w/ Oliver Kenyon, CEO of ConversionWise
“Look, if you redesign your grocery store and I can’t find the chicken or checkout clerk I like, I’m shopping somewhere else.”
How do you turn clicks into customers without falling for CRO myths? Oliver Kenyon, CEO of ConversionWise, exposes the lazy habits holding Shopify stores back and shares proven strategies to boost sales. It’s all about clarity, problem-solving, and delivering customer value—no gimmicks, just real results. This episode is packed with actionable insights to transform your Shopify store into a revenue machine.
Oliver's ConversionWise
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Address Validator. Did you know incorrect addresses cost US businesses $20 billion every year? That's $216,000 on average per company, just gone thanks to failed deliveries. Think about that extra re-delivery fee, the handling costs, and worst of all, unhappy customers who might never return. But here's the good news. Address validator has your back. It integrates seamlessly with Shopify to catch and correct address errors before they become costly problems. Every day it validates over 300,000 orders. and prevents more than 11,000 failed deliveries for brands like Sennheiser, Heli Hansen, and even Kylie Cosmetics. And it's a no-brainer to try. You can validate shipping addresses on your first 100 orders for free, no strings attached. Plus you could track exactly how much you're saving in the address validator dashboard. So stop letting bad addresses drain your revenue. Head to the Shopify App Store and get address validator today. Today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, we're talking one of my favorite topics, conversion rate optimization. Right? That is in the past we've talked to some other folks about conversion rate optimization and what's fun about it is everyone has different approaches. And certainly I learned in the comments that there are people who think that there are like absolutely right and wrong ways to go about things. And so today we've got someone whose approach is well respected, must be, based on how successful they've been. We have Oliver Kenyon from Conversion Wise. And I follow Oliver Kenyon on on Twitter and I enjoy his approach and he'll share um like example templates and layouts that I find are great starting points for when I'm like, I just don't want to have to think about a layout too hard, right? I just need to get unstuck. And so I love love resources like that. And that's why I reached out and said, you know what, come on the show. Let's talk about it. I want to hear how you got here, your journey. So, our our friend Oliver Kenyon from Conversion Wise, thank you for joining us. How you doing today?
Oliver Kenyon
I'm good. Very well, thank you. But most importantly, thank you so much for having me. Um big fan of the show, so really uh really grateful that you reached out and hopefully we can give some of your Listen to some real kind of actionable and insightful information.
Kurt Elster
I want to know how did you get into CRO? What were you doing before you became a CRO expert? Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon
I mean if I told you it was hip hop, would you believe me? That led me all the way to Ciaro? Uh probably not. Are you a rapper or no? I mean when I was younger, definitely had a go, uh around about kind of like 16, 17, but definitely not a rapper, 100% not. Um but I I kind of found the online space I guess through Kip Hop. Um I uh back in the day when I'm gonna show you my age here, when like MM was doing rap battles and eight mile, um I was obsessed with black hip hop and rap battles and I came online to Read more rap battles. And one thing led to another, met several people through these communities, started my own community, and met someone who introduced me originally to CPA and affiliate marketing. So my cur first kind of foray into the online space was uh basic communities and um uh affiliate marketing. I struggled to find anyone who shared how they made money with affiliate marketing. So I decided to start a community. This is before like Facebook groups before Discord. I am really sure my age here now. Uh and I created an affiliate marketing community because I just wanted people to come on, join the community, and discuss how they make money through affiliate marketing. And I never ever thought it was going to be a business. I never realized I could even monetize a community or a forum. I was still a full-time chef, but that community just started to grow. And people started to ask me if they could advertise on the community. Uh, I started to make money via the community and it was that community that actually led me to uh quitting as a full-time chef and going kind of doing this whole thing online. Fast forward, one of the affiliate networks on the community saw the aesthetics of the forum. It looked very nice. I hired a good designer to do this really nice landing page and design. And they said, hey, um, could your designer do me some landing pages uh for my offers? And I don't really know what a landing page was. Um And But I guess without knowing it, I had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit in me where I said, yes, but I'm gonna manage this and take a cut, right? So I sat in the middle. I uh basically account managed or project managed the design to the the kind of guy who was buying the designs. and uh made a little bit of money in the middle. And with that I kind of thought, right, let's start this as a business. And I kind of just geeked out on Laddie Pages. I just became obsessed with like building landing page frameworks, best practices, conversion principles, uh so much so that me and my co-founder actually called our business the landing page guys. So we were literally like the guys because I became fixated of like if anyone needs a landing page, they're gonna think of the landing page guys. And uh that's kind of how we ran our business for eight years. Um and we built these frameworks and built these landing pages and uh yeah, I always kind of originated back to hip hop, but realistically it's affiliate marketing and then um yeah, kind of uh stumbling across landing pages which then later turned into CRO and A B testing and everything that kind of encompasses into conversion optimization.
