Most conversion optimization strategies are setting you up for failure.
They’ll tell you to test things like removing form fields or changing button colors.
You end up testing random elements – with random (or, let’s be real, non-existent) results. You spend a ton of time and money with nothing concrete to show for it.
And it ultimately leads you down a cycle of continuous testing with no real strategic insights to glean.
It’s what I call the Deadly Hamster Wheel of Optimization.
And it’s time to break that deadly wheel.
“I’m not going to stop the wheel, I’m going to break the wheel.” – Daenerys Targaryen (without the burning the world part!)
Here are the 7 deadly mistakes keeping you trapped on this hamster wheel of doom – and exactly how to break free (with results that actually last).
Table of Contents
7 mistakes that keep you stuck on the deadly hamster wheel in your conversion optimization strategies
Several mistakes in your conversion rate optimization process are keeping you stuck on that deadly hamster wheel.
Mistake #1: Optimizing tactically rather than strategically
Most CRO strategies aren’t really strategies. They’re just tactics.
For example, HubSpot’s top CRO strategy says to use text-based CTAs in blog posts instead of buttons:
(Image source: HubSpot)
Similarly, one of Shopify’s top recommended strategies is to run A/B tests like Fuel Made did with their checkout cart:
(Image source: Shopify)
While it’s possible (likely) that HubSpot and Shopify would have an intentional strategy behind all of this, the tips they’re suggesting are more tactical than strategic.
The problem with a tactical approach is that even if it brings results, you have no idea why – so you don’t really have any insights that will make a lasting impact on your marketing long-term.
Mistake #2: Relying on best practices
With conversion rate optimization strategies, it’s easy to fall back on “best practices.”
And “best practices” are good… as a baseline.
(So, if you’re just getting started, then definitely go and make sure your site is following best UX and design practices, BUT that’s not a strategy – it’s foundational.)
And “best practices” are rarely rooted in reliable data.
Marketing gurus often cite impressive-sounding data when promoting “best practices,” but the data can be misleading for several reasons:
- Their data may be true, but their approach may not yield the same results for you (your situation and your audience are unique)
- Their data may be true but may not tell the whole story (300% increase in signups! But in reality, the increase was from one signup to four…)
- Their data may be fabricated (an unfortunate but very real possibility)
And, as with a “tactical” approach (which usually goes hand-in-hand with a “best practice” approach), you’re not getting any actionable knowledge that you can apply in a strategic way to your marketing.
You want messaging that makes people nod along and say, “This is exactly what I need!” But best practices won’t get you there. They won’t tell you what’s the right messaging to use for your audience.
And what works for your audience is what’s important.
Mistake #3: Copying competitors
When businesses notice that the elements they’re testing aren’t working, they often turn to competitors for inspiration.
It’s natural, everyone does it.
Gravitating toward competitors can also help make people on your team feel “safe” with the direction you’re going. It’s less risky since your approach is already being used by others in the industry.
Although you may not mean to actually copy those competitors, it somehow turns out that way.
And what happens when you copy your competitors is that you end up sounding like everyone else. It gets to the point that if you’re honest, you could swap out the name of your product with any of your competitors, and you wouldn’t know the difference…
The AI craze is one example that we’ve brought up before in our B2B messaging guide…
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Sounding like everyone else means that prospects can’t differentiate you from your competitors, so they can’t make a buying decision.
Mistake #4: Speaking to everyone – and to no one
This mistake is often the result of following mistake #3 (copying your competitors) – and the deadly hamster wheel continues to spin.
Your messaging ends up trying to speak to everyone. But by speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one, because there’s nothing to make your messaging stand apart as a solution meant specifically for your audience.
There are a bazillion voices speaking into your audience’s lives. So when you don’t zero in on who you’re selling to, your message just ends up getting drowned out.
Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter, analyzed one of the biggest SaaS product categories (email marketing tools) and found that “only 25% have some sort of differentiation or niche focus.”
He concludes that “75% of email marketing tools are plagued by sameness: the combined effect of being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding, and indistinct in their communication.” These tools highlighted similar features, used all-inclusive messaging (“Perfect for small businesses, agencies, eCommerce, and enterprises”), and relied on buzzwords.
You might be saying, “But Talia, won’t I turn people off if I’m too specific with my messaging?”
No, and here’s why: by not being specific, you’re turning off people who would actually be your true customers. Maybe generic messaging brings in some people that you wouldn’t otherwise bring in, but these people aren’t your best-fit customers, and they can be more likely to switch and churn than your best-fit customers.
