Andy Splichal:
Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is throwing things on your website and praying will not yield some results. Today's guest is the co founder of Invesp and the co author of the book Conversion Optimization. A big welcome to Ayat Shukairy. Hi, Ayat.
Ayat Shukairy:
Hello, Andy. Thank you for having me.
Andy Splichal:
Thanks for coming. Now, the title of this podcast is interesting. It's throwing things on your website and praying will not yield results. And I paraphrase that from your LinkedIn description. So what do you mean by it?
Ayat Shukairy:
So what we see a lot of companies do when it comes to conversion rate optimization is they'll just make random changes on their site because, you know, the hippo in the room, the person that's getting the paid the most bucks, decides that this has to change. And then thinking, okay, this is going to really impact and move our customers in the right direction. And then they're surprised, lo and behold, that that's not the case. Or we see so many companies say that we want to go through this big redesign, rebranding, I don't know what. And then they do it because thinking that that's going to get them the results, that's going to get them better conversions, that's going to get them more sales, and then they're shocked to learn that actually that doesn't happen.
Andy Splichal:
Yeah, no, I've seen that before. I've also seen replatforming and thinking that you need to replatform and then the conversions will go up. Is that one that comes through common for you?
Ayat Shukairy:
Exactly. We've actually had a recent client that they, they actually, they needed the replatform because they were on Magento and they wanted to replatform to Shopify, which is going to be a lot easier for them. But again, expecting that they're going to see the results, expecting that they're going to be up and running immediately. Things take a lot longer, things get delayed development, it's never within the estimates that you typically think. I think you always need to add a lot more and then expecting to see the results immediately and your conversion rate also is not what happens. But when I talk about also this concept of throwing things at the wall and hoping that something will stick, I always get the example of like, you know, if you have like a bunch of designers in a room, you can take a site and you can be like, okay, this needs to change. This need, these look like they need to change. However, just expecting that because somebody said that that's, that's what's going to happen, you're going to see an actual impact on that is, is something that is incorrect.
Ayat Shukairy:
And certainly there has to be a little bit more research to anything that you do. Right. You need to kind of like dig in a little bit deeper, look at analytics, do some more thorough investigation, look at heat map session recording to validate. Is this really, truly a problem that this site is facing? And if I present a solution, is it actually going to have a positive impact on their conversion rates?
Andy Splichal:
So over the last year or so, conversion optimization, it's been a really big emphasis of my show. And I've had a few different experts who run different optimization companies on as guest, and I mean, everybody seems to know what they're talking about. So I guess my question is, how would an e commerce company know who can legitimately help them when it comes to increasing conversion rates on their website?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think you have to kind of look at, there's a lot of, there's a few conversion optimization agencies that even we compete against that I think follow a process. I think it's super important that whenever you're investigating different agencies that are going to be doing CRO for you, you have to make sure that they follow a thorough process. Our process is called ship. It's really easy to remember, but it's not so different than what some of the other CRO agencies may offer. And what we do is we really emphasize the scrutinized phase, which is the research phase. Right. I want to do user testing. I want to understand my customers and conduct customer interviews.
Ayat Shukairy:
We conduct a certain kind of customer interviews called jobs to be done interviews, and they really give us a lot of insight onto, you know, again, like those deep social emotional aspects that really motivate the customer to move forward. And bringing that alive on your site is really going to change the game for you. Conducting analytics analysis, understanding where they're clicking, where they're going, you know, and then trying to uncover, well, why is this happening? Looking at session recordings and heat maps, all of that, you know, kind of compiling a list, a roadmap of information for you to kind of better tackle the different problems on a site in order for you to have more meaningful experiments that are actually going to yield results. And I also am not an advocate of just changing things. If I've come up with a problem and a hypothesis, I should probably test it, and I'm going to be able to give immediately see the impact of that particular change rather than having to wait and see, not be able to measure effectively if this particular change had an impact on my bottom line.
Andy Splichal:
Give me some examples. Where would you, through research, you've seen a problem and then made changes.
Ayat Shukairy:
So, for example, you might see that there is a high abandonment rate on a product page. This happens to a lot of ecommerce websites. They get to the product page and for some reason they're not moving forward. That could be due to a number of reasons. The visitor goes to the product page and the product isn't what was described. Perhaps they had a different idea of what that actual product page product was. Maybe the description is not, you know, giving them enough information. Perhaps it's difficult for them to even figure out what to do next or what's going to happen next if I add this item to cart.
Ayat Shukairy:
Perhaps, for example, they're at that stage where it's almost, they're going to make a decision. But clicking on add to cart means, hey, I need to validate. Do I even know who this company is? Do I trust them? Is there enough trust and confidence in this company for me to actually move forward? So I need to have that, some elements there that really impact the visitor. So it could be a number of different issues. You can look at analytics and heat maps and session recordings to give you an idea of what you think is a priority issue that needs to be addressed. Are they even scrolling down to the description? If they're not, maybe I need to move that up. Are they, for example, you know, looking for further information? Are they going back to the homepage to understand a little bit more about the brand? If that's happening, if I see that within my funnel, then I need to probably address the trust issues right on that product page again, hit them with it once more time. Or maybe I need to add some sort of like, incentive if I don't have my free shipping, you know, like very clearly stated next to the add to cart button to really give them the extra push that they need, then perhaps I need to add that or the exchange policy, whatever it is.
Ayat Shukairy:
So there's a number of factors that you're seeing, the abandonment rate. But then I need to kind of dig a little bit deeper to understand, well, what is the reason, the true reason why my visitors are not moving forward? And then I'm going to test different concepts to see which one is actually impacting them. And if I see that this impacted them at this stage, then perhaps I can replicate that throughout the site in different places.
Andy Splichal:
When you start with a client, do you test everything or are there some things that you're like, this has worked on 100% of my clients. Let's get this implemented right away. Let's get this implemented and then we can start testing based on your results.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we've developed something called the conversion framework. One of the first things that we look at when we're evaluating sites, I always say that the first thing that you want to look at are the bugs. That's something that if there's a bug, it needs to be fixed. If I'm clicking on something and it's bringing in a wrong result or a wrong link or it's directing visitors to a 404, I need to get that fixed. That's not something that I would test. That just needs to be fixed. The second phase is ux. Look, you know, providing this has been proven, you know, in our industry, that providing a better user experience on the site is going to yield better results.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we want to ensure that we're meeting the ten heuristics throughout the site on all the different pages. And as I go through the site, so we do like a heuristic evaluation. We actually bring the entire CRO and designer team into that heuristic evaluation and we evaluate, are they actually meeting these standards? And if they're not, what needs to happen? Okay, so that's kind of the number two phase.
Andy Splichal:
You know, you lost me right there. What are the ten? The ten do what now?
Ayat Shukairy:
The ten. The ten heuristics. These are the ten. The Nielsen group basically came up with ten heuristics that need to be addressed for a better user experience on the site.
Andy Splichal:
Okay, and what are those ten?
