Flynn Zaiger
Can you please briefly explain what traditional conversion rate optimization, CRO, is for our listeners and how it differs from disruptive CRO strategies?

Kanika Misra
Absolutely. So disruptive CRO is something that we’ve kind of coined within my team and our organization. So I’m going to save that for kind of the second explanation. And I’ll start with what traditional CRO is. Traditional CRO, probably better known just as CRO, is the process of making iterative changes that are typically really founded in design UX, UI development. And they’re iterative, very isolated tests.

that are meant to uncover or unlock opportunities that might be causing not as many people to convert as they could be. So examples, maybe for a SaaS company. A SaaS company, maybe there’s an experiment you could run where you are changing the fields of the information that you’re collecting. Maybe you collected six pieces of information and you say, you know what?

maybe we can get away with three of them, and maybe we can cut it down, and we can form the design of this box, submit form in a different way that really gets people to convert and trust us more, and they feel happier because it’s a faster process. Great, so that is an example of like a SAS conversion rate optimization test. And what you would do in that case, or what the company would do is they’d split traffic. So 50% of people that would hit that page where that signup form is.

50% would see the old version that has those six fields and whatever that old design is. And then 50% of the people would see the new version that maybe has those condensed fields and the new design that could look sleeker or could just help them feel like this is a fast, easy process. So that is traditional CRO. And the rest of the page, however it is, that remains the same. All you’re doing is really testing the impact of that isolated change. For e-commerce, for example,

I’ll give another example in another space, just in case that doesn’t make sense to folks who are not doing any lead gen. So for e-commerce, maybe you are selling supplements, for example. A lot of people are selling supplements these days. And instead of just having your standard drop-down, where you can maybe select one, I want one bottle, I want two bottles, I want five bottles, whatever it is, maybe instead you’re going to display three options in front of everybody and there’s a one bottle option and then there’s a three bottle option in the middle in its own little box and then there’s a six bottle option in its own little box. So people can kind of compare and they see, okay, one bottle, three bottles, six bottles, maybe there’s some discounts, great. So you’re really testing to see, rather than giving everyone the option to have a free for all and choose whatever they want from our dropdown, we’re going to instead design this in a way to show them one bottle, three bottles, six bottles, cool.

then same process, right? 50% of the people see the first one, 50% of people see the second one. You are keeping the rest of the page exactly the same. Okay, what won? What didn’t win? In best case scenarios, your new version that you tested and either one, it wins. And maybe you’re gonna see on average a lift of two to 5%. And that’s big, right? For a lot of companies and especially bigger companies, two to 5%, that’s awesome. And as you…

look at that month over month over the next year, that’s gonna be a lot of people, right? And you can do easy math if we say out of 100 people and say you got 20 to convert and you get a 5% improvement, I think that’s like two, so that’s like 22 people. But hey, maybe they make you $1,000 each. So cool, that’s another $2,000 that you got from pretty simple test, right? That is traditional CRO, that is, or just CRO as a whole.

I think that’s awesome and I have no qualms with traditional CRO. But I do believe that there is a way better way to conduct testing for the vast majority of companies and brands that are under, frankly, under 10 figures. And I know that’s a bold statement because that’s a lot of companies and brands. That being said, the biggest issue I see with

Again, traditional CRO. I’m just going to keep saying traditional CRO, even though that’s just CRO. But the biggest issue I see with traditional CRO is I am not convinced that a dropdown versus three boxes or two more informational fields versus six informational fields, whatever, that is not going to be the main decision driver for the vast majority of perspective clients or customers. That isolated design or development change is not going to take somebody who is thinking, I don’t really know. This might not be right for me to, heck yeah, I’m in, right? Like that’s not gonna do it. It’s gonna take the people that are like, hmm, I’m a little bit confused or this seems a little bit too long. All right, now it’s easier, right? It’s gonna take that percentage of people over the edge, but it’s not gonna take that vast majority who just…

wasn’t convinced in the first place. And so our belief and why we’ve kind of created this new methodology of CRO is the entire experience matters. So every section, every element is telling a whole story and the pieces that come before matter as much as the pieces come after. And you’ve got to put them all together to really change the experience and to really change people’s minds and motivate them to do what you want them to do.

