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E296 | What thousands of A/B tests reveal about websites that convert and retain with Casey Hill | DoWhatWorks

• Andrew Michael • Episode 296

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Today on the show we have Casey Hill, CMO of DoWhatWorks, a patented growth experiment tracking engine that reveals which website changes actually drive results. Casey brings experience from ActiveCampaign, his work as a Stanford instructor and advisor, and years of research into how leading companies like Slack, Shopify, and Asana run experiments. 

In this episode, Casey breaks down why most A/B tests fail and how to focus on the few elements that truly move the needle. We explore why two CTAs often outperform one, why customer logo bars underdeliver, and why expectation-to-reality alignment is the hidden driver of both conversions and retention. 

Casey also shares how DoWhatWorks blends large-scale data with human research to surface reliable best practices, why expansion revenue has become its biggest growth lever, and how enterprise clients are tackling churn by setting clear expectations from day one. 

We also discuss how onboarding experiments reduce early churn, why traffic sources should shape your CTA strategy, and why simplicity always wins on pricing pages.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on X.


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Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.

SPEAKER_02:

In your hero section, should you have one call to action or should you have two calls to action? We can look at thousands and thousands of companies that are testing this exact phenomenon, one versus two. And then we can assign this level of confidence, this level of certainty in whether you should have one or two. And in most cases, the answer is you should have two, by the way.

SPEAKER_01:

This is

SPEAKER_03:

Cher. The podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week, we hear how the world's fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel

SPEAKER_01:

their growth.

SPEAKER_00:

Strategies,

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tactics, and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode. Hey, Casey, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks

SPEAKER_02:

for having me back, Andrew. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_03:

It's great to have you. For the listeners, Casey is the CMO of Do What Works, a patented growth experiment tracking engine that helps you get more impact faster. Prior to Do What Works, Casey was the senior growth marketing manager at ActiveCampaign. He's also a Stanford instructor and advisor and was a previous guest of the show on episode 235, where we discussed the life cycle of loyalty and tackling trend critic stages in the user journey. My first question for you today, Casey, is what works?

SPEAKER_02:

What works is a broad question. I think that when we're approaching conversion rate optimization, usually my best guidance is start by being very selective about the pages that you focus on at all. Websites are typically, especially like for larger B2B SaaS, websites are really broad. There's tons or thousands of small tweaks you can make. So you typically want to zoom in on the things that are most tied to revenue. Often it's your homepage, it's your from a paid standpoint, like any landing pages, you're driving substantial traffic. And then typically the higher up the page, right? The above the fold, the hero sections are going to be the most impactful and there's going to be kind of diminishing as you kind of go down. So it's a very broad top level thing and we can definitely get into the nuance of some of the things that we've seen kind of like both the highest certainty and the highest impact happen. Because I think, by the way, both of those are really important. So one thing we'll look at is how certain are we that a certain thing works on a website? So for example, in your hero section, should you have one call to action or should you have two calls to action? We can look at thousands and thousands of companies that are testing this exact phenomenon, one versus two. And then we can assign this level of confidence, this level of certainty in whether you should have one or two. And in most cases, the answer is you should have two, by the way. We could talk about that. But so that's one thing. But the other question is like, degree of impact. So CTAs in your homepage right at the top are things that are very tied to your revenue journey. So that is typically going to have a very high degree of impact. So we can have a high degree of certainty, a high degree of impact. There might be other things where we see tons of people test, let's say customer logo bars is an interesting example. And we see that customer logo bars might maybe surprising for some of our listeners here actually don't perform well. The majority of companies that test having or removing their customer logo bar, removing it wins. And there's a lot of nuance and we can talk about companies that are doing it better or worse. But we also find that it doesn't have a massive degree of impact, meaning that if you have it or if you don't have it, it likely is not going to have a huge impact on your conversions. So it's like either move it down the page or remove it or do what Clay or Hex does by adding links to case studies to it. But if you mess it up, it probably has less impact than your headers, than your CTA buttons, than other things that might come to play.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, very interesting. I think we'll dive into all those details. I think it'll be good though, like just for the listeners, to give us a little bit of overview of Do What Works does, because obviously I think it probably gathered by now, but I think it'll be great to see a little bit of context as well around that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah, that's where we should start. So Do What Works essentially has an algorithm that allows us to detect A-B tests done by any company on the web. So it's actually public data, so we can gather it, we track it, and we see, hey, this website, let's say Asana or Slack or Klaviyo, Shopify, is running an A-B test and they're testing this versus this. We detect it and then we have a human research team that hops in. They start to track that test. They add tags and kind of validate what is being tested. And ultimately, they just look at what version the brand keeps. So they say, okay, like Shopify tested A versus B. We see that they ultimately kept B. We have a whole bunch of things we look at, like how long they have to keep it for at least three months. And there's all these other details. But just to keep it simple, we detect what is being tested. We then track it and then we add it to a database. And what it allows us to do is at scale, someone can come in and say, I'm a B2B SaaS company. I'm trying to test something on my pricing page. They can even put in exactly what they're trying to test. Like I'm trying to test my CTAs. I'm trying to test my plan tiers. And then you can look at thousands of tests and see essentially what is working in that space. And so we're kind of trying to redesign how most people approach A-B testing, get people to run less tests, but but to get them to do it more efficiently. Like Optimizely, who is a company that does A-B testing, published a thing that said only 11% of A-B tests are beating the controls. So that's a huge problem, right? Like people are pumping a ton of money, a ton of resources into stuff that doesn't move the needle. And I think anyone who's been in conversion rate optimization or worked on websites has had this experience, like running tests and it's like not statistically significant or you see a spike, but then it comes down. And so we're trying to help kind of solve for that problem.