Kurt Elster
So once you've d you've got Uh the landing page guys that runs for eight years. How does that turn into conversion wise your current agency business?
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, so the gift and the curse, and you know, uh again, we're very fortunate that we mentor um several other agencies and and people always ask us advice of like getting into to an agency or what we we do. I think the the gift of niching down to being like the landing page guys is like when you're starting out you stand out against a broad competitor because you are just like Putting it out there. We do landing pages. We're the best at landing pages. Come to us if you need your landing pages. The curse of that is as you grow as a business, it pigeonholes you into just landing pages. So what we found is we were now doing a lot of kind of uh ongoing CRO conversion rate optimization um projects with different businesses and brands that we were starting with other people that were asking us to do like AE testing. uh and traditional CRO but on the fate front of these we were still the landing cage guys so we kind of sat down we had a a discussion meet my co-founder and our lead shit team and we said let's re rant so We put everyone um who we loved in a room here in Bristol in the UK. We we organized this special evening uh and we put everyone we loved and all of our team members in this in this room and we unveiled our kind of new new uh name, which was Conversion Wise, which just enabled us, I guess, to think a little bit broader, to offer ongoing conversion rate optimization as well as the landing pages that we still offer today. And that was our kind of business decision to again broaden our kind of offering um from a offering and and solution standpoint, but also from a prospecting standpoint when people are coming to us and say you know, oh you're just the landing page guys, all you do is landing pages. No, we're actually conversion wise, we deal with conversion. Um, and that's kind of the the decision to shift.
Kurt Elster
So certainly that sounds like no regrets on rebranding. Now that you've made the shift to conversion-wise, how long has it been around? Around three years now. Okay. And if after three years of doing this, w you're not the only CRO agency, certainly. Um, what what do you think sets you apart?
Oliver Kenyon
Um so again, yeah, so we've been doing CRO for twelve years. It's just that we were so heavily focused on um landing pages. We are the same team, the same the same company, the same um people. We just obviously took that kind of shit from a branding perspective, I guess, three years to to shift into conversion wise and think uh a bit more broad. I think what sets us apart is we take more of a heuristic view on CRO. So I always say to people, prospects, people that we partner with, brands that we work with, that we are effectively a performance growth agency, but we have CRO as our framework. And we literally today had a leadership call where we kind of discussed this. Effectively, what we do is we solve problems. We solve problems for you as a brand, we solve problems for your customers when they come to uh come to your site and want to purchase. And we take that as from a holistic view. We kind of step back and we say, well, beyond the traditional A B testing, which is nine times out of ten what most CRO agencies fixate over, you know, we we speak with a lot of prospects who then speak with other agencies and we know. you know, most DR agencies become obsessed with A B testing and the velocity of testing. But it's very irrelevant to just throw out a number of like, we will deliver six A B tests per month. Like, what does that even be? Like for the the the the the sake of testing for the sake of testing is is irrelevant. Yeah, there's an argument of like the more tests we get, the more wins we can get. But Really, CRO is problem solving. It's how can we look at your business uh from a top level view and your Position funnel because you know nine times out of ten we're kind of working on, yeah, we look at things like lifetime value, of course we do, but it's like how can we turn more clicks into customers at a more effective rate for your business? But how can we do that via CRO and not just A B testing? So we don't guarantee any velocity of testing, but what we guarantee is we will solve problems for you and we will work with you typically within like a three-month roadmap. To solve your acquisition problem. So that may be A-B testing, but it may be your funnel's not strong enough, or it may be that you're actually selling