Using Emotional Targeting to Optimize Your Website Conversion Rates

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome back to Master the Marketplace with Caspian. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Master the Marketplace with Caspian. I'm, um, very excited to bring you today, another special guest on the episode, the founder and CEO, a conversion rate optimization expert, Founder and CEO of Get Uplift, uh, Talia Wolf. Talia, thank you for being on the show today.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker A: Now, I'm not going to be doing justice to your introduction, high, uh, level. I know you're an expert in this field, but why don't you just tell our viewers, our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background. So. And what do you do at Get Uplift?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Um, so I've been in the conversion optimization space, I'd say, for over a decade now, which is alarming. Um, and basically what I do is I help businesses all over different types of industries, whether if it's B2C or B2B E commerce SaaS, um, to optimize their websites and their funnels to get more conversions and sales and leads. And, and I do it using a methodology that I developed over a decade ago called the emotional targeting methodology. And we can get into that, I guess, soon. Um, but I teach my methodology too, on stages and in different courses and programs and really, um, do that, um, around the world.

Speaker A: That's awesome. And so, Tanya, just before we get into emotional targeting, I'd love to, you know, really deep dive on that a little bit, uh, tell us a little bit about, you know, what got you excited about conversion rate optimization. Like, why did you choose this field? You've been in this space for a while. But, uh, like, what got you excited? What got you started?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's funny because back when I started there were like, there wasn't an industry, there were like two companies maybe doing conversion optimization. Uh, most of my sales pitches were about, like, why you even need to like, invest in conversion optimization versus, like sending more traffic to your website. Um, so it's cool to see how mature, um, the industry is getting. But for sure, when I started out, when I started my career in marketing, it was in driving traffic and social media and just really kind of, um, more concerned with likes and engagement and driving traffic to websites. And, and I find I found myself asking, okay, but what are the results that I'm getting? Like, how, how much of an impact am I actually, um, do I have on my clients websites, their leads, their sales? And I didn't really know because back then a lot of people were using Google Analytics and Even if they were, they weren't really, like, didn't know how to connect them with social media. So what I would do is essentially just like, make things up. So I would test things in, like, Facebook ads and change, like images or headlines or in the landing page. Because back then it was like fbml. Like, um, I think that's what it was called. Like, you could, like, change things within Facebook and work on the landing page and whatever. So I'd sit with the designer and like, move this here and let's change this button. And it was just making things up. But I actually started seeing some changes and that was interesting. And that's what got me, like, diving into the whole world. And I eventually opened my own agency and built our own framework for optimization and so on. So it kind of started with just like, so how am I doing? Kind of question.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's great. And today, would you say that the field has matured a lot just over the years, and there are tons of different agencies, uh, out there? Like, what's your view of the space today?

Speaker B: It's a good question. It's a lot more mature. Um, so everyone knows what conversion optimization is. But, um, I'd say that there aren't a lot of agencies offering conversion optimization. There's different types of specialists. There's a lot of marketing agencies that say they do CRO, so they add it as part of what they do because they know it's important to say they do it. Um, but I think that right now the market is really kind of saturated with a lot of people that have a lot of good ideas but not a lot of experience. So I have quite a few, um, really good friends and colleagues that do conversion optimization. And, um, you know, we share a lot of knowledge together. And it's great to see that there's more interest in conversion optimization. There's a lot more, um, people asking about it, asking for it. But there's a long way to go, um, to get to a good place within conversion optimization because it's such a harder discipline. Uh, it's not like PPC or SEO or even design or Copy. In order to actually be a conversion optimizer, uh, you have to know all of what I just said. Like, you have to know PPC and SEO and design and psychology and copy and ux and like, there's so much, um, that it's not as, as. I'm not saying the PPC is easy, but it's not the same. It's not as tactical. Um, and It's a little different. So the market's there. Uh, it's interested, it's a lot better. But there's still so much to learn.

