From Clicks to Conversions

  

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a bonus huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community. CMO Huddles in this episode, Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze, shares hard-earned tips on how to optimize conversions on your website and landing pages. To see an example of Spiralyze’s awesome work in action, check out our homepage on cmohuddles.com. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number 1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: I’m excited to introduce you to Sahil Patel, the CEO of Spiralyze. Sahil and his team have a knack for turning clicks into conversions and have helped countless businesses transform their online presence through predictive landing page optimization. Now, several CMOs in our CMO Huddles have described Spiralyze as their secret weapon to deliver measurable impact in their first few months at a new company. And I want to talk about that for just one second. I’m going to put a pin in it, as some people say, because you’re in your first 90 days, you’re drinking from the fire hose. You’ve got to figure out brand, you’ve got to figure out all sorts of politics and where the business is going, and you don’t need to worry about, or shouldn’t have to worry about, are your landing pages optimized? Because you can hand that over to another company who can take care of that. You already have traffic, and all we’re doing is making sure that traffic is optimized. It’s brilliant. It’s a perfect thing for the first 90 days. Okay, as a way to demonstrate Sahil’s company’s expertise, as in Spiralyze, we asked him if CMO Huddles could be a test case, or, should I say, a test dummy, and he’s definitely on the dummy side. He’s going to walk us through the thinking behind their recommendations, so I’m excited to hear his thoughts, the company’s thoughts, and have no doubt it will be instructive for y’all as well. With that, hello Sahil. Where are you and how are you?

Sahil: Great, and I’m in Atlanta.

Drew: Awesome. Okay, we got that straight. Good, hot Atlanta. All right, one of the things we like to do these days, just in case our audience has to leave early, or we need to persuade them to stick around. Can you offer three things many marketers get wrong when approaching landing page optimization?

Sahil: Yeah, here’s three big things I think everyone can take home, put to use on their website. Number one, when they do optimization, they don’t take big swings. You should definitely swing big. Don’t do meek changes. Or if you’re even A/B testing, don’t do meek testing. That’s number one. Number two, they don’t show their product. Huge mistake. If you’re any kind of B2B, got to show your product. Number three, they try to do too much, especially on their homepage. They want to find prospects, get them interested, get them to buy, tell the story, investors, explain the origin story. You end up with a mishmash of vague, bland pages, all in the name of brand. And in fact, they’re hurting the brand, and they’re not converting people that they’re spending a lot of money to get to those pages.

Drew: I love it. And I want to go through all three of those. I love the big swing. You know, as a former agency owner with a name like Renegade Marketing, you know, we thought a lot about big swings. You brought me back to, like, one of the worst periods in my career. I spent 12 weeks at Wunderman, working on American Express direct marketing, and all we did was worry about, if we raised the font size a little bit or changed the color of the indicia, would the response rate go up 0.001% and that was the metric of success.

Sahil: Did it?

Drew: Sometimes. I mean, it was that kind of a finely tuned thing. And it’s also the period where I learned that sometimes dirty direct mail works better than clean, and sometimes you can fancy things up too much, and they go, “Oh, that’s fancy.” Throw it out. So anyway, you called it no meek testing. So what does it mean to take a big swing versus a little swing?

Sahil: Yeah, so big swing means take a dramatic change on the page. You’re thinking about the composition, the headline, the call to action, the imagery, whatever it is. Look, you got to stay on brand. You can’t go something kind of way off that’s confusing to the user, but don’t want to do meek testing. It’s a giant waste of time. This is the thing where someone says, “You know what, I’m going to change the button color, I’m going to move a few words around the page, and then I’m going to hope I get a little bit of lift from it.” This is a giant waste of time, especially in B2B, where you have limited amounts of traffic, which means you have a limited number of tests that you can run at any given time. To win big, got to swing big.

