How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

Kayvon Kay0:00Most founders run their website the way people used to take medicine before medicine was a science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guest today doesn't play that game. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralize, and he builds something called predictive CRO, studying what's already won and lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads, while your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for, and a two minute test using nothing but Google Translate that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell. If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting. This is the vault. Let's unlock it.

Kayvon Kay0:54Sahil,

Sahil Patel0:55welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here.

Kayvon Kay0:59The way from Spiralize the business itself. Now I know before the show we were talking, I'm I'm very I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and AB testing, and I know that what you guys are doing is is is revolutionary, and it's it's quite interesting. So I'm excited to get into it. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point? Yeah. So my name is Sahil. I'm the CEO of Spiralize.

Sahil Patel1:30We're an AB testing company. I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing different kind of SaaS tech type companies my whole career, and I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kayvon Kay1:44Okay. Well, I mean, how'd you get into into Spiralize? Where did like, tell us, like, where that came from. Yeah. So it's a fun story. So I am

Sahil Patel1:54actually not the founder. I was the founder CEO of my previous company, which was a SaaS business, and I was actually an early customer of Spiralize. So around the time Spiralize was just getting off the ground, I started using the product, and I saw that it really worked. And it, like, opened my eyes to the power of any let's see. The power of AB testing as a way to improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how I became a true believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about what's the next thing I wanna do. I had stayed in touch with the founder here. He had kept building the business organically, self funded, was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because they I lived in Atlanta already, and Spyros is based in Atlanta. So it was a good it was a good arrangement. And I'd done the solo CEO founder thing wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way. We both knew how hard that was. There was this mutual understanding of it. And we also had there's some things he's really good at. There's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work real, and and it's it's worked out really well. I've been doing it now for four years.

Kayvon Kay3:09And we, you know, we are using words like AB testing, and I'm just assuming, you know, there might be people listening that like, what is even AB testing? So let's take a step back here and go, okay. Let's talk about what is it? What are we even talking about right now?

Sahil Patel3:22Let's take this. Let's even step away from, like, marketing, websites, business. Let's just start with something probably everyone can relate to, which is when you have a new medicine, how do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment. You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better? You wanna make sure it really works. So what do you do? You get a 100 people. You give half of them what's called a placebo. It's a sugar pill. It just it's nothing. And you give half the people the actual drug and you measure how many people got better. And what you wanna make sure is that, you know, say you had a 100 people, 50 people, make sure men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things. Because you wanna make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one group and all the women in the other, and it turns out the drug works really well for men and not so well for women or some other variable. That's called randomization. That is an AB test, and it's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. There are other you can do it before and after. It's not as it's not as good. This is the gold standard. Something called this double blind controlled experiment. Fancy words, AB test, same thing. So that is now we we accept that as the best way to know if a medicine works. If you went to the doctor today and she said, hey. I've got something for your cold. Here. Take this. And you looked at it, and you're like, I never heard of this. Like, I was gonna take some Robitussin. Mhmm. But what is this? And and the doctor's, oh, it's it's really good. You might ask, well, how do I know it's good? Like, oh, I gave it to my neighbor. Work great. Okay. Is your neighbor they have the same symptoms as me? How do how much should I take? Oh, just take a swig. Okay. Like, is it effective at, like, two tablespoons, one tablespoon once a day? Like, oh, well, I I bought trust me. I've been a doctor for ten years. This will work. K? You would never do it. Okay? Or at least I don't think you would. K? I don't think you'd you would hope not. Okay. This is now back in the early days of of medicine. Okay? And by the way, that that time wasn't that long ago. K? We're measuring probably less than a 100 to 200 of recent history. That's how people take medicines. Right? That's the the days of patent medicine. And people standing on a shoebox, hawking their Sahil's patent cough syrup. Hey. No one would no one would do that now. You would never take a cancer drug that hasn't been tested and yet. Right? So the like, there's the prescientific era to medicine and then we're down scientific era to medicine. Yet for people's websites, they do that all the time. They do the equivalent of, I'm a doctor. I've done this for ten years. I don't know. I gave it to my neighbor. Work great for them. It should work for you. All the time, you you look at websites. Why'd you do this on the website? Oh, it's best practice. What do you mean it's best practice? Well, I read about on a blog. Okay. So it worked for one person. Just how do you know that works for you? Well, it looks good. CEO liked it. Yeah. Okay. Emotional decisions. I I used a template. I picked the best I I but I'm not gonna name brands because this is not the fault of any of the brands who do website templates. There's lots of really good ones out there. Some also not good ones. I looked at three templates. They said this was the best template for my landing page. This was my this was the best looking homepage template. By the way, if you're Sahil's barbershop, that's probably fine. K? But if you're building an actual business where the website is the front door to your business, you may wanna put a little bit more thought into it. Yeah. K? If you're an ecommerce brand, okay, if you are if you're selling b to b SaaS and you're selling cybersecurity software and your average product probably sells for, like, a $100,000. Every lead that comes every person that comes to your website and goes away, that's really valuable. You're millions of dollars you're losing. You're losing. So what is AB testing is taking that same thing that we use in all of many other parts of our life and applying the taking websites from the prescientific gut instinct era to the scientific era. There are that's a journey. And for some companies, it makes sense to do that. For some companies, it doesn't. And it doesn't mean you can't make mistakes doing that. It's prone to mistakes. It's not perfect. But if your website is an important place where you do business in some way with your customers or potential customers, this is a much better it's a really good way to make your website your number one salesperson.