Speaker A: Right. And Dalia, maybe, you know, to step back slightly, you know, just for our audience that might be newer to this space, you know. How would you define conversion optimization? Just in your own simple words for some newer folks who are listening?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Um, so essentially conversion optimization is the art and science of optimizing your website or your landing page or your funnel in order to turn more of your existing traffic into customers or leads. So if, uh, for example you're driving a thousand people a day to your e commerce website and every day 10 people convert, you would be able to do conversion. You would be able to optimize your website in order to turn those 10 people into 20 or 30 or 100. That would be your goal. So you're not actually optimizing traffic, you're not touching, anything to do with the Facebook ads, the Instagram, the, the display ads or search. You're really just uh, working on optimizing the website itself or the landing page itself or the funnel itself, the copy, the visuals, the flow, um, the content and all of that order to drive more conversions and turn more of that m. More of those visitors into customers.

Speaker A: I see that. That makes complete sense. So let's get a little bit into, you know, emotional targeting and the approach that you and your firm has been using. You know, maybe define for us the emotional targeting approach and then would love to also get into, you know, the kind of results that you've seen with, with your clients that you have served with this particular approach relative to maybe others out there. But yeah, let's get into that a little more.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I'm happy to. So when I started with conversion optimization, one of the first things that I did is basically change different elements on the page. Um, there wasn't a lot of content out there, there wasn't a lot of information and ah, in order to optimize my clients landing pages, I would basically change different elements on the page. So a call to action button, color, a headline, um, an image. Really kind of specific, very tactical things. Um, and I never actually got the results that I wanted. So maybe it would increase conversions a little, maybe it would kind of move the needle, but not enough. And what we found, my partners and I, is that there was a piece missing. Now as I mentioned back then, there were like, I could count on one hand how many people were doing conversion optimization in the world. So a lot of our work, uh, was really just building the foundations of everything. And what happened is we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves, okay, what impacts conversions? And ultimately what impacts conversions is decisions. The decisions that people make. So in order to help people decide and make better decisions and choose my client's product, I need to understand how they make decisions. I need to understand their psychology and their brain. And essentially what we did is we devoured psychology books and we really researched the whole process of how our brain and our hearts and how we people make decisions in life about anything. And what we uncovered was something that a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists knew for dozens and dozens of years, which is emotion affects every single decision that we make in life. Whether if it's a business decision, a personal decision, there's always emotion involved. And it is the biggest, um, part of our decision making process. And funnily enough, the offline world, when you think about advertising on television, on radio, they've always known that, they've always used emotion, but it was impossible to actually track any of that. And here we are on the online world where you have Google Analytics and tracking and people are just saying, like, like these are all features. This is our pricing. Buy, buy, buy. Now here's, you know, here's the sale. No one was using emotion. No one was actually connecting to customers and speaking their language and really understanding who they are. Because the online world is so focused on age, geographical location, gender, your browser, uh, the device that you're using, we've detached ourselves from people. And the emotional targeting methodology is the process that we built, uh, internally in uncover people's emotions, their intent, the real reason they're on your website right now and trying to convert and trying to purchase something and understanding their pains, their challenges, their desired outcomes, and the emotions that are essentially guiding them through the purchase. And we uncovered that when we understood this, when we knew exactly what their pains were, what their challenges were and what their desired outcomes were, we knew exactly what content needed to be on the page. We knew what we needed to say to people in order to convert them. We knew what they needed to feel and see and read in order to convert them into customers and keep them, because we were actually speaking to their minds and their hearts and you were asking about results. But the moment we switched to this framework was just when we saw 10 times conversions for our clients and 10 times in retention. It was just overwhelming. And what's amazing is that that's, you know, I did this 10 years ago and we're still doing it. And this is why companies come to us. They understand that changing elements on the page can only take you so far. If you really want to run meaningful conversion optimization and really move the needle and make changes that matter, you have to understand your customers better. You have to get into their hearts and their minds and understand the emotions that guide them order to increase your conversions. Yeah.

