Week 5: CRO, Best Practices (Lesson 7th — 12th), Review

So I’ve arrived at the end of week 5 for a Minidegree in Conversion Rate Optimization course with CXL: https://cxl.com/

In this article/review, I’ll go through the rest of the lessons in Best Practices course (lesson 7th — 12th, out of 18).

The lesson topics are listed below:

• Principles of persuasive design
• Typography and content
• Radical redesign vs. evolutionary design
• Home pages
• Pricing and pricing pages
• Website speed optimization

Now, let’s go through those one by one.

Lesson 7: Principles of persuasive design

This lesson, Peep Laja was giving a talk. I really like some interesting examples such as:

• At some airports around the world, the researcher installed a fly onto the urinals in men’s rooms; it turns out, it resulted in 80% less spillage.
• How Gary Vaynerchuk built his career on these 3 principles: talk fast, act confident and guard them, and swear a bit. Although it might just be his natural personality, it’s an interesting observation indeed.

To sum it up, there are the 5 main principles in persuasive design

1. Clarity above all
2. Visual appeal
3. Strong visual hierarchy
4. Conserve attention at all costs
5. One action per screen, when they’re ready

Lesson 8: Typography and content

Font size and type matters — they don’t recommend using fonts smaller than 16 pixels for body copy.

On the fonts:

• There’s no best fonts
• Just make sure you use the clean looking fonts and try to avoid the too non-traditional ones
• Make sure you don’t do ALL CAP since it will seem like you’re yelling at your readers

Structuring the copy — the suggested approach:

• Use plenty of ordered and unordered lists,
• always serve images with text to break it up,
• new paragraph every 3–4 lines,
• sub-headline every 1–2 paragraphs.

Optimal Line Length:

• Can adjust to make sure it’s not too short nor too long
• Point is do things that minimize the readers’ stress

What get read the most is a well-structured copy:

Thing like points below get read the most:

• Headline (#1)
• Intro paragraph,
• Bullets above the fold,
• Sub-headlines.

So, a good copywriter can really make a big difference here.

Lesson 9: Radical redesign vs. evolutionary design

Sometimes as a CRO, you have to decide whether to do an evolutionary design (optimizing the existing site) or to go with radical redesign instead.

Points:

• You might want to start over if there are changes in brand or company directions
• The terms “local maxima” = when you hit the limit of the current design, little improvements even with so many tweaks
• Keep in mind -> Radical redesigns are also risky, so will have to use both data and intuition
• Before redesign, you first have to understand what’s working and what’s not
• Keep what’s working and redesign what doesn’t
• Again, good user experience is key
• When the evolutionary design is better: the existing design is good enough and a lot of returning visitors are familiar with the current design

Lesson 10: Home pages

There are 2 main goals of home pages:

• Give users information
• Provide effective navigation towards further info inside the site

It’s essential to communicate the home page value proposition:

• What can I do here?
• Why should I do it?
• How’s this better/different from other offers?

The secondary goal for the home page is to get people off it and go into the sales funnel.

The lesson provided some good examples here.

Lesson 11: Pricing and pricing pages

Pricing is of course an important part of the business. As an optimizer, you can help reduce friction and lead people to the right direction.

Points:

• Reduce friction
• Can split test to figure out what’s the optimal price point
• Influence people by using psychological strategies
• You’ll need more explanation and proof the higher the price gets

Multiple prices VS one price:

• Don’t ask people how much they would pay — it’s better to test with real traffic
• Should experiment with: 2–3 options price plan usually sell better than 1 price option
• Should measure the revenue instead of just sign up numbers — since the signups can be more in control (1 option price point) than in variable and you can miss out instead of maximizing the revenue

Decoy pricing:

• Offer 2 similar price and offer, but one has clear sound advantage — hence a “no brainer” choice

Price Anchoring/Contrast principle:
(The lesson gave a to-do-at-home test we can experiment with)

• Lead with the most expensive price plan to make the other one look much cheaper

Decoy + Contrast:

• Can use a mixture of contrast and decoy pricing

Price that ends with 9s:

• They truly work better

Split Testing Prices:

• You should always test the pricing — that can really make a difference in revenue

Should I always reveal my prices (even B2B)?

• You should reveal the price as much as you can since most people are so impatient these days to request a quote

Assessing pricing plan design:

• There are many ways to design great pricing plan

Here are some of the tips and best practices for optimizer to consider:

• Simplicity: make sure it’s easy to understand what they will get
• Ease of comparison
• How easy for them to identify which plan is best for them, by themselves?
• If selling to international market, offer currency options
• Incentivize longer term commitment e.g. yearly plan
• Display a clear call to action

Lesson 12: Website speed optimization

Make sure that the site doesn’t lose customers due to its speed.

Site spread improvements are typically made by front end developers or caching or a CDN. You can seek technical help from technical people in order to do so.

The lesson went through:

• How to check speed info in Google Analytics

Tools to evaluate site speed:

• Code improvement suggestion tools
• Load speed measurement tools

Then, you can look at the load time report

Caching and CDNs:

• Minimize round-trip times (RTTs) — can have a web developer takes care of it

Ideal site speed:

• The section provided interesting stats

Thoughts:

• A great user experience should always be at the top of mind
• There are many things you can do with design to persuade the site visitors
• Human psychology principles can be applied for website optimization esp. in design effective pricing plan
• Good copywriting wins
• Change what doesn’t work and keep what does
• Test, test, test
• Page speed matters

That’s it for week 5. See you in week 6!