Live Blog – Fact & Act: How To Growth Hack Your Online Business

Ton Wesseling, the Chief Optimizations Officer at Online Dialogue, presented at Conversion Conference on growth hacking your online business.

Start-ups Need to Grow Fast

It’s all about Fact & Act. You learn the facts, then you act on them. Pretty simple, right?

Ton then discussed some start-ups (Wakoopa and Usabilla) which had a product that got their start providing a specific product, but then switched tact based on which aspects of their product consumers were demanding. They switched direction when market signals suggested they do so…fact and act!

Growth hacking is simply about using SEO, Analytics, Content Marketing, and A/B testing techniques. Quality is the result of effort divided by results. It’s all about continuous improvement, which requires A/B testing.

When you’re testing focus more on emotion, it’s not about conversion, it’s about meeting needs:

Why is your visitor visiting your site?
How can you help fulfill your visitor’s needs?

Fact & Act

First, you need to find something you can optimize that allows you to test a “why”
Next, you analyze. It’s not just about analytics, you can also look at science for actionable insights.
Create something new
Test your creation
Analyze results of the test
Combine your insights
Tell the story so you can learn from them

Case Study #1 Freo.nl – Lift in loan applications

They found that people weren’t clicking on the call to action, so they created multiple buttons and got lift.

Case Study #2 MoneYou.nl – Lift in new savings accounts

They changed landing page design in response to heatmap results suggesting that attention was pulled to the wrong portion of the landing page.

Surveys

Use surveys to generate user insights so you can learn. Including surveys on your site can actually increase your conversion rate. This is an example of a science-based marketing insight, rather than a traditional UX-based insight. It makes people feel good to know you care about them. So while using data is important, be sure to take advantage of other fact-types to ensure you are getting all of the “facts.”

Anchoring and the Ugly Brother Effect

Anchoring is when you list the most expensive product first to make others appear more appealing. If you add that with the ugly brother effect, which is basically a special offer where you get a discount when you bundle, you can get dramatic lift in conversion rates.

Consider why your visitor is coming to your site

Returning visitor conversion rates and first-time visitor conversion rates may be different. Consider segmenting the two experiences.

It’s not about conversion optimization, it’s about learning how to better serve your customers!