Ayat Shukairy:
This is anywhere between. From, like, you know, ensuring that there's continuity on the site, ensuring that, you know, that the visitor has orientation, ensuring that the. There's a minimalist design on the page so that the visitor, you know, there's less clutter and they can find exactly the primary goal that they're going for. So there's a number of different heuristics that we will evaluate and ensure that you're just at least mentioning those. And maybe we can provide a link to what those ten heuristics are in the footnotes of the show. But that'll be great. Something that I would say that's one of the first things that you should evaluate is the site on each page addressing these, and if they're not, then that needs to be, you know, addressed. Like one of the heuristics also is like, for example, error prevention.
Ayat Shukairy:
When there's an error, how is that error being communicated? Is it something that may cause the visitor to actually, you know, abandon, like you've seen on maybe like a lot of different cart pages where they have like the clear cart link right next to the, you know, next step link? Well, that's a mistake because if you do that, then you're going to have a lot of people that are accidentally clicking on that and then they'll abandon your site forever and they're probably not going to move forward.
Andy Splichal:
So you said that. I'm sorry. That was step two.
Ayat Shukairy:
That was step two. And then the third one is what kind of like the more conversion persuasive. This is where I go into like, you know, more the, my user research. I understand a little bit more about those emotional and social aspects that are going to move my visitor forward. So I'm going to create a better, engaging address, really, you know, the value proposition in a better way, ensure that I'm communicating that so that again, I stand out amongst the crowd because again, I need to understand, well, why are visitors selecting my solution instead of the status quo? Why are they selecting my solution instead of, for example, the hundreds of other competitors that are out there? What is it? What's that value add that my product or service offers that others don't? And I need to make sure that that's highlighted and communicated effectively on the site. There's definitely different persuasive ways that we can test that and ensure that that information is readily available.
Andy Splichal:
You had mentioned trust factors on the site is a big one. What are some of those trust factors?
Ayat Shukairy:
So, for example, ensuring that there's some sort of social proof on the site. It's always funny when I go to a site and we find that customer reviews are buried below, even on a homepage, you want to make sure that that's front and center. People see that. They trust that this company is reputable. People are talking about this particular company, again, some people take customer reviews with a grain of salt, but nonetheless, having that does enhance trust. And if you make sure that it's from a third party, it can enhance trust even more. For example, if you have achieved any type of recognition, ensuring that that is also, you're like part of an Inc. 5000 or you've gotten some sort of recognition for your organization within your industry.
Ayat Shukairy:
We work with, for example, a moving company, and they've been like, called one of the best moving companies in Texas. That's something that they need to put front and center because that's going to enhance trust and confidence that this is a company that people trust. If you have press that has covered your company, ensure that, again, that is available so that people can see it and they can understand that, okay, this is a company that I can trust and I'm going to move forward with them as a result.
Andy Splichal:
You know, I heard somewhere, and I'd be curious on your opinion on it, that the number one trust factor that an e commerce company can have on their website is a phone number. What do you think about that?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think it depends. I don't know that it's right at this time with just how the industry has been moving forward, that the phone number is what causes that trust or it enhances the trust to that extent. We have tested with adding the phone number, adding it more front and center. I've always found that it has a better impact when it's a company that offers a service versus a company that, for example, offers products, it's not as effective. A lot of companies, for example, what we've done instead of phone numbers are, is adding like kind of a live chat feature, which has also enhanced trust and confidence, because again, you know, people want to know that there's somebody that they can reach. But what I found is, hey, no matter what, trying to figure out, like, what is the information that they're missing, why would they contact you in the first place? And making sure that that information is available on the site actually improves conversion even better.
Andy Splichal:
So what are some of the biggest and most common mistakes even that you see websites making with their landing page that could negatively affect conversion.
Ayat Shukairy:
Number one thing that I find a lot of, um, landing pages, like the mistake with landing pages, is that there's not enough continuity between the ad and the actual landing page. So there's a disconnect. The visitor sees and reads information or a headline or an image on the ad. They get to the actual landing page and it's not replicated. Or there's different information or you're trying to, you know, say a lot of different things on that page rather than that primary thing that they came for, that they clicked on. So that's kind of the number one thing. It's a matter of just communicating, ensuring that whatever they see in the ad you're displaying on your product page so that there's no confusion and they're not going to be looking for that information elsewhere or they're abandoning because they think that they've gotten somewhere else or they've landed on the wrong page. One of the other things is just, again, having multiple goals on the site.
Ayat Shukairy:
Typically, what I always say is you want to make sure that the primary goal on your landing page is clear. It doesn't mean you can't have other links or other like information and whatnot, but you just want to make sure that it's very clear to anybody who sees the page, the hierarchy, and that the primary goal is, you know, front and center. And it's very easy to access and it's easily understandable that this is the primary goal that an action that we'd like the visitor to take. And then the last thing is, I would say just, you know, some key information sometimes is buried below the fold. You know, again, you have like a few seconds to kind of make that positive impression on visitors. So just make sure that the information, the most important information that you want them to understand about your product or service is immediately accessible and they don't have to scroll endlessly to find it.
Andy Splichal:
For e commerce companies, how much do you find that the platform matters for conversion? And, you know, we'll take for this, we'll look at the big three, the Shopify, the woocommerce and the bigcommerce.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we've had, we've worked with companies that are on every single platform. You can imagine custom platforms as well as Magento and of course, the Shopifys of the world and Woocommerce and whatnot, it does make a difference in terms of just the ease of change. So, for example, a lot of times we'll recommend experiments and it's just impossible if they're on a complex platform. Just in order for us to be able to run an experiment, there has to be so much backend work that has to be done, which in general is not an easy solution. And we don't necessarily recommend that either, because whatever I want to implement, it's an MVP in the end. My experiments, any test that I run on the A B test that I run on the site. It's an MVP for me to validate whether or not this hypothesis is true. If they have to do so much work, and I don't even know that this is actually going to have a positive impact on their site because you can never know for sure in marketing, then I definitely don't want them to do it.
Ayat Shukairy:
So the ease of making changes and being able to get things in place definitely matters. And I think being on some of the big three platforms, some of them are a little bit easier than others, but nonetheless they are easier than what, you know, like some of the custom platforms out there or some of like the Magentos of the world, they're a little bit more complex and they take a little bit more time from the visitor in order to be, be able to like make changes and implement. So it's like a much slower cycle in order to make changes, although, you know, it's impacting their conversion rates negatively.
Andy Splichal:
What, what software are you using to do your testing?
Ayat Shukairy:
So we are agnostic. We'll use all sorts of software. If our client comes in with a testing software already, we'll use it. We use Figpi a lot. Actually, Figpy is a sister company of invest, so it just is a easier synergy, but we're pretty agnostic. A lot of our clients are using VWO or optimizely, so it just kind of, whatever they come in with, we'll utilize it in order for them to have a robust a B testing program.