with what we have now called disruptive CRO, we are doing full page testing, which means that we are testing a combination of copy, design, sometimes development and features and functionality all at the same time. So that when people hit this key page, whatever this core page might be that gets them to convert, they’re actually experiencing something very different. They’re getting communicated with in a very different way. So you’re not only hitting on

maybe functionality, but you’re actually hitting on user values and the psychology of decision making and actual, you know, the benefits, I guess is a good way to say it. And with that, when these tests win, because these experiences are so vastly different versus these isolated little elements, when these tests win, you’re looking at 10, 15% improvements rather than 2 to 5% improvements.

So it’s double digit wins because you’re really trying something new. So we’re big believers that big swings equal big results and fortune favors the bold. So that is where we focus and why we believe that most brands who most brands or companies who are under 10 figures, if they aren’t fully confident and they have not exhausted testing on what their users and their customers care the most about, how they need to display that information and what they need to focus on in different hierarchies or different journeys, then that’s a way bigger opportunity than focusing on little elements of the page and functionality.

Flynn Zaiger
Awesome. That’s a great introduction. I just had a couple of follow-up on so many of the things that you talked about. I think the big thing that I am curious and I’ll just go with scared of is that a lot of the reason we think of traditional CRO is that you change one element, you know that that’s the element that was the difference. Forms to drop down is a sixth field instead of a seventh.

Separating first name to last name to the same thing has always been the thing that’s like, oh, yeah That’s gonna really affect whether people add an item to cart or not. I know that we always test for that and If you’re making such a big change to the website, how do you? Know which one of the hundreds of changes you’re likely making is really benefiting it or do you feel that it’s just such a Big shift that it doesn’t matter these smaller options

Kanika Misra
I love that question and that’s the number one question that I get asked from smart people who think about this. And it’s a good question. There’s a number of people that we speak to and I explain our methodology and they kind of ask the question and then they answer it themselves and they say, well, I don’t really care actually what made the change. I disagree. I think you should care. And I think you should care more with the way that we approach it about what made the change than you would maybe drop down versus a buy box because realistically, that tells you nothing about your users, right? So if we were just doing these isolated tests, I probably wouldn’t really care what made the difference because a dropdown versus a buy box, or squares, whatever, that tells me nothing. I can’t go and use that in my marketing efforts. I can’t use that in my emails. I can’t use that with my customer support. I just know, cool, they like that better. When it comes to our methodology, where we are making a dozen plus changes at a time, the number one way that we’re able to isolate it,

While it’s not as granularly accurate, we can get very accurate because we layer data sources. So we layer click maps and heat maps. We layer data segmentation, so we’re able to create different segments, see who’s doing what. But most importantly, we spend a stupid amount of time on video recordings. Because video recordings is that bridge between quantitative numbers and metrics and clicks and the heat maps and, OK, what’s actually happening?

Right? What is the reason that maybe they’re clicking here? Are they hesitating? Are they lingering? Are they scrolling up and down? You can’t see that stuff on just click maps. You can’t get that from just looking at numbers. But if you’re spending a lot of time observing screen recordings, watching what people are doing, figuring out what the patterns are to make sure that they are repeated and something to actually consider, then you actually get a whole picture.

Is it as accurate as one change, you know, one, this is the causation for sure? No, but is it very, very close as a directional, you know, idea? Yeah, 100%. And what we found, that’s how we optimize. Okay, great. We know that people are doing this. We know that no one’s paying attention to this. We know that this is confusing. Okay, we need to now update based on those behaviors. And most of the time that works very well.

Eliza Fillo
And you said most of the time, so that kind of leads me to a follow-up. And you mentioned these potential for 10 to 15% gains, and that sounds awesome. But are your clients ever hesitant or nervous about potentially a 10 to 15% drop when they make these changes?

Kanika Misra
100%. And that’s one of those things that there is an element of risk, I don’t know, comfortability that comes with this. And if you’re afraid, then I do think that sometimes traditional CRO is a better route, or at the very least, you can try it and how we typically approach it when partners say, ah, you know, I’m a little bit nervous about making so many changes. I get it.

