Transcript of How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

Most founders run their website the way people used to take medicine before medicine was a science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guest today doesn't play that game. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralize, and he built something called predictive CRO, studying what's already won and lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads, Why your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for. And a 2-minute test using nothing but Google Translate that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell. If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting. This is the vault. Let's unlock it.

Sahil, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here.

All the way from Spiralize, the business itself. Now, I know before the show we were talking, I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and A/B testing. And I know that what you guys are doing is revolutionary and it's quite interesting. So, I'm excited to get into it. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point?

Yeah. So my name is Sahil. I'm the CEO at Spiralize. We're an A/B testing company. I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing different kind of SaaS tech type companies my whole career, and I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

Okay. Well, I mean, how did you get into Spiralize? Where did— like, tell us like where that came from.

Yeah, so it's a fun story. So I am actually not the founder. I was the founder CEO of my previous company, which was a SaaS business, and I was actually an early customer of Spiralize. So around the time Spiralize was just getting off the ground, I started using the product and I saw that it really worked and it opened my eyes to the power of any The power of A/B testing as a way to improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how I became a true believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about what's the next thing I want to do. I had stayed in touch with the founder here. He had kept building the business organically, self-funded, was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because I lived in Atlanta already and Spyros was based in Atlanta. So it was a good arrangement. I'd done the solo CEO founder thing wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way. We both knew how hard that was. There was this mutual understanding of it. We also had— there are some things he's really good at.

There's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work really well and it's worked out really well. I've been doing it now for 4 years.

We are using words like A/B testing and I'm just assuming there might be people listening Like, what is even A/B testing? So let's take a step back here and go, okay, let's talk about what is it? What are we even talking about right now?

Okay, let's take this. Let's even step away from like marketing websites, business. Let's just start with something probably everyone can relate to, which is when you have a new medicine, how do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment. You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better? But you want to make sure it really works. So what do you do? You get 100 people, you give half of them what's called a placebo. It's like a sugar pill, it's nothing. And you give half the people the actual drug and you measure how many people got better. What you want to make sure is that, say you had 100 people, 50 people, make sure men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things because you want to make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one group and all the women in the other and it turns out the drug works really well for men and not so well for women or some other variable.

That's called randomization. That is an A/B test. It's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. You can do a before and after. It's not as good. This is the gold standard. Some people call this a double-blind controlled experiment. Fancy words. A/B test, same thing. So that is— now, we accept that as the best way to know if a medicine works. If you went to the doctor today and she said, hey, I've got something for your cold. Here, take this. And you looked at it and you're like, huh, I've never heard of this. Like, I was gonna take some Robitussin, but what is this? And, and the doctor's, oh, it's, it's really good. You might ask, well, how do I know it's good? Like, oh, I gave it to my neighbor, worked great. Okay, uh, is your neighbor— they have the same symptoms as me? Uh, how do I— how much should I take? I just Take a swig. Okay, like, is it effective at like 2 tablespoons, 1 tablespoon, once a day? Like, oh, well, I bought— trust me, I've been a doctor for 10 years, this'll work.

You would never do it, okay? Or at least I don't think you would. You would hope not. Okay, this is— now, back in the early days of medicine, okay, and by the way, that time wasn't that long ago, okay? We're measuring— probably less than 100 to 200 years of recent history, that's how people took medicines, right? That's the days of patent medicine and people standing on a shoebox hawking their Sahil's Patent Cough Syrup. No one would do that now. You would never take a cancer drug that hasn't been tested.

Yet, Right.

So there's the pre-scientific era to medicine and then we're now in scientific era to medicine. Yet for people's websites, they do that all the time. They do the equivalent of, I'm a doctor, I've done this for 10 years. I don't know, I gave it to my neighbor, worked great for them, should work for you. All the time you look at websites, why'd you do this on the website? Oh, it's best practice. What do you mean it's best practice? Well, I read about it on a blog. Okay, so it worked for one person. How do you know that works for you? Well, it looks good. CEO liked it. Yeah. Okay.

Emotional decisions.

I used a template. I picked the best— I'm not going to name brands because this is not the fault of any of the brands who do website templates. There's lots of really good ones out there, some also not good ones. I looked at 3 templates, they said, this was the best template for my landing page. This was my— this was the best-looking homepage template. By the way, if you're Sawhills Barbershop, that's probably fine. Okay, but if you're building an actual business where the website is the front door to your business, But you may want to put a little bit more thought into it.

Yeah.