Drew: I love it. Yeah, we’re going to change the color of the button, stop. No, that’s not going to work out. Particularly again, I’m thinking about you, CMOs, in your first 90 days, you’re going to take a little swing on a landing page. Come on. We’re gonna what, move the what? What do we talk about? It was like the peas from one corner to another in the plate, moving the vegetables around the plate. Yeah, it just doesn’t seem like that’s gonna make a lot of difference. And that’s what we’re trying to do in a short period of time. And find it. And again, you’re testing, so you don’t always need approval for that. As long as you know the brand police buy in that this is consistent, you can test a lot. Okay, number two, show product. So that’s really interesting. And, you know, obviously for CMO Huddles, that was a little bit tricky. And in a few minutes, you’ll, we’ll show how you did that. But not everybody has like a thing they actually look at on a screen. What do you do?

Sahil: Well, let’s first talk about, I’m referencing B2B here, right? I think the D2C world is something entirely different. And by the way, some of these concepts absolutely work in D2C. Some of them we’ve borrowed from D2C, put them in B2B. But context today, B2B, and particularly B2B SaaS, I think B2B SaaS, huge market. I just look at all these websites, and it’s just like pictures of good-looking people pretending to be nice people. I don’t know why these people are having so much fun in a conference room looking at a computer screen, like, what are they doing on their job? I love my job, but I don’t look like I’m having much fun at my job. Let me tell you, the data shows overwhelming when you show a bold, beautiful picture of your product, it beats showing happy people, because, by the way, that’s why your customer came there. They want to see the product. It is what you want them to do, B2B. You want to either buy the product, ask for a demo, start a free trial. Those are the three big things to show the product. Show the product. Show the product.

Drew: Oh my god, I have to tell a story at this moment. Okay. Oh my god, this was one of the most amazing… I met… Shiat Day. Our client is Sara Lee, one of the most prominent creative people that were in Chicago, were presenting three different television ads to the client, and they present the first ad, and the client looks at the ad and says, “You know, I’d like to have a picture of the cheesecake in there.” And you’re not going to believe this. The creative director took the storyboard, turned it over, and said, “You can have that ad.” Week later, the business went up for review. That was unbelievable, yeah, showing the product.

Sahil: Show the product. Yeah. So in D2C you would show the cheesecake. If you’re a B2B software company, you show the product. Show a screenshot. Doesn’t have to be the most beautiful picture, by the way. I think it’s very tempting to overthink this. Okay, which screenshot are we going to show? Oh, our product’s looking a little dated. I’m worried. Oh, our competitors are going to steal it. First of all, take the tinfoil hat off. Put it aside for a moment. Your job is not to convince your audience to buy the product today. It’s not even to convince them that your product is better than your competitors. It’s just to hook their attention. Don’t do that. Nothing else matters. So just show the product. Pick one. I know you’ve got 17 products, you got a platform, you have multiple suites. Just pick one. Ask your salespeople, what’s the wow moment when you do a demo, they’ll tell you, they don’t have to think about it. They know. Okay. And if you’re a services company, service company, show the people that are going to deliver the service. Okay, we actually have a client that’s a service company. They’re a franchised home cleaning service, and in the control it showed a happy family. Showed a mom with her two kids, joy on her face because she hadn’t just spent, presumably the afternoon cleaning the house. We tested it against showing using a picture of the service team that comes to clean the house. They were in uniforms. They looked professional. There was a picture of the truck behind them that was clearly labeled had the logo on it. That’s the product, okay? So we can perform just as well. It performed just as well. Software companies that show pictures of the software.

Drew: And we’re not showing 17, we’re showing one. Make it easy. Pick the wow moment. Love that. Okay, the last thing is trying to sell too much. Talk a little bit about this exercise and how you help your customers narrow it down and really think about the one thing versus the everything.

Sahil: Yeah, I think a great way to think about this is the billboard test. Take your homepage. Imagine it’s on the billboard. You’re driving by at 80 miles an hour. What would you put on it? Would you put the origin story? Would you explain in 8-point font all the things your product does? Would you have 14 words in the headline? No. By the time they read the third word, they’ve whizzed by and they’re not even thinking about you. Your job is not to explain your product. Your job is not to get people to buy. Your job is not even to explain why you’re better than your competitors. It is to hook your audience’s attention. Keep it simple. If you can explain why you’re different or distinct, even better, but just keep it simple.

