Jon Correll: Website Conversion Techniques You Could Learn On Your Own… If You Had 5 Years and $500,000,000 Burning a Hole in Your Pocket

Jon Correll is the co-founder and CEO of Conversion Voodoo. They provide landing page and conversion rate optimization services. Many companies do that.

Conversion Voodoo is unique in several ways. First, they charge their clients $0 to get started. They only get paid if they increase profits. Client’s profits don’t go up? Conversion Voodoo doesn’t get paid. Second, if your company doesn’t already do many, many, many millions of dollars a year in sales, they won’t work with you. You can try begging. Others have. It doesn’t help.

John says you should focus your efforts where you will get the maximum return:

• Headlines: 20% increase
• Build for Average 25%
• Trust Me 10%
• Price Elasticity 25%

To be sure your results are accurate:

• Test on many browsers,
• never test on Friday,
• commit to running tests for a full 7 + 1 days,
• Smaller sites 14+ 1 days

There is a wealth of information anyone can use

Jon Correll owns an SEO company that gets paid based on a percentage of th profit increase experienced by the client, and on a percentage of cash flow after the initial increase.

Always test everything for yourself.

Because they are paid on results, his company concentrates on things that work, not theory.

Their focus:

• Headlines
• Opt-in Offer
• Design (Build for Average)
• Trust
• Pricing

Headlines: Attract the eye of your visitor. Grab them by the lapels. Get their interest and decrease the bounce rate.

10:25 He gives some examples of split test headlines and the results

Headline styles:

• Fear (The next market crash is coming)
• Give me a shortcut (Speak any language in just 10 days)
• Confidential, amazing, exclusive, awesome (Shocking discovery for joint relief)
• Audacity (say something compelling, outrageous, controversial)
• Dynamic (now you can have this option in San diego, different content due to time zone) When people come back the headline is different.

Opt-ins

15:13 He gives some split test examples and explains why one works better

Opt in box: tell people what they should do (enter your email here)

Design: Build for Average: Avg American earns 25K per year and reads at an 8th grade level.

Build for your buyers, not for browsers. Understand your market segment.

Have a clear Call to Action, use 12 pt font. If your market is over 40, use 14 pt.

23:19 he has a chart of the horizontal hot zone heat map.

24:25 Trust logos: Used to be able to increase conversion just by putting the trust logos on the site.

24:41 He gives some examples of Trust logo placement and tells what affects the results of his split tests.

26:40 Price Elasticity: Very difficult to test if you have more than 1 product.

At a certain point pricing gives the best net revenue

28:16 He gives some examples of split testing for price.

29:24 Summary – Possible effect of each element on ROI

• Headlines 20%+
• Build for average 25%+
• Trust me (formatting) 10%+
• Price Elasticity 25%+

30:00 Optimization tools

For optimizing a website he recommends:

Visual Website Optimizer

Optimizely

They make it simple to split test.

Basic split testing

First make a small change, then try more radical change

Cross-browser testing: You can look at your site with different browsers.

They use 98% rule: Must work on 98% of browsers

You can use Google Analytics to see what browsers your users are using.

Don’t do testing unless you are dedicated to statistical relevance. If it doesn’t work at first it may as the days go on.

Never start a test on a Friday because the weekend days are weird.

• Commit to running test for full 7 + 1 days,
• For smaller sites use 14 + 1 days
• Call winners at 95% confidence

29:45: Note: CrossBrowserTesting.com isn’t around anymore. There are several other websites that allow you to see your how your site looks in different browsers. They come and they go. We don’t have a favorite to recommend. Head to your favorite search engine and look for “test my website in different browsers”.

36:20 What is important in growing your business

USP: He says “are you really different?” because USP sounds too technical.

You have to figure out how you are really different. How are your offerings better or what do they include that the competition doesn’t

38:30 He gives some examples of USPs

40:45 He gives some examples of ads with poor or nonexistent USPs

43:20 Things you can do to be different

• Know your customer avatar (most businesses don’t)
• Create an absolutely irresistible (and clear) offer
• Give them a reason to trust you (Testimonials/Previous Results)
• Give them a way out – Guarantee (risk reversal)

2 Simple Actions you can take to improve your site:

• Call customers and ask why they bought from you (Be a research company)
• Deep dive the competition in your market – What is their USP?. Figure out what elements are working for them and use them but don’t copy/paste.

1. Open an account with Visual Website Optimizer
2. Pick something on your site to test. The headline is probably best to start unless you have a specific area that you know needs improvement.
3. Make ONE small change.
4. Commit to running a test for at least 8 days (15 days for a smaller site).
5. Use the winner.
6. Rinse and repeat.

Review your USP using his guidelines. How are you different from your competitors?

Visual Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer

Crazy Egg