How Conversion Rate Optimization Got Its Name

I asked Bryan about how he coined the term conversion rate optimization.

"Funny story with the conversion rate optimization. That wasn't like we coined the term, but only because we wanted to rank for something."

People used to search for conversion rate. Yes, it was currency conversion rate, but they ended up putting out so much content, they ended up dominating the term and obviously coined it for the industry.

But when they first started, he and his brother Jeffrey, they actually more referred to what they were doing online as digital salespeople.

"And you know, people take the term sales and sale. Yes. So that didn't work very well early on."

Why Page Speed Still Matters After 20 Years

I asked Bryan what are the core principles that haven't changed even though platforms have evolved.

He was at a search engine conference this week where an SEO who has access to over 20,000 Google search consoles and $43 million spent on research found something they told people early on.

Stop wasting a long time for people to download your website. It's got to be quick. If it's not quick, they're going to leave.

People have always pushed that limit. When he first started, it was dial-up. Actually, when he first started, it was 300 baud modem.

They told people you have to keep it under eight seconds. Where does that eight seconds come from? Well, it's the same thing in advertising. "If you don't catch someone's attention in the first eight seconds, they're gone."

They did usability tests and they could see it. Eight seconds, site didn't load, they were gone.

"And today high speed people still think they can bloat the page."

And what the research is finding is that if you want the AIs to be effective and Google to rank you, if that site takes too long to load, it's too much of a cost on them.

"They're not gonna rank you as much, they're not gonna index you as much. They're just trying to replicate human behavior."

Why Great Marketing Is Not Predictable

I mentioned that AI is democratizing content creation but we still need experts. Bryan expanded on this brilliantly.

"I love that you mentioned that it raised the bar. The quality of content, the poorest level of content is better with AI than it was previously. So that's great."

But here's the problem. If you understand how these models work, they're trained on all these bodies of work and it's a predictive engine about what word needs to go next.

"Great marketing is not predictable."

So if this large body of context is just going to keep giving you predictable words, you're setting yourself up for failure to begin with.

"You have to know how to be remarkable."

The Red Screw That Changed Gettle HVAC

I asked Bryan about his Be Like Amazon book and the four pillars that any company can use.

The four pillars are: being customer centric, having a culture of innovation, having a culture of agility, and looking at what worked or didn't work to continuously improve.

One of his favorite examples is Ken Goodrich from Goettl. He built a $100 million HVAC company.

One of the things that Ken believed about air conditioners was that every screw that a technician touched needed to be super tight because if there's extra vibrations in the system, it would cause damage to the system in the longterm.

You might understand that, but how does a typical customer understand whether the technician touched the screws or not?

"So what Ken did, he replaced every single screw in every single truck in every single air conditioner into a bright red shiny screw."

What color are most air conditioner screws? Grey, black, chrome color.

"Now as a consumer, because it only matters if it matters to the consumer, I can go look at the work that you're doing and I could see, look at all those bright red screws. I know you touched every single one of those."

Not only did it impact the customers because now they know that his values and he's showing it, it's totally customer centric. It's easy for technicians because now when they're looking at what they touched and didn't touch, they only have to look for what's not shiny and red.

"And that's the beauty of something so simple. You don't have to do big crazy experiments. What do you think a red screw cost?"

Nothing. But it distinguished his company so much.

In pest control, could you imagine if you had something that was lit up where you sprayed everywhere instead of the invisible spray? It's going to go away in an hour, but you can see where we sprayed. It's all bioluminescence or something like that.

"It's that same kind of visual impact to the customer that I've really taken care of them."

That's what you get when you buy from Amazon. You feel like they've taken good care of you because everything about what they do and they built their brand on is about the customer values.

Why Conversion Rates Are Still 2% After 20 Years

Bryan dropped an incredible stat that blew my mind.

"In 2001, shop.org published the first ever benchmark conversion rates on the website. It was 1.8%. You know what a good conversion rate in direct marketing was? 2%."

You know what the average conversion rate is today? 2%.

"Still today, nothing about it is technology better. Graphics better. The way we access the internet, it's faster. People are smarter. We've got tons of books, tons of content about marketing."

And the conversion rate still hovering around 2% to 3% for most companies.

Here's the crazy part. In direct marketing, I send you something in the mail. Hopefully you open it up. You get a postcard, you call up, 2% and you're golden.

"Online. I searched for you. I typed in your name. I saw something on your social media and I decided to click through to your website. Tell me why in God's name it should only be 2% conversion."

Why shouldn't it be 10%? What happened to the other 90% of people?

Maybe 50% have ticks in their fingers and they clicked it by accident. So 50% gone. What are other excuses for not coming to your website? "Why spend time going to your website and not buy?"

That should be the first question every business owner should be asking themselves.

The Five Rs That Never Change

I asked Bryan about what matters for SEO and rankings. He explained the five Rs that will never change.

First, is it relevant? Is it relevant to the searcher? The only thing that the engines want to do is put you in front of relevant content for whatever query you're interested in.

The only thing the algorithms on social media want to do is put things on that they believe your interests matched relevance. "They don't want to do anything else."

Years ago, he had the head of the quality score team for Microsoft bring them in because he saw Bryan speak about landing page relevance. He wanted Bryan to explain it to his team because Bryan was explaining in more human terms, not geek talk.