Drew: So alright, so we are keeping it simple. We’re finding a hook. It’s a billboard. Talk a little bit about how much time we actually have from an attention standpoint. And what are we trying to get them to do besides just say, stop and spend a minute with us?

Sahil: And by the way, that’s the first job. Just get them to stop, presumably your audience first. They’re probably looking at your competitors. Maybe at the same time they’ve got three browser windows open, maybe just before they came to your page, they looked at a couple of your competitors. That’s number two, they’re distracted. That’s just the state of how people browse. Number three, there’s an exit. So what that means is there’s an extreme reward for skimmability. Your audience is going to make up their mind in the first one to three seconds if they’re even going to stay. And if you’re vague, if you’re bland, if you’re boring, they’re not going to stay.

Drew: So, alright, we’re not going to do meek testing. We’re going to have the product in a wow moment, and we’re going to reward for skimmability. We’re going to make it easy for them to sort of discover the initial greeting and say hello and get them involved in the conversation.

Sahil: That’s exactly right. Let’s convert that into something super actionable for the audience. Here’s my recommendation: take your headline, make a bold claim that delivers a benefit to your customer, and make it quantitative.

Drew: Benefit to the customers that is quantitative, okay?

Sahil: And a real and a real benefit, like a bold benefit.

Drew: Something that is significant, important, touches this heart and soul, surprise, emotion, relevance, those three things come together in six words. Just a reminder that this stuff is hard. It is hard to do that well, and it is why agencies still have some hope of existing, and good luck trying to get that out of ChatGPT. Sahil is going to walk through with a live demonstration of the new and improved CMO Huddles landing page. Let’s do it. Let’s expose our deep breath, we’re gonna do it. Yes, let’s dissect what’s wrong and how we can test our way to a better cmohuddles.com.

Sahil: I’m going to tell everyone who’s with us today. Drew, can take it, hit him with your best shot. Be constructive about it with the best shot. But Drew, I think almost all of us are our own worst critic. So I’m gonna actually give you the floor first. Let me get the screen share up. Okay, before we talk about how we can make it better, let’s just talk about here’s your homepage. If you go to cmohuddles.com, this is what all of us see. What do you think? I’d love to hear one minute. What do you think it’s doing well? What do you think it’s not doing well?

Drew: Let’s see. What is it doing well? It gives us a quick explainer of what it is and what the benefits are of confidence, colleagues and coverage. We’ve got some social proof down there with our testimonials. Have a little bit of fun with the language “swimming alone in choppy waters.” I don’t think we have the hook that you’re describing the one big idea, so it feels like it’s missing that. And there isn’t a pricing page per se, because you have to qualify anyway. But there are the buttons, if you’re an active B2B CMO, you know where to go. Right there buttons right at the top. Yay. Click that.

Sahil: Okay, okay. Let’s critique it. What do you think it’s failing to do or just not doing as well as it could?

Drew: Based on what you just described, there’s no core simple thing there. There’s no benefit. I’m not sure that those little icons are working for us necessarily. They take up a lot of space, and there’s a lot, there’s just a lot to unpack. But I’d rather let you provide the critique now, because I’m just guessing at what’s wrong.

