Conversion intelligence: where Unbounce is heading 🚀


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  • Former Community Manager @ Unbounce
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Hey everyone!

A big article just dropped, and I’m sharing the short version of it to discuss with all you smartypantses in here. 🧠

Campaign optimization is aspirational for most small businesses. They’re not actually able to prioritize continuous improvements to get their best conversion rates possible at this time. Not to mention that many businesses are having to focus on crisis handling or retention, further limiting the time they’re able to focus on marketing.

As far back as 3-4 years ago we started noticing some trends for marketers, from having conducted our own research with customers, as well as staying up-to-speed with industry research. We’ve seen that:

  • Nearly a quarter of small businesses have reported that finding the time and resources to focus on marketing is their top challenge
  • An additional 33% of marketers aren’t even sure if their marketing efforts are paying off
  • 20.8% of small businesses have at least one person doing marketing in addition to other tasks vs. a dedicated, in-house marketer

Up to this point, many marketers make up for the imbalanced focus by getting better at other aspects of marketing:

  • Tactics for writing conversion-focused copy
  • Placing CTA’s at just the right spot
  • Absorbing learnings from past campaigns and implementing them in new content
  • Creating eye-catching designs adhering to conversion-centered principles

We’ve been referring to this as an innate or learned marketing intelligence. But on its own, this type of intelligence is incomplete.

Cue, conversion intelligence 💡

Conversion intelligence is the pairing of your innate marketing expertise with AI-derived insights to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. It’s your creativity and understanding of human motivations, enhanced by the recognition of patterns and opportunities you simply couldn’t perceive without the processing power of a machine.

And it’s where things are headed—both for marketing as an industry and for us at Unbounce.

We’ve already made huge investments in this area with the release of Smart Traffic (which I hope you’ve all turned on by now) which is exactly how you can put conversion intelligence into action, right now. No, this has not been a Smart Traffic advertisement disguised as a community post – it really is the perfect example of how you can start developing your conversion intelligence. More on that later.

To give you a glimpse into what kind of conversion intelligence insights our team has been able to pull in the past week, here are just a few examples:

  • We’ve mathematically verified that roughly half of what influences someone to convert is the copy on a landing page (we’re lookin’ at you @seankirby)

  • We’ve seen indicators that there’s a slight increase in the impact design has on conversions for landing pages in ecommerce, legal, and SaaS, whereas design factors less into conversion rates for finance and insurance, catering and restaurants, as well as media and entertainment.

Curious where we’re getting all these sweet, sweet insights? Head over to Product Hunt to subscribe to the 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report on Product Hunt and sign up to get notified when it’s live (May 28, 2020).

As for what’s to come here in the community, I’ll be sharing ideas and strategies for how to get the most out of Smart Traffic, as well as more insights like what I’ve listed above over the next few weeks, so keep your eye on the shiny new Smart Traffic category.

For now, this is what I’d love to chat about:

  1. Do the challenges in this post resonate with you?
  2. Have you already gotten your hands dirty with pairing AI-derived insights and your marketing know-how?

Let’s discuss in the thread below 👇

See you in the forums!

-Jess


7 replies

Jess - this is a fantastic post. It’s almost over my head, so I’d love to learn more from you directly, and we’ve got an urgent and socially beneficial project brewing related to the COVID crisis that you might be uniquely suited to contribute to based on your angle here. I’ll reach out on LinkedIn, but if you see this first and are interested, I’m here.

Userlevel 7
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Absolutely, happy to chat any time @Gary_Michael 😀

This reminds me of what Jakub Linowski is doing over at GoodUI. I’ve found his site to be tremendously helpful over the years and welcome more.

Userlevel 7
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Wow I just spent a few minutes scrolling through that site, this is an awesome resource (and exactly the angle I’m moving towards). Thanks for passing that along!

-Jess

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Here are some results from one of my clients. We switched from A/B to Smart Traffic and I also made some layout enhancements.

I’m not sure how much of the boost was the layout improvements vs the Smart Traffic. But, the conversions are impressive and the client is happy.

Userlevel 7
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Wow!! 😲

Those are some impressive numbers, @Ed_Stanfield

What kind of layout improvements did you apply? I’m sure folks wouldn’t mind taking a page outta your book.

-Jess

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Previously, the client was sending all paid traffic to mobile due to the trending advice that stressed an emphasis on mobile.

I just created a clean desktop layout and the client added desktop to their paid traffic. We’re trusting Smart traffic AI to figure out the rest.

The conversion rates are insane.

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