Conversion Optimisation expert Talia Wolf Chats to Graham Arrowsmith and Kevin Appleby on The Next 100 Days Podcast.
Introducing Talia Wolf
Talia Wolf is a world child. She was born in England, worked for an Australian company and works with American companies and spoke to us from her home in Israel.
Talia started her career working in a social media company. She did Facebook pages, campaigns on Facebook, campaigns on Google, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Talia was doing conversion optimisation WAY before she was doing it! All here clients then cared about was likes on their Facebook page. It drove her nuts. She kept asking about leads and sales. Talia would go into Google Analytics and lay around with the ads – button colour, title, elements of the landing page. All based on intuition and reading best practices.
Talia Wolf discusses Conversion Optimisation on The Next 100 Days Podcast
She did that for 6 months and realised this was what she really wanted to do. She left the agency and started a conversion optimisation agency with her partners.
Talia went from guessing her way to better results to building an entire optimisation process. This built the knowledge of what to do and how to do it. This is what lead her to the EMOTIONAL TARGETING METHODOLOGY.
Conversioner and GetUplift
Talia sold Conversioner last year and her company is called GetUplift.
GetUplift is a conversion optimisation consultancy. Her services include courses, online training, in-house training and workshops.
Emotion and Conversion Optimisation
Talia focuses upon the emotional aspects of conversion optimisation, which is all about why people buy stuff and the processes etc that help them buy more. To understand why people buy stuff, you must understand how people make decisions. Our entire decision process in life is based on emotion.
She worked backwards from understanding emotions to then building the conversion optimisation methodology. She figures out what are the emotions that motivate her customers to make people buy. Once she knows those emotions, she can then choose better colours, fonts, images, content, social proof etc.
Talia observes that ads tend not to feature rational thought, they focus on emotions. Drinking Coca Cola make you a cool, fun and amazing person. Talia observes that EMOTION is lacking online.
Talia was doing well with her tests because she was introducing the emotional world to the online world. The people that know what they are doing are selling on emotion
It’s all about how our brains work and how we make decisions. Talia is helping her clients go from a focus on soft metrics like likes to money in the till metrics.
An Example of Talia’s Conversion Optimisation Process
Let’s say an eCommerce site who wish to optimise and get more sales.
The first thing she does is research, analytics, heatmaps, audience (geographical location, age)…
Then there is the strategic part. Who the customer really is. Doing customer interviews; surveys; competitor research; psychological profiles and building personas. Trying to identify that one true customer.
All this is to understand the purchasing decision. Why are people on my website, what are they looking for. People don’t buy products, features, pricing, they buy emotion. They buy better versions of themselves. People want to be more athletic, more good looking, more loved, part of a community. We want to be better than we are. We buy a promise.
Talia tries to figure out for her clients what that promise is. If it’s a dating site, they want to be loved. If it’s an ecommerce site, perhaps they want a beautiful home.
Once she understands what they are looking for emotionally, she can then adapt everything to it.
So, with images, instead of showing an image of a bag, she’ll show a happy person, who looks great, has a lot of friends around them, and how popular they are, thanks to this bag.
It is all about how to place things around that emotion. You can use colour psychology, headline, videos, the image itself. EVERYTHING on your page works towards that ONE TRUE PROMISE that you are making.
Instead of using the latest advice on a CTA button, she uses this researched emotion and structures everything around that. That emotion guides the page design.
Kevin asked – If they want to be loved, is that a pink button?
Colour Psychology
There is a lot of advice out there. Blue equals trust, Red equals energy. Pink equals love. Talia says that is completely incorrect.
Humans are affected by colour on 3 different levels. By experiences, by symbols we give to colour and by our culture.
White is considered a pure colour in western countries. In the east, white is a mourning colour, worn to funerals, a depressing colour. So, if you were targeting people in the far east, you would want to be careful using white.
So, it is all about understanding your target audience.
Is the colour purple regal? There are standard colours. Blue for trust. Also, known for speeding things up. It makes things quicker. But do research.
Are there some mistakes that are common in Conversion Optimisation?
