Davis 5:08

It's a good question, I get this a lot. I would say the floor is 1%. If you're below 1%, there's definitely something wrong with either who you're driving to your site, or what the site looks like, you're definitely having a problem. But we definitely have clients who are well above that, and are still making improvements to their conversion rate. So what is a good conversion rate is a different question than what's the bottom like, what's the worst possible like, you've got to take action right now. And in general, if you're focused on creating a good user experience, it's going to help you stay ahead of your competition, it's going to help increase your conversion rates increase your average cart value. So while we might not pinpoint a specific number, that's the ceiling, what we look for is continuous improvement. How do we make sure that you're staying ahead of your competitors staying on top top of market trends and really learning your customers and what they need.

Andy Splichal 6:01

Now speaking of conversion, and improving conversion, what are the most important elements that you believe when it comes to to increasing conversion?

AJ Davis 6:13

Now, there's a couple places I usually start with this. The first thing is we have to check that the most obvious things are really there. So the three things that every website needs to do, and almost every website fails in some way.

Andy Splichal 6:27

Oh I like this.

AJ Davis 6:28

Yeah.

Andy Splichal 6:29

Let's hear it.

AJ Davis 6:29

Yeah, right. It's the three things in particular, these are essential on home pages and landing pages. So if somebody gets to your page, and they can't answer these three questions without having to scroll or click around, you're failing. And this is minimum, right? Conversion improvement. So you have to state what it is that you do. What is it that you sell? Right? It's a lot of companies talk about something very aspirational. And they forget to say we sell shoes. So be very direct and really clear with the words you're using about exactly what it is that you're doing. And the second thing that's an, it's more often forgotten is who you're talking to, or who your target audience is. A lot of times, businesses want to target everyone, our product works for everyone. But that's really in practice, not the case. And people connect better if they see themselves in your website, in your messaging. And then the third thing that's got to be above the fold as quick as possible is why us? Why should I stay on this website, as opposed to clicking around maybe going back to Amazon or looking at one of your competitors. So then focusing on the what we do best are the three value props of why the stay at this business. So those to me are the three essentials, almost, you know, 75% of the sites I look at are failing on at least one of those three. And then beyond that, I think there's lots and lots of different themes that can increase conversion. Sometimes it's really simple, like, the flow to get to checkout is confusing, or it adds these little roadblocks along the way where customers get distracted, or they second guess what they're buying, or they're not really sure what your return policy is. So then they click around and kind of get lost in the muck of the user flow. So that's generally something we're looking at, as well as, what are the really important steps? And how do we make it really seamless to get through. And then the last theme, which I see on every client we've ever worked on, and I look forward to getting an email with a very simple email length, website length, it's just a button to prove me wrong. But almost every other website has just a lot on their site. And there's a lot of content, a lot of words, a lot of photos. And oftentimes, we want to simplify that and really boil it down to the essence of that message or the essence of that imagery. So we often do a lot of testing about just simplification. What's the value of having this image here? What how can we change this headline so people can understand it more clearly and more quickly. And clarity and quickness are things that get people to convert, because they have a lot going on in their day. And if they have to spend a lot of time understanding. It's very easy to get distracted while you're browsing on your mobile device. And so what we want to do is get right to the point, make it super straightforward and guided. And those are the things that help people convert.

Andy Splichal 9:32

Interesting. So to quickly summarize you said what you do, who you're doing it for, and why they should choose you? Now, you had mentioned that under the why they should choose you three value props?

AJ Davis 9:51

Yeah, it doesn't have to be three. I usually start with three and the reason is, one is not enough because it's just sort of, okay you have one thing that's different and helps you stand apart. But oftentimes, we want to do something between three and five, because our brains are only able to remember so much information. So if we get towards the seven and 10, we're listing out all kinds of reasons that were different or better. We can overwhelm people, and they won't really focus on those core differentiators. So I like to keep it simple and make sure that we're presenting the right things so that it's sticky. It's something that people see when they first get to your website, maybe you remind them of them on your product page, maybe you remind them of it in your cart. And so that way, those are the core things that are your values, or your differentiators are the same, what you're bringing,

Ware what are some examples of this?

Yeah, there's all kinds of different ways that businesses, especially in ECOM, can differentiate themselves. Sometimes it's where the product is made. Sometimes it's how quickly you're going to get the product. Sometimes it's the amount of research that went into the products, you're certified by another organization. Reviews, social proof often can come up like we're the we're the best software for this problem is a great one. And sometimes it's even simpler than that. So it's we've got free shipping and returns Your satisfaction is guaranteed. And so things like that can really make a difference for people to feel confident to stick around and learn more about your product.

Do you find that some value props work better than others?