at the wrong price point, or you haven't done offer testing, or you haven't done usability testing. or actually you're missing something because a lot of people we see a lot of brands where people um you know w work with other CRR agencies and they're like, ah they wanted to reduce our funnel. The the the the kind of uh mythology was like if we reduce your funnel, more people are likely to get to the more and put most important pages and therefore purchase. But really, we've seen so many case studies and so many scenarios when A-B testing should be the last thing you think about initially because your funnel or your acquisition funnel, it's just not set up correctly. For example, I'll give you an example. We work with several large Uh dog brands. We had a a call uh this this this last week about uh with specific brand where they're not just a dog brand. They don't just sell dog food. They sell way beyond that. They sell you get a a um a private vetery call with a nutritional veterinary specialist that actually caters the dog uh uh ingredients to your specific dog. Uh you get a tracker on your mobile via an app. You also get supplements plus the food. However, that's a lot to sell on a traditional homepage. To get that value across and that amount of kind of value across on a traditional homepage, it can be very hard to do. But they worked with a previous CR agency where they're like, let's cut the funnel down, let's send people straight to the product page, get them the information and get them to sell. When we came in, One thing we did is we took a holistic view, we zoomed out, we said, actually, we need to laden this bubble. The biggest problem you have here is pre-educating your your prospects on the value of your specific offer. So for example, we'll then say, okay, well, within that first three month or that that kind of quarterly roadmap, we're not going to be doing too much A-B testing. What we're going to be focusing on is designing, copywriting, and building your pre-purchase funnel, for example, using something like listicles or advertorials or editorial content that really pre-sells the product. So that yeah, you'll probably get fewer clicks through to that product page, but the people that actually do go through are way more educated, way more rela uh uh aware of the value and your uniqueness of your offer. that A they're gonna be purchasing more and B they're gonna stick around more because they get it. Um so I think our difference is we will look across the business. We'll also be very well connected so it will suggest Uh if your attention needs improvement, we can have a look at your creative, the meta strategy, uh, and suggest people or we can give feedback based on that as well. So it's more of a top-level view, it's more consultative what we do.
Kurt Elster
And Well that makes sense, right? The a consultative approach. And so the the criticism of other CRO agencies is they're focused on quantity of deliverable. If I can just up that number on total split tests, well that's the thing that they'll compare and that'll be like, well, i it when they compare these are these proposals, that's the one they'll select. And of course, you know, I could Make random tests all day. It's not there's no guarantee any of those are gonna be particularly helpful with the research that goes into it.
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, and I think uh research is obviously very important. We can deep dive into that if we want, but I think I think we speak to so many prospects where they're like, well, CRO agency A and B are promising us X amount of tests per month. How many do you do promise? And we're like, none. Like none plus one. Plus one for one dollar less. Um but like it it's honestly the the answer is none. We don't guarantee any velocity of testing because that might not be what you need within that given framework to achieve your specific goals with your brand. Um so we just we look at it a lot more holistically, but basically.
Kurt Elster
Are there the loaded question in conversion rate optimization is best practices? Best practices meaning that there are certain immutable laws of design and marketing funnels that Everyone must obey these, and if you don't obey these, then you won't have the right conversion rate optimization. And therefore we don't actually have to test anything, because we just know these work. And if we apply those and they don't work, wow, that's a problem somewhere else in the funnel that we didn't know about. Where do we fall on um I'm winding you up, but where where do you fall on best practices?
