Conversion Optimization For the International Market with Joris Bryon

“What I found out was that on one particular page in their check out today were losing 2 million says 150,000 dollars per year on that page alone.”

Welcome to the Global From Asia podcast where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice and now your host, Michael Michelini.

Mike: Happy Halloween, everybody. October is over and I was Captain America this year with the wife and the kids and it was always a fun time with family over. Also, that was the last big event for October as I mentioned on previous episodes, it’s been a very busy month for trade season and all this other extra curricular activities column. But there’s still stuff coming up in November. Our Global From Asia doing Chinese E-commerce from Hong Kong trip is on Friday November 18, check it out at globalfromasia.com/hktrip. Okay and now for this week’s show we have Joris talking about international markets, foreign conversion optimization. Enjoy everybody.

Mike : Thank you everybody for tuning into another Global From Asia podcast. We have Bryon with us on the show. Thanks for being here, Joris.

Joris: Hi Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike: I probably mess up that name, sorry. You said it’s much better before we record it.

Joris: It’s a difficult name. It’s Joris Bryon. So if you can call me for whatever it is. Say Joris is ok, I responsive pretty much on anything. Don’t worry.

Mike: Yeah, I always make fun of myself as an ignorant American so I can get away with that, right.

Joris: Sure.

Mike: Alright. So it’s great to get you on the show and we’re gonna talk about conversion optimization which is your specialty and before we get in to, you were saying you were based in Malta. I’ve heard the name maybe I’m curious how did you end up in Malta.

Joris: Well Malta, even I’m from Belgium originally, even in Belgium, Malta is not very well known. Most people think it’s part of Spain. But actually it’s a separate country. It’s South from Sicily, and most people know Sicily, Italy still don ‘t know where it is. But yeah I ended up here, I used to live in Belgium and at the beginning I was solo consultant and it evolved into an agency. And I worked for clients in Belgium in Netherlands. But I always, it’s working from a distance anyway. So I could relocate and start working from pretty much anywhere in the world. Yeah I was just looking for a good country and I was looking for a Sunny country. Most people don’t really know what the climate in Belgium is. But Belgium is pretty much like the UK so it’s gray all the time, raining a lot. It’s not really a great place to be. Well of course it’s nice there but I really like the sun. So, if you the sun Belgium is not really great place to be. So I started looking for countries in the South preferably Europe because as a citizen of the EU you can set up a business pretty much anywhere. Very easily you can relocate easily. And another aspect was taxes. Tax structure here in Malta is so interesting that took me little convincing to move here. Basically when you talk to our expats living here. If you want some wine Malta that’s they always sum it up like wow it’s sun and taxes.

Mike: Great, sun and taxes. Good combination. We always try to talk about cool places on Global From Asia here. So, thanks for that info. So let’s get into the heart, well a little bit more about yourself. We got connected through your business partner Marcus. Maybe first your business background.

Joris: Well actually. I’ve been a solo consultant in the beginning. Well, no, I worked as an employee of course like many other people have before becoming self-employed. And I used to work in advertising person and then I switch to online marketing. I have well gone through all process of learning SEO, PPC and stuff. And then one day, I discover conversion optimization and it was like, yeah I really felt this is what I want to do now. That’s  the only thing I want to do now. So, I started specializing in it and taking courses and stuff. I started teaching other agencies as well and at some point. I just jump interest, I said I’m gonna be self employed and see what’s gonna  happen. Things are really going well. So yeah we started getting a lot of clients and at some point I met Marcus at a conversion optimization conference . And Marcus is Swedish, he has a SEO agency in Sweden but he lives in Bangkok. Yeah well we just had a connection and we started talking about it and how we could develop an agency and we share the same vision of trying to set up an agency but a location independent agency. So we worked with people from anywhere in the world. We don’t wanna be limited to people from one country in one specific location. We worked from people from the US, from the Netherlands, Sweden and I am in Malta. So, it’s a bit from everywhere and it works out great. It’s not really a big deal to work location independently with a lot of people in an agency structure. So we call it virtual agency actually.

