The Psychological Strategy That Got Conversioner a 43% Revenue Boost in the First Round of Testing

Hey fellow marketer, thanks for joining me today. Now before the episode begins, there’s a step-by-step walk through of how to discover and utilize your customer’s deepest desires which today’s guest shares with us. To see that and gain access to a list of tools that are going to help you implement it, you’ll have to visit our website. Download it now at ConversionCast.com/TaliaDownload, that’s ConversionCast.com/TaliaDownload. Now if you’ve listened to the show before, you know I’m a massive proponent of testing single elements on your pages. I love testing buttons, images, copy you name it. I stand by the practice of split testing those individual elements 100%. Today’s guest though makes an incredible case for an alternative way of testing, one that leads quite nicely into my favorite method. Her name is Talia Wolf and she’s the founder of Conversioner, a well-respected conversion optimization company that works from the top to the bottom to ensure their work is effective. In this episode, you’ll hear how she uses tried and true advertising methods and some of the most powerful copywriting techniques in her direct response ask campaigns. 

At one point, the discussion gets so good that even her cat can’t help but meow like crazy out of pure excitement. But I will say this is a longer episode than most and I honestly couldn’t care less. Because it’s extremely powerful and I challenge you to give this a shot with your funnel to see how it works. To make it easier, go download the step-by-step guide we’ve put together which has links to the tools and resources you need to make it happen by going to ConversionCast.com/TaliaDownload, again that’s ConversionCast.com/TaliaDownload. 

I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is ConversionCast and here’s Talia Wolf from Conversioner.

Hi, Talia. How are you today? 

Talia:Great. How are you Tim? 

Tim:Good. Thanks so much for being here on ConversionCast. I’m excited to talk about this kind of, this really cool, I guess it’s a strategy that you’ve been implementing with a lot of your clients, is that right?

Talia:Yeah it’s a methodology we’ve been developing in the past five to six years. 

Tim:That’s fantastic. I love it. So can you tell us – at first, tell us the results that you’re able to get with this particular client.

Talia:So in this particular case study, we saw an increase of 43% in revenue in the actual first round of testing.

Tim:Well that’s fantastic. That’s great. Just right in the beginning right off the bat you were able to see amazing results and I mean talking about overall revenue that’s huge. So let’s –I think that for this it would make the most sense if you were to just kind of give an overview of what you ended up doing and kind of the specifics of how this machine operated.

Talia:Sure. So in general what we do is we do something called emotional targeting. So maybe in order to explain what emotional targeting is I’ll explain what behavioral targeting is which I’m sure most of the audience knows about which basically behavioral targeting is about understanding where users are coming from. So it maybe their browser, the time they came on to the site, the country they’re coming from, the language they’re speaking. Basically it gives us the opportunity to [0:03:37] [Indiscernible] the message and say something like shipping to Chicago for example. 

But what emotional targeting is about is basically digging deeper into trying to analyze why people make decisions and why people are basically trying to buy your product or your service. When we do so we try to analyze cycle of emotional triggers so to try to really understand what people are looking for in your product. Then what we do is we basically won this [0:04:06] [Indiscernible] and then when we finished with it, we create the entire funnel. So we’re kind of like an end to end service. We do the research and then we create the funnel so in this particular test, we created landing pages. Another test we create, you know, billing pages and registration forms or checkout processes. 

Yeah so in this case study we created landing pages and one of the things that’s different about emotional targeting and behavioral targeting is the way you test. So the normal thing about AB testing is what you usually see is two landing pages, which are basically the same. Basically one LeadPages is just duplicated and on one landing page you’ll for instance have a blue button call to action and on the other one you’ll have an orange call to action button. 

One of the things about that is that it’s really hard to learn something from this test. So you might actually see an increasing conversion but it will be very hard for me to scale from that way onwards. 

[0:05:07]

So what we do in emotional targeting is we don’t test the elements, we test strategies and this is what we did here. We basically when we ran our research, we found that we were trying to get people to feel in a certain way and basically promise them a specific thing. By doing so, we designed two completely different landing pages. Each landing page represented a different strategy and when we realize that strategy works better, then we were able to start scaling down to the manner of which title to use or which different colors to use on a button. Does that make sense?

Tim:It does make sense. So you get me really excited here because we’re talking about psychology and it’s one of those things that I think that we preach over and over and over and over again that you need to understand the psychology of your audience. This is what kind of your whole overall philosophy is about here and I love that. So I’d love to hear in this case and then we’ll kind of go back and dig a little bit deeper but I’d love to hear you know, what were the different emotions? You said there were two landing pages. What were you trying to – what emotional responses you were trying to get from your audience? 

Talia:So I think that in order to understand this, we have to kind of look at the original first.

Tim:Yes.