Kayvon Kay8:54And we're talking about optimization here. So we're talking about you, you have your website, which is let's call it your A. Yep. And then what you're doing is you're just testing little things here or there on a on a variable, on a b variable, and sending traffic to both to seeing what converts.

Sahil Patel9:17You don't have to limit it to small changes. You could make a big change. You can make big changes. Yeah. You can make big changes. If you're getting ready for to run a have you run a marathon or a half marathon ever? I I have ran a half marathon once, and I promise I would never do it again. My body's not meant to run long distance. I'm in the same okay. My wife ran once, and she did great. But just watching her train said, I'm I have other things that I wanna do. Okay. When you run, what did you do to get ready?

Kayvon Kay9:53I I did the there was, like, a protocol. This was a while back, but, like, I trained with a group and you do your runs and you, you know, you do your start with your two k's or you work your way up and then all the way up till you get to where you gotta go. Yeah. So so there's a there's a training regimen. There's a training regimen for sure. There's probably a rest regimen. K? If you if you run 10 miles every day, you're not gonna that's actually worse. Short distance, speed. There was there was quite a bit of work. Yes. There may have been a

Sahil Patel10:20dietary component. Okay. Now depending how serious you are, maybe you didn't need to make drastic changes, but they probably some advice told you to avoid some foods, probably go easy on the hamburgers and milkshakes, and maybe go a little bit more on the healthy lean protein. Okay? Now one way to get ready for a marathon is to only do one of those things. And then you could say, my my time got better, and I know with certainty it was because I wore the right kind of shoes. And then the next marathon, maybe you'll add compression socks. And the next one, you'll eat chicken five times a week instead of burgers. You could do that. And then every time you got this, like, pretty high confidence level but at the end of the day, you know, what gets you there a lot faster? You should do you should you should combine those things. Eat lean protein, wear good socks, wear good shoes, train, and get enough rest. Now will you know that 10% of your reduction in your race time came from the socks? I'm just making shit up. And another 5% came from eating lean protein. No. You'll never know that. The same is true in AB testing, and you can get away with it, I would say, particularly on websites, particularly, you know, on, like, a b two b website. First, I just want to the stakes are much lower. K? We're not injecting a cancer treating drug into your body. Yes. The stakes are really high, and you wanna go one variable at a time there. Absolutely. We're talking about, can you get someone to fill in a a lead generation form or click? I'm ready to start. I'm gonna try that software for seven days first, see if it'll work it. So the stakes are lower. The other thing is in a in for for our audience out there, I'm gonna use some acronyms b to b, d to c, just business to business. Okay? If I'm selling software to other corporations, that's business to business. If I'm selling you, you know, shoes on the Internet direct to consumer. K? Direct to consumer, you have all this traffic. K? How many millions of people are maybe going to nike.com to buy shoes? A lot. So you can quickly get a sample size, which means, you you know, maybe you run it for a week and there's millions of people coming. You can very quickly detect there's a difference between the performance two version of pages. On the b to b side, how many people are shopping for a new cybersecurity software today? Some. Okay? And in fact, just quite a few, but not as many are shopping for shoes. So one way to get results quicker is to make big changes. K? Now you don't wanna just do a bunch of random shit, but you it is an acceptable trade off to maybe you change the message on your homepage and the image that goes with it. And why? Because usually the messaging, the the the what's called the copywriting and then the visual image, they complement each other. And so if your headline is making some big claim about how effective your product is, say, stopping cybersecurity attacks, maybe the image should support that, and they work together. So it's not just changing random things, but this is for our marketing people in the audience today, and we're gonna talk about some very specific examples. This is what we're talking about, AB testing.

Kayvon Kay13:39Yeah. I think it's interesting because as you're as you're speaking, I'm thinking, okay. For for a true AB test to happen, we need traffic. Yes. So what, you know, what is that number? There's I don't think there's a set number, but there more is better than less, obviously. And then and then you're talking about making big changes. Yes. Big, small, minute changes. The the the question I have, because as a non AB testing expert, one thing that I've always thought about AB testing is if you change too many things and you don't know what works because you've changed too many things, then you can't control the variable.

