What is happening?

I just spent last weekend at Geekout in Miami, and man did I have a blast. I'm truly grateful for this little DTC community of nerds that we have. I learned a lot, made some great connections, and made some memories with great friends. I got to hang with some people I really look up to in this industry, including Amanda Goetz from House of Wise. Speaking of, if you've never taken their CBD gummies you need to. As a pretty anxious person, I've tried a bunch of CBD and this is the only one I will take now. You can use CODY10 for 10% off your first order.

Enough about me. This issue is about our website, and specifically 5 tactical changes we made to our website that helped improve our conversion rate. When I joined Jones Road, I inherited a website that was built for aesthetics but not with conversion in mind. I needed to keep it "on brand" and keep the aesthetic while improving conversion rate. A lot of CRO firms understand conversion, but have no understanding or respect for brand. The first thing I did when I joined was do an Oddit. The fine folks at Oddit are the best at combining brand and conversion tactics, with their "brand first conversion rate optimization" approach to things.

Based on their Oddit, here are 5 changes we made that made the biggest difference on our site:

1. Homepage Redesign

Our old homepage was a mess. We had sections with big blocks of text that no one read, fancy paralallax that offered nothing but made our original web design agency feel cool, and big product cards that looked cool but lacked context and took up too much valuable real estate. There were others. To be honest, our homepage was a mess before. Now, I'm pretty proud of it. We have a hero image where you clearly know we're a makeup brand when you land on it (Oddit said we looked like a fashion brand from our old hero image).

We then go straight into our best selling products, offer some social proof (Oddit is big on social proof), we funnel users to collections by product type, lead to our quiz, have a notable and readable quote from our founder, and our value props.

2. Added Social Proof

Yup, Oddit folks are big social proof guys. They do an amazing job of seeing things from a potential customer's perspective. The majority of your website visitors are going to be new visitors, so you have to assume they don't know much about you. They are going to be coming from an ad or other source where you've probably made a big claim, and they are going to be skeptical. They are going to look for reasons to not believe what you have to say, so you have to work very hard to overcome their certainity objections. A few places that Oddit had us add social proof were:

1. Press quotes and images on the home page
2. Display PDP reviews in a digestable and noticeable way
3. Utilize UGC on the website where appropriate

I'm sure there's more, but you get the point. Social proof sells.

3. Make The Headlines Stand Out And Do The Heavy Lifting

People skim, they don't read. Before Oddit, we had large blocks of text and small, boring headlines. Our bounce rate was too high because people couldn't easily get the information they were looking for. Oddit helped us simplify our messaging and get the important stuff across to everyone by using appropriate visual hierarchy. The lesson here is to avoid big blocks of text, use the proper font sizes, and make sure to make use of the valuable real estate you do have to get your primary messaging across.

4. Remove Unnecessary Friction

Before Oddit, we had a sliding cart (like we do now) but then we also went to a full cart page, then to checkout. Why? I have no idea, I wasn't involved in the original building of the website. Why have 2 steps that do nearly the same thing? So the very first thing we did after receiving our Oddit was to test how it would convert. We also didn't automatically open the sliding cart before, for some reason. Users had to add to cart, then manually open the cart. We had our dev team set up a multivariate test in Google Optimize. We tested 4 variations, and the winning variation was the one with the least friction, where the sliding cart automatically opened, then went straight to checkout.

5. Speed Is Everything

Our site was a little too slow before Oddit. We also worked with them on our speed optimization, and it made a huge difference. You probably already know how important a fast website is for your conversion rate. I won't bore you with all of the details, but they took care of all of them for a flat fee. It was easily the best money we've spent, and I plan to do it again soon now that it's been a while.

Summary

With iOs changes and lots of headwinds, there is no better investment than in your website to help convert more users that you're already spending money on, as well as to create a better relationship with those potential customers.

If you'd like to improve your site, I managed to snag a discount on Oddit's services. You can try out Oddit yourself with CODY10 for 10% off any Oddit report or grab a free month of Oddit Club - a private community for founders, marketers, and designers that is absolutely packed with value. It's as much of a no brainer as you can get.

If you have any questions about Oddit, please give me a reply. Also if you have any ideas for upcoming newsletters, please reply as well.

I'll see you next week!