Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I’ve spent much of the past week in sunny San Diego speaking at my final conference of 2024, HeroConf (yes, it’s back - but now under the BrightonSEO umbrella). While I was a bit skeptical on what to expect, the BrightonSEO/Rough Agenda team put together an exceptional event - a who’s who of fantastic speakers, a record-breaking crowd (2,800+ people) and an incredible environment. As you’re thinking about your 2025 conference plans, this is one I’d strongly consider.
This week’s topic is the outcome of an uncomfortable truth in advertising/paid media: there’s only so much we can do in the ad account to drive positive outcomes. We can optimize account structure, ship new creatives, refine audiences/keywords, debate whether cost caps or manual bids are better – but these are “Final 20%” actions. If the first 80% is there, nailing these will unlock massive growth.
So, what’s the First 80%?
I think it comes down to a few things: (1) the quality + positioning of your product/service; (2) the supporting infrastructure (i.e. how consistently well you can deliver (1)); and (3) differentiation + emotional resonance of the experience.
These are the big levers that enable performance marketing to, well, perform. They also tend to be ignored by marketers, precisely because they’re so difficult to move. It’s a hell of a lot easier to change a bid or ship a new creative than it is to re-think a user experience or reposition a product/service. But, if your goal is to transform your business (or your client’s business), it starts with obsessing over the first 80%.
Before we get into that, I want to discuss a 2nd concept I’ve mentioned on multiple occasions: inertia + momentum. In physics, inertia is the tendency of objects at rest to stay at rest, and objects in motion to remain in motion (unless acted on by an outside force); momentum is the product of an object’s mass and velocity - basically, it’s the quantity of motion a given object has at a point in time. And just as objects have inertia and momentum, so too do people (i.e. customers/prospects). What’s crucial about both of these terms is that they both specify that their value can be changed by an outside force – and so, too, can people. It’s called marketing.
If you plotted every single person on a continuum, it would probably look something like this:
Where each person falls in this matrix is highly contingent on dozens of factors - from the topic at hand (the same person might be wildly eager to learn about alternative investments but incredibly resistant to learning about microplastics) and current pain points to their risk tolerance and their goals/objectives. But what’s crucial is that their position isn’t fixed - it’s variable. It can be changed with sufficient time and effort (read: “cost”).
It’s likewise true that inertia is real: users that aren’t motivated (“at rest”) are going to stay that way unless acted on by an outside force (read: the user experience you create). Relatedly, a user that is highly motivated has momentum; it’s your job to channel it into the proper direction (also known as your solution).
All of this is what the First 80% does: it moves your audience from their “initial position” and “initial momentum” closer to (or farther from) the ideal zone. The implication of that is both simple and staggering: every element of a user’s experience - from the landing page button to the post-checkout email to the product/service itself - either moves them closer to “ideal” or farther from it. Each element increases or decreases your users’ motivation and willingness to consider what you’re offering.
If your website and experience are terrible, demanding or frustrating, you’ll repel most users; conversely, if your site and experience are engaging, empathetic and intuitive, you’ll find even lukewarm users engaging and converting.
All of this leads to a single question: how do we do it?
Tactic #1: Get The Data + Understand Your Users
If you want to understand what engages and repels your audience, start with data from your actual audience. There are dozens of ways to collect the data you need, but here are my three favorites:
Heatmaps
There’s nothing better than a heatmap for visualizing the hot/cold elements of your website. If at all possible, use a heatmap that actually connects to revenue (like Heatmap.com), so you have more insight into which elements are not only driving activity, but outcomes. If you don’t want to pay for another tool, go check out Microsoft Clarity.
Negative Events
I wish more brands used negative events; they’re wonderfully easy to set up (I wrote an entire issue about that here), and they provide a wealth of insight into the things that are going wrong and repelling users. If you see that a long form (10+ fields) has a sky-high abandonment rate, that’s a pretty clear signal that something is amiss.