Meanwhile, the customers who would be a great fit for your product don’t know they would be a great fit because your messaging is too broad.
In fact, being specific and speaking only to Teamwork.com’s best fit customers (client-facing teams) is what generated great results during our A/B tests. Directly calling out IT services, agencies and consulting services on their Homepage, Product pages, Solution pages, Pricing and even their main site’s navigation is what clearly shows their ICP this software was built for them (get the full case study over here).
If you’re not showcasing that you solve a specific problem for a specific audience, your audience may not know that your solution is what’s right for them.
Mistake #5: Overcomplicating your messaging
A natural consequence of trying to speak to everyone is that your messaging becomes convoluted.
Here’s another AI-related example:
The language they use may be what they’ve found really resonates with their enterprise audience… But they’re using many complicated words to describe simple concepts.
- Using the term ““AI voice “infrastructure” – instead of simply saying: software/API
- Saying “Build audio experiences” instead of “AI voiceover”
When things get technical, we lean on what we know (our features and technology). You start using jargon, complicated explanations, and elaborate page layouts that don’t make sense to your visitors.
What it usually looks like:
- A section about how your product is the “best <fill in the blank>”
- Then, a list of all your features
- Followed by some disconnected and generic testimonials
- A section about customer support
- Concluding with a friction-filled “STRAT TRIAL NOW and REQUEST A DEMO” CTAs
Your best messages get buried because you don’t understand what your customers actually care about or how to describe the solution. You haven’t zoned in on what’s truly important to them, so you’re not communicating real value.
When Strata Identity hired us to optimize their website and campaigns, they wanted to make sure they appealed to the right buyers and reflected who they were and why they should choose them over competitors. From the get-go it was clear that they had an excellent Identity Access Management (IAM) software and an amazing team devoted to meeting customers’ needs.
However, the sheer technicality of the product made it difficult for users to understand precisely how Strata could solve their specific problems.
Our research led us to identify the missing emotional piece in their messaging around being the identity hero of your company: the hero that reduces tech debt and modernizes non-standard apps without accepting risks. With this insight we were able to bring their most important message to the center of everything we optimized (the Homepage, recipes, emails and ads), and ensure their most important message doesn’t get buried.
Mistake #6: Relying on tools and software
When all of the above mistakes bring about little results, the deadly hamster wheel then rolls into a stage of turning to tools and software to help solve the problem.
The web is filled with advice about tools and technology, so leaning into the optimization tools everyone else uses feels like it’s the missing piece in the puzzle. If you only have the right tool, things will be much easier, and results will be easier obtained:
- Segmentation
- AI
- A/B testing platforms
- CRO mapping
These kinds of solutions can be helpful. They provide some interesting insights that can inform your conversion optimization efforts.
But they cost money. They take time to set up. And… you still need to use them strategically.
Once you’ve invested in a tool and set it up, you’re ready to start using it…
…but what should you test? Without an optimization strategy, those shiny tools can do a lot, but you end up testing random stuff.
Mistake #7: Testing random stuff
This is the inevitable result of moving forward with conversion optimization without a solid strategy.
You end up doing random things like this:
Button color tests, image placement, a headline here or there, removing a form field (random A/B test, anyone?) – Without critical business and customer questions to guide your testing, you’re back at the beginning of the hamster wheel.
…aaaaand all of that means you’re still getting minimal (if any) results.
Here’s a video explaining more about why some of these tactics don’t work:
So, what’s the solution to the hamster wheel problem?
Doing CRO strategically.
How to break that darn wheel with strategic CRO
To step off the hamster wheel, you need a repeatable process that’s rooted in 3 strategic steps:
- Conducting meaningful research
- Doing an emotional targeting audit
- Running meaningful tests
These are the steps in the Emotional Targeting Framework ™ we developed and use at Getuplift, and it’s helped us optimize thousands of customer journeys.
The reason it works so well is because it’s based on one important fact: The root to every conversion is a decision.
If you can understand what influences your own customers’ decisions and what they REALLY care about when making a buying decision, you can optimize your customer journey to include the information they care about and help them choose the right product for them.
#1 Conducting meaningful research
Your first step is conducting customer research that seeks to get to the heart of the emotions behind your customers’ decisions.
Why emotion?
As psychology and neuroscience professor Antonio Damasio determined in his studies, “We’re not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”
In other words, you should really really care how your customers feel.