Mike: Okay very cool. Virtual agency, yeah I mean this just like, I know a lot of our listeners we’re all around the world. It’s getting amazing in work just joking like our friend’s house about virtual reality just kind of put in glasses on and we could see each other in the future. Just putting on some VR glasses  maybe this interview in the few years will be face to face and vid listeners, if user, people can just sit next to us and watch us, it’s crazy.

Joris: Actually that’s pretty cool.

Mike: Okay great so conversion optimization. Before we did this interview we had a call and I like how we’re saying like it is for everybody ‘coz I’ve been told by others that you need a certain amount of traffic or maybe before going to that like maybe what is conversion optimization, is it a testing, is that the right way?

Joris: Well actually it’s a common misconception, it’s a confused conversion optimization an A B testing. Most people really think that it’s all about testing stuff but conversion optimization is a lot more than that. Testing should be the end point. It’s not gonna be the end point for everyone if you don’t have enough traffic testing doesn’t make much sense but on the other hand it doesn’t mean that you can’t do any conclusion optimization. So those terms get confused a lot and conversion optimization for me it’s really about understanding your customer, your visitor actually. And if you understand your visitor then you can change your side or test changes on your side to better meet their needs on your side. So, basically you don’t really need that much drastic to conversion optimization. For me conversion optimization is really combination of doing a research and the research to really understand your visitor and then you can implement that, a couple of no brainer, still always no brainer if you can do the research stuff you don’t really need to test. And then if you have enough traffic you can start testing. But if you don’t have enough traffic just implement all of the stuff that you find and all the changes together will make difference. The common misconceptions really saying A B testing conversion optimization it’s the same. But if you start with A B testing what’s gonna happen. So even if you have enough traffic. It’s gonna be a bit like throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks. So you’re gonna set up an A B test and you got a whole bit stuff of work. You don’t actually know if the thing you’re testing if it’s actually a problem or not on your side. And if it isn’t a problem then you are just wasting your time and your visitors as well on testing stuff that doesn’t matter. So you need to understand what’s happening on your side and what your visitors are doing, which kind of information they are missing. So that you can test stuff that makes sense and that could actually help your conversions.

Mike: Got it. Then for me just put some perspective like I have globalfromasia.com about 6,000 uniques a month. I don’t know if that’s, I’m also confused. I’ve actually just this past weekend up to the menu bar and side bar and stuff. I guess I’m kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall as what you say. But some people can do something with that?