If you're an e-commerce brand, okay, if you are, if you're selling B2B SaaS and you're selling cybersecurity software and your average product probably sells for like $100,000, every lead that comes, every person that comes to your website and goes away, that's really valuable. Millions of dollars you're losing. You're leading me. So what is A/B testing? It's taking that same thing that we use in many other parts of our life and applying the— taking websites from the pre-scientific gut instinct era to the scientific era. That's a journey. And for some companies, it makes sense to do that. For some companies, it doesn't. And it doesn't mean you can't make mistakes doing that. It's prone to mistakes. It's not perfect. But if your website is an important place where you do business in some way with your customers or potential customers, this is a much better— it's a really good way to make your website your number one salesperson.

And we're talking about optimization here. So we're talking about you have your website, which is, let's call it your A. And then what you're doing is you're just testing little things here or there. on a variable, on a B variable, and sending traffic to both to see what converts.

You don't have to limit it to small changes. You could make a big change.

You can make big changes.

Yeah, you can make big changes if you're getting ready to run them. Have you run a marathon or a half marathon ever?

I have ran a half marathon once and I promise I would never do it again. My body's not meant to run long distance. I'm in the same—

okay, my wife Fran once and she did great, but just watching her train, said, I'm— I have other things that I want to do. Okay. When you run, what did you do to get ready?

I, I did the— there was like a protocol. This was a while back, but like I trained with a group and you do your runs and you, you know, you do your start with your 2Ks or you work your way up and then all the way up till you get to where you gotta go.

Yeah. So, so there's, there's a training regimen.

There's a training regimen for sure.

There's probably a rest regimen. Okay. If you, if you run 10 miles, Miles every day. You're not gonna— that's actually worse.

Yeah, walking distance, speed. There was quite a bit of work, yes.

There may have been a dietary component. Okay. Now, depending on how serious you are, maybe you didn't need to make drastic changes, but probably some advice told you to avoid some foods, probably go easy on the hamburgers and milkshakes, and maybe go a little bit more on the healthy lean protein. Okay. One way to get ready for a marathon is to only do one of those things.

Yeah.

And then you could say, my time got better and I know with certainty it was because I wore the right kind of shoes. And then the next marathon, maybe you'll add compression socks. And the next one, you'll eat chicken 5 times a week instead of burgers. You could do that. And then every time you got this like, Pretty high confidence level, but at the end of the day, you know what gets you there a lot faster? Maybe you should do, you should, you should combine those things. Eat lean protein, wear good socks, wear good shoes and train and get enough rest. Now, will you know that 10% of your reduction in your race time came from the socks? I'm just making shit up. Another 5% came from eating lean protein. No, you'll never know that.

Okay.

The same is true in A/B testing and you can get away with it. I would say, particularly on websites, particularly on a B2B website. First, I just want to be clear, the stakes are much lower. We're not injecting a cancer-treating drug into your body.

Yes.

The stakes are really high and you want to go one variable at a time there, absolutely. We're talking about, can you get someone to fill in a lead generation form or click, I'm ready to start, I'm going to try that software for 7 days first, see if it works. So the stakes are lower. The other thing is, For our audience out there, I'm gonna use some acronyms, B2B, D2C, just business-to-business. If I'm selling software to other corporations, that's business-to-business. If I'm selling you shoes on the internet, direct-to-consumer. In direct-to-consumer, you have all this traffic. How many millions of people are maybe going to nike.com to buy shoes? A lot. So you can quickly get a sample size Which means maybe you run it for a week and there's millions of people coming in, you can very quickly detect there's a difference between the performance of 2 versions of pages. On the B2B side, how many people are shopping for a new cybersecurity software today? Some, okay, and in fact, there's quite a few, but not as many shopping for shoes. So one way to get results quicker is to Make big changes. Now, you don't want to just do a bunch of random shit, but it is an acceptable trade-off to maybe you change the message on your homepage and the image that goes with it.

And why? Because usually the messaging, what's called the copywriting, and then the visual image, they complement each other. And so if your headline is making some big claim about how effective your product is, say it's stopping cybersecurity attacks, maybe the image should support that and they work together. So it's not just changing random things, but this is for our marketing people in the audience today. And we're going to talk about some very specific examples. This is what we're talking about, A/B testing.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because as you're, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, okay, for, for a true A/B test to happen, we need traffic.

Yes.

So, what is that number? I don't think there's a set number, but more is better than less, obviously. And then, you were talking about making big changes. Yes, big, small, minute changes. The question I have, because as a non-A/B testing expert, one thing that I've always thought about A/B testing is if you change too many things and you don't know what works because you've changed too many things and you can't control the variable.