Oliver Kenyon
I I have a a very clear answer on this and one that I'm I'm willing to to stick by and and and die on this hill, but there are a hundred thousand percent best practices within CRO. A hundred thousand percent. However You will never get as good a result as if you do qualitative and quantitative research. So marrying the two is where you get the most effective um Test to winning test ratio. However, a hundred thousand percent there are definitely best practices when it comes to landing cages, layouts, conversion principles. uh element that should be on your page and we proved it time and time again. Don't forget I sit on both sides because for eight years and and for our design side of the agency it is fully it is 100% our business is built on best practices. on the ongoing solution, the ongoing CRA, conversion rate optimization, testing, uh usability, etc. , qualitative, quantitative. Um that's where you have the biggest uplick. When you're a brand of a certain size, and we always do this based on volume. So if you are doing under 100,000 sessions per month on your store or across your brand, you are far better or you're going to get way more effective results at a better cost by taking bigger swings. So that's where I fully fully believe and seen it seen it hundreds if not thousands of times best practices do exist ticking boxes social proof trust and credibility authority handling objections getting your value proposition across c uh effective copy. Um you know I can go on and on and on and we can go into this specific. But when you are above that hundred thousand sessions, taking those biggest swings can sometimes be detrimental to your store and have negative effects. Um, especially if you're, for example, getting repeat customers. I use this analogy quite a lot, but what we see is a a big Um a biggest stake by big brands who are doing like over 100,000 sessions per month is when they all of a sudden say, Hey, our compet competitors have got a new site, we want to completely launch a new site. And typically what that means is you'll hire an expensive uh agency, it'll take six to nine months, it tends to tends to take longer than the expect. Uh you don't rely on data, uh you don't look into, you know, you you when you hire a design agency that aren't really CRO focused or performance focused. Um and by the way there's some great ones that do exist, but typically web design agency just focus on kind of like brand, like oh we should just have this minimalistic design that's sexy because Nike do it so we can get away with it, right? Uh and the biggest Issue here is if you have repeat customers and all of a sudden you completely change your store, those customers are gonna be lost. Uh and I use the analogy of like a grocery store. Like let's say you and I shot every single week in a specific grocery store. We have our itemized list. We are quite boring people, so we buy the same product every week. We know exactly where it's going for our chicken, our cheese, our milk, our water, uh whatever it may be. We just without even thinking, we just know where to go in that store. We know exactly where to go to go and check out. We know the the clerk that we like at the checkout and we have a really good relationship with her and she gives us a bit of banter. We speak to her every single week. We know the exit, we skip out the exit because it's so easy to find, and we don't think twice about going back to that score every single week, and we never look at a competitor. All of a sudden, if you're a big brand and you're doing a lot of repeat purchases and you completely change things, this is like us going back to that grocery store the week after. And I walk into the entrance and shit, where's the door? Like it's gone, it's moved. Okay, I can't get into the store. The first thing I have to do is try and find the entrance. Now I'm gonna go uh buy my products around the store. And I I honestly don't know where they'd gone. The chicken's not in the same place. The milk's not in the same place. The cheese is moved. I'm really like becoming frustrated now that I can't just pick up these items that I do subconsciously and just pick them up. And then I I I finally find my my items that have taken me twice as long and I want to go to the checkout to pay for the items and they're in a completely different place in the store. And I become frustrated because I can't find that checkout how I get there. There's some upsells in my way if you gotta throw in different products in my way that weren't there before. And And then you know I finally get to the checkout. I can't use the say payment method. The same clerk that I normally have the band with is less. She's not there anymore. I finally pay for my item and I'm trying to get out of the store and the exit's changed and like the whole thing is a frustrating experience. And this is why nine times out of ten, we see this time and time again, when you do these things on your store, the repeat customers, you know, suffer, your conversion rates actually go up, down, and it takes a long way to kind of um recover that that side of things.
Kurt Elster
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Oliver Kenyon
I'd ask you as a brand. To me to me, no. It depends what your objective and goal is. Yeah, exactly. It depends what your outcome is. Um So yeah, I think I think that's where, you know, above that hundred thousand sessions, it's qualitative and quantitative data, it's marrying the two, it yes, it best practices, but it's having the data to back up that assumption based on your demographic. and and and what your prospects and your audience does, then it's kind of A B testing and we use the phrase all the time, like iterate to success. It's like we iterate via winning tests and we can update that design. We can update that Razat brand on the on the on the variant that we're testing. But it's not a massive change. It's not a big swing. It's iterating to success and under the hundred thousand, take those big savings. Best practices definitely exist. Landing pages are your best bet. And that's how you're going to acquire customers that achieve good cost per cost per acquisition.
Kurt Elster
You very rarely do you run into a situation where it's like a j hugely dramatic change unless, you know And if you did get into one, then it often is indicative that like something was just straight up broken before and no one caught it. But okay, walk me th we've touched on a little bit, but Walk me through your your typical process for y re diagnosing and improving conversion rates.
