Top Reasons Why To Consider Using A Conversion Rate Optimization Company with Martin Greif

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is, top reasons why to consider using a conversion rate optimization company. Today's guest is a conversion rate optimization expert, author, speaker, entrepreneur, senior executive and team leader. He brings more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience to his role at SiteTuners, where he is responsible for driving revenue growth, establishing and nurturing partner relationships and creating value for SiteTuners broad customer base. A big welcome to Marty Greif. Hi, Marty.

00:39 Martin Greif Hi, Andy. Thank you for having me.

00:42 Andy Splichal I've been looking forward to this. Great. Well, we're excited to have you on. Now, before we get into how you guys are helping your customers, let me ask, what are some of the biggest and most common mistakes that you see websites making with their landing pages that will negatively affect conversion?

00:59 Martin Greif Oh, that's simple. And we see this over and over and over again. Let's start with the fact that we're people, we're all human, which means we're actually animals, which means we're selfish. All right, we are truly selfish. So what do websites do? They talk all about themselves without worrying about what the visitor wants. Jokingly, we refer to that as the opera school of marketing. It's like, me, me, me, me, it's all about me. I don't care about you. Just give me your money. So all these websites always focus on what they want to tell people instead of answering the problem that the visitors actually have.

01:38 Andy Splichal So what are some of the changes that you will make to a website where you'll see the biggest impact on conversion?

01:47 Martin Greif Well, we apply the three questions to a website or to a web page. And when somebody lands on a website, they ask themselves three questions. Am I in the right place? How do I feel about this site? And what am I supposed to do here? So the, am I in the right place question, Andy, that's really somewhat dependent upon the upstream messaging. So if the upstream messaging uses very specific words, when you get to the landing page, it should use those same words, not something similar, not something related, the same words, because you have to design the website as if your visitor was lazy and or stupid. And I'm really sorry to say that, but don't make people think when they get there. Am I in the right place? Let's say, iPads were promised, iPads were delivered. Insurance was promised, insurance was delivered. Whatever you're offering, make sure it matches. The how do I feel about a question is a little harder because there's different types of trust, testimonials. You know what, Andy, let me ask you a question. You know what the biggest trust symbol on the face of the planet is? Probably testimonials. Interestingly enough, we've tested it and testimonials come right up there, but the biggest trust symbol on the face of the planet is a phone number. A phone number in the top right-hand corner on a webpage or at the click to call icon on mobile is the biggest trust factor because real companies don't hide their phone numbers. Now, some massive companies might hide their phone numbers in the footer because they don't really want phone calls. So if you're Apple or Amazon, you can get away with it. But if it's you and me, buddy, we have to have our phone number front and center.

03:33 Andy Splichal Interesting. Now, have you ever come across a website where you're like, you guys need to re-platform? What you're using just doesn't work.

03:42 Martin Greif So there's re-platforming and redesigning. So re-platforming is done when they're on some really outdated platform like Joongla or something just bizarre, or they've got maybe a WordPress site, but they're using some really strange builders or something that is just slowing the site down and weird. Now, redesigning happens fairly often because they've basically, like I said, done the me, me, me thing. And so you need to redesign it to make it for the visitor. But even then, we prefer not to redesign or even re-platform to start with. We always want to understand the user intent, figure out why the people are there, and then maybe test a little bit. And then once we do that, we know, okay, this is what we need to do next. Fair enough, Andy?

04:41 Andy Splichal Yeah, I know that makes sense. One of the topics that I've really been going into this year is for companies on how much of their resources they should focus on increasing acquisition, increasing… compared to how much of their resources on improving the customer experience. Where do you fall on that?

04:59 Martin Greif Oh, that's simple. All right. Conversion rate optimization, optimizing your sites so your conversion rate goes up, is the gift that keeps on giving. So let me give you an example. Let's say, and I'll just use simple numbers. Let's say for the sake of argument, the website does a million dollars a month and they want to increase by 50%. Whatever their ad budget is, and let's say their ad budget was 500,000 for the sake of argument, to increase by 50%, they'd have to spend another 250,000 every month, this month, next month, the following month. But if their conversion rate was 1% and you increase it to 1.5%, guess what? Instead of spending 750 next month, they still get to spend, let's say, 500,000. So conversion rate optimization is the gift that keeps on giving. First, you fix your site, then you drive traffic because what conversion rate optimization does is basically exponential to every other marketing thing they do.

06:00 Andy Splichal Now, are there any key metrics that you focus on that shows the ROI that's associated with conversion rate optimization?

06:10 Martin Greif Oh, absolutely. So the ROI is all based upon profit and customer lifetime value. Excuse me. I'm just getting over a little cold and sorry about the coughing. But anyway, if you know what your profit is, then it just becomes a math equation. To get there, however, the things that we focus on is we focus on, in the old days, bounce rate, although with GA4, we're moving from bounce rate to engagement rate. And if you look at those, those are directly related to conversion rates. And so if you measure conversion rates, lifetime value, average order value, and this works whether it's a lead gen site, a subscription site, or an e-commerce site, it doesn't matter. The math always works.

