Lower Your Cost Per Acquisition Through Conversion Rate Optimization

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Hello, everyone again.

Today I have a return guest, my friend Brian Massey. And Brian is THE Conversion Scientist. Note the lab coat. always.

And today Brian, just to like kind of have a yin and yang, I decided to wear my sports jacket because I'm going to add our conference on the way down to the ADSO.

For those of you who know that conference for dental service organizations. And I thought, Ok, I’ll wear my coat. So we both have collars and coats. I'll be the black hat for the black coat guy, the white lab coat guy. Anyway, welcome Brian.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's good get dressed up every now and then.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah. Well, I love the authority that you deserve and it helps build it with the lab coat, so I love it. So today we're going to talk about, Brian and I, you know, see each other at conferences when we're speaking or talk as friends periodically whenever we can because we're a little bit busy.

But one of the things we talked about and it was actually Brian's idea is to talk about conversion rate optimization which is what Brian talks about all the time.

But for the ideas of reducing cost per acquisition and I think it's the same thing to Brian and me but we're so close to this and we sort of forget that not everybody thinks the same way do Brian so I think it's really going to be a fun discussion today to talk about how to reduce cost per acquisition by focusing in on conversion rate optimization.

So Brian first of all I guess just introduce yourselves to people who aren't already fans and subscribers to your blog a little bit about you and your company.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yeah so in 2007 I founded conversion sciences. It was the culmination of the the strange set of experiences and neuroses that I carry around with me, computer programmer by training, ran a company in the 90s, worked for a number of companies building out their websites in the early 2000s, and really came out of college doing sales, so sales and marketing and programming, and then that particular gene that makes me not a very good employee forced me into the entrepreneurial role.

So, yeah, what else can I have done, but put on a lab coat and start a 100% CRO agency.

So we've been doing this since 2007, and I think we're the best.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Awesome.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Okay, so Brian, that was a good setup and for sure. What else could you do?

By way, my CFO tells me constantly, he's like, never get acquired, you'd be a terrible employee. I joke I haven't had a real job since 1988 when I worked at J. Walter Thompson. That's the last time I had, I've had job, but I was still so independent, I felt like was independent.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Anyway, so we don't want to over romanticize it too, because you and I have had to work many jobs at the same time as a result of our proclivities. Something smart about just doing like one job and enjoying that and becoming good at it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Good.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So Brian, one of the things to set this up a little bit as we talk, I have referred to this before with you and some of our readers and blogs, subscribers may recognize this, but this is a very simple model that we speak to and teach to a lot, which is that there are four vital optimizations required for any digital marketing.

And so for those of you that are watching this on YouTube, you can see my screen, but I'll describe it for everybody else who's just listening.

We essentially put together four puzzle pieces here, and we talk about number one is demand. That's a factor that is largely fixed, but we can influence with, for example, take social, traditional advertising or whatever, but there's only so many people searching for a gift product in a market unless you push demand.

Number two, is something that a lot of people think about our agency for, which is, you know, we're expert at, which is in the machine in the Google Ads platform, for example, or Microsoft Ads or, you know, paid social platforms or whatever.

It's where our engineers are working on things like keywords and, you know, class prequisition and, you know, click-through rate, conversion rate, all those things.

Number three is the part that you're focused on a lot of times, and we do as well with our company is the landing page experience or the website experience.

What actually happens once they click, yeah, how do they go to the website? What actually happens there? The number four is, the last puzzle piece is really about the conversion process in terms of, okay, somebody sends in an elite form and they acquire, or they use a calendar appointment, but how do you actually get them in?

So what does that look like? And the point of this little exercise is that every one of these little tiles houses is equally important.

So demand is equally important with the pay surge, is the landing page and the conversion process in the back end, and with healthcare providers so often that those calls end up going nowhere, because nobody picks up the phone or does a horrible job.

But, you know, the quadrant number four, these other quadrants are all equally important. It's a multiplicative value, meaning if you increase the effectiveness of 10 percent on any of these, the outcome is 10 percent better.

So it's very powerful, but your factor is the third quadrant primarily. And so let's talk about that, because I feel like that is the most unrecognized, unheralded piece of this puzzle.

So, you know, we talk all day about the first couple quadrants in our clients, and we help coach them on answering their own phone, which is another issue.

But the landing page is really, really vital. So let's talk about what that means, because, and again, tying it back to lowering cost per acquisition.

So let's just give you a hypothetical case, you must have lots of these where our right of client comes to you.

They've been squeezing a lot in with our line with page search, they think that they've got it optimized, but they're still not getting their cost per acquisition down.

Like, if you can expand on this for me, why is the landing page on court and how does that impact everything?

