A Mini-Masterclass in CRO + 5 Free Resources

Message auditing: Does your copy really resonate?!

Last week, we shared our 4-page SOP for how we build landing pages and the structure we use to build them.

In this week's newsletter, we'll dive deeper into how you audit the copy & messaging of a landing page to see if you've actually included all the psychological triggers needed to persuade a person to buy from you.

As copywriting is basically applied psychology, we can form a framework or a checklist of which things we absolutely need to include in order to make it a no-brainer for the customer to try your product. Because at the end of the day… Most humans evaluate many of the same factors when making a purchase decision.

Understanding the variables that move the conversion needle

There are five variables that determine the likelihood of whether a landing page will convert visitors into customers or not…

Those are:

• The degree to which you appeal to the users' motivations/desires

• The degree to which you're clearly articulating your value proposition

• The degree to which you are incentivizing the user to take action (e.g. through a good offer, scarcity, and urgency)

• The degree to which you are able to make it frictionless to shop with you

• The degree to which you are able to remove anxiety from the user.

Whenever we audit our own landing pages, and try to come up with new variations that we think are better we evaluate each of these variables. The important two words to note from the sections above are the words “The degree”. We always score the degree to which we do X variable on a given landing page, so that we know where we can improve the page and move the needle.

In one of the 5 free resources for today (Link in bottom), we’ve included the checklist and score-system that we use internally to audit our landing pages. All of the questions in the checklist are built off these 5 variables.

Making, organizing, and testing hypothesis

Step 1 in running successful CRO operations is understanding how to build, audit, and improve landing pages.

Step 2 is being able to form good, high-impacting hypotheses and then organizing them in a way where A) you can easily keep track of what is being tested and B) The hypothesis and results thereof are being properly documented so that the organization owns the knowledge, rather than an external agency or a team member who'll take it with them once they leave. If you don't document it properly, you don't own the knowledge and learning.

Let's dive a little further into this step.

How do you form good, high-impacting hypotheses?

As a general rule, we say that each hypothesis should first be built off of the five variables mentioned above, and then it should also clearly state the expected impact of the test from 1-3.

In this way, we make sure that A) we always have a strong rationale for running a given test and B) we can filter and prioritize the tests which are high-risk and high-reward, in the beginning, to get the big uplifts and then go on to the smaller ones later on (PS: there's a scientific argument for why this is the best way to do it… more on this in future newsletters)

The following is an example of a structure you can use to form your hypothesis: I think X change will lead to Y outcome because we are increasing the degree to which we appeal to the users' motivations/desires (for example) … because XYZ (Qualitative or Quantitative data backing)

Review-mining made easy, fast, and structured

Review mining is one of our preferred methods of getting insights into the minds of our customers. If you're not already doing it, then start…because you can literally find gold inside different review platforms (Amazon, Trustpilot, Feefo, etc.)

If you're already using your own + competitors' reviews to gather insights, then here's a way you can make the process easier, faster, and more structured.

For the longest time, we were just sporadically scrolling up and down the review sites and digesting the content. But, at some point - we figured that there must be a better way to approach it because, at the end of the day, we're still humans, and we are prone to forgetting and over/undervaluing different things we read in the reviews.

So we built a dummy-proof sheet to make sure we noted ALL of the important points, as well as how many times they occurred, how serious they were, whether they were positive or negative, etc…

… and of course, we're also sharing it with you so that you can use it too.

The two highest-yielding tests we’ve run at Obvi

Our mega menu

Because we have a ton of SKUs which solve a ton of different problems, we needed to find a way to categorize our SKUs into different goals so that our customers can easily navigate to the product that is solving their unique problem. To do this, we built our mega menu, where we did this categorization. After that, we tested whether it should be a highly text-based mega menu or whether it would work better if it were very visual. For our product and store, it turned out that the visual mega menu crushed the text-based one - so that's what we're rolling with.

Cart experience

Maybe you've already read about our cart page somewhere on Twitter, but essentially what we did was try to gamify our cart experience so that customers were incentivized with free gifts if they bought additional products. Another thing which significantly improved the performance of our cart experience was changing up the wording from "frequently bought together" to "Enhance your results". So, we essentially positioned it as products that would help them get to their goal faster / better.

…That was a lot to chew on, huh ?

Here's what you've all been waiting for.

The five free resources that we're giving away this week.

Here’s everything that’s included:
- Our copy & message auditing checklist
- Our objection handling worksheet
- Our worksheet for crafting captivating headlines & hooks
- Our landing page hypothesis and test tracking sheet
- Our review mining sheet

Btw, no questions this time

This newsletter alone is already quite a big chunk to chew on, so we figured that we’d save the questions for next weeks newsletter where the questions can get some more love.

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