SPEAKER_03:

the peaking problem when you start looking too early and you see the spike, get excited, and then things turn on you. Yeah, I definitely think in terms of experimentation, one of the biggest challenges I think is understanding when you can and can't do experimentation. And especially as you say, at an early stage startup, you typically don't really have the data to be able to get any level of statistical significance. So a lot of people end up wasting a lot of time. And then I think it also takes a good level of sophistication for teams to be able to run a good experimentation program. I think optimizely themselves sort of realized that there just weren't that many teams at that level of sophistication to build the business that they thought they had and so I think like it's very interesting perspective of like seeing how you go about doing this but I'm keen to understand as well like you mentioned let's say a SaaS and a pricing page or you gave a couple of examples like are you focusing on any specific verticals in general like I think from an e-commerce perspective there's obviously like way more e-commerce stores let's say than there are SaaS businesses and how are you approaching this is the first question and then the second question I get as well is like at least from my experience like running A-B tests across like multiple different companies and stuff like you can sometimes run the same experiment in two different companies and get two totally different results and so when you're like giving this advice is there sort of a level of probability of success I guess because it's not always going to be the case for every company like you say like the logos may work for one specific industry one specific case or even one specific company just the way they do it so keen to hear like on those two things like

SPEAKER_02:

yeah yeah yeah for sure. So we work across a lot of different industries and obviously not every industry out there, but I think we have more than like 35 different tracked industries. So obviously e-commerce, obviously B2B SaaS, finance, fintech, banking, direct to consumer stuff. So we do function across a lot of those. In terms of what works for one company, will it work for another company? There's a couple layers of that. First off, there's obviously never any guarantees. So a hundred percent, like we're always going to be looking at statistics. I think one of the advantages of what we're doing though, is we're not like, we can allow you to see a competitor. Someone comes to us, they say, I want to see my two biggest competitors. We can show you your two biggest competitors. We can show you what they're testing. But really what's valuable is the data at scale, right? So when you're trying to understand a phenomenon and you're like, hey, is this going to work for me? If we see 850 B2B SaaS brands test a basic logo bar right below the hero, and we see 88% of those tests lose, that's probably a pretty meaningful signal. Maybe you're in a different situation. Maybe you're the case where you're in that 12%. And so, yes, we won't know. But I think when we look at the amount of data that we have across a very, very similar application, so A-B testing is all contextual. The size of the company matters, the vertical matters, the specific type of customers, they matter. So that's one of the beauties of our system is like you pull all those filters. Like we have this very advanced dashboard and you're looking at like the exact element, the exact page type, the exact vertical. So you put in all those filters, or you can even say like these five companies are most similar similar to mine, and you can look at those five companies. But I think really, you want to look at the amount of data. And then we've developed an algorithm with John Hopkins University, some professors at John Hopkins University, called bet scores. And bet scores specifically are a probability type of assessment, right? Like our degree of certainty, based on the test based on was it a multivariable test or a single variable, obviously, single variable tests are weighted much higher, like geography, all these different variables, we compile them all. And then we give people an indication of how confident we are in that specific phenomenon based on the amount of data we have.