Speaker A: And so how do you, how do you do that, Dalia? How do you get into the minds and the hearts of customers? I mean, just to double click on the approach. So signs you up or you're working with them. Like how do you get the data around their customer? How do you understand the customer? Can you walk us through a little bit of that?

Speaker B: Of course. So, um, essentially when it comes to optimizing your website, it's very, very simple to go into Google Analytics and uncover where the problem is. So you know your homepage isn't converting, your product pages aren't working, there's something in checkout that isn't working. Or if you're a SaaS business, then you know that something, you know, there's a big drop off on your features page or on your pricing page. But knowing what changes to make is the biggest challenge with conversion optimization. So what we do with any client that we have, the first thing we'll actually do is very in depth, meaningful customer research. That means that we would uh, do surveys on your customers. We survey your visitors, your prospects on the site to understand their pains and challenges right now why they're on your website and survey your customers to understand why they came to your website and what the value was that they found. We also interview customers and actually speak to them to understand them and the words that they're using. We do competitor analysis, we do um, review mining, social listening and really what we're looking for is the conversations, the reviews and the mentions of the emotional outcome, the value that people get from these products that you're selling. Of course we pair this with data driven, uh, with data driven insights, meaning we look at Google Analytics, we look at heat maps, we do a UX and heuristic analysis on the website. So we have all the data of what's not working and why it's not working. But once we've done all the customer research and we now know, okay, this is why people came to the website, these are the things they've tried before that haven't worked, this is what they're hoping to achieve once, uh, they buy from you, it's so Much easier for us to say, okay, I know what's wrong. The messaging is off here. This is what's missing. The hierarchy of the content isn't working. We need to shift things around and rearrange things or we need to add more pages, we need to change the menu and the navigation. We, we need to create a new email sequence and so on and so on. So this really does uh, dictate everything that we do using just by, by basically just speaking to customers and asking them the right questions.

Speaker A: No, that, that makes sense. And then once you, you know, have that data, you do, you build out a, like uh, a hypothesis that, you know, this is what we should potentially try out and then do some a B testing. Like what's the process of coming to a solution that might make sense?

Speaker B: Yes. So the way it works is we inform ourselves by saying, okay, we have a very big issue on our homepage and this is something that happens to a lot of E commerce brands. Like they have a lot of products or maybe like one of our clients is ah, based on biofeedback. It's a wearable device that is, there's different types of wearable devices you can use um, to help yourself. And essentially what happens is your homepage becomes like a dump for everything and you don't know how to guide people and where to guide them to. So what we do is after actually doing all this customer research and identifying, okay, the homepage is a big thing for customers, we then say okay, our hypothesis is, in this case for our clients, we said okay, our hypothesis is we need to explain what the science behind this product and we need to understand why this is so important for your life and we build a story around it. So we write the whole homepage from scratch and we'll do a wireframe from it and we'll say this is our hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that if we mention X, Y and Z, and if we tell the story in this way and if we use images in this way, then we will increase conversions and we build the whole, test out the whole variation and then we'll test it out and see how it works. And we'll do the same with product pages and with the checkout and so on. So it's essentially this whole research helps identify your unique selling proposition. It helps identify who your Personas are and the actual people you're selling to. And then it helps you optimize everything on the website, every single page.

Speaker A: That makes sense. And would you, how would, what would you recommend rather to say companies wanting to try this approach out or wanting to get into the emotional marketing approach, Would you recommend that they start with, you know, maybe some customer surveys, learning a little more about their customer? That's one of the techniques that you mentioned. How would a company maybe listening to us today, uh, go back to their team and say, hey, we've got to go try this approach out?