You might not know us, you don’t know how this methodology works. This is brand new. You’ve never heard about it. I get it. And if that’s the case, instead of maybe starting with your top three or four highly trafficked pages, start with maybe number six or seven, right? Start a little bit further down the list. Because then you know that you’re not going to throw off the entire ecosystem of your business. You can keep it a little bit more controlled. You can see how it works.

you can kind of dip your toes in the water rather than diving in head first. And then if that goes well, or if you feel at least comfortable with the process, then great, you’re gonna be ready to do these on higher impact pages. But I think there’s always an element where you can’t expect to get double-digit wins without some element of risk. And there’s a point where you gotta at least get yourself comfortable with it, or if you’re not comfortable with it, traditional CRO is a good route, right? It can do it, but…

If you’re not comfortable with taking the big risk early, then be okay with smaller risks that take much longer.

Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think my personal pet peeve are business owners who say, I’m willing to invest more once there’s no risk. And it’s like, well, brilliant idea, but you have to, there’s always a risk if you’re trying to win big.

Kanika Misra
There’s a reason that all of us are not sitting on our yachts right now and we’re sitting here talking about marketing. And it’s because it’s not that easy.

Flynn Zaiger
Hahaha!

Eliza Fillo
Thank you. I’m going to go ahead and turn it off.

Flynn Zaiger
You never know, Eliza has that blank background. This could be inside a yacht, and she’s just trying not to show off.

Eliza Fillo
I know.

Kanika Misra
Yeah. She’s in the middle of the Pacific right now. Tropical times.

Eliza Fillo
Yes. My Wi-Fi goes out. It’s just that.

Flynn Zaiger
I’m sorry.

Kanika Misra
Sorry, my bad.

Eliza Fillo
Yeah. And I think you, you make such a good point. And as someone who works in Google ads, I experienced this a lot in a different way that there’s so many levers that I can pull. And I don’t always know, and I probably shouldn’t say this on the air, but I don’t always know how it’ll work. I can say in my experience, this is work time and time again, there is always the risk, but there’s also the opportunity for potential expansion. That’s really successful.

Kanika Misra
Eliza, I would be more concerned if you said that you know exactly what to do at all times, right? Like, again, you’d be sitting on your yacht, like, for sure, and you wouldn’t have to have this white background pretending that you’re not. But realistically, that’s how business works. That’s how marketing works. We, you work with the people who have experience and you work with people who have seen the problems and solve the problems that you have. But you’re never going to get somebody that can 100 percent guarantee that they can make something work. And nine times out of 10, if you speak to those people that say they can, they’re full of shit, sorry, in some way or the other, right? Like whether they are going to change the narrative and change the data in a way that supports what they’re saying, that’s very doable, unfortunately. It’s sad, but data can be manipulated. Or they’re going to use shady tactics to get you what you want, which are gonna bite you in the butt long term, or they’re going to really bank off of the fact that it’s really difficult as humans to ask for your money back, for example. Those are typically the three scenarios that you see playing out when people say, I guarantee you that I know exactly what to do to solve this problem. Business is hard. We’d all, entrepreneurship isn’t something that most people choose for a reason.

Most people choose for a reason. And certainly doing performance marketing is something that a lot of people burn out of very quickly for a very good reason.

Flynn Zaiger
Absolutely.

Eliza Fillo
Yeah. Well, I kind of want to take a step back to more of a 1,000 foot view here. And I want to hear from you how you got into disruptive CRO as opposed to traditional and how you started your company.

Kanika Misra
Yeah, absolutely. So disruptive CRO is again, something that we kind of just ended up making up over time. And it was a process of trying new things and trying big swings, but to back it up and how I even got into CRO in the first place, which then turned into the evolution of disruptive CRO. I was in-house in VC backed startups for the first seven years of my career. So I actually started in the SaaS space where everything is always high growth.