SPEAKER_03:

Interesting. And from your customers, are you injecting any of their first party data as well to leverage from the system? Or is it just purely scanning the web and seeing what you're doing? Because I think also there's like, one question then is like, how are you measuring results? Is it purely about like, which one to get selected? And that's like a binary, this was better than the other? Or is there some sort of way that you're detecting as well the impact that these experiments have?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, for sure. Great question. So first off, we don't cookie, we don't pixel, like we don't do anything back end on any of this. We're only using public data. So because we're only using public data, this is purely based on what version. It's like a black or white. It's binary. What version do they keep? What version are they not? That being said, we work with a lot of largest organizations in the world, right? Like we're working with like Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies. So they have huge amounts of firsthand data. So that becomes part of a collaborative back and forth. So like we are a SaaS product. We have a platform, but we also have this research team and we have a pretty expansive services arm. So those teams are working dynamically with, like if we're working with that certain client, they're giving us feedback. They're like, Hey, you told us you had a really high confidence interval on this, this, and this test. This is what our first party data says. And we're working collaboratively with them to kind of get them the best results. So it absolutely like uses, we can use first party data. Some people at the most basic level will just be like, I just want to track competitors, show them what they're doing. Cool. We'll do that. But especially for all of those large established clients who have built out conversion rate optimization programs, it's 100% a collaborative effort with their first party data as well.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, because I mean, that could also get then very interesting afterwards, if then it's not only from like the first like the scrape data that you're analyzing, but it's also actually from like your customers connecting the optimizer or the A B testing framework into do what works. And then you actually have their results across the board. I think like at some point in scale, that would look be super interesting. So because then you also have like both sides of the coin.

SPEAKER_02:

100% and these partners are vital. So we always tell people like we do not compete with Amplitude or Optimizely or Webflow or Adobe Target. They're our partners because we're just giving you data and recommendations. You need to then go execute and actually run your tests and validate those things. So we work hand in hand with those platforms. We know those teams really well. We run webinars with them. We co-promote with them. We share insights to their audiences. So those are all like partners of ours.

SPEAKER_03:

Amazing. And so in talking about experimentation, like we've mentioned the word CRO a few times as well. And I think generally when we think about experimentation it's generally around like how do we increase conversion rates how do we drive more sales more subscriptions there is obviously experimentation that can be done to improve retention to improve engagement activation and so forth and my assumption I think we discussed it before the show is that probably like the majority of the stuff that you're seeing is top of funnel increasing conversion but are you seeing anything interesting from companies when it comes to experiments that your team believes will have an impact on retention and activation

SPEAKER_02:

yeah yeah actually we see quite a few of those. So one of the ones that comes to mind immediately is from ramp and actually another company called hockey stack does the exact same thing. And so they essentially have these blocks that set the exact expectation for the first 30 days. They say like, Hey, day zero through seven, you need to get us these forms. You need to do these specific steps. Then at day 15, you should be connected to your ERP or, you know, blah, blah, blah. And by doing that, by setting that expectation up front, I think teams are going to address that front level churn, that zero to 30, that zero to 90 day churn, where people don't even get fully set up within the software. They get turned off by some specific thing. There's some disconnect. There's some key stakeholders that aren't involved and there's a mismatch there. So I think it's very smart for teams to get ahead of that and to address that. And we've seen this across, there's another company called Linear that has like a very specific like onboarding guide, but instead of an onboarding guide, like email, that's actually part of the website and it has like the things like send this to your CFO send it like it's very very directed towards trying to tackle that front end churn that activation layer churn so I think that kind of stuff is really smart and I think speaking more broadly websites in general they tend to do a decent job of establishing like what they do and okay kind of in the middle job of how and often a very poor job of the like why us the space specific why component. So I think companies that are implementing things on the front that help with that affinity, that identification are going to get much better traffic. They're going to pre-qualify out people that aren't a good fit. Another example, I know we're kind of spraying examples here, but another example here is Y Combinator. So Y Combinator is obviously one of the most well-known accelerators, incubators out there. And they have things on their site that are dedicated to saying like what they do, but also what they don't do, right? Like we don't We don't do this. We don't do this. And that's all part of just clearly setting that expectation to reality. And so I guess where I would encapsulate all of these things, and it's probably the most important part of conversion rate optimization, but obviously it ties to churn here, is just that simple thing. Expectation to reality. Because I could, you know, we could keep going down the rabbit hole. It's like, it's like CTA buttons. There's a reason why very basic text that says, see pricing, book a demo, start churning. trial performs better than text that says something like start imagining, hit your quota, like whatever type of language. And the reason is because there's a much clearer expectation to reality when it says book a demo. People understand what book a demo means. It's very clear. So I think you want to try to use that as a litmus test on your website. And I think that will impact churn positively as well as conversions.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I really like the examples you mentioned on. I just pulled up ramp as well to take a look at this. And it's very interesting on the site they have a section it's probably is it just it's a couple of sections below the fold but not too far down the page there's not much there and then it's a new software shouldn't take a year to implement here's what you can get done within ramp in just 30 days and then it has a timeline so it's like today and then they have three items on the checklist get started connect your ERP upload your policy issue yourself a card in one minute and it's got day five day 30 as you said and at that point you're like 100% of business spend moved over to ramp you intake to pay 8.5x more efficient and book close 75% faster so I think that is definitely very interesting I think that's also a lot of like when we think about the customer success process of what goes on it's like setting those expectations up front of like what works involved and what's needed and to your point I think as well like this may even have been an experiment like when it gets run you end up seeing like conversion rates potentially even drop from visitor to sign up but ultimately what you're really doing is you're pre-qualifying the right candidates to come through the pipeline and saving your team a lot of time and headache because I think that's also like one of the negative side effects of like conversion rate optimization I would say when you especially when you're dealing like B2B like high ticket item is that if you're filling the funnel with like the wrong types of customers you also end up then having a whole lot of time that you end up wasting on like trying to close these deals and then chasing them and then supporting them and so setting the right expectations up front as well may seem like at first glance have a negative impact on just the vanity metrics but the real bottom line is where it counts and it makes an impact.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think you got to be aware of it. And we look at a lot of things that hike up conversion rates, like for example, embedded email capture hikes up conversion rates, forms that are shorter than forms that are longer on intake hikes up conversion rates. But you do have to be very careful with that for the exact reasons that you just articulated. Like, yes, having embedded email capture does increase the total number of submissions, kind of like progressive profiling in general. But what ultimately matters is how much revenue comes to the door and how much revenue stays. And so all of these changes need to be done under that lens.

SPEAKER_03:

When you say embedded email capture, is that having the email address form on the landing page and the hero and not on the signup form?

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly, yeah. Like if you go to a website like Buffer as an example, you'll see that there's the email capture is like they can type their email and it says like, get started. Or actually, I believe that like Rippling and a lot of those finance sites do the same thing where they have like an embedded email capture. Even Ramp actually might. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but yeah, anytime where you're saving that click by there's not just a button, but you're actually adding your email in first. We've seen tons of data on this and we actually tested this back at ActiveCampaign ourselves and a bunch of other cases of that. It will increase total number of submissions, but you do just need to be careful and make sure that it's ultimately netting out to more good traffic.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And I think that's also the thing with experimentation. It's not always like you need to understand the primary metrics that you want to be tracking and also have your secondary metrics that you're monitoring to ensure that like you keep your eye on the ultimate goal which is like new business and retention as opposed to just like increasing signups and increasing noise for the team 100% and so nice so Durex obviously like it's definitely sounds interesting what you're trying to accomplish now you mentioned like you have quite a few researchers on the team working like I'm keen to dive into a little bit about like your business now how is the team approaching churn and retention from a perspective of a business? Like you mentioned, you're working with large Fortune 500 companies. What is your process looking like internally when it comes to churn and retention?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the first things that's super important for us when it comes to churn is having an expansion mindset off the bat. So people usually come in with a specific challenge or problem, like they're They want intelligence to help with that problem. But as people can probably imagine, if people come in wanting to fix something on their homepage or wanting to fix a specific landing page they're promoting or pricing page, you got a whole website, right? So there's a lot more ground for us to give you data, to give you tests, to do analysis, to do wireframes, et cetera, et cetera. So as soon as we come in, our research team is very trained at trying to understand not only that specific problem, but like the larger apparatus of that team, what they're grappling with, What are your metrics? How are you measured? And then having expansion as part of that. And we have an awesome group of folks and an awesome head of our research team who's really, really good at training all the folks to kind of have that eye and lens. And as a byproduct, we drive a ton of revenue from expansion. We actually have more revenue coming from expansion right now than we do have new revenue, which is kind of wild. And so it's a super key part of our business. And especially with very large organizations, there There's dozens of departments, right, where you can expand into. And so there's also this huge expansion potential if you're an enterprise focused organization. But I think the key thing is from the onset, having that eye, you know, some people use it's kind of like the cliche, like if you're not expanding, you're churning kind of thing. But I think very much like embracing that from a functional, systematic standpoint of like, okay, we just signed this client at month six, like what are the things that would also benefit us? And making sure that we're getting in there, we're positioning it, we're having those conversations in advance, has led to our team having a very, very strong net revenue retention.