@16:12 - Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Well, so imagine coming at it from a different perspective. So I was, I've never been involved in traffic generation professionally.

I mean, obviously we do it for the agency. But if you are landing page centric, your assumption is that the landing page or the website, the landing experience, we like to say, is the whole point.

And so you're not going to drive traffic to something that isn't well primed to convert. Now, if so, you know, typically they're, they're very siloed.

So the people that are involved in generating traffic are usually divorced from the work of improving the website.

And, you know, I can see all sorts of reasons why that is because it's a different set of skills you're going from really, you know, in the ad world, to purely creative to a website, which is a piece of software.

So it takes a very different kind of a different process to influence that. So the things that when you come at a if you look at the campaign level, so we have a product that we're going to offer.

We are going to generate some demand. We're going to put some ads out that will be the magnets for the what we're doing with that demand.

And then we will provide a service that allows the person to begin a conversation with us as a lead or turn it by the product, right?

Stewart Gandolf
Yep.

Brian Massey
So if we look at it from the campaign level, what too often happens is we'll try a different strategy. With some, add greed, a different offer, a different approach. Maybe we'll use video or something like that. And we'll drive traffic to the website. And we'll find out. Oh, this is, we're getting a lot of clicks. But we're not getting a lot of conversions. So the 1st thought is like, Okay, well, let's try some try some different ads rather than saying, Hmm, well, is there something that we could be doing on the on the landing experience side of things? And I, from my point of view, I find that a little bit hilarious quality traffic, and there are situations where you'll drive a whole bunch of traffic in it, and there is no landing experience that's going to convert those folks but the metric that you know some people optimize for bounce rate. But bounce rate is really a measure of the quality of the traffic, more so than the quality of the landing experience. so this is. This is the angle that I come from and scratch my head about. And it's like 2 people speaking different languages. When you're trying to have that that discussion.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

You know, it's really funny that you say that our pay digital team, their engineers, are, I think, probably certainly much more attuned to this than a lot of other teams might be, because it is, it's a different skill set, it's not where their brain is at.

And so a lot of times, the first question we're looking at prospective client is, where is the traffic going to go?

Is it good enough to get in-market right away? Because a lot of times by the time they call us, they're desperate, like they're not desperate, like they're going on a business, but they're really frustrated with the existing agency or they're not getting answers they want, they feel like their cost per acquisition is really high.

So by the time they call us, they don't call us when they're happy, they call us when they're frustrated.

And so they want to get an answer right now. And so I would say maybe 50% of the time the website or the landing pages they have are good enough to get started testing sometimes though It's so bad that it's dead on arrival like we just know from the experience having done is that any money you throw out to this money is gonna be good money after bad.

You really need to wait and a lot of times We are focused on Creating a web either a new website or a new landing page or whatever and a lot of times we’ll test and that's a big thing to Give me a sense of You know, that's so it is important to look at this from the standpoint of You know, is this site ready for primetime?

You know, is it ready for traffic? Give it some more thoughts on that?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

You know, it's pretty rare that we have someone come through And we do free consultations part of our sales process and have someone come through for a consultation and I look at the website I say like you need to to redesign so it's It when we're developing our websites, that's where all the attention

is it's the look in the feel and what cool things the designer can bring in the scroll triggered animations where copies fading in and parallaxed images and stuff like that and that's where all the attention is paid to but I mean there's some simple things that you can do how much of your ad traffic is going to the home page.

I know that simply by having a landing page that keeps the promise that was made in that ad uses those words in the headline and at top of the page I use a similar color to my imagery it's going to convert better than the home page for most of those ad groups so something as simple as that doesn't require any testing or user research or anything like that it just requires a little bit of extra effort of having multiple pages for multiple ad groups or multiple offers so I think it's as simple as that

is just a great way to optimize and see if you can't turn some more of that and try to get into dollars, instead of an expense.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

You know it's interesting because I could see when you're getting a corporate buyer they have more like our clients you know include you know everything from pharma to device to but especially multi-location providers hospitals health plans it can be pretty broad category but a lot of times when we see a client they may have you know a page for example for a specific new thing like telehealth for example but it's not built out at all there's not much there to work with there's a paragraph in the scripted copy it's not really designed as a landing page so from that standpoint that's what i'm talking about is that we prefer to send it to the website if we can like from our standpoint and our client standpoint they usually want to get a marker right away and a lot of times we're looking at you know we'll build a landing page or landing pages in parallel, but we'd like to send traffic right away to the website if it's ready to do so. And sometimes we can make some changes to the website pretty quickly and that'll help that.

But I want to go back to some of you to just said there because again, I think one of the challenges of having done this so long and you speak on this topic to crowds all the time so it should be easy for you.