That's right. That's right. And what I'm talking about here, maybe a good way to kind of put some boundaries on it is I might change, I might be okay. I could probably get okay with changing a few variables on one section of one page, but I wouldn't change multiple sections on the same page and I wouldn't change something up funnel or upstream. And on the page, and maybe after the page.

Okay.

Like, maybe just start with like, I've got a— I'm just gonna pick something simple, a shopping cart add to cart. And I want to test, do I get more people to add it to cart if I say free shipping or free returns? By the way, both probably work. Maybe you should test both. I could do that. Maybe I would change the button color and maybe I could also change the font size, how visible I want to make it. I probably could roll that all into one test. What I wouldn't do is then also change maybe the ad copy that gets people to come to that site to emphasize one of the— because now I'm really distorting the effect of the experiment. I think that's where most Experimenters would say, hang on a sec, be careful about changing too many things because now you're calling what's called confounding variables and it clouds. You just really don't know which thing made a difference.

I couldn't agree with you more. I haven't heard the word confounding, but yeah, it's if you're changing too many variables, then you just don't know which ones are actually working. It's interesting because we can go as detailed as, like you said, as simple as a small button going red or green. As simple as, I love what you just said, free shipping or free returns. How, when is there a business ready to start doing this type of A/B testing? Like at what levels of traffic are we talking about to the website? Now I know that's subjective 'cause you, I wanna make sure everyone is clear. Yes. Someone coming to Nike website and buying a pair of shoes, Very different than a cybersecurity product that's $1 million. Having said that, within the guardrails, when is it that people are coming to you usually? Where are they when they're saying, hey, we need to hire you and your service for A/B testing?

So maybe a good way to put it is, well, let's just start, why do we care about traffic? We care because you want to make a decision based on what's called a statistically significant result. So if you run a test for just one day, maybe you run it on a Monday, well, maybe the people that shop on the weekends are different than the people that shop during the week. In the morning. Who knows? Okay. So you want it to be representative of your traffic. And the more traffic you have, the more quickly you can represent it. But I want to talk about, there's 2 factors here. One is just the amount of traffic, the other is time. Because if you have a high-traffic site, running the test for 1 day still isn't enough time for the reason we just talked about. Maybe the weekend shoppers are different than the weekday shoppers. So you want to look at both of those things. Let's talk about for a business-to-business type of website and you're optimizing for lead generation, lead generation being someone fills in a form and they're saying, hey, I want to check out your product.

I want to see a demo. I want to do some kind of free trial. Usually where it starts to make sense that this is worthwhile is if you're getting 100 submissions a month. These are ballpark numbers. Take them as guidelines. There's some companies where 100 is more than enough and there's some where it's not nearly enough.

Yeah.

But most of the time, if you're south of 100-ish or maybe 50 to 100. One, you probably then don't have enough traffic. So traffic is not enough. You should look at the number of conversions. The second thing is, it probably means you're a small business. Nothing wrong with that. But there are probably other things you need to be working on before you work on conversion rate optimization. For the most part, maybe you just need to be trying to get more traffic or more of the right traffic.

Yeah.

Getting your ideal What, use some marketing jargon, ICP, ideal customer profile, or persona, same thing, just there in the first place. 'Cause if they're not even coming to the site, optimize it all day long, it doesn't really move the needle. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter.

Now you guys at your business, you said you guys do very unique, or you have a scientific way of A/B testing. What exactly is that or what makes it unique or different for you?

Yeah, so we do a thing called predictive CRO, predictive conversion rate optimization. So what most in-house testing teams do, by the way, there's many, many good ones that are out there. You tend to see these at bigger companies because they have the maturity and the budget to actually hire like a team of data scientists and They have people whose whole job every day is designing, doing web design. But most companies don't have that. And so when they say, oh, we're going to redesign the site, maybe they hire an agency, maybe they have someone in-house who's done it, and what they're mostly relying on is personal experience. They might be right, they might be wrong. But the data available to them inside their head is probably a very small number. And it's hard to know if the thing that worked for your last company, is it transferable to your new company?

Okay.

Okay. Why? Because 2 things have changed since you— even if you actually ran this as a good Statistically rigorous A/B test. One is a function of the company you're at today and the company you were at yesterday are probably different at least a little bit. Number 2, time. If you look at a website from 5 years ago, you can probably tell it was built 5 years ago. And if you get in the Wayback Machine and just look at some big company that you would consider modern but has been around for a long time, like Salesforce. If you look at in the Wayback Machine, you look at Salesforce's website from 10 years ago, you'd be like, oh my God, what were they thinking? 10 years ago, it looked normal.

