Hey 👋🏿 – Anthony here.
Happy Saturday to all my Stupid Simple eCommerce learners.
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Here's one tip on how to conduct a survey and the questions you need to ask.
Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.
Peep the scenario
Your website has been live for over a year now.
Your team has added every idea that they could think of to boost conversions and revenue, but nothing seems to be working.
You keep looking at your nearest competitors…
Their website looks so buttoned up.
Just look at the imagery, the way they use their words, and their style.
Then you look back at your site and you see the cracks in your user experience.
You know that you're close but the competition is BLOWING you away.
They’re getting more magazine ads and even television commercials.
They just seem to do everything right.
So in a last-ditch effort, you decide to copy what your competition has on their website.
But you know you can’t copy them verbatim, and the cost and time of a full redesign would be futile.
But you want all of those bells & whistles.
How do you do it?
You A/B test all of the features that you want on the website.
That’s how.
This is a big problem in the design industry as a whole.
It’s something that I’ve done as a UX/UI designer in the past before I started my CRO journey.
You do some research on your competition and you take the things that you “think” are working on the website and you use it for your website.
Now you look just like the competition and it makes it even harder to differentiate yourself from the rest.
What makes matters worse is that you don’t know the economic impact that these changes have on your bottom line.
Sometimes we think “hey if our much bigger competition is using it, then we MUST have it”.
Not knowing that the competition is spaghetti testing their website too.
So you never want to copy anyone verbatim.
You should do this instead…
My 3 part process for copying the competition
👉🏿 First, you should create a SWOT analysis of yourself and 3 other companies.
Conduct this analysis with 2 or more people so you get more than just 1 opinion.
If you’re looking for a great example of a SWOT analysis click here.
Also, here's a great framework for how to conduct an internal SWOT analysis.
What you should do is look for the strengths and weaknesses of your business compared to yours.
This will give you an accurate view of what is missing from your website and you can now “steal” the strengths of your competitors.
You will also know your competitor's weaknesses and you’ll have a better understanding of what not to include on your website.
👉🏿 Next, create a prioritization framework that helps you understand what needs to be worked on first.
The first things you should work on are the bigger changes. The bigger change, the bigger the risk, but also the bigger the payout.
These big changes can help you change the trajectory of your website so you’re going to want to work on those first.
I love to use the PXL Prioritization framework by CXL.
It’s very easy to use and it’s a great way to list and prioritize your work.
👉🏿 Finally, A/B test everything.
We like to use Google Optimize for most of our clients because it’s free and it connects to your Google Analytics account seamlessly.
You may not be able to A/B test every single feature but you should be able to test most changes.
If you don’t have a meaningful amount of traffic and conversions then you can just implement the new features and changes directly on the website.
You’re going to want to annotate your Google Analytics account with the features you’re implementing (you should be doing this even if you are A/B testing) and take note of the changes that happen after your change.
We like to implement new features on Monday and give it the full 7 days to see if there’s an immediate change.
After 14-30 days you can either leave the feature alone or remove it if it’s not performing well.
Hopefully, this will help you all with updating the user experience of your website.
Hopefully, this stops you all from making simple mistakes on your website.
If you find that you need help implementing any of this please feel free to reply to this email.
Aaaand that’s a wrap, folks!
See you again next week.
When you're ready there are 3 ways I can help you:
Work directly with my team to help transform your business into a high-growth brand.
Take my free 3-Day Conversion Breakthrough Challenge to further beef up your messaging.
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