SPEAKER_03:

Where do you think that insight came from? Because I think like, it's not common for a lot of startups to start thinking about expansion from like the get go. And it's typically something that comes three, four, year five, somewhere there where there's a little bit of saturation on the growth front. And it's okay, like now we need to sort of think because I think that's also like, expansion, as you mentioned, it's also like a good counter to churn on the other front, on the other side of it, to net revenue retention and for health of business as well. So where do you think that it originally came from? Like why so early?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think where it comes from is like, and this is a transition for me too, because I come from SMB world. I've spent the last 10 years working for like SMB companies and now I'm in the enterprise. So the first thing that's stark when you walk into the enterprise is you have a multi, you can have a multimillion dollar business that has 10 customers, right? So because there's less customers, in general, that creates some stability, but it also creates a huge amount of vulnerability, right? If you have 10 customers and you lose two customers, like it's huge. And so because of that, I think off the bat, when I came and joined you at works, I realized the critical importance of keeping that core base, right? Like if we add one new customer every single month with the six figure plus size contracts, like that's great. But we also want to make sure that we're continuing to expand and also retaining that existing base. So I think part of it is a byproduct of this, this enterprise focus. And I think if you are a company that is focused on larger brands, that's something that I think makes a ton of sense to embrace off the onset. Um, it's also kind of, you know, again, this whole thing, I hate to use the word flywheel cause it's kind of also so cliche, but it's like when you're in the enterprise world, it's also a huge word of mouth game. And it's also when you're trying to get in with the largest companies in the world, like having the ability to call up and say, like, Hey, NFL, Hey, you know, insert like large organization. Like, can you talk to the MLB about us getting in on this? Like that is hugely impactful. And so I think having this thing where you're rolling out the red carpet and you're not only trying to see what services, but it's really going above and beyond doing everything you can. Like we had one customer who got hit really hard with the tariff issues. And instead of doing like the normal, like we've all heard of pausing, like, Hey, we're gonna do this normal pause. We did kind of like the active pause where we're still providing a bunch of services. We're still like, we're committed to you. We want this relationship to be a long-term thing. So we understand that you might have to take a quarter off. We're still going to provide you support. We're still going to provide you these services and these different things. And guess what? That customer renewed two quarters later after we did that, they renewed for another big contract once things had kind of settled down. So it just shows like that investing in the customer, investing in the long-term relationship. And that same customer, by the way, also referred us another really good client. And so it's creating the word a mouth engine it's protecting that revenue it's all kind of interconnected

SPEAKER_03:

and then how is marketing like supporting this expansion revenue yourself so obviously you have the researchers identifying is there any way sort of marketing and you mentioned in the beginning as well like when a company signs up you're also then thinking about like month six what's that going to look like what are the additional use cases or ways that they can use the product then is there any way marketing is supporting this function or is it really marketing just focused purely on driving top of funnel

SPEAKER_02:

no I think it's all I think it's all interconnected So like we, on the top of funnel, we very much have a pipeline. Like we run a newsletter. I produce a lot of social, my social content on LinkedIn does like 10 million plus views per year. Our newsletter is doing like deep dive analysis is on certain targeted companies and industries. But when I say it's interconnected, like we look and understand what do our customers care about? What do they value? What are the new areas of exploration? So for example, if a lot of our customers are really interested in AI positioning, you know, not super surprising, it's a big question. We're on a marketing front. Also, we're going to maybe start producing a lot more of that collateral, especially if that's a land vector where someone's like, I'm going to be redoing my pricing and I'm going to be using AI credits now for this new agentic model. Okay, let's start producing a bunch of content on the marketing side. We know that other customers are going to be interested in that as well, but it also serves our own internal team to showcase like we have robust information and analysis. And I think what I try to add on the marketing front is our research team is very much, they're trained researchers. So they tend to be very, very careful about making any extrapolations. They'll just say like, this is what the data says. I, on the other hand, I'm a marketer and I make extrapolations all the time. I'm like, okay, we see this correlation between everyone, two CTAs seems to be consistently winning. Why? And I'll think about that. And I'll say like, well, the reason I think is people come with different levels of intent. If you only have the ability to do a demo, you're losing all these other people who maybe don't have have that level like i will give my input and analysis and so on the marketing front i put out a lot of the like why i think these things are true based on that data and i think that's also really appreciated by both new prospects but also our customers right because they can look at the data and they can obviously make extrapolations but sometimes that layer of analysis is something that i think can add a lot of value on both ends so we definitely try to work sales marketing customer success all in lockstep