Sahil: Well, I think you’re on the right track. So I think one is your headline is good because it tells people they’re in the right place. You got the logo if I was coming here, and I’m not sure that I’m on CMO Huddles, I’m definitely in the right place. And you’ve got these two things here that tell me who the audience is. It’s definitely CMOs. This is a marketing audience so that, I think that’s really good. There’s no bold claim, like, there’s no hook here, right? I’m also still not quite sure what it is. Of course, I know you Drew, everyone here knows what CMO Huddles is, but I’m like, at a quick glance, I’m not sure – is this a peer group? Is this a Slack community? Is this something else? Is it a service? Is it a product? Is this like VISTA or YPO? I get the sense that it’s kind of in that, you know, it’s like-minded people getting together, but I’m still not quite sure exactly what it is. Now, if I read more, I get it, but that my glance that that right five to seven words, one to three seconds, what is this and what do I get from it? It’s not happening for me. So that’s, I think that’s number one, and then number two, it’s hard to skim right. Three sentences, it feels like a wall of text. The Internet has a big reward for skimmability and a big penalty for lack of skimmability. Then, you know, and I would apply that here, just lots of words, lots of words, lots of words. These are okay, actually, they add some whimsy, some playfulness, and I think that’s part of your brand. I know that’s part of your brand, but I’m still not quite sure what to do with the three of them. I think the social proof here is good. Like these feel like real people, not clip art. And you’ve got someone from ZoomInfo, which is, I think, in our world, super high recognition. But I got to read again, right? So, you know, I mean, if you just use their logos instead of the words, your brain, everyone’s brain processes images much faster than words, so things that can give that instant recognition. If I saw the ZoomInfo, instant credibility booster. Everyone’s heard of it. The fact that you have the CMO says, oh, okay, there’s some credibility here. Thoughts before we workshop?

Drew: I just want to remind everyone the bravery that I’m demonstrating by allowing our website, which has served us so so so far, obviously, it has actually served us well. We’re excited about the opportunity to vastly improve it. So let’s talk about what new and improved looks like.

Sahil: Yeah. So big headline, show the product, social proof. Let’s take a look at some ideas for your homepage.

Drew: Look at that. There’s B2B Marketing community. We know what it is. There is the promise.

Sahil: We know what it is. It’s the category, and we’re putting in the eyebrow, right? So categories are great for eyebrows. And then here is the bold claim. There’s a benefit here. Draw from the power of 300+ marketing leaders, and we’re making it quantitative, because I don’t know how many people you have. Do you have 20? You have 4,300+. It’s great. Number two: skimmability, three bullets. Three is the magic number. We’re bolding your three C’s, and we’re keeping everything to two lines. Two lines. Okay, now showing the product. So when I think of your product, I think of one of the primary things of CMO Huddles is the huddle, so we went out, found one of your huddles, and got a screenshot. Love it, and then social proof. We did two things here. We got your logos up high above the fold and picked high brand recognition logos left to right, and then we paired that with—and by the way, data shows you can get more lift when you combine multiple types of social proof with direct testimonials.

Drew: Anybody think that this isn’t like 779% better than what we had? The only question is, how quickly can we implement it, and can we actually recreate this on our Wild Apricot platform, which is what hosts the community of CMO Huddles? So no argument from this side. I wonder, and what I appreciate is the math you’re describing here in the right redundancy, the logos followed by the testimonials as a redundant thing. I know that Melissa, our program manager, will be watching this going, “Okay, I know what I’m doing this weekend.”

Sahil: Yeah. And great comments in the chat here. Brent asked a great question: can the numeric outcome be in the five to seven words with the “what it is” in the text below? Yeah, Brent, I think the answer is yes, and I think that’s what we’re doing here. Quantitative up top, what I recommend is putting your category in the eyebrow—two to three words. It’s what you are: FinTech, software, conversion rate optimization, services, marketing, community, that kind of thing, not even elevator pitch level—just a quick reference. And then your bullets here should not introduce new claims. They should be entirely to support and bolster the big claim. This is one of the mistakes I often see is websites that make—they have a great big claim, and then instead of supporting the claim, they make new claims. Well, I’m probably not sold on your first claim, so don’t try and give me more claims.

Drew: I thought I saw one other question. Clarify the difference between purpose, objective, between the home page and a landing page?