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, absolutely. So on our ongoing CRO service, um we spend probably n tends to be three to four weeks of our kind of initial kickoff um deep in data. So there's a couple of like non-negotiables we need as a CRO agency to effectively uh draw a picture of your demographic and create a road map of kind of where we want to go to after. Those things are uh GA4 profec uh properly set up. Now a lot of people have GA4 but a lot of people have Problems with Google Analytics, so making sure that it's correctly set up and tracking across the whole funnel so we can see where the bottlenecks are, where people are spancing, where where drop-offs are happening, and that's like a non-negotiable yes. Non-negotiable number two is surveys. So two types of surveys. One post-purchase survey. So for those of the uh your listeners who aren't aware what that is, that's simply a survey that sits on the confirmation step of your store. You purchase the product and then on that confirmation step that says, hey, thank you so much for your purchase today. Would you just mind taking two minutes out of your day? To answer a couple of questions so that we can make the experience better in the future for for other customers and you and yourself. Now, what you want to ask in that post-purchase survey are a couple of really important questions. You can go product specific, but the broad questions you need to be asking are one, why did you purchase today? And two, what almost stopped you from purchasing today?
Kurt Elster
Now this is my favorite question.
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, there you go, right?
Kurt Elster
What almost stopped you? What if you didn't If you didn't make a purchase today, what stopped you? If you almost didn't purchase, why? Cause that you those are the objections.
Oliver Kenyon
There you go. So so a as you rightly just said, that gives you so much data um and commonalities between your audience because what you'll find is like 100% of the audience, 70% of them will be saying the same thing. It'll be like a common objection of like Let's take a supplement product, for example. Oh, we just didn't know how long it takes to see results, or we didn't know what the daily dosage was, or we didn't know how many uh pills were included in a butt uh a bottle or how long that lasted me is it a month supply is it no you'll get all of these common objections that you can then uh take and utilize on the front end to handle that friction point that objection that want that need uh of your typical diet demographic of your customer. So we'll always ask those questions post purchase. We'll also do exit intent surveys. Really interestingly, a lot of people utilize exit intent surveys for the wrong reasons. A lot of people think that they should use the exit intent surveys to get people back. That's not what an exit intent survey is designed for The Exit Intent survey is designed to understand why someone exits so that you could handle that objection when that other person who's going to be a similar-looking person within the demographic comes back. So we were on a uh a call a couple of weeks ago with a with a brand that's doing around a hundred and fifty million per uh per year. And they said to me, they were like Uh we couldn't get exit intent surveys um working. Like we tried to set them up, but no one, none of none of the people were coming back. We were offering like coupons, discounts, etc. And we were like That that because you're using the wrong, like you need to ask people why they're leaving because it's not about capturing that person and bringing them back, it's about capturing the reason why that person's leaving because normally You'll find these commonalities again in those surveys of exit. So we'll always set that up. So we've got uh GA4, we've got surveys. We tend to as a non-negotiable setup heat map software. So whether that's uh something like karate, which is free, we also like to use heatmap. com. Shout out to Dinananda, a friend of mine, um, because heatmap. com will track based on revenue generated from clicks and not just clicks, which is really insightful. Can't you do that in clarity now too? Uh you might be able to. You might be able to. That's typically what we'll use heat map for. But they they may have they may have uh recently updated that for sure. Um typically what uh a heatmap software will do will tell you like where the velocity of clicks are happening. but they won't attribute a monetary amount to those clicks because what we've seen, uh especially using something like heatmap. com, is like sometimes the the lesser clicked buttons are actually generating you more revenue. So you can make more revenue-informed decisions based on clip. Um, but we'll also be looking into things like scroll maps, um, movements, etc. Um And then we'll gather that data. So if you haven't surveyed your audience, we'll go out and send an email to your audience. Um the easiest way to do this and you don't have to use us to do this but any grands listing you haven't surveyed the audience, all you need to do is is start with your like VIP list. So like segment in in Shopify bar for like for like repeat customers that are purchasing from you a lot. segment them in Calledia, whatever EFP you use, and send out a broadcast email that says take two minutes to answer these questions and we'll enter you into a drawer for a hundred dollar Amazon gift card. Now we've tried everything by the way. We tried Discout, we tried free products, we tried um Group, uh uh not Froupon, what's the uh uh um Uber Eats, vouchers, etc. Amazon is the one that works the best. Um, so just offer a free entry into an Amazon gift card and then you can ask those questions. So don't You know, don't sit here listen to this and going like, oh, the lover said I should have had post-purchase set up, but I've missed all that data. You've still got that data in the form of an email. So just go and create a type for or something to survey your customers. Um so we'll always gather that data. We'll gather the analytics, the heat maps, the tracking, et cetera. We'll then do UX UI walkthroughs will actually go through your store, mobile, desktop, tablet, will actually purchase your product, get to know the kind of uh whole feeling. And that's another test that anyone could do, right? Like How many people are actually buying their own product on their own store? When's the last time you actually went to your store and purchased your own product to see the experience? There might be a button that's a bit misaligned, there might be something that's confusing and That pisses you off within your funnel. Like imagine if it pisses you off what it does to your customers. So like definitely go and buy your own product. I think that's a a big tip.