SPEAKER_03:

very nice yeah because it seems as well like uh at that sort of focus of the company that there's a lot of ways as well I think marketing can add value to it and it's interesting to hear like how a lot of times as well like as I mentioned there's not many companies that focus this early on expansion revenue and is there a customer success team over and above the researchers supporting these clients or is like would you call like the researchers maybe in a way CS reps to some degree as well

SPEAKER_02:

yeah they're kind of interspersed right so our researchers are like and there's different kind of like delineations based on the exact titles and stuff but in general it's like we have a research team the research team is providing the novel analysis they're providing the services they're analyzing all these tests coming up with outcomes they're responding to specific problems so we do a lot of what's called rapid analysis basically means someone comes in and they're like you know we saw this news article or we saw this thing like we want to run this fast change and we need info in the next three days that tells us whether this is a smart move right especially these larger companies they tend to like move quickly and so our team then rallies and kind of puts that together but it's the same folks that are then like going through the analysis with them and kind of going through the post there's a kind of separate research team to that that is doing the annotation of the actual test layer itself like the people who are tagging and like noting the test declaring what test one declaring like why it was like that's kind of one layer and then there's like the customer research team I guess you could call it that's dealing with all of that kind of

SPEAKER_03:

interaction yeah it's interesting that you're have like humans labeling all this data as well now and slowly over time like the model i think that you end up producing will become smarter and smarter to be able to detect what's going to work and what's not