Absolutely. And this is a place where you can do lots of iterations, lots of AV testing, and really interviewing your customers is going to get you to the right answer quicker. So for example, we had a client that had some value props on their homepage. And we thought, Hey, we should bring those to your product page, just just because not everyone sees your homepage, or we need to remind people of it. And by adding that to the product page, we saw no difference in conversion. And we were really surprised because we test this all the time. And usually we at least see something happen. So we decided instead of just kind of leaving it as inconclusive and moving on, we took a deeper and we did some customer interviews, and we heard over and over again, in those sessions. These don't matter. We don't care about these, everyone's saying the same ones.

So it was maybe free shipping? We care about your set, you know, satisfaction, you know, every things that everybody are doing.

Yeah, in this case, it was a software company. And so it was just some things that they you know, they said were like thoughtfully designed, or there's a couple of just sort of general things that seemed on their face value to be true and helpful to know about, but they really weren't the differentiators. And so by taking it to customers and asking the right open ended questions, we were able to get to the right value props for that specific audience, test them out and see a lift from that. So value props are one of the hardest things because it is so specific to your audience, so specific to your products, and can change over time. And so that's one where you often find yourself doing lots and lots of research and testing over time to get it right.

How did you reach out to the customers of this client?

Yeah, for this customer list, I believe we we recruited through their existing customer set, so we likely use their database to pull a subset of participants that met the criteria for the study. Sometimes we'll do proper value prop research with prospects as well. So prospects can be a little harder to find, because you don't have their mailing list, because if you did, you'd be sending them messages about your product. So oftentimes, if it's a company, or if we're looking at doing research with people, that would be the target customer but aren't yet using it, or haven't yet shown an interest in it, we'll use some outside recruiting tools. So some of the kind of the newer ones on the market, besides going to an agency to do the recruitment respondent.io and user interviews.com are great tools to find participants. Oftentimes we'll look for, for people to be involved in the study who purchase from competitors. So they're in the market for this type of thing. They understand it, they meet a lot of the criteria, and then they haven't purchased from this particular retailer or company.

That was interesting,

Different ways to get it.

Right. Ya know, I've used a company, I don't know if you've heard it called PickFu, where you can have people do a real time feedback surveys on different aspects of your website. But this is more this is this is speaking to customers or customers of your competitors.

Yeah, we go layers and layers deeper than a lot of the tools on the market. So we use the tools to answer a question. So we always start with the question and find out what method and tools we should use to get to the answer. So there are great tools where you can kind of plug in get some quick feedback. I absolutely encourage people to do that. But sometimes you've got a heavier question. just used to go layers deeper. And we pull our inspiration from user research that is typically done like the process is typically done for product development. And we've brought that into CRO. So we ask deeper questions, we do recruitment with very targeted people, we just borrow a lot of the methodology and approach from product development.

Now conversions, one of those sort of like called small hinges that can really move big doors and really impact your business. Let's, let's go over some numbers. What can a small epic conversion rate mean to bottom line revenue?

Yeah, and I'll just mention it a little plug here. While we're here, we actually build a tool. So companies can figure this out for themselves. So at on our website, we've got a CRO calculator that helps you figure this out for your context. So nice plugged in some numbers for us today, just to get us give me an example. But it's a great option for people wondering if it really matters for them. So let's say it's a business with a pretty moderate, like, let's call it as moderate amount of visitors, maybe 50,000 visitors per month, let's say they're getting a 2% conversion rate. So that's 1000 orders per month. And if the average order value is 125, that means their annual revenue is 1.5. Right? So if we get a 25% increase to conversion, that would mean their annual revenue moves from 1.5 to 1.9. Which

That's amazing,

Is amazing, right? So, you know, we basically what we're doing is a bunch of small changes that can lead to these, you know, massive impacts for the business and make a real difference to their growth trajectory.

You know, given that number, and it's huge, do you find that most companies are really spending enough time focusing on working to improve their conversion rates?

Yeah, what I find is that oftentimes, the, they're not thinking about it, because they're very focused on generating traffic, because when you put the lever and the gas on traffic, you get more money. But oftentimes, whoever's responsible for generating that traffic is thinking, wow, I can just multiply the benefit of all this effort we're doing on marketing, if we just bump up the conversion rate, and think about the experience a little bit more. So absolutely. There. If you dedicate a certain portion to your marketing budget, you should you're probably spending tons of money on marketing. And if you're not spending 5% 10% of that on CRO, you're really not balancing your budget in appropriate way to make sure you're getting that multiplier effect from all those dollars you're spending for traffic.

Yeah, for certain. Now, is there a favorite success story or two that you could share with one of your clients or or to your clients?