Talia says there are 2 main mistakes that she sees countless times…
- You want to increases leads and sales and you look at Google Analytics and landing page and YOU GUESS. You heard somewhere that an orange button works, you heard somewhere that reducing the form fields will help.No.If you don’t do your research, if you don’t analyse or speak to your customers, you will not know how to fix that issue or leak and you will not learn anything from it.Don’t guess. Don’t follow best practices. They are written as link bait. Eye candy. They don’t give you a process.
- Marketers treating customers as if they are units of data and not understanding they are people.They are not the browser they used to access your site. Behind the screen, is an actual person. They have challenges. They have problems.The only way you can increase your sales is by helping your customers achieve their goals. If you help them achieve their goals you’ll get what you want.
- Product first, NOT problem first.
Companies talk about themselves too much. Their features, their pricing.
People don’t care about the what, they care about the why.
Make it about the customer. The customer is the hero.
Talia mentioned a TED Talk with Nancy Duarte – The Secret Structure of Great Talks (all about communicating an idea in a way that conveys the idea). https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks
In detail…
Customer Surveys – they know why they are buying. See Talia’s blog http://getuplift.co/blog/
Competitor research – don’t copy from competitors! Talia highlights a technique from a Joanna Weibe – a conversion copywriter. https://copyhackers.com/about-copy-hackers/
- Look at your competitor’s reviews. Use that content on your website.
- Speak to people in your company. Ask your own people.
Social Proof
Use this on your website. Show reviews, testimonials, show the logos of the companies that trust you.
Companies fear showing negative reviews. If you only show 5 star reviews, it is not credible or authentic. You can show the small things that you get wrong, because it gives you authenticity and makes people feel that you are credible and more believable.
Talking to customers helps you to craft those testimonials and reviews. The testimonials should address your customer’s challenges WITHOUT you needing to. A client saying YOU are trustworthy is better than you saying that of yourself. It has so much power.
Don’t do fake reviews.
Videos – a good thing or bad thing for conversion on landing pages?
Talia is speaking at WistiaFest in Boston, June 11-13 2017 https://wistia.com/wistiafest/2017
The answer is where the video is. Many times when people talk about video, they talk about the home page video, the one big thing that’s up there. Talia points to different ways to use video:
- Case studies
- Testimonials
- On Thank You pages (a nice video from the CEO, perhaps, saying thanking their decision and asking them to take a SECOND action)
These are the things that can make a big impact on conversion.
Video CAN decrease conversion. It goes by the same rules. You shouldn’t make it about YOURSELF. So, above the fold on the home page, don’t use a video about how to use the product…but a video that tells you what’s in it for you. Why you are better. Why this solution is better for your customer.
Talia uses video in different ways rather than here’s what our product is.
A video on the ABOUT US page from the business owner, again focused on helping the customer overcome their challenge, but also to humanise the company – the people in the company, the company dog etc
Length of Copy
Long copy versus short copy?
Talia advises the length of copy depends on your business goal and what you are trying to promote.
According to recent US customs data statistics, marketers are often advised by others to shorten everything. They say people do not read. That’s a lie Talia stresses. (But don’t write boring long copy!!)
Make a case for someone that might not know they have that problem. It requires you to advise the problem, the different solutions that exist and why your solution is best for them and why they should buy from you. And start now.
When Talia started selling her course, the landing page had 5000 words! 70% of the visitors got to the end of the page! They’ll read if you give a reason.
Headlines
Talia once saw a landing page with Lorum Ipsum text. She says this indicates a state of mind that people erroneously believe that the only thing that matters is design. They used placeholder text on the page and they didn’t bother to think about the copy.
Talia says people who think like this are “not a good designer, you are a decorator” Design doesn’t work alone and copy doesn’t work alone.
Talia is a frequent sky-diver. Although she is petrified of flying, despite having clients all over the world. She started to dive to impress a guy. Emotion, not being rational!
Contact Talia
GetUplift.co
Visit Resources – checklists of Google Analytics and landing pages.
On Twitter
@taliagw
Tweets on articles, quotes and daily rants, people that annoy her and stuff about Harry Potter and her dog! She’s a Potter-head. She has read the books 4 or 5 times.
The Next 100 Days Podcast is brought to you by Graham Arrowsmith and Kevin Appleby
