Unconventional CRO Hacks From HubSpot & WordStream

Luckily, last month the CRO experts from HubSpot and WordStream organized a killer webinar for CRO Day where they shared some of their greatest CRO hacks.

Larry Kim of WordStream and Lanya Olmsted of HubSpot presented on conversion optimization hacks to make the marketing funnel more efficient.

Here are the highlights:

CRO Hack 1: Kill Your Landing Page

According to Larry Kim (the CEO & Founder of WordStream), the best way to increase your conversion rate is to eliminate your landing page altogether.

This makes a lot of sense.

No matter how great your landing page is, only a fraction of your visitors is going to convert to a lead. So the best way to increase conversions on your website is to not even direct visitors to your website in the first place.

Instead, Larry suggests using advanced AdWords features to collect the lead right from the search results. The e-mail capture ad extension allows a searcher to enter their e-mail address and become a lead right from the search results.

Larry suggests using the click-to-call ad extension for people searching on mobile devices. Via SlideShare

Another tip is to use the click-to-call ad extension for anyone searching from a mobile device. Don’t even include your URL, just include the phone number and a button to call. This encourages people to directly call your salesperson instead of navigating to a landing page.

CRO Hack 2: Eliminate Fields for Mobile

Nobody likes typing on a mobile device. But more people are using mobile devices to search for content than ever. In fact, Google recently announced that more people search on their mobile devices than on desktops.

So how to convert all these mobile searchers into leads? Larry suggests eliminating as many form fields as possible. The less mobile users have to type, the more likely they are to fill out your forms.

You can even reduce your lead forms to just include an e-mail address. WordStream was able to see a 5X lift in form submissions using this method.

Test paring down form fields to just email. Make sure to keep an eye on lead quality. Via SlideShare.

Eliminating form fields may cause some issues with lead quality and lead scoring, but it’s something worth testing to see if the benefits outweigh the costs.

CRO Hack 3: Understand Your Customer’s Motivations

Although we like to think we are logical beings, more often than not, our decisions are based on emotions. By tapping into emotions and psychological triggers, you can dramatically improve the conversions on your site.

Lanya Olmsted of HubSpot outlined a number of key psychological triggers such as pleasure/pain, hope/fear, and social acceptance/rejection which motivate us to take action.

Design tests around psychological triggers. Via SlideShare

CRO experiments should be rooted in psychology, rather than on random guesses or hunches about button color.

For example, Lanya gave an example of how HubSpot was able to increase their conversions by 4% by adding a download counter for one of their ebooks. The download counter ties into social acceptance, and motivates visitors to also download the ebook to fit in with the crowd.

Adding social proof to a landing page, increased download conversions by 4% for HubSpot. Via SlideShare

Another example Lanya pointed out was using urgency triggers with conversion copywriting. Try using words such as “now”, “immediately”, and “limited time”. Using urgent words creates a strong call to action to act now, and words like “limited time” create a sense of scarcity and tie into the fear of missing out on something valuable.

Watch the Webinar Now

Those are just a few of the CRO hacks and tips that Larry and Lanya shared on the webinar. The full webinar is available to watch on-demand for free right here.

If you have any great CRO hacks, please share them in the comments. And for even more conversion optimization ideas, check out our Opticon Conference where the industry’s leading CROs and optimization experts will be sharing their tips and success stories!