07:07 Andy Splichal How much when you're running tests for clients, you're changing messaging, changing this, how many things do you test on a page at one time?

07:12 Martin Greif It depends. And people hate the it depends answer, but it really does. If the page is really, really good already, then we might be testing one thing, we might be testing a flow, we might be testing some messaging. But if the page is a complete disaster, then we just do a replacement test because we know we'll take wild swings and it'll get big results. So it really depends on the starting point. And I hate to give it a depends answer, but it's the reality. Sorry.

Andy Splichal And how much traffic does it take to make a test statistically relevant?

Martin Greif It's actually not a traffic issue. It's a conversion issue. So you need to have a certain number of conversion actions per day. So if I'm getting a sale for sake of argument, or let's do Legion for a second because we've already done the sales. So if I get 10 leads a day off of my website, then I need to have a minimum of 10 leads a day per device type and in a perfect world per channel. So 10 from organic, 10 from social media, 10 from whatever. And you can test with 10 conversion actions a day, let's say on mobile, organic, whatever, that test will probably run about a month. The more traffic, not more traffic, the more conversion actions you get per day, the quicker you can get to significance and the more options you can have. You might not just do an A-B test, you could do an A-B-C, an A-B-C-D test and so on. So it's all about the conversion actions. And if they don't have enough conversions a day, they can actually test on micro conversions, which are, I get from this stage in the process to the next. So I'm on the home page, I get to the category page, I get from the category page to the product page. So each one of those gets me further along. And as long as I have a minimum of 10 conversion actions per day per device type and in a perfect world per channel, you're good.

Andy Splichal Now, what are you using to run these tests? What software?

Martin Greif So the software basically depends on what the client already has. If they don't have anything, then we're going to recommend that they pick something like a visual website optimizer or potentially an optimizely or… It just depends on what they're trying to accomplish. We also really like…

09:45 Andy Splichal I guess what I was getting into is like with Google optimizer sunsetting. Right. How does that affect your testing? Were you using that or no?

09:54 Martin Greif Well, we were. I mean, so Google optimize was great because for the majority of clients, it was free and it did pretty much everything they needed. I do believe that with GA4, there will be a new something from Google. I don't know when it'll be or what exactly it'll be, but there will be a replacement. They're not giving up on it. I'm guessing it just didn't work with GA4. But in the meantime, there's plenty of alternatives.

10:21 Andy Splichal So what are some of those alternatives that somebody could look at if they're panicking?

10:24 Martin Greif So visual website optimizer, VWO.com. Optimizely, we've been using them for years and years and years. And I believe it's optimizely.com. And there's a bunch of others that are out there that are also good. And there's ABtasty. I mean, the list is huge, right?

10:42 Andy Splichal Now, if somebody was looking to hire a conversion rate optimization company, what would be some important questions they would want to ask them?

10:51 Martin Greif Well, you know, and that's interesting. And this is going to be counterintuitive because obviously I run a conversion rate optimization agency, but we believe that conversion rate optimization is kind of strategic and it's something you should do in-house. And you should only hire an agency if you don't know what you should do. And will the agency teach you on what to do going forward? Or if you don't have enough resources to do it or if you run out of ideas? Because ideation can take a toll on people. So we believe it's strategic. And so if they really need a conversion rate optimization agency, make sure they're going to do knowledge transfer so that it's like, you know, yeah, I can give you a fish. But if I teach you how to fish, you'll eat forever. Right.

11:36 Andy Splichal You know, it's a yeah, no, that's a very unique answer because that definitely seems to would shorten your engagement with the company.

11:44 Martin Greif Yeah, it does. But I believe what goes around comes around. And at the end of the day, we got great references and people recommend us left and right because we always do the right thing by people. I don't know. It seems to me to be not just the right thing to do, but good business. Maybe I'm just confused, Andy.

12:03 Andy Splichal Now, so if somebody is running it in-house, what I guess, where should they even start? I mean, where do you even begin to test? I mean, are you testing product pages? Are you testing? I mean, where do you start?

12:16 Martin Greif So the first place to start is actually not on the website. The first place to start is is gaining executive sponsorship within the organization because we've actually seen this where you have a winning test and the winning test would generate more money. And some executive says, now we're just going to leave it alone. This actually happened to us with a very large company, a billion dollar company that the test on the landing page increased their revenue by 38 million per year. And the executive says, no, I just I like it the way it is. Well, yeah. So I know that's crazy, but executive sponsorship and getting people to be part of the team and celebrate testing and celebrate wins is more important than picking a specific thing on a website. Now, once you do that, you want to you want to understand why people are coming to your website and test things that make it easier for people to take action. OK, make sure your calls to action stand out, make sure you've got trust on the page, make sure that your value proposition is clear, you know, things like that.

13:33 Andy Splichal Now, you've been in the space for quite a while. I think in the bio, it's a 25 years. So I'm curious, have there been any business books that have inspired you on your journey?