Sahil Patel14:18That's right. That's right. And what I'm talking about here, maybe a good way to kind of put some boundaries on it is I might change I might be okay. I could probably get okay with changing a few variables on one section of one page. But I wouldn't change multiple sections on the same page, and I wouldn't change something up funnel or upstream and on the page and maybe after the page. Okay. Like, maybe just start with, like, I've got a I'm just gonna pick something simple, a shopping cart add to cart. And I wanna test, do I get more people to add it to cart if I say free shipping or free returns? By the way, both probably work. Maybe you should test both. I could do that. Maybe I would change the button color, and maybe I could also change the font size, how visible I wanna make it. I probably could roll out it all into one test. K? What I wouldn't do is then also change maybe the the the ad copy that gets people to come to that site to emphasize one of the because now I'm really distorting the effect of of the experiment. I I think that's where most experimenters would say, hang on a sec. Be careful about changing too many things because now you're calling what's called confounding confounding variables, and it and it clouds. You just really don't know which thing made a difference.

Kayvon Kay15:48I I couldn't agree with you more. I I I haven't heard the word confounding, but, it's if you change it to variables, then you just don't know which ones are actually working. It's interesting because we can go as detailed as, like you said, as simple as a small button going red or green. As simple as, I love what you just said, free shipping or free returns. How when when is there when the when is there a business ready to start doing this type of AB testing? Like, what levels of traffic are we talking about to the website? Now I know that's subjective because you you I wanna make sure everyone is clear. Yes. Someone coming to Nike website and buying a pair of shoes, very different than a cybersecurity product that's a million dollars. Having said that within the guardrails, when is it that people are coming to you usually? Where are they when they're saying, hey. We need to hire you and your service for AB testing?

Sahil Patel16:48So maybe a good way to put it is let's just start. Why do we care about traffic? We care because you want to make a decision based on a what's called a statistically significant result. So if you run a test for just one day, maybe run it on a Monday, well, maybe the people that shop on the weekends are different than the people that shop on during the week. Morning. Who knows? Okay. So you want it to be representative of your traffic. And the more traffic you have, the quickly you more quickly you can get represented. But I wanna talk about there's two there's two factors here. One is just the amount of traffic. The other is time. Because if you have a high traffic site, running the test for one day still isn't enough time for the reason we just talked about. Maybe the weekend shoppers are different than the weekday shoppers. So you you you wanna look at both of those things. For a let's talk about for a business to business type of website, and you're optimizing for lead generation. Lead generation being someone fills in a form, and they're saying, hey. I wanna I wanna check out your product. I wanna see a demo. I wanna do some kind of free trial. Usually, where it starts to make sense that this is worthwhile is if you're getting a 100 submissions a month. Right? These are ballpark numbers. Take them as guidelines. Mhmm. There's some companies where a 100 is more than enough, and there's some where it's not nearly enough. Yeah. But most of the time, if you're south of or maybe 50 to a 101, you probably then don't have enough traffic. It's so traffic is not enough. You should look at the the number of conversions. The second thing is it probably means you're a small business. Nothing wrong with that. But there are probably other things you need to be working on before you work on conversion rate optimization. You know? For the most part, maybe you just need to be trying to get more traffic or more of the right traffic. Yeah. And your your your ideal use of marketing jargon, ICP, ideal customer profile, your or persona, same thing. Just there in the first place. Because if they're not even coming to the site, optimize it all day long. It doesn't really It doesn't matter. Move the needle. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Now you guys at your business, you

Kayvon Kay19:07said you guys do very unique or you have a scientific way of AB testing. What exactly is that, or what what makes it unique or different for you?

Sahil Patel19:20Yeah. So we do a thing called predictive CRO, predictive conversion rate optimization. So what most in house testing teams do by the way, there are many, many good ones that are out there. You tend to see these at bigger companies because they have the maturity and the budget to actually hire, like, a team of data scientists. And they have people whose their whole job is every day is designing, doing, like, web design. But most most companies don't have that. And so when they say, oh, we're gonna we're gonna redesign the the site. Maybe they hire an agency. Maybe they have someone in house who's done it. And what they're mostly relying on is personal experience. They might be right. They might be wrong. But the data available to them, like, inside their head is probably a very small number. And it's hard to know if the thing that worked for your last company, is it is it transferable to your new company? Okay. Okay? Why? Because two things have changed since you even if you actually ran this as a good statistically rigorous AB test. One is a function of the company you're at today and the company you're yesterday are probably different, at least a little bit. K? Number two, time. K. If you look at a website from five years ago, you can probably tell it was built five years ago. And if you get in the way back machine and just look at some big company that you would consider modern but has been around for a long time, like Salesforce. If you look at in the way back machine, you look at Salesforce's website from ten year, like, like, oh my god. What were they thinking? Ten years ago, it looked normal. Yeah. So the thing that worked that was better than your, quote, control ten five years ago may not be. It could be. It could not be. But if if you if you're relying on personal experience, what is it? Now maybe you hire an agency to solve that problem for you. They do lots of AB tests. There's lots of CRO agencies, lots of good ones, some not so good ones. They are usually relying on what they've tested for their other customers. Could be a big number. Could be a small number, but it's still a limited number. And while they solve some of that problem, they still have that. What worked? Did it work because circumstance, or is it transferable? And to know that, you wanna have you wanna be able to see where it worked. You also wanna see where it didn't work. Winners and losers. K? Think about if you if you if you interview athletes and you only talk to the win we have the World Cup going on right now. If you only talk to the winner of the World Cup, k, and you said, what did you do to get ready for this game? It's pretty helpful. Right? But you probably should also go talk to teams that lost. It's about what did you do to get ready for this game and then compare that. Yeah. K. Same thing here. You wanna have the winners and the losers to know what works. And the more of that dataset you have, the better. So the thing that we do that's different, we crawl the Internet, and we shamelessly steal everybody else's AB tests. Now Okay. I say steal because it's I'm trying to be a little bit funny. We're not actually stealing anything Yeah. Because all AB testing is in the public domain.