Yeah.

So the thing that worked that was better than your control 10, 5 years ago may not be. It could be. It could not be. But if you're relying on personal experience, Now, maybe you hire an agency to solve that problem for you. They do lots of A/B tests. There's lots of CRO agencies, lots of good ones, some not so good ones. They are usually relying on what they've tested for their other customers. It could be a big number, it could be a small number, but it's still a limited number. And while they solve some of that problem, they still have that What worked? Did it work because circumstance, or is it transferable? And to know that you want to have, you want to be able to see where it worked. You also want to see where it didn't work, winners and losers. Okay. Think about if you, if you interview athletes and you only talk to the winner of the World Cup going on right now, if you only talk to the winner of the World Cup, okay. And you said, What did you do to get ready for this game? It's pretty helpful. But you probably should also go talk to the teams that lost.

Talk about what did you do to get ready for this game and then compare that.

Yeah.

Okay. Same thing here. You want to have the winners and the losers to know what works. And the more of that dataset you have, the better. So the thing that we do that's different, we crawl the internet, And we shamelessly steal everybody else's A/B tests. Now, I say steal because it's— I'm trying to be a little bit funny. We're not actually stealing anything because all A/B testing is in the public domain.

Yeah, I hear you're saying, but you look at what everybody else is doing and see what's the most converting for them. How do you know it's converting though?

That's a great question. Okay. Think about a company that Let's take nike.com. They're not a SpyroX customer. If they're running a test on their homepage, what we can see is that they're splitting the traffic. We can actually see the visual difference between the A and the B. Imagine every day for 2 weeks, they're running a split test. And then on the beginning of the 3rd week, they send 100% of traffic to the B version of that homepage. They've picked the one—

Do you know how they're sending traffic? Can you see that?

There are some ways that are proprietary that we have figured out how to do that.

AKA black hat or gray hat?

I wouldn't call it black hat. I would call it white hat.

Okay. But there's ways that you can see how much traffic are going to these different pages. I mean, this is pretty—

Yeah. Or you can estimate it.

You can estimate it. So you know that, okay, they're running 2. You have basically a way to find out that these big companies are running A/B tests and then figure out which one, which control actually worked. So that you can now take that data for your customers.

That's right. What we're looking for are repeat patterns among similar companies. So if nike.com runs this really interesting test, I don't think that is necessarily super relevant for CrowdStrike, a big cybersecurity company, and vice versa. By the way, Let's say CrowdStrike runs a test. Yes, it may be relevant for other cybersecurity companies, but is it predictive? It's really hard to know if you've got an N of 1. I would not go copy that because now you're just talking to the winner. You have the winner's curse.

Okay.

You want to look at the winners and the losers, so what you want to look at is like, hey, there's 100 cybersecurity companies, what is the portfolio of tests they ran and what things tend to win and what things tend to lose, and then bet on that portfolio.

Okay.

Okay? Not unlike if you were a poker player and you followed someone who's really good, World Series of Poker type of player, any one of her hands or his hands can win or lose. And if you only watch them play one hand, and you say, oh, I'm going to copy that hand, I don't think that's super predictive.

Yeah.

But if you watch them play 100 hands, you're going to detect some patterns. And if you watch 5 players play 100 hands, you're really good. And if you watch 100 players play 100 hands, now there's some clear patterns of when they hold, When they fold.

When to hold them, when to fold them.

When to hold them, when to fold them. That's what predictive CRO is. It predicts not what one test will do. It predicts a portfolio of tests that you should run based on what's worked for similar companies. Similar doesn't have to be just they look just like you. It could be someone that has a similar call to action on a paid landing page. By the way, paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic traffic. Is it on a homepage? on a signup page. You want to look at all of those and then say, okay, which ones are similar? Let's predict the portfolio of tests you should run. Run the whole portfolio because across that portfolio, you'll find the winners.

Let's talk. I know you have so much basics here and I want to talk— when I meant basics, I meant to say, sorry, data. You have so much data. I think for my listeners, I'm just thinking about the smaller businesses that may not be able to bring in yet a data scientist or have a full CRO team working for them, but they can maybe understand different things that we know through data that work. Like for instance, for things that I know, and I could be wrong, but I've heard is like, you want someone to say yes and move, you know, hit a button. The button shouldn't be red because red is a sign of stopping, right?

Maybe.

