How to double your leads and sales without increasing website traffic

It's an admirable goal - getting more conversions without increasing the volume of your website traffic, yet so few marketing campaigns focus specifically on increasing conversion rate.

I love working on increasing landing page conversion rate, I love talking about it, and I love writing about it.

There are three key ideas you need to understand about working on improving your conversion rate:

1. How to DIAGNOSE areas of opportunity (identifying conversion obstacles).
2. How to properly test one variant against another (there's a lot more to this than it may seem).
3. How to analyze the financial impact of your experiments and tests.

Does It Even Work?

Yes, it does. It really, really does.

I will show you more case studies in my live online training session, but just for starters, it's worked very well for our site (literally the website you're on right now).

The blue line represents our volume of leads per month from June to November (6 months). Our monthly traffic has stayed relatively stable at about 6500 unique visits per month.

Over these 6 months, we've redesigned elements of the site, rewrite copy, restructured the navigation, worked on social proof and other elements of effective persuasion, and increased the overall quality of our content. We did all this through using the exact strategies and concepts I'll be teaching in my upcoming free training session.

Our lead volume increased by almost 300% without increasing traffic.

So yea, this definitely works.

In fact, in this upcoming LIVE training session (it's 100% FREE to join), I will spend well over an hour discussing all three components of successful conversion rate experiment campaigns.

I'm running the training webinar through Zoom, and on my plan I'm limited to 1000 registrants. The space will fill up fast (being that I've notified 117,000 students). Please RSVP to the webinar now if you'd like to reserve a seat. Once again, the training is free.

Here's a brief overview of a few key elements we're going to talk about.

The Weibull Hazard Function

The Weibull Hazard Function is a formula that used to be used in factories to determine the likelihood of a factory part needing to be replaced at any point in time. That's not all that interesting by itself, but what's more interesting is that the Weibull Hazard Function follows a negative aging distribution.

Meaning, factory parts were less likely to need to be replaces as time went on. A new factory part was more likely to fail than an older factory part (overall). This makes sense when you think about consumer goods purchases. If you own a jacket past the 30 day return window, the very fact that you haven't returned the jacket yet indicates that you like it and will be unlikely to get rid of it any time soon. In other words, the closer to the purchase date you are, the more likely a jacket is going to be returned.

The factory parts scenario now makes more sense. The poorly designed parts were more likely to fail right away. If a part stayed in service past a certain time frame, it proved itself to be a well made part and would be less likely to fail.

Put simply, more calls were made for new parts shortly after a shipment of parts than calls made for new parts many months after the shipment.

This was not the assumption at the time, and the Weibull Distribution was an important breakthrough.

In 2010, The Microsoft Research Center conducted a massive study on landing page abandonment rates. They used the Weibull Hazard Function as a measurement tool, analyzing an enormous set of data. They simply replaced the likelihood of a part to fail with the likelihood of a visitor to abandon a website.

The results were groundbreaking, and this research provided conversion rate experts with a brand new set of design guidelines.

I will talk about this more in the upcoming online training session, but what they found was that abandonment rates of website visitors followed a Weibull negative aging distribution.

This is unbelievably important to understand, and once you do, you'll have a clear sense of what your landing pages and websites need to convey to visitors in the first moments of their website visit.

Getting this right will more than double your average time on site and will lead to a higher conversion rate as a result.

The 5 Second Usability Test

One you understand the dynamics and importance of a negative aging distribution, you need some sort of way to determine where your optimization efforts should be focused. The 5 second usability does just that in a quick and cost effective way.

Essentially, you ask a panel of respondents to answer a question (or two or three) after showing them an image for 5 seconds.

You typically show them an image of your home page, but the 5 second test can be applied to ads, call to action blocks, and product pages as well.

You then ask the respondents:

1. What does this company do?
2. What value do they provide their customers?
3. What makes them unique?

For your first few tests, you can just ask them the first question.

Now, you need a way to analyze and report on the results of the 5 second tests. I have a fast way of doing this by exporting all the responses into a Google Sheet and categorizing each response into one of three categories. I will walk you through a live 5 second test in the training, and I'll also show you exactly how to analyze, plot and report on the results of these tests.

Remember, the point of the 5 second test is to determine if you have a conversion obstacle. If your 5 second test shows that you do, that's when you know it'll be worth your while to run more sophisticated A/B tests.

You don't want to jump into running A/B tests right away, especially if you have a large site. A/B tests take time, and you'll save a lot of that precious commodity if you run a few good 5 second tests first.

Running A/B Tests

Once you've diagnosed your conversion obstacles, you'll want to start running A/B tests. Google Optimize is a great (and free) software that lets you do just that.

There are two types of A/B tests that are most commonly run: Redirect tests and Variant Tests.

Variant tests are when you edit an element (or number of elements) on an existing landing page. For example, you may edit the headline of your homepage, and run 50% of all traffic to that one URL to each of the two variants (one variant has the original headline and the other variant has the new headline). But, it's still all running through one URL. All visitors will see the exact same URL in the address bar, regardless of which headline they are seeing.

Redirect tests are where you design a different page altogether, on a different URL, and you send a certain percentage of the traffic heading to the first URL to your new URL. Redirect tests are like switching signals on railway tracks. 100% of the people are headed to platform A, but you're telling to Google to take 50% of those people who are headed for platform A and divert them to platform B.

In a variant test, everyone winds up at platform A, but the platform looks a little different to 50% of the people who arrive there.

There are advantages to each type of test, and I will discuss those in more depth in my upcoming free training which you may be able to still register for here (unless it's full already).

I will also show you, step by step, how to use Google Optimize to setup both types of A/B tests.

Analyzing The Financial Impact of A/B Tests

This is a skill that it sorely missing from most of your toolkits.

You need to be able to say more than, "Nice! we increased conversion rate by 15%".

If you want to be a compelling marketer, you need to be able to say, "We increased conversion rate by 15%, and that means we'll generate an additional 50 conversions a month, $20,500 in top line revenue per month, all while keeping our marketing costs stable".

Now you're talking! 

I have formula template that can be used for any business built out, and everyone who registers for my training session will be getting a copy of it (along with a couple other formula calculators).

Do you want to go more in depth in a live online training session with me?

Now that you know what my training will be about, you can decide if it's something that would be of value to you.

If you'd like to reserve your spot in the training, you can do so here.

All I ask is that you only register for the training if you really plan on attending. If you register and don't attend, someone else would have been able to attend in your place.

Again, my Zoom plan only allows for 1000 registrants, and I'm inviting over 117,000 to it.

Looking forward to seeing you there!