Joris: Well as far as testing goes, it’s probably not. 6,000 visitors a month is not a good enough for testing. And I don’t really look at the number of traffic but at the number of conversion. That’s a better measure to know if we could start testing or not. So, ‘coz your conversion can be anything, so conversion basically is the action people take on your site that you want to take. So that could be filling up form to get a lead in. Or could be transaction of course if its e-commerce site. But it could be also a page conversion, so let’s say people on the certain page to click through the next page. So that click could be equal version for that particular page. Then it make sense to look into at the number of that kind of conversions you have on that particular page. But as a rule of thumb, what I say don’t test if you don’t have a thousand conversions per month. It could be 7 or 800 of course, that’s still gonna work. But a thousand is more like a rule of thumb. So why is that, because if you gonna test something, what you need is about at least 150 – 200 preferably even more conversions per variations. So if you have the A version and it has only 50 conversions and the B version that also has about 50 conversion. It’s not gonna be statistically significant. It’s not, well the test is not gonna be valid and if you have to run a test for way too long, it’s not interesting to do that. It’s gonna be more interesting to invest your time in the research and just make changes to your side instead testing with low numbers. So really depends a bit on how many conversions you have and how you define a conversion so it could be a page conversion and that could be good thing to measure if you only have much traffic. So, for instance we have, we mainly work for e-commerce sites and of course we always look at the baseline. We look at how much revenue they get for each version and how many transactions they have. If that is not enough, it’s like for an e-commerce sites which 500-600 transactions is a bit low but what you could do is you could look at your let’s say your product page. What do you want people to do on your product page. It’s adding a product to their cart of course. So the act to cart could be a conversion for your product page. And that way you gotta have more final transaction. So you could get a test, could be conclusive faster when you are only looking at that page conversion. So it depends a little but I’d say rule of thumb a thousand conversions for the thing that they wanna test. From that point on it’s interesting to test. But it doesn’t mean like in your case if you have 6,000 unique visitors a month that you can do stuff. You can really try to understand your visitor and there’s several things that you can do. So in the conversion research, there’s 2 big kinds of research. There’s a quantitative research and there’s a qualitative research. The quantitative research for some of those things you’ll need a lot of visitors as well but numbers can be low. Like I Google analytics analysis, if you de-dive in your google analytics you’ll need the numbers of course as well but if you have 6,000 visitors, what you could do is widen your date range and look at the last 3 months for instance to have more numbers to be able to make a more meaningful analysis. What you could look at your forms as well, forms is really something that I really like. ‘Coz forms are usually crucial to every conversion. so if you have an e-commerce site, you have check out form, if you have cited that’s bad lead generation you have it form as well. And it’s unbelievable how many people drop off on forms and those people are actually very close to the conversion. So what you could do is, there’s tools that, they’re like, one tool I really like is Formisimo its called. What Formisimo does is it tracks the fills in your forms and it says where people exactly are chopping off. So they start filling up the form and at some point they just give up and they’re gone. And it’s creating information ‘coz then you try to figure out what’s happening there with that specific field, why people are dropping off, do I even need that information, can I leave it out like friends and telephone numbers. If you’re not gonna call up, just don’t ask it. ‘Coz it’s fair like people are gonna drop off there. And it start that you can do with 6,000 visitors a month, that’s not really a big deal. So form analysis probably gonna give you a lot of ways to improve your form and your conversion in general.

Mike: I mean, I know I can feel your passion. Yeah maybe we step back a little bit. So we are international here, you’ve work with few different languages in Belgium and other parts like, how did people deal, do you know if there’s any difference between languages or a cultures like in this test or conversion.

Joris: We were at this very dated trip, it’s simply because it gives the best result. There are differences of course there’s cultural differences. I once read a study of  I think it was comparison between France and Germany. I don’t know which one which country do works but one of the two, people were scrolling a lot further down the page than the other one. So there are some cultural differences and how they will use your sites. But basically it’s the same everywhere. There might be cultural differences but what you need to do is just try and understand your visitor first. That’s it. It’s as simple as that, sound simple but it isn’t always so simple. But of course it’s just understanding your visitor and try to meet their needs. It can be different from country to country and from languages and cultures, those kind have of influences. But the process is the same, it’s just about trying to understand your visitor.

Mike: Good, that makes sense. Okay, so which could be different of course between culture and languages. I know especially in Asia, I know how much exposure with that but in Asia the website designs are much different especially in Chinese. So okay, you mentioned phone numbers with forms and other things. Are there some kind of first thing that we should look at it to test like the big things on the website.

Joris: Well that’s the question I get often but I not really inclined to give a concrete answer to that. And I’ll tell you why. Because every site is different and has different problems, has different visitors, that need different solutions. One example is gonna just try to what I wanna say here is I had a client that came to me. And they were testing on a product page before they came to me and well the test weren’t really doing that much. And what I did is, I did a complete research and what I found out was that on 1 particular page in their checkout today were losing 2 million says 150,000 dollars per year on that page alone. So that was gigantic as soon as I told him that well it’s been I think almost 2 years now and we are still working together because that was eye opener for them. They were just testing on the wrong page so that’s why I’m not really inclined to say, you should work or test this first ‘coz it really depends on your site. Could be that you have a problem on the tool or different page. That being said, I worked a lot for a lot of e-commerce sites and usually the biggest win for test, that’s gonna be on product pages, on your cart page, and your checkout pages. Usually, so it’s not gonna be always there but usually that those are the place where I find the biggest wins.

Mike: Very cool. It might be hard but I guess you have to do this on the website you can control. There’s nothing you can, I know there’s Amazon FBA Sellers that are listening, is there any control that they can have.

