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 Bonjour Millionaire, This series on driving m***** f****** revenue has the best open rates of the year. I knew you guys were a bunch of growth dogs. I knew it!!! 🐺🐺🐺 It’s website time. *CRACKS KNUCKLES* Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by AudioEye CRO-heads, you & I need to talk. ON THIS EPISODE OF GO-TO-MILLIONS  In 2022 I started writing about funnel hacking. Inserting proof. Kindly use the green, now offbrand, hyperlinks as a time-stamp.  Because the journey we deliver when we’re selling is never isolated within our ad account. It’s never the full picture. It’s amateur to think that it is. I know you don’t think that because as you know, you’re smart. I’ve made it my life’s work to ~optimize~ digital experiences. All of them. All of the touchpoints that my sweet customer could ever find themselves in. Revenue never bleeds from 1 place, but if you do know of any slip and you then let it slide, you have lowered the bar (and your team will see you lower that standard) so every single element is worthy of scrutiny. I’ll start with a personal story. Last year, I was meeting with my old paid team. I used to work at an agency where I lead every team and every person. 1 of my teams was the web design team. 1 of my teams was the CRO team. And, of course, 1 of my teams was the paid media team. I was talking to my paid team early in the morning. We were talking about 1 of our clients that had nosedived in performance. Fell off a fucking cliff if you will. My team of actual killers, smartest paid media people I know, THAT I HAD WORKED WITH FOR YEARS AND THAT I DIED FOR was going on and on about optimizations they were planning in the ad account. Usually, I would be happy. The problem was the brand was umm tied to a celebrity founder and the founder umm got cancelled to fucking hell and umm Reddit turned on her UMMMM!!!!! I go off mute and I calmly (I promise) say: “Excuse me, she’s cancelled. Did you guys forget that? I haven’t heard 1 suggestion about launching creatives without her likeness. I haven’t heard 1 suggestion about changing the homepage hero to remove her. I haven’t heard 1 mention of our ad comments and on the topic we are under attack there so what’s the plan?” Ouchie! Ari mad! No, don’t worry, Ari not mad. Ari done with 3rd person, though. I wasn’t mad but I was honestly disappointed. After all those years and all those brands we still didn’t realize that we can’t outrun public opinion and that our customer is getting hit on TikTok with a video going IN on this issue, then our ad serves in the next swipe without any change of approach? NO! That’s not common-sense. And, honestly, driving revenue is always, always supported by common sense. And, as luck would have it, website optimizations are also always, always supported by intuition. Act like your customer (put yourself in their shoes and see if your idea would make you more inclined to shop) and you will be rewarded. USING OUR BRAINSThere are some elements of web CRO that get a ton of attention (or a ton of tests). If you’re reading this, you probably are always stewing about thresholds and if you have 1-too-many-widgets-on-site-and-if-it’s-getting-annoying. And, there’s a category of CRO you might be forgetting about, because it doesn’t show up cleanly in our dashboards. It gets scattered around as miscellaneous drop-off points on the site. And so, it’s missed! And with that miss, revenue invisibly disappears. 🙁 INVISIBLE REVENUE LEAKSItem 1: Accessibility problems. I’m sorry, it’s a massive, massive thing and it’s not as sexy as literally any other website work LOL but it matters because it’s avoidable. And costly. Accessibility gaps are maybe the most invisible/dangerous of all drop-offs. That’s why I put it 1st. Maybe you're running an A/B test on your headline. But if both versions of the page on which this copy lives have broken form fields, missing alt text on the product image(s), or a checkout flow a screen reader can't navigate…you're measuring marginal (read: sub-optimal) performance on top of a structural problem. The marginal wins look like wins. The leak is invisible in your dashboard. Because you’re bleeding on both sides of this test and you’re not testing for what you can’t see. As you know growth dog, 43% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because of an accessibility issue. As you know growth dog, 81% have never came back. 1/4 US adults has a disability that affects how they use the internet. 25% of adults. That’s a massive TAM. So, we must pay attention and use the best tech available to us and fix these issues before we do the fun things. I’d rather get my screen-reader in check before I split-test a video vs. static asset on homepage. You see? And, you don’t want to get sued. We like revenue but we also are running full P&L’s and that’s not $ I prefer to see go out the door. Item 2: Too many popups! I’m sorry, again. I really, really understand why we fire as many popups as we do. We’re trying to get our point across. We’re trying to grow our lists. We’re trying to guide our customer. I do all of these things and I agree with all of these tricks. What I grapple with is are we being annoying? Is it agitating to shop our beautiful website? Is what we’re doing ~uncool~? Particularly on mobile. Like let’s say your customer base is aged 50+ and high-spending. Gorgeous. We love that base. You know what ages 50+ also have? Aside from hopefully multiple-houses and daughters and sons they want to gift? They have glasses. Poor eyesight. And clumsy thumbs. Do you think they take kindly to 4 popups that interrupt their shopping? Or, do you think that they land on your site from a paid social ad (that you paid for), got overwhelmed, and told themselves that they’ll just shop on their desktop when they’re home? Only to forget? My point here is maybe the invisible revenue leak isn’t if this popup or that popup performs better. Maybe the thing to do is on this landing page targeting our older persona, we serve no popups at all and auto-apply our offer. You like that??? I do, too. It feels like common-sense. Feels like we’re using our brains. I bet it’s net-positive and that you can capture their email in the checkout because they won’t uncheck your tick-box. You get what you want but you don’t annoy them. Item 3: Merchandising is messed up! 🆙🆙🆙 Pretty please go look at your best performing ads. Your top 8. Watch or read the content in the ad. 1 by 1. Then click through from each ad. 1 by 1. Is the product that the ad primarily focuses on the #1 item shown when you land them on your landing page? If the ad has a flavor of protein bar shown, when you click through on that ad that is SUCCEEDING, do you land on that variant as #1? No? Okay, there’s your change. Test it if you want. I’d just fix it for all. Because when I’m looking for the red sweater that I saw in the ad about the red sweater, I want to land on the red sweater. That’s how my brain works, anyways. 🐺 Sponsored by AudioEye If you read this far, I'm assuming you probably have a website.  I cleaned up my instagram (read: archived all of the pictures where I was doing the peace-sign or kissy face) and I found this caption of mine from 2017. It’s giving motivational speaker.  Yours, Ari | |||||||||
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