You see, that's when— then I've heard that. I've seen—

I've seen—

interesting. And that's where I heard other people have said, no, you're actually wrong. Red actually does work. So are there— is there anything that for sure that are basics? Like, these are the musts. Like, these are the musts that you have to have or that we know work?

That's a great question. Here are 3 things that our listeners today can use right away and they don't have to spend money, buy fancy software, hire an expensive agency to do. Let's start, number 1. And by the way, what we're going to talk about are homepages and landing pages. I'm starting there because that's where most people's traffic goes. If you have some niche page or some technical— like a page that describes the technical attributes of your product, those are necessary elements of the user journey. Okay, I'm putting those aside for now. Okay, because typically those are so specific to you and your product or your service, you should—

Those are people searching also for you and they're already in the funnel. If they're looking at the technical page, they're, they're already sold. They're just trying to find a way to buy.

Okay, first thing, show the product, show the product, show the product. Okay. We have a phrase, happy people kill conversions. What does that mean? Happy people hurt conversions. So many websites have stock photos that they got on, you know, in their Adobe account of 2 people in a conference room looking at a tablet going, wow. First of all, who's having this much fun in a conference room? I want to go there. My conference room is not that much fun. No one— let's talk about this. Think about— can you think of the last car ad you saw? Okay. What do you remember? What car it was for or what brand?

I'm thinking— I remember. I don't know why it's sticking out for me, but I was thinking about the Audi one. There was one that was an Audi.

Okay, cool. Audi. Is it Audi? Makes really nice cars. Yeah. Can you picture what was that? Was it a TV ad, YouTube ad, magazine ad?

It was an awesome TV ad. It was a luxury TV ad. I only remember it because it was around where I live and it was a ballin' ad with a new car and rolling into a $40 million home on the bank of the ocean and with the beautiful wife, jacked husband gets out, smiles, throw the keys to her, she gets in, they drive off, and then the Audi comes in quattro.

Awesome. Awesome. So there's a component of lifestyle, there's a component of aspiration, but there's also kind of showing the car. Imagine the same ad, picture it right now, and just imagine you had a magic eraser and you just erased the car from that ad.

Yeah, totally.

What would be left? Lifestyle?

Lifestyle, yeah.

Lifestyles of the rich and famous and good-looking. Would anyone then say, I think I'm going to go to my Audi dealer and check out a car? No, no, you'd be like, what the hell is this? Okay.

This is actually really important. I hope people are, if they're here listening, this is, we're starting to get something very important here, AKA remove the stock.

Remove the stock photos. Now, if you have, if you're a product company, show the product. If you're a service company, show the people who deliver the service.

Explain that.

Okay. So we worked with a company that does home air conditioning repair. Imagine, now I live in Georgia. If my AC breaks, that is like the top of the list. I might fix the AC before I fix the toilet. It's like 110 degrees in August. You just cannot live without air conditioning. I can go to the backyard to go to the bathroom. I can't live without air conditioning. And we ran an A/B test. Their homepage had stock photo of mom with 2 kids, everyone looks happy. It kind of looked like, I don't know, Mother's Day, like the kids were giving her tulips.

Yeah.

It was a happy person. I think it was supposed to convey that, hey, if you need your AC fixed, you're going to be happy when it's fixed. The A/B test we ran against it, we replaced the photo with an image of 3 uniformed people in front of their van, with the brand name of the van and that was the image on the homepage. Didn't change the copy, didn't change the offer, didn't change anything else, didn't change the social proof and there was a double-digit improvement in people either filling in the form or clicking. They had 2 calls to action. It's a local thing, so it's click to call or fill out the form. Keep in mind, these people are already very high intent. When you need your air conditioning fixed—

They're massively high intent.

You would think, what could you do to actually stop someone from calling? Turns out, yeah, double-digit change just by people saying, oh, this is who I'm going to get. I get a professional person coming to my home in a nice van and they're going to fix my AC right away. We worked with a company that does home warranty.

Yeah.

The homepage showed, Images of that, kind of like, again, stock photos of happy people. Presumably it resonates because like, oh, they're happy, I'll be happy.

They have, yeah, they have home insurance or whatever warranty.

I have it.

Yeah.

Yeah. And what we, what we tested against it is images of things getting fixed. An AC unit getting fixed. A, it was like a Like a faucet, like a bathroom faucet getting fixed. Yeah.

Water, hot water tank or something.

Yeah. And then like an electrical, like, you know, what is it called where they, they put that thing in your, in your outlet to see if it's producing electrical charge?

Yeah.

These are all intuitive things. Okay. The kind of things also just the average DIYer probably doesn't do themselves. They want to call professionals. So it's clear, like, you will get these things fixed. Someone's going to come to your home and fix them. These are problems. Double-digit lift.

