How ConversionXL Got BullyMax a 68.1% Revenue Increase (with Shanelle Mullin)

Tim: Is your website really well optimized from all of viewers. I mean literally built with them in mind. If you’re like the majority of folks, the answer is a resounding no and that means you’re leaving money on the table. So looking at the analytics of Bully Max, Shanelle Mullin and the conversion excel team were able to spot the problem area, make a few changes and increase revenue by 68.1%.

Before I talk to Shanelle though, I want to make a mention of something that I teased last week and that’s some awesome new stuff coming up on ConversionCast. I can’t give too many details but we’re making some big changes to the show in the next couple months.

Don’t worry, we’ll still be bringing data-driven case studies but we’re going to bring them to you in a way that I believe is incredibly unique and probably even more actionable than the show has ever been before. Beyond the lookout for the all-new ConversionCast in the next few months and if you’re not subscribed to the show, now is probably the right time to do that.

I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast. All right, so let’s kick if off. Can you share the results you were able to get from today’s case study?

Shanelle: Yeah, for sure after about four weeks of implementation we detected a purchase conversion right up to about 24.5% and then even better than that our revenue improvement of 68.1%.

Tim: Wow, yeah that’s awesome. All right, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are? What you do? What your company is all about?

Shanelle: Yes, so I do growth and content at conversion excel. I’ve kind of split my time even here between creating content or the blog and then also doing random growth projects for the institute, the blog, and our annual conference.

Tim: Nice, awesome and what’s conversion excel all about?

Shanelle: A few things really. We have agencies out of the business and then we have our conversion excel institute which is training for mid marking at enterprise. Optimizers, we have the blog which is the most popular optimization blog in the world. We have a lot of different things going on, of course, this year and there, different guides that sort of thing.

Tim: Awesome. All right very cool so with that in mind tell us how you got this fantastic result.

Shanelle: Yes, so we were working with the company called Bully Max and they’re an online store and they sell dog supplements. If you have a dog, you need to check them out. It’s just super awesome site. We noticed just digging into the analytics super quickly that about 75% of their traffic was coming from mobile devices which I mean if you’re working e-commerce you know that’s huge.

Tim: Absolutely.

Shanelle: That’s definitely no typical. So we looked into that a little bit further and we found out only 18% roughly of mobile visitors were then moving to the card. So something on that product page was really messing up. There’s a lot of friction on that page so that’s where we knew we need to focus our efforts. We used what we call the research excel method. It’s a very cleverly-named model we use for a conversion research with that conversion excel. It has six arms or so. Basically, here as take analysis, men’s tracking analysis, web in analytics’ analysis, user testing, qualitative service and that can go on out at this. We combine all those things together to create basically a prioritized list of problem areas on the product page for mobile visitors.

Tim: Nice okay and so what did you find and maybe tell us a little bit about what you did about that?

Shanelle: Yeah, so we found basically…it was a responsive site more or less so it was a little bit clatter. It was just a bigger desktop site, moved down to mobile solution and that’s generally…I mean it’s a very common solution to the mobile problem but it’s not exactly mobile optimization, right? We’re kind of putting a band aid on it because mobile visitors respond very differently than desktop visitors so we need different things on the page. So we noticed that the CTA was very low in the page, as a result there was a lot of white space and above the four real estate it was really wasted on mobile.

All of the important stuff have been pushed below the fold for the most part. The text was really small. Multiple discounts were offered which is awesome but before we’re kind of confused about how they mixed together if they were the same offer just worded differently or how that was working. There was a lot of duplicate content as well.

Tim: Interesting because of the fact that it really just repurpose the content for mobile. It just changed the layout of this item to match mobile and because of that it ended up hiding a lot of the important information making it confusing and duplicating content?

Shanelle: Exactly, exactly. I mean it’s a very common solution as I said before, responsive is gaining a lot of popularity but in a lot of ways people need to look at them as two different sites registering in the same way and just throwing up a solution that’s not like a dot mobile.

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Tim: Got you. So you’ve found this problem and so once you figured that out, what did you do to fix it?

Shanelle: We figured that if we increase the clarity and the focus of the site, through different UX fixes, that we would end up increasing sales. So we basically just step by step to do the list, corrected them. We reduced the white space at the top, concentrated on the product, I mean, just a little bit more but we didn’t want to reduce their size. So we’ve kind of found a solution there. We added prominence and clarity to the discount so instead of people seeing multiple mentions of the discount but being confused about what it actually meant for. How much is they’re going to save? We just reworded a little bit and removed their repetition. We also cut out all of the less important content and the duplicate content and that basically just organically brought the CTA app over the fold.

Tim: Got you. So I think probably the big super broad takeaway here would be to understand the experience that folks are having on mobile and how that could be affecting your conversions because I think it is easy like you were saying to just say, “Oh it’s mobile responsive,” so therefore it looks great on mobile and it might but it also might mean that the things that you spent so much time and energy trying to optimize on your website, all those things maybe have gotten broken in the mobile experience and therefore cause a decreasing conversions.

So at that point it’s a matter of looking at what’s happening on your mobile device. Looking at various different mobile devices and seeing, is this still a positive experience? Does this still lend itself to the same elements of conversion that you would have focused on desktop but instead you’re focusing on them for a mobile, is that right?

Shanelle: Yeah, absolutely, I mean responsive design is not a bad solution. You just need to make sure that you’re going in and looking at the analytics and seeing if…if you’re iPhone users or can bring the same way your desktop users are or through android users are and then looking at specific models and device models and mobile browsers and that sort of thing. You really should be testing your mobile traffic and your desktop traffic separately.

Tim: That’s huge. Yeah, that’s a big takeaway. Well, I think that’s a great place to say goodbye so thank you so much really for sharing this. This is an interesting…It’s not only an interesting case study but also just a philosophy to keep in mind as folks are trying to optimize their sites so thanks again for sharing this on the show.

Shanelle: Absolutely, thanks for having me.