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. I think that the best way to approach it is to start with customer research. And what you want to remind yourself and your team is that you're not going out there to ask them like, what is your favorite feature or what is the favorite product or why did you come to our website today? Or what do you think of our website design? That's uh, not what we're asking. We really want to understand the emotion behind the purchase. So even asking something as simple as, um, let's say you reach out to your customers and you say, if you could no longer use our product, what is the one thing you'd miss the most? Like, that's one of my favorite questions of asking. And it gives you so much information because they're not going to mention features, they're not going to mention something specific to do with the product. They're going to talk about the real value that they see from it, how they feel about it. Or if you were to ask them, um, questions like if you were to recommend this to your friend, what would you say? What words would you use? And that gives you not only testimonials but actual words of how people describe your product, how they describe your service that then you can use that on your website. So starting from scratch, understanding customers is always the way to go. And just by asking those meaningful questions, you'll be able to come up with so many ideas for optimization from the get go.

Speaker A: Right. And if, if a company already has that wealth of knowledge, they already been, you know, with a lot of companies that continue to talk to their customers, they collect customer data from voice of customer initiatives and maybe through their sales team and customer service teams, etc. And they've got all that data, what would you recommend that they go and try out next? You know, what's the first step to go and try out the approaches that you're probably talking about?

Speaker B: Yeah, I say, I think after you do your customer research, the point of uh, for you is to understand, okay, what are the top pains that I'm addressing? What are the top desired outcomes and what am I actually trying to say? The point is to go to your website and audit it and ask yourself, am I speaking about myself? Am I just speaking about features? Am I just talking about, um, the pricing, the sale? Am um, I really just focusing on myself versus the customer? Because ultimately the customer is the hero of the story and not you. So you have to make sure, with all the knowledge that you've collected that everything on your website is making it about them. For example, with my customer that my client that I was mentioning before, a lot of the copy they were using was the number one device to do X, Y and Z. This is the most, you know, award winning. We don't need to say that the client doesn't care about that unless they go to the about section where they're trying to learn more. What they want to know is, okay, what is the result? What am I going to get by using this device? And it's the difference between saying like 80% off versus you will never have this type of pain again. You'll be able to sit in front of your computer for hours and do X. The whole idea of just really communicating the value to your customers. So the next step would be auditing, auditing your funnels and your emails and your website and asking yourself, am I making it about myself or am I making it about the customer? Can people see themselves on the page? Can they see the real value on the page, the emotional gain, the emotional outcome that they're going to get? And. Or are you making it about yourself? And if you can see that you're making it about yourself, which is what most companies are doing, then that's when you want to say, okay, I have a hypothesis. I'm going to change my header of the homepage and I'm going to introduce a very customer focused headline, a call to action, A, uh, visual that enhances what I'm trying to say in my messaging and let's see what happens. So you want to go about it in step by step, but you can try this out in different ways and test it.

Speaker A: And so let's talk a little bit about the testing. Right, because there's obviously a feedback loop that you're expecting from the changes that you're trying out and you want to maybe look at the data and say, well, did my conversion improve or not? How would you describe the testing process? What should we be looking for? Is it just a, you know, does my conversions on that page improve or not? And just use that compared to some benchmark or how do you think about the data that we should be looking at?

Speaker B: Yeah, so generally, like, generally if you're Testing, you want to be using a test, an A B testing tool, right? So that would be something like, just as an example, Google Optimize vwo, um, optimizely. There's so many right now. But any of those are great and fantastic. And the way it works of version optimization and why it's so powerful is that you're testing things live. Meaning it's not that you're looking at your homepage now and saying, okay, my homepage doesn't work, I'm going to switch it out for something else. You're essentially going live with two homepages and 50% of your traffic will see your homepage and 50% of your traffic will see the new variation you just created. And you will see in real time, in real life, how many conversions each one is getting. So if you're an E Commerce site and you're trying to drive more sales, you go into, for example, Google Optimize and you look at your test and you see, okay, this variation had 10,000 visits. This variation had 10,000 visits. This had 150 sales, this one had 250. And you can see it now. You want to run this for at least two weeks. And you want to, uh, make sure that you're looking at the right KPIs. But most importantly, you need to set KPIs. For me, when it comes to E Commerce specifically, I look at sales, I look at average order value, and I also look at add to cart if I'm, if I'm talking about product pages. So sometimes we'll see that a lot more people are adding to cart. So I can say, oh, great, my product page is working a lot better. But there's something wrong with the checkout flow now. Or if I'm checking a home, if I'm testing a homepage, a lot more people are navigating to the direct product page or to a category page. Fantastic. My homepage is doing a good work. Now let's move to the next one. So it really is about understanding what it is that you're trying to achieve and what you're testing on each page. Um, and it really depends. Like for SaaS, it's going to be something completely different. You're going to be looking at ltv, you're going to be looking at free trials, you're going to be looking at leads and demo requests. So it really depends on what it is that you are testing. But within E Commerce, I'm always looking at sales. Add to cart and AOV average order value.