Wow.

What about— Show the product, show the product, show the product.

So like for a SaaS company, you would just show, show like the screenshot of the app. The screenshot of the app.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's lots of different ways to do it, to style it. If you're concerned that the picture of your app is proprietary and that's a source of competitive advantage, first let me tell you, your competitors almost certainly already know what your app looks like. Okay? They've downloaded it. They probably signed up with a different email and they're using it. Everyone does that. So just let me— yeah, no, I hear that objection a lot. But even if you think that's true, you can, you could do a stylized version of your, of your user interface. What you're trying to get the person to do is just think of that Audi ad. You got to put the car in the Audi ad to get the person to go to the dealership.

Yeah.

Put a picture of your, of your product. So that's number one. Everyone can do that right now. Just go to your website. Just ask yourself, Do I have happy people? Because I'm probably hurting conversions. Okay. Number 2, this is a good one. Take your homepage, right? You gotta do this in a browser. Okay. Right-click in Chrome. And one of the things will be Google Translate. Pick a language that the people around you don't speak. Okay. So maybe pick Arabic, pick Hindi. I'm picking languages we speak at At home growing up, okay? Then take your homepage, show it to 5 people who don't know that it's your company, know you well, and just ask them, what do you think this company does?

Okay.

By the way, they're not going to come up with something specific like, this is a point-of-sale entry system for multi-location retailers, but they might say something like, oh, this looks like business software, or something, okay? If they can't even come close to the category, you have a problem. And the translation technique, what it's doing is it's removing the copywriting from the equation and it's forcing the person to use the imagery to draw an instantaneous conclusion about, am I in the right place? And by the way, that is what your audience does when they reach your homepage or landing page because the brain processes images faster than words.

So imagery is very important then on it.

Super important. Super important. And so if your copywriting is doing all the heavy lifting, you have a problem because you've created this high cognitive load homepage or landing page. The copywriting is absolutely important, but the instantaneous decision that almost everyone knows when they get to a page is, Am I even in the right place? Just like when you walk into a restaurant, if you're on date night, you're looking for certain things. Some ambiance. You haven't tasted anything. You're looking for ambiance. Is there a smile by the maître d'? What's on the tablecloth? If you're going to Italian, is this like white tablecloth? Is this checkered, more casual Italian, like Little Italy kind of thing? Or am I going to Chipotle? I love Chipotle. There are certain things I expect when I walk into Chipotle. If I don't see them, my brain is making kind of real quick decisions. If I go into Chipotle, I expect it to kind of smell a certain way. It's kind of that grilled chicken that's what I expect. If I go to date night at a nice place, there's a different kind of just all these little things. My brain is making instantaneous subconscious-level decisions about, am I in the right place?

I—

you can— yeah, you could do this. Don't spend money on fancy software. Don't hire an agency. Everyone can do this now.

Because I, I didn't get it, and then I got it, and I was like, oh my God. So I want to make sure it's very clear for people here. Like, step 1, remove the stock image. Just get rid of any happy-go-lucky stuff and replace it with the—

with your product or service.

And replace it— if you're a product-based business, replace it with your product. If you're a service-based business, Replace it with the service people or the type of service—

Or the outcome.

Or the outcome that people are getting.

The outcome. Like, so for example, like we worked with a higher education company, show the diploma.

Yeah, yeah, show them getting graduated, show them graduating, show them throwing the, the, the whatever, the, the hat up or whatever it is. Um, number 2, this is very interesting. Take your website, put into a different Language. Language.

And take the homepage. You only need to do this for the homepage.

Take your homepage. Sorry. Take your homepage, put it into a different language, send it to somebody and just say, hey, what, what is this company?

What do you think this company does?

What does this company do? And if they can't tell you within a range, obviously within a range, it's a business service. Oh, it's a, it's this type of service or this type of product. Uh, that tells your imagery is off and people look at the imagery versus the copy. Which is very interesting to me because I come from direct response copy market, like writing where it's all copy. Like the copy is like the most important thing. And you just said imagery and copy are both almost equal.

Well, well, let's, let's talk about that a little bit. There's 2 jobs. What the imagery does is it helps establish for the website visitor that they are in the right place. It is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and you go, hey, Am I in the right type of restaurant, fast food or fine dining? What the copywriting does, think of that as I'm reading the menu. And if I see some things and they're described in a way that's enticing, that speaks to me, to what I'm looking to get out of the experience, I'm going to order. And by the way, at McDonald's, they write those value meals in a certain way. That's copywriting.