Kayvon Kay23:01Yeah. I I hear what you're saying, but you you you look at what everybody else is doing and see what's the most converting for them. How do you know it's converting? That's the Great question. Okay.

Sahil Patel23:12Think about a company that let's take nike.com. They're not a Spiral customer. If they're running a test on their homepage, what we can see is that they're splitting the traffic. We can actually see the visual difference between the a and the b. Imagine every day for two weeks, they're they're running a split test. And then on the beginning of the third week, they send a 100% of traffic to the b version of that homepage.

Kayvon Kay23:36They pick the one. Know that they're how they're sending traffic? Can you see that?

Sahil Patel23:39There are some there are some ways that are proprietary that we have figured out how to do that. Black hat or gray hat? Or That's I wouldn't call it black hat. I would I would call it white hat. Okay.

Kayvon Kay23:51But there's ways that you can see how much traffic are going to these different pages.

Sahil Patel23:55I mean, is pretty easy. Can estimate it. You

Kayvon Kay23:59can estimate it. So you know that, okay, they're running to you have basically a way to find out that these big companies are running AB tests and then figure out which one, which control actually worked so that you can now take that data for your customers.

Sahil Patel24:16That's right. And what we're looking for are repeat patterns among similar companies. So if nike.com runs this really interesting test, I don't think that is necessarily super relevant for CrowdStrike, a big cybersecurity company, and vice versa. And by the way, let's say CrowdStrike runs a test. Yes. It may be relevant for other cybersecurity companies, but is it predictive? It's really hard to know if you got an n of one. I would not go copy that because now you're just talking to the winner. You have the winner's curse. Okay. You wanna look at the winners and the losers. So what you wanna look is like, hey. There's a 100 cybersecurity companies. What is the what is the portfolio of tests they ran? And what things tend to win and what things tend to lose and then bet on that portfolio. Okay. K. Not unlike if you were if you were poker player and you followed someone who's really good, world series of poker type of player, k, one of her hands or his hands can win or lose. And if you only watch them play one hand and you say, oh, I'm gonna copy that hand. I I don't think that's super predictive. Right? But if you watch them play a 100 hands, you're gonna detect some patterns. And if you watch five players play a 100 hands, you're really gonna watch a 100 players play a 100 hands. Now there's some clear patterns of when they hold, when they fold.

Kayvon Kay25:56When to hold them. When to fold them. That to fold

Sahil Patel25:59is a that's what predictive CROs. It predicts not what one test will do. It's it predicts a portfolio of tests that you should run based on what's worked for similar companies. And similar doesn't have to be just they look just like you. It could be someone that has a similar call to action on a paid landing page, but the paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic traffic. And is it on a home page? Is it on a on a sign up page? You wanna look at all of those and then say, okay. Which ones are similar? What's predict the portfolio of tests you should run? Run the whole portfolio because across that portfolio, you'll find the winners.

Kayvon Kay26:35Let's let's talk you I know you have so much basics here, and I I wanna talk and when I meant basics, I meant to say, sorry, data. You have so much data. And I think for my listeners, I'm just thinking about the smaller businesses that may not be able to bring in yet a data scientist or, you know, have a full CRO team working before them. But they but they can maybe understand different things that we know through data that work. Like, for instance, for things that I know, and I could be wrong, but I've heard is like, you want someone to say yes and move you know, hit a button, button shouldn't be red because red is a sign of stopping. Right? Maybe. You see, that's when but then I've heard that. I've seen interesting. And that's where I where it's other people, I've said, no. You're actually wrong. Red actually does work. So are there is there anything that for sure that are basics, like, these are the musts. Like, these are the musts that you have to have or that we know or That's a great question. Here are three things that our listeners today can use right away, and they don't have to spend money,

Sahil Patel27:50buy fancy software, hire an expensive agency to do. Let's start number one. And and by the way, what we can tell are, like, home pages and landing pages. I'm starting to because that's where most people's traffic goes. K? If you have some niche page or some techno like a page that describes the technical attributes of your product, those are necessary elements of the user journey. Okay? I'm putting those aside for now. Okay? Because typically, those are so specific to you and your product or your service.