Talia:And understand that this specific product has a lot of competitors like many companies have. One of the things about it is that it doesn’t only have a lot of competitors, it has many different obstacles. So it’s more expensive than their competitor and you can’t pay for one-time payment. You actually have to pay for a monthly or a yearly subscription. It’s not only even an online product, it’s actually a product that you have to download. So there’s actually different obstacles that stand in front of it. A lot of time I talk about the fact that you shouldn’t be talking about your features or your pricing. You should be talking about the value. This is what we were doing. Basically this is the company we’re talking about is an e-card company. So you can design invitations and birthday cards, slide shows and invite people to your event in various different ways online. 

So when we ran the research, we basically focused on what people were looking for and what people were really looking for was the promise of the most amazing event that’s going to happen. Actually what we focus on was the fact that an amazing event begins with the invitation. We designed two different landing pages each taking a different edge on it. So one was more in the fun aspect of telling them how amazing it’s going to be and fun and everyone is going to enjoy themselves and you’re going to create a lovely fun invitation. You could see that on the landing page in terms of color, in terms of the image, in terms of the text.

On the other landing page, we focused more on the actual promise of an unforgettable event. More in the side of what other people will be saying. Now these are two different emotional triggers because the first emotional trigger is more about how you are going to have fun, you and your friends. The second emotional trigger focused more on what other people will be set talking about you and it’s actually an emotional trigger called self-image. It’s a lot about people who want other people to think about them well and to think that they’re better and amazing and you know, a good coordinator. So these are the two strategies that we worked on and each one of them was tested. 

Tim:Okay. And so there are a few things that I want to get into and one of which is can you tell, can you first tell us which one performed better? 

Talia:Yeah. Actually what performed better, performed better sorry, was the later, the second one which was the more about you know, how your friends are going to be saying, how amazing [0:08:43] [Indiscernible] it’s going to be fantastic and everyone is going to be talking about it. 

Tim:Yeah that reminds me so much of a sales letter that I read, a really old sales letter about learning how to play piano and the whole sales letter was a story about the person playing piano and how everybody in the room was laughing when that person sat down to play the piano like oh this is going to be fun, you know, that kind of stuff. Then the person started playing and the room got silent and as soon as the person was done everybody started cheering and clapping and it was an ad to learn how to play piano. It was brilliant. It made me desperately want to learn more how to play the piano and I already know how to play piano. So —

Talia:[Laughs] 

Tim:– what I love about this is that this really from the sounds of it, is it kind of combines a lot of traditional advertising which is really all about kind of repositioning everything that people are doing with the direct response kind of advertising where we’re trying to initiate an action. I think that that’s really cool because you don’t hear a lot of that. Most of the time we just focus entirely on the action but in this case it sounds like you were positioning the ecard company as a way to achieve those things. I feel like that was a really interesting way to do that. Does that seem kind of like the way that you were approaching it?

[0:10:05]

Talia:I’m actually really happy you mentioned that because one of the things that we talk about a lot is bringing the offline world into the online world. Because I mean if you look at TV ads for instance, you know, the majority of the ads are very, very emotional. So at some point you look at it as you’re not really sure what the hell you know, they’re really actually advertising.

Tim:Yeah.

Talia:But they make you feel something. So Coca-cola you know, of it’s a phone company, they’re all trying to get you to feel something towards their product. You don’t really get – I mean when was the last time you understood you know, a cigarette ad or jeans ads or clothes? They’re all about positioning themselves and making you feel something towards their product and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

You know, we work with different psychologists and stuff but it’s really easy to try and understand what people want emotionally from your product because that’s what you’re trying to basically convey. It’s the emotion and not the features or the price.

Tim:Yeah that’s exactly right and so I think there’s one big thing that a lot of people are asking right now and I know it because I just can sense it. So once you have this idea whether you’re working with a client or let’s say somebody is working with their own business, how do they go out and find what are going to be the emotional responses that they want to evoke from their audience? 

Talia:Well actually there’s a few things that can be done in order to kind of start testing strategies and not elements. I think that is what you want to focus on because when you want to build a strategy, you kind of have to first look at what your goal is. Because a lot of the tests that I see today are kind of focused about I want them to do this and this and this and this and then we’ll see what happens.

Tim:[Laughs] 

Talia:So definitely try and focus one goal and one good thing to do is not just you know, if you’re a marketing doing it by yourself, get other people involved. Try and understand you know, what other people in your team are trying to do and what their goals are. And you’ll probably be surprised about the answers. 

The other thing to do is talk about where you want to start testing. So one of the things that happens usually is when people want to kind of work on their revenue or you know, and they’re checking and kind of increase their sales they go straight to working on the shopping cart. So they’ll do an AB test on that area. 

Actually what I’d like to say is that you don’t have to go straight over there because it’s very hard to scale from that. 

Tim:Yes. 