Andy Splichal:
For a lot of companies, it's all about customer acquisition. How much of a company's resources do you think should be given to customer acquisition versus increasing conversion?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think it's very important because email is one of those ways that you can always communicate to customers and convert them. And it's tends to be across most of our e commerce websites, still one of those resources that is able to convert customers a lot better than others. So certainly actually whenever we start with a client, if we don't see that there's a good way that they're capturing emails and trying to acquire more information about customers, we'll tend to encourage that. And then, for example, if we have, we see a lot of, we get lots of contacts and when we look at their traffic, if they don't have a lot of traffic, we tell them, you need to be spending the dollars on Google Ads, you need to be spending the dollars on SEO in order for you to increase traffic. And then we can work on converting that traffic. We want to make sure that it's very targeted traffic as well. So we don't typically take clients with certain low traffic thresholds. We ensure that they are at a certain point, you know, in terms of the traffic that's coming in, we ensure that they're at a certain point with their conversion rate in order for us to be able to actually take them in as clients.
Andy Splichal:
That's interesting. What are those levels?
Ayat Shukairy:
So we want to make sure that they have like around at least 10,000 visitors coming to their site and we want to make sure that they are converting at least 2% of those visitors. So in order for us to be able to have an effective program, otherwise, it's going to be very, very difficult for us to run experiments. For us, we have to wait very long for an experiment to actually yield any type of result. So we're looking at, again, the higher the traffic and the higher the conversions, the better that we're going to be able to actually have an effective program.
Andy Splichal:
How would a company calculate ROI on hiring a conversion rate optimization company?
Ayat Shukairy:
So actually what we always, we've kind of rebranded ROI at invest, we call it return on change, because with all these A B testing platforms, we're able to see the exact revenue impact that the experiment is going to have on your bottom line immediately. So, because it is about that particular, the impact of the change that I did on your site and what type of an impact that has on your bottom line. So we're calling it return on change, the change that you made on your site in real time. What is that impact and how does.
Andy Splichal:
And then are you forecasting that out over twelve months?
Ayat Shukairy:
Exactly. We forecast over six months. Six months. Because, and then we have a depreciation model because we know that, again, this the, just like any type of marketing change, it's going to depreciate over time just to ensure that it's accurate and it makes sense. And you know, these are, these results are what you would see with rolling out the particular experiment. Now, again, we have some clients that, for instance, might not roll it out immediately, but we're just giving them that forecast of if you roll it out, you're going to see this type of an impact on your bottom line. But that's the nice thing about a b testing. It gives you the immediate impact, the immediate revenue impact that that particular experiment has on your, on your bottom.
Andy Splichal:
How much a b testing is needed before it's statistically relevant. Does that come in the software you're using?
Ayat Shukairy:
Yes. So most softwares, if you're using any type of software, they would typically have it built in to the software in order for them to. They'll calculate how, whether it's statistically significant, whether it's reached the sample size in order for it to reach that significance. Because you don't want to turn it off too early, and you don't want to turn it off too late either. You want to make sure that it's that right moment where the results are conclusive and you can actually reflect on them and ensure that the results make sense.
Andy Splichal:
What about AI? Have you incorporated AI into any of your service?
Ayat Shukairy:
AI has been excellent for content. For example. If you're trying to look for that right headline, it'll give you ideas. It's not necessarily that you're going to utilize exactly what chat GPT comes out with, but you can still utilize it, leverage it, get ideas from it, and then take that back and see, okay, the way that it's explaining this particular value or the way that this headline is being outputted is a lot better. You can kind of test with that. So that's right now at this point in time, that's what we've used it for. We've also used it for analysis. So we do, of course, a lot of surveys, we do a lot of customer interviews.
Ayat Shukairy:
So sometimes we'll just input the script and we'll ask chat DPT to help output some insights of what the thoughts are in terms of, are there potential areas of improvement? Are there some experiment ideas as a result of some of the, the scripts that we've, or the interviews that we've conducted? And it actually comes out with some interesting ideas that maybe you may have not thought of. So we're trying to play around and leverage with it as much as possible. And I think I only see it increasing. I see even potentially being able to utilize it for experimentation. And within these tools, I'm hoping to see eventually that a b testing tools will also have an AI component that will kind of take it to the next step.
Andy Splichal:
How important is the interviewing compared to just using analytics and where people are bouncing? I mean, how important do you actually define, actually speaking to somebody compares to using just the data?
Ayat Shukairy:
Customer interviews are super important. I cannot emphasize it enough. I always say to, whenever I talk at different conferences, I always mention the importance of getting on the phone and talking to your customers. And sometimes there's a lot of companies out there, they're smaller, they don't have the capacity to hire a CRO agency. But guess what? You have this gold mine of information which are your customers, offer them a small incentive and get on the phone with them and talk to them and try to figure out what are those social emotional aspects that are really driving them to make a decision and decide on your company. And how can you better highlight that information on your site? Because a lot of times you don't realize that this is such an important thing. I'll give you an example. We had a client that they put so much emphasis on the fact that they were green and conscious of the environment and whatnot, and they thought that this was a huge driver for conversion everywhere on the site.
Ayat Shukairy:
And then just conducting some customer interviews we realized that actually that was not a major driver for customers. It was a nice to have, but it was not something that was really driving their decision. Mobility, easy access. This company sold ebooks. So having the easy access to these ebooks and being able to, you know, access wherever, whenever, you know, these uh, their books for whatever classes that they had, um, and the features that were within, you know, the ebook, that was a lot more of an attractive benefit than being, you know, conscious of the environment. And again, it was an added benefit later that they thought of, but it didn't drive their decision and it was never a consideration for them when they were actually making the decision if they were choosing between buying a book, uh, like a, you know, paper book or an actual ebook. So, you know, so that's what the customer interviews revealed. Whereas, you know, again, the client had spent so much on branding themselves as this eco friendly brand, but it wasn't something that was really impacting the decision on the customer.
Ayat Shukairy:
In the end, you know, the only.
Andy Splichal:
Thing that I hate to be a devil's advocate and play that, the only thing I'm, if you're doing the customer interviews, aren't you, you're only speaking to people who have made purchases, who actually like your product, opposed to, you're not reaching the people who left.
Ayat Shukairy:
Right? So what I would say is the reason why, first of all, when we're conducting interviews, we'll always try to look for that customer. That's a first time customer, this is the first time they've ever been exposed to the brand, first time that they've ever purchased from the brand. Because again these visitors, and we try to get them within the first three to six months of purchase, not more than that. Because again, I want to get fresh in their mind why they went with this brand versus other brands, because in the end they did make a decision. People like to say that hey, this was a very spontaneous decision and I didn't put any thought into it. But then when you dig deeper, you're able to find no people did put, there is a need that they have, there is a job that needs to get done, and this product or service filled that job. So I need to understand that what, what was it and how do I make sure that I highlight this information more? Um, so, you know, true to what you're saying is that you're not talking to customers that you lost, but there are still ways that we can reach those customers that you lost. Like from like, you know, surveys and like we do, like lots of abandonment surveys just to understand why are you leaving the site? You know, like, why are you abandoning at this point, what are we not providing you with? Again, like, the questions would be a lot more better formulated and we'd have to wordsmith them.
Ayat Shukairy:
But you get the point that you can still try to understand from those customers what the reason is for them leaving. But understanding also the purchase and why they decided is really critical. And it can really give you some emotional and social aspects to their decision making that you can highlight more. You can utilize their copy more, like the words from the customers, actual customers, into your copy more in order for you to really be a lot more persuasive on your site and attract other customers that may have not realized that you have this aspect or this value or whatever it is.