Kurt Elster
Um but we'll we'll that hold on, that one sounds so basic and yet nobody does it. The number of things that we've uncovered by just making a purchase, like I'll just be like, oh, I, you know, a client sells something, I need it, I buy it, and then I'm like, man, I and I'm not blaming the merchant. In this example, I didn't make a purchase either, right? But the moment you make that that actual test purchase on a real device, uh suddenly you reveal the issues that may be on the site. But really, I think even better than doing it yourself. Watch over the shoulder of someone who's not done it before, and then you definitely uncover the issues.
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great method of doing it, either in person or we do uh usability testing. So there are services where you can actually pay people to purchase products and they do screen recordings and give you feedback. Um so we'll always do that as well. So We kinda marry up.
Kurt Elster
I go across the walkway, you know, across the lobby from my building, walk into the Starbucks and just harass some strangers until they politely ask me to leave. Yeah.
Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, I love it. Love it, love it, love it, love it. Um so that's a great way of doing it. So yeah, we we basically uh there's more to it, but it's qualitative and quantitative. It's you know looking at the numbers and the analytics v and surveying your customers and heat maps versus usability walkthrough, actually buying the product, user testing. And that typically lasts around three to four weeks. It takes the three to four weeks to kind of do all that research. We then combine that research into a full audit. So nine times out of ten that all is between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pages and it sounds boring and sounds in-depth, but it's some of the most insightful lessons you can learn as a brand, not just for your site. I think that's what CRO is as well, is like We honor un uh findings around your prospects and your demographic that can be used across your whole business. So it can be used for retention, it can be used on your acquisition, your media company can use this, your creative company can use this. Uh and we like to meet each single uh key person who's involved with all those uh specific tasks so that we can kind of almost centralize the meshes because there has to be congruency between like add and page for example. So we speak to team members and then we'll present the audit to you and at the end of the audit is where the kind of magic happens because what the audit allows us to do is create a roadmap and a uh hypothesis or a test uh ranking system that we use the PXL framework. It's not ours, it's uh it's a CXL framework called PXL uh where we rank test ideas and the hypotheses based on uh how easy they are to implement, how much impact we say we think they'll have, are they above the fold, are they noticeable within five seconds? And then we'll kind of start working through that test uh roadmap. Sometimes, as I mentioned, it's not just about tests. We might say like, we're not going to do anything on MUD2 when it comes to AD testing because we want to build you out a listicle and an operator and test split test your attribution from at to then clicking through. So um it it very much consultative. It's very much not just about the velocity and AD testing, but we'll come with this roadmap. And it is kind of like a very English expression, but it's up to the races. It's like we start, we we design, we develop, we copyright. We manage uh and we're just constantly keeping you updated with the the performance of of any given experiment or test or uh landing page or whatever that may be.
Kurt Elster
What's the expected timeline for outcome of results here? Right? If I'm the merchant, I'm very much I want I want things to happen sooner rather than later. What do you say to people who expect instant results from CRO?
Oliver Kenyon
I think you need to look at CRO as a a long-term uh a long-term activity. We try to get a couple of tests up and running within the first month, but they're very much quick wins and they very much don't always win. So I think anyone who runs a CRA agency or has uh I feel like I have a responsibility in the CRO space to, I guess, um educate and tell the truth. That's something I've always stood by. More tests will lose than win. Like if the losing test will outweigh the winning test times 10, but that one winning test will times the the losers by 100. So you'll always after that one winning test. But I think CRO is is more about a holistic view again of like problem solving across the whole brand and It has to be a learning activity. You know, a lot tests lose, so you have to learn why those tests lose. And we always do free test analysis, whether it's a winning or losing test. So it's always like Okay, we're presenting this to you as a losing test. We understand it lost because of this. We're gonna therefore change something in the next test. But anyone who has a realistic expectation on CRO should not be thinking in months or weeks, they should be thinking in six to twelve months at least as a as a framework to grow your year on year revenue or profit profitability within the business. It's not a quick fix.
