Learn to validate your insights and know more about your customer with each test. That's winning continuously! Snehal Samant's talk from Startup Saturday

1. HOW TO WIN AT
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
- SNEHAL SAMANT

2. WHO’S SNEHAL SAMANT?
Leads Product Marketing @ VWO
– World’s easiest A/B testing tool
Head of Digital @ TastyKhana – acquired by FoodPanda
Co-founder @ Black Bean Engagement
Creative Director @ Grey

3. OPINIONS ARE LIKE ASSHOLES,
EVERYONE HAS ONE
(BUT EACH THINKS THE OTHER ’S STINKS)

4. NO 1 REASON WHY COMPANIES FAIL AT GROWTH?
Not enough ideas.
We aren't tracking the right data.
Don't have a testing framework.
They don't run enough experiments

5. ONLY 1 OUT OF 7 TESTS WIN
6 OUT OF 7 LOSE
Then why do people keep experimenting?

6. WITH EACH EXPERIMENT LEARN
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMER
NOW YOU ARE CONTINOUSLY WINNING

7. MORE CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE = GROWTH
Your customer knowledge
Revenue
1m ARR
10m ARR
100m ARR
BETTER FEATURES BETTER PRODUCTS BETTER SERVICE

8. WHERE WINS
LIVE?
MEASURE
SHIT
GREAT
INSIGHTS
PERSUASION

9. This deck isn't a
compilation of hacks.
LET'S LEARN TO FISH.

10. Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users

11. IDENTIFY YOUR MOST IMPORTANT METRICS
• AARRR framework
• Start tracking
• Establish baseline to
predict impact

12. Growth Hacking Like A Pirate,
A Beginner’s Guide To Pirate Metrics
Point-click to define events and
push to GA, MixPanel etc

13. COME UP WITH A STRONG HYPOTHESIS
Changing
[element tested - button, headline etc]
from ‘________________’
to ‘_____________’
will increase / decrease
[a conversion metric - clicks, downloads, signups etc].
by ‘______%’
BECAUSE ‘________’

14. A STRONG HYPOTHESIS TARGETS PAIN
Changing
THE CANCEL ACCOUNT SCREEN
from ‘Letting people cancel’
to ‘Letting people pause their account by downgrading to $9 plan’
will decrease
Account Churn Rate
by ‘20%’
BECAUSE ‘some customers do not want to lose their data
which we delete on cancellation.’

15. HOW TO FIND PAIN #1 - DATA ANALYSIS
Find aberration
High traffic + high bounce, Paid traffic + high bounce
Heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, visitor recordings
Look at internal search
Look at search landing pages from organic search

16. Become a GA ninja

17. HOW TO FIND PAIN #2 - HEURISTIC ANALYSIS
Structured approach to
critically evaluating UI /
UX. LIFT is one of several
frameworks.

18. An intro to the LIFT model

19. HOW TO FIND PAIN #3
TALK TO PEOPLE!
Ask users – Website / Email Surveys
Call them!

20. HOW TO PERSUADE
PEOPLE TO DO
WHAT YOU WANT
(ZE BLACK ARTS)

21. HOW #1 - USE USER VOICE
People skip marketing-speak
Use real-speak from surveys, conversation responses
Keep it simple

22. Learn to write super copy

23. How #2
VISUAL HIERARCHY
It works
Don’t fuck it up

25. HOW #3 - NUEROMARKETING 101

26. THE REPLTILIAN BRAIN TRIGGERS

28. Is There a Buy Button Inside the Brain?

29. HOW #4 - NUDGES - EXPLOIT BIASES
A nudge alters people’ s behaviour in a
predictable way without forbidding any
options or significantly changing their
economic incentives.
Putting fruit at eye level counts as a
nudge. Banning junk food does not.

30. COMMON BIASES Anchoring effect
40,000 6,000

31. COMMON BIASES Anchoring effect
900 200
Sarojini Market
Perception of cost is relative.

32. COMMON BIASES Current Moment Bias
People choose the pleasurable option available right now.
Constant feedback helps drive behavior.

33. COMMON BIASES Projection bias
Most people think like me, act like me and like what I like.
Most innovative, data-focused marketers
use VWO for driving growth
at products like Slack.

34. COMMON BIASES Observational Selection bias
Suddenly noticing things we didn’t notice that much before
and wrongly assume that the frequency has increased. A
perfect example is what happens after we buy a red car
and we inexplicably start to see red cars virtually
everywhere.

35. COMMON BIASES Confirmation bias
We love to agree with people who agree with us.
We tend to be put off by people and news sources that
make us feel uncomfortable or insecure about our views –
cognitive dissonance.
We focus on data which confirms our pre-conceived view.

36. 5 Principles of Persuasive Web Design
20 cognitive biases
that skew decisions

37. RUNNING EXPERIMENTS
Simple sequential testing – establish baseline, make a change,
expose 100% of your audience
Control + Variation – expose 50% random of your audience to
each at the same time
Use a tool like VWO – visual editor + repeat visitors see same
control or variation + Bayesian stats engine (most use
Frequentist which takes too long and uses p value)

38. WHY EXPERIMENTS CAN SKEW
Calculate sample size in advance for
statistically significant results (not required with VWO)
Don’t make changes mid-way
Test in weeks for equal number of Mondays, weekends etc
Be wary of external forces

39. INTERPRETING YOUR RESULTS
Aim for validated learnings, not just wins

40. THINK BEYOND HACKS
Improve processes
Pilot new, different mediums

41. GROWTH IS OPTIONAL
The easiest choice is to choose to do nothing.
Get these slides on SNEHALSAMANT.COM