So you just mentioned one of the low-hanging fruit ways of improving your response rate. The first things you look at, which is to make sure that your ads are going to a page that pays off the promise and the ad work or the group that you're talking about.

So for example, if we're working with an addiction client, we're talking about, you know, intensive outpatient kinds of terms, you want to talk about that versus the home page or if you're talking about trauma, you want to talk to a about that or whatever.

So that's a big aha for a lot of people. lot of people just send all the traffic to the home page.

So again, that's pretty low-hanging fruit if that's a mistake. What other low-hanging fruit do you see that are like, okay.

Before we get into like great big optimizations, are there other things that you just look for that are often smoking guns that you can fix really quickly as you before you get into the deeper stuff in the testing?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yeah, I think the next thing to think about is what you're offering. So you go to a home page and you have your generic offerings, your buttons that are like request to consultation, get a demo, shopping, start shopping men, start shopping women, not so much in your industry.

But having the right call to action. So if you're running ads and it's a very high level conceptual, getting people that have the problem but haven't perhaps started looking for a solution might be interested in this, they're very top of the funnel.

So designing a landing page, can get them through all of their objections, have them handled and make them feel comfortable getting on a sales call with someone or

giving a free consultation or a demo or something like that, is it's hard to do. So maybe your call to action should be to build your list, and that's where things like a report, some informational content, something that will help them understand the solutions to their problem better.

At that point, it is a better call to action. Like you mentioned, addiction treatment centers, we've done a lot of work in that space, and a phone call is 7 to 10 times more valuable than a form fill.

So should your landing page be heavily focused on getting those people that it would call to pick up the phone and do that?

And we've done a lot of experimentation on that, some surprising test results that were successful for us, and a little bit counterintuitive.

And so if your ads are very problem specific and you're targeting someone that knows that your kind of solution is the solution. And they're just trying to figure out which company they're gonna deliver that solution bottom of the funnel, and in those situations you can get them to do the demo. Do the consultation, trial, etc.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, that's really important, I think. And it's interesting. Let's talk about you know, again, we're talking about services versus e-commerce here largely again. There's exceptions. We work with e-commerce as well. But any thoughts about one step versus 2 step, because the one step where you know, you're just asking people to call and inquire for an appointment. The good news there is that they're calling and inquiring for an appointment. The bad news is, there's friction. Right? There's a there's a little bit of fear there to, you know. Call and ask for someone to speak to, where 2-Step more. Typically is a low risk, offer like an ebook or something else, to educate them a little bit more the good news there is. The conversion rates often can be higher on the short end. But then you have to go. Follow up and convert them, which is a whole process, and it's a lot more complicated. I'm curious. Do you have any thoughts on that and for any industry, whether it's healthcare or others? Because, you know, a lot of times we do both depending on the campaign. But you know there's definitely pros and cons. I'd love to hear some of your experiences.

Brian Massey
So if if I'm understanding correctly…

Stewart Gandolf
I'm referring to like where the offer is, either, you know, call us, or, you know, like find out like, are you an addict, you know, like, do this simple tech, and it can be either it can be an assessment, it can be a ebook, or whatever.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yeah. Well, a couple of thoughts are bouncing around. Number one, you said, know, having, you know, a two-step sign-up process, one of the things we've had amazing success with is expanding that to five or six or seven.

So, you begin by asking them some questions about their situation, their product or their condition, and then you, then you ask, then you present to them, like, well, which like to talk to somebody and have a solution. And it's at that point, you asked for the contact information.

And so the multi-step or the breadcrumb form style is having a good success in the number of industries. So I would not assume that a longer step process is actually gonna convert worse, even though intuitively every step you say is a chance to abandon.

But you're going to take a different approach for, like phone calls. So the thing that works for phone calls in a situation like addiction treatment is a long and personal form.

And at the top of that form, it says for immediate action call, otherwise fill out this form. And the form is purposefully made a bit more intimidating.

And that will get that segment of your visitors who would call, to call. Rather than filling out the form for all the reasons you talked about that getting them to respond when they're outside of the Emotion of whatever's going on becomes more and more difficult and I you know we talked about this last time that Healthcare you're in a you're in a unique position to be interacting with people at some of their most vulnerable times and so, you know, there's a certain compassion to Persuading someone to call because you know that's probably going to be a more effective conversation in terms of them solving their problem So I don't know if that answers your question.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, it does actually it's kind of a corollary So what we're talking about there I think is more of like if we break it down too, and I love that the comments along the way the idea of encouraging phone calls, which we often do and prefer to do. And it's interesting. Our testing, depending on the client, depending on the industry, sometimes overwhelmingly people fill out the form and don't want to call anybody.

And so that...