Joris: It’s gonna be different and I’m not really familiar with selling on Amazon ‘coz I haven’t work for that kind of clients. We’ve mainly work for clients that have their own site and we optimize those sites. But, so what I gets its gonna be mainly copy and pictures that’s gonna be make a difference of course. About pictures what is important for pages is that you have as many as possible and a very good quality , every possible angle. One of the examples I give a lot of conversion to my station training as well. I wanna do examples, I always find myself repeating there, especially for female audience, it’s interesting one. No one is gonna buy, no women is gonna buy a handbag if she doesn’t see the inside. So if you show a couple of pictures, show a picture of the inside. It’s a lot but that’s gonna be important for your audience. And it’s also about coffee. In coffee, it’s very, very important often underestimated ‘coz a lot of people think of conversion optimization and B testing is about design and of course it’s true, design can make a difference. But coffee is often even more powerful. So what you need to do is to figure out what kind of questions that your buyers have and try to answer them. And don’t try to be brief. What I mean is if we live through the world where 40 characters is normal or whatever. But it just doesn’t work that way for your products that you wanna sell. You have to figure out what kind of questions do my buyers have before they can even buy the product. Remember one of the reasons for a client, they were selling lot of bags and they had the dimensions on it and the bag itself and it was and sending me, they just gave the dimensions of the bag. And then we do the research and at one point, one of the users say yeah okay that’s good. But that’s my 15 inch laptop fits in that bag and it wasn’t mentioned anywhere. So it’s really an obstacle for someone’s conversion, it doesn’t have that information, it’s just not be able to convert. So you have to try to find out what questions does people have and the good thing about Amazon for instance that you can look at the Q & A section of a similar products and try to find out what kind of questions are people asking there. Just try to win it somewhere in your coffee. And try to answer those questions. It doesn’t mean you have to write coffee of the sake of it. You just have, you can be as brief as possible, give all the information they need. So, don’t say this is  too much coffee. If it’s written briefly and if it’s complete then it’s good. I think that’s gonna be the main thing.

Mike: Make sense. Is there any way to capture lost visitors. I know there’s like this exit pop up sometimes on the websites. Or I guess it’s just nothing we can do with it, if we lose them, they’re gone right.

Joris: Well there are some things that you can do. So for instance if you have an e-commerce site and you lose them on the checkout, what you can do, there’s tools out there as well. An excellent tool, we’ve been using before is Carts Fact. It’s not that expensive either and what it does is captures the email as soon as someone fills the email address in the checkout form and if they abandon at that point, it captures the email address and you can send a sequence of emails after that and try to recover them. And it’s great because it usually those emails cannot convert pretty well. But you have to make sure that you do it the right way so we usually send out the sequence of 3 emails. The first email is gonna be by 30 minutes after the abandonment of the site and that’s gonna be a full mail. So we’re not gonna push at that point, it’s just about asking them, is something go wrong ‘coz sometimes something went wrong. So something go wrong, can we help you something like that and then second email can be sent about 23 hours after that, ‘coz that’s gonna be a good time ‘coz that was the same time of the day they visited your site first time. And then the third email we usually send about 6 days and 23 hours after their first visit. ‘Coz then you’re gonna be on this exact same day of the week at the same time of the day they visited your site for the first time. So if you send those 3 emails before we gonna recover a lot of your abandoners. The other thing you can do of course is we target them. You can re-target them with Facebook add friends, the other thing options adwords reference as well. Or what you can also do and that’s interesting one is you read, beware of the fact that not everyone is gonna come on your side is ready to convert now. They are not always as same stage of the buying cycle. Some of them are just looking around and not really ready to convert right now. They’re comparing different solutions, different services whatever. So, what you need to do is try and capture their email address by giving them a good lead. So you don’t have to ask them to  sign up for your newsletter ‘coz no one wants to sign up for newsletter but just give them something in value, something it could be if you have e-commerce site you could give 5% off for the next purchase or whatever but then you have their email address and you can start emailing them and keeping them warm. Keeping them until they are ready to convert. So that’s really important as well to recover people that are abandoning your site.