Kayvon Kay28:26You should But those are people searching also for you, and they're already in the funnel. If they're looking at the technical page, they're Mhmm. They're they're already sold. They're they're just trying to find a way to buy.

Sahil Patel28:36Okay. First thing, show the product, show the product, show the product. K. We have a phrase, happy people kill conversions. What does that mean? Happy people hurt conversions. So many websites have stock photos that they got on, you know, in their Adobe account of two people in a conference room looking at a tablet going, wow. First of all, who's having this much fun in a conference room? I wanna go to my conference room is not that much fun. No one let's talk about this. Think about can you think of the last car ad you saw? Okay. What what do you remember what car it was for or what brand?

Kayvon Kay29:24I I'm thinking I remember I don't know why it's sticking out for me, but I was thinking about the Audi one. There was one that was an Audi one. Okay. Cool Audi. Is it?

Sahil Patel29:32Audi makes really nice cars. Yeah.

Kayvon Kay29:35Can you picture what was was it a TV ad, YouTube ad, magazine ad? It it it was an awesome TV ad. It was it was a luxury TV ad. I I only remember because it was around where I live, and it was it was Okay. You know, a balling ad with a new car and Cool. Rolling into a $40,000,000 home on the bank of the ocean and, you know, with the beautiful wife. Jack's, you know, husband gets out, smiles, throw the keys to her. She gets in, they drive off, and then the Audi comes in. Quattro. Right? Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So there's a component of lifestyle. There's a component of aspiration.

Sahil Patel30:08Yeah. Yeah. There's also kind of showing the car. Imagine the same ad. Okay. Picture it right now. And just imagine you had a magic eraser, and you just erase the car from that ad. Yeah. Totally. What would be left? Lifestyle? Lifestyle. Yeah. Lifestyles of the rich and famous and good looking. Okay. Would anyone then say, I think I'm gonna go to my Audi dealer and check out a car? No. No. You'd be like, what the hell is this? Okay. This is actually really important. I hope people are if they're here listening, this we're starting to get something very important here.

Kayvon Kay30:41AKA, remove the stock.

Sahil Patel30:44Remove the stock photos. Now if you have if you're a product company, show the product. If you're a service company, show the people who deliver the service. Explain that. Okay. So we worked with a company that does home air conditioning repair. K? Imagine now I live in Georgia. If my AC breaks, that is, like, the top of the list. I might fix the AC before I fix the toilet. Okay? It's like a 110 degrees in August. You just cannot live without air conditioning. Okay? I can go to the backyard to go to the bathroom. I can't live without air conditioning. K? And we ran an AB test. Their homepage had stock photo of mom with two kids. Everyone looks happy. And it kinda looked like, I don't know, Mother's Day, like, the kids were giving her tulips. It it was it was a happy person. Think it was supposed to convey that, hey. If you need your AC fixed, you're gonna be happy when it's fixed. And the AB test we ran against it, we just we we replaced the photo with an image of three uniformed people in front of their van with the brand name of the van, and that was the image on the home page. Didn't change the copy. Didn't change the offer. Didn't change anything else. Didn't change the social proof. And there was a double digit improvement in people either filling in the form or clicking. They had two call to action. It's a local, you know, it's a local thing. So it's click to call or fill out the form. K? And keep in mind, these people are already very high intent. When you need your air conditioning That's high intent. You would think, what could you do to actually stop someone from calling? Well, it turns out, yeah, double digit change just by people saying, oh, this is who I'm gonna get. I get to get a professional person coming to my home in a nice van, and they're gonna fix my AC right away. K. We worked with a a company that does home warranty. Yeah. And the homepage showed images of that. Kinda like, again, stock photos of happy people. Presumably, it resonates. It's like, oh, they're happy. I'll be happy. Great. They have, yeah, they have home insurance or whatever warranty. I have it. Yeah. Yeah. And what we what we tested against it is images of things getting fixed. K? An AC unit getting fixed. A it was like a like a faucet, like a bathroom faucet getting fixed. Yeah. Water water. Yeah. Hot water tank, something. Yeah. And then, like, an electrical like, you know, the the what is it called where they they put that thing in your in your outlet to see if it's producing electrical charge? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are all intuitive things. Okay? The kind of things also just the average DIYer probably doesn't do themselves. They they wanna call professionals. So it's clear, like, will get these things fixed. Someone's gonna come to your home and fix them. These are from double digit lift. Wow. What about Show the product.

Kayvon Kay33:46Show the product. So and, like, for a SaaS company, you would just show show, like, the product. Screenshot of the app. The screenshot of the app. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's lots of different ways to do it, to style it.