Talia:And actually what you want to do is go straight to top of the funnel and try working your way down. Because that way you can actually have a huge impact right from the start which maybe even a banner for this layout up to the checking point, checking out point. So I think that if you go slowly, slowly and check your strategy along the way you’ll have more increase in revenue and in conversions along the way. You also want to ask yourselves three different questions that I kind of wrote down here for you guys. So one of the things as I said was actually what are my test goals, what do I want people to do. The second question you’re going to have to ask yourself is why people want to buy your product or your service. 

Now as I said a lot of people are going to say well you know, it’s better for the competitors, it’s cool, it’s cool. It does this, it does that but I want to you to kind of dig deeper in that. The actual question would be how would people feel about themselves once they’ve actually purchased your products and service and that’s where you want to kind of scoop into because if you figure out what people are going to feel like after they have and they’ve used your products and they bought it that’s where you want to tap into with your messaging and your design. I think the best kind of example of that would probably be Apple products for example because people that buy Apple products, you know, if you ask them why they do so they’ll say oh best computers, best iPads, I love them. It’s got great interface, you know on and on and on.

But actually you know, if you kind of dig deeper you’ll see that the reason actually people buy Apple products you know, in addition to the fact that they’re amazing products —

Tim:[Laughs] 

Talia:- is you know, what they make them feel about themselves. So if you buy an Apple product you’re cool, you’re sophisticated, you’re kind of in somewhat related to Steve Jobs and kind of and it gives you – it gives you the aspects of being better than others and that is how Apple has managed to kind of brand themselves. I think that’s where you want to go, you want to look at them and see what people are trying to gain from your product and not how they want to use the product or the service. 

Tim:So the first thing it so to figure out the action, the primary action you want them to take, what the big goal is but the second thing is to figure out now what makes your product so special or not what features people are going to like best but what emotion that it’s going to bring out of them.

Talia:Yeah, exactly and then once you have that, you can start basically working on the images and the colors and the flow that you want to create for your users.

[0:15:05]

Tim:Okay and so I’ll move on to something that might even be a little bit more difficult but once you know the emotion, once you know kind of the response that you’re hoping to get from people how can you make –you know, for example in this case you were doing landing pages, how can make landing pages that are designed to do that? I mean is it based on great copywriting, is it based on color, is it based on you know, design? I mean we have things that we do at LeadPages that we do within our software to do that but what things do you focus on when you’re doing that?

Talia:So actually that’s a great question. There’s a few things that we need to focus on. I think one thing to stay  is that a lot of people today are talking about the fact of load time, okay. That you have to kind of get your landing page loaded as soon as possible and quick. Because you only have two seconds to kind of get people to load your page, otherwise people are going to leave. Actually about 40% of the people are going to leave. 

Then what I like to look about it and say is that it’s an actual symptom. It’s not a problem and the symptom is that the fact that we have two or three seconds to kind of convince people you know, to get people to stay and not leave the website is also about the messaging. So you only have about two or three seconds to convince people that your product is worth you know, using and staying and kind of buying. To do this, you have to kind of realize a few things. So one of a few things is that our brains process images 60,000 times quicker than text. Okay. So the image that you want to use and the colors are extremely important. 

So the images you want to have an there’s a lot of articles about that you know, out there today talking about what size of images you should be using, where they should be directing, what they should look like. The image has a huge, huge factor in your actual conversion. So I’d say first drop, features. Stop talking about all your features. That’s one thing that everyone does is kind of start listing in bullets everything that they have. 

Drop that. People are not looking for text. You have three seconds and that’s kind of the most important part. The thing about color is that colors project different emotions and there’s actually really cool tools out there that you can use to kind of understand what colors project which emotions. You can use them to kind of get the right ambience that you want. 

Tim:Just before you move on, can you mentioned any of those tools that would be help for understanding the color psychology?

Talia:So it’s more on the side of articles and again it’s psychology said each kind of article takes it differently. One you can find in our website, which is basically a checklist for your landing page. 13 things you want to do before you kind of set a test up and below it you’ll find a huge kind of pattern of what colors and what emotions you can use. 

Another one, a really cool one is Kiss Metrics has a really nice diagram of them showing what red means, what blue means, and kind of how to integrate them into your process. So those are kind of two kind of guides that I would read to do with color. 

Tim:Awesome.

Talia:And in regards to images well there’s so many articles out there to talk about. I’d be definitely happy to look up a few more and send them to you guys. 

Tim:Yeah that would be great. We can just add that to the show notes. So we have the tools for the color psychology and I love the image at the top. One thing that we found to be really successful is if we put a video kind of you know, towards the top but we also we use a thumbnail in the video. You know, a lot of people will put a video in their landing page but it’s just like a random slide. When people first come to the page, it’s just a slide of them like you know, making a goofy face. So have you found videos to be effective in that as well as long as they have a great thumbnail image in the beginning.

