19 Growth and CRO Experts on Increasing Revenue Without Increasing Traffic

“What’s the number one thing you wish more ecommerce entrepreneurs knew about your discipline?”

That’s the question I posed to 19 world-class conversion rate optimization (CRO) and growth experts.

From growth heavyweights like Sean Ellis and Noah Kagan to optimization legends like Joanna Wiebe and Peep Laja, the responses came flooding in.

Before you spend another dollar, another minute on traffic acquisition, hear what these experts have to say. By optimizing your site for conversions, you can increase your revenue without increasing your traffic.

Despite popular belief, it’s never too early for optimization.

So, without further ado, this is what some of the world’s leading experts wish you knew about CRO and growth.

Processes > Tactics

CRO and growth are often thought of in terms of tactics:

Everyone’s looking for a quick and easy golden nugget they can implement for 10x growth. A button copy tweak here, a color change there.

While tactics and growth hacks might be sexier than systematic processes, experts rely on the latter.

Why? Because the world of ecommerce is highly contextual.

What works for Amazon or Best Buy might not work for you, for example. You can’t bring someone else’s solutions in and expect them to solve your store’s problems.

Instead, Peep Laja of CXL Institute urges those new to CRO to rely on systematic processes:

The process is a bit different for everyone, but it generally looks something like this:

1. Conduct qualitative and quantitative research on your unique site to identify problem areas.
2. Use your research to come up with test and experiment ideas.
3. Prioritize those test and experiment ideas using a prioritization method like ICE or PXL.
4. Begin running the highest priority test or experiment.
5. Analyze the results of the test or experiment.
6. Record or archive the results of the test or experiment.
7. Use the insights from your most recent test or experiment to come up with smarter test and experiment ideas.

This process puts an emphasis on insights and continuous learning. It also makes your store the focus. So, you’re learning what works for your store and your audience vs. Best Buy and Best Buy’s audience, for example.

The trouble with tactics and growth hacks is that they don’t account for context. A systematic process, while perhaps not as exciting, does.

4 Core Disciplines of CRO

Optimization requires a wide variety of skills and traits from a wide variety of disciplines. Craig Sullivan wrote about the 11 traits of a successful optimizer a few years ago, which includes everything from humility to statistics.

That’s what makes CRO and growth exciting, that combination of so many different skillsets and disciplines. In this article, we’ll focus on only a few of the disciplines that make up CRO:

1. Copywriting
2. Psychology
3. Testing
4. User Experience (UX)

Before we dive in, there are a few ground rules to cover. First and foremost, CRO and growth have to be baked into the way you approach your business.

Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers explains:

If optimization and growth are not a pillar of your store and of your business, you won’t see the results you are expecting. Approaching all things with an experimentation mindset is key.

In fact, that experimentation mindset should extend beyond your site itself.

Paul Rouke of PRWD explains:

The four pillars of the audit that Paul references are:

1. Strategy + Culture: Your business’s approach to optimization.
2. Tools + Technology: The tools used in the optimization process.
3. People + Skills: The skills you develop to drive the optimization process.
4. Process + Methodology: The optimization process itself.

Note that all four pillars can extend beyond your online store and impact multiple aspects of your business, like product or even customer service.

Another important point to make is that it’s always a good time to be focused on optimization and growth. Many people believe that they must first focus on increasing traffic, that CRO comes after traffic growth.

Josh Garofalo of Sway Copy explains why you should consider putting CRO before traffic growth:

It’s true that you need a certain amount of traffic to run proper tests, yes. (We’ll get to that in-depth below.) But there is much more to optimization and growth than testing.

Sending more and more people to a site that is “leaking” potential customers is a temporary solution, a bandaid.

With CRO, you can actually increase your store’s revenue without increasing your traffic. Afterwards, when you do decide to focus on increasing traffic, the visitors you acquire will be more valuable because fewer of them will be “leaking out”. If you’re paying for ads, this is even better news.