Speaker A: Got it. And then have you seen what's your read on the current tools on the market, the platforms that you mentioned around Optimizely and, uh, others out there? Are they lacking functionality that might make sense in the scenarios that you're talking about, or do you feel like one is better than the other? Or what's your recommendation on this, the tool set?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it really depends on where you are as a business. Um, I think the tools are great for starting out and I think that any company, like even big enterprises that I work with, I prefer for them to work with an existing tool. Uh, a lot of companies, when they get to a certain maturity, they start developing their own A B testing tools and it becomes such a mess. Um, so when you have a tool that already works, are there issues? There's always issues. There's data tracking. You know, like, even the difference between Facebook ads and what you're seeing in your analytics is always going to be discrepancy. Um, so there's all sorts of things that can be fixed and changed. But ultimately I think these tools are really good for what you need right now, especially if you're just starting out in conversion optimization. Um, but again, it also depends on how much traffic you have and how many conversions you have. Not everyone can run AB tests. For example, if you have less than 300 sales a month on your website, then you probably shouldn't be running a B tests. And what I mean by that is the rule for a B test is that the minimum rule. And my role is that you want to run it for at least two weeks. Two weeks, so that you can test your page, um, on each day twice. So there hasn't been anything like something happened on the news or there was like something weird that spiked on Tuesday. And then you want to make sure that it's repetitive and you want to have at least 100 to 150 conversions per variation for it to be statistical significant. Now, a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have 300 conversions, um, a month. And that's okay. If you're just starting out and you don't have that, that's, that's fine. But then I'll say, so don't waste your time a B testing, but do spend a lot more time on the customer research I just mentioned, because if you don't have 300 conversions a month and you're just changing your button from blue to red, you're never going to get any results. But if you make systematic strategic changes on your homepage, they're going to have a much bigger impact. So you won't be able to see it live. But, okay, a month later, uh, look at the results and see what's happening in Google Analytics. It's not statistical significant. You know, it's not like the most statistical significant thing, but it is a better way and a better approach. And you know that you're making big strides versus just like changing a button which isn't going to get you anywhere. Um, yeah, hopefully that answered it.

Speaker A: No, absolutely, absolutely. And you, to that point, you know, there are companies that have been very stagnant in their marketing. And would you, would you recommend the approach around emotional targeting that you outlined today as a starting point for them? And you know, understand your customers, make a few changes, you have this feedback loop going. What's your recommendation for someone listening and saying, hey, um, my marketing is stagnant. I can't see any changes. What should I go do right now? What's the first one or two things that they should go do right now?

Speaker B: Yeah, customer research is always my go to. Like I'm. That. That would be my go to. And also setting up some heat maps. So tools like Lucky Orange and hotjar are great tools and there's many more that help you see screen recordings and heat maps and scrolls and taps. And that's a great thing for understanding how people are using your website. So if you're trying to figure out what to do and you can't come up with ideas, then yes, customer research first, super important. But you can do other things. Like it's not the only thing. Setting up a, uh, survey in type form or in Hotjar takes five minutes and you just put it on the website and go or email it out to your customers. So you should be able to spend two hours a month on like researching your customers, collecting more data and slowly making those changes.