Sahil Patel33:58If you're concerned that the picture of your app is proprietary and that's a source of competitive advantage. First, let me tell you, your competitors almost certainly already know what your app looks like. Okay? They've downloaded it. They probably signed up with a different email, and they're using it. Everyone does that. So just let me Yeah. No. I'm I hear that objection a But even if you think that's true, you can you could do a stylized version of your of your user interface. What you're trying to get the person to do is just think of that Audi ad. You gotta put the car in the Audi ad to get the person to go to the dealership. Yeah. Put Yeah. Put a picture of your of your product. So it's number one. Everyone can do that. Right now, just go to your website. Just ask yourself, do I have happy people? Yeah. Because I'm probably hurting conversions. Okay. Number two. This is a good one. Take your home page. Right you gotta do this in a browser. K? Right click in Chrome, and one of the things will be Google Translate. Pick a language that the people around you don't speak. Okay? So maybe pick Arabic. Pick Hindi. I'm picking languages that speak at home growing up. Okay? And then take your home page. Show it to five people who don't know that it's your company and know you want. Just ask them. What do you think this company does?

Kayvon Kay35:16K.

Sahil Patel35:17And by the way, they're not gonna come up with something specific. Like, this is a point of sale entry system for multilocation retailers. But they might say something like, oh, this looks like business software or something. Okay? If they can't even come close to the category, you have a problem. And the translation technique, what it's doing is it's removing the copywriting from the equation, and it's forcing the person to use the imagery to draw an instantaneous conclusion about, am I in the right place? And by the way, that is what your audience does when they reach your homepage or landing page because the brain processes images faster than words.

Kayvon Kay35:58So imagery is very important then on Super important. Super important.

Sahil Patel36:03And so if if your copywriting is doing all the heavy lifting, you have a problem because you've created this high cognitive load homepage or landing page. The the the copywriting is absolutely important, but the instantaneous react decision that almost everyone knows when they get to a page was, am I even in the right place? K. Just like when you walk into a restaurant, k, if you're on date night, you're looking for certain things, some ambient you haven't tasted anything. Okay? You're looking for ambiance. Is there a smile? My the maitre d. What's on the tablecloth? Okay. If you're going to is is this, like, white tablecloth? Is this checkered, more casual Italian, like, Italy kind of thing? Or or am I going to Chipotle? I love Chipotle. There's certain things I expect by going to Chipotle. Okay? And if I don't see them, my brain's making kind of real quick decisions. You know? If I go into Chipotle, I expect it to kinda smell a certain way. It's kind of that grilled chicken that know, that's what I expect. If I go to kind of date night at a nice place, there's a different kind of just all these little thing. And and I'm my brain's making instantaneous subconscious level decisions about am I in the right place?

Kayvon Kay37:16I You can Yeah. You could do this. Don't spend money on fancy software. Don't hire an agency. You can't Everyone can do this now. Because I I I didn't get it, and then I got it. And I was like, oh my god. So I wanna make sure it's very clear for people here. Like, step one, remove the stock and just get rid of any happy go lucky stock it with the with your product or service. And replace it. If you're a product based business, replace it with your product. If you're a service based business, replace it with the service people or the type of service Or the outcome. Or the outcome that people are going get. Like,

Sahil Patel37:48so for example, like, worked with a higher education company. Show the diploma.

Kayvon Kay37:52Yeah. Well, yeah. Show them getting graduate. Show them graduate and show them throwing the the the whatever the the hat up or whatever it is. Number two. This is very interesting. Take your website, put into a different Language. Language, and Yeah. Take the homepage. Only need to use for the homepage. Take your homepage. Sorry. Take your homepage, put it into a different language, send it to somebody, and just say, hey, what what is this What do company this company does? What does this company do? And if they can't tell you within a range, obviously, within a range, it's a business service. Oh, it's a it's this type of service or this type of product that tells your imagery is off. And people look at the imagery versus the copy, which is very interesting to me because I come from direct response copy market, like writing, where it's all copy. Like, the copy is, like, the most important thing, and you just said imagery and copy are both almost equal.