Conversion optimization isn’t about changing elements on a page. It’s about solving people’s problems. And since all people are humans (not robots), emotional targeting is what taps into your audience’s pain points and desires so that you can achieve meaningful results in your B2B (or B2C) optimization.
Amanda Natividad of SparkToro put it this way:
A lot of B2B companies have a hard time here.
You may have a lot of data on your audience, but if you’re asking questions like, “What’s your favorite feature?” – you won’t get real insights into how your customers are feeling. Those kinds of questions are great for pricing tests and product feature mapping but not for CRO. They won’t tell you anything about what is actually driving your customers’ decisions.
The goal is to figure out the answers to your most important questions, what are the biggest pains and challenges your prospects face daily (that drive them to look for a solution), and how they want to feel after finding a solution.
Whether you’re…
…make it your mission to understand your customers on a deep emotional level.
#2 Run an emotional targeting audit
Review the pages that you’re trying to optimize. Evaluate how they’re doing when it comes to addressing the kinds of concerns that truly speak to your audience on an emotional level.
Do these pages answer the deeper questions your audience may have, such as:
- “Will this product help me advance my career?”
- “Will this product help me feel more confident?”
- “Will this product make me a better <fill in the blank>?”
The actual questions you want your pages to answer will depend on what your customer research reveals about what’s meaningful to your audience. If you’ve done thorough audience research, the right questions will be clear to you.
When you know your customers’ pains, challenges, and problems, you’ll immediately be able to identify where your assets are falling short.
You may find that your page is filled with stories or features that your audience doesn’t care about.
It comes down to…
Does each page or piece of the customer journey help make your audience see themselves? Or is it about the solution?
#3 Run meaningful tests
After you’ve conducted some deep customer research to really understand your audience’s emotions and once you’ve done an emotional targeting audit…
You’re ready to run strategic tests.
This won’t be testing random elements – instead, you’ll run meaningful experiments that provide deep customer insights.
These tests will prioritize answering critical business questions. And the insights you glean from these tests can be aligned across all different facets of your business, from marketing to sales to product.
It’s the difference between tactical conversion optimization and strategic conversion optimization. Instead of asking, “What can we test next?” – you’re asking, “What can we learn from these tests that can inform our overall marketing strategies?”
What does meaningful testing look like in action?
We worked with Upright, a brilliant device designed to help improve your posture and eliminate back pain to increase their conversions and ran dozens of tests together.
The variations we A/B tested focused on the hidden pains and challenges Upright’s best customers dealt with daily:
Long hours of sitting in front of a screen resulting in back, shoulders and knee pain at the end of each day. Every morning the audience would start their day deciding to work on their posture and fix it – but as the day progressed, they did what most people did – they forgot and were simply unable to prioritize it.
By acknowledging their feelings of guilt and relieving them of that guilt, we were able to show prospects that this product was created with them specifically in mind. We included specific social proof from people who felt exactly like them before using Upright, we called out their guilt and promised to take that burden away from them AND we highlighted the number of people just like them who’ve eliminated back pain (without needing to do much other than place Upright on their back).
These changes resulted in:
- 33.69% increase in transactions and a 25% increase in revenue on the Homepage
- 27% increase in transactions on the Product page,
- 9% increase in transactions on the Category page
- And much more in their paid campaigns, email sequences and checkout flow.
Beyond the hamster wheel: Emotion-driven conversion strategies that actually work
The tactical way of conversion rate optimization is to:
- Decide you want to increase conversions on X page
- Come up with a list of changes that could optimize the page based on best practices and guesswork
- Launch your experiment
- Determine whether the experiment failed or succeeded based on whether it increased conversions or not
But that approach doesn’t provide the insight you need. (Let’s be honest, has it EVER?) It just puts you on that never-ending hamster wheel of ineffective guessing and testing random stuff. And you deserve better than that.
Your GROWTH deserves better.
The new way (the emotional targeting way) is this:
- Conduct meaningful research
- Do an emotional targeting audit
- Run meaningful tests based on deep insights
- Learn from every experiment you run whether it increases conversions or not
Break the deadly hamster wheel of optimization by focusing on understanding your customers on a deeper level and solving their problems with your experiments.
If you’re ready to get off that deadly hamster wheel for good… my upcoming book dives deep into emotional targeting (and goes WAY beyond what I’ve shared here). It’s your complete guide to stop testing random stuff and start understanding what ACTUALLY drives your customers’ decisions.