Speaker A: That's great. That's great, Dalia. And so Talia, just to kind of, you know, wrap up, I have one question around just getting your perspective on, on the evolution of this, of the industry. And I know we talked a little bit about this, uh, uh, upfront, but you know, what trends are you seeing in the industry as a whole? And I know the industry is large and there's so many. E commerce is, you know, there's so much in E commerce, but let's maybe focus on acquisition conversion and the kind of the funnel, the marketing funnel that what trends have you seen evolving? What's new age, what's coming in the Future that people should be aware of. Would love to get your expert opinion on that.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's funny you asked that because I think that one of the biggest things we're seeing and this isn't news, is that uh, there's overwhelmingly so much competition out there and uh, it's not even like direct competitors anymore. It's anyone that sends a notification to your phone and your customers like out of your store in seconds. So, and ultimately you're competing with so much noise, so many direct competitors, so much social media, there's just so much going on. So what I'm seeing is that the companies that really focus on the customer and make a customer build a customer driven business, those are the ones that are going to go for the long run. Those are the ones that are going to be able to keep customers coming back and to really, really connect with them. Well, because it's our job as marketers to essentially grab people's attention from whatever it is they're doing and come to our website and stay on our website and purchase from our website. So if you are doing what everyone else is doing, if you're like copy blindly copying your competitors because they know what they're doing, um, or if you are just trying to follow best practices and just like doing the same thing over and over again, you're not really going to get anywhere. Ultimately what people are looking for are, is help from you. Because I myself as a consumer, I'm also overwhelmed. So I'm looking for the brands that understand me, that catch me, that. I look on the website, I read the headline and I'm like, yes, that's me. Okay, that's what I need. I don't care about the sale at first. I don't care about your features at first. I want to just know I'm in the right place. So when you ask me about, okay, what are you seeing in the future? I think that the more personalized you can get, the more specific and direct uh, you can get about who your exact customer is, the better. Ah, chances you have to growing and scaling and getting bigger. You don't have to speak to everyone, you have to speak to your specific customer. Um, and you can do this with so many different, like different technologies. And I know that everyone around us is preaching us to be data driven or whatever, but ultimately data is data that the people are, there's people behind the screens, they're not cash machines. So we really need to ultimately focus on them. And I think that that is the future. The future is going Back to foundations and focusing on people.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think a lot of people get excited about new platforms and new marketplaces and. And all the different distribution channels, which I'm, uh, sure many will come up. We just talk about the Metaverse and a lot of that as well. And all great, like, all new opportunities available for brands to sell their products, to distribute their products. But I think you made a really good point, which is you can't forget the fundamentals of business, which is to understand your customer. Are you providing them with the right value proposition, and are you truly targeting them with a product that makes sense for that segment? And, uh, those fundamentals will not change, irrespective of distribution channel.

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: Excellent. Great. Well, Tyler, it was an absolute pleasure for folks listening on the show. Uh, is there a way that they can get in touch with you? What's the best way that folks, if they want to improve their, uh, conversion optimization, if they want to get some feedback, some work from you. Done. What's the best way that they can contact you?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, our website, getuplift code. Um, there is a ton of free content in there and free guides and worksheets and everything you need in there and courses you can take and you can hire us there. So it's all on that website.

Speaker A: Excellent. Great. Well, Dalia, thank you again for being on the show. We really appreciate your time. I certainly learned a bunch myself, uh, in the show, so, again, folks, thanks for joining us today on another episode of Master the Marketplace, and I'm sure we will see you very soon. Thank you, Talia. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you. Through conversations with experts in online retail, with years of marketing compliance and inventory management experience, we seek to empower our listeners to master, uh, the marketplace. Thanks for listening. We hope to see you next time on Massive to the Marketplace with Caspian.