Sahil: And then multiple types of social proof. I’ll do multiple types of social, because that’s a simple one. And then we’ll talk about landing page, home page, because there’s lots of nuance there. Okay, multiple types of social proof. I’ll come back to—your brain processes images faster than words, so you want to put the images as high up on the page, above the fold as possible. So if you have logos, great. Don’t have logos? You can do things like trust badges, media mentions, things that your brain can kind of seem like, okay, it’s credible in some way. I’m in the right place. Then lower below the fold, or kind of what web developers call the first div. Here, you now have more room to use a secondary form of social proof. Now, in the B2B world, we often segment enterprise, mid-market. Our data shows enterprise tends to convert better with logos; the mid-market and SMB tend to convert better with testimonials. The reason is, in the enterprise world, what they’re really looking for is, you’re big, you can handle complexity, you have the sophistication, and that comes from those logos that are easy to recognize. The mid-market, and especially the SMB, don’t care about that because there’s a gajillion of them. Again, no one knows who Drew’s taco stand is, right? But if they know that, hey, Drew looks like a real person, said three or four lines, or, you know, Sahil’s laundromat said three or four things. And hey, this worked for me. And I’m a taco stand owner. Like, “Oh yeah. I don’t know who Drew is, but I know he’s kind of like me, and this worked for him.” Okay, that’s persuasive.

Drew: And by the way, Drew’s Taco Stand has amazing guacamole. So rush on down.

Sahil: I’m eating there every single day. Okay, purpose, objective between a homepage and a landing page. Yes, they’re two very different things. You know, first of all, the homepage is for most websites—it’s the most traffic, most visited page on your site. Landing pages tend to be purpose-built. They might be purpose-built around educating your customer base. They’re reading case studies. They’re learning about you. It’s early in their journey. They’re low on the intent scale. It can also be purpose-built to convert them. If someone clicks on a search engine ad, and you’re explaining exactly what you do and why they should buy, you can what marketing people call “squeeze” them. It’s time to ask them to either sign up for that free trial or talk to sales, get a demo. So the two, at the risk of oversimplifying, differences between the homepage and the landing page, that being said, they are both prime opportunities to convert your highest intent audience into prospective customers.

Drew [AD Break]: This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness, and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a Huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you’re a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMOhuddles.com? Hope to see you in a Huddle soon. 

Drew: Can I ask a question about—I’m looking at two sort of little graphic images that just kind of don’t show a lot. The one right above the CMO studio screen grab, that one, and the one just below it, those subliminal little reinforcement. This is about, you know, what’s going on with those?

Sahil: Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on with this, Drew. We actually got them from somewhere on the website, and I thought they looked cool.

Drew: Okay, they were already on our website, and you just grabbed them. Okay, that’s hilarious.

Sahil: Okay. Now, with my clients, we often call those snippets, right? And they’re a way to kind of convey some additional imagery. So for example, if I have a client who is primarily a desktop application, we’ll show their best screenshot here. Say they’re mobile, they have a mobile app—we’ll then show a few screen grabs here and here, just to let the user know, hey, this also works on mobile.

Drew: Okay, so, boom, there we are. It feels like it’s vastly improved. Now what? What else we got?

Sahil: Here is one, just food for thought, with a different image. So if you’re A/B testing it, I would definitely test different images. So the last one was a classic. Basically, it’s a Zoom—it’s a screen grab from a Zoom CMO huddle. This reinforces the idea of this multi-connected network with nodes. Again, we got this from one of your pieces of collateral. You know, you might sharpen up by showing real people here and here and here instead of the cartoons. Make it feel a little bit more authentic. But I liked it because it really reinforces the power of the network, and that you’re benefiting from 300 professionals who are at the top of the game, and you can learn from all of them.

Drew: Yeah. So that animation is actually an animation that’s an explainer video that we did three years ago that we sort of kept in the loop, but doesn’t have any of the penguin branding or any of that.