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

There's also something that does not want to get on the phone, so we can't use it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah. So we have that. then in other industries, in other situations, the audience will be much more apt to call, and that's putting aside our own decision of which way we want them to go.

And again, we talked about briefly those four quadrants, number four there is answering the phone. So that presumes that there is demand, we're working the machine to get the inquiries in, the landing page is good, but somebody's going to answer the phone and do a good job with it.

And that's not a given. That is oftentimes the weakest link from putting aside everything else we just discussed is like, nobody will answer the phone.

Or it's after hours or person there isn't as qualified. we've had clients with pretty long... large businesses that have most of their leads going through one person, she retires and everything just goes upside down.

And so, you know, it's amazing. You would think like, well, that wouldn't matter, but it can. It's like, these are not necessarily, you know, we tap trainers to train to this.

We have consulting where we talk about how to answer their phone or whatever. So that's a whole thing. And I think that, but I do like the idea of what you just said there, of encouraging the calls, because if we knew that for sure that we had a strong call center, know, for example, for addiction, where they're working, they're going to answer the phone, that's definitely a more viable lead.

And we totally agree with that. So I think that's really an intriguing idea there, as just to how do you, you know, the immediate action, immediate help get this call, or he thought this long form.

That's, so that's one topic.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

I would add, if I can, like there's something going on that's going to make a lot of these problems go away.

And that is having a language model on the receiving end of those calls, being as helpful or maybe even more helpful than a live human being.

So I think this is going to happen very quickly that there's going be inexpensive solutions for answering the phone and if nothing else, prioritizing that call so that somebody gets back to that person, if there's not a human being available at the time. Yeah, it’s going to be striking.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

There is amazing stuff going on in this category and I'm actually going to be probably interviewing some people in this category and such future calls Brian.

I'm at the ADSO, the Association for Dental Service Organizations as we speak and there is a company reached out to me from India about six months ago and they had this amazing LLM answering called like it’s a receptionist and they suggest that you answer the question. You let them know they're talking to a bot, but you don't have to and you know during that phase I said, you know, I told them like I get us a quick advice and number one like HIPAA HIPAA HIPAA HIPAA to Make sure that you're compliant.

I just saw them while I'm here, and they are already working with lots of providers. They found the right pitch and they're just taking off And so there are other companies that are with various levels of skill So you know dentistry is a little easier than some other specialties It's more straightforward with a little bit less fear.

There's still fear for sure, but in medicine and addiction and mental health and all these different categories and What's really intriguing because I think that's absolutely going to be key, you know back in the old days of Brian We're diverting here a little bit, but what the heck it's our podcast.

do what we want But you know in the day for years the weakest link I mentioned is usually answering the phone and the old days They had their office manager answer the phone or somebody then they have call centers, but it's never

If you were to sit and do an audience of 1,000 people in health care, how many of you guys do think you have your phones right, maybe 20% of the hands would go out, but if we call those 20%, most of them don't have it together.

It's a widely acknowledged problem, it's just worse than everybody even thinks it is. The interesting thing is, back in the day, I thought, I don't really want to be a call center business, but maybe I'll start a one.

I decided not to because it's such an un-thankless, low-margin business, but I think what's interesting is, Brian, that this new AI is going to skip right over this problem.

So I often talk about in India, I've been told that there are former phone systems back, the analog version of all the telephone wires just never worked right, and so instead of fixing it, when cellular came out, they'd jump straight to cellular, just skipped over the whole problem, skipped over the whole rat's nest, and I think that may be the AI part of this, may be a huge part of this solution of, all right, we've been trying to train call centers for years to be good at this, for the bot, it'll not

never be tired, never be angry, never be frustrated from the last call, you know, it doesn't need time off or vacation.

And so there's a big application for being able to answer this and health care is a little special. It's already happening in other industries.

It's a super big area of opportunity that I think is going to happen. So for sure, that's really intriguing.

And it'll be interesting in something like addiction where the stakes are so high, there may be disqualifying discussions versus trying to actually, because this class is going to be really deep and really long.

So it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. But you're right, that's an intriguing topic. just as a side before I go back to the topic at hand, the other thing that's really big that we're tracking is the improvements in call tracking software, to be able to use AI to confirm this wasn't bad for legitimate new patient inquiry.

And do they, in fact, make a call? how did the office answer? Like that technology is exploding right now.

So, from our standpoint, we're looking at system. I'm going to step back up. So that's, I wish we had time talk about these things all day.

Next time we see each other at a conference, we'll have drinks talk about them a couple more. But the, so going back to what we discussed, you had to have a different question, which I think is interesting.

So the idea of interactive forms is where you're going, right? Where you have like multiple step forms. That is something that it's interesting.