You had to do what you could to make very, very large percentage wins month over month. And there’s a point where I took over all user acquisition for one of the companies I was at, and I had to go in front of the board. And then the board every month would say, okay, Conica, cool. You know, we hit our goals or we met our goals. Great. But now we’re going to raise those goals. We’re not going to give you more hires. We’re not going to give you more budget. You got to figure it out.

And so at that point, I was more on what I call like front end performance marketing, similar similarly to Uliza. So, you know, paid ads, I was mostly on meta. So I was a media buyer, very familiar with, you know, the paid media landscape, but also email content, affiliate partnerships, you know, a lot of good stuff. And what I realized was, no matter what I did in any of those channels, if I wasn’t getting more money,

If I wasn’t getting more people to do more stuff, then the only way to be able to hit those goals would be to become more efficient with every dollar I spend and every person I get to the site, or to the landing pages in that case. And so how do you become more efficient is just by making that experience better. Make sure that for every 100 people I drive, instead of getting 5% of them to do what I want, I need to get 6% of them, 7% of them, 10% of them to do what I want. And…

This was like 10 years ago now. And Optimizely is a CRO platform that is now enterprise level. But it used to be small business focused. And coming from SAS also means that you have a little bit more resources at your disposal. So leadership at the time basically said, OK, Conica, grab the engineers that you need, grab the product people you need, take your marketing team and do what you need with Optimizely. OK, cool.

I had no idea really what I was doing, but again, I had my background in that performance, previous background behind that, more in like copywriting and direct response. And so I said, okay, well, let’s look at all these flows. Let’s look at where we’re sending people. Let’s look at their experience. And I quickly realized we’re asking for a lot. Our signup process was a seven step form that was asking for pretty private information from an audience that it was mostly military folks, so both current service, active duty and veterans.

So folks who are not only inherently, I would say sometimes, more inclined to be private, but trained to also be a little bit more private. And so we’re asking for seven points of information, things like, what’s your security clearance? And we’re not really giving them that much in return, right? We’re not really saying, hey, this is super worth you giving us this info because of X, Y, and Z. And we’re not really having this huge pros list.

versus the cons list. I always think about conversion in that way, right? Like in order to get somebody to convert, the reasons why, the value list that you give has to be way longer than the reasons why they would hesitate. And we weren’t really doing that. And so taking a step back, I said, okay, great. Now we have this team of developers who can do crazy things. We have our designers and we have us, you know, being able to write copy and kind of strategize. And it turned into kind of like a team thing where I would basically break up everybody and say, okay, you come up with an idea, you come up with an idea, blah, blah.

So we’d have kind of our leaderboard. And so every couple of weeks, we’d run these testing sprints and it was incredible what happened, right? Like when you have a lot of smart people in a room together and they understand all of the objectives and they understand all the tools that you have to play with and you can run these tests that quickly, oh my God. So suddenly we’re seeing our cost of acquisition like drop in half and we’re seeing, you know, the ability to scale and I still have my same budget that I’ve always had, but oops.

Look at that, we’re now converting 20, 30, 40% more people. So that’s really what got me into it. I was an athlete for most of my previous life. I’m now an ARP, but I just love to compete. And so paid ads was awesome for me. It was very fun. You get to go in there every day and try to see what you can do. But CRO was even better because then you’re, especially the way that we set it up, you’re competing against your team, you’re competing against your colleagues.

But it allows you to really hone in on both that really nerdy kind of analytical side while balancing that with a more creative and copy design side of things. So I fell in love. I then joined another company. It was a fintech and very similar. I was their head of growth and we hit a point where our cost of acquisition was good, but it was not going to be scalable. It was like a banking company. So I was getting people’s social security numbers cold off the internet, which was wild. And yeah, I can do that for you if you need it though. Don’t worry. And, you know, cost of acquisition there was like 300 bucks, which isn’t bad. I think we ended up getting it down to like 215. So you think about your credit card and, you know, they’ll send you an offer now and then, sign up your friend, you know, use your referral link. We’ll give you 200 bucks, 300 bucks.