Sahil: Yeah. So Jason asked a great question: If you’re service-based and don’t have a lot to show visually, what do you recommend showing? So, great example. First of all, you can show your people. Your people are the product. In some ways, that’s what we did with Drew. Here it is. You know, in a lot of ways, Drew’s product is people getting together and learning from each other, and now he’s—I think this lends itself to something that’s very visual and recognizable. It is harder with service businesses. I haven’t tested it with what I would call true professional service like a consulting company. We have tested it with direct-to-end-user type of businesses, like franchise businesses, home cleaning, HVAC repair, plumbers, and showing the uniformed people who are going to come to your house and deliver it and show them that they are professional, they’re happy. That’s who you get. That’s the product you’re buying. We’ve tested that against showing pictures of the happy consumer, which is what a lot of our customers show. “Oh, well, people will connect it. It’s a happy customer. So I’ll be a happy customer.” Test data actually shows showing the service professionals who come to your home outperforms happy consumers.

Drew: Cool. This, to me, lacks a little bit of the excitement of the other one. It’s just a little less visually interesting. Yeah, I miss seeing the CMOs right there from CMO Huddle Studio episode.

Sahil: I like this one the best. I think this is the one that would perform the best.

Drew: One of the things that I did learn in my 12 miserable weeks in direct marketing is that it is totally unpredictable. Often, when you do these A/B tests, which one will win, you have your favorites, and then you go, “Oh my God, this one worked better,” right?

Sahil: Happens all the time. Testing is a cruel game.

Drew: Yeah, and so you can’t, even though you like it aesthetically, I can’t assume that the one that feels right is better, except for the fact that it feels like a better representation of our brand. So that, I think, is a subjective decision that is easily made.

Sahil: I’ve also got some good landing pages, right? Yeah, we got a couple landing pages here, right? Let’s look at them. Okay, so now we’ll do a little truncated critique, Drew.

Drew: See if you can move that over. There we go. All right, so truncated, fine.

Sahil: Yeah, what do you think doing well? Not doing well here?

Drew: You know, headline “Don’t go it alone” – that speaks to a problem. And there’s a quick video with some information, so hopefully that’s relevant for wherever that person came from.

Sahil: Yeah, so here’s what I would say. One is this: it’s just too vague. I still don’t know what you do or what I get from it. I think the converse is, okay, don’t go it alone, go it together, but I have to make a cognitive leap to get there. Number one. Number two, video is a huge distractor and cannibalizes conversions. Doesn’t mean video is bad or that you should remove all the video, but my clients get the best results when they move video down fold because your highest intent people are gonna get distracted by this. They have a finite reservoir of attention, right? And they’re gonna spend, I don’t know how long this video is, but let’s say it’s even a minute, right? You’re now probably eaten up a third to half of the time they plan to spend on your page. Logos, really nice. Here’s an issue: interesting thing, your audience equates importance with the size of real estate. So when you make your logos small, it makes them seem unimportant. Okay, so here we’ve got a couple ideas here to look at. So we’re doing three things here. First, bold headline. Number one, easy to skim value props. And then we’re starting with the qualifying question. By the way, Drew, the same question you asked on your current page. You just made it really clear what you’re asking for, and made it multi-select. These qualifying questions perform really well, and you’ve done it in a very finesse way. You’re not trying to qualify the person in a sneaky way. You’re trying to get them to think about what it is they’re here to do. And then we’ve got your logos number four. We just made them bigger.

Drew: Right.

Sahil: What do you think? What’s catching your eye?

Drew: Immediately, I want to update the challenge that you need assistance with. I’m bought in on the matching, because that’s certainly a tremendous thing. I don’t know if I would call them coaches, but that’s cool. We can fix that – more like probably advisors, I guess. The last connection, yeah, we definitely need to wordsmith it better. And so other than that, I like it because it feels like, oh, if I just click on that, I’ll actually get the answer. It’s enticing. Other thoughts, anybody else, relative to what we have there? What it does is it forces you to think about the challenges that you’re facing, and it says, okay, we’ve got these folks who have the answers to your questions. What’s your question?