Kurt Elster
But we hope to get you quick win.
Oliver Kenyon
That's that's the like that the for me as a as a as a business owner and for our teams The the best scenario, and it doesn't always happen, honestly it doesn't, is when we have a win in month one, let's say like a fifteen fifty thousand dollar incremental increase to your monthly revenue, um, and then we get into the roadmap, but that happens. one out of six seven times um it it's a long term it's a long term play.
Kurt Elster
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Oliver Kenyon
Yeah, no, it does. It definitely does. Um I think AI from a a a delivery uh the deliverability standpoint for us as a business has just sped everything up. So it it's as I as you kind of listen to in in this pod is like And data is everything within CRO. It's it's fifty to eighty percent of the battle, right? So like it's it's very much important. And We used to have to we call it like filter or mine data manually. So like let's say for example we're working with a large brand and they have over a hundred thousand responses to the post-purchase survey. We used to have to go through that line by line and it would take weeks to kind of spot commonalities. What we're always doing in data is we're looking for the common trend. What's the common objection? What's the tone of voice? What's bud words that a lot of people are using? What's the tonality of your customers? And that was always a manual process. It would take days, literally days, and and you know, it was a ro role of a a kind of VA to go through and and and and extract all that important Arsenal that we can use in our testing, testing um roadmap. Now we can beat something into ChatGPT, for example, and prompt it to analyze hundreds of thousands of rows of data. within minutes. So you know we can feed in that spreadsheet of turbo responses and instead of manually going through each line we can say Go through this and uh pull out any friction, any objections, any common uh buzzwords that are used, tonality, tone of voice, um, and we can kind of get to results very uh a lot quicker. Again, like reviews is one, right? So we do the same with reviews. So we'll look at uh reviews, but we work with um several kind of eight and nine figure brands where they have literally hundreds of thousands of reviews and that would be a very much a manual process of my and those reviews going through spotting um why people say the product's so good and why they love it uh and they those kind of buzzwords but now we can just export a spreadsheet feed it into the chat the the AI and it can tell us in in minutes. So For us, it's all about a time saver. On the design side of the business, we offer copywriting is included with every single one of our landing pages. And we have full-time, we have three full-time copywriters. Uh but they definitely do use AI as a starting point, you know, to to feed in um data and and and information about your specific brand and then say, you know, come up with their a kind of landing page copy based on our best practices and our frameworks and our rules that we feed it and then it's a kind of uh a manual let's edit, let's move things around, let's change things. But it's it it's speed. That's what we use it for, speed of execution.
Kurt Elster
I yeah, a hundred percent if it improves I think quality and quantity of output. And so when you're using it appropriately, as opposed to just like a shotgun approach to generating things. Right for a more nuanced focused purpose. It's really powerful. It's just getting things done faster, better. And it sounds like that's the approach you're taking. One thing I want to know from you that I'm sure you have an opinion on, tell me, give me one thing merchants should stop doing right now if they want better conversion rates. I know there's something that drives you nuts.
Oliver Kenyon
Um yeah, several things. I mean again it's it's uh I I have this strong thing around the kind of completely rebranding your site based on like a a kind of uh brand or a feel. Uh neglecting performance or neglecting you know necessities to actually convert people into customers if you're going to do that work with an agency who understands CRO and looks into the data and does it from a technical aspect. Don't just work with a brand agency that are just going to completely change your site for the kind of reasons I've I've already explained. I think that's one kind of big mistake we see happen uh a lot. I think one thing that's a common kind of occurrence between all brands that all anyone who who typically will own a product or an agency or a software or it doesn't matter. We get very much too clever with our our messaging. We because we eat, sleep, live, breathe our brand or our product or our agency or our SAS or our membership. We I guess wrongfully assume that prospects know as much as we do about what it is we're trying to sell. And therefore We're very we tend to be try to be too clever. We talk about shiny objects and features and you know I it it kills me when I go to a website and people with that main headline are trying to be like really clever with the wording and there's like encrypted messages in there and like The the only way you can combat this is like to keep it simple, stupid. Like I always say treat people like they're five years old Tell them exactly what you're selling and the outcome that they're gonna get. And that is like a mistake I see so many times that like people try to get really clever with the wording of their headline or the way they try to sell things that they neglect actually telling their prospect what it is they're selling and how that prospect is therefore going to benefit and the outcome they're going to get. So that's a common kind of a common occurrence that we kind of see quite a lot.