User Surveys/Feedback
AI has made user surveys exponentially more impactful and accessible. A halfway decent LLM can analyze a set of thousands of responses in minutes, surfacing relevant patterns/issues in minutes and for a fraction of the cost of a traditional survey/study.
Surveys are doubly impactful when combined with negative event and/or heatmap data, as you can ask users specific questions about problematic elements/functionalities to understand what’s wrong/broken/frustrating about each one.
Tactic #2: Revamp Positioning
Let’s be honest: most brand websites are glorified self-praise situations - brands can’t help but to tell everyone who arrives how absolutely wonderful they (and their products/services) are. For virtually every organization, you can draw a direct line between how the product/service teams talk about the product internally and how the product/service is positioned externally.
The problem is that most users don’t care about your brand/product/service. They care about themselves. All of the nice things about whatever it is you’re offering are only relevant insofar as they communicate how you’ll improve the user’s life. The example I’ve always gone back to, time and time again, is the contrast between the Archos Jukebox + the iPod:
When the Archos Jukebox series launched, it was - by every objective, technical measure - a superior product to the iPod. It was faster, cheaper, easier to use and more functional/inter-operable. The marketing team couldn’t trip over themselves fast enough to tell people that it had 15GB of storage, long-lasting battery and a massive (at the time) display.
Instead of all that, Apple shipped this:
Apple won. It wasn’t on features (iPod was consistently middle-of-the-pack from a technical specifications standpoint); it was on benefits. The Apple team consistently connected their hardware to the needs of their customers in a simple, easy-to-understand manner.
Put another way: they answered the “why do I give a damn?” question.
You can do the same thing. Go to your (or your client’s) website or lander. Put yourself in the mind of a self-interested, probably-skeptical user arriving for the first time. Read what’s there. Does the content on the page communicate why the brand is great, or how the brand will make your life better/easier?
If it’s the former, you’ve got a problem.
Tactic #3: Simplify The Experience
Another sad (but true) fact: most people don’t want to read. Written text is among the most information-dense formats (right up there with mathematical equations) - which is just a fancy way of saying that reading a whole bunch of text requires substantially more cognitive energy than skimming a graphic or looking at a picture or watching a video. That doesn’t mean the text doesn’t have value or that you should eliminate all of it from your site; it just means that you should critically re-examine the ratio of text to visual elements.
The “cup” theory of mental health/self-care is relatively well-known – and is applicable here. In essence, that theory states that every person’s motivation is like a cup: if it’s empty, there’s no motivation; if it’s full, you’ll pretty much do anything. And various activities either fill the cup or drain the cup. For an introvert, an in-person meeting is a cup-drainer and a warm fire with a book in a mountain cabin is a cup-filler. The key to keeping this hypothetical person happy/motivated is to balance the cup fillers and the cup drainers, such that the cup never reaches empty. The same is true for your users. If you’re going to include “cup-draining” elements (i.e. lots of text), do so in conjunction with cup-fillers (UGC, success stories, icons, blurbs).
If you want to know whether your site needs to be simplified, try the following exercise:
- Start with a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “I get it without reading” and 10 being “I need to read all of this in order to get it"
- Rate each module on the page using that scale. As an example, a logo bar might be a 1 or 2 (very little effort is needed to recognize that the brand has big-time customers or is used/trusted by credible third-parties); a SaaS-style comparison chart probably falls into the 4 or 5 range - it takes more effort than the logo bar, but you can skim it and get the gist; a few paragraphs of text is in the 8-9 range – you definitely have to read quite a bit of it in order to understand what it’s saying.
- Count the number of modules that fall into each of these buckets: 1-4, 5-7 and 8-10.
- Assign the 1-4 modules a value of +3. The 5-7 a -1 and the 8-10 and -5.
- Sum everything together and determine the “score” of the page. For instance, if you have 5 modules that are in the 1-4 range, 3 in the 5-7 range and 2 in the 8-10 range, the total page score would be: (5*3)+(3*-1)+(2*-5)= 2.
- If the page score is negative, the page is too complicated + you should consider simplifying it.