Yeah.

Okay? And it works. And if you go to a nice restaurant on date night, the way they write the menu is written in a certain way to make you feel like, oh, this chef is just— I'm getting something so special. This meal is just— it's going to be— when they talk about where is the food sourced from and whatever foam they use to decorate the plate and all these things, right? And you would never see that on a McDonald's value meal and vice versa. So the copywriting is— but they serve two— they— for our conversation we're having today, they really kind of have two different jobs.

Yeah.

Okay, now let's talk about the copy.

Is this number 3 or is this number 4?

Number 3. Number 3. Let's do number 3. So we talked about first, just tactically get rid of stock photos. Number 2, make sure whatever images you use are Low cognitive load.

Yeah, low cognitive load.

Okay. Low cognitive load. Okay. I see this all the time on B2B websites. They have like a schematic of how their software fits into the ecosystem and the tech stack and how it integrates with 17 different things and it's animated and things are flowing and that's the wrong place to put it. That's a high cognitive— put that on your technical page, put it on your solutions page, put it on your How the whole thing works. This is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and the maître d', before they ask you, hi, how many people today? Or, do you have a reservation? Or, do you want to sit at the bar or the dining room? Explaining to you the 17 steps the chef does to prepare the vegetables today. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Could I just see the menu? Or like— I just want to tell you, table for 2. You don't lead with, let me tell you where we source the chicken, and that kind of— right? So imagery is important. Homepages should start with low cognitive load and then move the user to higher cognitive load as they move through the journey.

You go to a restaurant, you start with, can I get you a drink? Let me bring you the menu. Have you thought about an appetizer today? Okay, let's pick your meal. McDonald's has it down to, or Wendy's, pick your 5. They just say, number 1. Number 1, just start there. You don't have to say 2 words. Give me a 1. 3 words.

Low cognitive load.

Then you go to a higher cognitive load. Don't do some complicated schematic blah, blah, blah. Number 2, you're talking about the copywriting. Make it skimmable. The more it offends your 12th grade English teacher, the better. You're not writing for the AP English exam. You're not taking the SAT. This is not the entrance exam. This is not your personal statement to get into graduate school. No one cares about what your belief system is, your aspirations, Or what you think you're about. They came there because they have a problem they're trying to solve. So, well, you've done direct response copy, right? You can make it easy for them. What is this?

It's interesting because the— it's interesting. Oh man, you're going to open up a whole can of worms here for me. Because I have seen little copy convert, right? But then where we're talking about, so I'm talking to B2C at this point, right? Business to consumer. And there's people that I see writing copy that are like essays, like, I mean essays, but they're converting. It's like long form. I'm sure you heard of like a long form sales letter.

But it can work. Long form can absolutely work. Long-form copy, long-form video, long-form anything can work in the right place.

Like, I come from the world where it's pre-headline, headline, subheadline.

That's great. And what do you put in the headline?

Well, that's the hook. Yeah.

The hook. Start with the hook.

Yeah.

That is—

that's either the pain or the solution, right?

Like pain or solution. Start with the hook.

Pre is who it's for, right?

Yep. Those things are all called skimmability.

Yeah. Okay.

And if you write a long paragraph, now how can you find the hook?

Yeah.

Lead with the hook. And then your subheading needs to support the original claim before you make new claims.

Yeah.

We see this all the time. There's a bold claim and then there's 3 new claims. Like, hang on a sec. I just— yeah. Like, I still haven't bought into your first claim. Why are you telling me about the next claim? If your hook is safe car— we just bought a Volvo. My oldest is about to get her license.

Yeah.

So she's going to, not tomorrow, but after some practice, she's going to inherit our 2017 Subaru, great safe car. So, we went out and found a nice pre-owned car for my wife. We bought a Volvo, beautiful car, safe. The hook, great safe car.

Well, I was just going to say, everyone knows Volvo, safe, right? You think Volvo is known for safety.

And, they do a great job. They've also moved upmarket, by the way. The old boxy cars that we all grew up with, the gray box Volvo that is like an indestructible cage, they look nice, too. Okay. But they first get you to buy into that it's safe before they start telling you about all the other things, right? Everything is, hey, we're safe. That's the hook. Why is it safe? We've got these great cameras. We've created this motion detection. By the way, I didn't know this until we went shopping. Do you know a Volvo weighs more than a Suburban?

I would assume so, yeah.

Yeah, I didn't. Well, it's the steel. It's like some kind of special steel they're made out of.

Yeah, there's safety. They're heavy cars. They're heavy. Yeah.