Mike: Make sense. Alright. So let’s just make an example like I mentioned earlier I’m doing like I’m trying to do a new header. I’m trying to organize my content on the website. I think there’s tons of podcast and blogs and services that we offer. Well, what would be an example of a  way to see that even if I added this new fancy header pop out thing, is the header are worst for conversion. I guess for me conversions are I have too many I don’t know, I’m not sure what other listeners, I’m not doing e-commerce per se I’m doing like information. So I have newsletters and listeners to podcast, so I’m not sure,  I guess you would ask me what’s the conversion that I’m trying to do on my website. I guess would be leads for services.

Joris: Okay let me ask you this first how did you find out that was a problem on your side that need to be fix.

Mike: A lot of people say they’re confused with what to do on my website. There’s so much stuff, so I’ve been just trying to find ways to organize the content to be more clear and quick to show what were offering.

Joris: so what you could do ideally you have a based line so you’d have some of the research before so you could measure it after if you don’t know the before it’s hard to say the after is working better than the before. What I say is what you could do next to check if it’s all going the way you’d like to go is you could check click maps so what you can do is audio reference is really great, one of the most things out there. But just because it is every good on (blurred) a single price point. But audio I can help you make some click maps and when it click my fill you’ll gonna see where people are clicking. And you can check on what they’re clicking on the elements that you want them to click. so that’s a good start. Another thing that you could do in particular in this case is you could do a 5 second test and if you Google on 5 second test you’ll land on the site and what it does is, it’ll show your home page and your case your homepage to a lot of people I think you can select about 10 people. The only task that you gave is you can say where would you click to go to an end and you define maybe the podcast section or whatever. The people are gonna see your homepage for 5 seconds and they all have to answer that question. And then you’ll see if well, if it’s sign] 5 seconds or not. If they haven’t then we need to re-work it a little. So that’s a pretty easy test that you could do. You could do also complete user testing just to test your site normal in general and not just got elements. User testing that’s conference is a great platform. They have a lot of user tester’s what you do is give them let’s say I usually do about 5 tasks. I give them at a day that should complete on your site. And what it does is, it records them going through your side and try to complete the task that you’ve given. And they have to comment out loud what they’re doing. So what you’re gonna get at the end is a video of them moving through your side and commenting out loud. So that’s a really useful way to get in an insight in your site on what your visitors are doing on your site. So, that’s one of the things you don’t need, even if you have zero traffic on your site you could do user test. And try to understand if people find your site logical, or they find what they’re looking for, if they understand what’s happening on their sites. So the user test is something definitely that you could do. And another thing that you could do is watch a visitor recordings. Because it’s all built in the same tool. And visitor recordings do is they just well, they do what the  name says they record the sessions of visitors. But they recorded and so they get a video to replay. The only downside is that it doesn’t have the common, so you don’t know what are they thinking at that point and maybe you see them stop for 10 minutes or so before they go on. That could be because they have a phone call or whatever. You just note on the contacts. But it can be helpful especially if you’re gonna look at some particular areas of the sites. Is it the recording triplicate  or not something that we start with ‘coz you can really get a lost in it, you can watch hundreds of sessions of people and if you’re not really sure what you’re looking for, it’s hard to, it’s a really good an insights from it but if you suspect that you have a problem on a certain area of your sites and watch a couple of visitors recording then you could get a clear indication that if your suspicion is right or not. So these recordings could be really great as it gets those insights and again you don’t need that much visitors for this kind of insights.

Mike: Cool. I think also I’ve done quite a few different startups and one was social agent mobile app and we have a website and even before we made much of a product we kind had just to wordpress blog with manual backend and we did a focus group like a dinner we invited 15 people, we bribed them with free dinner and some training. And then we just have 4 of us watching over their shoulders of like 3 or 4 people and it was amazing what we can learn so yeah I think that’s another reason that a way people can test with little or no traffic.  