Tactic #4: The Guided Tour
For brands that have either (a) a boatload of possible options and/or (b) an audience that doesn’t have a ton of information/expertise in a particular area, one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates and improve user experience is to eliminate a bunch of the options.
This is hardly new – retail stores have been doing it for over a hundred years with consultative sales associates. These nice people ask prospects strategic questions, then use the user’s responses to refine the universe of possible products/services down to an acceptable few. This works wonderfully because (i) choice overload is a real thing and (ii) involving the user in the curation of their choices creates the perception that the options remaining are what’s best for him/her.
The easiest way to do this? Quizzes. A well-structured, gamified quiz can increase conversion rates by 29% to 51% – all while providing the brand with a ton of useful information that can be leveraged in future marketing interactions.
If a quiz isn’t quite right, consider a “choose your own adventure” navigation, by giving visitors the opportunity to answer a series of simple, mutually-exclusive(ish) questions (“Are you shopping for yourself or for someone else?” or “Are you looking to lose weight or to increase muscle mass?”), then using the user’s response to generate a relevant user journey or curate a relevant set of product/service options.
Hims does a wonderful job of this with their interactive flows:
This is a simple, easy-to-follow user flow that ends with a series of personalized recommendations based on the answers provided, all while gathering a ton of information on the prospect that can be used by both the physician and the marketing team. Win-win.
Tactic #5: The Personal Off-Ramp
Conversely, if you notice that users tend to (for instance) browse a number of product/service offerings but not purchase/subscribe/proceed further, it’s likely they are being impacted by analysis-paralysis or second-guessing. For many users in this predicament, it’s unlikely that a bit of on-site content will compel them to move forward; these users need something more. It’s also unlikely a chat (especially the way most chats work) will do the trick.
The solution is to provide an off-ramp that leads to a direct communication with a member of your team (either a product specialist, a salesperson or some other relevant/appropriate individual). If at all possible, use a Calendly schedule (or similar) – the idea being that the user can take a concrete step toward the achievement of their objective (progress!), make a firm commitment to continue the journey (scheduling the meeting) AND create distance between this experience and that experience, so that the inhibitors that are currently top-of-mind take a back-seat during that conversation. Think of it like a “cooling off” or “pondering” period.
Tactic #6: The Zeal of the Convert
Most brands feature testimonials from the “born lovers” - the people who just intuitively understood/believed in the product/service/brand/whatever. If you’re finding that these testimonials/customer stories aren’t working (or aren’t producing a measurable lift in conversion rate when added to a page), it is probably because there’s a relational disconnect between the people from the testimonials and the people on your site. Put more bluntly: the people in your testimonials didn’t struggle or have the same doubts as the prospects currently on your site, so the prospects distrust the testimonial.
If that’s the case, one approach you can take is to adjust your testimonial structure to focus on initially-skeptical customers/prospects. These testimonials should lead with the objections, the initial hesitancy and the negative thoughts/prior experiences. Only after establishing this “negative” positioning should the testimonial shift to how these individuals ultimately had their doubts/concerns addressed by your brand (with particular emphasis on the specifics + outcomes).
The objective of these “anti-testimonials” is to meet your prospects where they currently are (from an emotional standpoint), then move them to a place of open-ness/willingness to try alongside the subject of the testimonial. To use a metaphor, most testimonials are akin to a person standing across the street from you, and saying, “It’s great over here, come across!” Anti-Testimonials, on the other hand, are akin to the person on the other side of the street first walking across to your side, then saying, “Crossing the street can be scary - I was terrified before, too. Let’s walk across together and I can show you the cool things I found over there.”
This is a fundamentally different way to approach testimonials, but it is one that can be remarkably effective – especially when your prospects/visitors aren’t responding to traditional, positive stories.
Tactic #7: Effort Investment Tracking
The sunk cost fallacy is one of the most powerful motivators for continued action out there – once you tell someone how much time they’ve already invested in a task, their motivation increases and their probability of giving up decreases – both of which are helpful for moving people toward that “ideal” section of the matrix.