Sahil Patel38:51Well well, let's let's talk about that a little bit. There's two jobs. What the imagery does is it helps establish for the website visitor that they are in the right place. It is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant and you go, hey. Am I in the right type of restaurant, fast food or fine dining? K? What the copywriting does, think of that as I'm reading the menu. K? And if I see some things and they're described in a way that's enticing, that speaks to me to what I'm looking to get out of the experience, and I'm I'm going to order. Okay? And by the way, at McDonald's, like, what they write those value meals in a certain way. That's copywriting. Yeah. K? And it and it works. If you go to a nice restaurant version. And if you go and if you go to a nice restaurant on date night, the the way they write the menu is written in a certain way to make you feel like, oh, the the chef is just is I'm getting something so special. This meal is just it's gonna be when they talk about where is the food source from and whatever foam they use to decorate the plate and all these things. Right? And you would never see that on a McDonald's value meal and vice versa. So the copywriting is they serve two they and for for our conversation we're having today, they they really kinda have two different jobs. Yeah. K. Now let's talk about the copy. Right. Is this number 3, or is this number 4? Number 3. Let's see number 3. So we talked about, first, just tactically, get rid of stock photos. Number two, make sure whatever images you use are low cognitive load. Yeah. Low cognitive load. Okay. Low cognitive load. K. I see this all the time in b two b websites. They have, like, a schematic of how their software fits into the ecosystem and the tech stack and how it integrates with 17 different things, and it's animated and things are flowing. And that's the wrong place to put it. That's a high cognitive put that on your technical page. Put it on your solutions page. Put it on your to you know, how the how the whole thing works. Okay? This is the equivalent of you walk into a restaurant, and the maitre d, before they ask you, hi. How many people today? Or do you have a reservation? Or do you wanna sit at the bar or the dining room? Explaining to you, like, the 17 steps the chef does to prepare the vegetables today. You're like, woah. Woah. Hang on. I just like, could I just see the menu? Or, like, I just wanna tell you table for two. K. You don't lead with, let me tell you where we source the chicken and, you know, that kind of right. So imagery is important. Home pages should start with low cognitive load and then move the user to high cognitive load as they move through the journey. Right? You're a restaurant. You start with, can I get you a drink? Let me bring you the menu. Have you thought about an appetizer today? Okay. Let's pick your meal. Right? McDonald's has it down to or Wendy's, pick your friend. They say, number one. Number one. Just start there. You don't have to say it. You say two words. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Give me a one. Three words. Low cognitive load. Low Low cognitive load. Then, yeah, then you go to a higher cognitive load. Okay. Don't do, like, some complicated schematic blah blah blah. Okay. Number two is something about the copywriting. Make it skimmable. The more it offends your twelfth grade English teacher, the better. Right? You're not writing for the AP English exam. You're not taking the SAT. This is not the entrance exam. This is not your personal statement to get into graduate school. No one cares about what your belief system is, your aspirations, or what you think you're about. They came there because they have a problem they're trying to solve. So well well, you've you've done direct response copy. Right? You can make it easier for them. What is this? It's it's interesting because the

Kayvon Kay43:11it's interesting. I yeah. Oh, man. You're gonna open up a a whole can of worms here for me. Because I have seen little copy convert. Right? But then where we're talking about so I'm talking to b to c at this point. Right? Business consumer. And there's people that I see writing copy that are like essays. Like, I mean, essays, but they're converting. It's like long form. I'm sure you heard of like a long form sales letter.

Sahil Patel43:42But It can work. Long form can absolutely work. Long form copy, long form video, long form anything can work in the right place.

Kayvon Kay43:53Like, I come from the world where it's pre headline, headline, sub headline.

Sahil Patel44:00That's great. And what do you put in the headline?

Kayvon Kay44:03Well, the hook. The hook. Yeah. The hook. Start with the hook. Yeah.

Sahil Patel44:09That is that's Either the pain or the solution. Right? Like Pain or solution. Start with the hook. Pre pre is who it's for. Right? Yep. That those things are all called skimmability. Right? Okay. And if you write a long paragraph, now how can you find the hook? Yeah. Right? Lead with the hook. And then your subheading needs to support the original claim before you make new claims. Yeah. Right? We see this all the time. There's a bold claim, and then there's three new claims. Like, hang on a sec. I just Yeah. Like, I still haven't I haven't bought into your first claim. Why are you telling about the next claim? Like, if your hook is safe car we just bought a Volvo. Right? So we just my my oldest is learn is about to get her license. Yeah. So she's going to, not tomorrow, but after some practice, she's gonna inherit our 2017 Subaru. Great safe car. So we went out and found a nice a pre owned car for my wife. We bought a Volvo. Like, beautiful car. Safe. The Hook, great safe car.

Kayvon Kay45:20Well, I was just gonna say, right, like, everyone knows Volvo, safe. Right? You think Volvo's

Sahil Patel45:26known for And they and they do a great job. Now they've also moved upmarket, by the way. Right? The the old boxy cars that we all group, the gray box Volvo that we it's like an instruct indestructible cage. They've now they look nice too. Okay? But they they they first get you to buy into that it's safe before they start telling you about the all the other things. Right? Everything is, hey. We're safe. That's the hook. Why is it safe? We've got these great cameras. We've created this, like, motion detection. By the way, there I didn't know this till we went shopping. Do you know a Volvo weighs more than a Suburban? I would assume so. Yeah. Is it safety? I didn't I didn't well, it's it's just steel. It's like some kind of special steel they're made out of. Yeah. They're safety. They're heavy cars. They're heavy They're Yeah. Super heavy cars. You're driving basically a a modern tank. Yeah. And they'll anyway, so they they support the first claim, then they go in and tell you about, okay. Now let's talk about some other things. Let's say about what this is a fun car, and let's say about how we made it nice. And same thing on your website, good copywriting. You start with a hook. Make the hook believable before you start introducing new claims. These are three I love it. Things that everyone can do on their website today.