So it was kind of like at par, maybe a little under what they were getting for themselves. Cool. Nothing that was going to help us as a VC-backed company, because we would have to raise a billion dollars to scale at that level. And so the question became, OK, we’ve got to do this again. How do we become more efficient with it? Because $200, no way. And again, coming from a SaaS, you have a little bit more in terms of resources. And so grabbed some of the smartest developers I’ve ever met.

On our team and we had designer, we had my team and same thing. I said, okay, this worked before, let’s try this again. And that was even crazier. We ended up seeing our cost of acquisition as we put together these different flows. And very counterintuitively, we actually made our flows longer. And we use different design elements to really create trust because we’re asking you for, I don’t know what I think is the most sensitive information that a random form on the internet can ask me for. And we’re asking you for that.

So using copy and design elements to really create that trust. And again, just make it really worth it for them. So if you give us your social, we’re going to give you all this stuff. And that’s going to be worth it for you, no matter what else happens, no matter what else you’re scared of. And for that one, after a few months of testing really frequently, we got that cost of acquisition down to $30. And that was crazy for me to see. And Amex, if you’re listening.

Call me. Yes, I will do it for you. Yes, I will charge a lot. But after that, it was kind of like, okay, this is wild. You can make such an impact. There’s only so much you can do and control on the demand gen side of things that you really need to take better control in between that gray area, between when they click and when they actually convert. And that solidified it for me.

I started consulting and contracting a little bit while I was there, started dipping into other spaces. So that’s when I first got introduced to e-commerce as well and just wondered, does this work? Does this work for other types of companies? And the answer was yes. So I started testing it out and it was just the fact that SaaS has a lot of money. VC backed SaaS has a lot of really smart people that go into it. And it was, I just got lucky, frankly. I just got lucky to be in those positions where I was just exposed.

to those people and these resources and the opportunities to try this stuff out. And did that for a few more years and then started BedaBeda Growth in 2019. And that’s where we focus fully now. So we work with Ecom and SAS and just do CRO only. We do offer, you’ll be surprised to hear, we do offer traditional CRO because there are people, believe it or not, who are very scared.

And I get it. And that’s why I’m not against traditional CRO. I just don’t think it is the best option for most people. So we do offer that. Very few of our clients take that route because obvious reasons. But especially as we got moving more in the e-commerce space and as I realized that margins for e-commerce are real small compared to SaaS. Like a SaaS.

their margins are 80% plus typically. E-commerce margins, oh yeah, exactly, exactly. And the stickiness can often be a lot better than physical products, which can be commoditized, I think a lot faster. But then there’s E-com, where depending on who’s running it, depending on what the space is, depending on various elements that continuously change, margins are 10 to 30%. And with that realization, waiting 12 months to get, you know, let’s say 50% of your tests win, right? And they’re two to five percent improvement. So let’s say they’re five percent improvements. So let’s say you get 10 wins. So 10 wins over a year. Okay, that’s 50% in 12 months. Like, you’re not going to be angry about that whatsoever. That’s pretty, that’s pretty badass. But what if you could get 50% improvement in five months?

that’s gonna change the projection of your business in a lot of other ways, right? Gets you your cash faster, which is much more important for e-commerce than SaaS. And then, depending on your business and your goals, and if you’re bootstrapped or you’re VC backed, sometimes speed and inefficiency in the near term is extra important. So it really just, there’s a lot of factors that come into it, but I think it’s risk appetite, to your point, Eliza, for sure, ability to consider the long-term and the short-term, and just your appetite for growth. If you’re a slow growth company and you’re cool with two to 5% improvements over time, then traditional CROs, it’s great. It’s a good way to go. I’m just not one of those people, right? I’m not one of those people that slows down significantly when there’s a clear path to to speeding up and reaping those benefits.

Eliza Fillo
Hmm. You mentioned building trust through design, which I guess I just never thought about it like that or phrased it like that, that the design or the copy, like you said, can build trust. Can you talk more about that and ways that you want to give all your secrets away?

Kanika Misra
Yeah, for sure. There’s not secrets. I mean, it’s very individual, right? It really depends on the company or the product. But, you know, in that example with the banking space, sometimes it was as simple as one, just making sure nothing looks sketchy, right? And like, that’s pretty simple. But two, it’s like having icons that are showing, you know, like little locks and that type of thing. Like, it sounds so basic, but those are those little things that can actually make somebody think, oh.