Andy Splichal:
So when you reach out to them, I mean, do you offer them an incentive? I'm guessing. And you ask if you can record it?
Ayat Shukairy:
Yes, absolutely. So that's kind of immediately you let them know we're going to be recording this and it's only shared internally. We're not going to be sharing it with anybody else. So you can just make sure that they're aware that they can trust you from that perspective. And yes, we offer an incentive because typically our interviews run anywhere between 30 minutes to 45 minutes.
Andy Splichal:
Wow.
Ayat Shukairy:
Yeah, they're really long. And it's a lot of recalling information, trying to understand, you know, that first event that happened that led them to your brand, trying to gauge a lot of, you know, like the decision making process, what was going through their mind, what was happening, why they decided again with your brand versus others. So there's a lot that goes into the interview. So, yes, expecting somebody to jump on a 45 minutes call with me, impossible. We're either going to offer them a discount directly from the e commerce site, if it's an e commerce site. But if it's not, like, for example, we work with a moving company like I told you before, they offered like an Amazon gift card.
Andy Splichal:
So how do you get, I mean, do you call them and say, do you have time for a 45 minutes conversation? I was thinking it's like five questions you ask and it's like a five minute conversation.
Ayat Shukairy:
It's a in depth conversation for sure. So what we do is we usually will ask our client to pull, like the first time customers. We don't want repeat customers, so they have to pull a list and customers that purchase within the shortest period, maybe like three months ago, so they'll remember it's fresh in their minds and then we'll ask them to email them a survey because we want to do another layer of validation that these are the right type of customers that we want to target. And the reason why we do this extra layer is because we get a lot of stragglers that come in between. They'll pull the email list, they'll think that they're first time customers, but then they turn out not to be. And we just want to ensure that they really are and they are the decision maker. We don't want, for example, oh, my wife's the one that made the decision. But I'm going to jump on the interview with you.
Ayat Shukairy:
We want to kind of avoid that, you know what I'm saying? Because again, then I can't gauge from that person any information. And so then, and then once we do that, then we'll see the list that comes out of the form. If these customers are validated, we'll send them a second email and tell them, congratulations, we're going to schedule this with you. Here's the calendly link that you can schedule this on. And then, you know, once the interview is completed, you'll get the gift card.
Andy Splichal:
And what kind of participation rate do you typically get?
Ayat Shukairy:
I'm going to tell you, it depends on the industry, depends on the client. Each client is a little bit different. We worked with a company that sold like tints and vinyls that cover cars and participation rate was very low. So it really depends on the type of customers that you have. So we might have to send out more rounds of emails, reach out to more customers in order for us to be able to get the customers needed for the interviews. But we're only looking for five to seven customers, no more than that. That'll give us enough base information. And then typically we'll follow up with a poll or a survey afterwards to validate whether or not the findings from the interview are indeed what the rest of you know the customers actually feel.
Andy Splichal:
So what services do you offer for customers? We've got through a lot of stuff so far.
Ayat Shukairy:
So does any. What I described to you, all the different services that I described to you are really a conversion optimization project. So we only offer two different services at invest. One is a conversion audit where we'll just go through the site, we'll do all of the evaluations that I mentioned to you, like the heuristic evaluation, the conversion framework evaluation, the analytics audit, and come up with a roadmap of experiments that you can conduct on your site on your own. If you don't want to engage with a full time conversion optimization project. Everything else that I described to you is within conversion optimization projects. We'll do all the research, but then we actually do everything from a to z of implementation of the experiment. You know, reviewing the results, learning from the results, taking kind of those learnings, and re, you know, kind of assessing whether or not there are other opportunities based on the results and the learnings that we gained from any experiment that we run.
Ayat Shukairy:
So that is all under a conversion optimization project that we run at investors.
Andy Splichal:
And how do the fee structures work?
Ayat Shukairy:
So it is a monthly retainer, and typically, if you want some sort of a discount, typically if you engage with us for six months to a year, because that's where we see the best result. Because we always say conversion optimization isn't an on and off switch that you can just turn on and off. It's something that's really long term in order for you to get that impact in those results. So, yes, it could be the discounts usually if you engage with us for six months or twelve months.
Andy Splichal:
And what is the monthly retainer?
Ayat Shukairy:
Monthly retainer, I believe, begins at around eight k and can go up to 18, depending on the number of experiments that you want us to run for you.
Andy Splichal:
And do you have a favorite success story of a client you could share?
Ayat Shukairy:
Favorite success story of a client. I mean, we have a client that we've been working with for three years now. And the transformation that we have seen on their site and the impact that our program has had on their bottom line has been so tremendous. And obviously that's why they continue to work with us. So that's always amazing. I think whenever we see clients like, you know, just being with us and really believing in the program and kind of seeing what the results can yield and working with us, I mean, I think, like, that's the thing about conversion optimization. We really are really hands on and we work a lot with the team itself within the company, because nobody knows that brand or service like the company owners do. And so you kind of get that information, you work with them, you kind of understand what their business goals are, and then you align your CRO and your testing program based on that.
Ayat Shukairy:
So those are always amazing success stories. And, you know, like, we really appreciate clients that believe in CRO and see kind of like, you know, the value.
Andy Splichal:
In it and who is the perfect client for your agency.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we work with a lot of ecommerce sites. This year in particular, I would say 2023. And 2024 has been interesting because we've. We've gained a lot more service industry clients, but typically before that, they've been e commerce doing anywhere between, I would say, ten to maybe $20 million in revenue. They typically will have, like, a smaller marketing team and or sometimes no marketing team at all. We usually, you know, in a lot of, a lot of companies that we work with, we work directly with the owners of the company or the CEO. Again, they're not the ones that are making the decisions. They have some other people that are there, but they're usually involved in the process as well.
Ayat Shukairy:
But, yeah, I mean, those are kind of some of the customers that we've worked with in our sweet spot.
Andy Splichal:
And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you guys?
Ayat Shukairy:
You can visit our site, investor.com. Our blog also has some really great conversion rate optimization information, and I think it's what invest CRO.com blog. You can visit, you know me, you can email me, I guess, or I have, like, lots of, whether it's LinkedIn or whether it's on Instagram, I'm very active on Twitter. I'm very active. It's just my first name. You can just find insights and information about us there.
Andy Splichal:
Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?
Ayat Shukairy:
No. I mean, I think I would just say that the first aspect of conversion optimization is always, like, the research part. So I would say even if you're not conducting any testing or you don't have the traffic to do so, just make sure that you're doing the research before you make a change to ensure that you've kind of looked into it, you're not just making a random change because you do want it to stick and you want it to have that impact on your bottom line.
Andy Splichal:
Well, this has been great. Thank you again for joining us today.
Ayat Shukairy:
Thank you, Andy.
Andy Splichal:
It's been great 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 invest or connecting with, you will 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 make each click we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information on any of the information discussed in previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.
Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is throwing things on your website and praying will not yield some results. Today's guest is the co founder of Invesp and the co author of the book Conversion Optimization. A big welcome to Ayat Shukairy. Hi, Ayat.
Ayat Shukairy:
Hello, Andy. Thank you for having me.
Andy Splichal:
Thanks for coming. Now, the title of this podcast is interesting. It's throwing things on your website and praying will not yield results. And I paraphrase that from your LinkedIn description. So what do you mean by it?
Ayat Shukairy:
So what we see a lot of companies do when it comes to conversion rate optimization is they'll just make random changes on their site because, you know, the hippo in the room, the person that's getting the paid the most bucks, decides that this has to change. And then thinking, okay, this is going to really impact and move our customers in the right direction. And then they're surprised, lo and behold, that that's not the case. Or we see so many companies say that we want to go through this big redesign, rebranding, I don't know what. And then they do it because thinking that that's going to get them the results, that's going to get them better conversions, that's going to get them more sales, and then they're shocked to learn that actually that doesn't happen.
Andy Splichal:
Yeah, no, I've seen that before. I've also seen replatforming and thinking that you need to replatform and then the conversions will go up. Is that one that comes through common for you?
Ayat Shukairy:
Exactly. We've actually had a recent client that they, they actually, they needed the replatform because they were on Magento and they wanted to replatform to Shopify, which is going to be a lot easier for them. But again, expecting that they're going to see the results, expecting that they're going to be up and running immediately. Things take a lot longer, things get delayed development, it's never within the estimates that you typically think. I think you always need to add a lot more and then expecting to see the results immediately and your conversion rate also is not what happens. But when I talk about also this concept of throwing things at the wall and hoping that something will stick, I always get the example of like, you know, if you have like a bunch of designers in a room, you can take a site and you can be like, okay, this needs to change. This need, these look like they need to change. However, just expecting that because somebody said that that's, that's what's going to happen, you're going to see an actual impact on that is, is something that is incorrect.
Ayat Shukairy:
And certainly there has to be a little bit more research to anything that you do. Right. You need to kind of like dig in a little bit deeper, look at analytics, do some more thorough investigation, look at heat map session recording to validate. Is this really, truly a problem that this site is facing? And if I present a solution, is it actually going to have a positive impact on their conversion rates?
Andy Splichal:
So over the last year or so, conversion optimization, it's been a really big emphasis of my show. And I've had a few different experts who run different optimization companies on as guest, and I mean, everybody seems to know what they're talking about. So I guess my question is, how would an e commerce company know who can legitimately help them when it comes to increasing conversion rates on their website?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think you have to kind of look at, there's a lot of, there's a few conversion optimization agencies that even we compete against that I think follow a process. I think it's super important that whenever you're investigating different agencies that are going to be doing CRO for you, you have to make sure that they follow a thorough process. Our process is called ship. It's really easy to remember, but it's not so different than what some of the other CRO agencies may offer. And what we do is we really emphasize the scrutinized phase, which is the research phase. Right. I want to do user testing. I want to understand my customers and conduct customer interviews.
Ayat Shukairy:
We conduct a certain kind of customer interviews called jobs to be done interviews, and they really give us a lot of insight onto, you know, again, like those deep social emotional aspects that really motivate the customer to move forward. And bringing that alive on your site is really going to change the game for you. Conducting analytics analysis, understanding where they're clicking, where they're going, you know, and then trying to uncover, well, why is this happening? Looking at session recordings and heat maps, all of that, you know, kind of compiling a list, a roadmap of information for you to kind of better tackle the different problems on a site in order for you to have more meaningful experiments that are actually going to yield results. And I also am not an advocate of just changing things. If I've come up with a problem and a hypothesis, I should probably test it, and I'm going to be able to give immediately see the impact of that particular change rather than having to wait and see, not be able to measure effectively if this particular change had an impact on my bottom line.
Andy Splichal:
Give me some examples. Where would you, through research, you've seen a problem and then made changes.
Ayat Shukairy:
So, for example, you might see that there is a high abandonment rate on a product page. This happens to a lot of ecommerce websites. They get to the product page and for some reason they're not moving forward. That could be due to a number of reasons. The visitor goes to the product page and the product isn't what was described. Perhaps they had a different idea of what that actual product page product was. Maybe the description is not, you know, giving them enough information. Perhaps it's difficult for them to even figure out what to do next or what's going to happen next if I add this item to cart.
Ayat Shukairy:
Perhaps, for example, they're at that stage where it's almost, they're going to make a decision. But clicking on add to cart means, hey, I need to validate. Do I even know who this company is? Do I trust them? Is there enough trust and confidence in this company for me to actually move forward? So I need to have that, some elements there that really impact the visitor. So it could be a number of different issues. You can look at analytics and heat maps and session recordings to give you an idea of what you think is a priority issue that needs to be addressed. Are they even scrolling down to the description? If they're not, maybe I need to move that up. Are they, for example, you know, looking for further information? Are they going back to the homepage to understand a little bit more about the brand? If that's happening, if I see that within my funnel, then I need to probably address the trust issues right on that product page again, hit them with it once more time. Or maybe I need to add some sort of like, incentive if I don't have my free shipping, you know, like very clearly stated next to the add to cart button to really give them the extra push that they need, then perhaps I need to add that or the exchange policy, whatever it is.
Ayat Shukairy:
So there's a number of factors that you're seeing, the abandonment rate. But then I need to kind of dig a little bit deeper to understand, well, what is the reason, the true reason why my visitors are not moving forward? And then I'm going to test different concepts to see which one is actually impacting them. And if I see that this impacted them at this stage, then perhaps I can replicate that throughout the site in different places.
Andy Splichal:
When you start with a client, do you test everything or are there some things that you're like, this has worked on 100% of my clients. Let's get this implemented right away. Let's get this implemented and then we can start testing based on your results.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we've developed something called the conversion framework. One of the first things that we look at when we're evaluating sites, I always say that the first thing that you want to look at are the bugs. That's something that if there's a bug, it needs to be fixed. If I'm clicking on something and it's bringing in a wrong result or a wrong link or it's directing visitors to a 404, I need to get that fixed. That's not something that I would test. That just needs to be fixed. The second phase is ux. Look, you know, providing this has been proven, you know, in our industry, that providing a better user experience on the site is going to yield better results.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we want to ensure that we're meeting the ten heuristics throughout the site on all the different pages. And as I go through the site, so we do like a heuristic evaluation. We actually bring the entire CRO and designer team into that heuristic evaluation and we evaluate, are they actually meeting these standards? And if they're not, what needs to happen? Okay, so that's kind of the number two phase.
Andy Splichal:
You know, you lost me right there. What are the ten? The ten do what now?
Ayat Shukairy:
The ten. The ten heuristics. These are the ten. The Nielsen group basically came up with ten heuristics that need to be addressed for a better user experience on the site.
Andy Splichal:
Okay, and what are those ten?