Super heavy cars. You're driving basically a modern tank.

Yeah.

Anyway, so they, they support the first claim, then they go in and tell you about, okay, now let's tell you about some other things. Let's talk about what— this is a fun car and let's talk about how we made it nice. And same thing on your website. Good copywriting. You start with a hook, make the hook believable before you start introducing your claims. These are 3 things that everyone can do on their website today.

I'm just going to say it again, right? Get rid of the stock images or the happy images. Show your product or show your service or the outcome of the service. Low cognitive load on the pictures. So again, translate it to some language nobody can understand, send it to somebody and say, do you know what this company does? The answer is, if they can't say it quickly, You are, you know, the problem. And then third is skimmable copy. I mean, this is huge. This is big stuff. Like any business owner, open up your website right now and just look at it right now. Like you want to, if you're wondering how do I make my website better, it's like we just gave you the 3 answers. Very simple. Open the website. I wanna do it right now with you so we can go through it. I'm not going to, but that's how I'm feeling. And then the bonus. What's the bonus?

Here's the bonus. We're gonna just— we gave you 3, so can I— 1, 2, 3. This is like 3A.

Okay.

Take whatever hook you have on your headline today, or if you're thinking of writing a new one, okay, write the new one. Take your 3 closest competitors, take their homepage, put them next to yours, like 1, 2, 3, 4. And then see if you can tell the difference. And if you can take your headline and put it on your competitors, it means you don't have a good hook because it doesn't stand out. And you're simulating what your audience is doing. They may not be doing it explicitly, they may be doing it implicitly, but you should always assume that your audience has your competitors' They either come from your competitor's website or they're going there next or they have them up side by side.

Yeah.

It's a great test of the hook. What it tends to do is it strips— it tends to force you to strip out jargon and fluff and not even worry about, am I better? Just start with, am I different?

Still saying the clear message though.

Yeah, yeah, it's got to be clear. And I'm saying do it on a homepage and not on like a technical page or a solutions page, because that's just a different ballgame. Okay, there, um, the homepage, you got to keep it simple and you just, you got to strip out the jargon.

Would you say, well, you're saying less is more. Would you say on a homepage, because I'm seeing this more and more, like homepages have very little copy. Almost now.

Especially in the hero. Yeah, the top, we call it the hero section, the top section.

Section.

I, so I think there's a happy medium. I think you should not be afraid of putting copy on your homepage. It does a lot of the heavy work. But it works better if you make it easy to skim. And you have a good hook.

Yeah, I love it. If people— what type of businesses do you work with?

So we mainly work with B2B SaaS companies, what we call the mid-market. So about 100 people to about 3,000 people and about $50 million in revenue to about $1 billion, $1.5 billion in revenue. The companies smaller than that, they usually are trying to solve other problems. that we don't help them with. And the companies that are bigger than that, especially a lot bigger, they don't need our help. They have their own internal army of data scientists, and that's great. That's great for them. But for that part of the market, we can give them a lot of help.

So $50 million-plus SaaS companies is who you really focus on?

That's right.

And I love it. You said this, I remember you said this to me before and I was like, wow. And you said anyone before $50 million, they don't have a conversion problem, they got a marketing problem. Or I think you said they got a marketing sales problem.

Yeah. There's other problems you need to solve first before you worry about optimization. I think of it as if you're out of shape and you haven't done any exercise, you don't need to be trying to get your marathon time down. You probably should start with walk 3 times a week, then maybe get to, can you do 10 pushups?

Yeah.

You do that, then you can start doing things like optimizing for diet and body composition. And maybe, can I do not just 10 pushups, but 10 pullups? But if you go straight to that, probably not going to work.

Yeah. I love it. Where can people find you if they are a— I mean, if you are a $50 million plus SaaS company and you want, obviously, the best and the best in the business right here, A/B testing, Where can people find you?

So, they can go to spiralize.com if they would like to find out more. Also, if you want to hear more tips on like the kind we just talked about, check me out on LinkedIn. I post 4 mornings a week at 7:30 AM Eastern, and it's always some combination of easy-to-digest 30 to 60-second things. I also have a game show where people come on. They try and beat me in finding different CRO crimes. That's actually the name of the show, CRO Crimes.

Nice.

It's a lot of fun. 7 lightning rounds. The winner gets $100 for the charity.

I love it. Well, we're going to make sure we have those in the show notes for you. Any last departing secrets, words for the audience?

Um, I think we covered it great. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. If anyone made it this far, thank you for listening.

Yeah. And I appreciate it. Thanks so much.