Cool, it’s secure. I was wondering about it and there’s nothing that was just in my face telling me it’s secure, but okay, cool, it’s this little thing. Or the way that you phrase copy as well can make a really big difference where, especially in the US, if you’re doing banking and most of your audience is gonna be natively English speaking, you wanna, if you have the opportunity, which is hard sometimes in the financial space, but if you have the opportunity to communicate in a way that kind of proves that you are a US-based company, do that. If it’s not just copy and paste, very, very corporate language, we found that helped in a really big way, right? Because people say, oh, okay, this is making sense to me. I can understand it first of all, because it’s no longer this corporate lingo. But second of all, I can understand who’s behind it. I know that I can trust these people because they can speak in this way, rather than just copy and pasting this from whatever bank site that they might’ve found this on.

And then other, you know, I think other things like in terms of trust, it might not always be security as well. It’s, it’s kind of just like peace of mind and over-communicating expectations. So things like in the flow, for example, just telling them what’s happening next. Right. Or even, even as simple, if you take it to a, to a more foundational level, how many steps are left, right? What else are you going to need to know from me to be able to open this account from me? So over-communicating, but doing it in a way that is not overwhelming, that’s the challenge. And if you can accomplish that, so don’t give them like pages of stuff saying, okay, here’s what you get next, here’s what’s gonna happen. If you can do that and little bullet points while making them feel comfortable, that is another way how you’re gonna build that trust and where does design play its role is making sure that people are focusing on those pieces of information, right? So if you can’t tell, we’re very copy first folks where we believe that.

Copy is where all, it’s the greatest conduit of strategy. Any beautiful page can look beautiful, it might not perform. There’s that silly saying that goes around everywhere that says ugly pages always outperform beautiful pages. It’s not because they’re ugly, it’s because most cases of that, they’ve just paid attention to copy more. And so design plays its role when it can really.

Bring out the best of the copy, where it can help people’s eyes be drawn to the most important elements because there’s different types of users that interact differently on a page. So if design can focus those folks who are just kind of, you know, the squirrels that are bouncing around and scanning stuff, design’s role is, okay, pay attention to this. Okay, look, it’s secure. Okay, look, this is what you expect next. Okay, here’s what you got to do. Bang, bang, you can get it done. It’s a complementary role.

More than a main actor or main event, but it’s very, very important. And when you do it right, then the exact message that you wanna get across is put on a platter for folks.

Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, that language and copywriting really speaks to us. And then when we’re talking to our clients, it’s very clear that if you’re a locally run business or not, which I think is interesting. Because we have national clients, but we also have clients in New Orleans. And it’s like the first thing they’ll call out is if someone on the account doesn’t understand the city, you lose all of that trust. But maybe we just need more images of padlocks on the pages and then we can get that. Well, I was wondering if you could give me

Kanika Misra
Maybe that’s it. No, you’re right.

Flynn Zaiger
You’ve mentioned so many numbers and examples. Is there a good example of a science-backed method that you’ve done that significantly improved conversion rates for one of your clients?

Kanika Misra
Yeah, there are a few. But one that I’m really excited about right now, it’s in progress. So I will give everyone that caveat. But we’re two days away from statistical significance and it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t gone down. So I don’t expect it to happen, but I could be wrong. But there’s a brand that we’re working with and they sell a very, very high priced product. It’s a premium kind of like kitchen appliance. And…

They have spent a ton of money on their branding and their just all their design and their graphic elements and all this stuff. And it looks beautiful. Don’t do not get me wrong. But what we found is their homepage is not really talking about why somebody should spend over $200 on a kitchen appliance. And it’s not really talking about all the incredible.

incredible craftsmanship that went into this product. And it’s not really helping people discover what’s the best for them. It has a lot of really pretty bells and whistles and it, man, it looks gorgeous, but there’s just a lot missing from it in terms of communication and communicating value really. So we did a full homepage revamp and that included a lot of research on who these.

actual customers are, right? Not only who do we think they are, are they just the people who are buying everything from, you know, William Sonoma and Lucrece, and, you know, they love to spend money? Sure, but there’s subsets of those folks who might not have been the target audience, but they’re the ones who are buying now, right? So what do they value? How do they speak to each other? What are the considerations that they have when they’re purchasing things like this? What is too much money for them to spend, and how can we make it justified?