Ayat Shukairy:
This is anywhere between. From, like, you know, ensuring that there's continuity on the site, ensuring that, you know, that the visitor has orientation, ensuring that the. There's a minimalist design on the page so that the visitor, you know, there's less clutter and they can find exactly the primary goal that they're going for. So there's a number of different heuristics that we will evaluate and ensure that you're just at least mentioning those. And maybe we can provide a link to what those ten heuristics are in the footnotes of the show. But that'll be great. Something that I would say that's one of the first things that you should evaluate is the site on each page addressing these, and if they're not, then that needs to be, you know, addressed. Like one of the heuristics also is like, for example, error prevention.
Ayat Shukairy:
When there's an error, how is that error being communicated? Is it something that may cause the visitor to actually, you know, abandon, like you've seen on maybe like a lot of different cart pages where they have like the clear cart link right next to the, you know, next step link? Well, that's a mistake because if you do that, then you're going to have a lot of people that are accidentally clicking on that and then they'll abandon your site forever and they're probably not going to move forward.
Andy Splichal:
So you said that. I'm sorry. That was step two.
Ayat Shukairy:
That was step two. And then the third one is what kind of like the more conversion persuasive. This is where I go into like, you know, more the, my user research. I understand a little bit more about those emotional and social aspects that are going to move my visitor forward. So I'm going to create a better, engaging address, really, you know, the value proposition in a better way, ensure that I'm communicating that so that again, I stand out amongst the crowd because again, I need to understand, well, why are visitors selecting my solution instead of the status quo? Why are they selecting my solution instead of, for example, the hundreds of other competitors that are out there? What is it? What's that value add that my product or service offers that others don't? And I need to make sure that that's highlighted and communicated effectively on the site. There's definitely different persuasive ways that we can test that and ensure that that information is readily available.
Andy Splichal:
You had mentioned trust factors on the site is a big one. What are some of those trust factors?
Ayat Shukairy:
So, for example, ensuring that there's some sort of social proof on the site. It's always funny when I go to a site and we find that customer reviews are buried below, even on a homepage, you want to make sure that that's front and center. People see that. They trust that this company is reputable. People are talking about this particular company, again, some people take customer reviews with a grain of salt, but nonetheless, having that does enhance trust. And if you make sure that it's from a third party, it can enhance trust even more. For example, if you have achieved any type of recognition, ensuring that that is also, you're like part of an Inc. 5000 or you've gotten some sort of recognition for your organization within your industry.
Ayat Shukairy:
We work with, for example, a moving company, and they've been like, called one of the best moving companies in Texas. That's something that they need to put front and center because that's going to enhance trust and confidence that this is a company that people trust. If you have press that has covered your company, ensure that, again, that is available so that people can see it and they can understand that, okay, this is a company that I can trust and I'm going to move forward with them as a result.
Andy Splichal:
You know, I heard somewhere, and I'd be curious on your opinion on it, that the number one trust factor that an e commerce company can have on their website is a phone number. What do you think about that?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think it depends. I don't know that it's right at this time with just how the industry has been moving forward, that the phone number is what causes that trust or it enhances the trust to that extent. We have tested with adding the phone number, adding it more front and center. I've always found that it has a better impact when it's a company that offers a service versus a company that, for example, offers products, it's not as effective. A lot of companies, for example, what we've done instead of phone numbers are, is adding like kind of a live chat feature, which has also enhanced trust and confidence, because again, you know, people want to know that there's somebody that they can reach. But what I found is, hey, no matter what, trying to figure out, like, what is the information that they're missing, why would they contact you in the first place? And making sure that that information is available on the site actually improves conversion even better.
Andy Splichal:
So what are some of the biggest and most common mistakes even that you see websites making with their landing page that could negatively affect conversion.
Ayat Shukairy:
Number one thing that I find a lot of, um, landing pages, like the mistake with landing pages, is that there's not enough continuity between the ad and the actual landing page. So there's a disconnect. The visitor sees and reads information or a headline or an image on the ad. They get to the actual landing page and it's not replicated. Or there's different information or you're trying to, you know, say a lot of different things on that page rather than that primary thing that they came for, that they clicked on. So that's kind of the number one thing. It's a matter of just communicating, ensuring that whatever they see in the ad you're displaying on your product page so that there's no confusion and they're not going to be looking for that information elsewhere or they're abandoning because they think that they've gotten somewhere else or they've landed on the wrong page. One of the other things is just, again, having multiple goals on the site.
Ayat Shukairy:
Typically, what I always say is you want to make sure that the primary goal on your landing page is clear. It doesn't mean you can't have other links or other like information and whatnot, but you just want to make sure that it's very clear to anybody who sees the page, the hierarchy, and that the primary goal is, you know, front and center. And it's very easy to access and it's easily understandable that this is the primary goal that an action that we'd like the visitor to take. And then the last thing is, I would say just, you know, some key information sometimes is buried below the fold. You know, again, you have like a few seconds to kind of make that positive impression on visitors. So just make sure that the information, the most important information that you want them to understand about your product or service is immediately accessible and they don't have to scroll endlessly to find it.
Andy Splichal:
For e commerce companies, how much do you find that the platform matters for conversion? And, you know, we'll take for this, we'll look at the big three, the Shopify, the woocommerce and the bigcommerce.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we've had, we've worked with companies that are on every single platform. You can imagine custom platforms as well as Magento and of course, the Shopifys of the world and Woocommerce and whatnot, it does make a difference in terms of just the ease of change. So, for example, a lot of times we'll recommend experiments and it's just impossible if they're on a complex platform. Just in order for us to be able to run an experiment, there has to be so much backend work that has to be done, which in general is not an easy solution. And we don't necessarily recommend that either, because whatever I want to implement, it's an MVP in the end. My experiments, any test that I run on the A B test that I run on the site. It's an MVP for me to validate whether or not this hypothesis is true. If they have to do so much work, and I don't even know that this is actually going to have a positive impact on their site because you can never know for sure in marketing, then I definitely don't want them to do it.
Ayat Shukairy:
So the ease of making changes and being able to get things in place definitely matters. And I think being on some of the big three platforms, some of them are a little bit easier than others, but nonetheless they are easier than what, you know, like some of the custom platforms out there or some of like the Magentos of the world, they're a little bit more complex and they take a little bit more time from the visitor in order to be, be able to like make changes and implement. So it's like a much slower cycle in order to make changes, although, you know, it's impacting their conversion rates negatively.
Andy Splichal:
What, what software are you using to do your testing?
Ayat Shukairy:
So we are agnostic. We'll use all sorts of software. If our client comes in with a testing software already, we'll use it. We use Figpi a lot. Actually, Figpy is a sister company of invest, so it just is a easier synergy, but we're pretty agnostic. A lot of our clients are using VWO or optimizely, so it just kind of, whatever they come in with, we'll utilize it in order for them to have a robust a B testing program.
Andy Splichal:
For a lot of companies, it's all about customer acquisition. How much of a company's resources do you think should be given to customer acquisition versus increasing conversion?