Robert Childon, gets credited for this, but this idea has been around a lot longer than that. Which is, you know, if you've got them engaged, they've gone through the form to fill out this far.

They're in, they're admitted now. So they're much more likely to go to the next step of, you know, sign up for a call.

It's like, you made them do this. they're just statistically, they're much more engaged. I think that's really cool you're doing that.

And we're seeing a lot of that doing a lot of that with, you know, health assessments, for example, and just to clarify, so I think that's cool.

And I love what you guys are doing. And we should work together for off on this stuff, which we talked about before.

But the other part I was talking about was just simply a completely different offer, meaning that one. So what I was referring to two step is, if you're downloading an e-book, which isn't as common in consumer, it certainly is common on the B2B side, but then you have to follow up with the lead, right?

They download it. We have a client right now that's doing an ERP for the pharmaceutical industry, and we're in the process of writing that e-book right now, and that'll be something that you've been a two-step process, right?

need have market animation, you need to have sales to be to follow up. It's little bit different in category, but there are some cases where it makes sense to think about that in healthcare.

So let's talk about another question I have for you that I've been meaning to ask lot. You mentioned earlier it's video, and I'd love to see what your results are in terms of video on the landing page or on the website.

Is it a distraction? Is it a big lift in conversion? Does it depend? What have been your experiences with video?

And if it does work under what circumstances in which they'd be thinking about it?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yep, so video is, there's no rule for everyone, but our playbook makes some assumptions. So we have added video to landing pages and significantly increased the conversion rate, but have not increased the play rate.

So more people are not watching the video, but they are converting. So there's something that the video might be lending to it.

And what we found from through experimentation is the right title card, whatever, is showing up on the video before they push play with a little green arrow on it.

If you can come up with a title card that essentially tells them what the primary point of the video was, watch to find out how, you know, so-and-so and give them the punch line, the video is effective without having been watched.

So it's- That's crazy. It is.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s crazy. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I love that. But that is so cool. That is something I had not anticipated you saying at all.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yeah, it is. So we'll optimize the title card before we start thinking about how long should the video be and start doing the analysis on when people are dropping off and things like that.

Absolutely. I look at YouTube and see how the highest traffic cards, how talented they are at giving someone a reason to watch their video and differentiating themselves and all of that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So I'm just curious before we give it back to the reducing cost per acquisition. On the videos, if you found a specific format or specific length, obviously optimizing the title card is most important.

But have you found, you know, explainers do well or, you know, founder-led videos or, you know, low production or high production or, you know, 30 seconds.

Any tips that, you know, and again, it's obviously But just broadly, you had to start somewhere, what types of video tend to be better most often?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Well, the issue with the video is that it is a high level of effort to test. So if you don't have any video, then you have to produce a video.

Now, again, the language models, the generative AI is going to fix this problem for us and it is already well equipped to fix this problem for us.

But we will usually start with something that exists. We usually have to instrument it. And so, for instance, lot of videos, companies like to start with their logo swirling and some cool music playing before they dive into the content of it, an absolute attention killer.

So get rid of the pre-play, the pre-roll videos that have your logo doing interesting things and get right into the meat of it.

That's something that we see over and over again. Beyond that, I mean, we've tested length and style, and I can't tell you that any of that can really map onto, it's honestly like the content of a landing page.

People say that your visitors have the attention span of a goldfish, and it's only because you're, what you're putting on the page is not engaging, it's not compelling, it's not interesting, it's conceptual and not talking about the problem that they're trying to solve.

So the same thing applies to video. If it is engaging and it is hitting them where they are, solving the problem, start handling objections, things like that, then we've been finding people watching it.

Once we've instrumented, we can go in and we can see where people are dropping off. There's some very interesting technology that watches micro-expressions of the face so you can hire a panel.

with people to come and watch your video and see when they seem to be attentive, see when they seem to be not attentive, get their sentiment.

So you can do some very fancy analysis of your video and find out through that data along how short it should be rather than iterating through and testing a whole bunch of things.

So yeah, that's pretty much our playbook. Sorry, don't have more.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

No, it's fine. You mentioned I'm going to take, go back to something you just said there, you've said it twice now. And so I'm going to give you a moment to think about the distractions.

So you mentioned the distraction of the long opening that goes nowhere. It's not really engaging. It's like basically eye candy for the videographer, the art team, or whomever.

You mentioned earlier, parallax, which I'm not against parallax per se, but or for the longest time we had the slider.

