Online shop operators and managers often know what their homework is. Everyone has long lists of ideas and to-dos lying around – but they don’t generate any sales. And when you plan a lot and do little. Or - even worse - if you put a lot of work into the wrong things, you won't make any progress. And the competition is over. Ignite your sales rocket - conversion hacker Jörg Dennis Krüger knows how.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST
Welcome to the Conversion Hacking Podcast. My name is Jörg Dennis Krüger and as my Gogo dancer just rightly said.
Yes, I'm the conversion hacker and as a conversion hacker I'm always thinking about how shops can really be made more successful. I don't care that much about the conversion rate. Increasing conversion rates is always cool – you should do it if you can. But a good conversion rate is not always what you want.
You want more sales or a little more spun, you want more profit. And that's why I tell my customers, "Hey, not... I'm increasing your conversion rate, I'm increasing your sales." We make sure more people buy from you. And that's what conversion hacking is all about. This 360 degree approach that I don't think about how to convert users better now. That too, of course. But not in focus. It's about how do we manage to get more users to the site and then convert them and do it as cheaply as possible.
How do we manage to address users, yes, stocks that are already there, simply better, so that we can still generate sales from them, because there might be greater potential there. Go out fresh and try to acquire completely new users. That's why conversion hacking also includes looking at the very beginning. Are we actually tracking everything correctly and not only tracking in the sense of knowing who is on which page, but we can also use the data for marketing for appropriate addressing on Facebook, for appropriate targeting. If we can use the data, we may use the data.
everything. Because of course there is huge potential in it. Just like looking at what e-mail addresses we have, can we maybe do something there, are they generated in a meaningful way, can we use them?
Or is the risk of using it manageable, even if we are actually not allowed to do so? I didn't say that now. In any case, there is often great potential that is not used at all. And then I hear this very often: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I already have that on the screen. Yes, I know, I know, I know, I know, we still have to do that, we still have to do that, yes, yes, if I have everything on the list, I know everything." And I also have to say: “Hey, conversion hacking is not knowing. It's not about sitting down with a long list of things you could do and then always walking around with a guilty conscience that you didn't do it." And on the other side says to all people who want to help you:
Yes, yes I know everything, everything is on the list. But conversion hacking also means finding priorities. Working in general means finding priorities in the Super Cluttery world in which we are traveling, otherwise you can't work successfully at all if I don't work properly with priorities.
But in online marketing in particular it is very, very easy that you somehow listen to advice from Google or Facebook to address even more target groups here, to book even more keywords here, then even more budget. Or somehow gets lost in creating a thousand pages now. For the organic ranking or whatever. But you look at it far too seldom: where are the priorities? And then we come to the fact that the priority is often not to make big changes to the shop. It's better to first see what hidden reserves we can tap into from the outside, where we can simply generate more sales without having to dig deep into the shop.
And that's why conversion hacking is a 360-degree view of everything to do with the shop. Because these 360 degrees are: where do the visitors come from, but also where are they going somehow? Because visitors that I may have addressed properly at the beginning and who have already bought or not bought – I can do something with them again. So if I've won it - first of all how do I win it? – how do I guide them through my shop? – and then what do I do with the users?
It's so, so, valuable to look at this overall view, then to dissect the shop. Where do I have pages where there is more information-driven content and where do I have pages where there is more transaction-driven content. And how do users get there? And how do I address the users there. There is no need to develop a super fancy targeting personalization WooHoo strategy, sometimes it is enough to simply ask the user for his email address when he is on an information-heavy page. And not for a 70, 120-page e-book, but for something that just brings him some use.
And where I then have his email address if I can do something. Yes, of course there are now shops that generate traffic with sites that are very peripheral to their topic. Then it might be part of the prioritization to say: There is so much wonderful traffic here. But that's all somehow with an intention that we can't pick up at all. Then don't put any energy into converting these visitors in any way, but say: no, we're concentrating on those where we see a higher potential. Always, ultimately with the aim of making more sales. In the end, yes, as little work as possible. Sounds kind of stupid now, in the end it's clear that work has to be put into it.
But we just have to do something. Do, do, do, and without doing we will not be successful. And then we're right back in that vicious circle.