Sahil: That’s right. Okay, here’s a different look. Now, this is the same page, right? We’re incorporating some elements you guys have already seen, so I won’t re-explain them, and we’re adding two new ideas here. First, we have a simpler call to action, Email Plus CTA, and then a different headline with quantitative proof. This is you’ve used this elsewhere. This kind of “saved 10 hours per month.” So we borrowed that, and then we did something that’s, I would say, runs against kind of conventional wisdom. The data shows it really works, something called locked hero. And the way the locked hero works is it stops users from vertically scrolling. Everyone instinctively vertically scrolls and takes them further and further away from the best part of the page to the hero. What happens is you lose your highest intent audience to vertical scrolling. So when the page loads, it’s locked here. It feels like this is the only part of the page, and if the user wants to read the below the fold content, they click “learn more,” and it releases the lock. It’s the kind of idea that no one would ever do this because it’s so counter to conventional wisdom, to best practice user experience. The data we’ve seen, we’ve seen this run for more than 100 companies, about one in three times it beats the control. So it’s worth testing. Really good test to run. Great way to convert more high-intent audience.

Drew: Well, you know, it keeps you right there. I don’t know if we could actually implement this on the Wild Apricot platform, but oh my gosh, if you’re listening or watching this, it’s brilliant, because there’s nowhere else to go – either you click or you’re done. So that’s really interesting, and it is counterintuitive, because everybody has infinite scroll pages. And then we have an older alternative.

Sahil: And then this is, I just wanted to show you what it looks like when it’s unlocked. I see they can go down and see Scott age, right? Hey, that’s so we looked at landing page, a few different alternatives on the landing page and the home page.

Drew: Well, I’m excited. I feel like there’s a lot of just really interesting and particularly, I’m sort of stuck on that lock thing because it makes so much sense, and I have not seen it anywhere. So that’s really interesting. A lot of things that struck me in this process, besides the core message, and how to frame that, how to use the social proof effectively, logos first, testimonial second, the notion of the video below the fold, I think, is another interesting thing, because it is a mistake. If it is a mistake, it is the squirrel. And hey, look, look squirrel for the ADD folk. You’re just setting them up. They’re going to look at the video, but they’re not going to finish it. And so you’ve lost them. So I get that. So videos again, get them to a point where they know they want to watch a video, right, and that they get to choose the video that they want to watch. I think that’s the moral of the story, right?

Sahil: That’s right. That’s right. Pat asked a great question about removing or simplifying the top nav bar. Yeah, that’s a great callout. So Pat, on a home page, I would always leave the nav bar in. On the landing page, you’ve got a couple choices. We didn’t do anything with it here, but on the landing page, I do think it’s worth simplifying the nav bar, particularly if… Now, if it’s a paid landing page, I would not remove the nav bar because you’re going to get a mix of traffic there, and you may want them to continue and have the option and ability to go to your main website or to the rest of the site. And if it’s a low-intent page, let’s say it’s taking them to an asset download or a blog article or informative content or educational content – pretty low intent – you definitely want to keep the nav bar there because some of that audience is going to read something and say, “Hey, I want to learn more.” And they go, “Oh, pricing page. Well, let me see what these guys cost.”

That’s a good part of the user journey. Where I have – or where the data shows – it’s worth removing and completely eliminating the nav bar is on organic or pages that are all, or mostly all, organic traffic, and you get to a squeeze page, which is the natural endpoint of the journey. And you’re there to squeeze them and ask them – it’s time to either sign up for that demo or talk to sales, or contact us to get a quote, or if you’re PLG (product-led growth) motion, you sign up for that free trial. And that’s a great place to remove the nav bar because you want to remove distractions. You want to remove escape doors for that highest-intent audience. You’re ready to squeeze them. You don’t want them thinking about walking out the door because they might not walk back in.