Yeah, yeah, so we have that going on. But like, are there, you know, are there, you know, is parallax, what are the things that are often either overused or mistakes or distraction, just things that, you know, like, we, for the sake of making, or maybe it's making it pretty, but there must be some things that you think are, you know, either verify something and talk about or deepen, like, what are the things that are just, just clean all that other stuff up and focus on this?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

What would things just to offer? Yeah, so, you know, prioritizing those kinds of things. So if you are a creative agency or a website development company, it might be a credibility builder to have kind of a cool website.

So, you know, I'm not saying it across the board, you should never do that. But I haven't seen any research or anything that would indicate that scroll-triggered animations, parallax images, that there is a reason to even put them on the hypothesis list.

So the design of the website is it's important for establishing that you're credible, that you are what they expect.

know, things need to be blue and white and rules like that. We're a professional, we're a big boy company and we put that into our website and you can trust us with that.

But to prioritize those sorts things over the messaging is little bit crazy. But typically it's, you know, we design the mock-ups and then everybody goes back to their desk and somebody in marketing writes the copy and then, you know, the language models again are going to help a lot with this and actually they're the problem with testing messaging, it's hard to test.

There's a lot of different things that you can change in the copy and in the images that you're using because we can't write like somebody else really effectively.

So I need to write like somebody that's very methodical. I write in a humanist voice, very relation-oriented. And if you want me to write in a methodical voice where it's the details and the way it works and all that, that's hard for me to do.

So it's not hard for the language models to do that. So we have this new era of say, take my copy and rewrite it for a methodical.

And there's actually a Myers-Briggs signature that we use to indicate that. And the language model has no problem pretending to be somebody else.

So you can get very different kind of copy and begin to get an idea of the kind of the research mode that your visitors are coming in.

And that for me is fantastic. So maybe some of that priority will change a little bit, but there's something very human about the visual portion of a web page that we even have trouble getting past.

We've been working with clients for a long time and then they decide to do a redesign and we're like, yeah, we'll do this all with data.

And they just revert right back to how does it look, I don't think I would, I don't think I would use this page and it's, it's, it's areas.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Do you feel like Darth Vader, like “No! I thought we were on the same page. You've been working together for three months.”

How can you progress back to that? No, no, no, no. That's funny. Um, yeah, I get it. You know, it's funny because we, you know, this thing is so topical.

Ryan, this morning, just before this call, I got on and we were, I was approving the outline for landing page writing.

And so my comment back, the team was great outline, looks really strong. Remember that the headline is like absolutely vital, right? Like most of the messaging needs to be above the fold. You know, you need to support that message and recognize it. Very few people are going to slow it down and all that other crap you're working on.

So if you don't get that right, that's a real problem, right? And then we talked about making it punch and motivational for the particular place.

It's that. So we've got creative direction going into that. So, you know, everything you just talked about, you know, it's like, we've got to make sure we're thinking about the messaging over the form.

The form is important. The form in this particular landing page, we're talking about is based on telehealth and tele mental health in California.

So we talked about how can we, you know, give a nod to that without being too hard. So that all that creative is really important to get it up to the point where it's ready to test, right?

And to get that messaging strong. But that was the reminder to my team is like, that headline is everything. And I call the action is everything and support that.

It's got to be above the fold. You can't, you know, we talk about proof and all these other things that really matter.

And then coincidentally, this again, as part of my day, later on this afternoon, we're presenting to a company that had a consultant in the middle that wants a new website.

And they're in Texas and they're with the governmental entity. And in that case, you know, it's like, you know, likely we will see that the focus will be on the visual.

It's almost always on the visual.

And when we talk about, you know, does our website. cost a lot more than the ones they're getting loans for.

like, well, you're talking about somebody's doing design. They're not doing the writing. They're not thinking about SEO. They're not thinking about the program.

They're just designing to a template. So that's a little bit different. And it's not going to deliver the same results.

So these things happen every day in my world, just like it does world, right? understand the thing of, you know, how does this stuff put together.

So let's go back to, we've been dancing around it, but let's go back to the main topic today, which is reducing acquisition costs.

So I think that, you know, it's difficult on a call like this because, you know, we can do full, multiple webinars on this topic, all the different variables, but today we're more conversational.

We've talked about some of the things that could reduce or help you lower your acquisition costs. just back up, like all the stuff we just talked about, right?

Like the video play card, we talked about mistakes getting caught up in technology or not, you know, sending to pay off the ad.

There's a lot of things. But what other things can really reduce acquisition costs, know, in addition to what we've talked about anything else before we talk about about anything

I want to talk about some case studies in moment, but any other factors that you just feel like, you know, and again, the subsidy industries work with are very focused on acquisition costs.

And so, you know, like, that's a big lever, and they just don't think about the conversion rate optimization. So any other conversion levers that you just see tend to lower acquisition costs quickly.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

One of the things that is in our Playbooks that you should look at is making sure that you're selling the offer.