1. Copywriting

Copywriting is the art and science of crafting words that persuade and sell.

The number one thing Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers and Airstory wishes people knew about copywriting? That it’s as data-informed as any other CRO discipline:

Josh agrees, adding that there’s a lot more to copywriting than, well, writing:

So while copywriting might seem like an exercise in creative writing, it’s much more data-informed and scientific than that. As Joanna and Josh alluded to, there’s a lot of research and data exploration required to write convincing copy.

Joel Klettke of Case Study Buddy agrees the copywriting research process is vital, especially for capturing the voice of your customer:

We’ve written an entire article on the ecommerce copywriting research process, but here’s the synopsis:

1. Define your audience and segments. Define your goal and a list of questions you want answered.
2. Conduct qualitative research. That means internal interviews, customer interviews, surveys, etc.
3. Identify and document patterns in the research. What words and phrases are standing out? What objections, products, benefits and questions keep coming up?
4. Define the messaging hierarchy and wireframe. What’s the most important messaging based on your research? Use that to create a wireframe, which clearly lays out your copy.

This is a time-consuming process, but the words on your site are one of your biggest selling tools, so investing your time here will pay off.

Plus, the customer insights from this research process will carry over to other areas of your business. For example, you can use the questions that come up over and over again to improve your FAQ page or your live chat autoresponders.

Research also helps define context. What are your visitors expecting from your copy at various stages of the lifecycle?

Jen Havice of Make Mention Media elaborates:

You can use your research to understand the customer journey and optimize it from beginning to end. Why does that matter? Your copy needs to serve and persuade a wide range of visitors at a wide range of stages.

For example, you might be familiar with the five stages of awareness:

• More Aware: She knows you and your product, she just needs to know the specifics.

• Product-Aware: She knows what you sell, but isn’t sure if it’s the right choice for her.

• Solution-Aware: She knows the result she wants, but doesn’t know your product provides it.

• Problem-Aware: She knows she has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.

• Unaware: She doesn’t know the problem, the solution or your product.

At any given time, your store’s copy could be trying to capture the attention of and persuade people from each of the five stages.

There are also different levels of motivation and intent. There could be someone who is feeling the problem intensely, someone who is feeling it passively. There could be someone who is ready to buy, someone who is just starting to research products.

Understanding contexts puts you in a better position to write copy.

For example, in the right context, humor can be a good persuasion tool. Lianna Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting argues that boring copy kills sales (and customer relationships):

Think about it this way. Would you rather talk to the in-store salesperson who has personality and makes you laugh, or the here’s-what-you-need-to-know-now-get-out salesperson?

My go-to example for funny ecommerce copywriting is Chubbies:

But there are plenty of stores that work subtle humor into their copy, like Moosejaw:

And Woot.com:

There’s nothing wrong with that just-the-facts salesperson, but no one is going to come back to the store because of his glowing practicality and logic. Inserting humor, even sparingly, will help you build a relationship with visitors and customers.

2. Psychology

When you think of CRO and growth, your mind probably naturally drifts to testing, statistics and analytics. You know, the quantitative aspects. But as we discovered while looking at copywriting, the qualitative matters, too.

Brian Balfour of Reforge.com explains:

This is an example of where all of that copywriting research comes in handy. Understanding who your customers are, why they act (or not), what motivates them, etc. puts you in a powerful position across the board. You’ll be able to make smarter decisions about inventory, shipping, pricing, promotion—you name it.

As Talia Wolf of GetUplift.co explains, that all starts with really, truly understanding your customer:

Once you understand how your visitors and customers tick, you can consider other elements of psychology, like:

• Cognitive Biases: Dozens of biases influence every decision your visitors and customers make. You can use these biases to persuade more effectively.

• Emotional Persuasion: The human brain is incredibly emotional. Appealing to emotion instead of exclusively logic can be effective.

• Persuasion (General): Understanding how the brain works, how it makes decisions, how it compares options, etc. can put you in a powerful sales position.