Joris: Yeah for sure and that’s one of the best ways to get quality feedback and if you can try to get people from your target audience to test your side and the oddest part when you do that stuff is to shut up ‘coz you’ll see people struggling and you wanna help them and see you have to click then just and let them struggle. ‘Coz that’s when you start to learn what’s happening on your websites, so just give them a task and then be silent for the rest of the time and that’s really powerful stuff and as you said let’s create, just ask invite them for dinner or I even invited them for Skype I had to do user test for a very specific target group and I was General Managers and so they didn’t have much time, they couldn’t come to an office or that’s not the kind of people that user testing that comment happen there (blurred). I did over Skype and then I have Camtasia I ask them to share the screens, I have Camtasia to screen it and do screen recording things and I just gave them the task and watch them do it and I had a recordings afterwards. So, it can be really easy that way.

Mike: Great. Alright Joris, this has been helpful for me, too. I’m getting little insights and tips. I guess we kind of cover the action, I was at feeling people have a lot of action and that almost I can do. How about multiple language sites, I’m trying to keep the show international related. Is there differences or maybe they should just have a completely different websites. There’s always a question people asked me, should I have like sub-domains or sub-folders or different domain names, I mean would you say like if we’re gonna do it languages would you suggest completely different websites with totally separate tests? Or I’m not sure what you’re opinion here.

Joris: Yeah that’s a difficult one to answer in general. Of course every situation is gonna be different and let’s say that well one thing is to show, you have to understand your visitor if it’s from different countries and if it’s totally different in markup then it makes sense to make different sites. Or I used to work with a lot Belgium companies as well and in Belgium it’s bilingual so it’s a lot of sites and both languages, etc. That’s really complex. So in another countries where if it’s a multilingual country you could do it all in one site of course. People or visitors are just used to it. But it’s hard to say in general if we should do that or not. It really depends one thing as well is it doesn’t make sense from financial point of view. So, for instance we’re looking at the analytics account for one of our customers a while ago and they had one website in English, for internationally action. So they were selling in a lot of countries but what happened is the conversion rate for some countries we’re really lower than for the other countries and surprisingly for France and they were converting less. So at that point it might consider making a language version of that website or even on a separate domain and what you have to do is calculate scenarios and just say what if we get the conversion rate of France at the same level of the west conversion rate. What would that mean in terms of revenue per year and is the investment, is it a wise investment to invest in a new sites for France or even to make a translation ‘coz that’s gonna cost you money as well. So it’s a trade that you have to make and you can make that in general  it’s gonna be a case by case thing.

Mike: Alright, so that’s all I have Joris. Of course you and Marcus are great guys and doing your virtual agency. So I’m sure there’s listeners that might be interested to get help with their e-commerce shops and I hope you guys can make some deals, is there, how can people find you in any kind of lead that you can offer people?

Joris: Yeah we got some special offer for the listeners of our Global From Asia podcast. So you can find it www.go.dexter.agency/globalfromasia  in one word. What we do is we offer Google analytics analysis and it usually cost 3,000 dollars for what we’re doing regularly for your listeners we can offer it for 490 dollars, ridiculously cheap. ‘Coz we put in a lot of time and usually they get analytics account for about 3 days just to find all the opportunities, all the optimization opportunities, all the places on your site where you gonna lose money. And analytics analysis is usually the first step if it’s a bigger e-commerce site. So it’s usually the first step ‘coz  you know where you’re losing money on your site and then the next steps is gonna be the rest of research but in analytics analysis already is gonna help you’re listeners a lot.

Mike: Okay, great. And I’ll make a forwarding address globalfromasia.com/joris  just go to that URL faster. Alright and thank you any last words for  listeners.

Joris: Well the thing is if you to remember one thing of all I said is understand your visitor. That’s the basic of conversion to first stage.

Mike: Very cool. That’s a good one, too. I’m even still learning. More frustrating is podcasting, it’s really hard to measure, it’s just downloads and you don’t really know even if they’re listening or just downloading it or skipping things or made it always to the end of the show.  It’s really tricky but thank you so much for your time and let’s keep helping businesses go global.

Joris: Alright, thanks Mike.

To get more info, on running international business please visit our website at www.globalfromasia.com that’s www.globalfromasia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.