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and there's a huge amount of like you know i don't want to underplay like the technology itself is doing a lot of like identification and recognition and tech but like it's critical for us to make sure that the human side of it that there's like a human checkpoint right like these decisions are highly impactful and we want to make sure that human side of it is not lost.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, for sure. And I think especially when it comes to sort of the experimentation side of things, like there's a lot of subjectivity in it and nuances need to be addressed as well by, I think at this stage, like people are probably still going to be better at that. I have an interesting question for you to think about. I'm sure you've been asked this as well, maybe a few times recently, but since you have access to all of this data, let's imagine tomorrow you need to work on a totally new homepage and it could be, let's say for Do What Works or for any other startup, what are the key ingredients you're absolutely including? And like, what is the order of these ingredients look like?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, for sure. So one thing I'll say too, our company grew entirely from word of mouth. When I walked in, our website had been done four and a half years ago, hadn't been changed. We are very close. I'm on about month six on the job. We're very close to a full relaunch. Our website is ugly. It does not follow almost any of these best practices. And that's because an enterprise focused organization like us, we just have haven't had a marketer haven't had a focus on that so yeah that's that's one thing i'll let people know as a you know come back in a month or two or maybe when this airs we'll see we can judge it'll be a lot it'll be a lot nicer uh that being said i think you want to start by thinking about your key pages your pricing page your home page or anywhere you're driving substantial traffic and typically you want to start with things that are revenue tied in terms of focus areas so think about your image that you're using at the top right like we know that in b2b SaaS product images tend to perform well, there's a reason why people do those over stylized images, over cartoons, over videos, over a lot of other things is because people have tested that and those teams seem to perform well. We've talked about this CTA buttons, those seem to perform well. And there's a lot of kind of like nuance, you know, things like, for example, reassurance text, when you have a trial saying no credit card required is reassurance text, and those seem to perform well when people test having them or removing them. So I think you focus on those core language Like on the homepage, on the pricing page, so much of the best practices are all about simplicity. So we've seen a ton of testing about people putting anything above the planters. And it's like, don't do it, except for maybe a header and a subhead, like get straight into your planters. And then inside your planters, we see simplicity work. So having more than seven line items tends to perform worse. Having like jargon or things that are not easily digestible tends to perform worse. Having the underneath the planters, some sort of simple identity So if it says like four solopreneurs, as an example, that's something that can allow people to self-select into that plan. Like anything that's giving that shorthand for people to self-select seems to be valuable, right? And so when it comes to those pricing pages, there's a huge amount of bet scores, hundreds of bet scores we have, but many things are tying back to simplicity and process level clarity, I think are very good things for folks to think about. And then as you're going through the page, I mean, there's so many different things around like grids versus carousel. Like there's a huge amount of that. But again, if we're to go really simple, focus on your headlines, focus on your headlines and your subheads and make sure those are really clear. What most companies do, which is a mistake is like, it's all very buzzwordy, right? It's all focused on like getting a specific benefit. You're going to increase revenue. You're going to increase whatever. Really what you want to do is you want to change it to capability focused language. So try to get away from benefit focused language and capability focused language. So benefit is like, you're going to increase revenue because we have all of these, you know, currency conversions or whatever. But the capability there very specifically is like, we can auto translate a hundred different currencies on your page. That is a specific capability that is being provided. And that is what the customer actually wants to see. Benefit language is very much glossed over. And that's a huge mismatch right now on websites. So if you're kind of going through with a lens and you're like, okay, based on listening to Casey, you're like, what are the quick things for me to do? Go to those headlines, go to those sub headers, make sure they're not too long. Also, they shouldn't be like more than 200 characters on the subhead, stuff like that. But like, make sure they're simple and make sure they're focused on capabilities. Make sure that you have CTAs each spot on the page. This might seem weird to some folks, but we've looked at a lot of test data. You want to continually have CTA buttons because you don't know what block might activate people. So make sure that those are done throughout and you're giving people that opportunity to engage. And then I know I mentioned this, but I'm just going to be a broken record. I'm going to say it because it's probably the most important thing. Expectation to reality. What does someone think is going to happen when they click on a button and make sure every single button on your website has clear process level clarity and you will see click through rates go up. You will see less bouncing. You'll see more quality folks coming through the door. It is one of the single most impactful and important things you can do. And And to be candid, it's also one of the most straightforward. Redesigning your brand colors and your scheme and the transitions, like those are complex. What's not complex is going through and making sure every CTA that you have is very, very clear, right? So it's a low-hanging fruit for folks.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I think that there's just so much as well, like so much time I think in new web design gets focused on like the actual UI and design side of things as opposed to really like the UX and the copy. And I think for me, like one of the best lessons I learned to actually was at Hotshot from one of our content team at that time and she sort of said like you've been doing websites wrong all this time like you start with copy not with like design and in the early days like you want to move fast you start doing wireframe you start putting text in and then you end up sort of like fitting your text into a design as opposed to really like focusing on like having good clear copy and as you said like CTA is really critical that it's crystal clear there you started out as well just focusing on like the hero section and then the pricing page and I wonder like as I think you alluded to in the beginning it was something as well like I noticed at Hotjar I think it's like it was something like 85 to 90% of people never ever really scrolled past the hero on websites something ridiculous like that and so you really just have like one message you can you can give to people at that point and so yeah it's definitely a very interesting like place like to think about like obsess over if you want that way like so like if you're going to run experiments like that's the place to start and like you could probably just like focus on that and have huge uplifts without even like approaching the rest of the page

SPEAKER_02:

100% and it also this is a huge thing that's important it's where does your traffic come from is really important and it matters and especially when you come to startups that can be a little bit more monolithic just meaning like you know it might be that for some organizations like they have a big podcast that's where all their people come from they come from the podcast well if your people all come from the podcast chances are they're going to have more context right they've been tuning in they've been listening they're like follow So versus like a paid ad that says like, go do whatever. It's good to understand what that level of understanding is based on where your traffic is. Because going back to like my one versus two CTA example, it may be the case that if all of your traffic, 95% of your traffic comes from one source that's super high intent, maybe you should just have one CTA. Maybe you should just say like book a demo because like people already know they come and they know versus if you have very disparate sources, Or if you're a person like me that drives a lot of stuff from social media, social media can be kind of a cold avenue because someone sees, oh, Casey shared this test from Clay that was really interesting. They come, they still don't even really exactly know what I do. They just know it's an interesting test from Clay. In those cases, it's probably very valuable to be able to be like, hey, join our newsletter. Hey, do this other lower lift thing. They don't want to hop on a demo yet. They're not ready. So that's one thing I would think about for your organization. Where does your traffic come from and make sure your stuff is paired to that?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, absolutely. I think understanding sort of the traffic source is really, really important for you. And as you say, if you know you have an audience that's really, really high intent, maybe two CTAs over one is not the best choice. But again, I think that's also maybe the beauty of what you do at Do It Works is you can be able to filter and see that and understand what works in different use cases and spaces. We're running up on time, so I want to make sure I ask you a question. I've asked you this question before, I'm pretty sure, but I'm going to ask it again now in a different context. Is What's one thing that you know today about Chandler Sinton that you didn't know six months ago before you joined Do What Works?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think the most notable change is probably the expansion focus that we've been expanding on and talking about here. I think that's been the biggest difference working in an enterprise organization and understanding how that functionally is so different. I mean, as a person who's followed churn for a long time, I could recite to you the average percentages like, oh, an SMB, you know, average churn might be three to 4%, but in enterprise, it's, you know, but beyond those statistics, the actual like tactical layer of having that very specific expansion focus. I think that is one large difference that I've adapted since joining this organization. I'll echo though, just as kind of a closing note, probably what I talked about last time, which is the stages of churn, which I still believe is really important, which is like thinking about churn in zero to 30, zero to 90, 90 to 365 type of deal, I think helps you create plans that functionally deal with the actual core reasons why there is churn. So I also think that is quite important.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe the last question then for today is, you obviously are now assuming you get asked a lot of questions when it comes to A-B testing and experimentation. What's one question that you wish more people would ask, but they don't?

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's a good question. I think part of it almost as a starting point, this might seem blasphemous coming from someone in my position, but it's probably should you be A-B testing in the first place? Right. I mean, there's a lot of

SPEAKER_03:

variables.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the honest answer. That's the candid answer, which is that as you talked about in the very beginning, if you're a very small organization, if you're a startup, if you don't have statistically significant traffic, I think all of those are very important. The other thing I want to just underscore too, is I think there's this big misconception. When I joined, I still remember I had this conversation with a friend of mine, guy I really like, but he was just like, I don't get this company at all. all. Like you just want to copy people. Like you're just going to be a company that copies your competition. Like what's the, what's the excitingness of copying. And I want to underscore that. I think there's these differences between things that should be done on websites, like technically logistically versus kind of creativity. Creativity to me is like your brand and your, in your, in your logos and kind of the way you're presenting things and your copy and all these kinds of components. But there's so many functional aspects that we're talking about. Like, should you have one or two CTAs? How should you talk about this information? Like all of these types of things that going back to my own personal experience, like when I launched an e-commerce company and I remember spending a year, spending a year by only having a credit card button, no ability for people to pay in an alternative way. And then having someone sit down with me and say, Hey Casey, your conversion rates are really bad on your checkout page because you're selling in European markets and these foreign markets. And in these markets, it's way better to have the ability to pay via PayPal, pay via Venmo, pay via Apple Pay. And when I added that one small thing, it was literally a massive binary overnight hike in my conversions. And I was hitting my head against the table looking, I've done this post about like how I left$200,000 on the table, calculating my new conversion percentage across my existing traffic. This is the type of thing we're trying to solve for people. We're not trying to replace creativity. We're selling in Europe and you don't have that pay with PayPal button, maybe that's something that you should be more aware of. And that's, by the way, I don't know specifically about how big PayPal buttons are in e-commerce in Europe anymore, but at the time, that's the type of decision that was super impactful. And that's really what we're trying to optimize for is those types of best practices. It's not about replacing people's creativity.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. Well, Casey, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. And is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up today? I

SPEAKER_02:

think we've honestly covered the core things. And so the last thing I'll say, again, tying back everything is go to your website and look at your headlines, look at your buttons, look across the website and say, is there a match between expectation and reality? That one thing that you can do will have the biggest impact on impacting your churn as well as your conversions.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. And it definitely is, as we talked about a lot, one of the biggest areas where marketing oversells makes a promise, product under delivers, like setting the right expectations up front will save you a little pain down the funnel. So Casey, as always, absolute pleasure. I wish you best of luck now in this new journey and looking forward to seeing what that new website looks like so we can judge you when it comes out.

SPEAKER_02:

I love it. I look forward to it. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks. Cheers.

SPEAKER_03:

And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review, as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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