You see, it’s not just about understanding how your visitors and customers think. It’s also about pairing that knowledge with an understanding of persuasion to convince them to take the actions you want.

CRO, at its core, is the practice of persuading visitors to change their behavior in your favor. Andre Morys of Web Arts explains:

Use your understanding of your customers and human psychology to design tests that aim to alter behavior.

So, for example, changing the button color from blue to green is much less meaningful than removing a secondary call to action to refocus the distracted visitor on the more valuable “Add to Cart” button.

Psychology, much like copywriting, is often considered a creative exercise by those who are new to CRO. To the contrary, it’s as data-informed as any other discipline and can directly impact your bottom line.

3. Testing

Before you dive into testing, Tiffany daSilva of FlowJo recommends putting in the effort to establish a solid marketing foundation:

The argument here? You need a strong starting point before you can begin making improvements. Often, there are problems waiting to be solved below the surface.

Ask yourself:

• Is my site being properly indexed by search engines?
• Am I missing out on any major keyword opportunities?
• Do all of my pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have effective landing pages?
• Have I optimized the settings of my PPC campaigns as much as possible?
• Are all of my SEO and PPC campaigns connected to a meaningful drip email campaign?
• How is my email deliverability?
• Are my emails inspiring action?
• Does my site load in all browsers?
• Does my site load on all devices?

Testing requires a certain amount of traffic. Before you run an A/B test, you have to calculate your sample size ahead of time using an online calculator:

In this scenario, I want to be able to detect a minimum 10% lift on my current 3% conversion rate, so I need 51,486 people to see variation A and 51,486 people to see variation B.

Now watch what happens if I want to be able to detect, say, a 5% lift:

As you can see, running an A/B test requires quite a bit of traffic and that number increases as the minimum detectable effect decreases. So, the smaller the effect you want to detect, the more traffic you’ll need.

This all means two things:

1. Not everyone is in a position to be running tests.
2. People who can run tests don’t want to waste their time and traffic on less impactful tests.

By ensuring you have a strong foundation pre-testing, you put yourself in the best position possible.

While all this research and foundation setting prepares you well, you have to prioritize execution, whether that’s in the form of a formal test, a quick fix or an informal experiment. Johnathan Dane of KlientBoost explains:

After you conduct conversion research or after a brainstorming session, you’ll be drowning in growth and optimization ideas. The issue then becomes, “What should I do first?”

That’s where prioritization comes into play. Don’t let the ideas you’re most excited about (or most biased towards) take over. Instead, use a prioritization method to decide what to do first. For example, the ICE (impact, confidence, ease) method is quite popular.

Johnathan also touches on the importance of staying close to the money. Instead of working towards the money (traffic, conversions, sales), work backwards from the money (sales, conversions, traffic).

Erin Bury from Eighty-Eight explains how this starts with proper performance measurement:

When deciding what to measure, work backwards from the money. Peep once said, “If you want to increase your conversion rate, make everything free.” Your conversion rate would skyrocket, but revenue would plummet.

Make sure your measurements are accurate and make sure they are as close to the money as possible. Though it’s easier, optimizing at the top of the funnel (e.g. email open rates, number of pageviews) will deliver a weaker impact to revenue.

Resist the urge to measure metrics for the sake of vanity!

Speaking of human biases in testing, there’s a little something called the confirmation bias that Andre urges you to keep an eye out for:

For example, if you suspect that a change to your product page will increase adds to cart, you will be more likely to influence the test results to confirm your assumptions. That might mean stopping the test early, running it for too long, interpreting the results inaccurately, etc.

That’s why you should run your tests for at least two business cycles and until your pre-calculated sample size is reached.

It also helps to avoid “peeking” at your tests while they’re running.

Be wary of testing tools! Many will tell you the test is complete because statistical significance has been reached, which may lead to you stopping the test early.

Statistical significance does not actually signal test validity on its own, so don’t be fooled.