Yeah, yeah, we actually, we were just wrapping up a test this week. So I can I can talk about that at a high level, we, to the point about simplifying your message, we have a client where we're looking to get more people to sign up for something to get leads from their site. And we built a brand new page for people to go to and compare it against an existing page. So I call this a landing page test where there's two different pages, two different experiences and messages. And the core of what we were looking to learn in this study was, can we really focus on instead of saying all the features, all the things you can do with this product, really focus on why this company over their competitors, and we're not mentioning competitors, but we're just focusing on what are those core differentiators between this product and working with the similar products, but a different company. And one of the challenges in this space is the products are pretty similar. So it's really about the service you're getting. So we build a page that really focused on the service talking about, you know, the quality of support, the length of the support, that it's all included in the product. And we just gave a really simple checklist of here are the features. And the other page that we were testing it against was very feature rich, each feature had a description and information you could read about so you really understood all the things that we're getting in this in this product. And we found that we could double their conversion rate just by focusing.

Wow, that's that's huge.

It was huge. And we're a little surprised it's so big, but it really kind of hits home this idea that we don't have to tell our customers everything, they have some expectations of how things work. And we need to instead focus on what do they need to know, to understand and make a decision.

Now on the flip side of that, what are some of the challenges with that you might struggle with getting results for clients?

Yeah, great question. One of the things that comes up for us a lot is that we want it to be easier for customers to move through your website. So if you have an Ecommerce Store, you've got a lot of different products. We want your search to be really easy to find. We want your navigation to be easy to find. And what happens is sometimes the Primary KPI, which is get people to search more get people to use your math more is goes way up because we the change we make is very effective. But the end result is that they get fewer orders. And so we kind of hit this wall sometimes where the intended effect is there at the very top of the funnel, but it hurts down the funnel. And so it makes it hard to you know, what it really points you was a deeper problem, because what we then say is, when more people use your nav, they get distracted, they their journey is broken. And it points to a much bigger problem than we can't find your mouth, it's the nav isn't working for your customer. So oftentimes, where we have trouble increasing conversion is elements that should be very beneficial are actually detracting from their conversion rate. And the team and our team doesn't know until we run an experiment on it. And so oftentimes, it leads to a series of investigations to go, you know, layers and layers in what's happening. How are people using it? What research questions can we ask? So we end up spending a lot of time on things that should be very straightforward, should be very, you know, based on just UX heuristics best practices, it should work. But by measuring it, we see it doesn't. And we can we can figure out why.

Interesting. Now, personally, have there been any business books out there that you can attribute to your success as an entrepreneur?

Oh, business books, absolutely. One of the first books I ever picked up in this space, and it's an old and good one is the Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug book, it's just common sense approach to web usability is very simple. It's a great read, if you've never really thought about usability and how to design a website, the examples are a little bit outdated and the version I own. But I think it's such a great version of just like the conscious the premise of don't make your customers think like, tell them what you do make it obvious. So there's some really great examples in there. This was one of the first books I picked up in this space. The other book that's really influential is The Lean Startup and really thinking about the taking the process to approaching a problem not with I know the answer, but I know how to ask the question. And once I have the question, I know what to do to find the answer. It's made a huge difference in our ability to, you know, think iteratively be really curious, experiment with everything we're doing, instead of assuming we're smart, we know it, we should just do it. So those are the two that I'd recommend.

Now, I don't know if I mentioned it early in the in the interview, but I love your company's name Experiment Zone. And I feel like I'm a mad scientist or something. When I when I looked at it, how how did you come up with a company name?

Might feels a little cliche to say this, we did customer research. So we you know, we it took a little while to figure out the right name, I will say this is not my forte, coming up with names. I was always that kid in class, if you have to a group name, I look at everyone else hoping they come up with it. So this was definitely a partnership. And the way we got to it was just kind of talking about talking to people who do testing or want to do testing. The word experiment comes up so often. And the idea of like being in that zone, being in that mindset of everything is an experiment just kind of clicked one day after all those conversations. So came about through some intention and some some accidental conversation.

Well, I like it, I like it. Now, I also read your bio, that you were the lead researcher on Google Optimizer product? How did that experience work in your favor when you were creating the experiments?

Yeah, I actually knew nothing about conversion rate optimization. So I started my career as a user experience researcher on products, including Google Optimize. And it was a really great lens to figure out this space. So I interviewed hundreds of people whose entire job was doing AV testing, doing optimization, and learned all about how they did it, why they did it. And, you know, I think, first of all expose me to this great world of testing and experimentation and getting the answer, like the real world answer to what's going on, and being able to take quick action in in the real environment. But I think the other piece of it that gives us an advantage now is that, you know, one thing we see a lot of companies doing is just guessing at what tests are run and we create with very, very intentional steps that process around how we decide and generate hypothesis that we do our AB tests on. So it's not just kind of sitting in the boardrooms like saying out sandwich in ideas out loud and saying, Oh, I like that one. But instead we have this like deeper dive into the data before we even think about testing. And I don't think that would have come without seeing and feeling that that was a missing gap across all those participants that I interviewed.