Ayat Shukairy:
I think it's very important because email is one of those ways that you can always communicate to customers and convert them. And it's tends to be across most of our e commerce websites, still one of those resources that is able to convert customers a lot better than others. So certainly actually whenever we start with a client, if we don't see that there's a good way that they're capturing emails and trying to acquire more information about customers, we'll tend to encourage that. And then, for example, if we have, we see a lot of, we get lots of contacts and when we look at their traffic, if they don't have a lot of traffic, we tell them, you need to be spending the dollars on Google Ads, you need to be spending the dollars on SEO in order for you to increase traffic. And then we can work on converting that traffic. We want to make sure that it's very targeted traffic as well. So we don't typically take clients with certain low traffic thresholds. We ensure that they are at a certain point, you know, in terms of the traffic that's coming in, we ensure that they're at a certain point with their conversion rate in order for us to be able to actually take them in as clients.
Andy Splichal:
That's interesting. What are those levels?
Ayat Shukairy:
So we want to make sure that they have like around at least 10,000 visitors coming to their site and we want to make sure that they are converting at least 2% of those visitors. So in order for us to be able to have an effective program, otherwise, it's going to be very, very difficult for us to run experiments. For us, we have to wait very long for an experiment to actually yield any type of result. So we're looking at, again, the higher the traffic and the higher the conversions, the better that we're going to be able to actually have an effective program.
Andy Splichal:
How would a company calculate ROI on hiring a conversion rate optimization company?
Ayat Shukairy:
So actually what we always, we've kind of rebranded ROI at invest, we call it return on change, because with all these A B testing platforms, we're able to see the exact revenue impact that the experiment is going to have on your bottom line immediately. So, because it is about that particular, the impact of the change that I did on your site and what type of an impact that has on your bottom line. So we're calling it return on change, the change that you made on your site in real time. What is that impact and how does.
Andy Splichal:
And then are you forecasting that out over twelve months?
Ayat Shukairy:
Exactly. We forecast over six months. Six months. Because, and then we have a depreciation model because we know that, again, this the, just like any type of marketing change, it's going to depreciate over time just to ensure that it's accurate and it makes sense. And you know, these are, these results are what you would see with rolling out the particular experiment. Now, again, we have some clients that, for instance, might not roll it out immediately, but we're just giving them that forecast of if you roll it out, you're going to see this type of an impact on your bottom line. But that's the nice thing about a b testing. It gives you the immediate impact, the immediate revenue impact that that particular experiment has on your, on your bottom.
Andy Splichal:
How much a b testing is needed before it's statistically relevant. Does that come in the software you're using?
Ayat Shukairy:
Yes. So most softwares, if you're using any type of software, they would typically have it built in to the software in order for them to. They'll calculate how, whether it's statistically significant, whether it's reached the sample size in order for it to reach that significance. Because you don't want to turn it off too early, and you don't want to turn it off too late either. You want to make sure that it's that right moment where the results are conclusive and you can actually reflect on them and ensure that the results make sense.
Andy Splichal:
What about AI? Have you incorporated AI into any of your service?
Ayat Shukairy:
AI has been excellent for content. For example. If you're trying to look for that right headline, it'll give you ideas. It's not necessarily that you're going to utilize exactly what chat GPT comes out with, but you can still utilize it, leverage it, get ideas from it, and then take that back and see, okay, the way that it's explaining this particular value or the way that this headline is being outputted is a lot better. You can kind of test with that. So that's right now at this point in time, that's what we've used it for. We've also used it for analysis. So we do, of course, a lot of surveys, we do a lot of customer interviews.
Ayat Shukairy:
So sometimes we'll just input the script and we'll ask chat DPT to help output some insights of what the thoughts are in terms of, are there potential areas of improvement? Are there some experiment ideas as a result of some of the, the scripts that we've, or the interviews that we've conducted? And it actually comes out with some interesting ideas that maybe you may have not thought of. So we're trying to play around and leverage with it as much as possible. And I think I only see it increasing. I see even potentially being able to utilize it for experimentation. And within these tools, I'm hoping to see eventually that a b testing tools will also have an AI component that will kind of take it to the next step.
Andy Splichal:
How important is the interviewing compared to just using analytics and where people are bouncing? I mean, how important do you actually define, actually speaking to somebody compares to using just the data?
Ayat Shukairy:
Customer interviews are super important. I cannot emphasize it enough. I always say to, whenever I talk at different conferences, I always mention the importance of getting on the phone and talking to your customers. And sometimes there's a lot of companies out there, they're smaller, they don't have the capacity to hire a CRO agency. But guess what? You have this gold mine of information which are your customers, offer them a small incentive and get on the phone with them and talk to them and try to figure out what are those social emotional aspects that are really driving them to make a decision and decide on your company. And how can you better highlight that information on your site? Because a lot of times you don't realize that this is such an important thing. I'll give you an example. We had a client that they put so much emphasis on the fact that they were green and conscious of the environment and whatnot, and they thought that this was a huge driver for conversion everywhere on the site.
Ayat Shukairy:
And then just conducting some customer interviews we realized that actually that was not a major driver for customers. It was a nice to have, but it was not something that was really driving their decision. Mobility, easy access. This company sold ebooks. So having the easy access to these ebooks and being able to, you know, access wherever, whenever, you know, these uh, their books for whatever classes that they had, um, and the features that were within, you know, the ebook, that was a lot more of an attractive benefit than being, you know, conscious of the environment. And again, it was an added benefit later that they thought of, but it didn't drive their decision and it was never a consideration for them when they were actually making the decision if they were choosing between buying a book, uh, like a, you know, paper book or an actual ebook. So, you know, so that's what the customer interviews revealed. Whereas, you know, again, the client had spent so much on branding themselves as this eco friendly brand, but it wasn't something that was really impacting the decision on the customer.
Ayat Shukairy:
In the end, you know, the only.
Andy Splichal:
Thing that I hate to be a devil's advocate and play that, the only thing I'm, if you're doing the customer interviews, aren't you, you're only speaking to people who have made purchases, who actually like your product, opposed to, you're not reaching the people who left.
Ayat Shukairy:
Right? So what I would say is the reason why, first of all, when we're conducting interviews, we'll always try to look for that customer. That's a first time customer, this is the first time they've ever been exposed to the brand, first time that they've ever purchased from the brand. Because again these visitors, and we try to get them within the first three to six months of purchase, not more than that. Because again, I want to get fresh in their mind why they went with this brand versus other brands, because in the end they did make a decision. People like to say that hey, this was a very spontaneous decision and I didn't put any thought into it. But then when you dig deeper, you're able to find no people did put, there is a need that they have, there is a job that needs to get done, and this product or service filled that job. So I need to understand that what, what was it and how do I make sure that I highlight this information more? Um, so, you know, true to what you're saying is that you're not talking to customers that you lost, but there are still ways that we can reach those customers that you lost. Like from like, you know, surveys and like we do, like lots of abandonment surveys just to understand why are you leaving the site? You know, like, why are you abandoning at this point, what are we not providing you with? Again, like, the questions would be a lot more better formulated and we'd have to wordsmith them.
Ayat Shukairy:
But you get the point that you can still try to understand from those customers what the reason is for them leaving. But understanding also the purchase and why they decided is really critical. And it can really give you some emotional and social aspects to their decision making that you can highlight more. You can utilize their copy more, like the words from the customers, actual customers, into your copy more in order for you to really be a lot more persuasive on your site and attract other customers that may have not realized that you have this aspect or this value or whatever it is.