So all of this kind of research that tells us what do we need to communicate? What order do we need to communicate it in on the homepage? And then also like, how do we help them discover the other stuff that we have, right? So it’s a kitchen appliance, but it has little accessories and stuff like that. How do we put this all together in a way that makes sense? So doing all that background research started it. And then we go ahead and we looked at the actual behaviors on the existing homepage, the beautiful one, the one that doesn’t actually communicate the value that well. So what are people doing? Where are they getting confused? We found that most people don’t really do much on the homepage, right? And your homepage should really be the start of your funnel. I think funnels are now turning old school, but it should be the start of your funnel. This is what pulls people in and gets them to click through your site and then eventually convert. So people weren’t really doing much.

they weren’t scrolling down the page almost at all. They had a very cute but nondescript hero headline. So again, if people are just landing there, they’re gonna be like, what the heck is this thing? And then they’re gonna go and click on the product and they’re gonna be like, holy F, that costs a lot of money. Is this worth it? So taking all these considerations at a point and then again, going back to design, making sure that the design is pointing out what they should focus on. And again,

in the order that they should focus on it. Putting all that together, new homepage design, currently their revenue per session is 45% higher than the control, which is wild. So again, we typically go for double digit wins, 10% to 15%. This one so far is blowing it out of the water. It’s going to add almost six figures to their monthly bottom line.

it is, it’s a big one. And, you know, we did decrease some of the bells and whistles. Like, it doesn’t have as many fun little animations that are going across the screen and things like that. However, clarity is very, very high, and people can understand it. They know why it’s worth the money that they’re charging for it, and it makes it a very streamlined experience for them. So, fingers crossed that we hit in two days. Yeah. And, uh, and fingers crossed for that because that’s a, that’s a big boost that, you know, is fairly simple.

Flynn Zaiger
Yeah, that’s, I think that you could wipe away your tears about the lost animations with nicer bank statements. I always find great. Oh, I guess just one last question. I would say if there’s any business owners listening or anyone working in marketing, when do you think is the right time to reach out to an organization like yours, obviously before the, you know, the revenue maps that you mentioned. And everyone’s always trying to improve their website. Is there any good time in a business’s life or in a marketing team’s life when they’re like, okay, we need to look into disruptive CRO. We need to bring in an outside perspective. When is that?

Kanika Misra
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. And there’s never really a time that’s too early to start thinking about CRO. But there’s a lot that you can do kind of initially yourself before you necessarily work with a team. CRO can be expensive, but there’s enough that you can do even just as maybe an individual business owner or a small team that can get you part of the way there. So if you’re just starting out and you’ve never done anything before, first just

Ask 10 people, ask your, if you have a few employees or you have a few team members, ask them to ask 10 people and just have those people go through your site and the further away from you that those connections are the better because then they won’t be biased and they won’t worry about hurting your feelings. Don’t worry about your feelings. Ask them to go through and make a list of, okay, if you were to land on this page, what are your first impressions? Is there anything that makes you not trust us?

Was there anything that was difficult to do? And is there anything that you particularly like? Four questions that tells you quite a bit. Again, this is not what you’re gonna base the rest of your business off of, but if you’ve never done anything else before, this is a very good way to get some quick user feedback on things that you’re gonna be blind to because you and your team look at your site all the freaking time. You’re just not gonna be able to see it. These people will show you. Two, I spoke about video recordings. It is one of the biggest things that we do differently

really any other CRO agency I know of, and it’s so silly. And the reason that other people don’t do it is because it takes a lot of time, but it’s easy. This is not hard work. So what I tell everyone is, if you’re just getting started or if you’ve never done it before, and a lot of people who are not getting started have never done this either, sign up for a video recording software. Microsoft Clarity is free. It’s not my favorite one, but it’s good. It’s free, right? It works. Sign up for it.

let it collect data for a week, the next weekend that you’re free, hook your computer up to your TV, grab some snacks, grab some drinks, and let it autoplay for an hour and a half. What you’re going to learn in that hour and a half is going to tremendously change the way that you think about your site, that you think about the way that people interact, and it’s probably going to make you feel like an idiot in a lot of ways. But the good news is it also gives you a lot of targets, so you can fix those things if you know what they are.