Finally, Alex Birkett of HubSpot reminds us to be conscious of the narrative fallacy, another cognitive bias, and how it impacts our test analysis:

The story you tell yourself about what works, what doesn’t and why matters. It’s not enough to be aware of the cognitive biases impacting your visitors and customers. You’re subject to those same cognitive biases and they will creep into your test results if you’re not careful.

4. User Experience (UX)

When you’re looking to improve the UX of your store, a little heuristic analysis can go a long way. Essentially, that means walking through your site page by page, evaluating it based on a set of factors.

I normally use the following factors to guide me:

• Motivation: What’s influencing the visitor to take action (or not)?
• Friction: What’s difficult and causing roadblocks?
• Distraction: What’s taking away from the top call to action?
• Relevancy: What’s irrelevant or out of context?
• Clarity: What’s unclear or too complex?

UX ties into the other three disciplines mentioned above. And, as with the others, a customer-centric UX approach is best. Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media explains:

Again, all of the qualitative conversion research for copywriting purposes is being recycled.

Andy emphasizes the importance of clarity, one of the five heuristic factors, here. It’s a good idea to identify the value each page delivers to the visitor as well as the most important call to action on each page.

Being clear about what you can do for them (value) and what they can do for themselves (call to action) is vital. One page, one goal. Anything else is a distraction, which doesn’t benefit you or your visitors.

When communicating the value, Dominic Coryell of GIMME GROWTH suggests asking yourself what’s in it for the visitor:

The moral here goes far beyond share buttons. It’s twofold:

1. Be overly concerned about the value every element of every page delivers to the visitor.
2. Don’t put something on the page unless it serves a meaningful purpose.

You have to serve the visitor first. Every element of every page should be purposeful and provide value, including your calls to action and products.

Now, UX is particularly interesting because there are a ton of best practices that have been circulating for years. Some valuable, some not so valuable.

For example, Noah Kagan of Sumo reminds us to be conscious of our above the fold real estate:

If you’re not familiar, “above the fold” refers to the portion of the site that’s visible without having to scroll. It’s a holdover from the newspaper era.

As you can imagine, discussions about the importance of the above the fold area have been around for many years.

In this case, the best practice has stood the test of time.

The above the fold real estate is still incredibly important. Nielsen Norman Group recently found that the average difference in how users treat info above vs. below the fold is 84%.

Impressive given the changing landscape. For example, with the rise of mobile, the fold as we know it has changed quite a bit.

As you can see, best practices aren’t inherently bad. They can actually be a good starting point, as Peep mentioned at the beginning of the article.

But it’s important to understand the why behind them.

For example, you’ll read that people don’t scroll, so all of your important information needs to be above the fold. That’s very inaccurate. Actually, a recent study found that 11% of mobile users start scrolling within four seconds of the page loading.

People do scroll, it’s not the 90s. And they will even click your calls to action below the fold. So, why does the fold still matter, really?

Because your above the fold content sets the stage. It sets expectations for content to come and quality to come.

Justin Rondeau of DigitalMarketer is a proponent of choice best practices as well:

As long as you understand the why behind the best practice and remain aware of how it’s evolving over time, it can be useful. Especially if you don’t have the traffic to test yet and haven’t had a chance to dive into conversion research.

Conclusion

From copywriting and psychology to testing and UX, the experts really delivered.

Now you know how to move beyond the growth hacks and tactics to systematic processes that will produce real results for your unique store.

And, of course, you know to optimize your site sooner rather than later to avoid perpetually filling a “leaky bucket”.

Yet we haven’t even scratched the surface.

There are so many other lessons to explore within these four disciplines as well as many other disciplines that make up CRO and growth. But that’s what makes the industry so exciting.

To start, take these lessons and apply them to your business. Then, continue to iterate and learn. As you explore, just remember: CRO and growth are for everyone, even blossoming ecommerce entrepreneurs like yourself.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

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