My fourth week in the CXL Institute Mini Degree of Conversion Rate Optimization CRO — A Review

Finally, I managed to finish the second course in the “Introduction” set of courses in my Conversion Optimization mini degree over at CXL Institute.

Here’s a small review of what I learned in this past week.

Lesson on Homepage Conversion Basics

In this lesson, we examine different home page examples and find what works for them and why. Most of the actual content on home page optimization is on a supplemental reading blog on the CXL website (written by Peep himself). So this particular lesson covers the basics only.

The examples used in this lesson are simple and easy to understand. I was expecting this lesson to be big with a lot of heuristics but it was much more subdued with a focus on some common sense conversion concepts, most of which I already knew. Still, it was good to get a revision of these concepts!

To optimize the homepage for conversions, it’s important to understand what role the homepage plays in your funnel.

Lesson on Pricing and Pricing Plans

This was a long lesson and I picked it up last. And it was the most comprehensive lessons in this long, LONG course.

In true Peep Laja fashion, this was all about examples and studies.

On the pricing page, as conversion optimizers, our job is to reduce friction and decision fatigue so as to minimize the loss of people who are interested in buying our product/service.

Sometimes, even the actual pricing point is subject to optimization testing. This was a new, interesting part of the learning.

Here are some highlights from this lesson:

• Pricing page designers will have different priorities depending on how the product/service is priced. While they all may look similar, each pricing plan has to be tailored according to the product/service, positioning of the company, the path the viewer took to reach the pricing page, and the currency/market they are from. Other factors may also come into consideration.
• If you don’t know what to charge, asking your customers how much they would pay for it is a really bad idea. I liked this tip the best. After, we are learning about conversion optimization for businesses, not charities. This section warns against asking the customers to decide the price because thinking about opening the wallet is much easier than actually opening the wallet and paying for something.

What can we test on the pricing page?

The pricing page is a goldmine of testing insights. There are so many things we can test on this page. Here are probable options:

• Multiple packages vs a single package: Here we learn that when you have multiple packages, you’ll give people more options to consider. This was really easy to understand because it was obvious.
• Decoy features: Here, they talked about an experiment in the travel domain where people had to choose between packages. Based on this experiment, people will always gravitate toward the “no-brainer” option. You have reduced their decision fatigue and made it happen.
• Dramatic pricing contrast principle: Here, Peep has introduced us to an interesting experiment where if we put our hands in water at dramatically lower & dramatically higher temperatures separately, both hands will feel differently when they are inserted into lukewarm water. This is called anchoring and adjustment in psychology.
• Decoy features + dramatic pricing contrast principle: How to best use psychology-principles to guide our design efforts and help users select a commonly-purchased plan.

Testing the price itself

When the product is marketed along with a price tag or is marketed as the lowest in its category, we cannot test prices.

But testing prices is absolutely possible with eCommerce products. The need for this was explained with an example. We learned that we could find a price that fetches the most revenue from among all our options.

Is revealing the price necessary?

This is a genuine question and a lot of B2B service/customized product companies will have this doubt. With a realistic example in this section, Peep explains how showing prices is necessary.

If you don’t show the price and a competitor of yours does, the lead could very well go to your competitor because they didn’t cause fatigue in the visitor’s buying process.

In this lesson, Peep also talks about some ways to display approximate pricing so you can give your audiences an estimate and reduce their anxieties around the affordability of your product/service.

Designing the display of pricing plans

This part of the lesson talks about the best ways to visually attune the design of the pricing plan table to the state of the user’s mind on the pricing page.

Everything on this page should help them make a decision. Nothing in here should give them an excuse to not move forward.

Lesson on Ecommerce Cart Pages

The goal of optimizing Ecommerce cart pages to improve the conversion rate as much as we can or simply prevent drop-offs.

There are several positive design heuristics to ensure that.

• I learned the right sequence of asking for shipping information and billing information
• They also taught about the most aesthetically pleasing design to accept payment/card details.
• The basics of security assurances on this page were also clearly explained
• The basics of how to store card information and provide options to let users edit them were also clarified

The goal of all these steps is to ensure that any reservations about payments are assuaged and the payment/checkout process does not end up like a thorn in the rose that was their shopping experience.

Lesson on AQs on Websites

If you answer all questions through smart design choices and smart copy, there would be no need for FAQ on the website.

This lesson does not provide more information about how to implement an FAQ. It would be nice to have a clean strategy to use them when we need them. The example they used was a negative example i.e. we were told not to do FAQs like this. I thought that it was a great way to do FAQs that could potentially lead to higher conversions.

Unfortunately, there were no stats on FAQs or the right way of doing FAQs that affect conversions positively. So I came through this particular section a little dissatisfied.

Where do we go from here?

This was a really long course and it was fully in the text; there was no video. As you might read in my previous weeks’ reviews on my blog, this is not an ideal situation to be learning such a large course from. But I somehow persisted.

Wait for my 5th week’s review. I am hitting some small courses and I should be able to finish more of them and pick up some learning pace.