And I’ll show you an example of what I mean. For those that are less familiar with this idea, I’ll bring up a client of ours. This is Record 360 – they sell software that helps head off damages and leads in rental equipment. And on their “Get Demo” page, if I’ve navigated around and actually click here, I’m pretty high intent. It’s time to squeeze me for the demo request. And this particular styling works really well for B2B SaaS. We call it “form over UI.” You take the form, you make it look like it’s floating over a picture of the product interface. It’s styled like what some people call a light box or modal. It’s not – it’s a flat page. So you get the benefit of the attention-grabbing of a modal or popup, without the messiness on mobile and tracking and all kinds of other things of a popup, and all there is to do here is convert. You know, it’s kind of convert or bounce, and there’s no nav bar. There’s nothing here. You can, of course, click back in your browser. But this works because it communicates visually and it appeals to that higher-intent audience. They go, “Ooh, there’s something cool here. I’ve read up on them. I looked around. I checked out pricing. Okay, I want to talk to them.”

Drew: Very cool. Yeah, there’s not much else to do here but fill out that form. There’s no distraction. It’s like no distractions. You click to demo, you’re going to get that. We got to wrap up, I could go on for a long time. So top three tools for B2B website and landing page optimization?

Sahil: Yeah, if you’re… here’s three things I would make part of my testing stack. One, heat mapping software of some kind. Crazy Egg is a good one. Hotjar is a good one. There’s a lot of them out there. Many of them have free versions. That’s number one. Number two, split testing software so you can actually run split tests. This automates the process of half your traffic getting one version, half your traffic getting a different version. It automates a lot of it, not all of it, and keeps track of the statistics. Make sure you can actually measure the outcomes and what kind of statistical significance you can reach. Number three, some product or service to get qualitative feedback. My favorite is Wynter. It’s W-Y-N-T-R, really great. In a week, you can take your home page, and they will find 15 of your ICP and give you qualitative feedback about what’s resonating and not resonating. I promise you it will generate a bunch of insights, something that surprises you, good and bad, and great ideas for testing.

Drew: Yeah, awesome. Okay, we’ve got heat mapping, split testing software, and a product feedback tool like Wynter, cool.

Sahil: Yeah. Now I would be remiss, Drew, if I didn’t say the most valuable piece is a platform for predictive AB testing, but if people are interested in doing that, they know who I am. They can come check me out.

Drew: Exactly, and we’ll talk about that in just a second. So we’re going to wrap up. We started at the top with this, but let’s wrap up with two do’s and one don’t for better page optimization. And basically, we’re really talking about – you’ve got traffic coming to your website, you’re not getting the most value out of it because you’re not giving them the experience that makes it easy for them. So two do’s and one don’t for better page optimization.

Sahil: Two do’s: number one, bold claim, quantitative. Number two, show the product. And a don’t is: don’t do wall of text. Don’t try and give your home page tons of jobs to do. Make it easy to skim, give it a single job. That job is hard enough.

Drew: Keep it simple focus. Just can’t say that enough. So alright, before we go, I want to thank you, obviously an amazing experience. Thank you. Sahil, how can listeners find you and engage with your firm?

Sahil: Yes. So if you want to just kind of hear or see a little bit more, you liked what you saw today, I post every day at 7:30 on LinkedIn. Everything’s one minute or less. And I do a lot of these things – do some teardowns, show you some good ideas. You’ll go to diagramming if you want to hear more about predictive CRO – Spiralyze.com.

Drew: Okay, we have one last question. Pros and cons for different use cases: are there any cons for doing landing page tests?

Sahil: So one thing that’s challenging with landing page tests – if you don’t have a ton of website traffic and you have, let’s say, five landing pages, purpose-built. Maybe two of them are for paid, two are for organic, and one is for low-intent audience. Maybe it’s like a white paper or a webinar sign-up. One challenge there is that you’ve now split your traffic across five pages, which makes it harder to run AB tests and get a statistically significant outcome. It’s a con. It’s not enough of a con for me to rule out landing pages. I think the mistake I often see is companies spend a lot on paid search ads, Facebook ads, and they send that traffic to their home page, or they send it to a product page or solution page. It’s just a total mismatch between what your audience is expecting and what you’re delivering to them.

Drew: Alright! Well, Sahil Patel, Spiralyze, thank you so much for joining us.

If you’re a B2B CMO, and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!