Where should you start if you want to improve conversions on your site?

Chances are you’ll get it wrong.

We’ve been talking about customer psychology in the previous issues and this is where it all begins.

A very useful framework to think about how to prioritize your CRO efforts is this:

List, Offer, Copy

In other words, touching your copy, before your offer is optimized is useless, and optimizing your offer before you have a list of people to sell to, well…you get it.

So is your list, your potential customers, where you should start from?

Not really.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard from a “marketing guru” comes from Flint McGlaughlin at the MECLABS Institute. The guy has spent the past 30 years studying what makes people say yes.

Talk about focus.

Damn, he equates marketing to philosophy!

His advice when it comes to start thinking about conversion optimization?

It doesn’t even start from your prospects.

It starts with you.

You as the marketer or the business owner.

Because what you have to get right first, is your approach and mindset.

You have to find a way to obliterate any preconceived notion or bias or baggage you carry when it comes to looking at your web pages. And get into your prospect’s shoes.

It’s basically like wiping your mind. And that’s why as a consultant I’m always starting fresh, every time I approach a new client project.

New audience, new psychology, new mindset.

And at the beginning this mindset will just be a blank slate that you fill up with research data.

The trick is to not let your own personality and mental models creep in again after you’ve done the research.

I’m currently in deep thinking mode, trying to develop my own methodology based on what I’ve seen working around.

So in the next few emails I’ll do a deep dive into how people think and go through a website. It will help me brainstorm and hopefully you’ll learn something useful in the process.

In the mean time, if you’re not on it yet, you can check out my monthly newsletter where I share some of the tools and processes I use to do this stuff.

Cheers,

Chris