You know that that really goes into my next question, which was how do you guys stand out from your competition?

Yeah, I think what makes us sticky and really valuable is that we really care about getting the answer. And we all go all the layers deep to find it for you. So it's not necessarily something that prospects know about or necessarily value. But the reason our clients stick with us for as long as they do, is because we think about things in a different lens, we ask questions, and we always find answers for them. And we'll we'll just keep going at it until we figure out what has happened or why something didn't work. So really, the core of it is this marriage between traditional conversion rate optimization and AV testing, with the practices of user research that so many product teams are doing, and just perfectly blending that so that our clients know, they can trust us to ask the right questions and get the right answers for them.

So how does your service work? Is it on a per project basis? Is it a time commitment? How, what is the timeframe that the client comes with when they sign up with you guys?

Yeah, we always start with clients with at least a six month engagement, because we want to make sure that we really get to know them, we really get a couple of things off the bat for different solutions, and all that thoughtful research that goes on alongside that most of our clients will then continue working with us and we become their conversion strategy team, we think about what questions to ask what the data is, we run and design and build the test for them as well. So they really look to us to be their outsourced conversion rate optimisation team.

And how are you programming these these tests? Are they AB test or multivariate test?

We do a mix of both. Most of the time we're doing multiple variants within an AB tests, like an ABCD test is a pretty standard approach. We have most of our clients are using what is called client side testing. And that's through a testing tool like Google Optimize, Monetate, AB Tasty, there's a whole bunch of options out on the market and that and what those tools do is essentially take a paintbrush to your existing content. So nothing's changed on the back end. And we can apply code through those tools to just change the experience for people who come to your website.

Got it, got it. Does it like give the experience more to the ones that are trending better? Or is it a straight, straight percentage of traffic?

We've got options for both. And generally, the way we approach it is we'll divide it up evenly between the variants and monitor them really closely. So if one is falling behind, we can kind of make a decision to turn that off. But we're looking to learn from the test to have a clear answer of which one one, the exception to that would be, you know, in the holiday period, when you're making quick decisions, or if you have a specific promotional window, these tools do offer the ability to just auto allocate traffic to the winning variant. So there's different scenarios, depending on if our goal is to get the most revenue in this weekend. Or if we're looking to definitively answer which version was better?

And who is the perfect client for your service? Are you guys mostly ecommerce clients or professional services? Where where's your sweet spot?

Yeah, we really started in the Ecommerce space that have been expanding, we do a lot of work with financial services and with software companies as well. So we really kind of spanned the use cases or the specific verticals, really the perfect client, our clients that want to be curious and want to grow, we're looking for customers or clients that you know, want to trust us to do that work for them, but also are excited about learning and excited about finding improvements for their business and learning about their customers. You know, we what we aren't is we're not just an outsourced AV testing company, you can find someone who will build tests for you that are just based on whatever your hunches and happy to let those people do that type of work. What we look for is to be a really good partner and to be, you know, to build trust and to work together so that we can make sure we're putting the best foot forward for our clients.

And is your retainer model. Is it based on traffic? I guess what, what kind of budgets should somebody be expecting when they when they want to partner with you?

Yeah, great question. It's mostly going to be based on how many tests and how much research and analytics we're doing. So it's basically kind of a pacing of what we do, that ultimately does come down to your traffic level. So if you've got less traffic, we can't run as many tests because we need more time to collect enough data to be certain. So it really varies. I would say this, the low end of what we do is somewhere between like four and 5k per month would be a starting price and then it goes up from there. Depending on kind of our recommendations about how much we can learn how much data you have, and how much testing makes sense for you.

Okay, great. Now, if somebody is interested out there if they're perfect or not, and they want to learn more about working with you and, and your services, how can they get a hold

of you?

They can go to our website, experimentzone.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, AJ Davis, happy to always be direct contacted that way, or you can message us through our website, we've got a giveaway on our site, which is a free report card, so you get a chance for our team to give personalized feedback about one page of your website. So it's right there in the navigation so you can go right to the experimentzone.com. And then it's that first link in the navigation.

Well, great. Now, is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

No, this is great. I think what I just recommend to your audience is to kind of be curious, make sure you're keeping track of what's going on with your experiences. You know, there's lots of lots of moving pieces for any ecommerce company or any digital company. And conversion is a really important piece of it. So don't forget about it.

Great. Well, thank you, AJ, once again for joining us today.

Great. Thanks so much for having me on Andy.

For listeners, remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding the

Experiment Zone, or connecting with AJ you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information regarding growing your business, check out our all new Podcasts Resource Center available at www.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all our different past guests by show topics and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any services I've discussed during previous episodes. That's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.