Kayvon Kay46:44I'm just gonna say it again. Right? Get rid of the stock of images or the happy images. Show your product or show your service or the outcome of the service. Low cognitive load on the pictures. So again, translate that to some language nobody can understand. Send it to somebody and say, do you know what this company does? The answer is if they can't say it quickly, know the problem. And then third is skimmable copy. I mean, is huge. This is big stuff. Like any business owner, open up your website right now and just look at it right now. Like, you wanna if you're wondering how do I make my website better, it's like we just gave you the three answers. Very simple. Opening a website. I wanna do it right now with you so we can go through it. I'm not going to, but it's how I'm feeling. And then the bonus. What's the bonus?

Sahil Patel47:35Here's the bonus. We're gonna just we gave you three. So kinda one, two, three. This is like three a. Okay. Take whatever hook you have on your headline today, or if you're thinking of writing a new one. K. Write the new one. Take your three closest competitors. Take their homepage. Put them next to yours, like one, two, three, four, and then see if you can tell the difference. And if you can take your headline and put it on your competitors, it means you don't have a good hook because it doesn't stand out. And you're simulating what your audience is doing. They may not do being explicitly. They may be doing it implicitly. But you should always assume that your your audience has your competitors. They either come from your competitor's website or they're going there next or they have them up side by side. Yeah. And it's a great test of the hook. And it what it tends to do is it strips it tends to force you to strip out jargon and fluff and not even worry about, am I better? Just start with, am I different? Still saying the clear message, though. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta be clear. And I'm saying do it on a homepage and not on, like, a technical page or a solutions page because that that's just a different ballgame, okay, there. How made you gotta keep it simple? And you just you gotta strip out the jargon.

Kayvon Kay49:12Would you say well, you're saying it less is more. Would you say on a homepage? Because I'm seeing this more and more, like, homepages have very little copy almost now. Especially in the hero.

Sahil Patel49:23Yeah. The the top we call it the hero section, the top section. Section. I I so I think there's a happy medium. I think you should not be afraid of putting copy on your homepage. It does a lot of the heavy work, but it works better if you make it easy to skim and you have a good hook. Yeah.

Kayvon Kay49:48I love it. If people what type of businesses do you work with?

Sahil Patel49:53So we mainly work with b to b SaaS companies Okay. What we call the mid market. So about a 100 people to about 3,000 people and about 50,000,000 in revenue to about a billion billion and 0.5 in revenue. The companies that's smaller than that, they usually are trying to solve other problems that we don't help them with. And the companies that are bigger than that, especially a lot bigger, they don't need our help. They have their own internal army of data scientists, and and that's great. That's great for them. But for that part of the market, we can we can give them a lot of help. $50,000,000

Kayvon Kay50:30plus SaaS companies is who you really focus on. That's right. And I love it. And I you said this I remember you said this to me before, and I was like, wow. And I I you said anyone before 50,000,000, they don't have a conversion problem. They got a marketing problem. Or you think you said they got a marketing sales problem?

Sahil Patel50:48Yeah. There's other problems you need to solve first before you worry about optimization. You know? I think of it as if you're if you're if you're out of shape and you haven't done any exercise, hey. You don't need to be trying to get your, like, marathon timed out. I probably should start with, like, walk three times a week. Yeah. Yeah. Then maybe get to, like, can you do 10 push ups? Yeah. You do that, then you can start doing things like optimizing for diet and body composition. And maybe can I do not just 10 push ups, but 10 pull ups? If you go straight to that,

Kayvon Kay51:21probably not gonna work. Yeah. I love it. Where can people find you if they if if they are a I mean, it's, you know, if you are a $50,000,000 plus SaaS company, and you want obviously, I the best and the best in the business right here, AB testing. Where can people find you?

Sahil Patel51:41So they can go to spiralized.com if they would like to find out more. Also, if you wanna hear more tips on, like, the kind we just talked about, check me out on LinkedIn. I post four mornings a week at 07:30AM eastern, and it's always some combination of easy to digest thirty to sixty second things. I also have a game show where people come on. They try and beat me in finding different CRO Crimes. That's actually the name of the show, CRO Crimes. Nice. It's a lot of fun. Seven lightning rounds. The winner gets a 100 for the charity.

Kayvon Kay52:16I love it. Well, we're gonna make sure we have those in the show notes for you. Any last departing secrets, words for I the

Sahil Patel52:26think we covered it great. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. If anyone made it this far, thank you for listening. Yeah. And I appreciate it. Thanks so much.