Do that at any point. If you’ve done that, then the next step would be just Google, you know, best practices for websites. Right. And this is why I also think traditional CRO, a lot of people can kind of do it on their own. Like there’s a lot of things that you can just kind of try and you can just Google and there’s people have ideas for everything now. So if you just want to get started and say, okay, let me just try a couple of things. Sure. You could run the classic button color test.

where you’re going to change the color of your button and see what happens. That might result in null results, which means that you’re not going to reach statistical significance, and that’s really frustrating. And if you don’t have a rhyme or reason for running a test, you’re probably better off not doing it because you’re going to waste your time. But if you just Google best practice, you know, website examples for blank, and then fill in the blank for your company, Google that, try some of those.

If you’re past that point where now you’re actually running significant, you know, or slightly significant paid traffic, you’re spending money that matters, spending, you know, more than 10, $15,000 a month. Okay. Now, now it’s time to really start considering actually investing in this because you’re, you’re investing money and now you want to make your traffic costs more efficient. So if you’re investing a little bit more than that, I think at that point, it would make sense to start either thinking about hiring a freelancer or maybe engaging with, with an agency. Um,

10 to 15 is probably a little bit on the early side, to be honest. But if you feel like you have reached product market fit and you need to get a little bit more cashflow, sure. That’s gonna be more traditional CRO. Once you’re past, for e-commerce, typically we say, when you’re past about two and a half million a year, you definitely have product market fit, you have channels that are up and running. That’s when it might make sense to really explore this sort of disruptive CRO, because now you have a plethora of…

Eliza Fillo
Thank you.

Kanika Misra
data and research and just information on what kind of works for your company in a wide range, and then you can start really kind of narrowing it down. Okay, so what are the specific values that works? What are we not communicating to people? How do we do that the best way? So two and a half million for e-comm and then for SaaS, if you’re VC backed, typically if you have raised your A round and you’re looking towards B, that’s often a good time

B rounds is around when you start scaling, right? So you wanna get as efficient as possible before you start putting the gas on the fire, try to get efficient there. If you are bootstrapped and those numbers mean nothing to you, then that’s probably the best kind of benchmark is I’m ready to start scaling. I have the money to do so. My current benchmarks are okay. And I could be sustainable with them.

But if I really want to make my business what I think it should be, and if I really want to hit these goals, I’m about to be in scaling mode. Let’s start CRO now. And that’s kind of the, okay, you want to start scaling? Time to do CRO first.

Eliza Fillo
Well, I know what my weekend plans are now, downloading Microsoft Clarity. Watching that.

Kanika Misra
Sounds like your yacht is going to be a blast to be on.

Flynn Zaiger
Hahaha

Eliza Fillo
Okay, well, I think we’ll wrap it up. But before we officially wrap up, we typically like to give our guests the opportunity to let our listeners know where they can find you. And if there’s anything specific you want to plug, anything upcoming, how is your channel?

Kanika Misra
Perfect. Well, if you have any questions for me or want to find me, I am unfortunately or fortunately relatively active on Twitter. So you can find me directly there. It’s konica underscore misra, which I’m sure will be linked somewhere around here and LinkedIn, same thing, first name, last name. And then if you want to work with us or if you want to see if we might be able to help you out, just check us out at bettabetagrowth.com.

Pretend that you’re from Boston and you don’t know how to say the word better like a normal person. So you say better And I can say that because we’re Boston based

Eliza (43:18.795)
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure having you.

Kanika Misra
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Eliza Fillo
Yeah. Thank you.

Flynn Zaiger
Thank you.