13:44 Martin Greif Well, there are two books that have inspired me. And then I wrote a book. All right. So I'm the author of something called True Connections, Relationship Marketing in the Digital World. But there's not a plug for my book. I will plug actually two other books that have made a major change in my life. OK, and you're going to think these are crazy. But the first one is Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, because it's all about understanding human behavior. And frankly, that's what we do on the web. If you understand people, your website experience that you create will be better. The other one is What Women Want Men to Know by Dr. Beverly DeAngelis. That completely changed my life. And I read that book. It's got to be 20 years ago. And what was interesting about it at the time, I was VP of sales and marketing for a software company, had a large team. And I read this book and the book was, I don't know, 400 pages. I got through the first 70 pages of it. And I went, you got to be kidding me. Women can't be this dysfunctional. And then I read a little further and I went, oh, my God, men can't be this dysfunctional. And it turns out we're all dysfunctional. But the way it was set up is like first they talked about women, then they talked about men. And I went, oh, my God, we really don't communicate. It's basically similar to like men are from Mars, women are from Venus. But for anybody to read without being turned off, it was an outstanding book. And I apply those principles in our marketing, as crazy as that sounds.

15:11 Andy Splichal You know, let's flip the page and talk about site tuners a bit. What are you offering clients and how is it working?

15:30 Martin Greif Well, the first thing we do is people come to our website and they sign up for a 30 minute consultation with one of my team members. Sometimes it's even me. And we look at their website and we don't sell them anything. We actually just look at their site and tell them things they could do that would immediately increase their revenue and their conversion rate. And you might say, well, again, that doesn't sound reasonable. Why would you do that? I'm a firm believer. What goes around comes around. You do these things and then people say things to me like, oh, my God, if that's what they do for free, imagine what happens if we pay you. And so at that stage, we then look at their analytics. We figure out, can we get them a lift or not? And if we can get them a lift that's sustainable, then we potentially engage 90% of the time on a retainer basis because there's always new things to optimize and improve. Sometimes we'll do a pilot project, which could be a test, you know, testing or a design or a funnel. But every every client is a little different. So we, you know, what sets us apart? We listen. It's that simple. We just listen. It's like, what problem are you trying to solve? And then we give them free advice.

Now, do you have a favorite success story of a client you could share?

Interesting. So my favorite is probably something we did for a small family-run business. They came to us and their conversion rate was okay. It was an e-commerce business and they just, they just, I didn't even know it was an e-commerce site. It looked like a blog when I looked at it. I mean, I was so confused. Anyway, when we redesigned it for them, their conversion rate went up by 277%. Now, let's be realistic. That's not normal. That's just one of my favorites because we were able to help people then it really mattered to them. You know, normally you do tests. You get 5% here, 10% there. A big test would be 30%. You don't normally see hundreds of percent, right? But their site was so confusing that we basically redid it and tripled, basically, their conversion rate and their revenue. So we're pretty proud of that.

17:51 Andy Splichal Have you ever had an instance where you think, man, this is an ugly site, and you redo it for conversion optimization and it doesn't work?

18:02 Martin Greif I'll actually go a step further than that. So years ago, I tested cart pages and we tested a really beautiful cart page versus what came directly out of the payment processor, which was one of the most god-awful ugly things I'd ever seen in my life. It was hard to use and it was convoluted. And don't you know ugly one? And yeah, I mean, it was amazing, right? So then we dug deeper. Why would ugly win versus beautiful? It's because ugly was trusted by people. Beautiful was too slick. Because we didn't just leave it at that, right? We were like, well, why would ugly win? They trusted ugly. They didn't trust slick and beautiful. How did you figure that out? We actually went back to people and did surveys and exit pops and asked people why they didn't buy, right? And because it's all about the user. It's not about what we think.

19:04 Andy Splichal Now on those surveys, speaking to people, are you using a hot jar? How are you getting that information?

19:09 Martin Greif Yeah, they're pop-ups. Or they call them exit pops. And so they're popping up and we're asking some questions. Obviously, getting people to self-select a little bit. And so over time, we made the slick thing a little bit uglier and we're able to finally win. But oh my god, that was a learning experience I will never forget.

19:24 Andy Splichal So who is the perfect client to work with you guys?

19:32 Martin Greif So we've had clients that are multi-billion dollar corporations and we've had clients that do a million dollars a year in revenue. Our perfect client is somewhere between 10 million dollars a year and maybe 100 to 200 million. Because we're dealing with the principles and they actually care about what we do. Under 10 million a year, sometimes it's hard for them to do the things that we tell them. We don't turn them away and we do give free advice. So that's fine. And over a couple hundred million, they're just no fun to work with because they're so bureaucratic and you give them a change and it takes them like six months to even agree to the change. It just makes you want to bang your head against the wall. And how can an interested listener, perfect or not, learn more about working with you? Well, it's really simple. They go to sitetuners.com and they can look at our website, read our case studies. And if they want, they can speak with one of our conversion experts about their website.

20:31 Andy Splichal We're always happy to help. Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

20:36 Martin Greif Well, I just wanted to thank you for inviting me. I love your podcast and I really appreciate you taking the time to invite me. So thank you. Thank you.

20:47 Andy Splichal Yeah, you're welcome. It's nice to have you on, Martin. For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on site tuners or connecting with Marty, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all our different past guests by show topic and included each other contact information in case you would like more information, any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. But that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing. And I'll talk to you in the next episode.