So, what we often see on landing pages is maybe the offer will be something higher up in the funnel.

Maybe it'll be a report, a checklist, something like that. And then you come to the landing page, and there's a form there, but the copy all talks about the company and its products, instead of saying like, oh, this is going to be a really helpful report.

It's so many pages. should be able to read it in so much time. It was written by these very well-qualified people.

Um, and you know, then you talk about the company like we've been doing this for 24 years and so we know our stuff So you're bringing the company in as more of a proof point than as um the point So, uh, I would definitely add to your idea list for trying things to like let's make sure that we're selling What it is this page is offering sell the offer.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Um, that is so that is so funny Brian. Sorry to interrupti you, but yesterday I had almost the same conversation.

the quick story back to the ERP company Work with right now. We were writing an e-book for them That was the strategy and the strategy included the creative for the e-book and the landing page And so I got landing page copy back and it wasn't about the e-book.

I could wait Hold on That wasn't the strategy and so it turned out the client wanted something more about the company And so at the end of the day we agreed about this actually happened yesterday Was like, okay, well, just give them this free landing page about the company But that's not what we need over here.

We need the landing page to be about the e-book and sell the e-book and for that case selling an e-book is easy, you know, like you're the expert here, but I'll just tell you my thoughts is like, you know, Maybe the visual of the book certainly the headline is pays it off a few bullet points of paragraph copy and the call to action and go, oh, it's not that But it may be a little bit of proof about the company and the credibility of who wrote it But yeah, it's not all about us.

It's like it's this resource or try to sell it So I think that's bizarre how timely that is literally these are conversations we're having today These are all really important points.

Um, let's talk about I love by the way, talking to you, talking to someone fun to compare notes And uh, I wish we had the time to do just what you do all day long because like you're playing in a really fun space Whereas like that's like it's it's creative.

It's analytical. It's like it all left brain right brain all of it comes together Uh, and oh by the way, do want to note also to some you just mentioned It's that intangible credibility of the site just looking good.

I don't want to say Website design It doesn't matter. We do awesome websites. We like to think and our clients are only think so too.

The design oftentimes seems like it's a subjective thing to me. I mean, certainly you want to think about eye Flow and where the calls to action are and you know, what's the all that stuff and that's on the user interface, user experience, all of that stuff.

But also beyond all that, or maybe in addition to that, or inclusive of that, is just the credibility factor.

Like, does this look like a legitimate company? And like, if it doesn't look like legitimate company, you're dead at the beginning.

So I'm guessing a lot of the clients you work with, don't see that very often, but we see that as well.

I saw that a couple days ago where it looked credible, but I looked little deeper and they're not so credible.

So it wasn't a really good fit for our agency. But that does matter.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Which feels like a bait and switch. So you spend your time on the visual part of the page and then you have copy that is just bland marketing speak.

It's … people feel like they've been duped. Like it's a bad brand experience.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, for sure.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

You could spend the visual, because visuals are, well, I don't want to insult designers, but it's pretty easy to have a credible visual design.

What's hard to do is get the visitor's eyes to the parts of your value proposition in the right order to manage scanners, are going to scan the page looking for something that is in the back of their mind.

And then images that advance the value proposition, these lifestyle images, I mean, lot of them do test well, but if you could put an image in there that advances your value proposition, you don't need to show that you have a diverse team, even though it's usually a stock photo and none of those people work for you.

Is the primary thing you need to communicate that you're not racist? Is that really the most important thing to communicate?

So it's 80% of your time. I'm on those sorts of things and you could make a whole lot more mistakes on the design if you've got this Scannable story Bringing someone through their learning on that on that page So let's talk about that for moment Because users have evolved over the years and I feel like myself.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

watched my attention span was already suspect But you know we're getting used to you know videos in six seconds And so what are you seeing is it is that the key thing?

I mean going back as far as I've been working this industry You know back in the old days. It was the more you tell the more you sell like when you're talking about direct mail like, you know Six pages no problem, you know today.

It's like the opposite Are you finding that that snackable copy is a critical success factor to being effective?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Snackable copy so you have to answer two questions at the top of the page very quickly And they this is when you'll have your lowest level of attention span number one.

You have to tell them that they're in the right place. So if I clicked on an ad that has a promise, I need to see a page that keeps that promise.

go to a home page, I have to hunt through the website to find out, find that promise. And then the second thing is give me a reason to keep reading this page.

So this is generally done in the hero area, a well-crafted headline that says you're in the right place. Actually, there's never been that well-crafted.

It just needs to match the ad or the email or the social media post or whatever brought them there.

And then something that makes them go, how are you gonna do that? Or that's counterintuitive to what I was thinking.