Andy Splichal:
So when you reach out to them, I mean, do you offer them an incentive? I'm guessing. And you ask if you can record it?
Ayat Shukairy:
Yes, absolutely. So that's kind of immediately you let them know we're going to be recording this and it's only shared internally. We're not going to be sharing it with anybody else. So you can just make sure that they're aware that they can trust you from that perspective. And yes, we offer an incentive because typically our interviews run anywhere between 30 minutes to 45 minutes.
Andy Splichal:
Wow.
Ayat Shukairy:
Yeah, they're really long. And it's a lot of recalling information, trying to understand, you know, that first event that happened that led them to your brand, trying to gauge a lot of, you know, like the decision making process, what was going through their mind, what was happening, why they decided again with your brand versus others. So there's a lot that goes into the interview. So, yes, expecting somebody to jump on a 45 minutes call with me, impossible. We're either going to offer them a discount directly from the e commerce site, if it's an e commerce site. But if it's not, like, for example, we work with a moving company like I told you before, they offered like an Amazon gift card.
Andy Splichal:
So how do you get, I mean, do you call them and say, do you have time for a 45 minutes conversation? I was thinking it's like five questions you ask and it's like a five minute conversation.
Ayat Shukairy:
It's a in depth conversation for sure. So what we do is we usually will ask our client to pull, like the first time customers. We don't want repeat customers, so they have to pull a list and customers that purchase within the shortest period, maybe like three months ago, so they'll remember it's fresh in their minds and then we'll ask them to email them a survey because we want to do another layer of validation that these are the right type of customers that we want to target. And the reason why we do this extra layer is because we get a lot of stragglers that come in between. They'll pull the email list, they'll think that they're first time customers, but then they turn out not to be. And we just want to ensure that they really are and they are the decision maker. We don't want, for example, oh, my wife's the one that made the decision. But I'm going to jump on the interview with you.
Ayat Shukairy:
We want to kind of avoid that, you know what I'm saying? Because again, then I can't gauge from that person any information. And so then, and then once we do that, then we'll see the list that comes out of the form. If these customers are validated, we'll send them a second email and tell them, congratulations, we're going to schedule this with you. Here's the calendly link that you can schedule this on. And then, you know, once the interview is completed, you'll get the gift card.
Andy Splichal:
And what kind of participation rate do you typically get?
Ayat Shukairy:
I'm going to tell you, it depends on the industry, depends on the client. Each client is a little bit different. We worked with a company that sold like tints and vinyls that cover cars and participation rate was very low. So it really depends on the type of customers that you have. So we might have to send out more rounds of emails, reach out to more customers in order for us to be able to get the customers needed for the interviews. But we're only looking for five to seven customers, no more than that. That'll give us enough base information. And then typically we'll follow up with a poll or a survey afterwards to validate whether or not the findings from the interview are indeed what the rest of you know the customers actually feel.
Andy Splichal:
So what services do you offer for customers? We've got through a lot of stuff so far.
Ayat Shukairy:
So does any. What I described to you, all the different services that I described to you are really a conversion optimization project. So we only offer two different services at invest. One is a conversion audit where we'll just go through the site, we'll do all of the evaluations that I mentioned to you, like the heuristic evaluation, the conversion framework evaluation, the analytics audit, and come up with a roadmap of experiments that you can conduct on your site on your own. If you don't want to engage with a full time conversion optimization project. Everything else that I described to you is within conversion optimization projects. We'll do all the research, but then we actually do everything from a to z of implementation of the experiment. You know, reviewing the results, learning from the results, taking kind of those learnings, and re, you know, kind of assessing whether or not there are other opportunities based on the results and the learnings that we gained from any experiment that we run.
Ayat Shukairy:
So that is all under a conversion optimization project that we run at investors.
Andy Splichal:
And how do the fee structures work?
Ayat Shukairy:
So it is a monthly retainer, and typically, if you want some sort of a discount, typically if you engage with us for six months to a year, because that's where we see the best result. Because we always say conversion optimization isn't an on and off switch that you can just turn on and off. It's something that's really long term in order for you to get that impact in those results. So, yes, it could be the discounts usually if you engage with us for six months or twelve months.
Andy Splichal:
And what is the monthly retainer?
Ayat Shukairy:
Monthly retainer, I believe, begins at around eight k and can go up to 18, depending on the number of experiments that you want us to run for you.
Andy Splichal:
And do you have a favorite success story of a client you could share?
Ayat Shukairy:
Favorite success story of a client. I mean, we have a client that we've been working with for three years now. And the transformation that we have seen on their site and the impact that our program has had on their bottom line has been so tremendous. And obviously that's why they continue to work with us. So that's always amazing. I think whenever we see clients like, you know, just being with us and really believing in the program and kind of seeing what the results can yield and working with us, I mean, I think, like, that's the thing about conversion optimization. We really are really hands on and we work a lot with the team itself within the company, because nobody knows that brand or service like the company owners do. And so you kind of get that information, you work with them, you kind of understand what their business goals are, and then you align your CRO and your testing program based on that.
Ayat Shukairy:
So those are always amazing success stories. And, you know, like, we really appreciate clients that believe in CRO and see kind of like, you know, the value.
Andy Splichal:
In it and who is the perfect client for your agency.
Ayat Shukairy:
So we work with a lot of ecommerce sites. This year in particular, I would say 2023. And 2024 has been interesting because we've. We've gained a lot more service industry clients, but typically before that, they've been e commerce doing anywhere between, I would say, ten to maybe $20 million in revenue. They typically will have, like, a smaller marketing team and or sometimes no marketing team at all. We usually, you know, in a lot of, a lot of companies that we work with, we work directly with the owners of the company or the CEO. Again, they're not the ones that are making the decisions. They have some other people that are there, but they're usually involved in the process as well.
Ayat Shukairy:
But, yeah, I mean, those are kind of some of the customers that we've worked with in our sweet spot.
Andy Splichal:
And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you guys?
Ayat Shukairy:
You can visit our site, investor.com. Our blog also has some really great conversion rate optimization information, and I think it's what invest CRO.com blog. You can visit, you know me, you can email me, I guess, or I have, like, lots of, whether it's LinkedIn or whether it's on Instagram, I'm very active on Twitter. I'm very active. It's just my first name. You can just find insights and information about us there.
Andy Splichal:
Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?
Ayat Shukairy:
No. I mean, I think I would just say that the first aspect of conversion optimization is always, like, the research part. So I would say even if you're not conducting any testing or you don't have the traffic to do so, just make sure that you're doing the research before you make a change to ensure that you've kind of looked into it, you're not just making a random change because you do want it to stick and you want it to have that impact on your bottom line.
Andy Splichal:
Well, this has been great. Thank you again for joining us today.
Ayat Shukairy:
Thank you, Andy.
Andy Splichal:
It's been great 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 invest or connecting with, you will 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 make each click we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information on any of the information discussed in previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.
