Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson
We coined the term conversion rate optimization (CRO) in 2007 to describe this process of pulling together all of the available tools, techniques, and skills—with the goal of improving a website’s conversion rates. (Location 451)
Strictly speaking, CRO is web design done right. It’s making a page that is perfectly designed to sell, or get sign-ups, or get downloads, or whatever the page is there for. (Location 456)
The obvious reason to improve your conversion rate is that you want more customers without having to spend a penny more on advertising. (Location 463)
Principle 1: The top companies design for function, not aesthetics (Location 564)
If you do make your website more beautiful, ensure your designs are minimalist—visually and technically. Keep them elegantly simple and easy to update. And don’t forget that—like the Stanley hammer—good functional design has a beauty of its own. (Location 605)
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” —Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (Location 612)
Principle 3: For reasons that are subtle, the top companies make frequent, incremental changes, and rarely (if ever) have huge website redesigns (Location 617)
If you update your website in incremental iterations, you get three benefits: (Location 626)
Scientific Web Design entails carrying out frequent, iterative changes. (Location 640)
The three principles of Scientific Web Design are embedded into our methodology as follows: First, analyze your website and visitors. Through intensive research, identify the biggest opportunities for improvement. Next, implement the changes in frequent, small, targeted iterations. Then, put your neck on the line (like we do) by insisting that the changes be A/B tested to prove (or disprove) that they have grown the business. (Location 649)
If you are a marketer or designer, ensure that you follow the three success principles: Design pages that fulfill their primary purpose, measure and test everything you create, and minimize your work-in-progress. Learn how to make websites ultra-effective. (Location 659)
Why you should avoid meek tweaking (and not just because it sounds creepy) Just because your changes are going to be incremental and frequent doesn’t mean they should be minor or trivial. In fact, the biggest mistake people make when optimizing their websites is what we call “meek tweaking.” They set up A/B testing software, then they make daft changes. They change button colors and shuffle items around the page, just because they read that it worked for someone else. They do the Garbage In → Garbage Out thing. (Location 673)
The moral of the story is that small improvements take ages to detect, disproportionately and counterintuitively so. So you should aim for bold, targeted changes, for the following reasons: Each change gets you more profit (an 80% improvement gives four times the benefit of a 20% improvement, obviously). It’s more fun and interesting. It’s much quicker. (Location 689)
And so, for each objection, you need to display a clear counterobjection. (Location 731)
The best marketers create funnels that counter each objection at the exact moment that the visitors think about it. And the only way to do that is to understand the visitors well. (Location 746)
Kissmetrics and Mixpanel provide additional functionality that can be useful to conversion marketers. Cohort reports, for example, show how groups of visitors behave over a long period. Amplitude helps marketers to understand how users behave within a website or app. (Location 849)
Tools for click-mapping We often use Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Clicktale, and several A/B testing tools that include similar functionality. (Location 877)