Like create a little cognitive dissonance. And then that makes me need to read more. And at that point, stuff has to follow.

And so the landing page copy kind of follows itself. And you do the, we're gonna make a claim. You're gonna say this is the feature that

delivers that. And here's the proof. And as you go through and handle each objection, the copy is going to be as long as it needs to be.

But if you've done this in an interesting way, it's going to get read or at least scanned.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So I have another question for you on, let's, you know, could talk for hours, obviously, but let's talk at the last couple of minutes here about, you know, reducing the cost per acquisition.

Like, give me a successful story or two, I hope it can be healthcare, but whatever.

like, we're really, all these other things, don't have to make a huge difference.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Well, I think, you know, going back to some of the work we did at the Addiction Treatment Centers, we, so we started optimizing on the, on the sites.

And so doing little things like, you know, if they're coming from I'm going to add for a particular, like, from Michigan, for the centers in Michigan, personalizing the landing page with some of the symbols.

We used to map of the Michigan area and found amazing wins. If you're optimizing for phone calls, we narrowed it down in the space to the places on the page that you need to show the phone number.

I think it was at the top and at 75% through the copy. these were fairly copy heavy landing pages.

But as we started doing that, they began to learn what language was working on the landing pages. they were like, we probably need to be doing this in the ads as well.

So we got drawn into helping to manage some of their ad groups. They gave us some, like, why don't you guys experiment with that?

And this is the brass ring. So you're handling both sides of that conversion rate fraction, the numerator and the denominator.

You're increasing the number of people that are converting and you're increasing the quality and quantity of people coming to the site.

And it is the brass ring. I think in that situation it was a real sign of freedom. We even considered like maybe we should get some people in here that will do ads and make them enslave them to the learning experience.

Completely different business models and I'm glad that there's folks like you that are handling that side of it. So I think that was, you know, that was for us really important.

And also the things we learned, we'll call them tricks, but I don't like to use that, especially in a scenario as sensitive and important as addiction treatment.

But for, you know, we could The rate of phone calls and if the number of form feels fell by a factor of three, you know, like a significant drop, it was still very positive.

higher close rates on the phone.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's awesome. Well Brian, it's always a pleasure talking to you. This has been fun and lightning and there's just so much here. I remember when I was first learning about paid digital and landing pages and all those things back in 2006.

So it was a developing industry. I'd go to PubCon or SCS, so it was different. And I would sit on sessions about landing pages every time.

I can't get enough of it. I just love the idea of whether it's going to the website or a standalone landing page and all the theory and all the best practices and it's something that, you know, we train to with our team.

We're always learning. We're always gathering new insights. And when we have the budget, we test a lot of times, and we didn't even talk about this.

you have a small budget, it's hard to test because you don't have data to test. And so you have to focus on one of the really big things and have a lot.

patience, but those best practices are helpful to everybody. So any final files before you wrap up here or any other final comments?

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

You know, I think it's interesting to mention kind of, well, so there's a black hat or a dark pattern side to conversion optimization that you can play.

can like leverage scarcity and leverage sunk cost fallacy. You can leverage urgency. And a lot of people seem to be very interested and worried about like, do we how do we use these psychological tricks to increase our conversion rates?

The challenge really is your own psychology. And it is that you're making decisions what goes on a website based on what you think is going to work based on things that haven't worked for you in the past or going to avoid those things.

And your audience may want the opposite, they may want the things that haven't worked for you in the past. And less of the things that you think are most effective. And so it's the whole point of conversion optimization and the scientific method in general is, how do I manage my own psychology?

And then you get a team involved. How do I manage my team's psychology and the complexities of the group?

That's where you should be focusing. And from your ads through to your landing experience, if you can get a handle on that, then you're going be delivering whatever your audience wants, whatever it shows it wants with its form fields and its wallets and… yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

I love it. Well, Brian, a pleasure always looking forward to working with you in the near future. I appreciate, you know, coming back. I love to have you back as kind of as often as you want to. good to have you back again today.

And Brian, just to plug yourself, you can link in to Brian Massey website you wanted to go to. I'll sign up for your newsletter or anything else you want to say.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Yeah, come to conversionsciences.com where we share all that we're learning and so there's plenty to read on blogs, there's some interesting lead magnets and we are holding a conference in April called Conversion Live and we're going to be feeding all of the learning into a language model ourselves so there will be an expert that you can go back and if you don't get to see all of the presentations you can go back and ask specific questions from the language model and jump right to that presentation, the place in that presentation that answers your question.

Get things summarized, it's going to be a very interesting way of consuming conference material.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

All right, very good. Brian, thanks again, I appreciate your time.

Brian Massey (Conversion Sciences)

Thank you.