If I just have the long list of things I could do but don't do, I've lost. If I have a long list of things I could do and I work through them from top to bottom, then I do something that's super, super, super great. But then I still have to prioritize properly to do the right things and not have put a lot of work into it and then somehow have no result. That demotivates everyone. Oneself, the team, it probably costs a lot of money, costs a lot of time and that's more of a losse, losse, losse, loose situation.
That's no good for anyone. So this mixture of: What can you do and how do I prioritize that, makes a lot of sense to achieve a lot, but also not to proceed according to interests.
You notice in a lot of companies, in those responsible for online marketing: They have a few things that they really like to do and the rest they just drop left and right. And then we come to these super SEO optimized pages. Or those sites with a thousand AdWords landing pages but no SEO optimization anywhere. Where you just see this scaling issue.
I have a topic here, I notice that it works and scaling it up is in principle a great idea, but in online marketing I always run into a problem: namely, the more I want to use a channel, the more expensive it becomes Channel because I'm just not in the low-hanging fruit anymore, because I'm not in the good spots anymore, because I'm competing more with others, and so on.
So the most successful strategy is actually to be on all channels with a certain level. So yeah holistic 360 degree bullshit bingo, what do I know. But really being on the move on all channels in such a way that I am efficiently on the move on every channel. And then I have the most success overall. And it's really great when I also think about innovation.
I have a conversion hacking model, it's like eight levels, it starts with prioritization and then goes through many levels with product and targeting and technology and I don't know what, then it goes down to innovation. And innovation is really exciting because you have to use innovation early on. Sonata is not an innovation. For example, how I set up the Conversion-Hacking Xing group was super easy and a really great channel.
There were 10,000 people in there, there are still almost 10,000 in it. And you could feed them really cool, you could send out cool newsletters and so on and so forth. Everything is no longer possible today. You can't set up the groups properly, you can't even feed them properly.
Xing takes money for everything but also has built in massive spam filters or hurdles. So you can no longer use it. Even if you now say: Hey, we're using Xing as an innovation topic, we're building that up now. Doesn't work anymore. Because innovation growth hacking only works if you are very, very early in a market to exploit exactly these things.
For example, I now had a customer who is active in the erotic sector and I attached the big Twitter sign to him: Hey, do Twitter. Twitter is the hot shit for eroticism and in general Twitter is a completely underestimated channel. If I mean to address a very real target group somewhere, then maybe I should try to really phase out Facebook because Facebook is becoming less and less exciting. Not for advertising, but for organic content, especially those that are a bit advertising, are becoming less and less exciting for Facebook. Instead, I concentrate on other channels, such as Twitter. And we see that in many areas. Website chats Website chats were like five or ten years ago, well, five years ago, they were really hot shit. You really sold it, sometimes the customers chatted with you, saved themselves the call, it was really cool.
Today everyone says no, is this a bot is the first question that comes up quite often. are you a bot And then it is no longer perceived as valuable because probably only a bot and no idea who is answering. The magic is gone now. Still somehow a valuable tool you can use but the advantages you could get out of it are just not there anymore. There are now other ways in which I can address my users better.
The subject of WhatsApp Newsletter has now been killed by Whatsapp and Facebook was also a very great channel for a long time and anyone who did not use it immediately missed the opportunity to use it. Because now it's dead. I think it's been dead for a few months now, then you can't send newsletters, you can't send them any more via WhatsApp, you were never really allowed to. But then WhatsApp takes action against it.
And that's why you can see again why such a holistic 360 degree approach is so important and why I'm talking about hacking. After all, hacking is about creativity. It's about thinking about how I can now achieve my goals and so on. And you just have to think deeper and consider: man, what isn't my competition doing yet. What are such new topics in which you can cheaply tear something and where can you just do it. where I haven't done anything yet. Because simply then the success can be achieved much faster and it is usually much greater than if I try to further scale another topic and put more work into it.
And in summary, conversion hacking, conversion optimization, growth hacking more e-commerce success. Yes, you have to look at everything, you just have to do it and maybe you have to have someone who can show you the right way, who knows how to do it, who looks into many shops and is always up to date with the latest technologies. Well, if you're looking for someone, you know where to find them. So make more sales, more conversions. Not necessarily a higher conversion rate, but rather accept a lower conversion rate and use all traffic channels and take traffic with you that doesn’t convert so well because in the end it means more money in your wallet.