Talia:Actually that’s a fantastic question. I think I have to kind of refer you back to the first point and that is what are your goals. Because a lot of landing pages that I see contain videos but they also contain a call to action. And then it kind of makes it hard for users to know what to click on.

Tim:Uh-hum.

Talia:So you really have to make sure you know, that you’re putting the video in the right place and that you’re using the right place and that you’re using the right call to action. That being said, there are a few things that you want to take care of when you’re basically creating a video and one of them is definitely the thumbnail. It’s really important to have the right thumbnail and definitely you can have kind of like a play action on it that’s always you know, very – a good way to get people to look at your videos. The colors that you put on you know, on the thumbnail I think is really important because obviously you want to have something projecting and kind of out there and big and a call to action is really important. 

There are three different triggers that you can use to increase video conversion, okay. One of them will be a visual trigger, which is more about taking the image and using it to direct people towards the video. So there’s quite a lot of examples of it out there. Usually the most common example is the baby stirring up a text and you’ll notice that a lot of people use images but they make sure that the image is kind of sending and projecting over to the actual video. 

[0:20:20]

Tim:Yes.

Talia:So that is one thing that is really important. Another thing is you know actually adding text you know like watch this video now, you know? But yeah definitely adding the thumbnail and making sure that you have a good colorful right image for the video can increase the conversion, which is the third one.  

Tim:I love it. Okay. So we’ve got some elements that can make the landing page work well. We’ve got an understanding of you know, the goal for the page. We’ve got an understanding of the emotion that we want to evoke. So is there anything else that kind of went into this strategy? I mean I know we can only fit so much into this episode but I want to make sure that the person listening right now could go in and try this in their business and go out and test these big sweeping things instead of the individual elements or maybe in conjunction with the individual elements. 

So is there anything else that you would have done in this case that maybe we didn’t talk about or that you feel like somebody needs to know in order to do this right? 

Talia:I think one of the most important things to take into consideration is the duration of a test that you run especially when you’re testing strategies. One of the things that happens especially when I work with you know, I work with different clients and they’re always inclined to kind of see the results in less than two days and say okay stop the campaign quickly. 

Tim:[Laughs] 

Talia:Please stop [0:21:47] [Indiscernible] you know, we’re ruining, we’re spending money. And one thing to know about testing strategies is that it really does take time. You’re going for a big win and you need to have statistical significance for this test. So for example this test at the beginning was showing you know, that it wasn’t working too well and I took about three days to kind [0:22:09] [Indiscernible] and see real results. So that’s something that I really do put an emphasis is always run your test to make sure that you have statistical significance and that you know what the results are not just an abnormal occurrence but actually a reason. Then once you have the results, use the strategy not to say okay this is the landing page that works fine. But try and kind of increase the strategy and think about it wider and see what else you can do to increase conversion. 

Tim:That’s great, that’s a solid point. So that it gives you enough time to really know if something is working and we’re not going to get a big spike and then you know, go back to the mean. That’s obviously not what we want. So I guess the only other question that I have is you know, we know that if somebody were to do this and they wanted to test some landing page examples they could use LeadPages and use our built-in split testing. That would be one way to do it. But if somebody were testing this for example on say their main site. They weren’t using specific landing pages. They say they were going to test this in their existing sales pages or something along those lines, how would they test that? Would you use something like optimizely or a visual website optimizer? Is that kind of how you would go about doing that? 

Talia:Yeah. I actually definitely recommend using Optimizely or a visual web optimizer. They’re fantastic tools and they give you a lot of insight. So definitely whether you’re using it on your website or if you’re using it for different landing pages, definitely use one of these tools because they’re going to help you a lot in kind of understanding where people are going and what they’re doing. The same goes for heat maps by the way because a heat map you know, a lot of people use it to kind of understand where the leaks are in the landing page. But you can really use it to understand what people are trying to do on your site. So these tools are fantastic for them. 

Tim:That’s right. So using, using the data to help you understand the psychology that’s awesome. I think that might be the nerdiest thing that has ever been discussed on this podcast that it makes me so happy. [Laughs] Wow. So this is – you know, this a little bit longer than a normal episode but there was no way that we could stop in the middle of that. I think this is going to be really, really valuable. It is different than you know, what a lot of people do and what we teach a lot of people to do to test the elements to make things convert better which is extremely valuable. But if we’re looking for big huge sweeping goals I love the idea of testing kind of overall strategies. So I think that’s awesome and this is a great, great point to stop. So Talia, thank you so much for being here and in sharing all of this stuff with us today. I hope that maybe we can – maybe check in with the audience and see if anybody does this and we can have them back and have a little discussion with them. So that will be great. Thanks again, Talia. 

Talia:Thank you so much for having me, Tim. It was a pleasure talking to you. 

Tim:Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.