One way you can leverage that bias is by simply telling your prospects who are mid-journey but showing signs of leaving (i.e. exit intent) just how much time they’ve already spent on this task - for instance, “You’ve already invested 6 minutes customizing your perfect shirt” or “You’re 80% closer to solving your [insert problem here] - only [Y] to go!”
These little nudges are often all it takes to re-focus your user on the task and get them to the finish line - but, in the off-chance they are not, you can pair the investment notification with a micro-commitment like a puzzle, a game (wheel spins are common for ecomm brands), or a simplified experience/quiz.
Tactic #8: Low-Pressure Mode
This one is radically counter-intuitive, but it does work. If your site/user experience heavily leverages “pressure” elements on PDPs or shop pages - think elements such as countdown timers, low stock indicators, urgency call-outs, current number of people shopping - give users the overt option to disable all of them with a toggle. And, if they choose to press that toggle, actually turn it all off.
I can feel your judgment. It’s palpable. You think I’ve lost my mind.
The simple fact is that most customers are aware of these elements and know that brands are using them to try to influence their buying decisions (that doesn’t stop them from being effective, either!). By offering the prospect the ability to turn off these elements, you actually create trust with the prospect which results in (ironically) increased conversion rates.
Tactic #9: Subtraction Pricing
This works best for brands with multiple product/service tiers/options that are struggling with customers consistently choosing lower-value/lower-tier options (i.e. a “basic” plan or a “starter” pack) over the higher tier, high-margin items.
Traditionally, most companies use a “good - better - best” model for pricing – the option presented first has both the lowest price and the fewest features; subsequent options have both higher costs and better features relative to the preceding options.
One way to solve this problem for brands that fit the above profile is to flip the traditional model on its head: present the highest tier option first, then give users the choice whether to remove specific features to “downgrade” to a lower model/tier/option. This leverages loss aversion to motivate a prospective customer to “keep” more of the features they “already had” because they saw the best option first.
Pair this “remove” option with the ability to “go back to what I had before” (basically - “give me the highest/best option again!”) and you have a recipe to get more users to actually commit to the higher tier option.
Tactic #10: Tiered Unlocks
For my readers in the B2B space (or the B2C lead gen space), one of the biggest pain points tends to be getting users to actually complete more complex forms. This results in one of two untenable situations: (i) persistently low conversion rates or (ii) overly simplified forms that lead to a lot of low-quality leads.
The common “resolution” to this is to use multi-step forms - once the user submits the initial 3-4 fields, another set of questions pops up. This triggers the sunk cost fallacy (the user thinks they’ve already spent X time completing the form, so what’s another 1-2 more questions), ultimately resulting in a higher percentage of users completing the multi-step form vs. the long initial form, albeit reluctantly.
The problem with this is twofold: (i) it converts user trust into user action (you’re basically exchanging trust for activity by showing a user one set of fields, then asking for more after they’ve completed the initial task) and (ii) it doesn’t give users an opportunity to self-select out based on getting more information.
One option for this is to use a “tier” system where each bit of information shared unlocks more information about the product/service, all using a guided/focused experience. For instance:
- Level 1: reviewing basic information requires no information
- Level 2: viewing a detailed case study requires sharing basic contact information
- Level 3: accessing pricing information or a price calculator requires sharing specifics on challenges, budget or pain points
- Level 4: obtaining personalized recommendations requires sharing their budget
This functionality can be easily integrated into a quiz-style format, such that the user is “unlocking” more information by sharing their details. This puts the user in control of the journey, while also allowing the brand to place strategic off-ramps to recapture users who are likely to exit (i.e. if a user seems unwilling to share more or makes an exit intent, you could provide the opportunity to save or ask if they’d like you to send them more information to their email).
That’s all for this week!
I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead, a nice Thanksgiving and (if you’re in eCommerce) a successful Black Friday/Small Business Saturday!
Cheers,
Sam
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