Kurt Elster
Um again it's the it's that brand owner ego sneaking up in there, right? Yeah. For like the one percent of the planet that'll actually know what the heck I'm talking about. And they still won't be con even if they know what you what you mean, they're like, I'm not confident here. And for that reason, even though it's not fun, clarity, being clear in your messaging always trumps clever. And I love clever. It like it kills me to admit that. But Joe my gosh, just be clear, right? That's the hack
Oliver Kenyon
Hundred percent. I think headlines and copy are so powerful. Um and uh you know, use something like Hennyway app that just gives you a score rating based on like how simple your your content is. And yeah, I I think just write on that kind of like fifth grade, like it just needs to be so simple of like, this is what we're selling and this is what you're gonna get out of it. Um you can then get clever further down the page and you can have the feature sections, but it's like it's very cliche, but like uh you know features tell benefits sell and it's all about like what am I going to get out of purchasing this product and I think so many times that gets neglected and people are like They're so proud of their product that they just forget the customer and they just talk about like why they're so proud of it and why it's like got extra battery life and zoom and all these things that are irrelevant to the actual outcome you're gonna get from purchasing it. So um that's a common mistake PC a lot as well. It's definitely within like Yeah, neglecting, I guess, the prospect and the breeze and someone's buying it and actually just communicating that with them and and and just, you know, being lazy enough to expect that they're gonna know this with your cleppy clever copy and your features that you're showing off.
Kurt Elster
Is there a CRO myth that particularly frustrates you?
Oliver Kenyon
Ooh, a myth. Yeah, I mean I guess going back to that best practice uh you know scenario, I I've I've spoken and listened to so many podcasts, I've been in the industry for so long that like You know, a lot of CRO agencies debunk that myth and say there isn't best practices. I agree with you. There are there is a definitely a better way of doing it, you know, firing the data with the the kind of front-end start. But there is a thousand percent best practices. There are conversion principles that you should have in your landing pages and your pages, especially particularly above the bulk, that will 100% make you convert better. So I think um I think yeah, like I say, my big thing is like I'm probably the only CRR agency that that kind of says, yeah, there are best practices and and you should have them on your page regardless of what you're doing. Um I think a lot of people like to say there isn't because they wanna, you know, sorry on a long contract or you know they wanna kind of uh And do it that way, but that's definitely not us. I think CRO best prices do exist. And I'm I'm willing to start on that help. We've seen it time and time again, time and time again. Um, I could audit, I I I would I would literally put my house on the fact that I could audit someone's site, suggests best practices based on conversion principles, and if they implemented it, their conversion rates would go up. Um the other the other the myth that I I hate Ibank is that the whole the whole fact around conversion rate, the conversion rates matter. Conversion rates don't matter. What mash matters are revenue per session or looking at your business as a whole. So Anyone can increase conversion rates. We just reduce the price. We just you know sash our prices by a hundred percent and your conversion rate's gonna go through the roof. So stop fixating on that conversion rate. What you really want to look at is conversion rate plus AAV. And that's going to give you a revenue per visitor. uh or you know how much you're going to be making per visits to your site and that's a far better metric to then um to then monetize because you really just want to be making more per click effectively
Kurt Elster
I think that is a great a great place to end this conversation. I love that as our our closing advice from you. Um Yeah. Okay. Where can listeners go to learn more about you in conversion-wise?
Oliver Kenyon
Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you. Um just follow me on social media at Oliver Kenyon on X, LinkedIn, etc. We put out so much free content, you know, really actionable insights that people can hopefully go and implement and increase their conversions, but Stuff that even I use in our agency business. Oh thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That means that means a lot from you. But um yeah, if people actually want to uh inquire and work with us Um just get on the free discovery call. Let's get on the call. Let's understand your business. Let's uh suggest if we think we can help you. Um and that's just conversionwise. com and we'd love to speak with you.
Kurt Elster
Oliver Kenyon, conversionwise. com. Thank you so much.
Oliver Kenyon
Thank you. It's been really great.
Kurt Elster
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