The second one is reputation. Reputation is twofold. Not only is reviews, obviously at the local level it's a really important thing, but also obviously citations.

But more so, can you get media talking about you? Can you get your partners talking about you? That tells a lot about your reputation.

Plus the behavior that the sites know about you. Google has analytics everywhere. They have the browsers, they have Chrome, they have Android. They know what's going on your website. They have Gmail. They know when people purchased, didn't purchase, when they get confirmation receipts.

"They know the reputation real well."

Third is remarkable. "If you want to stand out and you want to grow today, you just have to produce above and beyond."

It's not five stars. How would you get everybody to give you a six star review? Because people expect the five stars today. So you really have to go above that.

Then there's readability. For the search engine, for the AIs, for the LLMs, how are they consuming your content?

When they first wrote persuasive online copywriting in 2001, they talked about the importance of writing pages with headlines and sub headlines and interlinking with keywords in the links.

"And guess what the search engines like today is those little short blurbs, FAQ type stuff that's real short. And so that's a headline with a sub headline and explaining it in one clear point."

It doesn't change.

And then the last one is reach. How big of an audience are you speaking to?

His friend Ray Bard thinks about it like an ocean. You're reaching mass world. There's bayous, wells, and then puddles that are very shallow and not very wide.

"So you kind of have to choose what market you're playing in."

It's very different to compete in the heart of Austin or New York City than it is in Cedar Park, Austin, Texas, a suburb.

The Conversion Trinity

I asked Bryan about the Conversion Trinity, a simple technique anybody can do to improve conversion rates.

The Conversion Trinity looks at three things.

Relevance. And relevance is relative because it's relative to the perspective of the person who's coming on your website. There are different kinds of customers.

It's value. How do you express that value to them?

And then it's action, which is how do you develop the confidence in them to want to take that next action?

"You can apply this when looking at any ad, you can apply this when looking at any landing page at any website."

Every page should answer those two questions. Who is this relevant for? Is it relevant for the customer I'm trying to talk to today? How am I expressing that value to them? Is it clear and impactful?

And lastly, have I closed all the loops so they're comfortable and have confidence to take action?

"If you don't do those three things, everything's lost."

The One Graphic That Made $25 Million

Bryan shared incredible stories from working with massive companies.

They helped overstock.com with the CEO Patrick Burden. They worked with him literally overnight, gave him a solution, made a change.

"We found out later on it accounted for a $25 million lift in sales from changing one graphic."

And they never, ever did another change after that.

Or they worked with Dell. He wanted a report of all the things they can do to improve the conversion rate on the website. The report was like 65 pages long.

They came up with one test that gave them tens of millions of dollars over and over again, year after year, until the B2B section finally took it over and did the same thing.

"They never did anything else from that book."

So you can have big gains in big companies and then nothing else happens or somebody changes position and everything else is just gone.

"So we like working with decision makers and people who commit, who can just commit to I'm the owner and I can make it happen. It comes back to the four pillars."

Got Bugs? You Shouldn't.

We discussed messaging for pest control companies specifically.

"The typical pest control owner, how many hours a day does he think about pest control?"

A lot.

"The typical customer, how many hours do they want to spend thinking about pest control in a year?"

Zero.

"You've got a problem there."

Bryan said he would steal the campaign Got Milk. Got Milk was a great ad campaign that worked in the absence of milk.

"So I'm like, Got Bugs? You shouldn't."

And you shouldn't have a pest control guy breaking the time of your day to come spray everywhere. You just don't want bugs.

"We're going to be invisible. We're going to come. We're going to spray during the daytime. We're going to come a few times during the year. You're never going to notice us, but you're not going to see bugs. And if you've got bugs, our fault."

Bryan's Message: Clarity Starts With You

I asked Bryan for his final message to local marketers and business owners.

"I think one of the biggest things from this point in my life, I would say is if you don't have clarity in your life, you're not going to have clarity in your messaging."

You're not going to have clarity in your business. You're not going to have clarity in your relationships. And those things matter.

"Spend the time on you because there's no sense in you being burnt out when everyone else around you is also being burnt out."

We see the amount of chronic disease out there and all these issues, lack of attention that everybody has.

"Be the source that is paying attention, that is delivering attention to people and people will be attracted to you."

My Main Takeaway

This conversation with Bryan completely changed how I think about conversion optimization and customer-centricity. The biggest insight is conversion rates haven't changed in 20 years. Still 2%. When someone searches for you, types in your name, sees your social media and clicks through to your website, why should it only be 2% conversion?

The red screw story is brilliant. Gettle replaced every screw with bright red screws so customers could see every screw the technician touched. It cost nothing but distinguished his company massively. That's customer-centric innovation.

And the AI prediction insight blew my mind. Great marketing is not predictable. If large language models are trained on all this content and just predicting what word goes next, you're setting yourself up for failure. You have to know how to be remarkable.

But what resonated most was the five Rs will never change. Relevance, reputation, remarkable, readability, reach. These apply to SEO, social media algorithms, everything. Focus on these and you'll always win.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Bryan drops even more conversion strategies and persuasion architecture frameworks that I couldn't fit into this recap.

You can find Bryan at bryanheisenberg.com and on LinkedIn, Facebook, and all platforms. Read I Think I Swallowed an Elephant and Be Like Amazon.